The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

by Ethan Rutherford

  “He’s probably getting milk. Listen to yourself.”

  “He’s not getting milk. How’re the boys?”

  “The house is at seventy-eight, they picked some boogers, and we ordered a pizza.”

  “Sam hasn’t been sleeping well. I told you that, though, right?”

  “Yes. You want me to send John over? Are you really getting freaked out?”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Do you want to come over here?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  She’ll put the receiver down, listen for her husband, and wonder if she should call the police. And tell them what? That a week ago they had been mugged? That her husband has been acting like he’s become trapped by a movie in his head, a version not of what did happen, but what should have happened? Is there anything at all the police could do at this point? On the fridge, there are notes, and photographs, and a couple baseball cards stuck on with magnets. A picture-strip of her and Charles, mugging for the camera in a photo booth, years ago, before Sam. And she’s surprised to see, there in the picture, in his then-face, young, and exuberant, a glimmer of his now-face, hard set, distant, determined, unkind. As if this were the sort of man he had always planned to grow into.

  Her husband, five blocks away, will be heading home. Coming toward him, a group of kids, a pack of kids, there must be ten of them, hooded against the cold. High school kids. Little shits. He makes up his mind to walk right down the center of the group and puts his head down until they come face-to-face and then he’s suddenly flushed and nervous and despite himself, despite his resolve not to step out of the way, despite the fact that he’s got some store-bought confidence sheathed in his pocket, despite the fact that he’s been walking around all night looking for kids just like these, at the last moment he steps aside. ’Scuse you one of them says. He’ll mumble something in reply, and immediately regret it. What? one of them will say, turning around, clearly the leader, since the rest fall in line behind him. Nothing. What? Nothing. Thought so.

  Claire, alone in the house, standing in the kitchen, will be visited by a memory she has of the vacation they took after she found out she was pregnant. They, the two of them, Claire and Charles, on their way to Maui, sparing no expense, and once there sparing not even themselves in the Hawaiian heat. The sun cooked through their low-SPF sunscreen almost immediately and forced them back inside to the hotel pool, where they lounged, dispirited, until they realized the beach umbrellas were rentable and rented one, and tromped back down to the ocean. They were in so much pain from the sun but couldn’t stomach the idea of flying ten hours to not lie out on the beach, and so they spent the rest of the late morning wearing long sleeves, in the umbrella’s shade. Around lunch, after two hours of baking, fully clothed, in the midday Maui heat, Charles had turned to her, wearing sunglasses and a Gilligan hat that barely provided shade for his zinc-painted face, and said in his father’s voice: well, this is money well spent. It had made her laugh so hard—his face, she hadn’t recognized it, neon-covered and smiling, an advertisement for some debacle vacation, and his voice so like his father’s—that some of her virgin banana daiquiri had come through her nose. He had said Claire, that is beautiful and she told him if he didn’t like what he saw, it was just his tough luck. He’d said no, I like it as he got up on his elbows, I love it as he stood and then fell on his knees next to her and said I like it and then, out of nowhere, like something out of a nature show, he had ducked in close and licked the tip of her nose. She was so surprised by this, and made so oddly happy, that she dipped her nose deep into her drink and told him to try again, and the two of them had made a spectacle of their love for each other. You don’t fly ten hours to act like yourself, you fly ten hours specifically not to act like yourself, to rev whatever engines require revving, to get sunburned and silly, to not care, to really not care that you look like tourists with sun poisoning, or like two people trying to convince each other the decisions you made together were the right ones. Had there been anxiety about the pregnancy? There had been. But here they were: paradise. And it hadn’t mattered the next day when the rain began, conjured up from who knows where and so relentless they dubbed it parade-stopping, because near the beach was a cabana, and after they’d braved the sheeting water found themselves sitting alone under its roof. They stayed for hours. And just as they took one last look at the ocean before turning back to the hotel, the wind knocked a coconut from its palm tree and the thing flew down to them and rolled across the cabana’s slat floor. A hairy bowling ball, come to deliver the news. She had picked it up, and handed it to her husband, and told him congratulations, it’s a coconut, and he had said that’s fine by me and then after deciding it would be a girl and naming her, they’d taken turns reassuring each other they’d protect her from every bar-sponsored spike on the beach. Even if it was a coconut. Even if security, in coconut-land, couldn’t be guaranteed, they told her that tonight, at least, was one night she wouldn’t have to worry about thirsty tourists. They’d held the thing like a newborn, and enjoyed the expansive feeling they imagined this stranger would bring them, agreed that this stranger’s intrusion would result only in a deepening of themselves. That was the promise, then. They’d agreed.

  From the street, Charles will see his wife has come home. He’ll see she’s turned off most of the lights—the outside lights, the bedroom lights, the lights in the living room—but the kitchen lights are still on, and through that particular window, he can see her, leaning against the refrigerator, standing still like she’s studying something on the refrigerator, unaware of everything else, standing posed, as if framed in a painting. She could be anyone’s wife. He wishes she were anyone, at this point, but his wife. He’ll reach down for some snow, pack a snowball, and underhand it at the window. She’ll startle, and glance at the direction of the sound. She’ll turn her body toward the window, and roll her shoulders forward, unsure of herself, and he’ll know then that he loves her, but he can’t help, or stop, himself. He’s pulled his hood low over his face. He doesn’t want to be recognized, even if, and this he doubts, she can see beyond her own reflection in the glass. He’ll pick up a stick, chuck it onto the roof so it pinball-clatters between the gables, and be pleased with the sound. She won’t take her eyes off the window. He’ll reach down again, and pack another snowball; this one he’ll toss overhand, aimed right for the center of the painting. He hasn’t thrown like this since high school. He hasn’t moved like this since before he knew Claire. He hadn’t ever in his life been hit in the face, and this snowball is aimed directly at her face. It is flying perfectly. And directly before impact, the instant before the snowball flattens and Velcro-sticks to the window with its hollow thwack, the lights, in the kitchen, go dark.

  dirwhals!

  december 10

  This evening near the end of our shift the sun cracked like a brilliant orange yolk over the horizon. Bushard was standing next to me at the rail, and I told him it reminded me of the radiant and cold northern sunsets of my youth. He conceded that it would be possible to see it as beautiful, if only he could forget that beyond the twilit sand we could see was an operatic expanse of more sand. If he could erase this particular moment in history, have chosen another industry, and could, in fact, be someone other than himself, he said, then yes: beautiful. I told him that was the uplift I’d been looking for. He shrugged and replied it wasn’t his job to cheer me up.

  Tuva, my sister, you know me! I am long gone; your anger is justified. I left you when I could have stayed, when you needed me most, and my guilt has tugged at me like a living thing as we’ve crossed these dunes, looking for the bounty we have slowly come to realize may no longer be here. My messages to you go unanswered, but still I write, as if to underscore my own solitude and give shape to this expedition. These notes are addressed privately to you as well as myself; I feel compelled to put everything down. Will you read them? Years from now, will any of this make sense? At the very least I hope to find a friend in this log;
and if not you, then perhaps someone else will consider these jottings of note. Perhaps I will even find fame in an obscure journal of history. I’m dating these entries; there’s no reason for everything to come to nothing. The light has gone, the room is asleep. Let’s begin.

  My name is Lewis Dagnew, low crewman and spotter aboard the shipper-tank Halcyon, a tight-sleeper in an iron fo’c’sle, and one of thirty men to cast our lots and try our luck amidst the rolling dunes and oppressive heat found in the territory known as the Desert Gulf of Mexico. We left terra firma—packed dirt—over a year ago, and came to pin our fortune on the sliding sands; a fevered prospect, thus far an elusive hope. In the Halcyon’s case, fortune means a full hold; and we are here, a million miles from home, surrounded by a basin of sand four thousand miles wide, for one reason only: to spot, lance, and render dirwhal, that sand-diving beast, that dirt-drinking mass, that oil-saturated slowpoke who gave rise to an industry that not too long ago supported the energy needs of the entire southern biosphere.

  According to a normal timetable for an expedition like ours, we should’ve been off the sand months ago. Instead, we’ve pushed farther and farther out, treading concentric and ever-widening circles that place us well outside of the historically teeming hunting grounds. The heat during the day is constant and unyielding, the temperature yet to dip below 113 degrees, and our daily sweep has come to feel like a slow grinding scuttle across the floor of an arid oven. We’ve been issued sun-suits for the UV, but they do little to mitigate the heat. At the end of our deck shifts we go below, peel the heavy suits from our skin, and make jokes about being basted in our own juice.

  We are, it seems, alone on the sand. In the galley there’s a poster that explains how the pay structure works. It’s titled: Envision Success. But there have been no true dirwhal sightings, no trumpet’s call. Instead we compare heat-induced hallucinations of dirwhals breaching just off the bow and slipping back into the sand, never to be seen again.

  In the early months, we glimpsed other shipper-tanks cresting over the far dunes, but at that distance it was unclear if they were friendly vessels or not. We steered clear, and they disappeared like memories. Tuva: I would say that this state of isolation and disappointment dovetails with my general constitution and the luck I’ve had so far in life. But I am resolved to think of this voyage as more than a series of setbacks, even as the majority of the crew has begun to fret about the apparent barrenness of our surroundings. I am not here to sound the depths of my self-pity; I am here to push past the vagueness of my limited accomplishments. This morning, Renaldo caught me holding this journal and suggested I bind the pages and title it the Denouement. But why not assume that tomorrow will bring us what we’re looking for? Tonight I said as much to Bushard before lights-out.

  “A dream is a wish your heart makes,” he said, then turned his back to me and pulled his pillow over his head.

  december 18

  The Halcyon is a G Model 7 Kermode shipper-tank—one of the last in a series to roll out of Detroit before the invasion shut those factories down during my father’s generation—equipped with modified sand-treads and a flat metal deck. We are a slow-moving factory, an ungainly vessel that serves both as a hunting ship and a one-stop bio-processing plant. Our bow curves like a shovel, and is weighted for equal distribution at the contact points with the porous sand that surrounds us. The bridge rises abruptly, perpendicular, straight up, and is well windowed to aid with spotting. Stem to stern measures 180 feet, the length of three full-grown dirwhals laid head to tail. Middeck there’s a portable tryworks—three huge iron cauldrons perched atop industry-grade burners—where all our rending will theoretically occur. The cutting instruments—bizarrely curved, long-handled pole-knives so sharp you can’t help but imagine slipping them through flesh—are lashed under the portholes for easy access.

  From a distance, the overall impression the ship gives on the sand is that of a single and colossal iron shoe. Our hold, now empty, is a cavernous double-deck capable of storing the rendered bio-matter of anywhere between four to six hundred mature dirwhals. At four RPMs, the engine roar of the Halcyon is deafening; at six it’s like confusion opening in your skull. Below deck it’s a Minotaur maze of close corridors and low ceilings, poorly lit passageways that dead-end for no discernible reason. The buggy-steerers, mates, and coopers: they’ve each got their bunks aft, walls decorated with posters and postcards. Our Captain Tonker’s got his king’s quarters. The rest of us sleep in the bow near the engine, where there is little relief from the motorized churn of our generators.

  Today the plan had been to send a small group out in the buggies to explore the grounds to the south of us. I had been eager to leave the ship, but at the last minute one of the coopers decided he wanted to go, and I was forced into another eight hours of watching the sand from the hoop-rig near the stern. The buggies—we have four of them, small six-wheeled dune crawlers, each equipped with shock-prongs and a large sand-visor—zipped over the sand and away from the Halcyon with the buzzing speed of small insects. No one waved.

  Of the dirwhals I have yet to see I know this: they are large beasts, well toothed, long and finned, with a wide head that tapers to a flat tail, but their skin is the color of coal, which makes them easy to spot against the dunes. They have been known to attack shipper-tanks, but they are no match for the ordnance in our bomb-lances, and accounts of dirwhal aggression are at this point little more than spook stories, things of the past. It’s possible they’ve evolved to fear and avoid us. It’s more likely, though, that as their numbers have dwindled they have simply moved farther out into the basin, and as a result the hunting strategy aboard the Halcyon is straightforward: wherever they go, we follow.

  In the spotter’s manual, there is a color page delineating dirwhals by genus. Eight of twelve are crossed out, and two of the remaining four don’t render into usable energy. According to the timeline provided, hunting began in earnest forty-seven years after the Shift—the same year the Gulf drained and Further North refroze—and it’s taken us all of three generations to thin out what at first seemed an unlimited resource and the solution to all our energy problems. They are known to burrow under the sand to avoid the sun, but they sleep and feed on the surface. It’s been established that running an electrical current through the sand rouses them, but each day we send buggies to plunge a charge, and so far the pronging has yet to reveal anything at all.

  Months ago, I telecomped my sister—yes, you, Tuva—that things here weren’t so different from home: no perceivable seasons, weather that drives you into yourself, the illusion of unlimited space, shifting loyalties, petty grievances that burrow and sprout unexpectedly into meadows of resentment. That’s nice of you to say, my father comped back. I asked to speak directly to you, and he told me you weren’t interested in coming on the line.

  I could have insisted. I could have explained myself more clearly. Instead I cut the connection. Later, Renaldo told me I had a message. It read: Everything is worse. I stared at your message for an hour, typing and erasing different versions of a single apology before giving up and resolving that tomorrow, or the next day, I would try again. I never did. Weeks went by. Months. And now I’ve been informed that we are out of range for communication with anyone outside of the basin.

  Of note: there is no wind here in the Gulf, and the stillness is eerie. Yesterday, Renaldo mentioned that up in the hoop-rig, high above the deck and away from the engine noise, he had the sensation that we were the only moving thing for miles. It felt, he said, like he was the last man in the universe, cut loose from the earth, drifting through a painting.

  january 15

  This morning, Captain Tonker summoned all hands to the aft-deck. We gathered, and he stood above us on the bridge, brow furrowed against the sun. He’s a terse man, not given to conversation. He’s made it clear that he will brook neither dissent nor opinion. Those of us in the bow see him rarely. But what he had come to tell us was now that we were moving farther a
nd farther into the basin, those on watch were to be spotting for two things: dirwhals, and other shipper-tanks, which, given our current location, would most likely belong to the Firsties. A collective groan, followed by hissing, went up among the crew. Protection kooks, someone explained to me when I asked who the Firsties were. Bushard added: kamikaze environmentalists; degenerates; cultists; criminals. Captain Tonker held up his hand for silence.

  Their aim, he said, is to put us out of a job. Shipper-tanks have been dodging Firsties for years, and between them and Captain Tonker it’s a pointed circle of antagonism. He went on to explain that as the number of dirwhals has decreased, the number of preservationists active in the dunes has tripled, and their aim is the disruption—sabotage—of expeditions like ours, either by the violent immobilization of licensed shipper-tanks or by provoking us into firing on them. The law is on our side, he said, but they care nothing for the law. He ground his fist in his palm, and asked us how we felt about such heartlessness? So, his order: spot the Firsties, and report them, but under no circumstances were we to engage, even if provoked. They had cameras, they wanted us to fire on them, and they would stop at nothing to manufacture an incident, even if it came at great cost to their organization. He asked us if we understood. We answered: yes, of course.

  No one knows how old Captain Tonker is, but we know from the coopers that as a young man he’d been mate aboard a small fleet of shipper-tanks during the Great Hunt of ’78: the hinge-creak moment when it became clear just how lucrative the dunes could be. He’d been aboard a buggy doing a routine sand-prong, and whatever charge they sent down roused the earth itself. An entire dirwhal colony came to the surface. The lances were still rudimentary in those days—plagued by poor penetration and ordnance malfunction—but it didn’t matter: by the end of the second day, so much unrendered viscera had been spilled that his buggy had trouble finding traction in the sand. They were cutting and cooking for weeks. Flames licked the tryworks and illuminated the night sand, where the dead dirwhals were rolled together like pallets of log, awaiting their turn at the cutting platform. They were their own sun, a pulsar of energy that incinerated for twenty-four hours a day, and even so some of the dirwhals they lanced fell rotten before the buggies could pull them to the docks. The voyage had lasted all of two months, and taken them no more than two hundred miles into the Gulf. With the payout he got, he bought an island off the Canadian coast. Afterward he was made captain, and rechristened his ship the Halcyon.