Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here

by Nancy Wayson Dinan

  “Look,” the soldier said, and they were attracting attention now, as other men wandered over their direction. “We’re evacuating along the Blanco, but we’re not yet evacuating here. Even so, we don’t recommend that you cross this bridge. You got somewhere else to go?” He was addressing Aunt Lou now.

  Boyd turned away from him, addressing the other National Guard members coming their way. “We’ve got people down there. If I have to walk across this bridge, I will.”

  “And have more people down there?”

  “I’m not leaving my mother,” Boyd said, knowing that this wasn’t quite the truth. “Or my neighbor. Or my friend.”

  “Sam,” one of the other soldiers said. This man was slightly older, black, with three stripes on his sleeve. “This isn’t a hurricane. We’re not keeping people out. We’re only keeping them off the bridge.”

  “You can’t drive across this bridge, ma’am,” the soldier named Sam said, as if Boyd hadn’t heard the other man.

  To Aunt Lou, the other man said, “How far you got to go?”

  Aunt Lou jumped, surprised to be addressed. “Not me.” She pointed at Boyd. “Her. She’s trying to get home.”

  The sergeant thought about this for a minute. At last he said, “Sam, why don’t you drive this girl on home?” He nodded at Boyd and Aunt Lou, then trotted away to the conversation about the massive cypress. The private, Sam, watched Boyd. She guessed they were about the same age.

  “You’re not coming, ma’am?”

  Aunt Lou, dazed, looked back toward her car. “I can’t. I’ve got to get back to Aunt Fern,” she said, as if Sam the soldier knew Aunt Fern. To Boyd, Aunt Lou said, “Go straight home, now, okay? Call me when you get there.”

  Squeezing Aunt Lou’s elbow, Boyd nodded, then ran to get her stuff from the car. When she returned, Sam led her across the bridge as Aunt Lou waved, and Boyd felt as if she crossed some threshold then: the world as she knew it before, and the world as she was to know it now. This world looked similar, but with subtle differences, and Boyd felt that the new one was governed differently, that it had rules that were just a bit off-kilter. The new world had teeth, and in just a matter of time it would bite her.

  They stepped through waves of mud come to rest on the bridge. She knelt and palmed a handful, trying to locate the source, but the earth did not give up this information. Now, on the bridge, she only thought that the mud was silty, like the bottom of a riverbed, and she thought of the great rivers of the earth, the way they flooded regularly before we dammed them, the way they carried this rich silt out into the fields. Here, two National Guardsmen swept the silt from the bridge with straight brooms, service rifles strapped to their backs. In other lives, these men were salesmen: one sold Nissans, the other Dell servers. Both of them felt that what they were doing now—simply sweeping, wearing desert camo—was far more real of a thing than what they did at home: work and wives and, for one of them, a daughter, and domestic routines over and over until the grave. It did a man good, they both thought, to be out here like this, to reconnect to what the world was like, to see what it was capable of.

  Indeed, they were all men, except for Boyd, and except for Aunt Lou, whose car was now in reverse, and who waved tentatively as she backed up.

  Men with chain saws were shearing branches from the old cypress, the newly opened ends bleeding sap. She saw, suddenly, the cypress by the side of a riverbank, and underneath the cypress, other men: Comanche, the Spanish, the Germans. When her vision was gone, she stepped over the long fingers of the tree, which was older than the lake, an ancient thing now leaving the world. Standing water was on the bridge, and where the tree’s roots trailed in this water, the tannins turned the water the color of blood.

  Sam told her to wait next to the truck, and he ran back to the sergeant, rifle bouncing in his hands. She saw them talking—Keys are in the vehicle, We’re gonna need more help down here, this thing’s cracked straight through, who knows how old it is—then Sam ran back and motioned for her to get in. She climbed in the truck, tossing her backpack onto the floor, and Sam turned on the engine, leaving the bridge, heading out toward the lake. The white-tailed deer were everywhere, wandering, and they hightailed it when they heard the truck pass. She saw, without exaggeration, a hundred deer in the half mile between the bridge and her house, and she also saw two armadillos, a host of rabbits, dogs set loose and roaming.

  She motioned the soldier toward her house and he stopped the truck, looking at her doubtfully. “You sure you want to be out here all by yourself? You probably don’t have power. Maybe not even water.”

  “I’m not all by myself.”

  He nodded, not believing her exactly. “Yeah, okay.” A minute watching her, then: “Listen, let me give you my cell phone number. You get in trouble, you call me, promise?” He fiddled around in the console and pulled out a scrap of paper and a pen. When he handed her his number, she saw the paper was something official, some orders she probably shouldn’t be allowed to have.

  “I didn’t know soldiers could carry phones.”

  Sam waved his hand in denial, smiling a not-real smile. “We’re not soldiers. I study accounting at UTSA and work at H-E-B. This isn’t real life. You just call me …” He paused.

  “Boyd.”

  He nodded. “Good name. You just call me, Boyd, if you need me.”

  His hands, she saw, were small and well-kept, his grip on the steering wheel easy. What would it be like to go somewhere with him, to be with someone not Isaac?

  He drove away, massive tires popping fallen pecans. She looked for a minute at the phone number in her hand. Then she turned around and went into the house.

  Nobody was there and the electricity was indeed off. When she realized Isaac was not inside, a sliver of fear took her, the thought that Isaac might have been at their campsite during the storm. No, he wouldn’t have been at the site. But why had he not come to the wedding?

  She went back outside, heading toward the water, but the first footprints she saw in the mud led not to the lake but to her garden. She followed, curious.

  Her garden seemed not to have been affected by the storm. No. That wasn’t true. Her garden seemed not to have been destroyed by the storm. Instead, it seemed to have burgeoned, to have multiplied. She realized as she stood there, stunned, she could see the vines on the pole beans growing, lengthening nearly imperceptibly toward her, reaching as they had on that first day when she had knelt to guide the beans up the stakes. A constellation of white dots was on the soil where the pods had cast off blossoms, and she remembered her grandfather’s wedding.

  The garden had a smell that she couldn’t place: feral, meat eating, alive. Her tomatoes had blended into the beans—there were no longer orderly rows anywhere—and she pulled at a yellow plum tomato. The plant did not let go at first, stretching toward her before the fruit came loose. She placed it between her teeth and bit down, the juice overflowing her mouth so ripe that it tasted rotten.

  She had planted this garden—why? Not necessarily to feed herself or her mother; they had enough food. She liked beans and tomatoes well enough, and a garden tomato did taste better. But no—she remembered herself in those early weeks of spring, wrestling with the barrel, scratching that desiccated surface of earth, and she thought that maybe she had wanted to know the plenty the earth could provide if she stewarded it; she wanted to walk her short rows and see the beans dangling like earrings on their stems, to see the tomatoes lit from within. She had started this—whatever this was—on the day she had told the garden to multiply, her words an incantation.

  But she couldn’t remember what she’d told the scarecrow. There was no head, just a shirt tied off at the hands, jeans tucked into her mother’s old Nikes. Only one Nike now, crusted with mud, the other shoe missing, who knew where. She recognized the Swoosh in the footprints that had led her here, in the footprints all over this garden, lining the rows, yes, but more than that: circling the house, stopping at the windows as if looking in,
walking down to the lake, even approaching the road. For a moment, she imagined the scarecrow covering this distance, then laughed at herself. It was two crossed sticks. Nothing there but some old clothes.

  Then the answer came to her, even as she stood there and noted the mud on the jean cuffs, the streaks across the shirt where someone had wiped muddy hands (hands! There were only sleeves): Isaac had done this. He had felt bad about missing her grandfather’s wedding and so he’d played a joke on her. Isaac was joking, which was sometimes funny, sometimes not, but he was never mean-spirited. Nothing about Isaac was mean-spirited: he fancied himself a protector of all that was weak, some Texas knight-errant off to medical school (he hoped) instead of some quest, and she admired this about him. She smiled in utter relief that Isaac was here somewhere, safe and accounted for, her Isaac even when he wasn’t always hers. For a second, she wondered why the soldiers hadn’t mentioned that he had passed this way, then she realized he must have crossed the bridge before they arrived. When Isaac crossed, had the old cypress been there, bleeding into the water?

  She left the garden reluctantly, unwilling to leave behind this feeling of life, this feeling that she was connected to something much greater than just her little self. She could have lain on the space that remained in the rows and been happy for ages—but turned toward the lake, following the Nike footprints, sometimes deliberately placing her feet within them. This earth was now more hers, she thought, but could not say why she thought this. This sky, gray with the day’s rain, belonged to her, or she to it. She thought of how she’d questioned the scarecrow, before she’d realized that it had been Isaac, and how despite having been raised on horror movies that would have suggested otherwise, she had known that the scarecrow had meant her no harm. The worst thing it would have done was to pull her into this world, Hades to her Persephone, but this world was only a deeper, more vivid version of her own.

  Debris was caught in mesquite trees that were forty feet from the waterline, and she saw the trail that the water had made when it receded. Her tennis shoes stuck in the mud, her steps harder because of the suction. The ground was scattered with bits of Styrofoam coolers and plastic grocery bags, summer detritus coughed up and deposited here. She felt responsible for this mess and knew that she would clean it up as soon as she could.

  But nobody was at the campsite, and one glance told her that nobody had been since the storm. Isaac’s tent was caved in, water pooling in the giant depression in the top, the inside still dry but disturbed, as if the storm had picked up the tent, shaken it like a snow globe, then set it back down. Her tent was still perfect, stakes intact and everything. The tarp on which he’d cut his thumb hung from the trees, shredded, one grommet trailing the ground. The camp stove and chairs were missing.

  She unzipped her tent. Everything was still in place, even her bed still neatly made. But the floor was muddy with footprints. She looked closer: the Nike Swoosh in the ball of the foot, and now, despite what she believed to be the essential harmlessness of those two crossed sticks, dressed to scare the grackles, a chill took her. How could Isaac have done this and not fixed his own tent?

  Outside, low thunder, and then against the tent’s nylon, heavy drops, the next wave of rain. The sky, too heavy to hold itself longer, gave way.

  Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here

  Every Religion Has a Story of the Flood

  Here are the ones that apply to this part of the world:

  To the Germans, those Protestant lovers of the hard life, the flood washed away the sinners. We are all of us fallen, all of us deserving of punishment. Noah was a sinner, too, but not as bad, enough to save. The rainbow is not God’s promise to us but God’s promise to God: no matter how bad people get, God has drawn a line for himself.

  To the Spaniards, carrying the long arm of Catholicism, the facts of the flood are questioned, leading to an interesting paradox: the flood may not be fact, but it is definitely true. How is it possible that a man lived to be six hundred? How is it possible a man could gather two of every living creature and feed them and house them on a boat for forty days? The message is sacred, however: we have all sinned and fallen short, and God reserves the right to drown us.

  To the Comanche, who were here before anyone else, the flood was how the world started. They believe that this area was the first dry land in the world. This place was the first place to rise.

  9:00 A.M.

  Isaac could not open the door. The water pressed against it from the outside, and the water was stronger than he was. The car’s electrical system was unresponsive, something probably wet, so he could not roll down the window. Meanwhile, the water was now midthigh, the brown of cardboard or packing tape, and cold, cold. Once, he’d done a polar bear swim at Barton Springs in Austin, but that had been different. That water had invigorated him, had made him emerge from the water hopping gingerly on his toes. This cold numbed him, robbing him of life, settling deep and quick, tethering. He felt that if the water rose above his heart, his heart would stop.

  He pivoted in his seat, his back on the emergency brake, and brought his knees to his chest. The water, heavy with collected earth, grasped at him, weighing down his jeans, sending rivulets across his torso. He kicked.

  Nothing the first time: not a crack or a shard. Just the squeak of his boots on the window tint. Again. A line appeared, alive, running obliquely from his heel to the side mirror, continuing to crack even after he’d pulled his feet back for another go. In the water, things: a McDonald’s cup, paper, a UT baseball cap. These things came from inside the car, but what was on the other side?

  Another kick and now a whole network of splinters and shards, held together by the black film of tint. He kicked again and again, and now the water helped, came rushing in, crumbling what had once been his window. At first, it pushed him back and pinned him to his seat, the shattered glass fanning over him, scoring his cheeks and the backs of his hands. The water was everywhere now, even in his mouth, gritty against his teeth, and how easy it would be to let the water win. It was raw and somehow hot against the surface of his eyeballs, prying his fingernails back, entering the slit in his thumb, loosening the stitches. His body rose now, lifted by the torrent, and as he came loose, he was able to pull his feet underneath him, to press his toes against the passenger door, and push.

  The water now streamed in underneath, as well as through the window, and as he passed through, there was just enough room. He only just grabbed the side mirror as he went by. If he had missed this, he would surely have drowned, turned over and over in that tide. But he did grab it, his fingers catching in the gap between mirror and case, and before it gave way and came off, he grabbed the window frame, the glass rendered dull by the tint. He pulled himself onto the roof, which had not yet gone under.

  The car twisted in the current, not spinning exactly, but bumping into things and reacting. He was no longer on Allen Potivar’s hill. He could see the upper halves of pecan trees ahead and knew he was close to the Colorado River, down toward the valley. He would pass under one of those pecan trees soon, and when he did, he took his chance.

  He jumped, as much as he could with the water pulling at his legs, and felt the rough bark in his hands. He swung his feet up and put his face against the tree. His car kept going without him, and he could not know this then, but he would never see it again. The car would be swept past San Saba, coming to rest on a rancher’s piece of the river. In the dry years that followed, cattle would surround it, watching it rust into the dirt.

  Now, though, Isaac clung to the pecan, safe for the moment, thinking of all those years of childhood when he’d wanted a tree house, thinking that Boyd would think this turn of events a great joke. He laughed himself at the relief of it all. The wind chilled him further, and he reached for his phone, though he already knew it was not there.

  9:35 A.M.

  Abruptly, Boyd felt Isaac, tasted the copper fear in his mouth, felt the shivering of his chilled limbs, threatenin
g to rattle right off the branch. She saw him in the tree—not the chain of events that had led him there, not whatever had happened with his father—but enough to know she could find him if she looked. She did not know how long he had been there, nor how much longer he could hang on. Getting such a clear vision from Isaac was a shock—he had never given her so much, and he had certainly never needed anything from her. But now Isaac was in trouble—she felt his panic as her own, felt his chills as goose bumps on her arms, felt his heart race in the high pitch of her blood.

  There was something else, too, something she could not name, just a vision of a splash in the water, a thing she was meant to save being lost in the flood. She imagined, suddenly, her life without Isaac somewhere out there, and this idea also quickened her pulse—the thought was unthinkable. Even when they were separated, which was most of the time, the idea that he was out there was a comfort.

  She headed to Carla’s to borrow the truck, needing a vehicle and not knowing what she would encounter out there. She didn’t know if the army men would let her pass, but she imagined if that bridge could hold those two Humvees, it could bear a Ford Ranger. There was standing water in the floodplain between Carla’s house and the water, moving but with nowhere to go, quivering like Jell-O, so she had to walk up to the road. She was afraid that she would waste all this time and that Carla would not even be there, but Boyd had no choice—no car was at home, and anyway, she needed a truck.

  Carla’s house was dark, also without electricity, and in the front yard the mimosa tree had been stripped: red blossoms punctuated the slimy green pile of leaves on the ground, and the blacks of the branches and the trunk were wintery scratches, stark against the stucco. Boyd knocked on the door, and when there was no answer, she went in. “Carla?”

  The smell of sage and sweetgrass burning, the air thick with smoke. Carla wandered out into the foyer, a wide black stripe painted across her face, temple to temple, her body burly with layers of extra clothing: sweatshirts and leggings and jeans. Relief spread across her frightened features. “Boyd!” she exclaimed, taking Boyd’s face in her hands, hands that were slick with cold sweat. She smiled. “I didn’t even realize that I needed you, but here you came anyway.”