Galveston

by Paul Quarrington

  The actual casting was considerably more difficult. Caldwell held the rod upright, as best he could. The tendons in his forearm were puffed, the veins engorged, it felt as though his right arm might explode. The flyline was frozen behind him, describing a perfectly straight line perpendicular to the earth, virtually motionless. But Claire was almost done with thunder and lightning, as far as Dampier Cay was concerned. She would now use her two main powers: wind and, the greater one, water.

  “Mr. Caldwell?”

  Caldwell turned, and in that tiny moment of distraction the wind took his rod away. It flew like an arrow, sixty, seventy feet to the main building, striking one of the plywood boards that covered the dining-room windows, exploding into splinters. The storm had arrived.

  Beverly was standing a few feet behind him. Caldwell turned and spent a long moment looking into her eyes. He understood what she was searching for.

  Beverly said, “It’s time.”

  MR. WEATHER WAS READY to do his stuff.

  Jimmy had a computer bag slung over his shoulder, his laptop nestled in there, humming with battery power. The camera was wired to both the digital videocam and a transmitter that sent out a radio signal, and Newton had high hopes that the strange little metal tower in the centre of the dining room would fling this signal around the globe. Weather weenies everywhere could experience Hurricane Claire first-hand. But deep down he didn’t care if the technology betrayed him or not. He was here, that’s all that really mattered.

  Newton wobbled toward the door. He stopped and twisted his body, trying to shift all the gear, looking for balance and comfort. Everything was mighty cumbersome. The transmitter, the size of a paperback book, seemed to weigh about twenty pounds. What the fuck did they make it out of, kryptonite?

  What he needed, Jimmy decided, was an equipment caddy, someone to tote the peripherals. If Caldwell had stuck around, Jimmy would have asked him, but Caldwell was being weird; he was off fishing in the hurricane. Jimmy had seen him do this before. He’d spotted Caldwell standing in front of a monster storm surge with a fishing pole, poking at the sky, trying to get it to spit electricity. The man was fucking nuts, but let’s face it, no weather weenie is a poster boy for mental health.

  Caldwell only didn’t disappear, reflected Newton, when there was some sort of actual emergency to deal with. Caldwell liked to play hero. One time—Newton ran through the catalogue in his head and decided it was Hurricane Francine—everyone was gathered in a big hotel in … someplace. He wasn’t so good at remembering place names. It was a Third World country, Newton knew that, because although the hotel was tall and grand, it sat in the middle of a village, the houses small and wooden and not very well put together. Most of the villagers had come over to the hotel, where management grudgingly let them gather in the expansive lobby. The people seemed very happy there. They gossiped and played cards, and several men formed a circle and played some game that involved stones, throwing them on the floor and then exchanging coins. The watchers had commandeered their own little area, near a large plate glass window that rattled in its housing. This made the manager nervous, and he kept trying to lure the weather tourists away with promises of fine food and free drinks, but the weenies stood their ground. It’s not like Francine was much of a storm—she barely made “two” status.

  Anyway, they were looking through the window—Newton was recording the destruction of the villagers’ houses—when a woman appeared at the doorway of one of the little shacks. They couldn’t hear her, but it was clear she was screaming, her mouth forming a rictus of tormented fear. And Caldwell bolted out of the hotel. They all watched him struggle across the road. When he reached the woman, she gesticulated frantically at the shadows behind her. Caldwell dashed into the place just as the winds destroyed it. The planks and shingles flew away, and when they were gone, Caldwell stood there with a small child cradled in his arms. There was a big gash on his forehead and his nose was broken. All the weather watchers cheered. Caldwell, carrying the child in one arm now, stepped out of the debris and put the other around the woman’s shoulder. She leant into him and Caldwell brought them back to the hotel.

  But there was no Caldwell now, and it was time for Mr. Weather to deliver the goods, live coverage of the actual hurricane. Jimmy had an idea then, and he jerked his head up. He was a little startled to find Maywell Hope already looking at him. Hope’s eyes were hard, the wrinkles around them laced together tightly. “No,” said Maywell.

  “Hey,” protested Newton, “I’m a guest of the Water’s Edge. I’m your responsibility.”

  “That’s right, you’re my responsibility,” agreed Maywell. “So keep your butt parked here.”

  “Hey,” snapped Jimmy, “I am a, a, videographer. I need to record this storm. For posterity. For science. So they can study the storm.”

  Hope wished to God that he had something to smoke.

  Jimmy Newton decided to hammer home the point that recording the tempest would ultimately benefit mankind. “You know,” he said, “they think that a hurricane isn’t a storm, you see what I mean, they think it’s more like a lot of storms. A lot of twisters within the main system, but they’re not sure how they’re organized. So if the scientists, like my buddies at NOAA, had footage to study …” Newton spread his hands, as though to illustrate the obviousness of his thinking. “Come on,” he said to Maywell. “Night’s coming. There’s not much light left anyway.”

  Maywell was thinking that there must be a pack of cigarettes somewhere. He’d quit smoking a few months back, at least he’d told Polly at the time that he’d stopped forever, and during those torturous four days he’d secreted decks of smokes everywhere. “Go ahead, then, sir,” he snapped. “Go film your storm.”

  “The thing is, Maywell,” said Jimmy Newton, “I need your help. If you could just carry some of this stuff for me …”

  The word “help” preyed upon Maywell. After all, he’d been off-island when storms had come before. Now it was time for him to climb up into the mast-riggings with all the other pirates. “All right, Newton,” he said. “We’ll go do what you have to do. After that, we come back in here and ride the damn thing out. Do we have a deal?”

  Jimmy Newton extended his hand, then drew it back when it became clear no shaking was to be done. “Deal,” he said.

  CALDWELL TOOK BEVERLY’S HAND and they set off for the cottages, “J” and “K.” The wind was to their back; they managed only a few steps and then were bowled over. Beverly and Caldwell wrapped their arms around each other and brought their mouths together. They both tasted blood.

  Caldwell climbed to his feet and Beverly used him for purchase, digging her fingers under the waistband of his shorts, pulling herself upwards. She took hold of his chest, scratching him with her nails. And then she was upright, leaning into Caldwell’s body, which was large and muscled and seemed, for the moment, to be equal to the storm.

  “Your place or mine?” she screamed, her voice barely piercing Claire’s roar.

  Caldwell looked at the little harbour. Maywell’s boat had been thrown up onto the dock, and was lying on its side injured, dying. Caldwell noted that water had swamped the piers. He tried to determine if it was high tide. He, Beverly and Maywell had gone fishing with the incoming tide—the bonefish creeping up, with the rising water, onto the shrimp-filled flats—so Caldwell began to add fours (four hours to high tide, four hours back to low, etc.) and concluded that high tide had yet to arrive. The main storm surge, he knew, would come behind the eye of the hurricane, so the fact that Claire had already pushed so much of the ocean at them was startling. Alarming, even. If high tide coincided with the storm surge … A tiny knot of fear appeared in Caldwell’s belly, the first palpable emotion he’d felt in years.

  Caldwell suddenly realized that he was once again living in time. He hadn’t lived in time since that Saturday morning so long ago, which had been punctuated by looking at wall clocks, checking his watch, calculating Jaime’s whereabouts, wondering when Darl
a Featherstone might arrive with her camera crew. After that, he had become a stranger in time. He would wander about the world, only bumping into time occasionally. A bartender might call time. A hotel clerk might point to a seat in the lounge, telling Caldwell that he would have to wait, that it was not check-in time. And, of course, Caldwell was always missing check-out, management gleefully adding another day’s rent to the tally. The world Caldwell had lived in for the past few years was defined neither by time nor by geography; it was informed by the elements.

  Beverly took his hand and they completed their journey, running toward their twinned cottages. Beverly stopped outside the sliding glass door of “K.” The council trees around the place shivered with frenzy. She took hold of the handle and tried to pull the glass door open, but she couldn’t budge it. So Caldwell put his hand over hers, and together they moved the thing a foot to the left. Beverly slipped in first, then Caldwell. He pulled the door shut, turned, and Beverly fell into his arms.

  “Let’s dance,” she whispered, or at least the volume of her voice passed for a whisper. The cottage was not very well constructed, and the wind found its way through the far wall. If outside there was howling, inside “K” there was sighing.

  “Okay,” said Caldwell. Beverly and he linked left hands, placed the right on the small of the other’s back. They began to move about the room. Caldwell was awkward and bumped into things. Beverly rested her head on his shoulder, touched her lips to his neck. Caldwell turned his head slightly; Beverly’s hair smelled of sea spray.

  “I think we should get out of these wet things.” Beverly kissed his neck with some firmness now, signalling a break with the authority of a boxing ref separating two fighters from a clinch.

  She stepped back from Caldwell and kicked off her shoes, white runners made dingy by sand and dirt. Then she undid her green shorts and stepped out of them. She pulled her underwear off and straightened up. Caldwell saw that her pubic hair was light and downy. He had always found this exciting, nudity confined to a woman’s lower half, and sometimes he asked Jaime to keep her pyjama top on when they made love.

  Beverly reached down, crossing arms, taking hold of the bottom of her T-shirt. She pulled up. Her breasts were small, certainly much smaller than Jaime’s, but they had a wonderful shape, with nipples that were almost crimson.

  Caldwell hooked toes into heels and tossed his loafers into a corner. He removed his shorts and underwear as one. Beverly moved forward as soon as they hit the ground, reaching out and laying her soft palm upon his cock, which stirred with her touch. She stepped back and stared at Caldwell. He pulled off his own T-shirt. Beverly touched her fingertips to his pectorals, tracing their shape. Her hands came to rest above his nipples, and she pinched them, slowly increasing the pressure and then suddenly causing a little bolt of pain. Caldwell jerked, smiled and put his hands to her breasts, which were cool and smooth. The skin was especially soft on the outsides, and he brushed there with the sides of his callused fingers. He gingerly put thumbs and forefingers around her nipples; they hardened instantly, and, when he pinched, turned an even darker red. Beverly made a low humming noise and then said, “You have to tell me what you’re thinking about.”

  Caldwell understood that she was giving him guidelines now, rules.

  “I had to teach science to the boys,” Caldwell told her. “I never really understood it, and I don’t remember it now. I only remember a few weird facts.”

  “Such as?” Beverly stroked the back of his neck. She nuzzled in and kissed his chest, stretching upwards to lick his nipple.

  “Well … you know what a lodestone is?”

  Beverly stuck out her tongue and licked back and forth across Caldwell’s nipple, and in doing so managed to shake her head no.

  “Thousands of years ago they found these rocks, these stones, that were different from other stones in the world. The Chinese people called them loving stones, because they liked to kiss.” Caldwell remembered that the boys in his science class used to snicker at this little aside, the same boys who grew bashful in health whenever he pointed at the diagram of the reproductive organs. “Sailors discovered that if they put these stones on a piece of wood and floated them in water, these rocks would point at Polaris, the lodestar, the star they used most for navigation. A lodestone was what we now call a piece of magnetite. But not just any piece of magnetite. It had to have a certain, um, crystalline structure.” This was the sort of fact that Mr. Caldwell always barged by, ignoring. Although he knew it referred to matters microscopic, he imagined the stones were as cut and faceted as crystals from a chandelier in a fancy ballroom. “And something else had to happen for a piece of magnetite to become a lodestone,” Caldwell said. “It had to be hit by lightning.”

  Beverly dropped to her knees and used a hand to direct Caldwell’s penis into her mouth. Caldwell opened his own mouth, although he had yet to formulate the sentence he wanted to make. He knew it had something to do with futility. Perhaps he was going to echo the hooker Hester’s sensitive observation that there was some problem with the hydraulics. But before he could say anything, his cock began to harden. He listened to the wind, which came in pulses and made his ears pop.

  Beverly placed her hands on Caldwell’s hips and straightened up a bit, to accommodate the increasing inclination of his cock. Her tongue retreated and she touched her teeth against his skin. Then she began to move her head up and down, chewing in the most delicate way, enough to suggest pain without inflicting it upon him.

  A thought came to Caldwell then, although it’s not accurate to portray this as any kind of epiphany. The thought had been his steady companion for many years, sitting across from him in various bars, sleeping in the other bed in sterile hotel rooms. Caldwell had been ignoring it all this time, lowering his eyes when it got too close. He tried to put distance between himself and the thought whenever he could find a storm. And the bigger the storm, the greater the distance; someday he would find a big enough storm that he and the thought would be separated forever.

  The thought was, as you may have guessed, nothing but the simple reflection that he had loved his wife Jaime very, very much. And Andy, who was made of their love.

  Something happened then, there in cottage “K.” There was a low rumble, almost subsonic, a sound that crept beneath the ululation made by the wind. And then blue light pierced the wallboards, finding its way through the crooked imperfections. Everything in the room acquired an azure tinge: Beverly’s hair, her hand around his cock, the very air. And then the cottage shook, so hard that the few pieces of furniture shifted position. Caldwell’s ears popped and he was suddenly winded, working his mouth and lungs with the rhythmic desperation of a landed fish. Beverly released his cock and gulped for air. She seemed to notice the blue light then, turning her head first one way and then the other. There were only wisps of the strange light remaining, aquamarine filaments that were filtering back outside, sucked up once more by the cyclonic action.

  “We were hit by lightning,” said Caldwell.

  “You figure?” Beverly backed up and sat down upon the bed. She spread her legs apart and leaned backwards, smiling at Caldwell. “That’s good, right?”

  “Yeah,” nodded Caldwell. “It means we’ve turned into kissing stones.”

  MAYWELL DONNED FOUL-WEATHER GEAR, a green plastic suit that looked laughably inadequate. He replaced his baseball cap with a sou’wester, knotting it beneath his chin with a neat little bow. Jimmy Newton gave Maywell the transmitter and the laptop computer to carry, both of which were wired to Jimmy’s videocam, which meant that the two men were connected and had to stay no more than eight feet apart.

  On his way out, Maywell stopped in front of Polly, like a schoolboy presenting himself to his mother.

  “I won’t be long,” he said.

  “I’ll miss you.”

  Maywell opened his mouth to speak again but could find no words. He nodded, winked, turned to Jimmy. “Come on, then, Newton.”

  Jimmy s
topped by the table where Gail and Sorvig sat. “I’ll see you guys later,” he said. The girls nodded and smiled a bit warily, because this guy was a furry little freak. For one thing, he was all jazzed up about the hurricane. For another, he was the most eligible guy there (which goes to show how far wrong Gail and Sorvig had gone in booking this holiday) and he hadn’t even tried to cop a feel. They weren’t particularly vain, either one of them, but they were well worth an end-of-the-world tumble.

  Each woman felt this damned vacation was the other’s fault, but what was the point in saying anything? They had gone to their travel agent, who was a fairly cute guy named Helmet, a name that afforded Gail and Sorvig great mirth. They shared a giddy joke wherein “Helmet” referred to his dick, which they imagined to be circumcised in an overemphasized manner. Anyway, they had gone to his office at lunch hour, and while they talked with Helmet, both women thumbed through glossy pamphlets from resorts with titles like Sun & Sensuality. These places seemed perfect, just the ticket. They existed on islands that Gail and Sorvig had heard of. The pamphlets were full of pictures of people on the beach, in the pool, at organized dances. Helmet told them he’d been to many of the places and said they were big fun. Totally happening was the phrase he used, by which he implied, or maybe they inferred, unbridled sexual excess, with guys like himself, Gail and Sorvig imagined, Germanic sorts possessed of great fleshy hammerheads. Then one of them (each thought it was the other) had reached over and plucked up a cheesy mimeographed thing from a resort named Water’s Edge that existed on some island no one had ever heard of, Dampier Cay.