Acts of Nature - By Jonathon King Page 0,36

leather couch with his wife in their bunker, front to back, like trembling spoons in a darkened drawer.

“I’m glad the kids are at school.”

Harmon only nodded a response to the first words his wife had said in an hour. They’d sent both of their kids to Notre Dame in Indiana. Landlocked. No hurricanes. No earthquakes. And God’s own prejudicial eye watching out.

They waited for the wind scream to stop. Then they waited longer, until the numble went away, until silence. Harmon checked his watch: ten a.m. When he finally opened the bunker door, his house was intact. He used the big flashlight to move through the living room and kitchen, spraying the beam up into the high corners, looking for gaps, for water stain. When he got to the back door he opened it carefully, waiting for something to fall, a tree limb, a piece of roof tile, the sky itself.

Out on the patio he heard the stiff ruffle of leaves, mostly from the giant ficus tree that he could see had blown down and now straddled his fence. In the pale light he did a quick assessment: there were two additional sheets of screen ripped away from the pool enclosure. The turquoise blue water had turned dusty, the surface layered with dirt and leaves and twigs that had blown in through the openings and settled. But all the ironwork still stood. He looked up and off to the south and saw the raw hide of his neighbors’ roof where it was missing a quarter of its half-barrel tiles, leaving the black shred of tar paper exposed. To the east there was an unfamiliar gap in the horizon and Harmon had to think for a moment. What was gone? What was missing? Then he realized the Martins’ huge gumbo limbo tree, one hundred years old and seventy feet tall, had been pulled up and toppled, removed from sight.

“Is it safe?”

Harmon turned to see his wife, her shadowed figure just inside the doorway, her toes at the threshold, feet unwilling to move. After Andrew she had moved around the destruction of her home like a zombie, eyes wide and dry and uncomprehending. After three days she found their family scrap- book, clippings of the kids’ ball games, pictures of first days at school, birth announcements, all soaked and ripped and ruined. That’s when she started to cry and Harmon talked her into going to her sister’s in Michigan. He stayed to clean up and clean out a lifetime.

But this storm was not the heavyweight Andrew had been. When Harmon walked around his property to the front there were plenty of trees down. The streets were cluttered with debris: broken roof tiles, branches as thick as a man’s wrists, and the crumpled metal and plastic framework of the solar panels that had once been mounted on the Connellys’ rooftop. Across the street Donna Harper’s van had been pushed off her driveway and it now sat at an angle in her side yard. Harmon looked down the street. The new neighbors with the tape on their windows were unscathed. They’d gained another degree of false confidence.

He was still standing in the street, watching folks venture out to do their own survey just as he was doing, when his wife came to the front door.

“Ed. It’s the satellite phone,” she called out.

Christ, he thought. What the hell could they possibly want now?

THIRTEEN

When he woke up, it had to be from the smell. Wet, turgid, soaked earth odor like a compost pit in the rain that had just been forked and turned. That dead fish smell of someone’s catch that had lain in the bottom of the boat for three days while the fishermen went on a bender and then woke to a day when they were penniless again and had to get back to the job they both loved and despised. Buck had been there. And the morning after Hurricane Simone it smelled like he was back. He’d slept through the storm. Not because he was drunk and not that he hadn’t tried to get drunk. His ability to sleep through anything had come from prison. The constant night sound of men snoring, coughing, spitting, and jerking off. The antiseptic flavors of Pine-Sol and industrial-strength cleanser wafting up your nose. Buck had spent years in a place so foreign from his home that his only escape had been in dreamless sleep and it was as if he’d trained himself to do it, to fall