by Scott Ely
“Those clothes of mine need to be burned,” she said.
They ate dinner on the screened porch. As they ate the stew, he could not help but think of his father. When he made the stew, he had complained that he had no carrots. He never had any luck growing carrots in his garden.
She told him she was a senior at LSU, majoring in math. Her parents had expected her to become an accountant, but she wanted to have an academic career.
“They weren’t pleased with that,” she said. “There’s no money in it. My daddy pointed that out right away. To him those washing machines were the most important thing in his life. Now he’s dead because of them. And nobody tried to steal a single one. Those thieves were after other things.”
He recalled that his father had never seemed particularly concerned about the fate of the shop.
“My father cared about this house, not those boats and motors,” he said.
“Smarter than my father,” she said.
She sighed.
“I guess I’m being too hard on my father,” she said. “My mother didn’t want to stay. She told me. But I’ll bet she didn’t say a word to him.”
“He did the best he could,” he said.
“I suppose.”
She looked toward the airboat moored at the dock.
“Your mother’ll be surprised when you drive up,” she said.
He did wonder how his mother would react but did not speak of this to her. He was going to have to tell her his father was dead. She might laugh. She might cry. But she would not react in the way a normal person might.
“She’ll be surprised all right,” he said.
“She won’t be glad to see you?” she said.
He told her about his mother’s plans to send him off to military school, how she and her father never got along. And then he explained about all those young men.
“Better than old ones,” she said.
She laughed, and then he did too. Her indifference to the spectacle his mother was making of herself with those young men made him consider that his reaction was not a reasonable one. And he looked out into the darkness and wondered if there was someone out there listening to their laughter. He had not turned on any lights, and she had not asked any questions about why he had not.
“You worry about those men of hers a lot?” she asked.
“I guess,” he said.
“It sure sounds like you do.”
“What if it were your mother?”
She began to laugh.
“My mother hadn’t had sex with my father in years,” she said. “Who was going to be interested in her? She sure wouldn’t be interested in them. I’ll bet your mother is beautiful.”
Talking about sex was making him uncomfortable. He decided to work hard to make sure he gave no sign it did.
“I guess,” he said.
“Don’t you know if she’s beautiful?” she asked.
And he wondered if somehow she knew that he knew absolutely nothing about sex and women. She could be playing with him.
“She’s beautiful,” he said.
“I expect she is,” she said. “Maybe she wants to send you to military school because she likes you too much.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You’re a nice-looking boy, her only child. She might feel that it’s time to let go of you.”
He was thinking of his fever breaking and feeling cold and how his mother wrapped her arms around him and stroked his hair.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
“I wonder,” she said.
“Sometimes people don’t think anything at all.”
“Oh, is that so.”
“Yeah, sometimes it happens to me.”
Then she began to talk about herself. She told him how she planned to go to graduate school in mathematics. He wondered exactly what it was you studied after studying math for four years.
After a while she stopped talking. There were tree frogs on the screen, giving their calls over and over, their voices tiny compared to the deep voices of the marsh bullfrogs. Big moths bumped against the screen from time to time. She began to yawn.
He pointed out they would need to stand four-hour watches. He also explained why it was not a good idea to show any lights.
“No use getting killed on our last night here,” he said.
“Ironic,” she said.
“Do you know how to shoot?”
She told him she had never shot a gun. He decided this night was not a good time for her to learn.
“I’ll take the first watch,” he said.
She went off to sleep in his father’s bed. He sat on the porch with the Saiga beside him and listened to the frogs and the night birds. After a time he got tired of sitting and went out to his father’s grave. He stood over it, trying to think of something to say, but could find no words.
He found it was true he had no more tears, at least not at this moment. He wondered if he would be able to come to this place in ten or twenty years or if the sea would rise and put everything around him permanently underwater. It would not be so bad for his father to have a grave at the bottom of a warm shallow sea.
When he went back to the house, he decided to stand a double watch and let Angela get some sleep. She was exhausted. Besides, standing watch would give him time to think about the best way to get to New Orleans. The most direct way would be across Lake Pontchartrain. But then they would be vulnerable to the presence of speedier and more powerful boats, boats constructed to deal with rough water. The airboat was designed to run in a few inches of water or even a heavy dew, as his father liked to say. And the airboat would be overloaded with gas and water. He planned to find a route where the water was shallow and those other boats could not go. His plan was to follow the highway to the lake and then work around to the west end of either Pontchartrain or Lake Maurepas. He was not sure how long it might take to make the journey. It would be slow going through the swamps. But at least the danger of being ambushed would be greatly diminished.
He sat on the screened porch, thinking about these things, as the hours of his double watch wore on.
FOUR
He woke to bird songs. Angela was pulling her watch, sitting in a chair and looking out on the marsh.
“Do you always sleep with that gun?” she asked.
He explained how he started doing that after they killed his father.
“It makes me feel safe,” he said.
He did not tell her about his father sleeping with the machine gun. She would not understand. He had never really understood, but now that he had killed the men and his father was dead, he did. It seemed like a normal rational act.
“After Mother and Daddy were killed, I slept with that butcher knife,” she said.
So perhaps she did understand.
“I saw that picture of you with your parents,” she said. “Your mother’s beautiful.”
Josephine had taken the picture of them standing together on the front porch of his house. Early in the summer his father had enlarged it and tacked a print to the wall over his bed. Stephen had wondered why he did that when there were no other pictures of his mother in the house. Over the years other pictures had been taken, but he had not chosen to display any of those.
After breakfast they loaded the airboat. He took plenty of ammunition and all the weapons, along with water, food and fuel. He took a little gas camping stove and some cooking utensils. When he tried out the gps, he found it wouldn’t work. He wondered if it was a problem with the machine or if the service had been blocked or lost. Somewhere in the house was a compass, but he couldn’t find it. He took the radio. The report on the hurricane this morning from the Texas station was that it was going to make landfall somewhere in Mexico. He tried the mystery station but only pulled in static. He had never had much luck with that station during daytime hours.
Before they left, he stood with Angela at his
father’s grave. Her parents were unburied, still in the house, their corpses rapidly decomposing in the heat. He hoped she was not thinking about them.
“We should put up a cross,” Angela said.
“He wouldn’t like that,” he said.
“You mean he didn’t believe in God?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“I’ll pray for him.”
She looked down at the grave. He wondered how many people she had seen buried. For him, his father was the first one. She turned to him.
“And you. What do you believe?”
“Same as my father.”
“I’ll pray for you too.”
It seemed to him she was going to be wasting her time praying over people who didn’t believe. He didn’t imagine the men he killed believed in much of anything. But he kept all this to himself. He didn’t know exactly what a person was supposed to do when someone said they were going to pray for you and you had made it clear to the person doing the praying that you didn’t believe in that person’s god or any other god.
“Thank you,” he said.
She looked like she was getting ready to say something but changed her mind. She just stood there, looking down at the grave.
Then she spoke.
“Do you think your mother will ever come visit his grave?”
“Probably not,” he said.
He wondered if she was thinking of her parents, lying there rotting in the house. It would be a kindness, he thought, if the vultures came in through, say, a broken window and devoured them. She would return and there would be nothing but clean bones left. Or if the house washed away or burned. That would be good too.
“And you?” she asked.
He told her of his vision of his father’s grave covered by a warm shallow sea.
“I like that,” he said.
“Me too,” she said. “There could be coral. And those fish with all the colors. The water would be very clear.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
He imagined schools of bright-colored fish hovering over his father’s grave. That was a pleasant daydream. But it made him vaguely uncomfortable that she was participating in his vision.
“Sharks too and huge rays,” he said.
“To stand guard on his grave,” she said.
Then he realized they were both becoming too fanciful. And unexpectedly this did not feel like a good cure for grief.
He went to the shed where they kept tools and welding equipment. It was set up on steel pilings just like the house. He used a cutting torch to cut a rectangular piece, about the size of a license plate, out of a sheet of steel. Then he formed his father’s name, WALTER COLE, from pieces of wire and welded the letters to the steel. He welded the plate to a steel pipe and took it out to the grave where he drove it deep in the ground with a sledgehammer.
“No hurricane will bother this,” he said.
“We should say something,” she said.
He went to the house and got his father’s copy of The Iliad, his favorite book. They stood together at the foot of the grave while he read a passage from the account of the funeral of Patroklos. “‘And let us lay his bones in a golden jar…,’” he began. After he finished he felt satisfied. He thought his father would be pleased. But Angela was not pleased or satisfied. She stood there and said some sort of prayer under her breath. He could see her lips moving. He kept his mouth shut and tried to be respectful.
They boarded the airboat, and he started the engine. It ran beautifully. They went out to the flooded road and headed for town. They would be able to pick up the highway to Lake Pontchartrain there. The bodies and the vultures were all exactly in the same place. When they went down Main Street, Angela pointed out her father’s appliance store. He hoped she did not want to visit her house.
In the center of town he turned the boat onto the highway that led toward the lake. He placed Angela in the bow to look out for debris and ran as fast as he dared. They went through one flooded little town after another and did not see a single person. Before long, the water was over the tops of some of the houses, and they floated cautiously over the submerged towns. In the countryside they came upon dead animals and an occasional human corpse. He was beginning to think this was going to be easy. He had feared what they might meet up with in one of those little towns. Besides the problem of running into people who might want to kill them, there was the additional worry that they would encounter stranded people in need of food and water. They had only enough for themselves. But it would be hard to say no to desperate people.
Late in the afternoon, when he calculated that they were close to the lake, he ran the boat up into a cypress swamp and went several hundred yards into it until they were concealed from the highway. They had yet to see anything of Interstate 12. There was a good chance it was completely underwater. Parts of it might have been washed away. They ate some sandwiches he had made for supper.
As he rigged up the mosquito netting he had brought along, he cautioned Angela not to show any lights. They would be able to hear the sound of a motor before anyone got close to them. No one was likely to come into the swamp at night.
Once it was dark Angela went to sleep under the netting. He sat in the padded driver’s seat, the Saiga within easy reach. He picked up the radio and cranked the generator. Then he set the volume very low and dialed in the mystery station. And it came in, perfectly clear. He was tempted to wake up Angela but decided against it. The Swamp Hog told him the levees were breaking everywhere along the lower Mississippi. And New Orleans was finally flooded. But Baton Rouge was still mostly all right.
“New Orleans is now the city in the sea,” the voice said.
Then the Swamp Hog started reading a poem:
“Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down…”
But his voice began to break up, and Stephen could hardly understand a word he was saying.
“Apocalyptic Poe,” the voice announced.
After that there was nothing but static.
The hours passed, and he woke her for her watch.
“Wake me if you hear or see anything,” he said. “Just people moving about. I don’t need to know about alligators or turtles or snakes.”
She said she understood.
It seemed that he had just closed his eyes when he felt her shaking him.
“There’re lights,” she said.
He got up and saw the lights off toward the highway. They were far away and looked as if they were moving away from them. He heard the sound of a motor. Then he heard shots, from an automatic weapon he could not identify. The lights went out, and the sound of the motor faded and disappeared.
“Can you hear it?” he asked her.
“No,” she said.
They sat there for a long time, not talking, listening for a return of those threatening sounds. But the only thing they heard was a splash somewhere from deep in the swamp. It was probably a turtle sliding off a log, or an alligator. He went back to sleep; she returned to her watch.
In the morning they had rice and beans for breakfast. That was safe because the camping stove did not put out any smoke.
“I wonder if people down here are going to live like this for a long time,” she said.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I mean if the land stays flooded and the sea comes up.”
“You mean doing whatever they wish?”
“Yes.”
“It won’t be many people.”
He told her it seemed to him that new boundaries between land and water would be established. The army would restore order. He wondered what sort of people would return to what was essentially a new country.
There would be opportunities.
“I guess those washing machines belong to me now,” she said.
“You’d run the store?” he asked.
“No, I expect I’ll sell them. Bury my parents. Go someplace where
it’s dry.”
He wanted to tell her that by the time she returned there would not be much left to bury. But he saw nothing to be gained by pointing that out.
Instead they sat quietly talking for some time about the new country that would take shape after the water receded. He considered telling her of the Swamp Hog’s prediction of jungle-covered mountains but changed his mind. She was going to have to hear the voice first. If she did not, she would think he had gone mad.
He decided to teach Angela to drive the airboat so he could take a position in the bow with the Saiga. Unfortunately she would be exposed, sitting up high in the driver’s seat, but he could not shoot and drive at the same time. Depending on her to drive was going to be a safer bet than depending on her to shoot.
Following his instructions, she eased the boat through the cypresses toward the highway. Once they reached the highway, he could see nothing but trees and water and sky. He let her continue to drive so she would have more practice as they headed toward the lake. He sat in the bow with the Saiga beside him and watched the water before them for debris.
They had not gone far before he saw up ahead something moving in the lower limbs of a big live oak. It was probably a raccoon or a possum. But then, as they came closer, he saw it was a human figure. He picked up the Saiga and pointed toward the tree. Angela nodded her head to let him know she had seen it too.
The figure, he could now tell for sure it was a man, stood up on the thick limb and waved both arms above his head. Stephen motioned to Angela to ease them in slowly and then told her to make a circle of the tree. She did that well. He got a good look at the man, who appeared more frightened than dangerous. After they made two circles of the tree, it was clear nobody was setting an ambush for them. The tree was not filled with riflemen. He told Angela to put the engine in neutral so he could speak with the man.
“Don’t shoot me,” the man said. “I ain’t done nothing to you.”