“You stupid sonofabitch,” Uncle Cooter said, “you got me by the goddamn head.”
9:05 P.m.
Captain Slater thought they would be at the bottom of the Gulf by now, and was greatly surprised they were not. A great wave of water had hit them so hard the night before it had snapped the anchor chain. The ship was driven down, way down, and then all the water in the world washed over them and there was total darkness and horror, and then, what seemed like hours later but could only have been seconds, the water broke and the Pensacola flew high up as if shot from a cannon, came down again, leaned starboard so far it took water, then, miraculously, corrected itself. The sea had been choppy and wild ever since.
Slater shook shit and seawater out of his pants legs and followed the rope around his waist to the support post. He got hold of the post, felt for the rest of the rope. In the darkness, he cried out, “Bernard. You there?”
“I think so,” came Bernard’s voice from the darkness. And then they heard a couple of bolts pop free, fire off like rifle blasts. Then: “Oh, Jesus,” Bernard said. “Feel that swell? Here it comes again.”
Slater turned his head and looked out. There was nothing but a great wall of blackness moving toward them. It made the first wave seem like a mere rise; this one was bigger than the Great Wall of China.
10:00 P.m.
Bill and Angelique lay on the bed with Teddy. The water was washing over the edges of the feather mattress, blowing wet, cold wind over them. They had started the Edison and a gospel record had been playing, but the wind and rain had finally gotten into the mechanism and killed it.
As it went dead, the far wall cracked and leaned in and a ripple of cracking lumber went across the floor and the ceiling sagged and so did the bed. Bess suddenly disappeared through a hole in the floor. One moment she was there, the next she was gone, beneath the water.
Bill grabbed Angelique by the arm, pulled her to her feet in the knee-deep water. She held Teddy close to her. He pulled them across the room as the floor shifted, pulled them through the door that led onto the unfinished deck, stumbled over a hammer that lay beneath the water, but managed to keep his feet.
Bill couldn’t help but think of all the work he had put in on this deck. Now it would never be finished. He hated to leave anything unfinished. He hated worse that it was starting to lean.
There was one central post that seemed to stand well enough, and they took position behind that. The post was one of several that the house was built around; a support post to lift the house above the normal rise of water. It connected bedroom to deck.
Bill tried to look through the driving rain. All he could see was water. Galveston was covered by the sea. It had risen up and swallowed the city and the island.
The house began to shake violently. They heard lumber splintering, felt it shimmying. The deck swayed more dynamically.
“We’re not going to make it, are we, Bill?” Angelique said.
“No, darling. We aren’t.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
He held her and kissed her. She said, “It doesn’t matter, you and I. But Teddy. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand. God, why Teddy? He’s only a baby . . . How do I drown, darling?”
“One deep breath and it’s over. Just one deep pull of the water, and don’t fight it.”
Angelique started to cry. Bill squatted, ran his hand under the water and over the deck. He found the hammer. It was lodged in its spot because it was caught in a gap in the unfinished deck. Bill brought the hammer out. There was a big nail sticking out of the main support post. He had driven it there the day before, to find it easily enough. It was his last big nail and it was his intent to save it.
He used the claw of the hammer to pull it out. He looked at Angelique. “We can give Teddy a chance.”
Angelique couldn’t see Bill well in the darkness, but she somehow felt what his face was saying. “Oh, Bill.”
“It’s a chance.”
“But . . .”
“We can’t stand against this, but the support post—”
“Oh Lord, Bill,” and Angelique sagged, holding Teddy close to her chest. Bill grabbed her shoulders, said, “Give me my son.”
Angelique sobbed, then the house slouched far to the right—except for the support post. All the other supports were washing loose, but so far, this one hadn’t budged.
Angelique gave Teddy to Bill. Bill kissed the child, lifted him as high on the post as he could, pushed the child’s back against the wood, and lifted its arm. Angelique was suddenly there, supporting the baby. Bill kissed her. He took the hammer and the nail, and placing the nail squarely against Teddy’s little wrist, drove it through the child’s flesh with one swift blow.
Then the storm blew more furious and the deck turned to gelatin. Bill clutched Angelique, and Angelique almost managed to say, “Teddy,” then all the powers of nature took them and the flimsy house away.
High above it all, water lapping around the post, Teddy, wet and cold, squalled with pain.
Bess surfaced among lumber and junk. She began to paddle her legs furiously, snorting water. A nail on a board cut across her muzzle, opening a deep gash. The horse nickered, thrashed her legs violently, lifted her head, trying to stay afloat.
SundaY, SePtemBer 9, 4:00 a.m.
The mechanism that revolved the Bolivar lighthouse beam had stopped working. The stairs that led up to the lighthouse had gradually filled with people fleeing the storm, and as the water rose, so did the people. One man with a young boy had come in last, and therefore was on the constantly rising bottom rung. He kept saying, “Move up. Move up, lessen’ you want to see a man and his boy drown.” And everyone would move up. And then the man would soon repeat his refrain as the water rose.
The lighthouse was becoming congested. The lighthouse tower had begun to sway. The lighthouse operator, Jim Marlin, and his wife, Elizabeth, lit the kerosene lamp and placed it in the center of the circular, magnifying lens, and tried to turn the beam by hand. They wanted someone to know there was shelter here, even though it was overcrowded, and might soon cease to exist. The best thing to do was to douse the light and hope they could save those who were already there, and save themselves. But Jim and Elizabeth couldn’t do that. Elizabeth said, “Way I see it, Jim. It’s all or nothing, and the good Lord would want it that way. I want it that way.”
All night long they had heard screams and cries for help, and once, when the lighthouse beam was operating, they had seen a young man clinging to a timber. When the light swung back to where the young man had been, he had vanished.
Now, as they tried to turn the light by hand, they found it was too much of a chore. Finally, they let it shine in one direction, and there in the light they saw a couple of bodies being dragged by a large patch of canvas from which dangled ropes, like jellyfish tentacles. The ropes had grouped and twisted around the pair, and the canvas seemed to operate with design, folded and opened like a pair of great wings, as if it were an exotic sea creature bearing them off to a secret lair where they could be eaten in privacy.
Neither Jim nor Elizabeth Marlin knew the bloated men tangled in the ropes together; had no idea they were named Ronald Beems and Forrest Thomas.
5:00 a.m.
A crack of light. Dawn. Jim and Elizabeth had fallen asleep leaning against the base of the great light, and at the first ray of sunshine, they awoke, saw a ship’s bow at the lighthouse window, and standing at the bow, looking in at them, was a bedraggled man in uniform, and he was crying savagely.
Jim went to the window. The ship had been lifted up on great piles of sand and lumber. Across the bow he could see the letters PENSACOLA. The man was leaning against the glass. He wore a captain’s hat. He held out his hand, palm first. Jim put his hand to the glass, trying to match the span of the crying captain’s hand.
Behind the captain a number of wet men appeared. When they saw the lighthouse they fell to their knees and lifted their heads t
o the heavens in prayer, having forgotten that it was in fact the heavens that had devastated them.
6:00 a.m.
The day broke above the shining water, and the water began to go down, rapidly, and John McBride sat comfortably on the great hour hand of what was left of the City Hall clock. He sat there with his arms wrapped around debris that dangled from the clock. In the night, a huge spring mechanism had jumped from the face of the clock and hit him a glancing blow in the head, and for a moment, McBride had thought he was still battling the nigger. He wasn’t sure which was worse to fight. The hurricane or the nigger. But through the night, he had become grateful for the spring to hold on to.
Below him he saw much of what was left of the Sporting Club, including the lockers where he had put his belongings. The whole damn place had washed up beneath the clock tower.
McBride used his teeth to work off the binds of his boxing gloves and slip his hands free. All through the night the gloves had been a burden. He feared his lack of grip would cause him to fall. It felt good to have his hands out of the tight, wet leather.
McBride ventured to take hold of the minute hand of the clock, swing on it a little, and cause it to lower him onto a pile of rubble. He climbed over lumber and junk and found a mass of bloated bodies, men, women, and children, most of them sporting shingles that had cut into their heads and bodies. He searched their pockets for money and found none, but one of the women—he could tell it was a woman by her hair and dress only, her features were lost in the fleshy swelling of her face—had a ring. He tried to pull it off her finger, but it wouldn’t come off. The water had swollen her flesh all around it.
He sloshed his way to the pile of lockers. He searched through them until he found the one where he had put his clothes. They were so filthy with mud, he left them. But he got the razor and the revolver. The revolver was full of grit. He took out the shells and shook them and put them back.
He stuck the gun in his soaked boxing trunks. He opened the razor and shook out the silt and went over to the woman and used the razor to cut off her finger. The blade cut easily through the flesh, and he whacked through the bone. He pushed the ring on his little finger, closed the razor, and slipped it into the waistband of his trunks, next to his revolver.
This was a hell of a thing to happen. He had hidden his money back at the whorehouse, and he figured it and the plump madam were probably far at sea, the madam possibly full of harpoon wounds.
And the shitasses who were to pay him were now all choked, including the main one, the queer Beems. And if they weren’t, they were certainly no longer men of means.
This had been one shitty trip. No clothes. No money. No whipped nigger. And no more pussy. He’d come with more than he was leaving with.
What the hell else could go wrong?
He decided to wade toward the whorehouse, see if it was possibly standing, maybe find some bodies along the way to loot—something to make up for his losses.
As he started in that direction, he saw a dog on top of a doghouse float by. The dog was chained to the house and the chain had gotten tangled around some floating rubble and it had pulled the dog flat against the roof. It lifted its eyes and saw McBride, barked wearily for help. McBride determined it was well within pistol shot.
McBride lifted the revolver and pulled the trigger. It clicked, but nothing happened. He tried again, hoping against hope. It fired this time and the dog took a blast in the skull and rolled off the house, and hung by the chain, then sailed out of sight.
McBride said, “Poor thing.”
7:03 a.m.
The water was falling away rapidly, returning to the sea, leaving in its wake thousands of bodies and the debris that had once been Galveston. The stench was awful. Jack and Cooter, who had spent the night in a child’s tree house, awoke, amazed they were alive.
The huge oak tree they were in was stripped of leaves and limbs, but the tree house was unharmed. It was remarkable. They had washed right up to it, just climbed off the lumber to which they had been clinging, and went inside. It was dry in there, and they found three hard biscuits in a tin and three hot bottles of that good ole Waco, Texas, drink, Dr Pepper. There was a phone on the wall, but it was a fake, made of lumber and tin cans. Jack had the urge to try it, as if it might be a line to God, for surely, it was God who had brought them here.
Cooter had helped Jack remove his gloves, then they ate the biscuits, drank a bottle of Dr Pepper apiece, then split the last bottle and slept.
When it was good and light, they decided to climb down. The ladder, a series of boards nailed to the tree, had washed away, but they made it to the ground by sliding down like firemen on a pole.
When they reached the earth, they started walking, sloshing through the mud and water that had rolled back to ankle-deep. The world they had known was gone. Galveston was a wet mulch of bloated bodies— humans, dogs, mules, and horses—and mashed lumber. In the distance they saw a bedraggled family walking along like ducks in a row. Jack recognized them. He had seen them around town. They were Issac Cline, his brother Joseph, Issac’s wife and children. He wondered if they knew where they were going, or were they like him and Cooter, just out there? He decided on the latter.
Jack and Cooter decided to head for higher ground, back uptown. Soon they could see the tower of City Hall, in sad shape but still standing, the clock having sprung a great spring. It poked from the face of the mechanism like a twisted, metal tongue.
They hadn’t gone too far toward the tower when they encountered a man coming toward them. He was wearing shorts and shoes like Jack and was riding a chocolate-brown mare bareback. He had looped a piece of frayed rope around the horse’s muzzle and was using that as a primitive bridle. His hair was combed to perfection. It was McBride.
“Shit,” Cooter said. “Ain’t this somethin’? Well, Jack, you take care, I gonna be seein’ you.”
“Asshole,” Jack said.
Cooter put his hands in his pockets and turned right, headed over piles of junk and bodies on his way to who knew where.
McBride spotted Jack, yelled, “You somethin’, nigger. A hurricane can’t even drown you.”
“You neither,” Jack said. They were within twenty feet of one another now. Jack could see the revolver and the razor in McBride’s waistband. The horse, a beautiful animal with a deep cut on its muzzle, suddenly buckled and lay down with its legs folded beneath it, dropped its head into the mud.
McBride stepped off the animal, said, “Can you believe that? God-damn horse survived all this and it can’t carry me no ways at all.”
McBride pulled his pistol and shot the horse through the head. It rolled over gently, lay on its side without so much as one last heave of its belly. McBride turned back to Jack. The revolver lay loose in his hand. He said, “Had it misfired, I’d have had to beat that horse to death with a board. I don’t believe in animals suffering. Gun’s been underwater, and it’s worked two out of three. Can you believe that?”
“That horse would have been all right,” Jack said.
“Nah, it wouldn’t,” McBride said. “Why don’t you shake it, see if it’ll come around?” McBride pushed the revolver into the waistband of his shorts. “How’s about you and me? Want to finish where we left off?”
“You got to be jokin’,” Jack said.
“You hear me laughin’?”
“I don’t know about you, peckerwood, but I feel like I been in a hurricane, then swam a few miles in boxing gloves, then slept all night in a tree house and had biscuits and Dr Pepper for breakfast.”
“I ain’t even had no breakfast, nigger. Listen here. I can’t go home not knowing I can whip you or not. Hell, I might never get home. I
want to know I can take you. You want to know.”
“Yeah. I do. But I don’t want to fight no pistol and razor.”
McBride removed the pistol and razor from his trunks, found a dry spot and put them there. He said, “Come on.”
“Where?”
&n
bsp; “Here’s all we got.”
Jack turned and looked. He could see a slight rise of dirt beyond the piles of wreckage. A house had stood there. One of its great support poles was still visible.
“Over there,” Jack said.
They went over there and found a spot about the size of a boxing ring. Down below them on each side were heaps of bodies and heaps of gulls on the bodies, scrambling for soft flesh and eyeballs. McBride studied the bodies, what was left of Galveston, turned to Jack, said, “Fuck the rules.”
They waded into each other, bare knuckle. It was obvious after only moments that they were exhausted. They were throwing hammers, not punches, and the sounds of their strikes mixed with the caws and cries of the gulls. McBride ducked his head beneath Jack’s chin, drove it up. Jack locked his hands behind McBride’s neck, kneed him in the groin.
They rolled on the ground and in the mud, then came apart. They regained their feet and went at it again. Then the sounds of their blows and the shrieks of the gulls were overwhelmed by a cry so unique and savage, they ceased punching.
“Time,” Jack said.
“What in hell is that?” McBride said.
They walked toward the sound of the cry, leaned on the great support post. Once a fine house had stood here, and now, there was only this. McBride said, “I don’t know about you, nigger, but I’m one tired sonofabitch.”
The cry came again. Above him. He looked up. A baby was nailed near the top of the support. Its upraised, nailed arm was covered in caked blood. Gulls were flapping around its head, making a kind of halo.
“I’ll be goddamned,” Jack said. “Boost me, McBride.”
“What?”
“Boost me.”
“You got to be kidding.”
Jack lifted his leg. McBride sighed, made a stirrup with his cupped hands, and Jack stood, got hold of the post and worked his way painfully up. At the bottom, McBride picked up garbage and hurled it at the gulls.
Stories (2011) Page 48