Galveston Read online

  Praise for

  GALVESTON

  “I had no idea what to expect from each and every page. A charming, engrossing story.”

  —Douglas Coupland, author of Hey Nostradamus! and Eleanor Rigby

  “A terrific novel, as impressive for its compassionate inquiry into the psychology of obsession as for its remarkable narrative urgency.”

  —Barbara Gowdy, author of The White Bone and The Romantic

  “Loose as a fable but taut as the need to survive, Galveston is a rollicking depiction of man versus the cyclone within.”

  —The Citizen’s Weekly

  “Galveston’s humour is a veil over the astonishing grief that human beings can endure. Quarrington makes you laugh, but also slams you in the solar plexus.”

  —Times Colonist (Victoria)

  “Quarrington expertly creates extraordinarily visual imagery of storms and the approaching hurricane, and effortlessly weaves the weather around the turbulent lives of his characters.”

  —Calgary Herald

  “Lovely and amazing…. A stylistic tour de force; readers will be—yes—blown away. Galveston is a novel of great compassion; Quarrington does a knockout job of conveying to us the importance of every human breath.”

  —Quill & Quire

  THE WORKS OF PAUL QUARRINGTON

  Fiction

  The Service

  Home Game

  The Life of Hope

  King Leary

  Whale Music

  Logan in Overtime

  Civilization

  Original Six—True Stories from Hockey’s Classic Era (ed.)

  The Spirit Cabinet

  Galveston

  Non-fiction

  Hometown Heroes

  Fishing with My Old Guy

  The Boy on the Back of the Turtle

  From the Far Side of the River

  Plays

  The Second

  The Invention of Poetry

  Checkout Time

  Dying Is Easy

  The Heart in a Bottle

  After Four a-clock the Thunder and Rain abated, and then we saw a Corpus Sant at the Main-top-mast Head, on the very Top of the Truck of the Spindle. This sight rejoiced our Men exceedingly; for the height of the Storm is commonly over when the Corpus Sant is seen aloft; but when they are seen lying on the Deck, it is generally accounted a bad Sign.

  A Corpus Sant is a certain small glittering Light; when it appears as this did, on the very Top of the Main-mast or at a Yard-arm, it is like a Star; but when it appears on the Deck, it resembles a great Glow-worm. The Spaniards have another Name for it (though I take even this to be a Spanish or Portuguese Name, and a Corruption only of Corpus Sanctum) and I have been told that when they see them, they presently go to Prayers, and bless themselves for the happy Sight. I have heard some ignorant Seamen discoursing how they have seen them creep, or, as they say, travel about in the Scuppers, telling many dismal Stories that hapned at such times …

  —WILLIAM DAMPIER, A New Voyage Round the World

  THERE ONCE WAS AN ISLAND named Dampier Cay. It lay to the southwest of Jamaica, making a triangle with that country and the Caymans. Dampier Cay was, technically, under English governance; it retained the pound as its official currency, for example, even though no one on the island accepted, or carried, the local money. All transactions were made using the American dollar.

  Dampier Cay was a narrow strip of land, a few miles long, that nature had pushed forth from the water for no good reason. Still, it was land, and people built there. Because there was not much of it, property was relatively expensive. Some wealthy white people owned estates. The black people who worked for the white people lived in a tiny hamlet, Williamsville, which was near the centre of the island. Dampier Cay ran north and south, but it was bent in the middle. There was a harbour there; aside from a couple of local fishing trawlers, it was rarely used.

  On either end of Dampier Cay were resorts. At the south end was a big hotel. It claimed the best beaches and was popular, by island standards, with tourists. At the north end was a place called the Water’s Edge, a collection of buildings that sat near the bottom of the island’s only significant hill.

  That hill was called Lester’s Hump. Reporters were confused by that, for a while, because after the storm a man named Lester was found at the top, along with two white women. But Lester’s Hump had been so called for over two hundred years, ever since William Dampier had directed Lester Cooper to cart liquor and victuals up to the top. Dampier had seen weather coming.

  But the Day ensuing, which was the 4th Day of July, about Four a-Clock in the Afternoon, the Wind came to the N.E. and freshned upon us, and the Sky looked very black in that quarter, and the black Clouds began to rise apace and moved towards us; having hung all the Morning in the Horizon.

  The island’s east coast, much of it anyway, is a rock cliff that rises a mean height of twenty-five feet. It seemed reasonable protection should the weather and the water get into cahoots, but William Dampier had seen many odd things in his journeys, and heard much odder. He’d heard about waves that stood thirty yards tall. So he directed Lester Cooper to take the flour, sugar, suet, etc., to the summit, and the other men laughed and called it Lester’s Hump.

  There is, today, a small cross at the summit of Lester’s Hump. It is made out of wood and whitewashed, and someone attends to it, keeping the cross pristine and cultivating a small bed of flowers around its base. At the foot of Lester’s Hump there are ghostly suggestions of civilization and order—scattered timbers and pieces of metal and machinery. Further south, trees have been thrown over and lie crisscrossed, like wooden matches that have been rattled in the box and then tossed onto the ground. Beyond this is where Williamsville once stood. A handful of black people still live there, in hastily built, ramshackle constructions. Oddly, there are a few estates that stand in good condition, but the owners have boarded the windows and put up optimistic For Sale signs. The big hotel remains, although no tourists ever go there, because Dampier Cay no longer exists.

  It was a fairly easy matter for Dampier Cay to disappear, because it had never proclaimed its existence with any authority. It was not even on all maps. Many derive from the originals made by William Dampier, who was the Royal Cartographer, although he spent much of his time buccaneering with his Merry Boys. Ironically, having named the island after himself, Dampier left it off his depiction of the area. Where it should have been dotted, Dampier fashioned a large and ornate C to begin the word Caribbee.

  To get to Dampier Cay, in the days when it still existed, either one had to know exactly what one was doing—only one tiny airline serviced the island, the airport a glorified bungalow near Miami, Florida—or else one came by chance.

  Gail and Sorvig, whom you will meet, stumbled upon the island, or at least the knowledge of its existence, at a travel agency in New York City. One of them had idly picked up a small flyer from the Water’s Edge. The print was crooked, rendered out of Letraset, and announced prices much cheaper than any other resort. The flyer also featured a drawing of a bonefish, sleek and fierce-looking. The drawing was made by a man named Maywell Hope, although, when you meet him, you may find that hard to credit. Hope made the flyer and took it to the post office in Williamsville, where he and the postmistress mimeographed two hundred copies. Hope and the postmistress then used her computer to select random vacation bureaus around the world, and mailed them out.

  Maywell Hope made the flyer over the protestations of Polly Greenwich, his common-law wife and the owner of the Water’s Edge. Polly possessed a kind of grim optimism, and was convinced that business was as good as could be expected. Polly herself had come to Dampier Cay by chance, from New Zealand. Her first husband had died from cancer, he had withered aw
ay; and when he was gone, Polly boarded an airplane, not caring where it was headed, then she bought a berth on a cruising yacht, and one day the ship anchored at Dampier Cay. While the rest of the passengers went snorkelling, Polly wandered the small island until she came upon the collection of buildings at the bottom of Lester’s Hump. She had lunch in the little restaurant and, sipping her coffee afterwards, decided to purchase the place. It wasn’t a life she would have designed, but at least it was a life, it had purpose and parameters. There was even a bonus, a lover who came with the deal, the tall sunburnt fishing guide and transport captain, Maywell Hope.

  Maywell had come to Dampier Cay by the purest of chance—he was born there. So was Lester Vaughan, retained at the Water’s Edge as gardener and general handyman. The two had actually been fast friends as boys, and as young men they had shared many evenings at the Royal Tavern, consuming vast quantities of rum in honour of their ancestors. Then, you know, events had taken place. Maywell Hope no longer drank; Lester claimed he’d given it up but too often would return to the bottle. Lester would disappear, sometimes for days on end, and, when he turned up again, most often could be found sleeping it off in the tiny cemetery beside the pale blue church.

  There are three more people to meet. These people came neither by chance nor by design—or perhaps more accurately, by a combination of the two. What I’m getting at is that these three came because Dampier Cay was where it was, and they had reason to believe they might encounter something there, something most people take great measures to avoid.

  As soon as the tropical depression was identified, the World Meteorological Organization’s Western Hemisphere Hurricane Committee gave it the name Claire. The practice of naming storms began after the Second World War; prior to that, hurricanes were identified geographically, for example the Great Storm at Galveston.

  The Great Storm at Galveston occurred in 1900. The water began to rise in the early morning of September 8. Families gathered on the beach, and children played in the surf, delighted to see Nature behave so oddly. The chief meteorologist for the city rode up and down the strand on horseback, shouting that the barometer was plummeting and the winds were rising, and insisting that everyone seek higher ground. Many ignored him; those who didn’t had no higher ground to seek, Galveston being at most eight or nine feet above sea level. The storm surge that came was fifteen feet tall. By the next morning, eight thousand people were dead.

  After Tropical Depression Claire was born, it began to move westward. Meteorological bureaus posted its image, as seen from heaven, a pretty white swirl with a hole in its centre. The swirl changed position, hour to hour, and these movements were monitored by many people, most of them anxious, perhaps because it was their job to be so, perhaps because they owned property that might lie in her path.

  A few people were eager to know where Claire might wander for another purpose, and they appropriated her images for their own websites, which had names like Weatherweenies.com and Stormwatch.com. These were chasers, men and women eager to encounter extreme weather. Claire was born on Sunday, and by Tuesday morning she lay in the middle of the Atlantic. The chasers began to make guesses about her trajectory, guesses based on science, history and magic.

  Only three guessed right.

  Many were close. There were a few, for example, who journeyed to Martinique and St. Lucia, and they were slapped by wind and made sodden by rain falling in huge sheets that rippled and roared like bent sheet metal. But in the chaser’s own argot, these people merely got wet. The merciless elements that danced around Claire’s eye passed between these two islands, on their way toward Dampier Cay.

  THE CUSTOMS OFFICIAL STARED at the computer screen, trying to determine if Caldwell might be a terrorist or criminal.

  “Where are you going, Mr. Caldwell?”

  There was a moment of silence; being addressed as “Mr.” took Caldwell by surprise. Then he answered, “Galveston,” and was surprised again, by his own response.

  The customs official was a plump, freckled man, and out in the world, Caldwell knew, the customs official would sweat too much. He would be irritable, he would smell bad. Some customs officials sought the profession because they craved power, or because they enjoyed repelling unwanted aliens; this one wanted only the cool blue air of Toronto’s Pearson International Airport.

  The official said, “You visit the United States a lot.”

  Caldwell made no reply. It wasn’t a question.

  The official made it one: “Why do you visit the United States a lot?”

  “Fish.”

  “To buy fish?”

  “No, no. To catch fish. You know. To angle.”

  “I see.”

  “And the weather.”

  “You enjoy the climate?”

  “No. The weather.”

  The customs official now picked up Caldwell’s passport and flipped through, perplexed. The pages were scarred with the faded impressions of entry stamps from countries around the globe. The customs official grunted, indicating that he was putting two and two together, that Caldwell was up to something. “What line of work are you in?”

  “I’m in no line of work.”

  “How’s that?”

  Caldwell had annoyed the customs official, he could see that, so he proffered an explanation. He smiled as he said, “I used to be a teacher. Phys. ed. and science. But I don’t need to work any more. I’m rich.”

  The official looked at his computer screen again, as though this information about wealth should have been electronically forthcoming. He struck the keyboard hard. “How did you make your money, Mr. Caldwell?”

  “I didn’t make it. I won the lottery. Sixteen million dollars.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Exactly.”

  His wealth made people see him in a different light; they liked him better. That used to bother him. Well, that’s not entirely true, Caldwell used to let it bother him, make it bother him, because it was the sort of thing that should bother a decent man—but Caldwell laid no claim to decency, and hadn’t for some years.

  The plump, freckled customs official became friendlier. He riffled through the passport once more, this time in obvious admiration of Caldwell’s adventuring. “So where are you off to now?”

  “Miami.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “I’m going to a little airport just outside of Miami. I’m going to catch a plane, it’ll take me to Dampier Cay.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “No. I’ve never heard of it either.”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean, I hadn’t ever heard of it. It’s just a little island.”

  The customs official nodded and offered Caldwell his passport, then pulled it away before Caldwell could put his fingers on it. “Hold it, Mr. Caldwell. Didn’t you tell me first that you were going to Galveston?”

  “Yeah,” agreed Caldwell. “I guess I’m going the long way.”

  Beverly was already at the little airport outside Miami.

  She’d taken a bus from Orillia to Toronto, and then a train to Buffalo, New York, and from there she’d flown to Florida. It was the cheapest way to go, although she’d had to overnight in Miami, and even the small, seedy motel she’d found cost a lot more than she’d budgeted for.

  The flight to Dampier Cay was scheduled for one o’clock in the afternoon. Beverly had arrived at the airport at about seven-thirty in the morning. The place was deserted, a little bungalow beside a huge barren field cut with a strip of tarmac. At one end of this runway sat a battered twin Beech outside a rusted Quonset hut.

  The cabby was reluctant to leave her there alone, that’s how desolate it was. But Beverly said she’d be fine. “I’ll just wait. I’ve got my book.”

  Beverly had no book. After the taxi left, she sat down on the steps and folded her hands in her lap.

  At nine o’clock a small car pulled up and a beautiful black man stepped out. He was dressed in a blue uniform with golden buttons and brocade. Bever
ly stood and had to resist the impulse to salute.

  “Good morning, ma’am,” said the man.

  “I have a ticket for the flight to Dampier Cay,” said Beverly. “At least, I have a reservation number.”

  The man nodded. “That flight may be delayed.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Because of Tropical Storm Claire?”

  “No. Just because it usually always is.”

  “Ah.”

  “Don’t worry about Claire. Now they’re saying she’s going to miss everything, probably just blow out at sea.”

  Beverly nodded and smiled as though relieved. But really she knew that they were almost always wrong.

  Blowing out at sea was only one scenario; perhaps the most desirable, but by no means the most likely. Hurricanes are created moment by moment, as though fuelled by fresh time, by nowness.

  Take Hazel. Caldwell said that often, in barrooms around the globe, when he’d had three drinks too many and no desire to go up to his room. He would find some other lost soul and slowly work the conversation around to hurricanes, and then he would touch on their erratic nature. He would recite the science, hoping that his companion was too drunk and heartsick to interrupt. “No one’s really sure how a hurricane becomes organized,” he’d say. “They might get influenced by an upper tropospheric short-wave trough or something.” And then, while his listener’s eyes were still glazed over, he’d say, “The point is, hurricanes are erratic. Take Hazel.”

  No one had predicted that Hurricane Hazel would work her way through the Caribbean and Carolinas, up the Atlantic coast, and then, as furious as she had been at birth, kick the province of Ontario in the ass.

  Caldwell was three years old in 1954, and his earliest memory was of Hurricane Hazel. Granted, not all of the memory was genuine. For instance, part of the memory was of being put to bed by his parents, the pair of them beaming happily, proud of their little toddler. That never happened, because for one thing, his parents did nothing together. Sometimes Caldwell imagined that his own making was performed in the manner of fishes, his mother leaving a small pile of gleaming eggs in the depressed centre of the mattress, his father passing over sometime later and glumly depositing his own sticky contribution. But all that aside, Caldwell knew that his father was otherwise occupied; he was, that night, busy fighting the storm.