Another Kind of Hurricane (6 page)

There was no way Henry was going to school. He couldn't face anyone there. He wouldn't be able to concentrate in math on percentages, or in science about solids and liquids.

On instinct he headed for Wayne's house.

The middle of the trail between Henry and Wayne's went through a red pine grove. It was like walking on an old carpet. Henry's boots stopped snapping and shuffling, and he could hear the birds chasing after the wind, and the squirrels scraping their claws up and down the bark of the trees. He always loved this place, the quietest place on earth, the place that brought him straight to Wayne's.

“Out of the way!” a voice screamed from behind him.

Okay, not quiet today
.

Henry jumped, Brae jumped, and Henry swore the trees jumped too. He turned around. His up-the-hill neighbor, Nopie Lyons, bombed down the trail on his bike. His hair was in his
eyes, a huge backpack pushed his chest onto the bike frame, and silver boots came up over his pants. He looked like a cross between a turtle and an electric mixer. Nopie was a freak of nature, and he was coming straight at Henry.

Henry dove out of the way just in time.

“You're going the wrong way for school, Nopie!” Henry yelled as Nopie sped away.

Brae loped after Nopie.

“C'mon, Brae,” called Henry. “Stay with me.” He remembered the last time he had seen Nopie. The time before the funeral. “Please stay with me.”

“Does it have a bathroom?” Zavion leaned over to whisper to Papa.

Joe had driven them over the Sunshine Bridge and Skeet had picked them up and brought them the rest of the way here.

“Of course it has a bathroom. Two of them. And good water pressure too,” came a loud voice from above their heads.

A strong, minty smell came along with it. Not the sweet smell of gum or peppermint candy, but the sharp, fresh smell of real mint. Zavion turned his head. A woman with thick glasses, long gray dreadlocks, and knitting needles in her hands leaned over the railing of the stairs behind him. The needles were moving fast. A long scarf dangled by her side.

“The bathrooms are both blue,” she said. “Very soothing. Easy to be in there when you have to do your business.”

“You remember Ms. Cyn, Ben?” said Skeet.

“Of course. Hello, Ms. Cyn,” said Papa. He stood on his toes to give the woman a kiss on the cheek.

“Hello, Ben,” Ms. Cyn said, tapping Papa on the nose with her knitting needles and continuing down the stairs.

Zavion looked around the room. Sleeping bags covered the floor and the two couches and even a chair. The walls were bare except for a large cloth banner of a boy sitting at the base of a tree reading a book. Just above his lap, another book floated open in the air. And above that, where the branches started in the tree, a sort of half-book, half-bird floated again. Then, finally, a bird, wings outstretched, flew high in the sky. Written across the tree, in letters that sat hanging from the branches like fruit, was the word
gratitude
.

Zavion recognized the painting style. The banner was one of Skeet's.

How cool would it be to jump into the banner? To be the book? To jump, fly, up, up, turn into a book-bird, fly some more, higher and higher, until he was a real bird, wings wide, soaring in the sky?

“You ever been in Baton Rouge before?” Ms. Cyn asked Zavion, interrupting his thoughts. She motioned for him to sit with her on the bench at the bottom of the stairs. She knit and chewed her mint leaves.

“No, ma'am,” Zavion said. He scanned the room. Skeet and
Papa knelt on the floor with two men who Zavion didn't recognize. They were playing some sort of game with marbles. A little girl played on the rug near them.

“Well, welcome, then.”

“Thank you, ma'am.”

“You gonna tell me your name?”

“Oh. Yes, ma'am,” said Zavion. “My name is Zavion.”

“Don't think I didn't already know it, Zavion,” said Ms. Cyn, and she laughed a deep, loud laugh.

Ms. Cyn's needles flew in and out of the scarf. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a strip of yellow cloth. It was soft, like a piece of an old t-shirt. Zavion watched as she knit the cloth right into the scarf.

“What'd you do that for?” Zavion asked.

“What did I do?”

“That piece of cloth. Why'd you put it into the scarf?”

“I did it there too. See?”

Ms. Cyn pointed one of her needles to another strip of cloth toward the bottom of the scarf. A dark orange rectangle, hard to see because the wool was almost the same color.

“But what are they?”

“That orange one down at the bottom is from Tavius's t-shirt. And the yellow one here is from a shirt of Isaac's. A little bit of family for wrapping around someone's scrawny
neck.” The girl came running over to them. “A chicken neck just like this one. This is my grandniece, Osprey,” said Ms. Cyn, pulling on one of her pigtails. “Osprey, this is Zavion.”

“How old are you?” Osprey asked.

“Um—ten,” said Zavion.

“I'm four,” she said. “My dog, Crow, died in the hurricane. This was his leash.” She held a purple nylon leash in her hand.

“Hush,” said Ms. Cyn. She patted Osprey on the cheek. “Don't let her sweet face sucker you. She's fierce as a tiger.”

Zavion glanced back at the banner. The boy under the tree looked a little like Osprey. Osprey ran back to the rug to play.

“And those three clowns playing Ringer on the floor with your Papa—that one is Skeet, but you know him. He owns this house, and he was married to my daughter, God rest her soul, she died two years ago. Those are his two brothers, Enzo and Tavius. Enzo is Osprey's daddy. They escaped New Orleans like you.” Ms. Cyn took a deep breath. “And me. The only other person you need to know is me, Ms. Cyn. The Queen of Baton Rouge.” Ms. Cyn laughed a deep, minty laugh.

Zavion tried to repeat these new names inside his head, but pictures raced through it instead. His house. The water. The roof shingles. Luna Market. Chocolate bars. Rain.

“Go on into that blue bathroom, Zavion,” said Ms. Cyn.
“Change your shirt. Change your pants.” She pointed her knitting needle at Zavion's sleeve. Blood was splattered across it. He hadn't even noticed.

“I cut my leg—” he mumbled.

“Tavius!” Ms. Cyn yelled to one of the men on the floor.

“Yes, ma'am?”

“Get this boy, Zavion, some new clothes.”

Tavius reached behind a couch and pulled out a plastic bag. “Here!” he yelled to Zavion, tossing the bag.

“Thank you,” said Zavion.

“We got first pick at the Salvation Army.”

“How come we got first pick?” teased Enzo.

“Is it 'cause Pierre has a crush on you?” Skeet knocked his shoulder into Tavius's shoulder.

Tavius grinned.

“Go wash out that cut, Zavion. There's first aid cream in the bathroom,” said Ms. Cyn.

Zavion managed to stand. Walk across the room. He pushed open the bathroom door and fell against it as it closed. He jumped. Something moved up his back. He turned to look, but nothing was on the door. Whatever it was moved under his t-shirt. Crawled on his skin. He reached his hand through the neck of his shirt to his shoulder. His hand swept from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. Nothing was there. But still, he felt it.

Felt it. Heard it. Smelled it. Tasted it.

He pulled his hand back out of his t-shirt.

Zavion couldn't move. He couldn't even get out of the bathroom and back to the bench.

Instead, he gripped the bathroom door so hard his forearm shook—the rain pouring, the men shooting marbles and laughing, the water rising, the little girl playing, his mural breaking, Grandmother Mountain crumbling, his house collapsing, Ms. Cyn knitting, and the wind—the wind whipping and pulling and pushing him. His knees buckled and he fell to the floor. He couldn't keep his balance in the middle of it all.

“The school secretary didn't mention there was a field trip to our house today,” said Jake. “And on the second day of school too.” He sat next to Nopie, drinking a cup of coffee.

Nopie was at the table!

Henry couldn't believe it. But there he was, hunched over a piece of paper, drawing something. A heat rose up inside Henry. A smoky heat that curled and wisped from his feet all the way to his face. What was Nopie doing here, just sitting all comfortable, in Henry's chair, the chair Henry had sat in a million times before with Wayne right next to him, like he belonged there?

Nopie's head shot up all of a sudden like a spark had singed his eyebrow, and he grabbed hold of a Tupperware container full of something white.

“My mom needed some sugar,” Nopie said. “She's making an apple pie for Pop and she ran out of sugar and when we went apple picking the other day we got a whole lot of those
tart apples, 'cause it's really too early to pick apples, the kind that make your eyes water when you bite into them, so she really needs the sugar to sweeten 'em up and—”

“Give it a rest, Nopie,” said Henry. “Your mouth is gonna fall off.”

“Henry…” Annie cut the bottoms off some flower stems. She shot Henry a look.

“So I came here to get sugar,” Nopie finished, and took in a deep breath.

“Great,” said Henry. He put his hand out to pat Brae, but Brae lumbered over to Nopie and wagged his whole body against his shiny, silver-booted leg.

Nopie sat there, shaking the sugar container like it was a maraca. He had lived up the road from Henry for as long as Henry could remember. His motor mouth was the most glaring thing about him, always talking a mile a minute like he had lost the brakes on his tongue. But there was other weird stuff about him too. Like Nopie kept a rabbit at the school all last year in the lighting booth in the school auditorium. He had stolen a key from the janitor. Henry had to admit that was pretty impressive, but still, Nopie was a grade-A weirdo electric mixer–turtle dude.

“Sit down, Henry,” said Annie. “I'll make you boys something to eat.”

Henry didn't want to eat. He thought if he managed to swallow anything it would end up charred in his belly.

“So which neighbor saw Tiger last?” Nopie interrupted Henry's thoughts.

“Four neighbors said they saw him,” said Annie. “I think the last one was Mack.”

“I'm making a map of all the houses on the road and then marking where Tiger's been spotted,” Nopie said to Henry.

“Good for you.”

Jake put down his coffee. “Tiger's been gone since the day Wayne died.” His leg began to bounce up and down under the table.

“He used to take walks with me,” said Annie. She brought a plate of apples and peanut butter to the table. “Like a dog. He would follow me onto the trail and walk the whole thing at my side. Honestly.”

“Tiger is a strange cat,” said Nopie.

“You're strange,” said Henry.

“
Was
a strange cat,” said Jake. “Maybe a fisher's gotten him.”

“Don't say that, Jake,” said Annie.

Tiger could not be gone.
Oh man
, all the wrong things were disappearing—Henry glared at Nopie—and all the wrong things were staying rooted right where they were.

Nopie chewed on his apple, sucking peanut butter from
between his teeth. Henry focused on that. Henry couldn't decide which was a worse sound: the chewing-sucking one or the Nopie-running-his-mouth one.

“See,” said Nopie, his tongue thick with peanut butter—
great
, Henry was going to be serenaded by
both
sounds, “the four neighbors who saw Tiger are all on the same side of the road.” He pointed to his drawing. “One, two, three, four…all of them heading up to Mansfield.” Nopie paused. “Maybe he's looking for Wayne.”

Jake's bouncing leg got faster.

“Animals get sad when their owners leave them,” said Nopie. He leaned way down and put his arms around Brae's neck. Henry's whole body stiffened. Brae licked the peanut butter off the corners of Nopie's mouth.

Annie filled a jar with water and put a handful of flowers in it. “There was an interview on the radio this morning with a man who had to leave his dog behind when he escaped the hurricane. And he was sure that the dog had died.” Annie plucked a flower out of the jar and held it up to her nose. “But he was wrong. The dog escaped from the house, swam through the flooded streets, and found him.”

Jake's leg doubled its speed. The table wiggled as his knee hit it from underneath.

“Animal navigation,” said Nopie. “Like homing pigeons. Scientists don't know how they can find their way back home.”

“That's what they said about this dog,” said Annie. “They don't know how he got out of the house or how he smelled the man with the water washing over everything, but he found him.”

“Animals have an extrasensory perception,” said Nopie. “I bet Tiger feels something strong about Wayne, and he's looking for him.”

“Ah!” Jake pulled his hand away from his coffee mug. “Shoot! I burned myself!” He rubbed his knuckles with his other hand.

“I wonder if Tiger knows that Wayne died,” said Nopie. “I bet he doesn't—”

Jake stood up suddenly and almost knocked over the table. Nopie's pencil fell to the floor.

“I'm going to New Orleans,” he said.

“Perro,”
said Annie.

“Pardon me?” said Jake.

“Isn't that the Spanish word for
dog
?” said Annie.

“Yes,” said Henry. “We learned the names of animals in Spanish class.
Perro
. Dog.
Gato
. Cat.
Pájaro
. Bird.”

“I've been thinking—I want to learn Spanish.”

“Did you hear me?” said Jake. “I'm going to New Orleans—” Jake stumbled around his words. “Early Saturday morning,” he said with clarity. “Before the sun comes up.”

“There's more French in New Orleans, isn't there?” said Annie. “Not as much Spanish?”

“Annie?” Jake asked her name like a question.

“I understand,” she sighed. “You're going to New Orleans.”

“They still need folks to drive truckloads of food and clothes. I'll only be down there for a few days. I need to go.” Jake walked to the kitchen door but then turned around. “I'll be sad to miss that apple pie, Nopie.”

Nopie looked up from his drawing. “I'll freeze you a piece,” he said solemnly.

Jeez, what a stupid thing to say
.

“I'll be back to eat it,” said Jake. He turned and walked out.

—

For a long time, Henry and Nopie and Annie sat at the table and stared at the flowers in the jar. Henry watched their petals brighten and dim as clouds passed over the sun again and again, then looked outside the window at Jake fiddling under the hood of his rig. The big, shiny green eighteen-wheeler brightened and dimmed too, and the heat inside Henry slowly burned down, until all that was left were flickering embers—on and off, on and off—barely lighting the darkness inside his body.