Galveston (19 page)

After that class in kinesthiology, Caldwell went to the Olympic-size pool in the college’s athletic centre. He found an empty lane and dove in, and for half an hour he went up and down the right-hand side. He was not a particularly good swimmer, but he could go for very long distances. In the back of his mind he had always imagined attempting some marathon journey, across Lake Simcoe or something. He had done this since he was a child, although as a child he had dreamt of stepping into familiar water and swimming to some other shore where everything was new and unknown.

As he neared the wall in the deep end, he heard a voice say, “Excuse me.” Caldwell did not suspect that it was directed at him, since he was minding his own business. So he turned and did another two lengths, up and back. This time the voice was brittle.
“Excuse
me.” Caldwell stopped mid-turn, pushing off the wall and then waving his arms to slow his progress. He turned and saw a woman standing above him.

This image Caldwell kept with him. In the days before the hole in his life, it was always close at hand. Caldwell used it sometimes as he and Jaime were making love, especially as the end neared, when Jaime had come and Caldwell was free to charge at the finishing line like the huge clumsy athlete he was. After his memory was destroyed, the image would occur randomly, unbidden, and he would have to stop whatever he was doing.

As Caldwell looked up at her, Jaime’s thighs appeared even more massive than they really were. She was a competitive swimmer, and her hours in the pool had exaggerated her body in many ways. Her thighs wowed, ballooned with muscle. She
wore a black bathing suit, modestly cut, the bottom drawing a prudish line across the top of her legs, the top wrapping around her neck almost clerically. But she had raced through the showers on her way poolside, and the wet material clung to her little belly and her breasts.

So Caldwell pulled off his goggles and this image burned itself into his memory.

“The thing is,” Jaime said, and she lifted her hand and began to make a circular motion, “you’re supposed to do laps in the lane. You know. Up the right-hand side, down the left-hand side. That way, three, even four people could use the same one.”

“Seriously,” said Caldwell, “I think we ought to go out together.”

Jaime had been gazing at the pool and organizing it theoretically, but now she looked down and saw who it was. It took a moment, but a smile did come. “Oh, why not?” she muttered. Then she dove in. Caldwell watched as she moved underwater, like a dolphin, her body undulating and rippling with strength. She broke the surface about halfway down the pool’s length and began a fierce crawl.

Caldwell leapt off his bar stool suddenly. He looked at Beverly and smiled. “I have to go do something,” he said. He bent over and kissed Beverly on the lips, as lightly as he could manage, and then he left the Pirate’s Lair.

Jimmy Newton picked up the digital video camera, aimed it at the people in the Pirate’s Lair. There was a light on top, a lamp that sent out a strong beam, and people would squint and
scowl as the thing was aimed at them. Especially Maywell, who usually squinted and scowled. “Get that thing away from me.”

“We’re going out live all across the world,” said Jimmy. “Anybody you want to say hello to?”

“No.” The only person who meant anything to Maywell was in the same room.

Jimmy moved on. “Sorvig?”

Sorvig, after thinking for a moment, waved at the camera and then began to speak a strange language. Beverly listened for words she might recognize. In a certain mood she felt she could understand people no matter what language they spoke, because words were really not as powerful as everyone imagined. They were weak, rusty and old-fashioned locks that could be popped open with hairpins.

In fact, Sorvig did use some words that Beverly recognized, English words. “Sunbathing,” she said, and “hurricane.” Beverly wondered about the country Sorvig came from, which lacked expressions for these things, some vacuum of a place where there was no light or wind.

Jimmy aimed the camera at Sorvig’s friend. “How about you, Gail?”

“Well, um, hi, I guess,
Cheryl.
Wish you were here.” Gail and Sorvig both laughed for a short time and then fell silent.

“Crazy lady? I mean, Beverly?”

Was there anyone Beverly wanted,
needed
, to say hello to? Not her grandfather, certainly. Beverly didn’t hate her grandfather, but she was certainly angry with him most of the time, resentful of his resentment. He resented her, of course, because she’d survived her mother, because when the police
finally burst through the door, little Beverly was sitting in her high chair, apparently gurgling happily. Perhaps her grandfather resented that, the happy gurgling, but Beverly suspected the old man had made up that piece of the story, justification for his resentment.

If not her grandfather, then who? It suddenly struck Beverly as funny,
humorous
, that there was no one else in the world with whom she had any connection. She had not been distant, she had not been aloof—in fact, she’d been the furthest thing from aloof—and yet, there was no one.

Still, it seemed fitting to say something, to make some sort of announcement. “I’ll send a big hello to anyone out there,” said Beverly, “who has lost someone. Maybe that’s most everybody, I don’t know. It’s a lot of people. And I just wanted to point out that maybe they’re not really lost, I mean
gone.
Because when you think about it …” Beverly lifted a hand in the air, began to turn it around in a slow circle—cyclonic action. “Sometimes everything—people and time and
everything
—gets sucked up by a storm. A hurricane or a tornado. And it might seem like you’ve lost something, but you haven’t, when you think about it, not if you get sucked up by the same storm, you see what I mean, maybe you can’t get at it, but it’s not
lost
, you’re part of the same, it’s there and you’re here and everything goes round and round so that … Oh fuck, where is Mr. Caldwell?”

The mechanics of fly casting are simple; many people, even non-anglers, are familiar with the concept that the rod is stopped, forward and back, on the face of a huge imaginary
clock—one o’clock, eleven o’clock. This is how Caldwell had learned, but he didn’t conceive of casting that way any more, because it involved time. He preferred a conceptualization that had been suggested by a particularly grizzled guide in New Zealand: “You’re standing in the middle of an empty room with a paintbrush. Now, flick paint on the wall in front of you. Now on the wall behind.” This appealed to him for the sense of destructive mischievousness it lent to casting. But Caldwell’s favourite little mantra, the one he employed now, was “Hurl the hatchet” for the forward cast, and for the back, “Stab the sky.” Actually, he didn’t even bother with “Hurl the hatchet” most of the time, and he would mutter, over and over again, “Stab the sky. Stab the sky. Stab the sky.”

Of course, none of these are any use at all when hurricane-force winds are involved. That didn’t stop Caldwell. Lightning still sparked. The bolts were more infrequent but also more substantial, and Caldwell had hopes of hooking into one. So he stood on the rocks overlooking the ocean, staring into the face of Claire. He had found a flat surface, lower than much of the rise, only twelve, thirteen feet above sea level. The ocean exploded all around him, and once or twice spilled over and formed tentacles, wrapping around his ankles, trying to pull him away. Caldwell held fast, and, strangely, it wasn’t that difficult. The undertow, that phenomenon so feared by Beverly, had been tamed by the storm. Nature operates by balance and equiponderance. So when waves come ashore, the water molecules floundering on land must be replaced out in the deep; this is why the undertow comes into being. Hurricane Claire was driving
all
of the water toward Dampier
Cay. She was supplying any deficit, so Caldwell found it relatively easy to keep his footing, even on the slick rock.

The actual casting was considerably more difficult. Caldwell held the rod upright, as best he could. The tendons in his forearm were puffed, the veins engorged, it felt as though his right arm might explode. The flyline was frozen behind him, describing a perfectly straight line perpendicular to the earth, virtually motionless. But Claire was almost done with thunder and lightning, as far as Dampier Cay was concerned. She would now use her two main powers: wind and, the greater one, water.

“Mr. Caldwell?”

Caldwell turned, and in that tiny moment of distraction the wind took his rod away. It flew like an arrow, sixty, seventy feet to the main building, striking one of the plywood boards that covered the dining-room windows, exploding into splinters. The storm had arrived.

Beverly was standing a few feet behind him. Caldwell turned and spent a long moment looking into her eyes. He understood what she was searching for.

Beverly said, “It’s time.”

M
R
. W
EATHER WAS READY
to do his stuff.

Jimmy had a computer bag slung over his shoulder, his laptop nestled in there, humming with battery power. The camera was wired to both the digital videocam and a transmitter that sent out a radio signal, and Newton had high hopes that the strange little metal tower in the centre of the dining room would fling this signal around the globe. Weather weenies everywhere could experience Hurricane Claire first-hand. But deep down he didn’t care if the technology betrayed him or not. He was here, that’s all that really mattered.

Newton wobbled toward the door. He stopped and twisted his body, trying to shift all the gear, looking for balance and comfort. Everything was mighty cumbersome. The transmitter, the size of a paperback book, seemed to weigh about twenty pounds. What the fuck did they make it out of, kryptonite?

What he needed, Jimmy decided, was an equipment caddy, someone to tote the peripherals. If Caldwell had stuck around, Jimmy would have asked him, but Caldwell was being weird; he was off fishing in the hurricane. Jimmy had seen him do this before. He’d spotted Caldwell standing in front of a monster storm surge with a fishing pole, poking at the sky, trying to get it to spit electricity. The man was fucking nuts, but let’s face it, no weather weenie is a poster boy for mental health.

Caldwell only
didn’t
disappear, reflected Newton, when there was some sort of actual emergency to deal with. Caldwell liked to play hero. One time—Newton ran through the catalogue in his head and decided it was Hurricane Francine—everyone was gathered in a big hotel in … someplace. He wasn’t so good at remembering place names. It was a Third World country, Newton knew that, because although the hotel was tall and grand, it sat in the middle of a
village
, the houses small and wooden and not very well put together. Most of the villagers had come over to the hotel, where management grudgingly let them gather in the expansive lobby. The people seemed very happy there. They gossiped and played cards, and several men formed a circle and played some game that involved stones, throwing them on the floor and then exchanging coins. The watchers had commandeered their own little area, near a large plate glass window that rattled in its housing. This made the manager nervous, and he kept trying to lure the weather tourists away with promises of fine food and free drinks, but the weenies stood their ground. It’s not like Francine was much of a storm—she barely made “two” status.

Anyway, they were looking through the window—Newton was recording the destruction of the villagers’ houses—when a woman appeared at the doorway of one of the little shacks. They couldn’t hear her, but it was clear she was screaming, her mouth forming a rictus of tormented fear. And Caldwell bolted out of the hotel. They all watched him struggle across the road. When he reached the woman, she gesticulated frantically at the shadows behind her. Caldwell dashed into the place just as the winds destroyed it. The planks and shingles flew away,
and when they were gone, Caldwell stood there with a small child cradled in his arms. There was a big gash on his forehead and his nose was broken. All the weather watchers cheered. Caldwell, carrying the child in one arm now, stepped out of the debris and put the other around the woman’s shoulder. She leant into him and Caldwell brought them back to the hotel.

But there was no Caldwell now, and it was time for Mr. Weather to deliver the goods, live coverage of the actual hurricane. Jimmy had an idea then, and he jerked his head up. He was a little startled to find Maywell Hope already looking at him. Hope’s eyes were hard, the wrinkles around them laced together tightly. “No,” said Maywell.

“Hey,” protested Newton, “I’m a guest of the Water’s Edge. I’m your responsibility.”

“That’s right, you’re my responsibility,” agreed Maywell. “So keep your butt parked here.”

“Hey,” snapped Jimmy, “I am a, a,
videographer.
I need to record this storm. For posterity. For
science.
So they can study the storm.”

Hope wished to God that he had something to smoke.

Jimmy Newton decided to hammer home the point that recording the tempest would ultimately benefit mankind. “You know,” he said, “they think that a hurricane isn’t
a
storm, you see what I mean, they think it’s more like a lot of storms. A lot of twisters within the main system, but they’re not sure how they’re organized. So if the scientists, like my buddies at NOAA, had footage to study …” Newton spread his hands, as though to illustrate the obviousness of his thinking. “Come on,” he
said to Maywell. “Night’s coming. There’s not much light left anyway.”

Maywell was thinking that there must be a pack of cigarettes somewhere. He’d quit smoking a few months back, at least he’d told Polly at the time that he’d stopped forever, and during those torturous four days he’d secreted decks of smokes everywhere. “Go ahead, then, sir,” he snapped. “Go film your storm.”

“The thing is, Maywell,” said Jimmy Newton, “I need your help. If you could just carry some of this stuff for me …”

The word “help” preyed upon Maywell. After all, he’d been off-island when storms had come before. Now it was time for him to climb up into the mast-riggings with all the other pirates. “All right, Newton,” he said. “We’ll go do what you have to do. After that, we come back in here and ride the damn thing out. Do we have a deal?”