“Sure thing, man. No problem. You must be one of those people who can take naps. I wish I was. I’m up half the night. It’s like I can hear myself talk in my own head.”
“Hush, now.”
“Yeah, man. Sure. If anyone else comes in, I’ll tell them to be quiet.”
Zules closed his eyes. When Sheetrock started yelling, Zules knew he’d been asleep. For a few seconds he was disoriented, until the slow realization that he had awakened in a cage. It was a terrible feeling.
“Hey man, it’s you!” Sheetrock was pointing at the TV. “You’re a goddamn star. Look.”
The reporter said that a trucker had been arrested for blowing the dike. There was a final shot of Zules in the police car. Zules had never seen himself on camera and didn’t care for his appearance. He looked rough, like someone from the worst hollows at home, a man who belonged in the back of a police car.
“Just think of it,” Sheetrock said. “Me celling with a hardcase. I never knew nobody on TV before.” He offered Zules the remote. “Here, wish I had more to give.”
Zules waved it away and fought down the urge to pace. He didn’t mind getting locked up and he didn’t really blame the sheriff. Cops were just guys doing a job. Zules couldn’t think of much worse work except maybe driving a truck.
The jailer brought two trays of food into the common room. He gave Zules a hard stare and left. Zules ate the sandwich of baloney on white bread. He gave his cake to Sheetrock.
“Thanks, man,” Sheetrock said. “Guess you’re watching your weight, huh. What I wouldn’t give for a pork chop right now. The water done jumped through this town, man. Worst flooding ever. TV preacher said God did it on account of Portland’s porn shops.”
The jailer came back with his mouth tight. Sheetrock started eating faster.
“Take your time,” the jailer said. “Your cellie here’s out. Somebody paid his damn bail.”
Zules looked at Sheetrock as if seeing him for the first time. His clothes didn’t fit and he needed a haircut. The toothbrush stuck out of his mouth like a handle as he ate.
“Want me to see about you getting out?” Zules said. “Bail can’t be all that high on a car wreck.”
“Nope. I’m a stayer. That water is bad for my nerves. It won’t get in here, either. These cells are on the second floor up. Best place to be just now.”
“I could bring you something.”
“I got everything I want right here, man. You ought to stay, too. Lot to be said for a man who stays put.”
The jailer led Zules to an office where he signed a form to get his wallet, keys, and the gourd. He figured the news had gone national and somebody at home had seen it. He was surprised they’d got him out so fast.
“Who paid my bail?” he said.
“Somebody went through a town lawyer.” The jailer opened the main door. “Come back now,” he said.
Outside it was dusk and raining again. The water table was above the ground with nowhere to go and Zules felt caught in a crossfire from above and below. He’d heard that there was no new water in the world, that it was all a million years old, evaporating and coming back as rain. He wondered where the hole was that was left by the storms. Maybe the oceans were lower.
A car slowed behind him. The woman from the bar opened the passenger door and he got into the car. She wore a long vinyl poncho. Her bare legs ran into heavy galoshes.
“Are you hungry?” she said.
“Yes, but I don’t much feel like eating.”
“How was it?”
“Not bad. They got cable in there. They had that at home, half the boys would get locked up just to watch their shows.”
“Where’s home?”
“Kentucky.”
“What part?”
“The part people leave. You from herebouts?”
“Born and bred, except for five years in school at Corvallis. Halfway through I changed my major from science to art. My whole worldview went from the left hemisphere of my brain to the right, just like that.”
Zules nodded. He didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Sometimes I feel like an English novel translated into Chinese. It’s backwards and upside down, and you read it in the opposite direction. Know what I mean?”
He nodded again. People who’d gone to college made him nervous. He always felt as if they looked down on him, were waiting for a chance to make him sound stupid. He’d learned to be quiet around them, and eventually he discovered that his silence made them nervous.
She pulled into a driveway and shut off the engine and got out of the car. Zules followed her. The small house was jammed with boxes stacked on furniture. Everything was off the floor. She pulled a bottle of vodka from a cabinet and poured two shots.
“Mi casa es tu casa,” she said.
She swallowed the vodka and filled the glass again. Zules sipped his drink, wondering if what she’d said was from that backward Chinese book.
She opened a door and went down wooden steps and Zules followed. Water was seeping along cracks in the basement walls. An arched stream spouted from the corner like a fountain. Several inches of water ran steadily across the floor toward a hole in the corner. She shoved a stick into the opening. There was a dull click and the sound of a motor.
“Sump pump’s got a short,” she said.
“Kindly risky in all this wet.”
“It’s what I’m down to for risks. I have to start a bad habit just to have one to quit.”
“I gave up smokes.”
“Me, too. Plus pot, the dog track, and demolition derbies. The older I get, the harder it is not to be bored. Travel does it for you, I guess.”
“Well, I’m in new places pretty regular.”
“Must be nice.”
“Don’t reckon,” he said. “Once you leave a place, you’re sort of plowed under for living there again. I don’t stay nowhere but the truck mostly.”
“I shouldn’t have come back here after school. I guess that’s what ruined me.”
“You don’t look all that mint.”
“I figure guys like you have every kind of connection.”
“Well, I got cousins all through Ohio.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Zules nodded, glad that the basement was dark and she couldn’t see his face turning red. She stepped close to him.
“You know why I wear a wedding ring?” she said.
“No.”
“To remind me not to sleep with married men.”
“I ain’t married.”
She kissed him and he could taste the vodka. Her poncho squeaked. She went up stone steps to a tornado hatch and pushed it open. Warm air blew into the cellar. Zules climbed the steps to a backyard where lilac bushes grew lush from three months of rain. The storm hid the stars. The sound of thunder spread across the night.
A quick gust jerked the woman’s poncho and he could see the pale flash of skin. She took his hand and tugged him to the middle of the yard and kissed him. He smelled the lilacs and the rain. She began to unbuckle his belt. He slid his hands beneath her poncho and was astonished to realize that she was naked. Her skin was wet. The storm pelted them with water. Wind lifted the poncho and she tugged it over her head and it disappeared into the darkness as if yanked by a rope. Very slowly they sank to the ground. The earth was soft. She rolled him on his back.
Rain ran into Zules’s mouth and his eyes and his nose. He no longer knew where the water ended and the earth began. The storm crossed overhead, rain flying in all directions, the bellow of thunder within each drop. From a long ways away he could hear someone moaning. The sky was black and the air was warm. The moaning voice became his own. In a quick flash of lightning he saw her above him, her arched body streaming water, her face aimed at the sky, the veins straining in her neck. She resembled someone fighting not to drown.