Burn, p.21
Burn, page 21
Jess brought the Newsboy in slowly, inching her in the final feet, careful not to bump the pilings too hard lest the rickety dock fall over. He cut the engine and Storey jumped up onto the splintered decking and Collie pursed her lips and took one skeptical look at the landing and declared, “This is Nowheresville. And I’m hungry.”
In the sudden cessation left by the motor they heard their wake wash against the posts and the whine of mosquitoes. They both stared at the girl. “ ‘Nowheresville’?” Jess said. He felt the laugh quaking his abdomen. “Nowheresville? Where’d you learn that?”
Collie shrugged. “Hungry,” she repeated. The men exchanged glances. Neither had seen the other smile in a while, much less laugh. They were laughing now.
“Okay,” Storey said, wiping a tear from his eye. “Let’s make some Boston beans. ’Kay? Which are very best cold. Sound good?” She was still clearly suspicious but she nodded her lion head. “After lunch,” Storey said, “we can check out this dump.”
“Dump,” she repeated, finally satisfied.
* * *
Well, Collie was right, pretty much. Back of the dock was an old road, grown in, that stuck to the highest ground it could find—not much—and wound through marsh thick with mosquitoes. The first frost should have cut down the bugs, but the days had been warm, and the marsh held the heat. The water in the reeds was humped with beaver lodges and scattered with the gesturing skeletons of dead trees. The drowned tamarack were bleached, the biggest limbs broken. They weren’t checking out Nowheresville, they were trying to get through it as fast as they could. Collie rode the wagon, and though they had tightened her hood and smeared her face with the last of their bug dope, the mosquitoes swarmed her head and bit and got into her mouth and eyes. At first she tried to bat them away, but her hands got bitten so badly that within half an hour they were swollen, too, and so she shoved them down into the side pockets of her lion suit and curled up and buried her face in the blanket and cried. Jess and Storey grimaced and walked, both leaning into the straps of their packs and rifles and tugging their loads. Where the ground was drier they pushed through shadowed spruce woods, and tall pines, and heard the insistent tuneless complaint of a nuthatch, one protesting note repeated and repeated, and Jess thought it a fitting accompaniment. Wanh wanh wanh…The bird was warm-blooded and probably as tortured by mosquitoes as they were. Why did it stay? Because this was its niche? Because natural selection had allotted it no other. One version of fate.
By mid-afternoon they had come to a fork in the track and taken the one bearing left, eastward. They were in hardwoods now, maple and beech, thank God. They got Collie out of her pajamas, and when they dropped to a stone-bedded brook they cooled her swollen face in the rushing current.
The men did, too. They took off their hot boots and sat on a smooth, rounded boulder and stuck their feet into the icy flow. Swift water and the pressure against their raw ankles and shins and toes, and the cold—they closed their eyes and released. From physical pain and uncertainty. For a moment there was only the sound of water rushing against rocks and the blood cooling in their feet and Collie climbing up into their laps as they sat together, curling across both of them, heavy for someone so small, and saying, “Let’s catch frogs,” before she dropped abruptly into sleep.
Chapter Sixteen
I have meant well, haven’t I?
You took care of yourself.
Don’t we all do that first?
No.
No.
Jess lay in a patch of sun on a rock ledge above the town. He had been glassing the lie of the buildings, the wooded hills cloaked in fall color, the slate strip of county road; also the harbor, the boats moored and docked. All intact. Actual living townspeople walked the streets. One dock was occupied by a long metal shed, “Matinicus Lobster Co.” Matinicus was an island, wasn’t it? One of the farthest out in Penobscot Bay, the famous one where lobstermen feuded and shot each other over territory for their traps. Now he lay back, face to the sun, which reddened his closed eyelids; he thought he could see there the fine branching of arteries like the map of some river system. He floated on his own fatigue, which somehow buoyed and rocked him.
He thought of the airline safety injunction to strap the oxygen mask on oneself first before helping others. More than once he had heard people use it, flippantly, to justify selfish behavior. Strap the mask on first. Go hunting with Storey two months a year, a mental-health prescription that he told Jan he needed so that he could stay centered and work the other ten. “Are we ever gonna go on vacation?” Jan had asked. “We used to talk about Spain.”
He did not have to have the affair in Vermont. He did not have to make love to Storey’s mother that first time; he might have closed his eyes, shut out the sight of her, called his parents to come get him. He did not have to shoot the little buck in the meadow when he was fifteen. He might have lowered the gun, whispered, “Graze on. Live on. We will both live out our lives.”
Is that what people did on their deathbeds? Inventory their starkest failures? Was this granite overlook his last perch?
He wished he was in Spain. More than anything. With Jan. Sipping sangria at an outdoor table, on a cobbled street, above another harbor, maybe Barcelona. Anywhere but here and now.
Now he was going to walk down through the woods and straight into town. A living town. That was a shock; it made him queasy. How many weeks had they been out? Not many. He couldn’t tally them. He would find the drop-off spot, surveil it, watch for anyone who looked like Collie’s family. Maybe he would make discreet inquiries: Is there an older Mrs. Beckett? Is it safe here? We are out-of-state visitors—hunters—caught in the cross fire. We have no dog in this fight. Can we get home to Vermont and Colorado? Is there a refugee center?
Would he tell them where they’d been? What county? Where they seemed to take no prisoners? He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything. Would they believe him? Or would they look at the beard, the dirty clothes, the streaked campfire char on his thighs, and shoot him on sight? As some kind of spy or outlander.
He had studied the town for close to an hour. He had tugged the torn page of the Maine gazetteer from the inside pocket of his fleece jacket and unfolded it carefully and confirmed the numbers he had jotted in the upper-left corner. Confirmed again that the indicated lat-long lines touched the coast at one spot, the town of Grantham. And now he didn’t need to turn on the iPhone to check his current position: he lifted the binocs and again scanned the street and found the flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes and read on the façade of the low brick building “U.S. Post Office, Grantham, ME 04031.”
So this was the right town, good. He felt his heart thud in his chest, almost the way he felt back home when a bull elk stepped out of the aspen into a meadow and all he had to do was unsling the rifle and lift it slowly and brace the barrel against the fir tree against which he leaned. Good. But this wouldn’t be that simple.
He moved the glasses now methodically from the north end of town, his left, down to the south end, his right, and from the moored boats in the harbor into the docks and across the clustered downtown. He followed the occasional pickup and the sand-colored convoys of armored Humvees and troop carriers that passed up and down the main street, which was the state highway. Groups of ten vehicles at most. Numbers, it seemed, for an occupation, not an invasion. Were the towns along the coast sympathetic to the federal government? Pro-union? The American flag still flying at the post office seemed to indicate that this one was. Towns like this were packed with folks From Away, second-homers, retirees, quality-of-lifers. They tended to vote much more liberal. Would the feds even need to occupy such a town? Would partisans and secessionist sympathizers sabotage and harry it? Would he be mistaken for one of them?
No telling. He would have to be careful. He would walk down. He would suss out the town and return to Storey and Collie and guide them in. If it wasn’t safe, if he didn’t return, they would know.
He had insisted. Somehow he owed Storey that much. The girl, too; he wasn’t sure why.
Storey had said it out loud: “You don’t owe me anything.”
“Well.”
“You don’t. You—we were seventeen.”
“I—”
Storey had cut him off. His face behind his two weeks of beard was haggard and his eyes were stony. “All you had to do was tell me. We were brothers. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Jess could not hold his gaze. He looked away. “Like you said, we were seventeen.”
“Yeah.” The word not agreement, but judgment. Flat and hard. Jess flinched. We were seventeen. And people are hardwired, cradle to grave pretty much the same. If I had some problem looking truth square in the eye…
“Yes,” Jess repeated. “I owed you that.”
Collie’s face was welted from bites she’d gotten four days before. Angry red swellings. Smudged with dirt and tracked faintly with tear salt. She had stared up at the two men, looking from one to the other, not understanding but feeling the import. Then Jess had touched her head, just that. And picked up his pack and the rifle and walked off the four-wheeler track and into the deep midday shadows of the trees.
Now he stood. He hefted the pack beside him and leaned it against the trunk of a black birch. He put his nose against the silk-smooth and peeling bark and inhaled the wintergreen scent. It smelled like sharp mint and cool water. He closed his eyes. I have known this. He opened his hand and placed his palm gently against the trunk, as he would the flank of a horse. Felt the warmth in it, almost as if it were an animal. It’s enough, isn’t it? Almost enough.
He opened his eyes and rubbed them with the same hand. The fragrance of the birch was on his fingers. He unslung the rifle and leaned it there, too, against the pack. And then he turned away from the tree and made out the deer trail that dropped off the bench and through the ferns, and he walked.
Chapter Seventeen
It was odd. Now that he was unburdened of the pack and rifle he had carried for the last three weeks, it was not only his body that seemed to float. His mind did, too. He followed the game trail as it contoured across the ridge through thick woods, and his feet felt nimble as they found their footing in the ferns, and over roots, and down the slick slabrock of a recent rain. He almost ran. He felt agile for the first time in weeks. It was not that he had left his grief and terror leaning against that tree, but that they did not bind him so heavily, and it was almost as if he could look down on himself moving through the woods as a hawk would, or an owl. And he slowed. He would not just stumble out onto the main street and get himself shot. That would be dumb.
He had seen from above that these woods descended right to the western edge of the village. Good. It was an older town, the buildings mostly brick, and he had scoped from his perch a café, a ship chandler, several restaurants, an antique store, a bookstore, an army-surplus outdoor store. Typical Maine coast. A few people were on the streets, going about, it seemed, their daily business; there were few vehicles on the road but the short convoys of sand-colored troop carriers and military trucks. He could tell by the lat-long lines on the map that his destination was somewhere on the southern side of the village.
The main drag ran one block inland from the water street which serviced the many docks and piers. And to his right, at the south end of town, the two streets ran together and continued along the edge of the harbor and past a large boat shed and an unfenced yard crammed with hauled-out fishing boats and small yachts on cradles. Also skiffs on trailers. A drydock. On the far side of the shed, there would be a set of tracks running into the water and a lift for smaller vessels.
In the yard—unlike the rest of the town, which seemed to be bustling—he had seen no soul, either because the place was empty, or because everyone was inside. His intuition told him that this would be a good place to land, both because it was somewhere near where he wanted to end up, and because he could hide easily among the parked boats. Also, the woods nearly touched the road there; all he had to do was cross the state highway. And if men were working, he might draw less attention if he walked from the large repair shed into the center of town, carrying, say, a lunchbox or thermos or travel coffee mug. Might. He knew he was fantasizing now, his reasoning too buoyant. In truth, he had no idea what he was walking into, or how, exactly, he would walk out of it, or if he would survive the next hour.
Still, he let himself run. He let himself free-fall down the steeper sections of trail, trusted feet to find their place. Where the game trails branched he hewed to the right, south, so as to bring himself closer to the yard, and he figured he was very close. And he almost did stumble out into the clearing, but pulled himself short and threw an arm around a rough-barked maple as if clutching a friend.
The clearing was a narrow overgrown field and the bright afternoon blazed over it and he blinked and tucked back into the trees. About three acres, an old hayfield maybe, or corn patch, now disused and grown over with mugwort and grass and a scattering of spruce saplings. Beyond it was the two-lane highway, and beyond that the rows of landlocked boats and the metal shed. Left of them, north, was a line of houses and docks along the water. Good. Any one of these might be the place. Jess might have exulted, except that a breeze huffed from the south and instead of sun-toasted conifers he inhaled the stench of death.
He gagged. He looked to his right and saw the blue tarp, and beneath it the paper sacks stacked like bricks. White dust spilled from tears in the bags and he knew it was lime. How had he missed it? The tarped pile presided over a trench that ran along the edge of the trees. Beside the stack, two spades had been stuck into the ground, nearly upright, like uncrossed markers.
The bodies, from what he could see, were fresh. From where he stood he could only glimpse a few yards of the ditch, and the cadavers were dusted over with lime and otherwise uncovered. They gestured in the abrupt and grotesque ways he had seen in war photographs, rigid and twisted, almost defiant. He winced his eyes shut. And then he forced himself to look again. There were men, young and old, and a woman, two women, three. And no children, thank God. He spun away from the scene and covered his mouth and nose with his forearm and made himself breathe.
Okay, okay, get your shit together. Breathe. Vomit if you have to. Steady. You got yourself down here; now do what you came to do. Right? Right. C’mon, straighten up.
I have no rifle. Nothing. I am defenseless.
You don’t need a gun. You have your clip knife, don’t you?
Yeah, what am I gonna do, slit some sentry’s throat like in the movies?
You don’t need a weapon. You came to reconnoiter; now reconnoiter as best you can.
Forget it.
No.
Jess’s internal argument was interrupted by the sounds of engines. Around the bend, from the direction of town, came two pickups, not fast. They turned in at the shed. He lifted his binoculars and made out the sign at the entrance, “Grantham Boatworks, J. R. Brown.” The trucks passed behind a steel long-liner on a cradle and he lost them.
It was time to turn on his phone. He pried it out of the front pocket of his torn pants and held the On button and watched, gratified, as it came to life. The iconic apple, the one with the bite of knowledge taken out of it, except that now, to him, it looked like the mark of one who had bitten off more than he could chew. Ha! When the home screen lit he wondered again if he should change it, a photo of him and Jan and Bell in a meadow on Cottonwood Pass with the aspen in full autumn blaze behind them. As they would probably be blazing right now. Who had taken it? He couldn’t remember—some passing mountain biker, maybe. Who must have snapped it as a light gust blew through, because he noticed again three yellow leaves above them, catching the light as they fell through bright-blue air. Why did he keep it? Because it was real. Nothing would obliterate it.
He tapped his password and turned on the Gaia app, which immediately displayed his location in two lines, latitude and longitude, out to hundredths of a second. He took two steps to his right, over a broken limb, and the last digits flipped. Good. No one on the road. He unfolded the torn map and checked the numbers at the top and moved fast into the field, watching his step and his palmed phone, too—the spinning numbers to the right of the decimal—and he realized before he got to the pavement of the highway that the location he wanted was inside the boatworks, inside, it looked like, the big metal shed.
* * *
“Where is he going?”
“To look for someone.”
“Are you two mad?”
“Mad?”
“Are you mad at him?”
“No.”
“Is he coming back? I want him to come back.”
Storey’s hesitation, which she catches. For a second her lips quiver. Too much loss, he thinks. And he reaches down for her quickly and lifts her to him. “He’s coming back,” he urges. “He’s coming back soon.”
She buries her face in his neck, and he feels the wetness.
“I promise,” he says.
He can feel her wipe her cheeks back and forth against his neck, pull her face away.
“Is he your little brother?”
“No. Yes. Sort of.”
“He’s nice.”
“Yes.”
“He laughs more than you.”
Storey leans his head away, looks at her. Her expression is defiant.
“It’s true,” he says.
She’s relieved that he agrees. “Is he going to look for my dad?”
