Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories Read online

  George and Stephen took until nightfall to get all the decking in place. When they were finished, we made our way down to the tiny pond I’d built by damming a spring behind my house. We shed our clothes and pushed off into the pond, each on his own gasping course through the exhilarating blackness of the water. “Oh, oh, oh, God, it feels good,” cried Stephen in a voice of such carnal gratitude that I pitied him. But it was glorious, the sky and the water of a single world-ending darkness, and we levitated in it until we were as numb as the dead.

  Back at the house, I cooked up a gallon or so of beef Stroganoff, seasoned as George liked it, with enough salt to make your eyes water. A run of warm nights was upon us, thanks to a benevolent spasm of the Gulf Stream, and we dined in comfort on the newly finished porch. Over the course of the meal, we put away two bottles of wine and half a fifth of gin. By the time we’d moved on to brandied coffee to go with the blueberry pie George fetched from his place, the porch was humid with bonhomie.

  “Look at this,” Stephen said, stomping heavily on one of the newly fastened boards. “Fuckin’, I’ve got clients I’ve been working with ten years, and what’ve I done for them? I don’t know. But spend two hours banging nails, you got something to stand on, man. Real progress. This is what I oughta do. Come out here. Live on a fuckin’ hill.”

  “Actually, I’m glad you brought that up,” I said. “How big’s that nest egg you’ve got?”

  He gave a coy shrug.

  “What’s it, twenty-five grand or something?”

  “I guess,” he said.

  “Because, look, check it out,” I said. “Got a proposition for you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean, listen, how many guys like us, like me, do you think there are out there? Ballpark figure.”

  “What’s that mean, ‘like us’?” Stephen said.

  And here I began to spell out for him an idea I’d had on my mind lately, one that seemed rosiest after a wine-soaked dinner, when my gladness for the land, the stars, and the bullfrogs in my pond was at its maximum. I’d get to thinking about the sad, paunchy hordes, nightly pacing carpeted apartments from Spokane to Chattanooga, frantic for escape hatches of their own. These were the gentlemen to reach. The plan was simple. I’d advertise one-acre plots in the back pages of men’s magazines, put up a few spec cabins, handle the contracting myself, build a rifle range, some snowmobile trails, maybe a little saloon on the summit. In they’d swarm, a hill of pals, a couple of million in it for me, no sweat!

  “I don’t know,” said Stephen, helping himself to another plump dollop of brandy.

  “What don’t you know?” I asked him. “That twenty-five grand, and I’d put you in for an even share. You’d be getting what the other investors are getting for fifty.”

  “What other investors?” Stephen asked.

  “Ray Lawton,” I lied. “Lawton, Ed Hayes, and Dan Welsh. My point is I could let you in, even just with that twenty-five. If you could kick that twenty-five in, I’d set you up with an even share.”

  “No, yeah, it sounds great,” Stephen said. “It’s just I need to be careful with that money. That’s my whole savings and everything.”

  “Now, goddammit, Stephen, I’m sorry but let me explain something to you. I make money. That’s what I do,” I said. “I take land, and a little bit of money, and then I turn it into lots of money. You follow me? That’s what I do, and I’m good at it. What I’m asking is to basically just hold your twenty-five grand for a couple of months, and in return you’ll be in on something that could literally change your life.”

  “Can’t do it,” he said.

  “Well, all right, Stephen, what can you do? Could you go ten? Ten grand for a full share? Could you put in ten?”

  “Look, Matthew—”

  “Five? Three? Two thousand?”

  “Look—”

  “How about eight hundred, Stephen, or two hundred? Would that work for you, or would two hundred dollars break the bank?”

  “Two hundred’s good,” he said. “Put me down for that.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” I said.

  “Matthew, come on,” said George. “Cool it.”

  “I’m totally cool,” I said.

  “No, you’re being a shit,” said George. “And anyway, your dude ranch thing isn’t worth all this wind. Never work.”

  “Why not?”

  “First of all, the county’d never let you do it in the watershed. The ten-acre buffer—”

  “I already talked to them about a variance,” I said. “Wouldn’t be—”

  “And for another thing, I didn’t move back here to get among a bunch of swinging dicks.”

  “No offense, George, but it’s not your land we’re talking about.”

  “I know that, Matthew,” George said. “What I’m saying is, you carve this hill up and sell it out to a bunch of cocksuckers from Boston, I’d say the chance is pretty good that some night in the off-season, I’d get a few too many beers in me and I’d get it in my head to come around with a few gallons of kerosene.”

  George was staring at me with an irritating, stagy intensity. “Forget the kerosene, George—a hammer and nails’ll do it,” I said, turning and sweeping a hand at the wooden dainties on my gable. “Just sneak up some night and do a little raid with your scroll saw. Turn everybody’s camp into a huge doily. That’ll run them off pretty quick.”

  I laughed and went on laughing until my stomach muscles ached and tears beaded on my jaw. When I looked back at George, he had his lips set in a taut little dash. He was evidently vain about his scrollsaw work. I could not think what to do. I was still holding my pie plate, and without giving it much thought, I flung it into the woods. A crash followed without the rewarding tinkle of shattered crockery.

  “Oh, God,” I said.

  “What?” said Stephen.

  “Nothing,” I said. “My life is on fire.” Then I went into my cabin and got down on my mattress, and before long I was sleeping very well.

  I woke a little after three, thirsty as a poisoned rat, but I lay paralyzed in superstition that staggering to the sink would banish sleep for good. My heart raced. I thought of my performance on the porch, then of a good thick noose creaking as it swung. I thought of Amanda, and my two ex-wives. I thought of my first car, whose engine seized because I didn’t change the timing belt at 100,000 miles. I thought of how, two nights ago, I’d lost thirty dollars to George in a cribbage game. I thought of how, in the aftermath of my father’s death, for reasons I couldn’t recall, I stopped wearing underwear, and of a day in junior high when the cold rivet in a chair alerted me to a hole in the seat of my pants. I thought of everyone I owed money to, and everyone who owed me money. I thought of Stephen and me and the children we’d so far failed to produce, and how in the diminishing likelihood that I did find someone to smuggle my genetic material into, by the time our little one could tie his shoes, his father would be a florid fifty-year-old who would suck the innocence and joy from his child as greedily as a desert wanderer savaging a found orange.

  I wanted the sun to rise, to make coffee, to go out in the woods and find George’s trophy buck, to get back to spinning the blanket of mindless incident stretched ever thinner across the pit of regrets I found myself peering into most sleepless nights. But the sun was slow in coming. The montage wore on until dawn, and behind it, the soothing music of the noose, crik-creak, crik-creak, crik-creak.

  At the first bruised light in the eastern windows, I got up. The air in the cabin was dense with cold. Stephen wasn’t on the spare mattress. I put on boots, jeans, and a canvas parka, filled a thermos with hot coffee, and drove the quarter mile to George’s house.

  The lights were on at George’s. George was doing sit-ups and Stephen was at the counter, minting waffles. A very jolly pair. The percolator was gasping away, making me feel forlorn with my plaid thermos.

  “Hey, hey,” I said.

  “There he is,” Stephen said. He explained that he’d slept on Geor
ge’s couch. They’d been up late at the backgammon board. He handed me a waffle, all cheer and magnanimity, on his way toward another social heist in the Dodi Clark vein.

  “What do you say, George,” I said, when the old man had finished his crunches. “Feel like going shooting?”

  He rubbed at a fleck of pyrite in one of his chimney stones. “I suppose.” He turned to Stephen. “Coming with, little brother?”

  “I don’t have a gun for him,” I said.

  “Got that .30-30 he can use,” George said.

  “Why not,” Stephen said.

  Our spot of choice was Pigeon Lake, twenty miles away. You had to boat out to the evergreen cover on the far shore. After we’d eaten, we hooked George’s skiff and trailer to my trailer hitch, and went jouncing into the white fog that had settled on the road.

  We dropped the boat into the water. I sat in the stern, far away from my brother, and we headed north, hugging the shore, past realms of marsh grass and humps of pink granite, which in the hard red light of morning resembled corned beef hash.

  George stopped the boat at a stretch of muddy beach where he said he’d had some luck before. We beached the skiff and trudged into the tree line.

  My hangover was calamitous. I felt damp, unclean, and suicidal, and couldn’t concentrate on anything except the vision of a cool, smooth-sheeted bed and iced seltzer water and bitters. It was Stephen who found the first heap of deer sign, in the shadow of a pine sapling stripped orange by a rutting buck. He was thrilled with his discovery, and he scooped the droppings into his palm and carried them over to George, who sniffed the dark pebbles so avidly that for a second I thought he might eat them.

  “Pretty fresh,” said Stephen, who hadn’t hunted since the twelfth grade.

  “He probably just winded us,” George said. “Good eyes, Steve.”

  “Yeah, I just looked down and there it was,” said Stephen.

  George went off to perch in a nearby stand he knew about and left the two of us alone. Stephen and I sat at adjacent trees with our guns across our laps. A loon moaned. Squirrels rasped.

  “Hey, Matty,” Stephen said. “I wanted to talk about last night.”

  “How about let’s don’t,” I said. “I’ve put it out of my mind.”

  “No, seriously. What you were saying, about me investing out here. Maybe it’s something I should think about.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, not necessarily the man-campus idea or whatever. But to get a little land. George was saying he sold to you for ninety bucks an acre.”

  “Which is fair market price,” I said.

  “No, yeah, I’m sure it is. I mean, Jesus, a thousand bucks, I’d have eleven acres and still enough left to put up a cabin.”

  “Yeah, but what would you do? What about your work?”

  “What do you do out here? I’d hunt. Chop wood. Work with my hands. Reconcile the mind-body split, you know? I’m just fucking tired, Matty. I’ve been pushing for twenty years. I work so goddamned hard, and what have I got? I filled out this dating thing on the computer a few weeks ago. One thing they ask you is, ‘If you were an animal, what would you be?’ I wrote, ‘A bumblebee trying to fuck a marble.’ It’s true. Just grinding away at this goddamned thing that never gives back. Pointless.”

  “The people you’ve helped probably don’t think so,” I said.

  “I’m not talking about the sessions,” said Stephen. “Anybody could do that. You just march them through exercises. The composing. It’s all I do, Matty. I don’t go out. I don’t meet people. I sit in my shitty apartment and write. I could have spent the last two decades shooting heroin and the result would be the same, except I’d have some experiences to show for it.”

  “You just need to develop some connections,” I said. “Move down to L.A. or something. You wouldn’t like it out here.”

  “I would,” he said. “I already do. You know how long it’s been since I spent a day away from my piano? Just hanging out with other people? Actually living, actually being in the moment for once?”

  I lifted a haunch to let a long, low fart escape.

  “That’s fascinating,” Stephen said. “Please go on.”

  A moment passed.

  “I mean, shit, Stephen,” I said. “Let’s say you did want to buy in out here. For one thing, even just building materials—”

  “Wait, shut up,” he whispered, cocking an ear. He fussed with the rifle. When he managed to lever a round into the chamber, he raised the gun to his shoulder and drew a bead on the far side of the clearing.

  “There’s nothing there,” I said.

  He fired, and then charged off into the brush. I didn’t go with him. My head was killing me, and if my little brother had bagged a deer on his first day out, I had no interest in a supporting role in the victory. The shot summoned George. He jogged into the clearing just as Stephen was emerging from the brush.

  “Hit something, little brother?” George asked him.

  “Guess not,” Stephen said.

  “At least you got a look,” George said. “Next time.” He returned to his stand without saying a word to me.

  At noon, George came back empty-handed. We climbed back in the boat and went skimming across the lake. The fog had burned off and there wasn’t another craft in sight. The loveliness of the day was enough to knock you down. Swallows rioted above the calm green lid of the lake. Birch trees gleamed like filaments among the dark evergreens. No planes disturbed the sky. I felt dead to it, though I did take a kind of comfort that all of this beauty was out here, persisting like mad, whether you hearkened to it or not.

  George took us to another stretch of lakefront woods, where we waited three hours for some edible wildlife to appear and let itself be shot, but nothing did. The sun was sinking when we plodded back to the soggy delta where we’d tied the boat. Glancing down the beach, I spotted something that I thought at first might be a driftwood sculpture, but which sharpened under my stare into the brown serrations of a moose’s rack. It was standing in the shallows upwind, its head bent to drink. Three hundred yards at least, too far for a confident shot, but I raised my rifle anyway. “Goddammit, Matthew, no,” George said.

  I fired twice. The moose’s forelegs crumpled beneath it, and an instant later I saw the animal’s head jerk as the sound of the shot reached him. The moose tried to struggle upright but fell again. The effect was of a very old person trying to pitch a heavy tent. It tried to stand, and fell, and tried, and fell, and then gave up its strivings.

  We gazed at the prone creature in flat-footed amazement. Finally, George turned to me, shaking his head. “That,” he said, “has got to be the goddamnedest piece of marksmanship I’ve ever seen.”

  The moose had collapsed in a foot of icy river water and had to be dragged onto firm ground before it could be dressed. Stephen and I waded out to where the moose lay, and we had to crouch and soak ourselves to get rope under its chest. The other end we looped around a tree on the bank, and then tied the rope to the stern of the skiff, using the tree as a makeshift pulley. George gunned the outboard, and Stephen and I stood calf-deep in the shallows heaving on the line. By the time we’d gotten the moose to shore, our palms were puckered and torn raw, and our boots were full of water.

  With George’s hunting knife, I bled the moose from the throat, and then made a slit from the bottom of the rib cage to the jaw, revealing the gullet and a pale, corrugated column of windpipe. The scent was powerful. It brought to mind the dark, briny smell that seemed always to hang around my mother in summertime when I was a child.

  George was in a rapture, giddy at how I’d put us both in six months of meat with my preposterous shot. My offense of the night before seemed to be forgiven. He took the knife from me and gingerly opened the moose’s belly, careful not to puncture the intestines or the sack of his stomach. He dragged out the organs, setting aside the liver, kidneys, and pancreas. One strange hitch was the hide, which was hellish to remove. To get it loose, Steph
en and I had to take turns, bracing our boots against the moose’s spine, pulling at the hide while George slashed away at the fascia and connective tissues. I saw Stephen’s throat buck nauseously every now and again. Yet he wanted to have a part in dressing it, and I was proud of him for that. He took up the game saw and cut off a shoulder and a ham. We had to lift the legs like pallbearers to get them to the boat. Blood ran from the meat and down my shirt with hideous, vital warmth.

  The skiff sat low under the weight of our haul. The most substantial ballast of our crew, I sat in the stern and ran the kicker so the bow wouldn’t swamp. Stephen sat on the cross bench, our knees nearly touching. We puttered out, a potent blue vapor bubbling up from the propeller. Clearing the shallows, I opened the throttle, and the craft bullied its way through the low swells, a fat white fluke churning up behind us. We skimmed out while the sun tipped west toward dark woods. The gridded rubber handle of the Evinrude thrummed in my palm. The wind dried the fluids on my cheeks and tossed Stephen’s hair in a sparse frenzy. With the carcass receding behind us, it seemed I’d also escaped the blackness that had plagued me since Stephen’s arrival. The return of George’s expansiveness, the grueling ordeal of the butchery, the exhaustion in my limbs, the satisfaction in having made an unreasonably good shot that would feed my friend and me until the snow melted—it was glorious. I could feel absolution spread across the junk pit of my troubles as smoothly and securely as a motorized tarpaulin slides across a swimming pool.

  And Stephen felt it, too, or something anyway. The old unarmored smile I knew from childhood brightened his haunted face, a tidy, compact bow of lip and tooth, alongside which I always looked dour and shabby in the family photographs. There’s no point in trying to describe the love I can still feel for my brother when he looks at me this way, when he’s stopped tallying his resentments against me and has briefly left off despising himself for failing to hit the big time as the next John Tesh. Ours isn’t the kind of brotherhood I would wish on other men, but we are blessed with a single, simple gift: in these rare moments of happiness, we can share joy as passionately and single-mindedly as we do hatred. As we skimmed across the dimming lake, I could see how much it pleased him to see me at ease, to have his happiness magnified in my face and reflected back at him. No one said anything. This was love for us, or the best that love could do. I brought the boat in wide around the isthmus guarding the cove, letting the wake push us through the shallows to the launch where my sturdy blue truck was waiting.