Acts of Nature

ELEVEN

Maybe it was fifteen minutes, maybe an hour. My sense of time was gone with the wind. But when my head finally started to clear it was still in the pewter haze of a washed-out sunrise. There was a dim grayness all around us and when I focused my eyes, I realized I was staring out onto an open horizon. The back and side walls of the room were gone, simply obliterated or just picked up by the wind and sailed far away. I panicked, jerked against what I was leaning into, and Sherry groaned deep in her throat. We were up against the remains of the kitchen sink cabinet, wedged partially between it and the still-standing refrigerator. I moved my legs, turned on one hip and looked into Sherry’s face. She was conscious, her breathing shallow but steady, her eyes at half-mast, almost like she was simply taking a lolling rest after one of her long-distance runs.
“You OK?” I asked stupidly. “I mean, shit, how long have I been out?”
She didn’t respond at first and seemed to be looking out past me into the gray light.
“OK,” she finally whispered and then focused on my eyes. “I’m OK, I didn’t know what to do, Max. No place to go.”
I moved my arm, aimed my hand, found the side of her temple with my fingertips and stroked the side of her face.
“Jesus, Sherry. You OK?”
Maybe she was smiling at my denseness, but the corners of her mouth turned up, just a fraction.
“Hell of a night,” she said. “It’s morning, but I can’t get up.”
She reached down with her left hand but only got to her hip and stopped. She had a rag tied around her thigh, tight from the look of it. The torn piece of sheet and the fabric of her sweatpants were stained a rust color. I sat up, felt a spin in my head like I was a kid on the tilt-a-whirl for a second, and then moved down without too much pain to Sherry’s leg.
“Puncture?” I ask, probably hoping for something minor.
“No. It’s broken.”
“Compound?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Thigh bone came right through the skin on the interior side. I thought my muscles were stronger than that, that they would’ve kept it in.”
She was a cop. We’d both spent a lot of time at accident scenes gabbing with paramedics, picking up their medical cant.
“I was trying to drag you over here after the side wall ripped away,” she said. “My foot must have gone right through a split in the flooring. I fell over and the bone just snapped.”
I was staring at her face, trying to comprehend what she was telling me.
“When I felt for the pain I found the bone with my fingers. But I had to move, get us over. When I pulled my leg back out of the hole, I must have pulled the bone back in because it’s not exposed anymore.”
“Christ, Sherry.” It was the only thing that came to my lips.
“When I got us a little out of the wind I was going to use your shirt to tie it off but a bedsheet came whipping by like I’d ordered the thing from room service.”
Levity, I thought. She could have been crying, instead she was cracking jokes. Her blond hair looked almost brown, drenched and stringy with shards of wind-blown sawgrass stuck in it. Her face was smeared with dirt and streaks of her own blood wiped there from her hands. I was looking in her eyes for some sign of trauma or shock that just wasn’t there.
“I’m OK, Max. I passed out a couple of times but it feels kind of dead right now. I’m not sure that’s going to last if I try to move, though.”
Sherry’s brave suggestion motivated me to roll over to my own knees and then, slowly, gain my feet. There was an uneasy shift in my brainpan, like a load of water in a tub tipped from one side to the other, but I maintained my balance and the feeling passed.
In the dim light, I took in the shredded remains of the Snows’ fishing camp. The western wall that we used for shelter and a quarter of the south wall were still standing. The two others were completely gone, like they’d been ground to mulch or simply sailed away. Glops of wet stuffing from the couch and the bed had been whirled and splattered onto anything that was still vertical: the refrigerator, the cabinet fronts bolted into the standing wall, the now pristinely empty bookcase that was equally nailed to the quarter wall. I took a couple of steps on the floorboards and heard glass crunching under my feet. Past the bookcase, into now free space, I could see the outbuildings, which appeared to have been de-roofed and then simply folded over like wet cardboard boxes. The large water tank, easily four or five hundred pounds when filled, was tossed thirty yards out onto Wally’s now bald island. Several planks from the extensive deck had been peeled up with no discernible pattern and the walkway looked like a broken, haphazard piano keyboard. The air smelled of dank, sopping detritus, like the earth itself had been turned by some monstrous tiller and flopped back down on top of us. Looking out toward the south I could only see fifty or sixty yards in the grayness; the plain of sawgrass was flattened, as if by a steam roller. A few thicker, hardier stalks were just beginning to rise up like stubble after a mean harvest. There was civilization out there, the edges of the suburbs less than fifteen miles away. Speculating on what the hurricane might have done there was useless. But there would at least be medical response, even if they’d been hard hit. We didn’t have that luxury and, despite her bravery, Sherry was going to need that sooner than later.
The thought turned me to searching the wreckage around me. My pack. My first aid kit. The canoe.
Pulled in against the remaining wall last night, the canoe was only partially intact. The ribbing and gunwales were unbroken but there was a gaping wound in the middle of the hull. The paddles were long gone. So too the small metal first aid kit. No clean bandages. No astringent or antibiotic cream. Not even a f*cking aspirin.
I searched for water. The cooler we’d brought was gone and with it the water and whatever food was left. The upright refrigerator mocked me. The Snows always emptied it of perishables and shut it down when they left the place. We had not even bothered to open it. Inside I found four small bottles of store-bought water along with two jars of pickles, squeeze bottles of both mustard and ketchup, and three cans of beer. In the freezer compartment there were several empty ice cube trays and a mushy warm Ace reusable cold compress. I brought out the water, twisted open one bottle and then bent to Sherry, offering it to her lips.
“Ah, room service,” she said, but could not smile at the joke this time. “Anything up there from your vantage point that looks hopeful, Max? The view looks pretty dismal from down here.” She turned at the hip to take in the crushed outbuildings but winced at the effort. “At one point I thought of a signal fire but figured we could burn down everything we’ve got left to sit on and still not raise anybody’s attention.”
She wasn’t just being cute. If the hurricane had done any significant damage on the coast there would be plenty of emergencies for the authorities to handle in their own backyards, never mind some idiot who went frontiering out in the Glades without so much as leaving a word behind with a destination in mind. Who would miss them? And where would they look? Maybe if the river ranger at the park went out to my cabin to check on me. Maybe if he realizes my canoe is missing. Maybe if Sherry’s supervisor couldn’t contact her to come in for post- hurricane duty. Lots of maybes that could take days. I looked down at the stained bandage around Sherry’s leg and didn’t think we had days. From what little I knew about compound fractures, the sharp edges of the broken bone could be doing even more damage on the inside with every movement. Since the bone had once been exposed, infection was not just a possibility but a certainty. I sat back down next to her.
“I don’t think we can afford to stay here, Sherry.”
“Yeah, I figured,” she said. “No communications link. Not much in the way of passing traffic.” This time she found a way to tighten those laugh lines of hers but then turned her head to the bleak horizon.
“We walkin’ or ridin’?”
“I’m going to search what’s left of the utility room. There might be something we can use to patch the canoe. If we can get her floating, we’re riding,” I said, trying to at least match her formidable gumption.
“You’re thinking maybe that last camp we passed? That one in the trees? Might have been sheltered at least a little bit?”
“You’re way ahead of me, as usual,” I said and meant it.
“No, Max,” she said, turning back to find my eyes. “Not ahead. Just right with you.”
This time I did lean down and kiss her lightly, on the mouth.
“OK then,” I said and untied the flashlight from her belt. “I’ll be right back.”
The bunkhouse was completely gone, as if it had been swatted off the deck by a giant hand, only a few iron post anchors left bolted to the flooring where the corners of the building used to be. The utility building was flattened but there were still gaps of space under the collapsed walls, the largest made where an interior wall was still propped up off the deck by the generator. The heavy piece of machinery was bolted to the plank flooring and was close to one of the foundation posts. It had stayed put. I lifted a sheet of wood siding and shoved it aside, then sent a beam of light into the gap and start rooting around. After coming up with busted cans of paint, shattered jars of roofing nails, a completely intact box of “hurricane candles” and a single hammer, I found something useful: a silver roll of three-inch-wide duct tape. No home owner could live without it. My light also caught something chrome and shining on the floor and I was able to reach through a space behind the generator and get a hand on it. With some twisting and yanking and considerable working of angles, I came up with the sheared-off shaft of what was once a Big Bertha driving wood. In memory I recalled a scene of Jeff Snow standing out on this deck, the morning sun just coming up in the east, while he wedged a tee in between the planks and took practice driving old golf balls out into the distance. The environmentalists would have frowned at his depositing dozens of nonbiodegradable orbs of plastic and rubber into the pristine waters. But I had simply smiled at his morning constitutional. The fat head of the golf club was now gone, but the wet leather-wrapped grip and a sharp, wicked metallic point at the end remained. I told myself it might be useful, maybe as a splint for Sherry’s broken leg. But I knew there was something about its resemblance to a weapon that made me take it along with the roll of tape. If I ended up dragging a half-submerged canoe through the Everglades I didn’t want to face a disoriented Wally or the rest of his ilk with just a six-inch fillet knife.
When I got back to Sherry with my meager loot she had already shifted herself on the floor and had gone through the cabinet under the sink.
There she had found a clean dishrag and an intact bottle of isopropyl alcohol.
“Maybe your friend kept it under there for cuts from cleaning fish,” she said. “Whatever, it’s got to help.”
First things first, I used my knife to cut loose the blood- soaked sheet Sherry had used to tie off her wound and then the sweatpants fabric from around her thigh. The gash seemed less than ominous, like a half-moon slice from a pipe the diameter of a baseball bat handle. It was crusted shut with dried blood, but when I pinched the flesh on either side to open it a bit in order to pour in the alcohol, the hole opened and I could see how deep the cut went. Sherry twitched as I sloshed in the disinfectant and when I looked up at her there was a thin bright red fine of blood on her lip where she was biting against the pain.
“Sorry,” I muttered stupidly.
She closed her eyes and bobbed her head, excusing me.
I then lay the clean dish towel over the wound and ripped off long pieces of the sheet and tied the bandage in place.
“We should try to keep your leg straight and immobilized. You don’t know what that bone end is doing inside,” I said.
“Yeah, I do,” she said, her teeth now clenched together. “It’s cutting, Max. I can feel it. We just gotta hope it isn’t near an artery.”
“You’re right. But we can splint it,” I said. “God knows there are enough pieces of slat wood here to do that. Maybe strap it in place with the duct tape. That’ll keep it straight when we load you into the canoe.”
Now she was looking more skeptical than pained.
“Got to, Sherry. Time isn’t helping us any here.”
“I know,” she answered. “But I was just getting comfortable, you know?”
“That’a girl,” I answered, again complimenting her guts and hopefully encouraging her spirit for what was going to be one hell of an ordeal we both knew was coming.

I used the rest of the roll of tape on the hull of the canoe, first folding a piece of a Rubbermaid dish drainer from under the sink to cover the hole and then strapping it in place with the duct tape. While working on the patch I’d found three other punctures and a cracked rib toward the bow, but was sure the boat would still float. My next task was to find a replacement for the missing paddles and I discovered a long curved piece of mahogany under some debris that I recognized as once being the plaque backing for a bonefish trophy that Jeff Snow had mounted and displayed on one of the camp walls. The edges were smooth for grasping and pulling strokes. It would do.
I salvaged a plastic container that once held coffee and stuffed the last of the water bottles in. We could use it to bail water if we had to. I put it in the canoe under the stern seat along with the flashlight and then stored the headless shaft of the golf club along the boat’s spine. Though I knew there had once been several flotation cushions and some lifejackets for the Snows’ children here, I couldn’t find a sign of one. A damp, fabric-covered couch pillow was the best we had left. I propped it in the bow. With everything set I dragged the canoe over to the west side of the remaining deck and slid it onto the water. Sherry was next and I flexed my jaw and moved over to her, clearing a trail of any sharp debris or nail heads, anything that might catch her clothes. I knew how much it was going to hurt to move her and she knew it too.
“I’m going to get you under the arms and kind of drag you to the canoe,” I said. “I figure it’s the best way to keep the leg from bending.”
“Oooh, big cave man. How about just grabbing a hunk of hair,” she said, again with the forced grin. I shook my head.
“Then I can lower you into the bow. You use that pillow for your head and prop the leg up on the seat. That’ll keep it elevated and maybe reduce some of the blood flow,” I said.
She nodded her head, steeled herself as I got a grip under her arms and lifted her. Only then did she begin to cry.