John Swinburn

Pauling and Donaway were grilling trout from the morning’s catch over a driftwood campfire, filling the air with the sweet scent of salt and smoke and charred fish. The sun slipped low in the sky.

With the last fish off the grill, Pauling finally spoke.

“I knew we shouldn’t have let Stegner go off by himself this morning. What the hell is keeping him?”

Donaway squinted into the setting sun and heaved a long sigh.

“How were we gonna stop him? When he gets like that, you just gotta let him go and blow off steam. But he should have been back before now. I wonder if he got disoriented? Or he could be on the other side of the island. Hell, he could have gone back to the mainland for all we know. I shouldn’t have let him have the keys to the boat.”

The three men had spent the better part of a week on Flag Island, an uninhabited two hundred acre parcel forty-five miles off the coast. Every November for the past twelve years, they had escaped to the refuge, spending ten days isolated from the pressures of their lives and their wives. This year, the pain of Stegner’s divorce from his wife of twenty years was fresh.

On the other side of the island, Stegner’s corpse baked on the beige sand beach, surrounded by seaweed and tar balls. The narrow cove, crowded with detritus from the sea, was clogged with the stuff; his body and pieces of flotsam common to the shipping lanes.  The engine on the forty-foot yacht at the edge of the cove coughed and then started; the boat Donaway had navigated to the island six days earlier was a hundred yards from shore with two people, a man and a woman, on board.

[I wonder how this happened and where it’s going?]

The quality of his penmanship had declined since grade school. By the time he started keeping a journal, the only way he could assure himself he could read what he had written was to print his words in a slow, precise style unsuitable to capturing the flood of ideas that poured from his mind. Still, he tried.

“You try as hard as you can. But, still, it’s not enough. You can’t avoid that damn black hole swallowing you. It’s the inescapable allure of the swamp, sucking you into its seething, bubbling, overpowering muck. You wish and scream and try to awaken from this deadly dream that pulls you in like quicksand. But there it is, that inexorable draw; you have no power but to shout, hoping someone hears. No one does. Your voice is still, silent, caught in a web. Noise cannot escape.”

That evening, sitting alone in his tiny apartment with a dwindling bottle of whiskey for company, he withdrew from the sweet odor of the pipe smoke from the man who lived in the apartment next door and the sounds of the drunks singing outside the tavern on the ground floor below. Though the window was open and the crisp late autumn air called for a sweater, he felt no chill.

Chambers was so distant from the world around him he felt certain he was in another galaxy. His tears were like molten clots of transparent lead, ripping his cheeks with their weight, clinging to his skin like epoxy.

His thoughts were smoke. Billowing and choking, some too thick even to walk through, others thin as a lace curtain. He continued to write in his journal, the leather-bound ruled pages yellowed from time.

“A black void is so much more attractive than this sharp, ugly shredding of a lifetime of hope. Hope is meaningless drivel. Reality spins hope into what it is; steely, cold, and dangerous. Hope is a proxy for reality, years after reality lost its first child to cholera.”

He tipped the bottle to fill his glass, swallowed a mouth full of whiskey, and kept at it.

“I watch and listen and learn of people who have lost their battles with depression in ways that ruin the people they love, the very people who kept them from the abyss for so long. Pain, whether real or imagined, is part of the process of growth and change. So, you soldier on, keeping the worst of it to yourself, and let your chosen outlets speak for you the words you cannot dare use with your own voice. I would not like, nor could long tolerate, someone who writes and feels as I do.”

July third started like most days in Laredo. The sun crept slowly over the horizon, turning hot darkness into brutal, heat-drenched daylight.

Estella Garcia woke, steeped in sweat, just as the pink gauze of heat began to fill the sky. Her son, Ernesto, liked to call her early on weekend mornings. She was used to rising early to take his call. She often wondered, though, whether it occurred to him that, while he might naturally awaken at six o’clock in his New York apartment, it was only five o’clock in Laredo.

Even though she expected the call, the phone’s ring jarred Estella. She answered the phone with, “Buenos dias, mijito! How’s my favorite boy?”

“Hey, mom! Things are rockin! I get my performance review today and it looks like it might be a real good one!”

“A performance review on a Saturday?”

“Every day is a work day here, mom. And, besides, it’s my six month anniversary; boss told me he wanted me to come in today to talk about my plans for the future. Sounds promising!”

“That’s good news, mijito! When are you going in?  Will you call me after your review?”

“Of course! I hope it’ll be news of a promotion and a raise. I really think he likes my work and my work ethic, mom. He gives me kudos a lot, you know? I just think things are looking up.”

“I’m very happy you’re doing so well, Ernesto! I was afraid when you went to New York you would have a hard time finding…”

The call ended in mid-sentence. Ernesto tried several times to call again, but got the same recording each time: “We’re sorry; you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please check the number and try your call again.” After the fifth try, he gave up, assuming something had happened to the phone lines somewhere between Manhattan and Laredo.

***

There had been no threats, no suggestions, no indications of any kind of a planned attack. It simply happened. Suddenly, at 5:15 a.m. Central Time, much of Laredo, Texas and its Mexican counterpart, Nuevo Laredo, disappeared in a hellish inferno.

Roughly one third of the 240,000 citizens of Laredo, Texas and 375,000 citizens of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico were killed instantly.  Another three hundred thousand died within the week after the blast.

Ernesto learned a few months later that his mother had been one of those who perished several agonizing days after the blast; she lived through hell, her final days and hours a brutality no human should ever experience.

ISIL or ISIS or whatever they were calling themselves at the time claimed responsibility for the event. It didn’t matter who said they did it, though. What mattered was that revenge be exacted as quickly and as overwhelmingly as possible. That, after all, is the primary driver of US foreign policy.

[THIS HAS BEEN SITTING, ALONG WITH ABOUT A HUNDRED AND TWENTY OF ITS FRIENDS, ON THE BACK BURNER. THAT’S WHERE IT WILL STAY FOR NOW.]

For ten miles, ice filled tire ruts in the road, making it damn near impossible for me to stay on the highway. When I reached a town, I pulled into the gravel lot of a post office to escape the sleet and freezing rain, expecting to park there for a few minutes until the worst of it passed. Thirty minutes later, though, it was still coming down and I was getting cold. The tiny building looked like a beacon of warmth so I decided to abandon my old Ford pickup in favor of real shelter. The fierce wind grabbed the truck’s door as soon as I opened it. As I reached for the gust-launched door, a gust caught it and slammed it against my hand; the pain took my breath away. Tucking my throbbing hand in my coat, I gripped the handle with the other hand and made my way outside without further incident, using the force of the wind to my advantage to shut the door when I was out of the vehicle.

A huge flag flying above the building whipped in the savage wind, cracking like a bullwhip each time the outer edge of the cloth snapped against the frigid gale. I dipped my head into the wind and slowly made my way up the icy sidewalk, briefly losing traction with every step, to the plate-glass entry door.

The building was tiny.  Even in this godawful weather, a line of twelve people stretched from the clerk’s station, the only one available, blocking access to a couple of dozen boxes across the room. The place was ten by fifteen feet, if that.

[WHO ARE THE PEOPLE, WHY ARE THEY OUT IN THIS WEATHER? WHY AM “I” ON THE ROAD?]