Burn, p.22
Burn, page 22
He hesitates again, covers it with a cough.
“Is he?”
He nods.
“Let’s go.”
“We can’t.”
“He went.”
“He has to see if it’s safe.”
“He always goes first.”
Storey doesn’t say anything, but thinks, That’s true, too.
“Your dad is named Silas, right?”
“Papa,” she says.
“What do his friends call him?”
“Kernel.” Kernel. She says it like “kernel of corn.”
* * *
He didn’t need it anymore. Jess stuffed the phone back into his pocket and ran. Across the empty road, which was humped with frost heaves and webbed with black tar where they’d filled the cracks. He leapt the ditch and brushed through the purple-stemmed asters and sweet clover and hit a section of toppled hurricane fence hidden by weeds. He stumbled, nearly fell, ran on. Closest to the shed was a row of three small inshore lobster boats, maybe thirty-footers. Paint faded, winchless, probably older iterations of the boatworks’ own design. He ran for a gap between two of them and crouched. He was hidden from the road. Good. The grass in the yard was unmowed and thick, two feet high. He lay in it. He could hear voices. This part of the shed was not insulated. Fifteen feet farther down the wall was a door with a window, painted over. He belly-crawled to it and reached for the lever handle, but of course it didn’t budge. Fuck it. He got to his feet again and stayed low. He would not be invisible from the highway, but hard to see behind the boats. He ran again. Along the metal wall of the shed, which was painted a faded yellow and streaked with rust. He ran toward the water, and when he got to the end of the wall he lay flat again and peered around the corner.
The bay side of the shed was all open, as he’d suspected. Rails ran down into the harbor between concrete barriers that extended into the water like two levees. Farther out, backlit sloops tugged at their moorings, and he counted five inshore lobster boats beyond them, angling in after a morning running traps; their snowy bow wakes caught the light. He twisted his head and looked inside. In a cradle, tucked back into the middle of the building, was a blue-water sailer, mastless, and stripped to the naked wood of its hull, which curved and gleamed in the light from the tall bays. Maybe sixty feet, with a long windowed deckhouse forward of the cockpit. Jess swallowed hard at the stark beauty of the vessel, which was clearly being given a new life. A voice raised. “Not a chance.” It echoed in the drum of the vast space. He shifted his attention to the middle of the close wall, where four men in baseball caps stood in a small circle. They were close to the outside door he had tried. Jesus, he could have stumbled right into them. Three of the men were large; two were bearded and wore Carhartt coats; one had on frayed coveralls. The smallest man was broad-shouldered and wore a faded maroon hooded sweatshirt. He was facing away toward the back of the shed and it was he who was speaking. “Not a chance,” he repeated. His voice held a frayed resonance, which carried in the cavernous shed. “We’re moving now,” he said.
Jess let his eyes adjust. The men were no more than fifty feet away. The biggest, in the coveralls, was facing the open bay doors. He seemed to be looking straight at Jess, but Jess had only half his face around the corner, and he knew that the bright harbor would backlight everything. The man said, “Your call, Colonel. We’ll do it.”
Jess felt his chest constrict. Partisans for sure. Secessionists who were not fucking around, who blew up dams. So what was he supposed to do now? The coordinates were definitely here. She was supposed to come here. Was he, Jess, supposed to turn her over to these militiamen? No. Maybe they could— He didn’t finish the thought. Because the men bumped fists and broke and walked toward him and he saw that the one in the hooded sweatshirt wore thick black glasses that enlarged his eyes, and though he was not grinning now Jess saw him in an instant, in flickering overlay, holding a two-pound lake trout above his tiny, grinning daughter.
* * *
He ducked around the corner, lay flat in the grass, and heard the men walk out of the shed ten feet from where his head had been. Scuff of boots on the concrete apron, one saying, “He’s safe enough; why the fuck would they come down here to look?” One hacks a smoker’s cough. “Go everywhere, don’t they?” “Brown’s been vetted at least three times. They think we’re knitting socks. For the Marines.” “Yuh, funny.” “You know what to do.” That was the one in the coveralls. Car doors slamming, one, two, three. He heard one truck start then the other, heard the tires crunch gravel, and they were gone. He heard a cough, pitched like Beckett’s voice, and he knew that the colonel had stayed behind.
He could walk right in. Right now. Say, “Your daughter had the coordinates sewn into her lion suit. She is safe, I promise. We can bring her down.” But he doesn’t. Why not? Because the man’s voice was tuned like a preacher’s. Not deep, but it would tunnel through a crowd, carry the way the sound of water carries through trees. His absolute authority over the much bigger men. He was dangerous, very. Jess intuited that his ruthlessness would be as natural as the irresistible resonance of his voice. And that it would be better if they showed up with Collie in tow, unharmed and an ally.
Chapter Eighteen
Jess lay in the tall grass beside the boatworks. For a minute he just breathed. He inhaled the sun on the painted steel of the wall, and harbor water—the seaweed and barnacles of probably low tide—and spar varnish or epoxy from inside the shed. These guys were planning something big and violent and imminent. Military convoys passed the place all the time. Bad timing to introduce a little girl. Better to find Grandma, wasn’t it? Yes. That should be easy, she should be right up the street.
How did he look? He dug out his phone and flipped the camera to selfie and brought it over his face. He started. Was that him? Two weeks of dark beard, flecked with gray and bits of probably oatmeal. His eyes nested in pockets of shadow, red-rimmed, and stared back at him with surprise and a shy temerity: What the fuck did you think we would look like, after what we have seen? They were recessed and haunted, and years older. Firewood char streaked the side of his nose. Well. He rubbed at the smirch and combed the debris out of his beard and pressed off the phone. He didn’t look too much different from the men in the shed. It would have to do. He stood. No one on the road. He took off his jacket and shook it hard and patted off grass seeds and dirt. He swiped at his pant legs and dusted off his butt. At the road end of the building was a stack of wire lobster traps. Good. He picked up two, one in each hand, and instead of shoving them back through the hurricane fence he walked across the yard and straight out the drive under the big boatworks sign, and when he hit the paved road he took a deep breath and straightened tall and turned right toward the first line of buildings and the main street.
* * *
He hadn’t walked fifty yards when he heard the first engines. He heard them coming behind him loud and he felt the reflex to swerve into the weeds but made himself stick to the white line of the shoulder. He lived here, he was a proud lobsterman, why should he move over?
The first Humvee passed within two feet and did not slow. He raised a chin in greeting, but the helmeted soldier riding shotgun barely glanced. Two more Humvees and an armored truck followed, grinding gears in a downshift that pitched the engine higher. They left him in a wind-wake laden with diesel exhaust.
His heart hammered. He gained the narrow sidewalk by the first buildings on the harbor side—Cape cottage on its own dock and a sign over the door: “Debbie Beveridge Gallery, Original Watercolors”; then “Casco Bay Ship Chandler,” a brick storefront with a model of a clipper ship in the window. That’s when the second convoy passed. Two open jeeps, two tarped troop trucks. It, too, was heading into town, or through it, and the first jeep slowed, and an officer in a patrol cap with a captain’s single silver bar twisted back and surveyed him. Jess could see the automatic pistol on the man’s hip, and he lifted a lobster trap in salute, and the lieutenant waved the driver on.
Jess let out a long breath. Summary and extrajudicial, he thought. Someone, maybe these guys, were executing people. He didn’t know who the people in the trench were, or who put them there, but he didn’t want to join them. He focused on the sidewalk a few feet ahead. He had places to go, he was deep in thought. He passed a few people—an older couple in cheap tracksuits, a boy carrying a soccer ball, two young lobstermen in white rubber high boots, folded down. No tourists. The fishermen smelled like diesel and bait and must have just come off the morning trap run, and Jess made sure not to meet their eyes, but he noticed a hitch in their banter as they met and passed him. He also noticed that their tone was not light, but grim, and he heard no laughter. He kept his pace, neither slower nor faster, and he marveled at the discipline it took. He only scanned the store signs hanging from their quaint hooks with fast glances. Did he stand out? Would a lobsterman carry old traps down the street? Maybe—probably not. But these were not normal times, right? He was starting to scare himself and trying to decide if he should ditch the traps when he hustled across a ramped drive leading down to the Matinicus Lobster Company dock. Slow down, slow down, don’t panic now…And he attained the next row of shops and tried not to hurry along them when he looked up and saw the sign “Grantham Gifts,” three stores up. His heart hammered. It was on the corner, and the intersecting street ran up the hill on its left. It was three blocks long. Could it be this easy?
At the top of the street he could see a white clapboard church with a steeple and then the woods of the ridge. Collie and Storey were just up there at the top of it. They could descend to this wall of trees and come right down this street, do it in the dark. A nearly novel sensation warmed him: elation. Grandma would take Collie. She would be safe at last. He made himself not accelerate. A boxy and battered Dodge pickup rumbled down the main street toward him, and he set one trap on the sidewalk and found himself waving, and the driver, whose face was rimed with white stubble, waved back. And went on.
Jess picked up the trap. The store was fifty feet away. It was then, in his excitement, that he forgot to not look in the shopwindows, and he realized that all the businesses were dark and closed. One even had a “Will Return” paper clock in the glass door with the hands pointing to noon—or midnight—and a big black question mark scrawled at the bottom. He felt his pulse race again. It’s okay, it’s okay. He would knock at Grandma’s door, ring the bell; it was a two-story brick building with curtains in the windows upstairs; she probably lived there. He was thinking about what he would say first when he got to the door and saw that the big window he remembered from the photograph was now boarded up with plywood and on the wood was spray-painted a large red “X.”
Flush of panic. He hoisted the lobster traps. There is no war movie in which broken plate glass and a big red “X” in an occupied town means anything good. He spun toward the climbing side street. And noticed two women on the next block. They were on the opposite side of the street, thirty yards away; they wore business slacks and black nylon jackets; their heads were together, and they were staring at him and talking fast. One lifted a cell phone.
He shrugged. Not sure why. Still gripping the lobster pots, he crossed the street toward the climbing hill and the church—and the woods—and sauntered. He tried. Tried to seem casual. But once he had entered the side street and lost them from view—for a moment—he threw the traps into the bed of a parked pickup and ran. As fast as he could in his boots. When he hit the corner of the first block he twisted to look back; they were not in the street yet. He turned right and doglegged. Down a block and then up the next climbing street to a cul-de-sac and a wall of beeches and pines.
Chapter Nineteen
Late afternoon. The shed in shadow, the shadow of the ridge halfway into the slate-blue harbor. Cold. Clear sky, and tonight would freeze hard. Smell of wood smoke drifting from the village. On another evening he would have been enchanted.
He had run up the slope so fast he could taste blood in his mouth and he had dry-heaved as he topped out on the wooded ridge. Would they have marked him as so suspicious? Would they bother to send a patrol? Who knew, they might. The women, who were some kind of officials, were clearly alarmed. He could not unsee the mass grave. He told Storey with no explanation that they had to move, right now.
They left their packs but slung the rifles. He guided them back down, angling south, right, away from the town center, but as far from the trench as he could. So, when they got to the narrow field and the road, they had to cut back across the meadow as they ran. Storey carried Collie clutched to his chest and made sure she couldn’t see the bodies. They moved fast without the packs. They did hear engines and dove. Into a tall thicket of mugwort and grass, Storey tumbling with her as best he could, taking the hit on his opposite shoulder, all three watching through weeds, hearts pounding, as five sand-colored military vehicles passed, heading into town. Flatbed trucks and Humvees with mounted machine guns. When they rose cautiously again and crouched, Jess saw that Storey’s face was cut and bleeding. No time. No time to ask. They ran.
Brown’s big boatshed was right across the road. They crossed the two lanes of undulating pavement, skirted the toppled hurricane fence, ducked behind the row of old lobster boats eight feet from the shed wall. “Hold on,” Jess whispered. He bellied forward as he had before, peered around the corner. Twilight in the hangar, no light on. There wouldn’t be, would there? He hesitated. Then stood, took two steps through the open bay so that he was standing just inside the dark warehouse, and shouted: “Beckett! Silas Beckett!”
It echoed flat off the metal walls and died somewhere up in the girdered trusses of the roof.
“I’ve got your daughter, Collie! She’s safe, well fed. She’s wearing her lion suit and she loves her dog, Crystal, and oatmeal with milk and honey!”
Nothing. The words lapped against the steel drum of the building like the ripples of tossed stones.
“I came to bring her back. Just that. I have no dog in this fight. I was here moose-hunting. I am from Colorado. I just want to get Collie back home.”
He caught movement up and to his right. Gleam of light in one window of the cradled sailboat. He could see now that all the windows of the yacht’s deckhouse had been blacked out, covered and taped as if for staining the wood. But the light swam out of the hatch, flashlight or spot, and then he was blinded. It was on his face. He winced, blinked, raised both hands. Looked down, saw the red dot skittering on his chest.
“You’re alone?” Not a shout, even. The voice so clear and commanding it traveled the distance without effort.
Jess made an instant decision, no need to put Storey at risk. “Yes!” he shouted.
“Let me see her.”
Jess half turned toward the open bay. He called, “Collie, c’mere.”
And now she ran from the corner like a pony out of the gate and Jess knew Storey had uncovered her mouth and released her. “Papa! Papa!” she was yelling, running past Jess, her tail swinging and her mane brushed out from the top of her hood; she ran straight to the middle of an expanse of open concrete and she couldn’t see in the sudden shadow and she stopped dead. She raised her paws. “Papa?” she yelled. Jess could hear the panic. And he watched the beam of the Maglite swing to her and saw her cringe away. “Papa? Papa, where are you?”
The light snapped off. Silence. Jess held his breath. He could hear metal crick in the roof and water lap on the ramp below. Finally:
“Col?”
“Papa!” The shout a cry now, more desperate than relief. “Where are you? Papa, where are you?”
“Col! Col!” The man’s voice cracked. “Col, I can’t come out now.” The emotion reined in. The man’s timbred words echoed from the drydocked yacht, from back in the dark and above.
“Papa! Come out! Come out!” Her cry rose into the girders. Jess was riveted to the floor. She ran. Straight to the boat, straight across the open floor, into the shadows, and Jess saw her trip over the wheeled tank of a compressor. She hit hard and flew onto concrete and he jumped. He ran to her, fuck the red dot, and he picked her up, and she was sobbing so hard she could not breathe. He picked her up and covered her and squeezed and held her and the gasp of her without breath was louder than his own exhortations, “I got you, Collie. I got you, honey, I got you…” Until her arms reached up and found his neck and she squirmed herself higher and gripped him until her face was tight in his beard and she cried and he soothed and soothed her.
When she had finally quieted he said, “Here, let’s stand.” He slid her down gently to the floor and held her hand. She shook it free and took two steps and put one paw straight into the shadows. “Papa? Papa! Where are you? Papa, please.”
“I can’t, honey. I love you, Col. I love you so, so…More…” Silence. Then his preacher’s voice again, utterly commanding. That was it: it harnessed something greater than he, the speaker. Jess heard a hard resolve.
“Take her.”
“What?”
“Take her. Wherever you are going.”
“What?”
“If she stays here she will die.”
“I…what about the grandma, your mother?”
“How did you—?” Voice cold and hard. Then silence. The red dot crawled on his chest again. He felt it, looked down. His heart hammered. Collie was frozen, unable to digest the words. She looked wildly from the boat in the shadows to Jess.
“Her photo was in your house! Grantham Gifts. Looked like you, two of you together.”
“Okay.” Red dot relented. But Collie was running again. She was running in her suit and screaming, “Papa! Papa!” and Jess didn’t think but bolted after her and she hit an extension cord and fell again. She howled and slid and he scooped her up into his arms and she did not struggle but screamed into his chest until she had no voice.
