Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories Page 18

  He goes to a pay phone and calls his mother collect.

  “How’d you like to drive to Norton Beach?” he asks her. He explains about the carnival, and that he would like to come home.

  “Well, I think it sounds enriching, honestly.”

  “It’s not. Come and get me.”

  “David has a fractured rib,” she says. “It’s not all your fault, I know. You’re both barbarous idiots, as far as I’m concerned. If I weren’t so spineless, I’d tell the two of you to go fly a kite and live out my cronehood in solitude, but so be it. I’m a coward.”

  “Will you please come and get me?”

  “What you ask is impossible. I can’t bring you back here.”

  “Could you wire me some money?”

  “Fifty dollars is missing from my purse.”

  “Forty.”

  “Ah, my apologies,” she says.

  “Just get in the car.”

  The line is silent a moment. She sighs. “Look, I’m sorry, but now isn’t a good time. The Hendersons will be here in an hour, and I’ve got artichokes to stuff. Call me in two or three days, and we can talk things over. But really, I think in a way this could be a good thing. You needed a fire under you, I think.”

  A young reporter from the Norton Beach Intelligencer, on hand to cover the Future Farmers of America duck race, instead assigns himself a story on the accidental staving-in of the Zipper man’s head. Gary is in a coma and not expected to return. The reporter, who is not much older than Jeff Park, stops by the Pirate Ship to harvest a quote or two from those who knew him. He wands the butt of his ballpoint pen at Leon and Jeff, who both decline to speak. But Ellis is keen to talk to the young man. “Gary was a seriously generous person,” says Ellis. “That was the main thing about him.”

  The reporter jots this information down, and then looks back at Ellis with a reptilian smile. “You know what they’re selling over at the company office? A few years back Gary pulled a bid in Jackson Correctional for putting his hands on a four-year–old.”

  He lights a cigarette, savoring his custody of this ugly news about the Zipper man. “Course, they’re trying to pin that thing from the other night on him, but to me, there’s something about it that doesn’t pass the smell test.” He inhales a lungful and narrows his eyes at the Chaises Volantes, as though the Chaises Volantes do not pass the smell test, either. Then he goes across the way to Roy’s Hoop-La, the basketball toss. The reporter sinks a very respectable three shots out of five, though the hoop is rigged and shaped like a kidney bean.

  The FFA beef steer competition is under way in the agriculture pavilion. Chad is there with his black steer. He wears a kelly-green vest and bow tie, like the half-dozen young men and women standing beside him, stroking their animals’ bellies with slender hooked sticks.

  The judge, Horace Tate, is a man with a kind, boiled-looking face and a striped shirt tight over his prosperous belly. At his command, the contestants lead their animals around the ring in a sober march. After three laps, Tate brushes some sawdust from his cowboy hat and speaks into a microphone. “In judging this competition,” he says, “I was looking for the total package: a long-bodied, high-volume steer with good travelability and a masculine look. These young people have brought some very fine animals here tonight, but I think I’m going to have to give the first prize to . . . Chad’s Black Brangus, Domino. Chad, how about you say a few words about raising Domino here.” In fact, Domino’s a little sickle-hocked, but the finest steer, a white Charolais so flawless it looks carved out of soap, is owned by a squirrelly boy with bad acne and an untucked shirt who Tate feels is not a credit to the FFA.

  Chad looks fearfully at the microphone. He speaks into it in a voice scarcely louder than a whisper. “He was a pretty slow gainer. He was tough to halter-break.”

  While Chad murmurs at the empty stands, Horace Tate polishes his belt buckle with the cuff of his shirtsleeve. He’s proud of the buckle, a silver oval, studded in the center with a turquoise moon. His daughter was in high school when she made it for him. She lives in Santa Fe now, though he hasn’t heard from her in many years. Tate worries over his daughter, but the buckle comforts him, offers some assurance that things will turn out well for her.

  The competition ends. Chad leaves with his blue ribbon. The boy with the white steer and rumpled cheeks receives a commendation for keeping the neatest logbook.

  Tate’s down here for the week. He’s got a small ranch two hours west of here, outside Kissimmee, where he runs a few dozen head of skinny cattle and the alpaca herd his wife insists on keeping. In his younger years, Tate rode competition rough stock and then drove race cars, drawn to anything with minderasing speed. But he doesn’t care for the pointless velocity of the carnival amusements. Looking out at the whirling skyline of the fair, he can’t help thinking about all the earth you could move, all the beef you could haul with so much fuel and good steel. He thinks, too, of last night, of the boy in the Honeypot, and feels a pleasant ache, like being rasped on the back of the sternum with a jeweler’s file. There’s a want in him to take a stroll around, but he pushes it down. Instead, Tate goes to the one ride he enjoys—the Cliff Hanger, a fleet of little hammocks dangling beneath hang gliders’ wings. The wing-and-hammock rigs are bolted to a spinning ring of steel that, as it turns, soars high above the midway on a massive hydraulic arm. It is a gentle ride, designed by a large-hearted engineer who valued amazement over stark fear. You lie on your stomach with nothing beneath you. No other ride more perfectly approximates the feeling of bird flight. Up goes the arm. Swooping high and smooth above the fair, Tate giggles helplessly, the night air hitting him like a fast, sweet joke.

  “Excuse you, asshole,” a biker lady tells Jeff Park. She’s wearing a pair of high-dollar boots trimmed with spurs and moto-fringe. In his haste to meet the girl Katie, Jeff Park trod on her toe. But Jeff’s gone down the midway. What a funny hunger he’s got to see this girl he hasn’t shared five minutes’ talk with. Katie and her green-lit teeth—he couldn’t say why, but she’s the first thing that’s made any sense since the old man went for him in the sunroom. It’s not sexual urgency that hurries him but a kind of giddy fondness. He pictures her bedroom, clean and full of girl smells in a house far from here. The thought gets the saliva pooling under his tongue.

  But she’s not waiting for him at the coin toss, whose only patrons are two elderly women flinging dimes at dismal bounty—cloudy pilsner glasses, heaps of yellowed T-shirts, coffee mugs bearing obscure slogans—“Beezer County Recycling Program,” “Sulphur City Granddad.” While the attendant isn’t looking, Jeff Park puts the toe of his shoe over three dimes and drags them under the rope.

  Fifteen minutes pass, and Katie does not appear. Jeff feels like the victim of a theft. He doesn’t find her at the Forty Niner, the trough where, for five dollars, you can pan a sack of rigged dirt prestudded with unprecious gems. No luck either at the Zyklon, the Thunderbolt, the Roundup, the FireBall, or the Starship 2000, or at the toilet line or at the Village of Yesteryear. It’s almost ten o’clock when he sees her orange sweater among the throng of taunters at the Bengal tiger cage, watching the great cat stride his unceasing laps. Jeff calls her name. She is laughing at something the girl next to her is saying, and doesn’t hear. He goes to her quickly, puts his hand on her shoulder, and pulls her toward him, hard enough that her head jerks back. People turn. Her jaw hangs wide and pretty, but the light in her mouth has gone out.

  EVERYTHING RAVAGED, EVERYTHING BURNED

  Just as we were all getting back into the mainland domestic groove, somebody started in with dragons and crop blights from across the North Sea. We all knew who it was. A turncoat Norwegian monk named Naddod had been big medicine on the dragon-and-blight circuit for the last decade or so, and was known to bring heavy ordnance for whoever could lay out some silver. Scuttlebutt had it that Naddod was operating out of a monastery on Lindisfarne, whose people we’d troubled on a pillage-and-consternation tour through Northumbria a
fter Corn Harvesting Month last fall. Now bitter winds were screaming in from the west, searing the land and ripping the grass from the soil. Salmon were turning up spattered with sores, and grasshoppers clung to the wheat in rapacious buzzing bunches.

  I tried to put these things out of my mind. We’d been away three long months harrying the Hibernian shores, and now I was back with Pila, my common-law, and thinking that home was very close to paradise in these endless summer days. We’d built our house together, Pila and me. It was a fine little wattle-and-daub cabin on a pretty bit of plain where a wide blue fjord stabbed into the land. On summer evenings my young wife and I would sit out front, high on potato wine, and watch the sun stitch its orange skirt across the horizon. At times such as these, you get a good, humble feeling, like the gods made this place, this moment, first and concocted you as an afterthought just to be there to enjoy it.

  I was doing a lot of enjoying and relishing and laying around the rack with Pila, though I knew what it meant when I heard those flint-edged winds howling past the house. Some individuals three weeks’ boat ride off were messing up our summer and would probably need their asses whipped over it.

  Of course, Djarf Fairhair had his stinger out even before his wife spotted those dragons winging it inland from the coast. He was boss on our ship and a fool for warfare. His appetite for action was so terrifying and infectious, he’d once riled up a gang of Frankish slaves and led them south to afflict and maim their own countrymen. He’d gotten in four days of decent sacking when the slaves began to see the situation for what it was and underwent a sudden change of attitude. Djarf had been fighting his way up the Rhine Valley, making steady progress through a half-assed citizens’ militia of children and farmers, when the slaves closed in behind him. People who were there say he turned absolutely feral and began berserking with a pair of broadaxes, chewing through the lines like corn kernels on a cob, and that when the axes broke, he took up someone’s severed leg and used it as a club, so horrifying those gentle provincials that they fell back and gave him wide berth to the ship.

  Djarf was from Hedeby-Slesvig up the Sli fjord, a foul and rocky locality whose people take a worrisome pleasure in the gruesome sides of life. They have a habit down there if they don’t like a child’s looks when he slides from the womb, they pitch him into the deep and wait for the next one. Djarf himself was supposedly a colicky baby, and it was only the beneficence of the tides and his own vicious tenacity that got him to the far beach when his father tried to wash him from the world.

  He’d been campaigning for payback ever since. I guess I was with him on a search-and-destroy tour against Louis the Pious, and with my own eyes watched him climb up over the soldiers’ backs and stride across their shoulders, scything skulls as he went. On that same trip, we ran low on food, and it was Djarf who decided to throw our own dead on the fire and have at last night’s mutton when their stomachs burst. He’d been the only one of us to dig in, apart from a deranged Arab along as a spellbuster. He reached right in there, scooping out chewed-up victuals with a shank of pine bark. “Greenhorns,” he called us, the firelight twitching on his face. “Food’s food. If these boys hadn’t gotten their threads snipped, they’d tell you the same thing.”

  So Djarf, whose wife was a sour, carp-mouthed thing and little argument for staying home, was agitating to hop back in the ship and go straighten things out in Northumbria. My buddy Gnut, who lived just over the stony moraine our wheat field backed up on, came down the hill one day and admitted that he, too, was giving it some thought. Like me, he wasn’t big on warrioring. He was just crazy for boat. He’d have rowed from his shack to his shithouse if somebody would invent a ship whose prow could cut sod. His wife had passed years ago, dead from bad milk, and now that she was gone, the part of Gnut that felt peaceful in a place that didn’t move beneath him had sickened and died as well.

  Pila saw him coming down the hill and scowled. “Don’t need to guess what he’ll be wanting,” she said, and headed back indoors. Gnut ambled down over the hummocky earth and stopped at the pair of stump chairs Pila and I had put up on the hill where the view was so fine. From there, the fjord shone like poured silver, and sometimes you could spot a seal poking his head up through the waves.

  Gnut’s wool coat was stiff with filth and his long hair so heavy and unclean that even the raw wind was having a hard time getting it to move. He had a good crust of snot going in his mustache, not a pleasant thing to look at, but then, he had no one around to find it disagreeable. He tore a sprig of heather from the ground and chewed at its sweet roots.

  “Djarf get at you yet?” he asked.

  “No, not yet, but I’m not worried he’ll forget.”

  He took the sprig from his teeth and briefly jammed it into his ear before tossing it away. “You gonna go?”

  “Not until I hear the particulars, I won’t.”

  “You can bet I’m going. A hydra flew in last night and ran off Rolf Hierdal’s sheep. We can’t be putting up with this shit. It comes down to pride, is what it comes down to.”

  “Hell, Gnut, when’d you get to be such a gung-ho motherfucker? I don’t recall you being so proud and thin-skinned before Astrud went off to her good place. Anyhow, Lindisfarne is probably sacked-out already. If you don’t recall, we pillaged the tar out of those people on the last swing through, and I doubt they’ve come up with much in the meantime to justify a trip.”

  I wished Gnut would go ahead and own up to the fact that his life out here was making him lonely and miserable instead of laying on with this warrior-man routine. I could tell just to look at him that most days he was thinking of walking into the water and not bothering to turn back. It wasn’t combat he was after. He wanted back on the boat among company.

  Not that I was all that averse to a job myself, speaking in the abstract, but I was needing more sweet time with Pila. I cared more for that girl than even she probably knew, and I was hoping to get in some thorough lovemaking before the Haycutting Month was under way and see if I couldn’t make us a little monkey.

  But the days wore on and the weather worsened. Pila watched it closely, and the sadness welled up in her, as it often did when I’d be leaving. She cussed me on some days, and others she’d hold me to her and weep. And late one evening, far toward dawn, the hail started. It came suddenly, with the rasping sound a ship makes when its keel scrapes stone. We hunkered down in the sheepskins, and I whispered soothing things to Pila, trying to drown out the clatter.

  The sun was not yet full up in the sky when Djarf came and knocked. I rose and stepped across the floor, which was damp with cold dew. Djarf stood in the doorway wearing a mail jacket and shield and breathing like he’d jogged the whole way over. He chucked a handful of hail at my feet. “Today’s the day,” he said with a wild grin. “We got to get it on.”

  Sure, I could have told him thanks anyway, but once you back down from one job, you’re lucky if they’ll even let you put in for a flat-fee trade escort. I had to think long-term, me and Pila, and any little jits we might produce. Still, she didn’t like to hear it. When I got back in bed, she tucked the covers over her face, hoping I’d think she was angry instead of crying.

  The clouds were spilling out low across the sky when we shoved off. Thirty of us on board, Gnut rowing with me at the bow and behind us a lot of other men I’d been in some shit with before. Some of their families came down to watch us go. Ørl Stender fucked up the cadence waving to his son, who stood on the beach waving back. He was a tiny one, not four or five, standing there with no pants on, holding a baby pig on a hide leash. Some of the others on board weren’t a whole lot older, rash and violent children, so innocent about the world they would just as soon stick a knife in you as shake your hand.

  Gnut was overjoyed. He laughed and sang and put a lot of muscle into the oar, me just holding my hands on it to keep up appearances. I was missing Pila already. I watched the beach for her and her bright red hair. She hadn’t come down to see me off, too mad and sad a
bout me leaving to get up out of bed. But I looked for her anyway, the land scooting away with every jerk of the oars. If Gnut knew I was hurting, he didn’t say so. He nudged me and joked, and kept up a steady flow of dull, merry chatter, as though this whole thing was a private vacation the two of us had cooked up together.

  Djarf stood at his spot in the bow, the blood in his cheeks. His high spirits were wearying. Slesvigers will burst into song with no provocation whatever, their affinity for music roughly on a par with the wretchedness of their singing. He screeched out a cadence ballad that lasted hours, and his gang of young hockchoppers howled along with him and gave no one any peace.

  Three days out, the sun punched through the dirty clouds and put a steely shimmer on the sea. It cooked the brine out of our clothes and got everybody dry and happy. I couldn’t help but think that if Naddod was really as serious as we thought he was, this crossing would be a fine opportunity to call up a typhoon and drown us all like cats. But the weather held, and the seas stayed drowsy and low.

  We had less light in the evenings out here than at home, and it was a little easier sleeping in the open boat without an all-night sun. Gnut and I slept where we rowed, working around each other to get comfy on the bench. I woke up once in the middle of the night and found Gnut dead asleep, muttering and slobbering and holding me in a rough embrace. I tried to peel him off, but he was large, and his hard arms stayed on me tight as if they’d grown there. I poked him and yelled at him, but the big man would not be roused, so I just tried to work up a little slack to where he wasn’t hurting my ribs, and I drifted back to sleep.

  Later, I told him what had happened. “That’s a lot of horseshit,” he said, his broad face going red.