Arlen just stared at the kid for a moment, too disoriented to speak or move. Then he managed a nod and struggled out of bed. A blanket was snarled around his foot and he almost fell, but caught himself and tore free. The motion set off a bolt of pain that began in his head and ended in his gut, nausea sliding in behind it. He bent over, bracing his forearms on his knees, and sucked in a few breaths until it passed. Paul moved from the door as if to help, but Arlen held a hand up, breathed a few more times, and then straightened. His eyelids scraped like sandpaper with each blink, and his throat was dry and scorched.
“Sorry,” he said, his voice harsh as a rasp on a cedar plank. “I shouldn’t have… I didn’t mean to drink like that. It’s just the money was gone and I—”
Something tore on the side of the house, and Paul looked at the window as if he might be able to see through the boards to the other side.
“Let’s get on downstairs, Arlen.”
“Time is it?”
“Noon.”
Noon. He’d been up here for an entire night and morning.
They went down the steps and out into the barroom. The electric lights were still on and the fan still blowing, but even so the room was dark and hot with all the windows and doors sealed. Rebecca Cady was sitting with a radio at a table in front of the bar. The radio was off. She looked up as they entered, let her eyes hang on Arlen’s for a moment, and then said, “The water’s coming up.”
“Out of the ocean?” Paul said it like he didn’t believe it.
She nodded.
Paul crossed the room and went to one of the windows. Arlen noticed now that there was a jagged shaft of gray light where a piece of the board had been torn away. Paul put his face to the glass and stared at the beach.
“How high will it get?” he said. “It’s getting close to the porch.”
He was trying to say it calmly enough, but there was a tremor in his voice.
“I’m not sure how high it will go,” Rebecca Cady said. There was no tremor in hers.
Arlen crossed the room and joined Paul at the window, nudged him aside and looked out at the shore. The palm trees to the side of the back porch were bent at an incomprehensible angle—how the trunks didn’t split, he couldn’t imagine—and the Gulf of Mexico had turned into a wild, thrashing expanse of gray water speckled with white froth. Where the beach had once ended, now there was only water, furious water, pushed ahead by the wind and climbing with ease. The waves splashed no more than twenty feet from the base of the porch now, and even as Arlen watched, they seemed to grow closer.
“House is raised?” he said.
“Yes,” Rebecca Cady said.
“By how much?”
“Three feet,” Paul said quietly. “Block pylons. It’ll move through them instead of around the sides of the house. Higher than that, it’ll be on the porch.”
Arlen didn’t answer, still looking out at the water. A frond tore loose from one of the palms and snapped through the air, plastered onto the window just below Arlen’s eye with such force that he gave an involuntary jerk. The wind’s scream rose, as if it were laughing at him as it flattened the tops on the waves in the tossing sea. He stepped back from the window and shook his head. How could anything unseen have such savage strength? You could only watch its effects; the beast itself was invisible.
He followed Paul to the table and sat with Rebecca Cady, each of them listening to the sounds of the storm. He nodded at the radio.
“What do they say?”
“That it’s here.”
“That’s all they say?”
“The seawall failed in Tampa. There’s flooding.”
“How far away is that?”
“Fifty miles south. That’s nothing like what happened in the Keys. They still don’t have a death toll settled on.”
Arlen and Paul looked at each other until something crashed against the back of the house and gave them an excuse to turn away.
“Why don’t you turn it back on?” Arlen said, pointing at the radio.
“Saving the batteries.”
“I can’t believe your lights are still on.”
“It’s a good generator.”
“Sure is,” Arlen agreed. “How’d you pay for it, with no business?”
This time her silence lingered. He’d just about given up on a response when she said, “My father put that in. Things were different then.”
“Where is he now?”
“In a coffin.”
“A lot of good men are,” Arlen said.
She scowled and turned away. Arlen said, “Is there beer in that icebox?”
“I should think the last thing you’d need right now is another drink.”