Voices of the Storm

by Brad Munson

  “You’re lookin’ good!” he said, pumping Ken’s hand. “This your secretary who’s always makin’ the reservations? Finally givin’ her an afternoon off?” Even after twenty years in the desert, Tony clung to a mild but noticeable Brooklyn accent.

  Ken grinned. “My daughter, actually. Rose.”

  He wasn’t the least bit fazed. “Ah! Should’a known! Look at you two!” He put out a cordial hand, and Rose surprised him by taking it, and even allowing Tony to bow over it and put it to his lips. “Those eyes!” he said, looking up at her. “Please tell me you’re not wearing contacts.”

  “Not a chance,” she said, smiling.

  “Ah! You made my day!”

  He escorted them to a table against the front window. Two tables down and across the way, Ken recognized the only other patron in the place, that scientist woman from the Ag Station, the one shaped like a sack of bowling balls. She looked up as they approached and scratched her head – a busy little gesture, like an otter scrubbing its pelt – and sketched a smile. Ken smiles and nodded back to her. No reason to have an actual conversation; the nod was enough for both of them. Hi, I see you, you see me, have a good meal, don’t bother me.

  Tony held the chair for Rose. She looked amused by the whole process.

  O’Meara’s was built right at street level. On a good day you could sit for hours in its industrial-strength air-conditioning and admire the pretty young professionals on their lunch. Today there were no pedestrians, and the perennially crystal-clear windows were marred with droplets and streaks. The Convention Center – a serious gray brick hulk that covered most of the opposite block – was scarcely visible across the four lanes of Central Avenue, a blurry slate-colored ghost of itself that seemed to be hunkering down, bracing against the rain.

  The street itself had become a river, a single southbound torrent that filled the entire four lanes from curb to curb at least six inches deep. It was even beginning to develop its own chop and eddies underneath the constant pelting of new rain, more rain, endless rain.

  “You know the menu already, so I won’t bore you,” Tony said. “Genelle is your waitress. Don’t eat the salmon.” Rose looked surprised. He put up a hand. “No, really,” he said. “Don’t.” He nodded briskly and moved away. A moment later a dark-eyed blonde with slightly too much hair replaced him and took drink orders.

  For a long minute, they were both fascinated with the view. From where they sat, the rain was not only heavy and dark, it was right there, a scant few inches from their faces but still impossibly remote, falling in dull silver sheets that simply would not stop. Ken put his fingertips against the glass; he could actually feel the rhythm of the rain as it pounded against the ground.

  “Freaky,” he said.

  Rose didn’t say anything.

  Genelle came back again and they placed their orders: Caesar Salad for Rose, the World-Famous French Dip for Ken.

  The silence grew longer and more uncomfortable. They both watched avidly as a middle-aged woman frog-walked down the sidewalk and almost threw herself in her car, covering her head with a flapping fragment of newsprint that offered no protection at all.

  The food came. Ken selected a single French fry and steeled himself. Time for more conversation. “Pretty strange introduction to our quaint little town,” he said with an entirely forced lightness.

  Rose looked at him – regarded him with those wonderfully odd violet eyes. She wasn’t simply ignoring him; it was more as if he hadn’t spoken at all.

  “I pretty much hate you right now, you know,” she said.

  The bottom dropped out of his stomach.

  “I mean, you’ve been okay during this whole car wreck-rainstorm-hospital thing – better than okay, really, but…” She looked down and shook her head. “You were a complete shit two years ago, Dad. You were a great guy for my whole life, right up until then, and then Uncle Patrick died and you …broke.”

  He didn’t say a word. He just kept looking at her, stone silent.

  “You left us. Don’t you –”

  “I know what I did,” Ken said. The food tasted like paste in his mouth.

  Rose stopped talking and looked out the window again. The street-river had grown even deeper, rising past the level of the curb. Now it was an uninterrupted, roiling expanse that began outside the restaurant’s glass wall and stretched to the Convention Center’s brick staircase fifty feet away. Another step disappeared under the water while they sat in silence.

  “Do you know how hard this has been on Mom?” she asked, trying to keep her voice low, but not entirely succeeding. “She's trying to get this real estate thing off the ground at the worst possible time in human history. She cleans fucking apartments to make the bills, do you know that?”

  “I know that. She won't take any money from—”

  “Of course she won't, and you know why! You. Left. Us.”

  Ken pressed his lips together to keep the truth from pouring out. “Rosie, it's more complicated than—”

  “Sure it is, Dad,” she snapped, and glared at her meal, not at him. “Sure it is.”

  Neither of them said anything for a long time. Ken listened to the roaring hiss of the storm and let it fold around him.

  “You know,” she finally said, “I’m actually glad you’re not trying to apologize.” Her voice was very calm, very reasonable. She didn’t sound hurt; she wasn’t holding back tears or anger. She was discussing it, the way she might discuss a character in a movie or the problems of a distant friend. It was that distance that hurt him the most. “It wouldn’t really mean anything if you did. It wouldn’t matter.”

  A man in a black pea coat, shoulders hunched and head buried in a shapeless hat, trudged past them, outside the glass. He was so close it startled Ken when he slogged past, almost ankle-deep in water, sending up heavy sprays of brown water that nearly reached his knees. For a moment, Ken wondered if it was the same man they’d passed on the way to the restaurant, the one that Rose had screamed about. What the devil was that poor man doing out there?

  He moved relentlessly north against the current, and an old pick-up truck passed him in the middle lane, going the other way. The water boiled around its slowly turning tires, the wavelets already touching the top of the hubcaps.

  “I don’t know what to say, Rose.” It was the only honest thing he could come up with.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There was a lot going on. A lot you don’t understand.”

  She gave him a bland and meaningless smile and put out her hands as if she was weighing something in each one. She let the left hand dip down. “Explaining yourself,” she said, then let the right one dip, “Making excuses.” Then she spread them into a shrug. “I’ve never been real good at telling those apart.”

  “I know,” he said, and heard the anger in his own voice. “I know. It’s just–”

  There was a tremendous thwack on the glass above Rose’s head. She said “Shit!” and flinched away, ducking down and covering her head. Ken jumped up and reared back, almost overturning his chair. He looked up to see a dirty white mass the size of a human head smashed against the glass. It held there for a moment, then slid down the entire length of the window and plunged into the brown water on the sidewalk with a thick, ugly splash.

  “A bird,” said a gruff voice. Ken spun around to see the scientist woman standing right behind him, frowning deeply at the streak of blood and mud on the window. “It was a bird.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I see that.”

  Genelle was hovering. “That’s been happening all day,” she fretted. “This rain is screwing up the poor things. Or maybe it’s just the wind, I don’t know.”

  “I’m not that hungry,” Rose said. She pushed away the salad she had barely touched. “Can we go?”

  Ken nodded, glanced at the check, and peeled a set of bills from his modest roll. “Same here,” he said, with a glance at the scientist-woman. What as her name? Armstrong? Armitage? Arm…something. Why did s
he keep staring at him like that? “Let’s go home.”

  Rose froze half out of her chair. “Uh,” she said, and stood up much more slowly. “About that…”

  “About what?”

  “Home,” she said, and grimaced. “At least, your home.” She looked at him, then at their observers, and pitched her voice very low. There was more challenge and less certainty in it this time. “I really, really don’t want to go up there with… with that…”

  “Maggie,” he said stonily. “You mean Maggie.”

  “Yeah. It’s …it’s weird, Dad. This whole thing creeps me out. So I was thinking I could just get a hotel room down here somewhere, in a nice part of town and everything, so you wouldn’t have to worry. Nothing scummy, but –”

  “That wasn’t the deal.” he said firmly. He felt as if he had swallowed a stone.

  “I know,” she said hastily. “I know.” They were standing at the table now, but not moving toward the door. Genelle tried to give him change but he shook his head.

  “Keep it,” he said.

  She thanked him and moved away fast. Rose was back to staring at the storm.

  “You talk about me walking out on you,” he said. “Abandoning you.” He didn’t care if the others were listening now or not. “Here’s a chance to change that. But you won’t even stay in the same house with me.”

  “It’s not you,” she said, but he didn’t believe one word of it. “It’s that – JESUS! What the hell is that?” She stepped to the window and put a hand against the glass.

  A roughly cylindrical mass, as long as a man is tall, was rolling down the middle of the street, pushed along by the rising water. It looked like a bolt of tangled black cloth, or a log wrapped in fabric, or–

  –or a human body, overwhelmed by the rush of water, rolling over and over in the surging current.

  It was the same size, the same color, as the man in the pea coat who had walked past them a few minutes earlier.

  “Is… is that a person?” Ken said, squinting through the rain.

  “Oh my God. Oh my God.” It was Genelle, standing behind them again. Ken turned to her and saw Tony O’Meara behind the waitress, and the scientist even farther back. He looked grim.

  “We been seein’ all kind of shi–ah, stuff all day,” he said. “Maybe that’s nothin’.”

  Rose pressed her hand flat against the glass. “Help him,” she said. She turned to her father, outraged and desperate. “Help him!”

  Ken moved towards the main entrance with Tony close behind.

  “It’s just somethin’ got washed up in the rain,” Tony said. “Come on, Ken, don’t bring that crap in my place.”

  Ken didn’t take his eyes off the turning black thing in the water. It was still rolling south. He was barely pacing it as he reached the door and tried to push it open.

  The door didn’t move. He looked away from the turning thing long enough to see that the wide glass door wasn’t locked, so he pushed harder.

  “Wait a second, for Christ’s sake!” Tony said. He put a strong hand on Ken’s arm. “Look at that water! You open that door, you’ll flood the place!”

  Ken looked down. At least eight inches of water was flowing past the door, holding it shut, and it would roll into the restaurant like a miniature tidal wave if the seal was broken.

  “He’s right,” the scientist-woman said. “Maybe there’s something else…we can…”

  The turning thing had stopped for a moment, snagged on something under the water. Foam and mud was boiling around its trailing edge as it shifted, twenty feet away, right in front of them. There was a sudden flash of white – What was that, Ken thought. A hand? – that disappeared in an instant, then the thing came loose and started flowing south again, rolling and rolling.

  “I’ll help you clean it up,” Ken said, and started to shove at the door as hard as he could.

  Tony ripped him away from the glass, turned him around, and slammed his back against the opposite wall. “You leave that fuckin’ thing alone,” he said under his breath, holding him in place. His square face was bright red under his tan, sweating and slightly swollen. “Leave it. I don’t want that shit in here.”

  The scientist didn’t move to help. He didn’t expect her to. “Tony. Come on. They could be hurt. Hell, it could be somebody you know.”

  Tony didn’t let him go. “This is my place,” he said. “Mine. And that is not my problem. I don’t want it in here.”

  “But –”

  “I don’t want it in here!”

  Ken tried to push him away and Tony shoved him back again, tight against the wall. “Don’t,” he said, and this time it wasn’t a joke. “Just… don’t.”

  They stood together, tight and motionless for a long beat… and one more. Then Ken nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Your place.”

  Tony looked at him hard to make sure he wasn’t bluffing. Then he let him loose.

  Ken straightened up and looked into the street. The turning black thing was gone, swept south now, out of sight. Rose was standing at the edge of the waiting area, her hand on her mouth, her beautiful eyes huge and unblinking.

  “I’m sorry,” Ken said to her. He felt small and stupid and angry as hell.

  “It’s okay,” she said. Her voice was almost trembling.

  “I tried, I –”

  “It’s okay.”

  Tony picked up their ridiculous tablecloth, neatly folded and ready to go. “We got the back entrance sand-bagged already,” he said gruffly. “It’s up a little higher back in the alley there. We’ll help you to your car.” He looked at the scientist with a mixture of rage and shame. “You, too, Doctor Armbruster.”

  That was the name, Ken thought distantly. Armbruster.

  “Time to close,” Tony told them.

  Ken didn’t say anything. He took the cloth and turned toward the kitchen. “Come on,” he said to Rose.

  Rose whispered “’Bye,” as they plunged into the alley. The Range Rover was parked at the curb a few feet before the end of the block. They managed to get inside with only their shoes and cuffs soaked through.

  Ken was still burning. “No motels,” he said as the doors slammed shut and locked. “None of that shit. I know you’re weirded out. I get that. But you’re coming to stay at the hacienda, at least until your mother is out of the clinic, and that’s it.” He started the car without waiting for an answer.

  Rose looked at her lap and nodded. “Okay,” she said. The motel thing had been a bad idea all along, she knew that. And even though she hated that huge, stupid house on the West Ridge and the thought of everything that waited for her there, she was grateful that he had made the decision for her.

  After all that had happened, after the wreck and the hospital and the restaurant, she didn’t really want to be alone.

  Not now. Maybe not ever again.

  Five

  I should just keep going, Lucy Armbruster told herself as the Civic grumbled north on Highway 181. Just stay on the freeway, keep my head down and don’t stop ‘till I hit Barstow or Vegas or the friggin’ Canadian border.

  She knew what was waiting if she stayed here. The satellite data at the station would confirm it, but the drive across town and a good, hard look at the clouds convinced her: it was a hundred-year event. Maybe a five hundred-year event. The old Dos Hermanos was as good as gone already, and if it didn’t stop raining soon – by morning at the latest, there wouldn’t be enough dry land left inside the crater valley to rebuild the town. Not ever.

  A green and white highway sign passed on her right, whipping and trembling in the gusting wind like a living thing trying to pull itself free of the mud:

  NORTH RIDGE EXIT 1 MI.

  SCENIC VIEW

  UC RIVERSIDE

  AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH STATION

  “Scenic view my ass,” she muttered. The Civic plowed through the sheeting rain. On a good day there was a flat spot right near the off-ramp where you could see the entire Valle de Los Hermanos laid out like
a piece of dirty burlap. This was most decidedly, most indisputably, most sure as shittedly not a good day.

  Lucy was half-serious about the escape. She really could cruise right by and to hell with the consequences. Use the cell phone to call Cindy and Rebecca at the Station and tell them to go north, young women, go north. Hell, she would even leave a message for that cretin Steinberg to hit the road, not that he deserved it.

  She sighed and wished Frannie would speak to her in some kind of soft-focus romance-movie moment, a scene where that wonderful alto of hers, smooth as single malt scotch, would echo out of nowhere and say something like Nothing important is easy, my love, or The greatest good for greatest number, this is your shining moment, make the world your own, blah blah blah. Or even Shut up and get to the Station, you twit. But there was nothing like that. In fact, it was getting harder and harder to remember what Frannie sounded like at all. Lucy had to concentrate now to remember that wonderful voice. It was drifting away, like everything did. Drifting, she thought bitterly.

  The cell phone made the decision for her, bleeping from its holster on her hip where she wore it like a small-caliber pistol. It was a call from – oh, God, Cindy Bergstrom.

  She tapped on the phone. “Yes?”

  “Well, hey there, Dr. Armbruster!” Cindy chirped. It was the single most annoying voice on the planet. “Quite a little storm we’re brewin’ out there, eh?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “What is it you want, Cindy?”

  “Oh, I was just checkin’, y’know. Seein’ how things were goin’?” The last word came out more like “goo-in’,” and there was a charming little diphthong in there someplace. Cindy had been in Dos Bros more than seven years. She had come here with her husband and her sister when they both got jobs at VeriSil, but she still sounded like an apple-cheeked extra from a road company version of Fargo. At this particular moment, it was the last – the very last – voice that Lucy Armbruster wanted to hear.