The river.
Jeez, he thought. The river.
He remembered it differently than this. Sure, he’d lived here in Pine Deep long enough to have seen the river in all her costumes. Wearing gray under an overcast sky, running smoothly like liquid metal. Dressed in white and pale blue when the winter ice lured skaters to try and cross before the frozen surface turned to black lace. Camouflaged in red and gold and orange when early November winds blew the October leaves into the water.
Today, though, the river was swollen like a tumor and wore a kind of brown that looked like no color at all. It was like this when Halloween was about to hit. You’d think a town that used to be built around the holiday, a town that made its nut off of candy corn and jack-o-lantern pumpkins and all that trick or treat stuff would dress up for the occasion. But no. This time of year the colors all seemed to bleed away.
The last time he had seen the river was on one of those summer days that made you think summer would last forever and the world was built for swimming, kissing pretty girls, drinking beer, and floating on rubber inner tubes. It was the day before he had to report for basic training. He’d been with Jim Dooley, he remembered that so clearly.
Jim was going into the navy ’cause it was safe. A red-haired Mick with a smile that could charm the panties off a nun, and a laugh that came up from the soles of his feet. You couldn’t be around Jim and not have fun. It was impossible, probably illegal.
They’d driven twenty miles up Route 32 and parked Donny’s piece-of-shit old Ford-150 by Bleeker’s Dock. The two of them and those college girls. Cindy something and Judy something.
Cindy had the face, but Judy had the body.
Not that either of them looked like bridge trolls, even without makeup, even waking up in Jim’s brother’s Boy Scout tent in the woods at the top of Dark Hollow. They were both so healthy. You could stand next to them and your complexion would clear up. That kind of healthy.
And with Jim around they laughed all the time.
Nothing like pretty girls laughing on a sunny day, as the four of them pushed off from the dock and into the Delaware. Way up here, above the factories down south, way above the smutch of Philadelphia, the water was clean. It was nice.
On that day, the water had been slower and bluer. It hadn’t been a dry summer, but dry enough so that in shallow spots you could see the river stones under the rippling water. Judy swore she saw a starfish down there, but that was stupid. No such thing as freshwater starfish. Or, at least Donny didn’t think so.
Didn’t matter anyway. That was the last time Donny saw Judy. Or Cindy or even Jim for that matter. The girls went back to college. Jim went into the navy.
Donny went into the army.
It all seemed like a long time ago.
Way too fucking long.
It was no longer summer. October was burning off its last hours. Even if the river looked like sewer water at least the trees were wearing their Halloween colors.
Donny stood by the bridge and watched the brown river sweep the broken, dead things away. There was some message there, he thought. There was at least a Springsteen song there. Something about how nothing lasts.
But Donny was no more a songwriter than he was a philosopher.
He was a man who had spent too long coming home.
Donny climbed up from the bank and stepped onto the creosote-soaked planks of the bridge. It was a new bridge. The old one had been destroyed in the Trouble.
He’d missed that, too.
He’d read about it, though. Probably everybody read about it. That shit was how most people first heard of Pine Deep. Biggest news story in the world for a while. Bunch of militia nutjobs dumped all sorts of drugs into the town’s water supply. LSD, psychotropics, all sorts of stuff. Nearly everybody in town went totally ape shit. Lots of violence, a body count that dwarfed the combined death tolls of Afghanistan and Iraq. Eleven thousand six hundred and forty-one people dead.
So many of the people that Donny knew.
His folks.
His cousin Sherry and her kids.
And Jim.
Jim had come home on leave from the navy. He hadn’t taken a scratch in boot camp, had been posted to an aircraft carrier, was halfway through his tour and filling his letters with jokes about how the worst thing that happens to him is the clap from getting laid in every port in the Pacific.
Jim had been stabbed through the chest by a drugged-out corn farmer who claimed—swore under oath—that he was killing vampires.
How fucked up was that?
The massacre in Pine Deep changed the world. Like 9/11 did. Made the great big American paranoia machine shift its stare from everyone else in the world to its own backyard. Domestic terrorism. No one was safe, not even at home. Pine Deep proved that.
Eleven thousand people dead.
It had happened ten years ago. To the day. The militia goons had used the big Pine Deep Halloween Festival as its ground zero. Thousands of tourists in town. Celebrities. Everyone for miles around.
If the militia assholes ever had a point, it died with them. The press called them “white supremacists,” but that didn’t make sense. Most of the people in Pine Deep were white. WASPs, with some Catholics and a handful of Jews. Except for a few families and some of the tourists, there wasn’t enough of a black or Latino or Jewish or Muslim presence to make a hate war point. It never made sense to Donny. The people in town were just caught up in the slaughter. Either they wound up taking the same drugs, or the red wave of insanity just washed over them.
Donny had been in Iraq, midway through his second tour.
He’d been over there, killing people, trying not to die from insurgent bullets or IEDs, fighting to protect the people at home. But the people at home died anyway.
Donny never did figure out how to react to it, and standing here now on this new bridge didn’t make it any clearer. The death of so many at home, neighbor killing neighbor, felt like a sin. It felt like suicide. Even though he knew that with all those drugs in the water no one could ever be held responsible for what they did. Except those militia dickheads, and Donny wished there was at least one of them alive that he could hunt down and fuck up.
“Damn it, Jim,” he said to the air.
He stared across the bridge to the thick stands of oaks and maples and birch trees. From here, in the sun’s fading light, it was hard to tell if the trees were on fire or if it was just the red blaze of dying leaves.
Donny adjusted the straps of his backpack and stretched out one foot. Somehow taking this step would be like crossing a line.
But between what and what, Donny had no idea.
He was no philosopher.
He was a soldier coming home.
-2-
It seemed to take forever to walk across the bridge. Donny felt as if his feet were okay with the task but his heart was throwing out an anchor.
He paused halfway across and looked back.
Behind him was a million miles of bad road that led from here all the way back to Afghanistan and Iraq. He was amazed he’d made it this far home. Donny always figured he’d die on a cot in some dinky aide station in the ass-end of nowhere, way the hell out on the Big Sand. God knows the world had tried to kill him enough times. He touched the row of healed-over scars that were stitched diagonally from left hip to right shoulder. Five rounds.
Should have died in the battle.
Should have died in the evac helicopter.
Should have died in the field hospital.
Lost enough blood to swim home.
The dead flesh of the scars was numb, but the muscle and bone beneath it remembered the pain.
And beneath that suffering flesh?
A heart that had ached to come back home, when there was a home to come back to. Now that heart beat a warning tattoo as if to say, this is not your home anymore, soldier.
This isn’t home.
All the way here, with every mile, every step, he wondered why, after all these
years away, he was coming back here at all.
He closed his eyes and felt the river wind blow damp across his cheeks.
The house he grew up in wasn’t even his anymore. Attorneys and real estate agents had sold it for him. His parents’ stuff, his sister’s stuff, and everything he’d left behind when he joined the army had either gone to the Salvation Army or into storage.
Donny realized he didn’t know where the key was for that. A lawyer had sent it to him, but…
He gave himself a rough pat-down, but he didn’t have any keys at all.
No keys, no change in his pockets, not even a penknife to pry open the storage bin lock.
Shit.
He turned and looked back as if he could see where he’d left all of that stuff. Did someone clip him on the bus? Was it on the nightstand of that fleabag motel he’d slept in?
How much was gone?
He patted his left rear pocket and felt the familiar lump of his wallet, tugged on the chain to pull it out. He opened it, and stared at the contents.
Stared for a long time.
Donny felt something on his cheeks and his fingers came away wet.
“Why the fuck are you crying, asshole?” he demanded.
He didn’t know how to answer his own question.
Slow seconds fell like leaves around him.
A car came rumbling across the bridge, driving fast, rattling the timbers. Crappy old Jeep Grand Cherokee that looked so much like the one Jim used to drive that it tore a sob from his chest. Sunlight blazed off the windshield so he couldn’t see the driver. Just as well. Maybe it meant the driver couldn’t see a grown man standing on the fucking bridge crying his eyes out.
“You pussy,” he told himself.
The car faded into the sun glare on the other side but Donny could hear the tires crunching on gravel for a long time.
Donny sniffed back the tears, shoved his wallet back into his pocket, took a steadying breath, and then raised his head, resolved to get this shit done.
He crossed the bridge, paused only a moment at the end of the span, and stepped onto the road.
In Pine Deep.
Home.
-3-
Donny walked along Route A32.
Unless he could thumb a ride it was going to take hours to get into town. There were miles and miles of farm country between here and a cold beer. So far, though, no cars. Not a one.
As he passed each farm he thought about the families who lived there. Or…used to live there. Donny had no idea who was still here, who’d moved out after the Trouble, or who hadn’t made it through the war zone the militant assholes had created. He’d gotten some news, of course. The Tyler family was gone. All of them. And the Bradys.
The farm to his right, though, was the old Guthrie place. One of the biggest farms in town, one of the oldest families. Old man Guthrie had died before the Trouble. Or, maybe at the start of it, depending on which account he’d read. Guthrie had been gunned down by some gun thugs up from Philly. Donny couldn’t remember if the thugs were hiding out in Pine Deep, or they broke down there, or whether they were part of the white supremacist nut-bags. Either way, one of them popped a cap in Mr. Guthrie, and that was a shame ’cause the old guy was pretty cool. Always ready to hire some town kids to pick apples and pumpkins, and pay them pretty good wages. Always smiling, he was. Deserved better than what he got.
Beyond the rail fence the late season corn was high and green, the thick stalks heavy with unpicked ears. Two crows sat on the top bar, cawing for their buddies to join them, but the rest of the birds were way up in the air, circling, circling.
What was it they called a bunch of crows, he wondered? He had to think back to Mrs. Gillespie in the third grade. A pod of whales, a parliament of owls, and a…
A murder of crows.
Yeah, that was it. So, what was it when there were only two crows? Attempted murder?
Donny laughed aloud at his own joke and wished Jim was here. Jim usually came up with clever shit like that. Jim would have liked that joke, would have appreciated it. Would have patted him on the back, fist-bumped him, and then stolen the joke for his own repertoire. Which was okay. Jokes are free and everyone should take as many as they could, that’s how Donny saw it.
Smiling, Donny walked along the rail fence. Up ahead he saw an old guy on a ladder wiring a scarecrow to a post. The scarecrow was dressed in jeans and a fatigue jacket, work gloves for hands, and a pillowcase for a head. Straw and shredded rag dripped from the sleeves and pants cuffs. Shoes were mismatched, a Converse high-top sneaker and a dress shoe with no laces. Donny slowed to watch the man work. The man and the scarecrow were almost silhouetted by the sun. The image would have looked great on a Halloween calendar. A perfect snapshot of harvest time in the American farm country.
He liked it, and smiled.
“Looks great,” he said when he was close enough.
The old guy only half-turned. All Donny could see was grizzled white hair and wind-burned skin above pale eyes. He nodded at Donny’s fatigue jacket.
“Afghanistan?”
“Yes, sir,” answered Donny.
“You left the war,” said the old man.
“No, sir...I reckon the war left me. It’s over. They’re cycling most of us home.”
The old man studied him for a few long seconds. “You really think the war’s over?”
Donny didn’t want to get into a political debate with some old fool.
“I guess that’s not for me to decide. They sent me home.”
“Did they?” The man shook his head in clear disapproval and said, “The war’s not over. No sirree-bob, it’s not over by a long stretch.”
Donny didn’t know how to respond to that, so he began edging further up the road.
“Son,” said the old man, “some folks join the army to fight and some join to serve. What did you join for?”
“To protect my home and my family, sir.” It sounded like a bullshit platitude, even as he said it, but in truth it really was why Donny enlisted. Ever since 9/11, he was afraid of what might happen here at home, on American soil. Donny knew that he wasn’t particularly smart and he was far from being politically astute, but he knew that he wanted to do whatever he could to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves. In school, it had been Jim at his back, who kicked the asses of bigger kids picking on the geeks and dweebs. Donny hated a bully. As far as he saw it, terrorists were just bullies of a different wattage.
“Gonna be dark soon,” said the old guy, apropos of nothing.
Donny glanced at the angle of the sun.
“Yeah. In a while, I s’pose.”
“We all got to do what we can.”
With those words, the old man nodded to himself then turned back to his work. After half a minute Donny realized that there was nowhere to go with that conversation.
Gonna be dark soon.
Yeah, well, sure. Happens a lot around nighttime.
Crazy old fuck.
Donny walked on.
When he was just at the end of the Guthrie fence he heard a sound and turned to see a man riding a small tractor. Far, far away, though. Way on the other side of a harvested field. The tractor looked like one of those really old kind, the ones that looked a little like a 1950s hotrod. It chugged along, puffing smoke but not really making much noise. At least not much of it reached Donny. Only an echo of an echo.
He cupped his hands around his eyes to try and see who was riding it. But all he could see was a man in coveralls with hair that could have been white or blond.
Even so, Donny lifted his hand and waved.
The man on the tractor waved back.
Maybe another old guy, but not an old fuck.
It was a simple conversation between strangers a mile apart. Donny wondered if it was a stranger, though. Might have been another of the Guthries. Or it might have been someone working for them. Or, hell, maybe it was whoever bought the farm if the surviving Guthries sold it after the Trouble.
Didn’t much matter. It was just nice to see someone.
Anyone.
The Guthrie farm ended at Dark Hollow Road, and Donny lingered at the crossroads for a moment, staring down the twisted side road. Not that he could see much, certainly not all the way to the Passion Pit where everyone went to get high or get laid, but it was down there. That’s where he and Donny went with those two girls. Last place he went in town before he climbed onto a bus to go learn how to be a soldier.
That last good night and day. All those laughs, the snuggling, cuddling sex in the tent with Judy, while Jim and Cindy screwed each other’s brains out in a sleeping bag by their campfire. A great night.
But then he thought about Judy. She hadn’t written to him, not once in all the time he was away. He never heard from her after that night.
That was strange. It felt bad. For a long time it made him wonder if he was lousy in the sack, but over time he realized that probably wasn’t it. Judy had gone to college and that was a different world than a war half a world away. Maybe the sex and the pot they’d smoked was some kind of close-one-door-open-another thing. Like he and Jim were doing with their last blast weekend before going to war.
Maybe.
He’d written to her, though.
Four letters with no replies before he got the idea that she wasn’t ever going to write back.
In some way he supposed she was as dead to him as his folks and town. And Jim.
“Jesus, you’re a gloomy fuck, too,” he told himself. He turned away from Dark Hollow Road and the dead memories, disgusted with himself for thoughts like that.
On the road, the traffic was still a no-show, so he drifted into the center of the two-lane, liking the sound his heels made on the blacktop. A soft but solid tok-tok-tok. The echo of it bounced off the walls of trees that divided one farm from another.
At the top of a hill he looked down a long sweep and the beauty of his town nearly pulled more tears from him. The farms were not the geometrically perfect squares of some of the agricultural areas he’d seen. Some were angled this way, others turned that, with hedgerows and fences and rows of oaks to create borders. Cornfields swayed gently like waves on a slow ocean. Pumpkins dotted green fields with dots of orange. Autumn wheat blew like marsh grass in the soft breeze.