The Remedy for Love

by Bill Roorbach

  That day we saw Taliban coming into the village across a little valley all in a line. Jim picked the lead man and we each called the number of our man and shot simultaneous. He was the only one who got his target. The others over there started jumping around and firing down the valley, where our shots must have echoed from we guessed. We saw which doorway they entered when they quit. We all shot after them and shot all the windows then their rounds starting come right at us. You couldn’t see from where. And the bullets is flying. And they shoot through sheepskin to hide the muzzle flash. And it’s getting dark, so no air support.

  Mortar rounds came in all night, because we had compromise our position. Our translator was killed a nice man. Our medical officer was killed one of the team. Very bad. Four men down in two days. Not what you thought signing up. Just bad. Still bad. Very real. Not Sylvester Stallone. Actor gets up off the ground and wash off the blood and do the next movie and that’s what I had pictured. Jim led a service after the choppers took them. That next afternoon which was April 5 Jim tapped me and we crossed the valley on our bellies, several hours by inches knowing we might be having our last day, not real. We caught them eating dinner and made them pay one at a time running after them up the stairs but on the roof

  Another hole.

  second I took him out face-to-face so at least you know that and I stayed till the evac came in and got us both out I did my part and my part was not plenty I agree. None of it seemed real, or else nothing else was ever real. Honestly I don’t know which. This is hard to explain.

  And another.

  hy of Jim’s sacrifice. Every day I wish it had been me and not him that day. He talked about you often especially your singing. When I’m released maybe I will come to Maine and we can meet and talk about Jim and I hope heal. And I will ask you to sing.

  Eric found the letter from President Obama again, truly signed in Obama’s hand. Eric thought about that, how the president’s signing of a condolence letter was both personal and impersonal. He tried to imagine Inness O’Keefe all alone at her mailbox reading it, could not. Or maybe it was hand delivered the way he knew the fatality letters were. Probably Eric had heard about Jim’s death on the news. Probably it was in the news for days, Jim being a native Mainer. He tried to recall, but there were too many kids killed, a disproportionate number from Maine, it was often observed.

  Eric put the president’s letter on the butcher-block table, weighed the paper down with the votive candles so that it wouldn’t go anywhere, and so that Inness would know that he’d seen it, looked at it long, and blew the candles out.

  Forty-Two

  SHE CLIMBED INTO the makeshift bed with him at first light, her skin shockingly warm, like a fever. She put her face close to his. “Thanks for putting the ladder back,” she said.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” he said.

  She put her head on his chest. “Your heart pounds, mister. Like something down below on a ship.”

  “You’ll be all right, Inness O’Keefe.”

  “I want to believe you,” she said.

  The front wall groaned, a sustained noise, almost funny, like something bodily, digestive. Then it stopped. They lay together in the blue and gradually pinkening predawn light, vague through the blocked front window.

  Eric said, “I read the one from K-Bomb, too. That’s a real friend. He said you sing.”

  “I do not sing. That was a joke of Jimmy’s. He’d tell people I was a great musician and then out of the blue they’d ask me to play the piano or sing or whatever he’d told them. Very embarrassing. Please, no more about K-Bomb. K-Bomb is fucked. Right after that letter? I wanted to go see him? But he killed himself. In the V.A. hospital down in Washington, or wherever it is. Hung himself with a sheet.”

  Eric waited a moment, said, “Terrible.”

  She sniffed his cheek and said, “I thought I was going to slaughter Jim’s mother. After he was cremated. And we put his ashes in the wind. She was all over me, like. Like I had done something wrong. That’s exactly it. The same little shit-squad went to her door that came to mine, lieutenants with like stripes on their pants, and swords. I thought it would be dramatic to pull one of the swords and cut my own throat in front of them. At Arnold Elementary they had an assembly without telling me beforehand. Without telling me, Eric. Like, it was for his mom and not for me. A memorial for Jim the beloved gym teacher. And his celebrity mom in her black fucking gloves. Bitch with her hands inside chickens all day. Or maybe I just missed the announcement? Because I took two weeks off, which is the maximum grief allowance. Or maybe they told me about the assembly and I misunderstood. I couldn’t make sense of anything no matter what people said. The way they look at you, mister. Or the way they don’t, is more like it. You turn invisible, like you drank a potion. And the unbelievably moronic things almost everyone says. You can’t believe it.” She put on a deep voice: “ ‘He was a great hero. He died for freedom.’ And then they stuff your arms with flowers. ‘He would want you to know.’ And all this fantasy stuff about Heaven, how I’ll see him in Heaven. And I’m like, Jim is going to Hell, yo. He’s killed people now. He’s killed a lot of people and some of them were innocent, and like at least one was a twelve-year-old boy and probably some were babies, too. He fucked me in the ass when I didn’t want it and pulled my hair and called me his ho. And everyone? He’s never been nice, not to any of you, and not to anyone. So don’t talk about fucking Heaven and Jesus and God, not to me. Of course I didn’t say any of that. I went, Thank you, Father. And, Thank you, Mrs. LaRoque. I went, He was good to me. True, when he was good to me, he was very good. He was a great gym teacher and all the kids loved him to pieces and I believe K-Bomb that James T. LaRoque was a great soldier and that James T. LaRoque loved me. His mother has the medal. He got a medal. At the assembly. The, like, whole fucking army was there in dress uniforms. And the governor of Maine, fat slob with Cheetos dust all over his suit jacket. Anyway. I shouted at the principal and at the officer guys for not telling me and for talking about Heaven too much and for talking about honor, like that meant anything, and the twelve-year-old boy, I said: What about him? And I said how the room was filled with twelve-year-old boys, how’d they like to see them all shot? And people tried to comfort me, then it became more like restrain me. And I got away and got in my car and I drove and I drove and I never went back. So I guess what I’m saying is that despite earlier communications, I am available, fully available, more or less, though who would want me?” She threw her leg over him, neither sauce nor supplication, something else in the gesture, something new to Eric, something he’d have to work to understand: plain affection.

  That low rumbling under the house. A crackling in the front wall. A series of pops in the roof above them. A prolonged groan. They listened to the silence after.

  “Damn,” Eric said.

  “Probably it’s Jimmy,” she said.

  “Probably it’s not,” Eric said firmly.

  She climbed up on him, rocked her pelvis on him. “Can we please, just please fuck?”

  “Mm. No.”

  “I just think it would be a good idea to fuck before we go, I really mean it.”

  “Inness,” he said. “Inness O’Keefe.”

  “Mister,” she said.

  “We can save it for our date.”

  “Are we still having a date?”

  “If you want to have a date.”

  “It will be cold on the beach.”

  “Maybe we’ll wait a few months. Maybe we’ll wait a few months in any case.”

  “You are just you here, and that’s what you say here, when you are just you, just Eric, but out there, you are a lawyer. You might not want a date. Or I might not. You represented my friend Carly, yo. You are Eric DiGiacomo Neil.”

  “You knew Carly Martin?”

  “And Eric DiGiacomo Neil failed her.”

  Long silence. “I agree, I did.”

  She kissed him hard. Her mouth tasted like tears.

&nbs
p; “Inness,” he said.

  Very fast and against his cheek she whispered, “There was this kid I met at a party in high school in Jersey and he was a stranger and I never knew his name and never saw him again. I just called him the Good Kisser. I thought if I ever found someone who could kiss like that, like the center of everything . . .”

  “The center of everything . . .”

  “Give me that ring,” she said in the midst of another kiss.

  “It’s only an artifact,” he said.

  “I just want to see it.”

  “No.”

  “Give it.”

  He struggled to get his hand deep in his pants pocket, found the ring among useless change, drew it out, pinched it in his fingers where she could see it.

  She grabbed it fast, plunked it in her mouth, swallowed it with a gulp.

  Before he could react to that, there was a loud boom from the cabin, the whole building at once, it seemed, something crucial giving way. And suddenly, the whole place lurched and groaned and pitched toward the river, dove off its piers, the whole place wrenching and falling and thumping into the huge bank of snow that had dumped off the roof at river side, falling and settling and perching precariously right at the edge of the high bank, the front wall staying behind, the blanket patch ripping exactly in half, squeals and cries and a roaring, the shed detaching itself cleanly, nothing but tarpaper to hold it, the stove pulling free from the chimney pipe and sliding down the floor fast to the riverside wall just as the butcher-block table slid and just as Eric and Inness in their broken bed lurched and slid, right up against the kitchen drain board, Eric slamming into it, Inness into him with a yell, all of this a matter of seconds. The cookstove fell over beside them. The mostly frozen slipper tub came to a stop against it with a thonk. One of the kitchen cabinets tore from the wall, jars falling and exploding. The air in the cabin was all flying snow and bits of branches. Suddenly the loft was breaking free with loud snaps and screeches and itself falling with a percussive slam, finally the ladder landing with a clatter, just an afterthought, then silence. But no, it wasn’t silent. The world went on—all the wind of the forest, all the music of the river, all the pink of dawn were around them, above them, and the penetrating cold.

  Forty-Three

  THEY LAY CRUSHED together in surprise. The cookstove smoked where its chimney had been torn away. “Here we go,” Eric said firmly. They scrabbled up the inclined floor, collected Inness’s clothing, collected every garment they had—the clothing would keep them alive—put it on piece by piece and very fast, Inness her underpants backward, her jeans, her shirt, the robe, Eric his sports jacket, Inness the smelly coat, Eric the wool blanket. Dressed, their sense of emergency began to abate: the cabin wasn’t moving any further, though you didn’t want to stay: the loose edge of the roof might easily fall; the floor was cocked at a crazy angle; the sky was up there where the loft had been.

  “Let’s keep moving,” Eric said. “Food. And find your cap, your cap!”

  She found it, also his gloves. She said, “Holy shit,” and just kept repeating it.

  Eric found the FedEx envelope under the stove and stuffed it up under the blanket and into back of his pants, loosened his belt to accommodate the bulk, tightened it back again. He found the jar he’d put water in unbroken.

  She found the extra tortillas and the bag of carrots and the jar of peanut butter amid kitchen debris. “Holy shit. Holy shit.”

  “Calories are heat,” Eric said. “Let’s take everything we can.”

  They stuffed their food finds into a doubled plastic grocery bag, hurry, hurry, holy shit was right. Eric dumped out a loose jar of dry beans on the floor, scooped another quart of water from beneath the broken ice in the slipper tub, capped it. He stuffed that into another bag along with the nearly empty jar of peanut butter and one apple, grabbed the two oranges still left, upturned the slipper tub onto the ashes and coals that had spilled on the floor, the absolute end of their fire and water, one gesture. He remembered the duct tape—found a roll under the drainboard, jammed it in his jacket pocket. And then they scrabbled up to the high edge of the floor where the side wall had slid away, climbed down and right into Eric’s snow yard, its surface nice and hard and dry, barely dawn, the first sun in the very tops of the highest trees across the river.

  Inness said it one more time: “Holy fucking shit.”

  But they were safely outside, their heavy breaths coming in clouds of steam.

  Heaped in his blanket, Eric kept running through an inventory in his head. Their shoes! His would be somewhere under the wood stove. Hers, no clue. The rain boots were in the shed covered in duct tape. They hurried to the makeshift door he’d cut: great danger of their socks getting wet as their feet heated the hardened snow. The shed was whole, only torn from its mother ship and a little twisted—it had never been a show building. A show building would have been dragged into the sky. Inside it, up high on the workbench, Inness helped him arrange the blanket into a cloak with a big pocket on the shoulders, duct-taped the whole generously so it would keep its shape, tucked their bag of food into the pocket, their jars of water. She packed his feet wrapped in pieces of scarf into the rubber boots, duct tape, duct tape, duct tape. They trimmed squares off the train of his blanket, no discussion, wrapped her feet over her warm wool socks, made shoes out of duct tape, ten layers, slipped her feet into the child-size pair of water skis, duct tape, duct tape.

  She put her hands inside his blanket and then inside his shirt and he flinched at the cold and at the thought she’d find the FedEx mailer and the letters he’d salvaged, but she did not and soon her hands warmed. He gave her his fine leather gloves—like evidence in an O. J. Simpson trial at that point, but still functional—and she taped his feet to his skis generously. She had her Rasta cap, not warm, but the old coat had a hood, too loose: duct tape, duct tape. They could smell smoke from the stove; he thought of those hot coals on the floor in there, very doubtful he’d gotten them all put out.

  “Gotta go,” Inness said. “I mean, I’ve really gotta go.”

  “All right. And while you do I’ll go back in, see what we’ve forgotten.”

  “You’re not going back in there!”

  “Matches, for one thing.”

  “I burned all the matches. I’m so sorry, Eric. I’m so sorry.”

  “Okay, but I’ll make sure the fire’s out.”

  “You’re not going back in there.”

  “I need something for a hat.”

  “You’re not, you’re not, you’re not. Do you hear me? You’re not going back in there!”

  She was right about that: he was already taped into his skis. She turned effortfully on the bench in her own skis and shuffled them out the door he’d made. Eric quick grabbed the calendar off the wall, folded it closed, the August girl safely inside, tucked the thing back behind him under the blanket and under his shirt with the letters from Jim, a lot of fuss for talismans. Finally he got himself aimed at the makeshift door and shuffled out. Inness had waited for him, but now she tested her water skis, slid them awkwardly step-by-step to the snow-carved lady’s room. From the privacy of his own pretend outhouse he could see the cabin—the giant fallen pine trunks had shifted maybe three feet. The front wall had been pushed back, but was otherwise intact, the door swung open to nothing but snow. The entire rest of the cabin was tilted hard, almost forty-five degrees, the window side hanging over the river, nothing to stop it but the huge mountain of snow that had slid off that side of the roof in the night, more than precarious.

  Danielle had eaten his ring. He laughed and kept laughing. Tomorrow, if they survived, maybe she could recover it.

  “What’s so funny?” she called.

  “You ate my ring.”

  And then she was laughing, too.

  Reunited, they stood side by side and ate more: tortillas with peanut butter. They sipped some of their water, broke into giggles, a function of spent adrenaline, he thought, not a word between them. After
a while, the cabin groaning and creaking ominously, she pulled off her wedding ring—not the diamond ring below it, that she would keep—offered it to him. It was very small compared to his, hardly a Cheerio’s worth. He ate it. And that ended anything funny about it. They gazed at one another, but briefly.

  And grew anxious simultaneously. Her Advil! His Leatherman knife! Both were in the cabin somewhere, necessary survival tools. He said so and she said, “No, no. Eric. No, no, no.” Like she was talking to a grade-school kid.

  The cabin lurched and lifted, the cement piers giving way and falling. Eric and Inness shuffled backward and away in their skis. The cabin lurched again. And then the heavy bank of snow holding it on the precipice over the river let go, a secondary avalanche straight into the river. All that snow formed an island that slowly became saturated and rolled and sank, moving downstream quickly.

  Like a toboggan, very slowly at first, then gaining momentum, Professor DeMarco’s family cabin slid off the high rock bank, the roof collapsing with a roar and clatter as it progressed, slid until the heavy beam of the front sill almost touched the coursing river, then slid a little more, notch by notch till the sill was dipping in. And then a little more, and more yet, enough finally that the deep current caught hold. The cabin jerked and turned, spun sideways, then fell the rest of the way off the bank with groans and sighs and the cracking of boards, spun in the river current, bumping and heaving, began to break into pieces.

  “Holy shit,” Inness said. “That was us, mister.”

  Forty-Four

  HER SKIS WERE bright red, very wide. His were blue, narrower, might have been sporty back in the fifties or even the forties when they were bought, back when the flats dam was still in place and people boated down here. He had his hoe; she had two bamboo poles he’d broken mosquito torches off of, everything secured with duct tape, plenty of damn duct tape. His shoulder was already sore again. They crossed between the flattened cement piers of the missing house, and then they were on their way. He found the path he’d started. They looked back—you had to look back before you moved forward. The cabin had gotten stuck out in the middle of the river, three big pieces that would eventually be reduced.