The thought turned me to searching the wreckage around me. My pack. My first aid kit. The canoe.
Pulled in against the remaining wall last night, the canoe was only partially intact. The ribbing and gunwales were unbroken but there was a gaping wound in the middle of the hull. The paddles were long gone. So too the small metal first aid kit. No clean bandages. No astringent or antibiotic cream. Not even a fucking aspirin.
I searched for water. The cooler we'd brought was gone and with it the water and whatever food was left. The upright refrigerator mocked me. The Snows always emptied it of perishables and shut it down when they left the place. We had not even bothered to open it. Inside I found four small bottles of store-bought water along with two jars of pickles, squeeze bottles of both mustard and ketchup, and three cans of beer. In the freezer compartment there were several empty ice cube trays and a mushy warm Ace reusable cold compress. I brought out the water, twisted open one bottle and then bent to Sherry, offering it to her lips.
"Ah, room service," she said, but could not smile at the joke this time. "Anything up there from your vantage point that looks hopeful, Max? The view looks pretty dismal from down here." She turned at the hip to take in the crushed outbuildings but winced at the effort. "At one point I thought of a signal fire but figured we could burn down everything we've got left to sit on and still not raise anybody's attention."
She wasn't just being cute. If the hurricane had done any significant damage on the coast there would be plenty of emergencies for the authorities to handle in their own backyards, never mind some idiot who went frontiering out in the Glades without so much as leaving a word behind with a destination in mind. Who would miss them? And where would they look? Maybe if the river ranger at the park went out to my cabin to check on me. Maybe if he realizes my canoe is missing. Maybe if Sherry's supervisor couldn't contact her to come in for post- hurricane duty. Lots of maybes that could take days. I looked down at the stained bandage around Sherry's leg and didn't think we had days. From what little I knew about compound fractures, the sharp edges of the broken bone could be doing even more damage on the inside with every movement. Since the bone had once been exposed, infection was not just a possibility but a certainty. I sat back down next to her.
"I don't think we can afford to stay here, Sherry."
"Yeah, I figured," she said. "No communications link. Not much in the way of passing traffic." This time she found a way to tighten those laugh lines of hers but then turned her head to the bleak horizon.
"We walkin' or ridin'?"
"I'm going to search what's left of the utility room. There might be something we can use to patch the canoe. If we can get her floating, we're riding," I said, trying to at least match her formidable gumption.
"You're thinking maybe that last camp we passed? That one in the trees? Might have been sheltered at least a little bit?"
"You're way ahead of me, as usual," I said and meant it.
"No, Max," she said, turning back to find my eyes. "Not ahead. Just right with you."
This time I did lean down and kiss her lightly, on the mouth.
"OK then," I said and untied the flashlight from her belt. "I'll be right back."
The bunkhouse was completely gone, as if it had been swatted off the deck by a giant hand, only a few iron post anchors left bolted to the flooring where the corners of the building used to be. The utility building was flattened but there were still gaps of space under the collapsed walls, the largest made where an interior wall was still propped up off the deck by the generator. The heavy piece of machinery was bolted to the plank flooring and was close to one of the foundation posts. It had stayed put. I lifted a sheet of wood siding and shoved it aside, then sent a beam of light into the gap and start rooting around. After coming up with busted cans of paint, shattered jars of roofing nails, a completely intact box of "hurricane candles" and a single hammer, I found something useful: a silver roll of three-inch-wide duct tape. No home owner could live without it. My light also caught something chrome and shining on the floor and I was able to reach through a space behind the generator and get a hand on it. With some twisting and yanking and considerable working of angles, I came up with the sheared-off shaft of what was once a Big Bertha driving wood. In memory I recalled a scene of Jeff Snow standing out on this deck, the morning sun just coming up in the east, while he wedged a tee in between the planks and took practice driving old golf balls out into the distance. The environmentalists would have frowned at his depositing dozens of nonbiodegradable orbs of plastic and rubber into the pristine waters. But I had simply smiled at his morning constitutional. The fat head of the golf club was now gone, but the wet leather-wrapped grip and a sharp, wicked metallic point at the end remained. I told myself it might be useful, maybe as a splint for Sherry's broken leg. But I knew there was something about its resemblance to a weapon that made me take it along with the roll of tape. If I ended up dragging a half-submerged canoe through the Everglades I didn't want to face a disoriented Wally or the rest of his ilk with just a six-inch fillet knife.
When I got back to Sherry with my meager loot she had already shifted herself on the floor and had gone through the cabinet under the sink.
There she had found a clean dishrag and an intact bottle of isopropyl alcohol.
"Maybe your friend kept it under there for cuts from cleaning fish," she said. "Whatever, it's got to help."
First things first, I used my knife to cut loose the blood- soaked sheet Sherry had used to tie off her wound and then the sweatpants fabric from around her thigh. The gash seemed less than ominous, like a half-moon slice from a pipe the diameter of a baseball bat handle. It was crusted shut with dried blood, but when I pinched the flesh on either side to open it a bit in order to pour in the alcohol, the hole opened and I could see how deep the cut went. Sherry twitched as I sloshed in the disinfectant and when I looked up at her there was a thin bright red fine of blood on her lip where she was biting against the pain.
"Sorry," I muttered stupidly.
She closed her eyes and bobbed her head, excusing me.
I then lay the clean dish towel over the wound and ripped off long pieces of the sheet and tied the bandage in place.
"We should try to keep your leg straight and immobilized. You don't know what that bone end is doing inside," I said.
"Yeah, I do," she said, her teeth now clenched together. "It's cutting, Max. I can feel it. We just gotta hope it isn't near an artery."
"You're right. But we can splint it," I said. "God knows there are enough pieces of slat wood here to do that. Maybe strap it in place with the duct tape. That'll keep it straight when we load you into the canoe."
Now she was looking more skeptical than pained.
"Got to, Sherry. Time isn't helping us any here."
"I know," she answered. "But I was just getting comfortable, you know?"
"That'a girl," I answered, again complimenting her guts and hopefully encouraging her spirit for what was going to be one hell of an ordeal we both knew was coming. I used the rest of the roll of tape on the hull of the canoe, first folding a piece of a Rubbermaid dish drainer from under the sink to cover the hole and then strapping it in place with the duct tape. While working on the patch I'd found three other punctures and a cracked rib toward the bow, but was sure the boat would still float. My next task was to find a replacement for the missing paddles and I discovered a long curved piece of mahogany under some debris that I recognized as once being the plaque backing for a bonefish trophy that Jeff Snow had mounted and displayed on one of the camp walls. The edges were smooth for grasping and pulling strokes. It would do.
I salvaged a plastic container that once held coffee and stuffed the last of the water bottles in. We could use it to bail water if we had to. I put it in the canoe under the stern seat along with the flashlight and then stored the headless shaft of the golf club along the boat's spine. Though I knew there had once been several flotation cushions and some lifejackets f
or the Snows' children here, I couldn't find a sign of one. A damp, fabric-covered couch pillow was the best we had left. I propped it in the bow. With everything set I dragged the canoe over to the west side of the remaining deck and slid it onto the water. Sherry was next and I flexed my jaw and moved over to her, clearing a trail of any sharp debris or nail heads, anything that might catch her clothes. I knew how much it was going to hurt to move her and she knew it too.
"I'm going to get you under the arms and kind of drag you to the canoe," I said. "I figure it's the best way to keep the leg from bending."
"Oooh, big cave man. How about just grabbing a hunk of hair," she said, again with the forced grin. I shook my head.
"Then I can lower you into the bow. You use that pillow for your head and prop the leg up on the seat. That'll keep it elevated and maybe reduce some of the blood flow," I said.
She nodded her head, steeled herself as I got a grip under her arms and lifted her. Only then did she begin to cry.
TWELVE
Harmon and his wife had stayed all night in the den that he'd built, at considerable expense, just for this. But he did not gloat over his foresight. He held his wife's hand while they watched the breathless weather reporters correct themselves every thirty minutes and then unabashedly make yet another bold prediction of the hurricane's path and speed and level of ferocity. The storm had gained in strength in the Gulf and then had taken a completely unforeseen loop and then charged due east into the South Florida peninsula. The red- dotted depiction of her path looked like a comical ampersand on the television screen, but Harmon was too scared for levity. Simone came ashore just south of Sanibel Island as a category three, and according to the supposed "hurricane hunter" aircraft, she maintained her bitchiness and speed right up until the Harmons' power went out and left them sitting in the dark, nothing but the familiar touch of their hands and the sound of the wind bringing its terrifying memories. Harmon assured his wife for yet another of the uncountable times of their safety. He'd designed this room himself. Placed it in the middle of their new home, no exterior walls, no windows. Those interior walls had been made with thickened steel studs and fiberglass-covered wallboard. Then the ceiling of this room was sealed with a single, watertight sheet of fiberglass. He'd inspected the entire roof of the house while it was being built for them, counting the double hurricane straps as they were nailed to each roof joist, not just every other joist as was the code. This was their bunker. Harmon took a lot of shit from the few neighbors he knew, just nodded when they called him paranoid. But he would never experience another Andrew. Never. He had seen how Andrew's winds had torn down the steel structure of the flight tower on the Homestead Air Force Base. Her winds had ripped away the corner bricks to expose four floors of rooms at the nearby Holiday Inn, sending the bedsheets and lampshades and luggage flying. Out in the Redlands' open fields, Harmon had personally seen a one-by-one-quarter-inch piece of wood lath the length of a child's yardstick that had been driven through the trunk of a coconut palm that was the thickness of a man's skull. When he told his friends those stories, they went quiet and stopped ribbing him. Even Squires stopped calling him a pussy and stayed away from talk of his partner's storm room.
Inside his bunker Harmon had gathered his books, most of them replacements, but a few from his collection that had been salvaged and restored after that 1992 storm. He'd begun his reading habit when he was in the military hospital in the Philippines and then later in Hawaii. He had been one of those early into the country of Vietnam, his group unnamed and barely accounted for. They were young, wire-strong Americans, most of them from the wilderness states with a talent for survival and abilities with firearms and blades that were used to killing large, warm-blooded animals. Tactical surveillance and assassination were their orders. Go in undetected, come out the same way. It was there that Harmon learned to fear no man. But they'd been sent into Cambodia, early. Made a designated kill. On the way out, maybe misled by a guide-turned- traitor, they found themselves in a dead-end gorge. The climb out was straight up. The Cambodian rebels, bent on revenge for the killing shot to one of their commanders, had seen the talent level of Harmon's group up close and needed an agent of death less vulnerable than themselves. So instead of confronting the Americans they set the narrow gorge on fire and let a strong and natural wind carry the consuming flame to the enemy. At one point the small six-man group, backed against the wall, had to decide to rush into the flame and kill what men they could or take a chance of climbing the wall with the flames following their track, stealing their air, a natural killing force unafraid and consuming. Against his judgment, Harmon was overruled and they climbed. The smell of his own burning flesh and those of his mates around him would never leave him. Only two, Harmon and an eighteen-year- old private, made it to the top. The private got them to their rendezvous spot. Both were flown by chopper to safety and Harmon, later, to the offshore hospital.
There he'd tried to escape into the fictional worlds of Vonnegut, Hammett, Spillane. But each time the nurses came to do the debriding, to scrub away yet another layer of his burned skin, reality opened its throat of raw pain and brought him back to the real world. The bunker in his South Florida home now held a hundred tomes of the history of the Vietnam War on one wall, all with their own perspectives, inclusions, conclusions. He had three first editions of The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, which he had practically, or as he often thought, impractically, memorized. What good did it do him to be able to quote the line on page one hundred thirty- two? Other walls in the room held other wars, for comparison or maybe even reassurance. The enemy is us, human beings, Harmon often said. We are all so much alike, so bent on superiority, all willing to kill or the for dominance or money or retribution or vengeance or some other reason. But nature cared nothing of such piddling motivations. Nature trampled anything in its path without choice or conscience, not like men. Harmon wasn't afraid of men. He was scared to hell of nature.
It was an hour before dawn when the worst of Simone hit and Harmon lay on the leather couch with his wife in their bunker, front to back, like trembling spoons in a darkened drawer.
"I'm glad the kids are at school."
Harmon only nodded a response to the first words his wife had said in an hour. They'd sent both of their kids to Notre Dame in Indiana. Landlocked. No hurricanes. No earthquakes. And God's own prejudicial eye watching out.
They waited for the wind scream to stop. Then they waited longer, until the numble went away, until silence. Harmon checked his watch: ten a.m. When he finally opened the bunker door, his house was intact. He used the big flashlight to move through the living room and kitchen, spraying the beam up into the high corners, looking for gaps, for water stain. When he got to the back door he opened it carefully, waiting for something to fall, a tree limb, a piece of roof tile, the sky itself.
Out on the patio he heard the stiff ruffle of leaves, mostly from the giant ficus tree that he could see had blown down and now straddled his fence. In the pale light he did a quick assessment: there were two additional sheets of screen ripped away from the pool enclosure. The turquoise blue water had turned dusty, the surface layered with dirt and leaves and twigs that had blown in through the openings and settled. But all the ironwork still stood. He looked up and off to the south and saw the raw hide of his neighbors' roof where it was missing a quarter of its half-barrel tiles, leaving the black shred of tar paper exposed. To the east there was an unfamiliar gap in the horizon and Harmon had to think for a moment. What was gone? What was missing? Then he realized the Martins' huge gumbo limbo tree, one hundred years old and seventy feet tall, had been pulled up and toppled, removed from sight.
"Is it safe?"
Harmon turned to see his wife, her shadowed figure just inside the doorway, her toes at the threshold, feet unwilling to move. After Andrew she had moved around the destruction of her home like a zombie, eyes wide and dry and uncomprehending. After three days she found their family scrap- book, clippings of t
he kids' ball games, pictures of first days at school, birth announcements, all soaked and ripped and ruined. That's when she started to cry and Harmon talked her into going to her sister's in Michigan. He stayed to clean up and clean out a lifetime.
But this storm was not the heavyweight Andrew had been. When Harmon walked around his property to the front there were plenty of trees down. The streets were cluttered with debris: broken roof tiles, branches as thick as a man's wrists, and the crumpled metal and plastic framework of the solar panels that had once been mounted on the Connellys' rooftop. Across the street Donna Harper's van had been pushed off her driveway and it now sat at an angle in her side yard. Harmon looked down the street. The new neighbors with the tape on their windows were unscathed. They'd gained another degree of false confidence.
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