The From-Aways (33 page)

The song winds down and then it’s gone. The men are clapping and cheering and the two of us are heaving in unison, like we’re both pulling from the same reserve of air.

“I’m sweating, Bernstein. Are you sweating?” Quinn says. “Holy shit, everything’s still spinning.”

I say, “Thanks for the dance, Miss Winters.” The whole room is tilting on its floor planks back and forth.

“That’s the Old Crow, not the dancing,” Frank says as he saunters over and pours us new drinks.

Joseph Deep says, “My play,” and feeds the jukebox. The first chords of Joseph’s song play out and someone says, “Aw, Deep, how old are you anyhow?” The men instinctively tighten their circle around the yellow burbling jukebox. A trilling drumbeat pipes through the speakers and then the floor feels like it’s about to give way as every man in the bar starts stomping along. When the first keening “
Ohhh!
” sings out of the speakers, all the men join in: “Ohh!”

The singer in the jukebox starts rattling off a list of things he’d like.

“And a little drop of wine wouldn’t do us any harm and a drop of Nelson’s blood wouldn’t do us any harm. And a little slug of gin wouldn’t do us any harm, and a night up on the shore wouldn’t do us any harm.”

And then they start singing,

“Roll the old chariot! Roll the old chariot!”

Quinn and I are jumping up and down. We start singing along to the chorus as well, then suddenly the room goes dark and the singing a cappella. There’s grumbling in the silence.

Frank jumps up on a wooden chair and starts improv-ing: “And a couple million bucks wouldn’t do us any harm! And a week of summer weather wouldn’t do us any harm! And a night without the wives wouldn’t do us any harm! And a pot all full of bugs wouldn’t do us any harm!”

Everything dissolves into shouting and clapping and Frank hops off the chair and into the dark.

“Power’s out,” Joseph says.

“Power’s out!” The men cheer and clink their glasses, then sit back down and start talking like nothing’s wrong.

Quinn and I are left standing there alone by the dead jukebox in the semidark.

“Seriously?” I say.

“What about the music?” Quinn says.

“Isn’t there a generator?” I say.

“Let’s go look,” Quinn says.

We go out the back. It’s dark outside. I know there are houses across the street but I don’t see a single window lit up. “They lost power too,” I say.

“It must be the substation,” Quinn says. “It could shut everything off.”

“Look up,” I say. With all the other lights off, the sky is bright; there seem to be more stars than usual.

We crane our necks, lose our footing on the gravel, lean against each other for balance, like elderly people. Quinn sighs. “Yeah, there’s a whole lot of flickering cosmos up there.” She spins around.

I look past her. There’s a low shed at the back of the lot. “Generator!” I say. I pull Quinn across the parking lot, laughing. It feels like we are up to no good, doing something important. We have to do something important because we did something important with the article and no one knows about it, so it feels like it was nothing, which is terrible. It is terrible because it leaves us wondering what’s next, which is bad.

We unbolt the door. Inside, it is dark and smells like pine and diesel. I stoop, because the ceiling is low. The floor is covered with wood chips. The tank of the generator is like a sleeping animal, curled at the back.

We both stare at it.

“I know I said I wanted to turn it on but I don’t know how,” I say.

“I got it,” Quinn says. We are whispering, though I don’t know why. Quinn slinks back and starts feeling around for something that might start it.

Because Quinn can do anything. She can be a girl and sing and fix a generator and cheer me up, and fine, she’s only okay at writing newspaper articles but there will be
music
again soon, because Quinn and I are always making something happen. We are a team. We are in cahoots. We are Woodward and Bernstein. I start to tell her this, but then the generator switches on and it is so loud I can’t hear anything except the roaring.

38

Quinn

A
t the end of
All the President’s Men
they never show what happens after Woodward and Bernstein get the story. They crack it, they write it, then they make you hold your breath as you wait to see if they’ll be able to run it. Spoiler: They do. And then the movie’s over.

Of course you know what happens because you already knew what happened when you started watching it. It’s a historical fucking movie. Still, after the story is done, it feels like a copout, that spinning newspaper montage.

What happened to those men, together, after?

How do you celebrate a thing like this?

In the shed, it smells like cheap pine two-by-fours. It smells like the saw that buzzed through the pieces to cut them and make planks. It smells like the one one-hundredth of an inch of wood that you have to account for in your measurements, because it disappears when the saw runs through. That much of it, just gone. This is where we are, Leah and me, right now, in this shed. We are on that line you draw between the one part of the plank and the other, and once the saw goes through it, it will be gone. Sawdust.

I’m leaning back into the corner, over the generator, trying to figure out how to turn it on. I find the switch for the power and I flick it. The noise the generator makes is so loud it feels like someone’s slammed me on the ears. The shed’s board walls glow, beams filtering in all crisscrossed between the uncaulked boards. The lights are back on at the Uncle. Leah has this look on her face and she’s saying something but I can’t hear her, so I say, “Hold on!,” and I reach down to turn the generator off again, but I’m having trouble finding it because it feels like the world’s about to shake itself to pieces. And then Leah grabs me and spins me around and makes her mouth say the words big and clear so I can see them.

Sirens. Sirens,
she mouths to me. And I figure this is it. They’re coming to get us. The Dorians.

Leah pulls me by the hand out of the shed. My ears are ringing but I hear them. The sirens get louder as we run across the parking lot. And there they are, not police cars at all, but fire trucks, two of them, headed east. I didn’t think Menamon had two fire trucks. Guys start coming out of the bar, looking around, sniffing. And then I smell it. The smoke. It doesn’t smell like campfire. It’s more chemical. Other men come out of the Uncle and soon we’re a crowd standing in the parking lot. We all stare off toward where the fire trucks disappeared. “Look,” someone says. He points off to the east. I squint hard and see something awful glowing through the trees.

39

Leah

T
he woods are on fire.

People push out the front door of the Uncle, and I can hear the jukebox playing from inside.

We see a man coming out of the tree line. He is carrying something.

It’s Patsy Cline, I think. On the jukebox.

And it’s Jethro, coming through the trees, but what is in his arms I cannot tell.

40

Quinn

I
thought she would wake up,” Jethro says. “But she’s still sleeping.” His face is covered with soot. Rosie lolls in his arms like a heap of blankets too big to carry right. She keeps sliding out of his grip. Her face is sweaty. There’s blood in her hair. Why would there be blood in her hair? She looks very small and I worry about her eating again.

I say, “Jethro, get your hands off my girl.”

And he says, “Quinn.”

I say, “I mean it.” She’s drunk, Rosie, and Jethro is carrying her around like a prize. I think that she must be drunk. Too drunk.

“You have to get her to a hospital,” he says, and holds his arms out like I should take her but I can’t because I can’t move. I just stare at his face. His eyes refuse to settle on any single person in this crowd.

Billy is standing beside Jethro, crying like a kid. Joseph comes running through everyone and he slams into Billy like a collision. And then he’s squeezing him. He’s squashing Billy against him, and I’ve never seen Joseph move that fast, or touch someone this way before.

“Are you fucking crying, Billy?” I say. I can see part of his sooty face underneath the cage of his father’s arms.

“Quinn,” Leah says.

“Take her,” Jethro says again.

And I say, “Rosie, hey, Rosie.” I want to show Jethro there’s no reason for him to be touching her at all. That he should just put her down on her feet. She can hold her liquor fine.

Leah says, “Here.” She is so tall, Leah. Her arms are long enough that when she extends them, open to receive, and Jethro pours Rosie into her arms, it’s no problem. Rosie is so much smaller than she was before, so light now, it looks easy when Leah cradles her. She puts her face close to Rosie’s hot sleeping face, her ear near Rosie’s mouth. She nods.

“Joseph,” Leah says. “Can you drive?”

“What’s wrong with her, Jethro?” I say. I can’t move. “Jethro! What the fuck did you do to her?” And Jethro looks at me, his arms still half out where he’s let go of Rosie, and then he starts walking away. Away from the awful glowing, through the western bank of trees, and then he’s gone.

I take two steps to follow him but Leah says, “Quinn, get in the car. Come on.” It’s me and Rosie and Leah in the backseat and now I’m holding Rosie, who is sleeping, who is wearing my red number nine shirt, who is bleeding on both of our shirts, who reeks of gasoline. She’s breathing against my neck so slowly. Too slowly. I feel the air go in and out of her and it does not seem like enough.

“Hey, Rosie,” I say. I say “Rosalind” loudly, but she doesn’t wake up.

In the front seat Billy is all hunched over, just crying and crying. I think he’d crawl into the driver’s seat, into Joseph’s lap, if he could.

Joseph says, “Mercy General is closer but they might not have power. I think we should go to Saint John’s.”

41

Leah