Galveston (2 page)

After Tropical Depression Claire was born, it began to move westward. Meteorological bureaus posted its image, as seen from heaven, a pretty white swirl with a hole in its centre. The swirl changed position, hour to hour, and these movements were monitored by many people, most of them anxious, perhaps because it was their job to be so, perhaps because they owned property that might lie in her path.

A few people were eager to know where Claire might wander for another purpose, and they appropriated her images for their own websites, which had names like
Weatherweenies.com
and
Stormwatch.com.
These were chasers, men and women eager to encounter extreme weather. Claire was born on Sunday, and by Tuesday morning she lay in the middle of the Atlantic. The chasers began to make guesses about her trajectory, guesses based on science, history and magic.

Only three guessed right.

Many were close. There were a few, for example, who journeyed to Martinique and St. Lucia, and they were slapped
by wind and made sodden by rain falling in huge sheets that rippled and roared like bent sheet metal. But in the chaser’s own argot, these people merely
got wet.
The merciless elements that danced around Claire’s eye passed between these two islands, on their way toward Dampier Cay.

T
HE CUSTOMS OFFICIAL STARED
at the computer screen, trying to determine if Caldwell might be a terrorist or criminal.

“Where are you going, Mr. Caldwell?”

There was a moment of silence; being addressed as “Mr.” took Caldwell by surprise. Then he answered, “Galveston,” and was surprised again, by his own response.

The customs official was a plump, freckled man, and out in the world, Caldwell knew, the customs official would sweat too much. He would be irritable, he would smell bad. Some customs officials sought the profession because they craved power, or because they enjoyed repelling unwanted aliens; this one wanted only the cool blue air of Toronto’s Pearson International Airport.

The official said, “You visit the United States a lot.”

Caldwell made no reply. It wasn’t a question.

The official made it one: “Why do you visit the United States a lot?”

“Fish.”

“To buy fish?”

“No, no. To catch fish. You know. To angle.”

“I see.”

“And the weather.”

“You enjoy the climate?”

“No. The weather.”

The customs official now picked up Caldwell’s passport and flipped through, perplexed. The pages were scarred with the faded impressions of entry stamps from countries around the globe. The customs official grunted, indicating that he was putting two and two together, that Caldwell was up to something. “What line of work are you in?”

“I’m in no line of work.”

“How’s that?”

Caldwell had annoyed the customs official, he could see that, so he proffered an explanation. He smiled as he said, “I used to be a teacher. Phys. ed. and science. But I don’t need to work any more. I’m rich.”

The official looked at his computer screen again, as though this information about wealth should have been electronically forthcoming. He struck the keyboard hard. “How did you make your money, Mr. Caldwell?”

“I didn’t make it. I won the lottery. Sixteen million dollars.”

“Whoa.”

“Exactly.”

His wealth made people see him in a different light; they liked him better. That used to bother him. Well, that’s not entirely true, Caldwell used to let it bother him,
make
it bother him, because it was the sort of thing that
should
bother a decent man—but Caldwell laid no claim to decency, and hadn’t for some years.

The plump, freckled customs official became friendlier. He riffled through the passport once more, this time in obvious admiration of Caldwell’s adventuring. “So where are you off to now?”

“Miami.”

“Uh-huh?”

“I’m going to a little airport just outside of Miami. I’m going to catch a plane, it’ll take me to Dampier Cay.”

“Never heard of it.”

“No. I’ve never heard of it either.”

“Huh?”

“I mean, I hadn’t ever heard of it. It’s just a little island.”

The customs official nodded and offered Caldwell his passport, then pulled it away before Caldwell could put his fingers on it. “Hold it, Mr. Caldwell. Didn’t you tell me first that you were going to Galveston?”

“Yeah,” agreed Caldwell. “I guess I’m going the long way.”

Beverly was already at the little airport outside Miami.

She’d taken a bus from Orillia to Toronto, and then a train to Buffalo, New York, and from there she’d flown to Florida. It was the cheapest way to go, although she’d had to overnight in Miami, and even the small, seedy motel she’d found cost a lot more than she’d budgeted for.

The flight to Dampier Cay was scheduled for one o’clock in the afternoon. Beverly had arrived at the airport at about seven-thirty in the morning. The place was deserted, a little bungalow beside a huge barren field cut with a strip of tarmac. At one end of this runway sat a battered twin Beech outside a rusted Quonset hut.

The cabby was reluctant to leave her there alone, that’s how desolate it was. But Beverly said she’d be fine. “I’ll just wait. I’ve got my book.”

Beverly had no book. After the taxi left, she sat down on the steps and folded her hands in her lap.

At nine o’clock a small car pulled up and a beautiful black man stepped out. He was dressed in a blue uniform with golden buttons and brocade. Beverly stood and had to resist the impulse to salute.

“Good morning, ma’am,” said the man.

“I have a ticket for the flight to Dampier Cay,” said Beverly. “At least, I have a reservation number.”

The man nodded. “That flight may be delayed.”

“Why?” she asked. “Because of Tropical Storm Claire?”

“No. Just because it usually always is.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t worry about Claire. Now they’re saying she’s going to miss everything, probably just blow out at sea.”

Beverly nodded and smiled as though relieved. But really she knew that
they
were almost always wrong.

Blowing out at sea was only one scenario; perhaps the most desirable, but by no means the most likely. Hurricanes are created moment by moment, as though fuelled by fresh time, by nowness.

Take Hazel.
Caldwell said that often, in barrooms around the globe, when he’d had three drinks too many and no desire to go up to his room. He would find some other lost soul and slowly work the conversation around to hurricanes, and then he would touch on their erratic nature. He would recite the science, hoping that his companion was too drunk and heartsick to interrupt. “No one’s really sure how a hurricane
becomes organized,” he’d say. “They might get influenced by an upper tropospheric short-wave trough or something.” And then, while his listener’s eyes were still glazed over, he’d say, “The point is, hurricanes are erratic. Take Hazel.”

No one had predicted that Hurricane Hazel would work her way through the Caribbean and Carolinas, up the Atlantic coast, and then, as furious as she had been at birth, kick the province of Ontario in the ass.

Caldwell was three years old in
1954
, and his earliest memory was of Hurricane Hazel. Granted, not all of the memory was genuine. For instance, part of the memory was of being put to bed by his parents, the pair of them beaming happily, proud of their little toddler. That never happened, because for one thing, his parents did nothing together. Sometimes Caldwell imagined that his own making was performed in the manner of fishes, his mother leaving a small pile of gleaming eggs in the depressed centre of the mattress, his father passing over sometime later and glumly depositing his own sticky contribution. But all that aside, Caldwell knew that his father was otherwise occupied; he was, that night, busy fighting the storm.

The story of Hurricane Hazel was every bit as important to the elder Caldwell as it would become to the younger, perhaps because it was the only time in his life that Caldwell’s father did anything useful. There had been rain all that week, and the rivers and creeks to the north of Toronto were already brimming. When Hazel came on Friday afternoon and filled the world with wind and water, the rivers became riotous. The storm caught everyone by surprise—the radio reports had
called merely for “rain”—but by little Caldwell’s bedtime flooding was certain. So while his father may have taken a few minutes to say good night to his son, it is not likely. His father was almost certainly outside, helping to pile sandbags along the banks of the normally docile Humber River.

Back then the Caldwells lived on Kingdom Street, a block away from the river, close enough that Caldwell’s father feared the basement would flood and destroy his workbench and power tools. Caldwell couldn’t recall his father ever actually making anything, but throughout his life the older man maintained a professionally equipped shop in the basement of whatever house they lived in.

After being placed in his little bed, Caldwell had not fallen asleep. He had immediately raised himself up onto his knees and looked through the window. He was amazed at the sight. The rain did not come
down
, it blew in all directions. It obscured the world in the same manner in which Caldwell destroyed drawings he deemed poor, with violent cross-hatching. The boy was delighted at how musical the wind was making everything. The window glass vibrated in its frame with a low, steady hum.

Caldwell must have slept, but this was not part of his memory. He knew he fell asleep, because he had checked all the newspaper reports and the official police records. Caldwell knew the sequence of events that took place a little after three a.m., the logic and causality. The Humber River grew bigger and stronger and finally threw over the footbridge, the concrete walkway that allowed people in his neighbourhood of Westmount easier access to the shops on Weston Road. The
bridge was toppled, and when it fell it became a dam, turning the water aside. The river had nowhere to go but down Raymore Drive.

Kingdom Street shared backyards with the houses on Raymore Drive. Caldwell’s bedroom was at the back of the house, which means that when he once again knelt on his mattress and chinned himself up by the windowsill, he was staring at the houses on Raymore. He was never sure what woke him up, but it seems likely that it was screaming. When he grew up, it occurred to him that the houses had been too far away, the wind howling too fiercely, for him to have heard anything. But the screams may have been so anguished that they somehow pierced Caldwell’s ears, and he raised himself up and saw a wall of water move down the street and gather up the houses. It did this like a janitor gathering up chairs in a grade school auditorium. By the time the river was done, it had pushed seventeen houses off the face of the earth. Thirty-five people, including Caldwell’s playmate Kenny Janes, were gone forever.

And Caldwell had watched them disappear.

There were plastic chairs lining the walls of a room inside the bungalow airport, and Beverly claimed one in a corner. The beautiful black man stood behind a counter and busied himself with various chores, placing and receiving telephone calls, communicating with someone using a walkie-talkie. Beverly overheard discussions of wind speed and Mercator co-ordinates.

Other passengers arrived. The first was a man in his fifties, very neat, immaculately neat. His skin reminded Beverly of
the colour of coffee when she put the perfect amount of cream into the cup. He wore a blindingly clean white shirt and blue trousers with sharp creases.

This man held a little cardboard box in his hands, very lovingly and carefully. When he sat down, he did not set the box on an empty seat; he placed it in his lap and kept his fingers curved around the sides. Beverly wondered what was in the box, perhaps a small, dead thing that the immaculate man had once loved dearly.

A short while later, two young women entered the little airport. They were nearly identical, both in their twenties and wearing T-shirts and blue jeans stretched by slightly overfed bodies. They had long golden hair and fierce green eyes. One wore spectacles, the only clear distinction between them.

These women had a lot of energy, and a lot of luggage. They spent a few moments making a wall with their bags and suitcases, then they addressed the beautiful black man behind the counter.

“We’re on the flight to Dampier Cay,” said one, mispronouncing the name, delivering the first part as French, rendering the second as it is spelt. The airline representative did not correct this, he only said, “The flight’s been delayed a little.”

“Well, that’s excellent,” said one of the girls. “How come?”

“We’re keeping an eye on the weather.”

“Oh, peachy. It’s that Claire thing, right? The hurricane?”

“It’s not a hurricane,” Beverly piped up. “The winds haven’t reached seventy-two miles an hour.”

The two women sat down in plastic chairs and turned to her.

“We heard about it yesterday,” said one.

“We tried to change our week,” said the other. “We tried to change it, but our boss said no, the fucking prick. Now we’ve got to go on vacation when there’s gonna be a hurricane.”

Beverly could empathize, because her boss wasn’t the nicest fellow either. When Beverly had announced suddenly that she wanted a week off, Mr. Tovell had threatened to fire her. She made up an elaborate fiction: her great-aunt had been arrested for uttering bad cheques, her grandfather had gone down to the police station with a pistol, demanding his sister’s release, and the police had leapt upon him, shattering his jaw, and now he was going to stand trial on various charges and the old man needed Beverly to translate the moans and whines he produced through the wire. She just kept piling up details until Mr. Tovell waved a hand with weary exasperation. No one else at that workplace could have got away with it, but Beverly was associated with bizarre misfortune, she seemed to have “bizarre misfortune” tattooed across her forehead, so Mr. Tovell said, “Oh, okay, go ahead, take the days off.”

An elderly couple arrived, dragging little suitcases on wheels behind them. They nodded at the man behind the counter and sat down without speaking to him, obviously familiar with the routine. They linked hands and asked each other, in hushed tones, if everything was all right. Then the elderly man looked around the room, chuckled nervously and spoke to them all. “Looks like there might be a little bad weather.”