by Joan Brady
‘You okay?’ Boss said to Lamar’s replacement.
‘What was that?’
‘Pinhole leak.’
A tiny hole in a pressurized hose can release fluid at close to the muzzle velocity of a gun. At that speed, a thin stream of liquid becomes a hypodermic needle, goes straight through clothing, through the skin and drives into the muscle tissue itself. Sometimes gangrene and amputation result; that’s how the one-armed man had ended up with only one arm.
Lamar’s replacement stared at his hat with a dazed expression on his face. ‘It’s broke.’
Boss paid no attention. He was examining the gauges on the stainless-steel box. He wasn’t sure how far the dials had shifted, only that they weren’t where they had been. ‘Fuck it,’ he said as soon as the one-armed man reappeared, dripping with rain and breathing heavily from his dash. ‘I got no idea how to recalibrate this thing. Do you?’
The one-armed man studied the gauges himself, shook his head. ‘Can’t make that much difference, can it?’
Boss studied the dials a moment longer, then shrugged. ‘What the fuck do I care if it does? Turn the pressure back on.’
36
SPRINGFIELD: Thursday
‘Miss Helen! You upstairs? Miss Helen!’
It was four in the morning. Helen had taken a double dose of Becky’s sleeping pills; she’d slept through those claps of thunder even though they’d shaken the windows. She’d slept through the wind shaking the whole house, the rain bucketing down, even the hailstones that hit the copper roof like an avalanche.
‘Come on, girl.’ Lillian had hold of her shoulders, shaking hard. ‘We ain’t got much time.’
‘David?’ Helen was still asleep.
‘Miss Helen Freyl. You wake up.’ Lillian shook harder. ‘You hear me? Wake up!’
‘Where’s David?’
‘Well, he ain’t laying here now, is he? Wake up!’ Lillian was already threading Helen’s arms into a sweatshirt as she used to do when Helen was no more than three years old.
‘What’s . ’ Helen stumbled as she tried to get into underwear. ‘I want David. Where is—?’ She was abruptly awake, abruptly terrified out of her sleep just as she’d been a week ago and for the same reasons. ‘Where is he?’ The postcard: why hadn’t she destroyed it? Was it still in her pocket? Could she have dropped it somewhere? In the street? No, no. Wouldn’t matter if she had. No address. No salutation. No signature. Nobody could make anything out of it but her, and she wouldn’t have made anything of it herself if she hadn’t found it at Aloysia’s house. She’d overlooked something else. That had to be what’d happened, and the police had found it, whatever it was. ‘Oh, my God’ – she clutched Lillian’s arm – ‘have they arrested him already? What’s the charge?’
‘Shush up, girl. He’s waiting outside.’ Lillian knelt down, slipped one boot on Helen’s foot while Helen fumbled with the other. As Lillian opened the outside door, she took hold of Helen’s arm. ‘Hang on, sugar. It’s bad out there.’
Everything whipped, the rain so hard that Helen could hardly breathe, the wind so strong and the water covering the parking lot outside so gusty that she could stay upright only by clinging to Lillian. They sloshed together towards a mud-spattered truck. Lillian bundled her in it beside David at the wheel.
‘Have they issued a warrant?’ Helen demanded of him as Lillian crawled up beside her. He didn’t glance at her, just let the hand-brake off. The racket of the downpour on the truck’s roof was so loud that it was hard to hear anything else. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ she went on in a moan. ‘Why did you steal this truck? It’s an Isuzu. Even I could spot it.’
‘Trusting, isn’t she?’ David said to Lillian.
‘Fuck it all, David—’ What Helen saw in the headlights stopped her mid-sentence.
The road from her apartment curved around to the sweep of lawns and flowerbeds in front of Freyl House. But the truck’s headlights scanned through a break in the downpour, and she gasped at the sight. No sweeping lawns. Not any more. No Gerber daisies. Not even a stately sunflower.
The famous Freyl gardens were a lake.
‘Where’s Grandma?’ Her voice shook. ‘I want Grandma.’
‘We got her safe before we come for you,’ Lillian said.
David eased the truck into the water and began a slow crossing to the private road on the other side and the public street beyond that.
The ground around Springfield is flat; its height doesn’t vary more than a few feet, lower in the west, higher in the east. Donna Stevenson’s house was a little east of the Freyl property.
She woke just after dawn and a dream of Niagara Falls; she stretched out in her bed, luxuriated in the sound a moment, then bolted for the window. The wind shook the floor beneath her. The rain battered so heavily against the glass that she couldn’t see anything outside. Absolutely nothing. Not so far as the tree in front of her own house.
It was the smell that got her to start down the stairs. She knew at once what it was. Sewage. Broken mains. People in Kansas and Missouri had broken mains in a storm a year or so ago. That storm had made headlines all over, so severe that they’d even coined a new name for it. She strained to remember it, panicked because she couldn’t, panicked again as she got halfway down the stairs and could see her front door.
Dirty water hid the floor of the hallway that led to it as well as the antique Aubusson carpet that Becky had helped her order from Paris – maybe an inch deep, maybe two – an even, semi-reflective, brown-tan surface, nothing visible beneath. She ran back upstairs for her mobile: ‘No service’. She tried the landline. It was dead.
At least she didn’t have to worry about her novel. She always took a hard copy to her bedroom so she could spend the first hour of the morning on it. She shut the door against the smell, curled up on the bed with her pages, tried to concentrate, failed, ended up on the stairs with a washcloth over her nose to keep out the smell while she watched water creep up over the legs of the sofa that her father called ‘the Lincoln sofa’ because family legend said Abraham Lincoln had once sat on it.
Only a few blocks further east, Allan and Ruth Madison were better prepared. Much better prepared. Allan Madison, President of the First National Bank of Springfield, was a figure of weight in the town, if something of a pedant at home. He clucked over pictures out of alignment, read Consumer Reports cover to cover, listened to Weather Radio All Hazards every day and insulated himself, his wife Ruth and his house against every threat he could think of.
Unlike Donna, he remembered the name they’d given to the storm in June of 2011. First they’d called it an ‘inland hurricane’, then they’d upgraded it to a ‘derecho’. The word means straight in Spanish; it’s a thunderstorm as widespread, long-lived and violent as a hurricane, but where hurricanes swirl in a circle with a hole in the middle, a derecho cuts across countryside as straight as a road through Kansas. They’d shown weather maps with red and green areas; they’d said that this derecho showed ‘a bow-echo on radar, an inflow notch and a bookend vortex’. Allan had no idea how to interpret those phrases but he had no trouble understanding winds of close to a hundred miles an hour, and he could guess all too easily what an ‘eye wall’ thirty miles across might mean. He’d gone out at once and bought flood pumps that could get rid of seven thousand gallons of water an hour.
When he’d heard the forecast last night, he and Ruth had set up the pumps and barricaded the doors with sandbags. He’d woken at midnight to thunder and gone back to sleep, pleased with his foresight. Nor was he alarmed at water still bucketing out of the sky in the morning. In the bathroom, he turned the tap. It gurgled. Then it spat. Then it spewed out sewage. The toilet struggled to fill its tank with more filthy water. That did not please him, but his prescience had covered the eventuality; he’d stocked the attic with cases of bottled water.
‘Ruth!’ he called out, knowing she’d have discovered the dirty water too and gone straight to the attic.
‘Cold coffee this mor
ning.’ She stood in the bathroom doorway, but she had to shout over the roar of the wind.
‘Oh?’
‘No electricity.’
That did not please him either. But he’d bought a camping stove, containers of gas, batteries in all sizes. He and Ruth listened to the news while they drank the only pot of hot coffee in the entire neighbourhood.
‘. not just a derecho but a super -derecho.’ The newscaster’s voice was strained, excited, tired, scared. ‘We have winds of more than a hundred miles an hour. Flash floods all over the west side of Springfield. Sewage mains broken. That means the west side’s water supply is contaminated again. Listen to me, folks. DO NOT DRINK the water unless you can boil it. Not easy when you don’t have electricity. The city is rushing out supplies of purification tablets, but until we get them to you, drink only bottled water or Coke.’
Despite his irritation at the inconvenience, Allan gave Ruth a satisfied glance. ‘What a good banker God is,’ he said.
‘Really?’ Nothing bored her more than bankers.
‘Most of the bank’s investments are on the east side. You know, I think we own more than seventy per cent of Springfield’s low-cost housing.’
At ten in the morning, the storm stopped. Just like that. Wind and rain just shut off as though somebody had flicked a switch on a movie set.
Donna looked out of her bedroom window. The even, semi-reflective, brown-tan surface that hid her ground floor, hid all the ground outside. Houses floated in it as calm and placid as plastic ducks in a baby’s bath. Hedges and bushes cut out irregular shapes in the water and tree branches floated peacefully. She watched a full-sized oil can drift past, then a couple of spare tyres and a bathtub. A dog paddled across.
Down in her living room, the water had reached the knees of the Lincoln sofa; from it, she gauged the street at a depth of six inches. When she was a Girl Scout, she’d received one of the few river-fishing merit badges in the county; she figured she could handle a puddle like that. She pulled on some boots, sloshed through her house and out to the garage. She’d had a struggle with her conscience before giving way to her passion for a Hummer; the water barely reached the hubcaps of her 4-wheel-drive beloved. She started the engine, turned on the radio.
The newscaster reported the warnings that the Madisons had heard a couple of hours earlier, and then went on, ‘The Sangamon River, the Sugar, the Spring, the Horse: they’ve all burst their banks. The streets are extremely dangerous, especially on the west side. Surface water may look calm, but you can’t see the undercurrents. Undertows can sweep you away before you know it. DO NOT GO OUT OF YOUR HOUSE.’
Donna put the Hummer in gear, eased it into the street and began to ford her way south towards Schnucks, Springfield’s most elegant supermarket. The route was slow and painful; the Hummer slid off course if she tried to go as fast as five miles an hour. Trees were down. Some leaned against lamp-posts. Wiggins Avenue was impassable. So was Cherry Road. But Willemore was the real shock. She’d always liked Willemore, even thought of moving there. It wasn’t even a street any more. It was a rapids. Tan-brown water boiled down it; chunks of wood, boxes, planks of flooring, tangles of wire, newspapers, twigs bobbed in it as they swept past her. She headed towards the Shop ’n Save on Wabash instead, not a patch on Schnucks, but it was further east, higher up. Water levels dropped as she approached. By the time she got there, sun glistened off puddles in an entirely visible parking lot.
And the parking lot was packed. The store inside was even more packed. The soft drinks aisle was so solid with people that she couldn’t even see the shelves, and when she got to them, all that was left was twenty yards of emptiness and a single quart of Pepsi. She was oddly pleased; she’d rather liked Pepsi when she was a child. All the fresh milk was gone. So were the fruit juices.
‘What are we supposed to drink?’ she demanded of the checkout.
‘Got any cash on you?’
‘Why?’
‘Lot of businesses setting up in the parking lot.’
‘Already?’
The check-out gave her a crooked smile. ‘Springfield’s a town of enterprising people.’
Outside, the day was heating up. Steam rose from the damp tarmac. A row of cars waited at the edge of the parking lot with open doors, seats filled with bottles of water and soft drinks.
‘How much?’ Donna asked a bald man sitting in a station wagon.
‘Coke’s ten bucks a quart. Water’s five.’
She laughed. ‘You can’t mean that, can you?’
‘You don’t like it, go somewhere else.’
Next to him was a woman with a price of ten bucks for Evian. Donna finally found a kid willing to part with Pepsi for six. She bought two more quarts, feeling bullied and idiotic as she handed over the money. By the time she got back home, there’d been no rain for nearly three hours, and the water level had dropped enough so that tufts of the carpet were just beginning to reappear. She got out the bottle of Pepsi, swallowed some of it, filled the bottle up with bourbon, and sat on the stairs to drink it as she watched the water recede.
During the afternoon, ground emerged all over a sodden and debris-strewn west side.
The copper roof at the Freyl property still gave off its warm verdigris glow, and the walls still stood firm, but the gardens were a city dump: a landscape of car tyres, plastic bags of rubbish spilling out garbage, an orange plastic chair from some far-flung neighbour, a dead sheep with flies swarming over it and vultures circling above.
The chaos was just as bad inside. Mud covered the floors and soaked up curtains and drapes. Doors hung part-way off hinges, chairs and tables on their sides, sodden books, papers, magazines strewn everywhere.
‘Jesus, what a stench,’ Helen said, her hand over her nose.
‘The sewers done bust open,’ said Lillian.
David had made two long, slow journeys to the Hilton, first Becky and all her pills, then Helen. The Hilton wasn’t just the tallest building in Springfield; it had its own generator and a commercial supply of bottled water. The Executive Suite he’d taken them to was sleek and clean-lined, blanched cedar and slate in dappled earth colours; several bedrooms, two reception rooms, dining room, kitchen. Neither woman had any idea how he’d managed to claim such a prize at such an hour without any notice, especially when half of a besieged Springfield was clamouring for hotel rooms; a terrified assistant manager explained to Helen that she’d ‘relocated’ a party of holidaymakers after a five-minute discussion with him.
Becky had suppressed a smile at that, even though being carried out of her own house in David’s arms was a trauma she’d never forgive him. Or forgive Helen. Or Lillian. He’d told her that her removal came under the terms of his contract to protect her; and while she was in the process of losing the edge in this negotiation, Lillian was getting her dressed just as she had with Helen. It was all inexcusable. And yet Becky slept better in the Hilton’s Executive Suite than she had in years. When she woke, the only missing amenity was her wheelchair. That’s why she’d had breakfast in bed. That’s why she’d stayed in bed all morning, had lunch there too, had her nap as usual, then propped herself up on pillows to watch the news from bed while Helen and David went to pick up Lillian and assess the damage at Freyl House.
But nobody could have expected devastation on such a scale. Not even Becky’s wheelchair had escaped. It should have been safe upstairs, but it lay across a window sill in her study, a broken and filthy wreck, picked up by the flood waters, tossed halfway through the double-glazed pane.
‘You did that!’ Helen said to David.
He only shrugged.
She started to laugh, but the laugh turned at once into a sob. ‘Oh, God, we can’t fix this.’
‘We gonna make it all okay.’ Lillian put a comforting arm around her shoulders. ‘Just you wait, sugar. Just you wait.’
And that spirit pretty much prevailed throughout the town despite the private enterprise that boomed in the Shop ’n Save parking lot.
When the first fleet of water trucks arrived towards evening, the rich of Springfield gathered in orderly English queues with buckets and empty wine bottles. People chattered and laughed like kids at camp. As dark fell, there was spontaneous singing, a street party, a band, dancing.
But twenty-four hours without air conditioning, running water, a shower or a bath is simply not acceptable. By morning, the party spirit was dead. People got out of bed grim-faced and irritable.
They certainly hadn’t expected to find squad cars blocking access to still-flooded streets, where officials in fluorescent jackets and high boots waded knee-deep, looking determined but seeming to go nowhere and find nothing. In no longer flooded streets firefighters and volunteer firefighters clustered around huge pipes, pumping out water from basements. Trucks manoeuvred their way to deliver eight hundred gallon containers to crossroads and supermarket parking lots. Nobody could miss the UCAI logos on both trucks and containers; people weren’t impressed. Nor were they impressed by the UCAI logos on the tankers that followed, filling the containers with water. They grumbled that the multinational was making use of a disaster to advertise itself, but then they were ready to grumble about anything and everything. They were openly hostile to the Red Cross, which came next to set up tables beside the containers, unload packets of water-purifying tablets and signs that explained how to use them.
Loudspeakers perched on top of cars fresh from Becky’s campaign blared out Jimmy’s message, not the Coalition’s. ‘We’ll get through this,’ he was saying. ‘I promise you that. We’re filling water containers as fast as we can. Please drink only this water. Please purify it with the tablets before you drink it. Do not use the water from your faucets, not to brush your teeth or bathe in or cook with it. Don’t use flood water for any purpose, and do not let your kids play in it. This is serious, folks. We don’t want anybody to get sick.’