A man Boyd didn’t know whistled, good and drunk. “That’s right across the lake from here.” She could feel what they were thinking: they were not scared and wanted the storm to come closer. The man said, “Let’s go see if we can’t see it.”
They stood on the porch, the group of them, and they could see nothing in the sky because of the dark cloud cover. The wind had stripped the gazebo of its ornaments, and everywhere the loose, light leaves of summer strafed the air. The chairs had been folded and propped on the porch, but white bits of plastic had caught in the trees, and that plastic would line birds’ nests for months. The wind pulled at her, and she wanted to go wherever it wanted her to. They all felt that way.
“Shhhh,” Lucy Maud said. “Everybody shut up. Y’all hear that?” It took a while to get everybody to be quiet, a full minute of shushing and elbowing, and when the group was silent, nobody could hear anything.
“What?” a woman asked, head cocked to hear better.
“You hear that roar, that freight-train roar?”
Everybody was silent again, nobody hearing what Lucy Maud referred to.
“Y’all don’t hear that?” Lucy Maud regarded them and then heard something different. “Get in the storm cellar!”
Faces turned to Fern, and she pointed to the back of the house. Every one of them walked off the porch and into the rain, keeping close to the shelter of the structure, still listening, still hearing nothing. Lucy Maud held the door up and open, and they all filed downstairs, still clutching drinks or napkins. The older folks needed extra help on the stairs, so Boyd got out of the way and found a seat on the dirt floor, in the corner of the basement. When Lucy Maud climbed in last and shut the door, the light winked out with it, and for a few seconds they were all in total darkness, until Sylvia pulled the string on the bare lightbulb and once again they could see.
“I never did hear what you were talking about,” Homer said, looking awkward in his suit in the swaying yellow light.
Boyd’s dad checked his phone, as did the drunk man. “Oh, there’s something all right,” said Kevin, but the other man looked skeptical: “That ain’t anywhere around here, though.”
The rain came harder and faster and Lucy Maud said, “Just everybody make themselves comfortable. It’ll all be over soon.” To Lou, she whispered, “I’m not losing anybody on my first wedding.” Lou shrugged; Boyd knew it didn’t bother her to be in the storm cellar.
All told, they were down there for less than half an hour, even though Lucy Maud kept them in the cellar far longer than she needed to because, in the excitement of the storm, Kevin had held her hand. When she did release them, they emerged into hot sunshine and to a humidity that told them the heart of the storm had not passed through here. They did not yet know how close it had been, how it had blown through Lucy Maud’s house on the other side of the lake, not five miles as the crow flies. They laughed at each other, at how ridiculous they had been in the basement when there had been a keg to drink upstairs, hiding from nothing but electronic messages from their cell phones. They traded stories of how the weathermen never got anything right, how if the weathermen said that it was going to be a sunny day, they’d better bring an umbrella. The keg was halfway finished when the elderly couple left, and after them two ladies from Abilene, and the drunk man not far behind. Nobody saw Kevin pull Lucy Maud around the corner of the house or saw the way he placed his face in her neck, just breathing. She had pulled him backward by the hair, gently, and her eyes had met his, and the storm meant that their relationship was both more permanent and more temporary than they had ever before realized, a thing they would always return to but that would never again be primary. Behind them, in the house, the remnants of the wedding party: Italian cream cake on clear plastic plates, gold-rimmed napkins crumpled and discarded, cheap champagne left in the wells of plastic champagne flutes, red Solo cups with the rest of the Shiner. Lou and Aunt Fern were unscathed and silly, drunk from beer and on the memory of those flowers swirling around a bride and groom in the last days of their middle age. But they didn’t know about that first part of the rain, how bad that storm had been for some people.
Everywhere in the Hill Country, that night the drought broke and the lakes began to fill back in, things were lost. In Hutto, Brushy Creek broke its banks and a mother and daughter were swept away in their Toyota. In Victoria, a man was struck by lightning while sitting under a tree drinking beer out of a can wrapped in a paper sack. The papers reported that one of his eyeballs exploded when the lightning traveled through him, but it was too quick; he had never known. In Wimberley, a vacation house was torn from its foundation as the Blanco River rose from five feet to forty in a few hours. The father was pulled out of the river twelve miles away in San Marcos with a broken sternum and a punctured lung, the mother found much later in a cypress tree. The children were not found for years.
Also that night, Lucy Maud was raw, emotional, and when her husband looked at her, her hand full of his hair, she met that gaze eagerly, even though she knew he would not be her husband for much longer. When he pulled her to him and said that he was too drunk to drive back to Austin that night, she could not help herself; she put off the heartache for a little while longer. He’d been so unhappy with her aging, with the way that her body had not wanted another body, and so she couldn’t blame him for leaving. Tonight, however, her body remembered the old ways, and she had not been touched in so long. Boyd was staying at Aunt Fern’s, and Lucy Maud and Kevin left separately, because Lucy Maud didn’t want anybody else to know.
In the morning, the newlyweds were off to San Saba, sticking to the main highways, unaware of the extent of the storm. Kevin and Lucy Maud were in a hotel room in downtown Marble Falls. Lou, Fern, and Boyd sat on the front porch drinking their coffee and orange juice, Boyd thinking of Isaac, who had missed the wedding. The women were unaware yet that the storm had been what it had been, that to many folks it was pretty much the end of the world. Unaware that it wasn’t yet over, that it was coming for them, too. In the sky were the remnants of that early line of storms, clouds the three of them would never again see: lenticular and mammatus, stippled and peaked, like putty, or cake icing, only ever seen when the sky has ripped apart and sewn itself back together.
For the moment, a pause in the rain.
May 24
8:30 A.M.
Isaac woke in his father’s easy chair, the air swollen and tumescent, overfilled. His tongue was dry and large in his mouth. When he rubbed his eyes, the lip of his wound caught with a shot of pain, but not the same kind of pain as before. Not heat tunneling down into his bedrock, but the prick of a flu shot. It was early, morning giving way to full day. He did not yet realize that he had lost a day and almost two nights. His arms were quick to lose their stiffness, but his legs were reluctant to move, the bone ache of his thumb now translated bodily, something he could feel in his core even as he stretched and moved.
A glass of water first, then food: the rest of the cylindrical package of chorizo, turned out into his dad’s grimy skillet with two eggs over the top. With a curiosity about everything, and yet still a detachment, his eye cast over the contents of his father’s fridge. He registered the contents, intending to remind his father about the dangers of margarine, the nutritional worthlessness of canned biscuits. He pictured his father’s heart, oversize in a stringy body, strangled by trans fats. This train of thought had no real emotion, was simply a filing away of information, something to be handled later.
He ate his own fatty breakfast, thinking of Boyd, thinking it was the morning after the rehearsal dinner and that he needed to make sure he had a clean shirt for her grandfather’s wedding today. She, too, would likely wear something clean, but that would be the extent of what he could expect from her, style-wise. She would likely not even wear a dress, and he thought that he had never seen her in a dress, and that this might be something he would like. Boyd of the freckled angles, her head perched just forward of her neck, her eternal watching
and measurement. She caught things about people, and he did not know how she did this, but when she was with someone, she was so often only a reaction, an eternal observation, evaluation, and its subsequent response. He thought she was this way even with him but knew of no way to prove it. In the life he wanted for himself, his wife would have occasion to wear a dress. This was important to him.
He picked up his phone, intending to check his email, but the internet was out and his phone would not connect. A voice mail from his father, somehow retrievable even with the loss of network:
Hey, Isaac, where are you? I thought you might be at the house by now. I had to run when Allen Potivar came by, if you can believe it. You already took so long. Meet me here. Or call me at this number, at Allen Potivar’s. Yeah. Better to call first.
Isaac was more surprised by this message than he had been about the radio show. His father, in general not one to hate at all, hated Allen Potivar, ever since Allen’s grandkid had failed Texas history in middle school and Allen had wanted to actually fight his father, to meet him in the parking lot after school as if they had been the seventh graders. His father thought people such as Allen Potivar were what is wrong with the world. People such as Allen Potivar had no personal responsibility. And though Ruben King never spoke of it, Isaac disliked the look of Allen’s house down by the dry creek, stucco painted to seem like adobe, with a defunct satellite dish in the front yard. And now he’d have to go there, because Ruben’s phone was here, and Isaac couldn’t call his father.
First, coffee made quickly and orange juice whipped up from a can in the freezer. Isaac’s body needed something, but he couldn’t figure out what. Now in his Corolla with both drinks in cup holders, the fuel light came on as soon as he started the car. He headed the short way to Allen Potivar’s: back down the long road on this side of the hill, then around and up. Another way was down the main road past the Texaco station, where an ancient bloodhound sprawled on the painted concrete underneath the awning, taking in the coolness of the stone, but Isaac didn’t go that way because it was more than twice as far.
The things he saw as he drove surprised him: mesquite trees upended and on their sides, gouges in the white earth, animals—deer, dogs, goats, even a wild boar—standing in the road as if they did not even hear him driving through. In an old live oak, a girl’s yellow princess dress, caught on a branch and twisting in the wind as if being led in a monstrously quick waltz. The light had a quality he could not name; the world was overly bright, yet, when he turned to look at any one thing, the thing appeared too dim to examine. Birds in the sky, headed south, and he thought, Fleeing. Too high to tell what they were, but Boyd would know. Nobody was on the road, not a soul. A pecan tree partially blocked the way, and he drove around it.
As the Corolla climbed the other side of the hill, he caught every now and again a glimpse of the valley floor: empty, as if no human had ever crossed it, as if he were the first. When Allen Potivar’s road gave up being asphalt and became gravel, Isaac knew he was close. There was a sound, but he couldn’t place it, so he rolled down his window, thinking something was wrong with his car, but it was coming from outside.
Around a bend, he saw the source of the sound: the water coursing down the hill, the dry creek overflowing. It covered the low-water crossing that led to Allen Potivar’s house, and Isaac stopped his car and got out.
He couldn’t tell how deep the water was, but he knew he was close to Allen Potivar’s house. He climbed on top of his car, shielding his eyes from the yellow glare, and looked down the road on the opposite side. A glint of silver down there, and Isaac was sure the silver was his father’s Subaru. So close. A glance back at the river: swift and filthy with the earth it had taken on its journey. He tried to remember where the road was. He thought the water was no more than a foot deep. A glance behind him: such a long way back down the hill, coming back up the other side. His father right there.
So he got in the Corolla and drove slowly forward, inching the car’s tires into that moving water. Things from books appeared to him: the nest of water moccasins in Lonesome Dove, the part in another book where the narrator said that water moccasins smelled not only like death but also like something that feeds on death.
The car didn’t make it all the way in before the front wheels were lifted and taken downstream, and so this was how he ended up: car pointed with the river, as if he had chosen to drive that way instead of across. His hands on the steering wheel, he turned back toward the road but could get no purchase. The smell of earth and water, and a coldness on his feet: water rising, soaking his socks.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here
Most Deaths in Storms Are from Flash Floods
In places where there is soil, the soil takes the water up first. Especially in times of drought. The earth then is so parched that it will take on inches and inches of rainfall before the water begins to stand.
Not so in the rocky places. In rocky places, in gulches or washes or wadis, water has nowhere to go but down. Once it reaches the lowest place, and the water is left to stand for a long time, it will sift down, honeycombing the limestone because it is softer than the stone that has already metamorphosed: the granite, the marble. But in the short term, the water flows down and picks up the world as it goes: boulders, trees, dirt, animals. Anything in its way. Within a couple of hours, a flash flood formed like this can reach a height of thirty feet, rising into the air like a three-story building, barreling its way downstream.
8:54 A.M.
Because nobody could get ahold of Lucy Maud, Aunt Lou drove Boyd home once the breakfast dishes were washed up. Aunt Lou tried to get Boyd to stay at Aunt Fern’s, but Boyd was convinced that the reason she couldn’t get in touch with Isaac was because he had returned to their campsite and he wasn’t getting a signal. Aunt Lou told her no, that the campsite was likely rained in, but Boyd knew Isaac would be quick to go inspect it and set things to rights.
Everywhere the signs of devastation, but the things they didn’t yet know were worse. In the tornado’s path, a car spring wound through a torso, a body facedown on a roof. The low-water crossing leading to her house was gushing, the rain gauge reading five feet, and Aunt Lou sucked her teeth at how fast the water was moving. “Some fool’s going to get washed away today,” she told Boyd. “But it will be somebody from out of town, somebody who doesn’t know better.” She turned the car around and headed the other way, the way with the bridge.
When they reached the bridge, Boyd quickly caught her breath of surprise—if she betrayed herself now, if she showed fear, Aunt Lou would take her back to Aunt Fern’s to wait for her mother. She didn’t want to do that because she wanted to check on Isaac, so when she saw what awaited them, she trapped that breath and pressed her lips together.
On the bridge, an enormous cypress tree was wedged in the railing. The canopy trailed in the water still, but the roots, dripping and brown, went through and over the slats on the bridge. The trunk seemed almost redwood in scale, here, in such a surprising place. It must have been pulled on the storm’s current, because no cypress trees were on the lake. They were to be found much farther upriver. Here, where this tree should not have been, the astounding size was even more upsetting: juxtaposed against this massive trunk, the scale of the bridge was all wrong, was for a different size of human and car entirely. And on the bridge, presumably there to deal with the tree, were two army trucks, canvas hoisted from the truck beds by ropes on metal frames. The soldiers who had ridden in those trucks were busily fussing over the problem on the bridge.
Again, Aunt Lou stopped, sucking her teeth. Boyd knew Aunt Lou wasn’t sure how to handle this new information, or what her responsibility regarding her niece was. Well, Boyd didn’t particularly want to be Aunt Lou’s responsibility, so Boyd let go of her held breath and smiled. “Wow,” Boyd said innocently. “It must be the Army Corps of Engineers.” It wasn’t—they both knew it was the National Guard—but the statement allowed both women t
he freedom to pretend.
Boyd unbuckled her seat belt and got out. Already, a man in desert camouflage was heading in her direction, holding an M16 service rifle as if it was a part of his uniform, which, Boyd guessed, it was. Aunt Lou was right behind her, and together they stood on the bridge to Boyd’s house as the wind nearly knocked them over.
“No through traffic,” the soldier said, and it sounded rehearsed. Boyd knew he’d said the same sentence to somebody else who had recently passed—or had tried to—this way.
Again, that innocent smile. “Wow,” she said, marveling at the tree that lay across nearly the entire width of road. “That was some storm.” She cast a look at Aunt Lou, who was examining the soldier, and said, “But we’re not through traffic.”
“There’s another approach to this neighborhood,” the soldier told Boyd. “Nobody’s coming this way.” She saw his hesitation in the way he glanced backward, and she sensed that he didn’t feel quite capable of making any major decisions.
Now Aunt Lou spoke up. “The other approach has five feet of rushing water over the road. We have to come through here.” Aunt Lou, much like her twin sister, didn’t like to be told what to do.
The man drummed his fingers on the black body of the service rifle. “I can’t let you drive through here until they clear that tree.” Boyd, startled, caught a brief glimpse of something more from the soldier: It wasn’t just the tree. The army men were worried about the bridge.
“We can drive around the tree,” she said, and the way he twisted his mouth, choosing his next words, confirmed her suspicion.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here Page 6