Burn, p.4
Burn, page 4
“Okay.”
“Do you think we should go?”
“I think we should scavenge as much food out of these boats as we can find. Probably we should have done it before, back in Green Hill.”
“Yeah.”
“I guess we were in shock.”
“Is that what it was?” Is this what shock felt like? Jess didn’t know. He didn’t think so. He could move, reason. His gyroscope was working; he knew where his body was in space and in the landscape. He just didn’t know much else. Like what they were doing here or where they should go. “I was eyeing that Boston Whaler,” he confessed.
“I knew you were.”
“I figure we can use it to get out to all the moored boats. The ones worth a visit.”
“Okay. You wanna hit the docks first?”
“Yep.”
* * *
Two weeks after Labor Day and no one, it seemed, was in a hurry to trailer their boats off this lake. In other years, the years of their first hunts, most of the summer people would be gone by now, their houses closed up for winter and their vessels towed away. But now, with dependably warmer falls and with new iterations of the virus sweeping the country in seasonal waves, more people were working remotely and staying put in summer camps and homes through Thanksgiving at least. Many stayed all year. And on the warm days, the days of Indian summer that stretched into October and returned sporadically in November, the folks From Away still fished and wakeboarded, water-skied, and sailed. To Jess it seemed decadent. Vacations should have boundaries, shouldn’t they? He was surprised at his own puritanical impulse. He couldn’t help thinking that if these recreationalists had returned home earlier they all might be drinking coffee now in their home kitchens and not be mixing with rain-slurried ash. God. Nobody deserved this.
“Hey.” Storey touched his shoulder.
“Oh. Yeah?”
“Let’s find something to eat. Maybe we’re getting hangry.”
* * *
They left their packs on one of the benches and moved fast. The marina contained three floating docks with perpendicular spurs long enough to berth three twenty-six-footers end to end. And they were nearly full. But most of the vessels were either open motorboats built for day fishing or pulling a wakeboard, or little open sailboats, cats and sloops. Jess had noticed a cohort of probably nineteen-foot Friendship sloops on their way up the lake, and there were many more here. Something about the loyalty to an old working design stirred now a sense of admiration or kinship with all these boat owners; but he stifled it. Because right now they were scavenging their bones.
The little sloops had cabins big enough to shelter a lone sailor in a sudden squall—two in a pinch. Probably no food in those, and they didn’t think it worth the pain to break the teak hatches. Jess knew that it was because the boats were so graceful—say it: so beautiful—that they could not bring themselves to break them for a tube of Pringles or an old bottle of Coke.
Jess took up his new fire-burnished ax and they trotted along the docks, and when they came to a larger cabin cruiser or weekend sailer they jumped aboard and Jess swung his bladed truncheon and the light lock usually busted and the door swung in or the hatch cracked beneath the broken hasp. And they crouched and took narrow steps into dim cabins lit by skylights and pillaged the cabinets and underseat chests.
On one thirty-five-foot fishing cruiser with a flying bridge, Storey found at the nav station a new pair of Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses and tried them on. He couldn’t see anything in the darkened space, so he propped them on his baseball cap. In a chart drawer of the same boat he found a lightweight Leatherman with a corkscrew. On another boat, a sleek Peterson 34 stripped of sails, Jess found four bottles of two-year-old Saint Cosme Côtes du Rhône. There was food also, and by the time they’d pillaged eight likely yachts they had more canned food and bags of rice and boxes of oatmeal than they could pack. The marina had evidently supplied handcarts—a little like the old red wagons but stoutly built—for their patrons to use in shuttling supplies and parts out along the docks, and Jess found one upturned at the end of a spur and they loaded it with far more than they could ever carry and he towed it back. It bumped rhythmically over the gaps in the planks behind him and for one forgetful moment he thought of freight cars trundling over the tracks at the crossing on Box Elder in the little Vermont town they grew up in and he felt for a second what might be happiness. In strong sun he rolled the cart to the wrought-iron bench on the wharf, and whatever that emotion was that was not dread vanished when he saw their leaning packs and remembered where they were. He dropped the handle and a cloud shadow passed over fast, towing its own chill, and then he was in sun again but the moment of peace was gone. Storey was hefting two stuffed heavy-duty trash bags filled with provisions and he set them down and said, “I guess we don’t need to go out to the moorings after all. I know you wanted to pilot that Whaler.”
Jess waved it off.
“I was thinking about it,” Storey said. “Why do you think the cart was overturned? They didn’t savage the docks. Again.”
Jess shrugged. “Maybe whoever used it saw their kid on the wharf and in their hurry to get to them turned it over. Maybe it’s better not to think about it.”
Storey grimaced. “Right.”
They looked at their haul. “This might be the only easy food we get for a while,” Storey said.
“We can’t take all of it. Unless we pull the wagon. But, like I said, the road is dirt from here on up, and in about six miles it looks like that ends, too.”
“Okay, well…we can pull it that far. The wheels are pretty stout.”
“Or we can take that Whaler.”
Storey smiled at his friend’s tenacity. Jess said, “We can pile it with all of this and see what we find in…in…” He reached for the folded road map in his back pocket and flipped it open. He had carefully folded it all back so that the section they needed opened like a book. “In Beryl.”
Storey looked grimly north, up the shore.
“Or not,” Jess said. “We can drag the cart. The road is probably good and packed.”
“Thing is…” Storey wouldn’t form the words.
“What if they’re there?”
Storey nodded. He looked around them at what was once probably a charming and pretty town. “This place is still smoking,” he said. “They can’t be very far.”
“Could be over a day.”
“We don’t know. At least if we come up on the road…we can backtrack, get into the woods. In that boat, with the sound of the motor, on open water…” Storey rubbed his eyes.
“We don’t have to go up there,” Jess said gently. “We could keep following the highway. It turns away west now.”
“Whew, I feel like we need to go see this village, see if it survived. Six miles isn’t far. We can come back to this road after.”
“Okay,” Jess said. “We’ll pull the wagon. Maybe we should make a big meal here and then head up.”
They did. Jess fashioned a tumpline with a long webbing strap from one of the boats, and he ran it through the handle of the wagon and looped it across his waist and pulled the cart easily without having to strain one arm back. The streets were rough with debris but the cart had large pneumatic tires that bounced along. They retreated into the trees at the south edge of town. They made a fire. The breeze was northerly, but even had it been running south to north they wouldn’t have worried much, because, again, why would they—whoever they were—be alerted by the smell of smoke coming from a recently burned-out town behind them?
So they built a nice fire and watched through a scrim of trees the cloud shadows run over the lake and across the ruins of the town. Storey dug through the black garbage bags and pulled out four cans of Campbell’s clam chowder. He opened them with the can opener on his new Leatherman and he slid a plastic spoon carefully up the inside and pulled out the contents with a suck of air and the plop of a mostly intact cylinder of stew. They were both starving and figured that two cans apiece would work as an appetizer. Jess added a little water from his filter bottle and set the pot on a wire grill from a hibachi they’d lifted from the deck of one of the sailboats. He stirred and Storey shook in Cholula hot sauce from a fresh bottle and dug around and began emptying stewed tomatoes, kippered herring, canned mushrooms, artichoke hearts, “Escargots!”—he held up the can on a flat palm, as in an ad—and sliced Italian hard sausage all into the larger pot.
“This is gonna be jumble-aya, spelled like ‘jumble,’ ” he said.
“Yum.”
“I’ve got boxes of couscous. When you’re done with the chowder we’ll cook it up.”
“Delish.”
It was. To them. They dug into the clam chowder with groans of pleasure. Each shook more Cholula out of the glass bottle as if the burn of the salsa might distract them from other things. Storey opened the first wine bottle with his Leatherman and raised it in a toast—“Skål!”—and chugged half like water and passed it to Jess. While Jess drank he opened a second bottle.
“Good stuff,” Storey said. “I’d get it again. Will you remember the vintage?”
“No.”
“Me, neither.” Jess watched as Storey took out his phone and used some precious wattage from the battery to snap a picture of the cream-colored label with its sketch of a stone farmhouse on a French hill. Jess didn’t comment. Storey opened the second bottle and held it at arm’s length and addressed it. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “What the fuck.” And he drank. He held it out to Jess and their eyes met. Storey’s were bleary and uncertain, and Jess watched as they watered and welled and leaked from the corners. Storey held out the bottle, refusing to acknowledge the tears tracking his cheeks.
Jess took the bottle, and as their fingers touched he said, “Store.”
Storey blinked and nodded.
“The girls? Andrea?”
Storey looked away. He wiped his face on the sleeve of his jacket. “You heard about when her cat, Coco, died.”
“Yeah, you told me.”
“That was a year ago, April. The anorexia kicked in so badly Andrea almost died. She got better over late summer. I made her a milkshake every day, cooked for her every night.”
“I remember. She would only eat certain foods if you cooked them.”
Storey nodded. Jess held out the bottle and Storey now shook his head. He said, “I thought she was out of the woods.”
“And?”
“And then came the state cross-country running championship meet, and she won.”
“Won? I…I’m not sure if you told me. That’s awesome.” Jess lifted the wine in salute.
Storey shook his head. “Not awesome.”
“No?” Jess set the bottle on a bed of dead pine needles, leaned it against a fallen limb. “No? Why?”
“Because it freaked her out. Like now maybe she would get scouted by some fancy boarding school and have to leave home and then she’d get recruited by a Division One college and she would become a robot and never see us again.”
“She stopped eating.”
Storey nodded. Jess saw the tremor in his chest and watched as he shook it off. His stoic best friend. Jess did not know what to say, so he said nothing; finally, he murmured, “Lena is there. She’ll know what to do.”
“She’ll be making a thousand calls. Geneva will be tugging at her, demanding answers—that’s what she does. Andrea will clam up and drift. And drift. Hand me the bottle.”
They finished it. They took a vote and decided to save the other two bottles for some unforeseen celebration. They added the dregs of the wine to the larger pot and heated up the jumble-aya and poured it over a bed of couscous and devoured it all. It didn’t take long. The sun was high in the trees now, and the day was warm but not hot, and without a word they leaned back against their packs and fell asleep.
Chapter Three
Jess dreamed of water. He and Jan were swimming in a green bay. It was not night but their limbs sketched streaks of light as they swam, as of a bioluminescence so strong it was heedless of morning. Their fingers ignited heatless flames and they left two trails of phosphorescence behind them. He knew this because he was at once stroking through warm water and also gyring above, as an osprey gyres, and following the lovers. Lovers. He felt again what that means. She was breaststroking beside him and he did not need to look to feel her joy, her insoluble closeness, her mercy. They would swim together to some other continent if that’s what love demanded. He wheeled and banked hard against the wind and soared upward and the world revolved and when he swooped over and down and regained his patrol the swimmers were gone. The wake of green light was there in the water like two contrails, but they lay on the surface inert. He let out a scream. It was an osprey cry meant to pierce the belly of heaven. It could not reconstitute the lovers or rouse the gods—
It was a scream that woke him. Storey was already sitting up and squinting toward the water. “Hey. Hey, look.”
Jess looked. Someone was in a rowboat, a dinghy with short oars, casting off from a larger sloop moored farther out. It was a girl or young woman. She pushed off and seized the oars and stroked madly for the docks.
The two Black Hawks came over the treeline of the far shore and straight over the water. They came fast and low—Jess thought they couldn’t be more than a hundred feet off the lake—and their rotors churned a white wake as they came and drummed, then thudded off the thin skin of the afternoon. They came in tight formation, dark and unmarked, one to the side and just behind the other, and the helicopters banked once, hard, over the fleet of moored boats. The girl rowed, frantic. The whitewater frothed around her and then the choppers leveled and flew north. Jess thought they were departing. But a mile out they banked hard again and came straight at them, at the remains of the town, at the docks. In reflex, Jess and Storey rolled off their packs and bellied down and watched. A few hundred meters out, flames belched from the forward chopper and tore the water in a vicious line, and the girl flew out of the boat with half a shredded oar, and the dinghy disintegrated, and Jess thought he saw a halo of blood spray downwind on the breeze and fly apart under the storm of the whomping blades. The helicopters came on, did not miss a beat, came straight at them and right over the tops of their trees.
They had both squinched down their eyes and covered their heads with their arms, but the Black Hawks were gone, leaving shaken leaves and a tumping, fading pulse on the cooling air.
Jess noticed, when he lifted his head again, that the sun was low over the near ridge.
“What the hell,” Storey said.
Jess couldn’t speak. Not for a minute. Finally, he croaked, “So much for being safe on the water.”
“Man.”
The faint throb of the choppers died out. The natural wind off the lake resumed its irregular passes through the canopy.
“Who do you think she was?” Storey said.
“Storey?” Jess said.
“Yeah.”
“I could’ve sworn she screamed. Before they came.”
Storey sat up. He brushed some crumbs of dirt and dried leaves off his cheek. “What do you mean?”
“I mean her scream woke me up.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I was asleep. I guess we both were. And I dreamed of an osprey flying, I was the osprey, and I screamed, and I woke up. And then the girl was in the boat, but I think it was her scream.”
“Okaay…”
“And then the choppers came over the trees, way over on that side.”
Storey scratched his chin and throat, his days-old beard. “So…what?”
“It was all out of order is what.”
Storey snugged his cap back on his head.
Jess pressed on. “How could she know the choppers were coming? She was casting off. In a panic. She screamed as if she knew. And then they were there, breaking over the horizon, which is the shoreline, those trees on the far shore.” Jess shook his head, tried to align the images, the succession.
“Maybe she didn’t scream. Maybe you screamed like an eagle and woke yourself up.”
“Well, still. She was in the dinghy. Like fleeing, like in flight. She was panicked.”
Storey stared. “I think we’ve got bigger fish to worry about,” he said finally. “Like who the fuck were those guys?”
“Yeah, no shit. They had zero markings.” Jess rolled up onto his knees and took up the two pots, the spoons. “You have enough water in your bottle to wash these?”
Storey shook his head.
“Seems fucked up. To wash them in the lake now.”
Storey shut his eyes. “It’s a big lake. She’s pretty far out.”
“Okay. Okay, I’ll go down. Better to have everything clean before we go.”
* * *
Go where? Jess thought as he carried the dishes down to the dock. To the hamlet up the shore, to witness all this again? He scanned the water around the moored boats but could no longer see the dinghy or the girl. It must have sunk, the rowboat. She—whatever was left of her—must be floating just at the surface or beneath and not visible in the evening chop.
He knelt between two outboard skiffs and scooped up water in the larger pot. The skiffs were two nondescript aluminum motorboats with bench seats; rentals, probably. For tourists From Away. The town was clearly a destination spot, designed to attract and charm visitors. It was evident even from the smoking ruins: the quaint black-and-bronze street sign with its Roman letters, the wrought-iron benches on the wharf, the grove of poplars there, protecting the bronze statue of a little boy and girl walking with fishing rods over their shoulders and holding hands. Quaint. The quaintness of the town had somehow survived its immolation.
