Mr. Flood
By
Robert T. Jeschonek
Mr. Flood bangs his fork on the side of his plate, and thunder rumbles outside the restaurant. He winks one watery, sky blue eye at me and peels back his smooth, white lips in a dirty joke smile.
“Won’t be long now,” he says, his voice a gravelly tenor. “Not long till my retirement party.”
If you didn’t know better, to look at him, you’d think he was just another little old man hobbling around downtown Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Just another Central Park bench sitting, Social Security check cashing, prescription picking up, stumbling on the curbs, taking too long to cross Main Street old timer. You’d never know the kind of power that boils inside him.
Maybe you’d see him bang his fork on the plate a second time, and you’d hear the thunder, louder than before, but you wouldn’t connect the two. You wouldn’t realize that he’d made it happen. You wouldn’t know what he was about to do next.
But I know. I know all about what’s coming.
It’s the Big Night. He’s wearing his lucky suit for the occasion--a powder blue leisure suit from the ‘70’s with white piping around the collar, lapels, and pockets.
He’s the closest thing I have to a father, and I’m part of this, too. Tonight’s his retirement party and my graduation party wrapped up in one...though the people of Johnstown will call it something different altogether.
The ones who survive, anyway.
“I just hope I’m ready,” I say, picking at the gray, gravy-drowned meat loaf on my own cracked plate. Mr. Flood has wolfed down his turkey dinner like a teenage football star and chased it with a double slice of graham cracker pie, but I’m way too nervous tonight to be hungry.
“You’re more ready than I was in ’36, Dee,” says Mr. Flood, wagging his chicken hawk head on a neck so wishbone scrawny it looks like it ought to snap in two any second now. “I wasn’t nearly as good a student as you, and look how that turned out! Seventeen feet of water!”
I shrug and sigh and twist my curly, black hair around my index finger. I know my whole eighteen years of life have been leading up to this night, but now that it’s here, I kind of wish that it wasn’t. “Stressed out” doesn’t begin to cover the way I feel.
You’d be stressed out, too, if you were about to help destroy a city.
“Now drink up,” says Mr. Flood, refilling my water glass from the pitcher that he had the waitress leave at the table. The ice chips tinkle as he pushes the sweating glass toward me. “It’s almost time.”
Him and his water drinking, I think, but then I do what I’ve done all my life, which is what he tells me. I already have to pee like crazy, but I still gulp down half the glass.
I can’t even think about slipping off to the ladies’ room. A full bladder is part of the magic, Mr. Flood always says. Filling yourself with water till you’re ready to explode.
And then you do the same thing to the sky.
Mr. Flood refills my glass to the brim, and I roll my eyes, but I have another big drink. He just lifts the whole pitcher to his lips then, and it’s maybe half full, and he chugs it.
Except for a little bit left in the bottom, which he swishes around a few times and then slowly pours out on the table.
The water trickles from the rim of the sideways turned pitcher and patters on the sticky, dull wood of the tabletop.
And at the same moment, the same exact moment, I hear it start to rain outside.
“One two, buckle my shoe,” says Mr. Flood. “Three four, let it pour.”
And that’s how it starts. No one will ever know except me and Mr. Flood, but that’s exactly how the whole thing starts.
The fourth Johnstown Flood.
“Check, please,” he says to the ragged waitress.
Outside, I pop an umbrella, because it’s really coming down, but Mr. Flood takes it away from me.
“Now who ever heard of a Flood using an umbrella?” he says disgustedly, and then he holds out my umbrella to a passing woman. “Here you go, Miss.”
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 t
hat 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 h
e 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.
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