Lost Everything

by Brian Francis Slattery

  Elise slept for a long time, longer than she had since her pregnancy had begun. Since she had met the father, just a boy himself. The afternoon after, her parents’ anger. Alcohol stinging her face, her throat. All that felt like ages ago when she first woke up in the West Side Ballroom, just north of Berwick, as if another girl had died at the state border and she had inherited her soul and her child. It was not quite light out, and she could see nothing. Her hands moved across her belly, pushed down. There. The pressure of a foot, pushing back.

  The sun crept into a tiny window and across a flat of bare red carpet. Others were sleeping like hills in the distance. Metal chairs with mottled vinyl cushions, stacked in towers. Folded card tables leaning against the wall. A stage of plywood risers. Bad speakers. Four spotlights, the ends wrapped in colored cellophane. The fetus kicked and Elise shifted, itched. The blankets she was wrapped in were scratchy, but warmed her. She saw that two people were sleeping on the bare floor in just their clothes, that the blankets were theirs. Understood that this was her family, the one that she had always been trying to find, though they had not yet spoken a word to each other.

  In the next four months, before she gave birth, she got to know them all, the inhabitants of the West Side Ballroom, as it was called on the sign hanging off the building’s front. The letters punched out of metal, tin silhouettes of instruments—shadow puppets of fiddles, guitars, and banjos—swinging below them. The building had a curling metal roof, looking more like a barn than a dance hall. The days and nights were filled with music and scavenging. Plucking weeds and boiling them for hours to make them edible. Seeing what the river might bring. A fat smallmouth that they salted and boiled whole, making chowder. A string of catfish. Sometimes ducks. They put on shows to get the rest. Little gigs on the risers that people came from a few towns over to hear, bringing potatoes and carrots, leeks pale and slender. A giant zucchini, grown for sustenance, not flavor. They boiled all of it, fed everyone. A small miracle every twelve hours: to always have enough, just because they believed they would.

  Elise’s son was born in the parking lot outside, beneath the birdhouses perched on stilts. The house band playing under six torches, while teenagers danced and five men got in a fight over a motorcycle. Her new tribe all around her, holding her back and shoulders, stroking her hair. Strong hands on her feet, calves, and knees every time she pushed. They put the boy to her naked breast the moment he was born, and he squirmed and screamed. She swooned so hard her breath left her. She had never been so in love, knew even then that she never would be again, except perhaps for her other children. Her heart grew larger for them already, but they never came. Never would, now.

  Andre was eight when the war began. First it was a rumor, of floods, fires. A beast that ate men. It was east of them. It was south. Three buses trolled Route 11 shouting for recruits. Promised paychecks, a new pair of shoes. An officer with gold on his cap gave a speech on the steps of the marble bank building, in the shadow of the mountain. The people at the West Side Ballroom did not go to war. They saw enough of it in the people who came back to Shickshinny. Bandages covering half of someone’s face. A man with no legs struggling by in a wheelchair built from the sawed-off end of a church pew and three bicycle tires. Others were bodily whole, but their minds were scrambled. Monkey Wrench broke up a fight between three of them at four in the morning, in the middle of the road that ran down to the fields by the river. Talked about it after the sun came up, shaking his head. Those men didn’t fight like people, he said. They were snarling and howling, lunging, rolling, flipping on the pavement. Nails and teeth. After he separated them, they would not speak, just hacked and spat at each other from either side of the road. Monkey Wrench stood in the street with his big hands out, looking to one side, then the other. Trying to hold the town together by keeping them apart.

  But the war was spreading. Recruiting turned to drafting. Taking the men younger and younger. Nothing but legal kidnapping, a woman said. The coal companies all over again. Throwing the children into the black pit. It made the town mean. At the West Side Ballroom shows, there were more fights than parties. At last, a killing. In the morning, a dead man curled around the post of the Zephyr Plaza sign. They buried him on the other side of the tracks, far enough down that the river might take him, carry him to the sea. Then they stood around the grave and argued, half for staying, half for going, away from the war. They could turn their back on it, the second half said, live as if it had never begun. And besides, Elise said, there is no way they can have my boy. Ever.

  Monkey Wrench, who would never leave Shickshinny, smiled. Let the other half go, as long as they promised to come back before it was over.

  “We promise,” they said, and meant it. For the bond they shared seemed to be stronger than the fighting all around them. It could abide. The fires would pass, and then they would return, as if nothing had happened to anyone, and they had been gone no more than a day, maybe three.

  Andre was thirteen now. Skin, hair, clothes all the same tawny color, steeped in sun and river. He could remember the West Side Ballroom, the birdhouses, the cracks in the asphalt. Monkey Wrench throwing him in the air, his wide smile. The closest he had ever had to a father. He could recall, too, the string of houses and parties after they left. Then his first girlfriend, on the ladder of a water tower in Maryland. Her pink polyester shirt. Her hand on his bare shoulder, wet with dew and nervousness. He told people he was from Pennsylvania—or all over, he would say, tilting his head, sweeping his hand, taking in the world. But they had been on the Carthage long enough that Elise knew that the ship was the land that made him, the wooden planks from bow to stern the plains of his native country.

  Elise looked at the refugees along the shore of Millersburg again. A man shambling through the mud, eyes pushed into his skull, skin stretched over his cheeks. Five children beating on each other, too hard to be play. She thought of the parents she ran from, the war all around them. They were sailing through it all as if they were ghosts already. As if they could reach the edge of the world, glide off into emptiness through a thick morning fog. The boat floating on nothing and everyone on board still together, music and violence and all.

  Her son came up on deck, shirt off, shorts hanging off his hips. A swagger that had come with the first blond shadow of a mustache. He took a long look at what Millersburg had become and seemed to Elise, to accept it at once. He was better at that than she was, Elise thought. Tough in a way she would never be, so natural, so nonchalant it could be mistaken for gentleness. It made her so proud of him, so angry at everything else.

  “How long are we here for?” he said.

  “Tomorrow,” she said. “Maybe two days more. Shickshinny’s not far now.”

  “Are you sure we have to go?” There was a girl, the mother knew. One of his friends meant more to him than her now. She could not say when that had started. A few weeks ago, maybe. They were still trying to keep it secret, but she had seen them together. Knew what was happening inside her son, his life before discovering that girl already falling far away from him, the world receding. It was insanity at that age, the mother thought. A flash flood, a typhoon, dragging you out into the squall of the storm. It would drown you if you let it. It was impossible to imagine anything stronger. Until you had your first child.

  She did not answer him, and he turned to the river. The ferry squatting in mid-current, still more than a half mile off.

  “I’m going swimming,” he said.

  “Andre?” she said. “Are you sure it’s safe?” But he was already crossing the deck, leaping over the rail with a whoop and letting out a caterwaul that lasted all the way into the water, legs moving as if pumping a bicycle. Six other kids were in the river already, splashing and taunting, kids from the camp on the shore, who would be dead within a week. They swam out of the river’s current until the water was only up to their waists. The lighter ones mounting the heavier ones’ shoulders, pairing off to conduct chicken fights.

&n
bsp; She had protected him for so long. Saying, don’t eat that. Get away from there. Had leveled guns four times at other human beings in service to him. Never had to shoot because the target could tell how serious she was. All to ensure that the boy would live, for the war could not last forever and he was young. He had decades to only half remember what he had seen, to bury it under years of peace. To have children of his own. But the night she heard about the Big One, she gave him a shot of whiskey. Let him smoke dirty cigarettes with the pilot. Turned away when she saw him approaching the revelers sitting in a circle on the deck, passing a pipe. For a few days, he was a dog that did not realize its leash had been taken off, moved as if he were still wearing it, walking to what used to be the end of its length and stopping. Then he put his foot out, saw that there was nothing holding him back, and started running. Now she could always find him in the throng in the theater before dawn. Passed out under the roof of the captain’s quarters, feet hanging out in the rain. The best week of his life, he said, and she seethed with anger. It was supposed to be better than this. She promised her son then that she would do something about that.

  Out on the river, the ferry’s paddles slapped toward shore, toward the camp. On it, a man with two camels, ropes around their necks. A woman dressed in clothes made from blankets. Four children without an adult, the second-oldest bossing the oldest around, bickering as though they were married, while the youngest trailed her foot in the water and the second-youngest squinted at the pages of a water-warped book. Sergeant Foote, in a long dress, boots, and sun hat, a suitcase at her feet, watched the shore approach. The chaotic shape of the Carthage, the crew crawling across its skin. The refugee camp a strip of grays and browns, rising ashen smoke, sprawling across the shore. She turned to her reflection in the window of the ferry’s pilothouse. The shape of a woman again. Almost believable that she had never seen an entire town on fire around her, animals bleeding in the street, the cries of dying horses. But the war was there to be noticed, in the eyes, in the hands. She would have to be careful, or look for the other ones who had the signs. Her targets must have them, after all they had been through. Had her commander been able to see into her head at that moment, he would have reprimanded her. Compassion has no place in your mission, he might have said. But she could not help it. Did not want to. She imagined sometimes that kindness would come as an annihilating flood. Drown the war and us with it, recede just when we were on the edge of death. Leave us lying faceup on the ground, staring into the brilliant sky. Thankful for every breath.

  In Southern Pennsylvania there is now only a grayness beyond the hills. A long line of people in the narrow road below, winding among the empty farms. Untied sheets floating above them like flags. They are half dead already, ash and sallow skin. Yet it takes so little to bring them back to life. I open the front door and bring out food, and the shuffling stops, necks turn. Parents push their kids forward, become happy to the brink of tears to see their children fed. As if it is enough to sustain them, too. They hug me, offer me something from what they have left. A mechanical eggbeater, a pair of leather shoes. Something for when I have to go, too. All of us linked in chains of small kindnesses, the length of the road, from town to town, city to city, stretched across the land, lashing us together. We should be killing each other now, and some of us are. But others of us are meeting under highways, exchanging news and small peaches. Asking how everyone is. There are children playing soccer in debris-strewn streets. People holding each other on the chipped steps of dusty churches. We are not done for yet. If I did not believe that, there would be no point in writing, in trying to find you, so that we might speak to each other, tell each other what we have to say.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, VIOLENCE BROKE out on the shore at Millersburg. It began with grain alcohol and shouting. Fights in the street at the park’s edge, a woman bleeding from the shoulder and forehead. A flash of fire, a house lighting up. The flames taking it faster than anyone expected. The man who had lived in it just standing there, shaking his head. He had refused to leave the town, even as his neighbors cleared out. No war, no refugees, no nothing, could chase him away. He had been born in that house, on the tiles of the bathroom floor. An only child. When he was seven, he had climbed up to the roof, did not know how to get back down. Did not understand why his parents were so upset with him, why they held him so tight after the neighbor got a long ladder and brought him back to the ground. When he was sixteen, he went up there again with a girl he knew his mother and father disapproved of. They stayed there all night while all four parents scoured the town for them. Watched the first glimmer of sun pour across the sky. She kissed him twice, fidgeted with a bra strap. Said she would come back, and shimmied down the gutter. He did not see her for a week, and when at last he found her, walking with her head down on the side of the road, passing the grocery store on the way out of town, she would not talk to him, say where she was going. Then he did not see her at all, and for months afterward, he did not know what to do. He took it hard, too hard. He hated the house, hated the town. Almost hated his parents, until he realized that they had taught him everything he needed to pull himself from the wreckage. They saved him, and for all the years they had left, he tried to show them how grateful he was, was never sure he succeeded. He got everything his parents had when they died. Always said he would trade it all in to have them back. But now the flames had his house. What would he trade now if his parents were to approach him, standing at the threshold, staring back at him? The guardians at the gate needing only a bribe to let them come back?

  There was no time to think about it. All around the house, young men were gathering, staring into the flames. Kids that the war had entered. A boy with a brown shirt who had seen men with guns—he would never know who they were—come to his house, force his father to his knees in the living room and shoot him in the face, take fistfuls of his mother’s hair and lead her to the front yard. An hour later, she was disemboweled, her pants off. Then the men picked the boy up by his legs and swung him against the wall until his head cracked and he was bleeding all over the floor. They left when they thought they had killed him. He did not know when it was that he came to. His head in shock. His father on the floor next to him, bent backward, his blood dark brown and dried into the carpet. Through the window, he could see only his mother’s legs in the grass. There are people who live through that, with it. They put a hundred miles between themselves and the screaming memory of what happened to them—never far enough away that they cannot see it, hear it, but never so close that they cannot make themselves into something else. Not this boy. There was never the chance to walk the miles. His life was that living room, that yard, after the atrocities, for from Baltimore to Harrisburg, the country had shown him nothing else. Now he looked into the flames, grabbed the end of a burning timber, and spread them. Lit a rag on fire and threw it into the next camp. Destroyed a suitcase that had made it all the way from North Carolina to there. Four shirts. Six books tied with twine. The woman who owned these things came up to him, hollering, what the fuck are you doing? But there were already more boys throwing fire, the flames crawling across the park.

  The crew pulled the alarm on the Carthage, a cascade of bells, and Captain Mendoza rushed from her cabin, looked at Millersburg, and spat orders. The lines were loosed, the ship pulling from the shore, and Sergeant Foote and twelve other refugees who had boarded hours ago watched the land recede. Twenty-two boys gone feral with violence who saw them trying to leave ran into the water, threw burning sticks that made spirals of fire in the air. Three of them bounced off the hull and fell, hissing, into the water. Then there was only the light from the flames on the shore, the heads of the children in silhouette. Their ragged howls carrying across the water, as loud as ever.

  * * *

  SUNNY JIM AND REVEREND Bauxite lay in the smoldering dark, ears cocked to the screams outside. The tang of ash too strong to be a small fire. It was like Reverend Bauxite’s church after the bombs
. The charred pews, the broken windows. The stains on the stone. He had kneeled at the ruined altar, mumbling his prayers. Trying to give the building, the people who had gone with it, the best funeral he could. Talia, Talia, if only you were still here.

  “Do you think we’re all right?” Sunny Jim said.

  “I think we’re fine,” Reverend Bauxite said. “They’ll never let the violence aboard.”

  “Do you think they have a choice?”

  “As long as we can move, they do.”

  Crashing splinters. A yelp, simian. No. The sound of all the birds on deck, frantic in their cages.

  “I know you think I waited too long,” Sunny Jim said. “To go get him.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think,” Reverend Bauxite said. “I’ve never been married. Never had a child. And I have enough respect for both to know that I can’t imagine it.”

  They both felt the untruth in what he was saying. It had been only a matter of months, but it was months of bombs and ruin, of running in the dark, both of them making sure they could always see the boy, making sure Aaron’s arms were locked around their shoulders. Sunny Jim had seen how fast Reverend Bauxite’s hand opened toward the boy when they heard the artillery coming, how fast Aaron’s hand reached out and took it. Saw, too, how Reverend Bauxite looked Merry over when he met her, appraising her for how well she could protect the child, overlooking everything else. She reminds me of Aline, he said. With that single sentence, understanding why Sunny Jim loved his wife better than anyone. And then, after Aaron was gone, the way they talked about the boy, wondered what he was playing with, what he was eating, whether he was sleeping better or worse now that it was so quiet around him. Consoling themselves with the idea that he felt too safe with his aunt to miss them. They were both his parents now, Reverend Bauxite could feel it, though he had no idea how to tell Sunny Jim that.