Acts of Nature (11 page)

Inside his bunker Harmon had gathered his books, most of them replacements, but a few from his collection that had been salvaged and restored after that 1992 storm. He’d begun his reading habit when he was in the military hospital in the Philippines and then later in Hawaii. He had been one of those early into the country of Vietnam, his group unnamed and barely accounted for. They were young, wire-strong Americans, most of them from the wilderness states with a talent for survival and abilities with firearms and blades that were used to killing large, warm-blooded animals. Tactical surveillance and assassination were their orders. Go in undetected, come out the same way. It was there that Harmon learned to fear no man. But they’d been sent into Cambodia, early. Made a designated kill. On the way out, maybe misled by a guide-turned- traitor, they found themselves in a dead-end gorge. The climb out was straight up. The Cambodian rebels, bent on revenge for the killing shot to one of their commanders, had seen the talent level of Harmon’s group up close and needed an agent of death less vulnerable than themselves. So instead of confronting the Americans they set the narrow gorge on fire and let a strong and natural wind carry the consuming flame to the enemy. At one point the small six-man group, backed against the wall, had to decide to rush into the flame and kill what men they could or take a chance of climbing the wall with the flames following their track, stealing their air, a natural killing force unafraid and consuming. Against his judgment, Harmon was overruled and they climbed. The smell of his own burning flesh and those of his mates around him would never leave him. Only two, Harmon and an eighteen-year- old private, made it to the top. The private got them to their rendezvous spot. Both were flown by chopper to safety and Harmon, later, to the offshore hospital.

There he’d tried to escape into the fictional worlds of Vonnegut, Hammett, Spillane. But each time the nurses came to do the debriding, to scrub away yet another layer of his burned skin, reality opened its throat of raw pain and brought him back to the real world. The bunker in his South Florida home now held a hundred tomes of the history of the Vietnam War on one wall, all with their own perspectives, inclusions, conclusions. He had three first editions of
The Things They Carried
by Tim O’Brien, which he had practically, or as he often thought, impractically, memorized. What good did it do him to be able to quote the line on page one hundred thirty- two? Other walls in the room held other wars, for comparison or maybe even reassurance. The enemy is us, human beings, Harmon often said. We are all so much alike, so bent on superiority, all willing to kill or the for dominance or money or retribution or vengeance or some other reason. But nature cared nothing of such piddling motivations. Nature trampled anything in its path without choice or conscience, not like men. Harmon wasn’t afraid of men. He was scared to hell of nature.

It was an hour before dawn when the worst of Simone hit and Harmon lay on the leather couch with his wife in their bunker, front to back, like trembling spoons in a darkened drawer.

“I’m glad the kids are at school.”

Harmon only nodded a response to the first words his wife had said in an hour. They’d sent both of their kids to Notre Dame in Indiana. Landlocked. No hurricanes. No earthquakes. And God’s own prejudicial eye watching out.

They waited for the wind scream to stop. Then they waited longer, until the numble went away, until silence. Harmon checked his watch: ten a.m. When he finally opened the bunker door, his house was intact. He used the big flashlight to move through the living room and kitchen, spraying the beam up into the high corners, looking for gaps, for water stain. When he got to the back door he opened it carefully, waiting for something to fall, a tree limb, a piece of roof tile, the sky itself.

Out on the patio he heard the stiff ruffle of leaves, mostly from the giant ficus tree that he could see had blown down and now straddled his fence. In the pale light he did a quick assessment: there were two additional sheets of screen ripped away from the pool enclosure. The turquoise blue water had turned dusty, the surface layered with dirt and leaves and twigs that had blown in through the openings and settled. But all the ironwork still stood. He looked up and off to the south and saw the raw hide of his neighbors’ roof where it was missing a quarter of its half-barrel tiles, leaving the black shred of tar paper exposed. To the east there was an unfamiliar gap in the horizon and Harmon had to think for a moment. What was gone? What was missing? Then he realized the Martins’ huge gumbo limbo tree, one hundred years old and seventy feet tall, had been pulled up and toppled, removed from sight.

“Is it safe?”

Harmon turned to see his wife, her shadowed figure just inside the doorway, her toes at the threshold, feet unwilling to move. After Andrew she had moved around the destruction of her home like a zombie, eyes wide and dry and uncomprehending. After three days she found their family scrap- book, clippings of the kids’ ball games, pictures of first days at school, birth announcements, all soaked and ripped and ruined. That’s when she started to cry and Harmon talked her into going to her sister’s in Michigan. He stayed to clean up and clean out a lifetime.

But this storm was not the heavyweight Andrew had been. When Harmon walked around his property to the front there were plenty of trees down. The streets were cluttered with debris: broken roof tiles, branches as thick as a man’s wrists, and the crumpled metal and plastic framework of the solar panels that had once been mounted on the Connellys’ rooftop. Across the street Donna Harper’s van had been pushed off her driveway and it now sat at an angle in her side yard. Harmon looked down the street. The new neighbors with the tape on their windows were unscathed. They’d gained another degree of false confidence.

He was still standing in the street, watching folks venture out to do their own survey just as he was doing, when his wife came to the front door.

“Ed. It’s the satellite phone,” she called out.

Christ, he thought. What the hell could they possibly want now?

THIRTEEN

When he woke up, it had to be from the smell. Wet, turgid, soaked earth odor like a compost pit in the rain that had just been forked and turned. That dead fish smell of someone’s catch that had lain in the bottom of the boat for three days while the fishermen went on a bender and then woke to a day when they were penniless again and had to get back to the job they both loved and despised. Buck had been there. And the morning after Hurricane Simone it smelled like he was back. He’d slept through the storm. Not because he was drunk and not that he hadn’t tried to get drunk. His ability to sleep through anything had come from prison. The constant night sound of men snoring, coughing, spitting, and jerking off. The antiseptic flavors of Pine-Sol and industrial-strength cleanser wafting up your nose. Buck had spent years in a place so foreign from his home that his only escape had been in dreamless sleep and it was as if he’d trained himself to do it, to fall into a slumber where he heard nothing, felt nothing.

He had also lost his ability to get drunk in prison. He had tried the homemade shit that the inmates put together with sugar and fruit from the kitchen crews and then cooked up in some secret ceiling hidey hole where the heat could get to it and ferment the hell out of it. But the taste wasn’t worth the ugly high and he’d simply gone dry while he was inside. After his release he’d tried to drink himself into oblivion but no matter how much he consumed he couldn’t get drunk. Nothing like a sober drinker. If you were into getting women drunk and willing, it was a breeze. You could match ’em drink for drink all night and still have a focus. You could play cards all night, get into bar fights, and still have the advantage of full reflexes and a clear, mean head.

The other thing he’d lost in prison was his tolerance for darkness. When he was young he’d hunted and gigged frogs and fished in the dark with the eyes of a cat. But there was no darkness in prison. No sunrise or sunset. Just the unnatural fight of electricity, glowing 24/7 and never breaking. Now he would never admit it, but he was afraid of the dark, refused to sleep without some light source nearby. The jobs they’d pulled in the suburbs at night made him clammy and nervous and he’d had to push himself through the fear. Hell, the boys thought he was crazy when he started doing the jobs in daylight, opening the garage doors and looting the places and driving away. But it turned out to be the slickest job they’d done and Buck had not had to deal with the dark.

Last night the boys had gone home to their mommas late, before the brunt of Hurricane Simone hit. Buck had dumped all the empty beer bottles and cleared the table. He hated to wake up to that reminder in the morning. So while the storm had rolled through Chokoloskee, his stilt home swaying and creaking and threatening to come apart or simply topple over, he pulled his blanket up under his chin, put the battery-powered lamp on the table beside him, and did not come awake until morning when he believed he was roused by the smell.

He started a fire in the woodstove and put on a pot of coffee first. Then he dressed in a pair of dungarees and his boots. Outside the light was soft, like the sun filtered through dirty gauze, and it made everything dull as if the world had been turned into an old black-and-white photo from the 1930s. Then something he saw caused him to tuck a map under his arm, pour two cups of coffee, and step outside. Trees were down, the mangroves on the eastern side flattened, but even after only a handful of hours they had already started to rise ever so slightly, like they always did after an assault. Several varieties of shingles from rooftops and wood splinters from crab traps had caught the wind and tumbled through town. Now they all lay on the ground with a sheen of wet mud over them. Buck checked the watermark at the base of his steps. The tide and storm surge had come up to the second riser, about two feet, then receded back into the Gulf. There were a few dead mullet under his house, caught up in some rolled bales of chicken wire he’d stored there, like they’d been trapped on purpose. Part of the stink, he thought.

He walked lightly, picking his way, stepping over boards with the nail points exposed and around the low spots where coffee-colored mud hid their depth. He headed directly to old man Brown’s one-hundred-year-old home and was relieved first to see that the ancient Dade County pine structure seemed untouched by the night’s wind. Around the corner he heard the sound of someone coughing up a substantial quantity of phlegm and then spitting.

Nate Brown was in his side yard wearing a pair of dull yellow, knee-high rubber boots, a boatman’s foul-weather gear, and a flopping rain hat. He had the heads of three dead chickens in between the fingers of his right fist, their necks stretched with the weight of their wet feathered bodies. The old man was bending at the edge of his wire fence and plunged his other hand into the mud and came up with yet another. He did not turn to look at Buck but had sensed his presence.

“Goddamned birds. Don’t never learn they cain’t run from no hurrican’,” Brown said; his southern drawl gave any listener a sense he was pulling each word slowly and reluctandy from the past. “If’n they’d just stay inside the henhouse, they’d a been safe.”

Buck watched the old man wedge the newly found head into his hand with the others.

“Pretty good blow last night,” Buck finally said toward conversation, knowing he would get little in return. Brown looked up into the western sky like he was smelling the air in the aftermath as if to measure it.

“Seen worst,” he finally said, and nothing more.

“Looks like you came through all right,” Buck tried again, nodding back at Brown’s house. This time there wasn’t even a word in response. An answer would have been rhetorical and Nate Brown did not dabble in the rhetorical, especially with Buck. Brown had known Buck’s father and his grandfather. They might have even been friends back in the day if such a thing had been admitted among the old early settlers of the southwest. But they were connected not so much by something as ephemeral as friendship as by blood and guts and a reliance on one another to stay alive in such a place at the turn of the century. Buck knew that while Brown had respected his father for keeping his mouth shut and going to prison for his part of the smuggling, the old man had no time for him. Even Buck knew he was not the man his father was. It did not stop him from trying to ingratiate himself.

“Sir, if I can interrupt. Could I offer you a coffee and get your advice on somethin’?”

Brown looked down at the dead fowl in his hand, the fist full of chicken heads as if asking their opinion, and then tilted his head toward the porch on his house. Neither man bothered knocking the mud off his boots as the storm had already deposited as much debris and wet dirt on the interior floor as it could hold. Buck thought they were heading into the old man’s home, but Brown dropped the dead chickens at the doorway and then walked to the corner of the porch. With a few simple yanks of marine line to release the knots, he let loose the tie-downs to a small hand-hewn wooden table and a couple of straight-backed chairs he’d secured before the hurricane. He scraped the legs across the floorboards and settled in one of the chairs. Buck swallowed a rising humiliation at not being allowed into the house, but he knew it was the old man’s way. He recalled the time when he was a boy and watched his father go into Nate Brown’s home for late night meetings with other men. Once he had even crawled quietly to a corner window to listen, rewarded only by the slow, deep rumble of Nate Brown’s voice but unintelligible words. There had been no way to see past the yellowish glow of a pulled paper window sash that night, and Buck could only imagine the men standing or sitting, circled around Brown like he was some Indian chieftain or voodoo shaman. It was only later he’d learned of the marijuana smuggling activities of his father and the others and tied them in with the strategy meetings. After Brown had done his time in the federal pen, he’d come back home and had made a visit to Buck’s mother, to offer his condolences on the death of her husband. Buck remembered the quaking of his mother’s entire body and the anger of her response: “You was supposed to be the one looked after them men, Nate Brown. You and your goddamn old Glades wisdom,” she spat, and Buck remembered the old man’s gray, unflinching eye going, for the first time he’d ever witnessed, to the floor.