Stephen lay on the cot on the screened porch and looked up at the stars. A mad din of frogs rose from the water only a few yards away, the house set up on pilings against its rise. He never thought frogs could make so much noise. It seemed to him that all the frogs in the world were in the marsh, whose network of channels, like the veins on the back of his father’s hands, stretched away to the big creek that flowed into the Bogue Chitto that flowed into the Pearl that flowed into the Gulf of Mexico perhaps fifty or sixty miles away. The stars, whose names his father had been teaching him, were easy to see because there were no lights. There was a security light up on a pole, but they did not waste generator or solar power on that or on lights in the house. Also they did not want to reveal their presence. He supposed there were lights in New Orleans on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain. That was where his mother lived. Or perhaps she was no longer there? Perhaps she had been evacuated? Perhaps the city was absolutely dark and people were going about the flooded streets in boats and, like him, looking up at the stars?
Stephen was not back in New Orleans because in June a big hurricane had come ashore there. Then a week later another one made landfall not far from the city and, like the first, tracked up into the Mississippi Valley. Simultaneously one was coming ashore in Georgia. Then there were the two, one right after the other, in South Carolina. All made their way inland to areas drained by the Mississippi River. The one in Georgia went all the way to Ohio. The rain fell for weeks from these slow-moving, powerful storms.
The river rose higher and higher, and finally the river control structure failed. It was a dam and spillway system that once kept the Mississippi from entering the Atchafalaya River above New Orleans and creating a new path to the Gulf. Now most of the river flowed through what was once the Atchafalaya. Because of the rains upstream, there was still plenty of river flow past New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
From New Orleans to the high ground near Natchez, everything was underwater. The population had been evacuated. As more water came down the Mississippi from the rains inland, it became less and less likely anyone was going to return soon. The National Guard and the regular army were stretched very thin. Their attention was required for the two wars in Africa and a much larger one in Asia.
Some people stayed. Since the National Guard and the local police had abandoned the little towns, the result was that those stay-behinds did whatever they wished. His father called that anarchy, stealing some gasoline or fresh water from someone and perhaps killing him if you were in the mood. His father liked to say things like that happened routinely in other places in the world, and now Americans were finding out the true nature of human beings. Stephen did not know if that was true. He did not want to believe it.
Stephen kept getting conflicting and wild reports from the various radio stations. One in New Orleans claimed the new levees the Corps of Engineers completed, the ones to replace the levees built years ago in response to the big Hurricane Katrina, were holding and were in absolutely no danger of being overtopped or breaking. Other stations said the levees on the lower Mississippi had been overtopped in many places. Creeks and small rivers that under the levee system did not run directly into the Mississippi now did. As one report put it: “Things have been rearranged.” One station out of Texas claimed that the whole coastal plain from Texas to South Carolina, including New Orleans, was underwater and was going to stay that way for a long time. Florida had simply vanished beneath the sea, the victim of a series of big hurricanes and sea levels that rose faster than anyone thought possible. The same was true throughout the world. It was also hot, the climate going from temperate to tropical in just a few years.
The station he liked the best was one he could not place geographically. There were no commercials and no call letters, just a voice. The man spoke with a deep Mississippi accent and called himself the Swamp Hog.
“Listen, children, listen,” the Swamp Hog said. “Move inland. This ole hog can live in a swamp but not you. Move to the Himalayas. Move to the Andes. Move to the Rockies. Good Lord, but it’s turned hot. Soon those mountains will be covered with the thickest jungle you’ve ever seen. The sea is rising. Get yourself where it can’t reach you.”
He wanted his father to listen to it, but he was never able to bring the station in when his father was present.
“I think you’re dreaming that station,” his father said.
“No, it’s real,” he insisted.
“It’s the station of anxiety. Everyone has one of those broadcasting twenty-four hours a day. Up in their heads.”
He would carefully adjust the dial but was rewarded for his efforts only with static.
They were able to live comfortably. The generator and solar panels kept the freezer going, filled with meat, mostly venison, wild hog and fish. One room in the house was completely filled with steel drums containing rice and beans. When he lived with his mother in New Orleans in the house near Audubon Park, she occasionally referred to his father as “that crazy survivalist.” But he never thought she really meant those words. She was an impulsive woman, laughing one moment and crying the next. Sometimes he would study the girls at his school to see if any of them showed signs of growing up to be like his mother. It would be good to be able to tell early and avoid them.
His mother and father divorced when he was a baby. Now he was fifteen. His mother had done well as an investment banker in New York. When he turned ten, she retired to New Orleans, where her family had lived for a long time. There were some relatives still about, mostly old people who used canes. The ladies’ kisses left damp spots on his cheeks from their rubbery lips. They smelled of powder and perfume. The old men offered wrinkled, clawlike hands for him to shake. It was through them that his mother became deeply involved in Mardi Gras. Then she took up designing costumes. A young man of twenty-five or so, who he suspected she did not sleep with in the four-poster bed in the second-floor bedroom, came over regularly throughout the year to look at her sketches.
“Courtland is a genius with a sewing machine,” she liked to say.
Even then he could tell she was not satisfied with her retirement, with Mardi Gras, with him, with any part of her life.
He was never sure who he might meet when he came down for breakfast, prepared by Josephine, the young Cajun woman his mother hired to cook and clean. Josephine liked to sing and had a good voice. He enjoyed hearing her sing as she cooked, standing there chopping peppers, her clear pure soprano filling the house. She drove him to and from his school. He liked his school and wondered if it was underwater. He played defensive back on the football team. So he would come downstairs and one of his mother’s young men, who painted or played music, might be having breakfast by himself or sometimes with his mother. Sometimes with Josephine. He might see that particular young man for a few weeks at breakfast, but he would come downstairs one morning and the man who played the saxophone would be replaced by a man who painted or wrote poetry.
He knew what they did in her bedroom at night even though he had not done that yet. To the members of the football team he tried to give the impression he was knowledgeable about girls. No one ever challenged him even though he did not even have a girlfriend. He was more interested in football and baseball than he was in girls. Josephine said that soon he would be interested in girls. His mother said the same thing. He thought Josephine knew more about him than his mother. It was Josephine who came to his football games and who took him to the doctor when he was sick. The older boys made jokes about her and hinted she was more to him than a nanny. He hated that word. Those boys were careful to use it as much as possible.
Then his mother began to talk of sending him to military school. That was fine with him, just as long as they had a football team. He decided he might like wearing a uniform and marching around. After all, his father was once a soldier. His father fought in the Iraq War, before he was born. He did wonder why she wanted him gone. Josephine said that military schools were for bad boys, but he had never been in any sort of trouble. Although she was opposed to his going, she did not have a vote.
“Am I a bad boy?” he asked Josephine.
“Why, hell no, honey,” she said. “There’s no bad in you. You just keep going to your nice school. Then to college.”
By college she meant Louisiana State University. His mother had other choices in mind.
He could not recall seeing his father at any time when they lived in New York, but he did come to New Orleans to visit once or twice a year and took Stephen fishing at the mouth of the Mississippi. He always wondered if his father was perhaps more interested in catching red fish or sea trout than in seeing him. His father drank beer and got a little drunk and joked with the boat’s crew. Those men seemed to like his father, and he suspected it was not just because they were getting paid. He watched carefully, thinking he could learn to imitate his father’s easy way with those men.
Then his mother stopped talking about military school and made the decision for him to spend the summer with his father. She did not bother to ask him how he might feel about that. The day he found out, they were all having breakfast at the Café du Monde. He had returned from the bathroom, where his mother had sent him to wash the powdered sugar off his hands, and found them in the middle of a conversation.
“We agreed at the beginning you’d have Stephen in the summer,” his mother was saying.
His father shrugged.
“You were happy with the way things were, Anna. Why change them now?”
He wondered why he had never spent a summer with his father when that was the agreement.
“He’ll love spending the summer with you,” she said.
She put her arm around Stephen and gave him a hug. Involuntarily he felt himself stiffen. He imagined those young men putting their hands on her and felt a wave of anger sweep over him. This had happened before, but usually he could control himself better. And there were some of those young men he genuinely liked.
“You all right?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
She removed her arm and took a drink of her coffee.
“I’ve got work to do,” his father said.
“Well, you can teach him about motors,” she said.
He knew his father did repairs on outboard motors. Maybe he sold them too. It was not something they talked about on their fishing trips.
“Don’t blame me if he ends up being a mechanic,” he said.
“Oh, I’m not,” she said. “Only you would throw away a good education.” She turned to Stephen. “Did you know that your father has an engineering degree from Georgia Tech?”
He shook his head.
“Good Lord, Anna,” his father said. “Did you carry around a list in your head of the best schools in the country when you were fifteen years old?” He took a drink of his coffee and smiled at her. “Well, maybe you did.”
Stephen lay on his back on the cot and considered what he had learned. It was September now and instead of being back in school with his friends or marching around at some military school, he was here with his father. He had learned about outboard motors and airboat motors and guns. Along with the drums of rice and beans, there were cases of assault rifle ammunition. He had learned to shoot rifles and pistols and shotguns. He had learned to hunt and fish. It seemed to him there was no better way to live than the way they had been living.
There was no sign, as far as he could tell, of a woman ever being in the house. He could imagine how a woman like his mother might transform it. He could picture Courtland sitting at a sewing machine, yards of material trailing about on the floor, as he sewed furiously. If his father had a woman friend, he kept that a secret. Stephen did not think that would trouble him. He just preferred having his father all to himself after all those wasted years.
At first he thought his father was exaggerating when he called it a “paradise.” But he had come to agree with him. Before the hurricanes started coming, they would get up early in the morning and have coffee on the screened porch and watch the sun rise over the feathery-topped cypresses lining the big creek. Then the light would fall on the marsh, all those little channels shining in the light, and he thought that was the prettiest sight he had ever seen.
He wanted to remain with his father. His parents had discussed that. His father had met his mother in New Orleans to talk about it. He had been able to tell things had not gone well. His father was sad.
“What did she say?” he asked.
“You’re stuck with her until you’re eighteen,” his father said.
“She doesn’t even want me there.”
“If a person gets the idea you’re taking something away from them, they get real interested in that thing.”
He did not like his father using the word thing to stand for him, but he knew that his father was just giving him an example.
“Does she still want me to go to military school?” he asked.
“She wants you in New Orleans,” his father said.
His father looked old and tired. He was staring down at the floor, obviously thinking about something. Stephen waited for him to speak.
“You go back to New Orleans and have a good year at school,” his father said. “Study hard. You can spend the whole summer again next year.”
He was pleased that his father wanted him back.
“And interceptions,” his father said. “You’ll have more this year.”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
For some reason, after this summer, he thought that he might look on his mother’s young men differently when he met them at breakfast. He would think of them putting their hands on his mother, but that would not be the same either. He resolved that this year he would have a girlfriend. He would know exactly what his mother and those men did in the bedroom. And that knowledge would further change how he regarded them, move him closer to being an equal.
But then all those expectations and disappointments were wiped away when the hurricanes started to arrive. His mother and father talked on the phone about his staying through the first one. Then his mother seemed to prefer that he remain with his father when the second one approached.
“She hired that security service,” his father said. “Nothing like a few former Navy Seals hanging around to make you love a hurricane.”
The security people were there to protect the valuable furnishings of the house.
“Nobody’s going to carry off a single piece of furniture, not a single painting,” his father said.
But then the phone service failed, and his father had no more conversations with her.
He was delighted he was stuck. He wished the march of the hurricanes across the Gulf would never stop.
Even work was not really work. They did not go into town to his father’s shop anymore because the town and the road that led to it were underwater. They had been working on the engine of his father’s airboat, moored at the dock in the marsh. Its 454 Chevy big block engine had been running rough. His father thought it was the carburetor, and they rebuilt it, but the engine still ran rough and sometimes would not start at all. So they were going to have to go into town in the johnboat and hope they could find a carburetor that had not been ruined by the water at his shop or the auto parts store. They could walk right in and take one off the shelf at the auto parts store since the town was evacuated two weeks ago. The thought of going into the deserted town and taking the carburetor instead of paying for it filled him with excitement.
He supposed his father, a wonderful shot, had learned to shoot during the Iraq War. But he found it hard to get his father to talk about the war. He did persuade him to reveal that he was in a “special unit.” But nothing much beyond that. He liked to imagine his father parachuting into the desert wearing night-vision goggles. His black parachute was like a piece of the night sky. Silently floating down amid enemy soldiers who had no chance at all. He wondered how many men his father had killed. But that was a question he knew better than to ask.
“But what was it like?” he asked.
“Sand,” he said.
“Sand?”
“Yeah, lots of sand.”
He heard his father begin to snore from where he slept on the couch just inside the door to the porch. His father was partial to sleeping on couches, dropping off to sleep with a book in his hand. His mother had complained about that habit. He wondered if he had bad dreams of the war, dreams of sand. But he had never heard him cry out in his sleep or wake suddenly from a nightmare. His father slept with a MAT-60 submachine gun. Stephen liked it that now he knew the names of weapons like that. He imagined himself sitting on a bench in the locker room at his school and casually mentioning the rate of fire of that French machine gun. His father wrapped his arms around it as if it were a woman. He wondered if his father slept with the machine gun when he and his mother were together. He could not imagine any of his mother’s young men sleeping with a machine gun. But perhaps they did now, that is, if New Orleans was filled with anarchy.
To Stephen anarchy was nothing more than a word until last week when they discovered a man’s body in the big creek with a bullet hole in his head. The man was dressed in a business suit. It was the first time he had seen a dead person. As they sat there in the john-boat, Stephen wondered how they were going to get him aboard without turning the boat over. He thought perhaps the best plan was to let him stay right where he was. But he did not say any of this to his father. Stephen knew that dead folks were supposed to be buried.
“Shouldn’t we bury him?” he had asked.
“No, we don’t have time to bury everything that’s dead around here,” his father said.
Stephen supposed his father had seen plenty of dead people, and now they did not bother him at all. The dead man did not bother Stephen that much. He had not been in the water long enough for the turtles to get at him. He looked like if they towed him to shore and stood him on his feet he might wring out his clothes and walk away and nobody would know he had been dead at all.
His father gave the body a push out into the current with a paddle blade. It paused, spun slowly and then floated off down the creek toward the river only a few miles away. Stephen wondered if it would float all the way to the Gulf. He imagined the man’s bones coming to rest in deep water, lying there in that absolute darkness forever. It was then he realized they were not living in paradise after all.
“I learned about killing people in Iraq,” his father began. “You have to be careful.”
He stopped and looked off down the creek. The body had disappeared. Stephen thought he was going to tell him that it was kill or be killed if a soldier planned on staying alive. His father then continued in a voice so low Stephen had to listen carefully.
“You cut yourself off from those you kill,” his father said. “They’re just targets. But if you push too hard on that, then you cut yourself off from everyone.”
“Everyone?” Stephen asked.
“Yes, from love. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
But he did not understand. His father’s comment about war being equated with sand made just about as much sense.
“We don’t know what we’ll have to do out here,” his father said. “Be careful.”
“Yes, sir,” Stephen said.
Stephen wanted to ask his father a thousand questions but decided to keep silent. It seemed to him that his father was expecting trouble, and the thought of that both attracted and repelled him. His father had been tested in Iraq. Now it was his turn.
Stephen reached down and felt the barrel of the Saiga-12 under his cot. The Russian-made combat shotgun had a twenty-round ammunition drum and a skeletal collapsible stock. He had fired it many times on his father’s shooting range.
“Just keep shooting, even when they’re down,” his father cautioned him. “Even with double-ought buck it won’t be as easy as you think.”
He wondered what it was going to be like if they had to defend themselves. They were only five miles from the little town where his father had his boat shop. Everyone knew they had ample stores of food and fuel and water, all commodities worth killing for. His father liked to say that they now were living in a world in which anything was permitted.
They were all right during the storms because his father had built the house to withstand them. His father liked to say that if a tornado hit the house it would just bounce off and go on its way. The pilings the house sat on were steel, not wood. The house was made of concrete blocks over a steel frame. It was attached to the pilings with special tie-downs, and the metal roof was secured in the same way. Steel hurricane shutters protected the windows and the screened porch. So even the hurricane that hit them directly did no damage, although it made more noise than he thought was possible. And when it was over, they had fresh water from the big storage tank fed by a cistern. His father had released a few snapping turtles into the cistern. He liked to say you can’t have a cistern unless you have a turtle or two in it. The water was filtered when it came out of the cistern, so the turtles would not do any harm. They had plenty of gas and diesel fuel in big underground storage tanks.
As he closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep, he found himself imagining holding the shotgun in his hands and firing at the dead man in the creek, who now was alive and bringing up an assault rifle on him. The shotgun recoiled against his shoulder, the ejected shells spinning out, their brass bottoms gleaming in the sunlight. The man’s rifle barrel was swinging upward, but then the force of the buckshot caught him and he tumbled backward, like a wide receiver Stephen had laid a good hit on. His coaches had praised him for his willingness to hit much larger boys.
“Good boy,” he heard his father saying in his dream as he drifted off to a dreamless sleep. “Good boy.”