Lost Everything

by Brian Francis Slattery

  When the news hit Lisle that the Big One was coming, Merry and Aaron stood on the railroad tracks on the shoulder of Route 79 and watched the parade of people moving out of town, toward Route 11, toward 81. Any road that pointed south or east. Wearing five layers of clothes. Bags taped to their backs, trailing children with dogs, giving them long stares as they shuffled past, then turning their heads away to concentrate on their feet, the approaching hills. The land that they could still see in front of them.

  “Why aren’t we going with them?” Aaron said.

  “If we move, how will your dad find us? We can’t talk to him anymore.”

  “What if it comes before he does?”

  She did not say anything. Turned and smiled. Put a hand on his shoulder.

  “He won’t let that happen,” she said.

  She moved her hand to Aaron’s head, curled her fingers into his hair. He looked up and smiled. He was lit from within, and she could see everything. See her brother, her brother’s wife, though Merry had never met her. Everyone who had lived in the house, Merry’s parents, her cousins, her aunts and uncles. The grandparents with their knives and rusty frying pans. All of them in the boy, looking out at her. As if the boy was the place where violence ended, where truces were made in soft voices and there was light and warmth all the time, and the only thing Merry had to do to stay there forever was to smile back.

  The Highway

  LIEUTENANT TENENBAUM’S SOLDIERS COULD not see out of the truck. The four of them were packed into its back with another, larger unit, bound for Binghamton, and they sat against the walls in tight rows, everyone’s legs touching. The trailer had no windows. The doors had to be bolted shut from the inside. A crack between them let in a line of light and rain. A lantern hanging by a steel cable from the ceiling threw a wan orange glow over them. The highway beneath was slow, fractured into a web of fissures that turned the pavement into a long row of broken teeth, studded with stray rocks. When the truck hit a big pothole, the lantern jumped and smoking oil sputtered to the floor. The nearest soldier smothered the infant flames under his boot. No one else moved, as if they had agreed that they would let each other do as little as possible. In return, they did not have to speak to each other, try to be friends over the loud, shuddering ride, the heat, the sweat. They could each sink into themselves, walk back into their memories before the war, try to put back together who they were, but it was getting harder to do. Every bullet that moved the air near them, the sharp shock from every explosion, scattered their pasts. They could not always find all the pieces later, could not be sure whether their memories were true or pulled from what they wanted to be true, though some had decided that the difference did not matter.

  Ketcher had all the files from the field commander on Sunny Jim and Reverend Bauxite in a leather satchel, dozens of sheets of wrinkled paper, a few blurry photographs, years old. He had not had the time to look at them, and no one else cared enough. Let Ketcher do the homework, Largeman had said. Just tell me what to shoot and I’ll do it. A pause, then a long laugh that made Ketcher and Tenenbaum shiver. Jackson just shook his head. Largeman had been in Baltimore, they had heard. Had done a few things that the army chose to overlook. A good fighting man, they had opined, and said nothing more. And Ketcher did not like it. Even before the war, he had survived on his ability to see into his fellow man. Saw into Tenenbaum within hours of meeting the lieutenant, for she had opened herself to it. Believed being a leader meant being readable, predictable. The shining lines of law that governed the squad emanating from the clear edges of her personality, the things she would not hesitate to do. But Largeman was a blank, a hole in the air. A shark, Ketcher thought then. Soon, he will do something that horrifies us. What will we do then?

  The truck hit something, bounced too hard, blew a tire. The lantern shook and two soldiers had to stamp out fires. The vehicle was limping off the road, heading for a stop, when there was a flash through the cracks between the doors. They did not so much hear the shell as feel it, a concussion that forced its way through their bodies, pushed air from their lungs, moved their bowels. The truck jumped, landed on its wheels again, stopped. Outside, they heard screaming metal, the truck in front of them falling over. Shouts and cries. A long string of shots that prompted more screams, drilled a wavering line of holes in the wall of the trailer above their heads. The soldiers scrambled, unbolted the doors and kicked them open, dropped to the ground as soon as they were out. A few became corpses. The others fired on the side of the highway, where the bullets, the rockets, were coming from. They could hear the guerrillas there shouting orders to each other, but could not make out the words. For Ketcher, it was as though he was trapped underwater in a churning sea. A hurricane breaking the sky in two over his head. He curled on the ground, a rope of mewling sobs uncoiling from his throat. Fumbled with his gun, could not get it or his hands to work. Could not see as well as he wanted, could not tell that it was because he was crying. Then the noise ended, and there was the sound of the guerrillas retreating along the bank of the highway. Shouting to each other, fading away. The stuttering moans of the wounded. From where he lay between the trucks, Ketcher could see soldiers moving along the rising land, shooting the wounded guerillas who could not get away. One of them turned just as the soldier reached her.

  “Why are you doing this?” the guerrilla said.

  “Why are you?” the soldier said.

  “You burned down my town,” she said.

  The soldier paused, lowered his gun. Put his hand on his helmet. Ketcher could not see his face, but he felt his resolve breaking. They both fought for family killed, land lost, farms razed and houses burned to ash. For animals butchered in the road. For cities brought to ruin. They were one step away from each other, the soldiers and the guerrillas, one side fighting to keep the small things they had left, the other fighting because they had already lost them.

  “She knows the rules and so do you. Shoot her already.” The commanding officer’s voice. Ketcher could not tell where he was. Maybe back inside the truck already. The soldier raised his gun, and he and the guerrilla seemed to have a short conversation. She closed her eyes, and the soldier shot her in the forehead. Then the soldiers dragged all the bodies into a scorched hole left by a rocket and began dousing them with oil.

  “Half hour,” Lieutenant Tenenbaum called. She sounded tired. “Piss if you haven’t already.”

  They milled along the side of the highway, a gray stripe of pavement that had been painted over stitched patches of small farms the monsoons later turned to mud. A haze of gray smoke all around them, a gauze thrown over the earth. Someone set the pile of bodies alight. Ahead of them, an upraised hand from a robed sleeve, a part of a bearded face, smiled from a half-burned billboard. The word JESUS, and then below it, IN YOUR TIME. The rest of the message obliterated by fire. The highway next to them broken by black craters, until it escaped and rose to execute a graceful curl up a long slope to the north. Ketcher had a feeble thought. That was the resistance, putting holes in things, getting killed, and fleeing. It was easy to see that they were on their way out. If they felt their loss so hard, wouldn’t it be best to surrender, kill the war? For it was the war that ate houses and towns, left the bodies of children in the street. The war, not the army. He could not bring himself to examine the connection between them too much, for it brought him closer to accepting his complicity.

  He had joined the army to escape from a farm in Maryland that seemed to fade more and more into the air with each day. The weeks of training had been refreshing, even energizing, though they had been too short, with not enough firearms practice. We can’t spare the bullets anymore, his officer had said. Preserving Ketcher’s delusion that the war would never be dangerous for him. But now he was here, and moving northward, the stench of this place burrowing into his skin. He could feel the front ahead of him, a creature as wide as the horizon, and was terrified. Wanted to talk about it with someone. Knew it could not be Tenenbaum, who had no pat
ience for such abstractions, the idea of the war as a singular entity, a monster. There is no war except in our heads, she would say, or in our commanders’ heads. The reality is simpler. The bullets are flying or they aren’t. Things are on fire or they aren’t. That’s all. Jackson had no interest in talking about the war, either, was only waiting for it to be over. This’ll all blow over soon, I can tell, he had started to say. Had started smiling more, fooling around more, as if he knew, with great precision, what he was going to do the minute they discharged him, and nothing would stop him. And there was no talking to Largeman at all.

  Ketcher left the road, climbed over the lip of a crater. Felt something small and hard under his boot. It was a finger. Tiny patches of hair between the knuckles. The nail ragged, bitten to the quick. At once, he could no longer look at the dirt he had just walked through, at the soles of his shoes. He had been headed to the top of the ridge, but he changed his mind. It was too easy to imagine what was on the other side: corpses, body parts, half-cooked by explosions. If he stepped wrong on the way back to the truck, the ground would seep around his feet. His stomach bucked, forced bile into his throat, his nose. He put his hands on his knees and spat. He was sure he was going to vomit.

  “Hey,” Largeman called. “What’s the matter? You never smelled burnt people before?”

  He had not. Had not seen combat until now, though the others did not know that.

  “Hurry up,” Tenenbaum said.

  The bile was gone. He was an insect, detached, inquisitive. Picked up the finger, turned it over in his hand. Brought it back down the slope with him, almost put it in his pocket. Then he left it in the burnt grass on the side of the road, before anyone could see what he had done. Before they got back in the truck, Jackson patted him on the back, not so hard that anyone noticed, but firm enough to send a message. He had seen everything, and understood.

  The River

  JUST BELOW MILLERSBURG, THE Susquehanna flattened into a cool, expansive plain. The current loitered among submerged rocks while the Carthage threw its jagged reflection across the water’s surface, the only waves arising in its wake. The pilot banked the boat west, then cut east, up to a channel that men had dug and the river widened, until the Carthage sidled up to the sloping town. Once there had been an idyll here, as if it was a hazy morning all the time. A park of long shadows, shimmering trees. Only a growl from the motor, the slapping paddles, of the little ferry that carried people, a few cars, across the river. On the shore, eight people waited to board with the unhurried calm of vacationers. Standing by plaid suitcases. Lounging on the grass beneath the trees, propped on elbows, legs crossed at the ankles. Four greasy canoeists out for a few days’ float, making coffee on a camp stove on a picnic table, then ambling into town for water and ice. The canoes pulled up onto the shore, safe. The shaded houses conversing down the length of the river road, settling into their long decline.

  But now the park was gone, the houses blanched and streaked with mud. On the dirty slope down to the water, in the lawns and in the streets all the way up the hill, a vast camp of hovels had been banged together from parts of cars and fences, tents of stained bed sheets sagging after days of rain. Encampments with no shelter at all. And people everywhere, thousands of them. A family of thirteen, six adults and seven children, huddled around a scrap pile. People sitting, standing, their heads down, bony fingers clasped in their laps. All with the same expression of stunned lethargy. In the air, the tang of rancid food and burning plastic, from dozens of fires that fogged the air with a blue-gray miasma. Murmuring voices, the weakening cries of children. Low wails whenever someone died of starvation, of dysentery, of pneumonia. It seemed to be happening every second, a life loosed from the flesh, the grieving survivors. They had seen it coming, but were still in shock. Did not know what to do with the bodies. Looked around at the town being killed. The trees among them stripped to poles, to stumps. The yards uprooted, the buildings peeled to their skeletons. Millersburg would not survive much longer this way, but it was not the refugees’ fault. They had nowhere else to be. The war had driven them here. They had fled from it like animals before a forest fire. Left behind everything they could not wear, everyone they could not carry. They had lived like this for weeks, for months, their own bodies eating them alive. In a week, the war, moving with purpose up the river valley, would reach them at last, its hand falling upon them, and there would be a massacre. For what reason, none of them would ever know. They understood that the bullets that would take them were not far away—just a few miles south. They just couldn’t run anymore.

  As the Carthage drew close to the shore, they all raised their heads, stared at the people on the ship as one, all those faces and all that they had seen. Remember us, that we got this far. That we were still breathing when you saw us, though we did not get a chance to speak. Elise, the braided woman, stood at the Carthage’s rail, hands white around the smoothed wood. Up on tiptoes, scanning the shore. Her anxious brain making everyone on land familiar. Lost cousins, sisters she had not seen since childhood. Friends she had last seen eleven years ago, when she was sixteen, sitting in a car in February, the windows rolled up against a warm rain. The wipers screeching across the windshield. The vinyl sweating beneath her. Her boyfriend next to her in the car, saying Elise, you couldn’t be any prettier. The headlights slicing a gleaming gash of a wet field from the darkness, dead stalks of corn snapped off at calf height. Her friends running toward her, clothes soaking, arms pinwheeling through the growing storm, as though they were on fire.

  Elise grew up in Elmira, New York, but when she was seventeen, she fled south to Shickshinny, seventy-five miles north of Millersburg. Shickshinny huddled in a hollow among five peaks, houses scrambling up the steep hills along narrow streets not meant for cars. Stopping at walls of stone, the sheared toes of the mountains. She spent part of her pregnancy in a stolen car at the moldering remains of what used to be a gas station just north of town. The girl at the counter was fighting through the bulletproof glass with a man in a stained white T-shirt. Four people stood by a crate of overripe vegetables, watching, unmoving, one of them thinking he would break it up if it got too bad, one of them hoping it would get worse. A half a mile later she had the car on the shoulder, her door open, and she was vomiting into the gravel and crying. It was all catching up to her. Seven cars coughed by, a cart pulled by three horses. None of them slowed down. The ninth vehicle stopped, a green pickup too old to be running. A man with long stringy hair, a baseball cap, his beard tied with slim ribbons into four tails. An extended hand.

  “Looks like you need somewhere to be.”

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  “I noticed. What’s the name?”

  “Elise.”

  “That your name or its name?”

  “You a pervert?”

  “No. No, just curious,” he said.

  “That’s my name,” she said.

  “Pleased to meet you, Elise.” He smiled. “Monkey Wrench.”

  “That’s not your real name, is it?”

  “Might as well be, around here. Come on.”

  They left her car to die. He siphoned off the oil, put her in the passenger seat of the truck, and started driving. She understood then that she had been hallucinating for fifty miles. The road swimming out from under a collapsing sky. The steering wheel going soft in her hands, turning to wet clay. The fetus singing to her in a language she could not comprehend, all the way down Route 11 out of New York and into Pennsylvania, following the road as the road followed the river, the nerves along the spine. The last dozen miles, through Shickshinny and farther south, she remembered later only as a blur of gray and pale yellow, except for Monkey Wrench, who was in sharp focus. No. Just his hands. The right one on the wheel, the left hanging relaxed from his wrist, his elbow out the window. The hands were huge, knotted with veins, bolts of muscle and tendon. The web of creases and pores rubbed with dirt, turning his skin into tiny scales. A thin mat of fine dark hair from
the cuff of his shirt to his knuckles. The tail of a tattoo that slept on his arm. Giant calluses on his fingertips. She thought he must work construction. Realized later it was small engines and the string bass, though he always joked he never could tell them apart. She fell asleep in the truck and Monkey Wrench carried her inside, lay her down on a mattress next to the stage. Put blankets on her and went outside, as quiet as he could. Told everyone else to shut the fuck up when they got back home.