Galveston

by Paul Quarrington

  The building they were in was screaming. The wind pushed and pulled at the plywood that covered the windows. Rain forced its way through; although there were no gaping holes anywhere to be seen, the floor of the dining area was archipelagoed with puddles. From their table, Gail and Sorvig could see down the passageway. Polly was in the dining room, mop in hand, although as soon as she dealt with a puddle and turned away, it would reappear. Polly herself was soaking wet, a real mess, but she laboured with concentration and industry.

  “Come on, sit down, have a drink or something,” Gail called to her.

  “Yeah,” said Sorvig, “it’s not like what you’re doing is making any difference.”

  “You’ve got to try to keep up!” Polly called back. “Otherwise things get out of hand.”

  Things were already pretty much out of hand. The building screamed, and even though at any one moment the screaming seemed as loud as it could possibly get, the next moment would bring an augmentation. Gail and Sorvig were both way past being frightened, they had left fear eating dust a long time back. They were numb inside now. Their emotions had coalesced into a shapeless glob that lay off to one side of their bellies like roadkill. Both wondered if the building could actually withstand the storm, but no way was either going to bring up that point. It was a building, after all, someone had actually built it. What would have been the point of building the thing if it couldn’t stand up to what was, after all, just weather? Just fucking weather, that’s all it was. Buildings were supposed to protect people from weather, and weather certainly wasn’t supposed to pose a death threat. Gail and Sorvig lived in New York City, where night brought forth a horde of ghouls with ghastly intentions. They had survived that, and now their asses were grass because of weather.

  Lester appeared in the Pirate’s Lair. The girls didn’t know where he’d been, not outside because he was still pretty dry. He brandished a hammer, his symbol of utility. Gail and Sorvig spoke as one, saying it before he could: “What will be, will be.”

  “Amen,” said Lester. He went to the bar and stared at the wall there, the empty shelves, shelves that should have held liquor bottles shoulder to shoulder.

  “Polly put them away somewhere,” offered Sorvig.

  “You don’t need glass flying around,” pointed out Gail.

  They thought that Lester was at least halfway cool. True, he was on the far side of fifty, but he was in good shape, actually kind of astounding shape. All the guys at Planet Dickhead were always working out—the office tower had a fitness centre up on the thirty-fifth floor—but none of them had anything like Lester’s muscle definition. And he could dance, a talent highly prized by Gail and Sorvig. The guys they knew, the guys the gaga gods had decided made up their so-called “dating pool,” were all spastic.

  “Besides,” offered Gail, “you already got a pretty good buzz-on.”

  “Although,” said Sorvig, “I wouldn’t mind a little drink myself.”

  Gail nodded. “Me neither.”

  Lester swung around suddenly, as though trying to catch the liquor bottles in the act of tiptoeing toward the door. But Gail and Sorvig realized that he’d been distracted by a strange sound, an almost musical one, a raspy atonal yodelling.

  “What’s that?” asked the girls.

  Lester thought about that, chewing on his lips. “The wind,” he decided.

  “Yeah, but,” said Gail, “the wind and what?”

  Lester squinted suspiciously. He raised the hammer and waved it in the air, slightly but threateningly, and went off as though in search of an intruder. Gail and Sorvig laughed, and that felt good, but they only laughed for a brief moment, because a realization was descending hard upon them both. Gail said it first: “I don’t know if this building’s going to make it.”

  Sorvig nodded, shook her head in dismay, nodded again. “Where should we go?”

  Would the cottages be any safer? The main building was the most exposed to the onslaught, on the crest of the small rise. Their cottage was down the hillside a little, and maybe the wind wouldn’t be so strong there.

  Polly appeared beside the table, mop in hand. “Where’s Lester?”

  “Listen,” said Sorvig, “we think maybe we should go somewhere else.”

  Polly frowned. “Why’s that?”

  “Because this place,” said Gail, shrugging her shoulders to indicate the whole of the structure, “sounds like it’s about to blow.”

  “Nonsense,” said Polly. “Where’s Lester?”

  “He’s gone off to fix something,” answered Sorvig.

  “What he should fix,” Polly said, “is the covering to that big window in there. It’s coming away on one side.”

  Gail and Sorvig nodded.

  “Maywell hasn’t come back yet.” Polly made this both a statement and a question; there was an optimistic up-turn of inflection at the end of the statement, slight, just enough to elicit the response, “Yeah, he’s come back, you just can’t see him right now because he’s …” wherever that might be. But Gail and Sorvig only glanced down at the tabletop.

  “We’re going to be fine,” said Polly. “You two just relax.”

  “Okay,” said Gail. “Okay,” said Sorvig, although when Polly returned to her mopping, both girls rolled their eyes. “Yeah, right.”

  The door banged open and Jimmy Newton flew in backwards, covering a good ten feet in the air before landing. Gail and Sorvig were alarmed—Newton was allowing the fucking storm into the bar—but Maywell came through the door immediately afterwards, his hands still raised, his face still wrinkled by rage, and the girls understood that Newton’s flight, although wind-assisted, had been effected by the Last of the Merry Boys.

  “But you have to admit,” said Jimmy Newton from the ground, “it was a fucking awesome shot.”

  “I admit no such thing,” Maywell retorted, undoing the knot to his sou’wester. He pulled it from his head and shook water away. The hair underneath was matted, all of Hope’s tufts and cowlicks tamed and lying flat. There was a gash on his forehead; blood mixed with water had made half of his face pinkish, and little rivulets of crimson webbed his cheek.

  “Aw, what do you know?” said Newton testily, climbing to his feet. Sea water fell from them in steady streams.

  They had begun, Hope and Jimmy, by circling the perimeter of the main building, clinging to the boarded walls. Newton filmed the palm trees, which were driven low to the ground, their branches waving like arms in supplication. Palms worship big storms, they have evolved so that when winds come, they quiver and kowtow.

  The forest to the south of the Water’s Edge was not doing as well. The trees there, oak and Burmese rosewood, were stronger, sturdier, and the storm was having her way with them. The trees were naked of foliage, delimbed, and some had already fallen. The dead trees had been blown up against others, and were helping push them over. “I need to get closer,” Newton said to Maywell.

  Maywell was squinting to the south. He’d fixed a hand under the brim of his seafarer’s hat, to keep rain out of his eyes. He was trying to see Williamsville, which lay beyond the forest, but the air was too dark, the rain too heavy. “We’d have to go out in the open there,” he said.

  “That’s kind of the point. Being out in the open.”

  Maywell thought about that, grunted.

  “So let’s go,” said Jimmy, and together they left the meagre protection of the building. Maywell stood behind Jimmy, his hands upon his shoulders. They were slapped and pitched into by the storm.

  Jimmy raised the videocam and spoke as he filmed. “The winds are somewhere between eighty and ninety, I guess, gusting to a little over a ton. But the wall is still a long way off, so, man, there’s some power on the way.”

  After that, they’d made it to the other side of the building, the one facing east, the one that was broadside to the storm. They stood backed against the wall there and stared at the scene before them. “Jesus H. Christ,” marvelled Jimmy Newton, “would you look at that?”r />
  The sea was higher than Maywell had ever seen her. Looking up and down the coastline, he saw that the water had already risen halfway up the cliffside, and the tide was still going out. Unlike Caldwell, Maywell had to do no calculating, his rhythms and the ocean’s were tightly connected, his marrow knew the cycle.

  “Oh, boy! I need this!” shouted Jimmy Newton, pushed up against the building by the wind. He took Maywell’s hand as though they were schoolgirls in a playground and ran toward the water. As they neared the edge of the cliff, a huge gust rose and toppled them. Newton landed flat on his back, and crossed his arms over his chest, trying to protect the camera yoked about his neck.

  Maywell struggled to his hands and knees, slapped at Jimmy’s shoulder. “Come on,” he snarled, not thinking about what they were doing, or why, only continuing on doggedly now that a course of action had been decided. He scuttled ahead commando-style. Reaching the cliff edge, he hooked his fingers over it, and only then did he cast a glance backwards to see if Newton was following.

  As soon as Newton neared, Maywell reached out and dug his fingers into his collar, dragging him forward. The water was suddenly whipped into their faces, exploding off the rock face below. “You need that?” demanded Maywell. “Get it, then.”

  Newton drew the camera forward, wiped some rain away. He rested the machine on the ground in front of him and pressed a button. But Newton only let it run a moment or two, then he punched another that extinguished the little red “record” light.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I want to film the water actually coming at me,” he shouted. Newton chinned himself forward, peered down the rock face. “I could get in there,” he said. Some five feet below was a small crevice, a vee that nature had carved away. “I’ll wedge myself in there, you keep a hold of me from up here, this is going to be a-fucking-mazing.”

  “It’s dangerous,” said Maywell, nodding toward the ocean. “She’s riled.”

  “Arr, matey,” growled Newton, giddy with excitement. He reversed himself, dangling his legs over the side of the cliff. His face was now only an inch or two away from Maywell’s. Maywell reached out and put a hand on Newton’s shoulder. He took hold of the material hard, and Newton slipped away. His head bobbed out of sight; Maywell was dragged forward, the rocks scraping at his belly, but he did not let go of the man.

  Newton wedged his little feet into the crotch made by the outcroppings, folded himself up and pushed knees and elbows against the rock. The water pressed furiously against his feet, sometimes at his knees, occasionally rising as high as his belly. Maywell Hope was pulled forward, the whole of one arm hanging off the edge, his fingers still wrapped around the material of Newton’s shirt.

  Jimmy fumbled with his camera and raised it up. He didn’t bother with the viewfinder, he didn’t bother aiming the thing in any real way, he simply raised it as best he could and pressed the record button. He filmed dark water and black sky. The ocean bubbled and seethed.

  Caldwell, as usual, had got the science wrong. Really, the undertow was not so much tamed by the storm as shackled. The world existed in massive imbalance, there was simply too much water for the undertow to deal with in its regular and workmanlike manner. That work was left to a much fiercer relative, the rip current. The rip current prowled the edge of the coastline, moving vast amounts of water along narrow, invisible channels, occasionally darting into land when it spied any kind of opportunity. Which it did now, and Jimmy Newton happened to be there. Suddenly the videographer’s ankles were gripped as though by a huge hand and he was pulled out of his sheltering vee and dragged away toward the end of the world.

  Maywell was taken too. In an instant he found himself in the water, his forehead stinging. But he had not let go of Newton, because it was not in his nature to let go of things. If he’d been given any sort of advance warning, of course, Maywell might have elected to let the storm take Jimmy Newton. But as it was, he ended up in the water too, being consumed by a huge beast. In a calmer sea he might have been pulled to the bottom by the computer, the transmitter in his pocket, but this water churned so madly that the weight didn’t make much difference.

  Maywell lashed out with his free hand, scraping the knuckles against a rock, slapping it wildly, making contact with another, somehow managing to take hold of something. In an instant he was stretched out, both shoulders almost popping out of their sockets. One hand held a rock, one hand held Jimmy Newton, and there was a long moment of pain so intense that he didn’t even bother to scream. If he had screamed, his mouth would have filled up with water, and Maywell was very fearful of drowning, always had been. So he accepted this moment in silence, and then it was gone, and his body was folded back in on itself as though he were the bellows of a concertina, pulling Jimmy Newton into him, and then the two men were spat back at the rock face. They slammed against it, Maywell taking most of the punishment, his body acting as a cushion for Newton’s. The two men were shoved back into the vee and Maywell pedalled madly for purchase, and drove himself upwards. He managed to pull Newton up and threw him forward, and the two men ended up on top, clinging to the edge. There was a brief moment of relative safety then, during which Newton started giggling. He raised the videocam into the air. “Got it,” said Jimmy.

  “How bad is it?” asked Sorvig.

  “Bad,” said Maywell Hope.

  “It’s the greatest storm I’ve ever seen,” Jimmy said. “It’s small and tight, like Andrew. And it’s coming fast.”

  “Coming?” repeated Gail. “That motherfucker’s here.”

  “The big winds,” said Newton, “are going to be concentrated around the eye-wall.”

  “The eye-wall,” repeated Sorvig.

  “The inside of this baby. The wall around the eye.”

  Polly joined them with her mop. She knew full well the futility of her labour, but she needed to keep the implement in her hands, a symbol of vigilance. “May,” she said, “I want you to add some nails to those boards. I swear to God some of them have been sucked out.”

  Maywell looked around the place. “Polly, did you ever happen to find any packets of smokes anywhere, almost as though someone had hidden them or something …”

  “These ladies,” said Polly, dropping a shoulder toward Gail and Sorvig, “are a little concerned. Perhaps you could attend to it now.”

  The lights went out.

  The girls gave out a little yelp as darkness took over, even though there was not much of a grade between the new black and the gloom that had existed a few moments previously. Maywell was actually surprised that the electricity had lasted as long as it had. He suspected that the poles were down now, that the storm had worked one free of its posting and then they all came away.

  The sound came once more, that of a dying animal or, more precisely, of a beast that refused to die even though its limbs were torn off and blood gushed from gaping wounds.

  Sorvig could see down the connecting passageway and into the dining room. Light was pulsing in there, with the muscled insistence of a heart. She drew the others’ attention to it.

  Maywell Hope wondered if it could be the Corpus Sant. He’d read about the Corpus Sant in Dampier’s book. “‘A Corpus Sant is a certain small glittering Light,’” he quoted from memory. “‘The height of the Storm is commonly over when the Corpus Sant is seen aloft.’” Maywell had always wanted to see the Corpus Sant, a creature rendered out of pure light.

  “What that is,” said Jimmy Newton, “is the boards about to tear away from the windows.”

  Maywell took a few steps down the passageway, the rest following quietly behind. He glanced into the dining room and saw that Newton, damn him, was correct—the storm was pulling away the edges of the protective plywood, allowing the light, the doomed twilight, to flicker into the dining room.

  A new sound came, heard only faintly beneath the yowling of the wood, an arrhythmic banging.

  “What’s that?” whispered Gail. She had wrapped one of her hands around
Sorvig’s, her other hand clutching a clammy doughiness. She suspected it was Jimmy Newton, but it didn’t really matter at this point.

  “It’s Lester,” said Maywell. “Out there trying to fix things.”

  Even though Lester had his mouth full of nails, he was reciting the one-hundred-and-fifty-second psalm, the one he’d created sometime after his boy died. The psalm had come to him while he was sitting where the Royal Tavern used to be. He’d squatted among the debris and sucked at a bottle of rum, and the words filled his body and he spoke them aloud. Oh, Lord, sometimes it seems as though You are very far away from us. You withhold from us Your bitter bosom. You give us not the holy teat. Lester knew that the words were heaven-sent, because many of them baffled him. He had not been previously aware, for example, that the Almighty was possessed of teats, but it seemed to make sense.

  Lester was being shoved up against the plywood, a sheet that was six feet long, four feet wide. There were many nails driven into it, but the wind was plucking up the edges and the nails were popping out. They popped out and disappeared, swallowed by the tempest. The nails Lester had in his mouth were longer, four inches, and the two he’d managed to drive in were indeed holding. He drew out another, but it was stolen by the storm. He was down to four. Maybe, he thought, if he could affix one to each corner of the plywood, things would be all right.

  Lester jammed the nail into the corner of the plywood, twisting the point. Unfortunately, the nail was in his left hand, the hammer in his right, and the storm was pressing his chest up against the board. There was no way he could pound it. It occurred to him that if he turned around and put his back to the wall—and if he could manage to take the nail in his right hand, put the hammer in his left—he could perhaps swing across his body and get at the head.