Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery Page B

Jackson had no interest in talking about the war, either, was only waiting for it to be over. This’ll all blow over soon, I can tell, he had started to say. Had started smiling more, fooling around more, as if he knew, with great precision, what he was going to do the minute they discharged him, and nothing would stop him. And there was no talking to Largeman at all.
    Ketcher left the road, climbed over the lip of a crater. Felt something small and hard under his boot. It was a finger. Tiny patches of hair between the knuckles. The nail ragged, bitten to the quick. At once, he could no longer look at the dirt he had just walked through, at the soles of his shoes. He had been headed to the top of the ridge, but he changed his mind. It was too easy to imagine what was on the other side: corpses, body parts, half-cooked by explosions. If he stepped wrong on the way back to the truck, the ground would seep around his feet. His stomach bucked, forced bile into his throat, his nose. He put his hands on his knees and spat. He was sure he was going to vomit.
    “Hey,” Largeman called. “What’s the matter? You never smelled burnt people before?”
    He had not. Had not seen combat until now, though the others did not know that.
    “Hurry up,” Tenenbaum said.
    The bile was gone. He was an insect, detached, inquisitive. Picked up the finger, turned it over in his hand. Brought it back down the slope with him, almost put it in his pocket. Then he left it in the burnt grass on the side of the road, before anyone could see what he had done. Before they got back in the truck, Jackson patted him on the back, not so hard that anyone noticed, but firm enough to send a message. He had seen everything, and understood.

 
    The River
    JUST BELOW MILLERSBURG, THE Susquehanna flattened into a cool, expansive plain. The current loitered among submerged rocks while the Carthage threw its jagged reflection across the water’s surface, the only waves arising in its wake. The pilot banked the boat west, then cut east, up to a channel that men had dug and the river widened, until the Carthage sidled up to the sloping town. Once there had been an idyll here, as if it was a hazy morning all the time. A park of long shadows, shimmering trees. Only a growl from the motor, the slapping paddles, of the little ferry that carried people, a few cars, across the river. On the shore, eight people waited to board with the unhurried calm of vacationers. Standing by plaid suitcases. Lounging on the grass beneath the trees, propped on elbows, legs crossed at the ankles. Four greasy canoeists out for a few days’ float, making coffee on a camp stove on a picnic table, then ambling into town for water and ice. The canoes pulled up onto the shore, safe. The shaded houses conversing down the length of the river road, settling into their long decline.
    But now the park was gone, the houses blanched and streaked with mud. On the dirty slope down to the water, in the lawns and in the streets all the way up the hill, a vast camp of hovels had been banged together from parts of cars and fences, tents of stained bed sheets sagging after days of rain. Encampments with no shelter at all. And people everywhere, thousands of them. A family of thirteen, six adults and seven children, huddled around a scrap pile. People sitting, standing, their heads down, bony fingers clasped in their laps. All with the same expression of stunned lethargy. In the air, the tang of rancid food and burning plastic, from dozens of fires that fogged the air with a blue-gray miasma. Murmuring voices, the weakening cries of children. Low wails whenever someone died of starvation, of dysentery, of pneumonia. It seemed to be happening every second, a life loosed from the flesh, the grieving survivors. They had seen it coming, but were still in shock. Did not know what to do with the bodies. Looked around at the town being killed. The trees among them stripped to poles, to stumps. The yards uprooted,