ground slow but exceedingly fine.
Grunwald relaxed in his patio hot tub, dozing, until the approaching afternoon storm
woke him with the sound of thunder. He hauled himself out and went inside. As he
closed the sliding glass door between the patio and the living room, the rain began to fall. Grunwald smiled. “This’ll cool you off, neighbor,” he said.
The crows had once more taken up station on the scaffolding which clasped the half-
finished bank on three sides, but when thunder cracked almost directly overhead and
the rain began to fall they took wing and sought shelter in the woods, cawing their displeasure at being disturbed.
In the Port-O-San—it seemed he’d been locked in here for at least three years—Curtis
listened to the rain on the roof of his prison. The roof that had been the rear side until The Motherfucker tipped it over. The rain tapped at first, then beat, then roared. At
the height of the storm, it was like being in a telephone booth lined with stereo
speakers. Thunder exploded overhead. He had a momentary vision of being struck by
lightning and cooked like a capon in a microwave. He found this didn’t disturb him
much. It would be quick, at least, and what was happening now was slow.
The water began to rise again, but not fast. Curtis was actually glad about this, now
that he had determined there was no actual risk of drowning like a rat that has tumbled into a toilet bowl. At least it was water, and he was very thirsty. He lowered his head to one of the holes in the steel cladding. Water from the overflowing ditch was
bubbling up through it. He drank like a horse at a trough, sucking it up. The water was gritty, but he drank until his belly sloshed, constantly reminding himself that it was water, it was.
“There may be a certain piss content, but I’m sure it’s low,” he said, and began to
laugh. The laughter turned to sobbing, then back to laughter again.
The rain ended around six P.M., as it usually did this time of year. The sky cleared in time to provide a grade-A Florida sunset. The few summer residents of Turtle Island
gathered on the beach to watch it, as they usually did. No one commented on Curtis
Johnson’s absence. Sometimes he was there, sometimes he wasn’t. Tim Grunwald
was there, and several of the sunsetters remarked that he seemed exceptionally cheery
that evening. Mrs. Peebles told her husband, as they walked home hand in hand along
the beach, that she believed Mr. Grunwald was finally getting over the shock of losing his wife. Mr. Peebles told her she was a romantic. “Yes, dear,” she said, momentarily
putting her head on his shoulder, “that’s why I married you.”
When Curtis saw the light coming through the holes in the cladding—the few that
weren’t facedown in the ditch—fading from peach to gray, he realized he was actually
going to spend the night in this stinking coffin with two inches of water on the floor and a half-closed toilet hole at his feet. He was probably going to die in here, but that seemed academic. To spend the night in here, however—hours stacked on more hours, piles of hours like piles of great black books—that was real and unavoidable.
The panic pounced again. He once more began to scream and pound the walls, this
time turning around and around on his knees, first beating his right shoulder against
one wall and then his left against the other. Like a bird caught in a church steeple, he thought, but could not stop. One flailing foot splattered the escaped turd against the bottom of the bench seat. He tore his pants. He first bruised his knuckles, then split them. At last he stopped, weeping and sucking at his hands.
Got to stop. Got to save my strength.
Then he thought: For what?
By eight o’clock, the air had begun to cool. By ten o’clock, the pud dle in which
Curtis was lying had also cooled—seemed cold, in fact—and he began to tremble. He
clutched his arms around himself and drew his knees up to his chest.