“You’re a pilot now,” she said. “Find your own boat.”
“Aren’t you coming back for me?”
“We’ll see,” she said. She died the next day in a boiler explosion. He was fifteen.
Judge Spleen Smiley was still looking at him, waiting. The coffee in his hands.
“Will you tell me?” he said again. “If you see it coming?”
“I’ll try,” the pilot said.
The Highway
WE KILLED HALF THE towns along the river’s edge years ago when we put the highways through them, the ones we built in the second half of the twentieth century. We must have figured cars and trucks were better than railroads, and because we could not use the river for trade, we might as well not use it at all. Did we ask the people who lived in those towns if they needed the river? And did we apologize to their children? For the strip of pavement was a ravine, parting the town from the shore. Cutting off the roads and houses from the reason they had been put there in the first place. Making the towns places to pass through, pass over. When the war came to take everything, it found nothing to take. Nothing to eat. Progress had eaten everything already.
But in Marysville, just north of Harrisburg, there was a truce. The railroad and highway scarred the hill but left the town breathing. The houses leaning on each other in irregular blocks, as if they would all fall into the river together if the first one gave in. The church steeple tilting shy of vertical. A café with purple walls, a wood stove. The trains running through backyards, loud enough to crack foundations, but not enough to make the people who lived there leave. Then the war granted Marysville amnesty—it had spent itself at Harrisburg and its touch lightened for a time. It was regrouping, drawing strength for the towns and cities up the highway, turning Marysville into a scrappy garrison. But the army was bad for the town. The narrow streets choked with bivouacs, lanterns reeking of kerosene. Stalls on the church steps selling tobacco, cameras, plastic bags of sweet cheese. People without running water in their homes calling out to the soldiers in sharp voices: Buy this, buy this, you son of a bitch. Trash scurrying across the main road, lined with dim, smoking fires. Prostitutes calling to the soldiers in ragged, trilling voices. A row of tents made from men’s clothes stitched together, mattresses on the ground inside. A navy blue van with the wheels off, candles inside bubbling the vinyl seats. Four poles with sheets of plastic for walls and a plywood roof. A filthy RV parked on an island of grass, a torn Astroturf rug under the awning, plastic lawn chairs. It looked as if it were brought there before the war, on vacation. Had not been told what happened, that its owner had changed. That the people who were using it did not sleep there.
From the water, on a barge paddling up from Harrisburg, Sergeant Foote could hear three soldiers on the shore making music. One beating on a guitar, another on a wooden crate. The third clapping his hands. Out-of-tune three-part harmony, trying to pull down some gospel.
This train is bound for glory
This train, all aboard.
This train is bound for glory,
This train, all aboard.
This train is bound for glory
Don’t ride nothin’ but the righteous and the holy
On this train.
They were all drunk. Flogging the song to death, the words coming out wet and slurry. Soon it would expire, and the soldiers flop over, mouths open, gone from the world.
The camp’s dissipation began at the landing, got stronger along the street that led through the long stone tunnel under the highway, under the railroad tracks. Grand blocks of damp masonry. At the end of the tunnel, the street curved off and up to join the bigger road above. Rows of steel-framed hospital beds, cots on wooden frames, lined the tunnel’s walls. Soldiers dying. The stench of urine. Two doctors, eight nurses, running out of painkillers, switching to whiskey. It made the infirm rambunctious, hollering and shaking the bed frames. Three weeks before, six of them sprang from their sheets, danced down the middle of the tunnel in a line, arms locked, legs kicking in unison while the invalids clapped and cheered. The staff powerless against them. They ended by the sewer outlet at the riverbank, their feet in the water, daring each other. Come on, drink it. What do you have to lose? One of them did, and died four days later.
The highway above boomed with trucks, one after the other in a steady beat. A diesel caravan moving north, toward the front, drawing a wake of shouting and engine trouble. The prostitutes all waving good-bye. Come back soon. They knew they would never see those boys again. Sergeant Foote almost missed the old train station, which was hunched in a hollow on the side of the road, bristling with wires, antennae. Soldiers bustling in and out, hollering orders. As if the news had not reached them about the Big One coming in—the war was calamity enough and their eyes were fixated on its hot edge, the place where people burned alive, where the world was always ending, over and over again. An apocalypse at the tip of a shell, a bayonet, a turning bullet. There were people leaving the world at the very moment Sergeant Foote stepped into the station, hundreds of souls departing as her boot swung through the air, tapped against the tile. The air swarming with the dead, and the war still on, torching gardens, pushing over buildings. Pointing its smoking finger at the unlucky few who would go next. You. You. And now you.
The inside of the depot was dust and dingy wood. Marks all over the ceiling, long scratches in the beams. It had been a train station, then empty, then a boat shop, then empty again. It seemed as though the screeches of the trains against the rails, the jokes of the boat jockeys behind the counter, still moved through the thick air among the rafters. But the field commander could not hear them, sitting in the dark space behind a wooden desk too large for him, surrounded by stacks of paper, the overwhelming records of death, to the south, to the north. The price of the campaign, of decisions he was making. He did not look at them for long. The tap of Sergeant Foote’s boot startled him. He saluted from his seat, beckoned with a gloved hand for her to approach.
“Counterintelligence,” the field commander said. Pronounced it with such forceful precision that he broke the word in two. “Counter,” he said, “intelligence. Is the nature of your assignment. Though not intelligence as you understand the phrase. Perhaps espionage would be better. In the sense that violence is not precluded from your options.”
The field commander was a tiny man wearing very large circular glasses with such a heavy tint that Sergeant Foote wondered if he was blind. She was ten inches taller than he would be standing, and he was sitting down. She looked at the woodwork. The closed metal shutters over the windows, rattling with every passing truck. The beams. Anything but so far down at him.
“I understand,” she said.
“These are your targets.” He pushed a stack of twelve photographs toward her. They weighed too much, were printed on the wrong paper. Each of them shots of crowds. A mob on Union Street in Harrisburg. A demonstration near the capitol. The market near the river. Each one pocked with two red circles around out-of-focus faces. Desperate to catch up with their subjects. Heights. Stance. The curve of an eyebrow. They were Sunny Jim and Reverend Bauxite, but in the photographs, they were unrecognizable. Disappearing.
“This is the best you have?” she said.
“Afraid so.”
For a moment the field commander froze, eyes squeezed shut, shuddering. As if succumbing to a shock moving through his body. It took too long to pass. Then he moved three piles of papers to the floor, the last records of several hundred dead men. Brought out a tattered map, spread it across the desk. It was of central Pennsylvania, though that was not obvious. The ink was fading in places, smudged in others, and a giant hole had been burned away in the middle of the Alleghenies. The field commander’s notes scrawled across the paper in a frantic hand, the ends of words vanishing into a thicket of scratches.
“As you know,” he said, “the front is moving along here.” A thin finger tracing the line of I-81 through the middle of the state, up from Harrisburg to Binghamt
on. “The reasoning is obvious, Sergeant. Our operations are at a critical juncture. After years at war, we are poised to strike a final, decisive blow to the enemy”—he said this as if he believed it, Sergeant Foote noted—“and so we are moving with great swiftness, through Scranton and Wilkes-Barre up to Binghamton, where, we believe, we can subdue the resistance at last. But it all depends on speed, momentum. We cannot have our plans disrupted.”
His finger returned to Harrisburg, then followed the Susquehanna. Traced how the river bent from the highway for over a hundred miles, reconnected with it at Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, fled north into the mountains, then joined it again at Binghamton, sixty miles later. “We have conflicting reports as to where your targets might be. Some suggest that they are moving north on the highway, perhaps just ahead of the front, so they can receive support. Another report suggests that they are traveling by water, where our forces are underrepresented. Now, your targets, these two men, are responsible for some of the most effective sabotage against us in the Central Pennsylvania campaign. Communications lines disrupted that cost us entire units of men. Spottier intelligence suggests that they were involved in a series of very effective bombing campaigns across the greater Harrisburg area. We do not know that this is true, but we have our suspicions. We believe that they may mean to do us more harm, and that we cannot tolerate. Not at such a crucial moment in our cause.”
Foote found herself echoing his speech. “So I am to find them and figure out what their purpose for traveling north is. And if they intend malice toward us, I am to prevent them from acting upon it.”
The commander frowned, seemed to grow almost wistful. “There was a time, Sergeant, when the men of our army could have covered the highway and the river, brought everything before us under our dominion. No more. We had to make a choice, and having made it, we have to live with the consequences. One of which involves you. We are sending four soldiers up the highway, to move ahead of the front and perhaps intercept our targets. But we are sending you, incognito, up the river itself. Only one craft we know of is still moving north now, for reasons that should be clear—” and here he faltered. So he knew about what was coming, Sergeant Foote thought. Just could not get his head around it. She did not know that she could, either. It was too hard to imagine, a storm that would not pass, thunder that moved above your head and never left. “—and you are to board it,” he continued, “and investigate for the presence of your targets. If they are present, ascertain their reasons for being there and assess the level of threat they pose.”
He stopped, turned his head a little away from her. “Of course, the world is not a court, Sergeant,” he said, “and we are not lawyers. What I mean is that establishing their motives beyond a doubt is not, in the strictest sense, necessary to the mission. Or to taking effective action. No one will know the difference.”
“I understand.”
“Do you accept?” the field commander said.
“Of course.”
“Another question first.”
“Sir.”
Another surge of electricity seemed to move through him. His eyes clenched shut, his lips quivered. Then: “What are your thoughts on the meteorological phenomenon that may or may not be occurring to the north and west of our operations?” It was happening, it was coming.
“From a personal or a professional perspective?”
“Please speak with candor.”
“I have no opinion.”
“You must feel something.”
“I do not, sir.” She was lying. She felt everything.
“…”
“…”
“Well done,” the field commander said. “Whether it’s true affects nothing.” A delusion, she could see it in the twitching of an eyelid. “You have shown yourself to be an exemplary soldier, Sergeant. There will almost certainly be a promotion for you when this is over.” Another delusion. This one she saw, too, in a movement in his throat, the way he could not look at her when he said it.
She told herself she should not ask, should not push, but could not help herself. “When what is over, sir?” she said.
The field commander’s lip began to quiver again, for a moment, and she saw that the war had taken it all from him, all that he was before it began. Hollowed him out and beaten him into a mimicry of its own shape, until he could not imagine living without it. Could not fathom a place where no bombs fell, where bridges were built over water unchoked with metal and corpses. Where no smoke hung over cities and fires were for warmth and food. It had all left him. The war had seen to that, and it would never let him go. He would walk around its tautology—we fight because we fight—for the rest of his days.
“The operation, of course,” he said. “What did you think I meant?”
“Nothing,” she said.
There had been times, she thought, when the war had come for her, too, commanding her to submit. Give herself to it. A hot finger running along her cheek. In Baltimore, when she saw what her fellow soldiers had done. Again, in a long fight with a sniper nested in a boarded-up gas station in Wilmington. She lost four people. The sniper was eight years old. Then in Harrisburg, over a simple thing: a man standing in the street in a tattered coat, crying. Kneeling and hugging himself, shaking with sobs. The war spoke to her then. Do not ask how he came to this place, or how you got here, either. Do not ask. But she remembered anyway, remembered being in a kitchen when the war began. An iron pan on a woodstove. Potatoes in hot bacon fat. Half an onion, facedown and browning at the edge. Cooking for her father, who was upstairs, bedridden with pneumonia. He would die within the month, leave her alone in the empty house. The crops she did not know how to keep, eaten by animals. She would enlist a few months later. But four years before that, she was on a plaid blanket in a field of milkweed, naked but for her shoes. Her boyfriend next to her, dozing in the sun. His arm flung over his face. His car in the gravel by the side of the road, on its second-to-last tank of gasoline. A mosquito biting her ankle. She wanted them never to leave that field, the blanket, told him that. Told him, too, about the children they could have, the little wonders. She could not wait. Two months later, he left her, because it was too much for him, too much at once and it scared him. But she kept that memory close now, because the war could not get to her in that place. When the fighting was over, she thought, she would find him and thank him for rescuing her. Tell him it was all right. Then she would leave him alone and go, wherever she wanted. Thus could her history save her, and all of us, from annihilation.
I found her fifty-five miles south of here, sick and limping from a bad ankle. Helped her prop it up on a broken chair. Placed a cold rag on her head to ease her fever while another man held her head, spoke to her in a voice unafraid of how much he cared for her. The next day, while it rained outside, enough to drown the world, she told me everything, everything she knew. I’m not sorry I didn’t give up. I know it has to get better. I just wish I had children to see it for me.
She left the field commander’s office. Outside, four soldiers were waiting for their audience. One was wearing only one boot, joshing with the others. Trying to get a rise out of them. The uniform of another was fastidious, tailored. Sergeant Foote had not seen such crisp lines since the war’s very beginning, when such things had still seemed important.
“Ma’am? Are you Sergeant Foote?” the neat one said.
“I am.”
“Lieutenant Tenenbaum. We are your backup, as I understand it.”
“That’s my understanding as well.”
“Don’t let what I just told you reflect on the faith that our superiors have in your ability to complete your mission,” Tenenbaum said.
“I hadn’t until you mentioned it,” Foote said.
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m teasing you. Good luck on your mission.”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” she said. “I have some good people here.”
Good enough, and up to their mission. But only one of the four would s
urvive it.
The River
NIGHT FELL, AND IN the half light, the islands melted into the opposite shore, the river into the sky. All into simple shades of gray, as if everything had been replaced by its shadow. Faisal Jenkins whistled to the watchmen, and the Carthage dropped its anchor. Leaned back into the current and rested there. The pilot propped his legs against the wheel, folded his arms. Tilted back in his stool and closed his eyes. An astonishing mimicry of sleep. But his ears were open and listening to the river, listening for news. There. The march of troops toward Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, before the Susquehanna turned north and west, away from them. There. A tremor in the water, a first ripple, the first signal that the tip of the storm’s finger had touched the source of a stream that fed the Susquehanna far to the north. That the long arm of the storm had arced across the Adirondacks, taken the towns in the mountains already. Was howling over the small farms in the foothills, tearing apart the rusting grain silos. Pulling the gigantic windmills off the ground while they spun into a blur in the gale. Descending on the houses to flay paint from wood, then render the wood to splinters. Those towns had survived hundreds of scouring squalls, weather systems that hurtled down from the Arctic. The slanting soil all around them could freeze solid, be covered in sheets of driving, whipping snow, and still accept seeds in the spring. The people who lived when there was still winter had endured the black flies, the deer flies, the sudden swamps when the snow melted. Accepted those glorious summers and falls as consolation. But they had watched their towns start to disappear around them, even then. People walked out of their doors, drove south along the thin highways, and never came back, and their houses fell into themselves, the trees moving in to feast on the remains. They left because there was no money there, they said, because the winters were too hard. But it seemed now as if they had seen into the future, seen the Big One coming. Thought of their great-grandchildren, and left while they had the chance, before the curtain of lightning fell on the place where they were born. In Utica, they could see it coming now, the black clouds spinning and twisting, the storm screaming down the long hill into the Mohawk Valley. They were turning and looking at the city they’d stayed for, its bricked-up factories and green copper church spires, all the people who had come there for refuge. So long, everyone. The river was trying to explain it, tell the pilot what he was heading toward. Maybe, at its headwaters, the Susquehanna could see what lay beyond the edge of the storm. But it did not know how to say it.
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