Chapter Two
So that’s how they got to the lake and the ruined town. The town, according to the map, was named Green Hill. They had never been through it before, or to the shores of this lake. There was no green sign on the road this time; it had been blasted or burned. As if whoever had come through the day before had wanted to wipe it off the face of the earth. Was that just yesterday?
That morning, camping in the woods above the wreckage, they lay in the predawn dark and listened to the rain patter and sweep across the tarp with the rhythm of the winds, and neither was willing to move from the warmth of their sleeping bags. Jess thought that if he could just focus on the nested heat and sound of the rain and the smells of the wet woods he might lie there in relative peace for the rest of his days.
He said, “What do you think they want?”
“We don’t even know who they are.”
“Yeah.”
“Secessionists, I guess. I don’t know.” Storey reached back with both hands and bunched the pillow of his jacket tighter under the back of his head. He said, “If we knew, maybe we’d have a better idea what the hell’s going on.”
“I was thinking about that woman down there.”
“The one I found?”
“Yes. You think she held on to that rock?”
“No. That’s why she tucked it in her shirt. She was smart. Also…”
“What?” Jess said.
Storey coughed. “I wasn’t going to…”
“…tell me?”
“Yeah.”
“Kinda too late for that.”
“I know.”
Another flash, silent, and for a moment they saw the rain as a luminous scrim, and the dark lacing of the boughs, and then the far-off thunder boomed and rolled off the edge of the night like distant artillery. Maybe it was.
“She was pregnant,” Storey said. “Like full-term.”
“Oh.”
And they were silent, and Jess felt grateful for the drum and rush of the rain, which muted even his wildest imaginings. Because he didn’t have it in him. To keep guessing at why any of this was happening.
By first light, the rain had calmed to a gentle sift on the cloth roof, and it was a mere mist when they zipped into Gore-Tex rain gear and stepped out into the gray dawn. Cold, nearly frost. They walked to the edge of the woods and pissed and could not see the lake for the fog that lay over it and shredded in the tops of the trees on the far shore.
“I’ll go down,” Jess said. “Maybe I can find us something for breakfast.”
“You will. After the…I didn’t have it in me to scavenge.”
Jess picked up the .308 and slung the rifle and walked. He stopped, turned. “Did you leave her there? In the water? I don’t want to…” He trailed off.
Storey shook his head. “I carried her up to what must have been the marina shack and buried her in cinders.”
“Okay.”
Jess walked. Down the corridor of a paved street blown with drifting ash. The street dropped straight into the fog, and he descended into cloud. As he walked, the skeletal masonwork on either side faded to shapes spectral and half formed in the moving shroud and he made himself keep on. Where were the vehicles? Burned husks, every one. He felt it before he saw it: the lakewater warmer than the night air. And smelled an almost sea-like rank, maybe old algae on the rocks of the shore, or discarded fish, and he thought how fathers and daughters or sons might have been fishing here off the double docks just yesterday afternoon. Not possible. Years had passed since then.
He skirted the wet ash-and-cinder heap of what must have been the marina office and found the flagstone pavers that brought him to the docks and the boats tied there. The main stems of the docks extended eastward into the lake; they branched to either side with the shorter, planked decks of the berths. There were two docks, and he chose the one to the south, on his right hand. J-boats, day sailers, cats, and outboard skiffs. These were small sloops with cockpits and windowed cabins, and Jess knew they would have chests and latching cupboards with some provisions.
The first he came to had beautiful salmon-colored sails reefed and tied along the boom. No cover had been snapped over them, which meant probably that she was regularly used. What day of the week was it? He didn’t know. Maybe yesterday was Saturday and the owners hadn’t buttoned the cover on the sails because they knew they’d be back to sail today. What we take for granted—that another day would come. Everyone had to know in their bones that every life hung by a thread. That the world did. But if we couldn’t pretend to count on a morning of sailing, or fishing, or a visit with someone we loved the next day, we’d go nuts, right? Right. So pretend away.
The boat was called Isabella. That simple. No pretense to sophistication like the catamaran beside it called Aphrodite. No crude pun like the fishing cruiser in the next berth with downriggers and twin Mercs called Fish n Chicks. Jess hopped over the cable rail of the sloop and into the cockpit with its stainless-steel wheel.
He faced a locked hatch that battened the entry and what he knew were steps down to the cabin. The hatch was stout teak, beaded with rain, secured at the top with a padlock. He climbed back onto the dock and up to the ruin of the marina shack and past it. He did not want to dig around in the wreckage and find the woman. He went on between what once were houses and, in what had to be a backyard with a single standing apple tree, he found the small foundation of what yesterday was probably a toolshed. Beside a toppled rolling toolbox he found a blackened fireman’s ax. It was solid steel and had heft and balance but was not heavy; the head was larger than that of an ax made for splitting wood, and he swung it like a batter warming up, and though the rubber grip had burned away and the metal was wet, it felt good in his hands. Maybe he’d keep it. He walked with it back down to the Isabella and again climbed aboard, and he was about to take a full cathartic swing against the planks of the hatch when it occurred to him that they could sail this very boat up to Randall. The winds by late morning were westerly, and they could follow the shoreline generally north on a single tack and be there faster and with much less effort than walking. And the sails were the ruddy, uneven, washed color of red dirt, and he liked the name. So he set down the ax and jumped onto the dock again and went back to his ruined shed and dug around in ash so fine and wet it turned to paste where he stirred it. Against the far stem wall, in cinders burned hard like clinker coal, he found the bolt cutters. The rubber grips had melted off this, too, but the handles and the blades, though seared, were usable.
He cut the padlock off the boat and went down into the cabin, which was lit by a skylight and rows of high windows. In the tiny galley was a single cupboard with a half-eaten box of Oreos in a Ziploc and three cans of Dinty Moore beef stew. Good enough. He’d kill for some coffee. He was about to search for chest storage under one of the benches in the saloon when he saw on the cushion a paperback book titled The Outermost House with a bookmark partway through, and next to it a teddy bear and a plastic superhero. A wave of nausea shuddered, and he grabbed up the book and went up the four steep steps into the open and gasped for fresh air and did not vomit.
They didn’t make a fire this time. They opened the cans with their folding clip knives and ate the beef stew with plastic camp-spoons. Just as good cold, once they scraped away the white layer of clotted fat at the top. They were both impatient to get moving, though had anyone asked they wouldn’t have known why. Because they were in the wake of a rolling catastrophe, moving behind some malign harvest whose shape and intention they could only guess, and neither could have articulated why that was so. They could just as easily have fled south. If another bridge was blown they could have tried to swim or wade, couldn’t they? But they were not fleeing, they were following. They were both hunters. Were they hunting? No. They were trying to find a working vehicle they could take home. Home for Storey: Burlington, Vermont, where Storey was a professor at the university; it would be a long day’s drive from anywhere up here. It was southwest, but the roads in the big woods were so sparse and so harried by lakes and swamps, the fastest route was always due south to Bangor and across. Not an option, it seemed.
So they would walk up along the lakeshore. Now they sat on the log beside the water-soaked ashes in last night’s fire ring and scraped the last of the stew out of the cans. Storey said, “It’s strange: The buildings are all burned to the ground. Every single one.”
“I was thinking that, too.”
“In a wildfire, say, that overruns a town, there will be half-burned houses, whole buildings still standing that were jumped and spared. Here everything is gone.”
Jess scooped the thick brown sauce from the bottom of the tin and he sucked on the spoon. He could have eaten two more cans. “I got half a pack of Oreos, too,” he said.
Storey nodded.
“There’s a lot that’s strange.” Jess looked into the empty can with real sadness. “Do you want me to go down and look for more food?” He didn’t tell Storey about the doll and the teddy bear and how he had dreaded boarding more boats and had returned. Storey already knew, and shook his head. “Randall is a shore town, too. Bigger. On the map there’s a marina. Should be plenty more boats. We can get lunch there. And more.”
Get lunch. Like a plan to visit some eatery. Words it seemed now from another era.
“Do you think they’re dead? All of them? We saw so few bodies. Maybe they took everyone out before they burned it.”
“Maybe. I think they hit it from the air first.”
Scorched earth. Indiscriminate. Easier from the air. Neither said it.
“So I was thinking we could sail,” Jess said. “The food came off a twenty-four-foot sloop. The sails are on the halyards and reefed. The wind is picking up and we could be there in an hour.”
“No.”
“Because we’d be so visible?”
“Yes.”
“This thing, whatever it is, is not looking back. Doesn’t seem to be.”
“We don’t know where it’s looking. So far it…they…keep moving. But—”
Storey stopped midstream, as if he could not carry the weight of everything he did not know. He set the can on the damp duff and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. Storey had a wife and two daughters, eight and fourteen. These were three of the things he did not know about, and every once in a while they overtook him. Jess thought that it made him more cautious, because—to be blunt—he had more to live for. Jess asked himself if he, Jess, was cavalier with his own life, and if so, was it because he had no children and no longer had a wife. He didn’t think so. On all their hunting and canoe trips and travels in the past, he, Jess, was the one more willing to take risks. If he wanted to sail it was because there was a calculus of energy conservation and he figured that the energy they’d save on the boat might be energy that later on would save their lives. But was that it, or was he just lazier than Storey?
Storey collected himself and dropped his hand from his face. “It’d be like breaking cover and shouting, ‘Hey, over here! Look!’ You know that, right?”
“Yes.”
“We can walk.”
“Yeah.”
Jess saw Storey dig for the phone in the pocket of his pants again, tap the airplane-mode icon off, and check. A gesture now almost reflexive.
Jess said gently, “Store.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t check so often—”
Storey lifted his eyes. They were flat and bleak.
Jess said, “To save battery. And we should turn one off. For later. For emergencies. I’ve got one portable charger. I’ll…I’ll turn off mine.”
“For emergencies?”
Jess blinked. He turned and let his eyes travel down the hill, over the charred townsite. “Yeah.” He swallowed. “I know.”
One thing he did know was that Storey was worried sick not only about the safety of his family during a civil convulsion, but also about what Lena and the girls would be going through in their panic to reach him. If this was secession or something like it, Lena would have heard by now. She was also a professor at UVM, political science, well connected both in Vermont’s contingent to Washington and in the state Legislature, and she would be using those connections and lighting up dozens of phones in a frenzy to find her husband. And she would not be able to insulate her daughters. Andrea, the older sister, was a star cross-country runner and also suffered a form of anorexia and was super-sensitive. She was at serious risk, and upsets and trauma revved up her disorder. When their cat, Coco, had been hit by a car last year, Andrea had lost so much weight the doctor told Storey and Lena that even with extreme intervention she might die.
Jess also knew that the home screen on Storey’s phone was a photo of Lena and the girls on a bright, windy day, pressed all together against the rail of a ferry deck and smiling wildly. There was the gray-blue of Lake Champlain behind them, and the distant blue ridges of the Adirondacks beyond. They were going backpacking for the weekend. Lena’s ponytail was pulled through the band of her hat, but Andrea, who at fourteen was nearly as tall, wore her tracksuit jacket and her long hair loose, and it blew across her mother’s face. Little Geneva tucked up into her mother’s armpit like a fledgling and grinned uncertainly, and held her hands out as if to beseech the unbridled beauty of the day to calm down a little. Jess knew that Storey probably lit his phone as much to take solace in the picture as to check for a signal.
“Okay,” Storey said finally. “I’ll go easy with the phone and you keep yours off. Good idea.”
Nobody had to suggest they break down the shelter. They devoured the two stacks of Oreos and stood in unison and went to the olive nylon tarp and unstaked it and unslung the parachute cord from between the trees and folded the sheet and coiled the line. They packed up and shucked the rain gear and hefted the packs and rifles and walked out to the edge of the trees.
For some reason Jess held on to the firefighter’s ax. He snugged it through the ice-ax loop on his pack and strapped it tight. The fog was thinning now and spuming over the water in spectral tatters that merged and moved past each other. The two men descended the aisle of an ash-blown street, and when they intersected the larger thoroughfare that became the highway they turned left and walked out of town. On the two-lane county road the remains of burned foundations spaced wider and wider apart, and they followed the detritus of the violently displaced—the single shoes, wallets, upturned strollers, and shattered picture frames—until that, too, petered out on a ribbon of water-stained tarmac drying out, then steaming in late-September heat. Farm fields now, untouched, and woods. The lake through trees on their right. A small sign at the head of a driveway that said “C Bar C, Registered Quarter Horses, Hay, Boarding.” No barn or stable visible at the top of the hill. Jess wondered what had happened to the horses. Better not to know. As he walked he repeated the name of the boat, Isabella, over and over like a mantra. It was the name he and Jan had discussed for the girl they did not have.
The liminal spaces are the ones I love the most and where I feel the most uncomfortable. And the most sad. Do you know what I mean? Jan had nudged him, her face blurred with whimsy.
I think so.
Like my dreams. Between the waking, living world and the sleep of the dead. Mostly in my dreams I grieve. Mostly, they are about loss.
Me, too.
Or I am anxious. Stressed. I am on the wrong train, I watch the platform receding, the one where I am supposed to be. Nobody is speaking a language I can understand. There is usually some menace I should be running from but can’t. Rarely do I make love in my dreams or even have sex, or fly, or come over some ridge into Shangri-la.
Same.
But I love them just the same. My life without them would be a hollow shell.
A hollow shell.
He repeated it and thought how there is also a liminal space in an empty shell, one that you can hold to your ear and which will give you, out of its own emptiness, the sounds of surf and wind. A benison from one who holds nothing. And he thought of that conversation many times after she left, and how emptiness was a place he was learning to appreciate if not love, as she had learned to love the in-betweens. He had to acknowledge something. Bow to it, if slightly.
The day warmed and whatever mist clung to the ridges faded and vanished. They stopped in the road and stripped off their jackets. The road hugged the shoreline loosely, straying around wooded hills and what looked like large holdings at water’s edge. Hard to tell, because where there might have been mansions there were now only blackened ruins and docks. And, again, the boats. Whatever boats, cleated to the docks or rocking on their moorings, had been left untouched. So they walked the edge of the road and skirted the lake, sometimes close, sometimes as much as a half-mile above. They tried twice to shortcut across fields and lost time crossing fences and ditches and scratched their arms in the brambles. Lost time. Did they have time to lose, or gain? Jess wondered. Since they had started walking it almost seemed time was suspended. Or the normal accounting of it. Because time worked best when there was a movement toward or away. Toward desire, away from death. Away from the Big Bang, toward an infinite expansion that might or might not be God. Toward quitting time, beer-thirty, a quinceañera, a vacation, a wedding, a funeral. Toward the sense of a poem, or love, or away from the chaos of a dream. But now they did not know, truly, what they were headed into or out of. Or what flashed on the horizon.
And so Storey, who still believed he had a bearing, which was his family, was more eager to try the shortcuts, and Jess had to remind him that they had cost.
And then what once were houses along the shoreline became more frequent, houses with docks and ski boats tied, and little Friendship sloops on moorings—probably a race class up here. There were flagpoles on the lawns that sloped to the water where American flags still hung and lifted in the pulsing breeze. And Jess knew they were getting close to the town and he wondered if whatever militia had blazed through was unionist and punishing a secessionist county. Could you use that term in the third millennium? Unionist? Was any of this really happening? Or was he now in some long, involved anxious dream, in which his grief at the loss of his wife bubbled to the surface and frothed? And from which he would wake, pillow damp, into a hunting trip with Storey…wake into a darkness before daybreak that held the same scents of spruce and fir and lakewater that he smelled now? How many dreams within dreams could a person wake from? In grade school everyone said that if you sneezed more than eight times you would die; was it like that?
And if this grim procession or juggernaut of harvest that they were following now—if it was anti-secessionist, why would they burn the places that flew the Stars and Stripes? Wouldn’t they leapfrog around them? And why would a rabidly secessionist town—rabid enough to become a target—let anyone fly an American flag? It made no sense.
Maybe they, whoever they were, knew that flying the flag was a shallow attempt to save one’s skin. Maybe they knew that the town knew they were coming—maybe they knew that, as they attacked, they could not shut down cell service fast enough, not before a few desperate calls got out, warning other folks along the lake, or farther afield. And those people, the townspeople here, armed with the knowledge that the storm was bearing down, maybe in one last act of apostasy, or its inverse, they ran the flags up the poles and prayed.
It was too confusing. They had no idea who was on whose side, or what, really, the sides were about. Jess stopped in the road and shook his head as if trying to clear it.
“What?” Storey said.
“The flags.” Jess pointed.
“So?”
“Didn’t we say that this might be some eruption over secession?”
“So?” Storey blinked down to the landscaped shoreline.
“So what do the flags mean?”
“Hell if I know.”
“I mean, whose side is who on? I’m thinking destruction on this scale has gotta be full-on military. U.S. of A. So these towns must be rebel or whatever. Right?”
Storey stood looking east and blinked in the autumn sun, a pale, early-morning sun that was barely an hour clear of the ridges. He stood as if smelling the still-cool breeze that stirred in the long grass at the edge of the road.
“I wonder if it matters,” he said.
“What?”
“I wonder if it matters whose side anyone is on.”
Jess winced at his friend. “What does that mean?”
Storey turned. He tucked his thumbs under the pack straps and shrugged the weight up off his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “All this…” He trailed off. Jess waited. “It seems vicious and random.”
“Random?”
“Not random, I guess. Indiscriminate. They’re burning everything. Except the boats.”
“So…what, then?”
Storey looked back down to the lake. To the boats there, the flagpoles. “I dunno, Jess. It’s like the heat of the destruction, the savagery…It’s like it’s about something deeper than any issue like secession.”
Jess watched his oldest friend. Whose week-old beard had flecks of gray. He knew, watching him, that Storey was thinking about the fierce and pervasive violence and that he was praying that it not spill over into New Hampshire and Vermont and touch his children and his wife. In suggesting that the violence felt deeper than secession he was voicing his own dread that it might not have boundaries.
Jess spat into the road, hitched up his own pack. “It’s probably just some crazy central-Maine shit. Right? Something like this was bound to happen somewhere.”
Storey was more than worried; he was grieving. Already. Jess could see it on his face. But Storey smiled, sad. He appreciated Jess’s effort.
Storey said, “The town would have sent out distress signals. One kind or another.”
“Right.”
“They would have warned everyone else. You know that the attacks, news of them, are zinging all over the news and the internet right now.”
“Right.”
“Why doesn’t it feel that way?”
In half a mile they came to a sign, green, that said “Randall, Population 2,732.” So they had let the sign stand. That did seem random, or at least scattershot, since Green Hill’s, on both sides of town, were gone.
But, as in Green Hill, not much else had been spared. The county road dropped down a gentle hill and into what must have been a pretty Main Street not high above the water. And so the town center was mostly flat, with streets branching down to the shore and a lovely wharf, still intact. On the far side of the wharf, with its walkway and benches and shade trees of oak and pine and maple, was another marina, this one at least twice the size of the one in Green Hill. The trees still stood; the benches invited respite. The boats swung gently on their moorings, as before. The black reek of burned houses watered their eyes.
Again, as they walked the sooted aisles of the narrow streets, they passed only the silent blackened monuments of chimney, hearth, foundation wall. Some still smoked, and when they stirred a heap of cinders with a length of rebar they pushed up glowing embers. They passed what must have been the stone arch entryway to a modest church; nothing else of it stood. Again they called out. Again they knew, without knowing why, that the typhoon of the reapers had passed and gone. Again they found few bodies. There was what must have been a child curled behind a stack of chimney stones, sheltered in what once must have been a hidden cubby or closet. The body was small and blackened and lipless with bared teeth, and Storey lurched from the sight and Jess heard him heave. There was what must have been a couple embraced beneath what must have been a pickup in what must have been a garage. There was a badly burned body sprawled inside a grove of seven poplars whose unsinged leaves spun and clattered in the easy wind. How did that happen? On the north end of the wharf and behind it, at what once had been an intersection, a street sign still stood—bronzed letters embossed on dark steel: “Water Street.”
It seemed to Jess almost like a taunt; he wasn’t sure why. He didn’t want to look anymore. He walked to the edge of the wharf, which was decked with heavy, weather-grayed planks. They soothed him somehow. As did the prospect of open water, far shore, moored sailboats.
On the closest dock was a classic blue Boston Whaler skiff with a 150 Merc, clean and cleated, ready to travel. Why couldn’t they climb in and cast off? Gun the motor and aim for the distant shoreline? Land at some unburned camp and warn the family, make the calls, get a lift?
Because, Jess suspected, there were no families now. No cedar-shingled cottages with Adirondack chairs on a wide porch, with nursery-bought geraniums hanging from baskets under the eaves, and some yellow Lab barking good-naturedly as he and Storey coasted in. Some barefoot child running after the dog and yelling, “Opey, no! Opey! Bad dog!” Jess throwing a single hitch over the piling and clambering out, the dog now bumping legs and whining, Jess pounding the top of his mallet head with an open palm, the child yelling “Opey, no!” though there was nothing anymore to redress, the child scrambling out to the end of the dock and grabbing his dog by the collar, dragging him back, explaining seriously, “He’s nice, he doesn’t bite!” The mother stepping off the porch, the father from the garden beside the cottage, wiping hands on thighs of blue jeans as in a choreography, as in a movie, as in a Norman Rockwell painting titled The Greeting in which the Sunday-morning boaters are not traumatized strangers but old friends from across the lake who bring jars of honey from their own bees and a Superman comic for Willum, and everyone sticks to their lines. Jess felt a lurch in his chest. Why couldn’t anyone stick to their lines, ever? Life might accede to being idealized for a single freeze-frame picture but the characters always cracked. Or went away. And he knew that if that family ever did in fact exist, and did in fact share moments of joy and days of peace, they existed on this day no longer. He and Storey could get in the boat and power across the lake and run up along the shore and he knew what they’d find. And then what? Somehow they intuited that they were safer in the wake of the holocaust, the way veteran wildland firefighters will “run back into the black,” run for safety into the zone that has just been burned. But you could not follow the devastation forever. Because by the time you were discovered and killed your spirit would be already dead.
“No rental car, huh?” It was Storey on the wharf behind him.
“No.”
“You’re still thinking about a boat. Maybe running across and trying the other side.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think running east would help us. Roadwise.”
“No.”
“It’d be a long walk through the woods and mountains.”
“Yes.”
“Also food. We haven’t seen a single deer. Why not?”
“I don’t know.” Jess turned his head. If he had been looking with longing over the water, he could see in Storey’s grimace that his friend had no desire to go there. Well, Storey wanted to get to his family most of all, and Lena and the girls were to the west, behind them as they stood.
Jess said, “No signal, huh?”
“No.”
“I was looking at the road map. The county highway we’ve been following turns west, away from the lake. But there’s one more town up the shore. Not a town, a hamlet. Beryl. The road up there is dirt.”
“Okay.”
“Do you think we should go?”
“I think we should scavenge as much food out of these boats as we can find. Probably we should have done it before, back in Green Hill.”
“Yeah.”
“I guess we were in shock.”
“Is that what it was?” Is this what shock felt like? Jess didn’t know. He didn’t think so. He could move, reason. His gyroscope was working; he knew where his body was in space and in the landscape. He just didn’t know much else. Like what they were doing here or where they should go. “I was eyeing that Boston Whaler,” he confessed.
“I knew you were.”
“I figure we can use it to get out to all the moored boats. The ones worth a visit.”
“Okay. You wanna hit the docks first?”
“Yep.”
Two weeks after Labor Day and no one, it seemed, was in a hurry to trailer their boats off this lake. In other years, the years of their first hunts, most of the summer people would be gone by now, their houses closed up for winter and their vessels towed away. But now, with dependably warmer falls and with new iterations of the virus sweeping the country in seasonal waves, more people were working remotely and staying put in summer camps and homes through Thanksgiving at least. Many stayed all year. And on the warm days, the days of Indian summer that stretched into October and returned sporadically in November, the folks From Away still fished and wakeboarded, water-skied, and sailed. To Jess it seemed decadent. Vacations should have boundaries, shouldn’t they? He was surprised at his own puritanical impulse. He couldn’t help thinking that if these recreationalists had returned home earlier they all might be drinking coffee now in their home kitchens and not be mixing with rain-slurried ash. God. Nobody deserved this.
“Hey.” Storey touched his shoulder.
“Oh. Yeah?”
“Let’s find something to eat. Maybe we’re getting hangry.”
They left their packs on one of the benches and moved fast. The marina contained three floating docks with perpendicular spurs long enough to berth three twenty-six-footers end to end. And they were nearly full. But most of the vessels were either open motorboats built for day fishing or pulling a wakeboard, or little open sailboats, cats and sloops. Jess had noticed a cohort of probably nineteen-foot Friendship sloops on their way up the lake, and there were many more here. Something about the loyalty to an old working design stirred now a sense of admiration or kinship with all these boat owners; but he stifled it. Because right now they were scavenging their bones.
The little sloops had cabins big enough to shelter a lone sailor in a sudden squall—two in a pinch. Probably no food in those, and they didn’t think it worth the pain to break the teak hatches. Jess knew that it was because the boats were so graceful—say it: so beautiful—that they could not bring themselves to break them for a tube of Pringles or an old bottle of Coke.
Jess took up his new fire-burnished ax and they trotted along the docks, and when they came to a larger cabin cruiser or weekend sailer they jumped aboard and Jess swung his bladed truncheon and the light lock usually busted and the door swung in or the hatch cracked beneath the broken hasp. And they crouched and took narrow steps into dim cabins lit by skylights and pillaged the cabinets and underseat chests.
On one thirty-five-foot fishing cruiser with a flying bridge, Storey found at the nav station a new pair of Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses and tried them on. He couldn’t see anything in the darkened space, so he propped them on his baseball cap. In a chart drawer of the same boat he found a lightweight Leatherman with a corkscrew. On another boat, a sleek Peterson 34 stripped of sails, Jess found four bottles of two-year-old Saint Cosme Côtes du Rhône. There was food also, and by the time they’d pillaged eight likely yachts they had more canned food and bags of rice and boxes of oatmeal than they could pack. The marina had evidently supplied handcarts—a little like the old red wagons but stoutly built—for their patrons to use in shuttling supplies and parts out along the docks, and Jess found one upturned at the end of a spur and they loaded it with far more than they could ever carry and he towed it back. It bumped rhythmically over the gaps in the planks behind him and for one forgetful moment he thought of freight cars trundling over the tracks at the crossing on Box Elder in the little Vermont town they grew up in and he felt for a second what might be happiness. In strong sun he rolled the cart to the wrought-iron bench on the wharf, and whatever that emotion was that was not dread vanished when he saw their leaning packs and remembered where they were. He dropped the handle and a cloud shadow passed over fast, towing its own chill, and then he was in sun again but the moment of peace was gone. Storey was hefting two stuffed heavy-duty trash bags filled with provisions and he set them down and said, “I guess we don’t need to go out to the moorings after all. I know you wanted to pilot that Whaler.”
Jess waved it off.
“I was thinking about it,” Storey said. “Why do you think the cart was overturned? They didn’t savage the docks. Again.”
Jess shrugged. “Maybe whoever used it saw their kid on the wharf and in their hurry to get to them turned it over. Maybe it’s better not to think about it.”
Storey grimaced. “Right.”
They looked at their haul. “This might be the only easy food we get for a while,” Storey said.
“We can’t take all of it. Unless we pull the wagon. But, like I said, the road is dirt from here on up, and in about six miles it looks like that ends, too.”
“Okay, well…we can pull it that far. The wheels are pretty stout.”
“Or we can take that Whaler.”
Storey smiled at his friend’s tenacity. Jess said, “We can pile it with all of this and see what we find in…in…” He reached for the folded road map in his back pocket and flipped it open. He had carefully folded it all back so that the section they needed opened like a book. “In Beryl.”
Storey looked grimly north, up the shore.
“Or not,” Jess said. “We can drag the cart. The road is probably good and packed.”
“Thing is…” Storey wouldn’t form the words.
“What if they’re there?”
Storey nodded. He looked around them at what was once probably a charming and pretty town. “This place is still smoking,” he said. “They can’t be very far.”
“Could be over a day.”
“We don’t know. At least if we come up on the road…we can backtrack, get into the woods. In that boat, with the sound of the motor, on open water…” Storey rubbed his eyes.
“We don’t have to go up there,” Jess said gently. “We could keep following the highway. It turns away west now.”
“Whew, I feel like we need to go see this village, see if it survived. Six miles isn’t far. We can come back to this road after.”
“Okay,” Jess said. “We’ll pull the wagon. Maybe we should make a big meal here and then head up.”
They did. Jess fashioned a tumpline with a long webbing strap from one of the boats, and he ran it through the handle of the wagon and looped it across his waist and pulled the cart easily without having to strain one arm back. The streets were rough with debris but the cart had large pneumatic tires that bounced along. They retreated into the trees at the south edge of town. They made a fire. The breeze was northerly, but even had it been running south to north they wouldn’t have worried much, because, again, why would they—whoever they were—be alerted by the smell of smoke coming from a recently burned-out town behind them?
So they built a nice fire and watched through a scrim of trees the cloud shadows run over the lake and across the ruins of the town. Storey dug through the black garbage bags and pulled out four cans of Campbell’s clam chowder. He opened them with the can opener on his new Leatherman and he slid a plastic spoon carefully up the inside and pulled out the contents with a suck of air and the plop of a mostly intact cylinder of stew. They were both starving and figured that two cans apiece would work as an appetizer. Jess added a little water from his filter bottle and set the pot on a wire grill from a hibachi they’d lifted from the deck of one of the sailboats. He stirred and Storey shook in Cholula hot sauce from a fresh bottle and dug around and began emptying stewed tomatoes, kippered herring, canned mushrooms, artichoke hearts, “Escargots!”—he held up the can on a flat palm, as in an ad—and sliced Italian hard sausage all into the larger pot.
“This is gonna be jumble-aya, spelled like ‘jumble,’ ” he said.
“Yum.”
“I’ve got boxes of couscous. When you’re done with the chowder we’ll cook it up.”
“Delish.”
It was. To them. They dug into the clam chowder with groans of pleasure. Each shook more Cholula out of the glass bottle as if the burn of the salsa might distract them from other things. Storey opened the first wine bottle with his Leatherman and raised it in a toast—“Skål!”—and chugged half like water and passed it to Jess. While Jess drank he opened a second bottle.
“Good stuff,” Storey said. “I’d get it again. Will you remember the vintage?”
“No.”
“Me, neither.” Jess watched as Storey took out his phone and used some precious wattage from the battery to snap a picture of the cream-colored label with its sketch of a stone farmhouse on a French hill. Jess didn’t comment. Storey opened the second bottle and held it at arm’s length and addressed it. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “What the fuck.” And he drank. He held it out to Jess and their eyes met. Storey’s were bleary and uncertain, and Jess watched as they watered and welled and leaked from the corners. Storey held out the bottle, refusing to acknowledge the tears tracking his cheeks.
Jess took the bottle, and as their fingers touched he said, “Store.”
Storey blinked and nodded.
“The girls? Andrea?”
Storey looked away. He wiped his face on the sleeve of his jacket. “You heard about when her cat, Coco, died.”
“Yeah, you told me.”
“That was a year ago, April. The anorexia kicked in so badly Andrea almost died. She got better over late summer. I made her a milkshake every day, cooked for her every night.”
“I remember. She would only eat certain foods if you cooked them.”
Storey nodded. Jess held out the bottle and Storey now shook his head. He said, “I thought she was out of the woods.”
“And?”
“And then came the state cross-country running championship meet, and she won.”
“Won? I…I’m not sure if you told me. That’s awesome.” Jess lifted the wine in salute.
Storey shook his head. “Not awesome.”
“No?” Jess set the bottle on a bed of dead pine needles, leaned it against a fallen limb. “No? Why?”
“Because it freaked her out. Like now maybe she would get scouted by some fancy boarding school and have to leave home and then she’d get recruited by a Division One college and she would become a robot and never see us again.”
“She stopped eating.”
Storey nodded. Jess saw the tremor in his chest and watched as he shook it off. His stoic best friend. Jess did not know what to say, so he said nothing; finally, he murmured, “Lena is there. She’ll know what to do.”
“She’ll be making a thousand calls. Geneva will be tugging at her, demanding answers—that’s what she does. Andrea will clam up and drift. And drift. Hand me the bottle.”
They finished it. They took a vote and decided to save the other two bottles for some unforeseen celebration. They added the dregs of the wine to the larger pot and heated up the jumble-aya and poured it over a bed of couscous and devoured it all. It didn’t take long. The sun was high in the trees now, and the day was warm but not hot, and without a word they leaned back against their packs and fell asleep.