Photo by Cristofer Maximilian on Unsplash
DEFIANCE OF A STORM
Out on the veranda, Harrison is watching the Gulf of Mexico going about gargling and boiling and barking like a frightened cornered dog. He has never seen such festering in water, such disarray and chaos on the surface. The way the waves crash against the rocks and obliterate into a fine mist. The foamy seawater racing up over the lawn and sliding through the stilts, rising and falling like breathing lungs. He remembers something he saw on TV years ago, something about blood skies in the morning, and as his mind turns to blood — its color, its velvet flow! — a pleasant tremor moves down his spine. But he sees no blood-red skies. The hurricane loitering on the horizon has brought the blackest clouds he has ever seen.
So be it, my first hurricane, he thinks. Even the wretched need new experiences.
An hour later the winds begin to howl. Dirt and debris and small pieces of wood swirl in from the neighbors on the eastern side of the plot; palm fronds float at a height of twenty feet across the lawn. He breathes in deeply and tastes a hint of rust in the air. He senses an odor of centuries of sunken and rusted ships and metal rising to the surface. Gargling. Boiling. The hurricane comes to shore wearing black robes, swinging madly her scythe.
The owner of the Inn, Michael Soma, waddles up beside him, hands him the extra mug of coffee he is carrying, and joins him on the bench. “Got the windows and front door boarded up all right.” When he takes a sip, his chin fat rolls up and it resembles chocolate taffy. “All that’s left is this back door here and then we’re done. Which means you and me, we have some time to kill. But, you know, you can never be too early at a time like this, for a storm like her. Better safe than sorry, I always say, but I bet you a million bucks she won’t hit our humble little shores here until at least three.” He shades his eyes as he inspects the horizon. “At least…” he whispers.
The three palms at the inn’s western property line sway and bend, and to Harrison they look like Js standing drunk with a lean. The wind hisses and he breathes that in too, tasting the rust on the tip of his tongue. “Pretty exciting, isn’t it?” he says. “Although I must admit I’m a little nervous.”
“I hear you. I’ve been defending myself against these little visits since I was a tyke. What’s important is this: work’s done, time to kick back and let her pass. I don’t know what you’ve planned for the day,” he laughs, “but I myself will be releasing, drinking, and watching the weather channel, in that order. You know. Holding down the fort.”
Harrison smiles and clinks the butt of his mug against Michael’s. “I haven’t thanked you for not kicking me out. I wouldn’t know the first thing about prepping for one of these things, and figured I’d just be a burden or a danger, like an insurance risk.”
“Bah to the insurance company and their empire of lies. I can’t say I fully approve of you staying here with one approaching, but it’s not a burden. A free country means this is a free hotel. Not in payment, I mean. You’ll still owe for your room if she blows over, understand?”
Michael pulls out a silver flask from his pocket. “Now, if you were smart, you’d have joined entire neighborhood bunkered down in New Orleans or scurried north.” He pours the whiskey into their coffee mugs, one and then the other.
The smell of burning wheat rises into the rusty air.
“They’re saying she’ll hit as a category 3,” Michael continues, stirring with his finger. “Not so bad. But I bet we’ll get up to 120mph, you know. Those are real racing winds there. But don’t you worry; what I’ve done yesterday and this morning will hold. The Seawater’s one of a kind, I promise you that.”
Harrison smiles and gestures a salute with his whiskey coffee. “What can I say? Guess I picked the wrong time of the year to go fishing.”
“To Hurricane Bridget.”
“Hurricane Bridget!”
The wind hisses through the graying TV fog sky. The salty mist of obliterated waves, the rust from all those sunken ships, and all those people that went down with them. The gulf heaves, hoes.
After a few minutes, Michael raises his voice above the wind to shout. “She’s picking up. You afraid yet?”
“No, not really. I’m not the type of person who gets scared very often. My mother always told me it’s because I’m stupid.”
Michael laugh is low and jolly and he holds the bottom of his bouncing gut with his free hand as if shaking a bag of change.
“Ex wife used to tell me I’m a stubborn man too,” he says. “She used to tell me that the moment I sat down in my comfortable big red couch. ‘Your sins are going to bite you, Michael.’” He taps his big sausage finger on the wooden armrest, the sound invisible in the growing storm. “The Seawater, here, see she was my sin, is my sin, through and through. You understand? I fix her up, guests like yourself come, a hurricane tries to tear her down. Up, they come, down, I rebuild. On repeat like a beautiful record.” He sighs. “I’ll never leave this place. Hell, I’ll die in this place.”
I can see to that, Harrison thinks, strangely unenthusiastic about the prospect.
“Hurricanes are exactly like people.” The inn owner continues, shouting so loud that droplets of saliva expel outward from between his lips. “You can look one in the eye, directly in the eye, and you’ll know the truth in an instant.” He snaps his fingers in Harrison’s face. “For example, I look in your eye and I know you’re a lucky charm. You’re one the good ones. The ones in the light of God. I can see that by looking in your eye.”
“That’s very kind of you but I wouldn’t describe myself as one of the good ones.” The sky is moving, faster and blacker. The whiskey rises like steam to his head and a voice calls out. A voice he’s never heard before. You’ve done some very bad things, Harrison. Very, very bad things.
“Hey, you okay?” Michael says, touching Harrison by the elbow. “You looked all sorts of pale all of a sudden.”
Large drops of rain begin to land on the veranda, only a few at first but in seconds the sky falls in a shimmering shower. Thousands of splashes dance in the layer of water that has decided to settle over the lawn.
“Here she comes! Let’s get you inside where it’s warm.” Michael props open the door, dashes back to Harrison, and guides him inside holding his arm. Harrison gives the frenzied black sky a final look. The palms are sideways, horizontal, their roots anchored to nothing but air, and the night-black shelf of clouds creeps closer, standing a mile high in the sky, crawling to the shore as if through mud. The waves crash and the wardrums sound and sizzle on the rocks. The water is rising. He can see the water rise!
Inside the inn, the roar of the storm is muffled. The light is weak and gray shadows fade along the dark-green wallpaper behind the empty reception counter in the lobby. Michael walks Harrison down the hall, past the framed photos of black-and-white shrimp boats and Gulf sunsets and leads him into the lounge. He sits him down on the big red couch and closes Harrison’s fist around the handle of his whiskey coffee mug. “Drink this.”
The inn continues to spin, the muffled winds rattle every plank of wood. Harrison watches as Michael hammers the last pieces of plywood to the back door, sealing them in.
The storm swings her scythe.
ACCEPTANCE OF THE WAY
The weather channel displays a map with the outer arms of Hurricane Bridget only inches away from the shore. Harrison watches her slow twirl. With the dizzy spell that he suddenly experienced on the veranda gone, the inn no longer rocks like a drunken boat on drunken waters and he feels well enough to get up from the big red couch and walk through the lobby to his room. From his suitcase, open on the floor next to the bed, he pulls out the short metal bar that looks like a track and field baton and sets it on the pale oak dresser, next to the black-and-white photo of a coil of rope. Such a nice inn, he thinks, admiring the painting above the bed showing a fisherman and a dog in a sailboat. Such a nice man. It’ll be a shame to do this to him.
Shame to do this to him? What strange thoughts still ran through his mind.
Leaving the baton on the dresser, he returns to the lounge, the hum of the storm now louder and the light gloomier. Sharp shadows outline the room’s lamps, the big red couch, and Michael Soma’s round head on the dark green walls. Faded blue light from the TV disperses and illuminates Michael slumped in his chair. His head turns, as if on a swivel, and he holds up his empty glass and says, “You’re looking much, much better. Think you’re up for having another? Mine’s needing a touch of a refresh.”
“Yeah, okay. Just one more.”
Michael returns from the bar holding two drinks with ice clinking within. “Looks like I was wrong,” he says, handing one to Harrison and looking at the ceiling. “It’s ten past noon now and she’s already here, and she’s coming strong. Yeah, we’re category three. You know, pretty little Chloe here on the weather channel was saying about an hour ago that she, Bridget I mean, was making a hard turn north when she should’ve continued a little further west, like they predicated at sunup. Now we’re in the thick of it.” To the TV he shouts, “Chloe you were wrong too, you beautiful mink!” Stoned on whiskey coffee, he laughs and holds his bouncing gut before sinking back into the end of the big red couch nearest the TV.
A bright white flashes and Harrison slams his eyes shut. He feels his body fall onto the couch but then falls through it. The storm, the inn, Michael, the whole Gulf — they all vanish, replaced by a black void and giant wall with the title Have you seen these people? in blood-red letters across the top. A grid of faces line the wall in clean rows and columns. Faces of all sizes. Shades of color. Freckle patterns. HIDE AND SEEK CHAMPIONS OF THE WORLD!
“What was that?” Michael’s disembodied voice calls from above.
“What?” he shouts.
“You fell on the couch and said something about a girl?”
Harrison shakes his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? You sure you’re all right?”
Harrison shouts but the storm drowns him out. He looks to the wall, at the grid of all those faces, and immediately recognizes one: a woman from Yuba, Iowa, screaming as she hangs by her neck from the truss of an abandoned farm. Right on the outskirts of town, he remembers.
Why do I think of her now? Harrison wonders. Why do I see all of them?
He forces open his eyes and is back in the dark-green lounge. Chloe on the TV has been replaced by a man in a red rain jacket shouting at the wind. The inn creaks all over and the rain covers them in the constant low hum of doom. Besides him, Michael has fallen asleep and his snores vibrate, adding to the orchestra of noise around them.
When he closes his eyes, he sees all those missing people. HIDE AND SEEK CHAMPIONS OF THE WORLD!
He recognizes many faces.
There’s the young boy from Kearney.
The elderly couple from Simi Valley.
The junior football team at the summer camp near Vonore. Seven in total.
All the people in that nursing home near Lajitas, their old and wrinkly faces morphed in terror. For the first time, he asks Why? Why did I need to kill all of them?
Such thoughts have never crossed his mind before. Never has Harrison asked this very simple question: Why?
An explosion erupts and at first Harrison isn’t sure which world it comes from. When he opens his eyes, he sees Michael awake and sober, rushing into the lobby.
“That didn’t sound good!” he shouts, scrambling up the stairs. “You stay here. Nothing to worry about, my friend. Something was bound to happen. Hold on to your hats! Yee-haw!”
Meanwhile, Harrison keels over off the couch and onto the floor, holding his leaded gut as the room violently spins, the epiphany burns like electricity. My God what have I done? What have I done to all those good people?
OBEDIENCE TO THE WIND
When Michael returns to the lounge, his clothes are soaked through and dripping on the carpet, but he smiles with a warm pride. “Bridget here almost blew away room 2E. Blasted all the windows out but I was able to secure her right on up. Just a few boards and nails and we are golden.” Spying Harrison on the carpet in the fetal position, holding his head, he adds, “What the hell? Not looking so good, my friend. Can I offer you another drink? We have to be approaching the eye any minute.”
After a few minutes, Harrison groans. “I need to tell you something,” he says, but Michael is already gone. Around him the storm rages on, Chloe is back on the TV in her journalistic rhythm. His words hardly reach the bar where Michael is fixing another drink.
He tries again, this time shouting. “I need to tell you something!”
“What was that?” Michael raises one hand to his ear and mixes with the other.
“I need to tell you something!”
Harrison finds it difficult to breathe. Fear flows through every vein, every muscles tightens from fingertip to toe. What is happening? He hurls angry thoughts at himself. Why me? Why now?
Michael waddles back into the lounge. He sets Harrison’s drink on a circular end table and takes a long sip of his own. Staring at nothing, he says, “What’s on your mind?”
Optimistic, Harrison climbs on his hands and tries to stand but suddenly dry heaves. He spits. “I’m not feeling so well,” he says, to which Michael laughs and holds his gut.
“Looks to be that way. Hurricanes will do that to a man. Trust me there. I’ve seen hundreds of these bastards.” Michael runs to the lobby and returns with a bucket. “You think it’s the drink? I made you another if it’ll help calm the nerves. Drink and a nap will do you good. I had one and look at me.”
“No,” Harrison waves his hand. “No more alcohol. It’s my head.”
“Exactly what alcohol’s good for.” The violence of the wind had resumed so Michael shouts, cupping his mouth with both hands.
“I’ve done bad things,” Harrison yells back. The whole inn seems to shake. Vibrate. Transform. “I’ve done very horrible things.” When he closes his eyes he sees only the wall of missing people, the hide and seek champions, but this time there are no faces. Only names with pictures of broken bones, flayed livers, tongues and toenails. Out his mouth comes a stream of hot brown vomit.
“Thar she blows!” Michael cries.
There’s a picture of a red swimming pool. A FedEx cardboard package soaked with guts. More vomit. Dry heaves.
“That’s it. That’s all you gotta do.”
Harrison looks at Michael through his tear-stained eyes. I was going to kill you, he thinks. I came here to calm a bit of the killing nerves. On the wall in front of him, there’s an image of a bloodied baton underneath the name ‘Michael Soma’.
No.
Harrison refuses. Michael is a good man. A kind man. A man with a simple inn who deserves to live a simple life. “Does it stop?” he shouts. “Does the pain of what I’ve done ever stop?”
Seated on the floor, Michael laughs and holds his gut from falling off. “If it doesn’t, just keep on throwing it up.” He stands with a loud groan, pushing on his cracking knees. “I gotta go check my boards up in room 2E. Don’t you go nowhere, and remember: vomit it out!”
Harrison’s throat burns. His mind burns. Flames devour his neurons as he devoured all those poor souls, all over the blood-soaked country.
DISTURBANCE OF THE SUN
Hurricane Bridget has surrounded them. Her hand closes upon the shaking Seawater Inn, tightening with every howling gale. Her screams are constant, deafening, a cry from pain buried so deep it rips and tears everything down as it claws its way out. Harrison peers through a crack in the boards on the back door and sees a world of TV fog gray. Waves of water sweep across the faded veranda; beyond it is nothing.
Harrison recognizes Bridget’s screams. It’s the scream of all those faces on the wall. Those hide and seek champions. In unison, howling and moaning from beyond the Seawater, the screams and the storm engrave all of Harrison’s sins into his memory, and he knows, clearer than anything he has ever known, he will never hurt again.
I will help people, he vows.
“Get away from there!” Michael says from behind him. The owner waddles up and holds Harrison by the elbow, moving him away from the boarded-up door. Good, kind Michael. “We’ve lost the roof over the suite.” His face is the color of an old chocolate bar. His eyes are wide and sober. “Bridget broke through the window and the pressure popped the top right off. Like a dandelion! You believe that?”
“I’m so grateful you’re here to protect me.”
“Protect you? This baby will hold at 200 miles per hour, thank you very much. And old Bridget here can’t be blowing more than 130.” After a pause, he snaps his fingers and adds, “If that. You’re looking better. Get all that whiskey out of you? I guess hurricane drinking’s not for everyone. Now let’s get you away from that door.”
Back on the couch, Michael grabs the remote and turns on the TV but all he gets is fog. First he slaps the remote and then the side of the flat-screen. “Meh. I knew that was going to happen. So what do you want to do now?”
While Harrison shrugs he is thinking I’ll do anything. I will be good and kind, like Michael.
“You’re creeping me out, again. You’re a weird dude. You know that?” says Michael, eyeing his guest closely.
Another wind growls and shakes the inn. “Come on. TV’s out. The roof of the suite is gone. Let’s do some fortifying and then we’ll make more drinks. Survival, you know. I told you.”
It’s not much but redemption begins in the smallest acts. A tiny step towards the light is a supersonic flight from the blood-red darkness of his past. As Michael hammers another plank of wood to the window that opens up to the veranda, Harrison sits next to him and passes him nails.
“You were saying you did some pretty horrible things,” Michael says with two nails between his teeth. “I have, well, had, a friend, a best friend. We grew up together, went to school together. You know. A few years later he got into some real bad things. Robbed some people. Hurt a few others. Went to prison for it too. But you know, the way I see it, there’s nothing one can do that’s so bad they can’t ask for forgiveness. You might not get it, you might not deserve it, but you can always ask for it.”
“I don’t believe I deserve forgiveness. No, not for what I’ve done.”
“That’s not how it works. Ask me for it. Say, ‘Michael, will you forgive me?’”
“But I haven’t done anything to you.” Harrison thinks of the baton-like object in his suitcase, no more than 20 feet away. How could I? Who does these things?
“Hah!” Michael grabs his gut and laughs, the nails falling onto the floor. “Not so long ago you were on all fours in my lounge, vomiting demon’s blood. So yeah. I want an apology.”
“Will you forgive me?”
“I forgive you. See, not so difficult is it?”
Harrison is on the verge of crying, of transforming, when a ear-shattering explosion erupts and Hurricane Bridget bursts uninvited through the boarded-up back door. She screams all the screams of all those poor souls and she fires shards of wood in all directions. She thrashes and throws lamps and tears down the curtains. By the time Harrison looks up from his hands, expecting to find himself at the wall of hide and seek champions, Michael is lifeless and slumped against the stairs, a long and bulky piece of wood lodged in the side of his head and blood pooling in his empty eyes.
“NO! No no no no no!” Harrison races over, wind and rain tearing every fiber from the carpet; the TV rattles in its place on the wall and then comes crashing down. The big red couch moves left and right, left and right, as if waddling with the ghost of Michael trapped inside. “What the hell! Why!” Harrison cradles Michael’s bleeding head in his arms. “He was a good man! He had a long life ahead of him! A kind man!”
Hurricane Bridget swirls around them. A thousand little hammers badger the creaking structure. Other explosions come from upstairs. Out the open back door Harrison sees the endless gray of the Gulf. No land in sight. He knows he will soon join all those poor souls within it. In the endless gray. So he stays by Michael’s side, crying over him and mourning the loss of the kind man. The good man. And all those people.
There Harrison sits until the next morning, crying, until Bridget finally leaves the inn and finally the Gulf and the wind dies down, the rain slows, and the gray goes away. Out on the lawn, one palm remains standing and has become green once again. Harrison walks across the lawn, each step sinking inches into the mud. The sun is warm on his face and beneath his feet he feels the country breathing, wheezing from its bloodlust core. He looks at the damage around him, the inn still standing, albeit with a few holes here and there, and he can hear the songs of seagulls. The great divide calls him. The playground needs playing. He no longer hears a voice and is glad to be gone with it.
By evening, Harrison leaves the Seawall and heads west on foot. Outside Morgan City, a trucker picks him up on the side of the highway, says he’ll take him all the way to Houston.
The driver taps the steering wheel along with the beat of an old country song, and Harrison thinks he’d make a fine addition to his wall.
Daniel Newcomer is a writer from the American midwest. He has published short stories and poetry in Dreams and Nightmares, the Crack the Spine anthology, Literally Stories, Earth Island Journal, Bitchin' Kitsch, 34th Parallel, Visitant Lit, and Indonesia Expat. He is currently working on a novel and a book of poetry.