“Thanks,” says the minister. He glances with some trepidation at the tortoise on the seat behind Mrs. McGinn’s husband before sliding gingerly past it, dropping down across the aisle. Mrs. McGinn’s husband reaches back to pat the tortoise’s shell, then shifts the bus into gear and lurches toward downtown.
He has never liked the feeling of being in motion. He hates the smell of the exhaust, the vibration of the rubber wheel beneath his fingertips. He hates the music on the radio and the sound of the windshield wipers squealing like pigs. Usually he drives with the radio tuned to static and with the windshield wipers off. The rain smashes into the glass and makes it difficult for him to see, but he prefers to have his vision obstructed. The world seems less real.
On Wednesdays Mrs. McGinn’s husband drives the garbage truck, on Thursdays the recycling truck. On other days he drives delivery vans or the town taxi. Nine months of the year he carts the children of the town to a schoolhouse several hills over. The final day of the school year was last week, thank God. The roads were getting worse every day. Sometimes it took him a full two hours to bus the kids there, all of them loud and rowdy the whole way back. These days the bus is empty of children, but packed instead with folding pens, bales of hay, and buckets of feed. When the zoo flooded the zookeeper transferred all the animals’ supplies to a row of storage units downtown, and now it is Mrs. McGinn’s husband who must load up the bus every morning and haul the day’s supplies around to his neighbors’ houses. His skin has begun to stink to high heaven, and when he showers he scours himself with extra-hard brushes and lemon soap. The regularity, the circularity. The driving, the rain, the route. This is it, over and over again: his life.
“So,” he says, his gaze flicking into the rearview mirror. “Nice day for a walk.”
Noah nods.
“What were you doing out there, anyway?”
“Nothing,” says Noah, his gaze hollow. “Walking.”
Mrs. McGinn’s husband grunts. In the mirror he considers Noah’s face—his skin corrugated and sallow; his beard much shaggier than it was when he arrived, his curly hair wild and unkempt. Mrs. McGinn’s husband tries to remember the man as he was only five or six weeks ago, when he appeared with his wife and spoke at the cemetery. He wasn’t like this, anyway; his face was not ravaged with lines of weather and worry. His tone was resonant, his stance secure. He seemed certain of his purpose in this place—and now he goes out wandering for miles with no sense of direction? Mrs. McGinn’s husband shakes his head, unsurprised. Well, well, what do you know—this town has ruined yet another one.
“If I were you, Minister,” he says, feeling good-humored with George by his side and thus more talkative than usual, “I’d walk right on out of this town. Your plans for the church don’t seem to be working out. What the heck is keeping you here?”
Noah remains facing the window, his expression as smooth as stone. “The situation isn’t that simple,” he says.
“For you? Sure it is,” declares Mrs. McGinn’s husband. “You just got here—that means that you’ve got a life somewhere else. Hell, I’d leave in a second if I had a chance. I’ve been itching to get out of here since I was a kid.”
In truth Mrs. McGinn’s husband does not often think of his childhood. And when he does, he rarely remembers his parents’ home, which was full of broken glass and hateful words and hands lifted high, preparing to strike. Those years are a symphony of screams and slamming doors. Instead he remembers the weeks he spent at his grandmother’s house, the summer wind pulling waves over his toes, the cries of gulls as he pelted them with bread crumbs. On the clearest of days he had stayed out on the beach for hours, watching the way that the boats slid over the edge of the horizon and disappeared. He imagined standing on one himself, looking over his shoulder and watching as the shore grew smaller and smaller until the world, now, finally fell over the horizon and vanished beneath the sea.
He never left, of course. Once his brothers grew old enough they were gone, peeling out of the driveway without a single glance in the rearview mirror. He had wanted to leave, too, but if he had taken off, then there would have been no one left to stand between his father and his mother. He was middle-aged when she died—too old to take up sailing, he decided—and so after he helped carry her coffin to the overcrowded cemetery he took a job as a driver. And here he is.
Sometimes when he thinks about the life he had imagined for himself, the universe feels so maddening and unjust that there is nothing for him to do but to lift up an empty bottle from someone else’s trash bin and smash it against the side of his truck. There are moments when he sees his reflection in the window of the recycling truck—short and squat, red-faced, losing hair by the handful—and he thinks about clambering back inside and taking off, never looking back, but then he comes to his senses and tells himself what he already knows: Anytime you try to flee, you will only end up running into yourself. As the poet once wrote: Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.
“You know Latin?” the minister asks, hearing him mutter the motto to himself over the rumbling of the bus engine.
Damn right, he does. There’s a lot that people don’t know about him. He likes to write stories, for one thing—tall tales and mysteries. He used to be a runner, but he won’t run in the rain. Now when he has finished up his driving for the day, he goes down to the basement and slips ships into bottles. He paints the tiny hulls and assembles the tiny masts with a kind of furious patience that his neighbors would not understand, if they ever saw it. This is the closest he will ever come to the ocean.
“What does that phrase mean?” asks Noah. He tries to repeat it. “Caelum—”
Mrs. McGinn’s husband interrupts the minister before the man can butcher it. “It means that men are trapped,” he says. “It means that no matter how far you go, you’ll always be stuck with yourself.”
The truck rumbles through a pothole and both men grab at the dashboard while water sprays in waves outside the windows. Mrs. McGinn’s husband swears and heaves the steering wheel to the right. He had never wanted to be a truck driver or—for that matter—any other sort of driver. He had never wanted to be the kind of person who knocks over mailboxes on purpose, the kind of person who throws cereal at people he loves or smashes plates against kitchen walls. He had vowed that this was exactly who he would not become.
“Is that why you stay?” asks Noah, his voice so deep that Mrs. McGinn’s husband must strain to hear the question.
He shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I stay because of Evelyn. That’s what sets me apart from all those jackasses she married before: I wouldn’t leave her. Not for anything. Every man needs something to set himself apart, doesn’t he, Minister?” He chuckles bitterly, guiding the bus through downtown to the parsonage, ignoring the elk that stands between the pillars of the old post office and the toucans winging through the drowning trees. “But I’ll tell you, it’s not an easy life in this place. Every day is a battle.”
“And leaving,” says Noah, “is an admission of defeat.” For a minute or two they ride in silence. Then Noah asks, slowly: “What if you told your wife how you really felt?”
Mrs. McGinn’s husband can see the minister’s house now, and the lights that his wife has lit in every window. “She’d see it as a betrayal,” he states. “And within ten minutes, she’d be out the door. She’s fallen out of love plenty of times before.”
He pulls up to the front door, tires crackling on the driveway gravel. The house looks crumbling and forlorn, the paint peeling from its siding, the white shades in the windows yellowed with age, the rain falling in curtains from the eaves. The minister’s wife appears at the front door, a red fox cradled in her arms with its white-tipped tail hanging down to her waist.
For half a minute Noah remains seated where he is, gazing at his wife. “Jackson,” he says quietly. He stands up and stumbles toward the driver’s seat, pausing on the stair before descending to the ground. “Do you ever wish that you were not yourself?”
His life is like a ship in a bottle: the promise of movement, the dream of wind. All the journeys that could have been, lined up one after another on the plywood boards of his homemade bookshelves.
When all is said and done, he is not a bad man. He could be a better husband, a better father. But no one else here knows how it is to be confined within the invisible walls of an unhappy family history. The philosopher in Mrs. McGinn’s husband believes that we are born into a certain temperament the way we are born into a certain place or time.
When he finally returns home, he settles George into the garage before he walks into the house. Mrs. McGinn sticks her head out of the kitchen and asks him something, but he ignores her and heads straight for the stairs. Once he reaches the workbench, he hears the slam of cupboard doors in the kitchen, the clatter of copper measuring cups. A few minutes later the thud of his wife’s fists in the dough sends vibrations through the legs of the kitchen table to the floor.
Can a man fight his fate? he asks himself, lifting down his box of tools. He shakes his head. No, it isn’t possible.
All he can do is build another ship, slip it into another bottle, and set it on the shelf in the place that has been left for it.
nineteen
The weatherman has never possessed much of a talent for prediction.
He has, in fact, never been one to place much stock in the whole idea of prediction, or of expectation in general. Why expect, and be disappointed? he would ask himself. Why try to determine today where you will be tomorrow, who will be with you, where you will go? Where is the adventure in that?
He has spent most of his adult life on the road. He makes no promises, establishes no ties. The job with the weather service is one he has held for over a decade now, and most of the time he loves it. He likes flitting from one city to the next, monitoring winds and tracking severe weather patterns, pursuing storms with the same passion and dedication that other men display in pursuit of women or wealth. The weatherman, for the record, has never needed to pursue women. He is persuasive, charming. Impossible to resist.
Or at least that is what he has been in the past. He has never encountered a town as defiant or as pigheaded as this one.
He believes that if he can only gather the citizens together to hear his warnings, he will have no trouble convincing them to evacuate. And once that is done, he can return to the city in triumph, his job secure and his name cleared of disgrace. He is growing tired of this particular task: tired of the rain, of the citizens’ despair. He hardens his heart and grits his teeth and does his job, but the truth is that he does not relish commanding people to box up their lives and leave all they’ve ever known behind them. No one is ever pleased to see him coming.
Even today, the townspeople scowl at him when he enters the general store. They congregate near the mops and the sponges, most of them nursing some kind of bruise or bite, and all of them eyeing Mauro’s birds with trepidation. Mauro, unaware of their baleful stares, whistles while he arranges olives and cheese slices on a plate and sets it on a makeshift table he has constructed out of cardboard boxes and packing crates. He has been in a markedly better mood since taking in the peacocks, who follow him around the store with their broken wings pinned to their sides. The wary eyes of the storks and the cranes peer between the shelves.
The weatherman presides over the proceedings with an air of mingled incredulity and condescension. He towers above the townspeople on a sturdy metal step stool. In the second row a man is sitting opposite a birdcage. A few seats down from him, a woman perches on a folding chair with a box beside her, and the weatherman starts when he sees a paw poking out from the holes she has punched into the cardboard. He watches her stuff pieces of her sandwich into the box and then he hears the sound of animal teeth ripping through the bread.
He tries to catch the eye of the minister’s wife as she enters, but she avoids his gaze and herds her husband to an empty row near the back. Noah settles down among his neighbors and sits stiffly in place, one eye on the flamingo where she stalks among the lawn ornaments in the corner. His wife is pale and cool beside him.
“Listen,” says the weatherman, once everyone has gathered. A peacock shrieks and Mauro hums a lullaby. “We need to talk about what’s going on in this place.” He flings his hand toward the window, directing their attention outside, where the sky is churning violet and the rain is pelting down into the streets.
“It pours when it rains!” exclaims Mauro with disconcerting alacrity. He eats two olives and smiles at the group arranged around him in an attempt at camaraderie. “Isn’t it nice when we are all together like this? We should be doing this more often.”
The weatherman ignores the interruption. “I’ve been to the other towns in the hills,” he continues. “It’s even worse here than it was there, and most of them have already left. You’re no safer than they are. You need an evacuation plan. Let’s talk facts: dates, times, locations. How early can you leave? Where will you go?”
“Rabble-rouser,” mutters Mrs. McGinn.
“We’re not evacuating,” declares the zookeeper. He stands up, turns around to speak directly to his neighbors. “What would you do with the animals? We’ve got a responsibility to them. We made a promise. We’ve got to stay put until the water recedes in the zoo.”
“Don’t be so daft,” says the weatherman with a short laugh. “You mean those tigers you’ve got displayed in the windows? The penguins in the diner? That certainly can’t be a reason to stay. It was a stupid idea to begin with, and it’s a stupid idea now.”
“Adam,” says Mrs. McGinn’s daughter, tugging at his sleeve. “Please sit down.”
“Angela Rose!” exclaims Mrs. McGinn. “You can’t honestly be siding with this man.”
“You know,” says Mauro, “where I come from there is a whole town that is living on the water, with bridges and boats and the people there are not so worried as all of you. The people there are not always talking about staying or going. They are just staying. They are enjoying riding on the ferry. People are coming from all over the world to ride on their ferry!”
“Mauro, we don’t have a ferry,” someone snaps.
“That’s no problem!” exclaims Mauro. “We build one!”
There is a sudden roar of indignation, and the weatherman spends several minutes trying to restore order by pounding his hammer on a crate and grimacing at his audience. “Settle down!” he shouts. “Settle down!”
But they will not settle down, and the sound of his voice in their fray only incenses them further. What does he know of their town, he who only arrived with the rain? He can have no idea of what it was like before, when blue skies slid between the mountains and the trees bloomed silky and full. He has not fallen asleep on the warm and grassy banks of the river, as they have; he has not stayed until the golden light of dusk to see the sun topple over the far side of the western hills. This was once a beautiful place. Wildflowers sprouted between cracks in the sidewalk and people grew tomatoes and basil in their gardens. They raised their children here; they buried their dead. How can he expect them to turn their backs on all that, to give up on this town the way the rest of the world has given up on them?
“Listen!” bellows Noah, taking advantage of a sudden lull. His neighbors turn to stare. He clears his throat and rises slowly to his feet while his wife looks up in astonishment. “There comes a time in all of our lives when we must be tested,” the minister declares. He strides out into the aisle and paces up and down the rows of chairs, warming now to his speech, seeming to enjoy the fact of so many pairs of eyes upon him. It has been a long time. “A time when we are forced to ask ourselves whether the beliefs we have always cherished are true, in fact, or false; when for no apparent reason, through no fault of our own, we realize that suddenly we stand to lose everything that we once held so dear.
“The question, my friends, at a crossroad
like this one, is the following: are we to cling to the lives we have always known, fighting to regain the ground we have lost? Or do we leave those former lives behind, abandon the selves and the world we once knew, and start all over again?” He pauses, his jaw hanging slack, his expression suddenly blank. “We keep moving on, hoping that there is something better out there in the next town, or tomorrow. But maybe there isn’t. What if the next town is just as gray, in its own way?”
There is a brief silence after he has finished speaking, when he stops pacing and freezes in place. Once again, the townspeople erupt.
“Are you kidding?” several voices demand at once. “What does that even mean?”
“Pretty words,” grunts Mrs. McGinn’s husband. “How the hell does that help us?”
The librarian scoffs and points. “How are we supposed to take this man seriously when he’s got dirt on his face and twigs in his beard?”
The weatherman looks at the minister more closely. Indeed—what she says about him is true. Noah’s cheeks turn crimson and he quickly combs at the sticks and the leaves in his hair, but it is too late. The rest of his neighbors are rising now, and he ducks into a different aisle. The weatherman looks at Noah’s wife, who has been sitting throughout this scene with her gray gaze fixed upon her husband. When he disappears behind the canned goods, a peculiar expression flits across her face—there and gone before the weatherman has a chance to decipher it.
Mrs. McGinn stands. “The rain is lightening,” she declares. “The weather is already better than it was.”
“Is that right?” retorts the weatherman, gearing up for his final grenade. “I don’t think so. Your zoo is already underwater. The river is rising. The puddles are growing wider and deeper. The trees are losing their leaves, and the plants that were alive two weeks ago are dead.”
“That’s not true,” mutter the townspeople. “You’re making it sound worse than it is.”
“It is true!” he exclaims. “And I’ve got the evidence to prove it.” He throws out an extravagant arm to turn their attention to Noah’s wife, the evidence packed into a handbag at her feet. He will show them how, in the lower parts of town and the areas that have already been abandoned, the pools in front yards have begun creeping up mossy porches. He took pictures of the water coursing through gutters, of the buckets set out to collect leaks in shops and storefronts. He will show them the places where the telephone wires are leaning dangerously close to houses, where the force of the wind and the rain has broken windows, tossed mailboxes to the ground. She should have his print of the town cemetery, the headstones crooked and loose as if the water table has risen so high that it is beginning to push them up and out of the ground. The images will frighten them, and they should be frightened. By forcing them to face the reality of their situation, the weatherman will ensure that they are gone by tomorrow morning.
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