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The rush of wind and rain returns with her dark night,
Worse than what could have been imagined just before being bound,
She bites and claws with all her might,
Destroying and damaging all around,
The scarred and bent old oak took the hurricane's best,
Along with its exhausted companion who survived this nature's test.
-Author Unknown
PART I
Early Dawn
Fade in. The dark interior of the ramshackle trailer is illuminated only by the amber glow of the kerosene heater sitting next to a futon. Upon the futon lays a man huddled beneath the folds of several layers of blankets. His head is just visible as it pokes out from the edge of the covers. He snores loudly. At the opposite end of the futon a Doberman Pinscher is curled into a tight ball, nose planted beneath its front paws. The room is silent except for the strangled snores of the sleeping man.
Outside, the rain pelts the earth and an icy breeze begins to pick up. Off in the distance the sound of the trees rustling their branches begins to intensify. There is no moon due to the thick cloud cover. It's pitch black. The rain has been coming down at a steady pace all night. Water runs off the edges of the trailer and pools all around it creating muddy pockets in the over soaked dirt.
Inside, the doberman stirs, its ears fluttering, seeking the source of a sound. No, not a sound but an ambiance perhaps. The dog raises its head and tips its nose up slightly, nostrils expanding and contracting. He is air scenting. The subtle shift in the atmosphere would not be noticeable to most humans but the dog senses it. The wind has changed. The sound of the rain is different. Natures tempo just skipped a beat and the dog noticed. The man just continues to snore.
It began at 4 A.M.
Something slammed into the side of the trailer and woke me up.
Thor was acting sketchy and growling, we could hear the wind roaring outside combined with frequent rattles and flapping of the siding. All around the trailer stuff was hitting us and at one point the window in the living room shattered inward as something heavy came crashing down on us. I went outside to asses damages and was pelted both by icy rain and debris that kept flying through the air.
Thor wanted no part of what was happening out in the yard and just watched me from the doorway with his ears back and tail tucked tight. The rain appeared to actually be falling horizontal due to the high winds. I jury-rigged the window and returned inside. I had put on my trench coat, which is both windproof and water resistant. My legs below the bottom of the coat as well as my feet were completely soaked through to the bone. My hands were numb as I hadn't taken the time to put gloves on. I removed the drenched garments and we rode this out for some time, huddled around the kerosene heater listening and waiting for the roof to be ripped away, sucked into the darkness..
 At 7:30 A.M. I called over to the main house and my landlady told me that most of her porch awning was gone and that it looked like the roof over the carport was coming off a piece at a time. Tar paper and shingles were fluttering along the ridge line on the garage as well. One of the kennels in the back was shedding it's corrugated plastic roofing. An entire section was missing and the next one was bent in half flapping noisily against the back of the kennels.
I put my gear back on and headed over to the house. I have a gate in back of the trailer that I put in when I built the fence so that I wouldn't have to walk around all the time. The gate opens into the kennel area of the compound and allows me quick access to both the dogs and the main house when I need to go over there. Today however I would use the front gate and walk around on the main road leading up to her house because I wanted to see the damage to her porch and garage. I stepped out into the torrent once more pulling my over sized collar up over my face to shield it from the blasts of wind and water that seemed to be coming from all directions.
The damn sliding glass door came off it's track as I closed it and I cursed. I lifted it up and it made the usual scraping sound as it dropped back into it's proper alignment again. I crossed the yard and made a hasty exit through the main gate. As soon as I closed the gate behind me and turned around I was assaulted by the sight of my Chevy Suburban with it's hood not closed, but open. Open and bent backwards against the windshield.. holy shit.
 I cursed again remembering that when I had taken the alternator out a few weeks ago that I'd left some sockets and other tools laying on the radiator skirting. I had merely lowered the hood, not latching it because I figured I would be getting back in there again shortly to install the rebuilt unit. Well as usual one thing led to another and I hadn't yet finished this little project. Obviously at some point during the night the winds had discovered my poor vehicle and zeroed in on it like jackals to a wounded gazelle.. Even now as I stood there the hood quivered violently as the wind furiously tried to finish what it had started under cover of darkness.
I reached up and grabbed hold of the hood and tried to pull it back down. Not a chance. The hood was bent backwards and as I looked closer I could see that the hinge on the drivers side was bent and therefore locked open. I looked around for something to wedge into the hinge and pry it back into position. I saw a 12 inch drill bit that was laying in the back of the cab behind the drivers seat. I grabbed it and tried to slide it between the arm of the hinge and the flange that was bent past the point it should have stopped. I finally found an angle and got the bit in place. When I pulled back on it I was hoping to pop the flange back into position but instead all that happened was the drill bit bent in half.
Have I mentioned Karma before?
OK, this was really starting to piss me off. I was cold, wet below the knees and not having a good day at all. I realized that I would just have to unbolt the hinge and deal with it later. I quickly found the right size socket among the ones laying on the radiator skirting, snapped it onto the ratchet that lay beside them and proceeded to unscrew the bolt with one hand as I supported the hood with the other.
As if sensing my intent, the wind began to make an ominous howling sound, pummeling me from behind with branches and pieces of loose debris. The bolt came off and the weight of the hood dropped into my grasp for a moment but was suddenly yanked away by an angry, icy blast of stabbing wet wind. The spring on the other hinge was making a pitiful groaning noise as it began to buckle. I jumped up onto the skirting and grabbed onto the hood with both hands then let myself fall backwards using my own body weight to pull the hood down. It worked. I heard the distinct clicking sound of the latch closing in place.
I tossed the tools into the back of the Suburban and then headed once again up the drive towards the main house. It was like walking through the aftermath of an explosion. The road and entire yard was littered with all manner of trash and broken tree limbs everywhere. Tar paper along with pieces of 2 x 4 and plywood, some with nails sticking through lay in small heaps. Pieces of plastic lattice and corrugated roofing or maybe trailer skirting had been thrown about, most of it cracked and ripped. The wind was still raging and as I approached the house more pieces of tar paper and broken shingles came screaming out of the sky landing momentarily with a wet slap and then whipping back up and across the yard as if having second thoughts about where to settle.
She has four vehicles parked in front of her house. Three vans and a derelict car which she uses to store bags of stuff which she doesn't even remember the contents of. In fact, two of the three vans don't run either and serve her the purpose of miniature storage units. She's a pack rat the likes of which I've never seen before. Hell, I thought I was bad about hanging on to stuff.. not even close. Her property is chalk full of every little odd and end that she and her deceased husband ever owned. Some of it literally rotting or broken and unusable ever again at the very least.
 Last spring she made a huge dramatic ordeal about wanting to clean out her carport and that the stuff just accumulating in there was largely to blame for holding up the natural order of things on the entire property. I'm sure I've gotten the facts askew somehow here but it doesn't even matter, the point is that she made a huge fuss about it and pretty much demanded that we go through things together out there. So I agreed and one morning we headed out to the carport to do some cleaning. She immediately started acting like some sort of job site foreman as she pointed to things and started yammering away about where to stack this and that. This woman talks without pause for hours on end by nature so this was just a natural extension of that process for her. Every other item she saw prompted a twenty to forty five minute story. Most of the stories she relates are about someone else dropping the ball, giving up, being irresponsible or just plain not doing something the way she would do it. They almost all have similar endings as well; she has to take charge if she wants anything done and done right. Men and youth are her targets in general, her late husband being the source of countless examples of male ineptitude, proving her point as she rams it home over and over and over. Jerry, her husband, has died a thousand deaths since the day his body ceased to breath as she repeatedly violates him with her overwhelming distaste for the male species. Her attitude on this runs so deep that it transcends to the way she looks at her dogs as well. She constantly complains about the number of males on the property. Yet, somehow, I truly believe that deep down she misses him.
I lost a few brain cells trying to figure her out before I gave up and resigned to the fact that I'm never going to fully understand how her mind works. In any case the point of this is that after spending an entire morning going through her carport she ended up keeping 99% of the junk anyway. We simply moved things from one pile to another. She simply could not, or rather, would not get rid of anything. Instead she would make half-hearted attempts at justifying her need to cling to this menagerie. The property looks like something out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre with piles of junk laying around, derelict vehicles, bags of trash and lumber strewn all about.
Even with all of the trailer life decor as I've become familiar with here, the yard was distinctly more obliterated this morning. The real focus was her porch. She hadn't been exaggerating when she had said the awning was torn off. From the driveway I could see a staggered pile of lattice, corrugated roofing and other material laying on top of the staircase I had built her. A twisted handrail stabbed up through the back of the wreckage. The tree that she had planted at the bottom of the steps was smashed beneath all of this. Branches were splayed outward at inappropriate angles, their ends protruding like some kind of giant insect that had been squashed under a boot.
 I began pulling at the pieces trying to dislodge them. Slowly I cleared the staircase and was able to ascend to the porch. I went inside and as we began discussing the situation the power went out. The lights went dark, the hum of the ceiling fans went silent as the blades slowed to a halt and the computer made an abrupt popping sound. The screen turned black and the high pitch whir of the tiny fans faded. The most noticable change to the environment though was the sudden silence. She plays classical music 24-7 on her television through XM radio which is part of her Direct TV package. The music in the background is always there, after a time you don't even realize it's playing, until it stops. The silence inside the house made the storm outside seem to intensify. The wind screamed as it tore at anything it could manage to latch on to. The house rumbled and the roof rattled. The sound of flying debris impacting against the seemingly insignificant structure in which we stood made us glance up at the ceiling, both of us wondering if it was about to be stripped away. Behind me, somewhere in a back room I heard the muffled whimpers of scared dobermans.
TO BE CONTINUED...Labels: Short Stories, The Pineapple Express, Winter |
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| 10:27 PM | Posted by Dave |
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