surfacing from a dark swimming hole: Manny swimming up from the bottom of the black hole, eating light, splashing out, being born.
“Everything deserve to live,” Skeetah says. “And her and the puppies going to live.”
“Skeet,” Randall says, and Skeet and China stop in their walk, all three of them meeting in the doorway, China’s ears flat on her head, tail up, still and tense as Skeetah.
“What?” Skeetah barks. They are on either side of a crooked mirror, one short, the other tall, both muscle and tendon, tension, wounded knuckles, hands curling.
“I ain’t sleeping in the room with her.” Randall reaches. His good hand grabs.
“Stop!” Daddy’s voice is hard, loud. He slumps like it was all he had in him to breathe it out. “No. No fighting.”
I have to lean to hear him. He sways, punches his good arm in the mattress to hold himself up.
“It’s a category five,” Daddy says. “Woman on the news say it’s a category five.”
“Oh,” I say, but it is more a breath than a word. Daddy has faced a category 5, but we’re too young to remember the last category 5 hurricane that hit the coast: Camille, almost forty years ago. But Mama told us stories about that one.
“She stay in the room, Skeet. If I see her once out, I’m kicking her out in the middle of the storm, you hear? Randall, make do.”
Daddy’s arm buckles.
“I need some soup, Esch.”
Skeetah folds his arms, cocks his head at Randall like a dog. Randall shakes his.
“We usually sleep in the living room anyway, Randall,” I say, whispering, remembering how tender he was when he found me in the ditch.
“Esch,” Daddy breathes. He lays back on his side, facing the door.
“Yeah, Daddy,” Randall says. “I’ll get it.” He brushes by, stiff-armed, and leaves me and Skeetah standing in the hallway. The gas hisses on in the kitchen.
“Everything need a chance, Esch,” Skeet says, and he and China turn into his doorway. China sprawls on the floor, ears pointed to the ceiling again. Her tail thumps, and she smiles. The skin on either side of her scabbed breast pulls tight. Skeetah takes the puppies out one by one, cupping their round bellies, and lays them on the floor, where their noses start twitching and they begin jerking toward China. She looks at them like she looked at the chickens earlier. She licks. “Everything,” Skeetah says and looks through me.
THE ELEVENTH DAY: KATRINA
When mama first explained to me what a hurricane was, I thought that all the animals ran away, that they fled the storms before they came, that they put their noses to the wind days before and knew. That maybe they stuck their tongues out, pink and warm, to taste, to make sure. That the deer looked at their companions and leapt. That the foxes chattered to themselves, rolled their shoulders, and started off. And maybe the bigger animals do. But now I think that other animals, like the squirrels and the rabbits, don’t do that at all. Maybe the small don’t run. Maybe the small pause on their branches, the pine-lined earth, nose up, catch that coming storm air that would smell like salt to them, like salt and clean burning fire, and they prepare like us. The squirrels pack feathers, pack pine straw, pack shed fur and acorns from the oaks in the bowels of their trees, line them so that they are buried deep in the trunks, so safe they can hardly hear the storm cracking around them. The rabbits stand in profile, shank to shank, smell that storm smell that hits them all at once like a loud sound, and they tunnel down through the red clay and the sand, down until the earth turns black and cold, down past all the roots, until they have dug great halls so deep that they sit right above the underground reservoirs we tap into with our wells, and during the hurricane, they hear water lapping above and below while they sit safe in the hand of the earth.
Last night, we laid sleeping pallets in the living room, whose windows we’d lined with mismatched wood. Randall and I, side by side, on the floor, and Junior on the couch. We brought our own limp pillows, our flat and fitted sheets, and our old electric blankets short-circuited cold long ago. We piled them to create mattresses so flimsy we could feel the nubby carpet on the floor underneath us when we sat. We washed all the dishes. We filled the bathtub, the kitchen and the bathroom sinks to the brims with water that we could use for washing and flushing the toilet. We ate a few of the boiled eggs, and Randall cooked noodles for all of us. We balanced the hot bowls in our laps and watched TV. We took turns picking shows. Randall watched a home improvement show where a newlywed couple converted a room in their house from an office into a mint-green nursery. I chose a documentary on cheetahs. Junior picked last, and once there were cartoons on the screen, even after Junior fell asleep, we let them turn us bright colors in the dark. Daddy stayed in his room, but he left the door open. Skeetah stayed in his room with China and the puppies, but that door was closed.
Before I fell asleep, in the flickering light from the television and one dusty lamp, I read. In ancient Greece, for all her heroes, for Medea and her mutilated brother and her devastated father, water meant death. In the bathroom on the toilet, I heard the clanking of metal against metal outside, some broken machine tilting like a sinking headstone against another, and I knew it was the wind pushing a heavy rain.
On the day before a hurricane hits, the phone rings. When Mama was living, she picked it up; it is a phone call from the state government that goes out to everyone in the area who will be hit by a storm. Randall has answered it since we lost Mama; he lets it play at least once each summer. Skeetah answered once and hung up before the recording could get beyond the
This is when the hurricane becomes real.
The first hurricane that I remember happened when I was nine, and of the two or three we get every year, it was the worst I’ve ever been in. Mama let me kneel next to the chair she’d dragged next to the window. Even then, our boards were mismatched, and there were gaps we could peer out of, track the progress of the storm in the dark. The battery-operated radio told us nothing practical, but the yard did: the trees bending until almost breaking, arcing like fishing line, empty oil drums rattling across the yard, the water running in clear streams, carving canyons. Her stomach was big with Junior, and I laid a hand on it and watched. Junior was a surprise, a happy accident; she’d had me and Skeetah and Randall a year apart each, and then nothing else for nine years. I kneeled next to her and put my ear to her stomach and heard the watery swish of Junior inside her, as outside the wind pulled, branch by root, until it uprooted a tree ten feet from the house. Mama watched with her eye to the slit formed by the board over the window. She rocked from side to side like the baby in her would not let her sit still. She stroked my hair.
That storm, Elaine, had been a category 3. Katrina, as the newscaster said late last night after we settled in the living room, echoing Daddy, has reached a category 5.
During Elaine, Randall and Daddy had slept. Skeetah had sat on the other side of Mama, opposite me, and she’d told us about the big storm when she was little, the legend: Camille. She said Mother Lizbeth and Papa Joseph’s roof was ripped off the house. She said the smell afterward was what she remembered most clearly, a smell like garbage set to rot, seething with maggots in the hot sun. She said the newly dead and the old dead littered the beaches, the streets, the woods. She said Papa Joseph found a skeleton in the yard, gleaming, washed clean of flesh and clothing, but she said it still stank like a bad tooth in the mouth. She said that Papa Joseph never took the remains down to the church, but carried it in an oyster sack out into the woods; she thought he buried the bones there. She said she and Mother Lizbeth walked miles for water from an artesian well. She said she got sick, and most everybody did, because even then the water wasn’t clean, and she had dreamed that she could never get away from water because she couldn’t stop shitting it or pissing it or throwing it up. She said there would never be another like Camille, and if there was, she didn’t want to see it.
I fell asleep after everyone else did last night, and now I wake before everyone. Daddy snores so loudly I can
