Hunter's Island

chapter twenty

We stop under a nauseous green sky, thirty yards from the waterline, when the tractor’s tires start to smoke in the mud.  Mosquitoes electrify the air, breeding by the billions in every stagnant pool, every sodden hay bale and rotting twist of wood.  One at a time we step down into the rank suck, knee-deep, arms folded across our chests, and trudge forward to get a read on the river.  My father pensive and resolute.  Damon agitated, swearing under his breath.  Me soul-weary and blistered—ready at the barest prompting to throw myself into the current and drift away with the flotsam and scum. 

A river this wide flowing at ten-thousand cubic feet per second is a dangerous and erratic force—a creature as cold-blooded and soulless as the cottonmouths that skim its surface—but with experience I’d developed ways to predict it.  If water hit the oaks at the border of the property before the sluice topped off, it meant the riverbed was gravel-accreted and the inundation would stop short of the house—maybe.  But if the oaks were dry when the sluice hit capacity, it meant moving everything to the attic—food, clothes, appliances, furniture.  It meant hoarding fresh water, rolling up carpets, killing electricity.  It meant rounding up the cats and dogs, bulk shopping at Food-4-Less, moving the cars to higher ground and wrapping them in garden plastic.  It meant endless nights of trench digging and levee building, of driving the road back and forth to Crenshaw’s to fill, hoist and unload sandbags: the dominant anxiety symbols of my childhood dream life. 

Like bricks, boys, you want to stack em like bricks!

On every return trip from the sand plant the pickup drags and moans beneath weight it isn’t meant to bear.  The headlights illuminate the rain-slashed form of my mother standing in the yard, head tipped back as she makes her nightly appeal to the sky, posture wilted, bathrobe clinging to her back like the fur of a drowning cat.  I’d spent nights and years devising procedures to keep her and Isis safe.  Rendezvous points and meeting times.  Signaling systems with neon         glow-sticks, in basic semaphore.  Escape routes and contingency plans.  Under threat of disaster, the family achieved a higher level of functionality, a desperate efficiency that improved year after year.  And somehow, during some waterlogged August, at some forgotten moment, I’d become the one they looked to for direction.  When thunderheads gathered, authority shifted definitively to me.  I became decision-maker, strategizer, organizer, delegator, arbitrator.  It was the only time I felt justified telling my father—or any of them—what to do, and he deferred to my judgment without question.  But only until the water receded.  And only to a point.

He spits a sunflower seed into the current.  “What’s the word?” he asks, but I can tell by his tone that he already knows.  The water’s at least fifty yards from reaching the oaks, and through the scope of Damon’s .22 I can see that it’s already gurgling through the sluice grate, frothing onto the highway and into the ditches.  An earthy stink swims into my nostrils, making my stomach turn, and fatigue oozes into my blood.

“It’s going to back spill,” I say, lowering the rifle.  “Soon.”

The way my father looks at me, I know he hears surrender in my voice, and I watch judgment darken his eyes like a cloud.  I’m hanging on by a thread—a breath away from calling it quits—and he knows it, but he nods sagely at the sky as if it presents no obstacle the three of us together can’t overcome.  Damon won’t look at me at all.  He grabs the rifle from my hands, staring through me, and fires a round over my shoulder at a passing beer keg, as if I’m not even there.  He can feel my detachment as strongly as I can feel his reproach.  He’s hanging on by a thread, too, but we’re tied to different things, and we sense each other’s mounting dread.  If I break, he falls, and we both know it.

I follow him back to the tractor, anxious and conflicted, and we ride home in silence, projecting ourselves into the darkest corners of what we imagine is coming.

For two days, non-stop, the three of us and Andrej labor in pouring rain, stacking sandbags in a perimeter around the house, our fingers bloated and bleeding, while my mother and Isis elevate furniture and prep the interior for saturation.  People come and go, helping when they can, bringing soup and coffee and opinions about our decision to stay, looking at us like we’re insane, which we are.  Allinghams, Rosencutters, Naureths, McKeemans—the ones who usually ride it out in their attics with propane stoves and Chef Boyardee—are moving to higher ground for this one, their homes abandoned, their cars and pickups jam-packed with furniture, books, pets.  Even the wild animals started evacuating days ago: raccoons, skunks, groundhogs and anyone else with the brains they were born with getting the hell off island as soon as they sensed what was coming.  But us Keenans?  No, sir.  We pause to wave as they fade like ghosts into the rain, shivering in our garbage-bag ponchos, then keep stacking sandbags, each one heavier than the last.

When we’re finished, the levee’s eight feet high, two bags deep, and encircles the house like a fortress wall.  It’s more work than I’ve ever done, an accomplishment born of desperation, and I watch in awe from the second floor window as the river sweeps in to destroy it.  The deluge has been building momentum since Nebraska, speeding through creeks and drainages as if through a funnel, drowning grasslands and razing limestone, topping dams and ripping up trees, and it sweeps around the island all at once, tightening on us like a noose.  Floodwater rushes across fields from the east, a foaming brown tide—and back spill from the overwhelmed sluice races in from the northwest.  When the two fronts meet, half a mile from the house, a wall of water erupts fifteen feet high and rips along the seam like oceans colliding.  The sound is terrifying, a deafening aquatic roar, but it’s over quickly and everything falls silent beneath a shit-colored sea.

Waist-deep and rising fast, the water’s a chaos of wrestling currents.  Yellow foam and floating garbage eddy into spirals, break apart, eddy again.  Beyond the cul-de-sac a whirlpool forms and I watch it churn through the trees like a liquid tornado, shaking branches and rustling leaves.  It lifts the Gremlin off flaccid tires, spins it 360 degrees and drives it despite a dead battery through the side of the levee that skirts the front porch.  My mother’s grip tightens around my arm as sandbags tumble and the river pours in.

“Jesus Chris,” my father says, pulling Isis away from the window.  He hands her off to Andrej, then looks at me for what to do next, panic blooming in his eyes.  I want to grab him by the straps of his waders, put his hypocritical ass on the floor and scream it’s too late now, you dumb motherfucker!  But I’m too tired, and he wouldn’t get the point.

Turning my back on him, I speak to Damon for the first time in days: “Did you take supplies to the attic?”  He swears under his breath, then brushes past me, a smirk on his face because he knows I can’t leave.  I take the key from around my neck and toss it to him so he can unlock the supply closet, then I get the others organized to pass food, water and gear down the hall and up the stairs.  When the job’s done, I lean against the windowsill and close my eyes.  Exhaustion divides me from my body as I listen to water slopping downstairs, and with dreamlike clarity I glimpse the patterns that have trapped us for so long and what I must do to break them, but thunder jolts me back to my senses and when I open my eyes the answer floats away.

We spend the night on damp mattresses, rafters bulging under our backs.  The patter of rain lulls me into restless sleep, and I cough myself awake on fibers of pink insulation.  By sunrise water and sewage have infiltrated the second floor.  By noon we’re splashing down the attic stairs and wading neck-deep through it, boxes of food and jugs of water held over our bobbing heads.  We float out the window of Isis’s bathroom, passing supplies, then climb the ladder onto the roof, into the wind-whipped rain.

The next six days are a timeless purgatory between raging thunderheads above and howling dogs in the attic below.  Isis and my mother pass the time helping Andrej learn English, playing Parcheesi, and crying each other to sleep on a platform of carpeted plywood, which is sheltered from the weather by blue tarps and leveled against the roof on five-gallon buckets, each cut to the complimentary angle with a hacksaw.  I do what I can to keep them smiling, but most of the time they want to be left alone.  My father sleeps under the overturned canoe.  He spends his days floating around the perimeter of the house, pushing drowned cattle away with the blade of his paddle, using it to prod the eaves and siding, reaching into the water to scrape paint with his thumbnail, testing it for saturation.  When he and I speak, which isn’t often, it’s from an unfamiliar distance, in a tone of mutual disappointment and regret.

Damon’s shelter is a ramshackle framework of driftwood and lumber suspended between cottonwoods, where he tokes fiendish amounts of dope, occasionally emerging from his daze to shoot at floating garbage and the blue herons that shamble across the sky.  I find him crying one morning on the roof of the annex, berating himself for dropping a black-plumed female into the water, his voice shrill and broken, his language malicious and absurd.  He blanches when he catches me watching, then cocks the rifle and shoots its lifeless body again—and that’s when I realize how unstable he’s become.

Me, I sleep beneath a sheet of corrugated fiberglass propped against the chimney, a canvas tarp cocooned around my body.  All night, every night, I shiver in a fetal curl, dreaming another life, straining for the sound of helicopters or airboats to take me away.

The underwater forays I take into the house are my only relief from the sodden heat of the day and the doomed attachments of my family.  From the peak of the roof it’s a ten-foot dive into numbing water below.  I tumble and spin at the mercy of currents, eyes closed, enveloped by silence.  When I open them, visibility comes in pockets.  Drifting objects materialize from nowhere—a cowboy boot, a file cabinet, the mangled screen of a sliding glass door—then vanish into the murk.  On a full breath I can swim down to the yard until the bulbous green roof of the Gremlin appears, and indulge a few pensive moments behind the wheel, imagining how it would feel to live unburdened by the fear of drawing breath.  I can pull myself along the downspout to the front porch, kick through the kitchen window, the sluggishly fluttering curtains, and navigate the ground floor of the house, room-by-room, exiting the back door behind my own rising bubbles.

When the yowling dogs and cats drive Isis to tears, I undertake the attic swim, the one that tests my lungs to the point of implosion and affirms my conviction that drowning on Hunter’s Island is a matter of choice, that it has nothing to do with water at all.  To reach the attic hatch I have to swim blindly along the second floor hall, trolling the walls for familiar landmarks: doorjambs, light fixtures, picture hooks.  Rising water’s lifted the trapdoor from its frame, leaving a dim portal to the rafters above.  Gasping, I emerge into a cesspool of canine gratitude, floating turds and bloated feline carcasses.  The few desperate cats that haven’t drowned claw their way toward me over wagging dog backs and piled furniture, meowing frantically.  They leap at me and cling to my chest and arms, relieved more by the prospect of salvation than by the cans of Purina that bulge in the pockets of my shorts.  I speak to them softly, plucking their claws from my skin, and put them on the recently submerged top of a desk.  Six more inches and they’re doomed, so I stack a bureau on the desktop and hope they can figure it out.  Then I wade through waist-deep water to the gable vent and kick it through the sodden wall to let in some air and give them a view—let them choose where they’d rather be.  In or out.  Here or there.  Most of the dogs are good swimmers and can probably scent their way to dry land, but when I herd them toward the vent hole they turn on me to snap and growl.  Only Smiley sees the light and makes the jump, hitting the water with a hundred-pound splash and paddling in a straight line to nowhere.  The rest of them retreat into corners, wagging and whimpering.  I put their food in a Styrofoam cooler and float it toward them, then worm out the hole and drop into the water below, a cacophony of baffled silence behind me.

On the morning of the fifth day, the rain gutters submerge and water starts to lap the shingles, leaving scallops of yellow foam that cling despite the drizzle.  I shield my eyes and squint across the brown expanse to the hills that hedge us in, wondering how much higher the water will rise before the gullies and ravines start to release it onto the Konza.  Three feet?  Five?  Through the gloom I see flashes of white limestone, bones of the hills, and in their layered strata I glipmse the patterns again, the island sustaining and destroying us, the Permian sea ebbing and flowing over millennia, always advancing and withdrawing, always taking something with it and leaving something behind.  The trees and grasses that hold their breath beneath this flood, the ones that began here, will remain when the water recedes.  But the squatters will eventually perish, a few hearty stragglers clinging for life in a place they don’t belong, that won’t grant breath to their souls.  We’re on this soil, but we’re not of it, and if we stay any longer our bones are in the ground.

When I find my father, he’s floating in the canoe at the south side of the house, under an overhang of cottonwood branches, talking on the CB.  Damon’s there, too, reclined against the bow with his feet in the water, a paddle resting across his shoulders, supporting his arms like some kind of yoke.  When he sees me coming he sits up straight and the paddle flexes.  They track my progress with suspicious eyes.  I take a deep breath and sidestep down the shingles to confront them, but my father holds me off with an extended hand and turns up the volume.  Between jags of static I recognize the voices of Bob Crenshaw and Nedward Rosencutter as they tell him another front’s moving in—the one we’ve been warned about—and that the National Guard’s been called to evacuate stranded residents before it hits.  The relief that floods me is like nothing I’ve ever felt, but it freezes in my veins when my father looks at me and puts the mike to his lips.  

“Yeah,” he says, “tell em we got a wet one right here wants to evacuate.  Rest of us, we can handle the weather.  Keenan out.”  The swagger and derision in his voice are belied by gray in his whiskers and doubt in his eyes, but he stares me down anyway, and I know my authority’s been revoked.  Bewildered, I look at Damon to see where he stands, but his gaze is turned inward, and when I tell him I’m sorry the paddle snaps over his neck.

The rooftop becomes hostile territory, its peak forming a sharp division between them and me.  Only Isis and Andrej move between camps, materializing from the breezy dusk to bring me damp saltines and tomato soup heated in the can.  Andrej listens politely to my last-ditch appeal, nodding like a mindless puppet, never betraying his crackpot loyalty to my father.  My sister’s face wilts as the situation gels in her mind.  Crying, she takes my hand and tries to drag me with them as they cross back to the other side.

After dark I hunker beneath my tarp on the lee side of the chimney, enduring the wind.  It howls over the chimney cap, blowing hard enough to carve sheets of water off the floodplain and atomize them into mist.  I’m just sliding into restless dreams when it rips away my lean-to of corrugated fiberglass, jolting me upright, and flings it like a leaf into the dark.  Between gusts I hear agitated voices over the puttering generator—my mother and Isis—and pull on shoes to climb the roof and make sure they’re okay.

The gale hurls needles into my eyes as I peer over the peak.  On the other side, an electric lantern dangles from a cottonwood branch, swinging violently at the end of its cord, lighting the mist and revealing in glimpses their cowering forms.  They’re spooned together on the sleeping platform beneath a flap of carpet, their faces tucked to the wind, my mother clinging to Isis, Isis clinging to her Parcheesi game, neither willing to relinquish anything to the storm.  A ragged blue tarp that was once part of their tent is still staked to the shingles and flaps over their heads like an electrified wing.

Squinting past it, I see my father and Damon in the trees, lashing driftwood logs between branches and nailing up sheets of plywood to cut the wind.  They turn their faces to the stinging mist and tighten knots with their teeth, yelling back and forth over the sounds of snapping canvas and thrashing leaves.  The ramshackle windbreak they’re trying to secure flexes dangerously and pulls free at Damon’s corner, the whole thing threatening to sail off its moorings into the night.  My father cups his hands and shouts to my mother, warning her out of the way, but she doesn’t respond and his voice becomes desperate.  Then I see Andrej slipping and stumbling down the shingles with a coil of rope.  He stands tiptoe in his flip-flops, his poncho snapping wildly around his face, and tries to hand the rope up to Damon, who hangs precariously from a branch to reach it, his legs clamped around the windbreak to keep it from breaking free.  Get them out of there first! I want to yell, but the words are marbles in my mouth and I can’t spit them out.

The swinging lantern lights Damon in strobe as he leverages his torso to reach for the rope, cursing Andrej, cursing the wind, cursing himself—his improbable position achieved by some combination of desperation and rage.  I see what’s coming next even before it happens: Damon at the limit of extension, his fingers closing around the coil; Andrej slipping on the shingles and yanking him out of the tree; the windbreak sagging, holding on for a second, then tearing away with a gunshot crack.  It hits the roof right after Damon, with an impact I feel in my chest, then flies over my mother and sister like the wing of an ill-conceived plane, and crashes into water on the south side of the house.

When it’s clear that nobody’s hurt, I look down at Damon, who scrambles to his feet and surveys the scene, panting like a frightened dog.  Infuriated, he rips the coil of rope from Andrej’s hand and whips him across the face with it, then stands there stunned, like he can’t believe he did it, like it wasn’t really him.  The act is so shocking, and somehow familiar, that I can only stare as Andrej shrinks into the mist, cradling his cheek.  When he’s gone, Damon presses a fist to each temple and drops into a Kingblade on the shingles: knees splayed, quadriceps raging, elbows jutting wide.  My genetic affinities for this stance and for him are strong enough that I slip like a shadow into his meltdown, I step through the mirror to become my reflection.  Through the wind I catch snips of his brain talk—scratchin hater! God spankin mother bleeder!—and glimpse the darkest corners of myself, the ones he’ll inhabit after I’m gone.  I want to comfort him, to make us whole again, but when our eyes meet through the dark I know it’s too late.

I wake up in blazing sunlight with my back against the chimney, my legs folded awkwardly beneath me.  The sky is flawlessly blue, scrubbed clean by wind and rain, but storm clouds stack the horizon, piled into ominous layers by shifting pressure fronts.

On tingly feet I walk down slope to the waterline, shielding my eyes from the sun.  Illuminated, the floodplain is almost beautiful, the treetops lush green islands rising from the water, the hills an exotic coastline.  I pull my shirt over my head and spread my arms to the sky, letting solar rays penetrate my skin for the first time in weeks.  In the dry and warm, behind closed eyes, my decision seems clear.  There’s nothing left to dissuade me, nothing left to weigh.  But when I open them to Isis cresting the roof, windblown and bedraggled from last night’s storm, confusion and guilt surge into my chest again.  

She and I are playing Parcheesi on a towel when the helicopter passes overhead an hour or so later, its blades thwacking across the humid sky.  Her body stiffens at the sound and her worried eyes leap to my face.  “Don’t go,” she pleads.

I tilt the game board to funnel dice and pawns back into the box, no clue what to say to her.  When she begs me again and her lip starts to quiver, I lift her into my arms and tell her how much I love her, furious at my father for putting her through this. 

“You’re going to be okay,” I tell her, even though I don’t believe it.

I carry her in a hug to the waterline, where the others have gathered to watch the helicopter, and set her barefoot on the shingles, far enough away from them to make my intentions known.  Ankle-high waves break over our feet, growing more and more agitated as the copter approaches.  I raise a hand to signal the pilot, then put it back on Isis’s shoulder and pull her in close.  Disbelief transforms Damon’s face as it dawns on him what I mean to do.  He and my father scramble toward us across the shingles, rotor whipping their hair into a frenzy, and stop at some invisible boundary ten feet away, their feet planted awkwardly on the slope, their voices drowned by the thumping propeller. 

The copter hovers directly overhead, stirring up whitecaps and shaking the trees, rousing Damon to unprecedented heights of paranoia and resentment.  Crimson faced, he punches the air with his fists and empties his mind into the void, mouth moving in silent enmity, teeth flashing, tendons standing out on his neck as my father extends an arm to contain him.  I empty my mind, too, screaming at them until my throat burns, my appeals to reason, my assessment of history, my predictions for the future, my assertions of love and frustration lost on them and lost to the roar.  In their refusal to hear me they exude the same dumb terror as the dogs, the same incapacity to acknowledge their position.  Even my mother, standing behind them in the shelter of Andrej’s arm, seems to withdraw from me, fear and suspicion clouding her eyes.  They’ve become inured to their doom, and I see that now, I see that leaving isn’t an option for them, that it’s beyond their vision.

It isn’t until I hear my own voice that I realize the copter’s moving.  I gesture confusion to the pilot, who points at his eyes with two fingers, then at me and Isis, then peels away in a sudden updraft, leaving the rooftop in a vacuum of silence.

Nobody speaks.  Nobody moves.   My father and Damon glare at me, their chests rising and falling as they breathe off adrenaline.  My mother glares, too, one hand clasped over her mouth, the other beckoning to Isis, whose bony shoulders quake beneath my hands.  Alert to the new balance of forces, she hesitates for a moment, then breaks away and hurries across the roof to them, glancing back at me out of downcast eyes.

The moment freezes.  The sun beats down.  Sounds of sloshing water and my own rapid breath gradually replace the ringing in my ears, and I hear the hum of engines in the distance.  Everybody turns at the same time and watches out of bloodshot eyes as the airboats—two of them—approach across the floodplain.  They split in different directions a half-mile out, one veering toward the flats, the other heading straight at us, its nose slapping the water and kicking up spray.  The three or four minutes it will take to arrive are longer than I have composure to wait.  I walk on queasy legs to the chimney and reach inside for the Ziploc that holds my things, the ones I’ve deemed relevant to my life to this point.  I pocket my passport and wallet, my high school ring.  I slip the supply closet key around my neck, then throw the rest back and steel myself to say goodbye.

The atmosphere is so dense and humid I can feel the moisture in its molecules straining to break free.  My mother is crying.  My sister, too, leaning against Andrej’s leg.  The welt on his cheek is purple and swollen, and he touches it with his fingers as I start moving toward them.  There’s something I need to say to them, and they’re waiting to hear it, but I’m not sure what it is, and Damon intercepts me before I can speak. 

“Leave it alone,” my father says, taking hold of Damon’s wrist.

I try to step around them, but Damon wrenches free of his grip and grabs the front of my shirt, shoving me backward along the slope.  As soon as I recover my feet he’s on me again, his mouth twisted into a grimace, his eyes webbed in red, distorted by tears. 

He shoves me into the chimney.  We lock arms, fighting for leverage on the sun-baked shingles, but he’s too strong and bullies me toward the south end of the roof, where I see the brown water over my shoulder.  I hear my father yelling Damon’s name, yelling “god fuckin dammit,” my mother and sister crying in the background.  There’s nothing I can do to halt my momentum, except to grab Damon’s hair as he gives the last shove.

In the instant before we go over, while we teeter at the edge, locked in slow-motion, I see our reflections on the water below, the remains of the plywood windbreak floating on the surface and the hundreds of sunbathing cottonmouths that cascade off its edges, disturbed by waves from the approaching airboat, swarming the water like eels.

I let go of Damon’s hair and twist away, hitting the water on my shoulders and back.  His splash comes a split-second later, and I catch a glimpse of his flailing legs as I swim down deep, desperately holding my breath, my mind fixed on reaching the boat. 

Where I break the surface the water’s clear, but I can hear the horrified screaming of my brother behind me, the sound of my name beneath the gurgling engine, and I swear to myself I will never look back.