THE JUNGLE HAD GROWN BACK THROUGH THE BLACKENED GROUND. THERE WAS GREEN everywhere, green underbrush, green saplings, and dense green vines. Some of the saplings were six, seven, even nine feet high, so eager is the jungle to regain its ground.
Trees are different than men. A man’s arms are spread farthest high up, so that he can pick the fruit of the trees. Most of the greenery was at knee- and thigh-level, broadleaf plants with bold, wide, undulating leaves to catch every photon of available light. Lithe grasses that reached upward are different yet, thrusting themselves as high as their green skeletons allow and then bending to catch more light. The broad leaves of the young trees each looked like the map of a great virgin country with an irregular shore and rivers. The spiked grasses bent over from their own weight as they grew tall and waved and swayed in the gentle midday heat. Men bend over as we age. Trees stand up and insert their narrow tops into the sky as high as they can get, where the air is clear and the sun in strongest.
They had come out from Buchanan that morning in one car. John driving, Levin in the passenger seat again—men in the front and the women in the back. They drove to the plantation. There was still a sign, but there was no guard station anymore. They drove through the rubber trees, and then turned left at the road to the country club.
Some of the walls of The Club were still standing, but there was now a green and yellow thicket where the floor had once been. The wrecked grey-black cement block walls were covered with mosses and molds that snaked through the greenery as if it were camouflage, meant to blend into the shadows and streaming light. The burned-out trucks lay on their sides and were now brown-red, as they rusted. You could still see slivers of chrome as you walked from place to place.
The walls of the swimming pool had started to collapse. Where there had once been smooth pale blue tiles there was now a falling-in mound crusted with blue-green algae, and though there was still water in the pool, it had blackened, and there were water plants and marsh grasses growing in the water that had once been clear and sparkling.
The black tarmac in the parking lot and the cement of the helicopter landing pad had cracked, and there were weeds and grasses and even a few small saplings growing out of each crack. It would be many years before the asphalt and concrete could be digested by the earth, but the earth had begun the slow process of returning the asphalt to dust and allowing bush and jungle to replace that dust.
Levin didn’t see the brass shell casings at first. He could feel them under his feet as he walked. Half buried in the red earth, under the grasses and the moss, they crunched and clinked as he walked from place to place and made the footing tricky, like walking on clam shells left on a rocky beach by the retreating tide. There were still weaver birds making mud nest colonies in the ironwood tree, just beyond where the changing rooms had been.
There really wasn’t much to see. There was a place under a mango tree where the earth rose a little and another place on the other side of the swimming pool where a depression had become marshy with time. Perhaps the dead were buried in those places.
John stayed in the car.
Yvonne and Naomi picked their way across the site. Perhaps it gave them some comfort to be there. To walk where Carl and Terrance had walked. To stand where Terrance and Carl had died.
For Levin there was no comfort. No comfort now. No comfort ever. They had been one body—Carl, Terrance, and Levin—and for one brief moment, once in his life, he had been part of something bigger than himself, however doomed. This was the place where it ended.
Levin walked inside the ruins of the clubhouse. Was this the wall they slept next to? Were the cement blocks on the ground the cement blocks that had buried Carl and Terrance? The women followed Levin as he walked, even though he wasn’t able to say what he was thinking. The bar had been over there. The hallway here. The toilet, down the hall where the kitchen once was. What we should remember? How we should feel? What do we know? How can we ever get back what we have lost?
There is no proper trinket, Levin thought. No souvenir. No appropriate memento. They did not find a keychain or a pocket knife or a wallet or a necklace or a hat. There were the shell casings, of course, but they left the shell casings alone, and ground them deeper into the earth as they walked. There was just the thicket, the jungle, the undergrowth Levin felt around him, the dense green carpet that digests hopes, courage, dreams, sins, and failures; inhaling the people we are, the people we’ve been, and the people we love, after we stand up together to love and then lay down together under this warm green crust. Our bones, our carcasses—they are the only souvenirs, but who needs them? The green earth, the thicket, the jungle, growing back through the cracks in the asphalt is enough, is what we together become.
Then the women were in the car, waiting for him. John started the engine. It was time to go.
One foot after the next. One step at a time.