Into the Hurricane

by Neil Connelly

  She races with them all toward the door, looking back only for a second to catch a glimpse of Judge. His body has gone limp, and his arms aren’t moving. Eli shoves Max outside. Charity lingers too at the threshold, with Sabine’s face planted in her shoulder, and Max grabs her hand to tug them outside.

  “Time to be gone!” Eli shouts, and he leads them to the Odenkirks’ short white bus. As they all clamber inside, Max notices that the water has already reached the second step. The bus is basically a boat with wheels.

  “Oh, sweet Lord,” Charity says. “Judgment.” She drops onto her knees in the aisle and Sabine scrambles away from her, running to join her assorted cousins. Max stands behind her, looking at the dirty and scared faces of the children. When she locates Sabine, she lifts the backpack from her thin shoulders, feels the familiar weight of what’s inside. “You did good,” she says.

  “So did you,” Sabine tells her.

  Something unfamiliar swells in Max’s heart. She wants to linger in the feeling, but she’s knows there is more to be done. At the front of the bus, Eli has lowered Sweeney into one of the seats. Charity slides behind the big steering wheel and leans into it for a second as if she’s about to pass out.

  “Where’s Uncle J.J.?” one of the kids asks.

  Charity lifts her face and raises an open hand. “Stop. No questions now. We’ve got to drive.”

  Sweeney coughs and says, “That’s an awfully damn good idea, I think. I’m in need of the first-aid kit at my place. Be okay once we get there.” His face is pale, and he looks at Eli and Max. “I’ll be good here, direct this bunch. With the water, I figure ETA about twenty minutes. You two follow in my truck, okay?”

  “You bet,” Eli says.

  Max settles one hand on Charity’s shoulder. She feels her trembling. “Are you all right?”

  Charity nods. “Guess I’m gonna have to be for a little while longer.”

  Max is surprised when Charity shifts in the driver’s seat and rises to hug her. They embrace, shoulders on chins, and Charity whispers, “Thank you for taking care of Sabine. She’s special to me.”

  Max feels a strange kinship with Charity, a sisterhood of sorts, and tells her, “That girl’s special, period.”

  Charity says, “Ya’ll should get in the truck. I know where he lives.”

  “Right,” Eli says. He nods to Sweeney. “See you at your place.”

  Weakly, Sweeney smiles back. His eyes slowly close, but Max sees he’s still breathing fine.

  Charity swings open the door and Eli rushes into the storm. Max turns to her a final time and says, “I’m sorry about your brother.”

  “He made his own choices. I’m got more tears for my momma. She don’t deserve this.”

  Max swallows. The image of Mother Evangeline being swallowed by high waves troubles her. The woman is demented, for sure, and dangerous, but Max sees her for a second only as a mother who loves her children. A mother who above all tried to keep her family together, one who stayed. And the thing is decided. “Yeah. I might go see about that.”

  Charity studies her. “Don’t you do nothing crazy.”

  “I think that train left town,” Max says. “We’ll see you at Sweeney’s.”

  Outside the bus, Max has to tug her legs through the high waves, which seem determined to drag her back into the store. At Sweeney’s truck, she opens the driver’s side door and sees Eli behind the steering wheel. “Move your scrawny ass over,” she tells him. “I’m driving.”

  “Says who?” Eli asks, though he slides to his right. He jostles something and then lifts the ugliest cat Max has ever seen up onto his lap.

  Max answers, “Says you’re half-blind and have been beat about dead from the looks of it. I could say the same thing for that mangy cat. You sure it’s even alive?”

  “Mostly,” Eli says.

  Max shimmies in behind the wheel. She’s got the backpack on her lap now, with her arms through the straps in addition to the life vest. Eli says, “That don’t look real comfortable. Give it here.”

  Max holds up a hand. “I’ll keep it. You get back in the bus. Go on.”

  “Back in the bus why?”

  “I can handle this truck. I’ll be fine,” she tells him, not looking his way.

  Eli squints his one good eye. “What’s this about?”

  Max sets her hands on the steering wheel, still staring out into the rain. “I’m headed down to the Chains. Big Momma, she’s still alive.”

  “Mother Evangeline?”

  “Crazy as she is, I can’t leave her out there like that. Not when there’s a chance. You and that Sweeney guy, you came back for me.”

  Eli shakes his head. “You’re one to talk about crazy. This is nuts.”

  Max says, “I’ve made enough wrong choices, Eli. I was a royal bitch to Angie and a selfish brat to my dad. No better than my mother. Since I been on this island, I’ve seen a better way. Think about the chance Charity took, letting us go, giving us that girl. And I watched you climb out on the bridge. I knew what that meant. Even Sweeney, who was safe from this storm—look what he risked to try to save a total stranger. I’m ready to get something right. Know what I mean?”

  Eli nods, slow and deep. He lifts his eyes and says, “Damn straight I do. I’m with you.”

  The bus pulls alongside them. The horn honks twice. Eli sighs and says, “Hang on now.” He grabs the cat and climbs out, leaving the door open. Moments later, he comes back empty-handed and says, “Gave her to the kid. Said it was a friend for Jasper.” Max gives him a look, and Eli explains, “No point three of us getting killed.”

  As the bus rumbles into the island’s interior, Max watches its taillights grow dimmer. Then she swings the truck around and heads for Infinity Road, aimed at the Chains. Next to her, Eli shakes his head and grins. “I’m not entirely sure I didn’t like you better when you were selfish.”

  MAYBE THE SHACKS JUST MAKES PEOPLE CRAZY. CHEMICALS in the air, some ancient voodoo curse. But when I think about the kinds of folks who live out here—the Odenkirks, Sweeney, me—there’s hardly a sane one in the bunch. So maybe back when she lived in New Jersey, Max was something like normal. Or at least as normal as a girl with green hair can be. Whatever the case may be, this thing she’s doing now, driving into rising floodwaters on some half-assed rescue attempt, that’s certifiably insane. So make no doubt about it. She’s one of us now.

  I’m not claiming I don’t get what drives her. What she said before, about doing the right thing, making the better choice, that struck some chord in me. Like Max, I’m no fan of my life as it is. But it’s not like you can just trade in the one you got for a different one. You’re bound tight to your mistakes and your sins, and these are the things that make you who you are.

  Take this little field trip to the Chains. Could turn out to be a mistake that makes me dead.

  As we drive west, neither one of us says much about the hundred-mile-an-hour winds howling like a pack of banshees, or the rain so thick the windshield wipers are useless. We don’t mention the waves banging into either side of the Humvee, rocking the truck like a kid’s bath toy, or the water that’s sloshing under our feet. And we don’t talk about all that happened back at the Sportsman’s Castle, or what’s waiting for us ahead. We each guzzle a bottle of water from the backpack. I force down a silvery pouch of Chicken Burrito Bombshell, shocked at the awful taste of the soupy stuff, and Max passes when I offer her a Swedish Meatball Madness. Other than this, we just plow west.

  Max leans over the dashboard, strangling the steering wheel. Her eyes go from squinting to wide, and she slams the brakes, snapping me forward into the dashboard. I look up through the sheets of rain into the dim shine of our half-submerged headlights. A dozen oil drums ride up and down, bobbing in the waves. One bounces into the front grille and quarter panel, harmless, and then the storm splits them even, driving some inland and sucking the others out to sea. That’s how random these waters are ebbing and flowing now, pulling every which wa
y.

  After the road is clear, Max accelerates slow, and I lift my feet from the water, which smells of salt and brine. “We’re gonna need a bilge pump if this gets much worse.”

  “Pretty good bet it’s not going to get better,” Max says. “And I don’t know what a bilge pump is.”

  I tell her it doesn’t matter, then I ask a question that’s been lingering. “Back at the Castle, how exactly did Charity’s ATV end up on the wrong side of the door?”

  Max shrugs. “We needed to be inside, and I didn’t have a key handy.”

  “You just smashed into it?”

  “I’d like to think of it as a controlled collision.”

  “Think of it however you want to. It’s damn crazy, if you ask me.”

  “I didn’t ask you. At that particular point, I’d come to the conclusion you were pretty much dead.”

  There’s something in her voice—the usual sarcasm, yes, but also some hurt. I say, “Figure I came about as close as I want to.”

  She opens her mouth to speak, but then catches herself. We drive on, guessing where the road is only by where the houses are along the side, or the occasional parked car. Now and then I say “a little left” or “come on to the right.” At one point, a small white shape drifting toward us looks like something I know it can’t be. “That an iceberg?” I ask.

  Max squints and shakes her head. “Honda.”

  For a second, I’m fool enough to hope those knucklehead brothers got their momma unstuck, that we can all turn east and head to Sweeney’s. But the Honda is empty, and it bobs aimlessly into our lane.

  “Back up,” I tell her, even as she’s shifting gears. In reverse, we rumble about twenty feet, enough to let the abandoned car pass.

  “Unbelievable,” Max says, and together we watch the storm draw it out into the water. Most likely it’ll sink, but I imagine it washed up on a far-off Mexican beach. Waves rock into the driver’s side of the Humvee and then, not long after, another bangs into my door. Celeste is punching two-fisted now. Not long after we start moving again, Max says, “So listen. About before, back on the bridge.”

  She falls quiet, and I know she means for me to speak. “I was there,” I say. “What about it?”

  “What happened?” she snaps.

  “The wind caught ahold of me,” I tell her. “Blew my ass into the water, and I nearly drowned.” Images of what came next—my visit to the lighthouse, the way I ended up on the other side of the intercostal, the control booth—flicker through my mind, but she doesn’t need to know any of that. “I didn’t think that was a mystery.”

  Her face is all scrunched up. “That’s not what I mean. Before that. When you were just holding on to the side, you started yelling the hurricane’s name.”

  “I wasn’t calling the hurricane. I was calling my big sister.”

  “Huh,” Max says. “That’d be the dead one, right?”

  “Only one I got.”

  She seems unfazed by this. “So what kind of sister was this Celeste?” she asks.

  “She was the best,” I tell her. “As good a sister as you could ask for. Always took me with her on hikes around the island, taught me how to spot birds, helped me with algebra, looked out for me around town. Used to read to me from her history and travel books. When I was real little, Celeste was the first person I wanted to see my new Lego creations, and later, the first one I showed my drawings.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were an artist,” Max says.

  “I didn’t claim to be an artist,” I say back. “I just draw.”

  “Don’t be so damn touchy. Celeste sounds pretty cool.”

  “More than cool. She was absolutely awesome.”

  “So you were, like, calling for her help or something?”

  “Nothing like that.” I shift in my seat, rearrange my legs. But the decision to go on isn’t a choice I wrestle with. The words just come. “It’s like the Odenkirks were saying, Max. Sometimes she comes to me.”

  Max taps the brakes and stops the truck. She turns to me. “So you’re telling me you really see your sister’s ghost?”

  “She tends to show up when things are going good, like I’m about to be happy or achieve something. The bridge is a good example. Celeste likes to remind me how I mostly screw things up.”

  “That doesn’t sound so absolutely awesome,” Max says.

  I throw her a look. “Well, it’s complicated.”

  I’m thinking now of the charcoal-sketch nature of my sister’s spirit and how, when I got knocked on my skull, my dreamy vision was the same kind of thing.

  “Complicated’s a funny word,” Max says. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “A shrink up in Lake Charles told me it was all in my head, a manifestation of associative guilt or some crap like that. But I don’t know. Fact of the matter is, over the years, Celeste has been visiting me, I’ve kind of gotten used to her. It started right after she died.”

  “The lighthouse accident,” Max says, nodding like she’s fitting together puzzle pieces.

  “Yeah,” I say. “The accident.”

  “What?” Max asks. “Why’d you say it that way?”

  “Let’s just drive,” I tell her. “Haven’t you got more important things to do than interrogate me?”

  Her eyes tighten, and I see I hurt her feelings. After she starts us forward again, she says, “No need to get all pissy with me, Eli. Whatever land mine I just stepped on, I’m not the one who planted it.”

  I cross my arms and push back into the seat.

  “Fine by me,” she says, and we move forward into the flood.

  Now my head’s all a mess, and I can’t pull free of the lighthouse, what happened on the rocks below. The memory of it all is swarming around me like the hurricane, crowding in. I press my palms on either side of my head, like I’m trying to crush those thoughts, and Max says quietly, “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

  Instead of answering her, though, I ask a question of my own. “That time you screwed up your dad’s wedding. Would you figure that’s the very worst thing you ever did?”

  She considers this, and a smirk forms on her lips. “Hard to say,” she tells me. “The list of contenders is pretty long when I think about it.”

  This makes me smile. “Before, when you were talking about all the bad choices you made. How do you get over them?”

  A wave washes into us, and water gushes at our feet, ankle-deep. If it gets much higher, the engine will get swamped and we’ll be stranded. Still, she drives. It’s like we’re committed to this, fated to go forward. Max says, “I’m not sure it’s a question of getting over anything. Maybe it’s just a matter of getting on with it, moving to the next thing.”

  “What? You just forget?”

  “No,” she says. One hand reaches for the backpack on her stomach, and she holds tight to what’s inside. “You never forget. That’s not the way I’d put it.”

  “Well, how would you say it?”

  She squints hard, like she’s searching for her next words out in the storm. And then her eyes snap open and she says, “Holy crap.”

  When I look where she’s looking, I’m not sure what it is I see. At this end of the Chains, on the ramp that leads down from the main road to the crossway, a set of headlights aims up into the midnight-black sky. The grille of the Odenkirks’ Ford pickup rises out of the water, but the bed is totally submerged. It looks like a dog struggling to keep from drowning. Behind it in the surf is Mother Evangeline’s silver egg trailer, turned sideways and free-floating on the rolling surface. The hole cut in the side, the one I walked through earlier in the day, is facing up. How it’s not sunk, I got no idea. As we drive closer, I can see Percy Odenkirk standing in the truck’s bed, even there up to his knees in the water. The trailer swings wildly to the right, then snaps to the left, yanked by the waves.

  “Get as close as you can,” I tell Max. “But don’t drive down.”

  “Good advice,” she says.

  We p
ark almost bumper to bumper with the Ford, and get out into four feet of water. “Keep hold on something, or you’ll get washed away for sure,” I yell into the thunderous howling.

  At the front of Sweeney’s Humvee, I reach just under the water and take hold of the tow hook at the end of the winch line. I heave it along with me, unwinding wire as I walk along the Ford, Max on the opposite side. When we near Percy in the truck bed, he grabs his thick hair and hollers, “Momma and Obie! Out in that thing!”

  “All right,” I say. “Hold tight.”

  “The truck’s dead! Help us!” he screams, jumping down and taking hold of my shirt. It seems clear Percy’s come undone a bit. I tell him to go sit in the Humvee and wait for me to give him the signal, which gets him out of our way.

  From the other side of the bed, Max says, “Why don’t we just tow them both out?”

  “Too heavy for the winch,” I tell her. “Especially in all this water. Watch that chain! It’s got half a mind to rip your legs off.”

  The chain in question—between the Ford and the trailer—is like a ten-foot leash, the trailer like a yard dog trying to break free. The links attached to the floating trailer are above water, but they dip below the surface along the way back to the truck, where the chain must be hooked to the submerged hitch. As the trailer sways, it rips the chain back and forth.

  “So what’s the plan?” she yells.

  “That chain’s tugged way too tight to undo right now. I’m gonna try to hook this into the trailer chain.” I hold up the little grappling hook for show and tell. “Then we let the Humvee’s winch take the weight. Once we got us a little slack, we unhook the chain from the pickup, winch the trailer off that ramp, try to hook her up to the Humvee. After that, haul ass.”

  “Good plan,” she shouts. “I hope we’re not hauling corpses.”

  From fifteen feet away, there’s a shrill cry in the storm, and we turn to see Obie sticking his bald head out from the top of the sideways trailer. He’s waving his arms like a drowning man, though that trailer’s floating pretty good. Lord knows how.