The Hurricane (10 page)

He hated himself as soon as he thought it.

“Do I smell soup?” he asked around his toothbrush, trying to
change the course of his thoughts.

His mom sniffed and nodded. She hurried past him and into
the kitchen, and Daniel followed.

“The gas isn’t working,” she said. “Carlton pulled the
camping gear out of the attic before the storm hit.”

Daniel saw that their old Coleman stove had been set up on
the island. A worn fuel canister dangled from its curvy pipe. Flames licked and
hissed at the bottom of a pot; the clear lid was fogged and bubbling with the
steam of warm calories.

Daniel spit toothpaste into the sink. “I could eat that
whole thing,” he said.

His mom dried the bowls from earlier with a clean towel.
Daniel saw a bucket of water sitting by the sink, and realized how primitive
their home had become. It was nothing more than a cave, and one that leaked
rain.

He tapped his toothbrush on the edge of the sink to clean it
and left it to dry. Taking a bowl from his mother, he ladled some soup into it
and dug in. Carlton pulled out a loaf of bread and handed him a slice. Daniel
didn’t even inquire about butter—he took a bite and chewed contentedly.

“Should we wake Zola?” he asked.

“Let her sleep as long as she can,” his mom said.

“What time is it?”

“A little after two.”

“Man.” Daniel shook his head and spooned more soup toward
his lips. “When will things get back to normal? Like, when will we be able to
get the house fixed? Get power and water back? That sort of thing?”

“It depends,” Carlton said, helping himself to soup. He
turned down the heat on the Coleman, and the hiss lessened. “It could be that
we got the worst of it, that there isn’t much damage across Beaufort or any of
the surrounding area. If that’s the case, they’ll be able to concentrate on us
and get things back to normal in a few days.”

“But that’s not what you think,” Daniel said between bites.

Carlton frowned. “After we eat, we should try your radio
again.”

Daniel nodded. He turned as Zola exited from the bathroom,
rubbing her eyes and pouting.

“Come get some soup, honey,” their mom said.

The four of them ate in the kitchen. Zola sat on one of the
stools by the island, but the rest ate standing up. For Daniel, it was from
having been prone so long. He suspected it was also out of abject hunger. He
was too famished to take the time to get comfortable; and the noise outside
made him feel too revved up to rest. There were three empty cans of vegetable
soup by the sink, and after second helpings, the pot was scraped clean. Carlton
turned the stove off with a click of the knob, and Daniel wondered how many of
the canisters they had. His brain was in survival mode.

After the meal, Daniel and Carlton went through the house
closing the windows against the rain. The threat of the low pressure sucking
off the roof was gone, if indeed there was anything to the myth. Now there was
just rain spitting in to soak the carpet and furniture.

Daniel surveyed his room as he fastened the window upstairs.
He felt guilty for how untouched it was. The carpet wasn’t even all that wet
since his room was on the back of the house and out of the direct blow of the
wind. Compared to the wreck of Zola’s room, it was nothing.

When he and Carlton got back downstairs, his sister and mom
were tackling the living room, even as the wind blew a steady thirty or forty
miles an hour outside. The glass had been swept up. With a mop and bucket, they
worked on getting the puddles up from the fake hardwood floor. They wrung the
mops out by hand and chatted quietly while they worked. Carlton mentioned the
radio again, and Daniel retrieved his Zune from the book bag in the bathroom.

The same station came in a little better than before. They
were still talking about the storm. Daniel and Carlton took an earbud apiece
and listened to the numbers. The storm had reached category five status just
before landfall, an upgrade after getting some better wind readings. It was
still a category three even with the eye sixty miles inland. A clip from the
Governor was played; he was already declaring it a national emergency to open
up federal funds. There was talk of an evacuation nightmare as last-minute residents
from Charleston had clogged 26 and 601, leaving themselves locked in gridlock
traffic while the storm dumped rain and hail on top of them. Even though the
station was based in Charleston, the name Beaufort came up over and over again.
The eye had passed right through the city, nearly at high tide, which had
caused massive flooding. Power was out for several counties, wrapping up
hundreds of thousands in the same sort of living situation Daniel and his
family were experiencing. Hearing about the wide swath of damage, at how many
were affected, had Daniel thinking of Hunter and Roby and everyone else he
knew. Part of him felt a twinge of excitement that school might be out for part
of the next week, plunging them right back into an extended summer vacation. An
even bigger part of him, however, was dying to be around his peers to hear
their stories. There was some guilt to how giddy he felt; perhaps the sensation
was as much from the unusual sleep schedule as from the afterglow of surviving
something dangerous. He wrestled with the conflicting emotions as he spent the
rest of the day’s light working around the house mopping up, collecting shards
of glass, and fastening a shower curtain over the blown-out window (which
appeared to have been caused by a broken piece of limb, found halfway across
the room).

Carlton took Zola up to scavenge more items from her room,
which left her in tears once again. There was little to be done to keep the
wind and rain out of the room. Carlton grabbed a hammer to beat back some
exposed nails where broken bits of roof truss poked down through the shattered
sheetrock, just to keep anyone from running into them. Daniel felt like they
were all searching desperately for something to do, for some way to burn
energy, to beat back the storm, or to save their house and possessions. They
had spent nearly a full day cowering and helpless, and now it felt recuperative
to do anything at all.

The mood lasted until the sun began to set, which seemed to
happen suddenly for summertime; the clouds to the West once again gobbled up
the remaining daylight prematurely. The wind continued to blow outside, though
abating somewhat each hour. If felt like they’d always lived with it, this new
wind. It blew as they ate another meal of soup, the fuel canister on the
Coleman sputtering as it emptied. It blew as they congregated back by the
hallway to drag blankets and pillows out into more space. The four of them
ended up in the master bedroom, which had remained dry. It wasn’t so much for
safety—the house seemed to have survived and would not get worse—it was more
for comfort. It was to be near each other as Daniel and Zola curled up on the
floor and their mom and stepdad took to the bed. The wind continued to blow as
they fell into another long, dark, and fitful sleep, the house creaking with
aftershocks as the family slumbered.

Daniel was the first to wake the next morning. His mouth
felt full of cotton; his head pounded from getting too much sleep. He
extricated himself from the knotted tangle of sheets and covers and padded
softly across the carpet, out of his mom’s bedroom, and through the house.

The quiet outside was unfamiliar and haunting. Once again,
the birdsongs were notably absent. The house had also become lifeless. In the
perfect stillness, Daniel realized how much residual buzzing he was used to
hearing. The refrigerator normally hummed, but he didn’t know that until he
heard it
not
humming. The compressor usually clicked now and then, but
it hadn’t for over a day. There was nobody on the family computer; its whirring
fans had fallen silent as well. The living room TV was peculiarly quiet.
Normally, at all times of day, someone was vying for control of it.

Daniel padded upstairs and changed into a pair of shorts
that were already stained from an art class project. He grabbed fresh socks and
changed into a new t-shirt, then rummaged through his bedside table for his
cheapo digital camera. Back downstairs, he grabbed his shoes by the front door
and slid them on. He let himself out into the motionless air and heavy calm of
Hurricane Anna’s wake.

Even though the sun was just coming up, the sky was already
bright blue to the east. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, almost as if the
storm had swept them all up and dragged them off toward Columbia and North
Carolina.

Daniel made his way into the front yard and studied the
massive tree propped up against the house. The shingled roof was dented in
around the trunk of the tree, the flat plane punctured and demolished. He
worked his way through the tangle of branches from another fallen tree to
admire the peeled-up root ball of the old giant oak. A wall of soil stood up
from the yard, held together by the tree’s tangle of roots. Where they had been
pried up from the earth, a deep depression lay full of several inches of Anna’s
rain. The void of the missing roots formed a massive bowl, like a giant spoon
had descended from the heavens and taken a bite out of their front yard. Daniel
fished his inexpensive digital camera out of his pocket and took a picture of
the mud-caked wall of roots, marveling at the way the ends had been torn from
the violent ripping of the tree’s demise. He took a picture of the tree resting
against the house, the missing dormer making it appear as if the façade were
winking at him. As he panned the camera to take one of the littered yard, he
noticed movement in the house. His mom opened the front door and looked out at
him, shielding her eyes with a crisp salute.

“I’m gonna look around the neighborhood,” Daniel said, his
voice sounding much too loud in the post-storm calm.

“Don’t go too far,” his mother said. “And be back before
lunch.”

Daniel waved his consent and turned the camera off to
conserve the battery. It was already low, and he realized how poorly he’d
planned for the storm. His cell phone, his Zune, his camera, and who knew what
else was inadequately charged. As much as Daniel mocked others for being
reliant on their gizmos and for having far too many of them, he felt his own
connection to that digital pipeline now that it had been ruptured.

The driveway was almost completely free of downed trees, but
was lined on either side with crashed and crushed limbs. The long arms of the
oaks sagged broken on the ground. The magnolia leaves, waxy and bright green,
were tangled everywhere. Daniel strolled past them to the middle of the
cul-de-sac and turned to marvel at the destruction. The white and yellowing
flash of tree-wound was everywhere visible through the mangled canopy of woods.
Each spot of raw and splintered yellow highlighted another limb broken, another
trunk snapped in two, another tree destroyed or crippled. And the undergrowth
was now a tall field of oddly green branches and bushy leaves. It looked like a
blind barber had descended on the neighborhood with a gigantic set of clippers,
buzzing the trees at random, making a mess of everything.

Through the tangles, Daniel could see more rootballs
standing up on end like walls of caked mud. Each one had a large tree attached,
the trunk resting along the ground and terminating on a jumbled cauliflower of
leaves. Somehow, the trees were larger at rest than they had seemed pointing up
at the wide sky. Daniel took a picture of one downed tree that had clipped a
neighboring tree, slicing it pretty much in half. He saw lots of smaller trees
that had fallen, only to be caught in the crook of another tree’s arms. These
angled trunks stood out everywhere once he looked for them. He powered his
camera off and heard a screen door slap shut somewhere. Through the new jungle,
he could see the neighbors from across the cul-de-sac walking across their
front yard to survey the damage to their own house. Daniel waved when they
spotted him. He didn’t recognize either one of them and didn’t know their
names.

He turned away from the heavily wooded cul-de-sac and
wandered up the street, fighting the urge to take pictures of everything. Two
houses down, the lone tree in an otherwise cleared yard had fallen against a
neighbor’s house. The thick trunk hadn’t made a direct hit, but the massive
kraken of limbs had ensnared the house. The gutters hung like a twisted,
glittering tassel from the edge of the roof. The front door was completely
hemmed in from the crash. Daniel hoped the back door was obstruction free, or
the occupants were going to be climbing out windows.

Several of the houses he passed stirred with the same sort
of early-morning activity: People standing outside in pajamas, some of them
clutching steaming mugs, all sporting bewildered eyes. They waved at Daniel and
each other, and he marveled at how few of his neighbors he recognized.
Somewhere in the distance he heard a chainsaw buzz to life, the throttle worked
over and over as it revved up and down with the cough of a machine long asleep.
Daniel welcomed this intrusion into the quiet. It was the sound of a thing
working
and of progress being made. Somewhere, a piece of the littered ground was being
cleared. When he looked out at all the incredible damage, he wondered if it
would be months or even years before they had a handle on it all.

“Hey you.”

Daniel whirled around and looked for the person calling out.

“Over here.”

Someone by the bushes of the next house was waving at him.
Daniel turned and walked toward the house. He noticed a huge swath of shingles
had been ripped from the roof, leaving the black tar paper underneath torn, a
layer of raw plywood exposed beneath that. The person by the bushes waved him
over hurriedly. Daniel broke into a jog, wondering if someone was hurt. When he
got closer, he saw the person was kneeling down by a solar panel, an open
toolbox by her feet. It was difficult to peg the girl’s age. She had her hair
tied back and covered with a red bandana; her face was plain and young-looking with
no makeup.