Lucky Strike

by Bobbie Pyron

  “Why do you reckon the tracks are going the wrong way?”

  She studied the turtle tracks that were not heading inland as they should be, but were headed out to sea. “Maybe she already laid her eggs.” She walked away from the shoreline in search of a nest. None was found. Anywhere.

  Every set of tracks the two came across in the wet sand told the same tale: The turtle had come ashore and then, for some unknown reason, had done a U-turn and headed back out to the Gulf without laying a single solitary egg or digging a nest.

  “Did you notice if all the tracks were like that, Charles?”

  Chum shook his head. “I’ll go look.”

  He trotted back along the beach, turned around, and trotted back to Gen. “Yep, they’re all like that.”

  “And no nests?”

  He shook his head.

  She looked up and down the beach and then out to the heaving swells. “Something’s not right,” she said, plucking at an eyebrow.

  “Like something’s spooked them,” he agreed. “But what?”

  Once again, Gen pulled out her note pad and flipped back through the pages until she came to the page from the night before, up on the roof of the church.

  She chewed the end of her pencil. “I noted last night at my weather station that the barometer was falling at point-one millibars per hour, and the swells were coming in five seconds apart.”

  “So?” Chum asked, even though he had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

  “So,” she said, “tonight, before I came down here, I checked the barometer again. Now it’s falling by point-two millibars per hour. And I clocked wind gusts at thirty-four miles per hour.”

  “What does all that mean?”

  Gen rubbed the sand from her glasses. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say it means there’s a hurricane coming.”

  Chum laughed. “Hurricanes don’t come in the spring. Everybody knows that. Hurricane season is months and months away.”

  “Well duh,” she snapped. “I know that, but the facts are the facts.”

  “I may not be as book smart as you are, Genesis Beam, and I may not have a fancy-schmancy weather station on top of my house, but I know the weather. And hurricanes don’t come in the spring!”

  Gen slapped her notebook shut. She stood and staggered in the wind. “It’s not,” she yelled above a particularly robust gust of wind, “beyond the realm of possibility for a —”

  “Yes it is,” he snapped.

  “I beg to differ,” Gen said, fists balled up, just itching for a fight. She couldn’t believe she’d overlooked something as phenomenal as a blue moon. It was all because of this business with Nate and the lightning strike and luck (good and bad) and the pain of his words and not being best friends anymore and —

  The wind snatched her ever-present notebook from her hand and sent it skipping across the sand.

  “Holy Einstein!” she cried.

  Chum sprinted after the errant notebook and snatched it up just before a wave claimed it as its own. He brushed off the wet sand and seaweed and held it out to Gen.

  The smartest girl in Franklin County looked at the boy standing in front of her — wet, wind-rumpled, sand-coated, a sorry sight indeed — and all the fight went out of her.

  “Thanks, Charles,” she said, taking the notebook from his hand. And then she did something she rarely ever did. One might even say a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of rarely. She took his hand. “Come on, let’s go back to the church. I bet Mama’s baked something wonderful.”

  Nate listened to the wind howl and race around the trailer. He slid another piece of bread into the toaster, pushed down the lever, and waited.

  Ding! Out shot the toast. It landed fair and square in the center of his paper plate. The toast fairly wiggled as it reveled in its golden perfection. Just like the other twelve pieces piled on the table.

  He sighed. “No offense,” he said, “but being perfect is nothing special anymore.”

  Still, he could just hear Gen’s voice saying, It’s just coincidence, Nathaniel, that they’re all perfect. The odds are in your favor that one piece will end up burnt. Like before.

  He slid the last piece of bread from the bag into the toaster. He pushed down the lever.

  The front door flew open.

  Ding! sang the toaster.

  “Whoowee!” Grandpa said, pushing the door closed. “I haven’t seen wind like that in a long time.” He took off his raincoat and hung it on the peg by the door. He looked like a wild man. “I don’t know what’s blowing in, but it’s a doozy.”

  Nate offered the old fisherman a piece of toast.

  Grandpa eyed the tower of perfect toast, then took the slice. “Thank you, Nate. And put a pot of water on the stove for coffee, would you? I’m chilled through. That ornery new truck refused to start this evening.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” Nate asked from the kitchen.

  “I’ll be dipped if I know. Everything checked out fine. No missing parts. It’s like it just decided it didn’t want to go anywhere.”

  Nate could hear Gen say, A truck can’t decide anything because a truck doesn’t have a brain. Oh, how he missed the comfort of her certainty now that nothing made a bit of sense.

  “Alfred never pulled a stunt like that,” Grandpa grumbled. He pulled off his black rubber boots streaked with dried salt water and rubbed his foot. “The way my arthritis is acting up, I’d think a hurricane was coming in.”

  Nate handed his grandfather a cup of steaming hot coffee. “That’s crazy. Hurricane season isn’t until later in the summer,” he pointed out, none too kindly. “It’s just May.”

  Grandpa rubbed his foot and grimaced. “Just saying, is all. No need to get snappish.” It had not escaped the old man’s notice that lately his grandson was moody and short-tempered — two things the boy had never been before the lightning.

  Friday night, as soon as her parents and all of the children were asleep, Gen climbed out her bedroom window and up onto the roof of the church. She crept over to her homemade weather station, switched on her head lamp, and peered at the barometer. “Holy Einstein,” she whispered. “It’s falling by half a millibar per hour.” She checked the wind speed on the anemometer. Steady winds at thirty-three mph from the Gulf, she noted on her notebook. She switched off her head lamp and stared up at the sky. “What’s coming?” she asked the moon and stars. It couldn’t really be a hurricane, could it? Not this time of year. Plus, that weatherman on the Panama City station hadn’t said anything about it on the news.

  “Granted, he’s not the most accurate meteorologist in the world,” Gen muttered. “But even he couldn’t miss a hurricane, could he?”

  The next morning, Nate did not hear the mockingbird singing in the magnolia tree. He did not hear Grandpa banging his crab traps and fishing gear into the truck. He did not hear Miss Trundle calling her cats, or the Nguyen kids playing. It was far, far too quiet for a Saturday morning at the Sweet Magnolia RV and Trailer Park.

  He pushed his sheets back and looked out the window. The clouds lay low, heavy, and wet; the wind blew steady and hard.

  He stuck his lucky rabbit’s foot in his pocket, said good morning to his parents’ photo, and pulled on his clothes. His head hurt like the dickens. The scars on his hand buzzed like bees.

  His grandpa had left a note on the kitchen table — Down at the docks. Nate forced down a glass of chocolate milk and headed out. The wind about snatched him up when he stepped out the door. He held tight to his bicycle to keep from blowing away.

  The wind pushed Nate and his bike out of the Sweet Magnolia RV and Trailer Park and down the road. It pulled and pushed him this way and that until he skidded to a halt at the docks. He spotted his grandfather bent over the open hood of the shiny red truck, cussing up a storm.

  “You ornery bucket of bolts. You good-for-nothing, fancy-pantsy, high-fangled piece of plastic! I swear to Detroit, I’ll sell you for scrap — don’t think I won’t.”

&
nbsp; “Grandpa,” Nate said, pulling on the old man’s sleeve.

  His grandpa jerked his head up in surprise, roundly smacking it on the hood of the chastised truck. “Blue blazes, boy, don’t sneak up on me like that!”

  “Grandpa,” he said into the wind, “get behind the wheel. Start it up when I tell you to.”

  The old man rubbed the top of his head and studied the pale boy. “Nate, you don’t really believe in all that Midas touch malarkey, do you?”

  He shrugged. “Just try, Grandpa.”

  Nate laid his hand on the truck’s engine. “Grandpa was right about you. You think you’re better than us.” He jiggled a wire here, shook a connection there. The ornery truck gave a little hiccup.

  “Crank her up, Grandpa,” he hollered over the wind.

  Despite the truck’s best efforts to do otherwise, the engine turned over. Grandpa left the truck running and came over to Nate. He gave his shoulder a little pat. “Well, I reckon if nothing else, you have a promising future in auto mechanics.”

  “Yes sir,” Nate agreed. “You going out fishing, Grandpa?” he asked as they packed the tools away in the truck.

  Grandpa shook his head. “No sir, not today. Things don’t feel right.” His dark eyes took in the angry Gulf, the sodden sky, and the squadron of pelicans passing overhead. “All the birds are heading inland,” he said. “Strange …” He pulled his grandson close. “Let’s head over to the Laughing Gull and see what their TV says.”

  As Nate and his grandpa headed across the parking lot, a voice hallooed above the wind: “Jonah! Wait up!” Rem Bailey, Chum, and several other boat captains strode toward them.

  “Jonah,” Rem Bailey asked, “what do you make of this weather? Have you ever seen the like?” The wind snatched Mr. Bailey’s hat right off his head and sent it swirling toward the docks.

  Grandpa pulled on his ponytail, something he was inclined to do when worried and baffled. “It’s strange, all right,” he agreed. “And not just the weather. The birds are all heading toward Apalachicola like their tail feathers are on fire.”

  “Same with the dolphins,” Big Jim Sands hollered over the wind. “I saw them all heading over to the bay like they were being chased by killer whales.”

  Chum Bailey’s daddy held up his crab-claw hand and said, “Only time my hand hurts this much is when a hurricane’s coming. It’s a better predictor than those weathermen on TV.”

  The men looked at each other nervously. Finally, Rem Bailey said what they all were thinking but didn’t want to say. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear there’s a hurricane coming.”

  “Y’all reckon we should move our boats inland?” Grandpa asked.

  “Better safe than sorry,” Big Jim Sands said.

  Sunday morning, as most of the good citizens of Paradise Beach attended church or synagogue, the wind howled. Mothers in their pews held their children just a little closer as the windows rattled; men glanced nervously at the rain-streaked stained-glass windows. By evening, the winds shrieked and the moon and stars were hidden behind heavy, ominous clouds.

  Nate and Grandpa were busy stowing the bait buckets and crab traps underneath their trailer during a lull in the rain. Suddenly, the emergency siren at the firehouse shrieked.

  “What you think that’s all about?” Nate asked.

  “One way to find out,” his grandpa answered. “Throw your bike in the back of the truck and let’s go see what’s what.”

  “Great granny’s garters,” Grandpa said as they parked on Main Street. It looked like the wind had scoured out every resident of Paradise Beach from the town’s nooks and crannies and blown them toward the town hall. Councilman Lamprey held tight to his wife for ballast, Miss Lillian clutched the mayor’s collar, Pastor Jimmy and Rabbi Levine linked arms and bowed their heads into the wind and rain. Mr. Woods staggered out of the hardware store, Monk and Toots tucked tight under his arms. Folks poured out of the Laughing Gull Grill, the post office, the Sand Flea Hotel, and June’s Back Porch and were fairly pushed to the town hall by the wind. Before long just about every person in town dripped and huddled nervously in the meeting room.

  Almost everybody.

  Gen stood wet and shivering in front of her parents. Her notebook shook in her hands. “The barometer is fa-fa-falling now at one-point-five mi-mi-mi-millibars per hour,” she reported through her chattering teeth.

  Her mother fussed and fumed over her with a towel. “Lord have mercy, Gen, sometimes I think you don’t have the sense God gave a goose!”

  “Sure doesn’t,” Ruth agreed.

  “Yes she does,” Rebecca said.

  Gen turned to her father. “Daddy, there’s a hurricane co-coming.”

  The reverend gently removed the glasses from her wet face and frowned. “You have no business being out on that rooftop in a storm like this, young lady.”

  “But Daddy —”

  “I told you a long time ago to take that weather station down,” Mrs. Beam said to her husband, sharp as a snapping turtle.

  “She did,” Levi and Joshua said.

  Wind shook the entire building. Mrs. Beam clutched the twin boys to her. “Lord have mercy,” she whispered.

  The phone rang. Reverend Beam picked up. “Reverend Beam speaking.” All six pairs of eyes fixed on his face.

  “Is that right?” he said with a frown. “Well, that doesn’t seem very likely.” He studied his dripping daughter. “But yes, we’ll get over there right away.” He hung up the phone and rubbed at the frown on his face. “Everyone’s gathering over at the town hall. Seems they’re worried about the weather, and the basement there is the safest place to be.” He and his wife exchanged a worried look.

  “Boys,” Mrs. Beam commanded, “y’all get changed out of those filthy clothes and put something decent on. Girls, wash your hands and get something to occupy yourselves. We may be over there awhile.” And for once, the twins (both sets) did exactly as they were told without one argument.

  Mrs. Beam surveyed Gen with a sigh. “What am I going to do about you?”

  Councilman Lamprey banged his hand on the wooden desk in the town hall meeting room. “Folks,” he called, “I need everyone to take their seats so we can discuss this in an orderly fashion.”

  No one listened. Everyone was arguing over whether or not there could be or ever had been a hurricane in the spring.

  Nate put his hands over his ears. His head pounded and his stomach turned. His lightning scars burned and buzzed like blazes.

  Chum sat down next to him and touched his shoulder. “You okay?”

  He shook his head, then regretted it. “There’s a storm coming,” he whispered. “A huge one. I can feel it.”

  Chum nodded. “Yeah, my daddy says all the signs are there for a hurricane, but it can’t be a hurricane ’cause it’s spring.”

  “I know that, but …” Nate licked his lips.

  “Daddy says the last time a hurricane hit in the spring was over a hundred years ago. It only happens once in …” Chum stopped. Gen’s words came back to him: It’ll be a blue moon in four nights. This night. “… a blue moon,” he finished.

  And then he remembered the argument he’d had with Gen, the smartest person he’d ever known, out there on the dunes, with all her talk about millibars and barometric pressure and such. Chum gripped Nate’s trembling shoulder. “Gen said a hurricane’s coming too. All those instruments in her weather station said so.”

  “Then it must be,” Nate said.

  The wind shrieked and howled. A window blew out on the second floor. The mayor, in his infinite wisdom, tucked his tail between his legs and crawled under the table, shaking.

  “What kind of mayor does that?” Mr. Sands said, pointing accusingly at the dog.

  Nate couldn’t bear seeing the dog quivering with fright just like he did. “Spunk up,” he whispered to himself. He pushed out of his chair and said as loud as he could, “He’s scared because there’s a hurricane coming!”

  “That c
an’t be,” Mrs. Belk said, looking from the mayor to Nate. “It’s spring.”

  “Yes ma’am, I know, but —”

  “Ridiculous!” Mr. Sands declared. “Any fool knows hurricanes only come in the late summer and fall.”

  Grandpa jumped to his feet. “You calling my boy a fool, Sands?” His eyes spit daggers.

  Chum Bailey jumped to his feet too. “It’s true,” he said. “There is a hurricane coming. Genesis Beam said so, and she’s the smartest person I know.”

  Gen.

  Nate looked around the packed hall of confused faces. He did not see his friend’s face among them. Just like the barometric pressure, his stomach plummeted.

  “The dolphins were heading over to the bay side like they were being chased by a killer whale,” Rem Bailey pointed out.

  “And the birds have been heading inland,” Big Jim Sands said.

  “Aw, for Pete’s sake, Daddy,” Mr. Sands said. “There wasn’t a word about it on the TV, and you can bet that if a hurricane was coming in the spring —”

  The double doors to the meeting room flew open. Mr. Billy stood wide-eyed in the doorway holding his portable radio aloft. “There’s a hurricane coming, and it’s heading straight for Paradise Beach!”

  Everyone crowded around Mr. Billy. A voice crackled over the radio: “… and this once-in-a-century hurricane — yes, folks, y’all heard me right, I said hurricane — is heading straight for the little town of Paradise Beach. With uncanny accuracy and speed, I might add.”

  “Lord help us,” Pastor Jimmy whispered.

  “Saints preserve us,” Father Donovan said, looking up at the ceiling.

  “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” the good Reverend Beam intoned, heading toward the basement doors.

  “It’s those astronauts flying around up there, I tell you,” old man Marler reminded the crowd. And for once, they wondered if he just might be right.