Flood Plains Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Epilogue

  FLOOD PLAINS

  Mark Wheaton

  Southbound Films—2012

  For my grandfather

  “The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.” —Primo Levi

  Chapter 1

  Mother of Mercy, this darkness will be the death of me, thought Big Time.

  The forty-eight-year-old father of four groped around the dimly lit kitchen for the coffee maker, wondering who he might talk to about getting daylight savings to come early this year. Finding yesterday’s dirty filter in the brew basket, he opened the door under the sink and proceeded to toss the grounds-filled bag on the floor. The damp splat it made when he missed the trash bag made him wonder if the money saved on keeping the lights off whenever possible was cancelled out by the two paper towels he now used to clean it up.

  He stifled a grunt. His family’s money troubles weren’t that bad, but his mind wouldn’t let him off the hook.

  Big Time bent over and flipped the offending filter into the trash bag, fighting a juvenile urge to slam the cabinet door shut. His wife wasn’t home from her night shift running credit card approvals, but it would wake up the boys and his mother, Erna. He peered out the kitchen window, over the toy-littered backyard and up to the slowly purpling South Texas skyline.

  They’d been talking hurricane on the news all week, enough to make Big Time jumpy, to say nothing of his family. He couldn’t see the clouds, but the way the meteorologists were saying, chances of it running up against Houston were slim.

  That’s when he realized the troubling thing about the sky was that it was a little too bright for his tastes.

  “Shit, am I already late?” he asked himself.

  A quick glance at a clock, which read 5:09, reminded him for the sixth time in the past ten minutes that he was perfectly on time, just decaffeinated.

  Big Time plugged in the coffee maker and hit the “brew” button, the little orange light burning to life. He calculated the pennies he saved by unplugging the thing during the day and wondered if more folks would do the same if they knew how much latent energy was expended by keeping plugs in their sockets.

  Big Time’s was a tall, well-built black man with muscular hands and arms, a completely bald head, and a neatly trimmed mustache. He was sometimes mistaken for a football player who let himself would get a little pudgy around the middle. But he’d never played sports, barely worked out, and attributed his physique to an inability to sit still for long.

  He reached into the refrigerator, grabbed a Diet Dr. Pepper, and extracted a faded “Big Gulp” mug from the dishwasher. He poured the equivalent of three cups of coffee into the mug and finished it with twenty ounces of soda. He swirled the ice cold and boiling hot liquids together and remembered hearing a late-night comedian once joke about heating a freezing cold apartment by turning on a hot shower, only to create a thunderstorm in his living room. He looked into his mug and grinned, a tempest in a tea cup.

  His gaze ventured back out to the dark skies giving way to dawn and imagined the sound of thunder. He’d had his share of tempests.

  Hell, one was enough.

  • • •

  “Animal elegance.”

  This was what a reporter named Matt Loney had described Alan Terrell as having when he ran. Loney had been covering the 800-meter at a Louisiana all-region event when Alan was a senior in high school, a race the young man won. He’d also won the 400 and led his 1600-meter relay team to victory as well. It was buried in the sports pages of a Lafayette daily, but Alan’s grandmother kept a copy in her purse from then on. When Alan ran for the Tigers, she would repeat that phrase to anyone in the stands who couldn’t get away fast enough.

  She’d even tried to show the article to Carl Lewis the four times Alan and she had ventured into Texas for the Track Invitationals in Austin. Lewis hadn’t seemed to understand, merely shook her hand and wished Alan good luck, and after that, she didn’t allow Lewis’s name spoken in her house. Then, she had a heart attack and their house in the Lower Ninth Ward went quiet for a while.

  Whenever Alan raced, he was trying to live up to that description as well as others that came along.

  “Boy runs like a thoroughbred.”

  “Looks like a springing panther.”

  “Like watching a water moccasin cut through water.”

  Yeah, leave it to Southern white reporters to refer to him as black animals. He took pride in the fact that his skin showed off his cut muscles better than the white boys he competed against. They were a rarity in the African American-dominated track meets of the South, but he was looking forward to running against the cream in Colorado Springs someday. All these pretty Prefontaines from the big east colleges descending on the Olympic Training Facility with no idea how fast he’d blitz past them, thin air and all. He planned to break a few of their records in the process, too.

  But that would have to wait, if just for a little while.

  This morning, Alan couldn’t even find the T-shirt he wore to the factory the day before so he could go run in it. The living room of the small apartment he’d woken up in was littered with unpacked moving boxes and little else, but it was dark. He finally spied the faded, purple-and-gray Geaux Tigers freebie half-in half-out of a box of old clothes, but then realized he wasn’t alone.

  Peering out of one of three doors leading to the living room was his daughter, Mia. Though she was eleven now, her presence and proximity still felt alien to him. Wearing ratty SpongeBob pajamas she’d overgrown ages ago, she looked downright comical as she watched him get dressed.

  “Shh,” he said a finger to his lips. “Don’t wake up Mom.”

  Mia nodded, her bright, inquisitive eyes flashing, and grinned.

  Alan smiled back and threw on the shirt, pocketing his key as he headed out the front door. He waved to Mia, but she’d already disappeared into her room.

  It was a chilly morning, unusual for Texas in late September. With a storm rolling off the Gulf, though, all bets were off.

  Alan jogged his warm-up lap through a park only a few blocks from the apartment. The dew of a cold morning always limited the number of human obstacles on the paths. North Houston had its share of crime, but it was nothing like down in the city. This park was about as safe as it got even at just past five in the morning. At one point, Alan had counted sixteen soccer fields, ten on one side of the street that bisected the park and six on the side he was running on now. He imagined the place was pretty packed on a Saturday morning.

  Appearing out of the gloom were two middle-aged white men jogging together in slick running pants and tank tops.

  “On your left,” Alan said like a cyclist, accelerating slightly.

  “This is the
guy,” he heard one the joggers say.

  Alan grinned. The straightaway that ran along the northern fence began fifty yards in front of him. He slowed, glanced back to make sure the joggers were watching, and took off his watch, palming it. Coming to a complete stop, he took a couple of breaths of cold, damp air before dropping into starting position.

  He felt the stretch in his calves as he arched his back. He placed his thumb on a button on the side of the watch, waited another second, and pushed it. The tiny beep it sounded was like a starter’s pistol to Alan. He rocketed forward, cutting through the still morning air like a rocket. He loved running in the damp, as the chill always drove him faster.

  His legs pistoning up and down, Alan focused his eyes on the horizon. The tree that marked the finish line exactly eight hundred meters from where he started stayed in his peripheral vision, but he forced himself not to “run for the finish.” An 800-meter was about pacing, and seeing the finish could always spark an unexpected burst of unwanted adrenaline.

  Instead, he cleared his mind, focused on his legs, and felt the air whipping past his body.

  His thumb hit the button on the watch like a reflex the instant he passed the tree. As Alan decelerated, the joggers applauded and cheered, and he waved and smiled. He knew most people weren’t accustomed to see what they’d just seen. Everybody could run, but when they saw a real athlete at work, it was something they told their friends about.

  Then Alan looked at his watch and found 1:59:44 staring back at him.

  It could not have been worse. He angrily blanked the watch counter, but the time was already etched in his mind’s eye.

  After a moment, he took off jogging again. His worry displaying itself in his stride, he knew that what he’d been considering for months couldn’t wait any longer.

  • • •

  “As Hurricane Eliza looms off the Gulf, the Astros leave for a swing through the Northeast with three games against the Mets, four, including a double-header, against Philly.”

  Big Time had been in Texas for two years but still felt like a stranger. Even though Houston was just down the highway from New Orleans, he’d been raised to think of the Lone Star State as a land apart from what typically constituted “the South.” Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia: that was the South, with parts of the Florida panhandle making the cut on a good day. South Carolina? Nope. Tennessee or Kentucky or Arkansas? Not on your life. The South meant the states that lived and died by the whim of the Gulf of Mexico that created a temperate climate good for growing crops. It wasn’t where the hillbillies lived. It was where the wealthy could afford to keep slaves to work the land.

  Big Time had never been one for genealogy but had always heard his relatives came in through Galveston instead of the Atlantic ports most slaves entered America through. He wondered if that was why his people never had much use for Texas.

  A light rain fell as he drove Crosstimbers Avenue to the highway. The road was devoid of traffic this early, and his passage was witnessed only by the rows of crumbling wood frame houses on either side of the road. As if by design, the homes of Houston’s Fifth Ward all seemed to have yards overgrown with weeds and elm trees. Maintaining a shaggy outward appearance probably deterred at least a couple of would-be home invaders, at least more than the omnipresent waist-high chain link fences that encircled many properties. These were often so short a child could hop over without much difficulty.

  For a district with such a reputation for hardcore violence, the tall grass, dirt sidewalks, and overhanging trees gave this part of Fifth Ward a positively rural appearance. It reminded Big Time of the neighborhood he’d grown up in. Even though Slidell was just on the east side of the Pontchartrain Bridge from New Orleans, it might as well have been on another planet.

  Nearing the highway, Big Time jacked the windshield wipers up a notch as the rain came down harder. At the intersection of Crosstimbers and the entrance and exit ramps to the 59 Freeway, a two-story hotel that had been boarded up and painted a uniform white stood on his right and a Chevron gas station on his left. Realizing he would have to get gas at some point and the rain would only get worse as the hurricane got closer, Big Time pulled into the Chevron.

  After setting the hold-open to keep gas pumping into his tank, Big Time wandered into the station. As he entered, the owner was shouting obscenities at an emaciated young black man standing at the counter holding two half-gallon bottles of water.

  “You fuckers gotta have four or five of my bathroom keys over in your crack squat,” the owner, a bearded, ponytailed, white fifty-something with the name “Edwin” stitched to his grimy shirt bellowed at the kid. “I know you sneak over here all hours of the day to use my facilities and I’m sick of it. I don’t care what you buy. Restrooms are off-limits. Next time I see one of you crackheads out there, I’m calling the police.”

  The youngster stood glassy-eyed and took his dressing-down. When the owner finally went quiet, he nodded a sort of ‘good-bye’ and headed for the door. The owner turned an incredulous look at Big Time.

  “Man, I don’t know what’s worse,” Edwin began. “The dopeheads or the fact that the City knew exactly what they were doing when they let all that trash come over in the first place.”

  Big Time figured the guy had seen his Louisiana plates at least half a dozen times. Even now they were up on the rotating four-camera display alongside the register, but Big Time simply slid a twenty across the counter and said nothing.

  “I used to know a mechanic, Romanian guy, who worked on German cars. He sold a lot of parts and won some trip to Germany, but when he came back, he was just shaking his head because of all the immigrants fucking up the country. I still remember he said, ‘If Hitler came back for just one week, place would be paradise.’ Funny guy, right?”

  The owner waited for Big Time’s dirty look but got a grin instead. “You know Hitler killed all the Romanians, too, right? And your pal’s an immigrant, no? Sounds like he was plotting his own demise.”

  The owner was struck dumb. Big Time gave him a little salute before heading back to his truck. Making a mental note to gas up at the Texaco up by Deltech from here on, Big Time hopped back behind the wheel and angled towards the highway.

  Once up on the 59, he could see the dimly illuminated skyline of downtown. Unlike Dallas with its ball-topped Reunion Tower, Chicago with whatever they were now calling the Sears Tower, or Manhattan with the Empire State Building, Houston was downright anonymous. Even so, Big Time thought its cluster of modern skyscrapers looked like Oz when viewed against a foreground of the ramshackle, sub-poverty homes of Fifth Ward.

  Chapter 2

  Zakiyah Weldele sighed as she looked at the moving boxes in her living room, trying to remember how much bigger the place had appeared before Alan moved in. Sure, Katrina had wiped him out and his trademark good luck hadn’t followed him to Houston, but was that any reason to extend a hand to the man who’d knocked her up at fourteen and had played the absentee father to Mia ever since?

  Her cell phone said it was already 5:43, three minutes past her absolute, already-gonna-be-late cut-off time.

  “You tell your daddy he’d better have all this off the floor or in storage by the end of the week or it’s going in the dumpster,” Zakiyah said.

  Mia looked up from her breakfast cereal and giggled. Zakiyah tried unsuccessfully to stifle a smile.

  “It’s not funny! This place is a sty.”

  Most of the boxes were clothes, mostly workout gear with multiple pairs of shoes. The tread had been worn down to almost nothing on some of them, but Alan kept them anyway. Then there were three full boxes of trophies.

  Those goddamn trophies.

  Zakiyah realized a couple of the plaques were ones she’d first seen in Alan’s bedroom over ten years ago. She’d thought it was really something to be this big handsome track star’s girlfriend at the time, especially since she’d never considered herself the prettiest girl in class. Now, the fact that this same fellow,
now a grown man, was still carting around trinkets he’d won at a fifth-grade Field Day made her roll her eyes.

  “Oink, oink,” Mia grunted, giving herself a pig nose with her index finger. She pretended to eat her cereal as if from a trough.

  “That’s disgusting,” Zakiyah said. She walked over and kissed her daughter on the forehead. “I can’t be late, so tell Daddy to take the bus.”

  Mia nodded. Zakiyah grabbed her packed lunch off the counter, pretending first to grab Mia’s faded pink plastic lunch bag.

  “Mom!”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  Mia sighed and Zakiyah grinned.

  “Do well today and make me proud.”

  Once out the door, Zakiyah noticed that it was lightly raining. Quickly searching the parking lot for her faded blue Sentra, she spotted it only three spaces away from the front door. Deciding to take this as a good omen, she was soon on the road making up the time she’d lost.

  • • •

  Deltech Computers was created by four friends who had been laid off from their respective computer companies in the mid-eighties. Reagan had called in the small business loans, and demand for business computers crashed. As the story went, these fellows, who had gotten to know one another working booths across countless business conferences, met at a Luby’s Cafeteria in North Houston. Over iced tea and Jell-O, they designed a new kind of personal computer that would be cheap to manufacture, far lighter than anything on the market (making it cheaper to ship), but it would still include all the bells and whistles they knew their clients desired with none of the costly ones that tended to go unused for the life of the machine.

  Fifteen years later, they had leapt past several competitors to compete with the likes of IBM and Packard Bell to become one of the largest providers of business computers in the world. Their manufacturing, service, and administrative departments employed over thirty-five thousand people worldwide. Around eighteen thousand of these worked at the main Deltech campus an hour north of Houston in the cozy suburbs, home to many of the company’s top executives.