Going Broke
We met Cherry Ester in a school shelter during the flood that arrived directly after Hurricane Michael knocked into us like a punching bag. Appalachia gets punched again and again. Hurricane Florence had just engulfed us like a shipwreck a week ago. We had yet to recover and the hurricanes just kept coming. Over a hundred people died in both hurricanes and the damage ran into the billions.
Shelters were taking dogs. Quite unusual. But people were refusing to leave their homes without their pets.
Cherry Ester’s 17-year-old son, Ace, never said much from his cot in the gymnasium even if his mom talked up a storm in a storm where we lost electric in the night. I knew what he was up to. Sons in Appalachia never stay. If you walk down Main Street, all you ever see are the old people. But to leave your mother in the middle of a hurricane, to sneak off like that, was low something considerable even for me.
She was on her own. Unless you count the two pups she took care of.
There were a lot of Cherry Esters, and then the floods came.
“What I hate the most are the snakes,” she said.
Then she cried.
I hate it when they cry. It was the cry of everything I had is gone.
The flood is an assassin.
We had hitched our boat to the back of our jeep. Both survived in the parking lot of the school. Behind the school was a huge pile of coal ash about three stories tall.
By morning, the coal ash was gone. Leaked into the river like a barren nodding out.
Grandma in her coffin would float out to sea. I still don’t get how coffins manage to undig themselves. It’s an oddity.
Most people shot up right there on their cots. They knew that heroin withdrawal would begin soon enough. Passed the bleach around. The bleach ran out. Found more in a janitor’s closet.
Junkies in Appalachia, which is almost everyone, share needles with no awkwardness at all.
The smell in the shelter was a narrow, cadaverous mixture of terror and the slaughterous daybreak of a snuff film’s dinge.
She knew Ace had left in the dead vast and middle of the night.
People did what they had to do.
Lamar was fucking men in a third floor toilet for five bucks.
I just shake my head. Sex Work in the middle of a hurricane. I ignore it not unlike I ignored the gloaming doom.
Morning was just a farthing candle. The Red Cross had stale baloney sandwiches. My dogs gagged down two.
Cherry Ester asked if we would take her home when an all clear would be sounded. “I guess he ain’t coming back. I don’t know whatever kept him here anyway. I got no place to go.”
“You gotcher trailer,” I told her. I did not know what else to say.
“Maybe.”
Ace had taken Cherry Ester’s 1972 Ford F150. Life in the South is mostly a satire of the F150. 1972 was yesterday. Mainly, you buy your lead additive at Walmart.
We could smell it — thick as bricks — as we arrived in the boat. The water had receded just enough for us to get in the door.
“I appreciate the ride.”
She carried one pit bull pup. I carried the other shivering dog she called Bubba.
Cherry Ester was now home.
We had several other Smash Street boys to go rescue.
I’m sorry, but if you were caught unaware that a hurricane was on its way while you were working in some trick’s bed, you had to be about as stupid as a pig from a pig farm who thought it could fly over the flood.
A whore with wings.
The water was toxic and coal ash grey. Juwan took my gun and shot Cottonmouths that thought they might get in the boat. The water crawled with swimming Pigmy Rattlesnakes who thought some of the same thing. The swamps they lived in had disappeared. The whole place was like prose run mad.
It was not poetic. We were advised by cops not to touch the water. Good luck on that one.
The lot of us were sick by the time we made it home. This is where HIV becomes a depravity. We had clean water in plastic jugs from Stop and Go. I had not planned on spending as much money as was going to be necessary to feed this number of boys, but Stop and Go had hot dogs on sale.
They had gone bad but we did not know that.
The pathology of hunger.
I hear Cherry Ester has survived the flood. I don’t know why I thought I would sooner or later run across her son, Ace. I have not yet seen him. I hope he’s far away. Appalachia is the chain inside the dungeon dark, and it takes no prisoners.