Galveston (18 page)

Jimmy stopped halfway and the wind pushed him over sideways. He landed on his ass and elbows, his hands still tight around the camera. “Pick me up, pick me up, pick me up,” he giggled. Caldwell put his hands in Jimmy’s armpits and drew him skyward. There was a lightning bolt then, close enough that Newton started, but Caldwell wasn’t impressed. He wrapped his arms around Newton’s shoulders and then set himself, one leg back, the foot twisted sideways for purchase, the other leg locked forward.

“Okee-dokee.” Jimmy took his camera into his hands, raised it up, wiped rain from the tiny viewer and peered through. He aimed it at a naked palm tree that shook ecstatically. At
the shore, Maywell’s boat twisted on its moorings, colliding with the wooden pylons like a wild horse bucking inside a stall. Jimmy depressed the shutter, muttered,
“Another
fucking Pulitzer Prize.”

And this was the
leeward
side, Caldwell noted calmly. The storm was actually broadsiding the other side of Dampier Cay. Jimmy Newton seemed to have the same thought, because he batted Caldwell’s arms away, turned and began to make his way across the flagstone patio. Caldwell followed. The two men lowered their heads, bent forward and planted their feet with plodding intensity. Even though the patio was only twenty-odd feet across, these yards were hard won, and when Caldwell reached the other side, he was tempted to raise his arms above his head in triumph.

Caldwell had not wanted to be a professional athlete, not even in his teens, when he might reasonably have dreamt such dreams. He played junior hockey, after all, for the Barrie Blades. This was how his family had ended up in Barrie; the Caldwells, as a clan, had nothing going for them except their fifteen-year-old son’s burgeoning hockey career.

Caldwell took hold of Jimmy’s shoulders, braced himself against the wind. Newton raised the camera, aimed it at the sea. The long metal lens protector was useless here, rain finding its way down the shaft and onto the glass. Jimmy didn’t seem to care; after clicking the shutter a few times, he lowered the camera and simply stared at the approaching storm.

Newton half turned his head and called back, “Hey, Caldwell. Suppose the surge clears this cliff?”

Caldwell peered over the side. “You think it might?”

“Wouldn’t that be fricking
awesome?”

Though Caldwell had never wanted to be a professional athlete, on some level he had always wanted to be a phys. ed. teacher. Even as a teenager he had dressed like one, wearing grey slacks and white golf shirts while his friends wore jeans and T-shirts. Where their hair was long and messy, he kept his neatly trimmed, his instinct being to keep himself as plain as possible.

Jaime had wanted to be a phys. ed. teacher too.

They met at the University of Western Ontario, both attending, on the first day of their university careers, a class in kinesthiology It bewildered Caldwell to be attending a class in kinesthiology, because in the back of his mind he was already a phys. ed. teacher, and needed only to have the silver whistle hung about his neck. But now he found himself in a classroom, the rows of study tables raked precipitously. All around there were illustrations of naked human bodies, many more than naked, reduced to bands of muscle and connective tissue. The professor was a disappointingly small man, disappointing because Caldwell had assumed that all of the teaching would be done by phys. ed. teachers, über–phys. ed. teachers, remarkable specimens in blindingly white golf shirts.

Caldwell was drifting off—he’d had too much beer the night before, chumming about with others in the physical education program, young men who, like him, seemed always destined to become phys. ed. teachers—when the door behind the professor opened and this girl walked through. The other students had entered from doors up above, filtering down through the aisles. This girl had obviously been battling
through unknown subterranean territory; she barged through the door and was therefore the subject of the professor’s pointer when he said the words “a strong, healthy human body.”

The students laughed, the humour here being that the phrase was so obviously applicable. The girl radiated good health, as though she’d been some test subject, reared in a laboratory in the bowels of the building, milk-fed and exercised, and was just now being set free in the world. She said, “Gee, thanks,” which redoubled the students’ laughter, and the professor, perhaps angered by this, said, “You’re late.”

“I got lost,” she said. Caldwell would reflect later that this statement wasn’t precisely true. Jaime was always claiming to be lost, to have gotten lost, but what she really meant was that she’d made no great effort to discover where she was or where she was going, preferring to set out into the world with the naive innocence of a seventeenth-century explorer. So, in reading her schedule that day, Jaime had only noted the building and room number.

“Don’t be late again,” the professor cautioned, and the girl nodded, as though striking a bargain, and then mounted the risers two at a time, entering the same row as Caldwell and sitting down immediately beside him.

“What have we learned so far?” she whispered. She was busily arranging stuff on the workspace, which pulled up and folded out. She put her notebook there, a pen, a pencil, an eraser. Caldwell had set out none of these things and realized, when she asked the question, that he had no idea what he’d learned thus far. Probably nothing. He desperately tried to remember, because he’d been paying attention, at least he was
pretty certain he had. There was something about ligaments or ligatures or something. He knew this wasn’t good enough to present to the girl, who had pushed her short brown hair back behind her ears in order to listen better. He considered a response like “Sweet dick-all,” which he would have uttered without hesitation if it had been a guy sitting down beside him. By this time, of course, the girl thought he was an idiot anyway, because he hadn’t spoken. So he said what he figured would make the best locker-room story. And although Jaime made much hay of the fact that the first words he ever spoke to her were, “Would you like to go out with me?” she never suspected that they represented more truly her first encounter with Caldwell the A-hole.

T
HE DOOR BLASTED OPEN
and Caldwell and Jimmy Newton blew back into the Pirate’s Lair. They were soaking wet, their hair and clothes disarranged and tumbled. “Holy Christ,” Jimmy said, waving his little arms in the air, “she’s the biggest thing I’ve ever seen and she’s not even fucking
here.”

Gail scowled, shook her head. “Of course it’s
here.
Just listen to it.”

Beverly did just that, closing her eyes and tilting her head to listen to the song of lost souls.

“Hey,” demanded Gail, and Beverly popped open her eyes. Gail stood in front of her, her arms crossed sternly across her chest. “What are you smiling about?”

“I’m sorry,” said Beverly, “I was just thinking.”

“You people …” Gail pointed to Jimmy, Caldwell and Beverly. “You people kind of creep me out.”

“How so?” asked Beverly.

Sorvig answered, “Because you want to get
dead.”

Newton rubbed his head with a bar towel and patted his thin hair back into position. “Not me,” he said. “There’s some danger involved, sometimes, but it’s like any, you know,
extreme
activity. Haven’t you ever done anything risky?”

“Not really,” said Gail.

“Okay, here’s the thing,” said Jimmy. “You know what a tsunami is?”

“Sure,” said Sorvig.

Gail nodded. “Tidal wave.”

“Now
that
is power. A tsunami is the whole ocean coming at you.” Jimmy held his hands one above the other to illustrate compression, bringing them together, pulling them apart. “You know, if a tsunami starts like a hundred miles offshore, there’s only maybe seven actual wave actions before it hits land. Think about that. You know what happens before a tidal wave comes? The water disappears. Harbours just suddenly go bone dry. Then the wave arrives. A wall of water a hundred feet tall.” Newton shook his head wistfully. “And sometimes I think about that moment, you know, the moment just before the tsunami hits. I think how wonderful it would be to be standing there in that moment, looking up at it. But I know the next moment wouldn’t be so wonderful. So I try to see how close I can get to the one moment without getting my ass kicked the next.”

“Myself,” said Beverly, “I’m interested in what happens
between
those two moments.”

“Well, like I mentioned,” said Jimmy, “you’re just a little bit nuts.”

“Mm-hmm,” agreed Beverly. “That would seem to be the general consensus.”

“What is it exactly,” Dr. Noth had demanded, repositioning her notepad upon her wide lap, gripping the arms of her chair to haul her bulk forward—they were obviously getting down to the heart of the matter—“that you think you want of these encounters?” Dr. Noth was referring to the more furtive acts that Beverly had spoken of: prowling the streets of Orillia on
stormy nights, poking her head inside bus shelters to see who was standing in the shadows.

Dr. Noth irritated her more than most of the professionals. She had an odd odour and an unrelenting hunger for what she considered “answers.” Beverly pursed her mouth for a moment before answering. “I don’t suppose I want anything other than the encounter.”

“But what do you think is the significance of the weather?” “Hmmm, interesting.” Beverly often said that when sitting with Dr. Noth; the woman never noted the sarcasm. Beverly touched a finger to her face, as though giving the question serious thought. “Well, you know, there may be a biophysical significance. It may well have to do with ionization. People find storms exciting. Energizing.”

“And when energized, you feel the need to make these sexual connections with total strangers?”

“Well, I don’t have a very wide circle of acquaintances.” Dr. Noth wrote something down then, what exactly Beverly couldn’t guess. Beverly knew that she was a prize case for Dr. Noth, a history that the doctor intended to write up for some medical journal. There were so many tragedies in Beverly’s life that determining the root cause of her behaviour was, to a psychologist, what proving Fermat’s theorem was to a mathematician. Some professionals fastened onto the murder-suicide of her parents. Others asked endless questions about her grandfather, searching for signs of sexual abuse. And of course there were many who pointed their fingers at the death of Margaret, beautiful little Margaret of the long golden hair.

The way Beverly behaved bewildered her as much as it did anyone. She functioned well enough at work. Even Mr. Tovell, who did not like Beverly on some profound level, was willing to admit that she was efficient. Their office was a small branch of a large multinational concern, and Beverly’s main job was filing. She actually had the same problem with this as she had with grocery bag stuffing; there was usually something left over, a sheaf of papers in her hand for which there was no room in the cabinet. Beverly would then place it somewhere arbitrarily—or not quite arbitrarily, there was some sort of logic operating—and she maintained her reputation for efficiency by remembering where these things were. “Bring me the Donlands file,” Mr. Tovell would bark, when other staff had failed to locate the thing in the
D
s. Beverly would hurry away and dig through the
M
s, because when she was a little girl, milk had been delivered by Donlands Dairy.

This was how she usually got through the workday. After Margaret died, she moved to a flat above a store that sold uniforms, things like nurses’ outfits and white shoes with thick soles. She would mount the stairs to her apartment, which consisted of two rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen. The bedroom contained a bed, a standing closet, a small chest of drawers. In the kitchen was an old fridge that usually held some fruit and cartons of milk in various stages of souring. There was a tiny television set on the counter, and on the kitchen table was Beverly’s computer. As soon as she entered her apartment, she pressed the “on” button, and as the machine booted up, she threw off her work clothes. She would put on a T-shirt and sit down behind the keyboard.
Then she would click the icon that connected her with the Internet. Nightly she visited various sites pertaining to weather and storm tracking. She would stare at satellite photographs, squinting to simplify the masses of white, looking for big formations.

One day she saw a puff of white obscuring the Cape Verde islands, off the west coast of Africa. This excited her, even though she knew it was commonplace. But it was the beginning of September, the start of hurricane season, and perhaps her excitement was akin to the optimism a fisherman feels on opening day, an optimism that no amount of past failure can diminish. The next day this little button of white had grown larger, moved slightly toward the Americas. She checked with NOAA’s site, noted that it had achieved official depression status. She touched the little patch of white and pulled her finger across the computer’s screen, not thinking, only reacting to ethereal whim, and when her finger passed over a tiny sliver of black, she had enlarged the image. Another option laid a grid-work overtop the image, words appearing beside the various formations.
Dampier Cay.

Now, as the hurricane neared, as Caldwell once again took a seat on the bar stool beside her, an answer occurred to Beverly. She felt an urge to telephone Dr. Noth, but there were no telephones at the Water’s Edge. And whatever phones
were
on Dampier Cay were going to become useless very soon. But if she could have spoken to the professional, Beverly would have said, “It’s easy to see what I want. I’m looking for someone who is looking for the same thing.”