Between the Walls

Daddy says to put my jeans legs in my boots for the hookworm. The water’s been up past my socks since five this morning, maybe a little higher now. But even though I’ve been glued to the couch back all that time, watching the dark basement apartment start to float, kept my whole body well shy of the grass blades and asphalt pebbles, the drifting corpses of crickets and palmetto bugs and the occasional small squirrel—even though I’ve been careful, he still keeps jabbing a work-gloved paw at me and shouting for me to stay put. When I ask him, what’s a hookworm, what they’re doing in stormwaters, he wipes the glove across his brow and explains about septic tanks, animal shit, the many and varied dangers currently swimming through our living room. Hookworm’s the most likely of them, he says. Also the safest.

“How come we ain’t left yet, then?” I ask him, gesturing to the half-open front door. “If it’s so bad, how come we’re still sittin’ here? Waitin’ for Jesus?”

I learned this phrasing from my mother, something Daddy well knows. He fires off a look at me so angry it knocks the mouth right off of me, then shakes his head and moans a little in worry. “You sit tight,” he orders, and lifts one great black rubber boot out of the murk to start lunging for the kitchen. The splash of so much displaced water is unbearably loud in the lull after hours of heavy rainfall.

Outside, a set of concrete steps leads from our door up to the yard, also flooded but markedly less so. We are all of us well below sea level, and I still remember from a late fall storm two years ago what it all looked like when we did finally come out, to get up under the engine on the Dodge or check for trapped animals. The sky, still night-dark and huddled close to the roofs, grumbles with a distant menace.

The rain’s been after us since late Thursday, since the sirens gave way to the rushing sound of the storm wall, the sound that mutes all others, that swallows the place where the clouds meet the treetops and the satellite dishes. Daddy has told me, before tonight, some minor disaster or another in the years leading up, that the flooding isn’t the worst of it we could get—it’s tornadoes that are the real fright. How we know if they’re comin’? I asked, and he told me to listen for the sound of trains in the sky, a great shrieking cry like the agony of God himself.

I watch him now, as he hoists an enormous white cooler and blue lid from the waterlogged cabinet beneath the sink, dries it out with a towel from the top shelf of the hall closet, and begins to fill it with non-perishables and supplies that he keeps in one of the overheads for exactly this purpose. I am dutifully hushed while he does it, and he makes no attempt at conversation, does not try to calm me with even-toned explanations or little jokes. I know kids at school with fathers like that, the ones who are conscientious or looking to quell their own fears with talking—but Daddy is a man of quiet, deliberate love, who often lets a silence provide in his absence.

Still, the spaces between when he does speak have grown with the hours, and without them I am getting scared of all that we might be forced to do: leaving home, a long walk through parasite-filled waters so dark I can’t see past their surface. I watch sickened as Daddy’s boots, just two inches higher than the flooding, occasionally fill when he takes a heavy step and upsets it too greatly. But I don’t warn him when it happens, and he either doesn’t notice or insists on pretending. Slowly, by degrees, I can feel the compulsion to protest filling up the base of my throat. I want to beg him for something to happen faster: either we get out now, empty-handed, and leave all the dying insects to swim for the counters and tabletops without us, or else we get the radio and call someone, Uncle Ken or Paul MacMartin’s dad, who’s friends with my dad and has a truck and a house farther inland. Just so long as we do something. Once the eye passes, the rain will come again, and we can’t still be here when that happens. I know this, and Daddy knows this.

He opens another cabinet, gets up on the toes of his boots, searching. He swears under his breath, but in the silence I can hear it like a shout. I open my mouth to ask what’s the matter, when we both hear a sound from outside that makes us swivel and tense up.

The sound is like an animal, a dog or a wolf. A howl, long and wavering, composed of a number of smaller, shorter howls, an ow-ow-ow-owwww. But the voice that makes it is unmistakably human-like, lacking the deep resonance of a real animal’s cries. A mocking facsimile of the real thing. But it’s loud, carried over the eerie silence of the eye outside. And it feels close. A man standing in the yard, between the buildings of the complex. No more than sixty or seventy feet from the stairwell to our door.

I turn to look at Daddy. But he keeps his eyes on the half-windows that peek out onto the yard. He starts to take slow steps toward them, clearly making an effort to keep the water from giving him away,. It whispers low threats around his boots, but manages to stay quiet enough.

The man’s howl comes again—high, drawn out, pulled from powerful lungs—and then it collapses into a spate of laughter that makes me take in a quick, silent breath.

Daddy never stops walking toward the windows. But it takes him a long minute to get there, being careful as he is, and by the time he has reached them the howls have been gone for some time. He places his hands to the brick frame, gets up on his toes again, searching. Then he comes back down, grunting.

“Looters?” I ask, in a half-whisper that carries itself just far enough to reach him in the quiet.

He shakes his head. “Got to be the dumbest looters in the world if so. Eye’s gonna pass in less than an hour.”

“Then we can’t stay, right? We gotta get somewhere higher up, don’t we?” I start to breathe faster, grab at the sleeves of my big puffy jacket he made me wear, the one that’s making me sweat through my shirt in this soaked through place. “I-I don’t wanna—”

“Quiet!” he commands, in a harsh whisper that strains to keep from yelling. But now that he’s at the windows I can see his face, at least better than the pitch-black of the kitchen. And I can tell that he’s nearly as scared as I am. It wasn’t like this two years ago. That was just a Category 1, a “humble drizzle,” my Uncle Ken had joked with me at the time. (He had been a frightened talker, too, I realize, right in the middle of all of this.) And there was no man outside last time. No howls.

“I’m thinkin’,” is the only other thing Daddy says for a while. But whatever he’s thinking, it’s the same as before, because he just goes back to putting things in the cooler. Cans of beans and stock. A hammer and a roll of duct tape. Batteries, AA and D. Five pairs of socks and one spare pair of boots. He places these gingerly, snaps the lid on with equal care, hammering at the corners with the pinky end of his fist. I’m about to ask him what’s next when we hear the howl come again.

It feels more sudden this time, somehow, more startling. Perhaps this is because we had assumed the man had moved on; perhaps it is because, this time, the sound is much louder, much closer.

Daddy’s head jumps up again, toward the door, and I can see in the faintest light from outside that his chest is rising and falling irregularly, his breath coming in ragged as he tries to keep it silent. After a few moments, he shuffles across the length of the living room, right up to the edge of the couch where I have been waiting. “Erin,” he starts, bending slightly at the waist, placing one hand on the couch arm, “sweetie, I—I’m gonna tell you somethin’ now that… it ain’t gonna make you feel good, but you’re a big enough girl now that you gotta know. All right?”

I nod, dreading whatever will come next like a sharp peal of thunder.

“Now look, there’s uh…” He hesitates, closing his eyes and opening them. “There’s something your granddaddy used to tell me about, when we had storms like this, long time ago. He said that, a couple’a times, visitors would come by after something real bad had happened. Storm, tornado, big fire, all those kinds of things. They’d come, and they’d sound just like people, but… but they ain’t, all right? He never wanted to tell me more than that, but he was real clear about that part. And they’d… they’d wanna come into people’s houses. Sometimes they’d act like they were come to help out; sometimes they’d try to scare folks, you know, drive ‘em out like sparrows out of a bush. But you just have to—you have to hold your ground, and stay quiet, no matter what happens. You understand? You stay put and you don’t say one word. I-I know it’s hard to talk about, but if we need to—if you need to—I want you to know you can handle it, and what to do. You understand?”

With the greatest effort, I move my chin up and down. It’s beyond my capacity to answer him with words.

He nods, understanding. “Good. Now I’m gonna—”

“Hey!” a voice interrupts us. It’s close now, nearly to the top of the stairs. Barely at the edge of the yard. “That someone down there? Ya’ll need help?”

Without speaking, without deliberation, before the man has even finished asking, my daddy is making for the door. No longer is he trying to hide the racket he makes, and the water is like a storm of its own as he takes great leaping strides past the dining room table, past the unplugged TV, toward where the door still stands half-open with the muted light trickling in.

And just as quickly, I can hear the heavy, watery steps of feet up top, rushing to meet him. By the time he gets to the threshold, they’re splashing down the stairs. It takes him a few moments to fight the door back into place against the flood water, which is why the hand of the strange man nearly wedges just inside, nearly keeps it from pulling shut. Instead, he just slams against the old, splintered wood, causing the door to shudder in its frame.

My daddy flinches and takes a half step back, the only time in my memory that I have seen him show real, actual fright.

Because the power went out late last night, and we’ve been saving flashlight battery, I cannot see the face of the man at the door. Probably this is a blessing. But I can hear his breathing, heavy and slow, with a slight hitch at the top of the inhale. Mad at my daddy. “Now you come on!” he calls to us through the screen, the words coming in a furious burst. “Ain’t no need for that. We’re just—lookin’ to help out. Storm ain’t over, you know. We got a truck out front. Just lookin’ for people to take up the hill. Nobody’s safe down here until the other side, you got me?”

My daddy says nothing. He isn’t looking at the man, even. He’s looking at me. And while I cannot see his face any better than the stranger’s, I understand what the look means. He is commanding me to say nothing, under any circumstances.

The man outside gives a sudden, barking laugh. “Hey, ya’ll!” He shouts up over his shoulder. “Two down here!” He turns back and lowers his voice again, but when he speaks, it feels so, so much worse than when he was yelling. Because this time, he’s speaking directly to me.

“Hey,” he calls. “Hey, you. Yeah. You go on an’ tell your daddy the water’s got another foot an’ a half to go down there. Ain’t like it is for the ground-level ones, you hear? Floodin’ just goes downhill, just like shit. Right outta the upstairs places and in here. Whole place is gonna be under by the time this thing’s over. You don’t get out now, you both gonna be holdin’ your breath.”

Daddy is as still as the eye itself. His gaze on me, never moving. His hands at his sides. I can hear his breathing, underneath the other man’s. Counting on me.

A long minute passes, maybe more. The man at the door does not move, not once. I spend the minute trying not to shake, afraid that he will see me do it, even though none of us should be able to see anything the others do. I have almost grown used to the silence when the man pounds a fist against the door again, shaking it so hard I am afraid it will buckle over and collapse into the water. “You gonna make me wait outside all goddamn day?” he demands, in a full-throated scream. “I gotta come in there and haul your stupid ass out, just so you don’t die down here?”

I have never heard a sound like this. Like a shrieking and a growl mixed. I can hear some of the same rawness, the same uncontrolled glee, that I heard in his wolf-cry. If that was even him at all. I find myself wishing, against all reason, for the trains in the sky to drown him out. For the rains to come back and the water to rise until everything is washed away, even us. Anything would be better than this.

The man descends once more into silence. We are all three as quiet as the morning. Outside, no bird-calls, no passing cars. As though all sound was sucked away by the wind. I just keep looking at my daddy. He stands with his back to the wall, where he can see us both, me on one side, the man on the other. I am impossibly scared that we will remain this way for the rest of our lives.

Finally, the man takes a step back, lets out a short, high-pitched laugh, almost like mine, and mutters under his breath, “Don’t matter anyway.” He sloshes up the steps in a series of leaps, taking them two at a time in spite of the flood water’s weight, and the last thing he says before he’s gone is to yell out, into the silence, into the false calm of the eye, “Never mind! Guess they’re gonna just die the normal way!”

It is a long time before either me or my daddy makes a move. Maybe twenty minutes, maybe closer to an hour. Without light or sound, without any way to locate myself in the world, time stretches and folds. The water makes soft splashing sounds against the walls and table legs. My daddy’s breathing softens, then becomes inaudible again. With surprise, I realize that I’ve been listening to the painful thudding of my heart this entire time, ever since I first heard the howling. My whole chest aches like the longest run. I want to let myself fall against the couch back, take the strain out of my arms and legs and back, but I’m afraid that in my dazed exhaustion I will lose my balance and slip into the water, with the bodies and the hookworm.

It is with an unspeakable relief, then, when I hear him take in a deep breath, hold it, and announce into the darkness, “Come on. We’re goin’ out the back.”