So I cooled down and we started going through the apartment, bagging up the haul. Computer files, fake US government ID badges, credit cards and European bank accounts, photos of landmarks in the States. Video tapes, man. Chem warfare on dogs, bomb making, kidnapping, not to say anything about the porno, and one video from a training camp in Afghanistan with these dirtbags in Sinbad pajamas rehearsing to kill world leaders at a friggin’ golf tournament. Now listen to this. I’m checking out a pile of documents and crap and I find an envelope and inside are plane tickets, like five or six of them, most going to London or Germany but there’s one that originates in Islamabad connecting in Madrid to Santo Domingo and the final destination—want to guess?—was Port-au-Prince. You heard about that, right?
No, she said. It never came through the pipes.
Yeah, well there it is, he said. Small world.
Daddy’s world, she refrained from saying, talking to herself. Everyone against Dad.
The Bureau team is tussling with the SPECAT team over who has dibs on what. Meanwhile, we have five detainees and a zip-bag full of passports and my squad is trying to sort that out, snapping digital pics and uplinking them to our database, trying to determine the catch, who’s who, you on our playlists or not, and we’re working the stream, I’m fishing the passports, and suddenly the anti-cupid shoots me with a hate arrow, I’m looking at a match and it tells me the guy who winged Tilly is a Pakistani with connections and I just go off, for the third time I’m wailing on him, Spank has just put ten stitches in the guy’s forehead and I yank them right out with my fingernails, I’m screaming in his bloody face, Tell me about Khan, tell me about this plane ticket, and I’m knocking his brains out and the Bureau guys are saying, Dude, he’s defenseless, that ain’t right, and the SPECAT guys are saying, Whoa, killer, save some of that for our friends, and finally Scarecrow gets me in a headlock and pulls me away, saying, Burn, come on, man, have you lost your mind? And all I’ve been thinking about ever since is something that aikido instructor told us out in California—the warrior must descend all the way into his body and soul and live in that gap where the world falls apart.
What I want to know is, what does that really mean, said Burnette, pounding the steering wheel with the side of his fist. I lost it in that room in Sarajevo. My mind—gone. No argument. What worries me is what I found, what remained after everything else. No more wondering who you are, because here you are, pal.
What was it? she asked.
My soul, man. That’s what you find in the gap where things fall apart. You descend to your soul.
Tell me what you mean, she said. This interests me.
I don’t know, he said, a rise of escaping anguish, squelched. I’m all over the place with it. What does it mean, true to myself? I feel righteous, the next minute I’m ashamed. Or just disgusted.
Ev, she said, you’re a decent man, an appraisal that he, of course, promptly ignored. Can I say something, she asked with quiet adamance. So don’t be a coward, don’t be a hypocrite—choose your crime, she said. Isn’t that right?
Right, said Eville. There’s the rock, there’s the hard place.
People who won’t choose sides. They don’t accept they’re responsible for everything bad that happens.
Vasich’s wife, he said. She shoved the dog in the guy’s face. Kiss my boy’s dog, you bastard. Pulled the trigger.
So what do we call that? said Dottie. Crime of war, crime of dereliction, abdication, passion? Crime of what?
I don’t know, he said.
I think about this all the time, she said. I don’t think everybody who hurts us should be forgiven.
Maybe that’s right, he said, but it cuts both ways.
They approached a well-lit roundabout with an unmanned guard post at its center. Hey, said Eville, Camp Lejeune. He stuck his left arm out the window, pumped his fist in a salute, and hollered Semper fi! and seemed to feel better for it, the moment’s interjection of esprit de corps, as they passed into the sonambulent confines of the marine base, sharing, it seemed to her, a tacit agreement to ride on in silence, meandering in the lowlands of their own thoughts, Dottie imagining tonight was her first encounter with an honest man. Everything’s either cartoons or Tolstoy, she thought. Who’s playing games? We die, they go to the movies. No wonder the boys clam up, she thought, stifling their doubts. And who am I to blame them? she reasoned with herself. In her own vocabulary of self and experience, exposure meant to be extinguished, and honesty meant a reliable hell-bent shortcut to extinction.
On the military base, the fields and their silvered crops vanished into the primordial forests and mossy blackwater swamps of the Croatan Indians and Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony, the road sandwiched by insect-pulsating walls of leafy darkness blinking with fireflies. They emerged from this wilderness into an all-night mile of off-base decadence, servicemen’s bars and strip joints, tattoo parlors and bail bondsmen, patrol cars cruising past sidewalks clustered with Friday night brotherhoods of hooting, callow marines, invincible stumble-drunk boys with shaven heads and a deep yearning for faceless enemies. Then Highway 70 took them into Morehead City’s deserted streets, then out onto the causeways over to Beaufort and north toward Cedar Island, one of the old fishing settlements they sped through named Smyrna, not that she was on the lookout for omens, Eville tight with fatigue as they turned off the main road into the watermen’s hamlet of Atlantic and found the marina he had read about and turned down toward the harbor to park behind an industrial-sized pickup truck with balloon tires and a walk-in camper weighing down its bed.
I’ll be damned, Eville said, his head craned out the window. There’s already a line.
The moon had set into the westward spread of the continent and she could make out nothing beyond the vehicle in front, fishing rods rising straight up from its bumpers like a grove of radio antennae. A line for what? she said groggily, while still another truck took its place behind them.
She woke with the sound of the door closing and the engine starting again, half-conscious and feeling crappy, Eville, in a new kelly-green ball cap embroidered with a brassy fish, dog-faced tired but smiling as he handed her coffee and a sausage biscuit he had purchased in the marina store. She put the coffee in the cup holder and the sandwich in her lap and tried to focus, the truck in gear now and edging forward down a ramp. There were spartina marshes and the slate-colored expanse of Core Sound and out to the lavender mist of the horizon where they were going the low profile of the North Core Banks, and she thought somewhat obtusely, Water changes everything.
Then they were the last vehicle poised to be loaded onto the little four-car ferry, the Green Grass. Her heart was unprepared for this sight and, missing a breath, she said to herself in a breathless burst of despair, Burnette, what have you done, where have you brought me? because there was the water and the other side of the water and the ferry that would take them there, its sturdy classic lines identical to the upswept design of a Turkish tirandhil. Against her will, her memory had begun its bittersweet alterations, removed the ferry’s cuddy cabin and replaced it with a mast, it had stripped the deck of the boat’s white paint to reveal an expanse of varnished teak, and there lashed to the dock was her long lost Sea Nymph, the impossible cruelty of the happiness given and taken away, and here she was being a baby, a weakling, crying to herself, Go away.
Burnette, his smile collapsed, was looking over at her now, at the same time trying to obey the attendant’s directions into the confines of the remaining space on board, asking her, Shit, what’s wrong? And how could she ever open her mouth to tell him, in the guise of reminiscing, I haven’t been on a ferry in twelve years. Once upon a time I was a girl and my name was Dottie and I was seventeen and in love and I was real. I had a life that I loved and it was beautiful and the boy was beautiful and here I am again but once was enough, once is all you get to ask for, once is ab
out all I can survive.
They were securely on board and each sensation made her ache with sadness, the sense of imminent departure once so precious, the shimmy of the ferry’s diesel engine, thrumming into her flesh. The attendant chocked their wheels to keep the truck from rolling and she said without looking at him or anywhere, Ev, do you mind? I need a few minutes. Alone, she said coldly, feeling hateful, and she waited for him to get out of the truck. It was a moment, a straw, that you would never get past unless you love someone.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The sun rose red through a purpled cavalry of clouds marshaled along the horizon and after a while it spiked straight into her eyes and she could not look at it and looked away under the shield of her hand east along the ribbon of the island, thinking, It doesn’t look like a safe place, which she understood for some would be the island’s virtue. It could have been the Bosphorus, eons ago, before a cow jumped into the straits to break the diluvian spell separating east from west. The distance was approximate shore to shore, and the outer banks were in the purest sense borderlands, where you occupied the last footstep of a boundary and looked out beyond, facing the naked immensity of the unknown, impossible to see where it might end, plucking and shedding dreams until you arrive at the last dream and find that it is enough or it is not.
Dottie dropped her hand from her brow, looking out the windshield at Eville, his feet planted directly behind the low gunnel on the starboard side, no rail to prevent him from pitching overboard but the water was a slick calm and no traitors around to undercut him with a shove more consequential than the one he had just absorbed from her. Oh, Christ, she lamented, understanding the need to get out of the cab and speak to him.
This interests me, she had said to Eville during the night, her laconic catechist’s response to the overwrought, slightly flaky topic of soulcraft, yet by her own accounting she had lost her soul and had given up the search as besides the point and probably chimeric, her soul elsewhere in another unnameable realm, neither America nor heaven, not to be readmitted, believing that the loss was irretrievable but believing also that the loss was not insurmountable but a circumstance to which life required adaptation, a loss you ceased struggling with and learned—and it got easier, didn’t it—to live with as you learned to live without. Because in the end you can’t fight everything, she told herself. But how ironic, Eville finding his soul in Sarajevo, as if that would ever do him any good, bring him any peace of mind, secure his wholeness when he felt so condemned by the blemish of an anomalous part. Because, because. Someone would have to tell him—when you cannot be saved by love you must be saved by hate. Drop the knife and turn the other bloody torn cheek? Follow Christ to the cross? Why? Must we all be crucified? Why?
She opened the door and went to stand next to him, his face fallen with a lack of sleep but also with misgiving, and stared down as he was doing at the water, the reflections shifting over the shallows, the flicker of small fish and scuttle of crabs, the swaying meadows of turtle grass and the solitary whelks. After the silence became too much she said, It’s not you, I’m having these bad memories, I don’t always know how to be myself, you can throw me over if you want, a terrible joke she couldn’t believe hearing from her own mouth, unsparing, disloyal, but it seemed she had rendered him mute and she had to apologize.
Her penance was to suffer his polite aloofness, cool and matter-of-fact, his mouth opening and closing like a wind-up toy. He told her what he had heard from the other fishermen and the people in the marina. The red drum were running, the crowd would be down for the weekend and then the island would clear out, there was a chance for bad weather Tuesday or Wednesday. I got you five pounds of frozen mullet for bait, he told her, still reserved, his eyes in the shade of his ball cap and his vision still fixed over the side.
I’m sorry, Burnette. I really am.
I don’t get you.
How many times have you told me that? Why bother?
You gonna be okay?
I’ll live, she said, relieved that he had met her eyes without rebuke or animosity but open concern, trying to read her face and what it might tell him about his fortune. I was having some weird past-life flashback, she told him, I was Julia or somebody, the daughter of the Emperor Augustus, being banished to an island. It doesn’t make any sense, I know.
Eville said, Banished? Why?
I don’t remember. Either for being a whore or for plotting against her father. Probably both.
She grabbed a beer from the cooler and sat back down in the cab, satisfied for the remainder of the voyage to watch Eville in his element, striking up conversations with the guys in the other trucks, grand sportsmen all, a native among his people, gathering intel for the vagaries of Operation Dottie. One of the older fellows strolled over to examine Eville’s tires and she heard them talking, the man handing Ev an air gauge and advising him to deflate the pressure to fifteen pounds to avoid getting the truck bogged down wherever the sand was soft—the sort of practical butt-saving information Eville loved, and he spent the last five minutes of the trip in a squat, the tires hissing like reptiles. Then the Green Grass idled down into the channel of an austere cove staked with fish traps and they began to dock in what looked like the middle of nowhere, an osprey’s insouciant nest of sticks right there atop one of the pilings, and Eville was back behind the wheel and despite her general feeling of shittyness, she gave him what she suspected was a daffy look, thanks to her breakfast beer and sleep deprivation, wanting to reignite his optimism and diminish his anxiety for the gamble he felt he was taking simply by being with her.
They followed the other trucks off the ferry and down a sand track through flats of yaupon and sea oats into a small hamlet of rental cabins on stilts, where the truck in front of them pulled off but the lead trucks kept on and so did Eville until he was called upon to downshift into first gear to navigate the looser sand on the rising barrier of dunes. The trucks ahead mounted the incline easily and disappeared down but Eville had to back up and gain more speed to power up to the top of the crossing, where he stopped to appreciate the sudden stark magnificence of the view, disciplined squadrons of brown pelicans on patrol, an offshore breeze throwing back the manes of frisky little pony waves trotting to the beach, the beach itself an unstained purity as far as the eye could see, out into the emptiness that was the fullness of the natural world.
Dottie looked at the ocean and exclaimed, It’s blue! before she hung her head out the passenger window and quietly threw up.
The two other trucks on the ferry had turned south down the beach, heading, he supposed, to New Drum Inlet. Eville turned in the opposite direction and they motored along the tide line when they could, bouncing through the gullies higher up when they had no other choice. She began to feel like liquid, the sensation of her insides sluicing from head to gut with each gravitational dip and anti-dip. After several miles they had spotted only two other vehicles and their campsites and she asked where they were going and how much farther and Eville said he was just scouting around for a good place. It all looks the same, she said, her hands clamped to the dashboard, and he looked over at her, registering her distress and began angling up toward the dune line, slowing down at a hard-packed wash that formed a level cut between the hillocks back into the flats stretching beyond to the sound. He stopped and said, How’s this look? but she was already out of the truck with the dry heaves, telling him between gasps, perfect, great, she loved it, and then she felt as is she were spiraling and falling, and she fell.
There was an unremitting harsh light suddenly obstructed by a low ceiling or shelf of darkness, a claustrophobic change until she realized this was Eville’s doing, his work, taking care of her, blocking the sun. Later she felt her damp head lifted out of the sand and resettled on the comfort of a pillow and thought, self-satisfied, he was the one who didn’t want to bring pillows to camp.
Somew
here further along in the jagged sequence of her awareness there was the unimaginable luxury of lotion-spreading hands gliding along the inflamed contours of her face, the hands moving on to her arms, then alighting erotically on her feet, the exposed skin of her shins and calves, stopping prematurely, stopping before she was ready for this useful pleasure to end, her flesh engulfed in wretched heat, everything burns, she said or thought she said, keep going, do everywhere, and she slipped away again toward some center of longing that seemed always to be receding from her thirsty approach. Then there were fingers at her swollen lips, trying to put something into her mouth and she heard Eville, exasperated, say, Goddamn it, stop fucking hitting me and swallow, and she heard herself making an awful noise and Eville saying, What! his voice latent with repugnance, and she passed out in the middle of her incoherent objection, asking herself, What did I say? Telling herself she had lost them all, her lovers, all being no greater than one.
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