Acts of Nature

by Jonathon King

  “Looks like weather comin’,” he said to the girl’s eyes this time when she came back with his drinks, see if he could get her to stay down here. She was cute in a pale, thin kinda way.

  “Can’t be any worse than last year,” she said. “Uh, Mr. Hall.”

  Buck tensed up, just a notch. The bartender had used the name on the credit card Buck had passed to her for the first round and he was caught by surprise that she’d memorized it. Maybe that was company policy too. It had only been twenty minutes since he’d scrummed up against some older guy in a bar upstairs and lifted his wallet out of his polyester sport coat pocket. Buck had gone straight to the men’s room and locked himself inside a stall and lifted out fifty-three dollars in cash and two credit cards. The American Express card had the name Richard Hall stamped on it. Member since 1982. He’d dumped the wallet in the chrome trash receptacle and come downstairs.

  “We’ll worry about her when she gets to Naples, sweetheart,” he said to the bartender, recovering. She gave him a nondescript tip of her chin and turned away. Fucking snowbird, he thought.

  Buck’s parents and their parents before them had watched such storms approach for a century. Like most people born and raised in southwest Florida, they didn’t need some long- range predictions. Hell, these national weather forecast guys could track a fart coming off the African coast and watch it meander for three weeks across the Atlantic. Buck’s father had taught him to watch the weather on the horizon, note the slope of the Gulf water swells, pay attention to the birds and the lack of feeding fish.

  “The animals know what the world is doing long before we do, son.”

  Like most native Gladesmen, his daddy knew how to button down, tie off his boat, and strap down anything else that might fly off in a hundred-mile-an-hour gust or float away on an eight-foot storm tide and then just see what came. They’d dig out after. It was the way it was. Shit, look at New Orleans. Doppler weather my ass. If you could run, you ran. If you stayed, for whatever reason, you did the best you could and started again with whatever the storm left you. Survivors survived. The dead didn’t.

  It had been the same way in prison. You fought if you could, scammed if you could, joined up if you could, took what you could. Buck had taken the fight route just because he could. He’d chosen brass knuckles instead of becoming someone’s hump. A broken eye socket, a few busted ribs, a couple of teeth in his bloody spit. He’d suffer the same any day. They ought to make a commercial: “Prison love—a beating only hurts for a while, being someone’s bitch lasts forever.”

  Buck looked back over at the boys who were now feeding off each other’s enthusiasm for posturing and starting to look like some video off MTV. Marcus was doing his hand thing, fingers splayed out like they were unnaturally twisted or spastic and then turning his wrists and elbows to point with his index and little digits—at what? Who knew. He was dressed in that equally perplexing style with the oversized jeans that billowed out and hung down, but mysteriously only came to his mid-calf. He had on a Hawaiian shirt that actually didn’t look too bad to Buck even though it was too big and flying open to expose a T-shirt underneath with some bullshit rap message about “gettin’ drizzed, yo.”

  Wayne was similarly outfitted but his shirt was some impossibly long T-shirt thing that came past his knees and nearly met the low cuffs of his goofy pants. Their friend who had joined them, and was supposedly a contact for the real dude with the information and locations of the Glades camps, was in the same getup except his long shirt was a Miami Heat jersey that Shaquille O’Neal himself could have worn, but it looked like a drape on this kid. All three of them were wearing stiff-brimmed baseball hats that had never been touched by the fingertips of baseball players. The contact had his lopped over to one side like he was hiding a deformed ear. The three of them were flicking their fingers and bopping around on the balls of their feet and blatantly staring at any female who walked past them and probably doing that ppssst, ppsst sound that caused some of the younger girls to turn their heads to them but made at least one woman flip them the finger. Buck figured the costuming was just another version of kids trying to belong, cliquing up with one another in an effort to be in with something instead of having to realize we’re really out here all alone in the world. He’d seen the same thing in prison, mostly split along racial lines. Buck had learned quickly that the world inside was no different than the world outside. No one else was going to jump in to save you when your ship went down. You the alone, boys.

  Buck downed the rest of his drink and was about to go over to his misfits and find out what the deal was. He was fronting this operation with two hundred dollars and all he was getting was some punk floor show. He slid off the stool but froze when a guy in a casino uniform approached the group. It made him nervous and he eased back onto the bar stool and turned his face half away but kept his peripheral vision honed on them. It took him a second to notice the dustpan in the uniformed guy’s hand, a broom in the other. Minimum-wage sweeper boy. He tapped fists all around and then motioned the group back under an overhang. Smart, Buck thought. Kid probably knows where all the cameras are and knows that most of them are focused on the gaming tables and you don’t want to end up on some videotape upstairs. The uniform took something from his pocket and passed it to Wayne, who gave him a small roll of bills in return. A tap of the fists again and they went their separate ways. Wayne, who had been so instructed, looked over at Buck, put one finger to the side of his nose and flicked it. Jesus, Buck thought. Was that the kid’s idea of a high sign? Fucking scene from The Sting. Hell, that film was older than the kid was. Buck signaled the bartender for his check, signed it with Mr. Hall’s scribble, and headed for the parking lot.

  “You cool?”

  Wayne and Marcus looked at each other, shrugging their shoulders like they were afraid to offer up the wrong answer to Buck’s simple question.

  “Uh, yeah,” Wayne finally said and both of them nodded their heads as they climbed into the pickup truck. Marcus took the backseat of the club cab.

  Buck got behind the wheel dunking: Jesus H. I know these two haven’t been smoking pot for at least a couple of hours. How did two human minds get so dense? He let it go.

  “He gave us six possibles,” Wayne said, taking a sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolding it for Buck to see. “Here’s the GPS coordinates for each one so we could use that handheld unit and he said you can get out to the first one in a couple of hours.”

  Buck started the truck engine and looked over at the paper. It was the lined type you used in school, the kind with the three-ring binder holes in it. The numbers made no sense to anyone unaware of global positioning systems, but most of the people in the Glades had been using the GPS to mark fishing grounds and crab trap placements for the last fifteen years. Out on the Gulf waters it had become almost essential, a quick and easy way to find your way on a sea of nothing but bare horizon once you were out beyond sight of land. Then they started miniaturizing the technology so everyone and their grandmother were using the thing now. They even started building them into high-priced cars and even cell phones so you could be a halfwit and still find your way around. It was the way of the world now, Buck thought. Easier and softer. Same with the people. That’s what made them such simple prey. They got fat and comfortable. Might as well have been asking for it.

  “So this sweeper guy knows these camps?”

  “Yeah. His uncle is a kinda contractor and ferries the building supplies and stuff out to these places when they’re building them or redoin’ them all modern. Sometimes this kid goes along with his uncle to load and unload the wood and shingles and plumbing pipes an’ all. They’ve got a big ol’ airboat that lugs it,” Wayne said, rushing on with as much detail as he could so that Buck wouldn’t think he was just stupid and they wouldn’t have just wasted two hundred dollars on the locations and that would really piss Buck off.

  Marcus sat in the back where he always did, watching the backs of the others’ heads.
Wayne was stealing his idea, of course, and he’d never get any credit for it if it worked out. But then he figured he also wouldn’t catch all the shit if it didn’t. That was the trade-off.

  Buck looked at the numbers again. He’d have to map them out to have a clue where they were. All three sat in silence for a couple of minutes until Wayne couldn’t take Buck’s lack of response any longer.

  “Toby said this here one, at the top, is only about a half hour north off Alligator Alley on the airboat and then the others are pretty close too.”

  He kept looking at the paper, like you could see something there, like he was studying the numbers just like Buck appeared to be.

  “OK, we’ll see about that,” Buck finally said. “I’ve got a surveyor’s map back at the house. We can plot these out and see just what kind of access two hundred dollars just bought us.” Buck knew the Glades could be a tricky place to navigate even in the best of times. And although the boys were oblivious to the weather Buck had been watching in the casino, he knew a coming storm could work for them as well as against them.

  He looked back over his shoulder as he started the truck and said to Marcus: “This plan of yours might still have life.”

  NINE

  Harmon was in the back of his house in Coral Springs, a cordless electric drill in his hand, spinning tight the wing nuts that held his hurricane shutters over the rear sliding glass doors. The sun was out. He was already sweating profusely with the effort of carrying and mounting the steel panels from his garage and stacking them in front of every window and door to his home. Each one was marked with its designation: N SIDE BEDROOM, S SIDE DINING. He’d been through this many times during his years living down here and now it had become ritual. But he never went so far as to say he’d gotten used to it.

  With the attachment on the drill he whizzed the nut on the W SIDE BATH and then took a break. Inside his house the lack of light created by the sealed windows was already giving him a mildly claustrophobic feel. He poured himself a glass of cold water from the refrigerator and sat at the kitchen bar, watching the local weather channel on the television. The station had not been changed for the last twenty-four hours. His wife called him obsessed but he just flitted her off with the back of his fingers, told her she was right, it was probably a waste of time and effort, go on with whatever you were doing and don’t mind me. She shook her head and did just that. Harmon kept his face turned to the TV. He was scared and given who he was, the years that his wife had spent with him overseas on security details in the military, even the time he’d had to hand-strip down a couple of asshole muggers on the street in Miami in front of her when they’d tried to rob them and he’d left them both with snapped bones, mewling like broken kittens on the sidewalk, he’d never showed fear. Harmon was considered an expert with a handgun. He was also good at close-quarters hand fighting, techniques he’d learned long ago that had become so ingrained that despite his age he could regain them in an instant, not unlike riding a bike or crushing a man’s windpipe before he could yell out an alarm. Harmon was not a man who panicked and his wife and family had depended on that. But today he was scared and would be until the threat of this new hurricane had passed. Harmon had seen the strength of such a storm. It was nothing you could fight, nothing you could kill, nothing you could stand up against if it decided to cross your path. It was bigger and stronger than man. And if it wanted you, all you could do was huddle down with your head between your knees and kiss your ass good-bye, as Squires would say.

  He took another deep drink of the water and refocused on the news. Hurricane Simone had swung north from the Yucatán Peninsula and then stalled for a day in the Gulf of Mexico. There it sucked up energy from the heat rising off eighty-two-degree Gulf water and ate itself into a huge category four monster. Some people likened it to spilling millions of gallons of gasoline on a forest fire, fueling a force that already couldn’t be stopped from eating everything in its path. But Harmon had been in the middle of a forest fire. He had also been in the center of a hurricane and the comparison was lost on him.

  On the tube the muted commentator was incessantly moving his lips while pointing out the steering currents—a high pressure system moving down from the western states and a sucking low off the southeast Atlantic—that was now bringing the storm back to Florida. The red-shaded “cone of probability” graphic was now a thinner triangle whose narrow end was just off the coast of Naples on the west side of the state and then spreading out to cover everything from the big blob of blue representing Lake Okeechobee on the northern edge down to Miami on the south.

  “Goddamn reversal of Andrew,” Harmon said out loud.

  “What, honey?” his wife called out from the laundry room. He ignored her.

  They had been together in 1992 when Hurricane Andrew ripped like a freight train over their home just south of Miami on an opposite track, crossing the state from east to west. Harmon had been working security at Homestead Air Force Base as a consultant. The money had been good enough to buy a nice four-bedroom house with a pool and an acre of land shaded by two-hundred-year-old live oaks that towered like green clouds over his yards. On the sunny side of the acreage he’d planted a row of orange and grapefruit trees that never failed to blossom in spring and give fruit in summer. Eden. Even now the memories brought an interior smile.

  Yeah, he’d known that one was coming. He’d been called onto the base to make sure that the hangars were secure where they’d moved the military jet fighters and lighter stuff that might get blown around. He’d tightened up a contingency plan just in case they lost off-site civilian power and had to go to their own generators. At home he’d tossed the patio furniture into the pool as a neighbor had suggested and parked his pickup truck closer to the garage so it would be on the leeward side and less likely to be pelted by loose tree branches and debris. He’d seen that some folks had put masking tape in crisscross fashion over their front windows. Christ, even he knew that old trick was bullshit. If a wind-blown branch or a coconut or something like that hit your window head on it was going to crack the glass anyway. You were still going to have to sweep up. Scraping that glue from the tape off the windows after the storm was four times the work. He’d gone to bed that night without even watching the news. The wind woke him at two a.m.

  Go ahead, Harmon would later tell friends from other parts of the country or the world when he traveled. Push your vehicle up to ninety or a hundred miles an hour on the expressway if you dare and then note the sound. Not the engine sound, because that won’t compare with the rush of air blasting over your car hood and roof. Just listen to the sound and then stick your head out the side window and let the air rip at your face. That’s a category four hurricane. That’s the strength of the wind, tearing at your world. For hours.

  Harmon was staring at the television, but not seeing the weather woman with her graphics and maps and little spinning red pinwheel depicting the present location of Simone. He was instead seeing the Oakwood grain of his double front door during Andrew, his face pressed up against it, his then solid two hundred thirty pounds trying to keep it closed as the wind bowed the two-inch-thick planks into the entryway. His wife was in the hallway closet, crying, huddled with their two children. But he could not hear her or anything else but the wind blowing through the rubber seal of the doorway, the air under such pressure that the sound was like Arturo Sandoval hitting a high C note on his trumpet for what seemed an eternity. He had looked around behind him at the walls lined with his books, really the most important things to him other than his family, and cursed himself for not preparing better. And then, at that moment, as he watched, the ceiling at one corner of his living room began to rise like the devil himself was gripping the house with a giant hand and then peeled away the entire roof and sent it flipping away into the night.

  The house had been a total loss. They were lucky to salvage some important papers, some pictures, some heirlooms. Most of his books had been ruined by the rain that had washed unimpede
d through every room. After Andrew his family relocated farther up the state. Everyone in the house had survived unscathed but for the memories that crept back.

  Harmon refocused on the television, took another drink of cold water. Back to work, he thought. Only the south side shutters left. He thought about Squires, could see his partner on the beachfront somewhere, sitting out in the open, laughing into the face of the rising wind and downing yet another draft at the hurricane party thrown by the locals down at the infamous beachside tavern called the Elbo Room. He was probably toasting the fact that the company wouldn’t be sending them out to the oil rigs since this one had turned east. He’d be buying shots and toasting hell itself. Some of us took precautions, some just said fuck it, let it come. If she hit them head on, it would be difficult to argue who was the smarter.

  “Damn, Chez! It’s blowin’ like a snarly bitch out there now,” Wayne said as he came through the door, wind and rain swirling in behind him even though he’d only opened it far enough to squeeze through. “Old man Brown’s coconut tree is bent over like to touch its head on the ground and the water’s already up to the fourth step over to Smallwood Store.”