The Crossing

by Jason Mott

  There were almost ten of them standing in the forest before us, beneath the dim starlight. Embers, each and every one. And all of them old enough to be drafted. All of them trying to get away from the war.

  Save for one, they stood with their heads down, coats pulled up to their ears, legs trembling from cold and fatigue, as though everything in their lives was being carried on their shoulders and was pushing them into the earth, grinding them down with each moment.

  “Hey!” Tommy said before I could stop him.

  In unison, they all trained their eyes on him. “We’re not police or draft,” Tommy said. “We’re just on our way to Florida,” he continued. “Heading down to watch the launch. How about you guys?”

  After a long moment and a watchful stare, the person holding the flashlight spoke. She was dark-skinned with her hair cut close like a soldier’s. She had hard eyes. And when she spoke, her voice was confident as steel. “You both about the right age,” she said, looking us up and down. “You been drafted yet? You don’t have to go. None of us has to. If you’re smart you’ll come with us.” Her voice was still firm, but there was sympathy in it. Almost pity. In spite of whatever compassion might have been there, she never let her eyes leave me as I moved closer to Tommy and placed my hand inside his pocket. Gannon’s gun was still there.

  “Like my brother told you, we’re heading down to watch the launch,” I said.

  The girl with the hard eyes barked a sharp laugh. “Is your map broken? Because you’re a long way from Florida.”

  Tommy managed a smile. Then he squinted, looking over the group, and I could see that his brain had finally figured out what it was seeing. Now if only I could stop him before—“You’re dodgers, aren’t you?” Tommy asked, almost happily.

  A tremble went through the group. The girl with the hard eyes seemed to harden even more. “And if we are?” she asked, the question bordering on a threat.

  All over the country there had been groups of Embers running from the war. In some parts of the country it was becoming a rite of passage. The biggest case had been dubbed “The Dublin Disappearance.” Twenty-seven high school seniors simply didn’t show up for school one day. By the time the school and the parents found out about it, the kids had a three-day head start. They’d orchestrated it so that their parents had given them permission to go off on a weekend camping trip. But by Sunday night the kids weren’t back and then on Monday morning when time came for school, the kids still weren’t there.

  It was late Monday afternoon when a package arrived at the school containing all of the students’ cell phones and all twenty-seven draft letters with the words NO THANK YOU scrawled across them. It had become the slogan of the movement, a polite refusal to be a part of things, a deference so polite that it seemed as though they were only turning down an offer of dessert at the end of a meal. All across the country NO THANK YOU began showing up in the empty beds of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds who had been drafted.

  It was just over two months ago—seventy-seven days, to be exact, which my memory always was—since The Dublin Disappearance.

  In the beginning the story filled the news outlets. The people came on television and blamed the government, blamed the war, blamed the parents, blamed the students. There was no shortage of places to point. But when the days turned to weeks and the students still weren’t found, the concern shifted. They were called cowards and deemed “lacking in moral fortitude” by one of the pundits. “A generation of polite cowards” is what some people called them.

  Slowly, compassion for frightened kids hardened into anger at cowardly brats.

  More weeks came and went and a couple of the students were found. They were caught not far from the Canadian border by a pair of local hunters who had been chasing both deer and dodgers—their words. The pair was sent to jail and there they sat right up until one of them couldn’t take it anymore and decided that the war would be better. So his lawyer spoke to the judge and, sure enough, he went off to the war and died a miserable death but got called a hero for it.

  Still, NO THANK YOU showed up spray-painted on walls, plastered on websites, written on abandoned draft notices and left in the middle of schools increasingly diminished by the war’s insatiable appetite. The three words, I understood, weren’t a refusal, but a plea.

  “Where are you guys from?” Tommy asked, sounding as clueless and trusting as he always sounded.

  “Nowhere,” the girl with the hard eyes said. “Just passing through.”

  “Good,” I replied.

  “You really headed to the launch?” someone behind the girl with the hard eyes asked.

  “Yep,” Tommy replied brightly.

  But I couldn’t take my eyes off the girl in the lead and she wouldn’t take her eyes off me. My hand was still in Tommy’s pocket, clamped around the handle of Gannon’s gun. I stared at the girl’s close-cropped hair, the eyes that didn’t seem to blink, only watch and wait, as if she had seen beyond the darkness surrounding them and was able to observe everything, maybe even the whole world, in one swift movement.

  “You’ve already been to the war, haven’t you?” I asked.

  The girl’s eyes narrowed, then relaxed. “Yeah,” she said.

  “Tell me,” Tommy said, almost breathless. “Tell me how it was.”

  “It’s a war,” the girl replied. “How could it ever be anything other than terrible?” Her eyes lowered and she was no longer looking at us. She was looking inward, remembering, perhaps. Tommy and I both wanted to know what she saw. There is always a foolish curiosity about war. So many writers and filmmakers have tried to tell us about it, so many veterans, poems, songs. The oldest stories are stories of war. But still, all of us who have never been there wonder how much of the stories is true.

  “Really?” Tommy asked, a bit of awe in his voice. “And you made it back okay. You really came back okay.” He turned to me and pointed at the girl with the hard eyes. “You see? I told you. I told you!” Then he laughed and took my hand out of his pocket, making me let go of the weapon. “It’s all going to be okay,” Tommy said, but whether he was speaking of now or of the future was difficult to say.

  “Did I mention that I got drafted?” Tommy blurted out.

  “You don’t have to go,” one of the other teenagers said. Then, “Just say, ‘No Thank You.’” Their eyes cut from Tommy to me and back to Tommy, pleading.

  Tommy dismissed them with his hand. “I’m going to go and come back and be okay.”

  “Good for you,” the girl with the hard eyes said.

  “You’ll see,” Tommy replied, and he turned to me as he said the words. Then he turned and looked back over his shoulder, as if he was able to see Gannon in the distance, still locked in that car on the side of the road. “But for now,” Tommy said, “my sister and I need to get going.”

  The girl with the hard eyes waved her hand, and with military precision, the others behind her started forward. Tommy and I stood motionless as the crowd of young faces passed us by. I tried to see them all, tried to capture their visages into The Memory Gospel so that no matter how they fared in the war, they would not be lost. I would always remember them, perfect and undiminished.

  I could save them that way. Save them all.

  But then, no matter how much I tried to resist it, the moment came when the group has passed. Tommy and I lingered, turning to watch the teens disappear into the darkness, opening the distance between us. “Maybe they’ve got the right idea,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Tommy asked.

  “Maybe you should go with them. Maybe we should.”

  Tommy clucked a hard laugh.

  “Gannon would never find us if we went that way,” I said. “As far as he knows, we’re heading to Florida. So he’ll be looking for us along that path. But if we went with them...we’d be okay.”

  Tommy scratched the top
of his head for a moment, thinking. “Nope,” he said finally. “We started this. We’ve got to finish it.”

  He started off into the night, continuing into the forest, which had become deep and swollen since the passing of the others, who were headed north, maybe to Canada in the hope of getting away from the war, away from everything. But that would only delay the inevitable. Of course, none of us knew that then.

  I closed my eyes and remembered their faces, one by one. But it was the face of the girl with the hard eyes that I remembered most clearly. I saw myself in the girl’s face, in spite of the dark skin and the close-cropped hair. It was the face of someone who had been changed.

  I watched the girl with the hard eyes until she had disappeared into the darkness and the cold and, perhaps for the first time in my life, I wanted to be someone else. I wanted to be her.

  ELSEWHERE

  The money would last for another month and then, after that, well, they didn’t really know what would happen. Rather, they didn’t want to know what would happen.

  Diane knew the truth of it. She knew that as soon as the money ran out their parents would pass away like so many other people in this world. And she had come to terms with that. But it was worry over her sister, Helen, that kept her up at night more than anything else. Helen had always been the type who cared too much, the type to keep crying over what was lost. In fact, on the right day, she could still be found getting tight in the throat and watery around her eyes over the family dog, Sprite, that died when they were both children. And when Diane asked her sister about it, Helen would only reply by wiping the corner of her eyes and saying, “I can feel how I want to feel.”

  Day after day, Diane watched as Helen went on feeling how she wanted to feel about their parents, both of whom lay sleeping in their bed together, connected to feeding tubes and heart monitors and everything else that did nothing but stave off the inevitable one more hour at a time, and at the end of every day Diane sat down and reviewed the expenses and saw that the math of it all wasn’t ever going to come out fine. In the end, this would break them both and, in all honesty, maybe it already had.

  And so, finally, tired of watching everything fall apart, there was nothing left to do but try to save something.

  “Helen?” Diane called, her voice soft yet firm in the way it had always been.

  Helen was sitting at their parents’ bedside as usual. Helen was as delicate physically as she was emotionally, Diane thought. She was thin and long, angled like a heron sculpted from brass. Her face had been knotted in frustration or worry as far back as Diane could remember. Even when her sister smiled, it was clouded by anticipation of the frown that would soon follow behind it.

  Diane spent years wondering how she and her sister had been born of the same blood.

  “Helen?” she called again.

  “Yes,” Helen answered, snapping out of her thoughts. She looked around, confused for a moment, then found her bearings. “What’s the matter?”

  “We need to talk about the finances,” Diane said.

  Helen shook her head. “Not this again.”

  “It’s not going away,” Diane replied. “Have you even looked at the bills? In another month there’ll be nothing left.”

  “Then we’ll sell whatever we have.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. There won’t be anything left to sell.”

  “Then we’ll take out a loan. We’ll borrow it from somebody. Anybody.” Helen straightened her back and folded her arms across her chest and looked at their parents who lay side by side, sleeping, just as they had been for the last six months. “I told you I don’t want to talk about this type of stuff in front of them.”

  “They can’t hear us,” Diane said, but she wasn’t sure whether or not she believed that, so she said it more softly than she normally would have.

  “It’s been proven that coma patients can hear voices and find comfort in the sound of their loved ones.”

  “These aren’t coma patients, Helen. It’s The Disease. They’re not coming out of it.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do. And so do you.”

  They went back and forth this way for half an hour and by the end of it nothing had changed. When it was all said and done, Diane knew that her sister wouldn’t be dissuaded. All there was left to do was to cut ties. So she did. She emptied out her part of the savings and then, without much effort, decided not to go back to her parents or her sister.

  It kept her awake for the first few days. She sat up in the late hours of the night imagining the sight of her parents sleeping and Helen sitting at their bedside with no one to help her. But the difference between Diane and her sister had been that, just like with the family dog, Helen never knew when to let things go. Diane, on the other hand, had always known when to sever ties and get back to life.

  And with the war happening and The Disease burning through people, there wasn’t much life left to get back to. A person had to take advantage of everything they could get their hands on. So that’s what Diane did.

  Having finally mustered the courage, Diane took to heart what so many others in the world were saying, that this was the end so a person might as well enjoy what they could.

  She’d always wanted to go to Las Vegas so, finally, after years of not doing it, she went. Most of the flights were canceled due to growing hysteria over the war, so she loaded up her car and made the long, dusty drive into the desert and found Las Vegas waiting for her.

  It was everything Diane had dreamed it would be. Lights and music and people. Neither the war nor The Disease seemed to be able to find purchase here. Diane was able to forget about her sister and her parents and everything else. She drank and she gambled and she made love to a man with a nice face who reminded her of one of the boys she’d fallen in love with back in high school and she stayed awake for days and the lack of sleep only seemed to spur on more excitement and so she had fun and lived and was able to truly forget about everything that was going wrong in the world.

  A week later, when she finally decided to call home and check on her sister and her parents, she found them both just as she had left them. The money was all but gone, but Helen was still at their bedside, determined to burn every remaining penny to hold on to them for as long as she could. And when Diane said to her sister, “You need to let them go,” Helen simply replied, “Neither of us is wrong.”

  SIX

  We climbed up out of the forest almost an hour later and found the world burning.

  In a long, glowing line along an inky black highway, great plumes of flame burst out of the earth and licked at the dark sky. The fires were big enough to burn buses. At intervals like telephone poles, the pyres roared and shook the air, driving the cold back into the darkness. The air was suddenly hot and thick in our lungs. Beads of sweat sprang up on Tommy’s brow and all he could do was stand there with his eyes wide and his mouth agape as he tried to count the pyramids of flame that stretched along the highway as far as his eyes could see. The most he was able to manage was a whispered, awestruck “...Wow.”

  “It’s so warm,” I said, as the fire’s breath swept over me.

  Once our eyes adjusted to the alien light, Tommy and I could make out large, insect-like creatures picking at the fires. Steel backhoes and bulldozers housing men with glassy, drowsy eyes chewed at the earth and loaded severed trees onto the fires. The flames leaped. The machines worked. The earth died a little. And on and on it went.

  “What do you think they’re doing?” Tommy asked. He looked down the road, squinting, trying to see where the pyres ended and sanity began again.

  “Pipeline,” I said.

  Tommy thought for a moment. “What’s the point?”

  “We should get going,” I said, looking up at the sky. Finally the sun was breaking the horizon. The sky swelled before us, defying gravi
ty in its usual way, filling out the corners of the world like paint rolling out over a ceiling. I stared up for a moment, then turned on my heel and started east along the road.

  Tommy followed. He looked back over his shoulder now and again, probably half expecting to see Gannon’s car crawling up the road behind us. It was only a matter of time, Tommy and I knew, like everything else in life. Everything that could happen would happen if you gave it long enough. Tommy had heard someone say that once and he’d come to believe it. It made sense to him, for the most part. And that was all he could ask out of most philosophies. So, given enough time, he knew that Gannon would find us. And yet he also knew that I would make it to Florida somehow. And he knew that he would make it off to the war. It would all come to pass, just so long as we were given enough time.

  Life was all about time.

  We walked along the highway, watching the earth bloom into the new day. Trees grew from shadow to substance, like water hardening into ice. A flock of blackbirds bolted from the underbrush along the roadside not far from one of the bonfires, their wings pummeling the air. The men in the bulldozers and backhoes worked mechanically until the sun had climbed the backs of the trees. The men looked thin and hollow in the dawn, like puppets made of paper.

  Tommy and I outwalked the pyres. Miles came and went. The air became cold and clammy again. A chill fog rolled in around us, so dense that we could almost wrap it in our arms and squeeze it into rain.

  The tremble of cold returned to my hands. My stomach gnawed at itself. All the fatigue came pouring over me but there was nothing left to do but continue on.

  I walked with my head down, counting footsteps.

  Tommy saw the house before I did.

  “Ginny,” Tommy said. “Ginny!”

  “What?”

  “We should go to that house,” Tommy pointed. Off in the distance, beyond a field and at the end of a dirt road branching off the highway, stood a small farmhouse. A porch light burned like the eye of a cyclops in the foggy day.