Chapter Fifteen
Jess and Storey graduated from high school on a warm, overcast day in early June. They had to listen to an alum who had made a career out of being an eco-pirate. The speaker went on about smashing whaling ships on the high seas and our responsibility to other species. Preaching to the choir, really. But they leaned forward when she said that they had big speakers on their all-black attack ship, and that they blasted Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” at full volume as they bore down on the harpoon vessels, just like the choppers in Apocalypse Now, and it scared the crap out of the illegal whalers. One big tender was so terrified it sailed straight back to Japan. He and Storey sat up, a little nervously—they couldn’t help themselves—when she said that if every other species on the planet had a vote we would all be kicked off the lifeboat. A ripple of laughter went through the seniors sitting stiffly outside in their folding chairs. She said that God would blow her whistle and say, “Everybody out of the pool!” They knew it was true. “I can tell by your response,” she said approvingly, “that you are all biocentrists. Exactly what we need in the world. Not just to protect the ones without a voice, but to save ourselves. Congratulations.” Pretty cool.
Then there was a big late lunch out on the newly mown field at the top of the hill, and then most of the class bade goodbye to their gathered relatives and said, “See you tomorrow morning!” and took off to the traditional keg party on the High Forty. The understanding was: Don’t get alcohol poisoning and don’t drive drunk and the school and the local parents will turn a blind eye.
The day student Jeremy Fine had not had a single sip when he rolled his Jeep on the way to the party. He was just in high spirits. His girlfriend, Alyssa, by all accounts adored him, they were going to colleges in northern Vermont, an hour apart, he had bought the twenty-year-old Wrangler he was driving with his own money, money he had earned working in a Brattleboro printmaking studio on the weekends, and he had a summer ahead of him with Alyssa, working on a trail crew in the White Mountains. He was a sweet, self-deprecating kid who could never keep his unruly curly hair in line, and seemed always baffled by his good fortune, both of which made everyone around him want to help him more. The two were climbing the rough road to the field and the party with a box full of chips and jalapeños and trying to tune in the Bellows Falls pop station when his front tire slipped to the wrong side of a wet rock and missed the edge and they tumbled down a steep eight-foot bank into the brook.
Jess was the one who found them. He was urging his Subaru, Sue, up the track with a keg in the front seat and eight students everywhere else, talking to her as to an old horse as the springs groaned and the engine lugged: “Old one, you sweet, you can do this, you can, you can!” When he encountered the same rock and steered carefully around it, he glanced down into the dreaded streambed and saw the white Jeep on its back, muddy wheels to the sky. It took all nine of them, in shin-deep water, to rock the car enough to pull out their classmates, who were already unresponsive. The coroner later reported that Jeremy had died probably instantly of head trauma, she of a broken neck.
The entire class followed the ambulance to the hospital in Brattleboro, a convoy thirty cars long mustered by local students and their parents. After the two were pronounced dead, Storey pulled Jess’s arm and they walked out of the ER and down the hill to the river, and, silently, everyone followed. Storey had not spoken, and Jess had no idea where they were going. But Storey turned in at the Congregational church. The sign out front said, “Be Curious, Not Judgmental.” They went up the steps. The door was open. They walked in. Not a soul was there, but candles burned in the dim chapel, and Storey slipped into a pew and Jess slid beside him. The whole class filed in and filled the benches silently, and not a word was spoken, but Jess felt the power of his classmates at his back. They sat for who knew how long. He could hear sobbing and an occasional cough, and the crick of a hassock as someone kneeled, and the groan of a breeze against the high, colored windows. That was it. They sat until night fell.
Jess thought later that it was the most powerful service for the dead he had ever been to. Not a single word. And for years afterward, for the rest of his life, he thought of Jeremy and Alyssa on some continuing parallel journey in which all their potential was not thwarted but they were twined and excited, as they were on that day, and would explore the possibilities of the world together, delighted and bemused by their own luck. He kept them there, just beyond arm’s reach, as sort of spirit guides who could show him how lives could work—but, it seemed, never did.
Why didn’t they? He thought this as he fought down the dizziness and nausea and steered the Newsboy off a stretch of marsh-grass shallows. Why was everything, always, so fraught? The hammer had dropped so often in his life that when there was peace, when there was enough love, when he was cradled by it—the love of a friend, a wife, a dog—he knew that sometime around the height of his joy or contentment—right at the apex, when it seemed life might right itself like a ship in a cross sea, and turn, and sail smoothly—just then lightning would strike. A rogue wave would rise up and blot out the horizon.
Was it him? Or the nature of the beast? Born squalling, die retching, and in between tossed every which way like a chunk of broken Styrofoam. Wind and tide.
Why people seek God, of course. Why a church had been built for them to walk into on that June afternoon. Why candles burn. Why a cold stone floor echoes the footfalls and the sobs of the stricken. If Jeremy had been bewildered by the blessings in his life, by his uncooperative hair, by the love of a strong, joyful girl, then so are we all. And equally bewildered when it all falls apart.
It was falling apart now, big-time.
“You all right?” It was Storey behind him, hand on his arm.
“No. You?”
“Not really.”
Jess edged the throttle forward with the heel of his right hand, to raise the volume of the motor so she wouldn’t hear them, and to change the tempo. Maybe that would help. Maybe he was just feeling seasick. He raised his voice a little and said, “I can’t see how we can make it to the coast without encountering either side. And we have no clue who is actually waiting there or if they’ll be glad to see us.”
“No.”
“No meaning ‘no,’ or ‘yes’?”
“I mean, yes, we don’t know shit.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, we’ve gotta drop her,” Storey said. “At Grandma’s, at a safe house, wherever the location is. Maybe then we steal a boat and run.” He put a hand beside the binnacle to steady himself. “South. None of it’s very far. I helped my cousin Ted move his sloop once from Brunswick to Gloucester. We motored at, like, ten knots, and it took us one long day.”
Jess didn’t answer. He was thinking about the girl in her rowboat and the chopper. And Clawdette burning all over the water. “What about staying?” he said finally.
“Staying?”
“Wintering over. Somewhere up here. Waiting for it to cool down?”
“Cool down?”
“C’mon. We could raid whatever more we can get out of the boats, the houses in Beryl, maybe other villages, get a moose, hunker down. Then take her back. It’s not gonna do her or her family any good if we all get shot up trying to get there.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No place is safe. The sugarhouse. Any town. One day they’ll show up. Either side. And we’ll be cooked. We need to drop her. Then get to a safe zone, wherever that is. Massachusetts, maybe. Then I can work north, home.”
Home. That was Storey’s true north, Jess thought. That’s where Storey took his bearings. Where did he? Was home home anymore? No. Not, really. It was nothing more than a shell with a roof now.
Storey had said “I”: “Then I can work north…” To Vermont. What about him, Jess? He, it seemed, was always the one left to fend for himself. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll tr— We’ll go to the coast.”
The sun was near its zenith, midday, and broke apart the clouds that ran against it. Still cool enough for a jacket, and the afternoons would bend colder and colder until, one day, a light rain would flurry into the first snow. Now they saw the headlands at the end of the lake. The forested shore dark with spruce curved eastward and dipped into coves backed by marsh grass. No town here ever, too rocky on the spurs and too marshy in the bottoms for the first settlers, Jess thought. In a shallow bay he saw a broken-down dock, silvered by weather and leaning over its own reflection, puzzling itself out at the end of days. The map had not shown a road, but if there was a dock, there would be a road. Some semblance.
Jess brought the Newsboy in slowly, inching her in the final feet, careful not to bump the pilings too hard lest the rickety dock fall over. He cut the engine and Storey jumped up onto the splintered decking and Collie pursed her lips and took one skeptical look at the landing and declared, “This is Nowheresville. And I’m hungry.”
In the sudden cessation left by the motor they heard their wake wash against the posts and the whine of mosquitoes. They both stared at the girl. “ ‘Nowheresville’?” Jess said. He felt the laugh quaking his abdomen. “Nowheresville? Where’d you learn that?”
Collie shrugged. “Hungry,” she repeated. The men exchanged glances. Neither had seen the other smile in a while, much less laugh. They were laughing now.
“Okay,” Storey said, wiping a tear from his eye. “Let’s make some Boston beans. ’Kay? Which are very best cold. Sound good?” She was still clearly suspicious but she nodded her lion head. “After lunch,” Storey said, “we can check out this dump.”
“Dump,” she repeated, finally satisfied.
Well, Collie was right, pretty much. Back of the dock was an old road, grown in, that stuck to the highest ground it could find—not much—and wound through marsh thick with mosquitoes. The first frost should have cut down the bugs, but the days had been warm, and the marsh held the heat. The water in the reeds was humped with beaver lodges and scattered with the gesturing skeletons of dead trees. The drowned tamarack were bleached, the biggest limbs broken. They weren’t checking out Nowheresville, they were trying to get through it as fast as they could. Collie rode the wagon, and though they had tightened her hood and smeared her face with the last of their bug dope, the mosquitoes swarmed her head and bit and got into her mouth and eyes. At first she tried to bat them away, but her hands got bitten so badly that within half an hour they were swollen, too, and so she shoved them down into the side pockets of her lion suit and curled up and buried her face in the blanket and cried. Jess and Storey grimaced and walked, both leaning into the straps of their packs and rifles and tugging their loads. Where the ground was drier they pushed through shadowed spruce woods, and tall pines, and heard the insistent tuneless complaint of a nuthatch, one protesting note repeated and repeated, and Jess thought it a fitting accompaniment. Wanh wanh wanh…The bird was warm-blooded and probably as tortured by mosquitoes as they were. Why did it stay? Because this was its niche? Because natural selection had allotted it no other. One version of fate.
By mid-afternoon they had come to a fork in the track and taken the one bearing left, eastward. They were in hardwoods now, maple and beech, thank God. They got Collie out of her pajamas, and when they dropped to a stone-bedded brook they cooled her swollen face in the rushing current.
The men did, too. They took off their hot boots and sat on a smooth, rounded boulder and stuck their feet into the icy flow. Swift water and the pressure against their raw ankles and shins and toes, and the cold—they closed their eyes and released. From physical pain and uncertainty. For a moment there was only the sound of water rushing against rocks and the blood cooling in their feet and Collie climbing up into their laps as they sat together, curling across both of them, heavy for someone so small, and saying, “Let’s catch frogs,” before she dropped abruptly into sleep.