Galveston

by Paul Quarrington

  FOR SEVEN DAYS they had seen no twisters.

  This was Beverly’s first trip, although at the time she had expected it to be her last, her only. It had seemed like the end of a longer journey. First there were the two years spent in the land of the damned, which she viewed in some vague way as a holiday. But the truth finally dawned, this was no vacation, Beverly had never left the place; she’d been born in that land, was a certified damned citizen.

  Near the end of the two years she’d got into difficulty with the law. She had been charged by the OPP with public nudity. It seemed an open-and-shut case, seeing as Beverly was arrested stark naked in Coronation Park. But the police report made no mention of the water surface, which she’d stumbled upon, coming home from God knows where. There was nothing in the report about how Lake Couchiching, that dawn, was as smooth as a mirror, or how the mist had formed into gently swirling towers on top of it. So Beverly had torn off her clothes and waded among the wind devils and waterspouts, and if that caused some concern to the members of the Orillia Road Runners, fifteen pudgy people out on their morning jog, well, Beverly really couldn’t help that. The judge was lenient, and decreed that in lieu of a sentence or fine Beverly had to seek counselling. Beverly hated that. All of the professionals kept sticking their noses places they didn’t belong.

  Then she’d been arrested for destruction of public property and charged with vandalism. This was more serious—who would have thought stained glass windows cost so much?—but Beverly was able to mitigate the consequences by citing drink as the culprit. She proclaimed herself an alcoholic and promised to attend AA meetings. She went often, but she had no real trouble giving up liquor, because the stuff simply didn’t work. Booze couldn’t do what she needed done. Beverly didn’t know what that was, exactly, so she took all the governors off her impulses, just to see where they took her.

  She found herself prowling the streets on stormy nights.

  And she became a physical sensation junkie, roaming around southern Ontario in search of fairs and midways, spending hundreds of dollars on the rides.

  There came a day when the two interests met. She was in the town of Stayner on a hot summer day, sitting on the top of the Ferris wheel while the carnies down below loaded and unloaded customers. Suddenly the wind picked up, rocking the baskets on the antiquated contraption. The fairground echoed with screams. Dust flew in all directions, obscuring the world. Candy wrappers and cotton candy cones floated about. There came a force—cyclonic action—and things began to move around and around and around.

  Then there was dead calm. It had been nothing, really, just a little blow, nothing the locals hadn’t seen before. But Beverly had spotted the quarry.

  She realized that she couldn’t leave things up to chance, especially given her luck. As her grandfather said, Beverly was Jesus jinxed. (Sometimes, when her grandfather could get his hands on some money, he would take the bus to the racetrack in Barrie and wager on the trotters. He would leave Beverly alone in the apartment when he did this, even when she was five, six years old, fearful that she’d queer his luck. Even so, when he returned, drunk and penniless, he would blame her. Jesus jinxed.) Then one day, in the Packet & Times, she read a little filler piece about a company that took people to find tornadoes. Bingo, Beverly thought. She made a phone call and was dismayed to discover how much the endeavour would cost: a few thousand for the tour itself, not to mention transportation to Norman, Oklahoma. Her salary from Waubeshene Insurance alone would never get her there, so Beverly went back to Pilmer’s Grocery and asked if she could once again have a job as an assistant cashier. Mr. Pilmer was a little reluctant, given her recent notoriety, but he finally agreed.

  It was some months before she could afford to book her seat with the Tornado Hunter Company. The time wasn’t wasted, however. Beverly was pleased to discover that southern Ontario is actually a wonderful place to live if one is interested in violent weather. She got pretty good at reading signs, both scientific data and omens presented in the sky. She read a lot of books about weather.

  That was when she’d learned about Galveston.

  But there were no organized tours in southern Ontario, not like in the Tornado Alley that slices through several middle American states. Beverly was also eager to go with the Tornado Hunter Company because they engaged the services of Jimmy Newton. She didn’t own a computer back then, but she sometimes used the library’s, and so had become a fan of Mr. Weather.

  She was a little disappointed to discover when she arrived that there were two minivans and that she’d been assigned the one piloted by the young Larry DeWitt. Jimmy Newton drove the lead truck; Larry followed behind, drinking too much coffee and smoking cigarettes.

  Jimmy Newton put them on supercells easily enough. They spent a lot of time staring at huge dark monuments to energy. The cells mushroomed toward heaven and spat lightning. The sight was awesome, but not what Beverly had come for. She realized that, despite her great interest, she was not really a weather weenie. She couldn’t appreciate the mammati, no matter how well defined, and she wasn’t satisfied with horizontal vort tubes.

  Although she knew it was foolish, she blamed Larry for the failure to find actual tornadoes. She didn’t blame Jimmy Newton, because Newton shared her disdain for displays of unfocused energy, no matter how grand. Newton would march toward the dark system in the sky, his little fists buckled onto his hips like he was some kind of matador, trying to madden cyclones, to infuriate them to the point where the wind devils would split from the mother and charge. When nothing was forthcoming, he would spin around, his nose stuck up and testing the air. He’d say something like, “Let’s get on down to Ogallala. There’s something forming up down there.” Larry would still be staring at the supercell slack-jawed, his eyes clouded over with awe. Beverly would sometimes have to pull him away. “Mr. Newton says we should try near Ogallala,” she’d say, and Larry DeWitt would blink and spend a second remembering who Beverly was, and why he was standing in the middle of some farmer’s field in Nebraska.

  So she blamed Larry for not finding the quarry; not only that, she found him dull—well, he was dull, Jimmy Newton called him Larry the Wit with dripping sarcasm—and only reasonably good-looking. Beverly was much more drawn to another man on the trip, a professor of medieval literature, who had long flaxen hair and a scar across one cheek. Although she never asked how he got it, it thrilled her to imagine that he’d taken part in swordplay arguing over some delicate point of academia. And this man seemed to be attracted to her; at nights he would seek her out in the lounge of the hotel/motel, and he would drink whisky while Beverly sipped Cokes. But nothing ever happened. The man was, at fundament, shy, almost removed from the human race. Most drinkers were. And also, Beverly eventually relaxed enough with him to tell him her story, and from then on all he saw when he looked at her was a walking wound.

  On the seventh day, the last of the tour, they caught a twister. Funnily enough, the scene had not looked promising. They stood on the edge of a field and stared at a distant dark sky, and no one in the group held out much hope—except Jimmy Newton. Newton popped up and down, he waved his little arms with impatience that bordered on fury, and as she watched, the air on the earth’s edge began to move, she could see it turning. The motion was visible because dust and dry straw and the like had been sucked into it, but Beverly preferred to ignore that fact. In her memory it was as if she watched the air turn hard and furious, watched it spin and blacken and touch down.

  That’s what Jimmy Newton said—“touch down”—although it was not quite that way. The twister had not exactly lighted upon the earth; the earth had risen to meet it. A belly of dust lifted gently and joined the darkening coil of wind. Then the tornado was alive, black and dancing and heading straight for the brace of minivans.

  The other weather tourists were busy filming, armed with sleek compact digital recorders, except for the professor of medieval literature. He had a huge reflex camera mounted on an elaborate tripod,
but he had time only to depress the button once before he had to start dismantling.

  Beverly stared at the cyclone, barely noticing the commotion all around her. She heard Jimmy Newton cautioning people to get back into the van, but it meant nothing to her. Larry came up beside her and took her hand. But he didn’t pull her away, instead he walked with her as she took a few small steps toward the tornado. Larry said, “Let’s go, Bev,” and then she broke, throwing his hand away and running as fast as she could toward the thing. Larry tackled her, and she fell face forward onto the ground, tasting dirt and feeling little fingers of wind tousling her hair. It almost had her, but Larry turned out to be stronger than she had imagined. He picked her up and carried her to the minivan, despite the fact that she thrashed and punched and snarled, pitching more manic a tantrum than Margaret ever had. The other chasers had to hold her down in the back seat, they had to physically subdue her. Larry muttered, “Shit shit oh shit,” as he drove away, and if the tornado hadn’t suddenly veered off, they all probably would have died.

  That evening she had gone to Larry’s motel room, surprised him while he was in the shower. He came to the door with a towel wrapped around his bony hips, suds still plugging his ears. Beverly was wet too, because the storm that had spawned the tornado still raged. Thunder crashed and lightning lit the world like garish Vegas neon.

  She stepped into the room and pulled the towel away, pushing Larry back toward the bed. Larry figured this was his reward for saving her life, but he had it ass backwards. Larry had screwed things up, and Beverly was giving him a shot at some kind of redemption.

  Their sex was passionate, at least at the beginning, Beverly and Larry the Wit clawing at each other, covering each other with fierce kisses. When he was inside her, Beverly asked if he knew about Galveston.

  Larry was moving his hips with a certain rhythm, but it was no rhythm that meant anything to Beverly, as it communicated neither need nor pleasure.

  “Do you know about Galveston?” she repeated, because Larry had made no response.

  “I want to fuck you,” he answered.

  Beverly dug her fingers into his butt, which provoked a stuttering spasm that felt good to her for a moment, but she had clawed his ass with a certain anger. After all, she reflected, he was fucking her. What Larry the Wit meant was, I’d like to fuck you without interruption or distraction.

  Beverly’s adventure with the Tornado Hunter hadn’t completed any journey. When she whispered once again, “Do you know about Galveston?” all Larry did was grunt. She began to weep.

  “Yes, I do,” answered Caldwell, sitting up on his little cot, turning toward the voice and finding a wall. “I know all about it.” Sometimes images, imaginings, thoughts of Galveston, came to him with the force of memory—or what he remembered memory felt like.

  He stood up then, stared into the darkness and waited for his eyes to adjust. He went into the washroom to urinate and was surprised to find that his penis was stiff, at least stiffer than usual. He had no erection—hadn’t had one for a long, long time—but his penis was stiff enough that Caldwell wondered what stuff had been in his dreams. He took hold of his penis experimentally and pulled at it. There was actually a little stirring, the distant murmur of physical pleasure.

  “I know all about Galveston,” Caldwell whispered.

  Once (Caldwell wasn’t sure how long ago this was, perhaps it was even recently) he had summoned a call girl to his hotel room. The dispatcher had asked him a number of questions, trying to determine his predilections.

  “Blonde or brunette?” asked the dispatcher.

  “It doesn’t really matter. Blonde,” he decided, afraid that a girl with darker hair might favour Jaime.

  “Right. Do you like full-bodied girls?” The dispatcher’s voice had been ruined by cigarettes and her sentences were punctuated by greedy inhalations.

  “I don’t care. Just a girl. But she has to hurry.”

  “Oh, well, dear, it may be a little while. There’s a big storm on the way.”

  “She has to hurry,” Caldwell repeated. “She has to get here before the storm hits.”

  The dispatcher interpreted this as concern on Caldwell’s part. “Well, all right.” There was a long silence then; Caldwell imagined that the woman was consulting a clipboard or something. “Listen, sweetie, I can get Hester there in about twenty minutes, but I’ve got to tell you, she is dark-haired. And she’s not to everybody’s taste.”

  “Send Hester.” Caldwell had pulled back the curtain and was staring at the sky. If he’d been asked, at that moment, where he was, he would have had only the weakest notion—the earth was flat and seemingly endless, he was in either the Canadian or American prairie—but he knew the sky intimately, he’d been watching the sky all afternoon. He had watched the clouds form, towering to the troposphere and then flattening out to form huge anvils. He had watched them darken, he’d watched them turn black. Now they shone with an eerie green tinge. There wasn’t much time. Send this girl, this Hester.

  But the weather arrived before the girl did. Caldwell saw it march down the main street of the town, catching pedestrians unawares. Hats were snapped off of heads, bags ripped out of hands. People rushed into doorways, they huddled under awnings. The storm gleefully went in after them, tearing away green canvas and pelting people with hailstones the size of golf balls.

  Caldwell watched one woman who refused to take cover. She leant into the wind and made slow, halting headway. The wind sucked the dress almost off her body. There was not much to this dress, and what there was, was soaking wet. Caldwell could see the shape of her breasts, the dark nipples. He could see that she was wearing tiny panties. Caldwell realized this was Hester, because she’d trained her eyes on the hotel and wouldn’t tear them away.

  The storm pushed her over, knocking her to the sidewalk. She managed to get up on one knee and then she waited for a hole in the howling. When it came, she sprang up and ran. She disappeared from Caldwell’s sight and then, perhaps five minutes later, there came a weak knocking at the hotel-room door.

  When he opened it, the woman reeled in, giddy and befuddled. “Holy shit,” she declared. “That’s a fucker. That is a storm of Biblical proportions.”

  Caldwell saw why the dispatcher had said Hester was “not to everybody’s taste.” Her features were oddly assorted; her nose was too big, her eyes were too small, and her mouth was twisted by a scar that slashed across both lips. This scar made many of Hester’s words sound strange, causing the “s” to whistle and the “f” to come with too much air.

  Caldwell went to the little mini-bar, opened it up and offered this woman a drink.

  “Oh, sure, yeah, whatever,” she said, staring down at herself, trying to determine the damage done. Her knee was bloody, her dress soaked and her dark hair glued all over her back and shoulders. “Listen, bud, I’m a bit of a fucking mess here.” She went to the washroom to get cleaned up and she didn’t close the door behind her. “My father,” she called out above the sound of a blow-dryer, “is a religious freak. A deeply religious freak. And according to him, storms are God’s way of showing He’s pissed. Like God is pissed. You know. Demonstrating His wrath. And walking over here, I’m thinking, hey, maybe, like, what am I, I’m a whore, so there’s this big storm because God’s ticked. But if He’s mad at me, why is He taking it out on everybody else?”

  “Ah,” said Caldwell. “Good question.” He sat on the bed, looking into a mirror that showed him the interior of the bathroom. Hester had a towel wrapped around her waist, her arms raised and her hands in motion, one wielding the dryer, one pulling at her hair. “In the Middle Ages,” Caldwell said, “people thought that lightning was a sign that God was angry.”

  “Right. Only makes sense.”

  “So the whole deal was to try to appease God. Every church had a bell tower, you know, and they would send someone up to ring the bell. To try to make God happy. Of course, that was the worst place to be during a thunderstorm. Those bell-ri
ngers would get killed all the time. But they kept doing it. For centuries.” Caldwell often felt that he had been a bell-ringer in some other life, maybe even in this one.

  Hester came to stand in front of Caldwell and let the towel drop to the ground. “Anything in particular you like, bud?”

  When he said nothing, she took his hand and moved it first across her breasts, then over her belly, and finally put it between her soft thighs and held it there.

  Caldwell looked out the window. The storm had gone, leaving behind only grey skies and a dull, steady rain. There was no energy left.

  “Bud? You with me here?”

  The rain had made everything indistinct. The buildings melted into the street, the street melted into the ground.

  Hester sat down beside Caldwell and reached over and touched his penis through his trousers. “Come on, bud,” she whispered, “let’s get with the program.” She unzipped him, snaked her hand through, caressed his cock softly. “Um …” Hester hesitated, then asked a question gently. “Do we have some sort of problem with the hydraulics here?”

  “I’m sorry,” Caldwell managed.

  “Oh, hey, don’t worry about it. Do you want me to try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?”

  “I don’t think that would work,” said Caldwell.

  “There’s drugs, you know, that you can take …”

  “I know.”

  “Well, it’s your call, buddy. You placed the order, you got to pay. Tell me what you want and we’ll get to it.”

  “Can I tell you a story?”

  “Hot damn,” said Hester. “You hear about these freaks—no offence—who just want to talk, but I never got one before. So hell yes, bud, tell me a story.”

  Caldwell licked his lips and wondered where to begin. “One morning I got up,” he said. “It was Saturday, and I had the house to myself, so I spread the paper out all over the kitchen table.”