The World to Come

by Jim Shepard

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

Bursting with wicked humor and driven by an incomparable understanding of what it means to be human, The World to Come is the inimitable work of “the most ambitious story writer in America” (The Daily Beast).

Shepard traverses both borders and centuries, seamlessly inhabiting a multitude of disparate men and women, and giving voice to visionaries, pioneers, and secret misfits—from nineteenth-century explorers departing on one of the Arctic’s most nightmarish expeditions to twentieth-century American military wives maintaining hope at home. Shepard’s characters confront everything from the emotional pitfalls of everyday life to colossal catastrophes, battling natural forces, the hazards of new technology, and their own implacable shortcomings.

"[Shepard] has a knack for compressing a novel’s worth of life into 30 or 40 pages.” —The Boston Globe

Release date: February 21, 2017

Publisher: Vintage

Print pages: 272

Sample

Safety Tips for Living Alone

Twenty-­five years before Texas Tower no. 4 became one of the Air Force’s most unlikely achievements and most lethal peacetime disasters, marooning nineteen wives including Ellie Phelan, Betty Bakke, Edna Kovarick, and Jeannette Laino in their own little stewpots of grief and recrimination, the six-­year-­old Ellie thought of herself as forever stuck in Kansas: someone who would probably never see Chicago, never mind the Atlantic Ocean. Her grandfather wore his old brown duster whatever the weather, and when riding in her father’s convertible he always insisted on sitting in the dead center of the backseat with a hand on each side of the top to maintain the car’s balance on the road. This was back when the Army was running the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Navy exploring the Pole with Admiral Byrd, and the Air Corps still flying the mail in open-­cockpit biplanes. Gordon had reminded Ellie of her grandfather, and this had stirred her up and set her teeth on edge. She’d first noticed him when he’d stood on the Ferris wheel before the ride had begun, to make certain another family’s toddlers had been adequately strapped in, and when they were introduced she’d said, “Who made you the Ferris wheel monitor?” And then after he’d answered with a grin, “Isn’t it amazing how much guys like me pretend we know what we’re doing?” she’d been shocked by how exhilarating it was to catch a glimpse of someone who saw the world exactly as she did.

She’d always been moved and appalled by the confidence that men like her grandfather and Gordon projected when it came to getting a handle on their situations. But they each also had a way of responding to her as if she’d come around to the advantages of their caretaking, and she surprised herself by not saying no when after a few months of dating he asked her to marry him. That night she stood in her parents’ room in the dark, annoyed at her turmoil, and then switched on their bedside lamp and told them the news. And when they reacted with some of the same dismay she was feeling, she found herself more instead of less resolved to go ahead with the thing.

Her father had pointed out that as a service wife she might see exotic places and her share of excitement, but she’d also never be able to put down roots or buy a house, and year after year she’d get settled in one place and then have to disrupt her life and move to another. Her children would be dragged from school to school. Her husband would never earn what he could as a civilian. And most of all, the Air Force would always come first, and if that seemed too hard for her, then she’d better back out now.

When her mother came into her bedroom a few nights later and asked if she really understood what she was getting herself into, Ellie said that she did. And when her mother scoffed at the idea that her Ellie would ever know why she did anything, Ellie said, “At least I understand that about myself,” and her mother answered, “Well, what does that mean?” and Ellie said she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“Now that we see you’re not going to change your mind, we give up,” her father announced a few days later, and she chose not to respond to that, either. His final word on the subject was that he hoped this Gordon realized just how selfish she could be. She lived with her parents for two more months before the wedding and they exchanged maybe ten words in total. Her mother’s mother came for a visit and didn’t congratulate Ellie on her news but did mention that the military was no place for a woman because the men drank too much and their wives had to raise their children in the unhealthiest climates. She offered as an example the Philippines, that sinkhole of malaria and vice.

They were married by a justice of the peace in Gordon’s childhood home in Pasadena, and her parents came all the way out for the ceremony and left before the reception, their wedding present a card that read, “Take care and all best wishes, Mom.” The following week Gordon was posted to a base in upstate New York and Ellie spent a baffled month alone with his parents before taking the Air Force Wives’ Special across the country: Los Angeles to Boston for one hundred and forty dollars, with stops everywhere from Fresno to Providence and seats as hard as benches and twenty infants and children in her compartment alone. The women traveling solo helped out the most overwhelmed mothers, and Ellie spent the trip crawling under seats to retrieve crayons and shushing babies whose bottles were never the right temperature.

In upstate New York, the place Gordon found for her while they waited for quarters on the base was a rooming house that instead of fire escapes had ropes coiled beneath the bedroom windows. She had only a room to herself, with kitchen privileges. “At least it’s quiet,” he told her when he first saw it, and then asked a few days later if her nightly headaches were related to what he’d said about her room.

She was relieved that he mostly served his time on the base. Larry was born, and Gordon worked his way up to captain, and when in 1957 he was offered the command of some kind of new offshore platform, he wanted to request another assignment—­what Air Force officer wanted to squat in a box over the ocean?—­but told Ellie that it was her decision, too. “You have a family now,” she answered. “I just want anything that keeps you closer.” “I wouldn’t get home any more often,” he pointed out. “And safer,” she added. So after sleeping on it, he told her he’d take the command, though afterward he was so disappointed that he wasn’t himself for weeks.

By 1950 the Department of Defense had determined that the radar arrays carried on Navy picket ships and Air Force aircraft on station were not powerful enough to detect incoming Russian bombers sufficiently far offshore to enable fighter interception. The radar stations comprising the Distant Early Warning system across the far north of the continent provided some security in that direction, but given that nearly all of America’s highest-­priority targets were situated inside its northeastern metropolitan corridor, protection from an attack across the Atlantic seemed both essential and entirely absent. In response, the Air Defense Command urgently ordered the construction of five platforms along the coast from Bangor to Atlantic City. The platforms were called Texas Towers because of their resemblance to oil rigs, were numbered from north to south, and cost eleven million dollars apiece.

They faced engineering problems as unprecedented as the space program’s. Tower no. 4 in particular had presented a much greater challenge than the others since its footings would stand in 185 feet of water, more than three times as deep as the others. In 1955 the maximum depth at which anyone had built an undersea structure was sixty feet, and that had been in the Gulf of Mexico. Because of that, the Air Force had decided that this tower would require bold new thinking in its conception and hired a firm known for bridge design. The firm had had no experience at all in the area of ocean engineering for marine structures.

Tower no. 4 stood on three hollow legs nearly three hundred feet long. The legs were only twelve feet in diameter and braced by three submarine tiers of thirty-­inch steel struts, and topped with a triangular triple-­leveled platform that stood seventy feet above the waves. From its concrete footings on the seafloor to the top of its radomes it was the equivalent of a thirty-­story building out in the ocean.

Though oil-­drilling platforms had for the most part weathered the storms and seas of the Gulf, the Gulf at its worst was nothing like the North Atlantic.

And something was already wrong with Tower no. 4. Unlike the others, it moved so much in heavy weather or even a good strong wind that everyone who worked on it called it Old Shaky or the ­Tiltin’ Hilton.

The first time Gordon set foot on it he’d stood at the edge of the platform hanging on to the rope railings designed to catch those blown off their feet by wind gusts or prop wash, looked down into the waves so far below, and then out at the horizon, empty in all directions, and asked the officer he was relieving, “What the hell am I doing here?”

The tower housed seventy men. Besides crew and officer quarters and work stations it had a ward room, bakery, galley, mess, recreation area, and sick bay. Seven locomotive-­sized diesel engines provided electricity, and on the lower level ionizing machines converted salt water to drinking water. Fuel was stored in the hollow legs.

The crew was half Air Force and half civilian welders and electricians and technicians. For every thirty days on you got thirty days off. The military guys liked it because they got more time than they were used to with their families, but the civilians hated the isolation and complained they were always away for the big holidays, everybody seeming to be stuck out on the platform for New Year’s and home for Groundhog Day.

But the tower shuddered and flexed so much in bad weather that whoever had painted “Old Shaky” over the door in the mess hall hadn’t even been able to get the letters straight, and the floors moved so visibly in the winter that everyone was too seasick to eat. In his first phone call, Gordon told Ellie that the medic who’d flown out with him hadn’t even served out his first day; that when he saw how much the platform was pitching he refused to get off the helicopter and took it right back to shore on the next flight out. Once he left, Gordon found a crow hunkered down on the edge of the helipad, its tail feathers pummeled back in the wind. They got blown out here sometimes, the captain he was relieving had explained. Gordon boxed the crow up and carried it to his stateroom and made sure it was ferried back on the last copter out that night. “Well, at least the crow is safe,” Ellie told him. “Unless he comes back,” her husband answered.

Betty Bakke’s husband, Roy, was a medic who hadn’t insisted on flying back to the mainland the first time he’d set foot on Tower no. 4, because he believed a man fulfilled his responsibilities. He’d already made master sergeant and been nicknamed for his standard advice, as in “I thought I was coming down with something but Don’t Sweat It said I was okay.” He’d transferred from the Navy, where he’d served on a minesweeper in Korea. The only thing that fazed him, he told Betty in his phone calls, was his separation from her. She and their boy were still stuck in their old bungalow in Mount Laguna on the other side of the country. Roy had put his friend and commanding officer, Gordon Phelan, on the phone during one call, and the captain had regaled her with stories about Roy. Roy had stayed on duty eighty straight hours with an airman second class who’d had a heart attack, and was even better known for having stitched up his own eyebrow after a fall while everyone else watched. He’d organized fishing contests off the deck and also radioed passing trawlers so the guys could trade their cigarettes and beer for fresh fish and lobster. On top of all of that, he’d taken charge of the 16mm movies swapped from tower to tower and had scored big that Thanksgiving by having dealt The Vikings with Kirk Douglas for The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw with Jayne Mansfield.

Betty had told the captain that her husband sounded like a one-­man morale officer, and the captain said that was his point. And when Betty told him she’d heard that long separations were the reefs that sank military marriages, the captain had laughed and said he was going to pass the phone back to her husband. “Sounds like she needs a house call,” she heard him say to Roy.

The Navy Bureau of Yards and Docks had advised the engineers that Tower no. 4’s platform would need to withstand winds up to 125 miles per hour and breaking waves up to thirty-­five feet, based on twenty years’ worth of data provided by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. The main deck’s planned seventy-­foot elevation should then provide plenty of clearance. A few members of the design team dissented, wishing to put on record their belief that wave heights and wind speeds should be calculated on the basis of what might be expected once a century rather than once every twenty years. They were outvoted.

To extend its radar coverage, Tower no. 4 had been given a location as close as possible to the edge of the continental shelf, which meant that just to its east the bottom dropped away thousands of feet and that waves coming from that direction or the north encountered that rising bottom and mounted themselves upward even higher. And in winter storms Tower no. 2, in much shallower water, had already recorded waves breaking over its deck.

But wait, Gordon told Ellie once he’d done a little more research: the news got even worse. Because the footings were so deep, no. 4’s hollow legs had been designed to be towed to their location, where they’d be upended and anchored to the caissons on the bottom before the main deck was attached and raised. But because the legs were so long, the designers had had to use pin connections—­giant bolts—­rather than welds in the underwater braces. Though bolts were an innovative modification, they failed to take into account the constant yet random motions of the sea. For that reason, oil rigs and the other towers had used welded connections. The moment the bolts had gone in, they began generating impact stress around their connections. And Gordon had further discovered a storm had so pummeled two of the underwater braces during the towing that they’d sheared off and sunk during the upending, and that everyone had then floated around until the Air Force finally gave the order to improvise repairs at sea to avoid having to haul the entire structure back to shore.

Then, in heavy swells, the five-­thousand-­ton platform kept smashing up against the legs, so reinforced steel had been flown out and welded over the damage.

“Okay, I think it’s time to put in for a change of assignment,” Ellie told him in response. “Yeah, well, in for a penny, in for a pound,” he answered, by which she took him to mean, “You got me into this, so I don’t want to hear any complaints.”

As soon as the tower had gone operational, Wilbur Kovarick asked to be made its senior electrician so he could be closer to his family on Long Island, and Edna was so grateful that she kept him in bed the entire weekend.

By the time Edna had turned twenty-­six, all but two of her friends had married and she’d been a bridesmaid five times. She told Wilbur on their first date that at the last wedding, if the clergyman had dropped dead at the altar, she could have taken over the service. He’d been sweet, and thought she was a riot, but after they said good night, she found herself back in her little rented room with no radio or television and her three pots of ivy, wishing she’d thought to get his home address or telephone number. By the time he called her she had no patience for pretense and told him to come right over, and when he appeared at her door she kissed him until he finally pulled away and she pressed her cheek to his and said, “I’m not fast, I just know what I want,” and after a moment he squeezed her even harder than she was squeezing him. Their first apartment after the wedding was so small that neither could get dressed in the bedroom unless the other stayed in bed, and Wilbur swore to do better as a provider and joined the Air Force so they’d send him to electricians school.

He told her that without him, the whole tower went dark and the gigantic antennae stopped spinning, and she answered that this was just how she felt, too. He explained that when the diesels altered their output at odd intervals, the voltage changes caused the radar transmitters to sound their alarms, and every single time the threat had to be assessed, the alarm silenced, the transmitter readjusted, the alarm reset, and a threat assessment report filled out. That meant some of his shifts lasted up to nineteen hours. In those cases he was so wired that he called her when he went off duty and talked and talked. He told her that the windchill was so bad some days that in the sun and behind some shelter he’d be sweating in a T-­shirt, while out in the wind, water would freeze in a bucket. He told her that the space heater she’d insisted he take had made his part of the bunk room a popular gathering spot, and that he’d gotten a reputation as a good egg because instead of filing a report about an airman second class who’d dropped a transmitter drawer, he’d spent the night repairing it himself so the guy wouldn’t get in trouble.

She asked if that meant he’d made any friends, and he said no, not yet, and there was an awkward pause in which he could hear her disappointment, so he added that he had been getting a kick out of a diver who was always sucking helium out of a tank and then cracking everybody up by saying, “Take me to your leader” like he was the man from outer space.

After Gordon had been on the tower for a month, Ellie started hearing about his friend Captain Mangual. Gordon made it sound like he’d known him all his life. “Who is this guy?” she finally asked. “And why are there two captains out there?” He told her that Captain Mangual didn’t work on the platform but on the AKL-­17 supply ship. “But he has time to visit you on the tower?” she asked. No, they got to know each other by radio, Gordon told her. So he was quite the guy, huh? she wanted to know, and then got even more irritated when he answered, “Honey, there’s nothing this guy can’t do.”

Captain Mangual’s ship was specially outfitted to unload cargo between the legs of the tower, but it had to be positioned just so, in whatever seas, and it sometimes took three hours just to get its mooring set. And it was no dinghy: 177 feet from stem to stern. He had to have the patience of a saint, boy. And then he had to hold the ship as steady as possible under the crane that unloaded the cargo or personnel onto the platform. The poor crane operator would just get a load in the bucket and the boat would drop fifty feet and then come back up just as fast. And when stuff was unloaded onto the boat, that meant dropping it onto a bouncing and pitching cargo area, and once it landed the deckhands had to get it lashed down before it squashed them flat.

Ellie said it sounded like the crane operator and deckhands had it harder than Captain Mangual, and Gordon said, “No, no, no,” as though he hadn’t been getting through to her at all. No, Captain Mangual was the guy who made it all possible by doing a million different things to keep the boat in the same damn spot no matter what. He started to give another example and then just gave up.

“Oh,” Ellie finally said into the silence. After they hung up, she caught sight of her expression in the mirror in the foyer and snapped at herself: “Stupid.”

The butterfingers who’d dropped the transmitter drawer was Jeannette Laino’s husband, Louie, and the first snapshot he sent to her from the tower showed what looked like a circle of boys in life­jackets high in the air on a fairground ride, on the back of which he’d printed “On the Crane.” He explained later that that was how the guys got from the ship to the platform, and that spare parts and supplies were always unloaded first, since if anything got smashed or lost, it was better that it was the Coca-­Cola pallets. She asked how high the crane lifted them and he said over a hundred feet, and she exclaimed that it looked dangerous, and he told her that the rule was no lifting in winds over forty knots, since that sent the loads spinning like tops. And besides, two guys were always on safety lines trying to control the bucket’s swinging.

She asked if they couldn’t just go up the stairs. “Baby, if I had a baseball, from the ship’s deck I could barely hit the platform. And I was all-­state!” he said. “Does anything ever fall?” she asked. “I think the crane operators drop stuff on purpose to shake us up before it’s our turn,” he told her. When it was their turn, though, he added, it was funny how everybody stopped joking once they were up in the air.

“So are you keeping busy?” she asked. He reminded her that he was a grade 5, so he was as much a specialist as the tech sergeants. She allowed as how that was very impressive, and he answered that whenever she was ready to stop teasing him, that would be great, so she asked how he was getting along otherwise, and he said the same as always: he kept to himself and didn’t bother anyone. Those were his mottoes, along with “Stay friendly” and “Don’t question stupid orders.”

The new policy was that the helicopters would bring in everything except fuel and very heavy equipment. The choppers never shut off their engines, so while you stood there in the noise and wind, the guys coming off duty had to peel off their baggy yellow survival suits and hand them over to the guys coming on, and during the ride everyone did some serious sweating, so those suits were pretty funky. She asked if the helicopters flew in all sorts of weather and he answered that he guessed they had to, since they carried the mail and the beer. He said that you only got helicopter work in the armpits of the world, because in regular places the operating costs were too high with everything that was always going wrong and needing to be replaced. But he loved to see the choppers come in, their double rotors making their own storm and still setting the giant machines down as lightly as a leaf. And then you waited until the rotors lost enough speed to start drooping like they were worn out from the trip.

That night Jeannette lay in bed thinking about what a boy her Louie was, and then she moved on to other boys she’d dated before him. One she remembered had painted flames on his car and asked her to call him Shiv. She fell asleep thinking of that boy sitting in Louie’s television chair, and when she woke up her blinds were open and an old man wearing suspenders and no shirt was standing on her front lawn and looking in at her.

The guy that Louie wished Jeannette could meet, though, was Frankie Recupido, one of the divers, and a real Ernie Kovacs type. Louie had been told to watch out for him, and it wasn’t hard to see why: he was always pulling stunts like stuffing cut-­up rubber bands into someone’s pipe tobacco. On their first flight out to the tower he’d emptied a can of vegetable soup into his sick bag before takeoff and then pretended to throw up, so a few minutes later he could call out that he was still hungry before scarfing it down. He kept the noncoms and enlisted men supplied with moonshine he called plonk and made from sugar and banana peels and whatever else he scrounged from the cook. He’d gotten into two fights for punting the basketball off the platform after arguing about fouls during games. They’d had to launch a boat to recover the ball. In bad weather he went out to the railings around the platform and howled into the wind like a wolf.

Jeannette said he sounded like someone to keep away from, but Louie said he was a good guy who really missed his kids. His previous station had been Guam, and his family had gone along, but even so he’d been away so much in the eastern and southern Pacific that he’d been lucky to see them three weeks a year. Frankie told him that two-­thirds of the divers he knew were divorced or separated, since whenever the water heater shut down or a kid broke a finger or the roof sprang a leak back at the hacienda, a diver was probably offshore, and after a while the old ball and chain got fed up. He said his wife told him that for her the last straw had been the spiders hanging upside down from the living-­room ceiling. When their little girl first saw one, she’d said, “What is that? A cat?”

Louie found it funny that the one thing that Jeannette couldn’t get over about Frankie was that he had framed Playboy pinups over his bunk. When he told her about that, she just kept saying “Framed?” until he finally said, “You know what? Whether or not you’d run screaming from a guy like that onshore is beside the point. Here the only point is: can he do his job?”

Because, boy, they needed somebody to do that job. From day one, the official logs had listed unusual and alarming motions and sounds reported by personnel onboard, and after three or four visits the engineers agreed that the bracing and joints hadn’t been as effective in stabilizing the platform as they’d anticipated. They identified which braces and pins were most likely damaged and responsible, and this meant guys like Frankie had to carry out continual under­water inspections and bolt tightenings. The problem, the designers told them, was that the defective portions were not only weakening their immediate area but also shifting stress onto the entire structure.

Despite going down as often as they did, Frankie and the other divers couldn’t keep up with the accelerating damage. Even in good weather, the braces’ movements under the constant wave loads kept wearing down the pin joints. And what would happen in bad weather? The engineers had already figured out that each serious storm would stress a given pin as much as a full year of normal seas. Frankie would tighten bolts and the next day when he checked them again they’d be so loose he could turn them with his fingers.

At last the designers came up with a new idea, and big T-­bolts were flown out and installed at the loosest points to provide more rigidity. That helped some, but a few weeks later they investigated again, and word was that they’d told the Air Force that without radical measures the conditions would continue to worsen, with the ultimate loss of Tower no. 4 the most likely result.

So X-­bracing above the water was designed and installed in the summer of 1960. The guys felt the difference right away, but when Ellie asked Gordon why he didn’t sound more relieved, he told her what Captain Mangual had said when he first saw all that new rigmarole above the surface: since it filled in the space beneath the platform with its crisscrossing diagonals, waves that otherwise would have passed underneath the platform were now colliding head-­on into all that brace work. When she asked why that was a problem, Gordon answered that it was like when you were standing in the surf and saw a big wave coming: you wanted to turn sideways so as not to expose your whole chest to the wallop.

Betty Bakke was the first in her family to hear any reports about Hurricane Donna, from a spinster aunt whose telegram announced a ruined vacation in Miami Beach, and in her phone call to Roy that night Betty asked if the hurricane was something that the men on the tower needed to worry about. Gee, Roy answered, he sure hoped not, then asked how she was holding up, all by herself for so long, and she said that so many people now gave her such “poor you” glances that she really was starting to look tragic. She’d learned how to run the sewing machine and had made curtains and bedspreads. She told him that she was trying to be as self-­sufficient as possible and also doing volunteer work at the Airman’s Closet on the base, stocking donated items for the E-­4’s with dependents. He complimented her on being such a Samaritan, and she told him that she mostly stood embarrassed behind the counter while the less fortunate families picked over what was available. She said she never knew whether to wear her hat to work, so she always carried it in her hand. It was only after they’d gotten off the phone that she realized she hadn’t asked what was supposed to happen if the hurricane was headed toward the tower.

Edna Kovarick hadn’t heard about the hurricane until it was halfway up the North Carolina coast, but when she called Wilbur he was inside a radome watching the height-­finder antenna rock in its yoke while making its 360-­degree sweep, so he had to call her back. She asked then about the storm and he said they had an evacuation procedure in place and that if the storm got anywhere close he was sure they’d all be safe on dry land before she knew it. Next they talked about babies, and she reminded Wilbur of the story her sister had told them of carrying her infant on the train with an open wi