“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 him 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 porch 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.
The first time we had come over, to reconnoiter, the island had been deathly silent. There was not even any birdsong. Just the flat wash of the waves on an alien beach and here and there the flutter of a shredded flag.
But a week later, when we came leading a caravan of pick-ups and SUVs laden with lumber and rolls of screen and shingles, the island had come stubbornly alive again. Everywhere, clearing and construction were going on. The air rang with the sound of hammers and power drivers and the growling of bulldozers. A good many cottage owners stood about, their bewildered dogs leashed beside them, watching the wreckage of their pasts come down and the tentative beginning of their futures rise. Some left and never came back, we learned later, but a surprising number of Sullivan’s Islanders were rebuilding.