The Hurricane

She smiled grimly, her eyes twinkling. “Like send up smoke signals?” Her voice was full of sad impotence, not humor. She wiped her brow with the back of her arm, both of which were peppered with bits of bark and fine sawdust. “All we can do is trust that he’s okay,” she said. They’ll have power or cell phones or something up before long.”

“Maybe the landlines still work,” Daniel said. He had been against them getting rid of the old house phone the year before, but since it no longer rang, and everyone in the family carried a phone in their pockets anyway, his mom had decided that the cost of the bill no longer made sense.

Carlton returned from another Sisyphean trip to the debris pile. “The landlines weren’t working as of this morning.” He nodded toward the house across the street, the one with the morning coffee drinkers that Daniel had waved to the day before. “The Morrison’s have been trying theirs hourly.”

“When did you meet them?” Daniel’s mom asked.

“They were out this morning. I checked to make sure the chainsaw wouldn’t disturb them. They understood wanting to get an early start, what with the heat and all.” Carlton picked up the saw and flicked a lever on its side. He reached into the breast pocket of his short sleeve button-up and extracted his plastic safety goggles. “They seem like good people,” Carlton added, and Daniel felt less alone and silly for not knowing anything about them. He thought about another person he’d met in the neighborhood that he’d like to get to know better. The day before, working in the yard, he’d wracked his brain wondering how to get out of debris duty and what he’d say if he went over. By the time he’d worked up the courage and memorized a few excuses, he was too hot and sweaty to want to be seen. As he carried another cut log to the growing row Carlton had started between two trees, he realized he should go over there early and get it over with. Just to keep from perseverating about it all day long or waiting until he got nasty with sweat.

He turned back to his mom as the chainsaw sputtered then roared to life once again.

“I need to run down the street,” he yelled. His mother turned from watching Carlton wield the saw, her face scrunched with worry.

“What for?” she yelled back.

A fountain of fine dust sprayed out of the growing gash in the tree; it filled the air with a dry and pulpy mist.

“I need to charge my Zune so we can hear the news,” he said, stepping away and squinting his eyes at the fog of powdered tree.

“Charge it how?”

The saw made it through the bottom, and the tree leapt up as another heavy log fell from its end. Carlton looked poised to lop off another, but powered the tool down when he saw they were trying to have a conversation.

“There’s this gir—” Daniel realized he was yelling over the residual din of the now-quiet saw. He lowered his voice. “Someone down the street has a solar panel rigged up that can charge small devices. I was gonna go plug in my Zune and let it charge while we work.” He looked to Carlton for support.

“Can it do cell phones?” his stepdad asked.

Daniel shrugged.

Carlton dug into his pocket and held out his iPhone. “The charger’s on the table by my side of the bed,” he said.

“Can you do my Blackberry?” his mom asked. There was a sense of desperation there that Daniel wasn’t used to seeing from his in-control workaholic mom.

“I guess,” he said, wishing he hadn’t said anything. He should’ve told them he was going to go smoke cigarettes, or something.

“You know where my charger is,” she said simply.

Daniel accepted the phone. He was surprised both of them were carrying their phones around, even though there’d been no signal since the storm.

“Check with Zola,” his mom said.

“Mine’s fine,” his sister said. She tugged on a branch. “I put my other battery in.”

“Why do you have two batteries?” their mother asked.

Zola shrugged.

“I was already hesitant to ask about charging up my Zune,” Daniel complained. Which was the truth, but not for the reason he was insinuating.

“See if they need to borrow the saw in return,” Carlton said. He used the hem of his shirt to wipe sawdust off his glasses, which he then pinched with his gloves and inspected.

“Or if they need water. Or anything,” his mom said.

Daniel nodded, suddenly thrilled. The idea of making a transaction—from one family to another—released the knot of nerves in his stomach. He ran inside for his backpack with a surge of confidence. He was now going on a mission, not a tryst. This was about survival, not puppy love. He was a sanctioned ambassador with messages and offerings from a not-too-distant familial municipality. There was no pressure to fall in love, or force someone else to reciprocate. All he needed to do was establish a trade route. More formal treaties and arranged marriages could wait.

Daniel gathered his family’s dead gizmos and the various species of chargers with their fat heads and wispy tails. He ran back outside, balancing haste with the fear of stirring an unseemly sweat, and made his way through his new and wondrous wilderness neighborhood to that distant and promising kingdom a few houses down.

••••

The neighborhood streets were everywhere hedged with brush piles. They were like slumbering and camouflaged beasts, lying supine along the pavement’s shoulder. They crowded the black tar, which was still littered with leaves and the smallest limbs, and were deathly quiet and devoid of traffic. While Carlton’s chainsaw dimmed behind him, several others became audible elsewhere. The smell of tree sap and tar and sawdust filled the air. As far as Daniel could tell, this was the new way of things; the world had reverted to some primitive state, and that’s where he’d live forever. Juxtaposing this idea with the fact that people in Atlanta and Chicago were getting up, checking their email, going to work or school, waiting at red lights, hunting for WiFi —Daniel imagined what a Bahamian, Haitian, Mexican or Cuban might feel about such distant and magical realms as the United States. As he rounded the small tangle of limbs in front of Anna’s house, he considered the ridiculous idea that he could just walk from this primitive new island of his to that faraway land of promise. A few days of hiking, of sleeping under the stars, and he’d arrive somewhere to find streetlights and air conditioned houses. There’d be music and roving vehicles. There’d be signals: cell phone and wireless, radio and satellite. He could call people . . . just not anyone back here.

Daniel wandered up the white concrete driveway feeling conspicuous and uninvited, but also primal and in some survival mode that ignored taboo and embarrassment. He was on a mission from his family, he reminded himself, and nothing more.

As he turned down the walk curling from the driveway, he passed a curious addition to the house that had been erected between two large bushes: a small shed. It had a metal roof bent out of a single corrugated sheet with the solar panels mounted on top. The sides consisted of scrap vinyl siding, and it had double doors on massive hinges that stood open. There was a sign above the doors that read, in a neat print: “Community charging station. Help yourself.”

Help yourself, Daniel thought. Did that mean he didn’t have to ask? But now he wanted to ask.

He peered inside the structure to see the black inverter he’d helped solder mounted to one wall, out of any threat of rain. The other side was lined with shelves that each had their own outlets, which were wired up and covered with electrical tape. A scattering of wall warts were plugged in here and there. Two of them had devices attached, little green lights glowing happily.

For Daniel, it was like seeing a neon sign go up on his little island. He was a caveman peering into a fire. He saw at once that the same ingenuity and restlessness that had dragged his species out of their caves and down from their trees to the twenty-first century couldn’t be excised by a storm and a loss of power. Besides, it was his people who had created that power in the first place. And now he was seeing a small piece of evidence that it would all come back. Eventually.