Baptism in Blood(25)
Crazy.
He put on his bright red L.L. Bean rainwear—pants as well as jacket and hood—as if that would make a difference. Then he dug an old silver flask out of the pot cabinet in his kitchen and washed it out with the water he had left standing in the master bath. The flask had belonged to his father. The old man had taken it to football games, back in the days when people actually went to football games, instead of watching them on television. David filled the flask from a nearly full bottle of Johnnie Walker Red that sat on a shelf in the living room bar. He almost never drank liquor. It made his head fuzzy and left him unable to read. At the last moment, he took a long swig out of the bottle itself, before he put the cap back on it and put it back. He wasn’t going to be reading anytime soon. He felt he needed—courage.
Crazy.
He went out the front door and stood in the little sheltered entry. The scene outside was even crazier than the way he was thinking. There were trees down all along the beach road. They were big trees, too. The trees that were still standing were bending almost sideways in the wind. There were power lines down, too, but no live wires touching the ground as far as David could see. A few years ago, there would have been wires everywhere. Now the wires were mostly underground. It was only out here, where the summer people lived, that the power company hadn’t gotten around to the conversion.
David took the flask out of his back pocket and took a swig. The Scotch burned going down. He thought about going back into the house and forgetting this whole thing. He thought about Nag’s Head again. He put the flask back into his pocket and started off. He was a coward, he realized. A coward about water. He hated the thought of himself drowning in a black and choppy sea.
As soon as he was out from the shelter of the entry, the wind hit him. He felt it like a dozen hands pummeling him. When he hadn’t been subject to it, it had looked fairly far away—up on the road, maybe, high in the trees. Now he realized there was nothing on the beach to save him from it. He turned his back to it and tried to go forward without stumbling.
The sand was wet and slippery. The little incline up to the boardwalk was impossibly steep. David pushed against it and pushed against it, whatever it was, something coming at him, something strong. He suddenly realized what it was people saw when they thought they saw God. The world around him seemed very much alive to him, full of conscious intent and purpose. He thought of it as a grinning, angry man, bent on destroying David Sandler in particular, singling him out.
He got to the boardwalk, scrambling. He stumbled across to the road and then across the road to the start of Beach Street. The houses there hadn’t been as lucky as his own, in spite of the fact that they were farther from the water. Two of them had their roofs blown off. All five of them were missing glass from their windows. These were the houses that belonged to summer people. None of them had been boarded up. David went between two of them, to get out of the worst of the wind. That was when he felt water rising up around his boots. He looked down and saw it snaking up on him. Water from the sea.
Jesus Christ, David thought, making himself move faster. He looked back at his house, but it seemed to be safe. Waves were coming up over the deck now, but nothing was wobbling, nothing looked unstable. If the water came in much farther, though, these houses he was walking among now were all going to fall.
David wove in and out of yards—yards of houses where people lived year-round now; most of the windows boarded up—and finally stumbled out onto Tolliver Road. It seemed to be deserted. Everybody must have gone up to the high school, David thought. There were soggy pieces of paper and old tin cans everywhere. Somebody must have forgotten to take in his garbage cans. There were roof shingles everywhere, too. Some of the houses had had all their shingles on one side ripped off. A big pinewood doghouse had been lifted up and deposited in the middle of the street. It had lost most of its roof shingles, too.
David made his way between two half-house cottages and then out onto Main Street finally. The rain was coming down so hard it blinded him the second he stopped shading his eyes with his hands. Rose MacNeill’s turret was sagging. Something had smashed into the side of it and cracked a support beam. The bookstore’s door was open and paperback books had spilled out, as if they were liquid, too. David saw the bright cover of a romance novel about American Indians. Only the library looked as if it had been kept reasonably safe, and how long could that last? The wind was rising again. The rain was coming harder. I should have stayed in the house, David told himself again. Then he pushed himself into the partial shelter of the hardware store’s doorway and reached for his flask.