Galveston

by Paul Quarrington

  “That was goddam amazing, flying into Floyd,” he said to no one in particular. “We hit the wall, right, it’s like we’re a BB in a boxcar, you know, rattling around, and then, whoosh … into the eye. And in there it’s like heaven or something, you know. It’s all calm, and there’s these little puffy clouds and this weird silver rain. It was like light, right, like it was raining light.”

  The elderly couple stood up and started rolling their little suitcases toward the door. “Where are you going?” Newton demanded.

  “They’re going to cancel the flight,” the husband said resignedly.

  “They’re not going to cancel any goddam flight. Sit down.”

  The elderly couple obeyed. Jimmy Newton didn’t sit down himself, however. He remained standing in the middle of the room, staring at something he alone could see.

  Half an hour later, Caldwell opened the door to the waiting room and stepped through. He had a sailor’s duffel bag slung across his shoulder, and wore dark sunglasses, which he didn’t remove. Caldwell nodded at Newton, said his name quietly. “Jimmy.”

  “Hey, it’s the fisherman.”

  “So,” asked Caldwell, “what’s going on?”

  “The airline’s getting cold feet.”

  Caldwell nodded, taking in the information. It registered on Beverly that, had the flight left on schedule, this man would have missed it. It was possible that he’d anticipated there would be a delay; he seemed a well-travelled sort, to judge from the wear and tear on his duffel bag, his deep tan. But there was another possibility, and Beverly studied the man closely to see if there was anything in his appearance that would support it. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and wore a white golf shirt and lightweight grey trousers like a phys. ed. teacher. This man was so recognizably a phys. ed. teacher, in fact, that he seemed to have been ripped from another place, another time, and set down in the strange little bungalow airport in Florida.

  The beautiful black man re-entered the waiting area and came to attention behind his little counter. “I have an update on the flight 764 to Dampier Cay. In light of the warning issued by the—”

  Jimmy Newton cut him off. “An airplane ticket is like a contract,” he pointed out. “A legally binding contract. You people have contracted to supply a service—”

  “But in cases of, what do you call it, force majeure—”

  “Please don’t cancel the flight,” said the phys. ed. teacher. “I have to get over to the island. My family’s there.”

  “Your family,” repeated the black man, not as a question. He looked at Caldwell for a moment, and it was clear he understood that families should be together, especially in catastrophe. “I’ll talk to the pilot.” He picked up the walkie-talkie and depressed a button on its side. “Ed?” he said quietly.

  Caldwell took Newton by the elbow and led him away. “So,” asked Caldwell softly, “what have you heard?”

  “She’s just a little mewler, a newborn babe,” said Newton.

  Caldwell nodded, listened to the black man speak into the walkie-talkie, pleading on his behalf. “But the man’s family is over there …”

  “But hey,” said Jimmy Newton, “there’s another depression moving right behind her. I think maybe she’s going to suck it up, she’ll be two, maybe three by the time she hits any land. Maybe even …” He pressed his lips together, fearful of invoking some sort of jinx by speaking his hope aloud.

  “Where are you staying?” asked Caldwell.

  “Some place called the Water’s Edge.”

  Caldwell nodded. “Me, too.” Neither seemed particularly happy about it.

  “All right,” announced the man from the airline, stepping out from behind the counter. “Let’s everybody get on the plane,” he said gravely, “before the shit starts to fly.”

  They started across the field toward the airplane, in an order that corresponded with their arrival at the bungalow airport. Beverly was in the lead but deliberately slowed her pace, so that they all walked past her: the immaculate man, the two young women, the elderly couple, Jimmy Newton, and the beautiful black man, pulling an oversized child’s wagon piled high with their collective luggage.

  The phys. ed. teacher drew up beside her, and Beverly gave him a look and a quick smile. “You don’t have any family on the island,” she said.

  “How would you know that?” Caldwell asked.

  “Because I’ve done what you just did.”

  THE AIRPLANE had five rows, with pairs of seats on either side of a narrow aisle. Beverly selected the window of the middle row. She was hoping that the phys. ed. teacher would sit beside her, but before that could happen the immaculate man leapt into the seat, still cradling the cardboard box in his hands.

  The phys. ed. teacher was the last to mount the stairs into the belly of the Beech. He scanned the available spots and claimed the nearest window seat. Jimmy Newton had chosen the row behind, but he threw off his belt and moved to sit beside Caldwell.

  The flight attendant was a dark woman with hair that had been buzzed short and dyed a very improbable blonde. She came to loom over the man beside Beverly; she bent over and tried to take the little box away from him. “I’ll put this in the overhead compartment.”

  “No, ma’am, you won’t.”

  “Perhaps you could put it under your seat. At least for takeoff.”

  “I’m going to hold on to it.” He looked up at the flight attendant, and something in his eyes told her to drop it, to turn away.

  Jimmy Newton asked, “So, Caldwell, what have you been up to? Where you been lately?”

  Caldwell tried to think. Some images flew through his mind: there was a tropical island, maybe Fiji; New Zealand; some European city. He had no way of judging the newness of these memories. Then it occurred to him that he had some stale plane tickets in his pocket. He pulled them out and leafed through. “I was in Toronto,” he said, which is where his financial advisers kept offices. “And Seattle. At least, Washington State. Went there for a little steelhead fishing.”

  “Bullfuck. Ingshit. You went there looking for lightning.” Caldwell nodded. “Maybe so. I like lightning.” “I don’t,” said Newton. “Lightning is like foreplay. I’m interested in getting fucked.”

  The engines howled, the little plane moved forward and, although it never seemed to achieve sufficient speed, somehow lifted into the air and ascended toward the sun.

  Jimmy Newton droned on, the flat pitch of his voice sitting a quarter tone above the hum of the airplane’s twin engines. It made Caldwell long to plug his ears. Newton was explaining something to do with the quantification of chaos, which, if successful, would enhance the dynamic modelling of weather systems a hundredfold. Caldwell disliked such talk, because it baffled him. True, he had once taught science, but only because budget cutbacks had forced everybody in the phys. ed. department to take on other duties. Caldwell had campaigned for geography; it seemed somehow knowable, since he could study atlases and learn how the world was stitched together. Instead he had been landed with grade nine science. The curriculum for that level included work on weather. Caldwell had studied the teacher’s guide and in the classroom bandied about words like “convection,” “latent heat” and “potential energy.” He explained, haltingly, how hurricanes were formed, how water in the ocean near Africa was heated by the sun and set into circular motion. When the students asked questions, he sought refuge in history. He would tell them what he remembered of Hazel, the storm that had killed thirty-five of his neighbours.

  Jimmy Newton went on about this new prognostic technique, the quantification of chaos, but Caldwell didn’t listen, he knew the science was far beyond him. The science was a little beyond Jimmy Newton, for that matter; he would often use technical terms and then add, “Or some such shit.” But Newton didn’t really need science in order to understand storms.

  They called him Mr. Weather. Jimmy Newton was in the Guinness Book of World Records; he’d seen the most tornadoes, had the most personal experienc
es with cyclones—the umbrella term for both the western hemisphere’s hurricanes and the eastern’s typhoons. Newton was on television quite a bit, particularly a show called Miami AM. When a storm was headed toward Florida, Newton would tell the viewers what to expect. “This is only a one, it’s barely maintaining status. You all can sleep through this one.” Or he might say: “Okay, batten down the hatches. She’s a three.” When there was a storm somewhere other than Florida, Jimmy Newton would be unavailable (he’d be wherever the storm was), but he would appear on television afterwards, relating his experiences, showing his videos and photographs.

  He enjoyed being recognized on the street. He liked it when children pointed at him and shouted, “It’s Mr. Weather!” Newton had a low-grade ambition to be on that Oprah show, not so much because he liked it (or even had much familiarity with it), but more that he hated small potatoes. Miami AM was small potatoes, hosted by some juiced-up pretty boy and a woman with big boobs and hair.

  Newton also had a website, hugely popular with weather weenies. He got thousands of hits a day, mostly from people interested in particular systems. He tried to monitor all of the active weather around the globe, and his projections and predictions were uncommonly accurate. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration made no secret of the fact that they checked Jimmy Newton’s website daily, that they at least factored his thinking into their data. Some of the hits Jimmy got were from people who had heard about his photographs and bits of video. He had a reputation for bravery, although it was more truly an utter recklessness. He would take his cameras into the storm, and record images of power and destruction unlike anything people had ever seen.

  Newton abandoned the subject of chaos abruptly and pointed out the window. “You ever do this, Caldwell?”

  “Do what?”

  “We’re in a cloud now, right?”

  Caldwell turned and saw whiteness swimming by outside the airplane. “Right.”

  “Okay, so we wait, and … look, we’re not in the cloud any more.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “But when did we leave? You know? You can never tell when you leave a cloud, you just know when you’re out of it. Same the other way: you can never tell when you’re going into a cloud, but then—”

  “You know what, Jimmy? I’m a little tired. I think I’ll try to get a little sleep.”

  Newton nodded. “Sure thing.”

  Caldwell turned away, pressing his forehead against the thick oval of plastic. The plane went inside a cloud.

  One Saturday morning (back when Caldwell was a phys. ed. teacher forced to grapple with science) he had spread the paper out before him on the kitchen table. He read the sports section first, out of habit, registering scores from hockey and American college basketball. He then turned to the news proper, flipping the section over so that he could see the weather map. A front was advancing from the Prairies. The local forecast called for light snow. Caldwell jerked his head up, shot a glance through the kitchen window. They blew it again, he remarked to himself with some inner satisfaction. Already the snowfall was heavy enough to give the world outside a silvery glow.

  He noticed the six numbers isolated in a tiny box in the top right-hand corner of the front page: 6 22 47 16 8 9. Oh, right, the lottery. He’d bought a ticket the day before, so he fished around in his pocket and drew it out. He had purchased it on little more than a whim; it would indeed have been precisely “on a whim” except that he did it quite often. Caldwell had no system or series of special numbers, he liked to leave chance where it belonged, in the hands of the gods. So he would ask for the store computer to decide for him, to spit out a coupon with six random numbers. He took out his ticket now and saw: 6 22 47 16 8 9.

  Caldwell laid the ticket aside and drummed his fingers on the tabletop. The house was empty and for a moment he couldn’t remember why. Then it came to him that Jaime had taken Andy to hockey practice, it was her turn, her week, and that was why he was allowed the luxury of having the Saturday paper spread out before him on the kitchen table.

  He looked up at the clock. They would be heading back now, they would be halfway home. Caldwell picked up the telephone.

  The first call he made—before he called his sister, before he called any of his close friends—was to Matty Benn. Jaime would have taken him to task on this. She would have demanded, “Why did you call that A-hole?”

  Why, indeed? Caldwell had a number of reasons. For one thing, even if Matty Benn wasn’t a close friend, he was a current friend. Caldwell now hung out more with Matty Benn than he did with his putative best friend, Denton MacAuley. He’d been with Benn the night before. They had met at Mystery’s, something they did most Friday evenings. Caldwell and Matty Benn had consumed beer and shots of whisky and stared at the naked women.

  And maybe Matty Benn was an A-hole—at Mystery’s, for example, he hooted and spilled his drinks and yelled “Nice tatas!” every few seconds—but what Jaime didn’t seem to realize was that Caldwell himself was an A-hole. He enjoyed the drinking too, and he could chime in with some very loud hoots.

  Another reason was that Matty Benn was a reporter for the Examiner, he had the municipal beat. He reported on such things as had just happened to Caldwell, and as he picked out the numbers on the phone Caldwell could already imagine the headline: LOCAL MAN WINS MILLIONS. He could imagine the photograph: he would be holding an oversized cheque, and he would be smiling. Not grinning, not showing any of his slightly crooked teeth, only smiling slightly as if this were all a little prank pulled off by himself and the Big Man Upstairs. (The next day’s front page would look nothing like this, of course. It would feature a small photograph of Caldwell climbing into a police car, his features obscured by falling snow.)

  But the true reason Caldwell called Matty Benn is that Matty knew Darla Featherstone. Caldwell did not necessarily believe that Benn had slept with the Channel Four reporter, no matter how much detail Matty supplied whenever he told his stories. But Matty knew her, had access to her.

  Caldwell did not want to sleep with Darla Featherstone—that was not the point. But when she’d first appeared on the Channel Four news a couple of years earlier, Caldwell thought she was an extraordinary-looking woman, perhaps the most attractive woman he’d ever seen. Darla Featherstone had a curious intermingling of bloodlines, something like Chinese, African and Swedish. Jaime, of course, did not. Jaime had generations of Canadian blood coursing through her body, her distant ancestors dour Scots who’d come over looking for severe conditions, something to truly test their mettle. Jaime was brawny—she’d been a champion swimmer—and Darla Featherstone was slight. If Caldwell had wanted to, he could list many points on which his wife and this woman, this image on the television screen, were opposites. Remarking on these differences was not wrong, was it?

  Caldwell remembered sitting in the family room one night, reading yet another science textbook, trying to understand these riddles so that he might explain them to the hopeful children in his classroom. A voice on the television said something like, “And here with that story is Channel Four’s Darla Featherstone.”

  Caldwell’s head jerked up, and Jaime laughed from the sofa. “You like her,” his wife chided gently.

  “No, I don’t,” said Caldwell.

  “Go on, admit it. You like her.”

  “No, I don’t,” lied Caldwell.

  When Matty Benn answered the phone, Caldwell said, “I just won the lottery.”

  “Holy shitballs,” said Matty. He asked a few questions and then said, “You know what? I’ll call Darla.”

  “Good idea,” said Caldwell. Caldwell the A-hole.

  BEVERLY STARED THROUGH THE PLASTIC WINDOW at Dampier Cay, which seemed very small indeed. The island was shaped like a piece of macaroni, an idle reflection that made Beverly bury her face in her hands.

  In the seat beside her, the immaculate man in the pure white shirt and crisp blue trousers shook his head in commiseration. “Yes,” he declared. “What will be,
will be.”

  Beverly had no response; she was paralyzed by so silly a thing as the thought of macaroni.

  “And He alone knows what will be,” said the man. He tightened his grip on the small cardboard box, his fingers strong and gleaming, as though they were made of bronze. “You know, I wrote the hundred-and-fifty-second sam.”

  Macaroni, remembered Beverly, and not even real macaroni, rather something made from a packet of noodles and cheesy powder.

  “I used to say,” continued the immaculate man, “that I had written the one-hundred-and-fifty-first sam, but then I heard that they found one in the desert. And it was written before mine, so mine is the hundred-and-fifty-second sam.”

  Margaret loved the stuff, which broke Beverly’s heart. It broke Beverly’s heart that Margaret could love so wholeheartedly the junk the world handed out; Margaret with her yellow plastic bowl, the design of fairies so worn by time that it was all but invisible, spooning macaroni into her mouth at a dizzying clip, pausing only to shout, “Yum yum, piggy’s bum!”

  “David wrote the first one hundred and fifty,” continued the coffee-coloured man, and now Beverly turned toward him, not to listen, but to try to quiet him. His eyes were soft; very dark but soft nonetheless. “Then there was the one in the desert, and now there’s mine. One hundred and fifty-two.”

  In those days, the macaroni days, Beverly was always dating. While Margaret ate mac and cheese in the kitchenette, Beverly would be dressing in the bedroom, deciding which outfit to wear. It is not that she was desperate for a lover, but she was desperate to find a father for Margaret. Margaret seemed to have been born with a drive toward normalcy, a longing for the quotidian and democratic, and had a hard time living with fatherlessness.