“What’s he saying?” Max asks.
“Can’t hear him,” I tell her. “But it’s a good bet it’s a variation on ‘get us the hell out of here.’ ”
“Let’s get to it.”
I can’t attach the hook too low on the chain or else the truck’s position won’t let us pull forward enough. But the chain is like a string holding a kite in a crazy wind—totally unpredictable. With one hand steady on the tailgate of the pickup, the other clutches the grappling hook, just waiting for a shot. That chance comes just after a large wave swoops in, raising up to our necks, then rushes inland. In its wake, there’s a little lull, and the trailer drifts toward us, a lucky break. This makes the whole chain go loose, and in an instant, I change plans. We can do this all at once.
Splashing forward, I holler, “Unhook it! At the truck, the truck!” and I reach underwater for the slack chain. I grasp it, tugging a section up to the surface, and Max is scrambling back at the trailer hitch, shoving her arms under but keeping her head above the water. “Can’t find it!” I hear her yell. Carefully, I ease one curling hook through a single link in the chain, like threading a great metal needle, and drop it. “I’m on,” I say, wading fast back to her, swinging my arms and kicking my legs. The water’s still sort of calm, and I don’t understand or care why. The trailer’s bobbing along toward us, so near now I can actually hear Obie, though I can’t make out his words. Max says, “Here! Here!” and I’m at her side, my hands sliding along her arm down underwater, and my fingers feel for the S-shaped hook at the end of the chain that gets slipped through the tow hole. But all I feel is links of chain and the bumper. Where they meet, there’s a hard lumpy mess, rocky, like something melted.
Now the sounds Obie’s making come clear. I straighten, dread dropping in my gut, and tell Max what he’s saying, why he’s waving his arms like that. “It’s welded on,” I say. “The damn tow chain’s welded to the truck!”
“How do we get it off?” she shouts.
I shake my head. “We can’t. Not at this end.”
I can see it dawn in her eyes, the reality of what I’m telling her. And just as this sinks in, as my mind’s telling my legs to rush back and unhook the grappler, I figure out why the water’s gone calm. A low-pitched growl from the gulf side cuts under the wind’s wicked howling. I know its source before I turn, but even so I’m not ready for what I see.
A thirty-foot tall wave rumbles our way. It’s a rushing wall of tumbling water, capped by white foam. Like the devil come for his due, the storm surge has arrived.
I grab hold of Max, wrapping one wrist around a backpack strap. She says, “What are you—” and we’re blindsided by the wall of water. It sweeps us both sideways, rolling us upside down and trying to tug us apart. There’s no air, no earth, and I kick my legs to fight a current determined to suck me down with a riptide’s strength. I feel my lungs burn, and that backpack strap bites into my wrist, but I hold fast. Suddenly, my head breaks the surface, and I’m gulping for oxygen. Next to me, Max floats faceup. I take hold of her life vest and shake. “Hey! Hey! You with me?”
“I’m here,” she says, looking more surprised than anything. “Where’s the Humvee?”
I try to lift my head and take in what’s around us, but the waves are five-footers easy. “All I see is water.”
“Where’s the land?” she yells.
“Under us now, I think. We need to swim.” I swivel my head, looking for something to help me get my bearings. But there’s nothing. In all this drowning darkness, I can’t even guess my directions. Besides, exhausted as I am, I doubt I could doggy-paddle the length of a pool. Only clutching Max’s life vest is keeping me from going under.
Just then we hear a cry in the wind. “Mercy, Lord! Mercy on your servant!”
We both turn to locate Mother Evangeline, who is somehow bobbing along on the swells, not but twenty feet away.
“Come on!” Max shouts, and together we start fighting our way to her. As we near her, she keeps praying, and what I see makes less and less sense. Her entire upper body is out of the water, and her huge fleshy arms are draped over something long and rectangular. Only when we reach her do I realize what’s keeping her afloat: her husband’s coffin.
We both take hold too, me and Max across from Mother Evangeline, all of us now clinging to the wooden box. Looking at Max with a strangely satisfied grin, she shouts, “So it is as I foresaw. I knew we would face the storm together.”
In a loud voice, Max asks, “Any chance you saw us getting rescued?”
“Where are my boys?” she yells back. “Obie and Percy, they were trying to save me.”
Neither one of us can think of anything to say. There’s no way to tell where they are, but my guess is they didn’t make it. I’m afraid we’ll be joining them soon enough. Judging by Max’s face, she’s thinking the same thoughts as I am. My feet stretch out for solid ground and find nothing, and the swirling current is dragging us hard. I turn to Max. “Just hold on,” I tell her. “Don’t let go. That storm surge is the worst of it for now, and we survived.”
What I don’t tell her about is the cruddy feeling in my gut. I got no hard evidence, no compass to prove what I’m thinking. But I’m pretty sure Celeste is sucking us out to sea.
It’s not long before Mother Evangeline starts in singing hymns. A couple I recognize from mass at St. Jude’s like “Breathe on Me, Oh Breath of God,” and “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy.” Others I never heard before. But they’re all pretty much the same, songs about the greatness of the Almighty Lord, the messed-up nature of man, and the saving grace of Christ. As we get pelted by the rain and tossed by the waves, she belts them out loud and off-key, maybe hoping God or Jesus or her dead husband hears her over the wind, which is screaming like a freight train. At one point in the concert, Max asks her if she does requests, but Mother Evangeline ignores her and launches into “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” In between songs, she speaks to Aloysius, asking him if he remembers when they first met, if he regretted following the crooked path. This whole while, we’re swirling around on a rollicking ocean beneath a gray sky, and there’s no sign of land.
The hulking shadow appears like a dream, or maybe a mirage would be a better way to put it. But in the rolling black world, quite suddenly I’m aware of a darker shape rising from the waves, and it looks stable, solid. “You see that?” I shout to Max, who’s got her head planted between crossed arms. She lifts it and looks, and Mother Evangeline stops mid-lyric. I say, “Could be an oil platform.”
“Whatever it is,” Max says, “I vote we make a break for it.”
“No, child!” Mother Evangeline insists. “It’s a temptation. The four of us should stay together.”
“We’re only three,” I nearly say, then I realize how unhelpful that would be, so I keep my math to myself.
“Aloysius is certain salvation will come our way. God will send us a sign.”
The waves—each one maybe ten feet tall—roller-coaster us up and down, but gradually push us closer to whatever it is. After a few swells, I place the familiar outline. “It’s the Capricornia,” I yell. “The casino boat that got scuttled off the coast. That’s as good a sign as God’s likely to send.”
“Don’t mock the Lord,” Mother Evangeline says from the coffin’s other side.
I try to explain to her. “The hurricane’s dragging us into the gulf. We’re all getting weaker by the minute. If we don’t get off this thing, we’ll die. Now kick toward it!”
Mother Evangeline shakes her jowly face. “We can’t abandon Aloysius. Even the dead don’t never die. They just take on new form.”
Max says, “Me, I like the form I got just fine.” Together me and her lean into the wooden casket and start thrashing our legs, twin Evinrudes on the back of a johnboat. But who knows if we’re making any difference? The coffin rotates all on its own, it seems, ebbing and flowing with every wave whichever way it feels like. On top of that, I hear Mother Evangeline grunting
and realize she’s swinging her own hefty legs, probably the first exercise she’s done in a decade. The only thing is, she’s pushing into us from her side of the coffin, trying to drive us away from the boat.
“Are you serious?” I shout at her.
“You can’t resist God’s plan. Aloysius is certain we should stay together. We must!”
“Stay if you need to,” Max yells. “I’m heading for that boat.”
“Don’t go, child!” Mother Evangeline begs.
“We can’t leave her,” I holler to Max.
She turns to me, holds my eyes with hers, and says, “At this point, we aren’t leaving her, Eli. She’s staying. There’s a difference. She’s made her choice. You need to make yours.” With that, she lifts her hands from the coffin, and instantly the storm sweeps her away. Even with the orange life vest, she looks to be drowning, arms flailing in the whitewater. That boat seems far off.
Evangeline lurches forward, clasping a hand over my forearm. “Stay,” she begs. “God’s reward is here with me!”
I hesitate, looking at the deep need in her face, then place my free hand atop hers, which is cold and clammy. She takes this as an act of reassurance and smiles. Only when I start to pry her fingers away from my wrist does that smile tighten. She pleads for me to stop, praying for Jesus to give me strength. Some dark part of me, the part that felt empty, does want to float away with this crazy old bat and drown like a martyr. But deeper down, something else—some finer impulse—has begun to glow. The waters suck my legs away from the coffin, but my grip on Mother Evangeline keeps me anchored. She knows what I’m going to do and shakes her head. “No! You mustn’t! You can’t!”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I want to live.” And when I release, the waves pull me free, out into the ocean.
Tossed and swamped by the rollicking water, I spot a bit of orange ahead of me and try to aim myself its way. But swimming in these waters feels a bit like jogging through an earthquake. Some larger force like gravity’s got ahold of me—yanking me with an invisible hand—and I’m not convinced my kicking and splashing’s doing anything more than wearing me out. I lose sight of the boat, then catch it again in a fleeting glimpse as I crest another wave. Then one crashes over me, and I’m swallowed by the ocean. I burst to the surface choking up salt water. I feel heavy and tired, but I keep swimming hard as I’m able, for longer than I thought possible.
Little by little, the boat gets bigger, and then I hear Max’s voice hollering, “Come on! Here! Come on!” It’s there before me now, looming like a cliff, and Max splashes into the water at my side. She grabs me and heaves me forward. A wave slams us into something hard, and we’re scrambling together up under a railing, rolling onto a deck of some sort. There’s water still, water sloshing all around us, but we’re out of the waves.
After all that tumbling and tossing, it feels weird to have something solid beneath my feet again, and I feel dizzy as I rise up on wobbly knees, holding tight to the rail. Max stands at my side, and I half fall into her, wrapping my arms around her vest. To keep me from falling, she hugs me back, and together we squint through the rain, out into the dark ocean. In the distance, somehow I see Mother Evangeline still riding that coffin, still clinging hard to all that was, even as it draws her to her doom. And I hear her voice, offering up a song of praise or petition or both. I can’t make out the words.
WITHOUT A LIFE JACKET, ELI HAD A ROUGHER TIME THAN Max did with the swim from coffin to casino boat. Next to her at the rail, his body slumps forward, as if he might collapse. So she makes herself a human crutch, draping one of his arms around her neck and having him lean into her for support. After Mother Evangeline has vanished from view, Max guides them along the slick deck, gripping the wet railing. The gulf sloshes up over the sides, spilling cold water across their feet, and she’s surprised the ocean isn’t higher. They come across a set of double doors with a dollar sign across the split, emblazoned with the words FEEL LIKE A WINNER? When she rears back and drives her foot into them, they burst inward, and Max feels lucky indeed.
Inside, the storm is still loud, but the deafening crash is muted enough that there’s some relief. From her backpack, she pulls out a glow stick, rips the black foil, shakes it good. It comes to life and casts a pale green aura on their immediate surroundings. They pass a cashier’s cage and walk along a row of slot machines. Max can tell that in full light, the colors would all be gaudy, a rainbow of tacky brightness. She stumbles and thinks it must be because of her exhaustion, plus the weight of a boneless Eli. But then she notices that the cheap chandeliers hang slanted from the ceiling, which means the floor beneath her might well be tilted. She navigates through a blackjack pit and finally deposits Eli on a roulette table, dumping his limp body across the felt as if he were a drunk. His head thwacks the table hard, and Max quickly unbuckles her life vest, lifts his head gently, and sets the spongy material underneath. Eli smiles and says, “Much obliged.”
She studies his battered face, that one eye nothing but a bruise. “You’ve been beat down hard today, got tossed off a bridge, and nearly drowned twice that I know of. Now we’re on a shipwrecked casino boat in the heart of a hurricane. I figured you could use a hand.”
With what looks like considerable effort, he lifts an arm and sets his hand along her neck. “Hey, Jersey Girl. You just said ‘figured.’ ”
From beneath them a deep groan sounds, like wood straining under too much weight. “What’s that?” she asks.
“Probably a killer whale come to eat us, way things been going,” Eli says, and Max’s eyes widen. He says, “Just messing. That’s this old boat registering her complaint about all the abuse.”
“But it came from under us.”
“This isn’t the first floor,” he tells her. “She’s half-underwater. We’re not floating on account of that big hole in her bow from when she scuttled. Go down those steps and you’ll find yourself in an aquarium.”
Max thinks about all that water, rushing through the boat beneath them, and the wind outside beating at its walls. Another sound, this one like a huge hinge creaking, splits the air around them. “How much more can a boat like this take?”
“I guess we’ll find that out. But we’re better off now than we were on that coffin.”
“I guess so.”
“No need to guess. I’m telling you.” He lets go of her neck and reaches back to touch the life vest he’s using as a pillow. “Likely as not we’ll be going in the water again, and it’d be good to have a couple of them on hand. You think you could go look around for some on the deck?”
Max nods. “For sure. You all right on your own?”
“I’m fine. Or I will be soon enough. Just drank me a little too much ocean.”
Max isn’t sure about leaving Eli, not just because she’s worried about him but because she has mixed feelings about being alone. She looks at his face, where now both eyes have eased shut and his mouth is open in slow breathing. Shrugging her arms free of the straps, she deposits the backpack on the table next to his legs, then shakes out a second glow stick to leave with him.
Max crosses the casino floor, which even now feels a little more crooked than it did just minutes ago. If she dropped an eight ball, it might roll back in the direction she came. Rain sprays through the doors she kicked open, and before she strides out into the storm, she tucks her face into her shoulder and takes a deep breath, as if she’s about to leap from the high dive. Maybe the ocean has claimed a bit more of the ship and maybe she’s just imagining it, but either way, the water covering the deck isn’t enough to really slow her down. She’s careful and holds tight to the railing, pulling herself along arm over arm. The storm drives wind into her face, slaps her cheeks with rain. She hunches and keeps moving.
By a porthole, the shine of the glow stick illuminates a fire extinguisher next to a bolted notice with the warning signs of gambling addiction. Not long after, dark shapes curl along the white wall, what at first she takes for vines. But upon close
r inspection, she makes out loopy cursive letters spray-painted by some adventurous soul. “Heather and Blake Forever!” the graffiti reads.
As Max presses on, her mind strangely fixates on this couple, teenagers for sure, who used the boat not as a refuge from a storm but a romantic hideaway. Together maybe they rowed one of those skinny pirogues out here, away from the petty troubles of their daily lives.
Max reaches a rectangular pool of water, which she realizes can only be a flooded staircase. The handrail she’s holding angles down into the rollicking water. There’s a wall beyond this point, so she can go no farther, and it’s only when she turns that she sees a life preserver hanging over a white box, next to a sign that points into the flooded stairwell and reads THIS WAY TO MORE LUCKY WINNING!
Max leans over the white box and reaches for the life preserver, the old-fashioned circular kind, but she finds it stuck fast to the wall. Even tugging with her hands on either side fails to free it, and she probes the rim for some sort of safety latch or trigger. When she doesn’t find one, she hurries back to the fire extinguisher and returns. Hoisting it to shoulder height, Max pounds its rounded edge down onto the preserver. On the fifth blow, it breaks off, taking part of the plaster with it. This makes no sense until Max sees the pointy screws emerging from the preserver’s back. It’s a replica, a fake symbol of a nostalgic nautical past.
Exhausted and angry, Max slumps on the white box, holding the useless life preserver. Only then does she see the small red letters stenciled neatly on the top of the box, OPEN ONLY IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. She flings the fake preserver into the riotous ocean and lifts the plywood cover. Inside she finds not just one orange life vest but a whole stack of them, and off to the side, something else, an unexpected treasure. She grabs the canvas handle, and though she’s surprised by its heft, she can’t help but glance up at the THIS WAY TO MORE LUCKY WINNING! sign, which turned out to be prophetic.
Into the Hurricane Page 15
