The Hurricane (21 page)

Carlton yelled something.

“She’s down,” their father relayed.

The slack fed into the rope stayed there.

The three of them rested on the roof, smiling at one
another. Daniel looked around at the canopy with a new perspective. He saw each
large limb as a discrete unit, as a task that could be tackled in fifteen or
twenty minutes. Their father moved to the next one in the way, and Daniel could
even see how large chunks of the main trunk could be removed, careful of course
not to hit the shingles with the chainsaw.

They set to work, pausing after the next limb to accept a
thermos of water hauled up at the end of a line. After a while, the labor
became routine, and the spectators on the ground began working to clear the
smaller limbs as they were cut away and rained down. Daniel took special
pleasure when he saw Anna down in the front yard with Edward, the two of them
stopping by to see the progress. By then, he was moving around the tree and
roof with ease, handling the lines as surely as after a long weekend on the
boat. He and Hunter worked as a team, his older brother becoming something of
an equal in the labor. And together, with their father, and under the admiring
gaze of a girl he surely loved—however fast it had happened—they worked to
clear the house his dad had long ago built. They worked until the only thing
that remained was the tall trunk, stripped clean and leaning into the crushed
dormer and the stove-in roof.

••••

It was late when the three of them finally undid their
harnesses and came down the ladder, one by one. Their father was the last one
off the roof, pausing to tie a serious tangle of knots around the belly of the
old tree. He rattled down the ladder last, and then collapsed it and carried it
out of the way.

“I appreciate the use of the Bronco,” he told Edward, who
had returned with Anna for the last of the procedure.

“Absolutely,” he said, smiling through his beard.

Their father seized the line hanging from the tree and
walked with it through the front yard to the cul-de-sac where the Bronco had
been backed up between debris piles. He wrapped the line around the bumper,
tied a loop in one side, then fed the other side through the loop. With a
series of tugs, he yanked the line incredibly tight, taking the slack out,
tying the Bronco off to the tilting tree. The top of the taut line just barely
cleared the massive root ball sticking up from the ground, the circular pit of
missing dirt sitting like a bowl beneath.

“Four wheel drive?” Edward asked.

Their father nodded. “And we’ll ride, just to add more
weight.” He waved to the boys, then got in the passenger seat. Chen and Zola
ran out and joined Hunter in the back seat. Daniel and Anna crawled through the
open window and sat in the back, looking out at the tree and the taut line from
bumper to bough.

“Easy at first,” their dad said.

The Bronco lurched forward, the tires groaning against the
pavement, and the rope whined in complaint. It stretched, and the knot made a
crunching sound as it adjusted itself.

“Stay to the side,” Daniel told Anna, suddenly fearful of
the pent-up ferocity of the line. He imagined it parting and coming straight
through the back of the car.

The Bronco growled forward another foot, and the line
crackled. The car moved again, and Daniel saw a worried look on Carlton’s face,
standing at the side of the root ball. He seemed to be shaking his head as if
nothing was happening.

The engine revved; one tire spun a little; Daniel could
smell exhaust, could hear the rope grinding against itself. And then something
gave. He reached across the fearful void between himself and Anna, both still
leaning away from the power of the line stretching off the bumper, and fumbled
for her hand. The Bronco surged forward. Slack flew into the line, like it had
parted, but it was from the movement of the tree. The line went tight again.
Carlton and his mom flinched away from the root ball, then turned to study it.

Hunter whooped. It was hard to see, looking right at it, but
the tree was moving. The root ball was lowering back to the earth. Without the
heavy limbs, and with most of its upper trunk removed, the much lighter tree
was being pulled down by its roots and by the growling Bronco. It suddenly
lurched off the house and settled toward the ground, tilting dangerously, but
then guided by the rope as Edward drove across the cul-de-sac. It ended up back
where it once stood, pointing at the sky, a sad husk of a tree without its
limbs, the mound of earth clinging to its roots returning to the large divot it
had left behind.

The rope finally went slack, and Carlton waved. Even their
mother was smiling as she looked back at the house with its one busted eye. The
other kids in the car were cheering and hollering, and Daniel joined in. He
squeezed Anna, who didn’t seem to mind that he was covered in bark and roof
gravel and damp with sweat. They all poured out of the car to go and look.
Carlton and their mom steered them away from the tree, as if it still posed
some unsteady threat. Daniel gasped at the sight of the gaping hole in the
roof, the interior of the house visible and open to the sky above. It was a
wound, sure, a nasty shiner, but at least the offending blow had finally been
removed.

Things didn’t go back to normal; they went back to the way
they were. The power company showed up a day later apologizing for the delays,
explaining the hundreds of thousands who had been without power across the Low
Country. They estimated it would be another week, at least, before the
neighborhood had power.

Cell phone service was restored soon after that visit. Zola
said she could go without a hot shower for the rest of her life, if only those
bars remained. She and her friends wrote books to each other, one little line
at a time, detailing their adventures from Hurricane Anna and her aftermath.

Chen’s parents got in touch almost immediately after service
returned. They made their way down from Columbia with a list of supplies
relayed by Daniel’s mom. They also brought an incredible buffet of fast food
with them, a welcomed luxury. Edward and Anna came over to enjoy the feast.
Hunter left with Chen and her parents to help out at their house. It didn’t
seem like he was going far now that he was again a phone call away. Their
mother cried anyway.

Six days after the storm, Carlton finally got in touch with
the mechanics and was able to get his car back, giving the family enough
mobility to pick up supplies. Power was restored a day later to the grocery
store; several of the convenience stores reopened soon after. Daniel’s mom
spent many hours on the phone with State Farm, mostly on hold, as they tried to
find a rental and figure out when an adjuster could come see the car. The agent
explained that they were as busy as they’d ever been and that it could take
some time. She didn’t even mention the house to them.

Daniel spent the next week on the roof with his father. His
dad had rounded up some materials and supplies from old contractors he had
worked for; the lines at Lowe’s and Home Depot were too outrageous to consider.
Houses everywhere wore bandages of blue tarps and plywood. Chainsaws and
generators could not be had at any price. There were rumors of gouging as
entrepreneurs from out of state came through with trailers full of both,
selling them for twice the retail price. News trucks roamed Beaufort looking
for such tidbits, reporting from ground zero, the point of impact,
landfall
.

Daniel felt removed from and above it all. He was too busy
learning how to peel back shingles; cut sheathing with a handsaw; scab in
rafters, which often meant hammering at awkward angles. He learned how to
measure and cut plywood to fit, how to frame out a dormer, how to lay tar paper
and tack it in place with roofing nails. A few times a day, Anna would come
over to gauge their progress from the ground. Daniel would beam down at her,
rattling off the day’s work or holding his arms in a ta-da pose. She would
laugh and bring water up the ladder and smile at him with all the promises of
more moonlight strolls through the neighborhood, holding hands and talking,
enjoying the dead silence of the powerless world, laughing and kissing.

It was a momentous day when one of his father’s friends came
through with a brand new window. They were laying shingles down when he pulled
up in his truck and called out jovial insults to Daniel’s father, dropping his
tailgate with a bang. It took a few shims to get the fit right, but the window
went in with little effort. A handful of nails locked it in place. A piece of
damaged siding salvaged off the back of the house was cut to cover the house
wrap. The last of the shingles went on, and from the exterior, at least, the
house was healed over.

On that last day, after Daniel had climbed down the ladder
with a load of tools and supplies, his father had remained on the roof. Daniel
looked up from the ground and saw him resting on one of the toe-boards, that
two-by-four he had helped nail into place over a week ago. His father looked
over the new dormer—a seamless copy of the original on the other side of the
roof. He turned from it and gazed out over the yard, and Daniel didn’t ask or
intrude into his thoughts. He went off to wash his hands and track down the
smells from the kitchen, leaving his father to contemplate broken homes and
what it took to mend them.

The next day, their father found a ride to Columbia, where
there was plenty of work patching roofs. Daniel knew there was plenty more work
even closer by, but didn’t challenge the decision. He figured his dad wanted to
leave while he was still wanted—or needed, at least—rather than after he’d made
things worse. Or possibly, it was getting too hard to take for him: being
around the family he left, feeling a stranger in the house he’d built. Rather
than wait at the cul-de-sac for his friend to arrive, he had gathered his
meager belongings, said his goodbyes, and walked to the end of the neighborhood
to wait. He was to the end of the driveway when Daniel realized he’d left the
chainsaw behind.

Meanwhile, there remained a lot of work to be done on the
inside of the house. The damage from the storm, like much damage, was more than
skin deep. Zola’s room was a wreck; they took plenty of pictures, cataloged the
damage, and slowly went to work. Bags and piles of sheetrock, strips of carpet,
and mourned possessions went out. New insulation went in, covered by scraps of
sheetrock it took half a day at Lowe’s to secure. After mudding and painting,
putting down more carpet, moving Hunter’s bed into Zola’s room, it almost
looked like a room again, like someone could live there.

And then there was Anna.

It was unusual for a first named storm to form so late in
the season, even more unusual for it to become such a perfect storm and do such
damage. Nobody could remember an “A” storm having such an impact. All the same
could be said of Daniel’s Anna. From four houses down, she had come out of
nowhere. She was as electronically unpopular as he, and Daniel found in their
long walks and talks the sort of company he had been hunting for in the digital
wilderness. In the two weeks he was out of school, and the neighborhood was
without power, they hardly moved beyond holding hands, kissing, and lingering
embraces. For Daniel, it was an inconceivable enough. He had gone from
emotionally and romantically stunted to just right.

As he returned to school, and Anna continued her studies at
home, Daniel found that he was moving into the world as an adult, despite his
virginity. That last was now something he treasured and savored, rather than
something he meant to destroy and conquer. He moved into the world as an adult
with a secret, a man with a silly love in his heart, a girlfriend down the
street that hardly any of his friends knew—and Daniel figured it was their
loss.

••••

“Dude!”

Roby waved from across the courtyard, a goofy grin on his
face. Daniel dug his thumbs into the straps of his backpack and hurried over to
meet him.

“I’ve been trying to call you for two days, man.” Roby threw
his arms around Daniel and slapped his backpack.

“I’ve had my phone off,” Daniel said.

“What for?”

Daniel shrugged. “I got kinda used to not being reached at
any time by whoever,” he said. He left out that the “whoever” was usually his
mom trying to get him to come home from Anna’s house. “How’ve you been? Did you
guys get much damage?”

Roby rolled his eyes. “Did we get much damage? Dude, we had
half our windows blown in. Someone said the gusts got over one-sixty up on the
hill behind us. We were in the eye wall for like an hour.” He nodded his head.
“What about you guys?”

Daniel shrugged. “Lots of trees down. One big one into the
house. But it wasn’t that bad.”

“Sounds like you got lucky, then.”

“I don’t know about that,” Daniel said.

“Hell yeah you did. Didn’t you hear about Jeremy’s house?”

“Jeremy Stevens?”

“Yeah, dumbass.” Roby’s eyes widened. “You remember the
party, right? The night of the storm?”

“I guess,” Daniel said. Some of that night drifted back to
him. He remembered a ride in a cop car, loud music, having a little to drink—

“That’s weird. I’d kinda already had forgotten about that.”
He scratched his head. “Probably because of all that came after. I mean, I had
the worst two nights of sleep—”

“But you remember the video, don’t you?” Roby narrowed his
eyes. “Dude, it’s all anyone’s been talking about.”

Daniel stared at him.

“The video of you and Amanda Hicks? Full frontal nudity?
What the fuck, man?”

“Oh shit,” Daniel said. “Oh fuck. Fuck me, dude.” Sudden
images of Anna sitting in front of her dad’s computer, two hands over her
mouth, Daniel spinning naked before her. “I’m totally screwed,” Daniel said.