Buddy

by M. H. Herlong

  I ain’t never heard wind like that before. It sounds like a ship on the river and a cat screaming and a whistle blowing all at the same time. And it don’t stop. It just keeps going on and on and on.

  The pipes in the walls are rattling and the glass in the windows is shaking. The curtains are blowing in and out even though the windows are locked shut. Every once in a while the rain slams against the windows like somebody threw a bucket of gravel straight at the glass.

  I hear footsteps and it’s Mama. She’s tippy-toeing across the room. She pulls Baby Terrell out of the crib. He’s so asleep he almost flops out of her arms. She takes him in the bed with her. I see her crawling under the covers and tucking Baby Terrell up between her and Daddy. I feel Tanya next to me. In the dark I can barely see her eyes shining at me, wide open and still. “Don’t be scared,” I whisper, and pull her closer.

  Underneath all the sounds of the wind, there’s a howling sound. A howling sound like Buddy’s. I’m laying there with Tanya all snugged up next to me and I feel like I can hear him all the way in New Orleans. He’s sitting on that cold floor. That old house is shaking, and he’s hearing the wind just like I am. He’s tilting his head back. His mouth is opening up. And out comes that sound. “You left me, Li’l T,” he’s saying, and all the sadness in his heart is just pouring out in that little, bitty bathroom all by himself.

  I’m squinching up my eyes and trying to send him a message. “Be brave, Buddy,” I’m saying. “Be brave.”

  And then all a sudden something outside explodes. Loud. Like a bomb’s been dropped.

  And again and again and again.

  I hear Mama’s voice praying. She’s praying almost as loud as the wind but I can’t make out her words.

  And then Daddy’s bending down beside us and saying, “Everybody under the bed,” and we’re all crowding up under where it’s dusty and there are probably spiders, but we ain’t thinking about that.

  Daddy’s head is up beside me and I whisper in his ear, “What’s that sound, Daddy?”

  “The trees,” Daddy says. “All those pine trees are popping in two.”

  We lay under the bed and listen.

  One after the other the trees explode, and we hear the sound of the branches breaking as they crash past each other to the ground, and then they hit, and sometimes the whole house bounces and somewhere in the house we hear glass shatter, and always we hear that wind blowing and screaming and howling.

  And now I’m thinking about the window in our bathroom and the pecan tree beside our house and my mind is so tight with pictures I can’t send any more messages to Buddy.

  We’re laying there so long I forget there’s any other place to be. I forget my name is Li’l T. It’s almost like being asleep except it’s completely different. I feel Daddy beside me. Sometimes he’s stiff. Sometimes he’s praying. When I remember, I say my prayers, too. And I cross my fingers just in case.

  When it’s finally quiet, we creep out from under the bed. Granpa T’s so stiff he can’t hardly move. Mama’s got dust balls in her hair. Tanya’s practically sucked her thumb off her hand, and Baby Terrell needs a new diaper bad.

  We find Aunt Joyce locked in her bathroom. Daddy gets her to come out. All together we open the front door and look out into the drippy, morning sun.

  All the pine trees in her yard are down. Every single one.

  And the air smells sparkly and clean, like a Christmas tree lot.

  The electricity pole is broke in two and half is laying on the ground. One little tree is leaning on the roof of the front porch. All the other trees between the house and the road are snapped and cracked and blocking the driveway. Our car is crushed and Aunt Joyce’s car is penned in between two tree trunks twice as big around as a utility pole.

  “We ain’t going nowhere soon,” Granpa T says.

  Aunt Joyce bends down and picks up something laying on the front porch. It’s a shingle. Then I see the yard is full of them. She sighs. “We don’t have any electricity,” she says. “Don’t open the refrigerator unless you have to. We’ll fire up the grill to cook. The rescue trucks’ll come soon.”

  I look at Daddy. “You said two days.”

  He looks back at me. “What do you want me to do about it?” he says, and goes clomping out on the porch to sit.

  19

  Once the storm clears up, it gets hotter than ever. The air is still and quiet. There ain’t no breeze blowing. There ain’t no birds singing.

  My guess is, there ain’t no birds left and if there is, there ain’t nowhere for them to sit. When we stand on the porch and look out, Aunt Joyce’s yard looks like an ocean of pine branches with broke-off trunks sticking up every once in a while. Daddy asks Aunt Joyce if she’s got a saw he can start cutting some of the branches with. He says he wants to cut a path to the garden. He wants to make his way to her car. She finds a half-rusted saw and an old ax in a closet by her washing machine. She says they ain’t been used in a thousand years, and they look it.

  Daddy picks them up, heads outside, and starts chopping.

  Every morning Daddy and Granpa T sit in Aunt Joyce’s car and listen to the radio. When I ask Daddy what he’s listening to, he just looks at me and tells me to go pick up some shingles. I’m making a pile of shingles beside Daddy’s pile of branches. I can’t help but notice they ain’t all the same kind of shingles and there ain’t no other house nearby that I can see.

  We eat steak and chicken from the freezer. We drink hot drinks out of the can. We run out of clean clothes. We pull all the tomatoes still hanging on the vines.

  Mama says she’s losing count of the days, but I ain’t. Every night when I lay down on my pallet, I say to myself, “That’s another one.”

  I lay there and I’m wondering where in that bathroom does Buddy lay himself down. That tile is cold and hard, and we didn’t put his blanket in there with him. I’m wondering if he can eat all he needs out of that hole in the bag. I’m wondering what if the stopper don’t work in the tub and all the water drains out.

  Sometimes I think about the window and the pecan tree and I squinch up my eyes and I think as hard as I can to Buddy.

  When I get home, I’m thinking to him, I’m going to make it up to you. I promise. I tell him I’ll sell my bicycle back to the lady and it’ll be dog biscuits every day. I tell him I’ll make him that leg. I know Granpa T will help me. We’ll walk to the river. It won’t be long, Buddy, I’m thinking to him. It won’t be long.

  But no rescue trucks come.

  We’ve been living in that house without electricity for five days.

  On day six Mama says, “We got to get milk. This baby needs milk.”

  Granpa T nods real slow. “And I need my medicine.”

  “Are you about out?” Daddy says real sharp.

  Granpa T pulls the little brown bottle out of his pocket and shakes it. It don’t make hardly any noise.

  “Why didn’t you say something before?” Daddy asks, and then he looks at Aunt Joyce. “How far are we from town?”

  “Ten miles,” she says.

  Daddy looks down at his shoes. “I can walk ten miles,” he says, and heads for the door.

  We run after him. “When will you be back, Daddy?”

  “When I get back,” he says.

  We wait all day. We wait all night. We wait all morning.

  Baby Terrell’s crying something bad. Mosquitoes have bitten his arms all to pieces but we have to keep the windows open because it’s so hot. Mama’s run out of diapers and Aunt Joyce is ripping up her sheets. Tanya’s sucking on her thumb all day. Mama sits on the front porch and fans herself. Granpa T sits on the sofa and leans his head back. He hardly moves at all. He’s gone and can’t nobody go with him.

  When it’s almost night again, we hear a truck a long way off. We all jump up, and the
n after a while we see Daddy walking down the long drive with two other men. They got great big saws. They pull the cords and fire them up, and then they start cutting their way to the house. We can smell the pine trees again. We’re jumping up and down and cheering. When they’re done, me and Tanya go running down the road to Daddy and we jump in his arms. Mama’s standing on the porch yelling, “Thank you! Thank you!”

  Daddy grabs us up. He stinks something bad but it smells good. He sends us down the road. “Ride with the men,” he says. “We’ll be right behind you.”

  Mama and Aunt Joyce are already piling stuff in Aunt Joyce’s car, and I’m thinking, We’re going home at last. I’m thinking when I open that bathroom door Buddy’s probably going to knock me over he’ll be so glad to see me. I’m thinking I’ll take him outside, and we’ll walk a little in the yard to stretch his legs, and then I’ll take him to the shed, and we’ll sit in the dark, and I’ll tell him about the storm, and he’ll listen to every word. Every single word.

  Get ready, Buddy, I’m thinking. Here I come.

  “Are you taking us all the way to New Orleans?” I say to the men.

  They laugh. “Just to town,” they say.

  All the way in, we’re looking at what that storm did. Trees are down everywhere. Electricity lines are laying around like spaghetti. Some houses have their roofs torn off. One house has a swimming pool ripped up and laying against the front porch. Cars are laying around upside down and sideways. One store has its big, plate-glass window busted and yards of cloth trailing out into the parking lot.

  “Is it like this in New Orleans?” I say.

  They look at me. “You ain’t heard?” they say.

  “Heard what?” I say.

  “New Orleans flooded,” they say. “The levees broke. Everything is under water.”

  Tanya sucks in her breath.

  I sit real quiet.

  The engine is loud in that truck.

  “Everything?” I say.

  “Yessiree,” one man says. “Right up to the rooftops. Everything. Ain’t nothing living in that town no more.”

  The men take us to the shelter in town. It’s a big arena where football teams play their games. Out front there’s a long line of people waiting to get in. Some of them are carrying suitcases. Some have garbage bags. Most of them don’t have anything at all.

  The men wait with us until the others get there, then they’re gone.

  Daddy says they’re headed out to find other people stuck in their houses in the country. He says he already helped them cut the trees to two other houses today. He says at one house, the lady was dead and the man didn’t want to leave. “They’re too old for this,” Daddy says. “We had to carry the man out the door. He was crying like a baby the whole way.”

  Aunt Joyce takes one look at that line of people waiting to get in the shelter and she says there ain’t no way she going to stay in a shelter. She says she’s driving up to Atlanta right now to stay with her daughter even if she has to drive all night. She tells Granpa T to come on with her, but he says no. She begs him and begs him, but he keeps shaking his head. Finally she says there ain’t no fool like an old fool and drives off, leaving us waiting in line with everybody else. When we get to the front they give us badges to wear. They write down numbers off Daddy’s driver’s license. They take us to six cots lined up in a row on about the fifty-yard line. “How’s Baby Terrell going to sleep on a cot?” Mama says. Daddy puts his hand on her arm and says, “We’re the lucky ones.”

  I’m sitting there on my folding cot. Granpa T’s shaking his head. Mama’s opening the milk the ladies gave us. Tanya’s sucking her thumb.

  I can’t help it. I blurt it right out.

  “The men in the truck told us New Orleans is flooded. They said everything is under water. Everything.”

  Mama’s busy with the baby. Granpa T’s looking around for the shelter doctor. They don’t look at me.

  But Daddy looks at me. He looks at me a long time.

  “It’s true, son,” he finally says. “Everything.”

  He looks at me a little while longer. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m real, real sorry.”

  I lay down on my cot. I curl up. I close my eyes. I go to a place where nobody else can go. Not even Granpa T.

  20

  We ain’t got nowhere to live now so we stay in that shelter. There must be about a million other people living there with us, all in the same room. Half the people are from Mississippi. They’re telling about a giant wave that washed everything away—streets, houses, apartment buildings. I can’t hardly believe it but they’re telling about it on TV, too. The other half of the people are from New Orleans. I lay there on my cot and I think about what if I see somebody I know. What if my teacher walks down the aisle? Or that boy Rusty? What if I see the lady who cuts Mama’s hair or Mr. Nelson with the truck or Mrs. Washington? What if I see J-Boy walking by with his mama following behind him in her nightgown? I think about that and I look at all the faces, but I don’t see nobody I know. All those faces and not a single one of them is somebody I’ve ever seen before.

  Every day different workers come in and talk to the people. They’re trying to get us clothes and toothbrushes. They’re trying to feed us and find us places to live. They’re trying to match up families.

  People make signs and go walking up and down the aisles between the cots. The signs are just lists of names—all the people they can’t find. One lady says the names are her children. She says she was visiting her mama in the hospital in Jackson when the storm came. The neighbor was watching her babies. She calls and calls but the phones don’t work. Now she don’t know where any of them are. She’s riding from shelter to shelter carrying her sign. Every day she walks the aisles someplace else.

  I wonder if anybody is looking for us. I wonder if the news is telling about the storm all the way up in Chicago. I wonder if anybody tried to call us. I wonder what would happen if somebody wrote us a letter. Where would it go?

  The shelter’s getting fuller and fuller. We squeeze the cots closer together. They make rules about who uses the bathroom when.

  “You should have gone with Joyce,” Daddy tells Granpa T. “I’ll bet she would come back and get you if we called her.”

  “What am I going to do sleeping on the sofa in her daughter’s apartment in Atlanta?” Granpa T says.

  Daddy shrugs up his shoulders and Granpa T lays back down on his cot. He closes his eyes and goes to sleep—or wherever.

  Because to tell the truth, can’t nobody really sleep in that shelter with all those people always moving and talking. All day long they’re talking loud. All night long they’re whispering. They’re tossing and turning. They’re going to the bathroom. The babies are crying. And when it’s just barely light, the loud talking starts up again. “Move over.” “Where you from?” “How much water did you get?”

  And one thing everybody’s talking about is what it looks like in New Orleans. You can’t get away from it. They’re saying how the only thing you can see is the roofs of the houses. For miles and miles there ain’t nothing but black water and roofs. How the helicopters come and take the people off their roofs. How they’ve got boats everywhere pulling people out of the water. How they’ve got bodies floating around and tangled up in the trees and putrefying in the houses where they were trapped when the water rushed up.

  They’ve got the TV going all the time. They’re showing pictures of the buildings burning, right in the middle of the water. Can’t nobody get close enough to help, and the buildings just keep on burning.

  I’m watching that news and I’m thinking that can’t be real. That can’t be my home. That’s got to be a movie. And then I see I’m sitting on a cot in a shelter in Mississippi.

  One day they show a dog swimming through the water. He’s black and his tail is sticking
out straight behind him. I jump up off my cot and run over to take a look. He’s making a V-shaped ripple through the water and he’s barely able to keep his head up. The rescuers are standing in a boat and wearing yellow vests with orange belts. They’re saying, “Come on, boy! You can do it!” And they’re reaching out to him and grabbing him and dragging him up into that boat. That dog shakes water all over the place. The rescuers hold their hands up to protect their faces and you can see they’re smiling and I’ve got my face right up to that TV.

  But when the rescuers step back and the dog stands still, I can see he ain’t got no caterpillar eyebrow. His throat ain’t white underneath. He’s got all four of his legs.

  I lay back down on my cot. What am I doing thinking that dog might be Buddy? Even if he got out, even if he struggled through the window, even if he heard me calling and calling him in my sleep, how’s he going to swim with only three legs? What’s a dog like Buddy going to do in a world filled up with water?

  One shelter lady gives me a Game Boy. I sit on my cot and play it every day. I don’t do nothing else. I don’t talk. I don’t eat except when I have to. Mama keeps saying, “Are you okay, son?” and I don’t answer. Baby Terrell starts walking in that shelter and Mama has to chase after him. Tanya makes friends with two girls with cots near hers. They fix each other’s hair. Tanya looks pretty stupid afterward but she’s happy.

  A lady two cots over starts having a baby. They whisk her off while her fiancé is in the bathroom and he don’t have any idea where they took her. He sits there crying until somebody comes and leads him away by the hand. One old man stands up on the far end of the room and starts trying to take off all his clothes. His wife is screaming at him and he’s saying he’s itching all over. Granpa T sits up and watches that show awhile. When the lady finally makes the man stop, Granpa T lays back down and closes his eyes.

  I go to the next level.

  We’ve been in that shelter almost a week when Daddy comes up to Granpa T and says, “Wake up. I’ve got something to tell you.”