Shirley calls me about five in the morning and tells me I gotta get over to the house right now. This is a big deal because Shirley hasn’t wanted me anywhere near her or the house in weeks. When I first left, she’d call all the time with excuses for me to come over—the porch light was burnt out, the disposal was busted. One time she even called and was real straightforward about why. That was exciting. I thought after that maybe we’d get it back together, but then she stopped calling. I guess Shirley figured out how to change her own light bulb.
“What do you need, Babe?” I shouldn’t have called her that, but five is real early for me. I don’t know up from down at five.
“Turn on the news, Clint. Call me back when you’re out of bed. I got stuff to do.”
I tell her I’m awake, for chrissakes, I’m awake, but she’s not hearing it. She hangs up the phone, and I sit there wondering why I still bother. I guess I’m not done eating whatever I deserve to eat. So I sit up and rub the tip of my tongue against the edges of the plaque on my teeth. My tongue feels big and smoky in my mouth, and I remember the little half joint sitting on the plate by the bed. I use the bathroom, go back to bed, light the half joint, and turn on the TV.
I go to Channel 8, and there’s Brian Quain, the weatherman, pointing at a map of Florida. He’s got his tie loose. He looks like he’s been up all night. I watch for a couple minutes until I get the gist and call Shirley back.
“What?” she says, as if she wasn’t the one that called me.
“I looked,” I say. “It seems bad. I’m gonna come pick you up. We’ll drive to my mother’s in Fort Myers. The way the storm’s tracking, Fort Myers will be fine. Probably won’t rain a drop.
Shirley doesn’t like that idea, and she lets me know. She’s never going to Fort Myers again, she says, and she’s sure as something never setting foot in my mother’s house again. She tells me all the things she’d rather do than go to my mother’s house in Fort Myers. All of them involve dying or coming real close to it.
“Alright,” I say. “Okay. I get it. She’s an old lady, Shirley. Anyway, she never did anything to you.”
Shirley gets into all of it then, all the ways that I messed everything up. The big ones and the little ones that led up to all this. The way she tells it, it’s like a movie I’ve seen a hundred times. I know the dialogue by heart.
When she’s done, Shirley tells me to get over to the store before everyone else in town wakes up. “Get plywood and sandbags,” she says. “Get nails and a hammer.”
“I got a hammer,” I say. “It’s in the garage there.”
Shirley says no, I don’t got a hammer. She threw everything I ever touched away. Then she hangs up the phone.
At the big hardware megastore, it’s chaos city. I go to get a drill because I don’t know if Shirley tossed my drill out, but I bet she did. I used to have one of those good cordless drills with the big battery, but the store’s cleaned out of those. All they got left are these tiny handheld electric screwdriver things, like you’d give your daughter. I don’t think this electric screwdriver is gonna be enough, but you go to war with the army you’ve got, right? So I grab one, and a hammer, too.
I go to find what’s left of the plywood, and I know before I get there it won’t be pretty. It’s hardly anything. It’s nothing but scraps lying around. There’s one guy about my age picking the scraps up, staring at them a second, and tossing them back where he found them. What am I gonna do? Shirley isn’t gonna let me anywhere near that house without any plywood. Plywood’s my way in.
Then a guy pushing a dolly rolls up with a bundle of the most beautiful sheets of plywood you ever saw. He sets the bundle down and cuts it open. He looks at me and the other guy.
“Here you go, boys. That’s the last of it.”
Me and the other guy look at each other. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says “Hate Loses, Love Wins.” I take three quarters of the plywood and split. He doesn’t say a thing to me about it. I knew he wouldn’t.
I’m feeling pretty good when I get to the house. I back my pickup right into the driveway so Shirley can see all the plywood and sandbags. I also got us coffees, hers with the caramel syrup, how she always gets it. When Shirley walks out in flip flops and her big robe, I go, “Oh, hey Shirl.”
She looks at the truck full of goodies, looks at me, looks at the truck again, and says nothing. I reach into the cab and come out with the coffees. I go to hand her the latte, and she makes a face.
“I already had coffee,” she says. “I been up all night. Are you gonna get started?”
The day goes like solid rock. Boarding up the windows is almost impossible with the hammer and that electric screwdriver. It would be better if it were really impossible, if I could throw my hands up and say, “Well, Shirl, I tried, but no can do. Now pack your grandma’s quilt and the wedding pictures and let’s head to Fort Myers.” There was a time when that would have worked. There was a time when the things I said mattered. Then Shirley got sick. She got sick and, hey, thank god, she got better. Nothing was ever right after that, though.
All morning and afternoon I hammer these long wood screws through the plywood and halfway into the window frames, then finish the rest of the way with the electric screwdriver. The screwdriver is a kid’s toy. I have to put all my weight into it. The air all around me is like a damp pillow, and I’m sweating, everything in my body gushing out of my armpits and neck, my hair pasted flat to my head in wet clumps, my shirt so soaked it weighs me down, till finally, I take it off. Shirley comes out every once and a while and watches me but doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t even bring me water.
After a while, I run out of plywood. I got the basics covered—the sliding glass doors, the big window in the front. I curse the guy who sold me this house, a retired dentist who moved from up north, for putting in skylights. He left for Arizona after two years. Couldn’t handle the humidity. Some people don’t have what it takes.
It’s creepy dark inside the house with most of the windows covered, but at least I’m in. I go to sit down on the couch, but Shirley stops me. She wants to know what I think I’m doing. I say I’m having a seat. I don’t say that I paid for the damn couch, and if I want to sit down on it and drink some ice water after hanging plywood all day in the million-degree heat, I sure as hell can. Instead, I say Look, I’ll put a towel down first. She used to put a towel down for me so I could sit when I came in from working in the yard. She used to treat me like a human being.
“No,” Shirley says. “I mean you can’t stay here. You gotta go back to your place now.”
“To my place? Shirley, this is my place. I’m still making the damn payments.”
I think, okay, here we go. But Shirley scrunches her eyes and rubs her forehead.
“What’s wrong?” I say. Shirley gets a lot of headaches. She gets these migraines, and they lay her out for a whole day at a time. Sometimes I’d call in sick and spend the day bringing her cup-of-soup and aspirin, but it’s been a long time since I did that. “Your head hurt? You want me to get you something? You want me to go to the store?”
“My head’s fine,” she says. “You can’t stay here, okay.” She looks up at me and her mouth twists, and I can tell the next words are hard for her to push out. “Look, thanks for coming over. I appreciate it.”
“Shirley,” I say, and I can tell she’s not sure. “Look, turn on the news. Turn on Brian Quain. That storm’s gonna be here soon, and it might not be good. That apartment, that’s no place to be right now. Shirley, turn on Brian Quain.”
She picks up the remote, and while she’s working it, I get myself a big towel and a big plastic cup full of ice water and I sit down on the far end of the couch, away from her. I establish a beachhead.
On TV, Brian Quain’s tie is all the way off. We watch for a couple minutes, then Shirley turns the volume down and looks at me.
“We should call a hurricane repeller,” she says.
There’s an app called Magiquik. I’ve never tried it. I always thought magic was a waste of money. That was one of the things me and Shirley used to agree on. “Hiring a thaumaturge is like going to a restaurant. You spend three times what you’d pay to do it yourself, and it doesn’t even turn out as good.” I’d say that, and Shirley would say, “You’re right. I know.”
But this Magiquik app, Shirley shows me how it works. It’s real affordable, she says. It’s not the same as going through those big services where the people are licensed and bonded. Anyone who can do any magic can list themselves, so it’s full of hedge conjurers, and they’re all competing for your business. That keeps the prices low.
“You’ve used this?”
“A couple times,” she says. “A month ago, I kept seeing a water moccasin in the backyard. It got so I didn’t want to go out there. I tried animal control, but they said they couldn’t do anything. The person on the phone goes, ‘Lady, this is Florida.’ I wanted to tell him, ‘Listen you, I grew up here, okay?’ I downloaded the app. This little witch came over. She took a bag of salt in the back yard and spent a half hour out there, and there haven’t been any snakes since. The price wasn’t bad.” She looks kind of embarrassed when she says all this. I don’t know why.
Shirley shows me on the app where to go for “home protection.” Under that there’s a bunch of options, and one of them is “natural disasters.”
I click on “hurricane repellers.” I click through the steps, put in the Visa number.
Some graphics and a spinny circle appear on screen, and the app tells me it’s trying to find an expert in my area.
A cartoon smiley face pops up, then a photo of a dude with a mountain-man beard and Buddy Holly glasses. “Ezekial will arrive in 23 minutes.”
A decrepit Honda Civic pulls into the driveway and blocks my truck in. Ezekial gets out. He looks the way he does in the picture. He shuts the door to the Civic and looks around at the house, at my truck, at the sky, squinting from behind those Buddy Holly glasses like he’s never seen anything like it all before. He sees the big oak tree in the front yard and flinches.
I’m standing on tiptoes, watching him through the fanlight over the door.
“What is up with this guy?” I say to Shirley.
“Give it a chance, Clint,” she says. “This could help us keep the house.”
I look over at Shirley. She’s in the kitchen filling Ziploc bags with water and putting them in the freezer. Either she didn’t realize she said “us” or she did it on purpose.
“You’re right, you’re right,” I say. I don’t tell her that I never needed any help keeping the house up before. “Let’s give it a shot.”
I open the door and Ezekial is standing there with his fist in mid-air, right about to knock.
“Hey there,” I say. “I’m Clint. This is my wife, Shirley.”
I hear Shirley shut the freezer door. She puts some oomph into it.
“I’m Ezekial.” He ducks his head a little, like he’s trying to say it to my chest. I slap him on the shoulder and tell him to come on inside. Can I get him anything? Water? OJ? There might be a beer or two in the fridge out in the garage.
Shirley grunts at this, but I’m just joking, I say. I’m just trying to break the ice. Ezekial says no, thank you, but do we have any tea. Shirley grabs the blue pitcher and the yellow pitcher from the fridge. Sweet or unsweet? Ezekial pulls on his beard and asks for hot tea, chamomile, if we have it. We don’t. Shirley finds a box of Red Rose Tea in the back of the pantry. My mom used to drink Red Rose Tea back when I’d bring her up from Fort Myers to stay for the week.
After the tea’s all made, we sit down at the dining room table. Ezekial says he’ll start by giving us a little background on him. He’s from up north, he says, from Vermont. He came down here to do school in Sarasota.
“At the hippie college?” I ask.
“Clint,” Shirley says.
“I’m only asking,” I say. “I never knew anybody who went to the hippie college, that’s all. A guy I work with spent a hundred grand to send his kid there and says they didn’t even give her real grades. He says she’s going to be a monologist. Maybe you know her.”
Ezekial looks at Shirley. “I was in the alternative thaumaturgy program, not performing arts. Alternative thaumaturgy emphasizes the relationship between nature and magic. It’s an excellent program, but I’m taking a break from my studies to focus on my music.”
“Your music, huh?” I turn to Shirley. “This guy’s a musician, Babe.”
“Stop it,” she says.
“What? He’s a musician. What do you play, man? Jazz trombone?”
Shirley gets up and goes to the kitchen. Ezekial pulls on his beard and looks at the table. I can’t believe it. We’re gonna pay a dropout from the hippie college to try to save the house. My house. Why are we bothering with this?
“I play bass in a black metal band,” he says. “There’s a good scene in Tampa.”
“Black metal band? Like AC/DC?”
He straightens up. He looks at me like I told him his dog’s ugly. It’s the first time he’s looked like anything since he showed up.
“No, not like AC/DC. I mean, AC/DC’s fine. They’re great. We’re harder.”
“Harder than AC/DC?”
“Yes. Our performances are quite dark.”
“Wow.” I’m trying to figure out if he’s kidding about this black metal thing. I don’t think Ezekial’s got a great sense of humor, though. Those people, the kind who go to the hippie college, they don’t know how to joke around. They can’t take it, and they can’t give it. Still, I start to feel a little bad for saying that about jazz trombone.
“So, what, you do this on the side, while you do the metal thing?”
“Yes, for now.” He looks over to the kitchen. “Whenever you’re both ready, we can discuss a plan for the coming storm.”
Shirley’s been listening, and she comes back in. She gives me a look, so I smile and say, “Shirley, did you hear that? Ezekial here is in a metal band.”
Shirley says that’s really nice, and the way she says it I can tell she means she’s willing to be in the same room as me again so long as I act right. I nod and say that yeah, it’s real nice. So go ahead, what do we need to do?
A half hour later Ezekial is out in the front having a conversation with the oak tree. I don’t know why he’s bothering with that tree. I told him its roots are so deep we had to redo the sewer a couple years ago. That tree isn’t going anywhere. But Ezekial said that the tree was the most alive thing on the property, so he needed to engage with it.
“Is he still engaging with the tree?” I ask Shirley.
“You tell me,” she says. “You’re the one that keeps watching him.”
When Ezekial comes back in, he tells us he’s confident the oak tree understands the seriousness of the situation and, having no desire to alter its living conditions, is determined to keep root and to shed as few branches as possible. The tree does not wish to be an instrument of destruction.
“That’s great,” I say. “Good tree.”
Ezekial goes to the Civic, gets a small leather backpack, and heads up into the crawlspace. He spends about an hour up there. He says he’s placing protective charms on the roof. I tell him that the roof should be in pretty good shape. It got redone when that dentist put the skylights in.
Ezekial looks up at the skylights and his nose twitches.
He does the windows next, goes from room to room and asks us to keep out of whatever room he’s in. Shirley and I mostly stay in the living room watching Brian Quain and not talking.
“You think he’s legit?” she asks. We’ve been sitting there more than half an hour and she hasn’t said anything. I thought she fell asleep.
“The hurricane repeller?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s been a while since we had guests over, but we’ve had weirder than him.”
She laughs at that, and it’s not that single, coughed up “ha,” she’s given me so many times since all this with me and her started to get wrong. It’s her real laugh, her laugh—a little too loud and a little too rough. I try and can’t remember when I heard that laugh last.
“Hey, I’m hungry,” I say. “I’m gonna make a bologna sandwich. You want a bologna sandwich, Shirl?”
She closes her eyes and turns her head to the side. She looks old.
“I don’t have any bologna. You eat bologna. I hate it. It’s got nitrates in it, and I can’t have that. It’s not good for me and I don’t keep it here anymore.”
I try my best to burn the sound of that laugh from a second ago into my mind. I’m pretty sure I’ll never hear it again, and I want to be able to remember the last time I ever did.
We get in an argument, me and Shirley and the hurricane repeller. Shirley says she read that we should sit in the hallway when the storm comes. But our hallway is on the second floor of the house. I try to tell her, Shirl, we can’t be up there on the second floor. We should go in the bathroom downstairs.
Ezekial says Shirley, your husband’s right. We should listen to your husband.
That sets it. When the storm comes, we’re upstairs in the hallway.
“You blessed the roof,” Shirley says when Ezekial keeps trying to convince her to go back downstairs. “If you did it right, it shouldn’t matter.”
That shuts Ezekial up. I think for a second he’s gonna leave. I don’t know where he drove over from, but wherever it is, it’s only 23 minutes away. Probably downtown Tampa, renting a condo there with his parents’ money while he plays bass and doesn’t go to school. The wind’s blowing, but he could still get back downtown in time. He doesn’t leave, though.
Instead, he helps me move the TV into the hall upstairs. Shirley’s got a skinny table there where she keeps her Precious Moments figurines. She’s got them all arranged in a little Precious Moments village, the little Precious Moments mailman and the Precious Moments baby Jesus and the Precious Moments couple getting married. I put the TV under the table.
“You want to move these, Shirl?” I point to the Precious Moments. “You want me to box them up?”
“Don’t touch them,” Shirley says, so I don’t.
We sit there watching TV. We watch Brian Quain and the Channel 8 anchors. Brian Quain is telling people how to shelter under a mattress. We sit there for a while, listening to Brian Quain and the wind, none of us saying anything. Brian Quain is sitting behind the desk with his sleeves rolled up. He’s sitting between the guy anchor and the lady anchor. The two anchors look like they might cry. Brian Quain sits there with his mouth set and his eyes hard. The anchors ask him bunches of questions, and his face never changes while their faces fall apart.
Then the power cuts out. That’s when I hear the wind outside loud enough to bother me.
“I should have filled the bathtub,” Shirley says.
I tell her we can’t drink water out of the bathtub. It’s not clean.
“Not for drinking,” she says. “To flush the toilet.”
We sit for a while and don’t say anything. I fall asleep, more bushed than I realize from an early start and a day spent forcing screws into my house.
When I wake up, I can’t tell if it’s night or day. I hear a train. For a second, I forget that there’s no train near the house. I look at the hurricane repeller, who’s sitting next to me with his back against the wall.
“It’s here,” he says.
I stand up and look around in the dark. Shirley’s lying flat on her back at the end of the hallway. She props herself up on her elbows.
“Where are you going?” she says.
I don’t say. I head downstairs. I walk through the living room. I touch the pictures on the walls. Pictures Shirley took the first time we went to the Bahamas. I had them blown up and framed for her birthday. I touch the huge, ugly silk lilies that Shirley’s aunt sent when Shirley got sick. She sent them after I left, after I freaked out and begged off driving Shirley to chemo, watched through the fanlights over the door as Shirley and her aunt drove away. I rushed to pack two big bags, left a note. It was a stupid note, and it didn’t say anything right, because the only thing you should say when you do something like that is, “I don’t have what it takes.” I came back a week later. I drove her to her treatments and sat with her at the doctor and cleaned up when she puked and watched her get smaller and sicker, and after a while we both thought she forgave me. But she got better. She got stronger, and she got madder. I guess she’d been mad the whole time. She just hadn’t been strong enough to do anything about it. One day she told me I had to go, and because I don’t have what it takes, I listened to her. I left again.
I sit down, let the couch swallow me whole. I listen to the wind scream at the sliding glass door. The plywood I’d put over it is gone.
Then the sliding glass door goes. It sounds the same as a glass dropping on the kitchen floor. The wind is everywhere.
I hustle upstairs, take them two at a time. The wind follows me. I grab Ezekial and we go back down and drag a couple of bookcases in front of the blown-out sliding door, but it’s no good. The storm is in the house now. We can’t kick it out.
We go back upstairs, and I pull Shirley up onto her feet. I feel the floor under me lift like a paper plane.
“We gotta get downstairs,” I say.
“I should have boxed up the Precious Moments,” she says, but she comes with me.
Shirley and me and Ezekial get in the bathroom, and in there it’s dead dark until Ezekial grabs a little battery-powered camp lantern out of his backpack. Shirley can see Ezekial now.
“I thought you sealed it all up,” she says. “I thought this wasn’t going to happen.”
Ezekial shakes his head and looks at her. He can’t think of what to say. I feel for him. He failed, and now there’s no way to go back and do it right.
The bathroom door isn’t anything. The wind is pounding at it. The storm wants to be in here with us. The dumb, hollow bathroom door takes a pounding. I know it’s gonna splinter apart soon. I know this house, and I know it’s coming down. I curse the dentist one last time, and I turn to Ezekial.
“Can you send the storm away? It’s not legal, whatever, but can’t you do it?”
No, Ezekial says. It’s not just illegal. It’s also complicated. An expert thaumaturge who studied their whole life might be able to. There’s maybe twenty people alive who could. “I’m just a guy in a metal band,” he says. “I play bass.”
I can’t say anything to this. Shirley looks like she could say a lot, so many things she can’t get them out of her mouth, can only look pop-eyed. She probably can’t believe she’s going to die in a bathroom with me and spend her last moments listening to a college student talk about his band.
“Alright, you play bass, but you know a lot of useful stuff. And I can help you, man. I can do whatever we need me to do. I can help.”
Ezekial pulls on his beard. He’s maybe 10 years younger than me. He’s a kid trying to make a little money on a shady app, but he stayed when he could have left.
“I play Norwegian black metal.”
“Alright,” I say. I look over at Shirley, who either didn’t hear or doesn’t care
“It’s related to my practice, to my study.” I see the hurricane repeller get that “harder than AC/DC” look again. “Our songs, the lyrics are all taken from old galdrs I learned in college. I’m not even good at bass. I just know a great deal of creepy-sounding Norse spells.”
“Can you make any of them work?”
“There’s one. We turned it into a song, but when we’d play it, bad things would happen. Our drummer got followed home one day, beat up. I thought it was because of the song, so we stopped playing it.”
“What’s the song?”
“It’s called ‘Intruder.”’
Ezekial explains to me what the galdr does. It’s a curse, and once you put it on someone, anyone or anything that has come into a place with ill intent will follow the cursed person out.
I look over at Shirley. She’s sitting in the bathtub, and the anger she’s been showing me all day, it’s gone. She’s blank. I’ve known her since we were kids, since she played clarinet in the marching band and one day I rolled up on her in my truck and asked what she was doing with those band nerds anyway, and she gave me the finger and told me to bite my own dick. I’ve seen her a lot of ways since then. I’ve never seen her checked out.
I ask the hurricane repeller if he’s got a recording of the song on his phone. It takes him a minute, and the whole time he’s looking for it I think that lousy bathroom door is going to shatter. He finds it, though. We listen to it a couple times, and damned if Ezekial isn’t right. This stuff is harder than AC/DC.
“This sounds like someone lit a goat on fire,” I say.
Ezekial grins.
“Thanks,” he says.
It takes a couple more listens, but I memorize the lyrics. Ezekial and I are both kneeling in front of the sink, he’s pounding an angry beat on the counter tiles. I’m chanting the lyrics, a couple short verses. I don’t know what the words are or if I’m saying them right, but Ezekial starts nodding his head in time, harder and harder. He’s getting into it.
I feel weird. Everything around me is going flat. I look at the counter tile. It’s peach, that dentist’s idea of how Florida should look. I wish I’d changed that counter tile. Shirley was always asking me to.
Ezekial puts his hand on my shoulder.
“We’re done?”
“We’re done,” he says. Then he hugs me. I don’t know what the hell to do with that, so I hug him too.
“Thank you,” I tell him, and he doesn’t look at me. I stand up, and Shirley looks at me as if she just noticed I was in the bathroom.
“You’re leaving?”
I nod. I think about saying, “You’re right Shirl. I can’t stay here.” But I don’t. Instead, I just open the bathroom door and close it behind me. I walk out of her house, and the storm and I take each other away.