by Hugh Howey
“Stop at the peak,” he told them.
Daniel and Hunter clung to a limb at the roof’s apex. Their dad adjusted the rope holding the three of them to their tethered harnesses. He then uncoiled the rope around his chest and tied a series of loops and knots around the massive limb draped over the house. The other end of the rope was wrapped around the main trunk of the tree several times.
“Hold this,” their father told them.
Hunter and Daniel obeyed. They were in their father’s realm. What he said mattered, had force. This fact was as dizzying as the heights.
They each held the rope, which was wound twice around the great trunk, then tied tightly to the limb with complex knots. Daniel leaned back on the rope, testing it and finding security in the way it held him to the roof. Their father climbed up and straddled the peak of the roof. He brushed a small limb out of his way. Daniel looked back and could see his mom staring up at them. She had moved further into the yard to see them better through a hole in the canopy.
“The friction of the rope will do all the work,” their father said. “Just hold tight.” He looked to both of them. Daniel glanced over to Hunter to see a serious calm on his face. “You ready?”
Both boys nodded.
Their father set the chainsaw on his knee and flipped a lever. He yanked the handle and the machine roared to life. A haze of smoke billowed out, and the saw grumbled angrily as their dad revved the motor. He checked with the boys one more time, then pressed the chain into the massive broken limb clinging to their house.
He cut in stages, working his way down to the core of the limb from two angles. When the last bit went, the limb sagged down on the rope, stretching it, but not far. The chainsaw fell quiet.
“Now play it out,” he told them.
Daniel let some slack into the rope, and his brother did the same. They had to flick the line to get it going, but then the limb slid down the steep incline of the roof, the scratch of bark loud on the rough shingles.
“That’s good,” their father said, peeking over the side. He guided their efforts, having them hold up when the tree reached the other gutter. He and Carlton talked back and forth, the rattle of the aluminum ladder heard on the other side. Following their father’s commands, they lowered the huge limb down to the wooden deck out of sight and far below. The rope sang out as the limb went over the edge, its full weight hanging. The coil of line around the tree bit hard, but gobbled hungrily at any slack they fed it.
Carlton yelled something.
“She’s down,” their father relayed.
The slack fed into the rope stayed there.
The three of them rested on the roof, smiling at one another. Daniel looked around at the canopy with a new perspective. He saw each large limb as a discrete unit, as a task that could be tackled in fifteen or twenty minutes. Their father moved to the next one in the way, and Daniel could even see how large chunks of the main trunk could be removed, careful of course not to hit the shingles with the chainsaw.
They set to work, pausing after the next limb to accept a thermos of water hauled up at the end of a line. After a while, the labor became routine, and the spectators on the ground began working to clear the smaller limbs as they were cut away and rained down. Daniel took special pleasure when he saw Anna down in the front yard with Edward, the two of them stopping by to see the progress. By then, he was moving around the tree and roof with ease, handling the lines as surely as after a long weekend on the boat. He and Hunter worked as a team, his older brother becoming something of an equal in the labor. And together, with their father, and under the admiring gaze of a girl he surely loved—however fast it had happened—they worked to clear the house his dad had long ago built. They worked until the only thing that remained was the tall trunk, stripped clean and leaning into the crushed dormer and the stove-in roof.
••••
It was late when the three of them finally undid their harnesses and came down the ladder, one by one. Their father was the last one off the roof, pausing to tie a serious tangle of knots around the belly of the old tree. He rattled down the ladder last, and then collapsed it and carried it out of the way.
“I appreciate the use of the Bronco,” he told Edward, who had returned with Anna for the last of the procedure.
“Absolutely,” he said, smiling through his beard.
Their father seized the line hanging from the tree and walked with it through the front yard to the cul-de-sac where the Bronco had been backed up between debris piles. He wrapped the line around the bumper, tied a loop in one side, then fed the other side through the loop. With a series of tugs, he yanked the line incredibly tight, taking the slack out, tying the Bronco off to the tilting tree. The top of the taut line just barely cleared the massive root ball sticking up from the ground, the circular pit of missing dirt sitting like a bowl beneath.
“Four wheel drive?” Edward asked.
Their father nodded. “And we’ll ride, just to add more weight.” He waved to the boys, then got in the passenger seat. Chen and Zola ran out and joined Hunter in the back seat. Daniel and Anna crawled through the open window and sat in the back, looking out at the tree and the taut line from bumper to bough.
“Easy at first,” their dad said.
The Bronco lurched forward, the tires groaning against the pavement, and the rope whined in complaint. It stretched, and the knot made a crunching sound as it adjusted itself.
“Stay to the side,” Daniel told Anna, suddenly fearful of the pent-up ferocity of the line. He imagined it parting and coming straight through the back of the car.
The Bronco growled forward another foot, and the line crackled. The car moved again, and Daniel saw a worried look on Carlton’s face, standing at the side of the root ball. He seemed to be shaking his head as if nothing was happening.
The engine revved; one tire spun a little; Daniel could smell exhaust, could hear the rope grinding against itself. And then something gave. He reached across the fearful void between himself and Anna, both still leaning away from the power of the line stretching off the bumper, and fumbled for her hand. The Bronco surged forward. Slack flew into the line, like it had parted, but it was from the movement of the tree. The line went tight again. Carlton and his mom flinched away from the root ball, then turned to study it.
Hunter whooped. It was hard to see, looking right at it, but the tree was moving. The root ball was lowering back to the earth. Without the heavy limbs, and with most of its upper trunk removed, the much lighter tree was being pulled down by its roots and by the growling Bronco. It suddenly lurched off the house and settled toward the ground, tilting dangerously, but then guided by the rope as Edward drove across the cul-de-sac. It ended up back where it once stood, pointing at the sky, a sad husk of a tree without its limbs, the mound of earth clinging to its roots returning to the large divot it had left behind.
The rope finally went slack, and Carlton waved. Even their mother was smiling as she looked back at the house with its one busted eye. The other kids in the car were cheering and hollering, and Daniel joined in. He squeezed Anna, who didn’t seem to mind that he was covered in bark and roof gravel and damp with sweat. They all poured out of the car to go and look. Carlton and their mom steered them away from the tree, as if it still posed some unsteady threat. Daniel gasped at the sight of the gaping hole in the roof, the interior of the house visible and open to the sky above. It was a wound, sure, a nasty shiner, but at least the offending blow had finally been removed.
28
Things didn’t go back to normal; they went back to the way they were. The power company showed up a day later apologizing for the delays, explaining the hundreds of thousands who had been without power across the Low Country. They estimated it would be another week, at least, before the neighborhood had power.
Cell phone service was restored soon after that visit. Zola said she could go without a hot shower for the rest of her life, if only those bars remained. She and her friends wr
ote books to each other, one little line at a time, detailing their adventures from Hurricane Anna and her aftermath.
Chen’s parents got in touch almost immediately after service returned. They made their way down from Columbia with a list of supplies relayed by Daniel’s mom. They also brought an incredible buffet of fast food with them, a welcomed luxury. Edward and Anna came over to enjoy the feast. Hunter left with Chen and her parents to help out at their house. It didn’t seem like he was going far now that he was again a phone call away. Their mother cried anyway.
Six days after the storm, Carlton finally got in touch with the mechanics and was able to get his car back, giving the family enough mobility to pick up supplies. Power was restored a day later to the grocery store; several of the convenience stores reopened soon after. Daniel’s mom spent many hours on the phone with State Farm, mostly on hold, as they tried to find a rental and figure out when an adjuster could come see the car. The agent explained that they were as busy as they’d ever been and that it could take some time. She didn’t even mention the house to them.
Daniel spent the next week on the roof with his father. His dad had rounded up some materials and supplies from old contractors he had worked for; the lines at Lowe’s and Home Depot were too outrageous to consider. Houses everywhere wore bandages of blue tarps and plywood. Chainsaws and generators could not be had at any price. There were rumors of gouging as entrepreneurs from out of state came through with trailers full of both, selling them for twice the retail price. News trucks roamed Beaufort looking for such tidbits, reporting from ground zero, the point of impact, landfall.
Daniel felt removed from and above it all. He was too busy learning how to peel back shingles; cut sheathing with a handsaw; scab in rafters, which often meant hammering at awkward angles. He learned how to measure and cut plywood to fit, how to frame out a dormer, how to lay tar paper and tack it in place with roofing nails. A few times a day, Anna would come over to gauge their progress from the ground. Daniel would beam down at her, rattling off the day’s work or holding his arms in a ta-da pose. She would laugh and bring water up the ladder and smile at him with all the promises of more moonlight strolls through the neighborhood, holding hands and talking, enjoying the dead silence of the powerless world, laughing and kissing.
It was a momentous day when one of his father’s friends came through with a brand new window. They were laying shingles down when he pulled up in his truck and called out jovial insults to Daniel’s father, dropping his tailgate with a bang. It took a few shims to get the fit right, but the window went in with little effort. A handful of nails locked it in place. A piece of damaged siding salvaged off the back of the house was cut to cover the house wrap. The last of the shingles went on, and from the exterior, at least, the house was healed over.
On that last day, after Daniel had climbed down the ladder with a load of tools and supplies, his father had remained on the roof. Daniel looked up from the ground and saw him resting on one of the toe-boards, that two-by-four he had helped nail into place over a week ago. His father looked over the new dormer—a seamless copy of the original on the other side of the roof. He turned from it and gazed out over the yard, and Daniel didn’t ask or intrude into his thoughts. He went off to wash his hands and track down the smells from the kitchen, leaving his father to contemplate broken homes and what it took to mend them.
The next day, their father found a ride to Columbia, where there was plenty of work patching roofs. Daniel knew there was plenty more work even closer by, but didn’t challenge the decision. He figured his dad wanted to leave while he was still wanted—or needed, at least—rather than after he’d made things worse. Or possibly, it was getting too hard to take for him: being around the family he left, feeling a stranger in the house he’d built. Rather than wait at the cul-de-sac for his friend to arrive, he had gathered his meager belongings, said his goodbyes, and walked to the end of the neighborhood to wait. He was to the end of the driveway when Daniel realized he’d left the chainsaw behind.
Meanwhile, there remained a lot of work to be done on the inside of the house. The damage from the storm, like much damage, was more than skin deep. Zola’s room was a wreck; they took plenty of pictures, cataloged the damage, and slowly went to work. Bags and piles of sheetrock, strips of carpet, and mourned possessions went out. New insulation went in, covered by scraps of sheetrock it took half a day at Lowe’s to secure. After mudding and painting, putting down more carpet, moving Hunter’s bed into Zola’s room, it almost looked like a room again, like someone could live there.
And then there was Anna.
It was unusual for a first named storm to form so late in the season, even more unusual for it to become such a perfect storm and do such damage. Nobody could remember an “A” storm having such an impact. All the same could be said of Daniel’s Anna. From four houses down, she had come out of nowhere. She was as electronically unpopular as he, and Daniel found in their long walks and talks the sort of company he had been hunting for in the digital wilderness. In the two weeks he was out of school, and the neighborhood was without power, they hardly moved beyond holding hands, kissing, and lingering embraces. For Daniel, it was an inconceivable enough. He had gone from emotionally and romantically stunted to just right.
As he returned to school, and Anna continued her studies at home, Daniel found that he was moving into the world as an adult, despite his virginity. That last was now something he treasured and savored, rather than something he meant to destroy and conquer. He moved into the world as an adult with a secret, a man with a silly love in his heart, a girlfriend down the street that hardly any of his friends knew—and Daniel figured it was their loss.
••••
“Dude!”
Roby waved from across the courtyard, a goofy grin on his face. Daniel dug his thumbs into the straps of his backpack and hurried over to meet him.
“I’ve been trying to call you for two days, man.” Roby threw his arms around Daniel and slapped his backpack.
“I’ve had my phone off,” Daniel said.
“What for?”
Daniel shrugged. “I got kinda used to not being reached at any time by whoever,” he said. He left out that the “whoever” was usually his mom trying to get him to come home from Anna’s house. “How’ve you been? Did you guys get much damage?”
Roby rolled his eyes. “Did we get much damage? Dude, we had half our windows blown in. Someone said the gusts got over one-sixty up on the hill behind us. We were in the eye wall for like an hour.” He nodded his head. “What about you guys?”
Daniel shrugged. “Lots of trees down. One big one into the house. But it wasn’t that bad.”
“Sounds like you got lucky, then.”
“I don’t know about that,” Daniel said.
“Hell yeah you did. Didn’t you hear about Jeremy’s house?”
“Jeremy Stevens?”
“Yeah, dumbass.” Roby’s eyes widened. “You remember the party, right? The night of the storm?”
“I guess,” Daniel said. Some of that night drifted back to him. He remembered a ride in a cop car, loud music, having a little to drink—
“That’s weird. I’d kinda already had forgotten about that.” He scratched his head. “Probably because of all that came after. I mean, I had the worst two nights of sleep—”
“But you remember the video, don’t you?” Roby narrowed his eyes. “Dude, it’s all anyone’s been talking about.”
Daniel stared at him.
“The video of you and Amanda Hicks? Full frontal nudity? What the fuck, man?”
“Oh shit,” Daniel said. “Oh fuck. Fuck me, dude.” Sudden images of Anna sitting in front of her dad’s computer, two hands over her mouth, Daniel spinning naked before her. “I’m totally screwed,” Daniel said.
Roby laughed. “You have no idea how lucky you are, you shit! That video is like urban legend now. If you were one of the fifty or so people to see it, you’re like in this cult.�
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“What do you mean?” Daniel was pretty sure he was going to throw up on the pavement. He felt like everyone walking past was looking right at him, smiling.
“Jeremy’s house had flood damage. His home computer is toast.”
“You’re shittin’ me.” Daniel still felt sick. It was going to take days to pass. “But everyone’s okay, right?”
Roby waved his hand. “Like that’s more important. But yeah, it wasn’t even from the storm, not directly. Their pool burst open and flooded half the downstairs.”
Daniel clutched his shirt. “And the computer?”
“I tried everything.” Roby frowned. “Couldn’t save your little video.”
“What do you mean? You went over there and tried to salvage it?”
“Like I want to see your little prick.” Roby glanced around the courtyard. “I told Jeremy I would try and get their family stuff off the drive, pictures and documents and what-not, which I did.”
“You did.”
“Yeah. I plugged the drive into my computer. Worked like a charm. The motherboard was the only thing that got wet.”
Daniel was about to explode. “For fuck’s sakes, Roby, what the hell did you do?”
Roby smiled. “I put you in my debt for let’s see . . . like, forever.”
“You deleted it.”
He raised his eyebrows and grinned coyly. “Or I kept a copy. You’ll never know.”
“Dude—”
“Speaking of which, we still have a ton of debris to round up and get rid of. I told mom that you’d be coming over this week and helping me do my share.”
“Seriously, man? You’re gonna blackmail me?”
His friend smiled. “Nothing I do to you will be worse than what I prevented.”
“But you’re my friend!”
“Yeah, well, then you should’ve gotten in touch with me at some point the past two weeks.”
