John Finn

by Vincent McCaffrey

  I stopped at another saved entry.

  “In the morning the river and adjacent country were covered with a dense fog, through which the smoke of our fire curled up like a still subtler mist; but before we had rowed many rods, the sun arose and the fog rapidly dispersed, leaving a slight stream only to curl along the surface of the water. It was a quiet Sunday morning, with more of the auroral rosy and white than of the yellow light in it, as if it dated from earlier than the fall of man and preserved a heathenish integrity.”

  Thus, I can say that all of this goes back to August 31, 1839 and the boat journey Thoreau took with his own brother, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. In 1999, I had the bright idea of duplicating the journey as a way of getting into young Thoreau’s head. At that time I had no idea that Mary Andrews ever existed. I was just a failed writer with an unhappy wife, daughters busting out and growing up to their own lives, and a whole lot of bills I could not pay.

  My brother sells cars. Fords. There is not much else to say about that. He does it well. He makes a great deal more than I do in a year. He has a nice house in Norwell. His wife works at an office supply company. They have two kids—a couple of good boys. We see them occasionally at holidays, but not always. Generally, we don’t speak to one another now. And this state of things between us began with my foolish idea about getting a boat.

  “We glided noiselessly down the stream, occasionally driving a pickerel or a bream from the covert of the pads, and the smaller bittern now and then sailed away on sluggish wings from some access of the shore, or the larger lifted itself out of the long grass at our approach and carried its precious legs away to deposit them in a place of safety.”

  The genius of Thoreau’s simple observation of the way larger water birds carried their legs beneath them like ‘precious’ packages was enough to inspire me more. But that first Sunday of our own voyage, the mosquitoes stormed about us so that any observation we managed was made with a curse attached.

  My mind wandered with my body comfortably in bed.

  Before this, Martin and I had seen each other almost every week since the beginning of time, just out of habit, as brothers do. We got along fine. Our major topic of conversation then was mom and dad, or whether it was more difficult to raise girls or boys intermixed with thoughts about whether the Bruins would ever win a Stanley Cup again. I am still driving the Ford Explorer he found for me back then, almost 200,000 miles later. For some years he had a couple of regular season tickets to the Red Sox that he got through the promotion department at his dealership and I used to buy one off him maybe six or eight times a year. He likes to take his boys, but they play hockey and soccer more than baseball. And they had summer camp at the time. His wife won’t go to the ballpark more than a couple of times a year if that. Milly doesn’t have a reason other than not liking baseball. For my part, I’ve never liked Milly, even before that fateful trip, and I can’t tell you why.

  “A simple woman down in Tyngsborough at whose house I once stopped to get a draught of water, when I said, recognizing the bucket, that I had stopped there nine years before for the same purpose, asked if I was not a traveler, supposing that I had been traveling ever since, and had now come round again; that travel was one of the professions, more or less productive, which her husband did not follow.”

  Martin avoids the difficult thought out of fear for the consequences of finding an answer. Milly just doesn’t have them.

  Our first night out, a Saturday, we tried our best to reach a prearranged campsite on the lawn of one of Martin’s wealthier clients who had a house by the river. The Concord River through Billerica is mostly conservation land and off limits for fires. In the dark we finally settled at the edge of a small park, where we pitched our tent and ate raisins and pecans in the drizzle. At two in the morning, a police cruiser pulled up close enough to turn the night into day with its lights. The policeman agreed that it would be more dangerous for us to go out on the river again in the dark, but he wanted us gone at dawn and told us he did not want to see us there again. In the fog of the next morning, we rowed for a mile in the wrong direction and later, as we drifted past the park again, the policeman was there in his car drinking his morning coffee. He waved.

  “A straight old man he was who took his way in silence through the meadows, having passed the period of communication with his fellows. His old experienced coat, hanging long and straight and brown as the yellow pine bark, . . . so many sunny hours in an old man’s life, entrapping silly fish; almost grown to be the sun’s familiar; what need had he of hat or raiment any; having served out his time and seen through such disguises.”

  The only fisherman we passed on our entire journey cursed us for fouling his line. A series of thunderstorms halted our progress again and again as we hovered in the dank shadows of low bridges and talked about the odd thing, like the lightning that hit a golfer we once knew in Hingham and how, strangely, the man was smarter after that than he was before.

  But Martin was actually alright. His priorities are set even though they don’t have a lot in common with my own. What mattered then was that I had found the boat and he found the time. We had been talking about taking some sort of trip together since we were kids. It just never happened before that. Then Mary Ellen took the girls with her on Susannah’s college search, and Martin’s boys were off with their mother’s parents on the Cape. Labor Day is big at the car dealerships, but it fell late that year. This was our chance.

  I’ve learned long ago to let the thought find its level. There was a good reason not to be asleep. I just had to find it.

  “Suddenly a boatman’s horn was heard echoing from shore to shore, to give notice of his approach to the farmer’s wife with whom he was to take his dinner, though in that place only muskrats and Kingfishers seemed to hear.”

  On the Merrimack, our dinghy, with the sail fully up so that is was impossible to miss, was almost run down by a small cabin cruiser driven by a young woman in a bikini. The man who sprawled at the stern with a bottle of beer in one hand waved at us with the other, as the near-miss rocked us violently. In the mean time, I wondered about the farmer’s wife. Alone. And I wondered about the farmer.

  The facts are simple enough. We left on a Saturday, a couple days before Thoreau had set out on his journey 160 years before, so that Martin could be back to work at the dealership for Labor Day weekend. Then, when things finally fell completely apart midway, he took the bus back from Lowell two days early. He got home about midnight. Unfortunately, he found Milly was entertaining the boy’s soccer coach.

  You can’t trust soccer coaches. This is another established fact.

  I think there is a combination of problems between Martin and myself. He blames me for getting him off his routine and away from home that August. He blames me for the fact that the whole trip was a disaster. He is ashamed of his wife and doesn’t want to think about that. But they are not going to get a divorce, from what I can tell. They both still go to Church on Sundays. And they’ve made their Catholic accommodations in the years since.

  Thoreau had once kept warm by lying beneath planks of wood at a rude mountain observatory. Martin and I tied up our boat within sight of a shopping center and went into a Sears store and bought a couple of new sleeping bags because our old ones still stank after drying them at a laundromat. Our final argument began at the Sears.

  “So far as my experience goes, travelers generally exaggerate the difficulties of the way. Like most evil, the difficulty is imaginary; for what's the hurry? If a person lost would conclude that after all he is not lost, he is not beside himself, but standing in his own old shoes on the very spot where he is, and that for the time being he will live there; but the places that have known him, they are lost.”

  That’s the fact of it. I think I have come to believe that in some sort of self-defense, I suppose. It is not us who are lost, but the places we want to be. Martin was always keen on the maps while I was pointing out some flash of wings or an odd
colored turtle.

  When I divorced Mary Ellen, Martin even told me that I was making a big mistake. If, for no other reason than for the good of my girls. But then it was Mary Ellen who wanted the divorce because she didn’t want the girls to see us arguing any longer.

  Martin and I are brothers by blood but not much else. I feel closer now to Burley, or Connie for that matter. And as I have realized now, I have more sense of brotherhood toward Gary Apple, a man I have seen once in ten years.

  Martin refused to ever read Thoreau’s original account of the journey on the Concord and Merrimack. And that was just the beginning of our differences on our trip.

  “The cheapest way to travel, and the way to travel the furthest in the shortest distance is to go afoot, carrying a dipper and a spoon, and a fish-line, some Indian meal, some salt, and some sugar.”

  I haven’t tried that yet. Perhaps I should do that now. It is no more than a farmer might have carried to the sound of guns that April in 1775. It seemed to me that I might be able to walk the entire distance, as the Regulars did, from Lechmere’s Point to Concord in one day—easily enough. And then the next, I could walk back. But I was not really up to the task of marching the whole distance in one go as those benighted Brits did. Not while wearing those damp woolen suits and carrying sixty pounds of equipment, walking in stiff leather boots. On second thought, I will probably settle for a stroll on the level portion of the Battle Road set apart today for tourists in parkland between Concord and Lexington.

  “Far up in the country, . . . we met a soldier lad in the woods, going to muster in full regimentals, and holding the middle of the road, deep in the forest with shouldered musket and military step, and thought of war and glory all to himself. It was a sore trial to youth, tougher than many a battle, to get by us creditably and with soldier like bearing. Poor man! He actually shivered like a reed in his thin military pants, and by the time we had got up with him, all the sternness that become the soldier had forsaken his face and he skulked past as if he were driving his father’s sheep under a sword proof helmet.”

  A boy stood on a bridge in Lowell and watched us as we took our short mast down into the dinghy so that we could pass beneath. All this with us arguing the whole time. The boy watched us through the entire process without an expression on his face.

  Then the boy said, “Aren’t you too old to be doing that?”

  I looked up at him and said, “We’ve been arguing for almost forty years.”

  The boy said, “No. I mean sailing a toy boat.”

  It was barely an hour later that the dinghy capsized and our new Sears sleeping bags floated away on an inexplicable wake we had not seen coming and never saw the source of.

  But there was something else.

  Burley and I became friends over a beer one night in Alston. I had blood in my mouth from a fight we had been engaged with earlier. He simply needed the beer because his had been lost in the scuffle. What we talked about was books. Hemingway mostly, that night. Burley knew Hemingway was a boxer, and I had told him I was a writer when he inquired what I did for a living. This was hubris on my part, obviously. But then, in kind, he told me he was an actor—and yet he had never been paid a dime to act before that moment in his life. But the thought struck me now that the mutual lie had made us brothers. It was not the brawl that had attached us so much from the beginning as it was a common sense of aspiration.

  And then another thought.

  While he was in Iraq in 2004, Burley spent most of his time reading. Outside of college, he did more reading during those 30 weeks than any other time of his life. He had discovered Hemingway there. And it was his luck that his group was set up next to an EOD company. Explosive Ordnance Disposal.

  The EOD guys went out early every morning to remove the mines the Iraqis had set out in the desert, one by one. They were usually back by ten, when the sun became unbearable, and then went out again after sixteen hundred and came back at dusk. From ten to sixteen hundred they slept or played cards, basketball, even volley ball (if there were any women available for a game) or whatever could be done out of the sun.

  The recreation tent was a noisy place. Burley couldn’t take the noise. He used to sit in a corner of the medical unit, unless things were otherwise active, because it was somewhat air-conditioned. A dentist’s chair makes a good comfortable place to read and you can get the lighting just right. And that place was usually empty at that hour. Also, the guys didn’t want to use the Army dentists unless they had to, because most of those fellows were right out of school and into the Army just to get their medical bills paid for.

  One of the EOD guys was named Joe. He was a reader as well, and had the good taste to avoid most of the usual dreck, so it became a habit for Burley to trade books as he finished them. He read a little faster than Joe did, so he was the real beneficiary of that arrangement. Joe had a degree in literature from the University of California and he was fond of ‘heavy weight’ writers. He seemed to have an endless supply of Penguin paperbacks. Burley used to get a bundle every couple of weeks from a book dealer in Boston. Mostly science fiction. But that was where Burley had discovered Thoreau for himself. Sitting there at the edge of that small desert patch of universe with nothing but sand and sky in every direction, with stars bright right down to the black rim of the desert, it was easy to think about the woods and the water. Just sitting there.

  I wish I had gone on that trip up the Concord and Merrimack with Burley instead of Martin.

  As it turned out, the last time Burley saw Joe was in the dentist’s chair as they tried to reconstruct his jaw after he had come across a mine that was booby-trapped. And that had me thinking again about Fabian Lugano. This is how my mind works. Suddenly I was not thinking about brothers, or Thoreau. I was thinking about Patty Moriarty and Fabian Lugano.

  What I had learned from Patty Moriarty was that Fabian Lugano had taken up a specialty while he was in the Navy. E.O.D. She had no idea what the letters meant. She said he had trained out at Great Lakes in Illinois and later at Fort Benning. She used to get post cards from Virginia when he was stationed at Little Creek. The Post cards stopped coming when he was at Little Creek. At the time I was just trying to keep my pants on and hadn’t thought about it again.

  I’ve never been able to accommodate coincidences. What I knew now was that Fabian was not just a drug dealer. Not just a mule. He was Charlie Norris’s go-to guy for making things explode.

  With just one more phone call this morning, when it was late enough so I knew he’d answer, Wise confirmed what I suspected. It was a specialty and there were only a few such talents out there at any one time. If they didn’t get themselves killed while doing a job, they were often eliminated along with any other evidence that might connect the job with the boss. It was a very risky job, in any case. So that explained why Lugano wanted to find a new line of work. He had a woman he liked and a kid and he wanted to settle down. His talent was valuable, but not indispensable.

  Something told me that Lugano had overstepped his limits by trying to turn me into an aerosol. Charlie Norris would find out about that. He didn’t need the extra grief.

  Now, the fact was that I couldn’t prove a thing. I didn’t have the resources to prove a thing. I didn’t have the time. My problem was the worry that Fabian Lugano would try to hit me again. Odds were that he wouldn’t, but he might.

  But then again, the odds were that his career with Charlie Norris would be coming to an end soon.

  I suppose my real worry was whether my termination notice would come before his.

  So, I was thinking about too much at one time. I had to focus.

  And that was why I was thinking about Thoreau again, who probably never had a thought about blowing anything up in his life. Even a stump.

  27. Burley

  ​Mae Johnson opened the door and dipped her head slightly, eyeing me over the top of her glasses. She’s a big woman. Heavy set. As tall as Burley. Taller than Burley’s father. She fills the sp
ace she’s in. But I could see over her shoulder that there was already a gathering at the kitchen table.

  ​“If you’ve come for dinner, you picked the wrong night. I’m not cooking tonight. I’ve had a hard day at work. I’ve already warned everyone, it’s every man for himself.”

  ​No smile. Mae can do a deadpan like Jack Benny. She also has a stare that will quiet dogs and a scowl that can translate profanity without a word spoken. It’s obvious where Burley got his theatrical nature. She left the door open and walked back toward the kitchen. I closed the door behind myself and followed her.

  ​I said, “I was looking for Burley. The fact that I’m here at dinner time is a pure coincidence.”

  ​She said, “Emheh.” This is her all-purpose answer to anything she doubts.

  ​Burley was not in the kitchen—just his sister Sandra and his father, Herb.

  Burley’s father gave me a smile and put his hand out but stayed in his seat as he spoke. He’s an insurance adjuster. Or was. He retired a year or two ago and invested in a couple of laundromats. He has a thin mustache across his upper lip, as black as his eyebrows, and always cut neat. The mustache bends freely to accent whatever he’s saying. Herb is as wiry as Mae is stout. By the look of him you’d think he had just been sick, but he has looked the same since I first met him more than twenty years ago. Burley told me once that his mother took up with him just so she could practice her nursing when she was in school.