Burn, p.2
Burn, page 2
“Yeah.” Jess rolled onto his back and moved the jacket he used as a pillow up onto the pack behind his head and bolstered himself. “You wanna try that village up the shore? Randall?”
Storey hadn’t heard him. He had found his cell phone in the dark, and Jess saw it glow and then extinguish. “Nothing, right?” Jess said.
“No.” The rain pattered and sifted on the tarp. He couldn’t see his friend’s face, and he didn’t want to.
“Maybe, when we get up there, there’ll be something. Maybe there’s a tower.”
Storey didn’t answer. Well. He had two daughters and a wife back in Vermont. He, Jess, had no one. It was a little over a year since Jan had left, and their dog, Bell, had died two months later. Collapsed on her walk. Only seven and with no known health conditions—Jess figured she’d died from a broken heart. Did dogs do that? Some nights he had willed himself to go the same way; no luck.
This trip was Jess’s favorite annual ritual. Together, they often hunted the mountains of Vermont and Colorado, but this year, against great odds, they both drew nonresident moose tags in Maine, and so decided to hunt the earliest season in the big empty wilderness of north-central Maine, south of Mount Katahdin and east of Moosehead Lake. The famed and populous coast was more than a hundred miles away. You could drive a gravel road for hours and never see another soul but maybe the glimpsed face and wave of a truck driver, a log truck passing too fast and throwing stones against your windshield. The country was rolling wooded hills mostly, with spines of steeper ridges, and the valleys whispered with brooks and rivers that spilled into lakes and bogs. A country to get lost in.
They had hunted at the first camp for five days. They’d crossed sign—tracks, beds, scat—but not as much as in years past, and they’d come upon moose—cows with calves—but not as many. Neither even saw a bull. So they’d decided to shift the hunt to a boggier watershed to the south. They drove. When they found the bridge over the little river severed, they had parked in the shade and stood on the broken abutment. They blinked in the brightness and the heat—a sultry, humid, late-September afternoon. Storey had hopped out on a twisted girder and crouched. He placed one hand on the sunwarmed steel and ran his fingers over it. He looked up at Jess.
“Blown,” he said.
“What?”
“The bridge was blown. Like blown up.” Storey would know: he had been a dedicated rock climber in college, and in the summers he had worked on a road crew, blasting loose rock off of highway cliffs.
“Like dynamite?”
“Or C-4. Boom. Remember The Bridge on the River Kwai?”
“Who would do that?”
Storey shrugged. “Maybe it was condemned and they didn’t wanna risk anyone using it.”
“That’s crazy.”
They had turned the SUV around. They had planned to gas up in Branch and they were low on fuel. But they had no choice, and they backtracked to the next Forest Service road to the west and turned south again. It was a forty-mile detour. The woods were starting to turn, and the low sun came through them and lit them to amber. It was like driving through honey. Again they had come to a river—this one larger—and again the bridge was out. Not out, but deliberately destroyed. There was no cell service. They had topos of only the districts they would hunt and they had the gazetteer and a gas-station road map. They opened the map on the hood of the 4Runner. The closest town was back to the north, on the west side of the big lake. Fifty-seven miles, give or take. What might be a hamlet with a gas pump was about forty miles away on the same road. They had gotten about halfway when the engine revved and died. Out of gas. So they locked the Toyota and shouldered their hunting packs and took up their rifles and walked. They only had an hour and a half of daylight on that first day of hiking. On the afternoon of the second, they wondered aloud why they hadn’t seen another logging truck, or the vehicles of other hunters. Jess began to carry a stone in his gut he recognized as dread. On the morning of the third, they passed a green sign that said “Four Corners, Population 9.” His first thought was: How often do they change that sign? Doesn’t anyone go away to college or retire to Arizona? But then they smelled a black stench like the inside of a woodstove and they came around the forested bend to the burned remains of seven buildings. Four Corners, Population 0.
* * *
They had walked on the verge of the roads then, where they could duck into the woods if they needed to. They walked with a round chambered in their rifles, which they usually never did. They kept their cell phones on airplane mode to conserve battery, but when they stopped to take a drink in the shade of some brook, one or the other turned his phone’s receiver on and scanned for a cell signal. Nothing. Out here they didn’t expect any, but it cost nothing to try. They both had water-filter straws and the hills were threaded everywhere with streams, so thirst was never an issue. Once, at midday, they trotted down to the bank of a black-water pond and stripped and swam. The water was ice cold, but neither whooped. They clambered out through horsetail and dried in the breeze and let the sun smooth the goose bumps on their arms, and on any other day they would have hooted and grinned.
On the afternoon of the third day of walking, they came to a meadow maybe two miles wide. The road went right through the middle. Jess set his pack down and walked away to scout the edge along the treeline.
When he came back he said, “Ton of blowdown. And blackberry bramble. Tough walking. Very.”
“Okay. I guess we’ll take the road.”
Neither felt good about being in the open for half an hour. They both unslung their rifles and they opened the breeches and checked again for the rounds there. Storey had a Model 70 Winchester .30-06, bolt action; Jess his father’s .308 lever-action Savage 99. Both were scoped and both men were very good shots. Jess had always made clean kills; he could not remember when he had wounded an animal. Neither spoke, and they crossed the meadow without incident.
That night, they had pushed through the dense alders at the edge of a swamp and made a small fire and cooked one of the two remaining backpack meals. “Gallo Pinto, Costa Rican Rice and Beans,” it said on the pouch. Jess said the name seemed pompous. “What makes it Costa Rican?” he said.
Storey shrugged.
“And as if that was somehow better? Or more hip? Where does this stuff come from, anyway?” He tilted the packet in the slant light. “Figures.”
“Where?” Storey turned. Jess thought he looked for a second a little less like a zombie. He had noticed that every time Storey had checked his phone and found no news or way to connect with his family his eyes seemed a little duller.
“Golden, Colorado.”
“No kidding?” Storey’s eyes actually sparked. “That’s your backyard, isn’t it? Coors and gallo pinto.” Storey knew it was his backyard; he had visited Jess in Denver at least a dozen times. The last time they’d hunted elk over in Paonia, they’d celebrated the end of the week at the Silver Dollar Hotel, in Golden.
“Yep.”
“So you’d probably call rice and beans gallo pinto, too, if you could get away with it.”
“I do it all the time.”
Storey’s smile fluttered and stuck. Jess felt such relief to see it. And they ate the second-to-last supper with gusto. While they were eating, Jess said:
“Do you think this is some militia thing?”
“You mean about the stupid secession?”
“Some people clearly don’t think it’s so stupid.”
“What would they be doing way up here? Don’t they have better bridges to take out?”
Storey added a couple of sticks to the fire. Jess refilled the pot with water and nestled it into the coals for tea. “It’s weird. Do they want to keep moose from moving south—the moose and the loggers? And what’s the point of burning down some crossroads general store? Except to keep you and me from getting gas?”
No point. But neither slept well, and the next day they walked into the town by the lake. What was once a town.
Chapter Two
So that’s how they got to the lake and the ruined town. The town, according to the map, was named Green Hill. They had never been through it before, or to the shores of this lake. There was no green sign on the road this time; it had been blasted or burned. As if whoever had come through the day before had wanted to wipe it off the face of the earth. Was that just yesterday?
That morning, camping in the woods above the wreckage, they lay in the predawn dark and listened to the rain patter and sweep across the tarp with the rhythm of the winds, and neither was willing to move from the warmth of their sleeping bags. Jess thought that if he could just focus on the nested heat and sound of the rain and the smells of the wet woods he might lie there in relative peace for the rest of his days.
He said, “What do you think they want?”
“We don’t even know who they are.”
“Yeah.”
“Secessionists, I guess. I don’t know.” Storey reached back with both hands and bunched the pillow of his jacket tighter under the back of his head. He said, “If we knew, maybe we’d have a better idea what the hell’s going on.”
“I was thinking about that woman down there.”
“The one I found?”
“Yes. You think she held on to that rock?”
“No. That’s why she tucked it in her shirt. She was smart. Also…”
“What?” Jess said.
Storey coughed. “I wasn’t going to…”
“…tell me?”
“Yeah.”
“Kinda too late for that.”
“I know.”
Another flash, silent, and for a moment they saw the rain as a luminous scrim, and the dark lacing of the boughs, and then the far-off thunder boomed and rolled off the edge of the night like distant artillery. Maybe it was.
“She was pregnant,” Storey said. “Like full-term.”
“Oh.”
And they were silent, and Jess felt grateful for the drum and rush of the rain, which muted even his wildest imaginings. Because he didn’t have it in him. To keep guessing at why any of this was happening.
* * *
By first light, the rain had calmed to a gentle sift on the cloth roof, and it was a mere mist when they zipped into Gore-Tex rain gear and stepped out into the gray dawn. Cold, nearly frost. They walked to the edge of the woods and pissed and could not see the lake for the fog that lay over it and shredded in the tops of the trees on the far shore.
“I’ll go down,” Jess said. “Maybe I can find us something for breakfast.”
“You will. After the…I didn’t have it in me to scavenge.”
Jess picked up the .308 and slung the rifle and walked. He stopped, turned. “Did you leave her there? In the water? I don’t want to…” He trailed off.
Storey shook his head. “I carried her up to what must have been the marina shack and buried her in cinders.”
“Okay.”
Jess walked. Down the corridor of a paved street blown with drifting ash. The street dropped straight into the fog, and he descended into cloud. As he walked, the skeletal masonwork on either side faded to shapes spectral and half formed in the moving shroud and he made himself keep on. Where were the vehicles? Burned husks, every one. He felt it before he saw it: the lakewater warmer than the night air. And smelled an almost sea-like rank, maybe old algae on the rocks of the shore, or discarded fish, and he thought how fathers and daughters or sons might have been fishing here off the double docks just yesterday afternoon. Not possible. Years had passed since then.
He skirted the wet ash-and-cinder heap of what must have been the marina office and found the flagstone pavers that brought him to the docks and the boats tied there. The main stems of the docks extended eastward into the lake; they branched to either side with the shorter, planked decks of the berths. There were two docks, and he chose the one to the south, on his right hand. J-boats, day sailers, cats, and outboard skiffs. These were small sloops with cockpits and windowed cabins, and Jess knew they would have chests and latching cupboards with some provisions.
The first he came to had beautiful salmon-colored sails reefed and tied along the boom. No cover had been snapped over them, which meant probably that she was regularly used. What day of the week was it? He didn’t know. Maybe yesterday was Saturday and the owners hadn’t buttoned the cover on the sails because they knew they’d be back to sail today. What we take for granted—that another day would come. Everyone had to know in their bones that every life hung by a thread. That the world did. But if we couldn’t pretend to count on a morning of sailing, or fishing, or a visit with someone we loved the next day, we’d go nuts, right? Right. So pretend away.
The boat was called Isabella. That simple. No pretense to sophistication like the catamaran beside it called Aphrodite. No crude pun like the fishing cruiser in the next berth with downriggers and twin Mercs called Fish n Chicks. Jess hopped over the cable rail of the sloop and into the cockpit with its stainless-steel wheel.
He faced a locked hatch that battened the entry and what he knew were steps down to the cabin. The hatch was stout teak, beaded with rain, secured at the top with a padlock. He climbed back onto the dock and up to the ruin of the marina shack and past it. He did not want to dig around in the wreckage and find the woman. He went on between what once were houses and, in what had to be a backyard with a single standing apple tree, he found the small foundation of what yesterday was probably a toolshed. Beside a toppled rolling toolbox he found a blackened fireman’s ax. It was solid steel and had heft and balance but was not heavy; the head was larger than that of an ax made for splitting wood, and he swung it like a batter warming up, and though the rubber grip had burned away and the metal was wet, it felt good in his hands. Maybe he’d keep it. He walked with it back down to the Isabella and again climbed aboard, and he was about to take a full cathartic swing against the planks of the hatch when it occurred to him that they could sail this very boat up to Randall. The winds by late morning were westerly, and they could follow the shoreline generally north on a single tack and be there faster and with much less effort than walking. And the sails were the ruddy, uneven, washed color of red dirt, and he liked the name. So he set down the ax and jumped onto the dock again and went back to his ruined shed and dug around in ash so fine and wet it turned to paste where he stirred it. Against the far stem wall, in cinders burned hard like clinker coal, he found the bolt cutters. The rubber grips had melted off this, too, but the handles and the blades, though seared, were usable.
He cut the padlock off the boat and went down into the cabin, which was lit by a skylight and rows of high windows. In the tiny galley was a single cupboard with a half-eaten box of Oreos in a Ziploc and three cans of Dinty Moore beef stew. Good enough. He’d kill for some coffee. He was about to search for chest storage under one of the benches in the saloon when he saw on the cushion a paperback book titled The Outermost House with a bookmark partway through, and next to it a teddy bear and a plastic superhero. A wave of nausea shuddered, and he grabbed up the book and went up the four steep steps into the open and gasped for fresh air and did not vomit.
* * *
They didn’t make a fire this time. They opened the cans with their folding clip knives and ate the beef stew with plastic camp-spoons. Just as good cold, once they scraped away the white layer of clotted fat at the top. They were both impatient to get moving, though had anyone asked they wouldn’t have known why. Because they were in the wake of a rolling catastrophe, moving behind some malign harvest whose shape and intention they could only guess, and neither could have articulated why that was so. They could just as easily have fled south. If another bridge was blown they could have tried to swim or wade, couldn’t they? But they were not fleeing, they were following. They were both hunters. Were they hunting? No. They were trying to find a working vehicle they could take home. Home for Storey: Burlington, Vermont, where Storey was a professor at the university; it would be a long day’s drive from anywhere up here. It was southwest, but the roads in the big woods were so sparse and so harried by lakes and swamps, the fastest route was always due south to Bangor and across. Not an option, it seemed.
So they would walk up along the lakeshore. Now they sat on the log beside the water-soaked ashes in last night’s fire ring and scraped the last of the stew out of the cans. Storey said, “It’s strange: The buildings are all burned to the ground. Every single one.”
“I was thinking that, too.”
“In a wildfire, say, that overruns a town, there will be half-burned houses, whole buildings still standing that were jumped and spared. Here everything is gone.”
Jess scooped the thick brown sauce from the bottom of the tin and he sucked on the spoon. He could have eaten two more cans. “I got half a pack of Oreos, too,” he said.
Storey nodded.
“There’s a lot that’s strange.” Jess looked into the empty can with real sadness. “Do you want me to go down and look for more food?” He didn’t tell Storey about the doll and the teddy bear and how he had dreaded boarding more boats and had returned. Storey already knew, and shook his head. “Randall is a shore town, too. Bigger. On the map there’s a marina. Should be plenty more boats. We can get lunch there. And more.”
Get lunch. Like a plan to visit some eatery. Words it seemed now from another era.
“Do you think they’re dead? All of them? We saw so few bodies. Maybe they took everyone out before they burned it.”
“Maybe. I think they hit it from the air first.”
Scorched earth. Indiscriminate. Easier from the air. Neither said it.
