Flood Plains by Mark Wheaton (best reads txt) 📗

seventy-one-year-old said, adjusting the scarlet hat and gold shawl she wore whenever she “gave a reading.” “Wind is going to knock over a few trees, tear up the sign in front of the gas station, and knock out the windows in the grocery store next door. Buffalo Bayou’s going to damn near overflow, but it’s not going to get into downtown like last time. Good news is, she’ll then be gone by late afternoon.” A lie.

“Nobody’s going to die?”

“I didn’t say that. But none that won’t be done in by their own foolishness or misfortune.” Another lie.

Sineada was almost shaking by the time she finished. She was relieved when Viola smiled, signaling the end of the session.

“Well, don’t get up to any foolishness yourself, and I’ll see you next week.”

A freebie umbrella with the Avon logo in hand, Viola headed back out into the rain, but not before placing a twenty-dollar bill in Sineada’s donation box. Though this was how much she left after every visit—twice a month going on eight years—Sineada still felt it was overly generous. Regardless, she tucked it into her pocketbook a few minutes later and was glad to have it.

Everyone who came to Sineada brought with them a different version of what they believed her “powers” to be and what they could do for them. Knowing this, Sineada hammed it up for some clients, dropping words like “the sight” and “the spirits.” Others wanted to hear her talk in terms of “angels” and the “gift God gave her,” particularly the ones who were hoping to hear something from a loved on “on the other side.”

Still others, like Viola, were just paying for someone to talk things through with, as they weren’t going to trust their confidences to a shrink or a busybody pastor. They made for easy clients because they usually knew the answers to all their own questions but just needed someone to help convince them. Sineada did a lot of listening and nodding. She brought up comparative points from her own past and showed off her photographic memory of her client’s past. With someone who had been coming for years like Viola, Sineada was able to recollect and parrot back some opinion the woman had had on this relative or that with just enough magic that she knew she had a client for life.

Setting her hat and shawl on the table, she wandered out to the porch to watch the weather. The wind had picked up quite a bit, but the skies were still gray, not the purple she associated with a lifetime of weathering Gulf Coast hurricanes. When the real thing got here, the raindrops would shoot horizontally down the street as if shot from an arrow. The wind would pick up, and suddenly anything not nailed down would come racing down the sidewalk, careening into cars and blowing through exposed windows. The trees would come down next.

If it was a bad one.

Hello? she asked the wind. Is it going to be that bad?

Worse. Worse than you know. Worse than you’ve ever seen.

Chapter 5

“I was running fast, too, but that little bastard was running faster. You don’t think they can haul ass with all that freight on their back, but they just book it. Yet, every time it got to a tree, it tried to dig in under the roots. Then it would see me and take off running again.”

The storyteller was a wiry, white fellow with a mullet named Scott Shipley. He was standing in front of a two-story chain-link security cage in the center of the factory floor. He peered over his Sears-brand eyeglasses to make sure his listeners were absorbing all this. The men, a forklift driver named Kyle and a truck driver with “Gutierrez” on a patch over his right breast pocket, were definitely engaged, if also amused.

“I finally cornered it at this big old oak at the back of my property, but for some reason, it kept running,” Scott continued. “I started worrying, as it was racing for the trunk at full gallop as if it hadn’t see it or something and was going to crash. But just as it reached the base of the tree, it curled its tail up under its body, rolled up in a ball, and jumped straight up in the air! It had counted on me still running, so it was perfectly timed to smack me right in the face as I closed in. It was like somebody hit me between the eyes with a hammer.”

“Holy shit!” exclaimed Kyle.

“I went down like a sack of stones,” Scott continued, clapping his hands together. “Knocked out cold. I woke up two or three hours later with a migraine and armadillo shit all over my hair.”

Kyle’s mouth hung open in amazement. Gutierrez’s mouth opened a little, as if he was ready to denounce the storyteller as a fraud and a liar. He caught a look from Scott and instead merely nodded.

“I’ve heard about that. They do that out on the freeway and bash in a lot of windshields.”

Listening nearby, Alan just shook his head.

“Caca Toro!” the athlete said as he slapped Scott on the back. “I call ‘Caca Toro.’”

“That’d be caca de toro, son,” Scott grinned. “Get your Mexican right.”

Alan laughed. No one got mad at Scott for telling tales, mainly because his face had a sort of permanently dazed, Wile E. Coyote expression to it. It seemed to shout out: believe a word this man says at your own peril.

“You filling these young men’s minds with a fiction, there, Scott,” Alan said, bumping Scott’s proffered fist. Alan always thought that looked funny with a white man, which he knew was precisely why Scott did it.

“Don’t know what you’re trying to say. The Houston Chronicle did this two-year study with the New OrleansTimes-Picayune that proved Crescent City are sixty-two percent more full of shit than Texans. Guess this is a case of the pot calling the kettle African-American.”

Kyle, a white guy,