Galveston

by Paul Quarrington

  “I’m about as high as she gets. Maybe twenty-five feet.”

  “That might not be good enough, Jimmy.”

  “Right,” said Jimmy Newton. “Is she going to make four?”

  The man on the radio didn’t respond right away. “At least four, Newton.”

  “Thank you, NOAA. Over and out.”

  Beverly thought about Noah.

  She knew that Newton had been saying “NOAA”—the acronym stood for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—but in her thoughts the forecaster was Noah. He stood on the deck of the ark. He furrowed his brow and stared at the sky, and predicted that the rains would last for forty days and forty nights. Noah’s sons, clutching crooked staves, herded animals onto the ark. The animals came in pairs, as everyone knows, and in Beverly’s mind they boarded as couples, bound by love and devotion. Quadrupeds moved in comfortable unison, their heads touching. Some of the birds were actually mating as they came. The more exotic birds were belly to belly, while pigeons and seagulls did it doggy-style, flapping their wings with arrhythmic ecstasy.

  Then Beverly imagined all the damned and dying creatures. Water covered the face of the earth, and the air was filled with frantic whinnies, howls and ululations. As water flowed through valleys and around mountains, eddies were formed, whirlpools that dragged the animals down. All of their eyes were white, emptied by panic.

  She told Caldwell the second part of her story.

  Margaret’s swimming was simply not improving, and even though Steve told her over and over again not to worry, Beverly couldn’t help herself. She told her daughter that she’d have to practise more. Beverly checked the schedule the young people at the Y had given her. There was a free swim Saturdays at two o’clock.

  Beverly drove Margaret down to the YMCA. The little girl pushed buttons on the little radio in the dashboard until she at last heard the song that was number one, the song that the most people liked. She sat back in her seat and sang along tunelessly, then stopped singing abruptly as a troubled thought crept across her face. “Did you bring my swim cap?”

  “No,” Beverly snapped. “That is not my responsibility. I make sure your suit and towel are clean and dry. You are supposed to remember to bring your bathing cap, nose plugs, soap and shampoo.”

  “I forgot it.”

  “Well, then, you will have to go without one.”

  Margaret scowled. “The chlorine is bad for my hair.”

  “I know it is. That is why you’re supposed to bring a bathing cap.”

  Margaret’s hair was her pride and joy. Truth to tell, it was Beverly’s pride and joy. It was long, falling all the way to the little girl’s waist, and golden, full of curves and curls that caught sunlight. Margaret took good care of her hair; this confusion over the swim cap was just that, confusion—it didn’t reflect neglect on anyone’s part.

  (Caldwell reached over and took both of Beverly’s hands from where they lay, like wounded creatures, on her lap. Both of her small hands fit into one of his own.)

  There was a lounge area at the YMCA in Orillia, a few round tables and stools. Off to one side an old woman with milky eyes sold sandwiches, apples and coffee. On the other side was a curved glass wall, and through this parents could watch their kids in the pool. Beverly sat at one of the little tables with a stack of books. Before they left, she wanted to acquire at least elementary Spanish, as well as something of the history of the country.

  From time to time she glanced up and looked through the glass wall. The pool was crowded, as though all of the children in town had decided at the same time to go swimming. The kids were behaving badly, as kids will. They ran on the slick decks, they cannonballed into the shallow end, where signs demanded they not jump at all.

  Where, exactly, was the supervision? Beverly wasn’t the only one wondering that, because those words were spoken aloud by another mother sitting nearby. There were two lifeguards on duty, a boy and girl, not yet out of their teens. The boy strolled about the deck with a paddleboard grasped behind his back. The girl sat atop the small tower with her legs crossed and her hands folded. She should have been hunched forward, peering downwards with hawklike intensity—her supervisor should have demanded it of her.

  Steve sat in an office tucked into the corner, and every few minutes he would pop his head out. Sometimes he’d take a walk around the perimeter. He wore track pants, a sweatshirt and thick-soled running shoes, all emblematic of his don’t worry attitude, because if for any reason he needed to leap into the pool, this apparel would hamper his rescue efforts. Indeed, this point was brought up at the coroner’s inquest, although no one really paid much attention to it; Steve had comported himself in a valiant manner, even Beverly conceded that.

  Beverly tried to pretend that what she saw through the glass wall was normal, and maybe it was. She would later find out—sitting at the coroner’s inquest, staring down at her toes because she could not abide the scrutiny of the artists from the newspapers—that another guard had called in sick that day.

  Anyway, even if there had been a full contingent of guards, even if they’d been absolutely focused on the activity in the pool, it is still likely that tragedy would have occurred. Because, as Steve pointed out at the inquest, attention is paid to the middle depths of the pool, which is where souls are lost. People at the sides of the pool are usually safe, and that is why no one noticed little Margaret clinging there. No one noticed that her head was a foot below the surface, that she had been there for a few minutes. No one knew that her hair, her long hair, had been sucked into one of the filtration system’s intake pipes.

  Steve saw her first, blew the whistle and hollered, clearing the pool. He leapt in, and his efforts to save Margaret were furious but useless. He could not pry Beverly’s daughter away from the wall.

  At the coroner’s inquest a physicist from the university explained why. It had to do with the vortex created by the water rushing through the intake pipe.

  It had to do with cyclonic action.

  BEVERLY AND CALDWELL walked outside, where the wind might dry her tears. It was a warm wind, and still very gentle at this point.

  They walked along the gravel road, past cottages “J” and “K,” and stopped outside the churchyard. They stared at the little graveyard. The stones were ancient, their faces obscured by lichen and moss. There were crosses there, whitewashed barnboard nailed together at right angles. Most of the names were washed away by time, although some could still be read: Angela, Age Two; Naomi; Marvelle, No Years Old. There were no flowers in the graveyard; if there ever had been any, the wind had blown them away.

  “There was a guy I read about,” said Caldwell, who could not take his eyes away from a crude marker that read Andrew, “who bought a barometer.”

  “Mm-hmm?”

  “And he took it home and took it out of the box and it read really low, I don’t know how low …”

  “Well,” said Beverly, “the record low at sea level is twenty-five point six nine.”

  “Oh,” nodded Caldwell. “So it wasn’t that low, probably, maybe it was twenty-eight or something, the point is, he thought he’d got a dud, you know, so he drove into town to the post office to send it back to the manufacturer, and when he got—”

  —back, his house was gone, thought Beverly.

  “—back, his house was gone.”

  “Really?”

  “Wiped out by a hurricane.”

  “It was probably the freak hurricane of 1938, which caught the northeastern United States by complete surprise.”

  “I think it probably was. Five hundred dead in that one.”

  “Closer to six.”

  Caldwell nodded. He imagined that the six hundred lost souls divided up this way: two hundred children, two hundred wives, two hundred husbands who’d just happened not to be at home. They were off running errands, checking on faulty barometers and things like that.

  Caldwell told the rest of his story to Beverly.

  When s
he arrived, Darla Featherstone placed her fingertips on Caldwell’s chest. It was a suggestive, sexual touch, at least, so it seemed to Caldwell in the moment he had to savour it. Behind Darla stood a cameraman; he hunkered over and squinted into the eyepiece of his machine. A red light flashed above the lens. Caldwell understood that he was being filmed, so he grinned and winked. The cameraman was protected by an elaborate plastic umbrella that attached somehow to his shoulders. This was covered with snow, pebbled and crusted with ice.

  Caldwell opened the door wider, not understanding why Darla and the cameraman remained outside. Darla Featherstone shivered, her bottom lip quivered. Caldwell put this all down to the cold, so he gestured toward the warm kitchen. And maybe it was the emptiness there behind him, or maybe it was something in Darla’s face, but Caldwell knew before he heard the words spoken.

  Darla Featherstone said, “There’s been an accident.”

  “So she drove me out there,” Caldwell said. “Darla Featherstone did. With the cameraman in the back seat. With his camera going, I think. I don’t know. I never turned around or anything, but he was there in the back seat of this car with his camera. And I remember thinking, you know, is she driving me out there because, I don’t know, she’s a human being, or am I—am I news? And then I felt, you know, like shit, because I wasn’t news. I wish I had been news. I should have been news. Jaime was news. Andy was news. My mother was news.”

  “I remember that storm,” said Beverly. “I remember that Saturday. I drove Margaret to the Y for her swim lesson.”

  “This transport truck was going north on Highway 26—my mom’s nursing home was out near there—and he must have been going, I don’t know, fast, because he just sailed over the median and, um … Squashed like a bug. That’s what the Sun newspaper said. The big headline. Squashed like a bug. Because we drove a VW. A Beetle.”

  Beverly remembered seeing that headline. She’d allowed herself to drift close enough to the red Sun box to see the front page displayed behind the plastic. She saw enough to understand the cryptic headline, and part of her thought it was clever. She hadn’t purchased the newspaper or anything, she was hardly that ghoulish.

  “The next day,” Caldwell went on—he’d been dreading this day for years, when for some reason he no longer had problems with his memory—“the funeral director came over to the house, and he’s showing me all these photographs of coffins, and I’m asking how much is this one, how much is that one, and then I remembered. I was rich. I’d just won the provincial lottery. Sixteen million dollars. So I just turned to the last page of his binder, you know, where there were these golden coffins. And I said, ‘Three of these.’”

  Lester appeared beside them. He too stood and stared at the little graveyard. He held a bottle of rum in his hands, and had a sip before speaking. “Mind out for Maywell,” Lester said. “Something’s put him in a piss-poor mood.” He tried to hitch up his trousers then, fumbling with the bottle, splashing liquor down the front. “I got work to do. I have to chop off all the weak branches. From the bamboo and the monkey puzzle tree. The spiny branches from high up in the kapok. Mind you”—he had another sip, almost for rhetorical purposes—“that won’t help any when the trees themselves come out of the ground.” Lester pointed at a stone in the graveyard’s corner. A tear rolled out of his eye. “The last storm came in the middle of the night. We never knew it was coming. Nobody said anything about it. I don’t know if they knew and didn’t tell us, or if they didn’t know themselves. I know they didn’t die.”

  The rain started then, warm and heavy. Lester turned his head upwards, so it could wash away his tears. He drained the bottle of rum and tossed it into the churchyard.

  “Well,” said Caldwell, “I’m sure we’ll be all right.”

  Lester looked at him. “Is that really what you think? Or do you think that this island is going to get wiped off the face of the earth?”

  Caldwell looked around and shrugged. “Well, Lester. What will be, will be.”

  Lester smiled gently. “You got that fucking right, sir.” Then he lay down on the ground and fell asleep.

  Beverly looked at Caldwell. “I think we should get him out of the rain,” she said, pushing open the little gate. Caldwell bent over and took hold of the gardener’s shoulders, and dragged him toward the pale blue church.

  The door lacked a handle, and Caldwell backed through it easily, although the hinges still managed to send up an awful howl. There were no more than eight pews in the church, two sets of four across from each other, and before them a crude pulpit. Caldwell pulled Lester into the aisle and set him down there. Lester turned over on his side and slipped his hands, palms pressed together and fingers touching, underneath his head.

  Beverly had followed them into the church, and although Caldwell noted her trepidation, he put it down to the fact that the church was dark inside, full of shadows. He did not know that Beverly had made no peace with God, that in fact she hated Him and expected retribution if He should ever get her in His sights.

  Caldwell didn’t hate God, mostly because he had never really loved Him. As a young man, he might have professed a belief in the Almighty’s existence, and when he played sports he often joined pre-game prayer circles, linking hands with his fellow athletes and muttering small entreaties. But after the game, if his side had won, Caldwell would never offer up thanks like his Christian teammates. He would tear off his clothes and stand under the shower and exalt in his own strength. He had no need of God back then, and he was decent enough, in some strange way, not to blame God now.

  Not Beverly.

  She blamed God and made no secret of it. Indeed, she’d got into trouble for blaming God. There had been an incident, something the authorities might have been willing to overlook had it not come so closely upon the heels of her arrest for public indecency. In fact, the authorities did overlook it, in the sense that Beverly was not found guilty of the crime of vandalism, but she was ordered to attend additional counselling sessions and pay for the stained glass window.

  The police report stated that she’d been hurling stones through the elaborate and years-old stained glass window at Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy. The window pictured the Virgin (strangely faceless, her features hidden by a cowl) cradling the Infant Jesus. Birds crowded the scene, hundreds of them, packed so tightly that the metal forming the bottom of one creature’s wing often formed the top of another’s.

  The police report made no mention of the weather, the storm in heaven. (Just as the authorities had missed the fact that Beverly’s naked presence in the shallow bay had nothing to do with nudity and everything to do with the columns of mist that twisted awkwardly toward the sky.) No one pointed out that when Beverly had been arrested, the sky was boiling with black cloud, lightning cracked across the roof of the world, quivering strokes of blue light. Yet no rain or hail fell to the ground, which struck Beverly as very, very strange. Mind you, she was pretty drunk, having left the Dominion Tap Room after hours of inebriated communion. Her grandfather lay in a crumpled heap over by the church’s garbage cans. He’d crawled over there when he thought he was going to vomit, which was as close as the old man came to thoughtfulness. He hadn’t, thanks in large part to the fact that he hadn’t eaten anything for days; instead, he heaved a couple of dry retches and then fell asleep.

  Leaving Beverly to ponder the fact that nothing fell from the sky. Forcing her to the conclusion that God can do nothing right. God must be a buffoon, He fucks everything up. It was in a spirit of sarcastic helpfulness that Beverly picked up a handful of stones and threw them toward Mary and Child shining over her. She was surprised when the stones pierced the glass. Then she recalled stories of mothers demonstrating inhuman strength, of mothers lifting cars off of their children, wrestling polar bears to the ground when they threatened their infants. This was the same sort of thing. In a matter of minutes she had broken almost all of the panes.

  “Maybe we should go back to the cottages,” suggested Caldwell. Beverl
y shook her head. “No. It’s not time, yet.” She leant forward and, rising up on her toes, kissed Caldwell on the lips. “Let’s help get ready for the storm,” she said. “Let’s do all the little human stuff first.”

  MAYWELL HOPE boarded up the windows, standing in the rain and longing for a smoke. This wasn’t supposed to be his work, it was Lester’s, but Maywell felt sorry for Lester in a vague way. Pity was an emotion that didn’t really sit well in Maywell’s heart, so on occasion he did Lester’s chores for him. Lester was not much good at the chores anyway, sloppy at the best of times, especially so when he had a snootful. Not to mention the fact that Lester was nowhere to be found. Maywell also undertook the labour to fill his hands with wood and tools, because his hands looked very naked without a cigarette in them. He had nails in his mouth, too, big, long three-inchers that tasted bitterly of rust.

  “You need any help with that?”

  Maywell turned to find Caldwell there, wet from the rain but oddly happy. He wore a smile that Maywell hadn’t seen before. Maywell spat nails into his hand so that he could speak. “You could put your shoulder up against the board, if you don’t mind, sir.”

  Caldwell leant against the plywood. Maywell aimed a nail and began to hammer.

  “Can I ask you a question, sir?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Well, what is it with you people? You and the woman and Newton. You like storms. Why?”

  “Oh.” Caldwell pretended to be thinking about this, although it was the one thing he knew, a certainty that claimed his cold centre. “Energy.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Storms have energy.”

  “Uh-yeah.”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “No.” Maywell shook his head. “You’ve done it. Storms have energy. And I take it that you don’t?”