Galveston

by Paul Quarrington

  “Now where’s the other two?” asked Maywell.

  Jimmy Newton said, “If anyone can look after himself, it’s Caldwell. And he’ll take care of, um …”

  “Beverly,” supplied Maywell.

  “Yeah.” Jimmy realized that he understood something, without really understanding it at all. “Look, they’re fine. They’re all right. We should get to where we’re going. There’s not much time.”

  They looked toward Lester’s Hump, a huge black shadow hundreds of yards away.

  “Let’s go,” said Maywell.

  The quickest way to the summit of Lester’s Hump was to follow the crest formed by the cliffside. It was safer, perhaps, to descend to the road, to follow it up the rise, but it would add minutes to the journey and they all could see that minutes might be precious. A huge wall of black rose to the east. It fell as evenly as a curtain and dropped from the top of the sky. All of the elements were commingled there: water, of course, and wind, and fire (because lightning sparked, the forks meeting to form geometrical patterns), and earth (because the black wall contained land that had been destroyed along the way, pieces of islands that were now naked and barren). They took a moment to behold the sight, and each recognized it in his or her own way. Maywell Hope heard the voice of William Dampier: The Sky looked very black in that quarter. Gail saw something that she’d seen in a nightmare. Sorvig was taken back to her grandfather’s knee. The old man, strangled by a clerical collar, his face florid and his beard bone white, would often tell his little granddaughter how the world would end, and it was in this very manner, both chaotic and strangely organized. Lester saw a colour plate from the family bible, though he didn’t know what particular story or parable it illustrated, because Lester couldn’t read. He had never expected to see this one made real by the Almighty.

  Jimmy Newton saw what he’d always wanted to see, a category five coming to meet him.

  They began to walk along the crest. The edge of the island lay twenty feet away. Even so, they would often be slapped by waves, the foamy debris of waves shattered upon rock.

  To their left, down a scarp, sat the pale blue church. They all wondered how it had survived, everyone except Jimmy Newton, who had heard countless stories of such anomalies, how one man’s house was destroyed but his neighbour’s left standing. Anyway, thought Newton, the blue church didn’t represent that much of a freaky occurrence, not in the long run, because it would be crushed by the storm surge. Newton cast a glance to his right, toward the storm, and added a few words to that reflection: any minute now.

  Newton had time on his mind. He looked ahead and squinted. It was difficult to see anything, both because the storm filled the air with dark wind and because day hadn’t yet arrived. But it seemed to Newton that they didn’t start to actually climb for a couple of hundred yards, which would take them maybe five minutes at the rate they were going. Then he looked again toward the black wall and judged the progress it had made. It was coming awfully fucking fast.

  “Let’s go, Newton!” shouted Maywell Hope, as though Jimmy had been dawdling, which is kind of funny, because Newton had only been thinking about dawdling. “To the left!”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Jimmy made a subtle change in direction, enough of one, he hoped, to satisfy Hope. He reached into one of his jacket pockets and began to fumble with the camera there, a little thirty-five-millimetre automatic. He slipped his hand through the strap, popped off the lens cover.

  “Hurry up,” said Maywell, and he spoke it in very even tones, which, for him, indicated great panic.

  Jimmy Newton was tempted to glance to his right now, but that might give him away. Anyway, he could feel the eye-wall. All of his other senses were tuned to it, gauging its advent. The bottom of Lester’s Hump was approaching; they would soon begin to climb to its summit and a very slim chance of survival. Jimmy Newton imagined Oprah saying, “If I were you, all I would have been thinking about was getting up that hill!”

  “Ah,” Jimmy Newton would say, smiling a sly smile, something he would have to practise in front of a mirror, “you don’t understand the way my mind works.”

  “I don’t think any of us do,” Oprah might say, which would get a big laugh.

  But Maywell did. He understood the way Jimmy’s mind worked. He couldn’t comprehend the whys and the wherefores, but he did understand how Jimmy Newton behaved. The same as Maywell understood the comings and goings of bonefish.

  So Maywell knew that Newton was bewitched by that thing to his right, the colossus that panted and slobbered and groaned and licked at them, judging their tastiness. Like all pirates, Maywell had a fear of drowning at sea; he’d never suspected that the sea was capable of coming after him, of snatching him away even though he stood on land. But indeed it was, and indeed it was coming, and when Newton turned toward it, Maywell was ready.

  Jimmy rushed toward the edge of the island and drew the little camera up into position. His index finger found the shutter and he squinted into the viewer. All he could see was black; Newton glanced up to check his subject.

  And he saw the wall of black towering over him.

  Maywell Hope tackled Newton from behind, rolling into the back of his legs, causing Jimmy to buckle and fall to his knees. “You idiot,” he snarled, “what the jesus fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  Jimmy Newton raised his camera as though it were an offering to the black god that loomed before them. “Getting the shot.” These were the last words ever spoken by Jimmy Newton.

  The wall of water hit Dampier Cay. It did not crash upon it, this was not a huge wave, you shouldn’t think of it that way. This was a sudden translocation of the ocean itself. Some water was stopped by the land, but twenty-odd feet (NOAA later estimated the surge at a phenomenal forty-five feet) was simply sliced free by the sharp edge of the cliff. It drove across the island, looking to mate with other water. Water searches out water, that is a tenet of science so basic that even Caldwell understood it.

  The water took with it everything that was not bedrock, including Maywell Hope and Jimmy Newton. Gail saw them disappear, at least was fairly certain that she did, although this certainty arose not so much from memory, rather from the force with which the image appeared to her as she slept, months later. She saw Maywell and Jimmy offering no resistance to the water, clutching each other like lovers.

  She thought she saw them go by; Gail herself was stationary, because Lester and the girls had achieved the rise, made an ascent of a few feet, not enough to clear the water but enough that they weren’t claimed by the inundation. The girls were slapped and buffeted, but they were battered against land, smacking into trees, into rocks. Sometimes Gail and Sorvig did find themselves floating away, but then they would feel pain in their waists, intense but reassuring, ropes carving into their skin. Gail and Sorvig were pulled back to earth.

  And Lester held onto a rock, a rock that perhaps flowered from the very belly of the earth, because it was not moved by the storm. Lester held onto this rock for life, dear life. The rope around his waist was pulled so tightly that he had little air, little breath, but that was all right, because Lester had no prayers to offer.

  LATER THAT SAME DAY came helicopters, some finally able to respond to Newton’s SOS, the others dispatched by news organizations. The reporters were dressed in foul-weather gear, even though the storm was far away now, dissipating over Mexico. The reporters wore yellow and green rubber suits that covered them head to toe; the hoods had oversized brims, and these covered their faces and looked like bills, so it seemed as though a strange new species had descended upon what was left of Dampier Cay, a mutation that was half human, half fowl. The reporters scurried around, some of them photographing the debris, others speaking into little machines, recording their impressions.

  The reporters found Polly’s body in the storage area. There was a soggy note in her hand, held so tightly in her fingers that it tore when the reporters tried to remove it. They pieced the note back together and read, T
his is Polly Greenwich. She is a good woman. I love her very much. Maywell Hope.

  The reporters chronicled the story in various ways. Some implied that Maywell simply threw the body into the storage area and then hightailed it; others managed to convey a sense of reverence and ritual, Maywell taking his time despite the danger to himself. None of the reporters got the story right, of course. None wrote that the Last of the Merry Boys was gone forever, that while Hope may have been born with a pirate’s heart, he died with a finer one.

  The reporters and rescue workers went up Lester’s Hump, and at the very summit they found a black man and two white women. The three were sleeping, all with small smiles upon their lips, as though they were entertaining delightful dreams. The man wore overalls and a white shirt, and despite everything, his clothes had a sense of neatness about them. The girls were pretty and their clothes were tightened around their bodies by the heavy rains. Their photograph was on the front page of many newspapers. Gail Forster and Sorvig Laskin became known as the “Hurricane Party Girls,” and although they initially distrusted the label, they soon learned that it conferred a certain amount of respect.

  The reporters didn’t think there was much of a story in the case of Jimmy Newton, and his name was only mentioned once or twice in the newspapers. Mind you, there was considerable buzz on the Internet, weather weenies posting tributes and reminiscences. They felt a keen sense of loss, not that anybody really liked Jimmy. But he was Mr. Weather, and without his guidance the others were left to their own hunches, their best educated guesses. The globe once again became daunting, unknowable, so they mourned Jimmy Newton and called him the best there ever was.

  You might think it sacrilege that Beverly and Caldwell made love once again in the little church, the church that was painted the same shade of blue as a perfect sky. It is true that there was anger in Beverly’s heart, that she took a mischievous satisfaction in falling to her knees in front of the wooden cross, folding her hands with mock piety and then collapsing forward. Caldwell knelt behind her and guided himself inside. Beverly began to hum and hoot and finally to shriek at the top of her voice. She shrieked so that God might hear her over the storm, so that He might understand her anger. But those of you who think this sacrilege must therefore believe that God knew all about Beverly’s anger, and was forgiving. And you must believe that when the water crested the cliffside and began to gather up everything that lay in its way, you must believe that it picked up the church almost carefully, the entire pale blue structure, and carried it away to sea. You will temper your belief with what you know of science, and conjecture that this challenges credibility. All right, perhaps it does, but you might believe that when the pale blue church was destroyed, crushed by the huge hands of Hurricane Claire, some of the planks remained attached to the laths, and could serve as rafts. And you can imagine that Beverly and Mr. Caldwell rode these rafts upon the waves until they came to the shore of a small island where the natives, naked and smiling, greeted them with gifts.

  The author of nine novels, Paul Quarrington is also a musician, an award-winning screenwriter, a playwright and an acclaimed non-fiction writer. He won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction for Whale Music in 1989 and the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour in 1988 for King Leary. In 2004, Galveston was nominated for the Giller Prize.

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2005

  Copyright © 2004 Fizzy Dreams Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2004. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Quarrington, Paul

  Galveston : a novel / Paul Quarrington.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37553-7

  I. Title.

  PS8583.U334G34 2005 C813′.54 C2004-905231-4

  v3.0