“You think it was too long,” Sunny Jim said.
“Yes.”
“…”
“…”
“I waited so long because I knew my sister could handle it,” Sunny Jim said. “You know that, right?”
“I know.”
“I have so much faith in her. Can’t imagine her ever letting anything happen to him.”
“But now—”
“—Yes, now everything’s different.”
“…”
“Reverend? Do you believe that after the storm, there’s nothing?”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“…”
“Ten years ago,” Sunny Jim said, “whatever time I had, it was enough. Wanting more than that seemed like I was pressing my luck.”
“I understand.”
“But Aaron’s changed all that. Aaron and the storm.”
“Yes.”
The Big One was making converts of us all, Reverend Bauxite thought. Perhaps questions of faith and questions of what we had done to the planet had always been converging. Both had their deniers, people who claimed no responsibility. Things just happen, they said. But among the faithful—those who had seen enough evidence to believe that things happened for a reason, and that we were part of it—there was a sense of having sinned, and of there being a reckoning for those sins. The hope that if we changed our ways we would be saved. The paralyzing fear that we’d done too much and were already damned. It had been that way for a long time, and the planet had taken many things back from us. But the Big One was making it acute. It was an epiphany, the appearance of the divine on earth, and we could not deny its power any more than we could read its intent, or foretell the consequences. As if the war was not enough. As if, all at once, we were being forced to eat all the poisonous fruit we had been cultivating for years, eat it without knowing how to survive it. Reverend Bauxite had to believe we would survive, that something better was coming. On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast, he thought. Of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death for ever.
But it was so hard to wait, to know what to do until then. For Reverend Bauxite, the central question of being God’s instrument was the dilemma of righteousness or mercy: whether one should condemn or forgive. The crucifixion was supposed to have solved that problem—he had been told that, it was part of his training. The cross was love overwhelming justice, love in the divine destroying the need for a balancing of the scales on earth. Reverend Bauxite understood that on the page. The idea could still stir him, make him try to accept what he had seen. But there had been too much death, too many people scorched in flaming buildings, too many people blown to pieces in the street. Too many people he loved were gone for him to believe that faith demanded he abide it. Was there not a jagged stone of pride, a kind of judgment, embedded in the admonition to accept the world as it was and turn to the devotion of the divine? Was it not a small claim to know God’s mind? He did not know, could not pretend he would ever have an answer. He knew only that he could not look upon so much wrong and not act, and he asked for forgiveness only in the sense of comprehending his imperfection in not being sorry for some of the things he had done. He knew, too, that he had not always been true even to the path he had chosen, that he had erred often—been too merciful when righteousness demanded expression, been righteous when mercy was needed. There were two peoples in his head, the righteous and the merciful, in conflict with each other and arguing among themselves. He would never find an agreement that satisfied them, Reverend Bauxite knew. He was not smart enough. It was the nature of his faith. And that was only the beginning, for within each position, the questions compounded, fractured, turned inward, pointed outward.
But now his only friend left in the world, the father of his child, was standing in the middle of it. Tell it to him straight, said the righteous people. Tell him Aline’s dead, dead and gone, and shatter him. Then help him come together again, so he can get Aaron and deal with the world before him without ever looking back, even once. There is no time for anything else. But the merciful smiled. You do not see? they said to the righteous ones, all in unison. He needs her to live right now. She is not yours to take from him, only his to release. Reverend Bauxite could not see into his friend as well as he wanted to. But he saw something: how Sunny Jim had been pulled apart, the man who married Aline now separate from the new father who held his wailing son on the first day of his life.
Sunny Jim’s wife and son were the poles of his existence, and now they were opposed, moving away from each other. The husband saying to hang on, to wait. He could suspend himself until she came back—for she had to come back, she had to, even though every word he said about her, every utterance of her name, abandoned a small part of her, and a piece of him, to the world. He was not ready for that, or for the waves of grief that would come for him afterward, but he did not know what else to do. And then there was the father, calling to the husband, laying a hand on his forehead: Get ready, for the time is coming when you will let everything go, so that you can give it all to your son, the one you love most in the world. And it will all be worth it, even when you cannot recognize what you are in the light that follows. Sunny Jim could almost see it, this better place. He did not know how to get there, but knew, just knew, that Aaron did. Thought maybe his son would let him come with him. And maybe when they arrived, Aline would be waiting.
Two hours before dawn, they felt the Carthage’s engine shudder beneath them, the bow push into the current. Light and sound faded, and they were moving again. Slipping past islands overrun with broad leaves, arboreal poison ivy, frogs sleeping in the trees. In a day or two, maybe, there would be rain again. Sunny Jim fell asleep, at last, in the hammock, hands under his cheek, legs at strange angles. He must have been so tired, Reverend Bauxite thought. His own ear was to the floor, and under the ship’s machinery and the slide of the Susquehanna, he could hear her. Aline still there in the water, under the boat. Following them north, waiting for him to fall asleep, too. And the priest spoke to her through the floor. Your husband cannot let you go, but you can leave him alone. Let him find your boy without you. Stay out of this house. You are not wanted here, because Aaron has to live. He waited for her reply and it did not come. But Sunny Jim turned in his sleep, murmured. For it was him she had always wanted, him she was talking to now.
The Highway
THE SOLDIERS WERE APPROACHING Ravine, Pennsylvania when the monsoon, the storm before the storm, swept its arm over the countryside. Turned the curving road, the fading farms, the steep cliffs in the land ahead into water. The highway drowned in it, the convoy squealed and stopped. They observed a silence, a breath. The lantern in the truck was out. Rain battered the roof. One of the soldiers rose, muttered. Sparked an ancient lighter and lit the lantern’s wick. Shuffles, scuffles, the groans of people stretching their legs. Standing up. Pissing into a bottle, screwing the top tight. They knew the storm would not stop soon, and until it did, beyond the truck’s steel doors was the end of the world.
Ketcher sat on the floor, the papers from the satchel piled on his legs. Photographs, written files. Newspaper clippings, from when there was still something like newspapers, still something like police. People trying to keep the peace. He could remember them as a boy, the yellowed pages stacked and folded in his parents’ basement. Already decades old. Just down the block, two militia men in the battered shell of a police cruiser, idling behind a hedgerow. In time, they moved the cruiser to the middle of the road, sat on the hood with their guns out, pointed them at the driver of every car that tried to pass. Their free hands out, reminding the drivers that they were providing a valuable service. The smart drivers knew what to do. Gave them what they had, in time stopped driving altogether. The others were beaten, a few killed, the bod
ies disappeared. Their families quiet at the funeral service. They knew there was no one to complain to, and killing the men with the guns would not bring their own people back.
In the newspaper photograph, there was a house on three legs leaning into the space left by the fourth. A porch sliding off the front. Two men in shabby uniforms leading a girl to a truck, her hands behind her back. Unclear if she was cuffed or she held them there herself. A red circle drawn around the face of the boy sitting on the steps of the porch, Sunny Jim’s name underlined. But Ketcher’s eyes were on the girl. That expression. Not angry or surly. Almost content, as if she had seen this coming, planned for it. She was having a conversation with someone in her head.
You know what to do next.
Yes I do.
You will live to see all of this fall. Everything that is left.
I can’t wait.
Ketcher could not make out the boy’s face. Only a certain slump in his posture. Old before his time, Ketcher thought. Bet he still does that now. He took out a pen, a sheet of paper. Began writing. Disparate thoughts at first. The few facts he understood about the man they sought. This Jim, he was part of the record once. The quiet brother to a sister who made the paper. The sister went off and came back. He stayed there the whole time. Then, a few years later, something happened. Ketcher did not know what, because the newspaper was gone by then. But there was no trace of Sunny Jim. He vanished for almost a decade, until the war, Aline—Sunny Jim, her shadow. Their son. Ketcher looked again at the clip. The boy’s fuzzy expression, his fingers curled around the lip of the stairs. He was already disappearing by then.
Ketcher rose with the photograph, walked six difficult steps over prone soldiers. Stood before Tenenbaum, gave her the picture.
“What’s this?” She was eating a piece of cold, fatty pork, two days old.
“The house he grew up in. It’s not far from Binghamton.”
“So?”
“So I think maybe he’s not going to Binghamton. Maybe he’s going home.”
“For what?”
“Is that our problem?”
“Go tell the others,” Tenenbaum said. “When we reach Binghamton, we go to the house.” It was a quick decision, and seemed so clear, yet she could not think of what they would do if he was not there.
A half mile in front of the truck, a huge spear of stone sliced itself off from the rock face, where the highway swerved through the pass, and buried the road. They heard the roar through the rain, felt it through the tires of the truck. Three other trucks were lost in the collapse, thirty-six soldiers killed. Most of them died before they understood that their lives were over. Skulls fractured in a horrible tumbling off the road. Impaled on a piece of jutting metal. For the rest, death came slower, calmer. A patient crushing. Bleeding out into the cracks in the rubble. The people in the trucks to the south of them swarmed over the debris, tried to dig them out, but could not. It took them three days, first in the smothering rain, until the monsoon’s arm passed and the water slithered off the road. The soldiers wrung out their clothes, peered into the heavy sky. Some tried to look for evidence of the dead. A glint of helmet, a twisted boot. Ketcher looked only at the face of the hill, the fresh fracture exposed to the air. The edge of a tooth, he thought. He turned to regard the cleft in the ridge rising to either side of them, could see it all for a moment, as if from the air, the thread of the highway darting through a trembling maw in the country. It was a mouth, aching to close. When it did, it would snap the road in two for good, then never open again, and the road would not return.
The River
WHEN THE CON ARTIST, the man with the top hat, was a boy three decades before, he sat on the shore of an island in the Susquehanna with an older kid. A fire on the stones behind them, started from driftwood just as the sun was going down. Around them, a multitude of frogs, calling for their mates. A shack perched in the trees behind them, the ladder to the door rotted away. It had been there since they could remember, but they had never gone in, for their personal mythology had peopled it with the dead. The site of a murder-suicide, a sacrifice. The bodies still in there. The shadow of a desiccated hand on the filthy window.
“Did you know the trees used to lose all their leaves?” the older boy said.
“Like in a storm?” the younger boy said. He knew, he had heard the stories, too. But he felt like playing with his friend, decided to speak with just enough disingenuousness to get the older kid going. A bit of the con artist in him already, learning how to bait people, then seeing how far he could lead them out.
“No,” the older boy said. “Every year they’d just fall off. Turn all kinds of colors, orange, red, yellow, and then fall.”
“Didn’t the trees die then?”
“No. The leaves’d all grow back again a few months later.”
“That’s crazy,” the younger boy said. Repressed a smile.
“My grandfather told me,” the older boy said. “They’d all just come down.” Tried to mime it with his fingers, millions of leaves twisting and fluttering toward the ground, but had difficulty, for he had never seen it. None of us have. “That’s why they called it fall,” he said.
“Well, why’d it stop?” the younger boy said.
“I don’t know.”
“Your grandfather’s crazy,” the younger boy said. Setting the hook.
“No he isn’t.”
“Sure is. You know what I saw him do?” the younger boy said. Then uncorked a narrative about public nudity, desecration of the state flag. All false, no fictional detail spared. Enough of a whiff of truth that he could tell the older boy was starting to believe it.
“Take it back,” the older boy said.
“I can’t. It’s all true.”
“My grandfather didn’t do that.”
“Sure did. Ask anyone.”
“Take it back.”
“No.”
That was when the older boy hit the younger boy. First a fist to the ear. Then an oar to the back, until the younger boy cried and the older boy said he was sorry. Later, after the fire was out and they left the shore for the island’s interior, spread blankets on the ground to sleep, the younger one smiled in the dark. The beating had been worth it, for it told him that he had sold his story. Picked up the truth and moved it, just a little, by saying it just the right way.
In the decades since, there had been good cons that gave him cars, motorcycles, a round of drinks. A small cottage on a lake, its plumbing overrun with zebra mussels. A houseboat he lived in for three years, tethered to a dock where the Susquehanna opened its mouth to the Chesapeake. The river was huge and wide down there, a vein of the world, driving water back to its heart. But his best, his longest con, had been in Danville, Pennsylvania. It was so good that he fell for it himself.
He pedaled over the bridge from Riverside on a yellow bicycle. A bright blue bowler, a striped vest, red and white. Called himself Sam Lightshaft. Said he used to be a circus performer, until a trampoline accident retired him from the ring. In truth he was fleeing from his last con, had just enough money to work out his new persona. Four bars, the town hall, a garden party. In time, the arms of Melody Juniper, widowed six years before by pneumonia.
Sam Lightshaft figured her. Knew what he needed to say to unlock her and said all of it. Their courtship took a matter of weeks. A wedding under the broad trees of the yard of her sweeping house on Water Street, on the river’s bank. The sky built a wall of clouds that waited until it was dark and the guests had gone home to release their rain. They were alone in the house by then, and to this day he could recall, whenever he needed it, her face beneath him when the lightning struck. Two months later he was on the wide porch, frogs calling across the river. Two fishermen in a canoe on the dusky water. Yellow mayflies in the evening light. He could not believe his luck. Did not quite understand then that it had been so easy because he meant so much of it. That quiet evening was the peak of his life, the best that he would ever do, though he recognized
it only later.
For he could not help himself. A small job at the assessor’s office was parlayed into graft. An embellishment of his identity, the promise of capital from relatives upriver. Loans in a crumbling pyramid scheme. He told himself afterward that he should have known how sour it was going as his list of creditors grew, some with names falser than his own, a shuffle in their walk that suggested firearms or a bad, permanent injury from fighting. The jumpy speech of shaken minds. People to whom one did not want to owe anything. But at the time, he saw only possibility. If the plan could just spin out five more months, he thought then, it would open wide. The numbers blooming upon the page while he rose into rarer air, high enough to never need to work again, him or Melody. Then the ways in which he had bent the truth in secret, to everyone, would not matter. He could tell them all, five years later, how he pulled it off, and they would laugh in disbelief. And Melody would pull him down into a kiss, forgive him for how he had misled her, because in the end he had been so true.
But only two months later, at the beginning of the monsoon, three creditors appeared at his house. Shouted for him to come out, and beat him when he did. Left him curled in the yard while they headed for the front door.
“Don’t hurt her,” he said. “She doesn’t know about any of it.”
“Relax,” one of them said. “We won’t touch her. We’re just planning on telling her everything.”
They were only there for an hour, but by the time they came out, Sam Lightshaft was gone, two drinks into what would become a sixteen-hour bender and failed attempt at expiation. He shook hands in barbershops, in restaurants with tablecloths of plastic and paper folded up and taped to the corners. I’m leaving, I’m leaving. Yes, all of a sudden. I’ve talked it all out with Melody, yes. She is so understanding. I cannot imagine what I will do without her. I know how much this hurts all of you. I’m so sorry I let you down.
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