by Howard Owen
There was no radio to warn them, and they didn’t believe the sky. They jeered at the other vacationers and partiers as they fled.
When the storm hit, the dozen partiers at the Sink ‘r’ Swim would be on their own.
Six of them, rebuked as cowards, bailed out before the ocean cut the channel that would make White Oak Beach an island for the rest of the century. By the time the others realized the extent of their folly and bad luck, they were trapped.
A storm-surge wave that one survivor said was at least 15 feet high hit the beach and washed several cottages off their foundations, including the one in which Theron and Belle were marooned. They were now hanging on to the walls of a house chest-deep in water.
The only thing standing that looked as if it might survive the storm was the White Oak Beach water tower, only a short block away. As the water temporarily receded and the wind came howling in ever harder, the remaining six tried to reach it. They were halfway there, a survivor said, hanging on to each other, when another wave separated them, and they had to swim.
Four of them reached the water tower, which somehow did not collapse. They climbed up as high as they could and used their belts and other clothing to lash themselves to the stairs on the back side, facing land.
They could see Theron and Belle down below. They had gotten as far as a yaupon tree that stood like a gnarled old man in the middle of a vacant lot. Theron was helping Belle up to the highest point that would hold her when the next large wave hit. The four hanging on to the tower didn’t see it coming, because they were facing away from the sea, but they were 30 feet above the ground, and the water that roared in was no more than 10 feet from their perch.
Theron and Belle weren’t washed away. The yaupon tree perversely snared them, hanging them up in its limbs, spearing them there, while they struggled to get free, screaming for help and choking on seawater. Then the tree disappeared beneath a solid wall of ocean.
It was some time, nobody knew exactly how long, before the water receded enough for the other four to see Theron and Belle, their clothes torn away, their bodies stuck like kites in the yaupon tree. That was what dominated the survivors’ view for the next three hours, whenever they ventured to open their eyes.
When the winds finally subsided, the four in the tower climbed down and saw that they had chosen the only structure still standing for five blocks. The men walked through the still waist-deep water over to the tree; none of the four was wearing anything except rags by now. They were able to untangle Theron and Belle’s bodies and carry them over to a brick pumphouse. One of the women found a tablecloth snagged on a piece of wood and covered them. A survivor told Ruth, years later, that their faces and bodies had been sandblasted as smooth as if they were babies.
FOUR
Bob the Driver wakes Harry with a question.
“So, your sister killing the fatted calf for you down there?”
“Maybe the fatted tofu. Freda and Artie eat a little healthier than I do.”
“Fatted tofu,” Bob barks out a laugh. “Guess that’s kosher.”
Harry has regained, if nothing else, some of his appetite. For that he’s grateful. The last time he visited Freda, he and Artie went out for a pork barbecue sandwich at one of his old favorite places.
His sister asked him, when they got back, as politely as she could manage, if he didn’t think a man with the big toe of his left foot in the grave ought to try to walk the straight and narrow just a little bit.
No, he told her. He didn’t think God would approve of such hypocrisy. Harry believes, as much as he believes anything, that Harry Stein will have to stand on his record, barbecue and all. The idea of undoing 70 years of wrongs with a single moment of remorse seems too easy to him.
“God forbid,” he told Freda, “that I should be forgiven so easily.”
Bob gets him to the Islip airport with an hour to spare. Harry used to think nothing of rushing up here 20 minutes before the flight took off. Now, on top of everything else, he’s anxious, nervous.
His old friend carries most of the bags to the gate and makes sure Harry is checked and on his way south.
“Now, you make sure he gets to the right gate in Baltimore,” Bob admonishes the ticket clerk, to Harry’s great embarrassment. He starts to protest, to say something sharp, when Bob the Driver grabs him and gives him a painful but sincere hug.
“You take care of yourself,” he says. “You and I have got some goddamn tennis to play, come spring.”
And then Bob the Driver is gone, hurrying out the door. Harry watches him get back in the station wagon and sit there for a few seconds before he hurtles off into traffic, almost clipping a shuttle bus.
Harry likes the little USAir Express flights. The propellers make such a racket that he is almost always lulled to sleep. Somehow, the small cabin, the dull vibrating roar going up and down like a metallic chant in his ears, seems cozier, safer than the big planes do, a womb of noise.
He has a window seat, and once he gets comfortable, even before the plane begins to taxi, he is asleep.
Soon, Harry is in the middle of the same cruel dream he’s been having since the fall of 1944. Sometimes it will go away for years and then he’ll have it four sweat-drenched nights in a row, for no reason.
Lately, it has been on him again, hard.
All the variations have the same basic thread, and they all owe their existence to one single minute a thousand years ago.
In the dream, as it happened in life, Lieutenant Harry Stein is with a platoon of men crossing a small river a few kilometers east of Verdun. It is no more than a creek, a tributary that feeds the Meuse. The banks are lined with poplars, and the only houses and farm buildings in sight have been deserted for two days.
Harry and a sergeant even younger than he, are side by side, at the end of the irregular line wading in three feet of water, chilled by the fall wind, their rifles held overhead. The men are wary and silent, but they are not really afraid, not foul-your-pants afraid; there are no Germans within five miles, they know.
Sergeant Stevens is from Maryland, a square-headed, blond farm boy who says little unless he has been drinking, a vice he has taken up in the holes and trenches of northern France. He is on Harry’s side, for some reason, and Harry knows that this is important. Just before it happens, Harry and the sergeant agree that this would be a day better spent hunting quail back home.
They all know light travels faster than sound. They have seen it before. Still, Harry is surprised for the split second between Stevens’ sudden lurch and the tut-tut-tut from a barn more than a hundred yards away.
The water turns red, fading to pink. Stevens is moving forward, leaving his trail in the water. The other men rush in random terror for the safety of land and trees, no more than 50 feet away. The bullets barely disturb the water at all.
Stevens stumbles, then falls. Harry catches him around the waist and tries to go forward. When that fails, he bends low, beneath the water line, and tries to lift him. As he raises upward, staggering under the weight, a sudden convulsion tells Harry the sergeant has been hit again, and they both fall into the creek. Harry gulps a mouthful of water and thinks he can taste the other man’s blood.
Harry tries again, as the sniper continues to fire at them. He sees two more of his men hit. One falls into the water, blood streaming from his head. The other, shot between the hip and knee, is helped to safety by two friends.
Harry feels a stinging in his right arm. He makes one last, hurried effort, and then he lets the sergeant’s body slide slowly down his as he follows the other men out of the water and through the line of poplars. He has to pull hard to escape Stevens’ grasp, and this second above all the others will stay with him forever. He hears Stevens moan behind him, once, as he flees. He expects to be shot every step of the way; he has never known such fear.
When he looks back, the sergeant is nowhere to be seen. It is then that he sees that he himself is wounded. It is not a serious injury, and Har
ry will be back with his men soon, in truth more quickly than he would have preferred.
Gradually, he comes to understand that the other men either did not see his surrender of Stevens or do not choose to judge him. The incident is never spoken of except obliquely. Harry’s men do not turn on him, but no one tells him that he did his best, either. On good days he can convince himself that he did what he could.
On bad days, he has the dream.
This time, he looks back. Stevens, whose first name—Eldridge—Harry knew only from rosters and dog tags, is sitting up in the water. He is laughing, beckoning Harry back through the bullets. Stevens is bleeding from his mouth, and there are holes in his chest, yet he still laughs.
“C’mon, in, Harry,” he yells. “The water’s fine. It doesn’t hurt.”
Harry tries to get away, but the current carries him back toward the sergeant, and finally he crashes straight into the blood-soaked, laughing man, who embraces him.
“Is he OK?” Harry hears someone ask, and he thinks he must be in a hospital, somewhere behind the lines. Someone else, a woman, answers, after a pause, “I think so. He’s been asleep since before we took off.”
And then Harry realizes that he’s waking up, that it’s just the dream. He can’t believe, after all this time, that his brain can trick him so, can send him back to that day. Why, he wonders, don’t the good days become the stuff of dreams?
He is covered in sweat, but he keeps his eyes closed, embarrassed that his seatmate and the stewardess have seen this. He feigns sleep until they are descending toward the Baltimore airport.
Hank and Ruth cross into Georgia around 4. Outside Savannah, Hank finally pulls over and lets his mother drive for a while. She has asked three times. It’s still light, and they both know it’s preferable that she not have her turn on the interstate after sunset.
Ruth is pleased to see that Hank can actually doze off for a few minutes. He is the master of the 20-minute nap, and by the time they reach Jacksonville, he seems rested and ready for the final stretch, across the Florida panhandle to Sugar Beach.
With Hank back behind the wheel, they sail along between 75 and 80 miles an hour, westward into the sun. Ruth’s mind wanders; she’s as tired from her hour of driving as Hank is from all his.
“I wonder if Naomi is there yet,” he says, ending a long silence. Ruth and he, long used to living in the same house, can go a day comfortably without talking, but she has been too quiet today, too much inside herself.
Hank passes a long line of trucks and a billboard advertising alligators, boiled peanuts and fireworks.
Ruth found out, as soon as she called Paul to thank him for the surprise party, that her daughter would be coming, too. She wonders what inducements or threats it took to get her there, and she hopes all that effort isn’t for naught.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Ruth replies, trying to sound casual. “I think she was supposed to get there around 6.”
“Well, then, I suppose she will be there when we get there, unless I can figure some way to shift this Lincoln into warp speed.”
“You seem to be trying.”
She’s doing a tap dance on the console with her fingernails. Hank reaches over and puts his hand on hers.
“It’ll be OK, Momma,” he tells her. She sighs, shakes her head and tells him to pay attention to the road.
“Wonder if Thomas and the kids are coming, too.”
“You know as well as I do,” she answers, and looks away.
There are many things Ruth would change if she could. Naomi and her family’s last visit to Saraw is near the top of the list.
It was Christmas of 1992.
Actually, it was the first week in December, but Ruth was just thrilled that her daughter’s family was coming at all. She was filled with the Christmas spirit as she had not been in years. She and Naomi had not been close, not the way they once had been, for some time, but Ruth had hopes.
Grace was in college and Gary was a senior in high school that year. When they were in Saraw, they and their father would go for long drives, no doubt (Ruth imagined) counting the hours until time for the flight back to Denver. Thomas grew up in North Carolina, but he had said, at a family dinner a few years before, after a few glasses of a good Bordeaux, that if he never saw the state again, it would be too soon, and Hank had suggested that nobody had built a fence around it, that there were still flights out. Thomas thanked God for that, falling into his high-pitched cackle that Ruth always found irritating.
Then came the Christmas of ’92. They all seemed to be on edge, a half-step off, misunderstood and misunderstanding. Hank tried to be gone whenever Thomas was around.
Naomi and her family were in Saraw from Wednesday to Saturday. On Friday, the last full day, the others were outside playing a sloppy game of pickup basketball. Ruth, Naomi and Thomas were at the breakfast table, talking, with a cable news show on in the background. A story came on about a gay rights parade in San Francisco. Ruth, a little too quickly, picked up the remote control and clicked the TV off.
Naomi looked at her for a second, then asked her, a little sharply, “Anything wrong, Mother?”
Ruth wondered later how she had missed it.
“No, nothing’s wrong.” And then she said, “I just can’t bear to watch all that, that mess. It gives me a cold chill. How can people do that?”
Ruth had never considered Gary’s sexual orientation. He was a nice boy, very thoughtful, a little quiet. She never picked up on it at all. Otherwise, she would never have said anything. Surely they must know that.
Naomi seemed to take it as a blow to the heart, an outright attack on her only son. She lectured Ruth at length about tolerance and the myth that one has any control over sexual preference.
Ruth, her feelings hurt, brought the Old Testament into it, going deeper than she meant to. Thomas half-heartedly joined the fray on his wife’s side.
“It’s just a breakdown of the family,” Ruth said, “all this homosexuality is part of the whole thing.”
“The breakdown of the family!” Naomi bit off the words. “How can you lecture anybody, especially me, on the breakdown of the family? If this family was a car, they’d have junked it for parts 20 years ago.”
And she left Ruth sitting there with her mouth open, too stunned to cry right away. They avoided each other as much as possible for the rest of the day.
The next morning, Ruth was supposed to make breakfast for them before they left. They had a 10:30 flight.
The departing car woke Hank before 7. Ruth was still asleep, so he went downstairs. Naomi left a note, as cold as the cement steps where he read it, about trying to get an earlier flight back, as if there were more than one flight a day leaving Newport for Denver.
He had to break the news to Ruth, and that’s when he told her what everyone else seemed to know already.
She tried to deny it at first, then realized what she had said. How, she wondered then, still wonders now, can I be so stupid sometimes? On Christmas Day, she had to be persuaded even to open presents, and then she regretted spoiling things for everyone else.
She wrote a long letter to Naomi, trying to patch things up without actually saying that she knew her grandson was gay. Naomi didn’t write back for four months, and her letter made no reference to Ruth’s.
How, Ruth asks herself, can you expect it to be any different? If it hadn’t been Gary, it would have been something else. With her and Naomi, it’s always something, a million small somethings spawned by the one Large Something that turned everything upside-down.
When the plane lands at Baltimore, Harry tries to carry his own luggage and almost falls. Two airport workers take the large bags to the lobby, where Harry is placed near the departure gate. He’s surprised they don’t put a name tag on him so he doesn’t get lost.
In less than half an hour, he’s on another, similar plane, and soon they’re droning toward Richmond. He nods in and out of sleep, but the dream doesn’t come back.
&nb
sp; At the Richmond airport, he goes through the same ordeal of having to have his bags toted into the lobby. Here, at least, is family. Freda and Artie are waiting, first ones he sees inside the building. They approach him gingerly, it seems to Harry, as if he might break. He hasn’t seen them in a while. Maybe he’s not looking so good.
“You seem better,” his sister says, and he thanks her for that, for trying.
“Yeah,” Artie is nodding his head like a large dog. “Better.”
“Better than what?” Harry can’t resist saying, and they laugh, relieved to see that somewhere in there is old, wise-ass Harry Stein, not gone yet. At least it keeps them from exchanging The Look.
When he sees The Look, the one used by those mutually considering the plight of people like him, he wants to shout, “I’m a man, dammit! I’ve done amazing things! With another break or two, they’d have named schools after me!” But these days, what he mostly wants to do is nap.
There is a two-mile causeway leading from the mainland to Sugar Beach, which is a large sand bar packed solid with cottages and condominiums. When Paul and Tran bought their cottage, the beach was inhabited by only a dozen older places and one motel. Now, though, there are few vacant lots left.
Ruth has been here twice before. The beach is beautiful, but she privately prefers the Atlantic to the Gulf. She likes a strong salt breeze in the air, and she likes to hear the waves crashing in the distance. She is proud that she has learned to at least tolerate great bodies of water, at a safe distance.
Ruth has dozed off on the final stretch, but she wakes up when the car stops and frantically checks herself in the visor mirror.
“Don’t worry, Momma,” Hank tells her. “You look pretty.”
She gives him an impatient look, but she does smile.
Paul, Tran and their children come out to welcome them. Hank and Paul carry the large pieces of luggage in. Ruth brings the pecan pies.
“Thanks for driving,” she tells Hank.
