A thrashing alligator tangled in a barbed-wire fence.
Then they were in a thicket of screaming wood, where hackberry branches and cane chattered madly together. Josh found himself on the ground with his back against a tree, its convulsing boughs above him, limbs and twigs branching like capillaries, a whole circulatory system ripped out of some giant animal and held writhing over him.
Tin glinted in front of his face and then Ham was shoving the canteen in his mouth. He choked and coughed as he tried to suck water from it. The metal tasted sour but the rainwater was sweet as life.
More ventricles and arteries, this time made of lightning and sketched in white fire against the sky.
Another hank of Spanish moss came tumbling through the air to thud against the trunk of a nearby tree. Lightning guttered and flared again, and Josh realized it wasn’t Spanish moss at all, it was his mother’s face, dead white and clotted with seaweed. “Did you remember to bring the matches?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.” He started up from the kitchen table and gave her the matches. His father began putting their chess pieces away. “Can’t we play again?” Josh said.
“Again!” His mother smiled and shook her head. She lit the little oil lamp under the fondue pot she used for her experiments. The air smelled of mint and honeysuckle and hot wax. She must be making hand lotion or soap or some such. “You’ve been playing for hours, Josh.”
“I can’t go out in this weather,” he said reasonably. Shutters banged and the house beams creaked in the high wind as if to make his point. “I like playing a lot of games in a row. You learn more when you get in a zone.”
“Like father, like son.”
“Somebody once asked a grand master why there were no truly great female chess players,” Josh’s dad remarked. His wife turned around from her little pot and looked at him sardonically. “He said, ‘I expect women have better things to do with their time than play chess.’”
Joshua’s mother laughed.
“Can’t we play again? Please?”
Samuel Cane put the last of the chess pieces away and closed the lid of the box. “If you want to play more, it will have to be poker.”
“I like chess better,” Josh said sulkily.
“That’s because you’re still a boy.” His father was smiling, but Josh felt as if he had failed some obscure test.
His mom snorted. “So poker is a real man’s game, eh?”
“Josh likes chess because it’s fair. Each player controls exactly what happens on the board, and the one who plays best wins. That’s what makes it a boy’s game.” Sam took a pack of cards out of his jacket pocket and decanted them with thoughtless grace. “A man’s game should be like life.”
Rain creaked and pattered across the kitchen windows. Josh had a dim sense of things swaying outside, palm fronds and spears of oleander. His father shuffled the cards in long liquid waterfalls that sounded like the wind outside, like the rain. “The best player doesn’t always win. In real life, you get rags sometimes instead of paint. Winning is easy, Josh. Anyone can win. Losing, now…” He dealt quickly, two hands of live-card draw. Josh picked his up. He knew his mom and dad had been married to different people, before the Flood, and those other people had died. A lot of people had died, and the world they knew had died, too. “We get a whole lifetime to learn just one lesson,” Samuel Cane said. “How to lose with dignity.”
Wind and rain beat against the warm house. Darkness waited outside its windows. When he looked down, Josh saw that the kitchen floor was gone, replaced by muddy prairie. Somehow the rain had worked its way inside. Pools of dark water were spreading between clumps of salt grass and camphor daisies, joining up, the water rising. A tangle of sea purslane was twined around his feet. “I think I disbelieve that,” Joshua’s mom said with a funny smile. “But you know, Sam, some days you’re almost the man I thought you could be.”
Joshua’s dad laughed. “Don’t bet on it,” he said.
ONCE, much later, Josh came out of his delirium quite suddenly and unexpectedly, as if stepping through the wrong door by mistake. He was sitting in water up to his lap, lashed to a slender tree with a piece of what had once been Ham’s shirt. The pain from his wrist was pure and terrible, but very distant. The howl of the storm had vanished, leaving an unearthly calm. Water rocked gently against him, smelling of salt and mud. The sky was clear. Overhead, stars glimmered like foam thrown hissing across a black beach.
Ham was tied to the next tree over. The big man’s eyes were open, gazing out in profound solitude at the land and sea that had become the same unquiet thing. Even looking at him seemed intrusive somehow, shameful and unworthy.
Low to the horizon, a crescent moon drifted on the sea like a lost cradle. Trembling streaks of its yellow light fused and split on the face of the drowned land. The water rocked at Josh and rocked at him. Overhead, stars flickered like remote candles, going out when he looked at them, flickering back to life as his eyes moved on. Stars wavering like luminous droplets of blue water, surrounding and eluding him.
THE next time Josh woke it was morning.
The sky was clear and the day was pleasantly cool—lower seventies perhaps, although the sun was well up. A fly buzzed around his head. He was still sitting with his back against a tree and water up to his lap. The plain had become a marsh, pools and rills of glinting water broken by clumps of salt grass and stands of reeds. The normal Gulf breeze was back. It shook the salt grass and the water both, so the whole landscape seethed and trembled. Wondering if the water was fresh or salt, Josh started to reach out, then stopped, groaning, as a sick ballooning pain billowed up from his right wrist.
“Morning, Josh!” Ham splashed into view from around the copse. He was naked, the tip of his cock just visible, waggling under the loom of his belly. His gigantic flabby chest was scoured red everywhere it wasn’t bruised. His face was thickly stubbled with the beginnings of a beard. Exhaustion had left his eyes ringed like a racoon’s. He grinned. “Son, you look like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.”
“Don’t feel so great,” Josh whispered. His back was aching from being strapped to this tree. The muscles in his sides and legs ached, too, reminders of the fierce cramps the rattlesnake venom had induced. Ham splashed over to his side and clubbed a mosquito to death on Joshua’s thin chest. “There will be more of these little fuckers in a day or two.” He squatted beside Josh, ignoring another mosquito and two flies settling on his enormous shoulders.
“Where are your pants?”
Ham pointed into the branches over Joshua’s head. “When the wind started to die down I hung ’em up there to collect rainwater while it was still falling. Guess I better get ’em down before they dry out. Want a drink?”
“God, yes.” A minute later Josh was stretching his head up like a baby bird’s as Ham slowly wrung the cloth out into his mouth, careful not to waste a dribble. Only after the last drop was gone did Josh say, “Should we have saved that?”
“Don’t worry. I drank my fill and more last night. The canteen leaks at the bottom, by the way. If you screw the top on and hold it upside down it’ll hold, mostly. I got it stuck in a tree branch over here.” Ham squeezed his prison pants once more, wringing out a couple more drips for himself, then climbed into them, hopping and splashing in the muddy water.
“Ham?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m still tied to this tree.” Ham cussed and bent to untie him. “How’s my wrist?” Josh asked. He tried to make a fist. It was agony and his fingers barely moved. “I can’t stand to look at it. Just tell me, please.”
Joshua’s eyes teared with pain as Ham gently lifted up his right arm and inspected it. “It don’t look so hot,” Ham said slowly. “It don’t smell so good neither. I reckon your hand and wrist are still swole up about double. Josh, the meat here’s turned black. It’s black and it’s kind of…melted.” There was no amusement in Ham’s voice anymore. “I think some of it’s dripped off already. And it stinks.”
“It’s infected, then. Going necrotic.” Another fly buzzed around Josh. Drawn by the smell, no doubt. He swallowed and shifted, trying to ease his aching back, bringing his knees up in front of him. Using his left hand he picked up his right arm and laid it as gently as he could across his knees, hissing with pain. “Ham, are we going to die?”
“Hell, no. We made it through the hurricane, didn’t we? Too ugly to kill and too mean to die.”
“What about water?”
The big man waved him off with magnificent nonchalance. “No hay problemo, compadre. All we have to do is follow Highway 87 till we find some buildings. First house we come to we look for a tarp or a shower curtain, and bingo, there’s your still fixin’s. Plus rain barrels, cisterns, wells. Any windmill you see, that’s probably got a well at the bottom of it. It ain’t like nobody lived here before the Flood.”
“Won’t most of the good stuff have been scavenged by now?”
“I doubt anybody’s going to scavenge a stock tank. Those will be right where the farmers left ’em, and full up after last night’s rain. Specially if we find a road that cuts inland a piece.”
“What about food?”
“If you starve to death on a beach, you deserve to die,” Ham said. “You are in and amongst Nature’s All-You-Can-Eat-Buffet, my friend. You got your clams and crabs and oysters. Plus all the fish that got blown in and stranded. I’ve seen five or six flopping around already. One redfish stuck in a tree just yonder, damnedest thing I ever saw—Josh, there’s a fly on your wrist.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Plus this morning I seen a couple head of drowned cattle hung up on barbed wire. And a alligator. Damn fine eating, gator.” He trailed off. “There’s another fly on you. Git, you little fuckers,” he said, reaching forward to shoo them off.
“Leave them.”
“What?”
“Leave them,” Josh said. “In about an hour they’ll have laid a batch of eggs in the meat of my wrist. Then I’ll bandage the wound.” Ham’s eyes bugged out. “Maggot therapy,” Josh said. “They used it all the time in World War One. You let the maggots hatch. They eat up all the infected flesh and then you flush ’em out.”
Ham stared at the flies crawling on Joshua’s wrist. “You don’t mind if I puke, I hope.”
“Not here,” Josh said. “I don’t want competition.”
“Josh—”
“Can’t have all my flies crawling over to your vomit—”
“Josh!”
“—and wasting their maggots,” Josh finished, grinning. If Ham had retched, he would have laughed out loud.
THEY passed what was left of Ham’s shirt repeatedly through the leaves of the little copse of hackberry trees, soaking up as much of the leftover rainfall as possible and wringing it into their mouths. At the back of the copse stood a small hunchbacked black willow. Josh had Ham cut away a few long strips of bark with the pocketknife, then peel out the softer inner bark. He stuck most of it in his pants pocket and chewed on the rest, hoping the salicylates there would give him some relief from the pain in his forearm and bring down his temperature, which he estimated was around a hundred degrees. Josh didn’t know whether the fever was an aftereffect of Kyle’s beating, the bout of dehydration, rattlesnake venom, or his infected arm. According to Ham he was much cooler than he had been in the middle of the previous night, which fit with his delirious dreams and moments of glassy lucidity.
He had lost their matches, of course. Not that they would have been any use after that deluge. Ham had done better; he still had the gun and mismatched bullets, for a miracle, as well as the canteen and knife. “What next?” Josh said.
Ham was busy peeling off more chunks of bark. “I figure you should rest up today, best you can. I’ll find us some food. Then I’ll cut some sandals out of this bark, elsewise our feet are going to get flayed to ribbons when we walk. Especially after staying this long in salt water.” Josh lifted his foot out of the water. It was puffy and wrinkled like a steamed raisin. “We’ll move at night and find shade during the day,” Ham continued. “This afternoon, once it starts cooling down, we’ll get over to the highway yonder.”
“Why the highway? Shouldn’t we stick closer to the trees?”
Ham started to spit, thought better of it, and swallowed instead. “I like the idea of higher ground, for one thing. For another it will be a lot easier to travel on the road. Plus you’re more likely to find a house along it. And last”—he glanced into the water—“I like to see what I’m stepping on.”
“Maybe not all the snakes drowned, you think?”
“I know not all the gators did.”
Josh gulped. He had been hoping for a drowsy day of rest in the shade, but instead he started to imagine the marshland teeming with alligators, stranded jellyfish, and snakes: rattlesnakes, copperheads, cottonmouths, and water moccasins. “Ham, why don’t you cut me two small switches for a splint. Once I get this wrist bandaged up, I’ll follow you up to the road and rest there.”
It was nearly midday by the time they got on the move, picking their way through the marsh. Both men were naked from the waist up. Josh had lost his shirt in the hurricane, and Ham had torn his into strips to bandage Joshua’s elbow and lash them to the hackberry stand. It wasn’t nearly as hot as it had been for the weeks before the storm, but it was still over eighty and unbelievably muggy. After drinking quarts of rainwater the previous night Ham was sweating rivers. Bugs clouded the air around him, flies and marsh midges and the first mosquitoes coming back into the open after the big blow. The air was hot and dank and smelled like mud and rotten shrimp. Pools lay like broken glass between clumps of salt grass. Sunlight splintered off of them. Josh walked with his eyes screwed nearly shut against the glare.
A ton of fish had been stranded behind the accidental dike of Highway 87 when the sea receded. Josh could see them flicking around their feet as they walked, redfish and flounder and a few sea bass. The herons and egrets were feasting, striding through the marsh picking off fingerlings, baby snakes, and the croaking frogs that had begun to congregate atop every projecting log or clump of grass. At any one time there were always three or four flights of buzzards overhead, each marking the body of a drowned cow or a possum impaled on a barbed-wire fence.
It took more than an hour to get back to 87, and despite Ham’s cheerful conversation, largely made up of helpful tips on alligator wrestling, Josh was exhausted. The highway was coated in a thick layer of mud the consistency of axle grease, studded with gasping fish, drowned birds, and ropes of seaweed. Josh sat Indian style, slumping forward so his head nearly touched his knees, his damaged arm tucked against his stomach. He hoped the maggot eggs were festering in his wrist. He drowsed unpleasantly while Ham went off to forage.
The big man returned well pleased with himself. “The swell’s still running high, but there’s a bit of sand showing at the top of the beach now. Lots of wreckage piled against the dune, too. I think we can get in and amongst some shelter there.” He led Josh down the shore to where a massive live-oak limb, freshly splintered at the base, had been thrown against the sandy dune. Most of the leaves had been stripped away, but by piling seaweed and purslane and clumps of reed onto the twiggy lattice at the end of the limb. Ham manufactured a little shade.
Josh burrowed gingerly into the nest of twigs. It wasn’t very comfortable, and instead of sleeping he spent an unrewarding hour trying to break off inconvenient branchlets with his left hand. Ham collected bunches of purslane, sea lettuce, and plantain to eat. “Thought we’d save the meat and fish for when we can make a fire,” he said. Josh had no appetite, but he forced himself to nibble the salty plants.
The afternoon was clear and the breeze light, but the sea was still riled up. Eight- and ten-foot waves built and broke thirty yards out. White spray rushed up the beach to within a few feet of where Josh and Ham were sitting, crowded side by side under the haphazard roof of seaweed and bracken, trying to find shade. Ham shook his head, m
unching on a handful of sea lettuce. “Hell of a blow.”
“You figure the Fat Tuesday got caught in that?” Josh asked hopefully. He tried a plantain leaf. There was lots of mucilage in plantain; it figured in most of his poultices and potions for bruises and cuts. He should probably try packing some into the wound on his wrist, come to think of it, but he couldn’t bring himself to open the dressing.
Ham had stopped eating. “I hadn’t even thought. That hurricane was blowing east to west, so we must have got hit by the right side of the storm. Meaning the eye must have passed even closer to home.”
“Serves the bastards right,” Josh said. His mouth was bitter from chewing willow bark all morning.
Ham looked at him. “Fuck Galveston, eh?”
“Not my problem,” Josh said. The plantain leaves still tasted faintly of brine. He wondered how much salt they were eating. “We better find some more water tonight.”
“Those sailors gave me a goddamn rope burn when they tied us up,” Ham said. “And how about the people in that courthouse? Never mind the sheriff and Deacon Bose, what about all those Gardner cousins and maids and kids that came just for the show. That’s a hell of a way to get your jollies, ain’t it? Serves them right if that storm taught them a lesson. Yes, sir.”
Josh stopped eating. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Why stop there?” Ham said, scratching at the stubble growing through his sunburned cheeks. His eyes were narrow, and his fat face was ugly with anger. “Why not just scrape the fucking Island clean? Sure, maybe a few of the big houses will still be left standing, but at least you’ve killed off the riffraff.”
“Did I piss you off somehow?”
“At least you’d have a sterile working environment for once,” Ham said. He stared out at the furious ocean that still roiled and crashed along the shore.
Josh remembered the screaming squalls that had ripped off the water through the night. If the Fat Tuesday hadn’t put into shore she must surely have been lost. “I didn’t mean that I wanted everyone to die.”