Acts of Nature

NINE

Harmon was in the back of his house in Coral Springs, a cordless electric drill in his hand, spinning tight the wing nuts that held his hurricane shutters over the rear sliding glass doors. The sun was out. He was already sweating profusely with the effort of carrying and mounting the steel panels from his garage and stacking them in front of every window and door to his home. Each one was marked with its designation: N SIDE BEDROOM, S SIDE DINING. He’d been through this many times during his years living down here and now it had become ritual. But he never went so far as to say he’d gotten used to it.
With the attachment on the drill he whizzed the nut on the W SIDE BATH and then took a break. Inside his house the lack of light created by the sealed windows was already giving him a mildly claustrophobic feel. He poured himself a glass of cold water from the refrigerator and sat at the kitchen bar, watching the local weather channel on the television. The station had not been changed for the last twenty-four hours. His wife called him obsessed but he just flitted her off with the back of his fingers, told her she was right, it was probably a waste of time and effort, go on with whatever you were doing and don’t mind me. She shook her head and did just that. Harmon kept his face turned to the TV. He was scared and given who he was, the years that his wife had spent with him overseas on security details in the military, even the time he’d had to hand-strip down a couple of a*shole muggers on the street in Miami in front of her when they’d tried to rob them and he’d left them both with snapped bones, mewling like broken kittens on the sidewalk, he’d never showed fear. Harmon was considered an expert with a handgun. He was also good at close-quarters hand fighting, techniques he’d learned long ago that had become so ingrained that despite his age he could regain them in an instant, not unlike riding a bike or crushing a man’s windpipe before he could yell out an alarm. Harmon was not a man who panicked and his wife and family had depended on that. But today he was scared and would be until the threat of this new hurricane had passed. Harmon had seen the strength of such a storm. It was nothing you could fight, nothing you could kill, nothing you could stand up against if it decided to cross your path. It was bigger and stronger than man. And if it wanted you, all you could do was huddle down with your head between your knees and kiss your ass good-bye, as Squires would say.
He took another deep drink of the water and refocused on the news. Hurricane Simone had swung north from the Yucatán Peninsula and then stalled for a day in the Gulf of Mexico. There it sucked up energy from the heat rising off eighty-two-degree Gulf water and ate itself into a huge category four monster. Some people likened it to spilling millions of gallons of gasoline on a forest fire, fueling a force that already couldn’t be stopped from eating everything in its path. But Harmon had been in the middle of a forest fire. He had also been in the center of a hurricane and the comparison was lost on him.
On the tube the muted commentator was incessantly moving his lips while pointing out the steering currents—a high pressure system moving down from the western states and a sucking low off the southeast Atlantic—that was now bringing the storm back to Florida. The red-shaded “cone of probability” graphic was now a thinner triangle whose narrow end was just off the coast of Naples on the west side of the state and then spreading out to cover everything from the big blob of blue representing Lake Okeechobee on the northern edge down to Miami on the south.
“Goddamn reversal of Andrew,” Harmon said out loud.
“What, honey?” his wife called out from the laundry room. He ignored her.
They had been together in 1992 when Hurricane Andrew ripped like a freight train over their home just south of Miami on an opposite track, crossing the state from east to west. Harmon had been working security at Homestead Air Force Base as a consultant. The money had been good enough to buy a nice four-bedroom house with a pool and an acre of land shaded by two-hundred-year-old live oaks that towered like green clouds over his yards. On the sunny side of the acreage he’d planted a row of orange and grapefruit trees that never failed to blossom in spring and give fruit in summer. Eden. Even now the memories brought an interior smile.
Yeah, he’d known that one was coming. He’d been called onto the base to make sure that the hangars were secure where they’d moved the military jet fighters and lighter stuff that might get blown around. He’d tightened up a contingency plan just in case they lost off-site civilian power and had to go to their own generators. At home he’d tossed the patio furniture into the pool as a neighbor had suggested and parked his pickup truck closer to the garage so it would be on the leeward side and less likely to be pelted by loose tree branches and debris. He’d seen that some folks had put masking tape in crisscross fashion over their front windows. Christ, even he knew that old trick was bullshit. If a wind-blown branch or a coconut or something like that hit your window head on it was going to crack the glass anyway. You were still going to have to sweep up. Scraping that glue from the tape off the windows after the storm was four times the work. He’d gone to bed that night without even watching the news. The wind woke him at two a.m.
Go ahead, Harmon would later tell friends from other parts of the country or the world when he traveled. Push your vehicle up to ninety or a hundred miles an hour on the expressway if you dare and then note the sound. Not the engine sound, because that won’t compare with the rush of air blasting over your car hood and roof. Just listen to the sound and then stick your head out the side window and let the air rip at your face. That’s a category four hurricane. That’s the strength of the wind, tearing at your world. For hours.
Harmon was staring at the television, but not seeing the weather woman with her graphics and maps and little spinning red pinwheel depicting the present location of Simone. He was instead seeing the Oakwood grain of his double front door during Andrew, his face pressed up against it, his then solid two hundred thirty pounds trying to keep it closed as the wind bowed the two-inch-thick planks into the entryway. His wife was in the hallway closet, crying, huddled with their two children. But he could not hear her or anything else but the wind blowing through the rubber seal of the doorway, the air under such pressure that the sound was like Arturo Sandoval hitting a high C note on his trumpet for what seemed an eternity. He had looked around behind him at the walls lined with his books, really the most important things to him other than his family, and cursed himself for not preparing better. And then, at that moment, as he watched, the ceiling at one corner of his living room began to rise like the devil himself was gripping the house with a giant hand and then peeled away the entire roof and sent it flipping away into the night.
The house had been a total loss. They were lucky to salvage some important papers, some pictures, some heirlooms. Most of his books had been ruined by the rain that had washed unimpeded through every room. After Andrew his family relocated farther up the state. Everyone in the house had survived unscathed but for the memories that crept back.
Harmon refocused on the television, took another drink of cold water. Back to work, he thought. Only the south side shutters left. He thought about Squires, could see his partner on the beachfront somewhere, sitting out in the open, laughing into the face of the rising wind and downing yet another draft at the hurricane party thrown by the locals down at the infamous beachside tavern called the Elbo Room. He was probably toasting the fact that the company wouldn’t be sending them out to the oil rigs since this one had turned east. He’d be buying shots and toasting hell itself. Some of us took precautions, some just said f*ck it, let it come. If she hit them head on, it would be difficult to argue who was the smarter.

“Damn, Chez! It’s blowin’ like a snarly bitch out there now,” Wayne said as he came through the door, wind and rain swirling in behind him even though he’d only opened it far enough to squeeze through. “Old man Brown’s coconut tree is bent over like to touch its head on the ground and the water’s already up to the fourth step over to Smallwood Store.”
He shook himself like a dog that had just come out of the lake, the water flying off his slicker onto the linoleum floor and the nearby refrigerator. Buck and Marcus were again sitting in the kitchen, each with a hand of cards spread out in their fingers, a small pile of quarters and crumpled bills lay in the middle of the table.
“Hey, bring us a beer there, Stumpy,” Marcus said without looking up from his hand.
“F*ck you,” Wayne answered, peeling off the yellow foul- weather jacket.
Buck raised his own eyes at the boy’s answer and then looked at Wayne, and then at the fridge. Wayne got three cans of Budweiser out and set them on the table. One he put in front of the empty chair where he sat. He didn’t distribute the others, the smallest of rebellions.
“Don’t call me stumpy,” he said. Marcus just grinned into his cards. Wayne had lost his left thumb two years ago, working the stone crab boats with one of his uncles. He’d bragged about being allowed to work the traplines at the beginning of the harvest season. It was a man’s job. The stone crab traps, big as a large microwave oven and just as heavy, were strung out by the dozens On braided lines, sitting on the bottom of the Gulf and baited with fish heads and chicken parts. When harvest came a giant motor winch on the stern of the boat started pulling up the line at a steady speed. The boat captains timed the operation down to pure efficiency, the traps spaced just far enough so a line man could hook the first trap as it broke the surface, yank it up with a boat hook onto the gunwale, pop open its door, snag the crabs inside, and toss them into a bucket and then rebait the trap with half-frozen bait, and shove the whole thing back overboard just in time to grab the boat hook and snag the next trap hitting the surface. It was all a delicate dance. But there was nothing delicate if your gloved hand got caught in the line or even got stuck enough to yank you into the spinning winch. Wayne’s left hand had gotten caught. The line, perhaps luckily, only looped around his thumb, and with the power to drag hundreds of pounds through the warm Gulf water, it popped the digit off clean, the sound like a rifle shot, a sound many of the crewmen had heard before. Wayne was fourteen.
“Ain’t no girl gonna go for a four-finger thief,” Marcus had kidded him later. The comment, like the nickname itself, was something only your best friend could say. The boys had been neighbors since their toddler years. You always abuse the ones you know best.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Wayne had answered. “So what’s your excuse, dickhead?”
Shortly after the accident Wayne took to holding his beers with his left hand, out in front so anyone and everyone would notice his deformity. He never hid the hand, carried it like a badge or something, maybe a chip that should have been on his shoulder. Marcus might have even been envious. It was better’n any damn tattoo you could get in Miami.
Marcus let the lack-of-a-girlfriend insult bounce off him; old joke, he’d heard it before.
“So I’m in for three bucks and I raise you another dollar,” Marcus said, peering up over his cards at Buck. The man kept his eyes down, pinching the cards. The tips of his fingernails turned white when he did this, the rest of the nail shading a darker red with the press of blood against their backs. It was a tell that Buck had tried to get rid of playing cards in prison. He’d gotten his ass kicked in poker for the first nine months in prison until a new friend finally let on to the obvious sign he was flashing to the rest of the players whenever he had a good hand. But these boys weren’t so tuned into the small details of gambling. He saw and raised the bet back to Marcus, who scowled. Out of the hand, Wayne was bored.
“So we gonna do these expensive-ass fishing camps after the storm, right?”
No one answered. They’d been over the plan already. Buck had been twisting the images around in his head, just like when he’d lain awake all night in prison, working the details, what it was going to look like when he got out, what he was going to do, how this time he was going to be so careful there was no way he’d make the same mistakes again and get caught. Every opportunity could be the big score that would set him up.
“But what if the damn hurricane busts stuff up? A nice fishing rig or a stereo or somethin’ ain’t gonna be worth much if it’s busted up,” Wayne said. “I mean, I know it’ll be easier to get into the places like you said, Buck, make it look like nature done it and all. But suppose the good stuff gets damaged before we get there?”
Buck understood the boy was anxious; that always happened once you had a plan set and you were young and giddy, wanting to get your feet moving and your fingers on something profitable. He’d probably been the same way when he was younger, not as bad, of course, but somewhat the same.
“Son,” he said, still not looking up. “You hear that howl outside, boy? Ain’t a thing you can do about that ’cane coming in now. She’s gonna do what she gonna do, then we’ll run on out on the airboat as soon as she moves on through just like we planned. We’ll hit them places and see what we can see. Those owners are gonna be busy in their regular homes for days. Their fishing camps will be the last thing on their minds. We got all the time in the world to loot through. Might be some damage, but there won’t be anybody figuring what’s gone until we’ve already sold it and have the money in our pockets.
“You got that? Right, Wayne?”
“Yes, sir,” Wayne said, like he’d been put down by some teacher at the front of the class again. “I got it.”
Buck heard the twitch of humiliation, or was that anger, in the boy’s voice. He knew he had to keep his merry little band together.
“You did good with getting those locations, Wayne. But this storm helps us, right? Hell, it’s almost legal. Like a salvage operation. We could find something that’ll make our day out there and simply walk away.”
“I’ll call you,” Marcus suddenly said, like he hadn’t heard a word of what the others had been talking about. He laid down three queens and looked up at Buck, grinning.
Buck took a long draft off the beer, nearly half of it gone in one swallow and then, one at a time, lay down a ten high straight. Marcus shoved his chair back, disgusted, and went for another beer as Buck raked in the pile. A high-pitched gust of wind rattled the wooden shutters that had been nailed shut over the kitchen window.
“Mr. Brown all tightened down out there?” Buck asked Wayne.
“Tight like a tick,” Wayne said. “Even got some sandbags piled up at the back of his boathouse. Old fart must be expecting a big one.”
Buck snapped his eyes up. Both boys turned their heads at the silent change of pressure in the room. Even with their stunted powers of recollection, they’d realized the mistake that had been made.
“Old what?” Buck said, quiet like, almost a hiss, as if his voice was under pressure. Both boys were looking down into the pile of money on the table, neither willing to look up and meet Buck’s gaze. The air stayed silent for a full minute.
“Sorry,” Wayne finally said, no twitch of smartass in it, no possibility of even a flicker of grin at the corners of either boy’s mouth.
“Goddamn right you’re sorry.”
Nate Brown was a second generation denizen of the Ten Thousand Islands. He was born on a feather-stuffed mattress in his parents’ bed in their tar-paper shack in Chokoloskee somewhere between eighty and one hundred years ago. No one knew the exact year. In his time as the son of one of the original white families that moved to southwest Florida in the late 1800s, he had taken on a nearly mystical aura. He’d practically been born with a rifle in his hands. He knew every turn and twist and mangrove-covered trail from the middle keys to Lake Okeechobee. He was a gator hunter, a stone crabber, a net and hook fisherman beyond compare, a whiskey still operator, and a pot runner. He’d been to Germany in World War II, had worked behind the lines as a mountain soldier, and had a Medal of Honor to prove it. He’d gone to prison when he was sixty years old with the rest of the men in town rather than say a word about the infamous marijuana smuggling ring. Buck’s father had told a thousand legendary stories of the old man and how he’d taught the younger generation of Gladesmen how to sear spit-fired curlew birds and hand- caught mullet, how to kill and skin a ten-foot gator in minutes under cover from the game warden’s eye, how to outrun the high-powered Coast Guard patrols in a simple outboard flat-boat by using the sandbars and switchback water trails. How to survive in a place called the Everglades where few people chose to survive any longer.
The man was practically a god to the old timers, and to Buck. And you don’t call a man’s god an “old fart” to his face. It wasn’t until Buck finally raised his beer to his mouth and drained it that Wayne saw an opportunity to move without putting himself in danger and got up and fetched the man a new Budweiser. Outside, the wind kept up a low, steady bellow, like a fat man blowing across the mouth of a big clay jug. On occasion the tone would rise with the velocity of a gust. But mostly it hummed, still some distance away, out at sea, warming up to the task, preparing for its scream to come.