Flood

Flood

A flood threatened at city on the border of the state. The television in the ER waiting room flashed pictures of grey water in which houses were embedded. Jerome, the security guard, looked at the TV screen when he walked through the empty waiting room on patrol. The people in the city were passing sandbags shaped like small, limp infants hand to hand to make levees. Jerome didn’t know anyone in that city. He had driven through the town once and knew it was six hours away.

Jerome finished his two a.m. patrol and went to his cubicle in the hospital basement near the cafeteria. He opened his internet and looked at some photographs of the flood posted by users on a cable news site. Many pictures showed long chains of people passing sandbags up steep mounds of dirt enclosing the brimming river. The people were working in snow and sleet. Big earthmoving vehicles and dump trucks shot headlight rays through gloom swarming with snow. In other pictures, he river was the color of lead and scaly with ice floes that looked brighter than the water in the wan, slippery daylight. The headlines told Jerome that more than 20,000 volunteers had converged on the city to aid in the “epic battle” with the river.

His pager sounded. Jerome picked up. A nurse said that Dr. Singh needed assistance with a family member causing a “disruption” in the ER. Jerome was looking a picture of a labrador retriever that had climbed to the sandbag parapet’s top and was surveying vast fields of water striped by half-drowned barren trees.

An old man with wild white hair and a scuffed, yellow forehead was sitting in an examination room. An orderly was with the old man, sitting across from him and reading a hunting and fishing magazine.

“What seems to be the problem?” Jerome asked.

“You’ve got my wife,” the old man said. He was hyperventilating and his chest heaved under his withered throat.

The orderly said that the old man had brought his wife from their home in the country into the ER. There was a seep of water in their basement and the old woman had gone down to mop the water off the concrete floor. She mopped and mopped and refused to come from the basement. She told her husband that she was afraid that the meltwater from the snow was pressing against foundations of their home and that it was only a matter of time before water began bursting through the masonry.

“She couldn’t get the idea out of her head and so Dr. Singh thought she should go upstairs, to the Ward,” the orderly said.

“I can take care of her myself,” the old man said.

“Sure you can,” the orderly said.

“Sure you can,” Jerome repeated but without the sarcasm.

“I’m a soldier,” the old man said. “I was in the war. I was wounded. I deserve respect.”

“Thank you very much for your service,” Jerome said.

Jerome gently took the old man’s elbow. He helped him stand. Then, he stood facing the old man. He zipped up his coat so that it was tight across the old man’s chest. The old man continued to hyperventilate and his breast bone surged up and down.

They walked toward the heated garage archway where the ambulances unloaded. Jerome saw Dr. Singh drinking a cup of coffee. She had a bag of potato chips open and spilled out across her desk. She didn’t bother to look up to see Jerome escorting the old man to the door.

An ambulance was idling in the entry. An EMT was checking some equipment. Jerome knew the EMT from Thursday night bowling.

“Hey, could you check his vitals?” Jerome asked the EMT.

“Sure, Jerome,” the EMT said.

He extended his hand and slid his fingers in a caress down the old man’s forearm. Then, he extended his pointer finger over the old man’s wrist, cocking his head as if to listen for something faint and remote.

‘It’ll be okay, old fellow,” the EMT said. “You’ll be fine.

The EMT held the old man’s hand for ninety seconds. He steadied him, putting his other hand in the small of the old man’s back.

“There you are,” the EMT said. “Just fine.”

Jerome and the old man walked into the parking lot. A pickup truck smeared with road grime was parked askew in the closest handicap space. The lot was bright with orange lights, the color of heat lamps warming roast beef in a buffet, but there was no warmth and the air was chill and wet. Vast waters were moving upon the earth.

“If I could just understand that lady doctor,” the old man said. “She should speak English. If you are a doctor here, you should speak English.”

“She is a good doctor,” Jerome said.

“I couldn’t understand a word she was saying,” the old man said. “Not a word.”

“Your wife’s in good hands,” Jerome said.

The old man was crying, but he didn’t seem angry anymore.

“Can you drive, buddy?”

“I can drive,” the old man said.

At dawn, the levees in the embattled city were still holding. But the river was rising. The pictures of the people swarming around piles of sand in blowing snow didn’t impress Jerome as much as the photographs of animals. A woman was rescued by National Guardsmen in a rubber raft – her two cats sat at the front of the raft peering into the dark water. Twenty cows were crowded together on a little dome of mud surrounded on all sides by expanses of brown, swirling water. How deep was the water? Could cows swim? How far away from that muddy, trampled island was the next solid ground?

Jerome’s wife went to work at the plant a half-hour before he came home. Two English muffins smeared with purplish jam were waiting for him on the kitchen table. He fed the dog and let her out into the fenced backyard. A little drizzle was falling. Under the lilac bush, there was a dark rib of winter ice glistening and wet.

Jerome checked the computer for messages from his son in the service and his daughter away at college. There was nothing new. He took a shower and went to bed.

As he grew older, Jerome didn’t seem to need to sleep that much. Sometimes, it seemed to him, that he slept when he was still awake, that he never exactly fell asleep but remained partly alert, as if one eye were open and peering through the darkness of his curtained room.

Around 1:00, Jerome ate some tomato soup and grilled a cheese sandwich. He checked his work schedule, then, called his wife on his cell-phone to tell her that he was going to drive up to the flood and help the people in the city.

“They still need volunteers,” Jerome said. “It’s cold and sandbags are frozen and that means they don’t lock together tight. You could get a breach in the dikes at any time.”

“You’re crazy to go up there,” his wife said.

“I feel like I have to go,” Jerome told her.

He filled the tank of his car and bought a big bottle of Mountain Dew to keep himself awake on the road.

The ditches were flooded in the familiar farmland around town. Green grass brightened the brown, dead lawns where winter deadfall of twigs and broken branches edged the sidewalks and gathered under the naked trees. The little creeks under the freeway overpasses were flowing through the shrubs and thickets on their banks.

The edges of the metropolis also flew hesitant flags of green on the hilltops, new grass growing in the old, withered stubble. The skyscrapers stood blue and isolated in a puddle of light sullenly poured through an open cloud.

Then, there were hills and valleys and the valleys were drowned in deep water always there, but grown deeper in the last few weeks so that the lakeside trees were staked in the flood and the docks that didn’t float, but just extended like piers over the water were submerged, tethered rowboats riding up above them. The north-facing wooded slopes were white with snow.

At last, Jerome came to a plain. It was a very flat plain, perhaps, the flattest place that Jerome had ever driven across. The plain was growing dark and it extended to the horizon that was like a grey wall to a grey room. Huge tendrils of water spread like fingers across the absolutely flat land, reflecting the disorder and chill of the black-veined clouds surging through the sky. Sometimes, these great lagoons came to the very edge of the freeway which shot across the water as two extended concrete peninsulas.

It was growing dark. The city under attack by the flood was lit like an amusement park, great searchlights raking the earth and huge batteries of lights used for nighttime construction on freeways pouring radiance down across the sandbagging teams, the parapets and escarpments of the dike that was bearing the river like an aqueduct at a height of two-stories through the town, beyond the rim of sandbags, the black moving acreages of water carrying juggernauts of white ice.

Jerome exited from the freeway with the sense that he was sinking into a basin. Below the level of the freeway, among the city’s streets, he could no longer see the theatrical lighting visible from the overpasses. Strangely enough from inside the city, he could not find the flood – one-way streets channeled him to a four-lane boulevard with stoplights and the traffic ebbed and flowed among fast food places and Kwik-trip stations. He turned several times in the direction where he had sighted the river in its elevated canal, but, each time, the road went in a way that he didn’t expect and his car was jostled over railroad tracks beneath a tall and silent grain elevator or crept through a residential neighborhood where the lights were burning cheerfully in houses and where dogs barked greetings to him. At last, in the distance, he saw a procession of red lights and heard sirens – an ambulance was bullying its way through traffic with a couple police cars in tow – and Jerome accelerated up to the intersection where he had seen the vehicles, listened for them and saw their flashing lights, and, then, turned to follow the ambulance through town.

The ambulance went off the road and lurched over furrowed frozen mud. A row of dump trucks were waiting in a line that crossed the crinkled and rutted earth of an athletic field. Up against the night sky, Jerome saw the dome of a stadium. Cars were parked irregularly in the lot around the stadium, twisted at funny angles as if they had been deposited in that place in haste. The parking lot lights illuminated four-hundred people bundled in heavy winter coats and arrayed in serpentine chains, elbow-to-elbow around some big pyramids of wet sand. Red Cross trailers dispensing coffee and doughnuts had been dragged into a semi-circle to make an entrance into the area where the people were filling sandbags. In the distance, heavy equipments groaned and roared.

The ambulance bounced around the rear of the Red Cross trucks. Jerome parked his car and walked toward where the ambulance was slowly nosing its way: a dozen people gathered aside from the crowd making the sandbags and all pressed together around someone lying on the ground. A gurney was dragged over the icy mud. Two EMT’s used a scissor-board to scoop a big man off the ground. His face was grey and his lips were bluish purple. Someone told Jerome that the man had collapsed while passing sand-bags toward the dikes. “A heart attack,” a girl with a stocking cap half-covering her eyes said.

The air was cold and damp. Jerome walked to the line of people passing sandbags toward a big stack lit by the blaze of a searchlight tilted down to sweep the embankment. Some kind of breach had occurred and closer to the dike, ankle-deep water was standing in frigid puddles. The people working in that area were wearing hip-waders like fishermen and the water splashed under their boots.

A soldier was walking the line of people. He said that no one should work more than forty-five minutes without a break. Two girls slipped out of the line and Jerome took their place. He had left his gloves in the car and his fingers became very cold. It was stupid of him to have wandered into this work without gloves.

The sandbags were stiff and felt brittle, as if they were full of glassware. In the sweep of the searchlight over the dike, the bags looked voluptuous, statuesque, all deep cleavage and shadowy buttock. But in his grip, the bags were sodden, dirty, surprisingly light for the first ten minutes, then, heavier and heavier, as if the river and all its immense weight were slowly gathering in them.

The man beside him was wearing a snowmobile suit and had flipper-like gloves that looked like they could be used for welding. A kid with some silver studs in his cheek and nose was at Jerome’s other side. The kid was gripping a lit cigarette in his mouth. The man in the snowmobile suit said that the city and its dikes had split the river. The town was now an island in the river flowing three-and-a-half miles wide. This was the back side of the river, the man in the snowmobile suit explained – “it’s curled around us and is trying to get in the backdoor.”

When Jerome could no longer feel his hands at all, he looked down and saw that one of the bags had torn his fingernail on his index finger. He backed away from the line and walked toward the Red Cross dispensaries. People were coming and going all around him.

Near the coffee trailer, some ice caught him underfoot and he twisted and fell. All at once, a half dozen hands were on him, lifting him up. Jerome saw a whirl of faces.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” Jerome said. “I just tripped on the ice.”

But he was breathing heavily and someone said that his face was flushed.

A big cup of coffee was shoved into his hands and his cold fingers tingled and ached as the warmth restored feeling to them.

A couple women led him to a pickup truck. In the back of the pickup, there was a grill for barbecuing and some coolers and a couple of lawnchairs – it looked like tailgating equipment. A girl opened an aluminum lawn-chair on the muddy frozen grass and told Jerome to sit and rest.

“You need to rest a little, big fellow,” the girl said.

Jerome sat and rested. He looked around and his eyes adjusted a little to the contrasts between the searchlights and the darkness. For the first time, he could see the whole sweep of the sandbag dikes, a mile or more running along the edge of a vast and fatal darkness. Here, it seemed, that the battle against the flood was wrestling with the darkness threatening to encroach upon them.

Sometimes, invisible helicopters battered the air overhead. A woman carrying a flask of coffee refreshed his cup. She told him that the helicopters were from the army and could carry sandbags that weighed one ton each.

Jerome found his car. He felt tired and disoriented. Perhaps, he was hungry. He drove back into the quiet, empty streets of the city and found an all-night diner near the Greyhound bus station. Inside, some soldiers were eating pancakes. They were elaborately muddy, boots and thighs all sheathed in black ooze. The waitresses were flirting with them when they refilled their cups of coffee. Tracks and trails of mud marked the tile floors. In the window of the diner, there was a sign that said Free Coffee for Relief Workers – Mud welcome!

Jerome’s waitress told him that the river was receding. It was a foot below crest. Jerome had scrambled eggs, sausage, and toast.

“I came to help,” Jerome said.

“God bless you,” the waitress said.

“I guess I came too late,” Jerome said.

“At least you came,” she said.

After he had eaten, Jerome asked her where he could help. She gave him an address a few blocks away where FEMA had a temporary office in a storefront that had been rented to one of the political campaigns the preceding autumn. Red, white, and blue bunting hung in tatters from the windows and light fixtures and stacks of campaign posters and pamphlets stood in dusty reams in the corners of the rooms. A dour woman with a clipboard gave Jerome a button that was labeled Volunteer and told him to go back to the stadium and work there serving coffee and rolls. Before he left, she had him sign some kind of release.

There were lots of older men assigned coffee duty at the Red Cross trailers by the stadium. They pounced on anyone whose cup was less than three-quarters full, competing to be helpful. Jerome decided to go out to the sandbag lines and fill coffee cups there, but it had become very slippery and he was unsteady on his feet and, before he could reach the sandbaggers, he stumbled and spilled his coffee on the ground. Suddenly, he felt sick and he made his way to the row of aqua-marine porta-potties near the goal-post. It was cold in the plastic box of the toilet and smelled bad, but, at least, Jerome could hide there for a little while. He was ashamed of himself.

At dawn, Jerome went to his car and tried to leave the city. Before, when he arrive, he had been unable to find the flood. Now, every street that he took, and every avenue, lead inexorably to the flood and it was as if he were trapped in the town. Three blocks ahead, his headlights showed water churning over the road. In the grey gloom, he could see several SUV’s knocked sideways by the current, caught in a web of broken trees. He backed-up and went another way. This time, sawhorse barricades blocked the road and, ahead, he saw the iron trestle of an old bridge hovering over an awful sluice of ice tobogganing along the surge of water like so many bobsleds. The bridge deck was under water. An icy wind was blowing and he was alone in his car on a promontory surrounded by plains of water whipped to waves by the wind. He backed-up again and found another road and it took him into a neighborhood of houses, each sandbagged like a fortress where the air smelled of the gasoline in generators and where pumps were spraying feathery plumes of water up and away from the porches of the homes and their driveways. The streets of the neighborhood were six inches deep in grey water and each home stood apart from the others, behind its palisade of sandbags, and, at the cul-de-sac where the neighborhood ended, the water rolling over the asphalt was deeper so that his engine choked a couple of times and Jerome was afraid he would be stranded and, on all sides, there was nothing but a shallow, freezing sea stretching away to the horizon.

Finally, Jerome found the freeway and the way out of the city.

The cars coming toward him had their lights on, but the darkness had lifted enough to show the sea enclosing the interstate’s concrete causeway. The water was grey and mirrored the skies except where the wind bristled in the flood and made it shudder. The land was absolutely flat and the floodwater made a grey ribbon in the median and lapped against the gravel shoulder of the freeway.

Ahead, an old pickup veered to the left as if to avoid something in the road. Jerome was tired, but alert and he sat forward, looking to see what was on the highway.

There was nothing.

The pickup returned the right lane, overcompensating a little so that its right tires caught in the gravel for a moment. Then, the vehicle went to the center-line and held there, slowing slightly.

Jerome was eight or nine car-lengths behind the pickup. He took his foot off the accelerator. The pickup angled very slightly toward the right, gathered speed, and, then, crossed the shoulder and plunged into the lagoon next to the freeway. For a moment, it seemed that the pickup would skip across the great expanse of water like a flat rock side-armed by a child to dance over the surface of a still lake. The truck bounced on the mirror of the water twice, then, rolled sideways in a halo of white foam.

Jerome braked and pulled over to the side of the freeway. The shoulder was soft and his tires dug down, but the gravel and dirt held.

A young man stood by the truck hip-deep in the water. He took a step toward Jerome, stumbled, and went into the water on his knees. Jerome started down the bank. The cold water at his ankles was like an electric shock. The young man came forward, half-falling, half-scrambling and Jerome took him by the arm.

“What happened? What happened?” the young man said.

“Your truck went off the road,” Jerome gestured.

A semi pulled up ahead of where the pickup had crashed. The truck parked on the left shoulder.

“I was sandbagging all night,” the young man said. “I thought I was okay to drive. But I don’t know...”

“You must have fallen asleep,” Jerome said.

The young man’s face was white and he was trembling.

“Are you okay?” Jerome asked.

“I don’t know,” the young man said. His lips were quivering.

“I work at a hospital,” Jerome said. “Let me check you.”

“Are you a doctor?”

“Yes,” Jerome said.

He put his arm around the young man and pressed against him to transfer his warmth to the trembling boy. Jerome looked in his eyes. His pupils were equal and symmetrical. He put his hand on the boy’s wrist, stroking down from his elbow across his forearm, and, then, checked his pulse.

“Did you hit your head?” Jerome asked.

“I don’t think so,” the young man said.

A few cars zoomed by and, then, the trucker came across the lanes, strutting a little in his cowboy boots.

“Is anyone hurt?” the trucker asked.

“He’s a doctor,” the young man said, nodding at Jerome.

“So it’s okay?” the trucker asked.

“Okay,” Jerome said.

“I’m cold,” the young man said.

“I phoned it in,” the trucker said. “But the closest squad is back by the flood in town.”

“The key thing is to keep you from getting hypothermia. I’ve got a blanket in the back” Jerome said. He lead the boy to the car, put him in the passenger seat, and, then, found the blanket in his trunk. Some dead leaves from last autumn were clinging to the folds in the blanket.

The trucker saluted. “See you, doc,” he said. He crossed the road to his truck.

Jerome waved to him.

They drove to the next exit. The young man said that he had buddies in the village and that they would help him pull the truck out of the water. The blast of hot air from the car’s heater made Jerome sweat a little, but the young man had stopped trembling.

A big grain elevator stood alongside some railroad tracks. A few gaunt, white farmhouses were clustered around the concrete pillars of the grain elevator. Ramparts of sand bags cupped the tracks and the elevator and the houses.

They stopped at a gas station at the edge of the sand bag perimeter. The asphalt road dipped into the water a dozen yards from the pumps.

“This is okay,” the young man said. He got out of the car, the blanket draped over his shoulders and back.

“Just keep the blanket,” Jerome said. “You need it more than me.”

“Thanks, doc,” the boy said.

A half hour later, Jerome was beyond the flood. The sun had broken through the clouds and the distant hills and lakes were bathed in golden light.

The little towns at the edge of the freeway looked unprotected to him. They were open to the sky that was now heaped with clouds in the east but bright and blue elsewhere. Nothing was defending the streets and the houses of those villages. The churches stood on low hills to catch and focus the light, but the old brick schools were below where the land was lower and the streets and sidewalks there seemed to him canals, dry now, but prone to flood.

At home, his wife was watching TV.

“Did you help?” she asked.

“I tried,” Jerome said.