Raft of Stars

by Andrew J. Graff

  The hail fell. The wind pushed. Miranda called out to Jesus in the water. Tiffany felt blessed.

  CAL SPENT THE PAST HOUR SLAPPING MOSQUITOES AND WATCHING Teddy cuss and slash his way through spruce trees. The constant drizzle wasn’t enough to keep off the bugs. If anything, it seemed to enliven them, prod them to feast. The rain was just enough to soak everything slowly. First the foliage, then Cal’s jacket, and then his jeans and boot. Cal heard thunder far off to the west, back where the river was, and couldn’t decide which would be worse, to be caught in that storm or in these clouds of mosquitoes. Right now, damp as a rag, with itchy welts on his neck and hands, sweating but unable to remove his coat for fear of the swarm, Cal voted for thunderstorm, hands down. A tree-bending wind would do these bugs in nicely. There was another itch too. Cal wanted a drink. And he wanted one badly enough that it scared him, threatened all the hope of newness he’d found in this forest.

  Cal walked slowly behind Ted, who hacked and hacked. Cal held the reins of both horses. Jacks fell in behind, constantly whining and grumbling and shaking his ears. It would be Cal’s turn to slash through the undergrowth soon, and he’d welcome it. They’d already traded off about four times.

  Hours ago, when they first approached the stretch of forest that held Teddy’s logging road, Cal felt in his gut that it was a bad idea. As they moved farther inland, the open hardwoods and clearings gave way to cedar and pine and spruce. Every so often they’d come across a small stand of white pine that made for easier walking, the massive trees keeping the ground clear of undergrowth. But then the men had to plunge once again into thickets and branches so tangled a person couldn’t see more than ten or fifteen feet. It was just pine. An endless hedge of pine. When the woods became so thick that they had trouble leading the horses, Teddy took out his map. Pine boughs looked on over both of his shoulders. Cal held one away from his face, swatted bugs with his free hand.

  “Shouldn’t be much farther now, and we’ll make the road.” He ran his finger along the map while Cal eyed the woods suspiciously. They should have stayed by the river. This was misery.

  Teddy rolled up the map and retrieved a long canvas sheath from his saddlebag. The sheath was matte green and faded, with a military designator printed along one side like an old tattoo. It held a machete. Teddy grinned a bit as he slid the machete free.

  “We weren’t supposed to keep these,” he said. “But I figured they wouldn’t miss it. Some guys kept more.” He turned the blade over in his hand, brushed his thumb against the edge, held it up into a patch of gray light. “Come on,” he said, “less than a mile now and we’ll make the cut.”

  And with that, Cal led both horses as Teddy swiped and slashed his way through the hedge of pine boughs. The mile was a slow one, and when they made the road, or what used to be the road, Ted took his map out again. He studied it, put it away, rubbed his eyes, and kept them closed.

  “Where’s the road, Ted?” Cal asked. His mare whinnied. “I wasn’t talking to you, horse,” he said, and reached toward the horse’s face to wipe a blot of mosquitoes away from the corners of its eyes.

  Ted lifted his arms. Eyes still closed, he tilted his head up to the rain.

  “You’re standing in the road,” he said.

  It was hard to discern, but once Cal took his bearings via the treetops, he could make out the cut clear as day. A few paces to his right and left, pines rose to their adult height. Between them, where the men stood, younger pines not quite as tall marked a thirty-foot swath where the cut had been. The road hadn’t been kept up. Cal knew from his interactions with game wardens that most state logging projects around here were plagued by budget shortfalls and politics. This one had been abandoned. But the forest paid no mind. When the trucks and saws left a path of sunlight behind, the woods wasted no time filling itself back in.

  “We could go back,” said Cal.

  Ted opened his eyes, gave a laugh without humor in it. “To think I drove a skidder right through here.” He looked around at the tangle of trunks. “Can’t say I thought of this.”

  “Well, you didn’t, and that’s that, so let’s go,” said Cal, wiping rain and mosquitoes and thoughts of whiskey from his neck. The forest dripped in the humid quiet.

  “We ain’t going back,” Teddy said, and spat.

  Cal dropped the reins. This again. “We’re not going to chop our way to Ironsford. Let’s go back to the river and get on with it.”

  “It’s too late for that. We’ve wasted too much time just getting here.”

  “So let’s waste even more by staying? I didn’t come out here to prune trees, Teddy. I came out here to find those boys.”

  Teddy glared at him. It was icy, but Cal challenged it and glared back. He was hot from walking. The mosquitoes had doubled their efforts since they stopped. His tailbone still ached. And they now stood in the middle of a pine forest so thick a person couldn’t see over his own shoulder. If they kept it up, they’d be the ones needing a search party. At least the boys had the presence of mind to stick to the river.

  “I know where the forest opens up again,” said Ted. “If we keep going, we can push to the river without backtracking.”

  “Opens up? Opens up! We’ve been headed for miles through one big bush!” Cal slapped a hand against the buzzing at his ear. He looked at it, the small blotch of blood on his palm, the crumpled smear of wing and leg. “And if I get bit by one more mosquito,” he yelled up at the trees, “I’m going to burn this bush down!”

  Teddy exhaled through his nose. He stared at the ground and his face got red. He kept staring at the ground until the color left it a bit.

  “Cal, we can go back if you want,” he said. “You’re the sheriff.”

  “No, I am not,” Cal snarled.

  “But we’re not going to make up any time. This road’s a bust, and it’s my fault, but I know where these pines turn to hardwood that reaches clear to the river, and we can use that as a road out.”

  “How far?” Cal asked. He was aware that his tone wasn’t helping, but he wasn’t in the mood to reel it in.

  “We didn’t cut it. We wanted to, but the foresters marked only the pine. The hardwood is five miles down this road, give or take.”

  “Give or take.” Cal spat on the ground. Jacks whined and shook his ears. “May as well be fifty.”

  To his credit, Teddy kept his cool. Cal knew it.

  “Look, we can backtrack to the south,” Ted said, “and then head north.” He traced a wide loop in the air. “Or, we can cut through this road and keep going north through the hardwoods.” His finger cut a much tighter, straighter path.

  Cal spat again. He’d rarely been so mad. These woods had pressed in on him. Cal no longer feared it as he did in the past. But it had found a way of making him terribly angry. These bugs. This damp. This heat in his coat. The prick and slap of pine branches. As a cop, he’d seen plenty of men lose their lids over less—some call about a guy out in his yard beating a lawn mower to death with the whole neighborhood watching, or the guy he once saw kicking in the quarter panel of his minivan because his spare was flat, with the wife and kids standing out by the highway, vacation just beginning. Cal felt it in himself more often than he’d want to confess, that awful draw to boil over.

  “Give me that machete,” Cal said.

  Ted held it out, and Cal snatched it from his hand.

  “I’m mad at you, Ted!”

  “I know you are.”

  “I’m mad at all this pine, Ted!”

  “I know.”

  Cal took the lead, or what he thought was the lead. He looked to his left and right and gave a practice swipe at a sapling. In a spray of raindrops, he clipped it clean in two. That felt good. He looked back at Ted for direction. He widened his eyes at him.

  “Well,” he said, “are you going to tell me which way to go, or are we going to sit around and scratch?”

  Ted tried not to smile, and pointed into the trees, north, and Cal attacked the wall of pin
e, putting his whole back into his swings, cutting upward and downward, throwing sidearms from time to time.

  “Careful,” said Ted, behind him.

  “Don’t tell me how to cut pine branches, Ted.”

  “I ain’t. I’m just saying to be careful is all.”

  “I know how to cut off pine branches, Ted,” said Cal, and as he said it, a particularly stubborn branch failed to sever, so Cal kicked it free and stomped it flat with his boot for good measure. He slashed and cut for the better part of an hour. They made decent progress. If they could push through it, they pushed through it. If they couldn’t, Cal cut it down. Both men were covered with welts and scratches. The sweat stung their necks. Every now and then, Cal had to stop to pull his sodden sock back onto his foot. It was rotten work, but at least a man with a machete had a way of fighting it out. To hell with pine. To hell with whiskey. Cal had a machete! What Cal didn’t know was that during the hour he was blowing off steam, Teddy was building it. Toward the end of his shift, when Cal was beginning to feel pretty emotionally stable again, pretty pleased with himself, he was startled by Ted’s enraged voice.

  “Would you give over that damn chopper already!” Ted bellowed. Jacks, who had been walking at Teddy’s side, bolted into the underbrush.

  Cal stood straight up. “Yeah,” he said, as calmly as a man rising from a chair. “I didn’t know you wanted it.”

  Teddy strode forward and smeared bugs from his forehead, yanking the machete from Cal’s hand. His face was red and his lips were clenched. He didn’t stop walking when he grabbed the blade either. He just snatched the thing and bullied his way into the nearest tangle of pine, beating it to pieces.

  Cal, who by now felt at peace with everything, empathized with Ted’s plight but couldn’t help himself from egging him on, seeing how hot the old man could get.

  “Careful,” he called out. “Just be careful chopping there, Teddy.”

  Ted was too angry to see the joke. He spun away from his work and shook the machete at Cal and the horses. “Don’t tell me what to do, Sheriff! Don’t you tell me how to cut trail!”

  Cal stifled a smile and raised his hands in the air. Teddy turned and resumed his violence.

  This pattern repeated itself a number of times, one man getting frustrated enough with the bugs and horses to steal back the hateful pleasures of the machete. Eventually, Cal knew, they’d cuss and beat their way out of this forest. And as they rode the ebb and tide of their anger, Cal couldn’t help thinking about their conversation that morning, the way he really did hate police work, the way Teddy hated his quiet life of farming. He felt that beating their way out of the forest was a continuation of that conversation, like something was being hashed out between each man and his life.

  After several hours, Cal still felt the heat rising in him, but to be honest, it rose a little less. They’d made good progress, but they were also running out of steam. Cal looked forward to riding again. A breeze and passivity was what he craved now. The sky overhead was gray and framed on all sides by the spires of spruce and hemlock. Nothing but pine and drizzle and bugs and sky. Ted, it was clear now, was running on fumes. His slashes with the machete grew less adamant, halfhearted. Despite the mosquitoes, he removed his coat, and sweat and dirt stained his entire back. The neck of his shirt hung loose with rain. Eventually, he stopped and stood, stretched his back.

  “Can you cut awhile?” he asked, breathing through pursed lips.

  “Sure,” Cal said, dropping the reins. He wasn’t angry enough to attack the forest, but he’d do it. They weren’t fighting anymore. They were searching again. Keeping on. Finding the boys.

  “Want some water?” Cal extended his canteen out to Ted.

  Ted nodded, exhaled. He dumped some of the cool water on his neck, rubbed the dirt and bug bites. Then he lifted the canteen skyward and drank, his eyes closed.

  Cal’s eyes followed the mist upward. He hadn’t immediately realized that there was something different about the forest’s canopy ahead of them, about twenty yards off, a new kind of green rising among the spires of the pines.

  “Ted,” Cal said.

  Teddy kept drinking noisily before lowering the canteen and wiping his mouth with his arm. He capped it and panted, looked at Cal.

  Cal nodded up at the treetops, grinning, the broad-leafed canopy dangling over what was no doubt much more open ground.

  Ted saw it and nodded, nearly too winded to smile. He stretched his back. “Hardwoods,” he said.

  As the men mounted and rode out of the pine into open, moving air, Cal looked back at the path they’d carved, the cut and snapped branches, the carpet of needles and mud. It felt good to look at it. It felt like clarity. Cal wiped the welts on his neck and spurred his horse forward.

  Fifteen

  “AND WE ARE NOT QUITTING,” SAID BREAD. “NOW GET UP!”

  Fish didn’t move. He lay on his stomach on the giant sandbar. The sand beneath him was saturated in rain and leaf litter. River water dripped from his clothes. Falling rain soaked him. After the worst of the storm, the rain didn’t quit. It fell and fell, windless now, but heavy, the occasional rumble of thunder encircling their ruin. Fish’s stomach growled. His head ached. He lowered his forehead to the cool sand. It felt fine there, just being still. This is how it ends for beavers, hungry and dying on the sand, as wet and quiet as driftwood. The storm had ruined them.

  Bread glared, his hair plastered against his forehead. He had welts on his face and hands from the hailstones. Water dripped from his nose. He blew it away and started pacing, kicked sand at the river. Beyond him, closer to the vast expanse of cattails, lay the pieces that were left of the raft. The boys were still on board when the raft broke up in the storm, spinning and tilting, water washing up on the deck, the boys shielding their faces from the wind and noise. Fish had never seen a storm like that. Wrath was real. Bread had been wrong about God not doing anything. He could do something, all right. And it made Fish lie down on the sand to die. The image of the raft spinning and reeling beneath that terrible funnel cloud played again and again in Fish’s mind. It felt like judgment, and it didn’t matter if they were strong or good. They were fatherless. They were lost.

  When the storm came, the raft drifted into a part of the river that was wide and flat. Sandbars and cattails reached out into the channel. And then the rain got heavier. And then came wind and hail. And when the boys picked up their poles to try to push their way into the cattails, the hail and lightning became so fierce they were forced to take cover in their flannels and wait. Blind to the storm, Fish thought the wind sounded very much like a train, distant at first, and then rumbling up from downstream. He’d heard of a storm sounding like a train. The hum became feverish, whistling on its tracks until it shook the river in ways wind shouldn’t be able to.

  He and Bread clutched the ropes holding the deck together. The first thing to give was the wicker railing. The branches and skulls rattled and splashed, and then they stopped splashing. They tore off and flew, coyote skulls and deer skulls lifting off into the green and black. And when the ropes securing the A-frame broke, they snapped so sharply Fish thought the raft was lightning struck. He tore back his flannel hood and looked up just in time to see the cedar logs lift into the air, unfolding like the hind legs of a giant locust. After the legs tore away, the ribs broke. It wasn’t until he was neck-deep in water, holding on to a cedar log under each armpit, that he realized the deck had broken apart. He was too stunned by the sight he saw in that strobe of lightning. There on the riverbank—he could have thrown a stone to it—stood the heart of the storm, churning and booming, the engine itself. Lightning flashed white and black. The thundercloud had an arm. It was black and dangling. And that arm reached down to the earth and did violence to it, searched the ground for whatever it was it wanted. In the space of two or three flashes of lightning, Fish watched the arm grab hold of a grove of cedar trees. As easily as a hand pulling weeds, the funnel cloud twisted them in a knot and tore t
hem free. The arm whipped itself farther inland and made a crackling knot of a stand of pines. Lightning flashed again. Fish closed his eyes and clutched his logs. Hail beat his face. Somewhere in all of that light and darkness and noise he heard Bread’s yell. Fish! Fish! Fish! But Fish felt too choked by the storm and river to answer. There seemed so little air in all that wind. He just held to his logs until the funnel cloud broke apart, dropped its debris, and he felt river bottom with his toes. He let himself down from his logs, parted the stew of broken cattails, and fell upon the shore.

  Now lying on the sandbar was all there was left to do.

  Bread came back from kicking sand.

  “You’re a liar, Fish, for everything you’ve ever said,” Bread shouted, and it stung worse than Fish’s welts. Bread seemed switched on. He paced and spat, wrung out the sleeves of his shirt. “If you weren’t all I got, I’d leave you here for the coyotes! But you are all I got, and I’m gonna fix this dang raft and drag you on it, and we are going to make it to that armory! Now give me that barlow knife.”

  Fish winced when Bread mentioned the armory. Liar, he thought. I am a liar. I am not good. There was nothing for them at the armory. Fish opened his mouth to confess, and he knew that when he did the destruction would be like that storm, his tongue a hand reaching down to wring life from the earth. It would wreck the past. It would wreck the future. Bread would abandon him, stalk off into the woods. But Bread had to know. It was too cruel to let him hope anymore. They were not warriors. They were not beavers. They would never become tankers like Fish’s dad, because Fish’s dad was dead. There was nowhere left to go. They were without food. The river claimed all their gear except what they carried in their pockets or belts. They were finished.

  “Bread, I—”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” said Bread.