Galveston (16 page)

At the coroner’s inquest a physicist from the university explained why. It had to do with the vortex created by the water rushing through the intake pipe.

It had to do with cyclonic action.

B
EVERLY AND
C
ALDWELL
walked outside, where the wind might dry her tears. It was a warm wind, and still very gentle at this point.

They walked along the gravel road, past cottages “J” and “K,” and stopped outside the churchyard. They stared at the little graveyard. The stones were ancient, their faces obscured by lichen and moss. There were crosses there, whitewashed barnboard nailed together at right angles. Most of the names were washed away by time, although some could still be read:
Angela, Age Two; Naomi; Marvelle, No Years Old.
There were no flowers in the graveyard; if there ever had been any, the wind had blown them away.

“There was a guy I read about,” said Caldwell, who could not take his eyes away from a crude marker that read
Andrew
, “who bought a barometer.”

“Mm-hmm?”

“And he took it home and took it out of the box and it read really low, I don’t know how low …”

“Well,” said Beverly, “the record low at sea level is twenty-five point six nine.”

“Oh,” nodded Caldwell. “So it wasn’t that low, probably, maybe it was twenty-eight or something, the point is, he thought he’d got a dud, you know, so he drove into town to the post office to send it back to the manufacturer, and when he got—”

—back, his house was gone
, thought Beverly.

“—back, his house was gone.”

“Really?”

“Wiped out by a hurricane.”

“It was probably the freak hurricane of 1938, which caught the northeastern United States by complete surprise.”

“I think it probably was. Five hundred dead in that one.”

“Closer to six.”

Caldwell nodded. He imagined that the six hundred lost souls divided up this way: two hundred children, two hundred wives, two hundred husbands who’d just happened not to be at home. They were off running errands, checking on faulty barometers and things like that.

Caldwell told the rest of his story to Beverly.

When she arrived, Darla Featherstone placed her fingertips on Caldwell’s chest. It was a suggestive, sexual touch, at least, so it seemed to Caldwell in the moment he had to savour it. Behind Darla stood a cameraman; he hunkered over and squinted into the eyepiece of his machine. A red light flashed above the lens. Caldwell understood that he was being filmed, so he grinned and winked. The cameraman was protected by an elaborate plastic umbrella that attached somehow to his shoulders. This was covered with snow, pebbled and crusted with ice.

Caldwell opened the door wider, not understanding why Darla and the cameraman remained outside. Darla Featherstone shivered, her bottom lip quivered. Caldwell put this all down to the cold, so he gestured toward the warm
kitchen. And maybe it was the emptiness there behind him, or maybe it was something in Darla’s face, but Caldwell knew before he heard the words spoken.

Darla Featherstone said, “There’s been an accident.”

“So she drove me out there,” Caldwell said. “Darla Featherstone did. With the cameraman in the back seat. With his camera going, I think. I don’t know. I never turned around or anything, but he was there in the back seat of this car with his camera. And I remember thinking, you know, is she driving me out there because, I don’t know, she’s a human being, or am I—am I
news?
And then I felt, you know, like shit, because I wasn’t news. I wish I had been news. I should have been news. Jaime was news. Andy was news. My mother was news.”

“I remember that storm,” said Beverly. “I remember that Saturday. I drove Margaret to the Y for her swim lesson.”

“This transport truck was going north on Highway 26—my mom’s nursing home was out near there—and he must have been going, I don’t know,
fast
, because he just sailed over the median and, um …
Squashed like a bug.
That’s what the
Sun
newspaper said. The big headline.
Squashed like a bug.
Because we drove a VW. A Beetle.”

Beverly remembered seeing that headline. She’d allowed herself to drift close enough to the red
Sun
box to see the front page displayed behind the plastic. She saw enough to understand the cryptic headline, and part of her thought it was clever. She hadn’t purchased the newspaper or anything, she was hardly that ghoulish.

“The next day,” Caldwell went on—he’d been dreading this day for years, when for some reason he no longer had problems with his memory—“the funeral director came over to the house, and he’s showing me all these photographs of coffins, and I’m asking how much is this one, how much is that one, and then I remembered. I was rich. I’d just won the provincial lottery. Sixteen million dollars. So I just turned to the last page of his binder, you know, where there were these golden coffins. And I said, ‘Three of these.’”

Lester appeared beside them. He too stood and stared at the little graveyard. He held a bottle of rum in his hands, and had a sip before speaking. “Mind out for Maywell,” Lester said. “Something’s put him in a piss-poor mood.” He tried to hitch up his trousers then, fumbling with the bottle, splashing liquor down the front. “I got work to do. I have to chop off all the weak branches. From the bamboo and the monkey puzzle tree. The spiny branches from high up in the kapok. Mind you”—he had another sip, almost for rhetorical purposes—“that won’t help any when the trees themselves come out of the ground.” Lester pointed at a stone in the graveyard’s corner. A tear rolled out of his eye. “The last storm came in the middle of the night. We never knew it was coming. Nobody said anything about it. I don’t know if they knew and didn’t tell us, or if they didn’t know themselves. I know
they
didn’t die.”

The rain started then, warm and heavy. Lester turned his head upwards, so it could wash away his tears. He drained the bottle of rum and tossed it into the churchyard.

“Well,” said Caldwell, “I’m sure we’ll be all right.”

Lester looked at him. “Is that really what you think? Or do you think that this island is going to get wiped off the face of the earth?”

Caldwell looked around and shrugged. “Well, Lester. What will be, will be.”

Lester smiled gently. “You got that fucking right, sir.” Then he lay down on the ground and fell asleep.

Beverly looked at Caldwell. “I think we should get him out of the rain,” she said, pushing open the little gate. Caldwell bent over and took hold of the gardener’s shoulders, and dragged him toward the pale blue church.

The door lacked a handle, and Caldwell backed through it easily, although the hinges still managed to send up an awful howl. There were no more than eight pews in the church, two sets of four across from each other, and before them a crude pulpit. Caldwell pulled Lester into the aisle and set him down there. Lester turned over on his side and slipped his hands, palms pressed together and fingers touching, underneath his head.

Beverly had followed them into the church, and although Caldwell noted her trepidation, he put it down to the fact that the church was dark inside, full of shadows. He did not know that Beverly had made no peace with God, that in fact she hated Him and expected retribution if He should ever get her in His sights.

Caldwell didn’t hate God, mostly because he had never really loved Him. As a young man, he might have professed a belief in the Almighty’s existence, and when he played sports he often joined pre-game prayer circles, linking hands with his
fellow athletes and muttering small entreaties. But after the game, if his side had won, Caldwell would never offer up thanks like his Christian teammates. He would tear off his clothes and stand under the shower and exalt in his own strength. He had no need of God back then, and he was decent enough, in some strange way, not to blame God now.

Not Beverly.

She blamed God and made no secret of it. Indeed, she’d got into trouble for blaming God. There had been an incident, something the authorities might have been willing to overlook had it not come so closely upon the heels of her arrest for public indecency. In fact, the authorities
did
overlook it, in the sense that Beverly was not found guilty of the crime of vandalism, but she was ordered to attend additional counselling sessions and pay for the stained glass window.

The police report stated that she’d been hurling stones through the elaborate and years-old stained glass window at Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy. The window pictured the Virgin (strangely faceless, her features hidden by a cowl) cradling the Infant Jesus. Birds crowded the scene, hundreds of them, packed so tightly that the metal forming the bottom of one creature’s wing often formed the top of another’s.

The police report made no mention of the weather, the storm in heaven. (Just as the authorities had missed the fact that Beverly’s naked presence in the shallow bay had nothing to do with nudity and everything to do with the columns of mist that twisted awkwardly toward the sky.) No one pointed out that when Beverly had been arrested, the sky was boiling with black cloud, lightning cracked across the roof of the
world, quivering strokes of blue light. Yet no rain or hail fell to the ground, which struck Beverly as very, very strange. Mind you, she was pretty drunk, having left the Dominion Tap Room after hours of inebriated communion. Her grandfather lay in a crumpled heap over by the church’s garbage cans. He’d crawled over there when he thought he was going to vomit, which was as close as the old man came to thoughtfulness. He hadn’t, thanks in large part to the fact that he hadn’t eaten anything for days; instead, he heaved a couple of dry retches and then fell asleep.

Leaving Beverly to ponder the fact that nothing fell from the sky. Forcing her to the conclusion that God can do nothing right. God must be a buffoon, He fucks everything up. It was in a spirit of sarcastic helpfulness that Beverly picked up a handful of stones and threw them toward Mary and Child shining over her. She was surprised when the stones pierced the glass. Then she recalled stories of mothers demonstrating inhuman strength, of mothers lifting cars off of their children, wrestling polar bears to the ground when they threatened their infants. This was the same sort of thing. In a matter of minutes she had broken almost all of the panes.

“Maybe we should go back to the cottages,” suggested Caldwell. Beverly shook her head. “No. It’s not time, yet.” She leant forward and, rising up on her toes, kissed Caldwell on the lips. “Let’s help get ready for the storm,” she said. “Let’s do all the little human stuff first.”

M
AYWELL
H
OPE
boarded up the windows, standing in the rain and longing for a smoke. This wasn’t supposed to be his work, it was Lester’s, but Maywell felt sorry for Lester in a vague way. Pity was an emotion that didn’t really sit well in Maywell’s heart, so on occasion he did Lester’s chores for him. Lester was not much good at the chores anyway, sloppy at the best of times, especially so when he had a snootful. Not to mention the fact that Lester was nowhere to be found. Maywell also undertook the labour to fill his hands with wood and tools, because his hands looked very naked without a cigarette in them. He had nails in his mouth, too, big, long three-inchers that tasted bitterly of rust.

“You need any help with that?”

Maywell turned to find Caldwell there, wet from the rain but oddly happy. He wore a smile that Maywell hadn’t seen before. Maywell spat nails into his hand so that he could speak. “You could put your shoulder up against the board, if you don’t mind, sir.”

Caldwell leant against the plywood. Maywell aimed a nail and began to hammer.

“Can I ask you a question, sir?”

“Shoot.”

“Well, what is it with you people? You and the woman and Newton. You like storms. Why?”

“Oh.” Caldwell pretended to be thinking about this, although it was the one thing he knew, a certainty that claimed his cold centre. “Energy.”

“How’s that?”

“Storms have energy.”

“Uh-yeah.”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“No.” Maywell shook his head. “You’ve done it. Storms have energy. And I take it that you don’t?”

Caldwell shrugged. “You see, something happened to me.”

Hope drove another nail, sinking it with three well-aimed blows. “Something happens to a good number of us, sir,” he commented. “And I wouldn’t want to be one of the others.”

Caldwell surprised himself by laughing at this. “You got a point there, Maywell.”

“So you’ve found your storm, sir. You realize you may not walk away from this one?”

“Life and existence aren’t the same thing,” said Caldwell.

“There, you’ve lost me,” said Maywell, picking up a sheet of plywood and walking toward another window.

Beverly helped Polly transport stuff into a storage area, a crawl space located beneath the Pirate’s Lair, accessed by a trap door behind the bar. Polly stood waist-deep in the opening, her arms outstretched, while Beverly delivered cases of liquor, pots and pans. Polly stacked them in an orderly fashion.

“You and Mr. Caldwell,” said Polly, “seem to be hitting it off.”

“Hmmm.” Beverly brushed hair out of her eyes and picked
up a case of beer. “Isn’t that a funny expression, though? Hitting
what
off? Hitting something
o
ff
what?”

Polly could not resist sounding, for a second, like a holiday brochure. “The balmy, sunny climate in the Caribbean is responsible for many a romance.”

“Is that so?” Beverly seemed to receive this as new data to be processed. “Then just think what might happen when the storm hits.”

Jimmy Newton carried much of his equipment up to the main building at the Water’s Edge. He set his digital camera up in the dining room, mounting it atop a tripod; the camera was attached to his laptop, which sat on one of the tables; and the laptop was attached to a small metal tower, which Newton placed in what he calculated to be the exact middle of the room.

Then he sat at a table, his hands folded neatly on top, and smiled into the lens. “Hey,” he said. “I’m here in Dampier Cay, which you guys have never heard of. I’m sitting in this place called the Water’s Edge, and we’re waiting for Hurricane Claire. She should make landfall in three, three and a half hours. There should still be a little light, so I’m going to try to get some footage, and hopefully all this new technological stuff will work and you guys should get it live. Oh,” he added, reacting to a sound behind him, turning to look, “here come my buddies Gail and Sorvig. They aren’t chasers, in fact they’re a little pissed off … Hey, girls, come here, smile into the camera and say hello to the folks back home.”