Flood Plains (4 page)

With no radio, TV, or internet and the workers disallowed from waiting in the break area, the dayshift suddenly turned into a prison sentence.

“Don’t we have all those Jaguar keyboards dumped over at the end of the dock from last time?” Alan asked. “If we’ve got the chips, the Jaguar chassis is the same as what we’re building right now. It’s just a different chip.”

Alan searched Big Time’s face for any signs of suspicion but realized he was simply considering the suggestion.

“Is Scott back from the inventory meeting?”

“I can check,” Alan replied, hoping to not sound too eager.

“Okay. Go see what he’s got in the cages.”

Alan’s heart raced. He got the same kind of butterflies that struck every time he stepped up to the starting blocks. There was no turning back now.

•  •  •

Over on Line 8, Zakiyah zapped four screws into a plastic support bevel that locked the CD-ROM drive into place. She worked quickly, moving the line along but occasionally made a mistake: three screws instead of four. Sometimes two.

She didn’t give a shit, though. She hated this job. Zakiyah spent most of the day making up little games to keep herself from looking up at the ceiling clock. Mostly, she found herself stealing glances at regular five—or ten-minute intervals. If she surprised herself by going fifteen minutes between looks, she gave herself all sorts of positive vibes. If she managed to go twenty, which only happened if she’d gone to the restroom or on some other errand, she knew it was a special kind of day. One day that she was particularly zoned out, she went fifty-five minutes between clockwatching and almost had a heart attack.

It was only four hours ten into the day’s shift, and she was already wondering how she’d make it another seven hours fifty.

“Hey, you left without me this morning. What’s that say to our daughter?”

Zakiyah rolled her eyes as Alan sidled up to her. Sure, he’d been charming at one point, but after all the times he’d failed her over the past however many years, the charm had more than worn off. Most of the time, she wanted to slap him across the face for routinely making her daughter feel as if she meant less than nothing to him.

“It says you have to take responsibility for your actions.”

Alan scoffed.

“’Melia said I missed you by five minutes.”

“
Mia
. She hates Melia, hates Amelia. Just ask her.”

Alan kicked himself. The last thing he wanted to do was give Zakiyah more ammunition.

“We’re still getting reacquainted. She might end up liking Melia.”

“We got paid on Friday,” Zakiyah shot back, all but icing over. “I’m still waiting on your piece of the rent.”

“Oh, so that’s how it’s gonna be?”

“We agreed that there were no more favors. This is a business arrangement. You pay rent, and I don’t go after you for child support.”

“And I appreciate that,” Alan replied evenly. “But as you know, I’ve had some expenses. Most of them are about getting back to school in the spring. I’ve got one semester of eligibility left, and it has to count. The good news is, the way I’m running now? It will.”

As soon as it was out of his mouth, Alan regretted his words. Up until that exact moment, he’d been vague with Zakiyah about his progress. He was sure she knew about the chart Beverly kept at the back of Line 10 but doubted she glanced at it that often.

But it was too late to backtrack so he plowed ahead.

“My times are good enough for Nationals, which means it’ll start being about the Olympics pretty soon. Couple of records later, and I’m running pro. For
Nike
. That’s only a couple of years away. Then we’ve got no worries ever again.”

Zakiyah stared at Alan. For a brief moment, she wished she could share this dream with him. At one time, she believed it was within his grasp. This was before the death of his grandmother and before Katrina threw his collegiate career, training regimen, and life in general out of whack. He had spent so much time wallowing in self-pity after the storm that he’d pissed away several opportunities that might have helped him (and his estranged daughter, but that was a different story) out. He had this one semester of NCAA eligibility left, and all his hopes and dreams were tied up in using it to make the Prairie View A&M track team. They had offered him a slot immediately after the storm, but Alan had held out for what he thought would be more favorable openings around the corner.

That was two years ago.

He’d called up the Prairie View coach in the spring and said that he would be in shape for the following year. Knowing Alan’s story and charmed by his determination, he was offered a try out and a partial scholarship. Now Zakiyah had to hear about it in Herculean terms. He’d gotten what was rightfully his and now he just had to perform at a heroic level and get back in front of those news cameras. Destiny would take care of the rest.

“I’m supposed to believe the second you’re all big-time you’re not going to leave me and your daughter behind again? The first skinny white girl looks your way, you’ll be out the door.”

“Are you kidding me? You know I can’t get by without you. I learned my lesson.”

“So why am I the bad guy because I want rent and grocery money?”

“I’ve got a line on that,” Alan said, turning serious. “You need your money, and I need to stop spending my days in here when I need to be stepping up my training.”

“Meaning what, exactly?” Zakiyah asked, suspicious.

“If you want anything, you’ve gotta enterprise, right? That’s how it’s going to work here, too.”

With that, he blew her a kiss and walked away.

•  •  •

Sineada
.

Sineada Maria Araujo was surprised to hear her name, even more because no one had spoken it aloud.

Sineada
.
Prepare.

For what?
Sineada asked.

Sineada waited a long time for the answer. When none came, she realized what it must be and opened her eyes. She found herself looking at a fifty-something black woman, Viola Mason, across a table. Viola stared back at her in expectation. Rain poured down on the little Fifth Ward house as the disembodied voice of a radio announcer wafted into Sineada’s parlor from the kitchen.

“The National Hurricane Center is predicting landfall around Galveston Island tomorrow morning just before five in the a.m. At present, Eliza is still being designated a Category 4, but is speeding up as it nears the Texas coast.”

“So, what are they saying? Is it going to be a bad one?”

Sineada mentally composed herself, recalling the words of her grandmother when discussing the family business: “You’re there to tell them what they
need
to hear, not what they want to hear.”
Abuela
had always added, “But mind you be gentle,” something Sineada didn’t need to be reminded of, as most of her clients were like Viola. Past middle-age, often alone, often poor. It was why she had a donation box instead of a fixed rate and didn’t mind being paid in coins.

“They think it’s coming straight here and gonna drop buckets of rain on everybody, probably flood out Fourth and Fifth Ward,” Sineada said harshly.

Viola whistled.

“That doesn’t sound good at all.”

“No. Anybody that didn’t know if their roof was worth a damn will sure know by mid-day,” the diminutive seventy-one-year-old said, adjusting the scarlet hat and gold shawl she wore whenever she “gave a reading.” “Wind is going to knock over a few trees, tear up the sign in front of the gas station, and knock out the windows in the grocery store next door. Buffalo Bayou’s going to damn near overflow, but it’s not going to get into downtown like last time. Good news is, she’ll then be gone by late afternoon.”
A lie
.

“Nobody’s going to die?”

“I didn’t say that. But none that won’t be done in by their own foolishness or misfortune.”
Another lie.

Sineada was almost shaking by the time she finished. She was relieved when Viola smiled, signaling the end of the session.

“Well, don’t get up to any foolishness yourself, and I’ll see you next week.”

A freebie umbrella with the Avon logo in hand, Viola headed back out into the rain, but not before placing a twenty-dollar bill in Sineada’s donation box. Though this was how much she left after every visit—twice a month going on eight years—Sineada still felt it was overly generous. Regardless, she tucked it into her pocketbook a few minutes later and was glad to have it.

Everyone who came to Sineada brought with them a different version of what they believed her “powers” to be and what they could do for them. Knowing this, Sineada hammed it up for some clients, dropping words like “the sight” and “the spirits.” Others wanted to hear her talk in terms of “angels” and the “gift God gave her,” particularly the ones who were hoping to hear something from a loved on “on the other side.”

Still others, like Viola, were just paying for someone to talk things through with, as they weren’t going to trust their confidences to a shrink or a busybody pastor. They made for easy clients because they usually knew the answers to all their own questions but just needed someone to help convince them. Sineada did a lot of listening and nodding. She brought up comparative points from her own past and showed off her photographic memory of her client’s past. With someone who had been coming for years like Viola, Sineada was able to recollect and parrot back some opinion the woman had had on this relative or that with just enough magic that she knew she had a client for life.

Setting her hat and shawl on the table, she wandered out to the porch to watch the weather. The wind had picked up quite a bit, but the skies were still gray, not the purple she associated with a lifetime of weathering Gulf Coast hurricanes. When the real thing got here, the raindrops would shoot horizontally down the street as if shot from an arrow. The wind would pick up, and suddenly anything not nailed down would come racing down the sidewalk, careening into cars and blowing through exposed windows. The trees would come down next.

If it was a bad one.

Hello?
she asked the wind.
Is it going to be that bad?

Worse. Worse than you know. Worse than you’ve ever seen.

Chapter 5

“I
was running fast, too, but that little bastard was running faster. You don’t think they can haul ass with all that freight on their back, but they just book it. Yet, every time it got to a tree, it tried to dig in under the roots. Then it would see me and take off running again.”

The storyteller was a wiry, white fellow with a mullet named Scott Shipley. He was standing in front of a two-story chain-link security cage in the center of the factory floor. He peered over his Sears-brand eyeglasses to make sure his listeners were absorbing all this. The men, a forklift driver named Kyle and a truck driver with “Gutierrez” on a patch over his right breast pocket, were definitely engaged, if also amused.

“I finally cornered it at this big old oak at the back of my property, but for some reason, it kept running,” Scott continued. “I started worrying, as it was racing for the trunk at full gallop as if it hadn’t see it or something and was going to crash. But just as it reached the base of the tree, it curled its tail up under its body, rolled up in a ball, and jumped straight up in the air! It had counted on me still running, so it was perfectly timed to smack me right in the face as I closed in. It was like somebody hit me between the eyes with a hammer.”

“Holy shit!” exclaimed Kyle.

“I went down like a sack of stones,” Scott continued, clapping his hands together. “Knocked out cold. I woke up two or three hours later with a migraine and armadillo shit all over my hair.”

Kyle’s mouth hung open in amazement. Gutierrez’s mouth opened a little, as if he was ready to denounce the storyteller as a fraud and a liar. He caught a look from Scott and instead merely nodded.

“I’ve heard about that. They do that out on the freeway and bash in a lot of windshields.”

Listening nearby, Alan just shook his head.

“Caca Toro!” the athlete said as he slapped Scott on the back. “I call ‘Caca Toro.’”

“That’d be
caca de toro
, son,” Scott grinned. “Get your Mexican right.”

Alan laughed. No one got mad at Scott for telling tales, mainly because his face had a sort of permanently dazed, Wile E. Coyote expression to it. It seemed to shout out: believe a word this man says at your own peril.

“You filling these young men’s minds with a fiction, there, Scott,” Alan said, bumping Scott’s proffered fist. Alan always thought that looked funny with a white man, which he knew was precisely why Scott did it.

“Don’t know what you’re trying to say. The
Houston Chronicle
did this two-year study with the
New Orleans
Times-Picayune
that proved Crescent City are sixty-two percent more full of shit than Texans. Guess this is a case of the pot calling the kettle African-American.”

Kyle, a white guy, looked at Alan as if trying to detect whether Scott had just crossed a line. Alan shrugged.

“Rather be African-American than poor Texas white trash. Only way out of that lifestyle is with the blonde hair and the big titties. Last time I checked, you ain’t got neither.”

“You’re right about that,” Scott said, shaking his head while miming putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger. “Did you come over here for a reason, or were you just trying to make me more suicidal than my kid’s orthodontics bills?”

“Chip count. Big Time’s trying to keep us from going down. Might switch to CT3-U’s if we have the part.”

Scott shot a thumb at the cage behind him.

“Knock yourself out.”

•  •  •

The security looked like something you’d see in a wrestling ring, not a factory floor. A roofless, sixteen-foot-high box of chain link fencing, it contained the high-dollar parts used in the computers, mainly microchips. Though Scott’s full-time job was to keep track of all pieces coming in and out of the cage, blue plastic mesh had been woven through the links to prevent people from reaching in and pulling chips out through the links. Scott had no problem admitting he had the cushiest job in the factory.