Chapter Three
Jess dreamed of water. He and Jan were swimming in a green bay. It was not night but their limbs sketched streaks of light as they swam, as of a bioluminescence so strong it was heedless of morning. Their fingers ignited heatless flames and they left two trails of phosphorescence behind them. He knew this because he was at once stroking through warm water and also gyring above, as an osprey gyres, and following the lovers. Lovers. He felt again what that means. She was breaststroking beside him and he did not need to look to feel her joy, her insoluble closeness, her mercy. They would swim together to some other continent if that’s what love demanded. He wheeled and banked hard against the wind and soared upward and the world revolved and when he swooped over and down and regained his patrol the swimmers were gone. The wake of green light was there in the water like two contrails, but they lay on the surface inert. He let out a scream. It was an osprey cry meant to pierce the belly of heaven. It could not reconstitute the lovers or rouse the gods—
It was a scream that woke him. Storey was already sitting up and squinting toward the water. “Hey. Hey, look.”
Jess looked. Someone was in a rowboat, a dinghy with short oars, casting off from a larger sloop moored farther out. It was a girl or young woman. She pushed off and seized the oars and stroked madly for the docks.
The two Black Hawks came over the treeline of the far shore and straight over the water. They came fast and low—Jess thought they couldn’t be more than a hundred feet off the lake—and their rotors churned a white wake as they came and drummed, then thudded off the thin skin of the afternoon. They came in tight formation, dark and unmarked, one to the side and just behind the other, and the helicopters banked once, hard, over the fleet of moored boats. The girl rowed, frantic. The whitewater frothed around her and then the choppers leveled and flew north. Jess thought they were departing. But a mile out they banked hard again and came straight at them, at the remains of the town, at the docks. In reflex, Jess and Storey rolled off their packs and bellied down and watched. A few hundred meters out, flames belched from the forward chopper and tore the water in a vicious line, and the girl flew out of the boat with half a shredded oar, and the dinghy disintegrated, and Jess thought he saw a halo of blood spray downwind on the breeze and fly apart under the storm of the whomping blades. The helicopters came on, did not miss a beat, came straight at them and right over the tops of their trees.
They had both squinched down their eyes and covered their heads with their arms, but the Black Hawks were gone, leaving shaken leaves and a tumping, fading pulse on the cooling air.
Jess noticed, when he lifted his head again, that the sun was low over the near ridge.
“What the hell,” Storey said.
Jess couldn’t speak. Not for a minute. Finally, he croaked, “So much for being safe on the water.”
“Man.”
The faint throb of the choppers died out. The natural wind off the lake resumed its irregular passes through the canopy.
“Who do you think she was?” Storey said.
“Storey?” Jess said.
“Yeah.”
“I could’ve sworn she screamed. Before they came.”
Storey sat up. He brushed some crumbs of dirt and dried leaves off his cheek. “What do you mean?”
“I mean her scream woke me up.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I was asleep. I guess we both were. And I dreamed of an osprey flying, I was the osprey, and I screamed, and I woke up. And then the girl was in the boat, but I think it was her scream.”
“Okaay…”
“And then the choppers came over the trees, way over on that side.”
Storey scratched his chin and throat, his days-old beard. “So…what?”
“It was all out of order is what.”
Storey snugged his cap back on his head.
Jess pressed on. “How could she know the choppers were coming? She was casting off. In a panic. She screamed as if she knew. And then they were there, breaking over the horizon, which is the shoreline, those trees on the far shore.” Jess shook his head, tried to align the images, the succession.
“Maybe she didn’t scream. Maybe you screamed like an eagle and woke yourself up.”
“Well, still. She was in the dinghy. Like fleeing, like in flight. She was panicked.”
Storey stared. “I think we’ve got bigger fish to worry about,” he said finally. “Like who the fuck were those guys?”
“Yeah, no shit. They had zero markings.” Jess rolled up onto his knees and took up the two pots, the spoons. “You have enough water in your bottle to wash these?”
Storey shook his head.
“Seems fucked up. To wash them in the lake now.”
Storey shut his eyes. “It’s a big lake. She’s pretty far out.”
“Okay. Okay, I’ll go down. Better to have everything clean before we go.”
Go where? Jess thought as he carried the dishes down to the dock. To the hamlet up the shore, to witness all this again? He scanned the water around the moored boats but could no longer see the dinghy or the girl. It must have sunk, the rowboat. She—whatever was left of her—must be floating just at the surface or beneath and not visible in the evening chop.
He knelt between two outboard skiffs and scooped up water in the larger pot. The skiffs were two nondescript aluminum motorboats with bench seats; rentals, probably. For tourists From Away. The town was clearly a destination spot, designed to attract and charm visitors. It was evident even from the smoking ruins: the quaint black-and-bronze street sign with its Roman letters, the wrought-iron benches on the wharf, the grove of poplars there, protecting the bronze statue of a little boy and girl walking with fishing rods over their shoulders and holding hands. Quaint. The quaintness of the town had somehow survived its immolation.
His head hurt. A bottle of wine didn’t help. He squirted biodegradable soap from a small plastic bottle into the pot and took the piece of plastic scrubby they used for backpacking and scrubbed. He felt the lowering sun on the back of his neck, smelled the exhalation of woods about to drop their leaves, a certain sweetness, of relinquishment maybe to the turning wheel of the seasons, the coming ice. Maybe he should learn from the trees, he thought. Ha! How to gracefully handle loss. How to literally let go.
For an instant he saw himself dressed up like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, adorned with leaves and prancing in a dappled wood. And then saw the leaves turn yellow and fall behind him in a fluttering train. That’s me. Who could not keep a wife, or a dog. Who could not take a simple hunting trip with his oldest friend, whose world now wobbled off its axis. He pressed his fingers harder into the scrubby to get off a blackened burn patch and heard the waves kicked up by the evening wind slosh against the dock and slap the metal hulls of the motorboats. And he thought of the girl floating just off there, probably in several pieces, and thought, Snap out of it. You are alive, dude, and you have all your limbs, and your best friend is sitting up there, just inside those trees.
He didn’t snap out of it. He could not banish the image of the girl frantically rowing, or the little Isabella with her maroon sails uncovered, bouncing against the intact dock, waiting for her family to come and board her. Or the small burned body inside the living poplar grove, just over there. He wanted most of all to call Jan, to tell her everything he’d seen, to hear her sympathetic Oh, oh God, her I’m hugging you now, a big, big hug, to tell her he was sorry for everything he should be sorry for, and then he could not erase the image of her Forester pulling out and driving slowly up the shallow hill of their street—slowly, so that she would not hit and hurt the dog who ran beside her, desperately barking. The gradual acceleration up toward 23rd Street, Bell finally gone mute, feeling the end of something, standing in the middle of the street looking after the car, ears up and forward, both of them, Jess and the dog, watching it turn the corner and disappear. Both of them because she had said before leaving, in what he wasn’t sure was an act of generosity or aggression: “You keep Bell. You’re gonna need her more than me.” His shoulders shuddered. Was it narcissism to join his own personal loss to the wreckage smoldering around him? Probably.
Still, the quiver in his chest was a grief for all the sundered. All who believed in the next hour and day.
He looked down at his hand in the soapy water of the saucepan. Here we are. Hand pressing scrubby. What did the student ask the Zen master? “I have gained enlightenment, what do I do now?” And Roshi had answered: “Wash your bowl.” I have lost everything, what do I do now? Wash the pot, ha. Maybe enlightenment and total loss are the same thing. That is something to chew on.
He tossed the sudsy water and dipped the pot again and rinsed it. The lake was cold—a hard, serious autumn cold that would not be friendly to a swimmer. These past nights of frost. He looked across again to the far shore, lit now by the sun sinking behind him. What caught his eye was not the woods gone to tender greens, yellows, ambers, but the sharp blacks and grays of the ledge rock at water’s edge. The slabs of granite sloping to the lake, the short bands of bedrock that might have made jumping rocks. They somehow reflected the woods above them and were hued with green; they must have been flecked with pyrite and veined with quartz and so sheened like dull mirrors. They were—some of them—exactly the color of the two military helicopters whose thudding still seemed to sound over the horizon westward. Who the hell were they?
They were unmarked. U.S. military or some sleeper militia with powerful connections to the military or their contractors. Or foreign? Why couldn’t they be Canadian? Everything they had encountered was so crazy—the upheaval and politics. Had to be beyond the pale. Canadians. The border was not that far away. Fifty, sixty miles at the closest. Maybe this wasn’t about Maine seceding at all. What an idiot idea. Maybe some eruption over hydropower at the Quebec border, or oil pipelines from tar sands in Alberta, or mineral rights beneath the melting polar ice…or tourists bringing in garlic! To repel mosquitoes! Remember that, Jan? How we laughed and laughed in Thunder Bay when the customs official stared and said, “Good luck with that.” Some geopolitical straw that finally broke at last the brittle civility between the North American neighbors. Siblings that fall out hurl the worst vitriol.
But the choppers had not come for just the girl. Right? Right. They came over the trees straight and fast, evidently on their way somewhere. And they had spotted her rowing. And they had circled, whatthehell. Those maybe the words over the headsets: What the hell. And: Engaging target. They needed target practice, they were psychopaths. They had orders to shoot anyone who moved. They had orders to eliminate completely the towns on the lake. There could be no survivors, no witnesses. Jess’s head spun.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was that she was alive one second—heart pounding, crying out, lungs heaving, muscles engaged—and torn to pieces the next. And so, if Storey and Jess had any notion that all of this was not their fight, well…they moved, they breathed, they were walking bull’s-eyes. That frightened him, of course. But what frightened him even more was the nagging sense that the chronology was off—that she screamed and fled and then came the choppers. Unless she had much better hearing than either of them. Hearing like a wolf or an owl.
They packed up. Storey seemed groggy. The wine had anesthetized them both for a couple of hours; now the cost. Neither felt like cooking again, and the sun was only an hour off the ridgetop, and so they ate a bag of mixed dried apricots and cherries, a pack of Chips Ahoy! cookies, and three Slim Jims apiece. Ugh. Not the best fuel at any time of day, but especially lousy on top of too much wine. They packed the rest of the food tightly in the wagon and tied down the load with a bolt of sailcloth and a length of rigging line Jess had purloined from a day sailer. He had used the word “purloin” with Storey, who had grunted amusement. “Anachronistic and elegant,” he’d said. “I think when everybody is dead you’re stuck with ‘scavenge.’ We are scavengers.”
“Point taken.” Jess didn’t like the tone, but he figured Storey was irritable with hangover. He said, “But don’t forget we are hunters, too.”
Storey’s head swung up from where he was cinching closed the top of his pack. He didn’t respond.
Dusk overtook them on the dirt road north. The darkness filled the woods like a tide. The lake was too far below this road for them to see through trees, but they could feel the chill off the water flowing upslope with the first press of night. Maybe they should camp. Neither wanted to see another smoking burn today, another small body curled, another clutch of boats bobbing incongruously at their moorings.
They were walking north slowly, a graded track of smooth dirt scattered with the first fallen leaves, basswood and swamp maple. The woods grew over the ditches on either side and over the road, too, the limbs tangling overhead so that much of the time they were walking through a tunnel of hardwoods. Darkness came early. They had no problem following the road: the sandy hardpack seemed to emit its own glow, and there was nothing to trip over, as the flotsam of flight and wrecked households was weirdly absent.
“I guess we should call it,” Storey said as they came over a rise into a stirring of warmer air and a small clearing. “No water here, but my two-quart bottle’s full. You?”
“Same.”
“You hungry?”
“No.”
“Me, neither.”
They unslung the rifles and dropped the packs. Jess pulled the wagon off the road into the short broom grass. Out of habit. No vehicle would pass this way tonight. He could smell the thin anise of goldenrod and the round pungence of Queen Anne’s lace. So often had he smelled the two together in early fall that he could almost close his eyes and imagine that this was any other year and this any other meadow.
Jess pulled his water bottle from its sleeve on the side of his pack and drank. He said, “Do you think they came this way?”
Storey shrugged up his shoulders and stretched his arms high. In the near dark his outline was huge. He windmilled his arms and dropped his hands. “I don’t know. There were fresh tire tracks, a bunch of fresh footprints. But that might make sense anytime. Runners from Randall taking a nice six-mile out-and-back on good dirt; fishermen maybe heading up to secret spots away from the bigger town. Dunno. You?”
“No. There’d be more sign. It’s probably less than a mile to Beryl. What did the gazetteer show? A long decline, right? Probably right down at the bottom of this long hill. We could leave our packs and the wagon and walk down and look. Want to?”
“No.”
“Yeah.” Jess got it. Three deathscapes in one day was more than anyone ought to bear. “So we’ll camp,” he said.
“If that’s what you want to call it.”
The sudden turn to bitterness surprised Jess. Second time today. It stung. It wasn’t like Storey, not in any circumstance. Well, he was worried about his girls, his wife. Worried to distraction, and he kept it buttoned up most of the time. Storey forgot their agreement and still grimly checked his phone at every stop and then put it away and seemed to put away his panic, too. But that would be too much to ask. Jess couldn’t see his friend’s face in the dark. He coughed once, spat. “I’d kill for some chew,” he said. “Maybe bad choice of words.”
“Yeah, chew.” Storey sounded chastened. He said, “Might be too much to ask to find a general store in Beryl still standing, with fully stocked shelves and a rack of worm dirt.”
“You’re beside yourself about the girls, huh? And Lena.”
Silence. Crickets chirped in the grass of the clearing. Peepers sang from some seep or spring down below. Jess listened for the threshing of a brook but heard only the vespers of the first night wind.
“I…” Storey’s voice was husky when he finally spoke. He said, “The helicopters suggest to me it’s not just a Maine thing.”
Tonight they did not string a tarp. The stars sharpened over the clearing, and there was no smell of rain. The temperature dropped fast. They unrolled their sleeping pads and shook their down bags out and folded their jackets for pillows. They lay on their backs, side by side, and Jess felt the day sift down through his exhaustion, down into his chest and limbs. For a time without measure he let his attention move into the deepening stars and he imagined himself soaring there, not this time as some pelagic osprey but as a great beast that beat the dark slowly and with great power, and glided past the furnaces of stars on long extended wings. In this silent world only the hiss of incineration and the whisper of his primaries kept company with his traveling mind. And it did travel: far ahead into interstitial gloom where there were no screams and no choppers, and no blue Foresters driving away up a hill. No collapsed dogs. No apoplectic politicians, no states, no borders, no countries.
Storey moved his hands up under his head and knocked Jess’s arm with his elbow, and Jess snapped back into his own body on the ground.
“If it’s not just Maine, what do you think it could be?” Storey said. “And why were those choppers unmarked?”
Jess felt for his wool hat beside him and snugged it on. “Who knows. It probably is just Maine. Or Republicans versus Democrats. Or the Evangelical South versus the Heathen and Decadent Northeast. Sons of Silence versus Hells Angels. Seems like all we can do anymore is pick a fight.”
Storey grunted. “I checked out the gazetteer and the road map when you were asleep.”
“Yeah?”
“Burlington on foot is like three hundred miles. Pretty much southwest. Last few days we’ve been sucked north, first for gas, then along the lake hoping for a car. But the best road route is back south to Bangor, then across. If we counted on picking up some kind of vehicle on the way.”
“All burned,” Jess said.
“Yeah, but what kind of conflict destroys all the cars?”
“This one, maybe. Don’t you think it’s strange that there’s not even a bicycle intact?”
Storey ran the last days over in his mind. The vehicles in Four Corners were all incinerated. He didn’t remember any bikes. No scooters, no motorcycles. There had been a couple of motorbikes in Randall, but they had been only half-melted frames and engine blocks. Same in Green Hill. “Strange,” Storey repeated.
“We need to talk to someone,” Jess said. “Why we’re detouring up to this village. What goes for cars goes for people. No war kills everyone. Ever. So: The girl. And the other woman. In the lake. With the rock. Someone will know.”
As if on cue, an almost human scream rose out of the woods below them. A single strangled screech, frayed at the edges. They both tensed hard, then relaxed.
“Barn owl,” Storey said.
“Whew.” Jess let his heartbeat settle. “So I guess we should be searching all the boats. Seems like everyone who isn’t cremated is on the water.”
“Everyone.” The scalding bitterness again.
“Well.”
“If we board every boat. And break in,” Storey said. “If someone’s left, they’ll be waiting down there, crouched with a shotgun. A Winchester Marine. And won’t ask questions.”
“Hadn’t thought of that.”
“Right.”
“I was kind of thinking that anyone would be so relieved.”
The grunt again.
Jess let that sift, too. That they, he and Storey, were interlopers. “I was thinking…”
“Oh, no.”
Phew. A shred of Storey’s old self asserted.
“It bothers me about the deer.”
“That’s what you’re bothered about?”