The Last Karankawas(52)
They settled back into equilibrium, their comfortable life. The years helped. Day passed into month into year into decade, and they worked, lived, loved. They reached an ease together, moving separately in their own spheres and rejoining in the evenings, on the weekends, and, after Year 43, in retirement. They have been happy since. Their jagged edges worn smooth, been smooth so long he cannot recall the last time their tempers flared. But he remembers Year 9 now, fingering the wood of the bed frame. Her fury and grief, his impotent rage. What the two of them could have done with a hurricane like Ike.
He smells the water before he sees it, a scent of copper and salt, both natural and unnatural, and his eyes fly open in the flickering dark. Water seeps beneath the door of the guest room, a trickle, no rushing sounds or splashes. A steady creeping. Hurricane Ike has entered the house. When he swings his feet to the floor, the rug squelches.
* * *
Ike is on the top bunk, listening to the whistling wind outside and the soft slosh of water inside when he hears something he shouldn’t. A high, keening yowl beneath the wind. It sounds very close. Rain hammers against the windowpanes, but Ike stretches his already-limited hearing. There it is again: a yowl, pitched in panic. A cat. Coming from the front yard. His father’s watch reads 12:51 a.m.
Ike doesn’t hesitate to reach for his shoes, lying neatly on the bunk’s attached shelf. Idiot, Catherine would say to him—he can hear her voice as clearly as if she sat next to him, watching him pull on the sneakers and lace them tightly. That is a hurricane out there, hon. Stay inside. Stay safe. Ike taps a kiss to his finger and touches the mattress where in his mind’s eye she is sitting; then he tugs on the windbreaker lying beside him. He climbs slowly down the bunk ladder and descends into water midway up his calves.
The shock of it—water inside the house, where it does not belong—sings up Ike’s legs. Wrong, the wrongness of his submerged feet when he should be dry and feel floor beneath him. Though the water is warm, he begins to shiver. Gingerly, he moves through the inches of wrong water, making his way to the front door. Except for the lapping against the walls and furniture and the splashing sounds his legs make, the house is silent. He toes the now-useless towels aside from the door and grunts as he pulls it through the water to open. Then he opens the screen door.
Catherine, he thinks in that heartbeat before it hits him.
Rain screams into his eyes, thrown in sharp pellets. He gasps, tugs the hood of his windbreaker over his head to protect his glasses, but drops still beat like bullets. The screech of the wind is immense, and the world is water. Albacore Avenue sits beneath at least two feet of rain-churned liquid. The cottonwoods and live oaks in his neighbors’ yards whip back and forth; the palm trees are bent over nearly double, so far he is amazed they haven’t snapped. Branches and debris spear the air, flying without pattern. He wavers, fighting for balance, and moves down the driveway to the street, hands cupping his eyes, blocking the worst of the storm. Ike has arrived finally and all of Galveston is witness.
Ike the storm muscles through ocean and atmosphere, onto the narrow strip of sand-seawall-asphalt-wood-tree-gravel-earth, the only thing between it and the continent. Ike was a cluster at first, small points of loose, scattered weather systems before the heat came—the warmth cast down from the sun and rising from the salt water, tendrils reaching through and weaving the storms together, stoking them like embers. They bloomed into Ike. Ike has roiled and whirled, charged and swirled across the ocean, hurling cyclones, stinging rain. Ike whispers and bellows. Draw near, people, webs of paved roads and buildings and bridges, all icons of men’s hubris. Draw near to Ike, who breathes them in and exhales them in pieces. Stilts beneath houses on the beach splinter, snap. Buildings crumple into the water. Boats spin, take flight, crash in streets and cars. Sparks catch and fire ignites, but the water of Ike is too strong, the wind too ferocious, to be stilled or even slowed by fire. People run, huddle, cry out, drown. In control and reckless, restless, Ike is cruelty and compassion both: tear down to raise up again in the image of what was and will be—all wind, all water. Ike surges across the island and plunges through a tangle of homes at the east end where a man stands in the street with his hands raised high. To him, Ike is silence that lasts forever; Ike is a single voice forged from so many keening sounds that take the shape of Ike’s own name. Ike is howling, howling. From the throat of the funnel at its heart, Ike opens, holds in its mouth the man with its name. The man staggers in the water and lowers his arms to clutch himself.
This is how it had been, Ike the man thinks absurdly, in Year 22. The year of Nena, and the year Catherine left. They fought every day, bitterly. Dirty dishes left on the coffee table, his truck parked askew in the driveway, her overwatering of the sábila on the front porch—everything flinted their tempers, burst into flame. She was tired and irritable, and he was cheating, but more than that he was thinking of leaving.
Ike squints in the wailing wind. He pulls his jacket tighter around himself. He had pulled the shawl tight around Catherine, too, when she stood by her car that chilly day in Year 22. She caught cold so easily. With his hands on her shoulders, her face crumbled briefly, but she slipped behind the wheel—parked right here, where he stood—and drove to her amiga’s place in Texas City without another word. This was a sign, he believed then, watching her turn left from Albacore onto Ferry and vanish. He had been mentally packing his own bag for weeks. He told Nena so that night. Es una se?al, he murmured into her hair where it was draped across his face, still long and thick and mostly black despite their middling age. We can be together. Vámonos, mi amor, let’s go let’s go let’s just go.