Either the Beginning or the End of the World

by Terry Farish

  Then we heard the sound of helicopter rotors. The sound continued for hours as a helicopter hovered over the river, searching the water on either side of the Piscataqua River Bridge. This has happened more than one time since my father and I moved to the Heights. Our house is a row house, one of the small brick houses built before the first World War for shipbuilders and their families on the river. The sound of the rotors plying the river slowed our hands as we worked.

  Eventually my father had left the nets and the twine and sat in the growing dark beside the woodstove. I wished the helicopter would pull away and hush. They would stop if the search crew found what had fallen into the river. Or jumped into the river. Poor bastard, was all my father said. But he couldn’t work, and I knew he was shaken by whoever it was whose life hurt him so badly that he had come to a bridge with a 135-foot clearance below at high tide. Add another 9 feet at low tide. My father had laid his hand on my head.

  - - -

  But now no reassurance comes. No hand on my head. No hug to his shaggy hair. I stay in the shadows at the bottom of the stairs, already knowing, not taking the chance.

  But if he’d just turn. Give me a look of shared confidence—my father in his bandana and me, the girl he swore he’d die for—the exotic-looking one, strangers probably say when they meet us. His daughter’s got those dark, swimming eyes.

  Like I’m from some Asian war nobody clearly remembers.

  BRIDGE

  The Piscataqua River Bridge rises and arches like an enormous heron, its wings wide in flight.

  In the morning Pilot and I follow our unplowed street to the river path, then slog through the snow to our stretch of beach beneath the bridge. I barely see its shape in the morning dark, even now that I’m standing beside it. But I know the wings of the bridge curve out to the sky. Suddenly Pilot bays a high, chilling animal alarm. Nobody hangs out here. Especially in cold so fierce a body could crack. But I see a person in the snowy dawn, balanced on one of the rusted I-beams of a pier that was once here, maybe destroyed by the fast-running river. At low water the narrow beams reach long, first over rocks and then the river. Who’d want to be so near thirty-five-degree water screaming by?

  His feet are wide. A him?

  Pilot races in a wide arc around him. “Pilot,” I call softly. She is black and invisible in this light, except for her feet, which are white. I can’t find her feet running. Then a strip of pink light shows between the river and the sky. She’s there. A black cartoon nearly grown puppy with a licorice tail. The person turns, a figure etched in the new light, unaware of me.

  I make out camouflage baggy pants. Boots. A muddy-colored cap pulled low.

  Soldier things. The soldier shifts his feet on the beam like it’s a tightrope. I drop to the sand and hold out my arms. Pilot’s bony frame slams in. I fix on the marks on the soldier’s clothes and the cap that covers his eyes. His shoulders sag. He holds something in his right hand, his far hand from me. The sun’s pink tinge creeps through the mist and out of the water. The sun!

  My beach is not long, just the rocky shore you can walk at low tide between the bridge to the east and woods of white birch and oaks to the west. I’m not twenty feet from him. I call “Hey” toward the pier. He doesn’t say “Hey” back.

  Everything’s different this morning. It’s a school day. And I’m here, and there’s a soldier in the silver light. After what my father said last night.

  Pilot escapes my reach again. She gives out a ridiculously deep bark for the baby she is, all eleven months of her, a gangly puppy with pancake-sized feet.

  The soldier moves.

  “She’s friendly,” I say.

  Pilot calls up a gravelly howl from deep inside her. The soldier finally turns his head toward us. The soldier’s right hand seems to tremble and drum against his leg. Pilot’s body shakes with concentration on his every move. The pink light streaks over the sky. The soldier’s head bends at a funny angle, and for some reason I think of the Tin Man.

  “I’m not going to hurt her,” the soldier says. “The dog.” He scatters his words into the cold air. I glance at him directly. I see more of his face in the new light.

  Pilot sprawls flat, from muzzle to tail, watching him. “You’re on her beach,” I say.

  A low sound comes out of the soldier. It isn’t worried like Pilot’s. It’s flat.

  Pilot lets out a yip that cuts through the cold. “Excuse me,” I say, “do you have any treats? She’s food motivated. That’s what they said at the shelter. If you had a treat, she might stop howling.”

  Looking at the soldier, I don’t think he’s much older than Jamie, next door, who turned nineteen in December. He wears a thick watchband with a face as wide as his wrist. An American flag is stitched on his shoulder, only it’s in black and white. His lips are small, straight lines, except for a part that’s bloody and swollen. I want to tell him, Stay away from the Page. People get shot in that bar.

  Was he a soldier in Afghanistan? With Mr. Murray we are studying the country the way it was before we were at war.

  The soldier gets the word treat. Finally he pats his chest pockets. His hip pockets. He even has pockets on his sleeves. Above the flag are stripes like arrows.

  If he answers I don’t know. The roar of traffic from the bridge sucks up any words.

  Finally the soldier comes up with a packet of airline peanuts from one of his millions of pockets. “She like peanuts?” I think he says. He doesn’t focus on either of us.

  “Her name’s Pilot,” I say. “Call her.”

  The birches moan when the trees lean into each other, and then the wind suddenly stops. The soldier lets out a long, quivery whistle. It’s as if he heard a command—call her—and obeys.

  Pilot lifts her sleek self, walks straight to him. She scarfs up every peanut he holds out in his hand, then licks the scent from his open palm.

  My eyes are drawn to a glint of light, something in his other hand. I take a step nearer. But the soldier does some kind of trick, pulling something from another pocket. I freeze. I see what he drops into a place beneath his coat. What had glinted in the sunlight shining through falling snow was a gun.

  The warnings my mother would try to scare me with flash in my mind. Danger is everywhere. Trust no one. The spirits will get you. They want to take you to live with them. Watch out for spirits on your path. They lie in wait. For you, Sophea.

  I am not afraid. I don’t know any Khmer Rouge or the Pol Pot time my grandmother talked about. I am not Cambodian. I am American. I am not afraid. I have no past. I have no ancestors. I have no mother. I make myself from scratch every day.

  “Found this hanging from the fence.” The soldier gestures to the cyclone fence that divides the woods from the riverbank. My eyes leave his face and glance at what he holds. My ring. The black slit in the tiger’s eye stone gleams. He holds it out to me. I am aware of the ring, the rock, the soldier, the sun, the moon sucking the river back into the sea.

  “That’s mine.” I find myself shouting at him, as if he’ll pull the ring back and pocket it, too.

  He tosses it, and it lands in the crevice of the rock at my feet. On my knees, I scoop it into my hands clumsy with thick mittens.

  He’s watching me. “Are you real?” he asks.

  Somehow, this is confusing. I wrap my arms around myself. “I don’t know.”

  But all of a sudden, I’m aware of being a physical person. I’m aware of the ribbing of my undershirt hugging my wrists. I’m aware of my hair I wound in my fist that falls to the nape of my neck under my stocking cap. I feel the cold air as I breathe into my chest. We squint our eyes in the shard of sunlight and take each other in.

  “What’s your name?” I say. Did he forget the gun inside his coat?

  “Luke. Lucas.”

  I see the shadow of his beard. I step back.

  “I’m Sofie.” I jerk Pilot, who wants to run. Then I let her go and she flies, her floppy ears thrown back like Superman capes. I wonder what color
his eyes are. Maybe, like the river, they change with the angle of light. I love the feel of my ring back with me in my fist. It feels solid. I feel solid. But I can’t keep it.

  I open my mitten with my ring. “My father gave me this,” I say. “I’m giving it back to you. It’s for good luck, wherever you’re going. It’s a tiger’s eye.”

  I come closer, balance the ring on the steel bar. But this time I stay and study the American flag high up on his sleeve and try to make out the patch beneath it. Something Army National Guard. New Hampshire. I see a patch shaped like a shield, with many stars. Nine. Beneath that, bright colored bars. Striped and starred. Why did he pin on all these badges to stand under a roaring bridge?

  “How old are you?” he asks.

  “Sixteen,” I say, not thinking, since I’m almost seventeen. “Seventeen,” I say, but the roar of six lanes of cars overhead flattens it.

  The soldier lifts his glasses and turns his eyes on me. They are yellow-green exhausted eyes that are both terrifying and beckoning. I feel like I’m wearing nothing but the cotton undershirt and he can see every bone up my rib cage. “You need a night’s sleep,” I say, and again I feel the fear in my legs and also fascination with his eyes. He looks at me with eyes that make me remember lines my father used to tell me from a Scottish nursery rhyme. It begins, One for sorrow. I’m stalled on the first line.

  I say, “I have to go.”

  He pulls back toward the river.

  But he tosses something quite light toward me, and I catch it. It jangles on a silver chain that slides between my mittens. What is this? In exchange for the ring? I wrap it in my hand.

  “Sofie Grear!” I hear from the trees. My dog stops tearing across the strip of beach where, at the horizon, the splotch of pink shows through the snow clouds. She listens, too. “Sofie.” Short. Abrupt. It’s my father. He sees the soldier on the steel beam. I hold what the soldier tossed out of sight. Overhead, the sky has become smoke.

  “Sofie, come away from there.” I hear tension in my father’s voice. My father with the calmness of the sea.

  “I’m not a lost dog,” I call.

  Without looking, I feel the soldier—Luke—straighten.

  My father drops down through the scrub brush to the rocky beach so quickly, it’s as if he thought the current of the river had sucked me into her snake body. High above, angles and lines of the bridge disappear in the fog and the snow.

  “Sofie,” he calls again.

  “I’m here.”

  “What are you, crazy?” I am still near the beam. For one second my father looks like he is going to come hard on the soldier, and I think of the silly joke we have, “You can always come home. No matter what.” I could always come home. What is there in the world to keep me from my father?

  But the soldier and I are here in the snow. It’s hard to place my father here.

  It’s Luke who jumps from the pier to the rocky beach. He speaks softly, and my father answers in such a way that I realize they know each other. Luke looks at my father, his face at an angle. He is deferential. He holds out his hand. He wants to shake my father’s hand. My father extends his hand a short way to be done with the business of greeting, but Luke takes his hand in both of his. Then he leaps across the rocks and disappears into the snow.

  I slide the silver chain into my pocket.

  A MILLION SUNS

  The sun had risen and bloomed for only a second in the sky. Pilot and I climb the steep path slippery with snow back up into the evergreen woods, up to the trail that follows the cyclone fence for a few yards where Luke found my ring. I try to run through the deep snow. I’m not ready to talk to my father. I imagine the school bus horn honking, a world away. Everything feels mysterious and foreign. The snow has become glitter. Glitter falls on Pilot’s ears as I pound through the snow off the trail.

  “What were you doing?” My father is beside me.

  “You know him.” It sounds like an accusation. Why am I so angry?

  “What did you think you were doing!”

  “What do you mean? I wasn’t doing anything.” We trudge in silence through the thorny branches, curved low under the weight of snow. Snow sticks to my clothes. Pine boughs make the woods smell like Christmas. The air is so cold, clouds of our breath rise. We can see each other’s streams of smoke.

  “You’re stepping where you don’t belong.” His face is tight with cold and something like fear. “You have your whole life ahead of you.”

  “What did I do? I was talking to him.”

  “Sofie, you’re too young.”

  “I’m sixteen. Wasn’t my mother sixteen?”

  “Your mother was . . .” He doesn’t have the words.

  “I have to go to school.”

  “There is no school. This is a storm.”

  This stops me and brings me back to my father. I almost drop down and hug his knees like a child. What if he’d gone out, and instead of us yelling at each other in the woods like we’re doing, he’d be trying to fix the transmission or whatever broke on a boat taking on water in fifty-knot winds. I have nightmares about this. Storms are my nightmares. Fisherman’s daughter dreams.

  But he’s here. I slow down. I stop trying to escape him.

  A million tiny suns repeat on a boulder ahead from the glare of the shard of sun.

  Where’s the soldier? Luke. Thinking of him is like startling awake. He ran from the beach and into the snow. Someone needs to take the gun away. Maybe he has gone somewhere to sleep—his eyes were exhausted—and I will approach, careful not to crunch on the snow or scatter the beach stones underfoot. And I’ll steal the gun away. I will carry it in two hands, pointing down.

  All this is in my imagination while my father and I trudge through the snow, together, bits of fire coming from our breath.

  “Sofie, keep away from that kid.” My father’s voice is too loud.

  I ask, “How do you know him?”

  “He crewed for me. I know him. Just out of the service. You stay away from him.”

  “You’re going to Chincoteague. You’re leaving me with my mother.”

  “If I don’t land the fish, what kind of business are you going to run?”

  Important things are not said, like the secret I know about the soldier. The gun he slid maybe into a holster inside his coat.

  The you’re too young. Like my mother? Why’s my mother different? Tell me what you know.

  The are you real? The question the soldier asked me. I still feel it in my body.

  Pilot and I walk ahead. I am imagining the blast of the gun.

  My father has a gun. A lot of fishermen do. He taught me how to fire it. He taught me how to steady a gun. He taught me how to clasp my left hand around my firing hand holding the gun, stop breathing, and fire.

  But in my mind I see this gun and the hands of the soldier in a January dawn . . . alone. The gun in his own hand. Click click click baam. A horrible flash—a boy’s, a young man’s body—his blood washing into the river. A boy who searched his pockets for peanuts for my dog.

  I need to see you, I think, so I can take this image away.

  KILIM

  I tell Rosa that my father is going to Chincoteague. I don’t tell her that he says my mother is coming to my house. I don’t want this to happen. I have no place in my head to even talk about it. I want to talk about the boy who crews for my father, Luke, who I met by chance on my beach.

  “I shouldn’t see him,” I tell Rosa.

  She watches me, excited, since I’ve never been interested in anybody. I like running cross-country with boys. I like laughing and racing through the woods and dancing rock to rock, forging streams and collapsing under trees with them. They’re my friends. Sometimes Rosa tries to match me up, but I never would.

  She’s the party girl. She calls me driven.

  “I have to see him,” I say.

  “Are you looking for advice?” she asks.

  “No.”

  She shrugs, and the tassels on
the white hat she wears swirl playfully like a child’s hat. We’re red-cheeked with cold, even inside our meeting place, Caffe Kilim. Each time the door opens, we shiver. Before the door opens, we shiver and brace ourselves.

  I glance around the coffee shop. “Don’t lecture,” I say, “about how I always said no boys.”

  “As long as you don’t lecture me.”

  “You broke up? Again?”

  “He didn’t get me. I always had to finish my sentences.”

  We laugh. This makes perfect sense to us.

  “You want a person to get you,” she elaborates. “I’d never say to you, come on, Sofie, let’s spend the day at Wallis Sands in the waves. You don’t go in the ocean. Like I can’t look down from the bridge. How could anybody jump? They’d have to get up there.”

  So we agree. We’re perfect. To each other.

  Kilim smells like coffee beans, like our whole tourist town. Brianna behind the counter lifts the lid of the milk steamer. She pours foam over the bitter coffee in an orange and black Kilim cardboard cup. Boats at the Fisherman’s Co-op are littered with orange and black cups. Brianna, silver bangles on her tattooed arms, cuts the foam in midstream. They don’t make nonpaying customers leave.

  “How are you going to find him?” she asks.

  “I don’t think I’ll have to. It’ll happen.” I say this without thinking.

  My mind goes back to the co-op, where I had waited for Rosa. Ducks with emerald heads swarmed the pier. A new boat was berthed there, Storm Rider. My father wasn’t there. The harbor was quiet. Not a single fisherman was out there working on his boat in the punishing, aching cold. The boats hugged the pier even while waves rolled and tossed them.

  “Before you came, my eyes did funny things,” I tell Rosa. “I imagined the soldier was on Storm Rider, and he was thrown flat on the deck. And I got scared and didn’t know if I could . . .” Rosa can’t finish this one. She watches me. “If I could . . . leave. I’d want to stay.”

  “I can’t believe this is you talking,” she says.