Chapter Ten
Jess’s Uncle Harvey, who lived a few miles up the road on Putney Mountain, was a ham-radio nut. He had “friends” all over the country, all over the world, with whom he stayed in regular contact. “Friends” was bracketed in Jess’s mind, because he didn’t understand how one could consider anybody a friend whom one could not touch. Whose breath one never felt against cheek or arm, whose smell was as unknown as the true richness of a voice unmediated by radio waves or digital transmission. Someone with whom one had never broken bread or shared a consoling hug didn’t seem a bona fide friend.
Jess had classmates whose regular buddies were a thousand miles away, on the other side of a video-game console. He understood the need for human contact, but he did not understand the social-network “Friends” thing; claiming scores of strangers one had never met seemed cheap and somehow sad. He thought his uncle was truly odd. Harvey lived amid what Jess thought must be some of the most beautiful country on earth and he rarely went outside except to roll his garbage bin back and forth from his carport to the edge of Osgood Road. He spent all his time at his radio bench or in a recliner that looked like a NASA spaceship seat. He drank Diet Dr Pepper nonstop. He shaved intermittently. He was a cipher.
Jess liked him. For one, Harvey had an easy laugh and he seemed to truly enjoy Jess’s stories. He was interested. He prompted Jess to tell him what was going on in his life, what characters he’d met lately who intrigued him. He leaned forward, elbows on skinny knees, and gave Jess his full attention. Skinny knees. That was another mystery: he was rail-thin. The stereotype of a man with his passions was someone overweight who moved more like a parade float than a big cat. Not Harvey: he seemed agile. Was he a drug addict? Sedentary and corroded inside but unable to keep on weight? Jess looked for signs, and except for Harvey’s occasional bleary, bloodshot eyes from staying up into small hours—so he could converse with a buddy in Sulawesi—he found none.
One May afternoon when Jess was sixteen and visiting, his uncle took a scheduled call from a regular in Norway, and as he began the trading of call signs and frequencies that were preparatory to a less formal conversation, Harvey glanced over at his nephew and caught him watching with an expression maybe of distaste or even disgust. Maybe Jess just looked perplexed. When Harvey was done with the call, which lasted ten minutes, and included the revelation that Jørgen was at sea on his ketch at the moment, Harvey hung up his headset and swiveled his chair toward Jess and smiled, mouth compressed, but his brown eyes were serious, even grim. He rubbed the graying stubble on his jaw and said, “You think I’m a freak, huh?”
Jess was aghast and mute. His jaw might have fallen open. That was kind of exactly what he’d been thinking.
“You think a man who spends his life on a radio and has few friends but those that come over an airwave is not a man, or at least not living a real life. You think I’m a shell. Right?”
His eyes roved over Jess’s face and he continued: “A shell of a man you can’t help but like.” Now Harvey’s eyes creased and his smile became real. “You can’t help it. Family is family.”
Jess was stunned, more by his uncle’s accuracy than by any sense of confrontation, and he could still not speak.
Harvey scratched his chin with one finger and glanced down at Jess’s feet. “Are those your running shoes?”
Jess nodded.
“You’re wearing shorts. Good. Wanna take a run? Blueberries?”
Blueberries was a three-mile loop that climbed steeply through woods up a rock-slabbed four-wheel-drive track, crossed a stone wall and a meadow crowded with low-bush blueberries, and descended to Sawyer Brook, where it was often thick with ferns and wet.
“Run?” Jess stammered. Not that he didn’t know what the word meant, in a very visceral way. He was a born runner. He ran the loop often, sometimes in the morning before school and the same day as a big soccer match. He was known for his speed up the right side.
“Be right back.” Harvey pushed out of the chair and disappeared through the kitchen and came back a couple of minutes later wearing nylon too-short running shorts, tube socks, and shoes Jess recognized as a hot item when he was probably nine. Suddenly Jess was overwhelmed with sadness and compassion; he felt sorry for his uncle and was about to make some lame excuse when Harvey said, “Whoever loses buys the milkshakes,” and was out the door. He waited for Jess on the driveway and bent to touch his toes, bouncing in some awful archaic stretch, and Jess felt worse. Harvey seemed amused. “Not gonna stretch?”
Jess shook his head. He felt queasy.
“Suit yourself.” Harvey lifted one foot behind him, than another, in the classic quad stretch, shook himself all over, took a deep breath, huffed it out, and said, “Okay, let’s go. We’ll warm up nice and easy to Florence’s, then the race is on. ’Kay?”
Jess felt he was being sucked into doing something he really didn’t want to do. He intuited that his relationship with Harvey was about to change forever. He couldn’t look at him. Even at that tender age, he knew that once he humiliated his uncle there was no going back.
They trotted up the climbing dirt road. Very slowly. They passed the old overgrown tennis court at the edge of Frazer’s hayfield, passed Shumlin’s and Doc Brookhauser’s. There was a near-level quarter-mile of good dirt road to Florence’s Japanese teahouse, which Jess’s father—Harvey’s brother—had designed, and Harvey began to lengthen out his stride. At Florence’s carport there was a hayfield ahead and a sharp left turn; they took the bend, and immediately the county maintenance ended and the road became a steep rocky climbing track that at times more resembled a streambed than a road. As soon as they rounded the turn Harvey said, “Okay, race you back to the house.” And he put on the jets.
“Damn.” Jess remembered saying it to himself, and then he leaned hard into the climb.
He had run cross-country. In middle school, when the team was short runners, he ran races that didn’t interfere with soccer games. He knew how to hang on up a hill and then push over the top and break a competitor. It was one of the great satisfactions of the sport. But he could barely hang on to Uncle Harvey. He could hear his own breathing, not the regular chuff of a good run but the gulps of hitting a pulse rate too high. They jumped roots and slid on water-stained granite slabs. They pushed up a very steep cobbled straightaway and crossed the stone wall and contoured through the blueberry meadow and got hit with the sweet smell of apple blossoms wafting up from Darrow’s orchard. Jess had not tasted blood in his mouth for a couple of years, but now he did. The coppery signal that he was pushing too hard. Maybe Harvey had been listening to his breathing. Suddenly he slowed and dropped back, and Jess felt his uncle’s hand briefly on his sweat-soaked T-shirt, and Harvey said, “Wanna jog? Get our second wind?”
Jess thought he might be dreaming. None of this added up. He was certainly not gonna take charity from his freaky but lovable uncle. “Shit, no,” he breathed.
“ ’Kay. See ya at the house.” And then Harvey lengthened out again, and, as smoothly as if he were just hitting his stride, he took off. Into the trees on the other side of the meadow. Jess didn’t see him again until he got to Harvey’s mailbox. Where he was pushing against a maple tree in a stretch he probably learned in the last century. When Harvey heard the pats of Jess’s footfalls he straightened, turned, grinned. “Let’s go to Darcy’s and get the shakes. You still like malts? You can buy next time.”
On the way down the hill in Harvey’s old Bronco, they were silent until Jess finally turned in his seat and said, “How…?”
He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to ask. How could Harvey run like that, certainly, but also How…everything? Basically, he wanted to say, Who the hell was that masked man?
Harvey read his mind. “I run at night,” he said.
Jess felt himself wince as if he were looking into the sun.
“You knew I was in the war, right?”
Jess gaped, nodded.
“That’s kinda why I stick around home. I don’t like most people. Hard to explain, but that’s how it is. I run at night because I don’t want to run into the Brandts or the Brookhausers or the Hollisters. Nothing against ’em, it’s all me.” Harvey reached over and put a hand on Jess’s hot head. “You’re one hell of a runner,” he said. “You have your old man’s toughness.”
Jess woke out of his daze. He sat up and turned in surprise. “Pop?”
“I knew you’d say that.” Harvey laughed, stuck his elbow out the window. “Your old man is one tough honcho.”
So Jess knew a little about ham radios, by osmosis. He approached the bench from the side so as not to throw his shadow over the receiver. A headset hung on a wrought-iron fishhook; even Collie’s folks weren’t immune to a little kitsch. Jess stood. As if to sit on the padded stool was to commit fully to receiving information he did and did not wish to know. He reached forward and flipped the power switch. Nothing. There was an old steam-gauge amp meter and it did not light up and the needle did not budge. Dead. The batteries were shot. He bent and looked under the bench. Odd. There were the two marine batteries, there was the wire heading up to the radios, but there was no trickle charger on the posts, nothing leading to an outlet. Who knew how long they had been sitting on cold concrete, draining out.
Storey said, “What?” He was at the wall of provisions, scanning for anything useful.
“Batteries dead.”
“There’s a truck across the street.”
“Yeah, I was thinking that.”
“Hey, what the fuck. C’mere.” Storey had been kneeling on the concrete and he’d pried off one of the lids on a bucket labeled “Beans/Pinto.” Now he was holding up a phosphor-white brick wrapped in cellophane. He handed it to Jess, who hefted it. “Not beans,” he said. The bucket was packed with the bricks, and a sharp tar-smell rose out of it. He pried off the lid of the pail next to it, the one labeled “Rolled Oats,” and it, too, was full of the packets. He dug a thumbnail into the top of one; the contents had the consistency of marzipan, but stiffer.
“I’m thinking some kind of explosive?” Jess said.
“Yep, C-4.”
“Is that a shitload of C-4?”
“Yep.”
“Collie’s dad does more than fish.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing,” Jess said. “You think these guys blew the bridges on all the roads going south?”
Storey shrugged. He looked dazed. “Dunno,” he said. “Goddamn. Seems like we know less every minute.”
“Hold on,” Jess said. “I’ll get the battery from the truck.”
He climbed back up the ladderlike steps and squeezed up through the hatch. He jogged out the wrecked front door to the green Tacoma pulled in front of the cottage across the street. There were bullet holes in the side of the bed and two of the tires were flat, evidently shot out. Whoever did all this really did not want any serviceable vehicles left. The driver’s door was not locked. He yanked it open, popped the hood lever. He felt under the seat for a crescent wrench, socket set, even pliers. He could use the needle nose on his Leatherman if he had to, but it’d be tougher. There’d be nuts on the battery posts and one or two on the bracket. He didn’t feel any tools, but under the seat springs his hand ran over a set of keys. He had a sudden thought: Who needs ham radio?
He inserted the key into the ignition and turned it until the warning lights lit. He turned the knob on the old truck radio. Sudden static. The digital tuner read 90.9 FM. Probably the one local station out of Randall. Given how low it was on the dial, it was probably a public volunteer station that played indie, folk, classic rock, bluegrass, you name it, throughout the day, and Morning Edition right about now—that would have been good. Or maybe, given the apparent secessionist sentiment along the lake, the local station had been more right-leaning, maybe a Christian outfit that played country and inspirational songs all day. Didn’t matter now, because of course the station was ashes, like everything else in Randall.
Jess hit the AM button. Static. Made sense—they were way up in the middle of nowhere. He pushed the scanner and watched the numbers tumble on the tuner. It snagged on a couple of frequencies—nothing but snow, a stutter that might be a voice or just interference. He was about to give up, twist the key back, when the scanner stopped on 1485 and he heard a voice. Clear enough. It was French. A newscaster. Must be out of Quebec. Jess had studied French pretty much from first grade, all the way through comp-lit classes in college. His speaking was horrendous but his comprehension was good. He leaned in and heard, all in French:
“…Do you believe, Professor Laurent, that la décision in Ottawa to fortify the international border in Quebec has been met with continuing resistance by the provincial government in Quebec City, because there is fear the federal administration may now feel empowered to exhibit some of the same strong-arm tactics as our neighbor to the south?”
Jess lay half over the driver’s seat, ear to the radio, riveted. An electromagnetic whine blew through in gusts and obscured words, most of sentences at times, but he was having no problem translating. Now another voice, a woman’s: “No one believes Ottawa is going to wage a war on Quebec—”
Man again: “Of course, the assassination of the American President Schoeffler by the Maine secessionist Lamar Blodgett prompted a swift response, but Washington staunchly denies there is”—static—“kind of war. There is a police action to calm the riots and restore the peace—”
Woman, with disdain: “Paw! We have indisputable proof that two Marine battalions”—whine—“many as two thousand U.S. soldiers, both armored cavalry and infantry, were sent into the Kennebec River Valley on the twenty-sixth of September. Is that not a war?”—whine and snow—“cannot know what the federal government is doing now due to the most severe information blackout in modern times. Even private satellite companies, whole computer systems have been disabled. But you can bet this is no ‘police action’ to keep things calm, this is—”
Man: “Well, the threat to the republic is very real, we cannot deny”—dopplered whine—“day the Legislatures of both Vermont and New Hampshire took up emergency motions to express accord with the Legislature of Maine and to empower their national guards to deny entry to any other branches of the U.S. military. Don’t you think—”
Woman: “I think Washington has been deaf to the concerns of rural northern New England for too long and that the pigeon has come home to roost. I think we can cert”—blast, like a sandstorm—“parallels in our own country”—a keen of interference rose and broke into a storm of snow. Jess muttered, “Damn,” and turned the knob two digits up and two digits back. Gone. He worked the dial again, thought he heard maybe the man again out of the gale saying, “I’m sorry, we have urgent news out of Augusta…” But maybe not. Maybe it was his own hunger to know more. One thing was certain, they needed to hoof it. The world was blowing up around them and they did not need to take an hour to hook up the radio in the basement to another battery and get the thing fired up, and take another hour trying to locate some operator that had more specific knowledge. Jess didn’t even have an idea how to do that. What was clear was that the 49ers, or the rebels, or whoever they were, had a center of operations right here, in this village, and that they had ignited a full-blown civil war, and that the three of them needed to get gone now. Also, Collie’s father was part of it all. Jesus. It occurred to him then that maybe the Marines hadn’t leveled the town because they were searching it for intel.
He did not even turn off the key or the radio or slam the door. He just ran. Back across the street and into the house, through the kitchen. He put his head down into the hatch and called, “Store. Store. We’re gone. Come up! We gotta leave. Now!”
Where do we go?
That’s what he thought as he stood in the yard, feeling gratefully the warmth of the morning sun on his face. I don’t even know what direction.
He badly wished right now that he could turn back the clock some eight weeks and be on the fishing trip to Montana he had offered Storey as a prequel to their hunt. They would drive from his house in Denver up to Missoula, where he had a couple of good friends. Adam was a poet and a fishing guide, and he’d set them up with three or four days of driftboat trout fishing on the Blackfoot, the Clark Fork, the Bitterroot. Then they could drive into Yellowstone and fish the Lamar Valley and check on the wolf packs, which had been so recently devastated by Montana’s loosening of hunting and trapping laws. One of his favorite places on the planet and favorite things to do: to hike up the creeks that fed the Lamar, hike up and away from the crowds and into the spruce and pines, and fish the creeks, where they were small and you were as likely to run into a grizzly or a wolf as a person. Nothing he loved more. And nothing on earth more invigorating than to be casting into a clear run at dusk with the Absarokas leaning against the first faint scattering of stars and hear the wolves begin to sing. He wanted to be camped outside of Cooke City, on the border of Yellowstone, and go fishing every day with Storey. Why hadn’t they done it? Maybe then they would have decided they could forgo the moose hunt this year and none of this would be happening. To them.
Well, now they were truly fucked. Should they head west…try? To New Hampshire? And thence to Vermont and Storey’s family? It sounded like there were tensions coming to a head there, too. Like a military buildup. Like the fire of secessionism was spreading. How on earth? They might simply be shot on sight as spies at the New Hampshire border.
He heard talking, turned. They were walking toward him. She was not holding Storey’s hand now, she was clutching a ratty plush loon. To Jess, that was a good sign. She was coming along of her own free will, she was trusting Storey now, who was telling her, “We’re gonna go look for them now. That’s what we’ve gotta do, right?”
Her nod. Her gripping the loon more tightly. She was out of the lion suit and wearing synthetic black pants, a rose-colored fleece sweater. She carried a small pink daypack sewn to look like the head of a Saint Bernard. Good. Though the day was warming fast, Storey had understood that rain and cold would be their companions. Jess bet that if there were clothing items in the little pack it was her rain gear and a down jacket. And a Saint Bernard was as good a mascot as any. Right now Jess could really use the brandy in the little barrel they were purported to carry.
“ ’Sup?” Storey said, trying to sound casual.
Jess didn’t know what to say. If he spilled now, Collie would hear it all. He blurted, “Look at this truck bed. Never seen one like it.”
Storey turned immediately to Collie. “Here,” he said. “Sit in the shade of this maple tree for a second, okay? Jess is going to show me the truck. I don’t know, he’s crazy about trucks.”
“That’s Hartley’s.” She frowned. “He’s got flat tires. Oh boy.”
“Yep. What a pain. We’ll be back in a sec.”
Jess told him everything. Tried to replay the conversation as he had heard it. He began, “It was a station out of Quebec. The only one that tuned in. FM was all out.”
“Sure. Much shorter range, depends on repeaters.”
“Yeah, so it was some kind of news talk show, some interview with a professor—political science, I guess.”
“You understood it all?”
“Pretty much.”
“You always surprise me.”
“That a compliment? Listen, it’s bad…”
He told him. That three days into their hunting trip the president had been assassinated. By a Maine secessionist. That the Maine Legislature must have voted to secede from the union in the days before, because the Legislatures of New Hampshire and Vermont were apparently throwing their hat in with Maine, sympathizing if not seceding. That the response from the feds was apparently swift and overwhelming: the United States sent two battalions of Marines rolling into the Kennebec Valley. Which meant that the heart of the insurgency must have been in central, very rural Maine. “Which we knew from all the upheaval before we left. Some guy, Krichner, from right over on Moosehead, started the whole movement, remember? Don’t they always have names like that? Like ‘Grinch’? Sours them from birth. Anyway—”
Storey did not blanch, he flushed. “Two battalions?”
“Yep. That’s, like, two thousand troops. Infantry and armor, apparently.”
“Whoa.” Storey glanced back at Collie, who was sitting dutifully in the shade of the maple, having a conversation with Loony. He said, “It’s extreme. Armor is tanks. Extreme response. These are U.S. citizens, right? Why would they do that?”
“Because the VP, now POTUS, is DuPonte?”
“Right.” Storey rubbed his eyes. “The general. Hawk of hawks. Wasn’t he commandant of the Marines or something?”
“Yes.”
“Sonofabitch probably wet himself. Wanted his whole life to be a wartime president. Probably figures now he’ll get his head on a coin. Fuck. Still…” He swung his chin toward the half-destroyed village below them. “These are Americans.”
“So what?” Jess said.
Storey blinked at him.
Jess said, “What did Sherman do, burning through the South? Or the Russians to the Ukrainians, their ‘true brothers’? Or Pol Pot to his own people? Nobody held back.”
“What about the Maine National Guard? Were they radicalized, too?”
Jess shrugged.
Storey said, “They take orders from the governor, right? But the president has ultimate authority. What did they do? Sit it out?”
“I don’t know, they didn’t mention it.”
Storey winced his eyes shut. As if to squeeze the news into a strip he could store away somewhere. “So…that’s everything we’ve been seeing? The work of one radicalized militia that assassinated the president and an avenging general now in charge? Doesn’t quite add up.”
“I don’t know. It’s so fucked up.” Jess looked past Storey to the house, as if some answer might be found there. Then he let his gaze drift toward the climbing street, the rest of the town. He said, “DuPonte must have sent in air cav, too. The choppers…”
“Yeah.”
“How else could they have blasted those towns to the roots? That was from the air. Indiscriminate. I guess nobody knows how bad it is. The professor on the radio said there was a total news blackout; even the private satellite companies went dark. Nobody knows.”
“But us.” Storey waved toward the village center, the lake. “And these poor bastards.”
“Yep.”
They were leaning against the truck bed, elbows on the rail. Suddenly Storey straightened. “Wait. What did you say before? About Vermont?”
“They’re throwing their hat in. They and New Hampshire. With Maine. I guess the state Legislatures voted on motions of ‘accord.’ That’s what he said. They are mobilizing state national guards to the borders to keep out any other branch of the U.S. military. Those were his words. Till they sort it out with the feds, I guess.”
Now the heat or emotion did drain from Storey’s neck. “So…”
“So I guess there must be checkpoints all along the New Hampshire border to keep U.S. Marines from coming in from Maine. That’s some crazy shit.”
“So…”
“So I guess two dudes wandering out of the woods might get shot on sight. At the border. Or two strangers in any small town. The way everyone else has been acting.” Jess suddenly felt the weight in his gut—the constriction along the limbs, in the chest, neck—of dread. Leaden and contracted. As he had not quite felt before. The solid dread behind the fretwork of fear—of all options closing down.
“What’s in her little backpack?” he managed to say.
“Her lion suit. I put long underwear and rain gear in there, but she made me take it out.”
“It’s like her superhero Wonder Woman suit, huh?”
“I guess. I took the stuff she needs. Also, the family were campers. I found her little sleeping bag and pad.” He glanced at the plastic bag on the ground. “I rolled up the lion suit tight and tucked it in her dog pack.”
“Wish I had a suit like that about now.”
“No kidding.”
“Let’s eat something. I feel kinda queasy.”
“Okay. We’ll go back down to the packs and the wagon. Maybe eat something on the porch.”
“Or maybe that crazy old dude has possum stew on the stove.”