Flash floods are nasty sons-a-bitches. Devious. Duplicitous. They trickle at first, and you think Aw, it’s not so bad. You might even pull out your phone and take some video, because it’s a hypnotic sight to behold. But within minutes or seconds the trickle bloats up to a swell, and now you’re inching away from it. Moments later you’re thinking Oh shit, and the next thing you know, you’re running from a surge of water as high as you.
Flash floods catch up debris, which is the worst part. Sweep up all loose things and tumble them about in violent clashes that kick your feet out from under you and knock you into the current. The loose things come small at first. Litter, like crushed beer cans, neon-green bar cups, and chicken shack cartons. Leaves and yellow police tape, swirling atop the surface like confetti and streamers. But then things get bigger. Orange street cones. Black garbage bags from restaurant alleys. And bigger and bigger: full construction yard planks, tree branches cracked in half, window panels punched loose, lawn chairs and umbrellas and a child’s pink plastic Barbie jeep wrangler left forgotten outside on the porch.
And minute by minute, the cars parallel parked along the roads start groaning. When the water hits above the wheel, they start turning with the current. They slide sideways, pushed in diagonals into the cars parked in front of them. Alarms scree-ah-scree-ah! And the lead car, the one up at the corner, comes full loose and drifts across the street.
•
Elise Honoré was the last passenger off the FEMA bus. Her cashmere cardigan and designer jeans gone brown with the smell of flood water, algae, broken swamp rose, and drowned vermin. Two-days of mire and sweat without a shower.
Black highway asphalt scorched bare feet. She clutched her Valentino slouch to her chest. Felt the clink of the beloved artifacts within, the sharp edges of baubles and jewelry boxes tight against rib. The last remnants of her house, her belongings, her family, her ancestral home and its hundred-year history. That’s all she had left of any of it, tucked inside one water-stained designer bag.
Behind her, a puff of air and a whoosh as the door shut. She turned to stare at that bus, its clean, sleek sides, its black-tint windows, its air-conditioned interior with rows of plush gray seats, and its blue box body—F-E-M-A writ in white letters down the side. One of its taillights was burnt out. It looked like it was winking at her as it spun dust and left.
Its pod of passengers stood willy-nilly on the side of that hot highway. Their faces still slicked with flood mire, hair frizzed out, mottled brown clothes hanging stretched off torsos. A wan kid clutched a sad-looking teddy bear. A woman held a toddler to her chest, her shirt so loose it exposed half her bra.
“What now?” one of the others asked. She wore a purple skirt and matching jacket, all of it stained brown with sludge from the waist down. Her hair had been curled nice, but now it was all afrizz. She’d probably been at church, caught up in a pew when the water swept in to swallow the pulpit.
A dozen voices answered. “They coming back?”
“Maybe another one comin’, you think?”
“Sure. They just got to go get more people. Then they drop them off here and go back and get more.”
“Yeah, yeah, like a relay.”
“Another bus gonna come take us to a checkpoint or something.”
“Or one of them mega-shelters. They just built one an hour out, I heard . . .” “Sure thing. I bet that’s what they’re doing.”
There were shrugs, and more talk about what was going on, more maybe- maybe-maybes.
Elise winced. Her feet blazed on black. She picked over the pebble crunch and litter, and the miniscule, glinting green shards of long-broken glass. There was a strip of white gravel beneath the railing. There, she cooled her burning soles as best they could be cooled.
The passengers lolled and shuffled with hands in pockets. The FEMA people had unloaded a pallet of 16.9 oz bottled waters, three tiers high. Church Lady peeled back the plastic and started handing those out. A man with a bruised left eye helped her.
After another twenty minutes, then another, some started setting up camping tents pulled loose from hurricane bags. Some leaned survival tarps
alongside rails . . . just to get some shade. Others kept looking down the road, like they were waiting at an RTA stop. But as an hour peeled into a second, it became obvious. No bus was coming.
Sometimes they heard distant sirens, but no emergency vehicles ever came their way. An occasional car or truck whizzed past. A blur of screaming tires and exhaust gusts. Elise covered her mouth, coughed. They went too fast. She couldn’t see anybody inside: just boxes and furniture and bags pressed up against windows. Maybe it wasn’t a person behind the steering wheel. Just a coat rack or a floor lamp driving those cars.
Elise’d gone to the nail salon three days ago. Her heels had been scrubbed to a soft pale with a pumice stone, her toenails clipped and polished into lovely pink with perfect white French pedicure crests. Now, leaning on the highway rail, she gathered herself. Bent up her leg to get a look at the bottoms of her feet and the damage done. Poked her arches, her soles, the soft slopes along the bottom of her foot. The black and red, the bruises and burns and scrapes that made her skin look like a Kandinsky.
She felt eyes on her.
Water bottle in hand, there stood a boy, maybe twelve or thereabouts. He wore his red backpack frontways like a baby sling. The bag was huge: a hiking bag. It covered him shoulder-to-knee. Cylinder shapes pressed out from inside like ghost hands on glass. Canned food hardening the top into a square.
He had pimple scars as big as pepperonis and marbled eyes as big as bonkers. He stared, quizzical-like, darting those eyes up and down, up and down between Elise’s face and her feet. “Why don’t you got any shoes?”
“There wasn’t time.”
Shoe Boy cocked back at her. “You had time to get that boujee bag.”
Some couple feet away, a busker guy she’d noticed on the bus did a little shoulder shake that might’ve been a laugh. He had a skeezy gutter punk way. Loose shoulders, ear plug holes, skitzy fingers, and hand-stitched tattoos blurred up the arms. A sticker-slathered fiddle case viced between his legs.
Elise bristled at Busker’s laugh, at Shoe Boy’s pelt of words. A hard rock lifted up her throat, a responsive swell of hereditary Honoré pride come up from the pit of her. Pride: the one sin of the six that might as well’ve been carved into the family crest. They were an old family, an ancestral family that had seen the comings and goings of the generations since the signing of the Treaty of Fontainebleau. Elise was the last in the line, carried the last of that historical name. She carried it proud.
She squared back her shoulders, screwed up her lips. Shot Shoe Boy glassy splinters of glare.
“I got an extra pair if you want ’em,” he said. “I brought two pairs.” And he said it with a chin tilt up and a chest puff out, because he was a kid, and kids love an opportunity to lord it over an adult, whenever they do something better than the adult did.
“Thank you, that’s alright,” Elise said. She said it in that Southern, over- smiled, teeth-clenched way that put a polite face on fuck off.
Shoe Boy went on, pointing. “You got little kid-size feet. My extra sneakers, they’re missing a shoelace. You can have ’em.” He tapped one of his toes on the asphalt. The new-looking sneakers on his feet were running shoes, the puffy kind with a bouncy wide outsole, ridged on the bottom for traction. “These’ll last me.”
“That’s really not necessary.” “Take the shoes,” Busker said.
“Listen to him.” Shoe Boy nodded at Busker. “I’m probably the only person you’re gonna meet who was smart enough to bring two pairs a shoes.”
“And stupid enough to part with the extra pair for free,” someone at the water pallet mumbled. That man had a second-line look about him, with puffed out cheeks and wide shoulders used to carrying heavy tubas. “You gotta trade something for ’em, kid.”
“What else’d you bring?” Busker asked Shoe Boy.
Shoe Boy unzipped his bag and started pulling out his canned tuna fish, his instant soups, his mini cereals, and calorie food bars. He held up a heavy-duty LED flashlight, the industrial kind. “I don’t need this either. My brother brought two of ’em.”
“I’ll trade you my poncho for it,” Busker said. “What kind of poncho is it?”
“I’d take that poncho if he don’t want it,” Tuba said. “What’choo need for it?”
And so everyone from the passenger pod gathered near, sitting cross-legged and spreading out the bric-a-brac in their bags like kids trading Halloween candy.
“Anybody want my work gloves?” “I got extra toilet paper here.” “Nutrition bars anyone?”
“You want a warming blanket?” “Shit no. It’s ninety-fuckin’ degrees.” “How ’bout energy drinks?”
“Got a whistle here, and some water pouches.”
“Nah, I got extra. But here’s some shampoo and conditioner.”
Even Church Lady got in on it. She had sandwiches and sodas, probably grabbed from the church luncheon. She gave them away cheap for toothbrushes and toothpaste.
Elise watched ’em. Watched ’em all. Busker and Tuba and Church Lady. The others too: Mom with Toddler and Teddy Bear Kid, Bruised Eye, and a dozen others. Her throat thickened up as she held her Valentino close and closed. Her bare feet curled up tight, then relaxed, then curled up again in the pebbles.
Shoe Boy nodded over at her, “Hey Boujee, what’ve you got?”
She didn’t want to say. Didn’t want to admit that when the water came in and took her historic Honoré house, she didn’t go to the cupboards for canned foods and nutrition bars. Didn’t dig out her hurricane bag with its flashlight and first-aid kit. No, that wasn’t her instinct.
Instead, she’d grabbed herself a single change of clothes. A jewelry box with her grandmother’s heirloom sapphire ring, her grandfather’s gold signet, some hundred-year-old broaches, Russian enamel filigree earrings. A spritz bottle of Chanel No. 5—her mother’s smell. A few Tupperware containers of leftover home-cooked meals—a tossed salad, vegetable quinoa, creamy spinach-stuffed salmon—all of which would spoil in a day if they weren’t spoiled already.
Everyone else had nonperishable food, medical supplies, shelter, and tools. And Elise had . . . what? Waiting for FEMA out here on the side of the road with no shoes and only survival on the mind—her priceless heirlooms seemed to have little life value at all.
Shame swept through her as wide and fast as the flood had taken her home, and this time there was no wave of Honoré pride to answer it. Shoe Boy took pity on her and let her have the extra sneakers, free of charge.
Laura Hawbaker is a Chicago-based writer by way of New Orleans and Hawai’i. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia College Chicago and served as the Franz Kafka Fellow at the Prague School of Communication. Hawbaker is the editor in chief of MASKS Literary Magazine. www.lahawbaker.com