Chapter 11
Jack rested uneasily, his sleep fraught with nightmares. There was the dream
of the accident again, worse that before. He could hear his wife and child
screaming as the train bore down on them, hear their brief cries of agony as
the mass of metal crushed the life from them. Even, God forbid, see the
spray of red shooting out from the mangled wreckage, covering the street
near the tracks.
And there was another horrible nightmare disassociated from all that, one he
had never before had. In that one, he was walking some lonesome road just
before dark. A ways off to the right was a huge metal structure, perhaps a
cotton gin. To the left, up a pine-shrouded ridge, was a graveyard, old and
unkempt, the stones rising gray like squat sentinels in the dying light.
There was a low ground fog in the fading day and a chill in the air. Jack
walked at a hard pace to get by the scene, to put it behind him. It didn't
seem to matter how much he walked, how hard and fast, he never moved away
from it. It was as though the world beside the road moved at whatever pace
he moved. There was no escape from that place or moment, no way to get
beyond it.
Awake from the dream he lay on the floor starting into the darkness above.
Shadows raced across the lone window of his temporary home, the moving limbs
of trees playing across all four panes like bent black fingers, the shadows
of clouds sprinting across like ghosts in the night. The wind was up and he
could hear it whirring the corrugated metal roof of the shed. Some huge
insect's wings could have made the noise.
He shivered suddenly, caught in a feeling he had not experienced in a long
time. It was a sense of uneasiness, somewhat like the feeling one gets after
sobering up from a long drunk. The wretched idea that the other shoe is
about to fall at any instant and nothing can be done to avoid it.
He heard thunder rumbling off far in the distance. It sounded ominous even
from afar and did nothing to enhance his dark mood. At one time he had loved
thunderstorms and all their fury. But that was before the day he had run out
the door in the midst of one and came face to face with an oncoming tornado,
it's swirling fury lifting up debris from the proverbial trailer park. He
had seen the maelstrom of flying siding metal and insulation grinding in the
mixer beneath greenish black clouds, and it changed his past love for Mother
Nature's spectacular shows.
After that, the old memories of lying with her in the darkness on a pallet,
watching storms firing across the skies through the sliding glass door,
seemed foolish. And yet, at the time, both of them had been filled with some
kind of electric tension drawn from the charged air, a tension that ran
straight from the heavens to their sexual organs and such times always ended
in wild lovemaking, her straddling him from above, riding him in the flashes
of light and the booms of sound.
Of course his uneasiness about storms diminished with the passing of time
following the tornado. Odd how that happened, he thought, in light of the
fact that the ultimate fear is seldom conquered. That fear of the end game,
the winding up of it all and the uncertainty of what lay beyond. It wasn't
that he ever expected to understand Life in philosophical terms, but only
perhaps to find the answer to the simplest question: was it worth the trip?
Were all those moments of anguish strung together like sick beads the wampum
that bought salvation and peace when the curtain closed, or were the few
minutes of real pleasure payment made in advance?
"Screw that noise," he said aloud. It wasn't good to get too philosophical
at such times, no. Dark moods gained nothing from it, except they became
darker, more intense.
The thunder rolled closer and flashes of lightning burst like strobes across
the dingy window, casting strange shadows inside the shed. The wind
increased so that the hum of loose metal turned to a low rumble, a vibration
like the sound of an engine gone sick, expiring. It was a noise that grated
on the nerves; Jack recalled once as a child standing on the concrete floor
of a huge pump house on the river, feeling the vibrations from the gigantic
turbines rattling inside his bones. He felt much the same now, except there
was no smell of the dead shad churning in the watery swirl, white bellies
flashing.
He felt of his wrist in the dark and wondered what time it was. His good
watch how wound up in a pawnshop in Houston months ago. He'd bought a
cheaper one, but it broke after a few weeks and he tossed it beside the
road. For the past several years time had been inconsequential anyway, it
had not mattered. It was either day or night, which was close enough for
government work. But sometimes, in moments like he now found himself in, it
would be good to know how far away dawn was.
Jack sat up on the sleeping bag and reached to his right, taking his drums
from beneath the shelf. He stuck them between his crossed legs and began to
noodle with his fingertips. Shortly, he noticed that his rhythm was falling
into line with the rumble of the corrugated metal, the trills of the rapid
whirr played out on the small drum under his right fingertips and the bass
like thunk on the other corresponding to the exceptionally loud bangs of one
particular piece of metal, which seemed in danger of coming completely loose
from its mooring.
The storm intensified. The shed virtually shook and the air pressure seemed
to change. The rain beat the metal like a thousand mad drummers. It was then
Jack heard the old man's voice yelling above the wind. Claudie Longwood was
at the door of the shed, a kerosene lantern in his hand. He got one shoulder
inside the door, which was beating back and forth on him under the force of
the wind.
"Radio say big whirly comin' this way. We goin' gets in the root cellar. C'
mon, boy!"
Jack followed the old man out into the howling wind. It was raining
sideways, so hard that the house was barely visible. "Over this away," said
Claudie. He cut around to the back of the house and tried to pull open one
of the two wood doors covering an opening in the ground. The wind was too
strong against it.
"Here, let me help you," Jack yelled above the roar. He got his fingers
inside the small opening and yanked with all his might, and the door came up
enough for the old man to enter. He went down the dirt steps with the
lantern. Jack followed, leaning against the door until he was down far
enough to duck suddenly and let it blow shut. He looked around and found
himself inside a small earthen cell. It smelled dank and earthy, like a
musty tomb. On one wall was a homemade set of wooden shelves containing
several Mason jars of fruits and vegetables. A lawn chair sat in one corner.
There were masses of spider webs strung among the shelves.
"Doan reckon they no copperheads here 'bout," said Claudie uneasily, moving
the lantern around. The feeble yellow glow lit the space, but just barely.
Claudie made his way over to the lone chair and took a seat. "Jes hope it
doan blow de house down," he said. The old man took a pint from his back
pocket, took a big shot and handed it to Jack. Jack started to decline but
then thought what the hell and took a good jolt himself.
"You ever been in a to'nady, boy?"
"I was in one once, or almost in one. Saw it coming, saw the damage it was
doing. Close enough for me. You?"
"I's in one in thirty-six or seven. Blowed de whole damn place where I's
livin' away. Jes hope it doan blow it 'way 'gain." Claudie took another sip,
then asked Jack, "You scart? I ain't."
"Nah, not really. I was for a bit there but not now. I don't wanna see your
house blown away, but I'm not afraid. I figure when a guy's number is up not
much he can do about it but go with the flow. And I've been in a typhoon and
a big earthquake. Now that's scary."
"Hush yo' mouff," the old man said. "Ain't never been in them an' sho doan
wanna be neither. We get storms here and that 'bout it, but that 'nough."
The wind outside seemed to scream louder and the floorboards above actually
shook. "She comin' over now, gonna blow it down." And then, suddenly as it
had come, the wind died away and the roar ceased. Claudie cocked his head
and grinned. "It either the calm afore, or she be gone," he said.
Jack figured it was the latter, because it was quiet now except for the
spatter of rain hitting the wooden doors; some of the rain ran down onto the
dirt steps, he noticed. "I'm going to take a look," he told the old man.
He pushed the door up and stepped outside into the drizzle. The house and
shed were still there, no real damage so far as he could see. He walked
around the house and saw that a corner of the roof was pulled loose on the
left side of the front porch. Jack stuck his head inside the shed to make
sure the roof was still intact. It was.
Claudie got our of the fruit cellar and went back to bed. It was 3:30 in the
morning, Jack learned. The old man didn't get up until 5:00 and damned if a
storm was going to change his schedule.
Jack returned to his humble abode and breathed a sigh of relief. He was
beginning to convince himself that he was a survivor, and that things would
work out well in the end. If there was a calm in nature after the storm, so
was there a calm inside his mind. The storm seemed to have swept some of the
uneasiness from him, blown away some of the doubt.
He'd been in the Delta a couple days. He'd met and become friends, after a
fashion, with an old blues master. He'd met maybe the sexiest woman he had
ever seen. He'd lived through a close call with Southern law enforcement, a
jealous boyfriend, and an assault from Mother Nature.
What would happen next? He didn't know, but whatever it was would be a trip
he'd never experienced before. And that was what it was all about, what made
going on worthwhile.
Jack stretched out on his sleeping bag and quickly dozed back off. He never
saw the glimmer of headlight far down by the road end of the dirt drive, nor
did he hear the creak of the shed door minutes after the lights went out.
The first blow awakened him for a brief instant and somewhere inside his
head he heard a voice telling him next time he would die. And then he was
out, gone into blackness that the sun wouldn't touch.
Jenny found him unconscious in the shed when she came by after daylight. His
face was a bloody mess, his eyes swollen almost shut. She tried to wake him
and failing to do so, ran to the house and called the ambulance.
"It had to be that goddamn Lester," she told her uncle. "That son of a
bitch! He came by and threatened me earlier. I never thought he'd do
something like this, never."
"Doan worry, the boy be OK," said Claudie. "If it ol' Lester, he get his."
"The law won't touch him. His daddy owns them."
"His daddy, he doan own ol' Root Mary," Claudie smiled. "Sho 'nough he
doan.."
"Oh Uncle, you don't believe in that hoodoo stuff do you?"
"Damn rights I does. You believe it too 'fore it over with."
