Lost Everything

by Brian Francis Slattery

  Inside the Carthage, all the cabins were empty, the long wooden hallways quiet. Everyone was in the theater, on the verge of riot, people shoving for seats at the tables arranged across the floor, packing into the boxes along the sides, sitting in huddles all across the aisles, roaming, running, skulking, sweltering, their breath thickening the air until the room seemed to swell beyond the ship’s hull, the vessel expanding to fit them all. The boys playing Russian roulette decided to add another bullet, spun the chamber on the pistol. The fellow in the patched overcoat and impeccable top hat leaned over the shoulder of a woman who had just boarded. Showed her a card trick with his right hand while his left began to relieve her of her wallet, the object transfixed between long middle finger and angular thumb. A family of five occupied a table nearby, the parents in chairs, the three children fighting on the tabletop. They had a long buck knife among them, dared each other to throw it in the air, catch it in their teeth. A woman on crutches, a purple line threading down her face from hairline to jawbone. A young couple with obvious love between them sat in a box in the rear of the room. He sat close to her, put his lips to her ear. She had a faint, smoky smile, her hands where no one could see. A party of twenty coursed to stage left, all whoops and clanking bottles. Toasts and cheers, threats of violence. To stage right, a woman with a black parasol and sunglasses sat in the highest box, unmoving. Surveying all she could see while the partiers shouted for the show, urged the house lights to go down. One could not become festive in such brightness. It was against nature.

  At last the house lights dimmed and a spotlight played across the stage’s ragged curtain. The violin and accordion began together, creeping along a chromatic line that first lilted upward, then swooned like fabric spilling from a drawer as the curtain rose and revealed the ensemble, the violinist and the accordion player seated side by side, breathing as one. A woman on bass, a woman on vibraphone, listening, waiting, for their notes to arrive. Judge Spleen Smiley slid on stage singing, an ascending minor line in Neapolitan dialect. At its height, the bass and vibraphone moved together, let out a pulse as the melody climbed higher, another as it fell away.

  Vide ’o mare quant’è bello.

  Spira tanta sentimento

  Comme tu, a chi tiene mente

  Ca, scetato, ’o faje sunnà.

  They had caught the audience already. Heard a faint sob even before they climbed into a major key and the melody became unabashed, unafraid. A voice that shot across languages and decades, through a frayed wire bound in tattered cloth. It mattered not that they did not understand a word. Only that they were hearing it, that it had come so far, so long, to enter their heads. The woman in the box touched the frames of her glasses with a pale finger. The con artist’s fingers froze in mid-theft. All the Carthage seemed held in suspension, until the last note fell away and the musicians’ heads dropped to follow its descent. The applause should have begun then, but it did not. Nobody wanted to go. As if they knew what was coming, that this was all the peace they would have until morning.

  Judge Spleen Smiley lifted his chin into the silence and hummed, three falling notes that the vibraphone caught at once. She covered the chords while the accordion player swapped her instrument for a guitar, the violinist put down his fiddle and picked up a lap steel. The bass player walked down to the five to follow the phrase out, and everyone hit the downbeat together, a different band. Swaying in a languid, bluesy swing that half the audience had been aboard long enough to recognize at once:

  Mama bought a rooster, she thought it was a duck

  Brought it to the table with the legs straight up

  In came the children with a cup and a glass

  To catch the liquor from the yass, yass, yass …

  The judge mugged it up, elbows and knees out. Hand to the side of his mouth for the last line. A wink telegraphed to the next township, you know what I’m talking about. And the crowd did, waited through two verses, the Georgia Rub and the hoodoo women of Spain, to holler back at the singer when he told them how his gal caught the rheumatism in her feet—and the same thing struck her in the yass, yass, yass—then cover themselves in a sheet of laughter.

  Until three bottles, end over end, flew toward the judge’s head. The judge, a professional, saw them and spun away, let them break and the glass slide and spread across the stage, a pool of sharp light. The musicians felt fragments bounce off their shoes, looked down and regarded them without dropping a beat. Trying to supplicate the growing chaos. A rising scream went up from the darkest corner of the room. Something had gone wrong back there. A woman staggered forward with her cheek split open. Blood in a delta down her shirt. Cries, gasps, a sound of collective dread. Fights sparked across the floor. A man took a knife in his side. A woman was knocked down and kicked in the face. People began to run, jam the stairs out of the theater. Then Captain Mendoza was there, the crew spindling and flowing across the floors, walls, ceilings. Pinning down the people trying to hurt each other, pulling all the air out of the room to smother the flaring anger.

  “Stop,” the captain said, “stop. We can’t live like this.”

  A few days later, the first woman who was hurt would die of a rampant infection that spread from her cheek into her bloodstream. Two people trampled and cut open in the rush out would lose limbs to gangrene. Another man curled around a chair in the theater, just dead, somehow, the life pushed out of him. Not a mark on the skin. They asked Reverend Bauxite to do a short service and he obliged, gave himself away. Could almost feel the walls of his church in the air, though he could not see them yet.

  * * *

  SUNNY JIM EXCUSED HIMSELF from Reverend Bauxite’s company after the service. On the deck, a light rain was washing the planks. Animals and humans huddled together under the wide roofs. Eight people in a tight cluster behind the pilothouse, cupping hands against the wind. Passing something lit around. One of them spotted Jim, threw him a quick nod. Come here.

  “Can I help you?” Sunny Jim said.

  “We were going to ask you the same thing,” said the one with the joint in his mouth. Took it in his fingers, flipped it around. “Here. You look like you could use this.” He had a green beard.

  “That’s all right,” Sunny Jim said.

  “You sure, now?”

  “I’m sure.”

  The man with the green beard shrugged, passed the joint to a woman with four braids in her hair that began at her temples and seemed to join in the back. She did not smoke, passed it along. The talk among them was easy. So free that there was no rush. I had a dog once that licked its own nuts for hours. Died four days after my seventeenth birthday. I still have the collar. My first bicycle was a green-and-red thing with tassels streaming from the handles. My parents sold it later for six crates of vegetables. It was summer, so they lasted only five days. We ate as many as we could and boiled the rest for stock. Fed seventeen people for three more days on that. After every meal there was schnapps that someone had made in a glass jar in their basement. It tasted like rotting cherries to me but everyone said it was the best thing they’d ever had. I understand why now. I saw a man shot once, before the war. Just walking down the street. Then there was a hole in his head, and he fell as though he had been dropped. I went home and would not say what I had seen. Never did until this very minute.

  They passed the rolled paper around again, musky smoke in their nostrils. They were making up for the years they spent carrying these weights. Could not figure out why it had seemed so important to harbor them. As if they thought they were defined by what they did not say. As if giving it away meant dissolution, not transcendence. They were not sure if they would know the difference. But they were hopeful, and were opening themselves up now, as wide as they could, feeling their lives quicken with it, the possibility that they could fit the years they thought they had left into what remained. No time for anything but the reaching for dreams. Not even time to wonder why they had not decided to live like this sooner.

  They looked a
t Sunny Jim from time to time, expecting him to speak, too. But he said nothing. Did not want to tell them what he was thinking about. He had gotten the news that Aline was gone from Grendel Jones. Her weary voice over a fuzzy line, the alarm rising in his veins, up through his body. Setting his head on fire. Grendel had been on City Island, she and several other resistance leaders, she told him. Aline was protecting them, giving them a chance to get away. They could not have escaped without her, she said over the line, and they would never forget that, Jim. Jim?

  Reverend Bauxite had told him not to go. Too risky, he said. Tried to soften the impact, give him a chance to escape, too. But Jim went anyway. Saw the wreck of the Market Street Bridge, the soldiers taking bodies, parts of bodies, out of the water. A man with a leg slung over his shoulder, not knowing how else to carry it. A woman cradling a helmet, half a head inside it. He kept waiting for them to take Aline out of the water, too. Saw it a hundred different ways. Three of them tugging her out of a tangle of driftwood and metal, her arm snapping in its socket. A boot stepping on a wad of her hair. Fishing her jacket out of the current, not a stain on it, not a tear. Blown clean off. He would have taken anything, then, that told him it was over. Anything to tell him what to do next.

  “We should head back down soon,” the man with the green beard said.

  “Here, finish this,” the braided woman said. Handed the joint to Sunny Jim. “I’m not smoking any more tonight. Let them know if you need some more, though. They’re on the boat as far as Towanda, and they have more than enough to go around.”

  “What’s in Towanda?” Sunny Jim said.

  “It’s not what’s in Towanda. It’s what Towanda is,” the man with the green beard said. Then frowned, an appraiser. “Towanda’s going to be huge. Because we think what’s coming is nothing to be scared of.”

  “…”

  “You know, you can come with us. Everyone on this boat can, if they want.”

  “Thanks,” Sunny Jim said. “But I’ve got someone I need to find.”

  The man with the green beard smiled. “That’s what she keeps telling us, too.” Patting the braided woman on the back.

  “I’m Elise,” she said.

  “Jim.”

  “Good to meet you.”

  “You too.”

  “I need to go check on my boy,” she said. “So we’ll be downstairs? If you want to find us?”

  “Thanks.”

  Then he was alone under the roof, smoking. The animals nearby pressing together, the birds nestled tight. The music straining through the rain, a distant machine breaking down. On the islands all around, the chirping of a million frogs. Sunny Jim closed his eyes—he did not know for how long—until a tap on his shoulder startled him, made him cough.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  The man in the overcoat, its patches dampened into different colors. The top hat showing a stain. Four long scratches hooked on his cheekbone, bright with blood.

  “That looks like it hurts,” Sunny Jim said.

  “Nah. From a fight downstairs.” His mark had caught him before he could complete his robbery, before the chaos began. Kicked him in the crotch, pounced atop him when he fell to the floor, hands between his legs. Clawing his face was an afterthought, unnecessary but satisfying. He backed into a table, pulled himself to his feet. Staggered backward while she yelled and pointed. He shouted his apologies over and over to cover up what she was accusing him of, until the real violence started, and he escaped. He stepped into the hallway a cipher. Brushed off his coat, straightened his hat. Climbed the stairs to follow his next mark, the one from the Clarks Ferry Bridge. He had picked out Sunny Jim in the crowd, again, as though the spotlight were on him. That one. Exploit that one. Misreading him all over again as a man who had something—money, a valuable object, anything at all—he might be able to steal.

  Sunny Jim passed him the joint, and the con artist took a long pull.

  “Thanks, brother.”

  “Don’t mention it. It wasn’t even mine.”

  “Whose was it?” the man said. Eyed the wet end.

  “Does it really matter?”

  “No.”

  “What are you going upriver for?” Sunny Jim said.

  “Business opportunity. Up in Binghamton.”

  “Where the front is going to be?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Friend of mine up there pulled a scheme together. We should do all right.” He told me later that he was cringing as he said it, even then. It made no sense.

  “You mean make money,” Sunny Jim said.

  “Course. Or something like it. Human nature, you know?” He handed the joint back.

  Sunny Jim squinted, pulled. “What’s the point?” he said.

  “Of making money?”

  “Yeah.”

  “…”

  “…”

  “Between you and me?” the con artist said, “I don’t believe what they’re saying about the Big Blow, or whatever it is they’re calling it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That there’s nothing left inside it, or after it. Everything has to go somewhere. Doesn’t it?”

  “…”

  “Besides, what else are we supposed to do? We have to live our lives, don’t we?”

  Sunny Jim gave him the joint. The con artist looked at his mark’s shoes, what he did with his hands when he was idle. This man was hiding something, the con artist was sure of it. Assets up north. Land, maybe. Heirlooms. He imagined Sunny Jim a week from then, in a cart frothing with furniture and linens, pulled by a pale mule. Unused pairs of boots. A knife that had never cut vegetables. Taking the tiny roads back down through Pennsylvania, twisting through valleys, over patient creeks burrowing into underbrush. Passing houses with warped vinyl siding. Whipping the beast into a commotion that carried a hundred yards ahead of him. He would never make it, wherever he was going. There would be looters, or soldiers. It would be a mercy, the con artist thought, to figure out how to rob him now.

  He took a long drag and waited for Sunny Jim to answer him. But his mark was looking upriver. He was already in Lisle, arriving at the house too late. Finding it charred, eaten by fire. The bodies of soldiers in the gravel driveway. The corpses of his sister and son on the living room floor, hands extended toward each other. Or the whole town beyond the veil, beyond where he could go. He already knew what he would do if either of those things happened. Aaron, his boy, was everything. He did not know how to be without him.

  The House

  THE STRUCTURE’S CORNERS SKEWED to four different angles, none right, as if great hands had ripped the house from the earth, stretched and broken it, set it back on its foundations. One last flick of the finger, and it would fall into the basement. The porch hung from the front of the house on twenty-seven nails, bending from the weight. The window to the attic was already gone, broken years ago by who knew what. A bat, a bird. A branch in a storm. Merry knew only that the glass had shattered. She found the shards on the attic floor, let one of them slide its edge into the palm of her hand. Looked up at the empty window frame and shrugged. The town had not seen new glass in decades. She turned and looked across the attic. Almost nothing left in it by then. No more cribs, children’s clothes. No books stacked and tied with twine. Just eleven boxes piled near the corroding bricks of the old chimney, labeled on the side in a neat cursive hand. The boxes were older than she was, left by the people who lived there before her family did. One of them had died in the house, she was sure of it. A peaceful thing. When she was five, she had wandered from room to room wondering where it had happened, but she could never decide. She could feel it everywhere.

  Merry sat in one of the second-floor windows, a rifle across her legs. Pointed toward the ground. She could hear Aaron playing on the first floor. Throwing blocks at a toy xylophone he was too old for. Then his feet creaking on the stairs. The whisper of his hand at the door.

  “Can I go out?” he said.

  She did not turn
to look at him. “No.”

  “But I want to.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you can’t.”

  “Why did you show me all those places in the woods if you won’t let me go back there?”

  “Because I can’t let you go by yourself, okay?” She was trying to protect him, and keep him from thinking too much about why he was there, with her, in the house where his father was raised. Stalling him by giving him puzzles about the family, people long gone. The holes in the kitchen walls. The chips taken out of the banister. The gouges in the living room floor. How did they all get there? she asked him. His first stories were about pirates and Indians. Then ghosts, burglars. Fights with household objects, pieces of furniture. Always getting it half right, but never as brutal as what had happened. My brother raised him better than that, Merry thought. Never touched him in anger. Or maybe had, once, and never forgave himself, even as the boy forgot it. You broke the chain, Jim. But look down. It is still around your leg and mine. If there is a fire, we will not escape it. But at least he can get out.

  She had already taken Aaron down the hill, to the road that swelled over the grassy dike that kept the river out, separated the town from its phantom half, its impatient past. The stream swollen from the last storm, but still seeming so innocuous. As if it could never have risen and taken half the town with it, as it did long ago. Put its grimy mark across everyone who survived and their unborn children, their children’s children. Your town will never come back from this, the river told its people, and in time the rest of the country, all that you know, will follow. They bowed their heads and acquiesced. They would always know, even if they forgot. It was in the shape of the hills, the way they climbed into the night when it got dark. Speaking of what was coming. Merry could hear it, see it, even when she was small, the ghosts standing in the conspicuous emptiness between the water and the dike’s rise. The people and the houses huddled on the other side. Thinking maybe if they kept quiet, the ghosts would go away. But they knew one day the river would crest high enough to finish what it started. Rise and take the Methodist church, the building with the old arcade sign hanging from it, what was left of the antique store. Just like the Lisle Inn had been taken by fire a couple generations ago. A town landmark, the last place to get a beer. Just gone one morning. Everyone went down Main Street to get a look. They could not believe the place had burned down, but in retrospect it seemed inevitable. All that cracked wood and peeling paint, the dirty old plastic sign. The kind of place that people driving through the town pitied, but people who lived there loved. Aaron played in the streets, oblivious.