Local Souls

  While one twin kept the grill lit in the truck’s bed, the other (practically-amphibious for life) launched their outboard. He sped off to fetch the best from others’ room-temp freezers. We River Roaders all knew, as by internal pirate map, where the finest of everything edible must be thawing. We also guessed if that house stood on red clay high enough to not yet be submerged.

  Approached by a Bixby, folks were delighted to see their perishables used. Being largely Scotch-Irish, we do hate waste. (Fact is, the richer the Scots, the more the squandering of leftovers is hated, the more Scots salt away to become their future generations’ sometimes-wasteful wealth.) Twins made this food bank seem a game. Didn’t much matter who was eating your cache, so long as it got utilized, maybe enjoyed.

  The Bixbys, though famously, almost identically, handsome, were hardly chefs. But tonight’s ingredients proved of such high quality, something extra happened. All that okra and halibut. Tuna steaks. Pheasant breasts, white sea scallops tender as baby bottoms, mahi-mahi caught from charter-boats way way out. By the time twins pulled their truck through armory’s double doors, you could already smell their brew on glorious slow boil. Dogs were trying to get in. The scent, it traveled like a song. It was the smell of B.C.

  Boys stood hand-casting spices into one huge bubbling pot: bay leaves, cayenne. I’d call their game-muddle pure Male food. No parsley sprigs, no candlelit “presentation,” as Jan’s lately been calling it. No, you’ve got your one pooled substance, available tonight only. Into this one load, a man puts everything he means and is. How good did it taste? You had to have been there.

  Since regular utensils were mostly underwater, kids stirred their brew with one aluminum canoe-oar. We were already lined up, about to eat the dry hot dogs provided. We’d felt glad enough for those! Now here came Timothy-Tomothy, brown as Seminoles, wearing flip-flops, cut-off jeans. Beautiful hellions from birth, they appeared a platoon about six-strong, not just two kids on some frat-house lark. I watched food-serving twins move as one unit and marveled how that must feel. To still be sleek with health, with hearts the size of such torsos, shoulders. Imagine having a man-friend so close, this efficient and forever within reach.

  There was a certain married white lady who, a few years back, had baptized Tomothy-Timothy into sexual practice. She looked significantly older now while the twins looked somehow even younger. She was here tonight and hungry as the rest of us. Her traveling husband, now queued behind her, was among the few Riversiders present unaware of her history. She came tentatively forward, for food. Both Bixbys grinned down at her. Tomothy said, “For you and your man, a double portion, ma’am. Mighty good neighbors you’ve been.” All she said back was, “No problem.” Her husband, an explainer, then explained to her and everyone nearby, “Outstanding youngsters, these. Enterprising.”

  All of us, the poor and the loaded, wearing every nasty kind of housedress or running-outfit, we sure lined up quick beside the Bixbys’ red Dodge truck. We stood obedient as orphans, holding our paper plates. Odd, I kept thinking of my dad’s “town” grave, underwater, a shock for him.

  I noticed certain Republicans, one I’d heard rail for years against any person who’d ever take a single handout. I saw how they kept edging themselves and each other toward the line’s front. I seemed to see the comedy of things with fresh eyes. I seemed to have forgotten something that dulled me, held me back.

  We soon retreated to our cots. We sat there eating. Best stuff you ever put into your mouth. Sitting in a room this big, it tasted far better for being absolutely everybody’s. If this was a leveling, it had a fine collective flavor. I’d taken no meds in six hours but felt so avid, clear.

  That first long night, we talked. We went back for Bixby seconds, thirds. We just ate and cried and ate.

  3

  I’D EXITED MY sixties, feeling over-aware of Dad’s dying mid-swing at age fifty-one. I had come to despise the worries of keeping up a big old riverside house. It’d been Red’s great wish for himself, meaning me.

  Its water’s-edge window screens kept rusting lacy, kept making you appear a failure. I’d been warned against any further heavy lifting. Hence the pointless expense of hiring high-school kids who might show up and mow and edge your acre and a half even twice a month at any price.

  Yes, our stone house at river’s edge was kind of a museum to scenes of former family good times. Lately it’d served mainly as the ideal setting for her heirloom furniture. Country-made Chippendale, first threatened by Sherman’s torches; now global-warming’s wet! No fair!

  And yet, with this much standing water, no longer would I have to micromanage some place our kids required three days each Christmas. I’d never again slice myself while fixing the danged lawn mower. (See, I believed my own lies about home owner’s hardship.) Sitting on an army cot, I had at last become a “portable unit” after a lifetime hooked to one thick black extension cord. I was no longer a risk-averse insurance salesman to whom nothing had ever happened. True, now I more or less had nothing. Except of course some money in the bank. But tonight that eventual unknown amount seemed quite abstract, dry ice. I imagined I had nothing past the not-uninteresting story of losing it all! Surely there was a lesson floating in here somewhere: I again felt poor as that kid in a Myrtle Beach cowboy shirt, proud of his ducktail, the mullet of its day.

  With our exceptional armory meal now eaten, somebody produced his old college sterling flask. Jack Daniel’s is some invention. Slow burn, it topped off that stew just right. Slumped back on “our” cots, we lounged here, passing its proofing around. Though inwardly hysterical, post-traumatic whatever-ed, we flask-passing husbands and wives somehow briefly felt like smart teenagers during their first long unchaperoned night as camp counselors.

  Was only then a tennis partner said, “Bill, is it true what they’re saying about poor Roper?”

  I FIGURED DOC’S had been washed out like everybody along The River Road. (Fact is I’d forgotten Roper these past few hours, kind of an unusual and secret freshening relief.) Our friend told how Doc and Marge had lost their house and everything, naturally, like the rest. But, maybe worse than forfeiting home and cars, Doc’s wide bay windows overlooking the river?—those 20-foot studio windows honeycombed with shelving to display his decade and more of Marion masterpieces?—well, they’d busted out early. Popping loose, those lifted free, then sort of rafted off a ways. The glass had been found intact out past the Halseys’ diving raft. But all his masterful ducks?

  It seemed that even before the Ropers’ ground floor got soaked, Doc’s waterside studio, river-view on three sides, had been crushed, gutted. Once Doc and Marge were roused by the young spaniels’ barking, Roper dived off their second-story roof, swam out there wearing pajama bottoms. Apart from a newly-started decoy still clamped fast in his worktable vise, all two hundred of his finest saved-back waterbirds, they’d floated free.

  Doc’s life’s work—Phase Two of it, I mean—cleanly gone missing. But wouldn’t the corps of his work turn up once the all-clear signal sounded? Wouldn’t scattered ducks form a flotilla and someway swim home to Doc? To dock!

  His freezer full of dead creatures had also been bounced around by wild currents, wrestled to one side, then busted open like a coffin. Now even Roper’s frozen specimen birds were swimming free again.

  “WHAT A SHAME,” I finally said, sounding insincere even to myself. “But let’s us try and keep it in perspective? Before, we heard how the Blanchards’ granddaughter wandered into their half-basement looking for their cat (which is likely still on top of our fridge) and somehow fell, then almost drowned down there before they heard her. The Eddie McCombs made a run for high ground in their new T-bird, got swept off Mill Road’s bridge. I guess Hackney and Betty Eatman were found in their bed still wearing their eye masks and earplugs. And everybody we know has become ‘a Homeless’ in two hours. And yet, even so, like me, you’re all still hung up on how Roper’s lost some wood painted to seem . . . to be . . . uh? ducks? Why do we a
lways put him first? Ya’ll notice that? Even tonight. Will we ever get over his stitching us up? That was his job. I may be tipsy from Tad’s flask, but sometimes (and I think Janet’ll back me up in this) I believe . . . Doc is a decoy! He looks like us other ducks. But his paint’s a bit bright. Man hasn’t moved around much lately, has he? Why’s he always s’perfect? Why will we forgive him anything?”

  Janet said, “Bill.”

  But I finished, “And yet, too, I am, I’m basically so sad for him. Complicated, I guess. Sorry. Amazing person, of course. Everybody loves him to pieces. Me, too, so much, God knows. But with all this other happening, it’s . . . it’s just . . .”

  Others swapped looks but most gave immediate nods. Sure, I’d overstated. Sure, somehow my own self-pity always included Doc. But my other thoughts could not be news to anybody present. Janet flashed me her familiar You’ve really gone too far again look. And I felt that, sure.

  —Look, is it possible we truly secretly hate the best our flock can offer? Why was I so daily interested then pissed at him? Because of Roper’s underrating me? Hadn’t he kept me alive? Did I resent his ceasing to “treat” me just as my left side’s numbing got worse? Did I blame Doc’s losing faith in my own boyish “potential” as I shot past seventy?

  And what did I expect he’d think I might someday do? Why had I, the man best seen from afar if at all, chosen as my closest friend the best-loved man in town? The very guy who’d need buddyhood least! Some secret wish to live in permanent checkmate? Why’d he refuse to let me own his best carved beauty? I half-imagined it, under my arm, essential flood-luggage tonight. Funny, but just then I decided that the two of us, Doc and I, are a lot alike, especially when alone! Twins, nearly. But, as soon as anybody’s solitude is interrupted, see . . . ? I’d never solve that data-collecting quality-control problem. But tonight, one mystery resolved itself. I’d always wondered why Doc, sixth in his Yale class, chose to come on back to Falls and stay. Now I understood: It’d been his one best way to be alone. Here he was a “doc” for us before med school, already a given. He could leave us with that most attractive replica. It let Roper live as solitary as I felt. Still, any bird’s-eye view of his rounds would’ve shown you a man mobbed.

  So, why had I been waking all these years to have my coffee on our deck, just to sort of note where all the Roper cars had parked last night before I could even feel awake? Why did I hope he’d make one last dawn river-swim? Why? I always felt that I was missing something. Who’d tell me?

  STRANGE, BUT, HEARING about his losses, first thing that came was sadness Roper’d never invited me back into his precious inner sanctum. Ruined now. He might’ve shown me everything he made, even before he did the others. Second, I felt some odd relief at the end of “Marion’s” art. A menacing emotion, one I’m not real proud of. Recovering some scrap of my dignity, I did finally tell our half-drunk crowd, “At least the carvings he sold out of town will still show all he could do. And, hey, come to think of it, if Doc had let me buy that wood duck (his best single work, though he never seemed to know) and if I had just put that in the showcase on our third floor . . .”

  “It’d be Gone with the Wind like the rest of everything us Riversiders ever owned, fool!” So one tennis partner snapped.

  I laughed, “Yeah, well. Point taken . . .”

  OF COURSE, WE still had Janet’s empty-nesters’ cockatiels, birds that irritated me so much I was ready to make stuffed ducks of them.

  At ten p.m. that first public night of many, officials had doused our armory’s overhead lamps. Some people switched on hoarded little flashlights. The only other brightness came from near the bathrooms or out in the ugly khaki foyer. Not five minutes in, one small dog yelped, I could tell, crying in its sleep. Some omen: Yorkies having nightmares on Night #1. Water still rising, and personnel seeing things.

  I fought to doze in that giant room full of snoring men. (How had their wives not long ago shot them, us?) Between our cots, near the birds’ covered cage and her laptop, I held Janet’s hand. She’d conked out at once, though Jan (“Didn’t catch a wink”) would deny it all tomorrow.

  To ease toward any drifting scrap of sleep, I found myself mentally collecting poor Roper’s scattered birds. It became a mission that only some close friend might undertake. Like colored rosary beads—two hundred or more of our pal’s very best were out now, unparoled; released down forks of ditches, they kept somehow spreading into rivers that eventually crosshatched deltas become one raw ocean. Till last night, each bird had been worth thousands. I imagined them already exiting our state on whirlpooled currents, some sucked down into gasping sewers. While I kept trying to sleep, a map assembled above my cot. Like those old manhunt charts you see in police movies, grease-penciled within narrowing circles, sectors, “where suspect last seen.”

  MY BLOOD THINNERS, various meds, had last been spied at home, set neatly along one raftlike bedside table. Pill bottles now riding this same duck-water.

  “That’s mighty rough,” I’d said to friends. “Roper had so much work in those. But, hey, he can make others. The sec this is over, we’ll all start again. And so will ‘Marion,’ unsinkable . . .”

  But, lying here beneath an itchy army blanket, one hand in my wife’s hand, the other curled behind my head, I knew better: I was already somehow aging up pretty good myself. Doc had stumbled headlong up into his eighties, right? Even at my age, given my condition, I knew true resiliency requires serious health, pretty solid ground to stand on.

  Pretending I would sleep, I guessed I’d really only rest. Kept recalling news of Roper’s achievements throughout school, even with me trailing ten years behind him. Every club you joined he had either founded or presided over. Some groups never even bothered with an election his year. Cincinnatus. Others forced the man to lead. There was some quality. Not just his looks or style, whatever. Did I want it? Was that it? Or maybe I hoped to grow more like him, even now? He meant so much to me, I just didn’t yet know why.

  He might find energy to rebuild their house. Might even design a new place for Marge and him on slightly higher ground. But to re-create that unexpected bonus round he’d carved from his last decade? that was going to be a long shot. Restarting Phase II a second time, at eighty-two? Tough for anybody.

  Even for a Doc.

  AROUND ME, WHISPERERS still catalogued who’d been saved, who not. Which veterinary hospital had gone under, killing our beloved pets hidden exactly there for safety’s sake. And which geniuses among us actually owned flood insurance? Three households! One, Mitch’s, the other Riverside insurance agent of choice; the second Janet’s and mine. A third, one river-edge pennywise widow-dowager-client of mine who’d signed up over objections. All of us, we would keep quiet about the embarrassment of having stayed put while also keeping ourselves “covered.”

  I felt myself struggling to relax while on the brink of some finding: I’d been recognized by neighbors with embraces I could feel were truly meant. That finally convinced me. All along, I’d been a major part of Riverside. Safe in that at last. But why?

  Because it was all gone now.

  Somehow, tired unto death, I muttered that: “It’s gone now, it’s gone now, it’s . . .” and slept like some dim if trusting child.

  Gosh, I missed my father.

  4

  I WOKE DECIDING we were having an adventure. Mr. Safari had come for us. Our kids once made me re-re-read Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens aloud to them night after night. We loved the flying part but I made them stay grounded in beds at least till reading ended. That darn Peter had been a genius; he knew to stop growing on the nonshaving side of puberty. He could look over into adulthood’s promised land but he preferred not to take that bait. And this morning I recalled the flying boy’s simple line, “Dying would be an awfully big adventure.”

  A thanks-and-recovery service was announced for noon that day at All Saints Episcopal. Thanks seemed misplaced, recovery impossible, but we went. The one FEMA woman said she couldn?
??t let us stay in the armory all morning, said they’d need to sweep up, empty our trash cans.

  The old brick sanctuary Dad had loved still stood downtown, on fairly high ground. The donors, 1820s Paxtons, must’ve seen to this before our town maples obscured Falls’ highs and lows. I’d heard that First Presbyterian and its graveyard were submerged knee-deep. There was a borrowed cabin cruiser tied to a handy basketball goal. Old friends, minus the Ropers, all piled in. Somebody said this beautiful boat had once belonged to Doc Dennis S—.

  As a boy, I used to dream of flying. With your hometown drowned, you move over it, as if both underwater and at angel’s height. The smells come as surprises, too. We passed the chimney of our best African-American beauty salon; adjoining water wore a bubble roof of shampoo. Air grew sweet with all that coconutty lost cologne. I wanted to swing back for a second sniff but our friend’s inboard soon chewed into an ill-placed treetop. We just clambered out onto a loading dock then waded-walked the rest of the way.

  Somehow we three couples went from moaning to giggling over nothing, like kids, not a worry in the world. The full sun was out as if to show us more perfectly everything lost. Our deck shoes kept making comical Little Rascals squishy sounds. I felt stunned to where, if any of my male tennis partners had taken my free hand (like how kindergarten boys wander around), I would have enjoyed that. All rules gone. Most. A good-sized catfish made a U-turn at the corner of Church Street and Main. With that there came this streaming sense of a new chance. Another life, elsewhere. But walking in water proves harder than that same action in air. I had to slow down, stop at intervals . . . catching . . . breath. Others indulged me, circling back, then trudging but at my pace.