Islands Page 11

  There were no lights anywhere.

  A young guardsman stopped us and looked into the car.

  “What’s your business here?” he said. “Curfew is in an hour.”

  Henry handed him the physician’s identification that most doctors keep in their cars, and Lewis pulled his out, too. The young man studied them and then said, “Where will you be going?”

  “Bedon’s Alley,” Henry said. The guardsman looked at his clipboard.

  “You can go all the way down East Bay,” he said. “It’s been cleared. Watch out for Calhoun, though. It’s flooded. Looks like there’s lots of trees and debris blocking upper Tradd and Church Streets.”

  “What about Elliot?” Henry said.

  The guardsman looked again.

  “Seems to be open. But watch out. There’s emergency vehicles all over the place, and they don’t stop for intersections. Plus you’ve got a lot of gawkers wandering around.”

  We said nothing. Those gawkers were our friends and neighbors grieving for the mutilation of their city.

  It was in a still, eerie green dusk that we turned onto Elliot Street, crept slowly through a couple of turns, and drove down Bedon’s Alley to Henry and Fairlie’s house. On the entire trip we did not hear a sound, or see a light. All windows seemed to be boarded. Leaves and branches were everywhere. As we pulled up to the huge old stucco pile that dominated the alley, a pungent smell reached us.

  “Christ, that smells like barbecue,” Lewis said. “Has somebody gone nuts?”

  Henry pointed silently. Plumes of fragrant smoke were rising against the milky sky. They seemed to be coming from the back gardens of several of the houses. Through the iron gates we could see people milling around.

  “I know,” I said. It was the first thing I had been able to say since we turned onto East Bay. “They’re all cooking their meat. None of the freezers would be working.”

  “It smells very festive,” Henry said tightly.

  “Well, why not cook it and share?” I said. “What else are you going to do with it? Feed it to the dogs?”

  He did not reply, and I winced.

  “Henry, I’m sorry.”

  He made a don’t-mention-it motion with his hand and braked the car to a stop in front of his house. It, too, was boarded up and silent like the others, but in an instant the massive old door was thrown open, and Fairlie whirled down the steps toward us. Henry unfolded himself from the driver’s seat and took one long stride and gathered her into his arms. She buried her head in the hollow of his shoulder, and they stood that way for a long time. I could see the last of the sun turning the crown of her head to flame. She wore cutoffs and a halter and flip-flops. Even at seven-thirty, the car’s thermometer had read ninety-two degrees. Behind them, on the top step of the house, Camilla stood, her face pale and tranquil, a little smile tugging at the corners of her curly mouth. She, too, was in shorts.

  We got slowly out of the car, our limbs cramped, and felt the wet smack of the heat. It was no hotter than in Ciudad Real, I thought, but it was much, much wetter. And then I thought, How could I have thought of Ciudad Real in this moment?

  Camilla pattered down the stairs and came to Lewis and me and put her arms around us. We stood silently, hugging. I could feel the lovely tensile strength of her long arms, the bird’s ribs in her slender torso.

  She pushed us a little away and looked at us.

  “Thank God you’re here,” she said softly. “And thank God you didn’t have to go through this.”

  Her coppery eyes were wet.

  She turned then to Henry and Fairlie. They had broken apart and were looking up the block, at the tattered roofs and broken tree limbs. Camilla went silently to Henry and put her arms around him and pressed her face into his shoulder as Fairlie had done. She said nothing, nor did Henry. He just held her, smoothing back the strands of hair that were pasted to her forehead with sweat.

  “It will be all right, Cam,” Henry said presently, and she stepped back and smiled up at him. Tears stood on her cheeks.

  “It will now,” she said.

  We sat for a long time in Fairlie and Henry’s back garden. It was larger than most of Charleston’s pocket gardens and comfortably littered with mismatched chairs and a round wrought-iron table and a hammock on a stand. It was also littered with palm fronds and drying leaves stripped from the live oaks that sheltered it, and branches, and even a couple of shingles. Lewis and I had sat here many times before, in candlelight, with the Scrubs lounging contentedly around after one of Fairlie’s amazingly awful cold-pasta suppers. Because it was so large, both house and garden had become an in-town rallying spot for the Scrubs. I loved the mossy, shaggy old garden. It would never be on a tour.

  This night, we sat in the light of a dozen guttering candles and a kerosene lantern. There was no light anywhere but that of other flickering candles along the alley, and the huge white moon that rode above the wounded rooftops. Even without electric lights, we could see quite clearly in the drenching moonlight.

  “It’s as if God or whoever is in charge of hurricanes is trying to make it up to us,” Fairlie said. She shook her fist heavenward.

  “No dice,” she shouted.

  We had eaten perfectly grilled beef tenderloin and the last of Fairlie’s John’s Island tomatoes, and had drunk quite a lot of burgundy, brought over by Simms, who had a wine cellar in his Battery basement.

  “Or did,” he said wryly. “I found these floating in the basement. There were a couple more on the first floor, sitting on the sofa. The former sofa, I should say. The surge left them there. There’s a lot more if anybody wants to snorkel for it.”

  “I hate even thinking about your beautiful furniture,” I said. “Most of it belonged to your grandparents, didn’t it?”

  “Tyrell and a couple of the guys from the plant and I got most of it upstairs,” Simms said. “We boarded up the windows, too, but we might as well have used Kleenex. We’re luckier than most of Charleston. I have a crew ready to get to work in the morning. We ought to be able to get back in there in a few days.”

  Lila and Simms were staying with Henry and Fairlie. We stayed, too, that first night. We had no idea if we could get onto Bull Street, and I was suddenly and totally exhausted. Even as we spoke of damages and changes and nevermores, I nodded off.

  “Poor sweetie,” Camilla said. “You’ve come a long way today, haven’t you?”

  Lewis brushed my chaotic hair back and said, “This time last night she was asleep in the best room in a Mexican ho’ house. Had a TV, by God, and flowered sheets. Pretty fancy, even if it didn’t do to think where those sheets had been.”

  Camilla laughed her rich, throaty laugh.

  “I can’t wait to hear about that. In fact, I can’t wait to hear about the whole trip. Come on, Lewis. We need something to distract us.”

  “Another night, I promise,” Lewis said. “There’s something we need to do, and it may take a while.”

  “What on earth can you do with no lights and all this junk in the streets?” Lila said. In her lap, Sugar woke up and gave a peremptory treble bark. It was answered from somewhere in the top regions by deeper barks.

  “Boy and Girl are staying with us, too,” Fairlie said. “It’s what we talked about out at the beach, isn’t it? All of us together under one roof. Maybe we could just stay here.”

  There was a sheen of tears in her eyes, and I knew she was thinking of Gladys, our missing family member. I gave her hand a squeeze, and she smiled damply at me.

  Henry and Lewis and Simms stood up. Henry spoke. “I talked to Charlie, and he said they’re going to need us two or three straight days and nights,” he said. “People are breaking legs and having heart attacks all over the place, trying to clean up this damage. I told him if we came in tonight we’d drop dead of fatigue, and he said to take the night off and begin early in the morning.”

  “He’s the one who’s going to drop dead if he doesn’t let up,” Camilla said. “I haven’t seen hi
m since the night Hugo hit, and I know he isn’t sleeping more than an hour or two at a time. His voice sounds awful, all breathless and faint. Send him home, hear?”

  “We will. Now listen, y’all,” Lewis said. “We’re going over to the island and take a look at the damage. There’s not going to be any other time for it. I think…we’ve got to know.”

  “You what?” Fairlie squealed. “How the hell do you think you’re going to get over there? The damned bridge is out. The National Guard is patrolling regularly. The very least they’d do is arrest you. I heard they have orders to shoot looters. Have you completely lost your minds? What are you going to do, swim?”

  “No,” said Simms. “Sail.”

  Camilla and Lila and I simply stared at them. Then Lila said, “Have we still got a boat?”

  “We have the old one,” Simms said. “I moved the Venus way back up the Ashley River, and she should be safe. But the Flea is still bobbing around the yacht club dock. God knows why the club didn’t blow away, but it didn’t. They did a good job of securing the boats.”

  “The Flea…,” Lila said. “But it’s so tiny, Simms. And anyway, how do you think you can get onto the island without a patrol seeing you? I don’t like this at all.”

  “She’ll hold the three of us,” he said. “And if you remember, we painted her red when we gave her to the kids. Even got a red sail. At night it shows up black.”

  “Well, y’all don’t,” Fairlie snapped. “What are you going to do, go in blackface?”

  “Yes,” Henry said.

  “But with no lights—”

  “Fairlie,” Simms said, “I’ve been sailing that stretch from the yacht club to the island all my life. I could do it blindfolded. And the moon is almost as bright as day. We’re just going to ease up to Henry’s dock and then walk over to the beach house, and come right back. But we need to know.”

  My heart became a lump of dirty ice. No, Lewis, I said in my head. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters but that you’re safe.

  But when he looked over at me and raised an inquiring red eyebrow, I smiled. It was what my brother would have called a chickenshit smile.

  “Boys’ night out,” I said, and they laughed a little. Presently they went upstairs in the big house and came back down in dark pants and windbreakers. They wore dark deck shoes, too, and dark socks.

  We stared. They looked like a Mafia hit group.

  “Simms brought them over for us,” Henry said. “I’m supplying the blackface.”

  And he held out a tin of black shoe polish. Fairlie and Camilla and I began to laugh. Lila only stared.

  “Well, go paint your faces, kemo sabes, and let us see our braves off,” Camilla said.

  “We’ll put it on down at the dock,” Henry growled, but she took the tin away from him and sat him down in front of her.

  “Be still,” she said. “I’m an expert at making up little boys for Halloween. You won’t know yourself.” And she began to smear Henry’s face with shoe polish.

  She did the others after that. Everyone stood or sat silently, not knowing what to say. They were Peter Pan’s lost boys, of course, but they were something else, too. Something beyond the husbands and fathers and doctors and businessmen we had known all our lives, something harder than friends. Something wilder. They had drawn away into themselves, into the feral ranks of men, far away from the company of women.

  “Well,” said Henry. “Let’s do it.”

  They turned to walk out of the garden and through the crippled streets toward the yacht club. We watched them go, pillars of darkness, moving silently. My scalp crawled. I did not know Lewis. I did not know these men.

  “Henry, put something on your head,” Fairlie yelled after him. “You can see that hair of yours a mile away.”

  He gave her the V for victory signal. We all laughed, and the little cold spell was broken. Still, when they had passed out of sight, we looked at one another silently, as if to try to read in each other’s faces what we should do next.

  We sat down to wait.

  Dark fell in earnest, and the mosquitoes came in bloodsucking squadrons, but we did not move to go into the house. As long as we sat in the candlelit garden, we could preserve the illusion of just another outdoor summer supper. There was a lot of wine left, and we drank a good bit of it. The heat and the silence and the wine dulled the anxiety, but it was still there, under the layers of succor. At first we talked a little.

  “Remind me to try and get in touch with my office first thing in the morning,” I said. I felt extremely guilty that I had hardly thought of the agency since we left for Mexico, two weeks and a hundred years ago.

  “Oh,” Fairlie said, “I forgot to tell you. Somebody called here from your office…would it be Marcy? And said that you’ve pretty much got no first floor, but the second floor and the files are okay.”

  My little office, a former town house in a moribund development, sat across Calhoun Street from the Veterans Administration Hospital, overlooking the Ashley marina. I could just imagine what the storm surge had done to it. I closed my eyes in profound weariness. All that work, all those fund-raising drives, all the scrounging and sucking up for money…

  “We’ll take Charlie’s Navigator and go check in the morning,” Camilla said. “In fact, we’ll go check on everybody’s places. Maybe nothing’s as bad as it seems.”

  Later, I do not know how much, but the moon had begun to sink toward the South Battery, Lila said, “You know what this reminds me of? That scene in Gone With the Wind, where Scarlett and Melanie and the other women were sitting around sewing, waiting to hear that their men had come back from the Klan raid safely. There were Yankees all over the place, just like the National Guard now. The women never mentioned any of it. They just chatted as if nothing was wrong. I always loved that scene.”

  “Which of them would be Rhett and which one Ashley?” Fairlie said. Fatigue blurred her voice.

  After that the talk died, and we simply sat.

  I don’t know how much longer it was when I heard the sound. I had been drifting in and out of sleep, and the candles were burned down, and the moon had set. It was almost totally dark.

  In the profound silence we heard a jingle. And then the scrabble of claws. And then Gladys, sodden and filthy and ecstatic, slid and skittered onto the veranda, the whole back of her waggling.

  Fairlie dropped to her knees and simply held the wriggling dog. I could tell, over the slurping of Gladys’s tongue on her face, that Fairlie was crying.

  The men suddenly materialized in the garden. Camilla lit a candle. We looked at them. They looked…exuberant. They practically gave off sparks.

  Goddammit, I thought. They were playing commandos, and we were sitting here simply dying. Sons of bitches.

  I knew where my anger came from, though.

  “Well?” Camilla said. She sat up straight, with her hands folded in her lap.

  “The beach house is standing,” Lewis said. “I don’t know how in the name of God it could be; there’s literally nothing but rubble around it. But there it is. The space under it took the storm surge; we saw the Ping-Pong table across the street down near Stella Maris, and I think the lawn mower is out on the point. But except for the porch screens and the stairs and walkway down to the beach, it looks pretty good. It didn’t even lose any windows.”

  I felt tears gather in my chest and sting in my nose.

  “What about…our place? How is it?” Fairlie said.

  “You mean where is it?” Henry said. “There’s literally nothing left but the dock. We went in there. I couldn’t begin to guess where the house is.”

  “Oh, Henry,” Camilla began, but he shook his head.

  “We didn’t use it much anymore. Even the grandchildren are beginning to have other things to do here in town. I’ll find something to do with the insurance money, you can bet on that.”

  “Gladys?” Fairlie said, still hugging the dog.

  “You know, she was sitting on the po
rch of the beach house, as far up under the hammock as she could get. She was shivering like a leaf, but the minute she heard our footsteps she began to bark. Gladys spent the remainder of her time on Sullivan’s Island with my shorts holding her jaws shut. The guard was out in force.”

  “Did they see you?” I said.

  “If they did, they had other fish to fry. You aren’t going to know Sullivan’s Island. There’s just…almost nothing left.”

  “But the house,” Lila said.

  “But the house.”

  “Then we’ll be all right.”

  “Yes,” Henry said. “I believe we will.”

  Later that night, as it slid into morning, Lewis and I lay sweating and intertwined in the narrow bed in the room Fairlie kept for her grandchildren. The drone of mosquitoes should have maddened me, but I had been sleeping with mosquitoes for the past two weeks. It seemed to me that Mexican mosquitoes could teach Low Country mosquitoes a thing or two any day.

  We were both simply too tired to talk, but we could not quite drift into sleep either. Above us, on the third floor somewhere, Boy and Girl and Sugar were padding around and snuffling. I knew that Gladys, wet and stinking and home, would be sleeping on Fairlie and Henry’s bed.

  I looked over at the purple Barney that sat on the little chair beside the bed. Lewis looked, too.

  “Which is worse?” he said. “A Mexican ho’ house or Barney?”

  “Barney, by a landslide,” I said.

  And then we slept.

  It was perhaps six weeks before we could cross over to Sullivan’s Island, though we could and did sail along the strangely scalloped shore, or took Simms’s Boston Whaler. From the water, it looked, I thought, like some desolate, shell-pocked beach during World War II, its battles over but its casualties still strewn, motionless. The dune lines were gone, or had been reconfigured into another seascape entirely. When we finally jolted down Middle Street, we could see that the palms, crepe myrtles, and live oaks that had shaded the old houses lay uprooted, leaves long dead. Some lay across the shattered roofs of the few houses that stood. There were no standing trees. There was no sea grass. Most of the cottages were piles of rubbish. But some stood, bravely and inexplicably, like sentinels who had failed to foresee a war. Ours was one of them. It stood alone far down the beach, nothing around it, its oleanders and palms gone. The walkway to the beach and the stairs had totally vanished. We never did find them. The porch screens had been torn like wet tissue paper. Washed-up debris from who knew where jammed the backyard, and a claw-footed bathtub tilted against the deck, obviously someone’s treasure. Shingles littered the sand everywhere. But the windows were still stoutly boarded, and the roof, though partially denuded of shingles, still sheltered, and miraculously the hammock still stood serenely on the front porch. The storm surge had obviously gone just under the porch and swept through the basement, if it could be called that, and boiled on across to murder the houses toward the inland waterway, Henry’s included.