Moon Tide (34 page)

The barometer is tucked into his breast pocket. In a slight lull of wind and rain, he grips a crease between the shingles and, with his free hand, reaches in and pulls it out. The red has sunk another .02 of an inch to 28.08. He checks his pocket watch. Still one half hour off high tide.

A full moon tide, he notes to himself. He resumes his watch as the ice cream concession from the Town Landing floats by.

Patrick

W
ater is knee-high in the pavilion, unnaturally warm. Dining chairs, cupboards, and stock float through the room. The chandelier has come loose from its chain and swings into the head of a buck, its crystal tangled in the antlers. Joe Gallows tries to lock the south windows closed but the waves keep smashing them open. He does not hear the knocking at the front door—loud, persistent—a steady rap. One of the ceiling beams falls in. It shoots down, an inch shy of Joe’s left arm, and javelins a small sofa. Mattress stuffing flings up off the springs.

As Joe scrambles after his cocker spaniel swimming through the thigh-deep indoor sea, the door flies open. A man stands on the threshold—a stranger—in a black soaked coat, his hair in fair, wild tufts, eyes electric. As Joe looks up, the stranger raises his hand. His mouth opens, and the wind roars out of it as the trough of the first surge strikes. It draws the foundation out from under the pavilion in a horrific sucking sound. The room teeters, then resettles into a precarious stillness as if they have come to rest in a sudden void. From the corner of his eye through the south window behind Joe Gallows, Patrick can see the crest—a solid black wall of water bearing toward them. He looks back at Joe, the ashen face, and a moment of understanding passes between the two men. They are together in this space.
Slowly, they raise their eyes toward the ceiling beams and the trickle of water pattering the roof like a gentle rain. The wave crest drops, and the ceiling above them explodes.

Swept out the front door onto the porch, Patrick grabs for a post. His hand slides down it, the splintered wood digging in as the wave tears him loose, and he is carried like a matchstick up East Beach Road toward the lower dunes.

Millie Tripp

M
illie sees it before the old man does. Through the flying shingles, she can feel the houses begin to move. Dr. Carey’s two-story cottage starts northwest, twisting lightly clockwise, its upper deck out of sync with the bottom floor. Cars drive on their own down the road. They pinball off trees and skim along the marsh. One Rolls-Royce head-ends itself into a mosquito ditch, its pert rear trunk swinging up into the air as a new Chevrolet stockpiles in behind it. The cross snaps off the steeple of the Catholic church. The steeple smarts back and then is hit by another sharp gust. It breaks in half. Sections of the nave give way, deflating piece by piece from the top like meringue. A telephone pole ripped loose is picked up by the wind and thrust through the roof of the A & P.

From her window, Millie watches cottage after cottage slashed off their foundations and pulled into the floodwater. One floats by, and she can see an older couple inside it building a raft of beds. Farther down, toward the causeway, the cement blocks around Joe Gallows’s pavilion have begun to crumble. The roof of the bar next door cracks up into the air, then folds back on itself and smashes down across the bathhouses.

She sees it then: a long black band out beyond the tip of Gooseberry, stretching clear across the bay. A squat and thickening horizon.
It moves over the surface of the water, growing taller as it approaches the land. The wind has sheared off its top and it does not curl and break like an ordinary wave. It looms up over Gooseberry, and the spit of land disappears inside it. It swallows the causeway and then the Red Parrot Hotel. The sound of the wind heightens to a hollow wrenching scream as the wave strikes the Gallows Pavilion. The walls burst apart into a thunder of timber, shingles, spray.

The shock of the impact sends Millie reeling backward. She stumbles over the bedpan and bangs her left hip against the bedpost. She drops to the floor, then struggles to her knees, and crawls back to the window. She is determined not to miss any of it. They will ask her later. They will want to know whose house went when, where. They will need her to tell them everything.

The water level on what used to be the road has risen three feet. There is no trace of the Gallows Pavilion or Aberdeen’s Restaurant. The church has been uprooted by the surge and is drifting, slightly cockeyed, toward the let.

Through the window on the opposite wall, Millie can see the stone house. The two chimneys have been ripped off, but the building itself is still standing. She grips the sill and presses her nose to the window, her eyes straining through the horizontal rain, and there, just past the edge of the stone house roof, she can see Ben Soule still clinging to the shingles of his cottage, the mass of feathers next to him. His hair is plastered to his head, and he raises his fist toward the gathering sea in a gesture of deliverance or rage.

Coot, she murmurs and giggles to herself. He was gorgeous as a young man. Slim, deft hands. Blue eyes. She will tell them this. They will come to the counter for their mail, and she will pass them every tantalizing detail of this day. As she watches, Ben Soule hauls himself to his knees, still crouched on the lee side of the roof. He pulls the dead bird like a cape across his back, and she can see them now for what they are: multileveled wings. He tightens the shoulder straps, then positions himself on the pitch of the roof, he begins to creep
toward the peak, scaling up the shingles, his knees bent to his ears as if he is some kind of heavy-winged frog.

Far off across the bay, Millie can see the second black band moving toward them. By the time it reaches the outer rocks, it is a cliff of solid water, its head flayed by the wind. As it reaches the shore, the top has still not curled. The wind turns. Millie’s window quivers, jumping back and forth. She hears the crash as the water strikes the stone house, pieces of slate burst up into the air: sinks, chimney, gutters, a child’s rocking chair—all of it blown to bits like a peppered flock of birds. The old man peers over the peak of his roof to see it. A bed flies toward him and he ducks back down. A grandfather clock, bent in half, boomerangs out of the wreckage. It surfs out in front of the wave as if it has been shot from a cannon. The wave bears down on the old man’s house, a moving black wall bent at the top of its crest, and Millie knows—in a split second she knows—that same tower of water is bearing down on her. She sees Ben Soule stand—blades of slate pelt him like gravel as his knees lift and the wings extend—he pushes off the roof to rise above it, he flaps his arms, once, twice, as the water nicks his feet, and he slams his head on the shelf of solid wind above him. The gust rips through the wings, the feathers shred like salt. Stripped bare, he rolls, ass-over-teakettle, down the slope of his roof, as the wave comes down.

Ben Soule

A
loft. Airborne. The twisted shock of his body through space, a sharp intake of breath, and he can feel the pressure change around him, the cool wash of the wind across his face, the rush of the storm in his ears, and then silence. It is unlike anything he could have imagined. The slowness of flight. The ache through his chest as the wings stretch out behind him. He can feel the strain in the sockets of his shoulders, his spine arches like a bow. He tries to push up through the tumbling clouds, the air in slow dark motion all around him. The light is not what he expects—it is olive-colored, silty—bits of the uprooted world pass in a mad collage around him: a soapstone sink, a dead chicken, an upholstered library chair, a rowing skiff with one side busted off, the broken face of a grandfather clock—they drift, suspended, and sink down gently toward the earth below. Again the wind roars, but the sound is dampened as if his ears fill with the distance as he floats. He looks up, and it is as if he is looking through the surface of the sky; it ripples like glass above him, a rare flawed light, and there is a moment of stillness, a moment of joy. His heart shatters. He opens his mouth to cry out and the water floods his lungs.

The Shuckers Club

A
t the Shuckers Club, they sat out on the bench all morning, just like every other morning. They dished cards and whittled and talked cracks about Thin Gin Tripp who wasn’t there. They bitched about how there was no good work, no steady work, and how this winter might be a good winter—as good as any—to take a car down to Florida or New Orleans to see how the slow life rolls down there.

They knew the storm was coming. They’d heard talk on the radio. Someone had read another clip in the papers. They could smell it in the surf and in the air. It would be a line storm, they had agreed. It would be what they had seen every other year.

When the sky thickens early afternoon and the wind begins to steal the cards, they move into the dock house. North Kelly stands in the doorway for a moment, rests the whiskey on his hip, and chews on his cob pipe, looking around the place—this one place that has almost stayed the same.

Fishing gear on the floor and strung up on net corks. Stacks of anchors, buoys, oars, and locks. The old ice chest, nail kegs, and stools. The pool table in one corner. Crackled yellow oilskins hang spread-shouldered on the walls. In the back room, Tommy McDonough is
tarring his nets. In the corner by the sawhorses, Russ Barre is overhauling his gear, replacing the lost gangion on a trawl. His old fingers twist the new strings fast.

The wind bellows through the rolling door. North Kelly and Swampy Davoll play cards on a folding table. Every so often, they glance up from their whiskey and butts to see the chaos on the wharf: Noel Keyes pulling out his floating pots. Andy Waite bailing rain out of his skiff.

When the first window blows out, Tommy McDonough comes in from the back room to see it. The window in smithereens on the floor.

“You going to just sit there?” he says to North and Swampy who are deep in a round of pitch.