We slapped water: “Here, boys!” No go. The dogs’ collars were fitted with electrical stunners meant to keep them in the yard where a triggering line lay buried. Electricity citywide had been shut off since three a.m. Their owners were not home to help. I saw one dog had actually shed its collar. Still the poor creatures stayed. They must have scrambled up the house’s sides as water rose, then onto its roof, and finally out to the property’s front edge. And here they swam in bloody goldfish circles hours later.
I tried explaining their security system to the kids. But, dazed, boys didn’t quite register the setup. It would’ve seemed overelaborate, wasteful in their neighborhood. Seemed that way here, too.
Diana kept silent. I was now so glad for these youngsters’ strength. As I watched drowning dogs going under, snarling at each other’s necks, I started feeling sick. I went half faint myself—from motor fumes? Maybe stress.
Since waking to find my first and second floors sodden—I’d had a surge superhuman, pure attention mainly for others. Heck, I’d been in the boat for, what? six hours straight. Need be, just peeing off the side. But now I understood I hadn’t eaten since the night before, and then only a bowl of warmed-over oyster stew.
Could I somehow be a skinny old guy suddenly at retirement age? Oh, definitely. And, considering another rescue—of dogs so crazed and young and heavy—I felt myself go weak as water. Such gratitude now as four able brown hands (ivory palms) hooked the one poor creature’s collar then got another’s foreleg while heaving both with damp loud thwunks into the bottom of our rocking boat.
Soon as the gasping dogs were with us and safe on their sides, their tails, almost mechanical, beat three times very hard against aluminum. For a split second they looked over at each other. Just that once, but with such great joint effort. Then both fell dead asleep. This, of all things, shook me.
Of every triggering sight today, this seemed so sad and wonderful, their being saved if bloody, their staring at each other to acknowledge that, then out. I could see now: one was male, one female. So, a marriage.
The way they’d checked on each other before agreeing to lose consciousness, that was a true killer. I cannot describe it well enough. But when I looked at the kids astern, I felt glad they’d gone wet-eyed, too. Pals sat hugging. Diana barely noticed anybody, gazing at all our water as if it were just some mis-delivered Amazon order. Then, oh, but I wished my best friend were here. People always praised Jean’s jokes and smile as “dry”—a holy word today. Shouldn’t I have felt more grateful, forty years spent riding alongside someone so forgiving? I’d been the worst sort of snob—mine, a store-clerk’s snobbery. Now, finally qualified, I wanted my wife back. Now I was earning her.
One of the boys saw me shaken. Polite, he waited a few minutes before calling, “When you done with this load? If you still on the clock? Figure you could maybe take us back to where some our folks need help?”
“You bet you.”
With final prizes—three people and two live dogs, after all—I could head to higher ground. Our neighborhood smelled of raw pine sap so strong it burned your eyes like Lysol. You got a snootful of hog waste and this strange new scent, almost sweet. It was the smell of so damn much water left all to itself and allowed to rush anywhere, everywhere.
Dust had powdered each twig with a pinkish talcum (dust flying in odd puffs as if scared of becoming mud). But far under our boat, braiding currents pushed blackness over former golf courses and car lots. We squinted in the smell of what’s wild. Freedom, chaos, everything let loose at once.
It was something not even my great-grandparents got to sniff: it was the smell of wilderness, doing all it wanted before any of us ever got here.
—Doing all it will do once it has finally shed us.
IV.
FIVE YEARS LATER and I just turned seventy. “Mitch’s Boat People,” they call themselves? they threw me a surprise party.
Antoine and Sam and Lottie and her grandkids all turned up. Plus Diana, again looking forty-eight if a day. And the Hutchesons and Charlie Hague (with his skin like a girl’s).
Before floodwater dropped quite four feet, I’d already retired from insurance. If you think that paying it is hard, imagine the torture of quadruplicate recordkeeping. Went out of that office like I’d bailed from my second story. (Insurance had been Dad’s idea: “Take advantage of our contacts,” Shoe winked.)
The flood made me a thinker, made me mad, or smarter. Not sure which. Was it a breakdown afterward or some gush of overdue insight? Maybe all the above. A flood, after all.
That night in September, we’d been on our own. And somehow we briefly managed for each other. There truly was no government. No electricity, no property lines, no valid houses! There was whoever, in swimming distance, needed your little boat.
One thing I know now: It’s a privilege to at least try saving each other. It’s also a full-time job.
Riverside had been our one blue-chip sure thing, the citadel everybody in this eastern part of our state aspired to. Now? it’s a huge contaminated park, river view, not one 1939 “Colonial” still standing. So much for American history (a series of revivals anyways, I guess).
Five years after our night of high water, the number of people in Falls still seeing shrinks you would not believe.
Me, I actually have a new lady friend. Great bridge player, a widowed former school principal, Grace. Total charmer, too. Must be doing a little something right. I was spared owning even one salvageable stick of furniture. Blessing in disguise. And Dad’s “ancestral home,” very well-insured? So much harum-scarum flagstone way downstream.
These days I occupy a year-old maintenance-free condo, three miles from any river, thanks.
I like it here. White interiors, no floral wallpaper. One table, one bed, one real good couch. I guess I live like a 1950s shoe clerk staying strictly within his means. I live like a renter.
Retired, I scan three morning papers online. From the Times to the localest, I read them religiously. Aside from sports, I had let the world drift to hell in a handbasket. It sure got worse without my monitoring! Prediction and leadership keep failing us. Is it as bad as it seems or does this just mean I’ve entered my seventies?
Corrupt as it is today, Washington, D.C., must now smell like Falls did after the flood.
These days, maybe only the old and semi-brave should even bother keeping up with current events?
Only those with boats!
Now I sit quiet and dryly puzzle out my whole career: the choosing insurance, the marrying Jean, the not waiting for Diana, my old choices. Probably unadventurous to have stayed put in my hometown, in that Founding Father palace Dad bought for me, one high heel at a time.
“Never let Shadowlawn pass out of family hands,” he begged at the end. —Poor old Shoe. He died believing in American permanence. He’d never noticed others crowding behind us in line. He never guessed how fast we’d squander our country’s foolproof inheritance.
Finally, post-flood, I could live anyplace on earth. Some locals my age moved en masse to bone-dry Phoenix. But so many folks I know are still here, still getting over that one night. All my life I’d been waiting for something. —Was that it?
We’ve become good company for each other, way better than before. There are new kinds of people in my circle. I now know an artist that paints several “abstracts” a week. Keeps her busy. And I’ve come to like two gay guys that live together, and one of them, I swear, is the best golfer Falls ever produced. These days, between us, post-flood, so much can go unsaid. Since that night, I’ve given lots of Jean’s family money away. It never really felt mine.
Now that I can really begin again, I seem to have chosen to be here. It’s no longer my father’s neighborhood, not Jean’s or Diana’s. And, that’s what makes my staying put a choice. Pretty late in life, you can come to know your place.
But these five years afterwards, swimming animals still agitate my dreams: I’ll walk into a mall, our mall, and it has b
een sealed then flooded as if to make a skating rink but it’s overfilled with floating scared wild animals, smelling not terrible but more like wet-wool overcoats. These creatures make no sounds except the slaps of paws, the kicks of their hard hooves knocking against mall glass, mall stanchions, mall Sheetrock. I wake, sitting, terrified.
I am Mitch, now high and dry, and somehow seventy.
Before our flood, my drink of choice was Jack Daniel’s and water.
These days, I take it straight.
MY HEART IS A SNAKE FARM
I HAD A SNAKE FARM in Florida. Well, Buck really owned it, but I believe I’m still Board Chairlady. Almost overnight, he hand-sculpted a one-stop two-hundred-reptile exhibit right across the road from me here. At first it was very clean. It drew lively crowds from the day it opened: December 24, 1959.
Then President Kennedy went and excited our nation about putting a man on the moon. That sicced the Future on any act just roadside and zoological. Tourists soon shot through our state, bound only for Cape Canaveral. Our Seminoles? Our bathing beauties? Passé at eighty mph.
I myself had just retired from life as a grammar-school librarian. I was an unmarried woman of a certain age, imaginative as one could be on a fixed income. I’d felt a growing hatred of Ohio’s ice, of shoveling the brick walk I knew would break my hip if I stayed another year. I was and am a virgin, my never-braced teeth too healthy. Toledo’s secret nickname for me even as a little girl: Threshing Machine.
My worst vice? Letting others see me gauge their foolishness. So claimed my lifelong housemate, Mother. Even so, fellow-librarians did make me a national officer, thanks to my way with a joke, my memory for names, my basic good sense. And because, at our dressy conventions, everyone looked better than I and they all knew I knew.
An old college friend urged Florida on me. “But, Esther? Be careful where you first settle. Danger is, once you’re sprung from those fierce Toledo winters, the first place you find in the Sunshine State you will—like some windblown seed—take fast tropic-type root.” She was a prophet. I drove past Tallahassee and, eager to make good time, got only as far as a crumbling pink U.S. 301 motel called Los Parnassus Palms. “That’s almost literary,” I said, hitting the brakes of my blue Dodge. Been here ever since. Rented a room by the night, week, then year, and wound up buying the whole place for less than my Toledo town house cost. I still keep the towels fresh in all twelve suites.
A previous owner had named (then plaqued) each luxury efficiency: “The Monterey,” “The Bellagio,” etc. True, I never knew what such titles meant. But I accepted them as part of History’s welcome by-product, Romance. Some suites I lined with library shelves, others served recreation needs. E.g., 206-B, “The Segovia”: Periodicals, Ping-Pong, Reference.
I didn’t care to chat up strangers nor wash the sheets of hairy men. So I eventually switched off my place’s wraparound neon. But a motel cliff-hangs its highway as waterfront property has lake. Salesmen kept honking, believing that dead signage (plus one cute wink) might mean a discount.
Now, to me, Virginity and Refrigeration have both always seemed blue. Ditto one small steady “NO” under the pink and blinking “VACANCY.” So, months into ownership, royally sick of explaining myself, I flipped on that blue “NO” full-time. Redundant, you say? With my age sixty-seven or -eight? Well, let’s get this part over.
As to sex, I had one chance once with a beautiful boy but I chose not to. Actually, it was the father of a friend but it seemed wrong in their sedan in the countryside, and I thought there would be other takers. There were not. You can wind up with nothing; but, if you claim that and don’t apologize and forever tell it straight, it can become, in time, something. It’s not for everybody to marry and have kids, or even to be, well, homosexual. Or even to be sexual. But you can still retire and move to the semitropics and wind up on the board of a Serpentarium. You never know—that’s the thing. And I say, thank God.
Except for two middling hurricanes, my first year in Florida proved ever quieter. I’d always said I liked my own company; well, now I had twelve cubic suites’ worth. In identical bathroom mirrors, I found one tusky similarity saying, “Esther, you again?” True, the most intellectual Baptist ladies hereabouts invited me to join a “Serious Issues” book club; yes, I re-linoleumed my whole second story; by then it was almost 1960.
The previous October, Mother’d finally ceased ringing her favorite little bedside bell. I had put it there for emergencies, but soon a moth in the room, any passing car, warranted much brass chiming. By the end, I asked the morticians if they would settle Mother’s service bell right in the coffin with her. These large, kind men remembered me lording it benign over their grammar-school library. They now said, “How sentimental. So your momma, in case she wants something, can ring for someone else in the next world?” I lowered my eyes. “Exactly,” I said, but thought, “And ring, and ring!” I let gents believe whatever version of me they found easiest to take.
Now that I’d retired to wearing flats, finally becoming my own silent hobby, imagine my alarm when the two acres right across my highway here blossomed into Carnival overnight. Someone had leased the swampy inlet and its entire adjoining beachfront. He’d claimed my sole view of the ocean. One morning, two black Cadillacs, sharky with finnage, rolled up, pulling silver-bullet Airstream trailers. A pile driver soon pounded what looked like sawed-off telephone poles right into sand dunes.
The man in charge, I saw from my perch, was a big tanned white-haired fellow, all shoulders and department-store safari gear. He supervised via barks and back slaps, using his beer bottle as a pointer. I always resist such show-off males. (They never notice.) I’d served under three similar swaggering principals, mere boys. Any Ohio man willing to be called “third-grade teacher” got promoted above capable senior women. Now I watched this particular bull, six-two, fifty-eight if a day. Dentures probably.
Across the poles, he hand-stretched huge canvas placards pulled tight as fitted sheets. Each showed a different Wild Animal of the creeping, crawling, biting variety. The ocean? Already upstaged. (First a showman hides something, then he describes it so you’ll shell out the admission.) Braggart images looked wet with all the drippage colors of tattoos. Crocodiles were shown, big as floating shacks. Black snakes glistened in figure-eight oil spills that lashed up the legs of screaming white girls scarcely dressed. The more pictures this hatchet-faced lion-tamer rigged aloft, the slower flowed traffic on old U.S. 301. Beasts scaly, beasts spiny, swarthy, twisted, fanged. “Come one, come all.” Not wholly uninteresting.
Meantime, I dragged a cushioned bamboo lounger out of “The Santa Anna.” Arms crossed, jaw set, I settled in, daring him to get one centimeter tackier.
The salt-white dunes soon swarmed with antlike workers. Into sand, using driftwood, the head honcho drew a large scallop shell, outhouse-sized. He pointed where he wanted it built. Mexican-American bricklayers scratched their heads then shrugged but, laughing, nodded. Many cinder blocks got unloaded. Within hours, the men had formed three steps, each mitered round as a fish gill in Fantasia. Atop these stairs arose one little Aztec ruin dropped beside the sea—a ticket booth, glass-fronted, scallop-crowned.
As masons mosaicked, Jungle Jim praised his artistes, fed them grilled sandwiches, wielded a trowel while squinting past his cigarette. His big piñata head moved side to side, judging, as he framed all this beauty between his thumbs. He once backed too near traffic.
Three attractive young women, using hand fans, kept their folding chairs aimed wherever he largely stood. By six o’clock, his cinder-block fortress, shaped like some goldfish bowl’s hollow castle, had been painted an odd pistachio-meets-swimming-pool green.
All day, knuckles on hips, making a jolly silhouette, the man laughed and threw his head back sort of thing. He seemed as entertained as I by how his fantasy could rise in hours from sketch to housing. Come ruddy sunset, these circus folks threw tapering shadows that spanned traffic, just hooking their heads and shoulders
into my parking lot. The showman (roughly my age, I now decided, though some men carry it better) mixed two clear pitchers of possible martinis. He and his dark workers toasted their structure and everyone watched the sun sink ruby-colored behind it. Then the boss—with a bullfighter’s slash—tossed his whole martini up the stairs, cocktail glass shattering into sand. His women, stirred, saluted him by knocking back their drinks in single gulps. Thus ended their first day here.
If such a white-trash eyesore had sprung up across the street from my Toledo mews town house, I would’ve stormed City Hall with two hundred other irate owner-career girls. But here, even with my oceanfront eclipsing fast, I stared from my greenhouse (formerly 202-A) while pretending to read fiction, doubting that things could grow more gypsy-ish.
The level of construction across four lanes of traffic soon became almost too complex for even me to track. Then two huge snakes arrived UPS. How, you ask, could I know the bundle’s contents from this distance even while using Mother’s surprisingly helpful mother-of-pearl opera glasses? Hints: serpent-package length, two added suitcase handles, triangular orange Caution stickers, air-holes thickly screened, and how the delivery boy, wearing shorts, held these out like barbells, far, far from his plump legs.
The carnival’s first six days here, I played hard to get. I deprived management of my company. I did not even wave. They seemed to be coping all too well.
Nothing like this had ever so directly threatened my privacy tropique, my sense of self. Of course, the previous year, our retired librarians’ newsletter, Ex LIBRIS, had announced, “Guess which colorful national officer just retired to and purchased her own ‘compleat’ Florida motel? (As yet unlisted, she is 813-555-0152.) Yes, our Esther!” Librarians fetched up here so thick I thought of it as filing. I stuck the Altoona crowd in 104-A, “The Sangria.” The louder Texans I sent on purpose to the leaking 307-B, “The Santa Anna,” an Alamo pun only I got. Eventually, I hung sheets over my office doors and windows. And, slowly, even those big-time lending librarians greediest to borrow a free sunny room got the hint. Circulations dwindled.
The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus Page 18
