THIRTY

Paul Flood was not a careless man.

On Tuesday night, just in case, he had made sure that the minivan was filled with gas and the flashlights were well-placed. He even turned the vehicle around so that it was facing the road, only scant minutes from the bridge and the relative safety of the mainland.

Once across, he knew a back street that connected with a county road farther inland that led across the swamps to a state highway, placing him and those in his charge a full 10 miles from the coast before the first threat of major traffic delays. We shouldn’t even have to run for an emergency shelter, if it comes to that, he told Hank and Harry. He figured they would be able to drive straight to Atlanta, then come back later to gawk at the damage.

Should the storm hit (and Paul possessed the skepticism of someone who has spent a moderately breezy night sleeping on a gymnasium floor because he’d been bluffed out of his comfortable home), he would be more than ready. He had set his alarm for 5 a.m., just in case.

Paul was positive, sure to his no-nonsense, science-and-math bones, that he knew when to leave. He wouldn’t be with the old ladies who cut their vacations short for no good reason, and he wouldn’t be one of those heroes trying to surf a hurricane. There was a certain grace in timing, he felt: not too early, not too late.

His plans would have thwarted the first surprise that greeted them Wednesday morning.

At 11:15 the night before, the television weather report had “situated” the storm 180 miles out to sea, meandering toward a position west of Mobile, barely moving at all, with top winds of 95 miles per hour. In the face and voice of the local reporter, a young woman barely out of college who still had trouble differentiating Utah from Colorado on the weather map, there was disrespect.

“Jim,” she had told the anchor, “I think this storm is a little bit of a sissy.”

But by 4:30 a.m., the hurricane apparently had decided to reinvent itself, something Theron and Belle Crowder might have appreciated.

Without warning, it had begun moving forward at 25 miles an hour, and it had swung like a magnet, like a bull to a red cape, toward the part of the Florida Panhandle that contains Sugar Beach. Its wind speed increased to 120 miles per hour and would reach 140. It was, before anyone could think about preparing for its undependability, on a course that would have it making landfall 10 miles from Sugar Beach, before 9 a.m.

This hundred-to-one shot Paul was prepared for. But he hadn’t counted on the other surprise, the one that would turn self-sufficiency into negligence.

Across the sound from Sugar Beach is the mouth of the Wewahitchka River. The sound catches everything that the Wewa sends down: red clay from the Georgia foothills, pesticides, tree limbs, the discarded and drowned. The sound reciprocates by sending a variety of items back up the Wewa: small pleasure boats, larger commercial vessels, barges to haul pine wood back down to the Gulf and the big world beyond.

Sometime after dark the evening before, a tugboat had maneuvered a barge many times its size into the sound, seeking to wait out the weather, see which way the hurricane was going, then continue on up the Wewa to Bonner, Georgia, where harvested pine trees awaited.

The barge was sitting idle and harmless in the quiet shallow water behind the island, one of dozens that would bide their time overnight there in any given year, weathering large and small storms. If the hurricane took a turn toward Sugar Beach, Wewa Sound was as safe a place as any for a barge and a tug.

The tugboat’s crew was catching a few hours’ sleep. Someone was later alleged to have been on duty at 4:30 that morning.

The water sometimes sends its warning even before the wind does, to those paying attention. And the Gulf was showing Harry, Ruth and Naomi some uncharacteristic muscle by the time the three of them went to bed in the predawn, making promises to talk more later. Harry wondered if the promises would be valid in sunlight.

The pounding surf did not really register. Ruth later would realize that she was, in her distraction, equating it to the ocean waves to which she was accustomed.

Around 4:30, Harry collapses on their bed and assumes Ruth will follow soon, overwrought as she is.

He closes his eyes, just for a second.

Harry figures he must have been asleep for only a few minutes when he hears the horn’s relentless, maddening blast. At what seems the exact same time, Paul bangs on their door.

“Get up! We’ve got to go.”

It’s as loud or urgent as he has ever heard Paul.

“Oh, God,” Ruth says, wide awake. “Oh, my God.”

She is dressed and out the door in the time it takes Harry to sit upright. He feels as if he would like to throw up and then go to sleep for a very long time. That he has time to do neither is soon evident.

Normally, the barge would have been in no danger of losing its mooring.

But Harry and Ruth have drifted beyond normality, into a world where men who have worked too many hours think they deserve to rest rather than stand watch, where taxpayers see no sense in building a second causeway over a body of water until it is ready to devour them, where hurricanes change their minds.

When the barge breaks loose, it is a quarter-mile from the causeway, closer than it should be. In a calm sea it wouldn’t matter, but in a calm sea, it never would have lost its mooring in the first place.

Paul knows there is trouble even before the alarm sounds. The slow-motion collision, the discordant, ghostly grinding of barge metal with bridge metal, followed by the crashing of something heavy into shallow water—he hears it all.

And he doesn’t need The Weather Channel to know he has erred, in a position where his pride has left no cushion for mistakes. The sound of the wind and the surf tell him all he needs to know.

Now, he’s going through the house, not running but with hurry in his steps and his voice, rousing everyone. Hank and Naomi have to come for Harry and help him out. He sees Ruth standing there, waiting for him, wringing her hands.

Harry sees that they are in various stages of dress. Ruth is wearing her nightgown; he’s still in his old-man’s pajamas. Naomi, Tran, Paul and Hank have on a mixture of daywear and nightwear, whatever they could find quickly by the illumination of the hallway light. Stephen and Leigh, the most mobile, quickest to reach full consciousness, have T-shirts and jeans, even shoes.

Leigh asks her father again what’s the matter.

“It’s the causeway,’ he says. “I think we need to leave now.”

They want to know more, but Paul isn’t talking.

“Ruth?” Tran says. She’s been silent until this point.

Ruth looks at her, mute.

“Happy birthday.”

Ruth just nods her head. The others laugh, all except Paul, who tells them to hurry up. He shoos them out the door, trying hard not to show panic. They spill into the van, Paul last, keys in hand.

The engine doesn’t start on the first try.

“Oh, please,” he says it like a prayer, and the second time it catches.

They head down the street to the cottage’s rear, parallel to the Gulf and the sound, and Harry knows there’s a problem before they even reach the road leading to the causeway. Fuzzy red stars shine out at them from ground level up ahead through the foggy, soupy air, some of them twinkling on and off as drivers momentarily take their feet off the brakes.

They are stuck in a traffic jam 100 yards from the left turn that, in another 100 yards, they expect to lead them to permanently dry land. On an island which Harry figures can’t contain more than a few dozen people by this time, they are in gridlock. Ahead, people are blowing their horns, as if some Sunday driver, some lost tourist, is the cause of their delay. Endlessly, tirelessly the alarm continues bleating. It seems to be coming from the tug.

“Shut up!” Stephen says, putting his hands to his ears, speaking for them all.

Paul pulls off the street, gets out and starts running. Hank goes with him, taking a step and then stopping to tell them he will be back. After a few seconds, Naomi follows.

In the car, the rest sit in their abandonment and wonder. In the distance, higher than the brake lights and out in the sound, they see other, larger lights. They can hear angry, desperate, foreign voices, too far away to understand, even if they knew the language.

In a few minutes that seem to Harry like an hour, the three of them come back. They’re arguing, then grow quiet as they reach the minivan.

Inside, Paul tells them the extent of their problem.

Where the barge hit, it tore a section that Paul estimates to be at least 150 feet long out of the center of the low-slung causeway.

“Normally,” he says, “it wouldn’t be much of a swim.”

Normal it isn’t, Harry thinks, and he knows he doesn’t have to remind Paul that Ruth could not swim 10 feet on a sunny day with angels throwing rose petals on the water in front of her. And the 1935 Virginia state breaststroke age-group champion wonders if he could do a lap in a pool right now.

Harry can barely keep his eyes open. He should be energized by fear and desperation, but he can’t seem to raise any adrenaline. In saner times, he supposes he might be asking someone how far to the nearest hospital. He feels that some unwelcome corner has been turned, and the door at the end of the tunnel has Worse written on it.

Hank reaches over and turns on the radio. The stations still operating are full of laconic yet somehow urgent voices: “… residents of lower Bay County should evacuate immediately …” “… took an unexpected turn and has picked up in intensity and speed, with landfall now predicted for between 8:30 and 9 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time …” “… winds that could reach 140 miles per hour …” “… somewhere between Bay Shores and Sugar Beach …”

By the time Paul starts the van again, it’s past 6. In the line up ahead, there’s chaos. It won’t be light yet for more than an hour, so most of what can be seen are outlines, but they can tell that the occupants of two of the cars are fighting. Men, women and children have all poured out of two other vehicles and now wrestle with and gesture at each other in the chill and wind like some primitive tribe trying to dance the storm back to sea.

“Shit,” Paul says, and the rest are quiet.

Some of the stranded are doing U-turns in the soft sand and heading back to their cottages. Some have left their 4-wheel drive trucks and are walking and running in the direction of the severed causeway.

“Well,” Paul says, and he sounds a little more collected, “we ain’t going to figure anything out sitting here.” And he backs up and turns around.

The next thing Harry knows, Ruth is waking him, back at the cottage.

Paul leads them inside. They go silently and all settle in the living room.

“Are you OK, honey?” Ruth asks, and Harry realizes he is leaning against her. He can’t seem to wake up.

He squeezes her hand with as much strength as he has and tells her he’s fine.

Paul, Hank, Tran and Naomi try to attack it logically: They can either try to ride the storm out in their cottage or they can try to get across 150 feet of choppy water.

“It looked to me like part of the road was still there, just broken off,” Naomi says. “Maybe it would be like two short swims instead of one long one.”

Paul and Tran, it turns out, have four life-jackets. They try to figure how those go into eight people, then look to Paul, who is, despite everything, still the reigning expert.

“I just can’t see it,” he says, slowly and deliberately. “I know Naomi could make it, and maybe some of the rest could, but …”

“Then what you need to do is leave the ones that can’t swim back here,” Ruth says. Ever the pragmatist. “Harry and I have a better chance here than we do out in that water.”

This is violently vetoed, even though to Harry it makes sense.

Paul goes outside. The wind is getting stronger, slowly but inevitably. An aluminum lawn chair from a house somewhere down the beach flies onto their deck, barely missing him, and crashes into the side railing.

When he returns, he says he thinks the cottage will hold, but he calls Stephen outside to help him with something. They come back with the small, bright-green boat they store underneath, next to the pilings; they use it for fishing in the sound. And he has the four life-jackets. They have to turn the boat sideways to get it into the living room, where it looks ridiculous and ominous.

“Will we need that?” Naomi asks, what they’re all thinking.

“No,” Paul says, “but it’s like wearing your seatbelt. You want to be sure.”

No one else says anything.

They find a radio station across the sound that is still on the air, and they are told what they already know: Sugar Beach is cut off, not a tethered link to mainland America anymore but the independent entity it was until the bridge was built 20 years earlier, proud, free and vulnerable.

The station reports that a rescue operation is being attempted. On that thin hope, they leave again, get back in the minivan, now swaying in the gusts of wind, and try the causeway a second time. They get closer, to the bridge road itself, where they park and walk to the sundered edge of the pavement. It is broken cleanly and falls off like a tabletop. There, most of the island’s remaining population is standing and pacing. One woman in front of them is screaming loudly enough to be heard above the howling wind. Two men are holding her, to keep her from diving in. Another woman, her voice quavering, tells Ruth, leaning and shouting into her ear, that the screaming woman’s husband tried to swim across. They both did, but she turned back.

“They could swim good,” the woman says, then turns her eyes back to the blackness and water. Harry knows it’s near dawn, but he doubts that the dark will lift anytime soon.

Across the way, on the bridge, someone has managed to produce a light like the ones highway crews use at night. It only succeeds in blinding those on the island. In the intermediate distance, what appears to be a charter boat is bouncing around, bobbing up and down in the waves. It seems to be meant for their salvation, but Harry can see that it is making no progress at all. Several men have elbowed their way to the front of the crowd, urging the boat on, sure to be first in line if it happens to reach the island.

They never see the wave that combines with the wind to flip the small boat, and Harry will never know what happens to their would-be rescuers. The boat, under no one’s control, smashes sickeningly against the almost-submerged ruins of the causeway’s center span.

Harry can see that their chances of getting across are diminishing by the minute. Only one of their group would be an even bet to make it; Naomi doesn’t mention this, and neither does anyone else. By half past 7, when they turn back, they all know they will be in the cottage when the brunt of the storm hits.

To Harry, it is almost a relief to leave the panic and return to what he thinks of, in an attack of morbid humor that makes him almost giggle, as their last resort.

Others follow their lead. Those who are left greet this day, darker still than a half-moon night, with dread.

Paul and Hank haul the life-jackets back up the stairs to the living room when they get back to the cottage. Inside, everyone tries to dry off and get warm. Tran thinks of breakfast, something to get them through a hurricane, but then the power goes off, and they are reduced to peanut butter, jelly, bread, orange juice and soft drinks. They take their meal on the floor, as far as possible from the windows Paul and Hank have tried, belatedly, to cover.

Paul sits down next to Ruth.

“Momma,” he says, “I’m sorry. But we’ll get through this. We aren’t going to let anything happen to you.”

Ruth pats him on the knee. Neither she nor Harry has any appetite. Harry slips away for more pain pills and then returns.

He has somehow nodded off when the storm hits full force. He is dreaming, and the howling that was him, wartime Harry, wrestling with Sergeant Stevens, is the hurricane, upon them at last.

He rubs his eyes and looks at Ruth beside him. She is pale, and her hand feels cold as ice, even compared to his. Harry notices that his ears have popped, and there is a briny smell even inside, as if the wind is blowing salt through cracks they can’t even see.

“Well,” he says, just to say something, “we’ll ride this thing to Mexico if we have to.”

Neither of them is in a mood for lightness or brave chatter, though. Harry is surprised, when he can rise above his own fear and pain to think about it, that Ruth isn’t running around in circles, stark raving mad.

For an hour and a half, until sometime after 10, they sit in the near-dark, saying nothing, afraid to let the storm know they are there, hiding from the bogeyman like frightened children, trying to ride it out. Water is running down the inside of the walls, coming in sideways under the molding. The roof groans for mercy.

Nobody wants to see what’s outside, and nobody wants to turn the portable radio back on. Harry sees that Leigh is crying, and he thinks Stephen might be, too. Hank, trapped in a small space with seven other people, seems to be concentrating on something in the far distance that only he can see. Naomi is too nervous even to smoke.

Then Tran remembers. She gets up and scurries into the kitchen. Paul is about to go after her, to see what’s wrong, when she comes back in, bent low in case the window is blown out, carrying something in front of her with both hands.

The cake.

Ruth’s birthday cake has 70 candles on it. Tran has in her pockets kitchen matches and a knife. She lights three of the candles before giving up, and they all quietly urge Ruth to blow them out. She manages, through her tears, to wetly snuff them.

Tran cuts a piece for each of them, and they sing “Happy Birthday” just above a whisper, so the storm won’t hear them.

They are eating birthday cake when the wave hits.