Cajun Waltz (28 page)

Panic overcame Abe at one point. He told Tarzy about doing bad things for money and bad things with children that Tarzy listened to with incomprehension and dread, for he could tell that Abe was making a final confession. Abe pulled out of his spiral, apologized for his babble and made up a game to play, betting each other on the time between flying debris hitting the sides of the locker. The lags got longer as the wind abated. They noticed that the water inside the locker had leveled off. The storm was subsiding. The promise of morning encouraged them.

It was around eight
A.M
. when witnesses first saw the wall of seawater about twelve feet high, a brown boil of mud and landscape debris, rolling like a bulldozer from the shorefront over the land. Whole neighborhoods were obliterated by its impact. Sallie's plucking shed already had lost its roof and siding to the wind; the tidal wave took the rest like a matchbox hit by a five iron. It tore her house off its pilings and carried it for miles before the house hit the banks of the Intracoastal Canal and shattered into pieces. The wave knocked the cold locker off its slab and flipped it like a vandalized mailbox. The locker bobbed upside down in the current, its inmates drenched and bruised, terrified yet alive, and, once the shock passed, heartened by the fresh air and patch of daylight visible through the floor vent that now framed a glimpse of morning sky.

The locker began to fill. Abe and Tarzy treaded water alongside broken pieces of table and shelving. Soon there was less than two feet of space between the water and the ceiling, which a moment ago had been floor. They floundered beneath the vent overhead with faces upraised like seals begging for herring. Abe's breathing wheezed and he said “oh God” repeatedly. The boy wedged his fingers into the vent to hoist himself up. The grate broke away, leaving a square hole that gave a view of speeding clouds and sideways rain. He reached his arm through. The air on his skin was a tease of freedom inches away. He yelled for help but his words carried nowhere. Abe, face purple, gripped Tarzy's waist to raise him higher. When his strength failed they splashed back into the water. Coughing for breath, they tried again, and again after that, Abe hoisting Tarzy so he could signal for help through the vent. The effort gave hope. They would try once more. The boy was preparing to launch himself upward when down through the hole tumbled a large black snake.

Tarzy recoiled from the smack of the serpent hitting his forehead. He thrashed screaming under the water with the thing writhing cold in his face. He clawed it away and got clear of the water for an inward breath and outward scream. He and Abe hugged the sides of the locker as the snake slithered to and fro in the sloshing water. It bumped into Abe, who shrieked. In recent months cottonmouth numbers had erupted in the marsh along with the rats and nutria. Tarzy knew the snakes were poisonous.

Another one dropped through the vent. Then another. Abe splashed and kicked trying to get away from them. His eyes were swollen and his face looked about to explode. He stopped and studied his hand as if he'd broken a fingernail. “I'm bit.” He sounded relieved to have it done with.

Tarzy treaded water in the opposite corner. He stayed stone still whenever one of the snakes came near, letting it slide like an eel against him. He kept his eyes down to watch for them in the water and also not to watch Abe, whom he feared would die from the bite right in front of him. But Abe's heart had already stopped. The storm was passing and the sky outside had turned powder gray. Light through the vent illuminated the inside of the locker. Tarzy looked up to see Abe's head flop back with open eyes. Abe's body settled down in the water like a sponge in a tub. A snake slid up his chest and coiled on his upturned face. Its diamond head swayed, its black tongue flicked. Tarzy's terror became extreme.

*   *   *

R.J.
AND
D
ELLY
left Georgia Hill a little before midnight but didn't reach Hancock Bayou until evening the next day. Driving into the storm, they got as far as Belton, a one-pump village between Hackberry and Holly Beach, before spillover from Calcasieu Lake made the road impassable. Dawn was hours away. Houses were dark, streets were empty. They parked near an abandoned AME chapel that judging from its cinderblock walls and oil-stained floor had once been an auto garage. Raindrops hit like bullets and the wind made a train-whistle sound. The dash from the car to the church left them soaked. It might have been romantic under other circumstances, lovers in the rain and so forth. Not tonight. They'd fled a violent scene whose scope of injury they could only guess. Their crazy leap to go rescue a child seemed hopeless now that its adrenaline rush had subsided over the hours of difficult travel. R.J.'s side burned where the bullet had passed through the muscle above his hip—not fatal, not gory, but still painful as a blowtorch. Delly had driven, letting him sleep or mumble or stare at the wiper blades. There was nowhere else in the world she wanted to be.

The church door was unlocked. There were four pairs of rough-hewn benches divided by a narrow aisle they could just make out in the dimness. They guessed that the narrow windows down each side were made of stained glass because they were darker than the walls. A small round window above the altar had been blown out by the wind, yet the storm noise pouring through seemed strangely far away. R.J. lay back on one of the benches. Delly sat beside him and studied the hole where the altar window had been. R.J. shifted in a spasm and bumped his head on the wood. She slipped her hand under his head and lifted it onto her lap. The altar window resembled an eye or some kind of escape hatch. He shifted again. His head pressed against her belly below her breasts. She looked down. Her vision had adjusted to the dark. His eyes were open, looking up. He lifted his hand and gripped her upper arm. “Thank you, Adele,” he said.

“You're welcome.”

She kissed him then. Not long. Just once. Just right.

*   *   *

I
T FEELS LIKE
heaven's joke the way skies turn blue and breezes balmy right after a hurricane passes. Songbirds appear out of nowhere to serenade families picking through the wreckage. In the case of Audrey and Cameron Parish, you can't leave hundreds of dead bodies in such a small area without them showing up all over the place. Delly saw dozens, muddy and battered, after she and R.J. switched from car to foot once the ground approaching Hancock Bayou got too boggy to drive. Sand from the beaches clogged the coast highway. Standing water, deep in parts, covered the lowlands to the north. People got around in skiffs and pirogues, calling out names, looking for loved ones. The sound of outboard motors gave a sense of common labor, like homeowners mowing lawns up and down a suburban street. The pervasive shock was somewhat relieved by the sight of people organizing themselves into work crews and search parties. Like survivors emerging squint-eyed from caves, they would swap tales of the holocaust later. Right now there was work to do.

On the drive here from Belton, Delly had spotted a liquor store, broken in and taken a quart of Everclear to douse R.J.'s wound—two holes, entry and exit, about six inches apart and linked by a subcutaneous bruise rapidly turning purple. The bloodstain on his trousers ran to his knee. He grimaced at each step, one hand on Delly's shoulder.

They slogged inland. Channels of seawater encircled mounds of muck, steaming under the summer heat, everything draining toward the mud-colored lake that yesterday had been marsh. The mounds were matted with rain-beaten grass and infested with snakes. Seeing them glisten and glide like worms in a manure pile terrified Delly until she began to think of them as no different from everyone else today, homeless and so tired.

A motor sounded behind them. An old woman maneuvered her skiff toward the open water, her gaze steady, her face stolid as a wooden Indian's as she worked the outboard tiller. R.J. waved to her. “Sallie!”

Sallie Hooker was much amazed. Even fear for Tarzy, wherever he was, took a momentary backseat to seeing the dead return to life. She veered into the bank and, in one of those moments when massive unlikelihood becomes life's new condition, helped R.J. and Delly into her skiff before continuing her search for the missing child.

Motoring over the flooded land, they saw leafless trees and broken rooftops projecting from the water like the spars of sunken ships. It was getting late. Twilight over wetlands is always lovely; it was enhanced in this case by the absence of intact structures, everything primal and placid. Coming finally to Sallie's property, they saw her house was gone, its pilings sticking up bare. The cold locker too was gone. Sallie cut the engine. The vessel skimmed in silence through the flotsam in the water, the dead animals, weeds, and junk. She didn't bother calling Tarzy's name.

The sky went from orange to cobalt as the sun descended. No one spoke. A flight of ducks pitched down in the distance near a floating platform of wood. Delly gasped to see the platform was covered with snakes. Other snakes swam thickly around it like penguins around an ice floe. To fall overboard would have been a bad way to go, like being eaten by dogs or buried alive. Delly moved to the center of the skiff.

The three of them sat lost in themselves as the skiff's momentum carried it closer to the platform. The snakes were piled in a clumpy mass. From under the pile one of them poked upward like a cobra called by a flute. Delly studied the curious sight. Her gasp came simultaneous with Sallie's. The erect snake was a bare human arm reaching up through the glistening squirm. Alongside the platform now, they saw it was the top of a large submerged box with only a few inches still above water. The upraised arm, thin as a broomstick, wobbled at the elbow before retracting through the pile of snakes and vanishing inside the box.

The skiff almost capsized in the next moments. Sallie batted the snakes away with a paddle and jumped on top of the locker, which bobbed like a leaky canoe. She plunged her hand through the vent and swirled it around till she took grip and hoisted with all her strength. It wasn't Tarzy. The wrist she clasped was wearing white shirtsleeves, the body below as heavy and soggy as a boot pulled from a pond. She let go with a cry of biblical anguish and the arm slid back out of view. Now R.J. too leaped onto the locker, breathing through his teeth, his side on fire from pain. He knelt to the vent and called Tarzy's name. The reply, spoken inches from his face, was a whisper. “Please get me outta here please.”

Tarzy, over the long and horrible hours, had grown numb to conditions inside the locker, suspended afloat in the dark with the snakes and Abe's corpse as the locker drifted to deeper water and started to sink. The sound of voices outside had put him into frenzy. He screamed. He clawed at the vent to try and tear it wider, ripping his fingernails bloody. His great-aunt was a vision above him. She fell to her knees and put her face to the vent where his nose and eyes were barely visible above the water rising inside. Her weight and then R.J.'s sunk the locker further. Water spurted from the vent and Tarzy's face submerged. She cried out all kinds of prayers.

Night had fallen. Delly watched from the skiff as R.J. moved to the side of the locker and peered into the black water. Snakes were everywhere, thick and twisty like noodles in a pot. He rocked forward and dove in soundlessly, like a navy frogman mining a harbor. He groped along the side of the locker, sweeping aside the snakes and pulling them off his neck and shoulders, till he found the upside-down door. He took a breath and went under. The next sign of him was Sallie's scream that he was inside, that he'd unlocked the door and was inside with the child. She crawled on all fours to the edge of the locker and stared at the water with the mad intensity of a dog watching kids in a pool. Tarzy surfaced with a gasp. Sallie seized his wrist and hauled him out in one swoop as if sharks were at his heels. She took him in her arms and passed him to Delly in the skiff.

Time moved fast and slow. Sallie climbed in the skiff and yanked the cord of the outboard. Tarzy sobbed. He'd been bitten, he said. Sallie shoved off from the locker.

“No!” Delly screamed.

Sallie circled the locker in the dark. Once. Twice. Delly saw her counting in her mind, gauging how long to search before deeming R.J. gone and rushing Tarzy to shore. It was enough. She swung the tiller homeward and gunned the motor.

Delly launched herself out of the boat and swam the few yards to the locker, splashing wildly to scare off the snakes. She heard Sallie yelling behind her. She got to the locker and pulled herself up. She knocked away the snakes coiled there, grabbing them in her hands and hurling them overboard like wiggling ropes. She waved to Sallie to go and had no reaction when Sallie did so. She crawled along the locker's edge calling R.J.'s name. Like a proud pirate marooned by his shipmates, she didn't bother to turn and watch the skiff depart in the darkness. Soon the motor faded and night sounds of the marsh replaced it.

*   *   *

A
GUIDE IN
his mudboat found her the next day. She was on her knees atop the locker amid all the snakes she'd killed overnight with her shoe, and she was not in her right mind. She refused to leave there for one thing, clawing the face of her rescuer as he tried to coax her into his boat. She begged him to help her find her friend who'd vanished under the water. The guide realized it was dementia talking and slapped her to calm her down.

Seth would be her savior in the weeks and months ahead. With R.J. dead, Arthur Franklin dead, and Fiona placed in the care of her father's relatives, Delly had nothing left. Seth couldn't pass up the opportunity to make a fresh start that her mental breakdown presented. Once Delly stabilized into more or less her recognizable self, he undertook a supremely patient courtship lasting more than two years. When at last he proposed they get married, she accepted because why not? He was nice, he was good, he loved her—and he never once asked what had possessed her to run off with R.J. that night or what might have passed between them. It was an infinite kindness on his part, since of course there was no good answer.