by Tom Cooper
He thought of Crowe the egghead and how he used to give all those cats names. His plants, his car, his snakes and frogs and lizards in his yard.
Gone for a while.
Just bones, powdered bones indistinguishable from all the grit of the Gulf.
Just bones, just sand.
* * *
—
As the summer wore on that year so did the heat. And so did the storms. Tropical squalls. Five or ten minute fits of rain, gushing tantrums, then over. Then the radioactive sun searing down again. The rain steaming off the tarmac and the car hoods and the tin roofs of the canneries.
* * *
—
Late in the summer bees started dropping from the sky like a strange flurry. Their dead bodies choked the gutters and clogged the drainage ditches. They covered mailboxes and cars and floated by the thousands in backyard swimming pools. They blanketed front yards and houses, macabre tapestries. Meteorologists attributed the phenomenon to a freak occurrence, a temporary vagary of weather. Others, scientists, voiced bleaker forecasts.
Slashing veils of rain washed dead bee bodies into the ocean so all you saw of the sea was a veldt of yellow fuzzy carcasses, a freak algae.
APHRA
APHRA THEY WERE CALLING THE STORM that October.
Hurricane Aphra.
Aphra, Yahchilane marveled. Giving such a thing as this storm a name like that.
On television meteorologists stood in front of the map of Florida. The whole state looked ensnared in the tentacles of a black octopus.
The epicenter, ground zero: Emerald Island.
This was after Hurricane Katrina, all those people crammed in the Superdome. After Hurricane Sandy. After people, thousands, were left for dead in Puerto Rico, no food or water or electricity for months. After volcanic eruptions on Hawaii. After the wildfires as big as Emerald Island that blazed up and down the California coast and turned whole vineyards and valleys to cinder.
Sirens blared and wailed. Evacuation orders were decreed. Too late for sandbagging and plywood and putting up storm shutters if they weren’t already in place.
Still, some of the old Conchs stayed.
Including Henry Yahchilane.
At the Rum Jungle and at the Blue Parrot diner the patrons watched the televisions with mounting dread. People were closing their shops and stores.
The storefronts and restaurant windows were covered over with plywood. On the wood were messages spray-painted red.
SHELTER AT SEMINOLE HIGH SCHOOL. SHELTER AT CORAL REEF ELEMENTARY (PET FRIENDLY). PRAY FOR EMERALD ISLAND AND EMERALD CITY! GOD BLESS YOU AND YOUR FAMILIES AND YOUR HOMES. GET OUT NOW! EVACUATE! IT’S ALMOST TOO LATE.
At the Hoggly Woggly grocery, the scene was pandemonium. Aisles were littered with manhandled goods. Plastic bags were ripped apart and eviscerated. Bread everywhere. Hotdog buns, cereal pellets, crackers.
Two men threw blows over the last pallet of drinking water. Yahchilane could hear the meaty thwacks.
One guy’s tooth flew out of his mouth and skidded on the linoleum, leaving a squiggly bloody trail.
In the parking lot people were backing cars out of spaces and hitting grocery carts. “Hey, hey, you fuck, my daughter,” some guy screamed. A pack of ripped-open saltines was spilled on the tarmac. Seagulls lunged with their beaks, battling for the shattered crackers.
The manager blurted over the intercom, “People, people. Panic idn’t gonna help and fighting idn’t gonna help.”
Lightning flashed somewhere nearby. Thunder went off like dynamite.
As he loaded his beer and canned goods into the van, Yahchilane felt the boom in his heart.
“Aw, Jesus,” a woman cried.
Sparks flew from a transformer. People’s shocked faces incandesced.
Over the intercom, the store manager pleaded, “People, people, rippin’ the bread idn’t gonna help.”
* * *
—
Someone in the haste of evacuation had left the Sea Cave Arcade open.
Just as well, Henry Yahchilane surmised, since most of the games were long out of commission and now it was more of a crack and weed connection among the local under-the-bridge types.
The television mounted on the concession stand was on the local news and they were showing the spaghetti models of the hurricane track. Every one showed the state in the storm’s path.
Then they showed scenes of wreckage and chaos in Puerto Rico. Storm-blasted bridges, boats capsized and battered, the sea spuming in a white fury over brick walls and docks, swallowing beachside roads. Thousands of people awaited rescue, marooned on rooftops. Others navigating lagoons choked with wreckage in puny dinghies.
Yahchilane played pool alone in the empty arcade. Every so often someone would dash past on the sidewalk. Men carrying plywood. Other men toting sandbags and lumber and sheets of corrugated metal.
One of the volunteers, a woman wearing two fanny packs and a Tampa Bay Buccaneers jersey, glimpsed Yahchilane through the front window of the Sea Cave.
She doubled back and stepped inside, eyed him with a mixture of incredulity and contempt. Waited for him to make a remark. He did not. She waited another moment, asked, “Just gonna stand there?”
Yahchilane, cue in his hands, looked at his boots. Looked at the cue again, glanced around at the old arcade games. The red-knobbed joysticks balky and stuck.
“Do something,” the woman said.
“I’m doing it.”
Sarcastically the woman told him, “Thoughts and prayers.”
“Thoughts and prayers,” Yahchilane finally spoke, because he’d had enough of her megachurch-attending-ass, “I hear that said a lot.”
Another man, an old Conch, passed with a wheelbarrow heaped with bricks. The sky behind him was a dark cinder.
The woman told Yahchilane, “Well, you can use some thinking. And praying.”
He asked, “What’re you thinking?”
“What?”
“I said what are you thinking.”
“Mister, you need mental help.”
“When you say thoughts and prayers what are you thinking?”
“The victims, mister.”
“But thinking what? What are you praying? Specific.”
“Mister, standing here suckin’ down sodas and playing tiddledywinks. I ain’t sharing philosophy lessons with you.”
Yahchilane wanted to say, “Thoughts and prayers. This island doesn’t give a shit. It’ll shake you off like the last drops off a pissing dick.”
Instead he said, “Thoughts and prayers.”
“Go fuck yourself, mister,” said the woman.
* * *
—
The cars and trucks headed away from the Gulf Coast in a long slow exodus, like those shambolic gypsy caravans of yore. Except now instead of revelers harried fathers and mothers helmed the wheels. Their faces were wretched, vexed. All they could cram of their earthly possessions, everything that was precious to them, filling their beat-up vehicles.
Just beginning, this shit.
This ordeal.
This clusterfuck.
* * *
—
He was on his way home, almost to the Emerald Island bridge, when he saw a phalanx of cars and trucks pulled over in the turnaround. Yahchilane eased over to the shoulder and nosed into the scrum. He stepped out and joined the band of spectators. They were looking out at the bay, drained so thoroughly and quickly it was as though a dam had broke.
He remembered the long baths he used to take as a boy in the outdoor galvanized tub. The pulled plug, the water gushing out. God, so long ago. He remembered his mother telling him, “Time to get out, butterbean, before you turn into a prune.”
Now, the
bay was sinking lower and lower. The pilings showed. The marks the water and the storms had left over the years.
And the water sank lower still, lower and lower, until the harbor was a vast tundra of sulfur-stinking mud, the barnacled boats marooned and mired.
Fish were sucked up into the sky along with the water. Yahchilane spotted a few bull sharks in the mud. A porpoise. Rusted anchors. The carapace of a two-prop aircraft. An automobile of seventies vintage. A horse or mule skeleton. A refrigerator.
Artifacts dropped upon an apocalyptic waste.
* * *
—
By the time Henry Yahchilane got home, the clouds far out above the ocean were mottled green mackerel gray. Waterspouts tendriled out of them, delicate fingers touching the Gulf.
Yahchilane counted three, four. Then, incredibly, two more struck the rain-hazed ocean horizon.
Six waterspouts. The most he’d ever seen at once.
The last people on the island were evacuating. The old beach bums in their Jeeps and trucks with their luggage strapped to the roofs and their dogs crammed into backseats and truck beds. Their old jury-rigged trailers would be blown to scrap with the first stiff gusts, so they were wise to leave.
An old bohemian ornithologist couple braked their VW van in the street before Henry Yahchilane’s house.
The old gray-haired woman shouted against the wind, “You live in that barrel house.”
Yahchilane had to step closer to the van to hear. He was moving lawn ornaments from the outside to the inside, had the top of a birdbath in his arms. He set it down on the ground.
“The barrel house?” she repeated. “You don’t plan on staying there.”
“I live there.”
“We know, Mr. Yahchilane. But you’re staying there for the storm.”
Yahchilane said he was.
Only now did the hippyish man at the wheel finally speak. Regarding Yahchilane he said, “Well, good luck, dude.”
Yahchilane gave him a thumbs-up. “You too.”
More cars gunned past, honking short inquisitive honks. What the fuck? The drivers meant with their little dipshit horns.
Yahchilane waved. Meaning: Yeah, yeah, get outta here.
As the last stragglers fled, the honking turned reprimanding. Are you drunk? Are you senile? Are you crazy? Are you stupid?
Probably, Yahchilane thought.
SOS (THE PHONE, THE PHONE)
EVERY OTHER MINUTE THE PHONE RANG and he stopped in the middle of what he was doing and cussed and went to the kitchen. “Who the fuck now?” He’d swipe the phone off the wall and then, mild-voiced, calm, answer, “Hello” or “Yes” or “Yahchilane residence.”
“Are you staying?” was everyone’s question.
At first he told them yes.
They tried to change his mind.
His mind was made.
Finally he started lying to people. Easier that way. “Yeah,” he told Dr. Gabby Vu, now retired in Vermont, “getting out. About to leave. Packing. Took a swerve, didn’t it.”
It was Dr. Vu who told Yahchilane years ago around Crowe’s funeral that he should go visit Crowe’s beach house, now collapsing into the earth, the island, the sand.
Though they’d had relations, there was a lot of stuff she wasn’t comfortable with going through, so the task was up to Yahchilane.
Going through the mess of Reed Crowe’s house, amid the other paperwork, Yahchilane found a provisional will.
Provisional, of course.
Oh, you fuckin’ egghead, he thought.
He would have to go see some people over at Big Cypress, get the papers certified.
Instead of feeling honored Yahchilane felt burdened. He would let his son, Seymour, take care of it. He loved to get tangled in such business, Seymour. Like his uncle Cy in that way. Ten years gone now.
Anyway, Seymour had been in touch with some egghead in Gainesville working on his dissertation called “The Eldritch.” An archeology student, very eager to take a look at what Crowe had accumulated over the years.
Yahchilane continued looking the will over. His cash and savings to Eddie’s daughters, $8,435.62. Prepaid savings plan, so it would appreciate.
Mostly Yahchilane spotted liens and warnings and final-chance bills. Jury summons completely ignored.
Much of the mail was addressed to Crowe’s father. He’d heard rumors over the years, nothing that he ever prodded Crowe about because he figured Crowe liked his father just as much as he liked his, which is to say not at all.
* * *
—
Mostly though, the cubbyholes of his escritoire in the sunroom were filled with bright postcards.
Netherlands, Oslo, Luxembourg, Rome, Tokyo, Egypt.
Here was the atlas of Heidi’s life so far.
Yahchilane tried to imagine Reed Crowe getting on an airplane headed to Tokyo. He couldn’t. Beyond the powers of imagination. The man would have to be zip-tied, hog-tied, a restraining mask yanked over his mouth.
All of these places, and where had Reed Crowe gone?
The toilet.
Compared to Heidi Karavas, Crowe might as well have been a barnacle clinging onto a piling.
That, in essence, was the story of Reed Crowe’s life in Henry Yahchilane’s surmise, his biography writ on a scrap of fortune cookie paper, and there was nothing wrong with it at all. It was what it was. And he also surmised that what was true of Crowe was true of many men.
Yahchilane? What would his story be? “He wanted to be left the fuck alone.”
An epitaph shorter than Crowe’s.
* * *
—
Before the storm, Yahchilane’s phone kept ringing.
It was usually his daughter, Natasha, or his son, Seymour. What choice did they leave him, all the pestering? “Yeah, going to a friend’s,” he’d tell them.
More pestering.
“No, I’m not smoking. Look, I got shit to do. Love you.”
Two minutes later the phone rang again. “The phone, the phone, this fucking phone’s gonna kill me.”
One time it was his goddamn ex-wife of all people. “I’m good. I appreciate the gesture. Yeah, I’m smoking. I won’t lie. Not too smart, you’re right. Yeah, yeah, goin’ to that shelter.”
Sweet of her to call, he had to admit. Funny, how the grudges sloughed away over the years. Penelope, his ex, told him she was going up to Spokane to be with her sisters. He wished her well, knowing it was probably the last time he’d hear her voice unless something awful happened to one of the kids.
Eddie called from North Carolina, where he and Nina now lived. Mariposa was in New York City, Maribelle in Tibet.
Other people on the island were long gone. Chill was dead, stroke. Mr. Charley the hardware owner, long gone too, a slip in the tub, a crack of the skull against porcelain. Krumpp, may he rest in peace and also go fuck himself, met his end in a half-assed shoot-out. A holdup at his liquor store. Another gun casualty, another Florida Man who tried to go out in a blaze of glory but ended up with his dick in the dirt and his ass in the headlines, the butt of a joke, $11.68 in the register.
GET OUT NOW
THE STORM WINDS STRENGTHENED. THE CLOUDS lit up like a stoked furnace. The bamboo wind chimes banged together dementedly. The wind tangled them up and the bunch of them slammed the side of the house. Yahchilane got up on a footstool, took the chimes down. Far down on the beach, miles distant, red warning flags snapped in the dark afternoon.
The seabirds watched Yahchilane as he scoped the beach from his porch. Anhingas and seagulls and pelicans winged against the stiffening gales, making little headway. They regarded him while flapping in place, a quality almost plaintive and accusatory in the beadlet eyes.
The feral beach cats were a
lready hiding in their crannies under the house.
* * *
—
On the television the European models showed a last-minute strengthening and surge and had the hurricane aimed straight at the southwest Gulf Coast. Emerald City had hoped a last-minute jog of the storm. Prayed for a winnowing of its winds, a fraying of its fury.
No such luck.
Nope.
And anyways Yahchilane had always found this a strange sentiment. Say the hurricane was to strike somewhere else. Well, it was hitting somewhere else. With people. Who were also praying.
Thoughts and prayers.
* * *
—
In the hours before the first bands made landfall a strange calm befell the island. The coconut palms stood windless, the fronds like shaggy hula skirts.
But by afternoon the black thunderheads mounted and brought a blinding wall of water.
Yahchilane loved a good storm. Savored them more than he really should. Primal, this craving for biblical drama.
It stirred some caveman energy in his heart.
But this storm, Aphra, seemed another beast entirely.
* * *
—
On the local channels, old fat-faced Sheriff Schaffer held a news conference.
“Look at this egghead,” Yahchilane said, standing before the television with his thumbs in his jeans pockets.
There would be no water, the supply cut off by the county, Schaffer said. No rescue. No service. All federal personnel were ordered away from the path of the storm. Should the power go out, which was an ironclad certainty given how fragile the infrastructure this deep and far-flung into the state, there was no telling when it would be restored.
Weeks, months.
“I know you guys been through ten of these. Some of you old Conchs been through fifteen, twenty. Believe me, you’ve never been through anything like this and all you folks thinking yeah, yeah, yeah, I heard it before, I promise you, you’re wrong. You’ve never been through anything like this before. She’s out to get us.”
