Hystopia: A Novel (34 page)

(“Had to risk it, man. You see, I thought maybe Rake would freak and demand that they switch guns, become suspicious, something like that. In that case, I figured he’d switch and then freak and switch again, but he was unusually calm. Hearing the name Billy-T did something to him, I think. He was killer-calm, and he put his trust, such as it was, in me as his second. I’d fed him a line about the seconds being the only ones to get the guns ready—that’s their job, man, I told him. Seconds are duty-bound to make sure all the conditions are correct. I know how it sounds, hearing it from me. The plan was drawn from my gut, from a sense of whatever it was that had been enfolded, maybe.”)

*   *   *

As expected, Haze seemed to open fire first but they’d never know who got the first trigger-squeeze. Maybe there was a hollow click as Rake squeezed in frustration, realizing that his gun wasn’t kicking, that his clip was empty. Maybe not. Across the empty space between the two men in that split second everything seemed to freeze up. Haze fired until his clip was empty, stepping forward with the shots until he was over Rake’s body aiming down into it and then his clip was empty and he continued to press the trigger, clicking until Hank had his own gun to the back of Haze’s head.

Hank held his gun against Haze’s neck and told him he’d done the honorable thing, fighting Rake. You’re going do the next honorable thing, now. You’ll start walking down the beach to the east and you won’t stop.

His gun jammed or something, Haze mumbled. What makes you think I’d start walking?

The fact that I’m saying it makes me think you’ll do it, Hank said. The fact that I’ll shoot you now and bury you in the sand is another.

Rake owed me some cash, Haze said.

I’ve killed for the hell of it, but killing you would be for fun. Now, killing you because you mention cash, that would be priceless, but the only reason I’m not going to do it is because I don’t feel like digging a hole and I’d rather watch you walk away from me with that good eye working. I’d rather watch you make a run for it, but you’d better be quick because believe you me every single fucking man who was betrayed by Rake will be after you as soon as the word slips out that he’s dead. You understand me? They’ll start tracking you because they’ve built up in their minds that he’s some kind of figure in history and that’s part of the price you pay as his sidekick. Rake’s a mythic figure out there and so are you, my friend.

Haze staggered away down the beach. They watched him until he was out of sight.

Now’s the hard part, Hank said, holding Meg. Now we have to go into whatever strength we still have and use that part of ourselves that we’d rather not use to burn him and take him downstate. We’ll go to the house and get the wheelbarrow and we’ll put him in it and then I’ll build the fire and I’ll put him in while you stay inside and pretend it’s not happening. I’m sorry you even had to see this. I’m sorry it had to be done this way.

That night, after the fire—he put the body on it, leaving it to burn—it began to rain and they lay in bed listening.

I’m tired of this, she said.

I’ll leave in a few hours. You stay here and take care of MomMom. Nobody will know until the Corps sends someone up here, or word gets here from Flint. They’ll see his body and report it and then it’ll have to go through a vast network of bureaucratic bullshit before they identify. They’ll see what they want to see.

Out in the yard, a few hot coals still hissed. He went down to check it, casting the flashlight beam onto Rake’s face. His mouth curled back into a leathery smirk. The rain had passed and clouds scuttled across the moon. He caught the scent of honeysuckle and trees happy in the rain. The body seemed almost weightless as he moved it onto a blanket. He went back to the fire and put the dog tag into the coals and let it sit there for a while. Then he rubbed it with ash and, lifting Rake’s head, drew it around his neck. He patted it once, gently. He carried the body to the car, put it in the trunk, and went back to the house for his bag: a gun, some food, a grenade just in case. When he left around three, the trees hung with wetness. Tendrils of fog threaded across the road and through his headlights. He had the radio on, and when the state forest signal came in he scanned for music and, finding none, settled for a talk show out of Canada. They spoke of the spillover riots that had somehow crossed the Freedom Bridge to Sarnia before subsiding into a tense peace. A caller spoke of the potential for long-term peace. There was hope in the air, she said. She had a wonderful Canadian tartness to her voice that reminded Hank of his mother before she had gone mad.

He got to the bridge before dawn and pulled over to scan with his binoculars. The bridge lights were out and in the twenty minutes he sat looking only two sets of headlights went over, both heading from south to north. The water in Lake Michigan sat leaden. He resisted the familiar urge to go down and take a swim. Instead, he thought of Meg lying in bed, her hair pooled around her face. Her beauty seemed to him the only thing that could save him from himself. His mother would be asleep, too, snoring and then snorting and settling into that breathless silence that was near death. The weakness apparent by day in her weirdly unfocused eyes was even more apparent in those silences. He took a deep breath and shook his head and listened to the tense fuzzy hum of blood against the thin membrane of his eardrums.

*   *   *

He crossed the bridge and found the side street leading to Fort Michilimackinac. The body in the trunk, charred to feathery lightness, bones and shrunken skin and the grimace of teeth, shifted slightly, curled fetal in the blanket. He imagined he could feel it.

At the fort he parked on the far side of the lot and scanned with his field glasses. A man was asleep in a folding chair, a glint of badge silver on chest. His head rested against the log wall of the fort, which was a fake, a reconstruction for tourists, but in the predawn darkness looked real. Hank got out of the car, lifted the bundle of blankets from the trunk, and dragged it to the curb. An old oak had been violently pruned away from the entrance driveway. It had a long scab, a scrape on its trunk bleeding down to the roots. He touched the sap and took a sniff. Then he unfolded the blanket.

You’re dead now, he said to the corpse. You’ll be dead in five years, he said to the tree.

He lifted the body, again noting its lightness, and set it down carefully into a crook at the base of the tree. He silently thanked the tree for providing a nifty seatlike structure. For years the roots had clutched and changed direction, piling up against the concrete curb, bulging and pushing to form what he needed, a place to enshrine the body of a man who had done the same thing in his own way, struggling against forces invisible to him, responding instinctually, cell by cell, seeking nourishment in poor substrate. He adjusted the dog tag, pulling the chain straight, and wiped ash from his hands on his jeans.

The bridge was empty when he headed back. The hanger cables thrummed in the wind above the brutal currents, the contending forces from two huge bodies.

Hours later, back at the house, he found Meg in the kitchen drinking coffee.

*   *   *

They spent the next few days cleaning out the house, getting rid of reminders of Rake and reestablishing a sense of ownership. They built a fire and burned Rake’s junk. They hiked down to the river and he taught her how to line-cast in a clearing he knew about—the only one, really, where you wouldn’t get snagged. The word eventually would get out that Rake was dead, and then they’d have to make a move. For now they’d bide their time and take care of MomMom.

*   *   *

Those were sweet days, and nights. Hank took her down to the river each afternoon. She caught on quickly, wading bare-legged into the icy water, finding her footing on the slippery stones. He spent evenings studying forestry survey maps and making plans. MomMom was growing weak. When she threw a fit, she did it quietly. He held her and tried to read her eyes, to see something of the past, but it was all gone.

News of the assassination came on the radio one morning while they were sitting at the kitchen table. They listened and wept together.

Kennedy pushed his luck as far as he could and I respect him for that, Hank said. We did the same thing but were luckier.

The trees were just beginning to change, not in color but in the tenseness of the leaves, a loosening at the stems. Late summer weeds had bloomed and dried in the sun and were filling the afternoon air with chaff. Hank went out and chopped some wood and at night, when it got cold, he blessed it and fed a fire in the living room and they listened to the Stones and the Beatles and lay together on the couch. He had a loaded gun he kept on the table in case word leaked out about Rake. But the road to the house stayed quiet.

Several days after the assassination, the news reports were of the funeral train transporting the president’s body back to Washington, reversing the route of Lincoln’s body a century ago, across Ohio and through upstate New York. That night he built another fire and went outside, the grass crunching frost, and saw the northern lights through the trees. He went inside to get Meg and took her down to the beach to look at the long furls of electromagnetic radiation. He sniffed the air and said he was catching something new from the north, way, way up. He said they’d go there as soon as they didn’t have to fear being followed by gangs of agents.

That night they made love for the first time. She told him to stop saying he was sorry, that her desires had nothing to do with anything except the fact that she was her old self again, her original self.

DULUTH

The water had taken on a cold, wintery glint. The light had shifted, making the beach look wider, more ominous. The situation was unsafe, but before the four of them took off, they had taken one last hike together, through second-growth forest to the eastern branch of the Two Hearted River. Hank had wanted them to see it. They marched single-file, Hank leading and stopping them on occasion to sniff and listen.

They were still doing a penance for a loss, and it would be that way for a long time. The river snaked through the brambles and deep green beds of fern, hidden from the world, a river that had to be seen at ground level. From the sky it was obscured by a canopy of leaf.

Singleton, at the rear, experienced a sense of recognition. The buzz in his ear was still gone, leaving behind a feeling of having lived through battles. The fuzzball had resolved into concrete thought—images of a boy on a beach with freckles and a loose smile. From Meg he had gathered a sense of who Billy-T might’ve been, and he saw him through her eyes and she saw him through his eyes and Wendy saw her loss through Meg’s eyes and Meg through her eyes.

Hank led them to a mossy open clearing with limited snags. The only good fishing spot for miles and miles. He explained that the reputation of the stream was much greater than the stream itself.

When they got back to the house that night they found MomMom dead in the yard, her laundry basket next to her.

“Natural causes,” Hank said. “She must’ve dragged herself out of bed.”

His voice was abstracted. He stood for a moment and then walked over to her body, which looked less weighty, the apron loose around her hips, her chin flattened and her eyes still open.

“I don’t believe this,” Meg said, crying.

“I never got to know her in a sane state, because I was insane when she was sane,” Hank said. “Before that I was a kid and she was just my mom. It was clean and simple back then.” He dropped to his knees and kissed her cheek. “I treated her badly before I got the treatment. I was an evil man and I cast her aside, and me and Rake, whatever we did, it had to have been unspeakable.”

“Don’t blame yourself now,” Meg said, holding him.

“I’m blaming the man I was when I came back from Nam. I can’t remember it but I’m sure that when I came back she told me something like, ‘You’re not the boy I knew, not at all,’ something like that.”

“Blame the old Hank, but don’t blame yourself,” Meg said.

“When the president was killed I knew it wouldn’t be long. She started downhill, I mean physically, when that news came out.”

“I’m sorry, Hank,” Singleton said.

“I know you are,” Hank said.

“Nothing prepares you,” Wendy said. “I’ll go get a blanket.”

MomMom’s death was a sign. They all thought, but didn’t say, that the timing would ease the burden of travel. What would Klein say? He’d say that sometimes men died in the field to ease the burdens of other men. If they were beyond the reach of a dust-up crew it might look—and he’d stress only look, because he wasn’t coldhearted—like an act of God.

They buried her under the clothesline, along with her basket and her Bible.

“Love is the great transition of fury into stability, into the serenity of a mutual shared vibration,” Hank said, spreading his arms. “Love is when you see the forest and the trees and have a complete sense of both. Love means saying you’re sorry again and again and again.”

*   *   *

It was their last night on the beach. Lake Superior. Thirty-two thousand square miles of water producing waves that arrive in a sequence of four or five smaller ones and then a breaker born far out in the fury of a distant storm, where tiny bolts were caught up in the clouds, flickering their underbellies visible and then, a second later, consumed back into darkness. A log shifted and sparks were unleashed into the sky. Smoke from the embers was milky gray against the blackness. They were all aware not only of the fire’s warmth but of the dangerous dark beyond its light.

“You know what I hate,” Hank was saying.

“What do you hate?” Meg said.

“I hate it when people say something is ‘painfully beautiful.’ Pain’s never beautiful, man, never. The forest is beautiful, but I’d hope I never get to the point where I claim it’s painfully beautiful. MomMom used to rub Vicks on my chest when I was sick, and now, when I smell it, I can’t figure out why I feel this intense despair. All I can think is that it must have something to do with Nam, that smell. Is that painfully beautiful?”