The Hurricane (13 page)

His dad looked down at his tired boots. “It’s been since
June,” he said.

Daniel stepped back toward the door. He turned a bucket over
and sat on it, then dug in his pocket for the other pack of Pop-Tarts. He
chewed on one dry corner and on his dad’s words.

“I really was working up the courage to see you guys. I
promise.” He looked past Daniel and toward the house. “Is Hunter—?”

“At his girlfriend’s since the night of the storm.”

“Girlfriend?”

Daniel shrugged. He wasn’t about to tell his dad about his
brother’s relationships.

“Zola looks good.”

They chewed their Pop-Tarts.

“Why did you come here?” Daniel asked. “I’m sure you have
other places you coulda gone.”

His dad took a sip of water. “I guess I couldn’t handle not
knowing if you guys were okay. If the house was okay. Before, I mean I used to
cradle the phone for hours, you know? I’d dial the number and just rub the send
button and think of how easy it’d be to press it and hear your voices, even if
you were just yelling at me. You were always that close—hell, I was always that
close to doing it, but then the storm hit. My boat—” The old man looked away,
the morning sun glistening in his eye. “When the marina went, I thought I was a
gonner. All of ‘B’ dock tore loose and surged into town. It was a mess. There
were only a few of us dumb enough to be there, and we were lucky no one died.
The boats, though—”

Daniel’s father fell silent. The chainsaw out front bit into
something thick and struggled.

“I’m glad you didn’t die,” Daniel said. It was as much as he
could be thankful for. “I’m gonna go help Carlton. You can—” Daniel wasn’t sure
what his dad could do.

“I might work back here, just clean some stuff up around the
yard. If your mom will let me, I’d like to look at the roof.”

Daniel peered at the rest of his Pop-Tart, no longer hungry.
For some reason, he wanted to tell his dad about the girl down the street. He
didn’t know why. He waved goodbye rather than say anything and turned out of
the toolshed, breathing in the fresh and gasoline-free air outside. As he
walked toward the house, he saw Zola’s face pull away from the kitchen window.
The chainsaw in the front yard whined as it finished its work, buzzing through
open air, the throttle taking it to dangerous places before it was released and
wound itself down.

Daniel walked around the house, through the destruction and
quiet desolation left in the hurricane’s wake, and realized how quickly he was
getting used to this new environment. The limbs of old oaks, the bramble of
foliage, the scattered shingles and wet clods of insulation sucked from broken
homes. It was a new normal. The world had been roughed over and changed by the
storm.

Rounding the garage, he found Carlton and his mom struggling
with heavy logs chopped free from the torso of a fallen giant. Daniel headed
for the front stoop, where a pile of work gloves lay beside two plastic cups of
water, neither cup sweating with the promise of a cool, refreshing drink
within.

He tugged a pair of worn leather gloves on and went to help
haul more of the seemingly endless supply of firewood to the swelling debris
pile that now meandered partway around the cul-de-sac.

“You okay?” his mom asked, obviously aware of where Daniel
had chosen to eat breakfast.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Where’s Zola?”

“Bathroom,” his mom said. She looked over his shoulder and
lifted her chin toward the door. Daniel turned and saw his sister coming out on
the stoop. She padded down the brick steps and knelt to sort through all the
too-large gloves. Daniel looked back to his mom.

“Is there something we should be doing to get in touch with
Hunter?” he asked.

She smiled grimly, her eyes twinkling. “Like send up smoke
signals?” Her voice was full of sad impotence, not humor. She wiped her brow
with the back of her arm, both of which were peppered with bits of bark and
fine sawdust. “All we can do is trust that he’s okay,” she said. They’ll have
power or cell phones or something up before long.”

“Maybe the landlines still work,” Daniel said. He had been
against them getting rid of the old house phone the year before, but since it
no longer rang, and everyone in the family carried a phone in their pockets
anyway, his mom had decided that the cost of the bill no longer made sense.

Carlton returned from another Sisyphean trip to the debris
pile. “The landlines weren’t working as of this morning.” He nodded toward the
house across the street, the one with the morning coffee drinkers that Daniel
had waved to the day before. “The Morrison’s have been trying theirs hourly.”

“When did you meet them?” Daniel’s mom asked.

“They were out this morning. I checked to make sure the
chainsaw wouldn’t disturb them. They understood wanting to get an early start,
what with the heat and all.” Carlton picked up the saw and flicked a lever on
its side. He reached into the breast pocket of his short sleeve button-up and
extracted his plastic safety goggles. “They seem like good people,” Carlton
added, and Daniel felt less alone and silly for not knowing anything about
them. He thought about another person he’d met in the neighborhood that he’d
like to get to know better. The day before, working in the yard, he’d wracked
his brain wondering how to get out of debris duty and what he’d say if he went
over. By the time he’d worked up the courage and memorized a few excuses, he
was too hot and sweaty to want to be seen. As he carried another cut log to the
growing row Carlton had started between two trees, he realized he should go
over there early and get it over with. Just to keep from perseverating about it
all day long or waiting until he got nasty with sweat.

He turned back to his mom as the chainsaw sputtered then
roared to life once again.

“I need to run down the street,” he yelled. His mother
turned from watching Carlton wield the saw, her face scrunched with worry.

“What for?” she yelled back.

A fountain of fine dust sprayed out of the growing gash in
the tree; it filled the air with a dry and pulpy mist.

“I need to charge my Zune so we can hear the news,” he said,
stepping away and squinting his eyes at the fog of powdered tree.

“Charge it how?”

The saw made it through the bottom, and the tree leapt up as
another heavy log fell from its end. Carlton looked poised to lop off another,
but powered the tool down when he saw they were trying to have a conversation.

“There’s this gir—” Daniel realized he was yelling over the
residual din of the now-quiet saw. He lowered his voice. “Someone down the
street has a solar panel rigged up that can charge small devices. I was gonna
go plug in my Zune and let it charge while we work.” He looked to Carlton for
support.

“Can it do cell phones?” his stepdad asked.

Daniel shrugged.

Carlton dug into his pocket and held out his iPhone. “The
charger’s on the table by my side of the bed,” he said.

“Can you do my Blackberry?” his mom asked. There was a sense
of desperation there that Daniel wasn’t used to seeing from his in-control
workaholic mom.

“I guess,” he said, wishing he hadn’t said anything. He
should’ve told them he was going to go smoke cigarettes, or something.

“You know where my charger is,” she said simply.

Daniel accepted the phone. He was surprised both of them
were carrying their phones around, even though there’d been no signal since the
storm.

“Check with Zola,” his mom said.

“Mine’s fine,” his sister said. She tugged on a branch. “I
put my other battery in.”

“Why do you have two batteries?” their mother asked.

Zola shrugged.

“I was already hesitant to ask about charging up my Zune,”
Daniel complained. Which was the truth, but not for the reason he was
insinuating.

“See if they need to borrow the saw in return,” Carlton
said. He used the hem of his shirt to wipe sawdust off his glasses, which he
then pinched with his gloves and inspected.

“Or if they need water. Or anything,” his mom said.

Daniel nodded, suddenly thrilled. The idea of making a
transaction
—from
one family to another—released the knot of nerves in his stomach. He ran inside
for his backpack with a surge of confidence. He was now going on a
mission
,
not a tryst. This was about
survival
, not puppy love. He was a
sanctioned ambassador with messages and offerings from a not-too-distant
familial municipality. There was no pressure to fall in love, or force someone
else to reciprocate. All he needed to do was establish a trade route. More
formal treaties and arranged marriages could wait.

Daniel gathered his family’s dead gizmos and the various
species of chargers with their fat heads and wispy tails. He ran back outside,
balancing haste with the fear of stirring an unseemly sweat, and made his way
through his new and wondrous wilderness neighborhood to that distant and
promising kingdom a few houses down.

••••

The neighborhood streets were everywhere hedged with brush
piles. They were like slumbering and camouflaged beasts, lying supine along the
pavement’s shoulder. They crowded the black tar, which was still littered with
leaves and the smallest limbs, and were deathly quiet and devoid of traffic.
While Carlton’s chainsaw dimmed behind him, several others became audible
elsewhere. The smell of tree sap and tar and sawdust filled the air. As far as
Daniel could tell,
this
was the new way of things; the world had
reverted to some primitive state, and that’s where he’d live forever.
Juxtaposing this idea with the fact that people in Atlanta and Chicago were
getting up, checking their email, going to work or school, waiting at red
lights, hunting for WiFi—Daniel imagined what a Bahamian, Haitian, Mexican or
Cuban might feel about such distant and magical realms as the United States. As
he rounded the small tangle of limbs in front of Anna’s house, he considered
the ridiculous idea that he could just walk from this primitive new island of
his to that faraway land of promise. A few days of hiking, of sleeping under
the stars, and he’d arrive somewhere to find streetlights and air conditioned
houses. There’d be music and roving vehicles. There’d be
signals
: cell
phone and wireless, radio and satellite. He could
call
people
. . .
just not anyone back here.

Daniel wandered up the white concrete driveway feeling
conspicuous and uninvited, but also primal and in some survival mode that
ignored taboo and embarrassment. He was on a mission from his family, he
reminded himself, and nothing more.

As he turned down the walk curling from the driveway, he
passed a curious addition to the house that had been erected between two large
bushes: a small shed. It had a metal roof bent out of a single corrugated sheet
with the solar panels mounted on top. The sides consisted of scrap vinyl
siding, and it had double doors on massive hinges that stood open. There was a sign
above the doors that read, in a neat print: “Community charging station. Help
yourself.”

Help yourself
, Daniel thought. Did that mean he
didn’t have to ask? But now he
wanted
to ask.

He peered inside the structure to see the black inverter
he’d helped solder mounted to one wall, out of any threat of rain. The other
side was lined with shelves that each had their own outlets, which were wired
up and covered with electrical tape. A scattering of wall warts were plugged in
here and there. Two of them had devices attached, little green lights glowing
happily.

For Daniel, it was like seeing a neon sign go up on his
little island. He was a caveman peering into a fire. He saw at once that the
same ingenuity and restlessness that had dragged his species out of their caves
and down from their trees to the twenty-first century couldn’t be excised by a
storm and a loss of power. Besides, it was his people who had
created
that power in the first place. And now he was seeing a small piece of evidence
that it would all come back. Eventually.

Movement inside the house startled him out of his optimistic
revelry. Daniel straightened and turned toward the door. Despite the welcoming
hand-lettered sign, he wanted to make sure it was okay, especially since he had
so many items begging to be recharged.

Lumbering up the stairs, he found the front door propped
open, a screen door shut against the bugs. Daniel knocked on the wooden frame
of the door.

“Coming!” he heard someone say. Daniel heard feet stomping
through the house. He remained on the stoop and adjusted his backpack.

A tall man with a smiling beard arrived at the door; Daniel
recognized him as Anna’s father, or at least the man who had interrupted their
soldering and had been working with her on the roof.

“Is that Daniel?” the man said. He pushed the screen door
open and Daniel stepped back and out of the way.

“Yessir,” Daniel said, stunned that her father knew his
name.
But that meant she’s been talking about me
, Daniel realized. His
heart leapt with the idea that this lovely sprite with magical powers of
soldering had uttered his name—

“Ah, yes,” her father said. “I asked Anna who her little
helper was, but all she had was a name. Come inside. I’m Anna’s father,
Edward.”

Daniel digested all that information, feeling himself sink
and deflate as he did so. The conversation between father and daughter took a
more realistic aspect:
Who was that?
A shrug.
Some creeper named
Daniel
.

He suddenly felt like bolting through the screen door and
sprinting down the street.

There was thunder on the stairs, followed by the squeak of
bare feet on clean floors. Anna ran around the corner, her longish brown hair
twirling behind her in fine wisps. “Cool,” she said, beaming at Daniel. “You
brought your stuff?”