HAVING TAKEN A week off in celebration of Earth Day, the weather let loose its entire repertoire of tricks. The Hubble telescope, according to the paper, opened its eye to golf-ball-size hail; baseball-size hail was reported east of West. Funnel clouds and tornadoes descended across the county, the National Weather Service Station in Waco reporting sightings on the North Bosque at 3:55 p.m., the South Bosque at 4:25, China Spring at 4:27, east of the traffic circle at 4:52. Sirens met themselves going and coming, sounding like a barbershop quartet over-harmonizing. Temperatures dropped overnight from the high eighties to the high forties. After the hail had landed like meteorites on the dusty ground, twisters had picked up the whole and made flying mud pies of it, and then north central Texas was hit by the worst flash floods since the twenties. The paper carried daily photos of the swollen Trinity, the Brazos’s sister river to the east. It carried stories of Dallas County sustaining millions of dollars in property damage. But mostly it carried pictures of Dallasites in rowboats, Dallasites stranded on rooftops, Dallasites gazing from treetops down at drowned Cadillacs.
Deaths of humans and animals made the news. An unidentified woman drowned south of West when a flash flood washed out the two-lane farm-to-market. A couple was killed in a pickup when a bridge gave way and they were washed downstream. Teens capsized on an outing to Save the Marshlands. A seventy-year-old man was swept away on the bank of the Trinity, fishing line in hand. Five hundred dairy cows drowned as thousands of acres of farmland were inundated.
Rescue workers—Red Cross and fire departments—met further obstacles. Water pressure punctured an oil line and the surface of the river became an oil slick. The high water brought out poisonous snakes by the thousands, seeking higher ground. Fire ants swam on the surface of the bloated water, decimating everything in their path. Power lines were down; lightning ignited a 220,000-barrel tank of gasoline.
Then it hit the Brazos, and prurient readers stopped telling Dallas jokes. Thirty horses went under not far from Horseshoe Bend. All fishing docks closed. Flood control measures went into effect. And, extremely locally, meaning at my house, awful-alpine trim stayed in place, and it was too wet to move furniture or even to look at Theo’s castoffs in storage.
The flash floods, especially the story about the unidentified woman on a two-lane south of West, brought back to me the spring when an unidentified woman drowned south of Wimberly: my mother.
I’d been home alone, excited by the freedom at first; wondering what would happen if I called my boyfriend, Andy, to come over. But my daddy had gone fishing up at Lake Travis, which was sure to be flooded, too, and might at any minute pull into the drive. He was usually tanked on beer in those days, and fairly out to lunch when he wasn’t actually in his hardware store gossiping with his customers. He acted as if he thought I was still about ten; and I suspected I could have told him I’d been riding my bike if I stayed out all night, and he’d have believed me. There was this pairing of opposites at home that I couldn’t get a grasp on, with him like that and my mother always talking about teenage pregnancies and the unwanted babies nursing up and down the southern counties of the state. I imagined she’d have secured the pill for me if I’d asked.
She’d driven off that morning before school, waving to me, looking lovely as a film star (looking much like my daughters now, the thick hair, full lips, deep-set eyes, but dark where they were fair). Driven right out despite flash-flood warnings on the radio, and the low-water crossings outside Austin already underwater.
I didn’t consider my mother foolish for heading into it; I never thought her foolish. It seemed to me dedication: an activist on the front line of defense, standing for her rights. Even after Dr. Williams’s office had called in the afternoon to say the clinic at Wimberly had been canceled, I didn’t think her foolhardy to have gone.
When she didn’t come back, when I didn’t hear from Daddy, I turned on the television to get the news, having some halfhearted desire for drama, to have my family caught in the middle of the storm, everyone scared to death, us reunited in the downpour. Daddy, maybe, sobering up, losing his beer gut, getting his head out of the bait bucket long enough to notice we were around; Mother, frightened, chastened, sticking closer to home, perceiving that I, while not sharing the vast problems she daily battled, nevertheless had a few small needs kicking around.
One of the camera shots showed a swollen creek, an uprooted tree, the bumper of a submerged car. This flashed on the screen, held, flashed off, and the commentator reported that an unidentified woman had drowned on the road to Wimberly. I tried calling the bait shop up at Travis, but the lines were down.
By eleven that night, I was on the verge of frantic. I didn’t know who to call. Andy never came to mind; I couldn’t imagine calling his house in the middle of the night; it would appear as if I was presuming on his dad’s connection with my mother, asking for some favor that was out of order. Finally, at midnight, I decided that I’d call a teacher, late as it was, on the excuse that I might have to miss school tomorrow, both parents and their cars being gone; that I’d pick up my homework assignments from someone later. My favorite teacher, Mr. Johnson, taught Civics, but when I looked up Johnson in the phone book there were four pages of them, and although I knew he was called Ed, there were eight Edwards plus Edwins, Edgars, Edmonds, and E.A. through E.W. I also liked Mrs. Brown, my Texas History teacher, but she was married and in those days only the husbands’ names were listed in the phone books. So I decided it had to be Miss Moore. She was right up there with my all-time unfavorites, but I knew her name was Theodora and there couldn’t be many of those, and she was unmarried. Then it was fairly common for women to put only a first initial—this was to discourage obscene callers, but since no man ever listed himself that way, it was a giveaway—so I expected to find T. Moore. But there she was, Theo Moore, and I thought that pretty clever: sounded like a man, but was clear to anybody looking for her.
“Miss Moore,” I said, “I’m sorry to disturb you so late, this is Cile Guest, in your senior English class—”
“Why, yes,” she said, sounding very sleepy, a new concept for Miss Flour Sack. I’d assumed she never slept.
“I’m calling because, well, really, I’m not sure I can make it to class tomorrow.”
“Is anything wrong?”
“My mother’s down south of here and I’m afraid that—that she’s drowned.” I hadn’t meant to say that, or maybe I had. Maybe I needed to tell someone.
“Tell me about it.” She was alert now, and I could imagine her making notes in her large curling script on a flowered notepad by the bed.
When I finished, including the part about seeing the bumper of the car on TV, she asked, “Where is your daddy?”
“He went fishing, took off early. Said the rising water made the fish bite.” I didn’t know why I was telling her all that. Stuck a six-pack of Bud in his car and had probably stopped off somewhere and was on his sixth six-pack by that time. Probably Mother was trying to let us know she was fine and had stopped six pregnancies before nightfall but she couldn’t get through. I was talking too much, afraid to put down the phone.
“Now listen, girl, I better come over there. You leave and they won’t know how to reach you. Just sit tight. I need to collect my wits, get my notes for class and something to wear. Are you doing all right? You want me to send over the police? No, not while you’re there alone. We can call the Highway Department, they have those telephone networks. They can find a lost parakeet in the piny woods. Sit tight. Have yourself a glass of fruit juice, that’s a help for shock. Now I’ll be there in twenty minutes, you hear me, and I’ll knock three times. That’s so you won’t be scared to open the door.”
“Do you know where I live?”
“Why sure I do; I know where all my students live.”
She came and got on the phone to the Highway Department and they wanted to know what my mother had been wearing and what she looked like, and within the hour we’d got a confirmation. She’d looked at me and slow fat tears began to crawl down her fat cheeks, and she nodded her head and then looked a question at me, and then said, “You better tell it straight to the girl.” It took another hour to locate Shorty, stranded with a bunch of other fishing nuts, just as I’d guessed, in an all-night truck stop on high ground between the lakes, Travis and Austin. He’d seen the TV, too. It was six in the morning before the roads opened and he could get home—stone sober, his face a pasty white and his mouth sucking air like he was a catfish out of water.
“Nice of you to come over, Theo,” he said, remembering they’d met at the PTA. “I don’t know what she would have done, my Cile, here by herself. I thought I was going to go into cardiac arrest seeing that news item and wondering if she’d seen it, too. We owe you. We owe you, both of us do.”
“She’s my prize student, Mr.—Shorty. I’d have come anytime. I just wish she’d picked up that phone sooner. But it makes me feel real good that it was me she turned to.”
The rest was pretty obvious: they were thanking each other and hugging each other and before long they were doing whatever it was that fat people did together under the covers, and then one day, what seemed to me like about two weeks, Miss Moore announced to me (actually they’d discreetly waited until I was out of high school) that she and my daddy were going to tie the knot. I think she honestly thought I’d be tickled pink. I was anything but. I thought him fickle and faithless and callous, interested only in his gut and what nice meals he was going to have. I thought her calculating and pushy and looking to get herself a man even though she was already on the other side of thirty-five. I hated them both, sobbing myself to sleep the night she broke the news.
Then, when I dried my eyes, took note of the clear skies, when I could read that a big hurricane with a name that began with B was squalling out in the Gulf without coming unglued, I looked around for Andy. But he was gone. I called his daddy’s office: disconnected. I thought maybe his parents had divorced, so I went by his house: a FOR SALE sign was in the yard. Then he seemed to get enclosed in the other loss, wrapped up in it, as if the driving rain had dashed all my past against a brick wall.
All of which old stuff meant that I couldn’t land over there in Birdville while the Trinity and now the Brazos were wreaking havoc. I didn’t want to see that it didn’t remind them of anything; that they weren’t still tender on the nerve endings every time a flash flood washed away a car.
The deejay on the Best Country in the City was dredging up all his rain songs (“Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” “Singin’ in the Rain”), and my girls, when they came by to see if I was surviving, since I couldn’t move furniture or remove siding in all this extravagant weather, showed a rare flash of humor by both appearing in SAVE THE WETLANDS T-shirts.
It hadn’t dawned on me, not once, wrapped up as I was in reminiscence of a mournful kind, what the fact of Dallas County’s being underwater meant for Drew. And it was days before he got word to me.
I checked with Theo—to say that the flooding was messing up my move and to hear that it was messing up Shorty’s fishing—and she said, “That boy’s been trying to reach you. Wait a minute, I’ve got a number here. Hang on. You’re hard to get hold of. We were thinking about you.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“You been avoiding us because of that woman drowned on the two-lane up there south of West.”
“Sorry.”
“No need. You have a right to take care of old business your way.”
“No need for that, girl. I know what you’re feeling. The way things are doesn’t change the way things were.”
“That’s deep.”
“I’m practicing up for the Academy students.”
“I’ll come by to use your phone, mine isn’t in, if that’s okay.”
“Too late for lunch. How about supper? Your daddy’s sitting in there staring out the window, telling himself every hour on the hour that in the long run this is a big help. That when the water’s high, baby fish that would usually be eaten by big fish can hide out in the grass and weeds underwater, bass and stripers. That five years from now he’ll be fishing rivers of plenty.”
“Sounds like he’s in bad shape.”
“He saw the story about the drowning, too.”
“I forget sometimes he doesn’t have a heart of fish bones.”
“You forget a man never gets over his wife dying on her way to meet another man.”
I looked out at the weather. “I forget a lot of things, I guess. Including that you were a big help.”
“Tell your young man to come have supper, too. Shorty’d like to see him again.”
“We’ll see. He may be at the farm.”
The number I got for Drew, which I didn’t wait to use from their house, but called from a pay phone, since it was local, was his house, what I thought of, had always thought of, as Mary Virginia’s house. I wouldn’t have called him there in half a million years, but if he’d gone to the trouble to track me down, then I guessed I better use it fast. Maybe she was standing by his side and had to hear him say in my ear that he was sticking by his wife and wished I’d leave him alone.
“Williams residence.” It was the Swedish contingent. Lord, what was I supposed to do?
“I have a call for Andrew Williams.” I tried to sound like a telephone operator.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Long silence.
“Hello.” He sounded as if he’d like to bite nails in two.
“This is the party you’ve been trying to reach, sir.”
“Cile? Goddammit, where are you? I tried the parsonage and that Dr. Song answered so I hung up on her. Then I checked your name with information, no listing. I couldn’t remember your dad’s first name—or if he had one—but I knew Guest, since that was you, and I knew Birdville, so I looked in the book and there were Edgar and Theo on Nightingale. I said it’s got to be them. When I got your dad and asked him ‘Where’s Cile?’ he said, ‘Who wants to know?’ ‘Andy Williams,’ I said, thinking that’s how he’d remember me, and he said, ‘You the boyfriend?’ I said, ‘I’m the boyfriend.’ ‘She’s not here,’ he said, which he could have told me right off. I asked him, polite, ‘How can I reach her?’ ‘You got two arms, used to have.’ He hasn’t changed a bit.”
I could imagine the conversation. “Why are you at home calling? What’s the matter?”
“My in-laws had to get out of Dallas. They’re at the farm, waiting for the waters of the Trinity to go back down so they can go home and reclaim their Park Cities’ Georgian Colonial Second Empire Queen Anne homes.”
I laughed, thinking of his boys: architects in training. “You ever seen their houses?”
“More than once. One style piled on the other. You’d have to see to believe. Quarter of a million they were running when we got married.”
“Trey and Jock must have visited up there.”
“What is this? What’s going on? I’m trying to tell you that the locusts have descended on Granddad’s property, and you’re getting wet thinking about Romanesque English Tudor mansard mansions in Dallas.”
“I’m getting wet because I’m standing in a phone booth at the corner of Lago Lake Drive and the Fairgrounds.”
“There’s a phone booth there? I can’t picture it. Which corner?”
“While you’re dry and snug and Olga the milkmaid serves you coffee from a silver service.”
“Sorry. Look, don’t get in a huff.”
“Snit. I’m getting in a snit, trying to get some news.”
“They’re up there, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Mary Virginia’s mother, her sister, her sister’s husband, who is crying in his Beefeaters because he’s lost more than the rest of us ever see in a lifetime. He’s lost his—don’t those phone booths have a door, honey, did you pull it shut?—mallard duck collection. Doesn’t that sock it to you right here? Plus he and his partner, they’re both named John, everyone in Dallas is named John, the women are named Bitsy. That’s what Emvee’s sister’s named, Bitsy. That’s what they call her, Emvee. Anyway, the Johns have lost their drawers on ParkGate for sure in the flood.”
“Drew, wet feet here on Lago Lake. The South Bosque is over the tops of the banks and running down the street.”
“Don’t you hear me? I’m saying we can’t meet up at the farm. We can’t go up to the farm and everything is on hold, on account of the land in question being more or less under the waters of the Trinity at this point. I wonder if the supercollider people have budgeted in Flash Flood of the Decade costs.”
“So Mary Virginia is there?”
“That’s right, playing den mother.”
“So you’re here.”
“I’m here. You’re talking to me.”
“I’m here, too. Why aren’t we here together?”
“Where? Where can we go?” He was almost shouting at me.
“I have a house, Drew.”
“It’s for the berries, ha, ha.”
“It’s old; I thought you liked old.”
“There’s old and there’s old. It’s old, but not old.”
“My consulting architects say it’s vintage.”
“I can’t remember if I put the bikes where they can’t get to them.”
“I’m going to hang up. I hate phone sex.”
“God, honey, wait. I’m going nuts. I don’t know what’s going on. Them up there at the farm, trashing it, probably. Me down here baby-sitting these preppies.”
“How’s Lila Beth taking all this?”
“Has the flu. Can’t come to the phone.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I’ll have to bring the boys with me Saturday, if I can locate them in this acre of mowed carpet.”
“What’s Saturday?”
“Cinco de Mayo. I guess you’ve been leading too busy a social life to remember.”
“I am not dating. I am not dating anyone including you.” I took a breath, inhaled, exhaled. “Sorry about your eardrum.”
“I get out of my mind, everything being nuts like this, them up there and me down here.”
“I’ll have my girls with me, too, now that you mention it. Weekend visitation has begun.”
“If it’s still raining, they’re holding it in the Shrine Temple Hall.”
“If not—?”
“Heart of Texas Fairgrounds. I thought you said you used to go, looking for me. You forget?” His voice had an injured tone.
“I remember. That’s in walking distance of my house on Huckleberry, my new old house.” Mine did, too.
“We’ll just meet there, okay? I’m not going to be able to call you. This took two days.”
“We’ll meet there.”
“Where?”
“Rosa’s Chalupas,” I said.
“How do you know there’s a Rosa’s Chalupas?”
“I made it up.”
“Nearest thing, then.”
“Nearest thing.” I didn’t care if we were in the Shrine hall, or under a tent, or in a windowless beer joint or in the kitchen at the farm. I just wanted us dancing again, holding tight, moving to music.
“Oh, God, Cile, I’m steaming up this bedroom with its half acre of manicured broadloom.”
“Visibility in this phone booth is one inch. So’s the water in my shoes.”
“I wish things would get back to normal.”
“What time Saturday?” I asked.
“Let’s go early, so we’re not pushing through ten thousand people, but late enough so we can afford to feed the kids until the band starts.”
“Five o’clock?”
“Five’s good. I don’t suppose the preppies will be having a tennis match in this weather.”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“We had the four of them along at Czech Fest. That won’t be bad, having them along again.”
“Yeah.”