The Great Offshore Grounds

by Vanessa Veselka

  “I just don’t think microwaves work that way. They’re also half thawed.”

  Sarah shrugged. “I was at a laundromat where a guy threw a frozen pizza in the dryer to cook it. You should call your family either way because being stoic is a setup. I see it a lot. Hang on. Why wouldn’t it work if you double the time?”

  “Wait, what happened to the pizza in the dryer?”

  “He checked it after six minutes and it wasn’t done so he threw it away. But there was no reason it couldn’t have worked, and by family I don’t mean literal blood, chosen family, whatever. Anyone who really loves you.”

  “My family would make too big a deal out of this. It would only make it harder.”

  Sarah opened the microwave, restacking the paper trays before starting it again. Five minutes later they sat down to eat.

  “You can stay here,” said Sarah, stabbing the Salisbury steak with her fork, “I’m moving out in a few weeks. The rent’s paid. I don’t mind.”

  “Why are you leaving?”

  “I’m going to Panama.”

  Livy knew she was supposed to ask more, show a little curiosity, buoy her side of the dinner conversation, but she couldn’t.

  After dinner she wandered down the hill to a bar, but as soon as she entered she felt like an extra in a movie. This film takes place in Alaska. The hippie rednecks and the natives are drinking beer. Something is about to happen, but you’re not involved. She went to the bathroom to wash her hands. Her skin was dry and her lips were chapped. She looked at herself. The few freckles she had were nearly invisible, nothing like Sarah. Two girls came in, talking, spraying their hair to death, reapplying lipstick. Their eyes and hers meeting occasionally in the mirror. But all of Livy’s desire to flirt was gone. Because if I can’t touch myself, I’m certainly not going to touch you.

  44 Briar

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Jirshi walked down the driveway with Cheyenne.

  “I wait until you get a ride,” he said.

  “Okay, but stay in the bushes or no one will stop.”

  He handed her a bag. “Apples for your peanut butter.”

  It was such a thoughtful act that she had to swallow a couple of times so she wouldn’t cry.

  “Thanks. I like apples with peanut butter.”

  A car passed. She didn’t try to flag it.

  Jirshi hiding in the bushes didn’t work. There wasn’t enough cover and all the cars that passed just saw a guy crouching by a ditch. Once he left the next car stopped but only took her two miles down the road. She might as well have walked. For a while after that cars didn’t stop so she did walk, along the narrow dirt shoulder, making up new words to the ABC’s song, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Then the melodies got stuck in her head and made her crazy. The castle tower occasionally appeared in her mind as she’d seen it looking up, the intricate interlocking wood and stone, the star patterns in the floor, and the idea of being okay with being nothing.

  A guy in a Lexus pulled over. He was on a business trip to Fort Worth, which wasn’t the way she was going but he said she could pick up I-20 and it would be the same, so she got in. She made it to a Dallas truck stop by midday. By then another song was stuck in her head.

  It was in the month of June

  All things were bloomin’

  Sweet William on his deathbed lay

  For the love of Barbara Allen…

  She got a ride with a trucker to Birmingham, which is where she said she was going. He didn’t believe her but didn’t care. She said she’d called a friend from a pay phone and her friend was waiting in Alabama. Just outside Birmingham. “We’re supposed to meet in this motel where she works. Just off the interstate.”

  They rode to the east

  And they rode to the west

  Until she came nigh him

  And all she said when she got there

  Young man I think you’re dyin’…

  Hours later, past dark, she saw a billboard for a motel. Here, she told the trucker, here. She got out in front of a glowing sign advertising rooms cheap enough even for her. The woman at the desk said they were full. A bus of college kids had checked in for a game. She hadn’t had time to change the vacancy sign. Cheyenne could see she felt bad, and that she wasn’t lying but that didn’t help because it was getting dark and she was stuck.

  “You really don’t have anywhere to go?” the woman asked.

  “I’m going to North Carolina to see my mom.”

  The woman rolled a pencil back and forth over the glass counter.

  “My car was destroyed in a tornado in Texas two days ago,” said Cheyenne.

  “Well you don’t look very dangerous,” said the woman. “Pretty sure I could take you in a fight. I also have a gun in my purse. You can stay on my couch. I’m off at eleven.”

  The woman answered calls and handed out towels and microwave popcorn. At eleven sharp she locked up the laundry room and they drove a few blocks to a small house.

  Cheyenne heard an explosion.

  “Fireworks. My neighbors are having a party,” the woman said as she showed Cheyenne the couch.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning the woman drove her to a truck stop after giving her a peach-colored T-shirt with a large air-brushed bunny on it. The woman had said, “You can’t see your mother in that dirty shirt.” Cheyenne found a ride all the way to Georgia. Halfway through the morning she realized she’d left the peanut butter in the woman’s fridge, but the trucker bought her lunch. She rolled tampons out of toilet paper in the bathroom. How many days had she been bleeding? Who had she been when it started and how different was she now? She bought crackers and bean dip and gummy worms in the store.

  When they hit the weigh station she hid in the back of the trucker’s cab. Atlanta went on forever. From Augusta she got a ride to South Carolina. She saw a honey locust growing in a strip between a gas station and an undeveloped lot. It had huge thorns and was surrounded by cigarette butts and used condoms.

  The rest of the way it was a series of shorter rides, mostly in cars. Then it was: a right turn before the Cape Fear River, stay between the Green Swamp and the Boiling Spring Lakes, look for a temple in Bolivia.

  She got to Bolivia, or almost, and asked a man outside a convenience store how far she was from the temple. He said she’d never find it.

  “It’s not walking distance,” he said.

  “How far isn’t walking distance?”

  “My friend might run you there if you wait.”

  Ten minutes later she got into a taupe Prius.

  “Are you here for the festival?” his friend asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s mostly over,” he said.

  The road to the monastery was clogged with cars. The man dropped her off.

  The temple was built on pilings with columns. Asian people flooded in and out of it. Through a set of doors she saw a shamrock-green Buddha on a golden dais, spear-point hat nearly touching the ceiling. Men in ocher robes moved through the crowd—I’m looking for my mother—but they turned out to be visitors too. She followed the crowd toward a little creek where people were placing paper blossoms into a stream. Laden with candles, with cash. Some more like crowns than flowers. They floated away on black water shining from candlelight, and made their way through the forest. Not in Bolivia. Not Chiang Mai. Dixie.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder. “Are you Cheyenne?”

  She nodded.

  “Justine said you might come. She’s through the forest. I can take you.”

  “Doesn’t she live here?”

  “We take her mail but she’s not really part of the monastery.”

  The forest floor was sodden in places and fully underwater in others. She followed the man down a narrow wooden
boardwalk through the trees. Palmetto fronds fanned on either side of her. The farther they got from the temple, the less dry land there was. The palms disappeared. Oak and shagbark hickory too.

  “It’s always wet but not normally like this. It hasn’t drained off from the hurricanes this year.”

  The boardwalk branched. He stayed to the left. Rooted in an island in the swamp under a hole in the canopy that let in sun, a young and deluded swamp chestnut oak sprinkled crimson leaves over the water.

  “She’s a great woman.”

  The creek widened until there was no ground left. The boardwalk ended in a dock in a glassy pond. He pointed into the forest. Across the water she saw a large yurt in the woods.

  “We need to wade,” he said.

  “Aren’t there snakes?”

  “We need to wade carefully.”

  He didn’t have shoes on. She hadn’t noticed.

  “It’s not far.” He rolled his cotton pants up to his thighs. “There’s a makeshift footbridge that connects to the shore between the Cypress and the Tupelo. You’ll see it when we’re closer.”

  It was near dark. Everything was cast in blue shadow. He stepped into the swamp water and sank to his knees. She took off Jirshi’s shoes and rolled up her jeans. She was taller than the man was so the water only came to the middle of her calves. The fear of snakes was so intense she could barely breathe. Her mouth was dry and her tongue tasted like metal. She sank deep into the silt mud at one point but found a root under the water to stand on. The yurt was directly ahead.

  They reached the footbridge, a stray piece of the original boardwalk over a few buckets of packed dirt. The man offered her an arm but she handed him her shoes and stepped up by herself. They dipped their feet in the water several times to get the mud off.

  “How long since you’ve seen her?” he asked.

  “I’ve never seen her.”

  Someone in the yurt turned on a lamp. The brightness shot out of every window, a lighthouse beam.

  “That’s her,” he said.

  Justine looked out over the swamp. She couldn’t see them, though they could see her. She was searching. Lamplight cut angles on the water. Even at this distance Cheyenne would know her face anywhere.

  She looked exactly like Livy.

  BOOK 4—UPRIVER

  And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,

  And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

  —Penned by John Masefield, sung loudly by the starboard watch of the rebuilt Neva as they shivered on deck waiting for morning

  45 Waves and Light

  STANDING AT THE BEACHHEAD—not all that far from the Roanoke River, or even from Hatteras Island, a place of ghosts—looking east, the ghost of Sir Walter Raleigh is caught in a loop of time. Every night, he flees his lost colony and sails for El Dorado. Because on the inhale the Virgin Queen blessed the East Indies Company, and on the exhale she handed Raleigh a use-it-or-lose-it charter for the New World. Go east young man, go west. Go wherever the hell you want.

  Behind him, and inland down the North Carolina roads toward Jacksonville, is the Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune where thousands of troops skirmish daily. The base is home to the 2nd Marine Division, which was formed on the cusp of the twentieth century when a fledgling empire felt the need for a bodyguard. Conceived in the White House, born in the Philippines, schooled in Panama, Cuba, and Guadalcanal, the division provides ground forces to North Africa and the Middle East.

  Lately Raleigh’s taken to wearing a wreath of tobacco around his neck and carrying a lock of a blond child’s hair. In the distance, off the North Carolina coast, ship-like factories of whalers head for the Horn. Going deeper and farther out as they approach peak oil, they sail for the Great Offshore Grounds. Barefoot, Raleigh digs his toes in the oily sand. Ankle-deep in surf, he whispers his mantra: I am not liable. I am not liable.

  On the beach around him, marines practice for night landings on foreign shores. The tidal estuary that partially surrounds Camp Lejeune is considered ideal for training amphibious assault units. Sadly, taking the beachhead over and over for forty years did have unintended costs. The camp’s drinking water became poisoned with benzene and engine degreaser, which resulted in birth defects, cancer, and lawsuits. Because while gold cures impotency, alcoholism, and poverty, and whales cure machinery and darkness, there is no antidote for benzene poisoning.

  John A. Lejeune emerges from the sea with the Tuscarora people behind him, first as the crest of a wave then as foam on the sand. Raleigh turns into lightning bugs. Lejeune averts his solarium eyes. One, the explorer and brand-creator, the other, logistics and deliverables.

  Having fled north at the founding of the colonies, the local Tuscarora people were gone as a force but not gone forever. A hundred years after the Carolina colony subdivided into north and south, they remerged in the white imagination as the Union sloop of war the USS Tuscarora. This projection marked a subtle shift in the moral center of the country, repositioning itself outside the role of proud aggressor into the victimized center of the haunted colonial unconscious: I am not the cowboy but the Indian. I did not take the hill. That city is not mine. I am not covered in salt.

  On the eve of the Civil War, the USS Tuscarora was sent to intercept that soon-to-be notorious Confederate raider the CSS Alabama, for which the Alabama Hills would be named, hills now overrun with gladiators and lonely rangers. The order given to the USS Tuscarora was simple. Sink the CSS Alabama before it crosses the Atlantic—because who better than the Tuscarora understood the need for this? Who better than they understood the cost of failure? How if allowed to land, invasive seeds might take hold and colonize an entire garden and become very hard to eradicate later. The USS Tuscarora did fail, though. It did not stop the CSS Alabama. And the ship too, then, was forced to flee north. Ever-returning and reemerging, though, the sloop later sailed around the Horn to Valparaíso where it encountered ghosts, mostly the giant Galápagos turtles set on fire by the sailors of the whaleship Essex.

  The failure of the USS Tuscarora to intercept the CSS Alabama was very likely cheered by John A. Lejeune’s father, a devoted Confederate captain, though such things are impossible to know. Perhaps the elder Lejeune’s heart was never in the Confederacy so much as devoted to those whose hearts were—because who will not do things for a person whom they love that they would never do for themselves? Either way, the elder Lejeune’s allegiance to the Confederacy did not pass to the next generation. John A. Lejeune, a marine’s marine, though a plantation-born Southern son of a Confederate captain, lived and died a defender of the Union.

  Lejeune served in the Spanish-American War covering troops in the aftermath of the Battle of San Juan Hill. He fought in the battle for Guantánamo Bay, establishing Cuba briefly as a US colony. He commanded the USS Dixie in Panama when the United States took over construction of the canal. An opener of doors. The soft speaker. The carried stick. John A. Lejeune.

  In the summer of 1905, Lejeune remembered, the USS Dixie was rerouted to assist in the French colony of Algeria. They were tasked with helping to set up a scientific station from which to view the total solar eclipse. Lejeune arrived in August. He toured the city of Bône, which had been the site of a paradigmatic shift of force and brilliance. Grateful that he was there to absorb and not slaughter, he wandered alone. These were the streets of Hippo where Saint Augustine had walked. Augustine, who looked at the expansion and excesses of Rome and saw that its destiny was not divine but a glitch in the narrative of becoming. From the physical realities of the aqueduct and the arches, Augustine constructed a new and holy city set upon a hill, carved in salt and light, but invisible.

  In the moment before the 1905 eclipse, scientists checked their equipment. They had Algerian servants lay down bedsheets to catch the shadow bands. Then the eclipse began. The temperature dropped. Stuttering
light danced on the linen and the corona of the sun was captured with spectroscopes that owed much to Augustin-Jean Fresnel’s theories on waves and light. Such an elegant instrument, the spectroscope, only a prism. A couple of mirrors, a slit in a box, yet able to reveal the elements in complex radiation. For this reason, it is often used in the classroom to demonstrate spectrometry. The experiment is simple. Take a candle that’s been used before. Put sodium chloride in the well by the burnt wick. Then look at it burn through the spectroscope. In the dark a single bright yellow line will appear, also made of salt and light.

  * * *

  —

  Essex and Jared had each joined up on an open contract, so unlike other recruits, they had no idea what their military occupational specialty would be. The idea had been to cast the die for real. See what fate held. After taking the assessment test they awaited the results. Maybe a collection of skills and aptitudes captured on the assessment test would describe a new self. Brides in an arranged marriage, they hoped for the best.

  The Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery didn’t hold very many surprises, though. Essex and Jared both scored high on Assembling Objects and Electronics Information and tanked General Science. Essex aced the Word Knowledge section then totally blew it on Verbal Expression. Which only made sense when he thought about it. His record of saying what he meant in terms that anyone else but him understood did seem criminally low. But whether this or any of these attributes made a difference to the marine charged with giving them their MOS is unclear. They were both assigned to infantry. Jared as a basic marine. Essex as a rifleman.

  * * *

  —

  The Lejeune complex was a hundred square miles, larger than Seattle. Essex was struck by how different the land in North Carolina was. Much wilder than the hills around San Diego. The humidity of the South was like nothing he’d ever known. It was October but didn’t feel like fall at all. The air was wet but the plants were dry. Unlike the Pacific Northwest, they had no deep greens or blues. The only gray was pavement. The trees were not triangles or spears but bushes and hands. Pickle-colored cotton balls on parched grass, either in a thicket or planted in rows along the tank-wide avenues of the base.