Harry & Ruth (32 page)

The station reports that a rescue operation is being attempted. On that thin hope, they leave again, get back in the minivan, now swaying in the gusts of wind, and try the causeway a second time. They get closer, to the bridge road itself, where they park and walk to the sundered edge of the pavement. It is broken cleanly and falls off like a tabletop. There, most of the island's remaining population is standing and pacing. One woman in front of them is screaming loudly enough to be heard above the howling wind. Two men are holding her, to keep her from diving in. Another woman, her voice quavering, tells Ruth, leaning and shouting into her ear, that the screaming woman's husband tried to swim across. They both did, but she turned back.

“They could swim good,” the woman says, then turns her eyes back to the blackness and water. Harry knows it's near dawn, but he doubts that the dark will lift anytime soon.

Across the way, on the bridge, someone has managed to produce a light like the ones highway crews use at night. It only succeeds in blinding those on the island. In the intermediate distance, what appears to be a charter boat is bouncing around, bobbing up and down in the waves. It seems to be meant for their salvation, but Harry can see that it is making no progress at all. Several men have elbowed their way to the front of the crowd, urging the boat on, sure to be first in line if it happens to reach the island.

They never see the wave that combines with the wind to flip the small boat, and Harry will never know what happens to their would-be rescuers. The boat, under no one's control, smashes sickeningly against the almost-submerged ruins of the causeway's center span.

Harry can see that their chances of getting across are diminishing by the minute. Only one of their group would be an even bet to make it; Naomi doesn't mention this, and neither does anyone else. By half past 7, when they turn back, they all know they will be in the cottage when the brunt of the storm hits.

To Harry, it is almost a relief to leave the panic and return to what he thinks of, in an attack of morbid humor that makes him almost giggle, as their last resort.

Others follow their lead. Those who are left greet this day, darker still than a half-moon night, with dread.

Paul and Hank haul the life-jackets back up the stairs to the living room when they get back to the cottage. Inside, everyone tries to dry off and get warm. Tran thinks of breakfast, something to get them through a hurricane, but then the power goes off, and they are reduced to peanut butter, jelly, bread, orange juice and soft drinks. They take their meal on the floor, as far as possible from the windows Paul and Hank have tried, belatedly, to cover.

Paul sits down next to Ruth.

“Momma,” he says, “I'm sorry. But we'll get through this. We aren't going to let anything happen to you.”

Ruth pats him on the knee. Neither she nor Harry has any appetite. Harry slips away for more pain pills and then returns.

He has somehow nodded off when the storm hits full force. He is dreaming, and the howling that was him, wartime Harry, wrestling with Sergeant Stevens, is the hurricane, upon them at last.

He rubs his eyes and looks at Ruth beside him. She is pale, and her hand feels cold as ice, even compared to his. Harry notices that his ears have popped, and there is a briny smell even inside, as if the wind is blowing salt through cracks they can't even see.

“Well,” he says, just to say something, “we'll ride this thing to Mexico if we have to.”

Neither of them is in a mood for lightness or brave chatter, though. Harry is surprised, when he can rise above his own fear and pain to think about it, that Ruth isn't running around in circles, stark raving mad.

For an hour and a half, until sometime after 10, they sit in the near-dark, saying nothing, afraid to let the storm know they are there, hiding from the bogeyman like frightened children, trying to ride it out. Water is running down the inside of the walls, coming in sideways under the molding. The roof groans for mercy.

Nobody wants to see what's outside, and nobody wants to turn the portable radio back on. Harry sees that Leigh is crying, and he thinks Stephen might be, too. Hank, trapped in a small space with seven other people, seems to be concentrating on something in the far distance that only he can see. Naomi is too nervous even to smoke.

Then Tran remembers. She gets up and scurries into the kitchen. Paul is about to go after her, to see what's wrong, when she comes back in, bent low in case the window is blown out, carrying something in front of her with both hands.

The cake.

Ruth's birthday cake has 70 candles on it. Tran has in her pockets kitchen matches and a knife. She lights three of the candles before giving up, and they all quietly urge Ruth to blow them out. She manages, through her tears, to wetly snuff them.

Tran cuts a piece for each of them, and they sing “Happy Birthday” just above a whisper, so the storm won't hear them.

They are eating birthday cake when the wave hits.

THIRTY-ONE

Harry would never know how high the wave was, but the room became noticeably darker in the half-second before it hit.

The cottage pilings are six feet high, and the building itself is another eight at least, so he figures, in the time he has to figure anything, that it must have taken a wave of 20 feet or so to snuff their already-meager light.

The impact blows out every window facing the Gulf, and water is rushing in all around them. The impact has loosened the bond between walls and roof, and in another 20 seconds there is no roof. The whole structure is partially loose of its pilings, tilting at a 20-degree angle. The cottage is moving, sliding. All the water is draining to the western, lower end of it.

Paul screams for them to get outside, on the deck. Harry wonders if this is such a good idea, but he is beyond questioning authority. Stephen has grabbed the life jackets, and Paul is trying to wrestle the boat out with him; he seems to Harry to be engaging in some kind of awkward waltz with it.

They are forced to get on their hands and knees, as flat against the wind as they can manage, willing themselves unseen the way they tried to make themselves unheard when they were inside. Paul and Tran get life jackets on their children, and Naomi and Hank manage to put one on Ruth, who seems to Harry to have turned to stone in her shock. She seems to have aged 10 years in this one morning. Paul passes the other jacket to Harry and tells him to put it on.

He says no, give it to Tran, or to Hank.

“Put on the goddamn jacket and shut up!” Paul screams over the wind and the waves. Somehow, with Hank's help, Harry succeeds in doing this. Old people and children first, he thinks to himself.

They have no chance; Harry can see that. He glances back just as the cottage slowly separates from the deck, crumpling into the surf in slow motion, soon to be reduced to individual boards and shingles, then into smaller pieces. He imagines that eventually the cottage will be bits of colored sand under the feet of fearless future children.

But they do not sink. Somehow, perhaps from the old-timers he listens to at bait shops and the dock, Paul is aware that a deck can float.

The wave and its smaller afterwaves have driven Gulf water across to the sound. The barrier island of Sugar Beach was formed by another, nameless hurricane in the 1850s, and now the sea appears to be reclaiming it, reuniting with Wewahitchka Sound.

The deck, though, floats.

The eight of them cling to each other, to railings, to anything with a grip. Harry wonders if God is trying to find out how much they want to live.

At one point, Ruth is washed halfway off their deck-raft. Harry is afraid she will die of fright; she can't even scream. The worst part, though, is that he is beyond being able to help her; he can only watch her terror while Paul and Hank drag her back on board, saved momentarily from her worst nightmare.

After her rescue, Ruth and he lie flat against the storm. He reaches out and grabs the hand he couldn't reach when it mattered, and she closes on it so hard that he is sure he has broken a finger, but he has no intention of letting go, ever.

Harry has no idea how long it lasts. Paul is rolling around on the deck, trying to make sure there are still eight of them, a border collie obsessively herding his charges toward safety. The small green boat is long gone; none of them even remembers its departure.

There is no sense of direction, just wetness around and above as much as beneath, a gray continuity, a howling that fills all the space in their brains. Harry, with what strength he has left, howls to match it, and when he looks over at Paul, he's howling, too, but now they are drowned out completely, pantomime screamers. It's as if the wind is blowing the sounds back down their throats. Salt water burns his mouth, his nose, his eyes.

In a brief respite between bursts of wind and long, rolling waves, Harry sees something different: a swatch of red in the distance. He recognizes it and points it out to Paul. They must be moving westward, toward the one thing that stands out against the gray: the crimson roof of the Sugar Beach Inn.

Then, long after Harry has given up on the concept of breaks, when he has been hanging on for what seems an eternity out of sheer habit of living, it stops.

The calm is on them almost as quickly as the wave was. They have to remind themselves to let go a little. Now, instead of being at sea on the deck of Paul's splintered cottage in the middle of a Force 5 hurricane, they are merely at sea on the deck.

“The eye,” Paul says. “It'll be back.”

Harry doesn't want to know how soon. He is so tired, but he is allowed no rest.

They are drifting to the west. He can see that the Sugar Beach Inn is much closer than it was the last time he looked, so close that they can see individual people on the porch that overhangs water where the beach was a few hours ago. He can make out voices in the distance. Looking around, he sees the roofs of at least two cottages farther out in the Gulf. Clinging to one of them, several hundred yards away, is a woman, straddling the top of the roof. She appears to be naked.

The beach itself has changed completely. There seems to be a channel between Paul and Tran's cottage and the inn, the only structure still standing on the west side of the island.

The Sugar Beach Inn was built on enough fill dirt to place it 10 feet above the rest of the island, an edge the inn needed on this day. Some of the stranded islanders might have figured this out, Harry thinks, or perhaps everyone on the porch, calling to them through the gray mist, is a grateful guest.

Harry looks around at the rest. All of them are bleeding; no one has on anything resembling full clothing. Ruth and Leigh have lost their blouses, and now that the eye is upon them, they have the luxury of embarrassment. Stephen has one shoe on and is holding his leg. He and Hank have wicked-looking cuts on their arms.

Paul is looking at the Sugar Beach Inn's bright-red roof.

“We have to try for it,” he says, and no one disputes this.

They are almost even with the building, perhaps 100 yards east and 200 yards out. Beyond that is open Gulf, and Harry knows they won't be in God's eye much longer.

“The water shouldn't be too deep here,” Naomi says. She's been swimming farther out than this.

But when she was swimming, Harry thinks, the Sugar Beach Inn was on dry land. None of them can envision the present depth of the water between them and the inn.

The respite from all the wind and noise makes Harry sleepy. He is beyond pain and beyond caring. Still, though, they won't let him rest.

There is little time for a plan. Harry guesses Paul's strategy is that surely, this time, they are bound to catch a break. Murphy's law in reverse: Everything that can go wrong won't go wrong.

Naomi tells Ruth she will swim beside her, that she will lead her until Naomi can feel the bottom with her feet.

Harry isn't worried about Paul, or Tran. They are both excellent swimmers, and they plan to escort Hank and Leigh to safety.

Stephen, though, concerns him. The top freestyler at his school, he's already given his lifejacket to Hank and will stay with Harry, floating and dogpaddling beside him, urging him to shore. But the way he's holding his leg, Harry is sure he's suffering from more than the deep cut that is starting to bleed in the saltwater.

Stephen swears he can make it, though. Paul asks him if he is sure, and the boy says yes. The look they exchange, hanging to the side of the floating deck, is one that passes between fathers and sons who have camped together, sailed together, taken small risks for large profits. It is the look of fathers and sons who will be friends. Harry can tell, in that one look, that Paul doesn't fuss over Stephen. Harry wishes he could see, once more, his Martin.

He is sure Stephen will make it, buoyed by Paul's confidence if nothing else. He only has to avoid getting tangled up with ancient flotsam, Harry realizes, only has to keep from being dragged down by the death grip of desperate, shameless, selfish, hopeless old age, willing to take youth with it to the bottom on the outside chance of living five more minutes.

His eyes meet Ruth's. She looks so worn that Harry wonders if she will ever get back what has been lost this morning, even if she makes it to shore. She's still vomiting seawater, and she says nothing when she catches her breath and looks back, but from that look Harry sees that he must look worse than he feels even. Harry and Ruth shake their heads in unison, lying on their deck-raft, hoping for strength, and Harry surprises himself by laughing. Ruth tries to smile but can't.

Harry suddenly realizes that the pain has eased, but he is feeling nothing much else, either, except some regret. What he wants more than anything is a nap. They won't let him sleep.

They leave their raft when they have no other choice, with the inn and safety about to slip past and the storm returning. Naomi and Ruth go first, Naomi jumping in and then pulling her mother in with her. Naomi is swimming a side stroke, holding Ruth's life jacket with her free hand, talking to her as if she is trying to calm a wild bird trapped inside a house. Ruth's panicky paddling succeeds mainly in splashing more water into Naomi's eyes.