Galveston (24 page)

Gail deftly tore away the outer wrap, removed the protective backing, which disappeared instantly. “Move your hand,” she told Maywell. He lifted his fingers, and Gail capped the bloody well with the bandage. Then she lifted Polly’s head slightly from Maywell’s lap, and Sorvig began to wrap the gauze around Polly’s neck.

Maywell told himself that Polly knew how he felt about her, despite the fact that his gestures of affection were rather crude; he was given to butt-slapping, for example. It was not as though Polly had ever told Maywell she loved him, either. He understood that in some sense she wasn’t allowed to love him, not fully, because of the ghost of her dead husband. He often felt the ghost’s eyes upon his back as he attended to his labours in the bedroom, and he sensed there was something, somewhere, that Polly was not offering to him. That had always been fine with him.

“Not too tight, now.” He nodded toward the wrapping of the gauze.

Gail said, “Right,” even though it was the other, Sorvig, who was undertaking the operation.

Mind you, the matter here was not whether or not Polly loved Maywell. That matter was gone—it had been plucked up by the tempest and blown out to sea.

“May,” Polly said, although she had energy enough only to pop her pale lips apart, allow a little air to escape, shaping it into this sound that somehow made his name.

Jimmy Newton moved on hands and knees over broken glass, shards that shifted and swirled like the bottom of the sea. He thought about climbing to his feet, but the storm, trapped inside the dining room, was fierce and gladitorial, and Jimmy would simply be slammed up against the walls. Anyway, he had to locate the portable generator, and this lower vantage point would assist in that, so he tried to ignore the fresh cuts and lacerations he was acquiring with every second he spent on his knees and palms.

There wasn’t a lot of dining room left, no longer much distinction between inside and out. Human construct and the distinctions it tried to impose upon the world didn’t signify. It was like that game Jimmy played in airplanes, trying to determine when, precisely, the plane was entering a cloud. It was impossible; you could tell when the plane was outside the cloud, you could tell when the plane was inside, but there was no edge or border. The whole world was like that now, an endless moment of transition.

Jimmy Newton tried to remember where he’d left the portable generator, but the truth of the matter was that he didn’t pay all that much attention to the details of his life. Never had, really. He’d never even
considered
paying attention to his life, that’s how little attention he paid to it.

He crawled toward one corner of the room, but the contraption was not there. A chair rushed at him from out of the shadows, denting his forehead before lifting off slowly, awkwardly, like a helicopter with twisted blades. Jimmy Newton let out a little pained puff of air and a cuss word.

Then he was set upon by another inanimate object. This one was small, and scuttled through the opening made by his
arms, nestling against his chest as though it wanted to suckle. Newton raised himself up on his haunches, took hold of the object, which was a box with two ports for video camera batteries. “Aha!” he exclaimed, and he cast a canny eye upwards. Jimmy had never thought much about heaven. The way he figured it, it was like the cloud game: he’d be able to tell if he was there, but he wouldn’t be able to tell if he was entering.

C
ALDWELL HAD LEFT
G
ALVESTON
—he’d floated away with his family, the three of them clutching snapped timbers. Now he was back—he was back
now
—and Caldwell knew that time was running out, that the eye-wall was coming, that their world was going to be destroyed.

Caldwell gently spilled Beverly onto the bed. She reclined on one elbow, her back—and lovely backside—presented to him, through the dark and roiling mist. She raised her leg and he placed one hand on the bed and snugged the other between her legs so that his middle finger fell upon the moist lips of her pussy. His finger touched her clitoris, falling upon it with tentative authority. Beverly opened her legs wider.

The storm pushed him onto the bed, almost tenderly, as if Hurricane Claire wanted to get Caldwell out of the way while she destroyed what little there was left of cottage “K.” Beverly reached down, took hold of Caldwell’s cock, moved her wrist and hips slightly, and drew him into her.

She closed her eyes and listened. There was a sound that was louder than the wind now, though the wind was so loud that it caused a deep pain. The sound was the sea pounding upon Dampier Cay with redoubled insistence, a god come down from the heights to demand supplication and awe.

She was reminded of how the waves beat against the walls of her small home on Avenue C, the house she shared with
Margaret. The evening of September 8, 1900, the waves had come knocking and the water rose. Beverly mourned the ruination of the carpet on the floor below; she was sure that much of the furniture would need repair. But she was not worried, not terribly worried, until the first big crunching sound came.

“What was that again?”

Caldwell grunted, “Railway trestle.”

“Right.” Beverly took hold of the stained bedsheet and returned. There was another huge crunch. Margaret was terrified, then again, the girl was almost always terrified at some very profound level. This is why she valued so the touchstones of normalcy, because they gave the illusion that the world was not profoundly scarifying. This is why she insisted that her mother purchase Lowry’s Cleansing Powder, because it was advertised widely and sold the most, even though Beverly knew there were other detergents that produced cleaner clothes. The crunching sounds kept coming, as though there were some monster out there with huge teeth and an endless appetite.

Beverly pressed down, eased up, trying to find the precise pressure that would bring release. Not that she was aware of doing this, because her thoughts were occupied with the huge crunches, the plangent thunderclaps.

The house began to shake, at first in coincidence with the trestle’s assaults, and then independently of them and continuously. Beverly gathered Margaret into her arms. The child was too frightened to cry, although her little body spasmed with silent sobs. Beverly ran her fingers through Margaret’s hair,
long and golden and oh so soft because of the nightly ritual, two hundred strokes with the ebony hairbrush. Then she closed her eyes. She did not pray, because she was angry with God, but in her mind she bargained with Him, hard-nosed, almost belligerent, trying to negotiate safe delivery of her daughter.

No
, said God.

“Yes,” said Beverly.

She came as the timbers gave way, and screamed as the house collapsed and water rushed forward to claim her.

T
HE LIGHTS CAME ON
just as Jimmy Newton crawled back into the Pirate’s Lair with his portable generator. In the weak new light he saw the three people kneeling beside Polly. The girls were leaning back. There was nothing further they could do, this is what the attitude of their bodies told him. Maywell, on the other hand, was inclined forward, his head close to Polly’s, waiting in case she had words to speak and breath left to speak them.

When the lights came on, Maywell looked around briefly and said, “Lester must have started the generator. Newton, get on the radio. Tell them we have an emergency.”

Jimmy Newton abandoned the portable generator without rancour—even though he’d cut his hands and knees to ratshit getting the thing—lumbered to his feet and made for the bar, throwing himself through the opened hatch. The dial on the radio glowed very faintly. Newton took down the microphone, spun the dial to the emergency frequency.

“Miss Polly,” called Lester from the passageway, “if you don’t mind, ma’am, I would surely appreciate a drink.” This was the sentence that Lester had composed and rehearsed—it was appropriately sober, both meek and assured—so his mouth spoke it even as his eyes tried to take in the scene before him.

Maywell looked up at him and said, “Damn you, Lester,” and Lester was rocked on his feet, because Maywell had never
damned him before, and Maywell’s damnation possessed authority. Lester stumbled forward a few feet and then dropped to his knees. He tried to work out for himself what had happened, he tried to make sense of all the blood and the dark wrappings around Polly’s neck.

Jimmy Newton was sending out an SOS. He knew the Mercator coordinates of Dampier’s Cay, indeed that’s how he knew his present location best, as numbers assigned to a particular conception of the world. So he spoke these into the microphone and chanted, “S-O-S.” By way of response he received a lot of static.

“Tell them we have a medical emergency,” Maywell Hope called out.

Newton didn’t have the stomach, the
heart
, to tell Maywell that he was by no means confident the message was being received anywhere in the universe. So he said, “We need paramedics,” into the microphone, adding, for Hope’s benefit alone, “We have an injured woman here.”

“I’m going to pray for Polly’s soul,” Lester told Maywell.

“She doesn’t need you to pray for her soul,” muttered Hope. Polly’s lips were moving, but no words came.

Jimmy Newton couldn’t resist. He spun the dial and found the right frequency and said, “NOAA? Come in, NOAA. This is Jimmy Newton.”

“Newton?”

The voice was faint. Maybe it wasn’t even there, but Jimmy was pretty confident he’d heard his own name. “What is she?” Newton demanded. “Is she a five?”

“Five,” came the return.

Newton heard the word
five
, he was absolutely sure that NOAA had told him
five
, and Jimmy smiled and was about to rattle a fist in victory, but then Maywell appeared and delivered a right hand into Jimmy Newton’s face. Newton crashed into the shelves that held the old radio. He covered his nose with his hands, because his nose was spurting blood in great quantities. Newton felt something hit his back, and he realized that the radio had tumbled from its resting place, so he spun around and tried to catch it. Newton managed to get his hands around it, but his hands were covered with blood and the housing was rendered out of some crude plastic that would have been hard to grab hold of under any circumstances. So he watched the radio fall to the ground, where it cracked open like an egg; he watched the light in the tubes flicker and die.

“Well,” he offered, “we are now, like, totally fucked.”

Lester was improvising a prayer, begging safe passage for Polly’s immortal soul. He believed this to be his best prayer ever. He didn’t really know what he was saying, but his heart was beating fast and strong, emotions were bubbling as though his insides were on the boil, so this had to be one motherfucker of a prayer. Lester loved Polly, too, in his way. He worked hard for her, harder than he worked for anybody else. And he found her beautiful, truly beautiful, one of God’s finest womanly creations. She was so good and beautiful that her seat in glory was ensured; but Lester prayed hard anyway, as hard as he’d ever prayed, his best prayer ever.

Gail climbed to her feet and took a few steps. She poked her head forward and twisted her neck, taking a cautious look down the passageway, into the dining room. Wind rushed down
to slap her face, but it did so with no great force, it was firm and tentative at the same time. She stepped forward and let the wind rush around her body, and although it forced her to take a step backwards, she reclaimed her ground. Things stirred in the dining room, stirred and twitched, like the extremities of a creature that was dying. “Hey,” she called out, “know what?”

Lester finished his prayer. Polly’s lips moved and Lester imagined that she said “thank you,” but she was very far away now from the sad vale, and Lester didn’t think, necessarily, that she was speaking to him. She could very well be addressing Our Lord, who was holding out His great hand and bidding her welcome. Lester imagined that Polly was gazing at Paradise, where there was gentle blue water and beautiful flowers, Birds of Paradise, Crowns of Thorns.

“What?” Sorvig was the only one listening.

“I think it’s over.”

Newton stepped through the hatch in the bar, wiping blood away from his face. “It’s not over,” he said.

Maywell Hope had the broken radio in his hands and was staring into its innards, hoping to see tubes flicker back into operation.

“Yeah, it is, I think,” said Gail. “The sun’s even coming out.” At least, everything in the dining room was suffused with an odd violet glow.

“It’s the eye,” said Jimmy Newton. “The eye of the storm.”

“How long did they say?” said Maywell, looking at Polly, afraid to go nearer, because his view was blocked by Lester, and she might simply be sleeping.

“I don’t know if I got through,” said Jimmy. “I don’t think I did. Maybe. Even if I did, I don’t know how long they’d be, they have to fly through the thing.”

“But it’s over,” repeated Gail. She had seen nothing so odd as the lavender flush upon the new world, neither so odd nor so beautiful.