The Hurricane (20 page)

“You been seeing this Anna girl for long?” his dad asked,
sitting down. He looked up at Daniel as they both peeled back the metal foil
and chewed on the cold and dry pastries. Daniel grabbed the cup from between
his knees and took a sip.

“I met her the day after the storm,” he said.

His father laughed. “I
thought
the thing between you
two still had the shine on it.”

Daniel felt a surge of anger at the mocking tone, dispelled
at once by his father’s pronouncement: “She seems like a great girl.”

Daniel nodded and took another bite to keep his mouth busy
with other things. He didn’t feel like his dad had earned the right to know
about his personal life.

“How in the world are we gonna get rid of
that
thing.” He jabbed his Pop-Tart at the green plume of leaves sticking up over
the roof. The tree seemed bigger than the house.

“A piece at a time,” his father said. “That’s how most
things get done, good or bad. A piece at a time.”

He took a long pull from his cup of water.

“I wish I could take some things back,” his father said
quietly. He looked off into the woods, and Daniel could feel his own eyes coat
with tears. He lost himself in his second pastry.

“When I built this house, a part of me
knew
I could
do it. I’d done just about every piece of building a house at some point or
another, even though I never stayed on a job long enough to see it from
beginning to end. I didn’t really have that—what would you call it? Like an
unbroken chain of events—”

“A continuum,” Daniel said.

“Yeah. I just had all these jobs I drank myself on and off
of, going where the money was then splitting once I had a fistful.”

Daniel’s father turned to him, his eyes under a blanket of
water. “I had a problem before I met your mother,” he admitted. “I kept it from
her. Kept it from my parents when I was at school. Kept it from my teachers.
Hell, I didn’t even know it was a problem for the longest time. I knew other
kids along the same lines, drinking all the time. The people I worked with on
job sites seemed to be no different. You never know, when you’re so used to
hiding things, just how much everyone else is hiding as well. Your demons
become their demons.”

He stopped to take a bite. Daniel listened to the birds
sing.

“When I met your mom, I wanted to build her the world. You
should’ve seen how pretty she was.” He shook his head and smiled. “So I talked
myself and my future up, and I even believed some of it. That’s what you do
when you fall in love, or what most people do. They put this impossibly perfect
thing up there for the other person to destroy, or figure out for a lie—”

“That’s not how it has to be,” Daniel said, even though he
knew he had no idea about such things.

“I wish it wasn’t,” his father said. “With your kids, it’s
even harder. You guys looked up to me so much, right from the start. It was
confusing. I already knew what a shit I was then, but you guys thought I knew
everything—”

Daniel felt his body stiffen as his father lost it. His dad
sobbed, his Pop-Tart in the dirt, his hands over his face. “And the bad gets
built one piece at a time, too,” he sputtered. “You don’t know how it gets
there, this thing you become, but looking back, it’s like you drew it out with
a pencil—”

“Dad—” Daniel whispered.

His father wiped his hands on his thighs and stared down at
the dirt between his feet. Daniel saw tears plummet into the leaves and
disappear in the dew.

“I never meant to be a bad father—”

“But you were,” Daniel said.

“I know.” His head bobbed. “I wish I could tell you what
it’s like to be old and full of regret. How you want to turn back the clock,
how you pray for it every night, for one more giant chance to redo everything
in your life. But even then, even knowing how those mistakes feel, you keep
right on making them. You build and build on this awful foundation, you know?
It’s like you know there’s a better way, but you can’t start over. You want to
do things different, but you keep right on like before. That’s the curse of it
all, Son. You learn what you’re doing is wrong and bad, and you watch yourself
spin in circles. You feel lost in the woods, but your footsteps are right there
in front of you.”

He sniffed and wiped his nose.

“I can’t apologize for what I’ve put you kids through.
There’s no way I can make it up to your mom, and I’m not trying. When I leave
the next time, as soon as I can, it’ll be some short and foreign life I go off
to try and live.” His father looked at him, and Daniel realized he was crying
as well. “I want you to know that you never have to forgive me, ’cause I’ll
never forgive myself.”

“Dad—”

Daniel didn’t know what to say.

“I just hope you’ll do everything different than I did.
You’ve got this chance ahead of you that I’d kill for. I’m so jealous and proud
of you for that.”

“Dad. I’m sorry for some of the things I said to you back
then.”

“I deserved worse.”

“I’m still sorry. I wish I hadn’t. I used to blame myself—”

“Oh God, Son.” His father shook his head; his shoulders
shook with sobs. “Son, please don’t ever—”

“I don’t anymore—”

“God, Son, don’t ever blame yourself. I was a mess before I
made you.” He swiped the tears from his cheeks and wiped his nose. Daniel
stood. He reached over and put his hand on his dad’s shoulder, the most and
least he could think to do, and his father’s weathered hand came up to rest on
it, holding it there. And his father cried even harder. His bent body was
wracked by sobs, tears falling through the fingers of his other hand, which he
kept over his face as if to hide from his son, or from the world. He cried and
squeezed Daniel’s fingers, pinning them to himself, and Daniel could tell what
the simple gesture meant.

It made him wish he could offer or mean even more.

“Step through this loop first.”

An hour later, faces dry, Daniel’s father held a curl of
webbing open at his feet. Daniel stepped through, shifted his weight to that
foot, then did the same with the other.

“Now pull it up, just like a pair of shorts.”

“This’ll hold us if we fall?” Daniel shrugged the webbing up
over his shorts, tugging down at the hem of them to keep them from getting
bunched up.

“You could swing from this all day.”

Zola watched them from the front steps, sucking on a straw
punched through a warm juice box. Every now and then, she tried making a call
or sending a text. Now, when she put her phone aside with each network error,
it was with a practiced calm, none of the frustrated desperation from last
night. Her straw slurped at the bottom of the box.

“You’d better be real careful with my boys up there,” their
mother said. She stood near one of the log piles, her arms crossed, a doubting
look on her face. Daniel smiled at her to try and calm her nerves—and his.
Carlton topped up the oil and gas on the chainsaw, then walked over and peered
up the ladder leaning against the gutter. Hunter worked his homemade harness of
knotted webbing on without their father’s help.

“Knot your line on the other line like this when we get up
there.” He refreshed them on how to tie a bowline; the lessons taught on the
houseboat years ago came flooding back, and the loss of the boat gnawed at
Daniel. He untied and retied the knot several times while their father bent to
secure a short piece of rope to the chainsaw. He stood, slung it over his shoulder,
and went to the ladder first. The long, extended aluminum sides bent with his
weight. He took the rungs slowly, getting both feet in place before reaching up
with one hand to steady himself on a higher rung.

Once at the gutter, he lifted the chainsaw to a two-by-four
he’d nailed in place across the shingles. He hoisted himself up and tied his
webbing off to a loop of rope strung across the breadth of the house, from one
side to the other. The loose bowline let him slide left and right and crawl
higher up the roof, but should catch him if he slipped. Daniel watched, nerves
tickling his stomach, as he waited for his dad to move out of the way. Then he
went up the ladder after him.

The slope of the yard made the house feel more like three
stories on that side, the unfinished basement letting out on the edge of the
house around from where the tree hit. Daniel watched the bushes grow smaller as
he went up. He reached the gutter and steadied himself while he tied the
bowline. His dad watched while he made the twist, checking to make sure he did
it in the right direction.

“Dear God, please be careful,” his mother said.

“Don’t take
forever
,” Hunter offered. Chen and Zola
looked up from the limb they’d been dragging, shielding their eyes from the
morning glare.

Daniel finished the knot and scrambled to the side, the
edges of his sneakers clinging to the two-by-four. The ladder rattled as his
brother started the climb up.

“Hold this in place,” his father said. Daniel turned and
grasped another two-by-four held against the roof. His dad extracted a hammer
from his tool belt, shoved a few nails between his lips, and pressed one
against the wood. A few expert strikes from his hammer, and one end of the
board was fixed in place. He slammed another home, then passed the hammer and
final nail to Daniel.

Daniel took his time pounding the nail in. His brother made
it to the top of the ladder and worked on his knot.

“Up we go,” their father said.

Daniel took another look down at all the gawkers looking
back up. Carlton had started up the ladder, bringing them some more tools.
Hunter followed their dad onto the next two-by-four, brushing up against one of
the massive limbs bent across the shingles. Climbing up the roof was like
ascending a manmade intrusion into a natural canopy. The leaves and boughs were
in a tangle across the house that had seemed manageable from the ground. Now
that he was up within it, Daniel saw the incredible task ahead of them.

“Here,” Carlton said. He handed up the clippers and handsaw
that had been kept busy over the last few days, chopping up anything small
enough not to bother with the chainsaw. Daniel took the long-handled clippers
and passed the saw to Hunter. The two of them moved to the first limb while
their dad adjusted the loop of rope they were all attached to. Clipping the
smaller limbs, they let the branches slide down toward the gutter, some of them
getting caught up on the two-by-fours. They kicked these off, and Carlton
helped remove them from the top of the ladder.

“You might want to get down and take the ladder with you,”
their father said. “Go around to the other side and we’ll lower the first big
one.”

Carlton nodded and descended the ladder. Daniel and Hunter
worked to clean the limbs on the way up, forging a path past their father and over
the large boughs leaning against the house. Daniel still didn’t see how the
tree was going to be removed. He imagined a large crane would be necessary.

As they climbed, the
limbs branching out overhead shaded them from the sun. Now they had truly ascended
into a canopy. Daniel passed a fat limb that had snapped in half, the yellow
and jagged interior revealing splinters the size of baseball bats. Their father
climbed up beside them with a litheness that belied his age. He seemed to have
become younger with the transition to a tilted, dangerous world, as if he had
lived there much of his life.

“Stop at the peak,” he told them.

Daniel and Hunter clung to a limb at the roof’s apex. Their
dad adjusted the rope holding the three of them to their tethered harnesses. He
then uncoiled the rope around his chest and tied a series of loops and knots
around the massive limb draped over the house. The other end of the rope was
wrapped around the main trunk of the tree several times.

“Hold this,” their father told them.

Hunter and Daniel obeyed. They were in their father’s realm.
What he said mattered, had force. This fact was as dizzying as the heights.

They each held the rope, which was wound twice around the
great trunk, then tied tightly to the limb with complex knots. Daniel leaned
back on the rope, testing it and finding security in the way it held him to the
roof. Their father climbed up and straddled the peak of the roof. He brushed a
small limb out of his way. Daniel looked back and could see his mom staring up
at them. She had moved further into the yard to see them better through a hole
in the canopy.

“The friction of the rope will do all the work,” their
father said. “Just hold tight.” He looked to both of them. Daniel glanced over
to Hunter to see a serious calm on his face. “You ready?”

Both boys nodded.

Their father set the chainsaw on his knee and flipped a
lever. He yanked the handle and the machine roared to life. A haze of smoke
billowed out, and the saw grumbled angrily as their dad revved the motor. He
checked with the boys one more time, then pressed the chain into the massive
broken limb clinging to their house.

He cut in stages, working his way down to the core of the
limb from two angles. When the last bit went, the limb sagged down on the rope,
stretching it, but not far. The chainsaw fell quiet.

“Now play it out,” he told them.

Daniel let some slack into the rope, and his brother did the
same. They had to flick the line to get it going, but then the limb slid down
the steep incline of the roof, the scratch of bark loud on the rough shingles.

“That’s good,” their father said, peeking over the side. He
guided their efforts, having them hold up when the tree reached the other
gutter. He and Carlton talked back and forth, the rattle of the aluminum ladder
heard on the other side. Following their father’s commands, they lowered the
huge limb down to the wooden deck out of sight and far below. The rope sang out
as the limb went over the edge, its full weight hanging. The coil of line
around the tree bit hard, but gobbled hungrily at any slack they fed it.