“Can I pet him?” he asked.
“Sure,” Alice said. “He likes to be rubbed around his ears.”
Kuru watched Ellis tickle the pig. The pig had a permanent smile on his face, Kuru decided. He looked comical, actually, like a dog turned into a pig by a mean witch. But he seemed to accept Ellis’s attentions without any problem.
“Can Zebby go down stairs?” Day asked.
“He doesn’t like to, but he can. He’s better at going up stairs. He’s too heavy to carry.”
“We should get back down to G-Mom,” Kuru said, then saw the look of confusion on Alice’s face and explained. “My grandma.”
“Come on then, boy,” Alice said, digging in her pockets. “I give him popcorn and dog kibbles. He likes the kibbles best. He’ll do just about anything for them.”
“It’s only one flight of stairs, really,” Day said.
Kuru made sure they had enough candlelight, but she had trouble concentrating on anything but the pig. It was a remarkable creature. Sometimes Alice dropped food on the step lower than the one Zebby occupied, and sometimes she led him with her cupped hand in front of his muzzle. The pig’s short, stubby legs didn’t work well on the stairs. He might have done better on a truly wide set of stairs, but the shallowness of the apartment stairs didn’t give him room to rest his body. He had to have his front feet on the stair below him while his back feet stayed on the one above. Kuru sympathized with the animal. It wasn’t easy being a pig, she guessed.
Little by little the pig made it down the stairs. Kuru wondered what her G-Mom would say at the appearance of a pig in the apartment. Under other circumstances, it would have been a funny meeting to watch. But given everything that had happened, she didn’t imagine her G-Mom would be good-humored about it. G-Mom didn’t love animals the way a lot of people did.
It took a while to get to the second floor. Kuru heard the baby crying when they reached the landing. She looked at Ellis, who simply nodded and went ahead. Kuru realized she would never hear a baby crying without thinking of snakes from that point forward.
“This is Alice, G-Mom,” Kuru said when they finally reached the apartment. “She was up on the roof. And this is Zebby.”
“Is that a pig?” G-Mom asked from the table with the baked goods set out on plates around her. “You’re not bringing a pig in here.”
“This is Zebra Moonface,” Alice said. “You must be G-Mom.”
“Zebra what?” G-Mom asked, and Kuru had to stifle a laugh.
“Zebra Moonface. But we call him Zebby.”
“I don’t care what you call him. A pig is a barnyard animal and belongs in a barnyard, not in a house. Take him out now.”
“He’s cute, G-Mom,” Kuru said, although she wasn’t entirely sure she believed the pig qualified as cute. “He’ll be no trouble, I promise.”
“A pig? In a house? I’ve lived too long, that’s what,” G-Mom said. “That’s all there is to it. Your parents let you walk around with a pig on a leash like that?”
“Yes. They don’t mind.”
“Well, I mind,” G-Mom said. “You think this is Noah’s Ark?”
“It could be, G-Mom,” Kuru said, figuring that might be one way around the pig problem. “You never know.”
G-Mom, Kuru saw, pulled herself up to her judgment position. She kind of stacked her length on top of itself, building height along her spine. Usually G-Mom held forth on the government, or street life, or sometimes even a sports figure, but this time she didn’t get a chance to proclaim anything before Ellis handed Zebby a doughnut. The pig ate it in one breath.
“Isn’t that just the ugliest thing?” G-Mom said, clearly flabbergasted.
“That was awesome,” Ellis said. “I want a pig when this is over.”
“Why don’t we all sit down and take a rest?” Day said. “It’s going to be light pretty soon. Maybe you can tell us what you saw in the streets, Alice. And you said you were hungry, right? We’ve got plenty of pastries right here.”
That worked. Kuru understood that her G-Mom would come to her senses when she realized a young girl was alone and, more importantly, hungry.
“Sit, sit, sit,” G-Mom said, pushing a chair back for Alice. “Just keep that pig away from me. Filthy thing.”
“He’s not filthy,” Alice said, slowly taking a seat. “He’s a good pig.”
“I don’t care if he’s the greatest pig that ever lived, he belongs outside.”
“Out in the flood, G-Mom?” Day asked. “Come on, you don’t want them to be outside, do you?”
“Not the girl. Just the pig.”
Who knew how long they would have gone on, Kuru thought, except that Carmen interrupted them. Her voice came like a ghost’s voice, slowly twining through the darkness beyond the table.
“Can I have some water, please?” Carmen asked.
“She’s come awake,” G-Mom said, as if remembering. “Bring her over some water, Ellis, and be quick. You sit down, Alice, and give us an update. This is the longest night I can remember in half a century.”
“Who’s got some water?” Ellis asked.
And that moment stretched out a long, long time, until Day said simply, “We’re out of water. Clean water, anyway. Unless somebody has a supply that I haven’t seen. All we have to drink is the floodwater.”
“I’m in a band and I was driving to a gig and the water overtook us,” Alice said.
Carmen listened to the girl’s voice. She couldn’t see her. She couldn’t turn her head or lift her body from the couch, but her ears worked perfectly fine. It was sort of fun, actually, to listen to the voices going around the table without having to connect them to bodies. Her Uncle Elmer used to listen to radio-plays that he brought home from the library on old cassettes, and sometimes she couldn’t avoid listening along if he babysat her. The voices going around the table reminded her of that, of radio shows with silly commercials for soap and cigarettes between acts. It felt reassuring to hear the voices.
“What kind of band do you play in?” Ellis asked.
“Grunge, sort of. We play all kinds of music, but mostly hard rock. We do a lot of covers.”
Carmen heard Alice stop and bite into a doughnut. At least that’s what she imagined Alice did. Periodic stops interrupted her story. Carmen heard boxes being pushed around the table.
“Don’t worry about what kind of music she plays,” G-Mom said. “Get back to the rising water. We need information.”
“It came up suddenly. We were driving along near the river, not far from the train station, the old one, and next thing I knew we had to cross over a tiny stream. It wasn’t really a stream, of course … it was a little moving water, that was all. But it looked like a stream, so I edged our car across it and it stalled out right away. I tried to get it started again, and as I was doing that I realized that the water was more than what I had first bargained for. Just in the time it took me to turn the key a couple times the water came up and started soaking through the crack in the door and in the floorboards. I have an old beater car, so I was used to that, but not used to so much water.”
“What kind of car?” Ellis asked.
Carmen smiled. Ellis asked the questions she wanted to ask.
“… give him the rest of the bottle,” Carmen heard G-Mom tell someone about her brother. That was good. Her brother was in safe hands.
“An old Volkswagen Jetta. It’s really junky.”
“So what did you do next?” Kuru asked. “I’ve got him … he’s taking the bottle. He’s hungry enough, he doesn’t mind if it’s cold, I guess.”
“I didn’t do anything for a minute or two. I couldn’t believe the scene right before my eyes. Water started flowing everywhere. I’m telling you, it was bizarre. And it was getting dark, so it was hard to see what was going on. A couple cars went past me and continued on, splashing me, but they didn’t care. Big, SUV-type cars. Nobody stopped to see if I was all right or anything like that.”
“What next?” Day asked.
“I gradually realized what was going on. At least some of it. The water kept coming higher and I worried that it was going to pick up the car and carry it away. But I also thought you should stay with your vehicle or something…. It was hard to think clearly. I mean, who’s ever been in that kind of situation before? And I had Zebby here and he wasn’t digging it at all.”
“Zebra Moonface,” Ellis said, and Carmen imagined him petting the pig.
“Eventually, I climbed out through the driver’s window. The water pushed hard against me. Then I had to worry about Zebby. He was trapped, really, so I had to stay there and let the water get as high as the car window before he was forced to swim out. It was crazy. He could have drowned inside.”
“No great loss to the world if that had happened,” G-Mom said.
But there was a little humor inside G-Mom’s voice, Carmen decided. A little levity, like she was having fun by complaining.
“Anyway … do you mind if I have another doughnut? Sorry, I’m really hungry.”
“Go ahead,” Day said. “So you were up to your waist in water?”
“We headed for the only building we could see, which was your street here, more or less. Zebby had to swim. Pigs can swim awfully well. He didn’t mind the water once he was in it. A couple times I used him to pull me through.”
“Zebby!” Ellis said, his voice filled with pleasure. “Hero pig.”
“What did the authorities say?” G-Mom asked.
“I didn’t hear much. I listen to music in the car, but I caught a little of the news. They said the river was up to historical levels, whatever that means. Setting a record, I guess. But from my experience, it looked like something busted and all the water came loose almost at once. It came up really fast.”
“Why did you go up in the Old French building?” Kuru asked. “The abandoned building next to us?”
“It was the easiest way to get out of the water, that’s all. I had to get to higher ground, because the water came right down the street. It was like a river, honestly.”
“There’s a limit to how high the water can go,” Kuru said, apparently asking everyone at the table. “Right? I mean, it’s not like we’re in a canyon or something. The river valley just goes out into cornfields or something, doesn’t it?”
“It’s the amount of water all at once,” Day said. “I think that’s the issue. Eventually, it will whatchamacallit?”
“Disperse?” Ellis said.
“Yeah. Disperse. Right now, though, it’s too much too fast.”
“It has to be a dam,” G-Mom said, “or a levee. I’m telling you. One of these locks they’re always talking about gave way. Has to be something like that.”
“I guess,” Kuru said around a yawn, Carmen heard. “It doesn’t really matter how it happened. The fact is it happened. Now we have to deal with it.”
“We should get some sleep,” Day said. “Everybody’s tired.”
“It’s still raining,” Ellis said. “It’s raining harder than ever.”
Then Carmen heard things wind down. A little later someone came over and stretched out near the couch on the rug. She heard other people making beds. G-Mom, assisted by Kuru, took a long time to maneuver into a recliner near the television. Carmen didn’t feel particularly sleepy, but her eyes closed anyway. She heard Zebby make a low grunting sound. It was surprisingly soothing to hear it. If a pig felt safe, Carmen figured, they should probably feel safe, too.
Ellis had made up a makeshift bed beside the kitchen window and the light that slashed in stirred him awake. Not that it was much light, Ellis thought as he opened his eyes and slowly sat up. Rain still pattered against the window, but at least the night darkness was gone. He looked around the apartment. It looked like a bomb had gone off with all the people sleeping in different postures and locations around the room. Still, he was glad that he and Day hadn’t gone upstairs to sleep. It felt better to be around other people.
He tried to go back to sleep, but the baby fussed. He heard him gurgling and doing something and he got up to check on him. The snakes made him jumpy. The snakes and the idea of the baby — warm and bite-sized, oh, yeah! — made him even jumpier. He stood and tiptoed across the room, trying to be as quiet as possible. The baby lay on a blanket beside Kuru, not far from Carmen. He was wide-awake and playing with his hands punching up into the air.
“Hi, baby,” Ellis whispered.
He bent down and picked up the baby. In that moment, something moved underneath the couch.
Instead of making him jump back in alarm, the sound cranked something way down in his gut. He stared at the couch skirt, wondering what he would find if he put his hand underneath it. Really, it didn’t make sense to start seeing snakes everywhere, but something did seem to move when he reached for the baby. It might have been his imagination, or a trick of light, but he snatched the baby up quickly and walked him toward the kitchen and the growing morning light.
“That’s a good baby,” Ellis said, bouncing the baby a little. “You’re a good boy.”
He stood for a moment beside the window, surveying whatever he could see. The landscape had changed. That much was obvious. Everywhere he looked, he saw the reflection of water surfaces. Water had come directly down their street, but it also had gone up and into the buildings on the other side. If it was that high on those buildings, then it was that high on their building. That only made sense. Water sought its own level, which meant it would keep searching until the pressure on it to mount higher receded behind it. He was pretty sure that was true.
It was still raining. He had already seen that, but he noted it again.
“Hey,” Alice said, sitting up.
She had made up a bed in the small kitchen. Zebby slept beside her. He made snorting sounds most of the night. Ellis liked the pig. He walked into the kitchen and sat on one of the small stools that Carmen’s mother had arranged next to the counter. Apparently that was a place to sit and have coffee and watch the morning news. But there was no coffee this morning and no television for news.
“Whose baby is that again?” Alice asked.
Her movement brought Zebby awake. The pig climbed awkwardly to his feet. He was stiff, Ellis realized, but he also had trouble gaining traction on the linoleum floor. He walked in a circle like a little old man trying to loosen his bones. It was pretty fun to watch.
“He’s Carmen’s mom’s baby,” Ellis said. “Carmen is the one on the couch.”
“With the bad neck. I got you. It was so dark last night it was hard to see who was who.”
“I’m Ellis and this is Juan.”
“I knew you, Ellis. You’re hard to forget.”
She reached out and wiggled Juan’s little foot.
“It’s still raining,” Ellis said, mostly to make conversation.
“I heard it. That’s not good. I wish it would stop.”
“Someone should come by today. With a boat or something, I mean.”
“Maybe. Depends how many people are in need of rescue. They’ll probably try to figure out who needs it most and then work around it that way.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“But maybe they can give us supplies. We’re going to need water and food.”
“I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Believe it,” Alice said. Then she climbed out of bed and folded up her blankets.
Before she could do anything else, the building gave out an enormous groan and began to tilt. Ellis’s eyes met Alice’s. She held out her hands like a surfer getting her balance on a wave. The building gradually came to a stop. Everything inside — lamps, plates, pictures — chattered slowly as they skidded and came to new resting places.
“Whoa,” Ellis said.
“It’s the foundation,” Alice said. “It’s giving out.”
“From the water?”
“Of course from the water.”
The other people started talking. The building groan had shaken them awake. E
llis stepped over to see what they had to say. Kuru was already up on her feet, her head shaking.
“We have got to get going on a plan,” she said. “We cannot be sitting around waiting for other people to rescue us.”
“Easier said than done,” Day said.
He sat up from his bedroll. G-Mom was the only one still asleep. And maybe Carmen, Ellis thought. He couldn’t tell about Carmen.
“I want to go up to the roof,” Kuru said. “I want to look around. Who’s with me?”
“I’ll go,” Day said.
“I’ll stay with Zebby,” Alice said. “And I’ll hold the baby, if you like.”
Ellis handed Juan to Alice. He watched as Day picked up the fire ax.
“Bring some bowls and pans and things,” Kuru said. “We can collect some rainwater at least.”
“Good idea,” Day said.
Ellis went through the cabinets and pulled out a big spaghetti pot and three Tupperware bowls. Kuru nodded and wrapped them in a sheet, then tossed them over her shoulder.
“We’ll be back,” she said. “Let G-Mom sleep as long as she likes. She’s easier to handle when she’s asleep.”
“We’ve got to scavenge everything we can while there’s light,” Kuru said into the mini-huddle they had formed in the hallway just outside the door. “We should go to your apartment after we visit the roof. Look in the fridge, check for canned foods. You know, everything. There’s hardly anything in Carmen’s apartment.”
Day nodded. Kuru was impressive. She possessed a steady, calm manner that instilled confidence. In fact, the only thing that threw her off was the appearance of the snakes. Otherwise, she was boss.
After speaking, she turned and hustled up the stairs. Day followed. Ellis brought up the rear. They made much better time now without the pig and in adequate light. Day felt a small bubble of optimism enter his thinking. It was okay. It was going to be a mess, but at least, he reflected, their apartment hadn’t been affected. The water couldn’t reach that high.
At the door to the roof, he scrambled through the opening on his hands and knees, pushing the ax in front of him. Kuru chucked the pan and the bowls through. In a flash they made it outside. The wind felt fresh and good.
Flood Page 6
