Galveston (7 page)

She glanced out the window then—which was not covered, the venetian blinds bundled together unevenly at the top of the frame—and saw Lester. He held gardening shears in his hands and was working on the council tree just outside the window, snipping away shoots from the gnarled branches. At least, Beverly gathered that’s what he had been doing, but his labour was now arrested as he stared into her room.

Beverly turned away from the window. A hunger came upon her, a deep, general hunger, but as she stood there, letting the warm air steal away the numbness, trying to decide how to dress, the hunger crystallized. It was actually food she was hungry for. She hadn’t eaten since … since when? Canada? Beverly started sorting through her suitcase and drew out a pair of shorts, hunter green and multi-pocketed, designed for an arduous trek through Ontario’s hinterland. She put these on and then selected a plain white T-shirt, pulling it over her head, spinning as she did so, and when her head popped through she was staring out the window once more. Lester had disappeared.

She slid the big glass door to one side—a task that required considerable strength—and walked out into the world.

The twinned cottages “J” and “K” were near the water, closer than any other of the resort’s buildings; she had only to walk across a gravel road and a patch of thistly growth to reach the beach. But they were the furthest from the rest of the complex. The resort ended just on the other side of “J” and “K.” Beyond was a small church, made out of plywood and painted
blue. Beside the church sat a tiny, crowded graveyard. There were many stones there, the names obscured by lichen. There were also simple crosses, two pieces of barnboard hammered together, a name neatly rendered with whitewash.

The Water’s Edge was a collection of buildings clustered around a small cove. The office and restaurant occupied a long, low building atop a rise. Cabins and rows of maisonettes spread out from there. The rise led to a more substantial hill—Lester’s Hump—but Beverly was not interested in high ground.

The water on the leeward side of the island was calm, shone the colour of emeralds and sparkled with the setting sun. As Beverly mounted the stone steps to the main building, she could hear the surf pounding on the windward. When she got to the top, she was drawn forward, past the main building and a patch of manicured lawn. She found herself standing on top of a cliff, twenty, maybe twenty-five feet high. Looking left and right, she saw a series of boulders, little caves, tiny lagoons. It would be easy enough to climb down the rock face, which, Beverly noticed, is what Gail and Sorvig had done.

The waves were large and loud, and the girls were romping about in the surf. They screamed and giggled as salt water licked their bodies. Thirty feet beyond them, Beverly saw, a dark shape moved through the surf, a shark, relentless and lonely.

Beverly waved at the girls in a friendly fashion and went in for dinner.

C
ALDWELL COULD NOT GET COMFORTABLE
, not that he expected to, or even deserved to. He tried various positions: on his back with hands laced together behind his head, curled on his side with both arms driven between his legs. He even tried the other bed, for there were two singles in cottage “J,” at right angles to each other. Caldwell wondered what situation might demand this alignment, what union or family would want to sleep like that, heads close together but bodies divided so they could never meet.

He could hear the woman in the room beside his. She was pounding about fairly heavily, and making little drumming noises,
Bum-bum-bum.
This was one thin wall; Caldwell suspected that a fart would rent it asunder. He heard a hissing sound then, water splashing. A series of images occurred to him, and he allowed them to pass without interference. He did not recognize all of the naked women in his mind’s eye, but then came an image he knew well, a woman with oversized thighs and breasts made to look plastic by wet Lycra. Caldwell closed his eyes and listened to the pounding of the surf. It began gently enough, but soon the noise, the roaring and the thumping, became almost unbearable. It sounded, thought Caldwell, as though a streetcar trestle had been torn loose and was battering at the very foundations. And he fell into the hole once again, the hole in the middle of his life.

He had said, “Good idea,” to Matty Benn’s suggestion that he call Darla Featherstone. After he hung up, Caldwell cradled the telephone and didn’t move from beside it. He sat with his hands on his knees, his fingers gripping so tightly that blood left them. He made no further phone calls, even though this was monumental news. Caldwell didn’t earn much as a teacher, and he squandered what little he had. He didn’t know exactly
how
he squandered it, because his hobbies and habits were not extravagant. He enjoyed fishing, owned a fourteen-foot boat with a twenty-five-horsepower motor, but this was nothing, he had seen teenage boys out on Lake Simcoe with huge glittering bass boats, four-stroke engines as large as pagan idols. He played poker every couple of weeks, but just dollar, two-dollar stakes. There were, of course, the Friday-night visits to Mystery’s, where Caldwell would drink too many beers and purchase a table dance or two. Still, it was always only a dance or two. No, Caldwell did not know where his money went. It seemed to get picked up like leaves by the wind, blown out of his yard and into someone else’s.

When the phone finally rang, Caldwell knew who it was. He lifted the receiver and said, “Hello,” in what he hoped was an intelligent or mysterious way, almost making a melody of the two syllables.

“Is it true?”

“Yeah. I guess so. I’ve got the ticket with the numbers.”

“You have to go down to the lottery office. No, no. Wait. This is better. We’ll come to your house, we’ll film you with the ticket, right, then we’ll film you going down—are you sure the numbers are right?”

“Yes. Quite sure.” Caldwell felt as though he were watching himself on television.

“Okay, okay, excellent. Look, I’ve got to round up a cameraman. It’s Saturday.
Fuck.
Give me your address.”

Caldwell did so, and even began giving instructions, but Darla Featherstone cut him off. “I know the street. How big a burg do you think this is?”

She was right. In his head Caldwell had been briefly inhabiting some other city, some cosmopolis full of purlieus and quarters, a place large enough to allow the
possibility
of an illicit love affair. But all it took was Darla Featherstone’s saying, “I know the street,” to drive that notion out of his mind. That was as close as he came to unfaithfulness. But the wheels were already in motion. Something like a hurricane. Caldwell had thought about this, many times. A hurricane begins with the sun resting on the water, the two meeting as sun and water should.

“Okay,” said Darla Featherstone, “don’t move a muscle. Sit tight. I’m going to round up a cameraman and—
fuck
, it’s really coming down out there.”

He glanced out his window, and saw nothing but whiteness.

Caldwell came back to himself with a start, alarmed by a sound from cottage “K,” a pained grunt. He heard a glass door being slid back into place, and understood that the woman next door had left her room.

She was one of the women he had seen naked in his mind; oddly, the image seemed more an actual memory than many of the others did.
I’ve done what you just did
, this woman had said
to him. Caldwell swung his legs off the thin mattress. “Like hell you have,” he said aloud, and he decided that he needed to eat, that he was, in fact, ravenous. He pulled open his own sliding glass door—he too gave out a little grunt—and headed for the main building.

As he passed the small row of maisonettes, he heard his name called. Peering through a screened window, he saw Jimmy Newton sitting at a small table, in front of a small laptop, its screen providing the only light in a room that was unaccountably gloomy. The laptop was wired to paraphernalia, an odd little metal tower, a small sleek printer. There were pieces of paper everywhere, on the floor, the bed, even in the small sink in the corner. These were images of the storm as seen from heaven. Three were tacked to the wall.

Jimmy Newton had a cellphone pressed to his ear, and five more lay at his feet. Newton muttered, “Jesus H. Christ,” and dropped this one down there too. “I pay for every damn system there is,” he snarled. “You’d think one of the fuckers would work.”

“Who are you trying to call?” Caldwell knew that Newton had no family, it was one of the things he appreciated most about him.

“I want to talk to someone at en-oh-double-eh. I need to know if they’re thinking what I’m thinking.” Newton had one more little phone to try. He flipped it open, put it to his ear. He didn’t even bother pressing any of the buttons. He threw the thing away and muttered, “Talk about a dead zone.”

“Can’t get through to anybody?”

“I got the computer hooked up. Gee-ess-em. I’m bouncing off satellites, baby. But here on the third stone from the sun,
you and I are sitting in a black hole. You know what? This is officially the armpit of the world.”

“Huh. So he found it.”

“You want to try making sense, Caldwell?”

“William Dampier. He and his Merry Boys sailed around the world, you know, looking for the ends of the earth. The end of the earth. So now you’re telling me this is it. He found it.”

“Christ,” muttered Jimmy Newton, shaking his head. “I’m surrounded by lunatics here.”

“You hungry? You want to get some dinner?” Caldwell could not have said why, exactly, but he craved company.

“Gimme a sec.” Jimmy stabbed at the return button on his keyboard, leant back and watched as a new image appeared on the screen. Caldwell couldn’t see it from where he stood, but the computer screen pulsated.

“Oh-oh,” said Jimmy Newton.

“What?”

“I’m looking at the new NOGAPS. It looks a lot like the UKMET.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You know. Global baroclinic readings.” Newton rose from his seat, stretched, pulled material away from his crotch. “What the hell kind of chaser are you, anyway?”

“No kind,” admitted Caldwell.

“That’s right, isn’t it?” Jimmy Newton pushed through the door of Unit
A2
, joined Caldwell outside. “Whereas I am some kind of chaser. What kind? Piss poor.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, it looks like she’s deflecting.”

“Hmm?”

“The
storm
, numbnuts. Remember? The hurricane that we spent hundreds of dollars trying to get to? She’s deflecting.”

“Huh.”

“Right now the best track puts her maybe four hundred miles north.
Koo-bah.
We should have gone to Cuba. Cuba is a lot more fun than this fucking place, anyway. It’s got better booze and naked dancing girls. Fuck. We missed, Caldwell.”

Caldwell had experienced misses before, plenty of them. He could simply have chosen to live on Guam, which is battered by more storms than anywhere else on the planet, but Caldwell liked to keep moving, like the sharks that shadowed the beach. “Oh, well,” he said. “I don’t really care. You know me. I just come for the fishing.”

They entered the main building, went by the registration desk and into the dining room. Polly met them with a stern look on her face. “You’re late,” she said.

“Sorry,” said Caldwell, but Jimmy Newton was less apologetic. He pretended to dig around in the pockets of his white shorts. “Hey, it’s okay, lady, I got a note from my fricking
mommy.”

“It’s just that there’s a schedule,” Polly explained. She was in her mid-forties, pretty but almost trying not to be. Her hair, a light golden colour, was tied back so severely that it seemed to stretch the skin on her forehead. “The cook goes home at seven.”

“Sorry,” repeated Caldwell.

“Now listen,” said Jimmy Newton, but then he fell silent. Maywell Hope was standing nearby, in a passageway that
separated the restaurant from the resort’s bar. He had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, which made him squint, darkening his eyes. Newton looked back at Polly and nodded slightly. “Yeah, we’re sorry.”

Polly led them to a table and slipped menus onto the plastic placemats. The blonde woman sat nearby and was speaking to the two girls at a neighbouring table. The girls still wore their bathing suits and had soggy towels draped over their shoulders.

“You have to be careful of the undertow,” she said. “Even strong swimmers are often powerless against it.”

From his seat Caldwell could see the blonde woman in profile. Her nose was a little bit snubbed—a clinical observation, which is all Caldwell had been making for the past few years. She had shoved her plate of food away—the salad looked intact—and was drinking coffee.

“At Acapulco Bay in Mexico,” she said, “twenty-four swimmers disappeared once, within a few seconds, all taken away by the undertow.”

“Well,” said Gail, “it’s a good thing we’re not in Acapulco.”

The blonde woman nodded. “We’re not in Acapulco.”

Beverly had once planned to go to Mexico with Margaret. She had purchased an all-inclusive package, airfare and hotel, two meals a day, at a resort named Vista Playa de Oro in Manzanillo. The trip had, in a sense, been Margaret’s idea. When the little girl started school, it hadn’t taken her long to determine that the typical annual routine included a trip south during spring break. Margaret had no clear sense of what lay south; as far as
she was concerned, there might be serpent-filled seas. All she knew was, most kids went away during the winter, and Margaret, fatherless and belonging to a mother branded with the mark of a particularly squalid devil, was determined to join those ranks.

Beverly hadn’t managed to put anything together for that first year, when Margaret was in kindergarten, but the kid was so morose for the entire vacation that Beverly determined to do better. She took a second job, bagging groceries at Pilmer’s Grocery on Tuesday and Thursday nights. She enjoyed that job, although she was not very good at it. Each conveyor belt of foodstuffs seemed a puzzle, a twisted mystery. Beverly would bite her tongue with concentration and try to visualize how to pack it most economically, but there was always a jar of instant coffee or something left lying in the catch-all. Beverly would take it and make vague feints at the stuffed plastic. Finally, she would shrug and hand the jar to the customer.