Burn, p.6
Burn, page 6
He shook himself and zipped up his fly and stood very still. They slept fully dressed now, in case of a need for rapid deployment. Jess listened. A full mile is not far for sound to carry, especially on the wind. Was there wind? There was always a breeze, no matter how subtle. He wet an index finger in his mouth and held it up. He’d seen the trick in old Western movies and used it all his life. It worked. He felt how the left side of his finger got colder first. He craned his head back and found the ladle of the Big Dipper canted over the trees and followed the back side to the North Star. The wind was ten points east. Yep, the road was heading down the hill and generally north, and the breeze was north-northeast. He held his breath and listened hard.
Leaves ticked and rattled. Oak and poplar, probably; maple, beech. All the birches—white, black, yellow, each with a strong and distinct fragrance when you put your nose to the peeling bark. Black like wintergreen; white like clear water if it could be turned to powdery talc; yellow subtle, sweet and sour together. Soon they, the leaves on these trees, would be turning to color with enthusiasm, and loosing in the gusts and covering their tracks. His and Storey’s and whoever traveled before them. He couldn’t imagine. And the choppers—were they for or against? Why on earth circle back and kill a young woman rowing alone in a boat? What harm could she possibly do? Why spend the bullets or the fuel? Except that she bore witness, as had he and Storey.
He was still craning back, following the Dipper to Polaris, Polaris to the upside-down “W” of Cassiopeia, when through the soft clamor of the leaves he heard a more percussive rattle. They were arrhythmic pops that rode the breeze, single notes, then a riff that ran together like beads on a string. Automatic-weapons fire. A firefight? In Beryl? Now? Before he could parse the source—how many?—the shooting stopped. If that’s what it was. Ceased without echo, overtaken by the forest’s rustlings.
Whatever that was, was a fifteen-minute walk down the hill. For all he knew, they were in range right now. You go to hunt a moose who has no weapon but flailing hooves and a span of antlers and you start dodging bullets. Karma, maybe. His toes were going numb. He padded back to the bags and thought to wake Storey and tell him, but what good would it do? He was snoring heavily, sighing on the exhales like a man traveling, a man in a train window watching a strange country unfurl, and missing his family. Jess felt a moment of tenderness for his friend, his vulnerability now—no way to pretend that he was tough or that his spirit could carry any of this. He let him sleep. They weren’t going anywhere tonight, and in the morning they would have to decide if they would keep on or turn back in their first flight from the violence.
* * *
Do you believe in soulmates?
No, Jan said.
Me, neither…. Uh, why not?
Awww, did that ouch? He heard the smile in Jan’s sleepy voice and, sure enough, her arm came around him and she was pulling herself to him and spooning his back.
I just wonder why you don’t.
Jan nuzzled her nose in his neck, murmured, Well, I think love is all about the subject, not the object.
What do you mean?
I mean love is about how you engage the world. I keep trying to drum that into you, but you’re so slow. You’re like a quarter horse.
Hey, quarter horses aren’t slow.
How would you know?
Silence.
I think love is all about our own capacity. So, if I am really good at love, at paying attention, at appreciation, at acceptance, then I can fully love anyone. How deep I love is about the depth of my ability and not the other person. And whom I choose is really happenstance.
Hey! Ouch. Happenstance? Anyone?
Do you think that if I were born in, say, Tonga I couldn’t find someone to love as deeply as I love you? That tiny island kingdom in the middle of the South Pacific?
Well.
Look, some folks are pretty hard to love. The mean and cruel ones. But I mean we can love anyone who really interests us.
What about pheromones and stuff? And, like, smelling someone’s genetic immune status and discovering it’s a perfect match to complement your own. All the stuff they’re discovering.
So?
So maybe there is a soulmate. Maybe it has to do with finding someone whose interests and values jibe, and who you are attracted to for a million reasons, half chemical, and who has a variation on Gene Eight Thousand and Forty-Two that fits like a jigsaw puzzle with yours. That’s not anyone. Or happenstance.
I don’t think that’s how genes are named. And: You should have been a lawyer. And, you big dumdum, I love you more than anything on earth.
She squeezed him tight then, and, despite all the dumb theorizing, he believed her.
* * *
Why was he thinking about that now? Back in his warm sleeping bag on a night of frost with Storey wheezing beside him? In the middle of—apparently—a civil war. His rain shell was folded next to his head, and he reached up and found the prayer stone in the pocket, the one she had given him. It came not from any known religion but from her own practice of deliberate love. Love is kind attention, dummy, she once told him. Which is why you cannot hunt with Storey four months a year. I need attention, too. And she tugged his beard. But she meant it with the force of an openhearted belief, and she tried to give as serious an attention to the rocks in the river and to the leaning spruce as she did to Jess or the dog Bell. As much to the act of washing dishes as to the slow dance of making love to her husband. Love, to Jan, was only that: paying attention. Not a word or gesture, a romance or a vow.
Now he curled his fingers around the stone and tucked his fist under his chin and drifted. He thought he would never love anyone again. Not the way he loved her. That’s what his intuition told him. And it might be because, simply, he would not survive the next week.
* * *
Dawn. First light moved on the meadow like fog. Dense and shadowless. Revealing a clearing paled by frost. Jess heard an owl mourning the dregs of night, a dirge in single, then double hollow notes, unanswered.
They had found coffee on the boats, but now they didn’t make it. Jess wanted a cup almost more than he wanted to know that the next few hours would be okay. But. They didn’t make a fire. They were too close to whatever had occurred at the village, so they each ate a can of Boston baked beans and two convenience-store mini–apple pies, stale and glazed with sugar. They tied down the wagonload under sail canvas, and Storey lifted the handle of the cart and snugged the loop of webbing over his forehead and leaned like a beast of burden.
“I can take it today,” Storey said.
“I got it. You’re a better shot.”
Much unspoken. Meaning: If we come under fire in the next twenty minutes, you better be able to move fast. It was good dirt road now, falling downhill; they would be there in less time.
They were in cover, in thick woods, down a sandy road that made a long “S,” and then they could smell the lakewater through the trees, and then they broke out into open ground, hayfield that dropped to the cluster of houses—houses!—and a quaint miniature lighthouse standing sentinel over a town dock. Not miniature, scaled down: a painted clapboard tower, blazoned white in the long light of the early sun. It was maybe thirty feet high, an octagon with no windows until the top, where a gallery of glass encircled. It drew the eye. Jess saw that the windows had no glazing. Crouching at the edge of the trees, he unslung the Savage and sighted through the scope at the tower. He could see shards remaining, shattered window frames. Bullet holes peppering the siding. He slid the scope down and across, into the village proper. The town, it seemed, had been built or recast as a Maine fishing village. Saltbox houses beside the dock had been painted Penobscot red and hung with lobster buoys. Lobster buoys! This was a lake, and so of course there were no lobsters. Crawdads, maybe. One of these houses had disgorged its insides through a blackened hole on its inland side. Scorched armchair, twisted vinyl table, what looked to be a body thrown. Clearly, it was a real town, if gussied up: people had lived in the houses. Other signs: snowmobiles on trailers in the backyards, swing sets and hanging laundry. Behind and beside the bombed cottage were other houses clothed in coastal cedar shingle, with stacks of old-school wood-slat lobster pots in the yards. The stacks, Jess saw, were still neatly standing, but the houses betrayed mortal wounds on roofs, in blasted doorways.
“What the hell,” Storey said. His growing refrain. He, too, was bent to his rifle.
Jess groaned in answer. Said, “They’re standing, mostly. The houses. At least there’s that.”
“Fuckin’ A.”
“Fuckin’ A.”
Jess said, “I guess we leave the wagon and go in.”
Storey didn’t answer. He was moving the scope house to house. Up the one street they could see. He was counting under his breath. Bodies, Jess thought. He could see them, too, twisted and thrown. Some charred, as in Green Hill and Randall, others unburned. Storey slid the scope over the sign that said “General Store,” over the wooden Iroquois on its long porch, the carved and painted black bear on the other side of a front door that was blown off its hinges.
“Last night I heard a firefight,” Jess murmured. “I forgot to tell you. And I saw flashes, big explosions.”
No answer. Storey thumbed up the safety on the Winchester.
“You see something?”
“Not sure.” Storey speaking to the rifle now, moving it in increments. As if around a door frame, a window.
“You’re not gonna shoot.”
“No.”
Okay, Jess thought. But he was ready. “Do you think we should go in?”
Storey was breathing the way a hunter—or a marksman—does when he is steadying his shot. “Store?”
“Yuh.”
“Do you think we should go in?” Jess said again.
Storey finally lifted off the eyepiece, glanced over. Jess thought he looked in a trance. Or coming out of one. “Hey, hey,” Jess said. “Store. We’re not shooting anyone. Right? Right?”
Storey licked his dry lips. “Yeah,” he said. “I was just looking.”
“Okay. Good. We don’t know who anybody is. For or against. What against what. Jesus. I don’t get any of this. Why is the town still pretty much standing?”
Storey blinked, stretched his mouth as against some retainer left in too long. Seemed back to himself. They were talking softly, as much not to startle crows or doves or a covey of exploding partridges. The morning was new, the chill barely above last night’s freeze, but Storey wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of his sleeve. He said, “We’ve got to go in. See if anyone is still alive. See what they know, see what the hell is going on.”
“Okay. Agreed.” Jess swallowed hard. The prospect of crossing this wide field with no cover was not appealing.
“We can’t cross here. I mean, it would be stupid.”
“Right.” Relief.
“I don’t know if I saw anything or not. Probably just the light.”
“Yeah.”
“And nobody wants to shoot at us, anyway. If anything…if anyone is still alive they would want help.”
“Yeah.”
“We are unaffiliated.”
Jess didn’t answer. Are we? he thought. Right now I am on the side of the girl and against the helicopters. And I don’t know who any of them are.
They slipped back into the dark of the woods. Now they didn’t speak; they didn’t need to. They had been hunting together since they were boys. Jess shucked his pack and put out a palm against the wagon, motioned that they would leave the stuff just off the road, and Storey didn’t need to nod. They slipped into the trees on the west, the inland, side of the track. They moved fast through the sparse understory, making little noise. How many times had they moved this way? In tandem, crossing a drainage, moving up on a bull or a buck? But never in pursuit of humans. Were they in pursuit? No. They were just being careful.
They stayed in trees and circled to the west end of the town. Not hard to do. There might have been sixty houses altogether. The streets were not running parallel to the water, but they all ended at the gully of what must be a large brook in springtime. The creek was low now, showing its bones—gravel bars, and blowdown propped on smooth boulders—and it ran through a little rock canyon. It must circle the village and run into the lake on the far side. A footbridge suspended on steel cables crossed the gorge. The little ravine was surprisingly deep, and the cliffs on either side were sheer. Without the little bridge it would have been very tough to cross. On the other side of the bridge a cobble street began. Cobbles. How cute. Clapboard and stone houses lined it on either side. The buildings were not widely spaced, but they were well built and quaint, with wide porches and flowerpots hanging over the railings and gracing the front steps; and the wood-sided cottages were painted white and yellow and brick red. Again, lobster traps in the front yards, colorful lobster buoys tacked to the sides of toolsheds. Jess rocked with vertigo. Lobsters were ocean; last time he checked, the water down there was a lake. He shifted ten feet to his left so he could get a clear view down the middle of the bridge and the street, down to the dock and the water. Nothing moved. Except, almost imperceptibly, the boats at their moorings. He blinked, as if trying to clear his sight. A few of the boats were clearly lobster boats. Not full-sized, but scaled down like the lighthouse. Half-sized replicas of classic Down Easters with open sterns and winch arms over the starboard rails. Jesus. He had never heard of such a thing. If a pint-sized Penobscot ferry rounded the point and steamed into the cove with a double blast of its horn he would not have been more surprised. They had been coming to these woods for fifteen years; he would have thought that a contrived half-shrunk seaside village in the middle of the big woods would be a famous tourist attraction, like the gingerbread cottages at Oak Bluffs.
“You see the boats?” Jess whispered.
“Yeah. This is screwed up. I mean, it’s kinda cool.”
“Any other day it would be cool. Let’s go. I gotta see this place.” Jess stepped to the bridge before Storey could stop him.
* * *
They moved slowly down the right side of the street, house to house, rifles unslung and across their chests. To the side of one house and cautiously around the front to the side of the next. No dog barked, no cat watched them from the shade of a porch rail. There were few vehicles, but they were not completely absent. On this street Jess counted six: four pickups, an old Bronco, a rusted Subaru. Two of the trucks carried blue plastic barrels in the beds, the kind lobstermen used for bait. Carrying it a little too far, Jess thought. He wanted to call out as they had in Randall and Green Hill, but the silence of a mostly unscathed town prevented him. The fourth house was fieldstone. Two stories with a wooden porch. They crouched in its shadow.
“I’m kinda creeped out,” Jess whispered.
“No shit.”
“Doesn’t seem like they left anyone alive. Neither animal nor human.”
“I know.”
“We might search the houses.”
“Not yet.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s get to the dock and check the lighthouse. Somebody put up a fight from up there. Then we can double back.”
“Okay.”
Storey stepped around the corner of the porch, and the shot cracked, and Storey was thrown back and sprawled. Hard sting in Jess’s cheek. Oh Christ. He, too, stumbled back, hand to cheek wet with blood. Storey was on the ground, sitting like a kid who had fallen off a swing in the schoolyard. Jess guttered a “Store, Store!”—expected to see a gut pile in his lap. But Storey turned his head and gaped, soundless, then heaved and caught his breath.
“You all right?” Storey gasped.
Jess nodded. “You?”
“You’re all bloody.”
Jess held a hand to the stinging cheek, felt the protruding wood. “Splinter.” He pinched and yanked and it pulled free. “I thought you were shot.”
“Breath knocked out when I hit the ground. Fuckers.”
Jess breathed. He could barely hear Storey for the pounding in his ears. His own heart. “Where do you think it came from?” he said.
“I dunno. Sounded high. Maybe the lighthouse. Fuck.” Storey bent forward, reached for his rifle in the mown grass, tugged it to him. “We need to talk to these guys. Tell ’em we come in peace. Hold on.” Storey grasped the sling of the gun and stood, huffed a breath, gathered himself. Took a step as if to test his status: okay, he worked. He trotted to the back of the house, where they could see a clothesline and laundry pinned. He was not in view of other houses or, presumably, the line of fire, but he did not dally. He ripped a stained white T-shirt from the line and hustled back. On the way he picked up a rake leaning against the fieldstone wall. Jess nodded. Storey scooped a loop of orange baling twine out of the grass and knotted the sleeves of the shirt to the rake handle to make a flag. He crouched and slipped to the corner of the porch, kept his head below the deck.
