Burn, p.8
Burn, page 8
I am grateful for Storey. I am grateful for this dumb sculpture of a saltwater fisherman and his boat a hundred miles from any coast.
How did that happen, anyway? He found himself wondering about the life-sized bronze that shielded them. And what about its maker? Odd to think of that now. Did the man or woman grow up admiring the sculpted works of Remington and turn to replicas for the public commission? Because this was a replica, nearly. He wondered if the maker put a real skiff through a CAD duplicator. She could not have put the fisherman in his gear through the machine, or maybe now, with digital tracing, she could have. The hands of the fisherman probably had fingerprints, it was that realistic, and Jess noticed somehow, in his panic and relief at not getting shot, that the ring finger on the hand holding the net sported a wedding band. Jess had an image of an artist from maybe outside New York City, maybe holed up in Tarrytown on the Hudson in a spacious studio in a repurposed barn, the artist who wore a light patterned scarf always, like the French, coaxing an old-salt Mainer she had picked up from Rockland or Damariscotta, the man in full anachronistic oilskins confused as she cajoled him to lie down inside a machine that looked like an MRI so that he could be faithfully copied…
“Hey!” Storey’s urgent whisper, Storey’s hand on his shoulder shaking him, roughly. “Hey, wake up! Check your safety!”
“Wha—?” Jess’s eyes flew open. For a split second he did not know where he was, thought for a moment he was on his own couch at home in Denver, woken suddenly from a nap. It was a nap. With something like horror he saw that the sun was sinking into the tops of trees, on a ridgeline he could see above the burnished skiff, above the town. He had passed out cold and slept. Fuck. Storey had let him sleep.
Jess rolled fast to his knees, scooped up the rifle, levered the action back—a shell was chambered, good.
“What?” he said again, almost a gasp.
“They’re moving. I heard it.” Storey was whispering fast. “Clicks, a latch, boot scuff. They probably think by now we’re dead or passed out.” He didn’t say: We almost were. You were.
“Okay,” Jess said. Was it? Okay? He was trying to clear his head, fully wake up. Also steady himself. Killing another human, it was…not something he was getting used to. The air off the lake was chilly and he sucked it in gratefully.
“Get ready,” Storey said. “Listen,” he whispered and put a finger to his lips. Jess watched his oldest friend notch the bolt of his rifle back to check for chambered brass, then shove it home. He watched him thumb the safety off and suck in a long, steadying breath. Watched him stare sightlessly at the cobbles beneath his knees and tune his hearing to the plaza beyond their blind and intone something to himself only he could hear. Suddenly, sharply, his hazel eyes bored into Jess. “Get ready,” he mouthed.
Oh. Yeah. Fuck. Jess rechecked his own rifle, shoved the slide of his own safety forward with his right thumb, and tried to focus. Focus! He heard a click of stone and a low voice—was it?—and in an instant the grog of sleep cleared like fog in a gust and his ear was on the new sounds, his eyes on Storey. Who nodded, whispered: Now!
They came over the bronze keel together, a single tandem motion, and they were firing. They both shot scoped rifles, both eyes open, and as soon as he came up Jess found the figure, the sight picture, and led the man like a running deer, big and tan and flying right to left, and he led center mass, and fired and levered the Savage as fast as he could. Fired and fired and swung on the second as the first fell. The blasting of the ought-six to his right was like a clash of overhead thunder, the kind that sends you flat and obliterates all thought but Live! Fuck, yeah, I’m gonna live! And the second figure, following, was smaller, small, some blur of green and black and slower, and Jess swung and fired with instinct and levered and fired, and he and Storey must have hit together, because the man flew off, feet into air, seemed like flight, and arced into near dusk and thudded to ground. Flat echo rolled away over lakewater. Jess’s ears rang. He rubbed his right eye with the back of his trigger hand, spat past his left shoulder, turned. Storey’s face was blank and taut. He looked past Jess at the lake, or beyond it, and breathed. The crow’s-feet at his eyes were threads of white that quivered minutely. Storey blinked hard and let his eyes find Jess. Held up a palm, cocked an ear. Meaning: Don’t frigging lift your head yet. Jess dropped his chin: Okay.
They listened hard and heard it, a groaning, guttural and choked. “Oh shit,” Storey whispered. “Wait.” Storey belly-crawled to the fisherman side of the boat and peered around it. Two beats in which the encroaching evening stopped stock-still. “Goddamnit,” he said, full-voice. And Jess watched him stand, as reluctantly as he had ever seen Storey do anything.
The boy—it was a boy, maybe twelve or thirteen—lay on the clean granite cobbles. Head back, blue-black eyes open to sky. He wore camo that was torn in three places and blood-soaked. Left thigh, right torso, right chest. His breath gurgled in his throat and his mouth gushed blood, and he arched once and heaved, and Storey stepped forward and shot him in the head. Jess doubled over himself and crouched, spread a hand flat on cold stone as if the heedless earth might steady him.
* * *
The other lay sprawled twelve feet closer to the water, beside the boy’s rifle, which had been somehow thrown. He was a big, heavy-shouldered man in sand-colored coveralls, frayed at cuffs and hems and stained by oil and what Jess recognized as blood. Ginger beard and green eyes open to the dusk. The eyes stared, startled. Why wouldn’t they be? His own rifle, a scoped Remington Sportsman, lay touching his knee, and his baseball cap rested over the action as if neatly placed.
Storey tugged the back of Jess’s jacket and pulled him to his feet.
“Hey,” he said gently.
“I’m all right,” Jess said. “I just—”
“Yeah.” Storey motioned him to the boy. “Look at this.” Storey touched the boy’s shoulder with the barrel of his Winchester. On the arm of the camo coat was an embroidered patch, red and white, with the number “49.” “And here,” he said. He walked to the man and touched the same patch on the breast of the man’s Carhartt coveralls. “What do you think that means?”
Jess looked. Mostly, he saw what was probably a father and son seeping blood and splayed to the coming nightfall. Whatever ritual they were used to enacting at end of day would forevermore be reduced to vespers of silence. Jess imagined them seated at a kitchen table in low conversation, scooping up sliced potatoes in cream. He was a good father, must have been to teach his son the discipline needed to shoot so well and to follow him so blindly. Where was the mother? She was not in the scene he envisioned. Maybe it was just the two of them. He got that sense, he wasn’t sure why. They lay now on the stones more than a man’s length apart, more than two. Why did that trouble him? As if the spirit of the man would extend an arm and try to touch his son. There was no reaching across now, no matter the distance.
“Dunno what it means,” Jess muttered. He shrugged. Did he do this?
“Jess.”
“Yuh.”
“They were trying to kill us. They would have.”
“Yes.”
Storey said, “I may have shot them both.”
“Sure.” Jess knew it wasn’t true. He knew his first shot was perfect, the way you know a free throw is going in before it leaves your hands. He also knew that at least one of the holes in the boy’s camo came from the Savage, because Storey could not have gotten three shots off that fast. So.
Clear bowl of sky, the high blue nearly dark and deep enough for the first stars. Probably frost tonight. If there was an answer there, or any solace, Jess could not see it. He turned to his friend. “You don’t have to say stuff like that.”
“Okay.”
“We’re in it now. We’re in it. Sure as fuck didn’t ask for it, but we’re in it.” He put the barrel of his own rifle on the man’s breast patch. “It means forty-nine states. Fifty minus Maine. Secession. Hold on.” On the man’s other breast was a zip pocket, which bulged slightly with what looked like a hockey puck. Jess crouched and unzipped it, pulled out a tin of Copenhagen Wintergreen. He shut his eyes tight for a moment, as if asking for forgiveness, and tapped the lid hard with two fingers. He twisted it off, held it out to Storey. A fresh can, almost full. Jess was not surprised to see that Storey’s eyes were wet. “I feel grateful to the sonofabitch now,” Storey said. “For the chew. Weird, huh?”
“No.”
“What do we do now?” Storey said. He pressed a wad of chew into his upper lip.
“I was gonna ask you.”
But Storey didn’t have a chance to answer. The thrub and growl of a marine diesel engine startled the gulls on the dock, and they flew up like blown rags as the two men hit the cobbles. Half crawl, half crouch and run. To where? Neither knew from what direction they were most exposed. The percussive motor revved into a thrum, and it came off the water. One of the moored boats—it was leaving fast. They fell against the town side of the sculpture now.
“Holy shit.”
“We were—”
“Yeah, wide open. We were ducks.”
“Why didn’t they—? The folks on the water, why didn’t they engage us?”
“Too busy with the boat. Maybe thought we were more than two.”
Storey lifted his head, elbowed Jess. “Look.”
“Jesus.”
The lake shimmered with a luminous blue at the edges that deepened toward the center. Cutting across it, pushing up a frill of bow wave and leaving behind it a silver gash, was one of the replica lobster boats. White, trimmed with teal along the rails and around the wheelhouse. It was not far off, they could read the name in cursive on the stern—“Newsboy, Beryl Harbor.” Whoever was at the helm was gunning it now, and the bow rose higher in the water. They could not see the captain, but they could make out two men and a child on the open stern.
“Let’s go,” Storey said.
“Go?”
“Yeah. Let’s go after them.”
“Them? Why? It’s the wrong direction.”
“They’ll know.” Storey was up, tugging on the shoulder of Jess’s jacket. “C’mon. They’ll know, then we’ll know. And then maybe we’ll know how to get out of this.”
Jess uttered a groan that was not quite acquiescence, but he stood. “C’mon,” Storey urged. “They should have keys for all the boats in the shack.”
Chapter Five
In the scattering of boats at their moorings, one inboard was larger than the rest. It was a Rhode Island Marine Design forty-footer, two-thirds scale of the lobster boats he had worked out of Newport when he was eighteen. The bigger boats went offshore for three or four days at a time and dropped strings of lobster traps a mile long at the edge of the Continental Shelf. He had been a rail man, swinging the traps up onto the gunwale as they rose out of water to the winch. He flipped open the wire door to the pot, tossed whatever lobster back onto the banding table, rebaited the trap, and slid it down to the stern man. He loved the work maybe more than he had loved any job since. It was high-pressure speed work, paced by the relentless turning of the winch, which rarely paused—the next trap would breach the surface, shedding water, and spin on its leash just as he slid the one on the rail away—and the days often stretched late into night, the repetitive dance colder under the acid lights, the seas often rougher, and he loved it with a wildness of heart he never found again. Maybe he did—in the first months of love with Jan, when the possibility of sharing a life with a partner so game and beautiful dawned on him like the prospect of a strange sea seen from a trackless height.
As much as the strenuous work in big swells, in wind, in rain, he loved the nights cruising between sets. If there was a four-hour night watch, he took it. Because there was nothing better than chugging ten knots on a clear autumn night when the stars turned all together like vast schools of minnows and the bioluminescence left a glowing green wake a mile long. He’d set the wheel on autopilot and walk back to the open stern and steady himself and pee a stream that sparkled when it hit, and he’d imagine what it would be like to lose balance and tip overboard. They were in the Gulf Stream and the water was pretty warm, and he could probably tread water for hours as he watched the running lights slip away and blink out over the curve of earth. His skipper, Dave, told him that 80 percent of the bodies they found floating at sea had their flies unzipped.
What the open-stern vessel was doing here, turning slowly against its mooring buoy, he wouldn’t know. The lake was big, sure—twenty miles at least in length, and here maybe four miles across. Big. But. No lobster and no commercial fishery, he was certain. And it would be an odd boat for tours, unless you wanted to hold a dance on the stern deck. Maybe they did.
Storey was already in the doorway of the marina shack, which had been riddled like the lighthouse. Jess read the name on the stern of the big boat and called out: “Hey! Find the keys to Clawdette. Should be fast.”
“Got it!” Storey was already running to the dock. They’d start one of the outboards to get out to the mooring.
“Hey!” Jess called. Storey did not break stride. “Hey, Store, stop!”
Storey nearly skidded on the planks. Pulled himself up, impatient.
“What about the packs?” Jess said. “We can trot right up the road now, right across the field, retrieve it all. Nothing stopping us.”
“Fuck ’em,” Storey said. He turned away.
“Wait! No!”
Storey never got pissed at Jess, but now he did. Jess could tell, because Storey waited a beat before turning back around. He spat, crossed his arms.
“We could starve on the other side,” Jess said. “We don’t know. It’ll take us half an hour, tops, to get the packs and the wagon. We can catch up. This boat is bigger, faster.”
“In half an hour it’ll be close to full dark and they will be on the far shore and gone. We can come back for the food.”
“No.”
Storey closed his eyes. “Jess, fuck! They’re getting away. We catch ’em, make them tell us what the heck is going on, and come back. Okay?”
“No. They can’t move easily in the dark, either. We can track them.”
“I’m going. Suit yourself.” Storey showed Jess his back and trotted on.
“Fuck you, too,” Jess murmured, and trotted after him.
* * *
But he jumped into the first outboard, squeezed the bulb on the gas line, primed the motor, and yanked the cord. He had more experience than Storey with boats. Storey tossed the lines and jumped in and Jess throttled hard so that Storey missed his seat and had to grab the gunwale with both hands. “Damn!” Storey yelled.
“Sorry!” Jess called over the motor.
“No you’re not!”
“No!”
Jess turned to starboard sharply and water sprayed back over the bow into Storey’s face, and when Storey whipped around they caught each other’s eye. If there was a shred of laughter in the look, no one uttered a sound. Jess throttled back just as abruptly and Storey lurched forward and they bumped the hull of Clawdette. “You should never make a guy skip his afternoon snack,” Jess said and cut the engine.
They just shoved the skiff off, let it drift, and Jess slipped into the wheelhouse with the keys and started the big diesel, and Storey cast off the mooring, and they gunned out of the shallow bay.
Chapter Six
At the helm, he could pretend. For a few seconds at a time. That he was eighteen and on his watch in the wheelhouse somewhere off Nantucket; that he was beholden to no one and not brokenhearted and that the lake, tilting in stillness and luminous with last light, was not a lake at all but the deeps just west of Georges Bank; that he might sing “Barbara Allen” to himself and to the loud thrum of the diesel, sing it the way his father sang it to him when he was a boy, and feel the pathos of the lovers as a fable, a sweet abstraction, and not something personal; that the stars, when they floated out of the dark, would kindle a kinship with the infinite and a longing for adventure.
That’s what it felt like then: that the sea and the stars cradled him like something woven in which he swung in the dark, swung to a beat that was his own and yet belonged also to the ocean and the constellated night. Now, in the middle of his life, as often as not, when he looked to the heavens they answered with a presentiment of death and a cold and distant solace.
How did he get here? To the sense or suspicion that somewhere along the way he had been derailed?
Now he aimed Clawdette toward a point on the far shore and edged the throttle back just enough not to blow the engine, and remembered. Not so much remembered as let himself be buoyed and transported in time. The throaty sounds of the motor and the wash of the bow wave, the feel of the wheel and throttle under his hands, the rhythmic press of the water against the hull, and the frame of silver-blue through the thick window…they transported him. If only for a moment he felt again, in muscle and bone, what it was to stand snug and capable in his own skin, and to wonder at the ramifying vastness of everything beyond it and the possibilities there. How his heart had opened.
He thought, as he scanned the lake for movement, that the value of a life reckoned by the one living it was always determined in relation to the landscape of spirit through which that person moves. How that changes over time. So, if he was in a dark wood now, a spiritual nadir, he might be apt to believe he had wasted his life.
Well. He had just killed probably three people: Buck up! It’s a rough patch!
The bow thudded as if in exclamation. Probably a chunk of driftwood. The hull thunked twice more and shed whatever it was, and Jess startled and prodded himself to pay attention. Don’t maunder, he thought. Keep your shit together. You are not a starry-eyed teenager, thank God. You are thirty-seven, and a whole bunch of folks, it seems, are trying to kill you.
