Galveston (3 page)

“It’s not a hurricane,” said one of the two girls, looking to Beverly for confirmation. “Right?”

“Yes. I mean, no, it’s not. Not, um, yet.”

The immaculate man lifted one of his hands from the little box and held up a finger. “What will be,” he said, “will be.”

On the flight from Toronto to Miami, Caldwell was one of only two passengers in first class. The other sat across the aisle, an elderly woman who seemed to be going south to die. She wore a heavy coat and a fur hat much too warm for early September, and she removed neither for the flight. The upturned lapels threw her face into shadow. After she sat down, she fell into a fitful sleep, her hands wrapped around the ends of the armrests, the fingers bloodless.

Before the flight attendant drew the curtain, Caldwell looked back into economy. It was full of tall, strapping young men of about fifteen years of age, sporting the same uniform, a bright blue blazer and grey flannel shorts, plaid knee socks and heavy brogues. They were a team of some sort, an athletic team; they grinned lopsidedly, drunk with the belief that they could kick the shit out of the world. Caldwell knew that they were returning from, rather than going to, the contest; he could tell from their glowing contentment that they had won.

Halfway through the flight, he put down his magazine and stretched. Across the aisle, the elderly woman sputtered slightly, banking away from the Great Beyond. Caldwell rose, parted the curtain and walked into the economy section.

Some of the boys were eating and some were sleeping, both activities performed with noise and gusto. Many of the boys wore headphones, not the light black discs of foam supplied by the airline but brightly coloured forks of plastic that drove deep into their ears. A few read horror novels.

Caldwell looked for the coach but couldn’t see an adult among the youths. For a brief moment he imagined that
he
was the coach, Mr. Caldwell, that he was their leader. He wanted to sit down among them and leaf through
Sports Illustrated
and drift off to sleep, pleased as punch with what his boys had accomplished.

He was certain his life had held such moments before, but he had trouble remembering now. He couldn’t string it together, couldn’t make the events sit side by side. He could summon passages from his childhood (the memory of Hurricane Hazel was always at his beck and call); and scenes from his adulthood would sometimes arrive unbidden. But he had real problems with his middle age, the last ten years, which seemed to belong in a dream, or to someone else.

For a while he had pretended to himself that this was some fault of his faculties, his actual memory, and he’d gone to doctors, some of whom were sufficiently impressed by his wealth that they designed complex therapies and prescribed magical drugs. He went along with all this—especially the drugs—until it became clear that his inability to remember his life was due to the life itself, the great hollow that lay in the middle, a black hole that sucked in all matter. When this became clear (nothing had actually become
clear
, rather it had become less indistinct), Caldwell found pastimes. He had no interest in them beyond the fact that they consumed hours. For example, he did crossword puzzles. He didn’t care whether or not he completed them; he often entered words that he knew were incorrect, and sometimes crammed two, even three, letters into the same tiny square. And he tied flies, his
huge fingers clamping down feathers and bits of fur onto minuscule hooks. But Caldwell never used the flies.

His friend Denton MacAuley, hoping to cheer him up, had taken Caldwell to a fly-in lodge in northern Ontario. It was indicative of Denton’s relentless optimism that he thought Caldwell simply needed “cheering up.” When he invited him, Denton had said, “It’s been two years,” a statement he obviously found as significant as Caldwell found it baffling.

Denton and Caldwell had played junior hockey together for the Barrie Blades, and their relationship retained a kind of naked bluntness. So, even though Caldwell maintained that he didn’t want to go fishing, Denton said, “Fuck off.” Denton was a doctor, a cosmetic surgeon who specialized in grafting new skin onto burn victims. But when speaking with Caldwell, he was still a hockey player.
“You,”
he said, poking a finger into his friend’s chest, “are going fucking fishing.”

They had flown into a dreary northern outpost, and travelled to a huge log cabin where men hunted pike by day and drank heavily at night. Denton had laboured terrifically hard at creating fun; he told jokes and exchanged good-natured insults with the other sports, he roused Caldwell at five in the morning and drove him out into the dawn and into a motorboat. Denton jabbered and gesticulated and even managed to raise a smile on the face of Herbert, the Cree guide, who gave the impression of never having smiled in his life. But Caldwell was unmoved, and sat in the bow, hunched over, his hands pressed together in a mockery of prayer.

On their last day at the lodge, they stopped in the middle of the lake, a lake so large that land could not be seen at the
edges. Herbert stood upright and worked the tiller, positioning the boat more precisely in the middle of the emptiness, and then he threw over a little anchor, an apple juice can filled with concrete. Denton MacAuley looked baffled. “Is there a shoal or something here?”

Herbert shrugged and nodded in several directions. “It’s a good spot,” he declared. “Big fish.”

And it had proved to be a good spot. Denton tossed in a lure and water boiled around it. He set the hook and a huge pike came out of the water, its maw opened, making a mighty, if silent, roar. “Holy shit,” said Denton.

Caldwell wasn’t fishing, even though Denton begged him to. “Come on, buddy. You love to fish. You used to be a fishing machine. Look at the size of this motherfucker.”

Caldwell made no answer. He was looking at a huge shadow, far away where the water met the sky.

Herbert released Denton’s pike, and Denton threw the lure back into the water and had another fish on almost immediately. This one was larger still, and Denton had a hard time managing it on the light tackle. The pike came to the surface and rolled there, wrapping itself in monofilament. Herbert grabbed a paddle and poked at the fish, trying to get it to roll the other way. In their preoccupation, neither of them noticed what the shadow was doing.

It was spreading out across the face of the water.

Caldwell’s rod was propped up beside him in the bow, and he heard the line snap and crackle faintly. There was no wind (there was the
sound
of wind, ever so slight, but no wind) and yet the line was twitching back and forth.

Herbert stopped poking at the fish and jerked his head upwards.

The shadow fell upon them.

“Oh-oh,” said Herbert.

He swung the paddle as though it were a baseball bat, straight at Caldwell. Caldwell merely bent over, so that the paddle sliced the air over his head and connected with the fishing rod beside Caldwell, snapping it in two. Herbert struck the pole with sufficient force that both halves flew out of the boat—the reel crank caught briefly in the cuff of Caldwell’s jeans, and the butt was propelled upwards—and then the sky cracked open.

There occurred an instant so strange that no one who was there—not Caldwell, not Denton MacAuley, not Herbert—afterwards described it the same way. Herbert maintained that he had heard the line crackling, and looked up to see the tempest bearing down, so he’d aimed the paddle at Caldwell’s rod to launch it out of the boat, knowing a lightning strike was coming. The lightning hit the rod at the apex of its flight, and the rod carried the power into the water and the water carried it away, and that was why they were all still alive. (And, Herbert also maintained, that was why the fifty-dollar tip he’d received was wholly inadequate.) Denton, a man of science, maintained that lightning had smacked the water hundreds of feet away. The strike was nowhere near the boat, or else they’d all be dead.

But Caldwell knew he’d been hit. He felt heaven’s fire course through his body. And if his heart didn’t stop, it was because his heart wasn’t functioning in any true sense to begin
with. No, when the lightning hit, Caldwell’s heart
started
, and in that moment before they began their panicked flight toward shore, Caldwell stood up, flushed and clumsy, and spoke.

“Hey,” he said, “did we come here to fish or to fool around?”

T
EN MINUTES BEFORE
the scheduled departure time, Jimmy Newton entered the little airport. Beverly recognized him at once.

Not only was Jimmy the most famous storm chaser on earth, Beverly had once accompanied him on a tour of Tornado Alley. But she was not surprised when Newton’s eyes moved across her without pausing. On that tour there had been two van loads of chasers, and Beverly had been in the group led by Larry DeWitt, with whom she’d had a one-night fling. Beverly scowled at that memory, forced it out of her mind. It’s not that she was ashamed of her behaviour—she had, in the past few years, done many more shameful things—but she was still stung by the bitter disappointment of the encounter.

There were camera and computer bags slung over Newton’s shoulders, and as he approached the beautiful black man, Newton shrugged and dropped these things to the ground, leaving a little trail of high technology from the door to the counter. “Okay, chief,” he said. “Let’s fly.”

“Yes, sir,” said the black man. “Only there’s been a delay.”

“Typical,” Newton muttered.

It was the first time the black man had mentioned the delay officially, and everyone in the little waiting room came to attention. “You see,” said the airline representative, addressing them all, “there is an active weather system.”

“There is an active weather system which is fricking hundreds of miles away,” said Jimmy Newton.

“Yes, sir. But we are trying to assess the potential danger to our passengers and pilot.”

“I’ll assess it for you: zilch-o.”

“There is a thought that we should cancel today’s flight. We’ll reschedule for tomorrow. The airline would put everyone up in Miami for the night.”

“Does this mean it’s a hurricane now?” asked one of the young women.

“Yes,” said the black man. “It’s been upgraded. The weather office has issued a hurricane watch for the area, including Dampier Cay.”

“Let’s review the terminology,” said Jimmy Newton derisively.
“Hurricane watch
means that hurricane conditions are possible within twenty-four to thirty-six hours. And the flight we’re talking about only takes an hour and a half.”

“I don’t understand why you’d want to fly knowing that there is the potential for danger.”

“Because there’s not all that much potential. And even if the storm was here, it wouldn’t be all that dangerous. You can fly through all sorts of systems. Hey, I flew into Floyd with the Hurricane Hunters. Right through the wall and into the eye. And Floyd was
a four.”

The man behind the counter took a step backwards and raised his voice. “Flight number
764
is delayed until further notice.”

“But not cancelled?” asked Beverly.

“The matter is still under consideration.” He picked up his
walkie-talkie and a cellphone and disappeared through a door behind him.

Jimmy Newton scowled, turned away, took a few steps into the middle of the room. He had a large trunk, short legs and arms, and was dressed like a little boy, Beverly noted: running shoes, white shorts and a T-shirt that he tucked into the elastic waistband. Newton put his hands into his pockets but had to hoist up the shorts first in order to do so.

“That was goddam amazing, flying into Floyd,” he said to no one in particular. “We hit the wall, right, it’s like we’re a BB in a boxcar, you know, rattling around, and then,
whoosh …
into the eye. And in there it’s like heaven or something, you know. It’s all calm, and there’s these little puffy clouds and this weird silver rain. It was like light, right, like it was raining light.”

The elderly couple stood up and started rolling their little suitcases toward the door. “Where are you going?” Newton demanded.

“They’re going to cancel the flight,” the husband said resignedly.

“They’re not going to cancel any goddam flight. Sit down.”

The elderly couple obeyed. Jimmy Newton didn’t sit down himself, however. He remained standing in the middle of the room, staring at something he alone could see.

Half an hour later, Caldwell opened the door to the waiting room and stepped through. He had a sailor’s duffel bag slung across his shoulder, and wore dark sunglasses, which he didn’t remove. Caldwell nodded at Newton, said his name quietly. “Jimmy.”

“Hey, it’s the fisherman.”

“So,” asked Caldwell, “what’s going on?”

“The airline’s getting cold feet.”

Caldwell nodded, taking in the information. It registered on Beverly that, had the flight left on schedule, this man would have missed it. It was possible that he’d anticipated there would be a delay; he seemed a well-travelled sort, to judge from the wear and tear on his duffel bag, his deep tan. But there was another possibility, and Beverly studied the man closely to see if there was anything in his appearance that would support it. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and wore a white golf shirt and lightweight grey trousers like a phys. ed. teacher. This man was so recognizably a phys. ed. teacher, in fact, that he seemed to have been ripped from another place, another time, and set down in the strange little bungalow airport in Florida.

The beautiful black man re-entered the waiting area and came to attention behind his little counter. “I have an update on the flight
764
to Dampier Cay. In light of the warning issued by the—”

Jimmy Newton cut him off. “An airplane ticket is like a contract,” he pointed out. “A legally binding contract. You people have contracted to supply a service—”

“But in cases of, what do you call it,
force majeure—
”

“Please don’t cancel the flight,” said the phys. ed. teacher. “I have to get over to the island. My family’s there.”