Raft of Stars

by Andrew J. Graff

  “Look,” said Fish, “maybe one of us should go inside and leave a note for my grandpa.”

  Bread didn’t move.

  “I mean, it doesn’t feel right leaving without a note. Does it?”

  His friend needed something. They both did. They needed a destination, a point of aim, no matter how improbable. Even after all their preparations for a moment like this, it was clear that it wasn’t enough to simply survive. Survive for what, or to do what? That was the question they never planned for. And so Fish spoke the half-formed lie that had been in his mind.

  “We’re going to the National Guard armory, Bread.” Fish paused here, and then he cursed himself even as the words were leaving his mouth. “We’re going to see my dad. He’ll know what to do.”

  Bread shifted on his feet. “Do you think he’ll help us?” Bread’s tone had changed. There was a whisper of hope in his voice. A small light in his eyes. Fish’s lie worked.

  “My dad will keep us safe.”

  Bread nodded in the darkness, zipped the fishing lure into the pocket of his bag. “I’ll leave a note if you tell me what it should say,” he said.

  Bread went inside, and Fish’s throat felt dry as he stood alone in the darkness. Bread had asked so many times when he’d get to meet Fish’s dad—Bear, the famous tank driver of Desert Storm—about whom Fish told so many stories. Bread asked each August if Fish’s dad was going to pick him up instead of his mom. Fish usually told a lie, something like how his dad was planning to come, in uniform too, but had to go back to the desert at the last minute. Desert Storm was over, but there was still a rotation of troops in a place called Saudi. Fish cursed himself. He could have chosen any other destination, like his mom’s house, or the train tracks south of town, or California, anything. Now, if they ever made it to the armory, he’d have to tell more lies. The armory was in Ironsford, on the other side of Mishicot Forest. Fish hadn’t been to the armory since he was six years old. His dad wasn’t there. His dad wasn’t anywhere anymore.

  THE AMBULANCE HAD ALREADY PULLED AWAY FROM JACK BREADWIN’S house by the time Teddy Branson knocked on the door. By dumb luck, an ambulance crew was nearby when Cal made the call, for which he was especially thankful. He hated death. When he discovered Jack’s body, he quickly cleared the rest of the home, and then attempted to assess the victim. When he stooped to check for a pulse, he slipped in Jack’s blood, and that got his own heart racing so badly that he couldn’t bring himself to touch the body. The man was headshot, gray and bled out, damn it. That was assessed enough. Cal stood and washed his shaking hands in the sink and made the call. He hadn’t seen this in a while, he reminded himself, not since Houston. He was okay. It was okay. He poured himself a glass of cold water, but it wasn’t much help.

  Cal excused himself while the ambulance crew did its work, and he didn’t enter the house again until after they left. He stood in the shadows by the passenger door of his truck, spoke soothingly to his dog. When his hands wouldn’t stop trembling, he took a drink or two of whiskey from the bottle he kept behind the seat. It helped, unfortunately.

  The house was silent now. Cal opened another window. Lilacs mixed with the copper. A knock on the door gave him a start.

  “Sheriff?” Teddy stepped into the kitchen, then stopped. Cal knew that Teddy knew the smell of blood as well as he did. Teddy knew it from Korea, and from slaughtering hogs.

  “Teddy. Thanks for coming.” Cal put on his best sheriff voice, as if the night hadn’t shaken him. He busied his hands by tapping a pen on his notepad, his radio lying next to it on the kitchen table.

  “Where are the boys?” asked Teddy. He moved farther into the room and pulled the green cap from his head. When he reached the far side of the kitchen counter, he stopped and moved a step backward. Blood pooled along the linoleum from the counter to the table.

  The sheriff looked up from his notes. “I was going to ask you the same. They’re not here.”

  The deep lines in the older man’s face relaxed, and then furrowed. “They’ll probably turn up at my place,” said Ted. “I should get back over there.”

  “Maybe not,” said Cal, tapping a final dot onto his notepad before folding it into the pocket of his vest. His radio came to life as he picked it up off the table.

  “Sheriff, Dispatch,” said the voice in the radio.

  “Dispatch, go ahead.”

  “We’ve got another call,” said Marge, worry in her voice.

  Cal waited, and kept waiting, and then he closed his eyes. This wasn’t Houston. He’d reminded himself of that so many times over the last eight months. He keyed his radio, lifted it to his mouth.

  “A call for what?” he said.

  “Mrs. Meyers said she heard more gunshots coming from over by Burt Akinson’s farm, and it’s too late for hunting, so she’s worried and wants you to go over to Burt’s place.”

  Teddy took a step closer. “What do you mean, Maybe not?” he said.

  Cal felt his neck tense up. He didn’t move from Houston to take on this type of thing, he had left precisely to avoid it. Four years as a young cop in the city burnt him out. His nerves weren’t built for it, nor was his bleeding heart, and it eventually became clear that it was either move and start over in a place less stressful or find a new line of work. He was capable—his chief had told him that much—but the drinking, Cal, the drinking had become too much, and then the situation with the mother and that kid and the father. Everyone knew the next morning what Cal had done to that man, and quietly loved him for it, though they all said it was bad form. The chief even set him up with the sheriff’s position on the very morning he was forced to suspend him. It was in a place called Claypot, Wisconsin, population 1,999, county seat of Marigamie County, a sprawling, forested county, sparsely populated. Cal’s chief said it was the kind of place a cop could spend the rest of his days drinking coffee with his dog, painting up a cabin on a lake, dragging the occasional drunk out of a country bar if things got too stale. Cal immediately rejected the idea—he’d have to run for the position anyway—but the chief assured him that he knew some folks, had a cousin up there on a town board, said the last sheriff died two weeks earlier, sitting in a chair. A place like Claypot would gladly take him on as interim until an election took place. Don’t miss the opportunity, his chief said. It was now or nothing. Cal stood on the old carpet in front of the chief’s desk, rubbing the scab where he’d split the skin on that kid’s father’s jaw. He tried to picture his hand holding a paintbrush, a snow shovel, a match in a fireplace. Cal had never been north of Missouri. Never been in the woods either, except for Boy Scouts, which he wouldn’t have joined had his father not shamed him into it. He’d never had a dog, although he used to want one as a kid. The reality was, his chief reminded him, that as of the altercation with that kid’s father, Cal’s options in Houston or Dallas or anywhere else in God’s Own Country were gone. He’d do his best to avoid a paperwork trail, but word gets around, and no department wants to take on a young cop who beats up parolees in his free time. This was a chance to start again, brand new.

  Teddy eyeballed him, made himself larger. “I said, what do you mean, Maybe not?”

  Cal remembered himself. “Because, Ted, those boys are—”

  “Sheriff Cal, Dispatch. Do you copy the call? Mrs. Meyers said she—”

  Cal lifted the radio to his mouth but Teddy stepped forward and swatted it away. He was an old man, but not a small man, and Cal knew he still unloaded hay wagons by himself when his grandson wasn’t around.

  “Never mind that damn call about Burt’s place,” said Teddy. “I stopped at Burt’s on the way over here to ask if he’s seen Fischer.” He shook his head in frustration. “All he’s been shooting at are coyotes in his field. Now say what you were saying about the boys.”

  Cal backed one step away from the older man and raised his radio to his mouth. Teddy Branson had fear in his eyes, and anger too. Cal considered Teddy a friend in this town, but Cal also knew better than to
stand too close to anger, his own or anyone else’s. And he didn’t appreciate having his radio nearly cuffed from his hand. He was sheriff, after all, even if he was young, even if he always felt like a fake. He took a metered breath.

  “I copy the call,” he said, and added, “It’s just Burt, shooting coyotes.”

  “Dispatch copies. Oh, and Bobby wants you to know he’ll be right there for the ambulance call once he gets out of the bathroom.” Bobby was the county constable, the closest thing Cal had to a deputy. Bobby was a seventy-year-old, plump retiree with bad knees. He could be found most often sitting at Dispatch, a package of cookies and a blanket on his lap. Cal liked him well enough, when he stayed put. The last time he accompanied Cal on a lost person call, it took Cal an hour and a half to help Bobby back up a hill to his car.

  “That’s a negative, Dispatch. I repeat, that is a negative.” Cal paused a moment. “Tell Bobby to stay where he is. Please. I’ll call if I need him.”

  Cal turned the radio off. “What I was saying, Ted, is that those boys might be in bad trouble.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Bread’s dad was headshot.”

  Cal was deliberate in using the word was. It implied a shooter other than the victim. He saw Teddy swallow, and knew his point wasn’t lost on the man.

  Teddy frowned, annoyed. “Jack probably did it to his damn self,” he said, as hopefully as a person can say that sort of thing. “He messed with that gun when he was drunk.”

  The sheriff shook his head.

  Teddy waited.

  “There ain’t a gun here, Ted,” said the sheriff. “If he shot himself, there’d be a gun.”

  A bat attached itself to the window screen, rattled its wings, and dropped away. Both men looked out at the square of darkness, standing still in the quiet kitchen, blood still soaking along the lines of linoleum, the smell of lilacs in the air.

  “We gotta find them boys,” said Teddy. “Right now.”

  The sheriff nodded. “That’s why I called you,” he said, and then looked at the floor and then back into Teddy’s eyes. “I need help.”

  FIVE MILES AWAY IN TEDDY’S BACK FIELD, BREAD AND FISH LEANED on their bikes, which were loaded like pack animals. The white pines at the edge of Mishicot Forest towered into the stars and galaxy. Fish looked into the depths of the trees, the sky. He knew the trail that would take them as far as the river. He and Bread had taken it before, but they never went by it at night. There was something that changed a forest at night, something awful about it. Bread put his finger on it last August, after the boys spent the first hours of moonlight scaring themselves by running as far into the trees as they could muster, and then tearing out into the corn again, breathless. “The scary thing about the woods at night,” he said, panting, “is that you just can’t see.” Fish thought that about summed it up.

  Silence came from that darkness now. And silence came from the sky overhead. Fish’s fingers tingled. He made a fist a few times. He looked at Bread, and Bread’s eyes looked like that cow’s eyes had—all starlit and startled. Fish knew he looked the same.

  “So we got everything, then?” asked Fish. The darkness seemed to swallow his words.

  “Yeah,” said Bread.

  “Okay, then,” said Fish.

  “Okay,” said Bread.

  Four

  “CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT THE ARMY AGAIN?” ASKED BREAD IN a hushed voice. The boys pushed their bikes along a ridge trail overlooking a moonlit river. The trail was soft with pine needles where it wasn’t riddled with rocks. The air smelled green, like ferns and cedar. About forty feet below, to the boys’ left, the river sparkled blackly as it coursed and spilled through its beds and eddies. Last spring, when the water was high and powerful, Fish heard the river moving rocks. He remembered it sounding like marbles teased together. He thought about the rocks tearing loose, tumbling in that frigid current.

  Bread tried again. “Tell me about your dad. Will he let us drive the tanks?”

  Fish pushed his bike up and over a downed tree blocking the path. They needed to gain distance from Claypot tonight, and their progress had been slower than he would have liked. The darkness and footing forced them to shuffle amid the trees and stones. Every so often a branch would snap off in the darkness, or an animal would bolt through the underbrush, and the boys would either freeze or start walking faster. As difficult as it was, Fish was thankful for the distraction offered by the slow deliberateness of walking the trail.

  “Maybe we should stay quiet a little longer,” said Fish. “Until we get where we’re going for the night.”

  Bread pushed his bike up and over the same downed tree. Its chain clanked. “Where are we going to stop for the night?” he asked.

  “Shh,” whispered Fish. “Lantern Rock, I figure.”

  Fish waited for a response, but when none came he took the silence for consent. Lantern Rock was a place the boys named themselves. It was six miles into the forest, where the trail crossed the river at a series of islands and shallow rapids. A split boulder of granite jutted out from a rise near shore. The rock had a good lookout, a flat spot on its top about fifteen feet high. The split itself was three feet wide with a cedar growing out of it. It made a good fort, what with the lookout and hideout and access to skipping stones and crayfish.

  The rock got its name when the boys once saw a lantern out on one of the nearby islands. They had played too long and let dusk catch them, and as darkness fell a light snapped on and hovered in the darkness in the trees across the channel. It looked to them like a spirit. The boys bolted. They sprinted the rocky trails and crashed through hedges of ferns to make it out of the forest before moonlight. Probably just a coon hunter, Fish’s grandpa had said when they arrived breathlessly back at the farm. But it wasn’t a coon hunter. Coon hunters were noisy. They had dogs. This lantern, this light, it just sparked to life, swayed in the quiet.

  It bothered Fish, the way his grandpa seemed unable to get caught up in the excitement of things. It was his constant reluctance. Fish learned early on how his grandpa liked rhythms in life. Daily, the man woke without an alarm, drank his coffee standing in the kitchen, placed his milk pail on the same wooden block in the barn, said the same things to the same cows. How’s Rocket this morning, attagirl, and Pipe, out you go, all done. Fish’s mom said he’d been like that for as long as she’d known him, but Fish’s grandma said he’d been like that only since he came back from the war. Before he left—she’d laugh as she said it—he was pure gasoline. When he returned, he demanded peace. He wouldn’t stand an argument, or emotions in general, would walk away from it all. Spontaneity made him uncomfortable. He didn’t like a mess. He hated loose ends, and bills, so he mailed payments the day they arrived, handed them directly to the postmaster on his way to the feed mill. The man oiled his work boots every Friday, watching the alfalfa field from the porch while rubbing his thumbs into the leather. But he’s better than most, Fish’s grandma said. He’d overheard her saying such things enough times to learn that providing an explanation for her husband was a refrain in her life. Some of ’em came back mean. Some of ’em angry. Teddy came back quiet. Fish’s memories of his grandma always had her with something in her lap—some knitting if she was indoors, a bowl of peas if she was on the porch. He never did expand the farm, she said of her once-ambitious husband returned from war. She spoke such things when Fish was old enough to understand, but still young enough that adults felt they could speak freely around him. He’s like a river that’s been dammed up, she said. The river is there, buried, but there. And then she’d sigh and shell her bowl of peas.

  Fish often wondered if his grandpa didn’t treat him with an extra dose of such restraint. When Fish told of a snake behind the barn, a tree branch that snapped with him on it, or a porcupine in the hayloft, his grandpa would just smooth the air over with his hands, as if washing it all, and then he’d wave Fish back to the dinner table, or the milkshed, or whatever he was busy with.

  This need
to smooth over disturbance reminded Fish of his own father, the sorts of things he would say before leaving for another deployment. Fish hated deployment, but knew it was shameful to say so. His dad would kneel down next to his packed duffel bags. It’s no big deal, he’d say. I’ll be back before you know it. But it was a big deal, and he wouldn’t be back for months. And no amount of hand-waving could smooth over his father’s long absence. Fish idolized the man. It wasn’t just that his dad was a sergeant in the National Guard. It wasn’t the way he folded those exotic desert uniforms into his green canvas bags. Instead, it was the simple presence Fish missed most—the way his dad’s whiskers covered the sink after he shaved, the shape of his jaw, the way his father used to smile and wink at Fish when his mom chided him too much. With that wink Fish always felt he’d been offered the keys to manhood, and all other hidden knowledge in the universe. Don’t worry about it, that wink seemed to say. Just keep busy. I know.

  Fish’s dad’s buddies called him Bear. He was of medium build but solid strong. And it pleased Fish to no end when his mom or his grandma said he was turning out to be the spitting image of his father. Fish would stare in the mirror and try to see it. The blue eyes. The high cheekbones. Fish prayed for whiskers. On weekends, his dad often took him to the armory, to sit on the tanks, or to the machine shop, where he worked when the Army didn’t need him. They’d drive in his Ford truck, stop for Cokes, and then pull into the shop and talk with machinists on the Saturday shift. Fish used to watch the metal shavings spool from the lathes while the men pushed and pulled and adjusted the machines in a way that seemed a mystery to him. Fish got to start a tank motor once. Another time, he watched his dad walk in a Labor Day parade. Fish needed nothing in life.