by JoeAnn Hart
He turned a corner, out from behind the protection of the houses, and immediately felt the wind slam into the Duck, which shook but did not slide across the road. Duncan grasped the wheel tighter. The trees on either side of him swayed back and forth like underwater plants. Out in the darkness he heard but could not see the harbor. The sea continued to boil, undoubtedly crunching vessels lying at anchor and absorbing the debris into its unfathomable maw. Nod, Nod, Nod. Nothing could save him from this storm. The time to save him had been before he’d even left, and Duncan had failed at so simple a task.
Water poured down the windshield in sheets so thick that he had only a second of visibility after the wipers cleared the view, like watching photos being flipped by an unseen thumb. He braked with a lurch when the thumb stopped at the flooded causeway. His headlights shone on the debris washing past with the tide and spilling over into the salt marsh, which was indistinguishable now from the ocean that fed it. Logs, nets, shreds of hulls, lobster traps, plastic fish boxes, small appliances—off they went. Duncan half-expected to see Nod sweep by in the inflatable, and then he thought how easy it would be to get washed away himself. He hoped the Duck’s engine was up to this.
He looked at the fuel gauge. “Almost empty,” he said out loud. He wanted to be angry with Nod, but what with him missing at sea, it seemed a petty thing to contemplate. In truth, he had only himself to blame. He should have checked the gauge before he left. He could have siphoned oil from the home’s heating system. His own bad decisions had led him right to where he was at that moment, out in a hurricane, caught between his childhood home and his marital bed, with only a teaspoon full of diesel to see him through.
It would have to be enough. He only had to get to Seacrest’s, where there was plenty of fuel to be had. He inched the Duck into the water until he felt the tires lift from the pavement, then switched on the propeller. The Duck jerked alarmingly to the right, but it quickly regained its stability and began to chug over the washed-out section of the road to the other side. The wild screaming of the gale made him want to scream himself, but he could not afford to lose concentration as he tried to keep a straight path. He felt a hard bump underneath the Duck and realized he had made it across, even managing to arrive more or less back on the road. He paused to reflect on his success when, off to his left in the harbor, a white fishing boat appeared, lifted from a furrow by a large wave, then disappeared again. Its estimated landfall would be …
He slammed the Duck into gear and did not look back. He rounded the corner into town and was just about to take a breath when he had to brake again. A splintered oak had fallen across the road, exposing a gothic cathedral of jagged roots and taking the electric lines with it. Houses nearby were dark behind their high fences, and their lawns were underwater. He could see the road on the other side of the tree, but there was no way to it. He’d have to take High Ridge into town and hope that the Duck could squeeze through its narrow lanes and negotiate its sharp turns.
He backed up to change direction but was soon stopped again. Another tree, more downed wires. A garage by the road was missing its roof. A car was tipped over on its side. He could wait it out where he was, sitting in the Duck until the roads were opened, or he could try to get back to where he came from. His mother’s house.
“No,” he said. “No, no, no, no.” With some difficulty, he turned the Duck around, back to the harbor road, and stopped. He closed his eyes and imagined the short bit of coastline from where he was to Seacrest’s, and he realized that if he could just navigate the Duck the few hundred yards past the stony lump of land that bulged out into the water, he could ride the tide onto Seacrest’s beach. He could do it. He could. He opened his eyes and saw the rolling green tides batter the shore.
“I can’t do this.” And it wasn’t fear of the water that made him say it. The Duck could navigate land and sea, but it could not fly over the walls that stood between him and the water. Right ahead was the “Lightkeeper’s House,” whose raw plywood was swollen with rain and bowing out from the frame. The roof on the fake lighthouse was gone, and he imagined the tower filling with the sea. Usually surrounded by weeds, the house was now surrounded by water. The gate was swinging open and closed, open and closed.
Duncan looked around, tapped the fuel gauge, said a prayer, and gunned the motor. He waited for his moment when the gate slammed open, then steered the Duck into the driveway, scraping both sides of the vessel against the pillars. The gate and the fence were so rotted they just gave way. The driveway turned into lawn that sloped down to the water and became a launch, letting the Duck roll into the harbor. It immediately began rocking and snorting. He was waterborne, and then airborne as a wave picked him up. In that moment he did not think “death” but “life,” and then he could think of nothing through the pumping of blood in his head. The Duck belly flopped back on the water without splitting in half, and Duncan choked out a little laugh.
The compass on the dashboard glowed a fluorescent direction that he could not read because the needle was too jittery. He would have to steer by his gut. If only he hadn’t shied away from the water these past few years, he might have more confidence. He was as bad as his mother. He thought of his father, clinging to his little boat when the squall came up, with nature leaving no options. Duncan hoped that when his father got swept overboard, he did not linger long. That was the worst part. The suffering. The lungs filling with water even as the brain remained on. It was why Clyde Harmon talked about keeping a gun on board. And yet, knowing his father, he would never have equated sinking with drowning. He would have remained positive even as the pressurized world turned slow, dark, then quietly black.
Duncan felt the surf twisting the Duck’s screw, but on it chugged. Off to his lee side, he saw a boat rear up like a great sea beast, leaping clear out of the water then dropping sideways. He thought of his mother’s warning that all the boats were heading this way, toward Seacrest’s, but he could not see through the walls of water that surrounded him. His amphibious vessel powered on without sinking, even as he jerked it back and forth to avoid the rocks and the heaving navigational markers, which appeared and disappeared like deathly phantoms. He thought of his father. “You have to just hunker down and ride out the storm, son,” he used to say in the face of any problem that Duncan brought to him, whether it was math homework as a child or girl problems later in life. He never offered any specifics on these matters, only the one piece of advice: perseverance. Then from nowhere, other words shot through his brain, sounding very much like Winston Churchill: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
He stepped on the accelerator and kept going, buffeted by the storm, which soon felt like an extension of himself, something not to be fought but to be accepted. Since he could not change the water, he would change himself. He would enjoy it, lost in a wild ride into the darkness, thrilling, frightening, and brief though it was. It might be all there was.
The Duck, amazingly, cleared the rocky point without crashing, and almost immediately got swept sideways on a massive swell, propelled toward what Duncan could only hope was Seacrest’s beach. The boat went down on its ear before righting itself. Mountains of black water surrounded him. No lights shone through the mountains, but that could be because there was no electricity in town. Noah’s dove could not find land in this storm, but Duncan refused to panic. His shoulders ached from holding the wheel so hard, and he wanted to let go, at least long enough to put on a life jacket, which was something he should have thought about much sooner than this.
It became clear he would have to do more than just hold on. He could not just ride the wave and hope for the best any longer. Even if he was going in the right direction, the chances of a smooth landing in this storm were nil. He would be battered to pieces on the shore—if not here, then elsewhere. He opened the throttle all the way, even at the risk of running out of fuel, so that he could steer the Duck perpendicular to the waves so it would not get rolled over. The windshield wipers contin
ued to work furiously against the onslaught of water, and there was a brief moment when he was lifted up, as if by a hand, and held aloft long enough to see the glimmer of a light on shore. Seacrest’s. Yes, it was Seacrest’s. He’d made it, and he began to laugh, and in it he heard the crazy laugh of his brother. It was a pure, sweet glimpse into Nod’s soul, now that it was too late. For a moment it seemed as if the ocean stopped moving and the world stopped spinning. It was as if his mind cleared itself of a lifetime of accumulated debris, useless fears and damaging thoughts, and in this clearing, in this clear blue light of heightened awareness, he realized that the keys to Seacrest’s were attached to the ignition keys in his pickup truck, somewhere with Syrie.
That was a problem. But it was not the problem of the very moment. Slowly, slowly, he started to rise again. He smiled at the sight of the lights returning and went higher still. As high as he was lifted, he was suddenly dropped into a valley set down among the high hills of the sea, and the boat shuddered in pain. The cabin immediately began to take on water. He held his breath when it reached his face, and then all the noise stopped as he became completely submerged. He felt his glasses slip off his face and float away, but he could not take his hands off the wheel to save them. A figure appeared before his closed eyes. He was hallucinating, but at least he knew he was. It was Cora, wrapped only in a mist. He remembered what Slocum said about gales subsiding if a naked woman appeared before a sailor. He felt saved, even as he was plunging into the night. It was very dark, but peaceful in a way he could not have anticipated. He was almost calm. He did not even panic as his lungs began to ache. He clutched the wheel tighter. What else was there to do? What went down would come back up, in theory, and at the very lowest point in the swell he felt himself lifted again and all the water drained out of the cab. He breathed. He hoarded air as he felt the vessel begin the cycle again. This happened two times more, and two times more he held his breath and refused to panic. He held on to the wheel and gunned the motor to keep her from rolling under the waves.
At the bottom of the third drop, he felt his tires bounce on sand. To keep from getting pulled back into the harbor, he struggled to get the Duck moving forward and realized the engine was dead. He’d run out of fuel and out of time and felt silly for thinking he was any match for the ruthless force of nature. He sensed the hand of the sea slip under him again, pulling him back. Then the hand disappeared as if deciding against him, and the momentum of the storm threw the Duck forward. Duncan was seized with vertigo and felt the Duck plunge downward like a diver, jerking sideways, then skidding through a vast, nameless corridor of green-black water. The last thing Duncan saw before his head hit the steering wheel was lobsters, flying through the air around him.
eighteen
Duncan sank slowly beneath the violent surface of the storm, where all was still, infusing him with an unworldly serenity. He found himself suspended in a warm saline fluid, somehow mastering the replication of his own cells, watching the expansion of veins like flooded streams along transparent limbs. The minute pulse of his multi-celled heart began to beat. Over and under he tumbled in total surrender, his feet drifting, his arms spread, his spine curved in repose. From this sweet darkness, soft hands lifted him into the light, where he sensed booming waves vaulting the seawall, a tremendous crash and a withdrawing roar. Somewhere from the edge of this watery swirl came weak flashes of red and blue lights and the muffled blare of emergency vehicles. A megaphone voice cut through the noise as if shouting down from the black heavens: Evacuate. As he was being stripped of his clothes, he remembered saying that the lobsters were still trapped inside the Duck, and a voice close to his ear assured him that they would all be saved.
“Lovesters,” Duncan whispered before passing out again, itching to get back to the complete peace of abandon, and then he felt an annoying yank of reason on his frontal lobe.
“Don’t surrender, Leland,” said another voice.
The words “rapture of the deep” floated to the surface of his mind. The seductive killer, they called it, as cruel and efficient as a curvaceous shark. Deep sea divers, fooled by oxygen-deprived brains, sometimes froze in wonder at the beauty around them, convinced they were beyond the grasping tendrils of mortality, a delusion that holds them down until they drown.
“No,” he said. “No.” He struggled to return to the solid world, the world where Cora lived, where he used to live before he broke loose from his mooring, unable to withstand the pressure of so simple a decision as life. It was not too late to say yes. Yes to everything. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. He flapped his arms and legs, prompting his muscles to get back to work and return to physical consciousness. It was exhausting, like swimming in the air, and just when he felt he might slip back under, he felt something small and alive scamper across his chest.
“Fingers,” he croaked.
He snapped upright to a seated position as if the ferret had pressed an electric buzzer on his stomach. His eyes were open wide, and he was breathing unevenly as his heart pounded. The taste of salt water was in his throat, and he could smell his own mustiness, as if he’d been stored somewhere dark and damp for a very long time. He was naked except for a scratchy blanket, which he tightened around him. At first, he didn’t know where he was, but as his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he was surprised to find himself on Seacrest’s factory floor. The fluorescent lights, which made the factory as bright as day in the middle of the night, were off. Only the security floodlights in the corners were lit, criss-crossing their beams in the air, casting shadows among the columns and tanks. The stainless-steel surfaces were clean, radiating a dull silver in the half-light of the room, creating the atmosphere of an empty church, or a tomb.
“Twenty-two minutes to high tide,” said a familiar voice. Duncan blinked at the figure in the corner as he patted his naked body for glasses.
Beaky Harrow was sitting jackknifed on the floor a few feet away, leaning against a wall, his head sunken in the stiff carapace of a yellow raincoat, still dripping water. The ferret sat on his knees. Beaky handed it a pair of glasses. “Go ahead, Fingers. He needs these.”
Fingers lifted the glasses in its mouth and ran slinky-style across the floor toward Duncan, who leaned away from the animal. It dropped the glasses within his reach and stared at Duncan with its probing little eyes.
“Beaky,” said Duncan, putting on his glasses. “What are you doing here?”
Duncan once heard that businesses often got torched for insurance money during hurricanes because emergency crews couldn’t get to them, and then the storm erased all the evidence. Not to mention that the wind accelerated the destruction. Had Osbert sent Beaky to do just that, using the trash company’s key? Duncan couldn’t remember what the contract said about who got the insurance money if something happened to the building before the loan was paid off, but he was sure it was in Osbert’s favor. Then he thought about the death clause. Maybe it wasn’t the building Beaky was here to destroy.
“Waiting,” said Beaky, contemplating the ceiling. “Waiting for the tide to turn. What’re you doing here?”
“I don’t need to explain why I’m here. It’s my factory. Still. In spite of you and your blackmailing photo.”
Beaky turned to him with an exaggerated look of surprise, like a Kabuki actor. “Blackmail?”
“You plan to ruin me for disposing of a couple of bird bodies?” said Duncan. “Is this Osbert’s plan to get control of the company? Because if that’s your scheme, I intend to fight you every step of the way.”
“Please, Mr. Leland.” Beaky took Duncan’s tie out of his pocket. It was wet, and the red stripes seemed to bleed into the yellow background. Fingers stood up on his hind legs. “We’re just trying to keep you out of trouble. You’ve got to think of your public image. It’s a valuable commodity to us all.” He made a quick motion with the tie, and Fingers came scurrying to him. “I showed you the picture as a way of saying be more careful. It’s my job to keep an eye on you.”
&nbs
p; “You’re not going to use the photo against me?”
“If we wanted to exact harm, Leland, we would have just let nature have its way with you and let you get washed back out to sea right now. You’re a lucky man.” He teased the ferret with the tie. “We were pulling into the lot when we saw the Duck get tossed onto the last scratch of beach. With effort, lots of effort, we chained your axle to the Benz. There was a monumental tug of war between us and an outgoing wave, I can tell you—our boots and ears filled with water, couldn’t open our lips for drowning, but we won you. Won you from the sea like a prize marlin. Lucky us. Tied your Duck to the loading dock.” He flicked the tie. “Poor Fingers nearly drowned in my pocket. We had to revive him under the hand dryer in the bathroom.”
“We?” Duncan stood up with a groan. He felt badly bruised all over, and his bare feet were cold against the cement floor. He wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and found his socks hanging to dry on a heat duct and put them on damp. The rest of his clothes were still too wet. He limped over to the window that faced the parking lot, and through the rain he could make out the flashing emergency vehicles in the street, trailing flood evacuation warnings behind them. On higher ground, a black Mercedes was chained to a light post to keep it from being washed away. When a wave retreated to gather strength he saw that the seawall was gone, and when the wave rushed back in it smacked hard against the sea side of the building. His mother was right. It was coming this way. Through the horizontal rain he could see the barge-like shape of the Duck floating at the dock meant for trucks. The water had to be three feet deep in the lot. It was coming in fast. Another few feet and the water would start pressing against the windows. There was no way out. He could not possibly get to Cora’s from here. He went back to his dripping clothes and pulled his cell phone out of his pants to call her, and water poured from the seams. He picked up the phone on Annuncia’s desk in her office, and it was dead. This meant that he couldn’t even activate the alarm system to be saved by the police. He saw his wellies propped up against the wall to dry upside down, exposing the white crosses painted on the bottoms.