Lost Everything

by Brian Francis Slattery

  Just off the midway, still in the glow of its lights, a horde of people were hopping on one leg, shaking as if in a fit. Behind them, four bodies lay on a long white sheet, weak surprise on their frozen faces. Another carnival ride stuttered and whined, and a ripple of violence swept over the crowd, a crest of gunshots and shouting that flew through them and was gone. Three of the dancers fell, and one crawled away out of the light. His legs shuffled in the dust and then did not move.

  Under the shriek of the machines, Elise and Aaron could hear wailing. They ran, then, mother and son, out of the field, until they were crouching next to a brick building, in the glass-strewn mud under the branches of a wide, old tree. The tree surveyed the chaos as if from a hundred miles away. It could wait.

  “Mom, why did you bring me here?”

  “It was never like this.”

  “It’s because we’re back before the war’s over, isn’t it. Because the war’s still here.”

  This is not just the war, she thought. “It’ll be over soon,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  “No, Mom. How do you know?”

  She turned on him. I don’t, she thought. I don’t even know if we’re going to be alive next week. I don’t know anything anymore, and I can’t bear the thought of watching you die. She kept herself from saying it, but her eyes sharpened with the effort, got much sharper than she had intended, and her hands shook. Andre saw it and was a small boy again, a kid who had fallen and hurt his arm, who had broken a good toy. Trying to be brave.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean it.” She had not known she still had such power over him. Felt a flash of embarrassment that he had seen her like that. Getting away from herself.

  The street leading to the center of town was clogged with tents, shacks with thin metal walls. Houses to either side with porches full of people, piles of belongings slipping toward refuse. Small fires everywhere. The smells of burning wood, burning paint, melting plastic. A blue-gray gauze thrown across the air. Three brothers standing against the side of a house, trying to sleep, their arms around each other. A corpse, swaddled in a dark blue sheet, lying on the cracked pavement. One mourner kneeling next to it, her hand on the covered forehead. She did not make a sound. They were all refugees from upstream, kept asking Elise if she had any food, a roll, a potato. A carrot for a child. There was not enough to go around, they said. When the rest ran out, things could start to get ugly.

  She looked toward the low wooden buildings in the valley, the stone bank building, the white church nestled against the cliff, growing from the earth like a tooth. The houses in tight knots along roads tangled in the hills. The canal running by the school. They would take this place apart, she thought. It could not withstand their hunger.

  Goodbye, beautiful town. Every Sunday, the Baptists used to cram into the church up the hill, park their cars all over the road in front, and sing loud inside. She’d kissed a man by the canal once, put her hand on the back of his head, got up on tiptoes to be closer to him. Andre still a baby, lashed to her back and dreaming, fidgeting against her. Perhaps in his head he was flying, like the birds he had seen, though he could not yet walk. You saved me, she said to the place. Me and my son. I’m so sorry I can’t save you. And the town answered: Don’t worry, child. I am already moving on. I always was.

  The sun had not quite risen when they reached the West Side Ballroom. In the light leaking through the clouds, it was possible to imagine that it was as she had left it. The streaks left by fire only shadows across the walls that would soon be erased by the light. But the door was on one hinge, askew on the frame. The scent of charred vinyl and timber. The flames were recent visitors, harbingers.

  Elise recognized nothing in the front room. The damage done in the years she’d been gone. The carpet had turned to ash, the furniture burned to bones. The ceiling half-eaten, the remaining half buckled, its seared edge hanging like a taloned hand. Andre began to cough, drew in a wheezing breath to cough again. The room pushed its way into him, into the walls of his lungs. She may have cut months off the end of his life, she thought. Then thought of what was coming, and stopped worrying.

  But the back room was as she remembered. Her first night there, sleeping on the floor, the parties in the parking lot. Andre at thirteen months, his first steps goaded and cheered by a room full of drunk musicians. Come here, little dude, you can do it, one of them said. And another, to her: is this really his first steps, right here? Is this the shit right here? Andre at two years, when everyone in the world was in the third person. His small hands around her thumbs as she lay on the floor and he climbed her angled knees, stood up, then leaned into her hands and balanced there, his feet in the air. Andre at seven, the flash of the soles of his sneakers as he crawled into a drainage pipe, shimmied through to end up under a grate in the lot. Called up to the people walking by, laughed when she told him how dangerous it was. All at once, she was crying and hugging her grown boy, running her hands through his hair. He did not like it, was too old for it. She did not care.

  “Mom. Mom—”

  They saw the gun’s barrel first. Then the man behind it.

  “Are you kidding me?” Monkey Wrench said. “Are you kidding me?” He dropped the gun and ran forward, lifted them both in his arms, his big hands on their backs.

  “I tried to keep it together,” he said. “But I couldn’t do it.”

  “You did do it,” she said. “Don’t you see? Here we are. You did it.”

  So they ended as they began. The Big One was almost upon Shickshinny when I found them there. I could see it beginning to fall onto the five peaks, a great wave cresting and crashing. The first rain just threads of gray drifting on the streets, the houses, the stoplights, the churches. The river flowing dark and flat. The lightning over the next hill starting fires, the smoke mingling with the clouds. A distant roar. I took the last ten miles of highway to the West Side Ballroom, past the empty supermarkets and dollar stores, past quiet houses, abandoned auto dealerships. Saw the sign for Zephyr Plaza even before I saw the rising smoke. They were all outside, Elise, Andre, Monkey Wrench, twelve others who had found their way back. They had enough food for a few more days, a fire in a wide pit. A pot suspended over the flames, the cooking warm and sweet. You could see the good coming from there, see it flowing over the land. A woman sang a slow song I could not recognize, the melody floating and swooping, backed up by a man picking at a guitar with four strings left. The talk, then, of those who were not there, who did not make it, and Elise and Andre spoke of the Carthage, the years they had spent aboard that ship. The captain. The revelers. The musicians. Even Sunny Jim and the priest. Just nodded when I told them what had happened to them all. The others told old jokes that they had already heard so many times, they could just repeat the punch lines, pieces of punch lines. Make them all ugly again. As soon as I get these pajamas off. They laughed all the same. It was almost upon them.

  “You know you could go,” I told them. “You still have time.”

  “We know,” they said. “But we’re already where we want to be.”

  * * *

  AS THEY PASSED SHICKSHINNY and neared Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, there were only trees again, trees and the cooling towers on the north bank, until the dikes rose to either side, the old grassy mounds submerged and the long ridge of concrete walls built atop them almost cresting. The hasty lines of sandbags sagged with rain. Holes and cracks from four springs ago, never fixed. Now they never would be, Captain Mendoza thought.

  They all thought at first that the rippling gray ahead of them was another storm, and waited for thunder that did not come. Then the wind carried to them the whiff of char: sweet, earthy, tangy, bitter. As if ghosts were passing through the ship in turns. The smell grew until it had crawled into the lungs of everyone on the deck, and they wheezed and coughed with it, but stayed, made everyone below come up. For the valley was on fire, all of it, from the roads at the li
p of the dikes to the buildings far beyond. The delis and the movie theaters, the social clubs and furniture stores. The banners stretched between the streetlights, fringed with red tinsel. WE LOVE OUR NEIGHBORHOOD. It was all burned or burning, the flames huge but taking their time, for nobody would stop them from their work, and there was so much left to consume.

  In Baltimore, the captain had seen the cityscape from the bay after the fighting was through. It was a decaying mouth pried open, filled with blackened teeth. She had brought the Carthage in close to look for survivors. Called to the silent shore for hours. Nobody ever answered. At last she saw the corpses of three people lying on a dock, just a few feet from the water. They were charred into dark carbon, but she could see their arms around one another. They had been on fire, all three of them, and were trying to get to the water. They had almost made it.

  She looked at Wilkes-Barre, all fire before her. “How long will it take to get through this?” the captain said.

  “A few hours,” the pilot said. “There’s a lot of debris in the river.”

  She looked ahead to Scranton. The heat, the flames, even brighter there.

  “There’s nothing here, is there,” she said.

  “No.”

  “I’m going to my quarters. Let me know when we’re out.”

  The deck stayed crowded, for it was too much not to look at, these walls of rolling flame. The people stood there, calming their animals, trying to hush the birds, frantic in their cages. The first mate’s boy sat close to the bow, letting the fire pour into his eyes, quieter than the first mate had ever seen him. Somewhere between the border of Wilkes-Barre and the place where the river turned north, the sun went down and the sky above the smoke darkened. No one noticed.

  The House

  AGAIN MERRY WAS IN the attic window, rifle across her lap, waiting, under a slate of gray clouds. She felt her legs falling asleep, shifted them. Then no movement at all. Her breathing too slow to see or hear, as it was when she was hunting.

  Aaron sat on a mattress thrown on the planks behind her. Played with a plush monkey, a toy that had been his father’s. He was bored again, had been bored for a long time, though it was leading to unexpected riches: He had become a good painter, a good plumber. She’d found him composing songs, unintelligible words riding melodies that rose and fell on a scale her ear could not decipher. But the pieces were consistent, they were as he intended, refined by repetition, unbeholden to an audience. He made them for himself. She loved it all, she had decided weeks ago, the music and the boy. It went beyond her brother now, the pact they shared. Beyond simple compassion. In her defense of Aaron, she decided, she would be like his mother. There would be no mercy.

  “What are you waiting for?” Aaron asked.

  She did not want to tell him the truth. “For the sun to come out,” she said.

  “Why do you need your gun for that?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then why do you have it?”

  “I always have it,” she said, “to keep you safe.”

  A lone bird shot over the house, heading south. Two more. Eight. Then a giant whisper in the air, as of a wave approaching, and the sky was black with birds. Swarms of swallows, starlings, and sparrows, warblers and finches. Mobs of geese, herons gliding in pairs. Red-tailed hawks beating and keening. All of them crying at once, a general alarm sounding across the empty farms, fields turned to weeds and saplings, houses falling into the dirt. Animals ran on the ground before the wave in the air, and the earth seethed with bounding rodents and snakes. Aaron came to the window and saw the procession, gripped his aunt’s shoulders with two long fingers.

  “What are they doing?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she lied.

  “There are deer and geese out there.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why aren’t you shooting them?”

  “I told you the gun was to keep you safe.”

  “Not eat?”

  “We have enough food,” she said.

  “For how long?”

  “Long enough.” She could see that her answers dissatisfied him. He was starting to understand, but had not worked up the courage to ask the questions that would strip away the gauze of fiction that she had wrapped around him. In the story she kept telling, Aaron’s father was coming soon, and together they would pack and go, far from this place to one where the word for war was never spoken, except in contempt. What did it get us? someone would say. Bullet holes in houses and school buildings. Bricks and broken glass scattered in the street. Empty bedrooms and unmarked graves. No more. A time of plenty was coming, a balm for the lean years they had just lived, and they would walk into them sure of step, never looking back, for deprivation’s only useful lesson had been learned long ago. They did not need to know more.

  The animals were still fleeing all around them, a heaving, crying darkness. They were not letting up. Merry looked at Aaron and then turned away. Soon he would be able to see how bad it was. What Merry was trying to protect him from. She could feel it herself: a magnetic pull north, a constant whisper, come away, come away. You have been on the earth too long already. She wanted to go as others yearned for children. Part of her, she knew, had left years ago, disappeared into the woods, dissolved into the fields at the top of the road’s rise. Now the rest of her wanted to leave, too, with a final, ecstatic sigh. She would tell Aaron all of this, except that it would only frighten him. Would not prepare him for what was coming.

  Hurry, Jim, she thought. I do not know how much time we have left.

  The River

  IN THE FIRST FIVE seconds that Sunny Jim was awake, he knew that Aline was there. She was on the floor with him, her legs curled beneath his, her lips at his ear, whispering to him. In his dream, her words had been so clear, but they were already falling from him, letters and sounds fading away. He would not catch them in time.

  It was still night, but they had cleared the cities, turned with the Susquehanna when it cut north and the flames boiled its edges, covered it in ash. He could still smell the smoke, but only a slight tang, weakening in the eddies of cooler air. He dressed in the dark, went up on deck. The animals, which had brayed and lowed when the Carthage passed through the flames, were all sleeping. The cows lay in a huddle, the birds twitched in their cages. Near the bow, three women slumbered under a bundle of blankets, all wrapped together. A shirt strewn on the boards next to them.

  We can never lose each other, Aline had said once. They were sitting in a corner of a tractor dealership that had become a flophouse and livestock pen. Hay about their feet, a heavy odor of pig excrement. Seven sows roaming the cement floor, knocking over children who picked themselves up without crying. Their parents joking and haggling. A woman in a pink vest boiled water over a propane stove, chopping onions and carrots on the cover of an old book. Aline was seven months pregnant with Aaron, leaning back against her husband. His hands clasped her belly.

  “We won’t,” he said.

  “No, I mean it,” she said. Turned her head to stare at him. “We can’t.”

  “I promise we won’t,” he had said then. But he had not seen her in so long. And he was trying so hard to remember now, but pieces of her were going already. Her face, when she tasted something sour. What she sang to Aaron when she bathed him. The feel of the soles of her feet in his hands. He could not hold onto all of it, and at once he was shaking. Aline, my girl, my darling. He rattled against the rail as though he would scream or retch, but instead dropped to his knees, hung his head. Felt the river moving beneath them, the vein from the heart of the north bleeding into the sea. He shut his eyes tight, was sure that if he looked up, he would see the life in the hills, the way they bucked and subsided under geology and weather, smothered the towns cowering in their hollows. The planet preparing for the next era without us. He would not mind going if the bullet came for him now, or the virus, or the lightning, if not for his son, his best boy.

  He had not been ready for it, what being a fa
ther would mean to him. The night after Aaron was born, the boy was crying, screeching, his lungs letting out a sound that his throat was too small to bear, his will already too big for his body. He choked and gagged, the crying stuttering into a mockery of laughter. Little arms batted the air. Sunny Jim had no idea what to do. But Aline lay unconscious with exhaustion, bloodless, for the labor had been hard, and they had no medicine. In all the world, nobody awake but Sunny Jim cared about the child, nobody else even knew he was alive. So he picked Aaron up, held him close, and felt it, all at once, a wide expanse, annihilating and exhilarating, opening within him, leaping through him. The feeling would take him apart if he let it, and it was all for the infant screaming in his arms, the certainty that he loved this little boy so much that he would kill for him, die for him. It was the strongest thing he had ever felt, and Sunny Jim did not know how to use it. Could not figure out how to impart it to the child, to give him comfort. And so the son was unconsoled, and wailed until dawn.

  I’m getting ready, son. I understand now. Please forgive me for taking so long.

  “Are you sick?”

  Sunny Jim turned. The boy from the camp.

  “No. Just very tired.”