Local Souls

by Allan Gurganus

  First came a hurricane named Gretel. Fierce winds had been predicted. Never gusted much past 50. It ain’t even a hurricane if it drops to 74. Since H follows G, jokes ran we should fear brother Hansel next. As usual, we felt we’d got off pretty easy, at least in this more desirable part of town. All of Riverside went to bed after one more than our standard several drinks. We slept soundly, having ducked another biggie.

  But, though we slept so well, we soon would wake to trouble, friend, right here in River City.

  THE FIRST JAN and I recognized something was off we heard our birds Billy and Jill going berserk downstairs. That would have been about three a.m. The cockatiels Jan had foolishly bought then named for our absent kids to offset “empty nest” feelings? they squawked like the devil. Janet sits up saying, “What’s got into them? Storm was a fizzle. I’ll just go check, Billy. Remember how that one mouse spooked them so?”

  Pitch-black-dark, and Jan climbs off the edge of our four-poster, opens the door into the hall. She wanders to our staircase and is halfway down before I hear her turning my way. Janet’s usual calm governs every word. “Billy. Billy? There’s . . . Our birds might just be drowning.”

  Well, that got me up.

  YOU ACCEPT AS how things will change but never overnight. You expect the mercy of a little slowness. I put on bedroom slippers and a silk robe as if it were Christmas morning and I’m just going down to photograph the kids opening their Santa loot. But tonight, to wander downstairs and to be suddenly wading. To slush, arms lifted, into your dark dining room. To “ford” your dining room. Then you hit something smelling like a badly-kept kennel and strangers’ motor oil making one wrong mix. And all arrived here, silent, since you went to sleep among your fellow Fallen. That the water in your house feels river-cold seemed logical enough; far creepier, these stripes of warm. God knows what’s fomenting in this chemical slop. It seems a Hell rehearsal, with water being fire. Its lithium does not cut our shock tonight. You descend into a house become aquarium. It offers further practice at your getting good at saying goodbye. Bye-bye to property, so long responsibility, and finally, maybe, solid earthen matter itself. “Dust to dust” is at least tidier than “Dust to mud.”

  Heroic, I waded into our kitchen and, idiotic, turned on each nonworking light-switch. Lucky for us there was most of a moon, and it made everything go silver, mercury. Caged birds still kept going crazy and then I saw it. Something swimming near them, circling our marble-topped “island.” I blindly found a broom and prodded toward what seemed a black beaver-otter paddling hard. One hissing yowl proved this must be the Blanchards’ Siamese cat. How it had washed into our home, I couldn’t guess. I saw why Jan’s birds were freaking out. But, eating something feathered seemed the last thing a cat this wet might crave.

  “Jan, honey? We’ve got the Blanchards’ Tang or Chang in here swimming laps.” “Ming,” she corrected. Then we had the comedy of my trying to save a drowning pet so irritated it would kill you for getting it above the waterline. Finally I found Jan’s thickest oven mitts and, holding this thrashing oil-blackened creature far from me head-outermost, I heaved it up on top of the fridge. It did not sound real grateful there.

  No, we counted ourselves among the lucky ones, really. Because of a river hillside, our home stands three stories, not Riverside’s usual two. We soon sat on our roof beside caged cockatiels wet and noisy. We sat between two dresser drawers stacked with family photos, stock coupons; Janet’s laptop (couldn’t find its case). It contained the all-important will. Brilliant, I was about to leave all my heart meds lined neat along our bedside table. Quite a night then day ahead. Of course, first thing, I checked across the street.

  Doc and Marge’s place showed no flashlight glare, no sign of life. They’d likely already made a James Bond motorboat escape, somehow without asking us along. I had the bass boat but Janet worried that wrestling with that and even getting my reliable Evinrude cranked would overtax me. At first I defied her. Got down into it finally, worried if the short rope still securing it to our underwater dock would hold. The Evinrude called “Old Reliable” for years would not turn over. No way. It was dead and I had my omen. And Jan had her first of several thousand I told you so’s.

  If our dear neighbor Mitch (my friendly insurance competitor) hadn’t motored past right then in his aluminum outboard, I think we might still be perched up there at the roofline like birds ourselves. Our cockatiels, even on a good dry day, are ill-tempered, very irritating pets. They do nothing. Janet bought them without consulting me, right when our second kid went off to school. “They were on sale, two for the price of one. They’re married, the clerk said.” “Well, in that case.” Next Jan made both of us seem even more conventional: by naming the male for Bill, Jr., and the girl for our brilliant linguist daughter, Jill. And I never once complained. Too much to even say.

  When you lose everything overnight you gain at least surprising information. After that first gulping “Uh-oh,” there can come a start-up giddiness. It registers almost as relief. Maybe only a man as old as I would think: No more hiring teenagers to overpay for grass-mowing. I’d come to hate our enslaving acre and a half! And to think how much my dad had valued a green yard of no farm-animal food value. If Red grew up fantasizing about town, my dreams had lately run toward a silent farmhouse, Presbyterian-plain, zero-maintenance—it would hold me, seated cross-legged alone on the plank porch, a Zen-monk hayseed whose only crops would be invisible hanging garden meditations.

  Washed out, I imagined myself if Dad had not inherited. What if we’d been forced to apply for club membership using only my own looks and cash? If I lived in the country, would it be this wet? But I learned at once to try and hide any such idle speculation from my wife.

  Most of our antiques downstairs had come from “Barton,” Janet’s mother’s family’s Edenton plantation. Me, being a tenant farmer’s son, I’d inherited no object of importance. The Mabrys’ everything had been provisional as next month’s rent. The importance of Barton’s 1799 sideboards and wing chairs to Jan would prove far greater than I’d ever even guessed.

  Sounds absurd to say my wife mistook such farm furniture for the missing plantation itself. Might seem silly to admit how the loss of one slave-made cypress breakfront would give my unsentimental darling a nervous breakdown. But that is really sort of just what was about to happen.

  2

  WE (AND SIX hundred others) spent that first night in a National Guard armory. If its gym made for an unsightly B&B, at least the price was right. No friends could take us in, being flooded out as we. Many humans endure Some One Night When Everything Changes. Somehow, we, the Fallens’ 6,803, all drew September 15th.

  The richest people in Falls occupied Riverside’s twelve square blocks surrounding us, ours. Falls’ poorest folks live at sixes-and-sevens down near the closed cotton mill in B.A., Baby Africa. Its stretch of silt land has always been considered so worthless, freed slaves were given it for free. So, into this overlighted army multipurpose room, all us river rats crawled, finally together.

  Whatever our class or race, we lugged the selfsame items: family Bibles, deeds, love letters, photos of dead parents, of living children and grandkids. We held our damp pets shivering inside bath mats, pillowcases. For once, we did not just nod howdy; we looked each other square in the eyes. Mait said, “Now, ain’t this a bitch, Mr. Bill?” Here he stood, Dad’s calming caddy. Miller’s hair looked even whiter, with good reason. Almost before I knew quite who he was, Mait, greeted this evening, seemed a dear old friend. Think of all we’d been through together.

  I asked, “You-all swamped, too?”

  “Pretty much it got everything. And right when I had worked my yard up to where I could just about look at it.” He studied the floor.

  WE NONE OF us appeared our tip-top best, I promise you. In this gym crisscrossed by cots, echoing yapping dogs and crying kids, you heard a jumpy madcap energy short-circuited. You heard an intentional costume party’s loudness. Everybody talk
ed too loud and all our info came through eavesdropping, but at least we were alive. Half the children underfoot kept “acting out” unsupervised; the rest, in corners, stayed bent in thumb-sucking, fetal positions.

  We bunched here imagining how it’d happened, to be attacked from the rear, our placeholder waterway gushing suddenly with Mississippi ambitions.

  The “Why?” we’d leave to helpless half-drowned rectors to explain. The “How?”—our government should’ve known and warned us.

  We sat on our provided cots, Vietnam surplus, stating common knowledge: the weather’d lately changed; hurricanes more frequent and far meaner. These days officials had to name so many storms a year they used up every English letter clear to X. Then they reverted to a second alphabet, the Greek one. (That in itself sounded a bit un-American.) Meanwhile the right-wingers in D.C. still ask each other, “Is there really global warming? Surely we need another blue-ribbon study.” Republicans must not watch as much Weather Channel as Jan and I do in our rooted waning years.

  The wife and I found, among other milling refugees, Lottie Clemens, our retired longtime child-care friend and cleaner. In her housecoat pocket, I saw a zip-lock bag full of costume jewelry. We seemed to be meeting on some train speeding toward the same internment camp. “The house! How the house?” She yelled for news of a place she’d weekly vacuumed forty years. Janet and I glanced at each other, then simplified our answer. We spared everyone’s dignity by skipping details. We just shook our heads no.

  “Don’t be telling me that now. Unh-unh. Not the house . . .”

  “But, Lottie, your boys?”

  “Oh, they safe. Youngest two running round here somewhere. Both that age where they all-the-time playing they don’t know me. Even while sitting there facing they own momma in the same boat!”

  Then we kissed each other. I sort of cried all over Lottie—pillow breasts and wiry arms—she fell against and between us. With our last formality and feeble manners shot, we re-understood. Our lives, our childbearing years and these longer hot-flashing ones, our whole life spans had been spent together in one shuttling station-wagon and those same few rooms. Rooms now ruined. Including, I belatedly noted, Lottie’s useful office.

  —I vowed then, if we ever got through this I’d enlarge her pension. She is a decent funny woman with four sons, twelve grandkids, all somehow boys. (And I did live to boost her retirement. I’m not bragging. My truly stepping up to actually financing her old age, it was already overdue about four years.)

  THE SMALLER THE town, the bigger the event looms. Or so I told myself. But the scale of both seemed huge tonight. The Department of Interior raffles off the wetlands meant to absorb our runoff rain. With Wal-Mart parking-lots paved hard, no sponginess is left. Water’s got to go somewhere, so it came picking our locks. We all sat discussing this as someone said, “If I told you you were about to see Diana de Pres without makeup, would you believe me? Miracles and wonders.” We turned, and the men, tired and old as we felt, somehow, helping each other, stood. If only saluting the memory of first seeing her enter a club dance eons back.

  RIVERSIDE’S GREATEST CAUCASIAN beauty of our age, the witty bourbon-loving Diana de Pres, dragged our way, chuckling. “Well, this is what’s left of the goods, boys,” and she did a runway turn, witty in ruin. It still registered as sexy. Force of habit from all sides.

  She stood blinking in not-good light wearing only a tarp and donated hip boots, nothing much underneath. Since childhood, not even her husbands had ever seen her bare-faced. Our gorgeous hard-drinking Diana—compared for life to that poorer local farm-gal, the unbeatable good sport Ava Gardner—our same Diana now stood, sans jewelry, minus a dot or dash of lipstick and eye paint, erased nearly unrecognizable. Poor thing looked like one wet cockatiel. We made room for her on the cot and passed her a spare blanket. “It is not yet bourbon time? Mitch found me in a tree,” she kept trying to sound chipper but mixed up her next: “Was up the paddle without a creek.”

  Then she looked at us. Di saw we knew what she meant and she need not give a do-over. We were all the same age. Diana fell to sleep almost at once. And my dear Janet, who loathes all divas, was too in shock to even properly gloat.

  ENCOUNTERING YOUR NEIGHBORS in this overlit gym felt like a class reunion convened in some lesser circle of prison Hell. Even the National Guard’s hanging lamps had all been caged like convicts.

  You hugged your most casual friends, and why? because they’d also survived. (Some of us had not. Two pals we’d known for life had been electrocuted by a falling power line; one beloved married pair drowned inside their own new sports car during a botched dash north that washed them straight off Mill Road’s dam.)

  Now greeting chums, finding them unhurt, you need not say a word. You knew that their “good stuff” must be, like your heirlooms, so much soggy pulp. —Jan and I slouched here with the crowd we usually saw only at the club near month’s end when you needed to eat a little of the food you’ll pay for anyway.

  ALL THAT MATTERED was our knowing others and being recognized by them. Broke, fresh out of shelter, we had so little else to recommend us. We were our aging faces. Credit lines? Our former looks. Others’ memory of which beautiful house had been our own. But tonight made for a wonderful once-in-a-lifetime bond. Revival meeting. It felt either like the end of something, or a radical fresh start.

  Sat feeling glad that poor Red Mabry had not heard certain flood sounds: the way many of our six hundred paired River Road maples, once robbed of supporting soil, fell into and against each other. The sound? If bowling pins were big as dinosaurs. Trees then pressed by current toward the first farm, the next town.

  JUST ONE STRETCH of this armory’s baseboard heat really worked; I counted twenty wide-open family Bibles spread there on gym flooring, toasting some. Damp Good Books were attended by people waiting for those to slowly dry. As if stirring little campfires, seated folks would idly reach down and flip from the crisper Old to a wetter New Testament. I heard certain guardians muttering to themselves. I slowly understood these sounds were not just shocked complaints but stubborn busted prayers.

  Bibles seemed more valuable for their crocheted cross-shaped bookmarks, browned Palm Sunday fronds. Some showed handwritten names and birth dates, marriages then death dates. Books, black and white, attended by people white and black, being dried face-up wide-open as if meant to breathe.

  Hard to describe why that first evening should seem one of the most joyful of my life. Or maybe “memorable,” which is joy at its most attention-getting. Had I, as a house-proud man with a retired insurance-office income, been secretly waiting for higher-octane trouble? For some outside woe past my being built around a heart this bad?

  The second night would prove the killer.

  And don’t even mention Night #3.

  Those of us who’d stayed in Falls now had no place TO stay.

  Jan’s first impulse was borrowing a cell phone, calling our far-flung kids to reassure, “You didn’t even know? It’s not on the national news yet? Well, but we’re okay, thanks. The house? likely a dead-loss but your dad and I aren’t. What? Oh, honey, I will. Your dad’s waving his love as usual. Just didn’t want you worried sick—and here you had no idea!”

  Emotion never behaves. Like mercury, that particular material is seriously hard to grasp. Its mass keeps turning into beads, then vice versa. (Example: The day my son graduated from Haverford, I should have felt ecstatic. “With special distinction,” the dean announced. But traces of my dad’s (and his dad’s) cardiac condition had long since been found in our Bill #IV, passed on to him via me. Meds were part of his life, too. Why did three sick generations’ sadness find me that one dressed-up day? Fact is, I felt so guilty for having passed my boy such a plug heart, I honestly considered suicide. A rifle in the garage seemed the least “botheration” to Janet’s antiques and rugs. So why was this flood night unlike any other? This night of the day when I lost our house and cars and her great-great-grandfolks’ only oil portrait
s, why should an unaccountable elation now come to call?

  Maybe because, being like everybody else, I felt briefly washed of guilt. I could claim God’s love or be another hard luck case or both, whichever suited me. I need no longer actually succeed. Not like those that fled Falls early to strain for stardom elsewhere. I was Bill Mabry, formerly of The River Road, which was presently The River.

  Maybe I had suddenly floated into my own fated Phase II?

  Somebody announced our dinner tonight would be hot dogs, meant for the grammar school now closed, either with or without buns.

  SINCE EVEN NOW our part of the world is still farmed, most of us keep big deep freezes. Janet and I had shucked, then “put up” this past summer’s exceptional Silver Queen corn grown on her family’s last country holding. Like Doc’s duck specimen freezer, other neighbors’ were stocked with game, but theirs proved edible. Everybody specializes in a different delicacy.

  The Blanchards have a summer place in Maine and so they always fly home south with August’s lobsters onboard. Everybody stashes shrimp we peeled ourselves, quail we’ve plucked, and all of it was suddenly left unrefrigerated. We knew we’d have no electricity hereabouts for weeks, at least. Easily a million bucks’ worth of our neighbors’ best possible food was now going going gone.

  Timothy and Tomothy Bixby got suddenly inspired. Being teens they were insisting on being called “Thomas” and “Timothy.” But nobody could give up that other, it was such fun to say. They’d become famous when Doc Roper breathed them both back to life. (Later rumors claimed that all along they’d been secretly Roper’s sons! Not true.) Twins were slated for full-ride swim team scholarships at the University of Miami.

  We heard how, as the Bixbys’ pool emptied into their sodden house, boys had already wrestled their mom’s butane gas grill up into their red pickup’s bed. Boys set all good stuff from their own family-freezer over a slow flame—venison, homemade sausage, lump-crab picked by many a loud Bixby watching UNC basketball on Riverside’s first giant screen.