He went back to the house at four in the morning. All the lights were off. The doors locked, a thing she never did. As if the house did not know who he was, told him he did not belong there. He stood in the street, wavering. He was waiting for her to open the window, tell him she was worried sick about where he had gone, then beckon him inside. He waited until dawn, when he could almost see into the house, then turned toward the river, took the bridge back to Riverside.
The con artist had told himself then that he could never go back to Danville, but now the Carthage was taking him there. It would force him to see the house, the porch, the broad branches. Leaves scattering the sun. She would be in the yard as they passed, turn her face to them. See him there on the rail, put her hand to her brow to shield her eyes from the light. Then, he knew, there would be a sign. A shadow across the face, an angle of the hip. A bend in the shoulder. Letting him know how much she still hated him. The Carthage was not a good place for him, he decided. It kept him from the bullets, but there was only so long he could stay, only so long before someone figured out what he was. He could not stay here much longer, though he had no idea where else to go. And he did not want to go alone.
No one else was awake on deck. The con artist walked among the rows of birdcages, the livestock lowing in their pens, waiting to be fed. Around him people slept sitting up. They passed through another notch the river had bored into the hills, shorn slopes towering to either side. On the eastern shore, the land had snapped the train tracks in half, pulled them into the river, heaped them with boulders. As if the water and the mountain had conspired together, called a truce in their war in order to turn on us. We were so easy to beat, a matter of a few hundred years—nothing to them, who had been fighting each other for millennia.
When the con artist thought back on what happened next, it seemed as though someone must have told him Sergeant Foote was coming. Be here on the deck at this hour. Watch that door. The fourth person to walk through it? You must do what you can to win her. But at the time, he felt only a vague anxiety. He was thinking about Melody. Leaning against the wall of the captain’s quarters, fidgeting. First, two of Judge Spleen Smiley’s band members emerged on deck with an erhu and ukulele, tuned up, and started playing a languid old Mississippi Sheiks number, an easy swing. The erhu had the melody covered, but the uke player could not keep from singing, When I find that river, then I’m coming home for you. Then there was a man with a beard scraggling down to his waist, very thin, wearing a shirt too big for him, collarbones jutting out of it like the edges of wings. Then her. Something shuddered in the con artist, worked his feet to propel him toward her. Filled his brain with words to say, though when he stood at last in front of her, he could not remember anything.
“Yes?” Sergeant Foote said.
“Who are you?” he said.
“Who are you?” she said.
Hallelujah James, John Ray Plum, Sam Lightshaft, the con artist thought. The history of his aliases flashed before him, recombining. There were so many to choose from. So little danger of ever being caught. For he had conned from Maine to Carolina, his successes clean, his failures not great enough to earn him infamy. He could afford to start repeating. It was easier to remember that way. His brain dusted off one of his favorites and sent it to his tongue. But his tongue disobeyed, ignored and betrayed. Gave her his real name.
“Really?” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“It sounds made up.”
“It isn’t.”
“I feel like I can’t trust you.”
“You can’t.” Why was he saying these things?
“I appreciate your honesty,” she said.
“But I’m not honest.”
“Is this some sort of a logic puzzle?”
“Can I see you later? This evening?”
“If you can find me.”
He did. By then the band was waist-deep into a set of New Orleans jazz, the drummer stomping the beat into the stage floor. Sending out a prayer to ward off mayhem. The denizens of the Carthage had put the tables on their sides and rolled them to the walls, stacked the chairs, and were dancing in ever-changing pairs. The con artist began with a husky woman from Philadelphia with big, comforting arms who gave a rich laugh at the end of each song. Switched to a woman with hair down to her waist who fixed him in her eyes, said almost nothing except thank you. Somewhere four bottles broke at once to cheers and clapping. A man in a waistcoat and shorts hopped on stage and bowed, hopped off again. The band counted off another number, and then he saw her, standing by the footlights, arms crossed. Peering into the crowd.
“A woman on a mission,” he said.
She shrugged, wondered if somehow she was that transparent. She had been all through the ship in the past few hours, looking for a sign of the men she sought. Gone up and down the long wooden hallways, peered into open doorways at people sitting around low tables, speaking in low voices, who stopped when they saw her, squinted back. Can I help you? How long have you been on this boat? she asked. Since Drumore, they said. Since Peach Bottom. They boarded early in the war, before Baltimore, just after someone blew up the Conowingo Dam, flooded half of Port Deposit and Havre de Grace. It was like a tidal wave, they said. The water just surging over the land, taking everything. You never knew how fragile houses could be. How fast they could just be picked up and carried off. We’ve been on this boat ever since, and we’re never leaving unless it leaves us, or one of those knives or guns takes us out.
She waved good-bye, sorry to have bothered them. Then paused in the doorway.
“How is it that the ship is so big on the inside?” she said.
One of them reached down, patted the floor. “What matters is that it’s here. Blood and all, it’s here.”
She had gone in the library, a room made of books saved from fires, from water. Books shelved on books, laid into walls of books. The hallways just wide enough to walk through sideways. The people in there too young, too old to be who she was looking for. In the corner, a man surrounded by stacks of records, cranking a player by hand, leaning forward to press his ear against the waning speaker. She had gone into the boiler room that powered the paddles, watched the crew crawling over the machinery, carrying wood, shoveling it into the furnace. The pistons working back and forth, the turning wheels moaning in the humidity. The engine sighing every minute, a grandfather in a chair, overcome by memories of when he was young. Two men stood in the hall, sharing a thin cigarette, and she pretended to flirt with them. Been here long? But they were already lovers, had time only for each other. I hope you find whoever you’re looking for, one of them said.
In the theater, the con artist made a flourish, his best imitation of courtliness, as the band kicked into “Dinah.” She did not smile, but stepped forward. Took his hand in hers. Knew the steps. At first she was somewhere else, he thought, but five songs and two glasses of vinegary wine later, she was softer. Looked at him and smiled, and he thought that if the war were to come for them right that second, the boat to explode and take them all with it, that would be all right by him.
“Will you spend the night with me?” he said. How had he become so forward?
She looked away, looked at him again, as if to say she would. But an hour later she excused herself, said she thought she saw someone she knew. He said he would wait for her where he’d first found her, and he did.
The band’s groove slowed as it crept toward dawn. The people wanted something to carry them off to bed. Something good, because, at last, no one had died that day. Pairs had stopped swapping, couples grew closer. Their dancing turned into swaying, arms around each other, hips and foreheads touching, eyes closed. Partnerless, standing in the middle of the floor, the con artist could feel them all breathing together, musicians and dancers, the room’s pulse. They were all going somewhere, beyond the ship and the dark water, and he wanted to go with them, with her. But she did not return.
The House
WHEN MERRY WAS TEN and Sunny Jim was eig
ht, Mr. Dave, who fixed the electrical lines that ran through town, was killed by a deer. He was driving a decades-old sedan on the back road from Lisle to the highway, found the animal standing in the middle of the road after midnight. He laid on the horn, jammed the brakes, and the deer turned toward him, charged the car. The first hoof put a tight, deep dent in the hood. The next went through the windshield, through the driver’s skull. Then the deer was up and over the roof, down the other side, and Mr. Dave was leaning back in his seat, mouth open, eyes staring upward. Hands draped over the wheel. The car went another twenty yards, then listed left and rocked to a gentle stop on the side of the road. Joe Thule’s father found him like that a few hours later, in the dusky hours before dawn. Gleaned what had happened in pieces. The shape the car was in. Patches of reddish hair, a bit of skin, the strong odor. The expression on Mr. Dave’s face.
The funeral was two days later, and the people of the town gathered around, looked at each other as the man in the shroud went down. They were all thinking the same thing. Almost every month the lights died in Lisle, and every time, Mr. Dave resurrected them. That would not happen again. The electricity lasted another five weeks, winked out at last in a strong wind that brought no rain. The fight on Owen Hill Road that night gave the kids’ mother twelve stitches across her forehead, put their father on the floor, while Sunny Jim and Merry fled into the weather. The steps on the front porch were loose by then, rocked forward when they walked down them. Seven shingles flew from the roof in a gust and were never replaced. The kids walked through town, holding their jackets close against their bodies, passed house after darkened house. Saw the dim light from Whitney Point, from lanterns, torches, nurtured fires, aching through the leaves of the trees. Sunny Jim wondered how much longer he had to stay in that house, in this town. The first adult thought of his life.
“When’s Dad getting up?” he said the next night. His dad had been carried to bed, was still there, shouting through the wooden door for water.
“Isn’t the county fair happening now?” his mother said. Ran her finger along the rough stitches on her brow. The neighbor had done them, knew only a little what he was doing. “Why don’t you go?”
Merry and Sunny Jim’s seventeen-year-old cousin drove them to the fairgrounds in Whitney Point in a pickup with a plywood bed. He sat in the cab by himself, with the windows rolled up, smoking. The kids sat in the back, leaning against the rear window, their legs resting on three shot tires and a gutted jackhammer. They passed houses built close to the road, still wearing skins of Tyvek and tar paper. Clear plastic stretched across cracked windows. Then the houses yielded to rusty gas stations and empty body shops. A motel painted burgundy, defensive on the far end of a crumbling parking lot. The middle school cut in half by a sink in the land. The wound in the building exposing pipes twisting out of the floors, rusting desks, classrooms without roofs collecting dirt and cultivating weeds. The roots of trees spreading into the cracked foundation, breaking it further apart. The high school had burned to the ground for some reason no one could remember. By the time the flames came, it had been so long since anyone had used it. In the wide field beyond the school, across an expanse of dark grass, the lights of the fair were like a distant city. Electric bulbs on spinning rides streaking the air. The neon spindles on the Ferris wheel, benches in slow orbit around the blazing center.
They pulled into a clot of cars trying and failing to make rows. The truck stopped with a shudder and their cousin knocked on the rear window from the inside. He was not going with them. They walked through the lot’s dried mud, past teenagers huddled in the dark. Then, at once, the fair’s light and sound began together, as though they had crossed a border, entered another country. The neon running into white light that bleached the ground. Rides wheeling above them. The roar of gears and motors, hissing pistons. Riders yelling and screaming. A row of stands, painted wooden signs: THE MOLE MAN, THE DRAGON LADY. SIAMESE TRIPLETS! WHAT THE DEVIL HAS JOINED, NO MAN MAY CAST ASUNDER. Whistles and sirens, a barker’s rapid patter. Try your luck, try your luck, hey there you strapping young lad, I bet your girl there would love one of these. Merry took her brother’s hand and they moved down the midway, and to Sunny Jim, it was as if they floated above it. Looking down from the dark. Above them, nothing but cold clouds, invisible, eating the moon and the stars. Merry tapped him on the shoulder, pointed up to the swing ride, the chairs on long chains flying above them. The dozens of children with their arms and legs out. It was so much like flight up there. You could look out past the fair’s lights, to the buildings at the intersection, to the bridge across the river. The dead stoplight swinging on a wire. The sweep of the highway beyond, the only road around there big enough to let you believe you could leave at any time.
There must have been a sound when the bolts gave way, but Sunny Jim only saw, everyone only saw, one of the swings pull loose from its mooring, chair and rider fly over the fair, rising up into the darkness. Trailing the chains behind. The passenger, a twelve-year-old girl who lived in Lisle, laughing all the way up. The police and ambulances looked for her for hours afterward, all through the fairgrounds, along the road through town. The rooftops of gas stations and old hotel buildings. The river’s banks, its bed. They never found her. Her parents, who lived in a two-bedroom apartment above the arcade, succumbed to the belief that she would come back at any minute, float back down to them. This lasted until a malevolent spirit entered their house one night, throttled their marriage to death while they slept. They woke up the next morning blunted and hazy, shuffled through a few more months, then realized that they no longer saw the other in themselves, they saw only her. But that was nearly a year away.
Six weeks after their daughter left, the parents held a service for her. Another funeral in Lisle, people said. Soon there won’t be anyone left, and the last one will have to bury himself. They stood in the Congregationalist church, heads bowed, hands clasped in front of them. A mountain of flowers on the altar. There was a small reception near the swimming pool in the town park, people offering weak words. Nobody knew what to say. Sunny Jim’s father put his hand on the man’s shoulder. Damn sorry about your kid. Sunny Jim’s mother, with fresh stitches, three of them, on her arm, hugged the woman and said nothing. The embrace went on too long, not long enough. The town’s kids loitered on the sidewalk, trying not to play. Cat Wallace and his two brothers sat in a row along the curb, bouncing stones across the highway. Henry Robinson and Joe Thule, who had been born on the same day and were friends since infancy, stood behind them, Henry pulling on Joe’s tie to strangle him. There was a squirrel on a fraying power line. A shout from a few houses down, an old woman punishing her dog.
Then, all at once, Merry was laughing. It burst out of her as if it had been building for a year and she had gone necrotic trying to keep it in, was surrendering at last. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew this was going to happen. I knew the whole time I was at the fair, before I even got there. Years ago, as soon as I saw her in school.” Then she sang: Yellow bird, high up in banana tree. Yellow bird, she sits all alone like me.
That was when the mother began to wail. Merry was kneeling, clutching her stomach, her mirth asphyxiating her. The lost girl’s father put his arm around his wife, rushed to take her home. Glared at Sunny Jim’s father. How dare you bring her, he said, when we all know how she is. The kids stood in a circle around the laughing child, unsettled, upset. Many of them began to cry. It began to sink in that they had survived something. Get her out of here, the other parents said. Get out of here yourselves. But Sunny Jim’s parents were already fighting, yet again, so it was Sunny Jim who knelt beside his sister, grabbed her arm to bring her back.
“Come on,” he said.
They walked up Owen Hill Road alone. Watched their parents flash by them in the car, swerving. They could hear the shouting over the lost muffler. The fight lasted for hours, tore the house apart, scattered the aunts and cousins. Sunny Jim and Merry sat on the porch, amid the peeling paint,
the boards above their heads starting to rot. The whole house, they knew, was starting to come apart, shedding wood and relations. In time there would only be them and their parents, Sunny Jim thought, and the house would be a skeleton. They did not say a word to each other until it got dark and their parents had exhausted themselves, went to their room. No small lights came on in the valley, no streetlights drew the line of the main road through town. Just flashes of headlights. Fireflies.
“What did you mean by that?” he said in the dark.
“Mean by what?” she said.
“That you knew.”
“I did know,” she said.
“How?”
“The shadow man told me.”
“You went out in the woods again?”
“No, no. He’s much closer now. He lives right over there.”
“Across the road?”
She nodded. “But not for long. Pretty soon, Jim, he’ll move in with us. Then you’ll really see something.”
“Merry?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t let him in.”
“Don’t you want to see what he’ll do?”
“No.”
“…”
“…”
“Well, it’s too late, anyway. His mind’s made up.”
“Can you tell me when he comes?”
“I won’t have to. You’ll know.”
His sister was watching the road, as if the visitor would appear out of the tall grass any minute. Take the lawn in two steps. She leaned forward a little. She could not wait.
I love you so much, Merry, Sunny Jim thought. Please don’t go.
The River
NORTH OF MILLERSBURG THE Susquehanna got wild. The water thick and slow. Islands rippling with dense trees, birds of prey skulking in the leaves. The calls and roars of monkeys. The half-submerged columns of a long-gone trestle bridge, stone and crumbling mortar, shaggy crowns of small trees. A dead bass, bloated and bleaching, bumped against the Carthage’s hull. In the hills and on the shore, shambling flooded farms. Houses with plywood walls and tin roofs melting into the water. A dock made of tires, a bright blue fan boat tied to a tree with dirty yellow rope. A dented gas can with a hole in the top, floating on its side, pouring greasy rainbows into the current. As if everyone had left without much of a hurry, stood outside their houses while the water rose and the sky churned to the north of them. They took a good long look. Understood that material goods didn’t mean much. The blue couch in the living room, the Formica table. A kitchen full of particleboard shelves. Grandmother had made the purple pillows on the bed, but Grandmother was gone now, never sentimental when she was here, and alive in their heads besides. Those three kids in the car, hitting each other, pressing their hands into the condensation on the windows, were all that mattered.
Lost Everything Page 11
