Burn, p.3
Burn, page 3
“So I was thinking we could sail,” Jess said. “The food came off a twenty-four-foot sloop. The sails are on the halyards and reefed. The wind is picking up and we could be there in an hour.”
“No.”
“Because we’d be so visible?”
“Yes.”
“This thing, whatever it is, is not looking back. Doesn’t seem to be.”
“We don’t know where it’s looking. So far it…they…keep moving. But—”
Storey stopped midstream, as if he could not carry the weight of everything he did not know. He set the can on the damp duff and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. Storey had a wife and two daughters, eight and fourteen. These were three of the things he did not know about, and every once in a while they overtook him. Jess thought that it made him more cautious, because—to be blunt—he had more to live for. Jess asked himself if he, Jess, was cavalier with his own life, and if so, was it because he had no children and no longer had a wife. He didn’t think so. On all their hunting and canoe trips and travels in the past, he, Jess, was the one more willing to take risks. If he wanted to sail it was because there was a calculus of energy conservation and he figured that the energy they’d save on the boat might be energy that later on would save their lives. But was that it, or was he just lazier than Storey?
Storey collected himself and dropped his hand from his face. “It’d be like breaking cover and shouting, ‘Hey, over here! Look!’ You know that, right?”
“Yes.”
“We can walk.”
“Yeah.”
Jess saw Storey dig for the phone in the pocket of his pants again, tap the airplane-mode icon off, and check. A gesture now almost reflexive.
Jess said gently, “Store.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t check so often—”
Storey lifted his eyes. They were flat and bleak.
Jess said, “To save battery. And we should turn one off. For later. For emergencies. I’ve got one portable charger. I’ll…I’ll turn off mine.”
“For emergencies?”
Jess blinked. He turned and let his eyes travel down the hill, over the charred townsite. “Yeah.” He swallowed. “I know.”
One thing he did know was that Storey was worried sick not only about the safety of his family during a civil convulsion, but also about what Lena and the girls would be going through in their panic to reach him. If this was secession or something like it, Lena would have heard by now. She was also a professor at UVM, political science, well connected both in Vermont’s contingent to Washington and in the state Legislature, and she would be using those connections and lighting up dozens of phones in a frenzy to find her husband. And she would not be able to insulate her daughters. Andrea, the older sister, was a star cross-country runner and also suffered a form of anorexia and was super-sensitive. She was at serious risk, and upsets and trauma revved up her disorder. When their cat, Coco, had been hit by a car last year, Andrea had lost so much weight the doctor told Storey and Lena that even with extreme intervention she might die.
Jess also knew that the home screen on Storey’s phone was a photo of Lena and the girls on a bright, windy day, pressed all together against the rail of a ferry deck and smiling wildly. There was the gray-blue of Lake Champlain behind them, and the distant blue ridges of the Adirondacks beyond. They were going backpacking for the weekend. Lena’s ponytail was pulled through the band of her hat, but Andrea, who at fourteen was nearly as tall, wore her tracksuit jacket and her long hair loose, and it blew across her mother’s face. Little Geneva tucked up into her mother’s armpit like a fledgling and grinned uncertainly, and held her hands out as if to beseech the unbridled beauty of the day to calm down a little. Jess knew that Storey probably lit his phone as much to take solace in the picture as to check for a signal.
“Okay,” Storey said finally. “I’ll go easy with the phone and you keep yours off. Good idea.”
Nobody had to suggest they break down the shelter. They devoured the two stacks of Oreos and stood in unison and went to the olive nylon tarp and unstaked it and unslung the parachute cord from between the trees and folded the sheet and coiled the line. They packed up and shucked the rain gear and hefted the packs and rifles and walked out to the edge of the trees.
For some reason Jess held on to the firefighter’s ax. He snugged it through the ice-ax loop on his pack and strapped it tight. The fog was thinning now and spuming over the water in spectral tatters that merged and moved past each other. The two men descended the aisle of an ash-blown street, and when they intersected the larger thoroughfare that became the highway they turned left and walked out of town. On the two-lane county road the remains of burned foundations spaced wider and wider apart, and they followed the detritus of the violently displaced—the single shoes, wallets, upturned strollers, and shattered picture frames—until that, too, petered out on a ribbon of water-stained tarmac drying out, then steaming in late-September heat. Farm fields now, untouched, and woods. The lake through trees on their right. A small sign at the head of a driveway that said “C Bar C, Registered Quarter Horses, Hay, Boarding.” No barn or stable visible at the top of the hill. Jess wondered what had happened to the horses. Better not to know. As he walked he repeated the name of the boat, Isabella, over and over like a mantra. It was the name he and Jan had discussed for the girl they did not have.
* * *
The liminal spaces are the ones I love the most and where I feel the most uncomfortable. And the most sad. Do you know what I mean? Jan had nudged him, her face blurred with whimsy.
I think so.
Like my dreams. Between the waking, living world and the sleep of the dead. Mostly in my dreams I grieve. Mostly, they are about loss.
Me, too.
Or I am anxious. Stressed. I am on the wrong train, I watch the platform receding, the one where I am supposed to be. Nobody is speaking a language I can understand. There is usually some menace I should be running from but can’t. Rarely do I make love in my dreams or even have sex, or fly, or come over some ridge into Shangri-la.
Same.
But I love them just the same. My life without them would be a hollow shell.
A hollow shell.
He repeated it and thought how there is also a liminal space in an empty shell, one that you can hold to your ear and which will give you, out of its own emptiness, the sounds of surf and wind. A benison from one who holds nothing. And he thought of that conversation many times after she left, and how emptiness was a place he was learning to appreciate if not love, as she had learned to love the in-betweens. He had to acknowledge something. Bow to it, if slightly.
* * *
The day warmed and whatever mist clung to the ridges faded and vanished. They stopped in the road and stripped off their jackets. The road hugged the shoreline loosely, straying around wooded hills and what looked like large holdings at water’s edge. Hard to tell, because where there might have been mansions there were now only blackened ruins and docks. And, again, the boats. Whatever boats, cleated to the docks or rocking on their moorings, had been left untouched. So they walked the edge of the road and skirted the lake, sometimes close, sometimes as much as a half-mile above. They tried twice to shortcut across fields and lost time crossing fences and ditches and scratched their arms in the brambles. Lost time. Did they have time to lose, or gain? Jess wondered. Since they had started walking it almost seemed time was suspended. Or the normal accounting of it. Because time worked best when there was a movement toward or away. Toward desire, away from death. Away from the Big Bang, toward an infinite expansion that might or might not be God. Toward quitting time, beer-thirty, a quinceañera, a vacation, a wedding, a funeral. Toward the sense of a poem, or love, or away from the chaos of a dream. But now they did not know, truly, what they were headed into or out of. Or what flashed on the horizon.
And so Storey, who still believed he had a bearing, which was his family, was more eager to try the shortcuts, and Jess had to remind him that they had cost.
And then what once were houses along the shoreline became more frequent, houses with docks and ski boats tied, and little Friendship sloops on moorings—probably a race class up here. There were flagpoles on the lawns that sloped to the water where American flags still hung and lifted in the pulsing breeze. And Jess knew they were getting close to the town and he wondered if whatever militia had blazed through was unionist and punishing a secessionist county. Could you use that term in the third millennium? Unionist? Was any of this really happening? Or was he now in some long, involved anxious dream, in which his grief at the loss of his wife bubbled to the surface and frothed? And from which he would wake, pillow damp, into a hunting trip with Storey…wake into a darkness before daybreak that held the same scents of spruce and fir and lakewater that he smelled now? How many dreams within dreams could a person wake from? In grade school everyone said that if you sneezed more than eight times you would die; was it like that?
And if this grim procession or juggernaut of harvest that they were following now—if it was anti-secessionist, why would they burn the places that flew the Stars and Stripes? Wouldn’t they leapfrog around them? And why would a rabidly secessionist town—rabid enough to become a target—let anyone fly an American flag? It made no sense.
Maybe they, whoever they were, knew that flying the flag was a shallow attempt to save one’s skin. Maybe they knew that the town knew they were coming—maybe they knew that, as they attacked, they could not shut down cell service fast enough, not before a few desperate calls got out, warning other folks along the lake, or farther afield. And those people, the townspeople here, armed with the knowledge that the storm was bearing down, maybe in one last act of apostasy, or its inverse, they ran the flags up the poles and prayed.
It was too confusing. They had no idea who was on whose side, or what, really, the sides were about. Jess stopped in the road and shook his head as if trying to clear it.
“What?” Storey said.
“The flags.” Jess pointed.
“So?”
“Didn’t we say that this might be some eruption over secession?”
“So?” Storey blinked down to the landscaped shoreline.
“So what do the flags mean?”
“Hell if I know.”
“I mean, whose side is who on? I’m thinking destruction on this scale has gotta be full-on military. U.S. of A. So these towns must be rebel or whatever. Right?”
Storey stood looking east and blinked in the autumn sun, a pale, early-morning sun that was barely an hour clear of the ridges. He stood as if smelling the still-cool breeze that stirred in the long grass at the edge of the road.
“I wonder if it matters,” he said.
“What?”
“I wonder if it matters whose side anyone is on.”
Jess winced at his friend. “What does that mean?”
Storey turned. He tucked his thumbs under the pack straps and shrugged the weight up off his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “All this…” He trailed off. Jess waited. “It seems vicious and random.”
“Random?”
“Not random, I guess. Indiscriminate. They’re burning everything. Except the boats.”
“So…what, then?”
Storey looked back down to the lake. To the boats there, the flagpoles. “I dunno, Jess. It’s like the heat of the destruction, the savagery…It’s like it’s about something deeper than any issue like secession.”
Jess watched his oldest friend. Whose week-old beard had flecks of gray. He knew, watching him, that Storey was thinking about the fierce and pervasive violence and that he was praying that it not spill over into New Hampshire and Vermont and touch his children and his wife. In suggesting that the violence felt deeper than secession he was voicing his own dread that it might not have boundaries.
Jess spat into the road, hitched up his own pack. “It’s probably just some crazy central-Maine shit. Right? Something like this was bound to happen somewhere.”
Storey was more than worried; he was grieving. Already. Jess could see it on his face. But Storey smiled, sad. He appreciated Jess’s effort.
Storey said, “The town would have sent out distress signals. One kind or another.”
“Right.”
“They would have warned everyone else. You know that the attacks, news of them, are zinging all over the news and the internet right now.”
“Right.”
“Why doesn’t it feel that way?”
* * *
In half a mile they came to a sign, green, that said “Randall, Population 2,732.” So they had let the sign stand. That did seem random, or at least scattershot, since Green Hill’s, on both sides of town, were gone.
But, as in Green Hill, not much else had been spared. The county road dropped down a gentle hill and into what must have been a pretty Main Street not high above the water. And so the town center was mostly flat, with streets branching down to the shore and a lovely wharf, still intact. On the far side of the wharf, with its walkway and benches and shade trees of oak and pine and maple, was another marina, this one at least twice the size of the one in Green Hill. The trees still stood; the benches invited respite. The boats swung gently on their moorings, as before. The black reek of burned houses watered their eyes.
Again, as they walked the sooted aisles of the narrow streets, they passed only the silent blackened monuments of chimney, hearth, foundation wall. Some still smoked, and when they stirred a heap of cinders with a length of rebar they pushed up glowing embers. They passed what must have been the stone arch entryway to a modest church; nothing else of it stood. Again they called out. Again they knew, without knowing why, that the typhoon of the reapers had passed and gone. Again they found few bodies. There was what must have been a child curled behind a stack of chimney stones, sheltered in what once must have been a hidden cubby or closet. The body was small and blackened and lipless with bared teeth, and Storey lurched from the sight and Jess heard him heave. There was what must have been a couple embraced beneath what must have been a pickup in what must have been a garage. There was a badly burned body sprawled inside a grove of seven poplars whose unsinged leaves spun and clattered in the easy wind. How did that happen? On the north end of the wharf and behind it, at what once had been an intersection, a street sign still stood—bronzed letters embossed on dark steel: “Water Street.”
It seemed to Jess almost like a taunt; he wasn’t sure why. He didn’t want to look anymore. He walked to the edge of the wharf, which was decked with heavy, weather-grayed planks. They soothed him somehow. As did the prospect of open water, far shore, moored sailboats.
On the closest dock was a classic blue Boston Whaler skiff with a 150 Merc, clean and cleated, ready to travel. Why couldn’t they climb in and cast off? Gun the motor and aim for the distant shoreline? Land at some unburned camp and warn the family, make the calls, get a lift?
Because, Jess suspected, there were no families now. No cedar-shingled cottages with Adirondack chairs on a wide porch, with nursery-bought geraniums hanging from baskets under the eaves, and some yellow Lab barking good-naturedly as he and Storey coasted in. Some barefoot child running after the dog and yelling, “Opey, no! Opey! Bad dog!” Jess throwing a single hitch over the piling and clambering out, the dog now bumping legs and whining, Jess pounding the top of his mallet head with an open palm, the child yelling “Opey, no!” though there was nothing anymore to redress, the child scrambling out to the end of the dock and grabbing his dog by the collar, dragging him back, explaining seriously, “He’s nice, he doesn’t bite!” The mother stepping off the porch, the father from the garden beside the cottage, wiping hands on thighs of blue jeans as in a choreography, as in a movie, as in a Norman Rockwell painting titled The Greeting in which the Sunday-morning boaters are not traumatized strangers but old friends from across the lake who bring jars of honey from their own bees and a Superman comic for Willum, and everyone sticks to their lines. Jess felt a lurch in his chest. Why couldn’t anyone stick to their lines, ever? Life might accede to being idealized for a single freeze-frame picture but the characters always cracked. Or went away. And he knew that if that family ever did in fact exist, and did in fact share moments of joy and days of peace, they existed on this day no longer. He and Storey could get in the boat and power across the lake and run up along the shore and he knew what they’d find. And then what? Somehow they intuited that they were safer in the wake of the holocaust, the way veteran wildland firefighters will “run back into the black,” run for safety into the zone that has just been burned. But you could not follow the devastation forever. Because by the time you were discovered and killed your spirit would be already dead.
“No rental car, huh?” It was Storey on the wharf behind him.
“No.”
“You’re still thinking about a boat. Maybe running across and trying the other side.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think running east would help us. Roadwise.”
“No.”
“It’d be a long walk through the woods and mountains.”
“Yes.”
“Also food. We haven’t seen a single deer. Why not?”
“I don’t know.” Jess turned his head. If he had been looking with longing over the water, he could see in Storey’s grimace that his friend had no desire to go there. Well, Storey wanted to get to his family most of all, and Lena and the girls were to the west, behind them as they stood.
Jess said, “No signal, huh?”
“No.”
“I was looking at the road map. The county highway we’ve been following turns west, away from the lake. But there’s one more town up the shore. Not a town, a hamlet. Beryl. The road up there is dirt.”
