by Austin Bunn
His attention went to the open window. He remembered Marlena saying that she’d opened them to “let the must out,” must being whatever made their clothes smell ripe and subterranean, though Graham believed (it wasn’t worth the argument) that the open windows let the must in, that the must was inside the house, a part of it now, generations of sweat on the wood. But they were selling soon. It would be someone else’s must.
Marlena had found three grassy, charmed acres at Five Mile, outside Grand Rapids, where they’d build. It was their dream, their best-case scenario. They were on the verge of themselves. They had Emma young, and Emma had been hard. First night terrors, then quaking shyness, and most recently weeklong silences to punish them for their interest in her life. She treated Graham like he was a parole officer, sensing judgment in her every move, and offered glimpses of her personality only when she wanted special dispensations. She had one friend, a redhead named Helena who said nothing to them, ever, a statue with freckles whose parents were divorcing and left her needy, and together they could vanish into black holes of time. At last, though, Em had come into a boy period, and what self-immolating energy that consumed her now found direction. Already, two different boys with inky hair and piercings had come to the door for her, and the horizon of her departure from their daily lives was in view. Graham and Marlena had spoken to an architect, even rolled that appointment into drinks for the two of them. The silhouette in Graham’s mind: a wood-timbered ranch with a raked slate roof, floor-to-ceiling windows on the side facing the grasses, obscene amounts of light . . . He would tell Josh and Delia at work that after two decades ferrying copy and deliberating offsets, he’d get to know every joist and stud in the house personally. His hands would finally get dirty.
Graham’s attention circled back to the bag. Someone fleeing the police had thrown it through the window, he decided. There were drugs inside it—he imagined a Tide-like mound of cocaine. The neighborhood had tipped, hadn’t it? A few weeks ago, a rental property up the street had its porch set on fire. Their next-door neighbor, a young plumber named Aaron, had just adopted a German shepherd “for protection,” an animal now digging holes under their shared fence and barking neurotically at squirrels. Graham and Marlena moved in when Em was just two, when the area was up and coming. But it never quite came. An alarm company had come through and he’d noticed their neighbors all had the signs jabbed into their front flower beds. Every window, every door, wired. Marlena had refused. “I don’t want to live in a terrified world,” she’d said.
But the window, Graham saw, was intact, the screen in place. So the bag had been placed there from inside.
Graham picked it up. Something inside was dense and jointed and uncocaine-like. He set it on the tool table, and undid a knot in the plastic. A fetid smell gusted out, enough to make him recoil.
Later, that dark bloom of plastic, opening in his hands, was what he could not stop thinking of: the moment before, when he had the choice to stop, to tie it up and fling it into the trash, and never see the corpse. Inside the bag, the baby was facing down, almost deferentially, its back to him. It was a mercy to have not seen its face. The skin was still speckled with birth. Graham would remember the ashen color and the scale of it, six months along, too small to be full-term, for the rest of his godforsaken life.
He walked over to the slop sink and heaved. His hands closed the bag, shaking convulsively, and cinched it with a contractor tie. His thoughts spiraled into thinking about Em, this stranger who was his daughter. How could they have missed the months of her showing or the sickness—Marlena had been bedridden for months with her—or the advances of one of her pierced suitors, these friends with benefits?
Graham couldn’t leave the bag on the table, or the basement floor. He didn’t want it to touch anything in the house, to deposit a residue of itself on their lives. He gathered himself, by some ancient instinct, and walked out into the backyard.
The air was frigid, biting, even at noon. He could see the top of their neighbor’s white plumbing van over the fence. Graham stepped into the shadow of his garage, out of view, and laid the bag softly (how else?) on the hard-packed ground. It seemed vital to get the bag in the ground before Graham thought too hard or too much. He needed a shovel. If he dug deep and quick, the fact of it wouldn’t take hold. Before Em, back when Graham and Marlena traveled the country—they were hoboes for a couple of years there—they had a running joke: when things got bad, when they’d left some shameful evidence of themselves somewhere, he would rush into the car and say, “Go, go, go!” like a getaway, like the end of a heist, because you recalled a place less the faster you left it.
He left the bag and stepped into the garage. The wall had one empty spot for the shovel, next to the rake and the broken rake and the pitchfork that was a prop in some life he would never live. Then Graham remembered Aaron at his back door over the weekend, his presidential face, dressed in a thermal shirt and grimy jeans, shovel pieces in his hands. He said his shovel had snapped when he’d tried to attack a tree root. So he’d come through the door in the fence between their yards—installed by their prior neighbors, who imagined a community on the block and then promptly relocated to Houston—to ask to borrow theirs. Facing him on the back stairs, Aaron peeked around behind Graham, at the kitchen interior, and said, “Hey, Emma,” and Emma, at the island, smiled, and Graham wondered which men earned her attention and which her dismissal. In the yard, Aaron’s German shepherd, improbably named Schatzi, ran around, sniffing, pissing on the sapling Marlena had planted. Graham recalled the swell of masculine provisioning he felt escorting him to the garage, where he handed over his own shovel. Keep it as long as you need it, Graham said, while Aaron surveyed his wall of tools, his whole garage, as though he might find another tool he wanted.
Graham noticed a trowel in an empty flowerpot. It had a sparkly red handle. Marlena had bought it for Em, her very own trowel, to encourage gardening, though Em preferred to do anything but. Now that he thought about it, where had Em been yesterday? Or the day before? Graham’s thinking hit the wall of her routine: school, dinner on the couch, then up in her bedroom, earphones in, computer on and trilling. When did she look up long enough to get pregnant? God, he barely knew her.
He took the trowel grimly, knowing a bad decision the instant he gripped the handle.
He chose a spot near the pine tree, screened by the fence from the rear alley. The ground was dense and dry—Graham had to jab with two hands. The dirt made a pitiful pile until he reached sand a few inches down. He could hear the shepherd next door snorting in Aaron’s yard, pacing the fence line. Don’t bark, Graham willed. Don’t.
He’d done this once before. One summer in high school, he buried the family cat, a beloved throw pillow named Moe that had never quite understood that the road outside the house was a goddamn killing field. He buried her in the ground and surprised himself weeping inconsolably at the graveside, kneeling against his mother’s leg and discovering it was sweet and perfumed and cluttered the grief. The next summer, their neighbor set a fence and drove a backhoe into the ground right through the plot. That would not happen here.
Finally, a hole opened up. Deep enough, he thought. Graham set the bag in the hole and tucked the extra plastic in. It occurred to him that inside the plastic, nothing would rot. Generations on, you could dig this thing up and know just what was inside. He got the pitchfork from the garage and jabbed into the bag. The tines struck soft matter and he willed himself to think no further. Then he kicked dirt on top and tamped with his foot, delicately. He promised himself he would never tell anyone where this was. This was the absolute final time he would allow his eyes to fall on this spot. He was murmuring a half-remembered prayer when his cell rang inside the house.
It was Marlena, at the library. He found himself at the counter, phone in hand, unable to answer. If he moved, if he answered and so much as spoke the events of the last fifteen minutes aloud, a crack would spider its way through their entire lives. No one
could know. If he called the police, Emma would go to jail, or he would. That is what happened in an area like this, where the pro-life ads on billboards—fetuses, forty feet tall!—promised good lives and loving parents to every single baby if you would just allow them into the world.
He let the air run out of his lungs. The phone went silent, and in the silence, he discovered he needed Marlena to know. She would know which lawyers to call, how to sit Em down and not destroy her. She worked at the branch library. She could parry anything.
She picked up at the first ring.
“I found something,” Graham said. “In the basement.”
Marlena sighed. “Did the sewer explode again? Because we’re staying at a hotel this time.”
“No, it’s not the sewer. You need to come home right now.”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
He looked out through the kitchen window. A strange shape moved out by the pine tree. Dirt kicked up in the air. He saw the shepherd’s black muzzle nose the grave.
“Get home,” Graham managed to say before he hung up.
As soon as the screen door slammed behind him, the dog turned and gripped the ground. A low growl escaped from its tawny throat and then a single bark ripped through the air. Graham froze, empty-handed. Schatzi’s black eyes did not waver.
He could see the trench at the far end of the fence where it had, finally, dug underneath. He had to get the dog back on other side, either through the door or the gap it had made. Aaron would hear the barking and come. He had to undo time. Graham stepped backward and his hand fell on the stem of the pitchfork, resting on the back banister.
At the grave, he could see the black plastic shredded already. He had been wrong—he could never hide or forget the fact of the burial. It was a sinister molecule in the universe, pulling things toward it, like his family, his future, like his right foot, moving one step forward, which shattered some invisible perimeter around the dog, and it dove forward and snarled.
Graham held the pitchfork out. Schatzi snapped and backed up. Graham went to the door in the fence and flipped the latch. It swung open and the dog’s ears pricked up, quizzically. Now, Graham edged in wide circle to the opposite flank.
“Come on, come on,” Graham said, trying to settle him, making eye contact.
Schatzi rotated with him. Graham’s two hands held the pitchfork out, his only defense. When he took a step toward the hole, the dog lunged. Impulsively, Graham thrust. The tines of the pitchfork jabbed once, into the dog’s fur. Schatzi yelped and reeled away toward the fence, where Aaron stood in the opening, mouth agape.
“Jesus Christ,” Aaron said, leaning over to grip Schatzi’s collar. His hand came away smeared with blood. “What the fuck?”
The screen door to the house slammed. Graham felt a wave of relief. Marlena was here. Marlena would know which lawyers, everything.
But it was his daughter, Em’s face contorted in horror, and redheaded Helena, Aaron too, these witnesses, every one of them seeing him and the pitchfork and the gray limbs exposed to the air. Graham could not move.
“Everyone, please, go back inside,” Graham said.
Then, in a kind of trance, Helena stepped down the stairs. She wore tight, ripped jeans and a sweater that looked collapsed. Her face had spots where she picked at it. She walked straight past Graham and fell to her knees at the side of the grave, the black plastic visible. The German shepard barked and tested Aaron’s grip.
“What did you do?” Aaron said, staring into the hole.
Helena looked at him, bitterness etched in her face, Aaron’s face went slack in recognition, and she began to rake the earth into the hole with her hands. Graham dropped the pitchfork and led Em inside, Come with me, where they looked at each other across the kitchen island, both of them shaking, trying not to hear the low voices outside. His daughter’s eyes were imploring, terrified, and he realized he had grown accustomed to not seeing them, not knowing her. Em tucked her hands into the sleeves and he told her to tell him what she knew, what had happened in the basement, and then they would bury the details and, together, never say another word.
The five acres at Five Mile will not be theirs. The market will shit itself again, but they will sell their house and buy another house. Em will go away to college, but she will call regularly, and when she calls, she will ask to speak to her father because, and this he couldn’t have predicted, she will want him to know her. The event of a secret will become a kind of gift. She will tell him about strange boys she meets, about her anxiety, about the place she volunteers. Eventually she will talk about traveling, as her father and mother did once, to ruins in Asia, to the coast of Spain, gathering distance from them and from the dark molecule. And when Em does, Graham will hear his voice, across the years, saying, Go, go, go.
Ledge
Mother, I have seen such marvels. Like the ocean aglow at night with a cold green fire and a fish with a child’s face and two fleshy whiskers. (No man would eat it. We blessed the creature and tossed it back.) I’ve seen a corpse with golden hair in a boat set adrift; his eyes were the slits on a newly born kitten. When the boatswain came to after three days on the garrucha for the crime of sodomy—his wrists tied behind him and hoisted above the deck so that his arms tore and jellied—he asked, “Am I dead?” and soon he was. I looked to Diego, who dropped his dark eyes in shame, and I saw that too. Three hundred leagues into the sea, we came upon a floating meadow, crabs and petrels tinkering along its dank branches and fronds. A palm tree had taken root there and I imagined, briefly, the coastline of Seville, of home.
But none of these compare to you, Mother, suddenly here, at the gunwale of this ship, soaking wet. Your hands are folded across your chest and you stare away, at the ledge. You look precisely as I left you, your long black hair damp and loose against your back and your bare feet white as salt. Around me, the crew and the others race to trim the Elena’s sails in a westerly. The captain is missing and I am full of questions. Are you a dream? Is this a fever or worse? I’m afraid to speak. And so I sit alone with my ledger, in the shade of the quarterdeck, and write.
The great Venetian saw the court of the Kublai Khan and wrote his Book of Marvels. I remember how I loved it as a young man, how I stole into the college to read the manuscript and teach myself the words. It took me a year to finish it, and when I was done, I started over again. At night, I dreamed of trader Polo’s adventures: the falcons of Karmania, the gold and silver tower of Mien, and the festival of wives. Marco Polo told his story from a Genoese jail. The Elena is now my prison. His stories saved his life. Perhaps so will mine.
This record began three days ago, on the Elena’s twenty-second day at sea. We sailed in search of the sea path to India, driving a slant from the Canaries to the Azores into the blue-black unknown. For days, we had been mired in a meadow of sargassum. Captain Veragua, convinced it was the grass of a submarine ridge, ordered the crew to sound the waters on every watch. But the bulb of lead, at the end of the fathom-long cordage, could not sink through the dense thicket. In boredom, the English conscript used a crossbow to hunt a petrel, resting on the carpet of weed, and his arrow succeeded only in punching it down into oblivion. But on Sunday, the meadow miraculously began to break into patches and then lacy fingers. As it trailed into our wake, the crew sang psalms and “Salve Regina” with renewed (if not exactly pleasing) vigor.
Summoned by our good feeling, a group of dolphins assembled beneath the Elena and moved together like a shadow, fracturing and collecting with astounding speed. They teased us, the way children at the Magdalena city gate greet strangers. They leapt into the air and made an exuberant birdlike speech. I opened the navigation ledger and stared at our rhumb line, fixed at one end and one thousand leagues long. I wrote, “Sea like a river, new company, new hope.”
And then a cry came from the rigging. Diego, swung up in the web of mainsail rope, yelled a shapeless sound and pointed frantically off the side of the ship. At port, two iridescent coils, the
height of three men, arched across our length. They moved as fast as a lash and seemed pure muscle, strong enough to splinter the Elena to matchwood. Their scales shimmered like slick cathedral glass. I froze with the ledger open on my lap. Before long, other sea serpents, large as the first, foamed the water in a frenzy. The ocean was a tipped basket of eels. The serpents coiled and, at once, lunged beneath the boat.
The men backed away from the gunwale. The waters went still and the air flashed with heat. No man moved. In short time, our wake ran red. Bits of pink meat floated and were snatched down.
Pinzón, our interpreter, clutched my arm.
“Where,” he whispered, “are we?”
Every sailor knows the stories of sea cats and mermaids with cadaver-cold breasts. St. Brendan told of riding on the back of a whale. But in my young years at sail, as a scribe, men never died from stories. They reefed on fogged-out coasts. They wrecked on breakers off Cape Bojador, circled forever in the Mare Tenebrosum. Except now, new horrors brushed against our keel and knifed the water. We were eighteen men buoyed by forty feet of caulked and tarred oak, a thin wooden wall between our fate and us.
Thirteen-year-old Marco, the ship’s boy, squirreled up the mast, as high as he could go. The brothers Alfredo the Tall and Armando the Taller fell to their knees and raced through the Lord’s Prayer. Others went to the sail locker for armaments, but the Elena is an ocean exploration ship, fast and weak. We carry no arms stronger than crossbows and a meager falconet mounted on the deck that spits spoons and scrap metal. Against raiders—or worse—we have little defense.
Only Diego bravely craned over the side and searched through the water. I wanted to go to his side, the safest place I know, but panic fixed me.
