Acts of Nature

second floor, to the sheared-away beams that had once supported a cathedral ceiling, until he was staring straight up into the clouds passing high above. It was like a tiny tornado, spinning within the chaos of the hurricane, had peeled away the entire roof and then dipped its finger straight down into the building and did a little twirl and then left.
    It was disconcerting to Marcus, and he stood there thinking of the time when he was very young, maybe about the time his father had left. His mom had decided to make changes in their lives to forget the past and she’d completely redone his room; moved his bed to another wall; the dresser, the bedside lamp, even the posters, all shifted. He remembered now how it had confused and scared him when he would awake in the middle of the night and have that overwhelming feeling that he didn’t know where he was. That fear came over him now, that he was someplace so foreign and unsafe that there was nothing familiar to hold on to.
    “Marcus!”
    Buck was leaning over a spiral, wrought-iron staircase that gave access to the bedroom upstairs.
    “Marcus? What the fuck, son. You gonna help or just watch, boy? Get your ass up here and go through this other bedroom.”
    “I got it, Buck,” Wayne said, then turned to Marcus. “Why don’t you see if you can pack up that player with something waterproof, man.”
    He nudged Marcus with the satchel he’d filled with CDs and had slung over his shoulder and on the way past whispered, “Got us some booty here, brother.”
    Wayne was sounding giddy too. “Both you guys are fucking lost,” Marcus said.
    Buck was filling the gas tank of the airboat when a hot, dangerous urge came into his head and he stopped to wonder where the hell it came from. He could suddenly see himself: the red five-gallon can in hand, sloshing the contents in a careful path along the first floor baseboards of the entire place they’d just looted. Make sure you get it on all sides and in the corners so that every remaining wall would go up in flames. Fuck ’em. Asshole city boys and their seaside mansions out here, he thought. He could especially see the now broken photos curling up and going black in the flames. He’d picked one up in the den area: four guys no older than him, big-ass grins on their faces, the two on the ends holding trophy-size mangrove snapper, the two on the inside holding half-full bottles of piss yellow Corona beer. One actually had on a polo shirt, probably with his country club logo on it but Buck couldn’t tell. One had a ring on his right hand with a rock as big as the eye of the fish he held hooked in the gills. Buck was not normally a jealous sort. He didn’t look at fancy sports cars at the casino or on trips into Naples and lust after them. The big plasma television sets he saw when he was creeping one of those suburban homes did not have any allure to him. He’d go down to the bar at the Rod & Hunt Club and watch their big screen game for the price of a few beers.
    But for some reason this monstrous, yellow-painted structure built like an ass pimple out here in the middle of the Glades and filled with all the comforts of those homes had put him in a pissy mood. Hell, he ought to be thanking the owners. He’d found their stash of booze, a case of some kind of imported rum, back in the corner of a pantry closet. He’d picked up a fine pair of binoculars upstairs in one of the bedrooms; six hundred bucks retail, probably unload them for two hundred to Bobby the Fence. Then he’d pulled out the drawer that he almost missed in what was probably the master suite. The thing was actually built into the bed frame. He’d stubbed his toes on it, expecting his foot to slide under the mattress when he’d stepped up close to the bed and instead kicking the solid frame below.
    He’d gone to his knees and saw the handles and the lock. The pry bar he carried took care of the latter. When he pulled out the sliding drawer he was not exactly surprised, considering the boys he’d seen in the photos, to be met by the odor of gun oil and the sight of carefully wrapped firearms. But the five weapons he took out and arranged on the bed mattress were exceptional.
    A 30-30 Winchester rifle, old style as far as he could tell, but in such pristine shape it had to be a collector’s item. He couldn’t help but pick it up, throw the lever action, and sight down the barrel, dreaming scenes of the Old West. Yee ha. He smiled. Born in the wrong