Galveston

by Paul Quarrington

  Newton heard the word five, he was absolutely sure that NOAA had told him five, and Jimmy smiled and was about to rattle a fist in victory, but then Maywell appeared and delivered a right hand into Jimmy Newton’s face. Newton crashed into the shelves that held the old radio. He covered his nose with his hands, because his nose was spurting blood in great quantities. Newton felt something hit his back, and he realized that the radio had tumbled from its resting place, so he spun around and tried to catch it. Newton managed to get his hands around it, but his hands were covered with blood and the housing was rendered out of some crude plastic that would have been hard to grab hold of under any circumstances. So he watched the radio fall to the ground, where it cracked open like an egg; he watched the light in the tubes flicker and die.

  “Well,” he offered, “we are now, like, totally fucked.”

  Lester was improvising a prayer, begging safe passage for Polly’s immortal soul. He believed this to be his best prayer ever. He didn’t really know what he was saying, but his heart was beating fast and strong, emotions were bubbling as though his insides were on the boil, so this had to be one motherfucker of a prayer. Lester loved Polly, too, in his way. He worked hard for her, harder than he worked for anybody else. And he found her beautiful, truly beautiful, one of God’s finest womanly creations. She was so good and beautiful that her seat in glory was ensured; but Lester prayed hard anyway, as hard as he’d ever prayed, his best prayer ever.

  Gail climbed to her feet and took a few steps. She poked her head forward and twisted her neck, taking a cautious look down the passageway, into the dining room. Wind rushed down to slap her face, but it did so with no great force, it was firm and tentative at the same time. She stepped forward and let the wind rush around her body, and although it forced her to take a step backwards, she reclaimed her ground. Things stirred in the dining room, stirred and twitched, like the extremities of a creature that was dying. “Hey,” she called out, “know what?”

  Lester finished his prayer. Polly’s lips moved and Lester imagined that she said “thank you,” but she was very far away now from the sad vale, and Lester didn’t think, necessarily, that she was speaking to him. She could very well be addressing Our Lord, who was holding out His great hand and bidding her welcome. Lester imagined that Polly was gazing at Paradise, where there was gentle blue water and beautiful flowers, Birds of Paradise, Crowns of Thorns.

  “What?” Sorvig was the only one listening.

  “I think it’s over.”

  Newton stepped through the hatch in the bar, wiping blood away from his face. “It’s not over,” he said.

  Maywell Hope had the broken radio in his hands and was staring into its innards, hoping to see tubes flicker back into operation.

  “Yeah, it is, I think,” said Gail. “The sun’s even coming out.” At least, everything in the dining room was suffused with an odd violet glow.

  “It’s the eye,” said Jimmy Newton. “The eye of the storm.”

  “How long did they say?” said Maywell, looking at Polly, afraid to go nearer, because his view was blocked by Lester, and she might simply be sleeping.

  “I don’t know if I got through,” said Jimmy. “I don’t think I did. Maybe. Even if I did, I don’t know how long they’d be, they have to fly through the thing.”

  “But it’s over,” repeated Gail. She had seen nothing so odd as the lavender flush upon the new world, neither so odd nor so beautiful.

  “It’s not frigging over,” said Newton. “We’re in the eye of the storm. And we better get out of here.”

  “Where would we go?” whispered Sorvig. “To another building?”

  “This is a five,” said Newton, shaking his head.

  “What do you mean, a five?” Maywell said.

  “I’m talking the Saffir–Simpson scale, which is how they measure hurricanes. One through five.”

  “Numbers.” Maywell spat the word with great disdain. “You know what, Jimmy? It is what it is.”

  “‘Category five,’” recited Newton. “‘Catastrophic. Winds greater than 155 miles per hour. Storm surge greater than eighteen feet. Complete building failures with small utility buildings blown over or away. All shrubs, trees and signs blown down. Major damage to all structures located less than fifteen feet above shore level and within five hundred yards of the shoreline.’” Newton took a pause. “That’s us, baby.”

  Polly was almost gone now. Lester prayed for a miracle. The notion of miracles was the foundation of his idiosyncratic religion. When he preached, he featured all of the miracles mentioned in the Bible, and made up a few of his own—Jesus gesturing at the ground and causing flowers to burst upwards through the parched sand. It occurred to him that he might assist in the miracle (Lester was God’s instrument, after all), so he bent forward and gave Polly the kiss of life. He locked his lips over hers and blew life into her body.

  “So,” said Sorvig, “let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “But it’s over,” said Gail.

  “It’s not over, Gail,” said Jimmy Newton. “We’re in the eye. The other side’s coming, and when it does, we’ll be hit even worse.”

  Lester lifted his head and studied Polly’s face. He thought he saw life flickering there, he thought that she was smiling now, happy to be returning, so he reapplied his lips.

  “What the hell are you doing, Lester?” demanded Maywell.

  Lester gestured at Miss Polly, demonstrating the reani-mation he and the Lord were creating. But Polly lay very still.

  Maywell began to move toward her, slowly.

  “Where would we go?” asked Sorvig.

  “There’s only one place to go,” answered Jimmy Newton. “Up. We go up the hill, get as high as we can.”

  “But there are no buildings there,” argued Sorvig.

  “I got bad news: there are no buildings here.”

  Maywell Hope pushed Lester aside and knelt down beside Polly. He placed his lips upon her own. Maywell didn’t breathe hard, as Lester had done, Maywell kissed Polly as gently as he could. He had never done that, seen how lightly their lips could meet. He was not a man given to tenderness, and Polly had never minded. But now Maywell tried to be as gentle as he could, and he hoped that Polly would comprehend that his love, though imperfect, was the best thing about him. And during these moments Maywell hoped that she had life enough left to understand. And once he’d admitted in this way that his wife was dying, he had no choice but to admit to himself that she was dead.

  BEVERLY CLIMBED OFF THE BED and looked around. She did this in a very leisurely manner, as though it were Saturday morning, reflected Caldwell, as though she were searching in the debris for the damned newspaper, which the boy tossed from his bicycle with frenzied insouciance. The wall that had existed between cottage “K” and cottage “J” had disappeared, and Beverly glanced through and saw not very much. The shower stall remained over there, tilted, a bed frame sticking out of its opening. A few uprights had survived the storm; the enamel washstand in “K” was still standing. It was a useless convenience, remembered Beverly, not hooked up to any piping, but there it was, full of warm water. “Hmmm,” she said, turning back toward Caldwell and shrugging.

  She was caught in a shaft of light that drove down from heaven with the determination of lightning and made her iridescent. Beverly’s naked body shone different colours: her breasts were mauve and her stomach was kind of green, one leg was yellowish, the other pink. “You’re beautiful,” Caldwell told her, more informative than complimentary.

  “Hey, look,” said Beverly, and she pointed toward her feet. There were small pieces of light there, round and pulsating. These little balls of illumination moved about pell-mell, seeking sanctuary. “That’s weird, huh?”

  Caldwell climbed off the bed and went to join Beverly in the shaft of light. She smiled at him, stroked his chest. “We better get out of here,” said Caldwell.

  Beverly smiled, but in an odd way. “What do you mean?”

&nbs
p; “Well,” shrugged Caldwell, “this is the eye of the storm.”

  “Yes,” agreed Beverly. “Soon the winds are going to come from the other direction.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The winds are going to come from the other direction, and they will make everything right again.”

  “Ummm …”

  “Things that the wind knocked over, it will make them erect once more. Things that it destroyed, it shall now make whole.”

  “No, Beverly.”

  She stretched upwards to kiss Caldwell’s lips lightly. “You just wait and see,” she whispered.

  “The storm surge,” said Caldwell, “is centred in the right side of a hurricane. You see, while the wind in the rear of the system is pushing toward shore, the wind in the front is pushing toward the centre. It’s pushing toward the centre, piling up water against the rear. Do you understand?” Caldwell looked into Beverly’s eyes, searching for enlightenment, just as he’d desperately searched the eyes of his students, hoping that they’d comprehended what he himself did not. But, Caldwell realized, he did understand, this time. In fact, he understood it all—the creation of the tropical depression, how it was set into motion by the Coriolis effect, the airy concept of organization. He realized that science wasn’t a way to explain the world, science was rather a way in which the world explained itself, employing this shaky but shared vocabulary.

  “I understand,” said Beverly, her tone indicating that she understood without caring. “And this is compounded by the so-called soda-straw effect.”

  “Exactly,” said Mr. Caldwell enthusiastically. “When we suck on a straw, we cause a sudden decrease in the air pressure within the tube. That draws the liquid up. In the eye of the storm the pressure is the lowest, so the water around the wall rises, approximately one foot per every inch of barometric pressure.” Caldwell spread his arms to demonstrate simplicity.

  “So what?” demanded Beverly.

  “So … we’d better get to higher ground.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought I’d just explained all that.”

  Beverly went outside, that is, she stepped over a ghostly doorstep, and strolled down to the road, where the road used to be, kicking through dirty water. “Please don’t feel that you have to stay with me,” she called over her shoulder. “If you wish to get to higher ground …” Beverly looked to her left, where Lester’s Hump loomed in the weak new light. But her interest was caught by something. “Hey. Look at that.”

  The little blue church still stood. It was soaking wet, and a couple of huge Afzelius fig leaves lay plastered on its rooftop. The gravestones, even the little wooden crosses, remained upright.

  Caldwell came to stand beside her. She smiled at him, nodded in the direction of the blue church, took his large hand into both of her small ones. “It’s kind of a miracle.”

  “I suppose,” he agreed. Caldwell could hear the storm coming again, not a roar so much as a rumble, a huge freight train. A freight train, but the engineer was drunk and sleeping it off, dreaming of true love but knowing none. “But what I’m saying is, the surge is going to clear the cliff over there …”

  “Go, then.” Beverly pointed toward the summit of Lester’s Hump.

  “We’ll both go.”

  “What are you thinking, Caldwell? That we are going to wed? That we are going to live happily ever after?”

  Truthfully, Caldwell had got no further in his thinking than that they should try to escape. Beverly, on the other hand, had been thinking deeply. She’d thought about the life she’d abandoned in Orillia, Ontario, and wondered if there was any part of it that required her return. She didn’t have to go watch her grandfather die, because it would be anticlimactic. The old man had perished years ago and was existing in an alcoholic half-life. She wasn’t needed at the office; the papers she’d misfiled would turn up sooner or later. She had no friends, not a single one, and even the very odd clique of which she was a member—weather tourists, weather weenies—didn’t accept her. They couldn’t comprehend her relationship to cyclonic action, and they were sanctimonious regarding her employment of her physical self. All she had in her life, now, were memories of Galveston, 1900, and a phys. ed. teacher named Mr. Caldwell. And she had him forever; it would make no significant difference if the man wanted to seek salvation upon the hilltop.

  “Go on,” she told him. “I’ll be fine.”

  “But the storm surge—”

  “I understand about the storm surge.”

  “What will you do?”

  Of course, it hadn’t occurred to Beverly to do anything at all, but she gave an answer anyway, mostly because Caldwell seemed to need one. “The church,” she said. “I’ll go inside the church.”

  There was irony there, which pleased Beverly, even a kind of satisfying sarcasm, because Beverly knew she was damned. She had been born in the land of the damned, into a damned family, and had been damned all of her years.

  Caldwell was damned too, because he’d allowed separation. He’d parted from his love. Caldwell had thought it was only for a short while, an hour or so, while they went one place and he remained in another, but now he realized that separation is an absolute, there are no qualifiers. You are either with someone or you are not.

  “Okay,” said Caldwell, and he began to walk toward the pale blue structure. “We’ll take our chances in the church.”

  There had been no clear demarcation between being and non-being. It was like the cloud game, the heaven game. Polly slipped out of life, into death, and no one could say when, exactly, it happened. But they all knew when she was gone.

  Maywell stood up and rubbed at his eyes, but he was always rubbing at his eyes and there was no evidence that he was now digging out tears. Gail and Sorvig reached out toward him, but their fingers made no contact. Jimmy Newton scowled, looked around and considered practicalities. Should he try to fix the radio, endeavour to rescind the SOS? He thought about that, even though he knew it was stupid shit, designed merely to take his mind off the woman with the waxy skin. The only real acknowledgment of Polly’s death was a negative one: Lester fell silent. He’d had every faith that his prayers would not fail, and when they did, he was a bit stupefied.

  Maywell went behind the bar. He bent over and lifted the hatch to the storage area, the crawl space, full of bottles, cases of soda and beer. Maywell jumped down through the opening, bent over and began to reorganize the beverages systematically. After all, a mess would irritate Polly, and he didn’t want that. As soon as that thought raced through his mind, a tiny, unwanted souvenir from life, Maywell became angry, kicking at the cases, levelling them until they became a crude funereal dais. He hoisted himself out and pulled open a drawer, fishing around inside.

  “We don’t got oodles of time,” said Jimmy Newton.

  “Fuck you, Jimmy Newton,” replied Maywell.

  “Got you.” Newton smiled at the others, shrugged, as though Maywell were his errant and idiotic brother.

  “Are you sure the storm’s not over?” asked Gail. There was light, after all, bolts of colour that broke through the clouds. Dawn was approaching, so things felt like they were getting back to normal, the wheel once more spinning truly.

  “It’s not over,” said Sorvig with finality.

  Lester considered saying, “What will be, will be,” but then decided, in a trice, that he was done saying it forever. Some things could be otherwise, in another vale or Holy Realm. Lester hadn’t reasoned it all out, but he would before his next sermon, and this notion would form his text. He wondered which islanders would be around to hear it, he even wondered where he might deliver it, because Dampier Cay would not be the same. The work of ages had been undone in a few short hours.

  Maywell Hope found a piece of paper and a pencil, and scrawled out a few words. He bent over Polly’s body and arranged it somewhat, smoothing her hair behind her ears, folding her hands across her chest, pressing this piece of paper between her cold fingers. Then he
lowered his lover’s body into the storage area. He stood up and slapped his hands together, which he knew looked, at best, odd, but he was not trying to rid his hands of death, he was trying to approximate as best he could a proper interment, and this is what he might have done had he thrown a handful of dirt upon sweet Polly to wish her a safe journey. He had been born with a black mark beside his name, but Polly had never noticed. Maywell was going to miss her very much.

  “Lester,” he said, “maybe you’d say a few words.”

  “Lord,” said Lester, “this is Polly.”

  Those words had come to Lester easily enough, but once he’d spoken them, he felt the oppression of silence.

  “Polly,” he said after a few long moments, “this is our Lord.”

  Maywell threw the trap door shut. “We need rope. Come along, Lester.”

  Maywell headed toward the check-in desk, and Lester trotted eagerly to catch up. “I know where there’s rope, Maywell. There’s some underneath the counter.”

  Maywell stopped abruptly, turned back, and Lester’s first thought was that he had angered him. Maywell reached out and clamped his hand on Lester’s shoulder, tightening his grip so much that Lester felt pain and had to let out a small moan. “Lester,” said Maywell, “we need to save the guests.”

  Lester nodded.

  “I’m counting on you to help me. Now, you won’t let me down.”

  “I won’t let you down, sir.”

  “Don’t call me sir, Lester.”

  “I won’t let you down, Maywell.”

  Maywell nodded. “Lester, guess what? I’ve given up smoking.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Leastwise,” said Maywell Hope, “I don’t expect I’ll have another cigarette before I die.”

  The two men laughed, and for a moment were once again both Merry Boys.

  THE FIVE PEOPLE CAME OUT OF THE MAIN BUILDING. They were bound together with rope, lengths of six feet or so connecting them at the waist. They were tied together in two separate groups. Lester was tied with Gail on one side, Sorvig on the other; Maywell and Jimmy Newton were bound.