Lost Everything (17 page)

“Is everyone all right?” she said.

The bodies were already almost consumed. The pyres were ships with riggings of fire, the wind filling sails of smoke. The people of Sunbury waited until they were sure that flesh and bone had become ash, then pushed their dead away from them with a final wail. Watched the fiery vessels wend their way into the current, where they broke into pieces, cast a long line of sparks along the surface of the water.

*   *   *

WE TRY TO FIX
our gaze on the consolations, the bread broken, the fruit shared, the kind words. The light that must be coming. But it is too easy now to remember other things instead. All that suffering. There must be something better than this world, and the world must be better than this. We want to know how it got so low, and we are angry when there is no answer. I am failing you, too, in leaving so much out, the people I cannot find, the names I cannot record, the places I can no longer go. The words I cannot say. Though if there is a plan, perhaps this is part of it, that we will look on those who suffer most, consider all that we have lost, and speak with their voices when we say we have had enough and we cannot lose any more. Speak, and then turn to act, with what the powers have put before us.

I have been to so many funerals now. We bury them in the gray soil, stand over the mounds, lean on our shovels. Say the same words again and again. But there are pregnancies too, children coming. A woman like a great egg. Another just conceived. They help us dig, then turn and spit into the earth. They will not say it, but they cannot keep it all in either. For their coming children are their hopes embodied, their faith made flesh, that all that is ending is beginning again. For the world will not be fallen to their children. It will only be the world, new as they are. And perhaps if we tell them enough, if we say the right thing, they will see a way out, and know what to do.

*   *   *

THAT NIGHT AT SUNBURY,
Elise almost died twice. First there were the two bullets through the window, hissing by her ear so fast that she could not think to duck. She looked at the shards of glass on the floor, the holes in the wooden wall. Realized that if she’d seen the shots coming, tried to get away, they would have gotten her, one in the jaw and one in the neck. Then she ran out into the hallway, looking for her boy. Found his girlfriend, standing in the hall, arms at her sides. Where is he, she said, her voice too sharp. The girl winced, just pointed up the stairs toward the deck, where the slugs and arrows were already flying. Elise yelled her son’s name, scrambled up the stairs, just in time to see Sunny Jim pull her boy to safety, then start shooting. Andre lay in the stairwell, not blinking enough, then blinking too much. Her hands moved over him, pressing into him, rifling through his clothes, as though he were a child again. She was looking for the wound. When she found nothing, she crushed him in her arms. Andre, Andre. Started crying as soon as she felt his hands move, hugging her back.

At the service on the
Carthage,
Sunny Jim stood near the back, his hands clasped in front of him. Was slow to move as the service ended, only began to turn as others moved past him. The partiers comforting each other: When we get to Towanda, everything will be better. We just have to get there and we’ll be all right.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. “I want to thank you,” Elise said, “for saving my son yesterday.”

“It was nothing,” Sunny Jim said. “You would have done the same.”

“Maybe. You have kids?”

“Yeah. One, also a boy. I’m going to get him now.”

“Where is he?”

“Up north, with my sister.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Lisle.”

“I grew up in Elmira.”

They both nodded. A shared understanding of the country, the fits of luck and misfortune that could bend a life. How you could start out at their mercy, though that never meant you should give up.

“You know, Andre’s never even met his father,” Elise said. Thought, for a moment, that she should be careful, then decided there was no time for it. “He’s had people in his life before that do the job, but no one for a while, for long enough. Just me. It seems a shame, doesn’t it? When it’s so much easier with two.”

“What’s your name again?” Sunny Jim said.

“Elise.”

“Elise, I have a wife.” A hitch in his voice when he said that, and for an instant, she saw straight into him.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be. You didn’t know.”

“I hope you find her,” Elise said. “Does she know how good you are?”

“No. Or how bad I am, either.”

There was so much he had never said to Aline. They met years before the war in the basement of a house that someone had turned into a bar whose name he could not remember. He creaked down the wooden stairs and found her there with another man. They were fighting, like Sunny Jim’s parents had fought, and she was winning. It ended with her splitting the man’s forehead open with a green metal toolbox. He staggered back three steps to the wall, sat down as though he were hypnotized, the blood already halfway down his shirt. Both eyes still open, staring at her, the hatred settling into his face to stay. She dropped the toolbox and just looked at him. Almost fascinated by what she had done. An expression Sunny Jim had seen on Merry, before he left.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Sunny Jim told her. “Though, if I were you, I’d quit seeing him.”

“…”

“Do you have a place to be?” he said.

He had two rooms over what had once been a Chinese restaurant. Windows overlooking the parking lot in the back. Two cars there that weather and animals were taking apart. The windshield had gone on one of them, and plants grew from the seats. Fourteen cats lived in the other. They lounged on the dashboard, mated in the footwell, slept on the engine, though it had not been warm since Sunny Jim lived there.

Sunny Jim and Aline stumbled up the stairs together. He put her in the bed, then lay on the couch, hands under his head, unable to sleep, since he had given her the blanket. The cracks in the ceiling were dry riverbeds on a desert floor. He listened to Aline breathe all night and decided he needed it. In the morning, he convinced her to stay a few days. By the end of the week, they were sharing the bed. The sound of her breath was even better when it was closer.

Then there was Aaron, Aaron and the war. Their pasts and futures fell away from Sunny Jim and Aline until only the minutes close to them mattered, the bullets and bombs looking for them, their son’s fingers in their hair. The three of them clung to each other whenever Aline was there, holding their little family together. There was a night two years into the war, when Aaron was only four, and it was just the three of them in a house that had been half taken apart by the fighting. The living room, the stairs to the second floor, open to the sky. Two of the bedrooms covered with broken glass. But one room was somehow still intact. A twin bed, a dresser, a nightstand. Only the lamp knocked over. The three of them got into the bed and Aaron fell asleep between them, on his side. Soon Aline was slumbering, too. Sunny Jim could hear the war, not far off. Hear the house groaning and shuddering around him. They were in danger, there was no question about it. Tomorrow they would have to move, and he did not know where they were going to sleep then. But for that hour, Sunny Jim was happy, as happy as he had ever been. And when Aline was gone, every day was a year, a year that Aaron skipped through, stringing songs together from what he saw all around him. Broken glass, broken glass, make one slip and cut your …

And then Aline did not come back at all.

From the night he met her, Sunny Jim knew what people thought Aline was. She was half feral to them. They looked at her teeth and her nails before they got too close, because she looked like someone who would use them. And when Sunny Jim and Aline got together, he knew what everyone they met was thinking, that someday she would eat him alive. Leave him in a pool of his blood if he said the wrong thing. One pair of eyes after another would say it: What are you doing with her? They did not see what he saw, the loyalty coiled inside her ferocity, the ferocity that made him loyal to her. Before he met her, he could not imagine living very long. He was far from home, and the storm was coming. But with Aline, he had built a temporary shelter, and wherever they went, the rain could not touch them. When Aaron was born, he felt invincible, as though the evils of the world parted before his family when they walked down the street together, the baby in his arms. He began to dream, as he wouldn’t let himself before, of a new house, beneath trees on a hill, a place that could keep the rain out for years, and that he would not live to see fall over.

They first saw the war feasting on a small town in Maryland one night. They were walking along a county road that skimmed across rolling land, a wrinkled map folded in Sunny Jim’s jacket pocket. Aaron asleep, strapped to his back. He and Aline thought they would round the next bend out of a stand of trees and see the lights from the windows of low houses. Instead, all the houses were dark, lit from behind by a great fire. Flares and columns of flame rose into the air. They knew what it was that they were seeing, had heard about the violence rising out of the south, and Sunny Jim felt Aline take his left hand, grip it hard. They watched the destruction for a full minute without saying anything. Did not need to. I will never leave you, Aline said, and Sunny Jim knew she wanted to believe it. But he could feel the war pulling at her even then, opening its fiery arms. Knew that he could not stop her from running toward it.

You left us, Aline, he wanted to say now. You left us to this. Why won’t you come back? There was so much he wanted to tell her, because he had never said enough. About how much he loved her. About their son, the incredible being he was, the kind of man he was already becoming. Embodying what was good in his parents and casting the rest aside. He had never told her everything about Merry: enough that Aline was worried, but not enough to be scared, of Merry, of him. If she knew it all, she might have left him earlier, he thought, left and taken Aaron with her. Or maybe she would have loved him more, he never could decide which. He always imagined telling her one day when they were much older, telling her everything, about the bodies in the driveway and the deal he struck with his sister, a promise they both kept and always would. How he thought he could tell sometimes when his sister was thinking of him, feel a warmth under the scalp, spreading across his skull. I love you, Sunny Jim, even if I cannot imagine what you look like anymore. He wanted to tell Aline all these things, but could not. He was not ready.

“I didn’t realize you were so good with a gun,” Reverend Bauxite said later.

“Learned it hunting,” Sunny Jim said.

“You must have been some hunter.”

“…”

“They could have used you in Harrisburg.”

“I know.”

“Jim?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you ever shot anybody before?”

“…”

“…”

All those nights in Harrisburg when Sunny Jim had said no guns, Reverend Bauxite thought it was because he did not know how to shoot, or would not. Believed that the willingness to hurt, to kill, was a thing that separated him from Aline. But now the priest could almost see it, the burning hand shaping his friend’s life, leaving its fingerprints. The violence he was capable of. He thought of Merry, too, an hour before she took Aaron with her back to Lisle. A long rifle slung across her back at a casual angle, an obvious piece of hunting equipment that set her apart from the guerrillas, made Reverend Bauxite worry whether she’d be able to keep the boy from harm. Then a shell landed close to them, shook the floor and ceiling, brought down pieces of plaster. Sunny Jim didn’t even duck, and Merry closed her eyes and smiled a little, as if listening to distant music, the voice of a beloved child in another room. A small rapture blooming in her. Reverend Bauxite studied her, the doubt in her abilities replaced by something else—he could not say what with precision. She opened her eyes again, stared at him, as though she could read him in a glance. And then Sunny Jim embraced her, gave her and his son a long, crushing hug.

“Merry—”

“—There’s no time, Jim. No time. Just know I’ll do anything to keep him safe. You know I will.”

“I know.”

Reverend Bauxite believed her, and was afraid of her. As he was a little afraid of his friend now, though he loved him all the same.

The Highway

THE SOLDIERS COULD HEAR
the fighting ahead of them for miles. Even over the truck’s roar, the booming rumbled through the ground: drums, footsteps, thunder. When the truck blew another tire on the road four miles south of Scranton, they could see the war in the sky. The city’s light projected onto the belly of the monsoon. Flashes of fire, then the sounds of the explosions rolling over them. The echo carried the voices of the victims, rising in surprise and terror. The soldiers on the road could feel it then. What it might be like in the valley right now.

A change came over Largeman. His ears pricked, his arms and legs grew taut, and his eyes and mouth went slack, as though something else were taking over. Ketcher saw it and a sharp, dissonant pain speared his brain. Something terrible was about to happen. It was waiting for them on the road, feet stamping the earth. Come here.

“Are we posted for combat?” Ketcher said.

“No,” Tenenbaum said. “It’s straight through to Lisle now.” Oblivious. Whatever was waiting on the road for them smiled.

The light gathered around them, poured into the crack between the doors, as they rode into Scranton. The voices of bombs much closer, more complex, a hissing roar over the thudding shudder. The truck’s engine jumped and screeched, the vehicle leaning forward. Going faster, as though the driver was trying to outrun something. Jumped again, lurched back. The tires skidding to the left and right, jostling the soldiers. Then they stopped. The engine idled, died. The sounds of war got even clearer. The whistles of shells, notes at intervals dropping together. The hoarse trill of machine-gun fire. A great shuffling, human voices yelling, complaining. Sighing, dying. The driver’s head out the side window. Please get off the road and let us through. The truck did not move. A discussion in the cab, footsteps at the side of the truck. The doors swung open.