In The Falling Light Page 4

  “Bailey,” Arlene was shouting, “I want my hands free to grab anyone who might slip, so I’m going to pass Dylan forward. Ricky, you’re going to help. Put him tight in between the two of you.”

  Both kids nodded that they understood, and whatever fear they might have had for themselves momentarily vanished as they undertook the deadly serious task of protecting their youngest. Within moments, Dylan was safely tucked between his brother and sister, Bailey covering him with her body. In the midst of the horror, Dell McCall felt a burst of pride for his children.

  It was short-lived, as the situation and bitterness crashed back in on him. He could have evacuated them days ago, when Sophie was crossing Florida. They could have left when she brushed Louisiana, showing no signs of diminishing, then again as she made landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast. But everyone was so certain she would slow down and blow out in the Hill Country, even the TV weathermen, that it would just be hard rain and high wind by the time it reached them. What Texan picked up his family and ran from that? They had been through heavy weather before. Dell supposed that had been at the heart of it. Pride. Too proud to be chased off his land.

  And then there she’d been in all her terrible glory, ripping overland at record speeds, and it had been too late. The wind and thunder had gotten them moving in the early hours, and the dreaded grumble of water rushing across the main road – cutting off any hope of driving out – had sent them up an aluminum ladder and onto the roof mere seconds before a dark tide bristling with uprooted trees had surged across the flats, surrounding their house.

  He looked at the barn, with its safe, dry loft and much higher roof. I should have taken them there, he thought.

  New gusts attacked out of the early morning, rain cutting hard through their clothes, making them all tuck and hunch against it, closing their eyes. Dylan cried loudly until a long barrage of thunder drowned him out.

  You did this to them, Dell thought. You led them up here to die.

  He clenched his teeth so hard he thought they might crack.

  The wind lifted for a moment as the storm drew a breath, and he looked around once more. All gone. The horses drowned in their stalls, his fine Dall sheep either swept away on the Texas tide or drowned in their pens. The house. Arlene’s photo albums. Troy’s flag. All gone.

  The thought of Troy McCall’s flag – handed to Arlene two years ago by a somber Army colonel and later placed reverently over the mantle, now just another piece of floating debris – caused an ache in his chest. Nineteen-years-old and killed by a roadside bomb on some obscure, numbered highway outside Baghdad, dead in a war that began when he was still Ricky’s age. It was Dell who had given his approval to the enlistment, caught up in his eldest son’s excitement over adventure and patriotism and career possibilities, the chance to be more than a sheep rancher.

  He looked at his family shivering in the storm. Troy wouldn’t be the last McCall child to be led to destruction by their father.

  Dell looked to the barn again, remembering a night shortly after they’d gotten the news, him alone in the dark, surrounded by the warm sweetness of hay and horses, alone with his shotgun resting across his knees. He had been beyond crying, his body exhausted and drained, eyes distant and raw, a single shell in the chamber. It was this fine woman in front of him who came along in the dark, taking the shotgun and holding him, and he’d discovered he did have more tears, the two of them crying together. She had saved his life.

  And as repayment for that gift, he had now sentenced her to death.

  “Daddy?”

  Dell squeezed his eyes shut, his fists tight and shaking.

  “Daddy, look.”

  He opened his eyes to see Ricky pointing to the sheep shed, and Dell wiped away tears and rain as he saw what had caught his son’s attention. An animal was scrambling out of the floodwaters, nails scratching and slipping as it clawed furiously up the corrugated tin slope, finally gaining purchase and moving on unsteady legs to the peak. It was a coyote, a female he had seen before, recognized by her drooping left ear. She gave herself a shake from tail to head, then stood there shivering, looking down at the brown sea churning all about the shed.

  “She’s alone,” said Ricky, who remembered her too, and now they were all looking. “Where’s her pups?”

  Dell and Ricky had been out riding a few weeks ago, and saw her fifty yards off, loping across the grasslands, three little pups trotting behind her in a line. As a rule, sheep ranchers will shoot a coyote on sight, and Dell was no exception, in fact he’d had his rifle with him that day. He could have easily made the shot, but allowed her to go on her way, not sure why. Not because of Ricky, who was old enough to know what a plague coyotes were to a sheep herd, and not because of her pups. Every rancher Dell knew would have dropped each one in turn without hesitation, getting them before they got bigger and could do real damage. But he didn’t, hadn’t even wanted to. He had no explanation for his son or himself, other than a private suspicion it probably had something to do with Troy, but it was confused and they were thoughts he had no desire to explore.

  Now, as he looked at her, scrawny and shaking and alone on a rooftop with no understanding of what was happening to her, he was glad he hadn’t done it. “Her pups are gone,” he told his son. “She couldn’t save them.”

  Arlene reached back and squeezed her husband’s knee. It was small comfort.

  For a while no one said anything, just watched the animal pace from one end of the roof to the other, turning her head from side to side, tail tucked. Finally it was Ricky who asked the question.

  “Are we going to get rescued, Daddy?” Behind him, Bailey looked up to see the answer.

  “Of course we are.” He had to raise his voice so they could hear him over the wind, and doing that allowed him to hide the way it cracked.

  “Is a helicopter going to pick us up, like we saw them do on TV during Katrina?”

  “They can’t fly in this,” Bailey said. “The wind’s too strong.” It was snapping her hair around her head and face as if she was being electrocuted.

  Arlene shot her daughter a look. “They’ll just have to use a boat, won’t they, honey?” She gave her husband’s leg another squeeze.

  Dell said that yes, a boat would come for them. He couldn’t see his wife’s eyes, and that was just as well. They wouldn’t have to watch each other lie.

  Another rising surge of wind ended further conversation, and the McCall’s tucked down as lightning flashed within the violent clouds, rain pelting them without relent while thunder rolled across the Texas sea. They were all shivering, the wind and rain turning cold. Only Dell kept his head up, looking at the coyote which had ceased pacing for the moment and stood midway along the rooftop, her pelt hanging in wet straggles. She winced at every crash of thunder, and though he couldn’t hear her, Dell imagined she was whining as well. Wet and whining and hopeless.

  He saw that the water was halfway up the shed’s metal slope, and a glance down to the right showed him that the gutters of his house were gone, a good foot under now. The brown sea rolled against his roof, and a huge oak tumbled past, branches turning slowly as it floated quickly by. Some debris was tangled with it; a red cooler, a lawn chair, the bloated shape of an armadillo corpse, a telephone pole with a snarl of wire trailing behind, thumping briefly against the house before it was gone. Something swollen and gray with stiff legs sticking out of the water chased the debris, and Dell realized it was a dead mule.

  Minutes later the white box of a delivery truck cruised past on the far side of the front yard tree, leaning at a sharp angle, and Dell recognized the logo of bright flowers on the side as Dawson’s Orchids. Gonzales County was one of the biggest orchid suppliers in the U.S., and Dell knew the owner. The truck’s cab was submerged, and with a chill he wondered if Lyle Dawson might not still be in the driver’s seat, buckled in tight with his dead hands on the wheel.

  While Dell watched Texas float by, the water climbed another foot up his roof.
<
br />   Arlene was tugging at his pants leg to get his attention, and she half turned and moved her head close so the kids wouldn’t hear her. “What are we going to do?”

  Dell looked at her for a long moment. “We have to hang on as long as we can, and hope someone comes.”

  Her green eyes never left his. “No one’s coming.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Not in time to make a difference.”

  She turned back to face her children and said nothing more.

  Dell silently cursed the storm, cursed himself, then just stared at the coyote. She was pacing again, looking and sniffing, back and forth, but nothing had changed except the water was closer. He wondered if she realized she was finished. He doubted she could grasp a concept like that, and didn’t really expect her to start howling as if lamenting her fate. Animals didn’t do that. He suspected she would go out with more dignity, anyway. She was lucky. She wouldn’t have to stand there helplessly and watch the storm take her pups. The wind screamed at them then, the rain an endless lashing of needles, and they tried to become as small and tightly wrapped as they could. No one made a sound, not even little Dylan who just cowered and shook against his mother, and they waited. Waited for a salvation Dell knew wasn’t coming.

  The temperature dropped further and they were all shivering, the wind whipping their clothes and buffeting them, trying to push them off. Rain streamed off their bodies, down their cheeks, into their eyes and noses, and the volume of the torrent around them raised, more and more debris cracking off the edges of the roof. Out front, the branches of the big oak were whipping madly, and once in a while a larger limb would snap off with a sound like a gunshot, falling to be pulled away. Abruptly there was a great tearing noise, like a deck of giant cards being shuffled, and an entire section of shingles was ripped away, one after another in mere seconds, each spinning away into the sky.

  Dell scanned the horizon as best he could. He had been through tornados, most Texans had, and twisters were famous for teaming up with hurricanes to add their own flavor of death and destruction. In this low light and masked by the constant shrieking, one could be upon them before they knew it. And there would simply be no way to hide from it.

  He palmed the water off his face, rubbing it out of his eyes, squinting into the storm. The sheep shed was gone now, completely submerged and for all he knew, torn away completely. The coyote was gone as well, and no one had witnessed her passing.

  The water had risen to within four feet of the peak and his family.

  The crunching of another floating tree bumping and brushing against the house made him snap his head to the left, and for an instant he saw the oncoming arms of a hundred black branches, reaching to tear his family away, and then the tree rolled and swept past. Dell let out a gasp, realizing that it was only a matter of time before another tree arrived, floating higher, one that didn’t turn away and brushed them off as casually as a man sweeping toast crumbs off a table.

  A cracking of branches made him look right again, towards the front yard oak, and he saw his capsized pickup was still firmly wedged against it. Something else had floated up onto it and become stuck. Something wide and silver. Construction site material? It was hard to tell through the gray curtain of rain. After a full minute of staring he realized what it was.

  Arlene saw it at the same moment and knew immediately. “My God, is that a boat?”

  A wave rocked the silver object, turning it slightly and showing it to be the aluminum hull of a capsized fishing boat, the black prop of an outboard motor jutting out of the water. A red stripe ran down one side, and big, upside-down reflective letters read LEESVILLE FIRE RESCUE.

  Arlene gripped her husband’s knee in a fierce clench. “Ray Hammond.”

  Dell stared at the inverted hull. Ray Hammond was chief of the Leesville Volunteer Fire Department, and the crew leader of the town’s swift water rescue team.

  “What happened?”

  Dell shook his head. “Nothing good.” People’s lives in small towns are hopelessly intertwined, everyone knowing everyone’s business and all the little details of their lives. But that was also what made that sort of life so wonderful. Ray, his crew, their families were not strangers, and to the McCall’s, were extensions of their own family. The sight of that empty boat shook them, because they both knew it hadn’t floated off a trailer somewhere. Ray and his boys would have been aboard, out in the thick of the nightmare as soon as the water started rising, doing their duty and trying to help their friends in the community.

  But Dell was thinking more about the boat.

  He judged the distance, about twenty yards directly in front of the house, fast moving water in between. Water filled with debris that could sweep him away, providing the current didn’t do it first. He could get a head start on it by going off the far end of the roof, buying maybe fifty feet of upstream advantage. Then swim like hell.

  A tangle of barbed wire and fence posts rushed past.

  Arlene was a better swimmer, no doubt about that, but she wouldn’t have the strength to turn the boat upright once she made it. He wondered if he would. Dell was not an impressive swimmer, but twenty years of ranching had kept him fit. It would have to be enough. The current would fight against the boat, and despite his strength it might take it away before the job was finished. Even if he flipped it and held on, could he get the motor started? It was underwater now. Would it crank? He realized there was a time not so long ago when his biggest problem was lambing, a month-long season of labor and midwiving. He had always thought his life depended upon its success. Funny how quickly things changed.

  Dell noticed Arlene was staring at him, and turned to look at her. She raised her voice over the wind. “How am I going to handle three children up here if you drown, Dell McCall?”

  “What choice do I have?”

  “You can stay alive. You can stay here with your family and hope for rescue.”

  He pointed at the boat. “Ray and his crew were the only rescue we were going to get. Bailey was right, they can’t send up helicopters in this, and the water’s going to be up here in two hours, probably less. No one is coming.”

  His wife pushed wet hair aside and stared at him, but it fell right back into her eyes. Then a gust hit them, making them both hunch, the force of it ripping away more shingles and creating whitecaps on the water’s surface, howling across the rooftop, adding spray to the downpour.

  He kissed her long and hard, then turned on the peak and started scooting towards the opposite end of the house. Bailey and Ricky saw him going, and cries of “Daddy!” came to him from behind, distant in the wind as he fixed his eyes on the edge ahead of him. Though it seemed longer, it took only minutes before he had crossed the rain-washed roof to where it dropped off at the end, turbulent waves spinning only a few feet below, smashing against the side of the house before flowing around it. He stared down at the turning current and wondered about whirlpools. Ahead, out over the stormy flats, all manner of debris was floating their direction, mostly trees, but also something big and flat and dark. He watched, entranced by the sight as it slowly rolled over in the water, wheels up.

  A boxcar.

  Dear Jesus. If that thing hit the house it would take it right out from under them.

  He stood, one foot on either side of the peak, arms outstretched as he balanced against the wind, straightening slowly. A forceful gust drove him back into a crouch, but when it passed he straightened again. He didn’t dare look back at his family, knowing that if he did he would lose his nerve and crawl back to them. He took several quick breaths and dove.

  The sea welcomed him like an expectant killer.

  The water was cold, faster than he had anticipated, and no sooner did his head break the surface that he slammed back against the wall of his house, instantly losing whatever distance the dive had given him. He heard a hollow, sucking gurgle and felt it carrying him to the corner, where it would pull him under and around, sending him speeding past his family in seco
nds.

  Dell kicked out against the house and started swimming, pulling hard against the current, straight into it. The draft at the corner tore at him from behind, dragging, and he kicked to get away, to get distance from the suction before he tried turning towards the boat.

  Rain and wind beat at his eyes, and he sputtered in the brown water. It was so damn strong, and he felt like he was swimming in place, going nowhere, like he was in one of those fancy motorized lap pools rich folks installed in their houses. Only here there was no switch to shut off the current. This was nothing like swimming in still Texas lakes or slow moving rivers. He tried to remember the lessons of his youth, swimming in the heavily chlorinated pool at the ‘Y’ in Brownsville. Face down, stroke, turn to the side and breathe, stroke, face down, stroke, breathe, kicking, kicking all the time, never stop kicking. Fight the urge to dog paddle.

  He had moved only a few yards from the house, and still it sucked him back.

  Dell began angling to get away from that deadly corner of the house, still into the current, stroke, stroke, kick, breathe. Something caught at his pants leg and tugged hard, a branch maybe, please, God, not more fencing, he would be like a fish in a net. The object pulled free. Stroke, stroke, kick, breathe, stroke STROKE SWIM LIKE A MAN GODDAMIT!

  He lost track of where he was, didn’t dare look. Had he already been carried past the house? Was he struggling towards nothing while his family watched him flailing away into the distance? Stroke, stroke, pulling harder, kick, kick, muscles burning, oh my God why didn’t I take off my boots? Stupid! Kicking harder still, turning his face to the right for a breath. The long dark shape of the boxcar was closer, tall white letters down one rusting side reading SOO LINE. It was heading for the house. Couldn’t think about that, swimming, pulling hard, hard, HARDER!