Flood Plains

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Epilogue

FLOOD PLAINS

Mark Wheaton

Southbound Films—2012

For my grandfather

“The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.” —Primo Levi

Chapter 1

M
other of Mercy, this darkness will be the death of me
, thought Big Time.

The forty-eight-year-old father of four groped around the dimly lit kitchen for the coffee maker, wondering who he might talk to about getting daylight savings to come early this year. Finding yesterday’s dirty filter in the brew basket, he opened the door under the sink and proceeded to toss the grounds-filled bag on the floor. The damp
splat
it made when he missed the trash bag made him wonder if the money saved on keeping the lights off whenever possible was cancelled out by the two paper towels he now used to clean it up.

He stifled a grunt. His family’s money troubles weren’t that bad, but his mind wouldn’t let him off the hook.

Big Time bent over and flipped the offending filter into the trash bag, fighting a juvenile urge to slam the cabinet door shut. His wife wasn’t home from her night shift running credit card approvals, but it would wake up the boys and his mother, Erna. He peered out the kitchen window, over the toy-littered backyard and up to the slowly purpling South Texas skyline.

They’d been talking hurricane on the news all week, enough to make Big Time jumpy, to say nothing of his family. He couldn’t see the clouds, but the way the meteorologists were saying, chances of it running up against Houston were slim.

That’s when he realized the troubling thing about the sky was that it was a little too bright for his tastes.

“Shit, am I already late?” he asked himself.

A quick glance at a clock, which read 5:09, reminded him for the sixth time in the past ten minutes that he was perfectly on time, just decaffeinated.

Big Time plugged in the coffee maker and hit the “brew” button, the little orange light burning to life. He calculated the pennies he saved by unplugging the thing during the day and wondered if more folks would do the same if they knew how much latent energy was expended by keeping plugs in their sockets.

Big Time’s was a tall, well-built black man with muscular hands and arms, a completely bald head, and a neatly trimmed mustache. He was sometimes mistaken for a football player who let himself would get a little pudgy around the middle. But he’d never played sports, barely worked out, and attributed his physique to an inability to sit still for long.

He reached into the refrigerator, grabbed a Diet Dr. Pepper, and extracted a faded “Big Gulp” mug from the dishwasher. He poured the equivalent of three cups of coffee into the mug and finished it with twenty ounces of soda. He swirled the ice cold and boiling hot liquids together and remembered hearing a late-night comedian once joke about heating a freezing cold apartment by turning on a hot shower, only to create a thunderstorm in his living room. He looked into his mug and grinned, a tempest in a tea cup.

His gaze ventured back out to the dark skies giving way to dawn and imagined the sound of thunder. He’d had his share of tempests.

Hell, one was enough.

•  •  •

“Animal elegance.”

This was what a reporter named Matt Loney had described Alan Terrell as having when he ran. Loney had been covering the 800-meter at a Louisiana all-region event when Alan was a senior in high school, a race the young man won. He’d also won the 400 and led his 1600-meter relay team to victory as well. It was buried in the sports pages of a Lafayette daily, but Alan’s grandmother kept a copy in her purse from then on. When Alan ran for the Tigers, she would repeat that phrase to anyone in the stands who couldn’t get away fast enough.

She’d even tried to show the article to Carl Lewis the four times Alan and she had ventured into Texas for the Track Invitationals in Austin. Lewis hadn’t seemed to understand, merely shook her hand and wished Alan good luck, and after that, she didn’t allow Lewis’s name spoken in her house. Then, she had a heart attack and their house in the Lower Ninth Ward went quiet for a while.

Whenever Alan raced, he was trying to live up to that description as well as others that came along.

“Boy runs like a thoroughbred.”

“Looks like a springing panther.”

“Like watching a water moccasin cut through water.”

Yeah, leave it to Southern white reporters to refer to him as black animals. He took pride in the fact that his skin showed off his cut muscles better than the white boys he competed against. They were a rarity in the African American-dominated track meets of the South, but he was looking forward to running against the cream in Colorado Springs someday. All these pretty Prefontaines from the big east colleges descending on the Olympic Training Facility with no idea how fast he’d blitz past them, thin air and all. He planned to break a few of their records in the process, too.

But that would have to wait, if just for a little while.

This morning, Alan couldn’t even find the T-shirt he wore to the factory the day before so he could go run in it. The living room of the small apartment he’d woken up in was littered with unpacked moving boxes and little else, but it was dark. He finally spied the faded, purple-and-gray
Geaux Tigers
freebie half-in half-out of a box of old clothes, but then realized he wasn’t alone.

Peering out of one of three doors leading to the living room was his daughter, Mia. Though she was eleven now, her presence and proximity still felt alien to him. Wearing ratty
SpongeBob
pajamas she’d overgrown ages ago, she looked downright comical as she watched him get dressed.

“
Shh,
” he said a finger to his lips. “Don’t wake up Mom.”

Mia nodded, her bright, inquisitive eyes flashing, and grinned.

Alan smiled back and threw on the shirt, pocketing his key as he headed out the front door. He waved to Mia, but she’d already disappeared into her room.

It was a chilly morning, unusual for Texas in late September. With a storm rolling off the Gulf, though, all bets were off.

Alan jogged his warm-up lap through a park only a few blocks from the apartment. The dew of a cold morning always limited the number of human obstacles on the paths. North Houston had its share of crime, but it was nothing like down in the city. This park was about as safe as it got even at just past five in the morning. At one point, Alan had counted sixteen soccer fields, ten on one side of the street that bisected the park and six on the side he was running on now. He imagined the place was pretty packed on a Saturday morning.

Appearing out of the gloom were two middle-aged white men jogging together in slick running pants and tank tops.

“On your left,” Alan said like a cyclist, accelerating slightly.

“
This is the guy
,” he heard one the joggers say.

Alan grinned. The straightaway that ran along the northern fence began fifty yards in front of him. He slowed, glanced back to make sure the joggers were watching, and took off his watch, palming it. Coming to a complete stop, he took a couple of breaths of cold, damp air before dropping into starting position.

He felt the stretch in his calves as he arched his back. He placed his thumb on a button on the side of the watch, waited another second, and pushed it. The tiny
beep
it sounded was like a starter’s pistol to Alan. He rocketed forward, cutting through the still morning air like a rocket. He loved running in the damp, as the chill always drove him faster.

His legs pistoning up and down, Alan focused his eyes on the horizon. The tree that marked the finish line exactly eight hundred meters from where he started stayed in his peripheral vision, but he forced himself not to “run for the finish.” An 800-meter was about pacing, and seeing the finish could always spark an unexpected burst of unwanted adrenaline.

Instead, he cleared his mind, focused on his legs, and felt the air whipping past his body.

His thumb hit the button on the watch like a reflex the instant he passed the tree. As Alan decelerated, the joggers applauded and cheered, and he waved and smiled. He knew most people weren’t accustomed to see what they’d just seen. Everybody could run, but when they saw a real athlete at work, it was something they told their friends about.

Then Alan looked at his watch and found 1:59:44 staring back at him.

It could not have been worse. He angrily blanked the watch counter, but the time was already etched in his mind’s eye.

After a moment, he took off jogging again. His worry displaying itself in his stride, he knew that what he’d been considering for months couldn’t wait any longer.

•  •  •

“As Hurricane Eliza looms off the Gulf, the Astros leave for a swing through the Northeast with three games against the Mets, four, including a double-header, against Philly.”

Big Time had been in Texas for two years but still felt like a stranger. Even though Houston was just down the highway from New Orleans, he’d been raised to think of the Lone Star State as a land apart from what typically constituted “the South.” Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia: that was the South, with parts of the Florida panhandle making the cut on a good day. South Carolina? Nope. Tennessee or Kentucky or Arkansas? Not on your life. The South meant the states that lived and died by the whim of the Gulf of Mexico that created a temperate climate good for growing crops. It wasn’t where the hillbillies lived. It was where the wealthy could afford to keep slaves to work the land.

Big Time had never been one for genealogy but had always heard his relatives came in through Galveston instead of the Atlantic ports most slaves entered America through. He wondered if that was why his people never had much use for Texas.

A light rain fell as he drove Crosstimbers Avenue to the highway. The road was devoid of traffic this early, and his passage was witnessed only by the rows of crumbling wood frame houses on either side of the road. As if by design, the homes of Houston’s Fifth Ward all seemed to have yards overgrown with weeds and elm trees. Maintaining a shaggy outward appearance probably deterred at least a couple of would-be home invaders, at least more than the omnipresent waist-high chain link fences that encircled many properties. These were often so short a child could hop over without much difficulty.