Lost Everything

by Brian Francis Slattery

  The four soldiers slept for five hours, walked out of the camp in the late afternoon. Left the highway behind for the small roads that followed the rivers. Joined a branch of the Susquehanna where it curled south from Binghamton into the steep, huddled hills. It took them another day to skirt the city, where the shooting was already starting. Ropes of smoke rising, chased by flares. The fading lights in the valley behind them, the darkness to the north. The wound in the firmament above them their compass needle. Then they were walking along the highway again and it was dark, darker than it had been for any of them in a long time. They walked off the road into the tall grass to put themselves down for the night, but it was too quiet to sleep. At first light they moved again, departed from the interstate to a road where all the houses leaned, sagging as if knocked out in a fight. Barns missing teeth, missing jaws, waiting for the final breath that would push them over. Cars in the driveways with their doors open, rain-soaked seats rank with mildew. Abandoned fast, as though their owners had always been ready, as though their parents had taught them how. They were on the long arm of Appalachia, its shoulder in Georgia, its fingers buried somewhere under the miles of pines stretching to the Canadian border. The people that lived on it had always been hidden, were always disappearing. Towns and cities vanishing under collapsing mountains, rising rivers. All those houses at the bottoms of reservoirs. Porches and living rooms thick with muck and algae. A brood of snapping turtles lumbering across the dining room floor. A school of perch shimmering up the stairs. Curtains wafting in the current through the open windows, as if blown by a subtle breeze. This thing that scares us so much, they lived with it for generations. The land rejecting them, the rivers coming to get them. Their kids covered in black dust, sliding into holes in the ground and never coming out. They saw all of this coming, put it in their songs, songs with thin stabbing voices, melodies angled like broken glass. They tried to tell us that what had happened to them would happen to us, too, but we could not hear the message. Mistook it for nostalgia, when they were speaking prophecy.

  Six miles to Lisle. The last stretch of road through Whitney Point, past the school, the motels, the fairgrounds. The antique tank on a slab of concrete, painted green from the caterpillar treads to the end of the barrel. All mottled with rust. The long cyclone fence bowing in the middle. The clouds in the sky moving north in an unnatural pattern, streaking toward a focal point, as if being pulled there.

  “It’ll all be over soon,” Tenenbaum said. “The war, I mean.”

  “Do you think so?” Ketcher said.

  “Here we are on the northern end of it,” she said. “They say it stops in Binghamton. And look around you. This place doesn’t even know about it.”

  “What do you think you’ll do?” Ketcher said. “When the war ends.”

  The other three stopped, turned, looked at him. Up at the clouds.

  “Come on,” Ketcher said. “We can’t live like this, the way we are now. Just for a minute, pretend it’s not happening, will you?”

  “…”

  “…”

  “I’m going to go to the beach,” Tenenbaum said. “The longest one I can find.”

  “All the beaches are gone,” Jackson said.

  “There must be one somewhere,” Tenenbaum said. “I know there is. And when I find it, I’ll just stand there. Put my feet in the water and stare at those waves coming in. Like it’d look if I were on a ship, right? Heading out to sea.”

  “And then what?” Jackson said.

  “I don’t know,” Tenenbaum said. “That’s the whole point.”

  Jackson nodded. “I want to have another kid,” he said.

  “Thought your wife said no,” Tenenbaum said.

  “When she sees me at the end of all this,” he said, “there’s no way she’ll refuse me.” His dreams the last few nights had been full. First of his wife, carrying a pregnancy while they hoed, planted crops in long furrows, sat on the porch and prayed for rain. Then the child, a girl. Always with black hair, tan skin, bright blue eyes. A firecracker, where the boy had been cautious. Patient, where the boy had been impetuous. As if the boy were still alive and the siblings were defining themselves against each other, carving their own spaces into the world. Yet she was still the best of her parents, just like the boy had been, and in the dream, they stood behind the girl, arms around each other, marveling that people such as they could create a child like that.

  Largeman was walking point, his back to them. The request hung in the air: Ask him, ask him. But they did not want to do it, did not want to know what his plans were. He’ll take a job at a farm, Ketcher thought, shooting cattle in the head. Drowning the barn cats in the pond. Or find another man like him, and each will goad the other until they cut a stripe of chaos across the neck of this country that ends with a shoot-out against the chipped wall of a schoolhouse. Each of them with three dozen bullets in him, but not before they create nine corpses, put two women in a coma, take off a boy’s foot. Or maybe, Ketcher thought, Largeman has become too much the war’s creature to outlive it. There will be a month of vagrancy, an abandoned attempt to fix the axle of a rusted truck. A string of splintering hallways, the wind purring through the cracks in the windows. Then a gun under the chin, the caliber high enough to paint the ceiling. Yes, Ketcher thought, for a man like that, there is no other way. And then Largeman stopped, turned. Looked at Ketcher, his face stricken, terrified. He barked out four sobs, coughing on the last one’s tail. As if he had seen what was in Ketcher’s head, and knew, with a certainty that Ketcher could never have, that the private’s final vision was about right. He had only a little time left, and so much to be sorry for.

  They knew where Sunny Jim’s family house was from the papers in the satchel. Turned off Route 79 to follow the bent sign pointing to Owen Hill Road, Killawog. The houses around them, the paint half sanded off by rain, were all empty. Things on the lawn, big pieces of furniture, three chairs. The doors left open, a few jammed open with scraps of wood. Notes pinned to ripped screens, half unreadable, unable to hold the words against the weather. We are going south on 17. Meet us in Livingston Manor. Meet us in Monticello. We will wait for you there. Please find us, please. We love you to the sky and back.

  The soldiers left the houses behind, walked over the rise in the road and over the dike, followed the pavement’s curve through tall grass shaded by huge trees closing in over the swelling stream. It was almost dark again, and under the long branches, darker still. A heavy mist in the air. The shapes of houses hiding among the trees. The road rose into the gloom, and the four soldiers went quiet, ascended in a staggered line. Then they were out of the gully and there was a little more light. Enough to see the house before them, a black hulk spiking into the sky. They each paused for a breath, began to flash each other hand signals. Tenenbaum surveyed the grounds, the pitched lawn, the gravel driveway. Then she raised her hand, pointed at the front door, and each of them took a step forward. They did not know that the first bullet from the attic was only four inches from Tenenbaum’s skull, the second bullet halfway to Ketcher’s eye. The third in the chamber, the fourth in the cartridge, tiny lugs of buzzing metal, jumping, ready to fly.

  * * *

  I FOUND JACKSON IN northern Virginia. A small man, husky, nimble, a wrestler. A wide blast of scar tissue across his cheek that made one eye squint. His wiry wife just beginning to show. I think it’s a girl, she said. It feels like a girl. They both ate everything I gave them, too fast. They had not eaten enough of late.

  After his wife slipped off to sleep, I asked. “Do you mind telling me what happened?”

  “Mind? No. I tell everyone what happened.”

  He had found Ketcher’s family, told them what he knew of their son, so they could grieve and grieve right. Tried to find Largeman’s family, too, learned that they’d all been killed in the first year of the war. He liked to think he understood the man better after that, though he could never be sure, for Largeman had said so little. Then he took my h
and in his, turned it over, studying my palm. Smiled a little as his wife and unborn child stirred in their slumber.

  “If only we all knew each other a little better,” he said. “Maybe all this would have been a little different.”

  They were going to the shore next, he said, to wait for the Big One. A place with fish and shade, a pail to catch rain. He would take the war in his head and push it below the surface, sink it to the bottom and never let it come back up. For his wife and child needed him there, for whatever time they had left, and he wanted nothing more.

  The House

  IN THE END, THERE was only the mother, the father, Merry, and Sunny Jim in the big family home. The mother and father still in the same room, too tired to fight anymore. Sunny Jim slept on the couch in the living room, woke his father every morning with the creak on the stairs when he went back to his room for clothes. He heard his father shift in the sheets, let out a sighing groan. His mother off hours ago. Every spring the father and mother hauled everything into the hallway and painted their room a blinding white. They let the rest of the house go. Boards fell rotting off the side. The walls ran with the tracks of water damage. Nobody except Merry had gone to the third floor for years. Once, Sunny Jim had not seen her in a week, heard something moving up there. Went to the bottom of the stairs and called up into the grayness. Merry, are you there? Please say something. He heard movement again, and just stood there, calling her name, until the movement stopped. Late that night, she sat on the rug next to the couch, woke him with a hand on his shoulder.

  “I heard you calling,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “You wouldn’t have been able to hear me. I wasn’t in the house.”

  “How did you hear me, then?”

  “…”

  “Merry. Tell me you’re all right.”

  “…”

  “You’re my only sister. Don’t go.”

  “I won’t. Not without telling you first.”

  But the people in the valley were still talking about her. How they saw her going into the woods, coming out again. There was blood in her hair, they said, a streak of it on her cheek. What’s she doing out there?

  “Deer,” she said. “Almost always deer. Sometimes a grouse.”

  “You have to stay here now, Merry,” Sunny Jim said. “They’re scared of you.”

  “I didn’t hurt anybody.”

  “Just Dad.”

  “I was protecting you, Jim.”

  “I know.”

  “That was for you.”

  “I know that. But nobody outside of this house does. They only know that you shot your father, and that we don’t know how to keep you in the house.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “Merry…”

  He was seventeen, could not tell her what he heard, on the sidewalk in front of the Lisle Inn, on the green metal bridge across the river. If someone ever goes missing, ever turns up hurt, they said, we’ll know where to look. The Wallace brothers, Henry Robinson, and Joe Thule all remembered how she’d acted at the funeral of the girl who flew away. Heard all about what she’d done to her father, though they did not know why, thought it didn’t matter. Sunny Jim knew that one day they would be on the lawn of her house with guns in their hands. Come out, Merry. Come on out, now. They could not see how they had made it inevitable, but Sunny Jim could. He knew even then how the town lost its young. When they were children, they vanished into the sky. They were taken to hospitals forty minutes away and never came back. When they got older, they climbed into cars and buses, and the road took them, mangled them in ditches, drowned them in rivers, flung them far away. One house after another lost its people, then the trees swarmed over the timbers and glass, knocked them down and buried them. It had been that way since the flood, and nobody seemed to speak of it. It was just a thing the people left behind knew, that in time the town would be gone for good, and all of us, too. But we have to go somewhere, do we not? Even if we do not know where?

  Two weeks later, Earl Granger, six and a half years old, with a thick lisp, walked out the back door of his house. The people at the end of the road saw him enter the woods, holding one of his sister’s dolls. They thought his sister was right in front of him, they said, could have sworn they saw someone with him, or they would have stopped him. Instead they watched him step into the trees. Even waved. The next day, the panicked parents ran from house to house, rapping on doors. Have you seen my son? Staggered stricken through Lisle’s streets that night, shouting the boy’s name. Spent days in the woods, joined by parents with bigger children who felt they owed a debt to the world since their own kids were still with them. And Merry vanished herself, for days longer than usual, came back to Sunny Jim yelling at her, the first time she had ever seen him angry.

  “For God’s sake, stay in the house,” he said.

  “I’m trying to help,” she said.

  “Don’t, okay? Just don’t.”

  For nine days there was a truce, an attempt to stave off mayhem. There was no sign of Earl at all, and it was easy to believe that, in the next second, or the next, the boy would scramble out of the woods, doll in hand, looking just as he left. Asking for a jelly sandwich. As though he had fallen asleep on the ground just a few hundred yards in, been in the safe hands of vivid dreams and local deities, until hunger woke him. But then they found the doll by the plane in the woods, darkened by mud and water, half-sitting on a piece of bright white metal. There was still no sign of the boy, but it did not matter. Something had happened to him out there, they said in town. He was there and then he was gone. And they knew who knew those woods better than anyone. A few years ago, Cat Wallace’s father said, he’d come across Merry while hunting. He’d gotten lost, asked her to draw him a map back to the road and she did, too fast, too detailed. As though she carried that space around in her head all the time. The Wallace father showed the map around at the Lisle Inn, and they shook their heads. She’s spent too much time out there, they said. She’s not done with whatever it is she started.

  “Well, she’s done now,” Cat Wallace said. Fetched his brothers, a just-opened bottle of rotgut moonshine from the cabinet, and the rifles from the garage. A handgun for Joe Thule. Henry Robinson was waiting in the road for them. Together the five of them stood in the road, passing the bottle, except for the youngest. Then they walked up Owen Hill Road, guns in their hands, across their shoulders, in plain sight. Letting everyone know what they were up to without saying a thing. They were all courage at first, until Cat Wallace began to talk about the details. I’ll take the first shot, he said, but I need someone to cover me. Who’s taking the second? The other four boys looked at each other, and Joe Thule felt a beam of harsh light through the alcohol’s haze. He did not want to be there. Could not fire a gun that day. Was afraid of what Merry could do.

  “Hey guys?” he said. “I’m staying here.”

  They all stopped. Cat Wallace stared hard at Joe Thule. Joe Thule stared back.

  “You pussying out, Joe?” Cat Wallace said.

  “I’m just not doing this.”

  “She’s dangerous.”

  “What do you think we are right now? Look at us.”

  “…”

  “Go on and do it, Cat,” Joe Thule said. “I’m just saying I’m not going.”

  “Me neither,” the youngest Wallace brother said. He was having trouble standing still. He was six years old.

  Cat turned on him. “You chickenshit.”

  “Hey.” Joe Thule again. “He doesn’t want to do it.” He was still holding the pistol. The youngest Wallace wobbled, extended his arm, offering the rifle.

  “Keep it.” Cat Wallace said. “You’re no good with it, anyway.”

  The paint on the house was half-gone, the angles on the walls beginning to slacken, as though the house was a book, lying on its spine, and the covers were opening to the mold and rain. They really let this place go, Henry Robinson thought. Merry was in t
he front yard, digging a small furrow. Burying a mouse she had found on the porch the night before. She heard them coming, stopped and turned her head.

  “Hello, boys,” she said. They expected her to ask if they were going hunting. She did not. She looked Henry Robinson up and down. The boy realized at once that they were all in trouble, but there was no way out.

  “Did you hear about the Granger boy?” Cat Wallace said.

  “Yes,” she said. Looked down again, covered the mouse with earth. “They’re not going to find him. It’s very sad.”

  “You don’t think it’s funny?” Cat Wallace said.

  “That was a long time ago,” she said.

  “Not that long.”

  She stood, picked up her rifle. The boys had not seen it next to her.

  “What have you come here for?”

  Henry Robinson was about to speak, but Cat Wallace interrupted him, raised his gun and fired. He was nervous and missed. He got off two more wild shots before she brought up her own rifle and shot him in the left eye. For the middle Wallace brother and Henry Robinson, the next two-and-a-half seconds were a smear of terror. They hit her twice, the first bullet drilling into her thigh, the second one grazing her ear. She got the middle Wallace in the chest, aimed at Henry Robinson, knew before he did that his next bullet would go right in her forehead. Thought of the shadow man, first in the woods, then on the other side of the road, and now in her, and was confused. This is not what you had in mind for me, is it, she thought. You had not counted on what those boys can do.

  But then Henry Robinson fell, two shots in him. A third scored the air where he had stood. Sunny Jim was on the porch, his own rifle at his shoulder. Stared at his sister, helpless.

  “He would have killed you,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  The bodies of three young men lay in their driveway, limbs in a tangle, as if they had been dancing. Birds peeped in the trees. A bright blue day. Just down the road, they heard shouting, recognized Joe Thule’s voice. They were running back down Owen Hill Road, would go to the nearest house, fling the door to the kitchen wide. Something awful has happened. Sunny Jim staggered off the porch to his sister, and they held each other close, whispered in each other’s ears the promises neither of them would ever break. We will never lose each other. Never. We will always be there, each for the other. Then he was tearing through the woods with her rifle, stopping only to vomit. Shooting small animals, foraging from trash. Ditched the rifle at last in a pond on a farm just south of LaFayette, dug into the muck at two in the morning and buried it, under the silt, under the water. Then it was soup kitchens in Syracuse, odd jobs in Buffalo. A long trip south in a shambling wagon, following the farm work in the fall. The Wallace brothers and Henry Robinson sitting next to him, close, boys of eight again, as they had been at the funeral of the girl who flew away. He never slipped, knew Merry never would either. Only had to remember the deal they made, that he would disappear, and she would say it was Jim who killed them all. There was no one to dispute it. And he would never speak of it to anyone. Maybe never come back. But they were bound to each other then, no matter how far apart they got, and he could count on her for anything, until he let her go.