Acts of Nature

but even after only a handful of hours they had already started to rise ever so slightly, like they always did after an assault. Several varieties of shingles from rooftops and wood splinters from crab traps had caught the wind and tumbled through town. Now they all lay on the ground with a sheen of wet mud over them. Buck checked the watermark at the base of his steps. The tide and storm surge had come up to the second riser, about two feet, then receded back into the Gulf. There were a few dead mullet under his house, caught up in some rolled bales of chicken wire he’d stored there, like they’d been trapped on purpose. Part of the stink, he thought.
    He walked lightly, picking his way, stepping over boards with the nail points exposed and around the low spots where coffee-colored mud hid their depth. He headed directly to old man Brown’s one-hundred-year-old home and was relieved first to see that the ancient Dade County pine structure seemed untouched by the night’s wind. Around the corner he heard the sound of someone coughing up a substantial quantity of phlegm and then spitting.
    Nate Brown was in his side yard wearing a pair of dull yellow, knee-high rubber boots, a boatman’s foul-weather gear, and a flopping rain hat. He had the heads of three dead chickens in between the fingers of his right fist, their necks stretched with the weight of their wet feathered bodies. The old man was bending at the edge of his wire fence and plunged his other hand into the mud and came up with yet another. He did not turn to look at Buck but had sensed his presence.
    “Goddamned birds. Don’t never learn they cain’t run from no hurrican’,” Brown said; his southern drawl gave any listener a sense he was pulling each word slowly and reluctandy from the past. “If’n they’d just stay inside the henhouse, they’d a been safe.”
    Buck watched the old man wedge the newly found head into his hand with the others.
    “Pretty good blow last night,” Buck finally said toward conversation, knowing he would get little in return. Brown looked up into the western sky like he was smelling the air in the aftermath as if to measure it.
    “Seen worst,” he finally said, and nothing more.
    “Looks like you came through all right,” Buck tried again, nodding back at Brown’s house. This time there wasn’t even a word in response. An answer would have been rhetorical and Nate Brown did not dabble in the rhetorical, especially with Buck. Brown had known Buck’s father and his grandfather. They might have even been friends back in the day if such a thing had been admitted among the old early settlers of the southwest. But they were connected not so much by something as ephemeral as friendship as by blood and guts and a reliance on one another to stay alive in such a place at the turn of the century. Buck knew that while Brown had respected his father for keeping his mouth shut and going to prison for his part of the smuggling, the old man had no time for him. Even Buck knew he was not the man his father was. It did not stop him from trying to ingratiate himself.
    “Sir, if I can interrupt. Could I offer you a coffee and get your advice on somethin’?”
    Brown looked down at the dead fowl in his hand, the fist full of chicken heads as if asking their opinion, and then tilted his head toward the porch on his house. Neither man bothered knocking the mud off his boots as the storm had already deposited as much debris and wet dirt on the interior floor as it could hold. Buck thought they were heading into the old man’s home, but Brown dropped the dead chickens at the doorway and then walked to the corner of the porch. With a few simple yanks of marine line to release the knots, he let loose the tie-downs to a small hand-hewn wooden table and a couple of straight-backed chairs he’d secured before the hurricane. He scraped the legs across the floorboards and settled in one of the chairs. Buck swallowed a rising humiliation at not being allowed into the house, but he knew it was the old man’s way. He recalled the time when he was a boy and watched his father go into Nate Brown’s home for late night meetings with other men. Once he had even crawled quietly to a corner window to listen, rewarded only by the slow, deep rumble of Nate Brown’s voice but unintelligible words. There had been no way to see past the yellowish glow of a pulled paper window sash that night, and Buck could only imagine the men standing or