Galveston (20 page)

Jimmy Newton extended his hand, then drew it back when it became clear no shaking was to be done. “Deal,” he said.

C
ALDWELL TOOK
B
EVERLY
’
S HAND
and they set off for the cottages, “J” and “K.” The wind was to their back; they managed only a few steps and then were bowled over. Beverly and Caldwell wrapped their arms around each other and brought their mouths together. They both tasted blood.

Caldwell climbed to his feet and Beverly used him for purchase, digging her fingers under the waistband of his shorts, pulling herself upwards. She took hold of his chest, scratching him with her nails. And then she was upright, leaning into Caldwell’s body, which was large and muscled and seemed, for the moment, to be equal to the storm.

“Your place or mine?” she screamed, her voice barely piercing Claire’s roar.

Caldwell looked at the little harbour. Maywell’s boat had been thrown up onto the dock, and was lying on its side injured, dying. Caldwell noted that water had swamped the piers. He tried to determine if it was high tide. He, Beverly and Maywell had gone fishing with the incoming tide—the bonefish creeping up, with the rising water, onto the shrimp-filled flats—so Caldwell began to add fours (four hours to high tide, four hours back to low, etc.) and concluded that high tide had yet to arrive. The main storm surge, he knew, would come behind the eye of the hurricane, so the fact that Claire had already pushed so much of the ocean at them was startling.
Alarming, even. If high tide coincided with the storm surge … A tiny knot of fear appeared in Caldwell’s belly, the first palpable emotion he’d felt in years.

Caldwell suddenly realized that he was once again living in time. He hadn’t lived in time since that Saturday morning so long ago, which had been punctuated by looking at wall clocks, checking his watch, calculating Jaime’s whereabouts, wondering when Darla Featherstone might arrive with her camera crew. After that, he had become a stranger in time. He would wander about the world, only bumping into time occasionally. A bartender might call time. A hotel clerk might point to a seat in the lounge, telling Caldwell that he would have to wait, that it was not check-in time. And, of course, Caldwell was always missing check-
out
, management gleefully adding another day’s rent to the tally. The world Caldwell had lived in for the past few years was defined neither by time nor by geography; it was informed by the elements.

Beverly took his hand and they completed their journey, running toward their twinned cottages. Beverly stopped outside the sliding glass door of “K.” The council trees around the place shivered with frenzy. She took hold of the handle and tried to pull the glass door open, but she couldn’t budge it. So Caldwell put his hand over hers, and together they moved the thing a foot to the left. Beverly slipped in first, then Caldwell. He pulled the door shut, turned, and Beverly fell into his arms.

“Let’s dance,” she whispered, or at least the volume of her voice passed for a whisper. The cottage was not very well constructed, and the wind found its way through the far wall. If outside there was howling, inside “K” there was sighing.

“Okay,” said Caldwell. Beverly and he linked left hands, placed the right on the small of the other’s back. They began to move about the room. Caldwell was awkward and bumped into things. Beverly rested her head on his shoulder, touched her lips to his neck. Caldwell turned his head slightly; Beverly’s hair smelled of sea spray.

“I think we should get out of these wet things.” Beverly kissed his neck with some firmness now, signalling a break with the authority of a boxing ref separating two fighters from a clinch.

She stepped back from Caldwell and kicked off her shoes, white runners made dingy by sand and dirt. Then she undid her green shorts and stepped out of them. She pulled her underwear off and straightened up. Caldwell saw that her pubic hair was light and downy. He had always found this exciting, nudity confined to a woman’s lower half, and sometimes he asked Jaime to keep her pyjama top on when they made love.

Beverly reached down, crossing arms, taking hold of the bottom of her T-shirt. She pulled up. Her breasts were small, certainly much smaller than Jaime’s, but they had a wonderful shape, with nipples that were almost crimson.

Caldwell hooked toes into heels and tossed his loafers into a corner. He removed his shorts and underwear as one. Beverly moved forward as soon as they hit the ground, reaching out and laying her soft palm upon his cock, which stirred with her touch. She stepped back and stared at Caldwell. He pulled off his own T-shirt. Beverly touched her fingertips to his pectorals, tracing their shape. Her hands came to rest above
his nipples, and she pinched them, slowly increasing the pressure and then suddenly causing a little bolt of pain. Caldwell jerked, smiled and put his hands to her breasts, which were cool and smooth. The skin was especially soft on the outsides, and he brushed there with the sides of his callused fingers. He gingerly put thumbs and forefingers around her nipples; they hardened instantly, and, when he pinched, turned an even darker red. Beverly made a low humming noise and then said, “You have to tell me what you’re thinking about.”

Caldwell understood that she was giving him guidelines now, rules.

“I had to teach science to the boys,” Caldwell told her. “I never really understood it, and I don’t remember it now. I only remember a few weird facts.”

“Such as?” Beverly stroked the back of his neck. She nuzzled in and kissed his chest, stretching upwards to lick his nipple.

“Well … you know what a lodestone is?”

Beverly stuck out her tongue and licked back and forth across Caldwell’s nipple, and in doing so managed to shake her head no
.

“Thousands of years ago they found these rocks, these stones, that were different from other stones in the world. The Chinese people called them loving stones, because they liked to kiss.” Caldwell remembered that the boys in his science class used to snicker at this little aside, the same boys who grew bashful in health whenever he pointed at the diagram of the reproductive organs. “Sailors discovered that if they put these stones on a piece of wood and floated them in water, these rocks would point at Polaris, the lodestar, the star they
used most for navigation. A lodestone was what we now call a piece of magnetite. But not just any piece of magnetite. It had to have a certain, um, crystalline structure.” This was the sort of fact that Mr. Caldwell always barged by, ignoring. Although he knew it referred to matters microscopic, he imagined the stones were as cut and faceted as crystals from a chandelier in a fancy ballroom. “And something else had to happen for a piece of magnetite to become a lodestone,” Caldwell said. “It had to be hit by lightning.”

Beverly dropped to her knees and used a hand to direct Caldwell’s penis into her mouth. Caldwell opened his own mouth, although he had yet to formulate the sentence he wanted to make. He knew it had something to do with futility. Perhaps he was going to echo the hooker Hester’s sensitive observation that there was some problem with the hydraulics. But before he could say anything, his cock began to harden. He listened to the wind, which came in pulses and made his ears pop.

Beverly placed her hands on Caldwell’s hips and straightened up a bit, to accommodate the increasing inclination of his cock. Her tongue retreated and she touched her teeth against his skin. Then she began to move her head up and down, chewing in the most delicate way, enough to suggest pain without inflicting it upon him.

A thought came to Caldwell then, although it’s not accurate to portray this as any kind of epiphany. The thought had been his steady companion for many years, sitting across from him in various bars, sleeping in the other bed in sterile hotel rooms. Caldwell had been ignoring it all this time, lowering his
eyes when it got too close. He tried to put distance between himself and the thought whenever he could find a storm. And the bigger the storm, the greater the distance; someday he would find a big enough storm that he and the thought would be separated forever.

The thought was, as you may have guessed, nothing but the simple reflection that he had loved his wife Jaime very, very much. And Andy, who was made of their love.

Something happened then, there in cottage “K.” There was a low rumble, almost subsonic, a sound that crept beneath the ululation made by the wind. And then blue light pierced the wallboards, finding its way through the crooked imperfections. Everything in the room acquired an azure tinge: Beverly’s hair, her hand around his cock, the very air. And then the cottage shook, so hard that the few pieces of furniture shifted position. Caldwell’s ears popped and he was suddenly winded, working his mouth and lungs with the rhythmic desperation of a landed fish. Beverly released his cock and gulped for air. She seemed to notice the blue light then, turning her head first one way and then the other. There were only wisps of the strange light remaining, aquamarine filaments that were filtering back outside, sucked up once more by the cyclonic action.

“We were hit by lightning,” said Caldwell.

“You figure?” Beverly backed up and sat down upon the bed. She spread her legs apart and leaned backwards, smiling at Caldwell. “That’s good, right?”

“Yeah,” nodded Caldwell. “It means we’ve turned into kissing stones.”

M
AYWELL DONNED FOUL-WEATHER GEAR
, a green plastic suit that looked laughably inadequate. He replaced his baseball cap with a sou’wester, knotting it beneath his chin with a neat little bow. Jimmy Newton gave Maywell the transmitter and the laptop computer to carry, both of which were wired to Jimmy’s videocam, which meant that the two men were connected and had to stay no more than eight feet apart.

On his way out, Maywell stopped in front of Polly, like a schoolboy presenting himself to his mother.

“I won’t be long,” he said.

“I’ll miss you.”

Maywell opened his mouth to speak again but could find no words. He nodded, winked, turned to Jimmy. “Come on, then, Newton.”

Jimmy stopped by the table where Gail and Sorvig sat. “I’ll see you guys later,” he said. The girls nodded and smiled a bit warily, because this guy was a furry little freak. For one thing, he was all jazzed up about the hurricane. For another, he was the most eligible guy there (which goes to show how far wrong Gail and Sorvig had gone in booking
this
holiday) and he hadn’t even tried to cop a feel. They weren’t particularly vain, either one of them, but they were well worth an end-of-the-world tumble.

Each woman felt this damned vacation was the other’s fault, but what was the point in saying anything? They had
gone to their travel agent, who was a fairly cute guy named Helmet, a name that afforded Gail and Sorvig great mirth. They shared a giddy joke wherein “Helmet” referred to his dick, which they imagined to be circumcised in an overemphasized manner. Anyway, they had gone to his office at lunch hour, and while they talked with Helmet, both women thumbed through glossy pamphlets from resorts with titles like Sun & Sensuality
.
These places seemed perfect, just the ticket. They existed on islands that Gail and Sorvig had heard of. The pamphlets were full of pictures of people on the beach, in the pool, at organized dances. Helmet told them he’d been to many of the places and said they were big fun.
Totally happening
was the phrase he used, by which he implied, or maybe they inferred, unbridled sexual excess, with guys like himself, Gail and Sorvig imagined, Germanic sorts possessed of great fleshy hammerheads. Then
one of them
(each thought it was the other) had reached over and plucked up a cheesy mimeographed thing from a resort named Water’s Edge that existed on some island no one had ever heard of, Dampier Cay.

The building they were in was screaming. The wind pushed and pulled at the plywood that covered the windows. Rain forced its way through; although there were no gaping holes anywhere to be seen, the floor of the dining area was archipelagoed with puddles. From their table, Gail and Sorvig could see down the passageway. Polly was in the dining room, mop in hand, although as soon as she dealt with a puddle and turned away, it would reappear. Polly herself was soaking wet, a real mess, but she laboured with concentration and industry.

“Come on, sit down, have a drink or something,” Gail called to her.

“Yeah,” said Sorvig, “it’s not like what you’re doing is making any difference.”

“You’ve got to try to keep up!” Polly called back. “Otherwise things get out of hand.”

Things were already pretty much out of hand. The building screamed, and even though at any one moment the screaming seemed as loud as it could possibly get, the next moment would bring an augmentation. Gail and Sorvig were both way past being frightened, they had left fear eating dust a long time back. They were numb inside now. Their emotions had coalesced into a shapeless glob that lay off to one side of their bellies like roadkill. Both wondered if the building could actually withstand the storm, but no way was either going to bring up that point. It was a
building
, after all, someone had actually
built
it. What would have been the point of building the thing if it couldn’t stand up to what was, after all, just weather? Just fucking weather, that’s all it was. Buildings were supposed to protect people from weather, and weather certainly wasn’t supposed to pose a death threat. Gail and Sorvig lived in New York City, where night brought forth a horde of ghouls with ghastly intentions. They had survived that, and now their asses were grass because of
weather.

Lester appeared in the Pirate’s Lair. The girls didn’t know where he’d been, not outside because he was still pretty dry. He brandished a hammer, his symbol of utility. Gail and Sorvig spoke as one, saying it before he could: “What will be, will be.”

“Amen,” said Lester. He went to the bar and stared at the wall there, the empty shelves, shelves that should have held liquor bottles shoulder to shoulder.

“Polly put them away somewhere,” offered Sorvig.