He opened his last beer and sat there for a minute watching the storm. The truck rocked in the current like a boat on gentle seas. The only thing Percy could think to do was bail out and swim the creek, find a house or something on the other side, somebody who could help. He had no idea what came after that. He rolled the window down and hauled Mutt into his lap. He was trying to convince the dog to jump, when, to his surprise, the railing creaked and splintered and the current washed his back end around so he was looking upstream a moment, his rear wheels poised over nothing. Then it was like the bottom dropped out of the Earth and Percy remembered to hold his breath as he plunged into the creek, Mutt scrambling and confused, water pouring through the window, beer cans floating by his head, the whole world upside down and dark.
It wasn’t as bad as Kathleen expected. Aunt Nora got them situated in the walk-in pantry and they had plenty of food in there and a portable radio, which seemed so old-timey to Kathleen, so quaint, and Aunt Nora lit a bunch of candles when the power went out, illuminating the pantry like a vigil or a honeymoon or a ghost story. She brought blankets and pillows and Murphy’s bassinette and lots of extra diapers and Lucy was curious about the baby—How much did he eat? How much did he sleep? Why did they name the baby Murphy? Aunt Nora had been distracted by their arrival at first, almost irritated, Kathleen thought, but she warmed to Lucy’s questions. Turned out Murphy was Aunt Nora’s maiden name.
“Your grandmother wanted him to be the third,” she said, whispering because the baby was asleep.
Lucy said, “The third what?”
Sometimes, her sister was so stupid, so young, that Kathleen wanted to hit her in the head, but other times her nearness to childhood charmed Kathleen and made her jealous in a way she couldn’t have explained. Aunt Nora had encouraged them to eat the perishables from the fridge so Lucy was spooning ice cream straight out of the carton, smearing her chin, and Kathleen had to resist the impulse to give her a hug. “Angus Bradshaw Ransom the third,” she said, and Lucy’s eyes and mouth went perfectly round with comprehension, as if a mystery of the universe had been explained. Aunt Nora did a quiet laugh, a slumber party laugh, and dipped a spoon into a carton of her own.
“Your Uncle Percy told me the craziest thing one time,” she said.
The close quarters and the forced quiet and the wavery light combined somehow to make Kathleen aware of her whole body, every muscle and bone, the follicles of her hair and the bottoms of her feet and the inside of her nose—the air in the pantry was thick with complicated smells—and this awareness of herself, of being alive at just this moment, made her think of Dexter and what they had planned and she couldn’t help wondering if Dexter was thinking of her as well.
“He claimed,” Aunt Nora said, “that newborns always look more like their fathers than their mothers, that there’s some prehistoric strand of DNA hardwired into every species to keep fathers from eating their young.”
Lucy said, “Uncle Percy is so weird.”
“I wish Dad had eaten you,” Kathleen said, and Lucy flicked her with her ice cream spoon, leaving a smear on Kathleen’s neck. Kathleen swiped the ice cream with her finger and stuck her finger in Lucy’s ear and Lucy, squealing, batted Kathleen’s hand away.
Aunt Nora shushed them but it was clear she was amused.
“He probably made it up,” Aunt Nora said. “You might have noticed that your Uncle Percy is more than a little full of shit.”
This was true, Kathleen thought, but also one of the reasons she liked Uncle Percy, how different he was than Uncle Angus and her own parents, how little he seemed to care what they thought of him, how little he seemed to care about anything at all. She considered being offended on his behalf but decided that Aunt Nora sounded more affectionate than rude.
“He told me once that humans blink over ten million times a year.”
“Why would anyone know that?” Lucy said.
Between bursts of static, the radio murmured on about the storm, volume turned down low enough that Murphy wouldn’t be disturbed. “According to the National Weather Service, Hurricane Raphael came ashore at . . . three feet of water in Bienville Square . . . one eyewitness reports . . .” Sometimes, when the static crackled, Murphy fidgeted and twitched and brought his fists up to his face, but he never woke enough to fuss. “Evacuation of Dauphin Island . . . gusts up to 160 miles per hour . . . emergency room closed at Mobile Infirmary due to . . .”
Was Kathleen worried about her mother and her grandmother? Yes, of course, but how could she explain the way it felt to be here with her aunt and her baby cousin and her sister with this hurricane beating against the house? The candlelight, the radio. When they got bored with storm reports, Aunt Nora twirled the dial looking for music, found an AM station broadcasting hits from the eighties. One particular line from a song Kathleen had never heard before got stuck in her head. When love walks in the room/Everybody stand up. Those words kept scrolling across her mind while she waited for Lucy and Aunt Nora to fall asleep. Finally, the wind died down outside and she felt a heavier silence settling over the pantry and she stepped quietly past her sister and her aunt and skirted Murphy’s bassinette and slipped out the back door into the night. When love walks in the room/Everybody stand up.
According to Dexter, they would have an hour or so of calm before the rest of the hurricane caught up, a hole in the fabric of the weather. She’d heard the expression before, of course, eye of the storm, but even so the silver moon caught her off guard, the way the sky had opened up, all those stars making their presence known inside a ring of clouds. It was exactly as beautiful as Dexter had promised. When loves walks in the room. Dexter was seventeen. His family lived around the block. He’d proposed their usual meeting place. Uncle Percy’s lot. He’d have no trouble sneaking out. His parents were older than Kathleen’s grandmother, too old to keep up with him anymore. He had a brother in his forties, bipolar, institutionalized since long before Dexter was born, and his parents hadn’t meant to risk another child. Everybody stand up. But Dexter was perfect, those broad shoulders, the way his hair was cut too short, so tall his arms and legs went on forever.
Earlier that day, she’d swiped a cigarette from her mother’s hiding place in the tampon box under the bathroom sink and she lit it now, wanted Dexter to taste it when he kissed her, smoked as she picked her way through the debris, limbs and shingles everywhere. She noticed the fallen oak almost right away but registered it out of order, as if her subconscious was protecting her from the sight, its root base first, making a lean-to over a flooded crater in the ground, then its trunk, split in two across the middle on impact, and then its upper reaches, caving in through the roof of her grandmother’s house, taking the balcony and section of wall with it as it fell, the lesion V-shaped, like the house had been unzipped. At first, she could hardly believe her eyes and then she did believe and she gasped and dropped her cigarette in a puddle. When loves walks in the room/Everybody stand up. She could see Dexter’s flashlight playing on the magnolia leaves and quickened her pace across the lawn.
“There she is,” he said, as Kathleen ducked under the branches.
They kissed until she raised her arms so he could help her with her shirt.
“I’ve got a song stuck in my head.”
“Sucks,” he said.
They kissed again while Kathleen unbuckled his belt.
Dexter asked her, “How’s your grandmother?”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” she said.
They were standing under the tree, her shirt and his pants draped on the nearest branch, the flashlight balanced on its base, its beam illuminating the upper reaches and catching on wet leaves like candle flames. The truth was she didn’t know the answer to his question. Nobody’s phones were working. They hadn’t heard from her mother since she left. Kathleen was just about to step back into his arms when a noise separated itself from the night. She couldn�
�t put her finger on the sound but it was somehow human and right away she knew that Lucy had followed her from the house. She crossed her arms over her chest. “What?” Dexter said. When love walks in the room/Everybody stand up. For what felt like a long time, she stood there looking at him, thinking Lucy had seen this much already, thinking how awful and magnificent was the world, wondering what were the chances a moment like this, exactly like this, would ever come along in her life again.
The old man was sitting in the stairwell, resting the barrel of a single-shot .410 on his bottom teeth and listening to the storm blunder around. He’d left the windows open wide. The house was a hundred years old, two over two, bedrooms up, kitchen and parlor down, and there was nothing here that mattered. The wind whipped past him on the stairs, stinging wet, surprised and angry sounding, he thought, at meeting no resistance. It had already taken his screened porch, the roof above his bedroom. He’d installed indoor plumbing twenty years ago but the bathroom was little more than a corrugated tin amendment to the kitchen and the storm had snatched that away as well.
He thought for a moment he heard a voice but that was impossible. It had to be a trick of wind. In the cedars. In the soybeans. In the kitchen.
In addition to the shotgun, he had a flashlight and a pint of Early Times with him on the stairs. He heard the voice again, was able to make out the word, “Anybody—” before the wind tore it to shreds. He slipped the barrel from his mouth and spat to clear the taste. He never had visitors. No way was somebody in the house on a night like this but he pushed to his feet anyhow, peeked around the corner. A shadow, a flicker of darkness deeper than the night. He stepped down off the stairs, gripped the unlit flashlight in his left hand and braced the .410 on his hip.
“What the hell?” he said, and hit the light.
There before him was the figure of a man, shirtless, barefoot, slicked brown with mud, his hair all wild angles from his head, arms covering his face like he’d never been exposed to artificial light. He might have shot. He would have been within his rights. But he only had one shell and it was spoken for. The figure was lowering his hands, patting the air between them, speaking now, his voice drowned out by wind. The old man waved with the shotgun, indicating the stairs. He walked the figure halfway up, used the .410 to let him know that he should sit.
“Talk,” he said.
The figure said, “I lost my dog.”
“I used to have a dog.”
“My truck is in the creek,” the figure said.
“Used to have one of those, too,” the old man said. “Now I just take the tractor when I need to go to town.”
The story that the figure told, shouting to be heard over the storm, took longer than the old man expected but it was just wild and dark enough to be believed. He spoke of mothers and hospitals, a washed-out bridge. He backed up in time and came forward again, crying now, partly, the old man thought, because of what he’d been through on this night but also because of the story he was telling. Some of what he said was lost to wind. Even more came out a jumbled mess. But the old man heard enough. The impossibility of living up to the past. The burden of trying. A last chance to measure up. Finally, the story caught up to the present, the house in the field, maybe a mile from the swollen creek, the two men here upon the stairs, one young, one old, both beset by storm.
The old man fished in his pocket for a key.
“Do you know how to drive a tractor?” he said.
The figure stared at the key the old man dropped into his palm like it was precious and strange.
“I’ll buy you a new tractor. I’ll buy you a new truck, too. What’s your number? I’ll call as soon as I can.”
“No phone,” the old man said.
“Then your address?”
“Don’t matter,” the old man said. “No way you’re gonna make it.”
He laughed and sipped the Early Times.
“I have to make it,” the figure said.
He used the key to scratch his phone number into the drywall. The old man followed him down the stairs and they stepped through an open window into the storm. The old man went no farther than what was left of his front porch, had to cling to a post to keep upright in the wind. He watched the figure crab low across the ground to the tractor, watched the tractor receding down the drive, one taillight busted out, the other a dying red pinprick in the fabric of this enormous night.
When the tractor was out of sight, he returned to the stairs and put the barrel of the .410 back in his mouth. The hurricane didn’t pay him any mind. After a minute, he took the barrel out and leaned the shotgun against the wall. He had to admit that he was curious. He couldn’t remember being curious about much of anything in a long, long time. He decided to wait, maybe give it a day or two. Then, if the hurricane saw fit to spare him, he’d hitchhike to town and call the number on his wall and find out if his tractor had brought this stranger safely through the storm.
Angus carried the cage back through the holds, sealing everything shut behind him, the bird quiet after all that talk. Morris was radioing their position to the Coast Guard when he returned. Standard procedure in these conditions. Call in every couple of hours so somebody would know where to start looking if they went down. Wind and rain lashing the wheelhouse, waves swamping the bow, Bullard leaning into the wheel with his legs apart, his cap turned backward on his head.
Morris signed off with the Coast Guard. Over his shoulder, without looking, he said, “We were about to flip a coin to see which one of us would have to break it to your wife.”
“I found this bird,” Angus said.
Morris stiffened. Angus saw it in his shoulders, his neck.
“That’s Dinah,” he said. “That’s my bird.” He turned to Angus, then, his expression difficult to read. “I live out on Dauphin Island. Maybe you knew that. I couldn’t leave them all.”
“How many do you have?” Angus said.
“Sixteen,” Morris said. “Different kinds.”
Angus pictured exotic birds perched on the backs of chairs like doves perched on a power line, Morris’s life unbidden before his eyes, molted feathers, cages, seed, newspaper, a charcoal grill where Morris did most of his cooking because it was too hard to keep the kitchen clean. Angus could see the storm surge sweeping under the house, wind shattering in through the windows, all those birds whipped to death like doomed confetti.
“What kind is Dinah?”
“She’s a mynah bird.”
“Dinah the mynah?”
“That’s right,” Morris said.
Angus passed him the cage and Morris scanned around for a place to put it, settled on the captain’s chair. He instructed Angus to take the wheel, sent Bullard below deck to hunt for rope. He pushed a finger through the bars. The bird nipped him with its beak but said nothing, as if it understood that it had revealed a secret in its terror and was ashamed. I’m so alone. His father would have let Morris keep his pride.
“Thank you,” he said.
Morris said, “For what?”
“For being here. For getting us this far.”
Morris made a face. “Thank the boat,” he said.
Bullard clattered back up the stairs a minute later bearing a length of rope. While Morris secured the cage, Angus tried to return the wheel to Bullard but Bullard said, “You take her,” and the Kagero plowed down the backside of a swell. Angus felt the wheel jumping and fighting in his hands but he held her steady through the trough, bow lights glimmering and bobbing in the rain. Took a moment to realize that he was seeing bow lights at all, the world no longer blotted out by the whiteness of the storm, and it dawned on him that his seasickness had passed. He thought of his wife, his son. Checked his bearings. Tried to sort out how many more hours before they might begin the slow turn back toward Mobile, but he couldn’t make the numbers line up in his head.
“You know what the
name means?” he said.
“What name?” Bullard said.
“Kagero.”
They stood there looking at him.
“It means ‘the shimmering mist that rises from the earth on a hot day.’”
“No shit?” Morris said.
“No shit,” Angus said.
Muriel didn’t know what time it was when A.B. came up to bed. To her surprise, she’d drifted off and now the mattress shifted and she opened her eyes and there he was, slump-backed, rubbing his face with both hands. She could hear the clock ticking on the nightstand but couldn’t turn to look because she was covered up with sleeping children, Doodle on one side, Angus on the other, Percy draped across her lap.
“Everything all right?” she whispered.
A.B. smiled over his shoulder, tired, unconvincing.
“I called his father. I didn’t want to get the police.”
How on earth had she managed to fall asleep on the heels of such a fright?
“They’ve been through enough,” she said.
He stood without reply and began to undress, peeling his shirt over his arms, revealing his broad shoulders, tufts of hair springing up around the collar of his undershirt. Her husband had a country boy’s physique, she thought, big and round, soft-looking but strong, his power an afterthought, innate rather than cultivated.
“I might have killed that boy,” he said.
He removed his dentures, dropped them in a glass of water, then dropped in one of the cleaning tablets, which made a sizzling noise like whispers. He stared into the glass as if he was reflected in it. After a moment, he clapped a hand over his mouth and began to cry. He didn’t make a sound. You wouldn’t have known to look at him but she could tell. She understood her husband well enough to be certain that his tears were born not only of what might have happened on this night but of the fact that no matter how strong he was, he didn’t have it in him to ward off all the danger and tragedy in the world, not even from his family. She knew as well that if she spoke, he’d push her away. So she watched him cry in silence. It didn’t last long. He wiped his eyes, his nose. He braced his hands on the chest of drawers and breathed until he was himself again.
Eveningland Page 15
