The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (3 page)

Frank takes one of Arnold’s boots and pulls the laces clean off. Arnold puts up his fists and Frank apologizes. “It was my intention,” he says, “to unlace both.”

“Intentions, intentions,” Augustus says. “Never the follow-through.”

Frank shrugs. He leans over, finds Arnold’s other boot, yanks the laces, and ties the boot closed. We have our fish boat. We have our bomb. We possess what the less observant might call an indifference to plausibility, which is matched only by our private desire to transfer this thing back to a human scale. We have what Augustus calls our Stab at Enlargement. Everything else hovers in a constant state somewhere just beyond recognition.

Before going to sleep, Carleton convinces Augustus to tell his balloon corps story. It’s one of our favorites; we know it by heart. Before stepping on his bayonet, Augustus had fought in Virginia with General Beauregard. Things hadn’t been going well. They were being outmaneuvered: any flank operation they attempted was spotted far ahead of time by the Union Balloon Corps—lookout men in balloons, who surveyed the land from the air and reported on Confederate flanking formations. These balloons were something to see. They hung in the sky like inverted onion bulbs, tethered to the ground. You kept waiting for them to sprout. They’d been bad news for the last few months, spotting and shucking any surprises General Beauregard could dream up. One night, the night before a planned mobilization, Augustus’s commander recruited a small group of soldiers and tasked them with a covert, and potentially dangerous, operation: they were to leave their encampment, bushwhack across the Union lines, fire on the corps, and return. No one in the balloons would be armed, and, if they managed their surprise, there would be minimal protection on the ground. Augustus and four other soldiers were given three muskets each, grimly saluted, and sent on their way. They ran like Indians through the forest, ducking branches, kneeling in the brush. It took them two hours to get within range, and another hour of crawling on their stomachs to get a clear view of the balloons. Afraid of being seen, they were quick to load and arrange their extra muskets in a row on the grass in front of them. At one of their whispered commands, they shouldered for the first volley. As Augustus lined and steadied his shot, he caught a glimpse of the man in the basket. He was small and bespectacled. He looked completely at peace.

It took two volleys to puncture the balloon. Beset by a sudden bolt of conscience—what Augustus calls one of his finer moments of not connecting the dots—he’d been very careful to aim well above the bespectacled man on his second shot. The basket fell. The man plummeted in silence and hit a patch of rocks. The sound was like a melon breaking. The musket reports brought the Union soldiers out of their tents, but by the time they figured out what had happened, Augustus was streaking back to camp, musket-less and exhilarated by the sound of panicked Union guns firing at the copse of trees where they had just been.

Confident he’d dismantled the enemy’s ability to undercut his formations, General Beauregard drafted his plans and slept the sleep of the satisfied.

The next day thousands of men—including Augustus’s commander and all four of the men who’d accompanied him through the forest the night before—died.

“Turns out,” Augustus says, “balloons weren’t the problem.”

We are quiet for a few minutes. Then Frank breaks the silence by telling Augustus he never tires of that particular story.

“I do,” Augustus replies, and turns his back to the rest of us to sleep.

T
wo nights later, the repairs have been made. We make our way to the wharf and run a quick inspection, our fish boat patient and quiet as we check the outside of her hull, crouch to run our hands across her deck, dip our fingers in the water. We secure the torpedo with care, triple-checking the firing mechanism. Lieutenant Dixon is in full regalia, his pistols crossed below his bandolier. The tassels of his shoulder ensigns sweep with his movement like grass in the wind. A gibbous moon hangs suspended over Breach Inlet, mirror-reflected in the water. We lower ourselves into the
Hunley
barely aware of one another. No one sees us off. As we go hands on the propeller and prepare to flood the ballast tanks, Carleton remarks on the thorough pleasantness of this February evening. It hadn’t occurred to any of us that the shelling had stopped.

The
Housatonic
sits two and a half miles outside of Battery Marshall, sails reefed, becalmed. On Lieutenant Dixon’s orders, we crank slowly, a partially submerged monster of complete silence.

We leave the inlet and churn at our stations for what could be one hour or five, lost in the rhythm of our cranking. We know we are closing the distance; we care about nothing else. Fifty yards from the ship, Lieutenant Dixon calls for maximum speed and we oblige. Thirty-five yards away we are spotted and some sort of bell aboard the
Housatonic
peals alarm. We are too close for their cannons, but musket balls fired from deck ricochet off our conning towers—the only part of the
Hunley
they can see—and the sharp pings of impact are amplified between us, marbles tossed against a heavy iron tub. There is shouting, and I’m not sure if it’s coming from us or somewhere else.

The hollow thunk of our spar as it embeds itself in the wooden hull of the
Housatonic
jolts us forward; we scramble to regain our positions. Lieutenant Dixon yells for reverse. It takes us a second to remember which direction to crank until Frank says “Away from you” and we put it together. I’m aware that we’re moving at an angle, our stern dipping low, leading the bow below the surface. We glide in reverse for just long enough to wonder whether we’ve attached the line to the firing mechanism correctly, and then there’s an explosion so deafening it’s like tasting sound.

We take our hands off the crank and stare at the iron wall two feet in front of us. I can feel an arm on my shoulder, applying pressure. I’m vaguely aware of a hand on my leg. My feet are cold.

Lieutenant Dixon lights his candle and swivels in his seat. His expression is unreadable. He asks Carleton to check the ballast tank. He tells Frank to re-secure the rear hatch. When they tell him all is as expected, three quarters full, secured, he closes his eyes and lets his chin fall to his chest. I look down. We’re sitting shin-deep in water.

Battery Marshall is two and a half miles away. No one says anything. The swell bobs us back and forth, gently sloshing the water we’ve taken on, now at our knees, as if in a basin. Lieutenant Dixon tells us that through the porthole he can see the
Housatonic
in flames, listing to port. Lifeboats are being lowered. Men are in the water. We remain at our stations as he unscrews the front hatch and fires a magnesium flare, signaling success. Then he secures the hatch and returns to his seat without a word.

The
Hunley
fills fast. We stop moving in the swell, and I have the sensation of diving without diving. When the water’s at my waist, I wonder if we’ll make it to the bottom of the harbor before we drown. I imagine a gentle cessation, silt and mud pillowing out and up, then settling. I imagine rust and barnacles, inquisitive fish. When the water’s at chest level, Frank mumbles something and puts his head under. No one restrains him.

When the water’s at my neck, my father appears. He asks me if I know that, one hundred years from now, the
Hunley
will be found and fished out of the harbor by an expedition costing millions of dollars, and, once salvaged, will be paraded through the streets of Charleston by young men dressed in gray uniforms. He asks me if I know that they’ll find a boot and a button, and verify that Arnold had been one of the men aboard. That, eventually, they will find Lieutenant Dixon’s gold coin, dented in the middle, and a great effort will go into finding out what happened to his fiancée—whose name, it turns out, was Queenie—but that her story will prove mysterious, no beginning, just an ending, as it is with us. He asks me if I know that, despite sustaining over seven million pounds of artillery, Charleston will never succumb to Union occupation.

“Did you,” he says, “ever wonder at this?”

I tell him that at every turn our understanding of what was happening around us had been mitigated by such a clanging abashment that we’d become rock-like as far as expectations go. It was pick-up sticks in the middle of a hurricane. It had never occurred to us to wonder about much of anything.

He tells me that we will be remembered mostly for our optimism. I tell him it isn’t optimism that gets you aboard something like this. He says, Still.

I ask him what we’ve done beyond proving our own uselessness? What are we but a spectacle of self-defeat? He answers that we are an expression of an intangible truth that has plagued victors for thousands of years. That immolation as a form of confrontation holds irreducible power.

I tell him he has it backward, and if it had been approval we were looking for, we would’ve kept diaries.

There is another explosion above us, the keel of the
Housatonic
seizing in on itself, collapsing, and my father disappears. Through the darkness I feel the iron hull on my back. I feel for the crank handle and grasp it. Carleton is frantic. Augustus is standing so his head is in the small hollow of the conning tower, which will be the last place to fill. Someone is screaming at a pitch both familiar and thoroughly distant, a keening that only stops, and briefly, in surprise when our stern hits the floor of the harbor and our bow follows, scrapes a rock of some kind, and rests.

summer boys

F
riends, two boys, stare at each other and themselves in the slightly warped mirror in the second-floor bathroom of a small house in Laurelhurst, shorts on, shirts off. It’s the summer after fifth grade, and school, for them, is already beginning to seem like a dream that belongs to someone else. It’s in their slipstream. Gone. The days are beginning to get
hot
hot, there’s a Popsicle man somewhere, but right now? They don’t care. They’re almost exactly the same age—their birthdays are four days apart, a cosmic near-miss that in their calculations brings them just short of being brothers, twins, the way things were supposed to be. One of them, the older-by-four-days friend has a younger sister; the other only parents, and, standing next to his friend, in his friend’s house, he feels a deformity calmed. Their chests are concave; their feet are growing. Their arms are marbled with the musculature of tiny woodland creatures. One has an innie, the other an outie. No one is home.

One of them, the taller one, holds a hair clipper that belongs to his father, a clipper that has been rescued from the dank recesses of an upstairs closet in the Laurelhurst house, a closet that smells like soap and shoes and motor oil and is as dark as dark gets, and he is saying to the other that now is the time to do this; now, while his father’s at work in the motorcycle garage where he’s employed on Saturdays; now, while his mother is at the market getting groceries that will include, per the boys’ special request, Fruity Pebbles, Gushers, Dr Pepper, and frozen pizza (which is the reason they are always at this house; the other house is nothing but wheat germ and raisins, wooden cars and make-your-own-fun, early bedtime and no TV, ever);
now
is the time, he says, now is the
time
. It is 1987, and Brian Bosworth, the terror from Oklahoma, has arrived in Seattle to play for the Seahawks; it’s time to make the magic happen. They love Walter Payton, they love Jim McMahon, they love the Bears (mostly because one of the boys’ fathers, the father they idolize, loves the Bears), but it’s more accurate to say they loved, because now the Boz is here, a hometown hero, an eleven-million-dollar man who will unify the city and bring a form of gilded greatness to the Northwest, and his arrival has obliterated everything else in their orbit of likes and dislikes.

Think of the Boz, the boy holding the clipper says. The haircut was his idea.
Think
of the
Boz,
he says again, as if they were capable, at this moment, of thinking about anything else. He’s theirs now. The Boz, picked in the supplemental draft, belongs to them. He has hair from the future, spiked on top, bare on the sides, and in back a flowing river of awesomeness that sneaks out from under his helmet. The Boz wears his torn jersey
outside
his pants. The Boz marks his ankle-tape with his college number, 44, because the NFL won’t allow that to be his official number, which is 55—an echo, certainly, but a pale one. The switch is flipped; the clipper’s mosquito hum fills the second floor. This will not be just any haircut. This will be
the
haircut, and with it they will become part of something bigger than themselves. This, one of them thinks, is a pivotal moment. It’s a jumbotron experience, a statistical miracle, and they are doing it together. It’s not about being like someone. It’s about becoming him. And with a few swipes and a scalp reveal you can
make
it happen. They are tender, precise with each other. They take turns. Concentrate on the line. Hair falls to the tile, dirty snow-clumps on the bathroom floor.

Do they look like the Boz, with their torn jerseys and markered-up shoes? Do they look like the Boz, when they have brown hair and he’s decidedly platinum? Does anyone care? Before this, they were just friends, certain of their affection, uncertain of its expression. Before this, one of them, the worrier, was afraid that his hours in the Laurelhurst house were numbered, that he would overstay his welcome, that he would be exposed as an interloper, but that worry is now gone. The haircut is proof. The haircut is a leveler. So do they look like the Boz, who could curl their combined weight without so much as a lip-twitch? Who cares! They look like each other, and that, for one of them, is good enough.

Their hair clogs in the sink; they leave it there. Hair, impossible, at this point, to say whose, is on the counter; they leave it there. Hair, little splinters of it, covers every bathroom surface, including, somehow, the mirror, and they, the two of them, are down the stairs like future linebackers, swinging their weight around the shoddy banister, obliterating the weak side run. The grandfather chair on the first floor becomes Bo Jackson. The screen door is the Broncos porous offensive line. Outside the sun is high, and the front yard is the Kingdome. Plays are called, random numbers, slow huts, sharp hikes, and the trees lining the street, the great oaks and elms that have been watching over this particular block for who knows how long, who have seen how many plays called, how many errant, throwing-starred punts go up on the roof, who hold, in their branches, a generation’s worth of Aerobies too high to knock out—these trees, who have enjoyed, for centuries it seems, those magical on-the-lawn hours when balls are drawn heavenward, who have stood in rapt attention for those endless minutes before the car-door-slamming parents return from the outside world to ask their kids what the hell, just what the hell is going
on,
these trees, they whistle their applause.

Stop rubbing your dicks together,
says the boy’s father when he gets back from the garage and sees their hair,
he’s not that great
. They are sitting at the dinner table, he has just pulled up a chair, and his voice is like the phlegmatic roar of a garbage disposal. Each word a lifetime of cigarettes. One of the boys is used to the sound of this voice. The other is not, but wishes,
thinks,
he could be. The two of them take all criticism delivered from the mouth of this man seriously, this man who rides motorcycles and has promised to teach them, soon, to ride, this man who carries in his limbs the promise of casual violence and who wears a look of weary surprise upon entering the rooms of his own house as if he can’t quite believe what his life has handed him, this man, they are attuned to him—but this time one of them can’t take what he’s said seriously, because he’s just heard the word
dick
said aloud. Inside! In the presence of a mother who doesn’t bat an eyelash as she slaps the molten pizza on the table. To his relief, he sees his friend is already laughing. Words like this send the two of them into hysterical revelry.
Butt, crack, nuts, ball-peen,
these words are everywhere, and they’re hilarious. A family history of angina, the recent and casual mention of it, was close enough to the real thing that the one boy’s mother told them to go ahead and get it out of their system and then knock it off. The father’s more indulgent, telling them now through monstrous bites of pizza that their one and only Brian Bosworth received the Dick Butkus award not just once but twice, and try saying that five times fast. They try, of course they try, and the effort almost brings them off their chairs. Later this father buys his son a Land of Boz poster to replace their now unloved and forgotten Jim McMahon on his bedroom wall. Their tank-topped hero: wide-stanced, implacable, and domineering in wraparound shades. Across his chest it reads “Monster D.B. 44”—
defensive back,
the father explains—and he’s flanked by menacing kids their own age wearing shades, a menacing Tin Man, a stepped-on Scarecrow, and a Dorothy pinup who has laced her small arm around his just so, in that perfect way. It’s an invitation that for now does nothing for the two boys, not just yet, because directly below where she has placed her hand in the crook of his elbow the Boz is palming a football helmet, his fingers dug in, the helmet an egg, the helmet not going anywhere. The father hadn’t been leveling criticism, judgment, at all, the boys understand. It’s just the way men talk to each other. The friends stare at the poster for hours, and imagine that instead of there being only one Boz standing guard at the foot of a road that leads, behind him, to a spired and mysterious Emerald City, there are two.

Weeks pass and here’s how the boys talk to each other: What do you like? What do you like? Is that something we should like? Every day is a disputation of taste, and nothing ascends without the explicit approval of both. When they wrestle, one wins. The next time they wrestle, the other wins. Some things they can do nothing about (chins, eye color, hand size); others (shoes, hair, room decoration, lunch box) they can. For one of the boys, the unworried one, this equilibrium seems a natural, effortless state; for the other, it’s become everything. What do you like? I like what you like. Up in one of the trees in the yard, on a climbable but out-of-the-way branch, they’ve carved their first names followed by a last name they made up.

These friends, two boys, they spend their days—all their days it seems, the one boy’s mother wondering what’s wrong with
this
house—in Laurelhurst, going to the beach, swimming, jumping off the high platform, mugging for each other on the way down, playing rag-tag in the water with a sock-covered tennis ball they peg at each other like Norwegian berserkers. They get splinters from running on the old dock, wooden shards they extract, painfully, with the mother’s tweezers. They roll the log-boom for hours, so good at it that eventually their suits actually dry in the sun. They scrape their elbows on cement, they hyperextend on trampolines, they tear their baseball pants sliding in the rec-field diamonds, wounds that weep clear liquid and require rubbing alcohol. They mis-time their tree-climbing dismounts and roll their ankles, they play butt-ball off the garage door until their backs are patterned with bruises, swing pillows like merciless cudgels, chuck super-bounce balls into traffic from the cover of shrubs. Their days are long and they are war buddies, forging experience. Long days, and enough time to explore the texture of friendly violence without consequence until one of the boys, while running, kicks playfully at the other’s back foot and sends him sprawling. An accident, an accident, he wants to shout even before his friend hits the ground, his arms so surprised by the physics of what is happening to him that they don’t even consider reaching down to break the fall. Accident, as one of the boys lands hard on his face, scrapes the bridge of his nose, blackens his eye, and screams like a bird of prey until his mother hustles from the kitchen to hold him in her arms; the other, unhurt, standing, guilty, numb, listening, is surprised to find himself wishing not that it hadn’t happened, but that it had happened, instead, to him. Back in the kitchen, he hands his friend an ice pack, and then takes one for himself; he puts it on his own uninjured face, and pushes it into his eye until it hurts the back of his head, says,
oh, shit, ow,
a thing so dumb to do, an action so transparent, that everyone at the table laughs. All is forgiven. It was a mistake. He will not be sent home. The pain subsides.

The next morning, in the garage, they trick their bikes out with Spokey Dokes and then pedal out into the neighborhood, jumping curbs, careening down stairs, and calling out their favorite parts of their new favorite movie,
Rad,
which is about BMX bike racers who jump over things larger than curbs until Jeremy, an older cousin, released to his own summer and suddenly present, tells them bike riding’s for faggots, since
bike
is German for
dick,
and so then what are you doing when you ride your bike? Neither of the boys are German, this is information they hadn’t known. Jeremy, and his rumbling skateboard, here to deliver the news. They are open to it, to this attention from Jeremy; or, at least, are interested enough to hear what he has to say. He’s about to enter high school. He’s got hair that is not buzzed, but ratty and long. Though he lives only a few blocks over he’s never once expressed even a passing interest in either of them; they are eager to prolong this exchange, and even feel, on this day, strangely blessed by it. They watch him kick-flip his skateboard. They watch his loping leg-push, and his deep lean as he carves back toward them, kicks again, and stops a few feet away. What’s wrong with your
eye
? Jeremy says. What’s wrong with your
hair
? What, he says, is with the matching sweatshirts?

They are caught off guard by the certainty of this questioning. They stand silently astride their bikes, one boy waiting for the other to speak up, not daring to defend the two of them himself. Jeremy is not his cousin. But his friend does not speak up, and the worry returns. Have they been wrong this whole time? Is their closeness being called into question? The thought hovers, takes hold, then disperses as Jeremy kick-pushes lazily down the street, back to his house. Hey, rich boy, he calls over his shoulder. Can you do this? Try copying this. The skateboard flips under his feet, once, twice, catching the sun like an airborne, twisting fish, and then is pulled out of its orbit and expertly stomped to the concrete by Jeremy’s mismatched Converse high-tops. I’m not rich, one of the boys says to the other when Jeremy is out of sight. It’s not a bad thing, the other says back. As they walk their bikes home, one of the boys runs his fingers through his hair. The Boz, somewhere, looks out disapprovingly at the prospect of his short career.

Soon bikes are out, Spokey Dokes are out, BMX movies are out, Velcro crotch guards are out, wheel-pegs are out, and skateboards are in. It’s not only Jeremy telling them this. They’ve just seen
Back to the Future
on VHS, where Michael J. Fox goes back in time and
invents
the skateboard, which he then rides while holding on to the back of a car. All information received from the movies they watch is stored and internalized and mulled over until it reemerges as want and necessity. How come we didn’t see this earlier? one of them says. The back of a
car
! the other says back. They beg for the same skateboard, a Nightmare III model available only at one store, a store that happens to be near the motorcycle garage. This is the model Jeremy has.