TWO

by Richard Leise and Lillian Taylor

Two stood on one of Hiawatha Island’s unnamed shores.  A white boat moved upriver.  He hitched his jeans with a thumb, and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.  He looked across the water.  He’d dropped weight since being here, and that was saying something. 
Mom looked downriver.  Her expression changed.   
She said, You might want to bet on calling Big John.
Two dropped his cigarette on the soft mud underfoot.  He ran his tongue across the back of his teeth.  He didn’t know whose boat, but it wouldn't have mattered if he did.     
Don’t look like they’ve come to deliver the mail, Mom added.   
Two spit.  Daddy’s rifle in his hands felt reassuring.

Hiawatha.  The Susquehanna’s largest island this side of the border.  Four-hundred and twenty acres of scrub, mud, mosquitoes, and junk timber.  Preacher Rob says a river is only as mighty as its banks.  On that measure, Two agreed.  But, unto Two, what was being delivered? 
He had a clue. 

The moon was super.  Across the river, roots from banked trees held together a hardpan eroded from receded waters risen since time turned stillness into something, a sheer moraine wall rising five feet above this liquid plane.  Deep within this baled turbidity petrified animals well-suited for nothing but any one particular purpose and so adapted to aberrant conditions created by these spurned children of their self-same God.  From within this cliff face huge rocks honed by epochs smooth and flush with the earth like pointless fossils glittered so exposed, each informed by minor imperfections, their moon-struck minerals dazzling, sparkling, a pretty sort of irony. 
For just as easily all could be made ugly. 
Such beauty requiring Man’s open eye to see. 

Mom said, I hope you don’t plan on your Daddy’s rifle offering you no solutions.

Last summer was rain.  The Susquehanna flooded, submerging Hiawatha, all but the terminals of its tallest trees under water.  This summer was hot, and there was no rain, and the river ran low, and there was more island than Two had ever seen.  Recently-risen land cut through any number of newly-formed vly, blowdown creating a huge dryki pocked with tree tip pits cradling small catchment ponds visited by Hiawatha’s squirrels and shorebirds.  Root wads rising house-high made like a movie set a wasteland providing neither cover nor hope, the trunks of those still-standing trees gray with silt, their branches decorated with debris, detritus both organic and manmade catching the wind to produce movement and sound.  As if here there were so held a demented holiday. 

Their campfire, its logs arranged in their pyramidal pyre and aflame for hours now, indeed alit for the better part of the afternoon—its wood reduced to little more than petrified ash, suffuse with a lavitic red that, defined by lines both yellow and gold, pulsed in pockets Bic blue and purple—faltered.  Smoke made the breeze visible—striated, like a tree’s rings—the wind carrying the smell of woodsmoke and lifting Mom’s hair and cooling Mom’s exposed skin.  Fallen leaves rose and slammed, flush with the earth.  The logs collapsed, a crescendo of charred embers and beechwood sparks, bright particles rising and roiling like water boiling and swirling, making of the darkness something discernible, a vortex almost, but not quite, invisible. 
Mom grabbed the folds of her sweater, she wrapped them around herself.  Almost dark, anything could happen, and nothing would come as a surprise.  Bats like broken kingbirds dipped and flitted, all but hitting the water.  The poet’s strange, upside-down, sky. 
She said, Two?

The boat was that much closer, its motor a sound they would have heard had they been sleeping inside the trailer. 
There’s only so much you can do. 
Two? 
He waited.  He stood.      

Mom stood a foot behind her husband’s rifle, and so a few feet further from the boat.  She hadn’t showered since leaving Endwell, and her brown hair, usually dry as a brushfire, fell heavy with grease, slick-looking strands which lent unto her countenance an uncertain complexion.  She drew her hair behind her ears.  Heavy, slick-looking strands fell again. 
Where her hair thinned flakes from a desiccated scalp drifted to her shoulders.  Bright as a bindi, the sore on her forehead.  Bright as blood, the sores on her arms.  Her face. 
Here was a woman absent definite shape. 
In torn Levis she was a series of slashes and crazed angles, the side of her neck and jaw line scarred—she had been burned as a child—but not terribly, her skin, instead of white, a taut pink pocked. 
Time had passed and in that way she was neither pretty nor ugly.  She appeared to lack one dimension, as if experience had erased an inessential, yet once lovely quality.  In her thinness she possessed a stillborn fury, like an emotion inside her, only born dead.  Her phone she grasped like reason, and this left an impression on a front pocket of her jeans, where she usually kept the device. 
Their trailer had a generator. 
The Internet was the atmosphere. 
While Hiawatha was remote, it was no longer possible to be far from anywhere.  Sound became something different as the boat slowed. 
Mom said, Well, don’t think of me as one who would’ve figured.     

The trees without their leaves were blacker than the horizon.  Across the river, the low rolling hillside.  Marred by highways and the Interstate, miles and miles of asphalt sweep away in carefully engineered arcs, running straight for distances long enough for military aircraft to land on.  Exits led to access roads, and these to Endwell’s county routes.  Here, between crumbling farms and rusty silos, desolate gas stations and homemade stands proffering honey and jam, split-level houses and doublewide trailers mark the roadway.  Here, atop gravel driveways, sedentary SUVs and compressed pop-up campers—their tire cavities orange with oxidation, their asking prices, scrawled black in permanent marker across tattered pieces of cardboard and affixed to rain-stained front windows—go unsold.  And power lines, like corporate cobwebs, extend from telephone poles rising from either side of the asphalt in their seeming isotropy, they cross one another and see how they create a futuristic, a nihilistic canopy.  Giant billboards, their faces strips of peeling PVC, the intestines of forgotten messages, advertise only the artery’s insignificance.  And any variety of roadkill, their rotting carcasses attracting pools of flies and large ravens brazen with bloodlust, their molten shapes indecipherable until almost upon them (and even then a mystery often enough, only their entrails identifiable) lay slumped atop either shoulder.   
Minutes, this, from Hiawatha.   
That world where, if you believed Daddy, citizens abdicated freedom in exchange for bigger versions of comfort.  For ugly and uglier narratives artfully arranged inside different episodes of the same four-year stories and shaped by some fallen Empire’s idea of policy.  
Two’s father.  For all his anger, and for all his seasoned ignorance, had never been called dumb.  Two didn’t begrudge his leaving, and he didn’t question if the man was going to return. 
There was no way of knowing.          
So there was less point in wondering.

The boat was close.  Closer than that, given God left Two here with all the thinking.  Two made out numbers, a big red beacon, a gun – a man on the rail.  From the shoreline the red light in the falling darkness concentrated tight as skin on a made fist.  Two got to wondering what, precisely, he should do.
Once, Daddy said, Numbers add up to nothing. 
Another time, Red means run.   
Presently, Two could have done with, or without, his father. 
There wasn’t any other way of thinking.  None.

Across the river headlights provided the illusion of some life other than this.  Here there was the water and the cliff with its glittering minerals, its trees like dead things rising from the earth with branches like claws reaching to claim nothing.  See how they amount to nothing, and look closer still to see how they stand for nothing.  Not even a passing season.  The water still as concrete, absent flow or eddy, and even there, at the water’s edge, the river, like a cloth folded, thick with algae and possessing nothing by way of wave or wake only out where the sandbar after fifteen, maybe twenty feet dropped into nothing did moonlight, like soft fingers, lift the river’s slow-moving current to create a tail-stream.  But for weeks there’d been little wind and there’d been no rain so the river’s surface moved nothing.  Not even a passing thought.     

Two could have stood for his brother, Christopher.  But wish in one hand, use the other to take a leak, and you didn’t need to be a schoolteacher to know which hand would fill up faster.  Unlike Big John, Christopher left Hiawatha, and he was out a week now, maybe two, hunting, trapping the Poconos, fixed to find what remained of the state’s mink, the mountainsides’ ethereal Bobcat. 
Besides the genial, near-blank expression Christopher wore when alone, he assumed few others.  Aside from Two, and, occasionally, an idea, these he reserved for animals.  He had little interest in people.  Christopher didn’t believe in his parents, or Uncle John, nor would he take anything Hiawatha provided. 
He helped, though. 
For Mom he would risk everything.  He would return from the mountains and, unlike the others, kayak from the public launch, visible to those high overhead, crossing one of 434’s bridges. 
He wasn’t paranoid, he didn’t think anyone cared enough to pay attention.  From when he left through when he returned the only difference between Chris and his brother would be the one:  Two wouldn’t have fired a gun.

Two turned and looked downriver, his shadow still on the stunted water. Before him Hiawatha angled around a boathook bend, dropping from sight. Built back into the bosque, a human sort of pushcover, the trailer. There as long as Two could remember, its ventilation cut to release exhaust from no point easily detected. Nearby, a set of tire tracks cut through tall grasses and then nothing. Only there was no sign nor evidence of a vehicle. The ground cracked and fissured. Crag and intercise filled with trash, with cigarette butts, with bottle caps, with waste. Closer still a dead bird, the color of its feathers erased by the sun. Rotten iridescence. The corpse pushed against itself with rigor mortis’ permanent resolve. Ants crawled around and through a cavity slowly made larger by this incessant purpose. Moonlight touched the points of so many jittering carapaces, making of the ants one bright mass, something pretty, a transitory substance firm with the ebb and flow of instinct.

Mom was frightened.  For her, fear was not familiar.  When she searched, and this for anything, she sought without desire or demand.  She did not carry the weight of loss, and she possessed not even the awareness of consciousness, the care to consider life as something that possibly was not this.   
But this?  This was different. 
Between two fingers she worried a slender silver crucifix, a gift from her grandmother, and she inched closer to her son, to Two, away from the night’s dying blaze, her feet leaving impressions on the softened, the fire-warmed earth. 

There’d been a time as a child when she was taken seriously.  She’d always been quiet, knowing that, from her, others wanted more.  Away from Hiawatha, walking the woods behind her home far from the river’s rising promontories she studied the steady nature of flowers and the rocks and the trees and the clouds and glittering pebbles and even the breeze, sliding and scrabbling across the day’s new-found talus, chunks of broken rock falling to form patterns wonderful with unnamed geometries, scraping her elbows, her knees, and with pain the feeling that she was waking from some dream, each day becoming more and more animated, understanding that silence was happiness and that happiness was not an obligation. 
And then she went to school. 
A building made of invented things, a home to classrooms with glowing screens directed at her, pointed screams, their frequencies drowning understanding.  Peace erodes, becomes confusion, everything contrary to comprehension, this becomes that, comfort drenched in a doubt wet as water until one day she realizes that she has been awake, that she might never have been sleeping, and all that was calm and wonderful ceased. 
Ruined, she slowly begins talking.  And talking.  She fills herself with syllables to speak instead of heard sounds by which to find solace.  Ideas replace feelings, and her parents grow distant, first her father leaves and then her mother disappears until it is as though the world is no longer real, has been nothing but words after all and she speaks and her head is filled with sound.

Be funny if that’s Daddy.  Two didn’t smile.  Two stared at the boat.  He said, Be funny if that’s Daddy, don’t you think? 
As a child, Mom would have fought the urge to sing.  To say nothing.  Now?  Because she didn’t know the answer?  She said, Funny.  And then, Just think. 
Weary, Mom’s eyes shined.  But for so long she bore sadness like joy, so that even a threat arrived as nothing more than something to be observed, like one of the island’s strange shore birds.

Years ago—just seventeen, popping with Christopher—Mom bathed before bed.  Given the Susquehanna’s force, she followed Two’s father a sensible distance down the sandbar, the couple then kneeling.  Guided by her husband, flat-backed, hands not her own soaping and rinsing her long blond hair deep within the river’s cold, wild current, she relaxed, her hair kicking and clawing to rise, to settle on the surface. 
Such simple cause and effect. 
Had she known the play, or had she seen the painting—  Still.  She never would’ve thought:  Ophelia. 
Lord, she prayed, some rock pleasantly grating a rib.  Grant me more bewilderment.         
There had been something in the water.  A pike?  Surprise flashed across her husband’s face, he drew a hand to his mouth.  Blood welled to flow from his index finger to fall, like oil, on the side of her head.  He rinsed his finger, examined the wound.  A cut.  Reaching wide of that point where he had injured his hand, he fondled the river, felt along its bed.  He lifted a large jar, water streaming from cracks in the vessel’s orange, strange, luminous glass.  Broken, the bottle had been mended with duct tape and stopped with a cork.  He held the bottle up to the moonlight.  Heavy with pennies.  The copper a mossy green.   
Make a wish, he said, casting the jar far across the Susquehanna’s quick-moving water, the jar filling with moonlight and assuming a wild, tangerine glow. 
He had kissed her, he had laughed.  Her man massaging her scalp and smiling, saying nothing, the sound of the water like her heart, pulsing, and then, back at the fire, undressing her and before the fire brushing her hair, not because her hair needed it, but a break for mercy, for atonement.  (How there was so much of this—presently, she turned from Two to face the hidden trailer—before there was too much of that.)  The glow of the campfire warming her face and how like slipping into a warm bath this moment a junkie’s rush of well-being a corporeal sort of buoyancy as he combed her hair and then, with a hand rough from working a job she no longer remembered, how he gently cupped a breast, rested his chin on her shoulder, looking across the river and even then already leaving, planning his exit from that world to this.

A sound from a tractor trailer’s low-moaning horn.  Two looked over the Susquehanna to that world where, with greater and greater frequency, Daddy had retreated until he disappeared.  Beyond the river and beneath the hillside’s distant trees bright are those lights from those vehicles moving along 434, how mile after mile they amass to unroll so much terrific speed but how from here they, like planes high in the sky, contradict sense, disrupt reason, are so slow in their passing as to forever remain in view. 

Two does not have a tent.  During those rare occasions when Big John and Mom canoe across the river, the trailer is locked.  Traps set.  Still, Two remains.  There are ways to manage. 
He, too, will one day leave. 
But where?  Or:  Who to?      

Across the river risen moonlight made blue the still water.  The moonlight a sort of magic upon which disbelief has no effect.  He turned.  Mom’s closed eyes made bright by the fire. 

Close now the boat was rocking, it was making big waves.  Water from its wake like light from some distant star reached Hiawatha, surged up, and then receded from the shoreline.  There were no pebbles or stones for the river to kick.  What Two heard he expected, and so all noise was silent, the world still.  Submerged, the earth darkened.  When the river water receded the ground, like sand, gradually lightened in degrees of gentle gradation, like those coils atop Big John’s electric oven fading from a swollen red to a thin burnt black. 

Mom turned over her hand and examined the face of her phone, as if it held a clue.  She said, Guess we’ll just have to wait to wonder what your Uncle John’d do.   

Standing on an angle of repose, Hiawatha dipped toward the river and Mom had a foot on her child—but she didn’t try to hold him.  If Two were to move, if Two were to step to the side, she would fall into the water, into a darkness that looked exactly like what it was.  She spoke to him, told him that now it might be best to turn, to return to the trailer.  She inched closer to her son, her chin brushing his shoulder.   

People, Two knew, used words when they ran out of things to do. 

Big John was back at the trailer, cooking or too high to know what was happening, or what to make of what was, if he did.  When he wasn’t too high, he was just high, and this was enough to make him useless, if not dangerous.  Wary of sunlight, suspicious of sleep, he heard nothing other than his thoughts, and these like waves cresting only to break in upon themselves, to become a part of themselves, only aligned a bit differently.  As a simple realization—as a statement of fact—Two understood that Big John wasn’t cooking, and that he was better off without him.

Mom started humming.

Two’s father filled a backpack and stepped into a canoe, he set off downriver.  Had that moment been now, the motorboat would’ve been forced to slow to allow his father to pass. 
But that was who knows when.  They’d been here long enough, and Two’s father had been gone long enough, for the boat to mean one thing. 

Two had never been to the ocean.  He’d managed to dodge school, mostly, and his world had been reduced to so little that existence had condensed and informed his sole nature, a pressure weighted with an appreciation not even for heightened physical pleasure—he didn’t, for instance, fix—but for the simple absence of discomfort.  The few times he left Hiawatha he left with Christopher.  The girls his brother picked up were nice and pretty and smelled good and while they all wanted something different, Christopher said, smoke rising from his cigarette, they all expected the same thing.   

The boat was loud now, a man had cut the engine.  The sudden silence like a bell in its tolling, and how all seemed to ring.     

“Doesn’t look like they’re coming to stay,” Mom said.

It’s impossible to understand sorrow, to define despair, until you’re no longer happy and have lost the spirit to summon hope. 
     Once you have—or once you do—you know too much.

Waves pushed towards the shore.  Collapsing, this water returned to the river with greater force.  Surge met surge creating a tiny crack, like a stepped-on stick.  There was an Atlantic and there was a Pacific Ocean, but Two couldn’t place either.  Of dunes, of hurricanes?  Two knew nothing.  There was nothing for him to understand about high or low tides.  Of the surf.  Reduced to the scale of his particular circumference, America assumed a queer geometry.  Without lines there were no maps, and this made much of what was ordinary extraordinary, sometimes good.  For this there was a price to pay, and what if that payment was grace? 
At least Two didn’t understand.  Upon favor he had not looked the other way, rather—  

The first shot hit the water.  The crack! sounded about the same time mud splattered, horizons of ancient land preserved beneath ash, sand, peat, and other deposits rising from the river, splashing Two’s face and arms and shoulders.  Across the river loose pebbles and weatherworn stones rocked by reverb fell from a mass of land, recoil creating a landslide and this debris creeping down angled earth to slink through the Susquehanna’s surface.  That which wasn’t carried away by the underwater current informed a sort of settlement and the slide revealing, like a tapestry, layers of earth darker in color and bright in the moonlight like curtains hanging from some war-torn window.

Two believed in a higher power.  How not to.  He came from his mom.  His mom from his grandmother.  His grandmother from his great-grandmother.  And his great-grandmother from— 
At this point Two stopped thinking. 
But the idea that something came from nothing?  This added up to nothing.   

Two wasn’t religious.  If asked, he would’ve shrugged. 
But who was there to ask?    

Mom once said, Don’t cry.  It’s okay.  And then, You don’t worry about them others at that school.  We all of us have questions.  And we none of us have answers, none of us do.  The difference between us and them is that we ain’t afraid of asking.   

Once Mom said, I’ve known Daddy forever.  He doesn’t think to believe.  He does what, and who, he trusts.  He trusts what he makes.  And what he sees.  But he wasn’t like that.  I mean, at least not always.

When Two was a boy Daddy said, With words this world is so fucking top-heavy.  Nothing anyone says can support its own weight, so it all breaks.         

Someone said, Until we meet God there are no explanations.  So there’s no point in guessing.  There’s thinking.  And that can be fun.  So long’s you don’t think too hard. 

With her eyes closed, Mom looks prettier.     
And a tongue of flame leaps from the boat. 

This is when we turn.  This is when, for reasons we never know, we turn our heads not inward, but heavenward.  So listen: 
Hear not the fire; rather, dance to the music of its flames—   

Dad said, Used to be you played music, you swayed to the music, you closed your eyes. 
Then, Now it’s all these images.  It’s all these fucking movies to show the music’s good, that you’re fucking alive.   

Two raised Daddy’s rifle to his eye. 
He didn’t think to wonder why. 

People point to order, equate order with beauty.  Only beauty must be organized so that it can be understood, and it must be reduced to information so that it can be organized.  So why not assume that organization is a property inherent of the knowledge of beauty itself, rendering beauty some other thing, another piece of information collectively considered knowledge, general erudition.  And of course information is assimilated from other information in order to be taught, to be assimilated and disseminated, and so beauty, if found within the natural order of the designs and patterns made meaningful by some nascent quality present not in perceived beauty—

Yes, beauty is ordered towards beauty. 
And he who finds it must be both God and Man. 

—Or, if not, let it be that, like gunshot, the solitary siren note stretches, stretching, bending, breaking now, streaking and lost now, music no more fettered to gravity than the mind cooling but for the depth of shadow held in the corner of the grand cathedral’s spire. 

And then Two saw black. 
And his face splashed the sky.       

Richard writes and teaches outside Ithaca, NY. Lillian Taylor grew up in Croatia. Now living among the vineyards of New York’s Finger Lakes, she spends time tending vines, trying new recipes in the kitchen, and writing stories.