Faisal Jenkins, the pilot, saw the rain in the water before he felt it in the air. It was a scout for the Big One, and the river was rising with it, pushing harder. The channel broadening and deepening. Soon there would be debris from upstream. A tangle of branches, broken trunks, roots grasping for ground. A signpost. Clothes. Maybe bodies, some poor people facedown, arms out. Faisal Jenkins had talked about it once with another pilot, before the war came to Harrisburg. The other pilot sitting on the floor of the bar, back against the wall, spitting out the husks of seeds.
“You know all those dikes,” he said, “in Binghamton, in Scranton? Wilkes-Barre? All those towns walling in the river? I think this is the year the river breaks them all. It will put us under six, seven feet of water, and stay that way until we stop thinking of going back. Do you hear what I’m saying?” A glare in his eye. “It wants revenge.”
“Revenge for what?” Faisal Jenkins said. The other pilot squinted. Spat out another seed.
“For what?” he said. “Where do I start?”
Judge Spleen Smiley was sitting on the deck at the bow, his back to the north, picking out some Delmore Brothers on a tenor guitar, that old freight train moving along to Nashville. The clouds were scudding down the valley behind him, a wall of rain.
“Hey,” Faisal Jenkins said. “Hey! Get under here. Big piece of weather in about two minutes.” He pointed and Judge Spleen Smiley turned, gave a low whistle. But nothing could rush him. He put the guitar in its case. Closed all four latches. Ambled up to the pilothouse just as the rain swept the water in front of them. It started pounding the tin roof as soon as he stepped under it.
“Nice timing,” Faisal Jenkins said.
He patted the case. “Why they pay me the big bucks.” He wanted to say something else, but the rain started hitting hard. A steady clash of thick drops on metal. Water running off the roof in ropes and liquid scarves. The river whipped into peaks of whiteness all around them, curtains of water flailing across the surface. The pilothouse got hot and damp, far too loud to talk. Then the musician smiled, produced a small silver flask, uncapped it, and handed it to the pilot, who smelled it. The stuttering burn of alcohol, wood, and caramel. Two small cups followed, filled with what the pilot first mistook for marbles, stones. Then he realized it was ice. He had not seen any in a year. Where did the judge get it? The musician poured the booze over the ice in one of the cups, smiled, and handed it to the pilot, who took a long sip. It was harsh going down, but soon a coolness spread from his stomach, soothing the heat in his clothes, pushing it away. If the river was whiskey and I was a duck. He took a second long draft and knew for sure that whiskey would never taste so good again. It made him glad, as if something had been won. A minute unwasted.
The rain slackened but the clouds thickened, bringing night early. They passed the flask eight times, were on their ninth when the musician saw the pilot’s eyebrows rise, wrinkles appear on his forehead. His eyes getting watery.
“What’s wrong?” Judge Spleen Smiley said. “Is it time?”
“No, no. It’s not that.”
Something in the river was talking to Faisal Jenkins, and he was beginning to feel bad. As though he had gone hiking and discovered the corpse of a child in a stand of white pines. No: corpses. More than five. More than fifteen. The river was overwhelming him with it, filling his head. By the time they saw the smoke on an island in the river, the pilot did not have to be told. There was a fish kill around the dock, a hundred bass decaying into porridge in the water, eyes distended from their sockets. A wall of stench and flies. Blackened streaks across the sign for the Boy Scout camp. A fire in an oil drum. A new sign swinging from the old one by a yellow rope. SAVE US.
“I don’t think we should stop,” the pilot said.
“We take on who we can, Faisal. Especially now,” Captain Mendoza said.
“I just don’t think there’ll be anyone to take.”
The captain watched from the rail as the first mate and two other crew members rowed a skiff to the dock. They stood up and began batting their arms at the air, swimming through insects. They disappeared under the camp sign and into the trees, were gone less than a minute before the first mate reappeared on the dock. She beckoned the Carthage closer until the captain could see her face. Shaking her head. Her hand on her stomach.
The captain nudged the second mate. “Go find the preacher.”
The smell hit Reverend Bauxite where the dock joined the land, at the thin wooden stairs to higher ground. Rancid and gamey. The camp was in severe disrepair. A few cinder block buildings, shingles peeling off. A lawn ringed with trees, spiked with saplings. A basketball hoop jutting out of the grass, the backboard furry with moss. The last of the rain pattering through huge old trees that shaded everything. At first, Reverend Bauxite thought the ground was strewn with laundry as far as he could see in the gathering dark. Shirts, socks, pants. Red, green, yellow, blue. Stripes and checkers. Floral dresses. Then he understood. These were men, women, children, all laid down under the trees. Faces to the earth. A bright pink headband in a woman’s matted hair. A man in a red jacket, hands under his head. A family, the father’s arm thrown over the mother. The child between them, legs curled. Reverend Bauxite tried to be holy, decided it was better to be human. God damn it, he thought. God damn it. Then he was saying it out loud, louder and louder, until the crest of his anger passed, though he knew another was coming.
“We don’t have anything to cover them with?” he said. One of the crew just opened his arms. Where would we begin?
The first mate was taking soft steps among the bodies. Then she squinted, looked toward Reverend Bauxite, who was praying: Into thy hands, O merciful Savior, we commend thy servants. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech thee, a sheep of thine own fold, a lamb of thine own flock, a sinner of thine own redeeming. Receive them into the arms of thy mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light.
“Father,” she said, “who could have started the fire in the drum?”
She found the washtub full of poison inside one of the buildings. A pile of people in the windowless darkness, looking like they were cold, huddling together. They had died trying to comfort each other. The first mate kneeled, dug her fingers into her scalp, and let it go, a shriek that unfurled into a crying stutter. Tears dropping off her face onto the earthen floor, a girl’s black shoes.
“Don’t do that. They can’t hear you.”
A boy stood in the corner. His arms, shirt, hair, eyes, were all the same gray-blue in the half light.
“That one’s my sister,” he said. Pointed. “My mom’s behind her.”
The first mate strangled the questions in her throat. Too cruel, she thought, to make him tell her anything. Did they all just fall over together, mewling, shifting their feet in the dirt? They must have been so brave when they poisoned themselves. Did they start to lose their nerves when their limbs began to harden? Wondering if somehow they could take it all back?
The boy saw the first mate through lightning and fog. An apparition moving among the dead, speaking to him from a great distance. The past unwilling to recede, charging into the present. His home on the opposite shore, hiding in the trees at the water’s edge. Crab apple trunks twisting toward the house. His father throwing him in the air and laughing, before driving south in the back of a truck with six other men, a rifle between his knees. They never see him again. A year later, his mother is counting potatoes in the kitchen. Letting the dog go. Why did you do that? the neighbor says. We could have eaten it. Then the news of the Big One coming down the road. A meeting in the road with eight neighbors, all of them turning north. Why can’t we see it? one of them saying. Why can’t we see it coming? The boat out to the camp. Hoping for a little dignity. We love you so much.
“Did you start the fire?” the first mate said.
“No.”
“What about the sign?”
“That wasn’t for you.”
&nbs
p; The first mate held out her hand.
“Do you want to come with me?”
“No. You scare me.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re crying so much.”
“Please come with us.”
“Not until you stop crying.”
In the end, Reverend Bauxite took the boy aboard the Carthage, guiding the boy’s slender shoulders with his big arm. Angry all over again for being made so small. Why did You forsake them? he thought. We would have saved them all. Why did You not let us?
The boy thought they would feed him and put him back on the island. When he realized they were leaving, he hung on the rail and screamed across the water at the swinging sign, the fading fire. The captain sedated him with Valium, put him on a roll and pallets on the first mate’s floor. The first mate insisted. Lay on her cot no more than three feet from him. Now and again she stretched out her arm, put her hand on his chest. Making sure he was still breathing, as if he were a baby. He shifted and murmured in his sleep. She imagined he was reliving the final hours, the distribution of poison.
He was not. In his dreams, his family was whole again. His father sitting on the steps of their house in a white shirt, a thin green tie, a wool fedora on his head. His mother next to him in a light dress. Both of them eating fruit out of a white metal colander. Behind them, five-hundred-foot giants dug their fingers into hillsides, pulling up acres of land, the boulders beneath it. Ripping houses from their foundations. Getting closer and closer, shaking the ground with every step. The boy stood in front of his parents, jumping and pointing, trying to get them to turn around. His father smiled as his mother held out the colander, half-filled with perfect strawberries, and a monstrous hand descended from the sky.
* * *
I FOUND THEM TOGETHER, the first mate and the boy, in Rainelle, West Virginia—the place where she was from, though the house she grew up in was gone. They were living in what used to be an outdoor store in a little strip mall, their belongings in a small pile on the linoleum floor. She told me then how it still stunned her, what she felt for the boy, how fast she felt it. A bond that shackled her heart to him. She had never even contemplated children, she said. Never thought she was the kind. When she was a kid, she was a hellion, always trying to escape. Could not wait to get out of that town. She took her parents’ car when she was ten, craning her neck to look between the steering wheel and the dashboard. Thought she would get to Covington, Virginia, where she would sell the car and use whatever she made to get even farther away, but the car ran out of gas in White Sulphur Springs. It took her two days to walk back. She left at last at sixteen, headed east with a boyfriend. Her first time out of the mountains. She could still remember the long descent into Lexington, Virginia, as though the car were sliding down the road, the land opening out below her into yellow farms, clusters of towns, the Blue Ridge a curtain over the next horizon. Her boyfriend trying to drive and smile at her at the same time. He said they would stay together forever, did not see that when she had talked about leaving everything behind her, she meant him, too. They broke up in Richmond, and after that, she was single, solitary, with a ferocity that frightened men and women alike after only a few weeks of trying to court her. She found the Carthage a few months after it was built, saw in the captain the same quality she had herself: accepting the country’s disintegration, the land turning to water all around them, while so many others just panicked. She was that ship’s first and last first mate, and once she was afloat, she thought she would never be tied to anything again. But she knew she was wrong as soon as the boy spoke to her on that island, and she pulled him to her. She acted on the impulse before she understood it. Never questioned it. And though she was not a believer, could not be convinced there was a plan, she could not help but notice the symmetry: that she saved the boy, and he would save her, too.
So we stood in the parking lot in Rainelle, the boy coloring the asphalt with house paint from a rusting can he’d found in the next shop over. And why did you come back here? I said. She looked toward the north, then back at the boy, who did not look up. I don’t know what’s coming, she said. But at least I know where I am.
* * *
ONCE, THE CONFLUENCE OF the west and north branches of the Susquehanna was choked with infrastructure. High floodwalls imprisoning the river, imprisoning the towns that grew up when they found coal and were left for dead when the coal was gone. A web of bridges. Dams for the ferry, for the power station, to create a lake in the summer, broad and shallow, for boats and swimmers. The river huge and serene, its push against metal and stone so quiet that it was easy to forget it was there until it took a child, a dog, from one of those places where it had been diverted and forced to show its strength. The towns faded behind the walls. The power station struggled to stay open, gave up with a final sigh. The four smokestacks on the eastern shore still rose high over the trees, but were leaning askew. Waiting for the Big One to knock them over. The electric lines hanging in a long curve over the water held out for much longer than anyone thought, long after the power was turned off, but at last, on the tail of a brittle winter, they snapped with a whipping yelp. That was the river’s signal, but it did not hurry. It went over the dams and carried pieces of them off—not enough to pull everything down, but enough to flood the towns, taste the land, and recede, leaving marks on buildings, fences, telephone poles, to show where it had been. Would be again.
It was past midnight when the Carthage rode by Sunbury during a break in the rain, the moon through the clouds throwing gray light on black water. The crew on watch saw that the wall there had broken, the river spilling through the breach, covering the houses along the frontage road up to their knees. The water stretched across the town, turning each house into an unstable island. There were torches lit on chimneys, making sparking reflections in the water. In the glow of the fires they could see a couch resting on sheets of plywood propped up by lengths of pipe, erecting a stage across the roof. A blue tarp on poles, stretched over the couch to keep the rain off. Laundry suspended from house to house. On a tall tan garret, a bucket on a winch, half-lowered and pushed by the wind into a slow swing, tapping against the vinyl siding. Signs of lives lived outside, though not of the people who lived them. Everything silent, while on the ship, there was so much noise. The deck of the Carthage was packed with cries and hollers, people haggling under the lanterns, the rising whoops of young men who were getting drunk too fast, the edge in their voices of wanting to start something bloody. Wanting the kind of night they would wake up from with teeth missing. In the theater below, the band had started early, struck up a lilting, relentless rumba. The bass and drums laying down a beat that forced hips to move. Twin guitars climbing a rope of sunny notes that the singer set to swinging. Trying to ward off bloodshed. Feet tapping, legs bent, backs arched, hands in the air. They shouted and yelped when the music asked for it, and it gave them ripples of ringing arpeggios, splashes of percussion, in return. The sweating walls sent the groove through the hull of the boat, into the water, to vibrate against the banks. For a small hour, there were no couples, just a mass of humans moving together, letting everything in. The brushes with another’s skin. The tang in the air from a million breaths. Smoke rolling across the ceiling from sputtering lanterns. The grainy ferment of shared beer. Each person believing that what they were feeling could spread across the ship, turn the knives outside to steam, then carry them where no bullets flew and no bodies failed, and it would not matter if the earth and sky left, for they no longer needed them.
Until one of the six young men playing Russian roulette in the back of the theater lost. He was smiling when he did it, halfway through a joke, so casual when he pulled the trigger. Later the other five would wonder if he was so loose because he never imagined it would happen, or because he was hoping it would. The sharp shot, the pained shouts from all who saw it, the smell of salt and gunpowder, killed the music, made the dancers spin and hit the floor, sobbing. A few rushing forward,
trying to hold the boy’s head together, shredding their throats with cries for help. The first mate ran up with bandages and alcohol, saw what had happened, and just stood there, digging her fingers into the cloth. A woman standing nearby had taken the bullet in the thigh. Another was spattered with blood. A curl of brain on a third’s shoe. A small piece of skull had made it to the other side of the room.
Then all the torches on the shore winked out, and, for the people in the theater, the walls shook from the outside, as though the ship had struck something. From above, cries, shouts. Gunshots. Moans. Another shudder. The sobbing getting harder. It was the war, they all thought, the war had come for them at last. Voices rose toward panic. The second mate ran through the crowd, burst onto the stage, the spotlight gleaming off the horn in her ear. Grabbed the microphone.
“Anyone who can handle a gun, please help us now,” she said. “The rest of you, stay here.” A shock through the boat, greater than the last. The report of splintering wood.
“Where are you going?” Reverend Bauxite said.
“You heard the woman,” Sunny Jim said.
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