The woman is tall, with dark hair and a navy blue dress. She’s holding her purse above her head in a lame attempt to block the rain. “I couldn’t, thank you,” she says with a smile, shaking her head. “You two need it as much as I do.”
“We’ll be fine,” says Mr. Flood. “We don’t have far to go. Please, take it.”
The woman looks at me for approval, but I just shrug. She looks back at Mr. Flood and shakes her head again. “I really couldn’t,” she says.
But she doesn’t walk away.
Mr. Flood steps toward her and presses the umbrella handle into her grip. “Go ahead,” he says. “You’re going to need it.”
I can tell she feels guilty, but she doesn’t try to hand the umbrella back to him. “It’s really coming down, isn’t it?” she says. “And they weren’t even calling for rain tonight.”
Mr. Flood nods and backs out from under the umbrella. “They’ll really be kicking themselves after tonight,” he says.
“Oh, they’re always wrong anyway,” says the woman. “What’s the difference tonight?”
“A couple hundred million gallons,” says Mr. Flood, and then he turns and hustles me off across the street.
“An umbrella. What were you thinking?” he says to me angrily. “Get your head in the game, girl. You’re supposed to be welcoming the rain, not hiding from it.”
*****
I know he’s right, but I still pull up the hood of my red raincoat. So I don’t like rain, so sue me.
He’s lucky I’m out here getting drenched at all, because I really don’t like rain. In fact, you could say I hate it...which, I know, is totally bizarre given what I’m about to do. Given the power I have.
But hey, you wouldn’t like it so much either if your parents died in a flash flood.
As he leads me down Main Street, Mr. Flood taps his twisted cane on the wet sidewalk. It’s a special cane that looks like two snakes slithering together, and it has a forked tip at the bottom. Mr. Flood says it’s like a divining rod, which he needs to help make the big rains come.
Whenever he walks under a street light, it gets brighter, then goes back to normal when he’s past it...though, I don’t know, it could be partly because of me. I’ve got some power, too, even if it’s not as much as he has.
Not till later tonight, anyway.
At the end of the block, Mr. Flood drifts over to the corner of City Hall and looks up at a bronze plaque set into the stone wall. The plaque shows the high water mark of the third Johnstown Flood, the one in 1977. It’s a couple feet above our heads, and he swings up his cane and taps on it.
High Water
July 20, 1977
8’ 6”
“Still my favorite,” says Mr. Flood, and then he sighs. “More water in ’36, but this one will always be near and dear to my heart.” He shakes his head and runs the tip of his cane back and forth over the raised letters on the plaque. “They say it was a once in ten thousand years rainfall. Twelve inches in ten hours.
“Quite an accomplishment,” he says, smiling proudly. With his free hand, he plucks the lapel of his powder blue leisure suit with the white piping. As much rain as is dumping down on us both, his polyester jacket and slacks look as dry as if they were still hanging in a closet at home. “Now here I am, wearing the same suit I had on that night back in ’77. Getting ready to do it again, and I can hardly wait. How about you?”
“Oh, sure,” I say, nodding, though I don’t feel anywhere near as pumped as he sounds.
That chicken hawk head of his bobbles a little for no reason, the way it does sometimes these days. “So, how much do you think we’ll manage tonight?”
“No idea,” I say with a shrug.
“See that plaque up there?” says Mr. Flood, pointing his cane at a plaque mounted much higher than the first.
I nod as I stare up at it.
High Water
March 17, 1936
17’
Grinning, Mr. Flood jabs my shoulder with his bony elbow. “The fourth flood will be higher than that,” he says. “See the next plaque up?”
“Yeah,” I say, looking at the third and highest plaque, set a few feet higher than the second.
High Water
May 31, 1889
21’
Mr. Flood shakes his soaking wet head. “Higher,” he says, his eyes twinkling with amusement.
“Up there,” says Mr. Flood, poking his cane at the roof of City Hall. “We’ll cover the peaks of the rooftops tonight, and then some. This bowl of a valley down here will fill up like a lake.”
I can’t take my eyes off the roof. I get a shiver up my spine, and not just because I’m cold and wet. I knew this was going to be the Big Night, but I didn’t know just how big it would be.
Mr. Flood chuckles. “Actually,” he says, “I guess I should say that the water would cover the roof if City Hall were still standing after tonight.”
“It won’t be?” I say.
“Nosiree Dee,” says Mr. Flood, and then he swings his cane down and sweeps it in a circle around him. “Matter of fact, not a single thing that you see around you will still be standing in the morning.
“Except that one.” With a flourish, he swirls his cane in the air like a sword and points it across Market Street. Right away, I see what he’s got in his sights.
When we cross the street to get to it, we’re almost run over by two young guys blindly charging full tilt through the rain. One has a newspaper over his head, the other has nothing, and they’re both as soaked as if they’d just climbed out of a swimming pool.
Mr. Flood and I stop at the chain link fence around the little grassy square on the corner of Main and Market. The streetlamps brighten when we get close, lighting up a red-painted statue of a big bloodhound inside the fence.
It’s Morley’s Dog. That’s what’s going to survive.
A damn statue of a dog.
“I love this dog,” says Mr. Flood. “It reminds me why I do this job.”
He’s lost me with that one. If anything, that dog reminds me of stupidity. People think it’s in honor of some hero dog from the 1889 flood, but it’s really just a lawn ornament that washed out of some guy’s yard.
“This is the true heart of Johnstown,” says Mr. Flood, waving his snaky cane at Morley’s Dog. “It is battered by the elements again and again, but it survives. It does not surprise or impress, but it endures.
“Just like my perfect little Johnstown,” says Mr. Flood. Seemingly as an afterthought, he spits in the grass...and the rain comes down a little harder.
Mr. Flood takes a deep breath like he’s drinking in the sweet air of a sunny spring morning, but all I can smell is the rubber-and-soap stink of wet streets.
“God, I love this town,” says Mr. Flood. “Always behind the times. Always on a different wavelength than the rest of the world.
“An oasis in an ocean of crap,” says Mr. Flood. “And we’re the ones who keep it that way.” He pats me on the shoulder. “Every forty years or so, we give this town a bath. We wash away its hopes. We wipe the slate clean of so-called progress.
“And Johnstown stays backward and God-fearing, because who knows when the next flood might come around? Johnstown stays small.
“Small as a raindrop.” Mr. Flood looks up, straight up, and waves his cane over his head. Just like that, the rain stops falling on us.
I still hear it spattering on the streets and sidewalks, and I still see soaking wet people running past with jackets and newspapers over their heads. I still see it pouring down in sheets through the light of nearby streetlamps...but now, in a circle around us, the rain is frozen in midair. Trails of glistening drops hang suspended between us, shimmering in the glow of streetlamps and headlights.
As much as I hate the rain, this is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. I catch my breath, and this time it’s not from nervousness.
I never knew. Never knew he could do
This.
One, two,
thirty, forty. I can count them. Just hanging there between the sky and the pavement as if someone had paused our disk in the DVD player.
As Mr. Flood reaches out, the droplets part around his arm like a curtain of crystal beads. He slides a pale fingertip under one and holds it there, balanced like a perfect teardrop of blown glass.
“Small as a raindrop,” he says. “One raindrop in the midst of a storm.”
I reach for my own droplet then, and I catch it on a purple-painted fingernail. I can still hardly believe my eyes, can hardly believe Mr. Flood’s frozen the rain. I guess it’s not such a stretch, since he and I have some kind of magical rainmaking power.
But still. For some reason, this strikes me as the most incredible thing I have ever seen him do. It amazes me.
It also confuses me. How can he do something amazing like this and then turn around and wipe out a city and its people?
It makes me sad, too, because I can’t help thinking about how this man who can do something so beautiful will be dead before this night is over.
*****
Mr. Flood unfreezes the rain around us with a snap of his fingers, and the two of us walk down Market Street to Vine Street. By the time we get to the stairway at the end of Vine Street, I have to pee so bad that I’m about ready to wet my pants...but I know better than to ask if I can pee before a flood.
We walk up the concrete steps to an elevated walkway. As we cross over the expressway that loops around the edge of downtown, I’m just glad that the walkway’s covered, and I’m out of the rain for a moment.
On the other side of the walkway, we cross a bridge over the murky, brown Stonycreek River. At the end of the bridge, we enter a little station, and Mr. Flood buys us tickets for the World’s Steepest Vehicular Inclined Plane.
“The Incline,” as everyone in town calls it, looks like a boxcar that runs up and down the side of a steep hill on railroad tracks. Besides the three floods, the Incline is Johnstown’s other claim to fame, though it’s not much of one, if you ask me.
“This is some storm we’re havin’,” says the old man who sells us our tickets. “It’s rainin’ cats and dogs tonight.”
“I heard it’ll be raining elephants and dinosaurs before long,” says Mr. Flood.
“Might not be a bad idea, headin’ for higher ground tonight,” says the ticket seller, hiking a thumb toward the top of the hill. “The weatherman on the radio says not to worry, but my rheumatoid knees are tellin’ me otherwise.”
“I agree with your knees,” says Mr. Flood with a wink.
Mr. Flood and I board the Incline passenger car. As the car climbs its track up the hillside, the two of us stand at the window and look out at the rainy city unfolding below us.
Johnstown doesn’t look different from most any other night of the year. Rain is one thing that’s hardly ever in short supply around here.
Not that it seems to clean the place up very much. I guess the city was a lot dirtier back in the old days, and it must be cleaner since the steel mills shut down in the ‘80’s...but if you ask me, it still always looks like it has a grimy film over everything. It’s like the rain can never wash off this bottom layer of soot that’s been stuck to all the buildings and houses and trees and streets since the turn of the century.
Of course, if nothing in town is left standing after tonight (except Morley’s Dog), like Mr. Flood says, that grimy soot will finally get scrubbed out the hard way. Unless it all just floats up in the air and comes down and sticks to whatever new buildings are put up after the flood...which, knowing Johnstown, I think is more likely.
When we’re midway up the hillside, Mr. Flood elbows me and points to the left and down. I’m not sure what he’s pointing at until he tells me.
“The Old Stone Bridge,” Mr. Flood says solemnly, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. “Eighty people died in debris that washed up against it in 1889. They burned to death when the debris caught fire. Died by fire because of a flood.”
I’ve heard the story before, but I can’t really picture it. All I see is a railroad bridge over the river and expressway on the edge of downtown, an ordinary looking bridge I’ve been under about a zillion times.
Mr. Flood squeezes my shoulder. “That won’t happen tonight,” he says. “Drowning only. A merciful death. A peaceful death.”
As he says this, I think about my mom and dad, who drowned when a flash flood washed out a bridge under their car. I wish it made me feel better, thinking they might have died peacefully. Unfortunately, I think Mr. Flood is full of crap on this subject.
Sometimes, I can’t figure him out. Here’s a guy who’s about to kill God knows how many people in a so-called natural disaster, and he’s patting himself on the back for not burning them to death.
And the messed up part of it is, how much better am I? I can’t even stand the thought of my own parents drowning, and here I’m getting ready to help kill hundreds or thousands more in the same exact way.
It’s all for a good cause, according to Mr. Flood. Like he said at Morley’s Dog, he thinks we’re saving Johnstown by wrecking it. He claims that the deaths are the price we pay to protect this place he loves from the craziness in the rest of the world.
It would be nice if I could believe all that like he does. It would be easier if I could convince myself that he’s not as crazy as he is powerful, and that I’m not going along with this whole flood thing just because I always do what he tells me. Because I don’t want to let him down.
It would be even nicer if I could honestly say that the thought of drowning all those people bothers me more than the thought of one single person dying tonight.
The person who raised me after my parents died. The person who home-schooled me and gave me my powers and taught me to use them. The person whose place I’m supposed to take tonight, just like he took the place of the one before him.
Mr. Flood.
It’s funny, because we have kind of a love/hate relationship. He’s never let me live my own life. All he’s done is push me since Day One to learn the “family business” and take over for him.
But he’s never hurt me. I never had to do without. I’m pretty sure he’s treated me the same way he’d treat his own kids, if he had any.
There’s another reason, too...another reason I don’t want to see him die.
When you get right down to it, he’s all I’ve got.
The rain hammers the roof of the boxcar, falling harder than ever. As we climb toward the upper station and the hilltop borough of Westmont, I dread the thought of going out in that downpour.
Mr. Flood swings his cane up and raps the forked tip on the window. As soon as he does it, a lightning flash illuminates the town like an instant of daylight creasing the darkness, blowing back in time from tomorrow morning.
Not that tomorrow morning will be all that bright for Johnstown.
Thunder cracks in the distance, and Mr. Flood chuckles. He raps his cane again, and lightning flares like before.
“Water, water everywhere,” he says. “And no one’s got an ark.”
He yanks back my hood and tousles my hair and brings the lightning and thunder with more raps of his cane, and I wonder.
I wonder if I’ll end up crazy like him when I get to be his age.
And I wonder what life will be like without him after tonight.
*****
The rain is blasting down as Mr. Flood leads me out of the station at the top of the hill. Pushing through the wind-driven sheets is like being hit in the face with one bucket of water after another.
Walking sideways to cut the resistance, I see the old lady who runs the gift shop lock the shop’s door and plunge into the downpour. People stream out of the adjacent restaurant, diners and waiters and waitresses alike rushing out to their cars. The conductor who brought us up the hill dashes past us, soaked to the skin after just a few steps.
Everyone’s getting out and hurrying home as the storm gets worse. At this rate, the entire Incline station an
d restaurant ought to be shut down and empty within minutes. Evacuating the place doesn’t make sense, because the high ground up here is one of the safest places to be if a flood hits the valley...but I guess no one really knows for sure what’s going to happen next.
Except Mr. Flood and I, of course.
Squinting against the rain, I follow Mr. Flood out onto the cement observation deck that juts out of the hilltop beside the station. I’m all slouched over, but old Mr. Flood just about breaks into a run on his way to the railing at the edge of the deck.
When I come up beside him and look down, I see that the flood is about to begin. The Stonycreek River at the base of the hill is rising fast, filling with rain faster than the current can carry it off.
“We’re about to make history,” says Mr. Flood, drumming his fingers on the metal rail. “How does it feel to be a part of something that people will still read about and talk about hundreds of years from now?”
I turn to him then, and his eyes are wet with what I think are tears of joy as well as rain, and his pale cheeks are flushed with excitement, and the breath catches in my chest.
“I don’t want you to go,” I say to him. “Please don’t leave me.”
Mr. Flood smiles warmly and pats my back. “Thank you,” he says. “When my predecessor passed on, I was glad to see her go. It does my heart good knowing that you don’t feel that way about me.”
As usual, I’m not getting through to him. “Call off the flood,” I say. “Let’s go home.”
“The people of Johnstown are counting on us,” says Mr. Flood. “We have to save their way of life.”
“Then run for mayor or something!” I tell him.
Mr. Flood tilts his head back and laughs loudly, letting the rain fall into his open mouth. “Hey, I like that!” he says. “A flood elected mayor of Johnstown! That’s good!”
“I’m serious,” I say, getting more frustrated because I know his mind’s made up and it always has been. “Don’t do this. Don’t go.”
“You’ll see,” says Mr. Flood, brushing my cheek with his fingertips. “When it’s your time to pass the torch, you’ll understand.”
I feel tears in my own eyes, but they aren’t tears of joy. I know people would say he’s evil and crazy because of what he does--and I guess I couldn’t really argue with them--but he’s the closest thing I’ve got to a father. To anyone, actually. I’ve led a sheltered life, being home-schooled and spending all my time training to flood the city of Johnstown.
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