Lost Everything

by Brian Francis Slattery

  “I want to stay on this river forever,” Captain Mendoza had said, though she was not a captain yet, would not be for years. They were lying side by side on the deck of a barge, slipping by the last hills of New York, away from Waverly, into Athens, Pennsylvania. A candle weaving a scarf of smoke to keep the insects away. The spring flood silent beneath them. Aline got up on her elbows, looked to the banks. The trees up to their waists on the submerged shore. The river eating the houses beyond.

  “Well, then you have a choice to make,” Aline said, “because I’m leaving.” She did not have to say how much she hated it. The captain could see how she stayed away from the rail. The kids on the barge tied yellow ropes to the stern and jumped in, rode the current on those tethers. Swinging wide on the river’s turns, arms and legs brushing by trout under the surface. Aline never put her feet in the water. As if she knew then, the captain thought, had a premonition that she would be down there for good someday, and just wanted to stay in the air for now.

  The Carthage was fifteen miles south of Harrisburg when Captain Mendoza got the news about the Market Street Bridge and who had been on it. She lowered anchor, did not leave her quarters for two days. Closed the windows and lay in bed, staring at the warped timbers across the ceiling. The afternoon air thickening around her. At night the rain rolled across the deck and the birds huddled in their swinging cages. Below, in the vaudeville theater she had salvaged from an old movie house, the evening was beginning. Voices rising, the slap of cards, the rolling of dice. The clicks and shouts of six young men playing Russian roulette with a two-hundred-year-old gun. Bottles breaking across the floor. A scattering of music, struggling to coalesce but coming apart again in a pile of dying notes and cantankerous percussion. Two fights beginning in hoarse names and ending with splintering furniture. It was chaos down there, unless the band prevailed, and it would end as every night did since the war had gotten so bad: with people hurt, ruined shoes, a photograph destroyed, a pocketknife that belonged to a grandfather gambled away and lost. The sanctuary that the boat gave unable to altogether shut out the country beyond and what it had become. But that night all the noise seemed to come together into wails and moans, swooping sobs. As if they had pulled Aline out of the water, hoisted her up through the floor, laid her on a table. Let the cry go out that she was gone. Hacked apart the floorboards to fashion her coffin, fixed it with screws and twine. Bore her over their heads, passed her from hand to hand. The body rocking on a sea of palms as the band played and the people sang, she is dead, she is dead, and dropped to their knees in submission to their grief, opened their lungs and shouted at the sky. The end of their misery lay in another country, a place they did not want to go yet. Not if it meant leaving her behind.

  No. No, no. The truth is, I do not know what the captain was thinking. I never met her, never got to talk to her. She was gone, and the Carthage, too, before I ever knew they existed. But you must allow me these lies. The violence I do to all of them, when I put holes in their skulls to show you the thoughts in their heads. It is the only way I know how to bring them back for you—them, the boat, the cities, everything—and let them into your head. Maybe then we can live again, in you. As though it were the last day, and we were all risen from the dead.

  The House

  THEIR CABIN ON THE ship was dark and tiny, had a small window to the night outside. Reverend Bauxite closed the shutters, picked the hammock, and collapsed into it. He slept at once. Sunny Jim, on a mattress on the floor, could not. Lay awake clear through to the gray of the hour before the sun came. In the rocking of the boat, the walls flexed. There was shuffling, footsteps on the ceiling above him. Outside, a monkey screaming in a tree. Then the door to the hallway bowed, drifted open, and three boys shambled up it and across the ceiling, down the opposite wall, then across the floor, dragging their legs, pulling themselves into crouches around him. The past coming to visit.

  “Long time no see, Jim,” Henry Robinson said.

  “Yeah. Been a little while,” the Wallace brothers said, in unison. “Heading back our way?” One of them had his arms wrapped around his chest, trying to cover the hole on one side of his sternum. The other was missing his left eye, all the blood long gone.

  “That’s the plan,” Sunny Jim said.

  “Do you think you’ll get there in time?” Henry Robinson said. He had two holes in him, one in his stomach, the other in his forehead, above his right eye.

  “I have to,” Sunny Jim said.

  “It’s not up to you, though, is it,” Henry Robinson said.

  “We have seen it,” the Wallace brothers said. Turned their heads northward. “What’s coming.”

  “What does it look like?” Sunny Jim said. “Tell me.”

  “Like the land and sky are going to sleep, and all their dreams are coming out.”

  “The good dreams or the bad dreams?”

  “…”

  “You know what they’re talking about, don’t you?” Henry Robinson said.

  “Yes. I do.”

  When Merry was eight and Sunny Jim was six, there was a double murder in the hills behind their house, in the place where a small plane had crashed decades ago. The bodies were found at least a week after it happened, lying side by side, legs and arms straight, heads angled until they were almost touching, eyes still open as if watching something moving in the trees above them. It took a day to remove them from the woods. Nine men bearing them in stretchers carried them down Owen Hill Road, past their house. The kids’ mother told Sunny Jim and Merry it was rude to look, but Merry did it anyway. Could not stop staring, until they had turned the corner and were descending into the steep gully.

  They had no idea how much had been lost already. Their elementary school in Whitney Point had caved in decades ago from water pooling on the roof. Rows of broken windows, shelves of rotting books. One part of the bus shelter in front of the school fallen over into the road. The parking lot overrun with spiky weeds. The doctors’ offices in town on the other side of the river had been abandoned years before they were born, after the last doctor died of tetanus, his jaw locked, his body arched off the bed in a convulsive rictus. There were no more shots, no more antibiotics, for anyone. After that, children were delivered in their houses by a man whose father had trained him as a veterinarian. He could do stitches, fix splints. Little more. But had an intuition about Merry by the time she was two.

  “There’s a hospital in Binghamton that’s still open,” he had said then. “You might want to take her there.” The mother had screamed at him until he left, then hugged her daughter too tight to notice that the girl did not hug her back.

  There was violence in the house then, shouting, splintering wood. Four babies crying. Dozens of extended family members brawling up and down the stairs. They were all made of kindling and gasoline, needed the smallest spark to go up. A fight between Sunny Jim’s father and one of his uncles ended with six planks of siding falling off the house, rattling together on the ground. It was too much, so many people living there, and they said how much they hated each other when they were angry, even though they were family and did not want to go. But they would in time, one by one, even if they had nowhere else to be. Two of the uncles, an aunt first. Just packed up three suitcases and walked down the hill, the aunt carrying her bag on her head. So long, old house. But that was not for a little while.

  The siblings left the riot in the house and went out on the back porch. Moved into the grass gone to seed, the yard thick with summer’s rain, over the crest of Owen Hill Road. Through the fields overgrown with clawing saplings, the line of trees beyond, the patches of pine, the bleached trunks of birches, all swarming with vines. They passed into the woods as deer would, following a trail in their heads. The trees shaped like men, like animals. The ravines that turned to streams every time it stormed. The mossy foundation of a ghost building. Sunny Jim thought Merry was taking him to the hill where the small plane was. The broken wings still at angles. The glass from the cockpit
lying atop the soil. It had been a game of theirs to sit in the metal frames of the seats and reenact the crash in reverse, until the plane was safe on the runway again, a century ago, preparing for takeoff. But Merry did not take him to the crash that day. Her path veered off the slope, descended into a valley that Sunny Jim did not know well. All at once the light was almost gone. The trees changed into black trunks against a fading gray, all flowing together, the air dead already. His feet cold in the dusty leaves. Merry just a shade that stopped, turned.

  “Do you feel him?” she said.

  “No.”

  “The shadow man. He’s so close.”

  “…”

  “…”

  “I want to go home,” Sunny Jim said.

  “Sh.”

  “…”

  “I love it so much here,” she said. “I would live here if I could.”

  The River

  IN THE MORNING, THE Carthage’s deck was heavy with the peaty reek of animal droppings, the sugar of their milk. Refugees cooking breakfast in pots over hot coals. The crew throwing shouts and hand signals from bow to stern. An argument between strangers ended with one of them almost overboard, his assailant catching him by his ankles, then pulling him back up and smacking him across the face. A man in a bow tie tried to sell camels’ ears, for your dogs, for your kids, got no takers. Nine monkeys squatted on the tin roof of the pilothouse, brows furrowed, lips protruding. Surveying the chaos of human affairs with a wary detachment that preceded sorties for fruit. The skirmishes among themselves would come later.

  Under the roof, Faisal Jenkins, the pilot, sat perched on a stool, fanning himself with a wanted poster folded like the bellows of an accordion. His bare feet on the pegs of the Carthage’s wheel. A thin cigarette rolled from a yellow receipt angling from two fingers. He eked out a drag, let the smoke waft from his mouth. Fanned himself seven times. Another drag, another fan. His vigilant feet moving on the pegs, responding to signals only he could feel.

  “Do you ever sleep?” It was Judge Spleen Smiley, bandleader, with two cups of coffee.

  “If I do,” Faisal Jenkins said, “I’m unaware of it. Why? You don’t sleep, do you?”

  “I don’t remember the last time I was awake,” Judge Spleen Smiley said. “I’m only a musician in my dreams, see. In my real life, I’m a bookbinder. Denim apron, glue on my hands. The whole thing.” He took Faisal’s cigarette, put it to his lips, and dragged.

  “Hey, I need that,” the pilot said.

  “You don’t want this, too?” the judge said. Raised one of the cups he held.

  “Real coffee?”

  “Don’t tell anyone.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  The cup was warm even against the spring humidity. As if a living creature nestled in the pilot’s hands. The liquid was like bitter chocolate. He tried to discipline himself, but he could not. Drank it all too fast, under the musician’s smirk.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?” Faisal Jenkins said.

  “I need a favor.”

  “I figured.”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “And what is it you think I think it is?”

  “Whatever it is, it’s not what you think.”

  “What is it then?”

  The musician came in close. “Remember what you told me a couple nights ago?”

  “No…”

  “Well, you told me that when a ship is on a course that it won’t recover from—when its destruction is certain—the pilot is the first to know.”

  “I said that?” the pilot said. He must have been drunk then, said too many things, things that sober Faisal would punch him in the stomach for saying.

  “You did.”

  “So what’s the favor?”

  “If it happens to you,” Judge Spleen Smiley said, “if you know it’s coming, will you tell me?”

  “Judge, I don’t know if I’ll know.”

  “But if you do. Will you tell me?”

  Faisal Jenkins’s earliest memory was of his mother, making coffee in dim light. A faint lantern, a wan flame. The aluminum coffeemaker with a half-melted handle, balanced on a seething blue burner. The coffee’s bitterness spiking the air. He liked the smell even then. He was an addict by the age of twelve. You’ll be a pilot yet, his mother said. Like your grandmother. Like me.

  His grandmother was not born to be a pilot. She said she could remember when summers used to be dry, grass burnt to blond. Acres of dirt on farms. The heat bleeding the green off the leaves in the woods. She remembered the last time it snowed, too. Not a big storm. A few flakes, none ever seeming to land. She was in a car, walked through the flurry to get to the house. She went out later and it was already over. The ground wet but not white with it. A lip of it dusting the house’s gutters. If she had known it was the last snow, she used to say, she would have stayed out in it. Captured the flakes on the wool of her coat. Do as the smallest children do, fling out her arms, open her mouth, stick out her tongue. Snow tasted like ice, she said, like it and not like it. There was a tang in it, something brought down from the atmosphere. She never could recall what kept her inside that day. It never got that cold again.

  The monsoons began, she said, not long after the snow stopped. First, a wet, warm spring. Then a spring and summer under clouds, two months of steady rain that dissolved houses, filled basements. The stairs from the kitchen dry only for the first two steps, the rest descending into brackish liquid. The rain seeped under the roof, around the chimney. Dripped into the fireplace that would never house a fire again. Crept across beams and under moldings. Poured down the walls of the living room until they shimmered.

  There’s going to be a war over this, Faisal’s great-grandfather said. Outside their windows in western Pennsylvania, there was war in the forests already, old species flooded out, new ones flooding in, the trees from the south all moving northward year by year with the spreading warmth. Roads and sidewalks burst by them. A phalanx of flowers breaking up a highway. Great trunks growing in the middles of streets, hung with fiery flowers. Turning towns into woods, his great-grandfather said. You think this is forest? said his great-grandmother. Have you seen the forest? She had visited the day before. It was like humans had never been there. Like everything else was getting ready for us to leave.

  “This place is becoming inhospitable,” Faisal’s great-grandfather said. Mopped his sweating brow. The great-grandmother looked out the window, into the dense flora. Heard the calls of large mammals, new fauna coming in.

  “Just inhospitable to us,” she said. “There’s a big difference.” But what was coming next? she thought. And was she being greedy for wanting to know?

  Under the rain, the Susquehanna grew, year after year. The first few monsoons were warnings to the towns along its banks. The river stole docks off the shore, rose against embankments and bridge pilings up to the roads. Then, all at once, it jumped. Started taking whole bridges and dams. For a month, his grandmother said, the river was a monster, eating the land. When it was done, there were wounds, raw with mud and metal, in every town it ran through, from Binghamton to the Chesapeake Bay. They had to redraw the maps. Some towns gave up, let themselves slip into history, into myth. The corner where he held her for the first time. The porch of the bar where she left him. The plot where his great-aunt, who had raised him as her own, was buried. The stand of trees by the river’s bank where she undid the buttons on her shirt after dark. Those places all taken by the river as it deepened, widened. Scoured out its channel.

  The crews of the first boats sailed it with teeth clenched. Expecting to do as their predecessors had done, end in fire or drowning. But they made Binghamton, north of Binghamton, headed south again. Drifted past Owego, where children waved handkerchiefs from the porches hanging over the banks. There were strings of accidents, boats running aground and the river taking them apart. But the memory forgives, perhaps too much, and the Susquehanna a
t last became a highway. The days of a mile wide and knee deep are over, the captains told their passengers, we get so much more rain now—and that was the truth, but not all of it. Their pilots were special, had learned to read the water, its ripples and surges. Knew how to hear when it spoke of islands submerged just beneath the water’s surface. So Faisal Jenkins’s grandmother gave what she knew to Faisal’s mother, who gave it to him. His most vivid memory.

  He had been on the water all his life. A boy who balanced on the rails during storms. Never slept in a bed that did not move beneath him. Pitied those who did, the sad kids on the muddy shore. Swinging themselves over the water on a rope, dropping themselves in, then thrashing back to land. Not for me, Faisal thought. Dragged a huge striped bass from the river’s belly and grilled it on the ship’s boiler. Until the night his mother woke him with a sharp nudge in the ribs, poured coffee down his throat.

  “I need to tell you something,” she said.

  “What?” he said.

  “Everything,” she said. “Now listen close, because I’m only going to say it once. Then tomorrow morning, when we stop in Towanda, you’re getting off.”

  “Why?”

  “Just pay attention.” It took only a few hours for her to tell it all, for she had thought about it for years, distilled it into short, sharp sentences that he would spend the rest of his life cutting himself on. What her own mother had taught her, what she had learned herself. The river’s wicked ways. She was done before sunrise, and when the boat docked, she hustled him down the plank.