According to the barometer, air pressure had dropped three millibars in the last hour, which meant the eye was roughly a hundred miles to port, the Kagero lifting and falling on the swells, lifting and slowly falling again, sickness rising in Angus by the minute, washing over him entire, weakness in his knees and elbows and prickling on the insides of his cheeks, wind battering the wheelhouse like it wanted in out of the rain.
“Your old man would’ve loved this shit,” Morris said. “I remember we built a yacht for this oil man back in the nineties, Threadgil, he had all these rigs out in the Gulf. Your dad hated that sonofabitch. He was always complaining and making last-minute demands and the oil business was in the tank or so he said, kept trying to pay less than he owed. But somehow he had plenty of money for this big party for the launch. Band and caterers and shit. Anyhow, your dad had me go out looking for a storm on the maiden voyage.” He laughed and shook his head. “I found one, too. I mean a doozy. Women in party dresses puking in every corner.”
As if on cue, Angus’s stomach boiled up into his throat. He was too preoccupied by his symptoms, by the effort of resisting their inevitable finale, to know if Morris was having fun at his expense or just telling stories. His father had taught him to focus on the horizon—no matter how much a boat rocked and dove and rose and plunged, the horizon was always steady—but the world beyond the wheelhouse was a blur of rain and mist sheared from the waves, everything white out there, no horizon to focus on, no form or shape, like they were passing through a cloud, so that when a cargo hatch was torn loose from the bow and borne aloft by wind, it was visible only for an instant, unidentifiable in the storm, a shadow swooping close enough to the bridge that Angus flinched, then on through the cluster of antennae on the roof, leaving the radar dark.
“The hell was that?” he said.
“Hatch,” Morris said, “if I had to guess.”
Angus gestured at the vacant radar screens, worried that if he opened his mouth again he wouldn’t be able to control what might come out.
“That’s not the problem,” Bullard said.
The seasickness made it difficult to concentrate and it took Angus a moment to catch on. Swells were washing over the deck, which meant without a hatch they’d start taking on water in the hold. Not a desperate concern in and of itself. Took a lot of water to drown a boat this big. But someone would have to go below and seal the doors between holds or the pumps could fall behind and the rest of the Kagero could be flooded.
“I’ll go,” Angus said.
The last thing he wanted was to vomit in front of Morris. Morris studied him for a second, then shrugged and slapped a flashlight into his palm and pointed at a life vest in the corner.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Bullard said, but Angus was too sick to be offended or afraid.
“He’ll be fine,” Morris said. He squinted and bunched his lips. After a moment, he said to Angus, “Maybe Bullard’s got a point. Don’t try to seal the holds yourself. Get one of the deckhands to do it. How’s your Spanish?”
“So-so.”
“Find Ramirez. His English is pretty decent.”
Angus nodded and clanged down a set of perforated metal stairs, then along a corridor, bracing himself against the wall as the floor lurched and sagged beneath his feet, his brain lurching in his skull. Ahead, he could see a pale oblong of light from the mess hall and he could hear voices but all the talking was in Spanish. He found five deckhands holding hands around a metal table as if conducting a séance. They were all wearing life jackets. One had a bucket between his knees. The sight of the bucket and the thought of what was in it brought the sickness up but Angus managed to choke it down.
“Este barco esta embrujado por un fantasma solitario,” one of the men said.
Angus looked at their faces, pallid with fear, but he didn’t know which one had spoken until he spoke again. The one with a crucifix on a chain hanging outside his T-shirt. Angus had heard the word for ship. About the rest he had no idea.
“Podemos oírlo,” the man said. “Vive en las entrañas del barco. Todos nos vamos a morir.”
The word for live. The word for die. The word for ship again.
“Just stay put,” he said.
He followed the corridor to a second set of stairs. Halfway down, he opened his mouth and leaned over the railing and let it out. The sound he made seemed far removed from his own throat. His vomit swirled in the water in the corridor. Already inches deep. Giving in to the nausea only made it worse. He was light-headed with it, his spine filled up with sand.
At the bottom of the stairs, he heard more voices. English this time. The engine room was aft of him. He waited a second to see if anyone emerged, if anyone had heard him, then pressed forward to the first cargo hold. The door was open, latched against the wall, wind whistling through like breath over a bottle magnified a thousand times.
He followed his flashlight through the first hold and into the second, steel beams bracing the walls like ribs, and there he dropped onto his hands and knees and vomited again, emptied himself into the water. It didn’t help. His eyeballs swayed in their sockets. His head wobbled on his neck. The water rolled over his wrists. He’d been seasick before but nothing like this. This was phantasmagoric. This was vast.
The wind died down a moment, as if catching its own breath, and in the sudden quiet, he would have sworn he heard a flapping noise, like shuffling cards, accompanied by a rasping voice. “I’m so alone,” it said. Not quite human. Part of him knew he was being overdramatic but another part, the part wobbling and quivering inside his skin, believed that he was hearing the voice of his own regret. He knew this night was a mistake. The storm would bring them down or worse, the ship would pass the storm intact but something terrible would happen to his wife and son while he was gone. He curled into a ball and worked backward over the last few months, the way it seemed he’d lost his wife to motherhood, this new and inexplicable distance between them, and from there to Murphy’s birth, how he’d tried to be a good husband, a good father, how he’d cut Murphy’s umbilical cord, something his own father never would have done, how he’d held Nora’s hand, coached and encouraged her, the way he’d been taught in birthing class, how he felt like an appendage, a distraction, how during her pregnancy he’d had the sense that she was burrowing into herself, as if into her own womb. He slipped down his memory to the months they’d had in the new house before she got pregnant, Sunday afternoons in bed, the secret places on her body, all the way back to the day they met, that wedding in New Orleans. The bride was the daughter of a client whose company ran cargo barges on the Mississippi. Nora was waitressing for the caterer, making pocket money while she finished at Tulane. She was tall, fair, her hair impossibly soft-looking as it brushed across her back, her cheeks flushed from the heat. The black skirt. The crisp white blouse. The way she shouldered her tray. No makeup. He hadn’t been able to find a date and he was bored, made lonely by too much wine, wound up following Nora through the reception, putting himself in her path, obliging her to offer him hors d’oeuvres. Finally, as he was selecting a canapé from her tray, she said, “Ask.”
“Oh,” he said, and he could feel the heat rising in his face. “May I please have a canapé?”
Nora smiled and rolled her eyes. “My name?” she said. “My number? Whatever. Tell me that I’m beautiful.”
And so he did.
“How do you feel?”
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“I was just thinking that now, when I tell you to please leave me alone, you won’t feel like I’m the one that got away or something. Like you missed a chance. If only you’d had the courage to speak to me, et cetera. I thought maybe you’d feel relieved.”
“I see.”
“And?”
“It’s complicated. I’m embarrassed. That’s one thing. There are other things, too, though they’re harde
r to describe. None of them feel like relief. Maybe that’ll kick in down the road. Years from now I’ll be in bed with my soon-to-be ex-wife, wondering where everything went wrong, and I’ll remember this moment and take comfort in the fact that you humiliated me. I have my doubts but you never know.”
Nora looked at him a second.
“I’m so alone,” she said, but he knew those weren’t her words. His regret was intruding even upon his memory. Nora had asked him for a pen at that point, given him her number after all. Nine weeks later they were married.
Angus gathered himself and struggled to his feet and the Kagero fell away beneath him, plunging for what felt like a long time. He stumbled toward the last door just as the boat began to rise, water pouring through between the holds, enough to sweep his legs from under him, to wash him backward along the floor, enough to leave him beached and gasping against the wall. The wind was all around him now, filling his ears like liquid, and as the Kagero dipped again, he saw what looked like a gilded cage bobbing toward the foremost hold. It disappeared over the sill and he was almost sure he had imagined it, or if he hadn’t that it would be lifted up and away and overboard through the ruined hatch, but as they climbed again, here it came, rushing back over the sill and into his arms.
There, before his eyes was a great, black bird with a long, yellow beak, the very demon of his regret, his mistake given essence and form.
The bird shivered water from its feathers.
“I’m so alone,” it said.
Her mother had a seizure not long after midnight, legs jittering beneath the sheet, hips bucking, hands balled into fists, eyes squeezed shut, her mouth drawn into an awful smile. The nurses came rushing in. A doctor Doodle hadn’t met before explained that this was to be expected, given her mother’s condition. It was like a short, he said. The blood on her mother’s brain. It was like pouring water on a hard drive. Those were his exact words. Doodle wanted to scratch his eyes.
She couldn’t stand that room another minute, couldn’t wait around for another seizure, couldn’t bear the thought of seeing her mother like that again. The power had been out almost an hour, the generators reserved for necessities, the corridor thick with patients from the windward side of the building, displaced in case the hurricane got the better of the windows, nurses bustling between the beds, the hospital lit only by the glow of apparatus, a pale and greenish glow like a sickly cousin of true light.
Through occasional open doors, Doodle could see that most of the rooms on her mother’s side were doubled or tripled-up but no one had even asked about sharing her mother’s room. Doodle didn’t know if that was because of her condition, how serious it was, how hopeless, and this idea made her afraid, though it was difficult to imagine being more afraid than she already was. Surely there were limits to the body’s capacity for fear. For everything. That’s what glands were for, she thought. Some gland somewhere woke up at the last minute and released a haze of chemicals into your blood. She wondered about her mother. Her face was peaceful enough in repose, eyes darting back and forth under their lids like she was dreaming, but during the seizure, there was something very much like fear present in her features. That or pain. The doctor had assured Doodle that it was all reflex, electrical misfiring, that she didn’t feel a thing, but if that was true, her mother was lost and Doodle wanted more than anything to leave that possibility behind, find her way back to the lobby and out to her car, wanted to keep driving until Russell or Angus or even Percy had sorted all this out, wanted to rush home and wrap her daughters in her arms, but she was hemmed in by the storm and no one was coming and she couldn’t have left her mother regardless. She knew that. For now, she would settle for putting a little distance between herself and where she’d been.
She pressed the button for the elevator, waited, pressed it again before remembering that there was no power. Blushed. She found the stairwell around the corner, a rolled-up magazine wedged under the door to keep it open. Red emergency bulbs on the stairs. Two floors down, she thought she smelled cigarette smoke, barely perceptible, like a memory of smoke or an olfactory hallucination brought on by her own craving. These days, it was hard to imagine anybody crass enough or desperate enough to light up in a hospital but the odor kept growing stronger as she descended. Finally, in the basement, she found the police officer from the waiting room sitting on the floor with her back against the wall. Officer Pruitt. Her head was tipped back and she glared at Doodle, down her nose and through a cloud of smoke, as if daring Doodle to tell her to put it out.
“Can I bum one of those?” Doodle said.
Officer Pruitt eyed her a second longer, then lifted her hips to scrounge a pack from the pocket of her trousers. She tapped out a wrinkled cigarette, passed Doodle a lighter.
“I haven’t smoked since I started the academy. Going on four years now. Paid an orderly ten bucks for what was left in his pack.”
“I’ve been trying to quit myself,” Doodle said.
She sat on the steps, lit her cigarette, returned the lighter. That first inhale was exquisite. It had been so long since her last cigarette that this one dizzied her a little. Officer Pruitt tipped her head in the direction of a windowless, metal door, the word MORGUE stenciled there in chipped black letters.
“Nobody down here worried about our smoke,” she said.
“I guess not.”
“My partner’s in there.” She inhaled, exhaled. The smoke hung low between them. “Got himself run over during a traffic stop. Right up on Dauphin Street. He’s at the window writing a ticket when this kid drives by looking at his phone.”
“My mother slipped in the bathroom,” Doodle said.
To Doodle’s amazement, she felt absolutely nothing at these words. She waited, sounding her depths for a rush of emotion that was surely coming, but she was perfectly still inside.
“This place ought to be full of cops,” Officer Pruitt said. “It would be, too, if not for this hurricane. Everybody loved Hildebran.”
She lit another cigarette off the ember of the first, then mashed the first one out on the bottom of her shoe. Doodle considered mentioning her brothers, her husband, how she, too, was all alone. But it didn’t matter. So many stupid ways to live and die. She felt a shift inside herself at the thought, a letting go. It wasn’t that she was any less heartbroken or angry or afraid but she had reached a limit now and was moving into something new.
State troopers had roadblocked the I-65 on-ramps, funneling all traffic north. Percy took a chance on some nameless rural route, thinking that as long as he kept heading south he’d eventually wind up in Mobile. The wind was really blowing now, making the truck veer and shudder, and the rain seemed less like itself than some diabolical invention of the wind. Every couple of miles, his headlights picked out a tree down in the road but he managed each time to creep past on the shoulder or in the other lane. Nothing out here but woods. He should have turned around hours ago but he’d sat there at the gas pump, long after the woman with the birthmark had locked the doors, unable to make himself retreat to Horseshoe Bend.
Mutt whined and scratched the window.
“Trust me,” Percy said. “You don’t wanna stick your head out.”
He was thinking about his father all of a sudden, how he always had a dog up at the camp, always a lab, always well-bred and well trained but half-ruined by the easy life. His father liked to duck hunt and he liked a good dog to hunt with, but his expectations were minimal. If a dog wasn’t gun shy, if it didn’t lose too many ducks in the marsh grass, A.B. Ransom was content. He didn’t care about a dog drinking from the toilet or letting itself up on the couch when the men had relinquished it for the night. He didn’t care much if it chewed his ducks a little on the way back to the blind. His father bought Horseshoe Bend when Percy was three years old and he could remember going up there when Angus was still too young to tag along, just him and his father. The cold, early mornings. Th
e dog shivering in the blind. The mist over the water and the lazy rising of the sun. The way those mornings felt reminded Percy of church. He was not, like other boys, driven to distraction by impatience during a Mass. Even very young, he had a sense, bred into him by his mother, that there was something in the world bigger than his own life. Religion promised the possibility of that mysterious something becoming clear. The problem was that the Mass never lived up to his expectations. The gospel, the homily, the ritual of communion. Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed. Those mornings with his father, on the other hand, they delivered without fail. Perfect quiet for hours, then the voices of the ducks, like distant laughter, then his old man whispering, “OK, boy. Easy now. Here they come.” He might have been talking to Percy or the dog or to himself. It didn’t matter. Then, at last, the thunder of his father’s side-by-side fired in empty woods. Every time.
He couldn’t have been more than thirty miles from the city limits when he came upon a flooded bridge, this nothing creek gone bigheaded with the storm surge, all stirred up, shrugging its banks, rushing over and around the bridge and into the road on either side. Percy inched forward until he could hear the exhaust pipe beginning to gurgle in the water. He stopped and pounded the wheel.
“Fuck my luck,” he said.
He could make out three feet of guardrail, which meant the creek had likely risen only a foot or two higher than the bridge. The bridge itself was only forty feet across. He hadn’t seen another road for half an hour and he didn’t want to backtrack now, not when he was so close. He reversed out of the flood, then eased back in, keeping a gentle but steady pressure on the accelerator. He felt the current right away, trying to float the truck, shoving him toward the rail, the water deeper than he’d guessed. The engine cut out on him halfway. He cursed and turned the key a few times but he knew it was no use.
“Well, Mutt,” he said. Then he said, “Were you aware that the Roe River in Montana is the shortest river in the world? You should know that. That’s your home state.”
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