ALBERT E. COWDREY

Grey Star

WHAT A DAY! SARAH thought as she passed through the gilded doors of the Win or Lose Casino into the buzz and flicker of a blazing neon marquee.

Waiting for Burke to bring the car, she paced back and forth on a concrete apron covered with crimson carpeting. The night had turned restless. Rain had fallen; the carpet was sopping and pools on the causeway were reflecting the frenzy of the lights.

Gusts of warm wind off the Gulf of Mexico fanned her short-cut blonde hair, and she brushed it back with one hand — capable, strong, no polish on the nails — a workman’s hand, only smaller. Raising her head to emphasize her long smooth neck, thrusting her big bosom just a bit forward, she posed unconsciously, like a cat, not to make others look at her but to fulfill her own image of herself.

At the other end of the causeway, a thousand lighted windows outlined the Hotel Grandview, and her thoughts slipped back to the morning, the dim beige light of a room where she’d had some really, really good sex with Burke. How did Mae West put it — a hard man is good to find?

She had so many memories of him; when she was alone she fingered them like a miser counting coins.

Their first meeting in the ER of the New Orleans Hospital Center. It was the first day of her residency in emergency medicine and she was, let’s face it, scared to death when a male patient, for no visible reason, started turning blue. Burke was passing by, and without a word grabbed a breathing tube and slid it down the guy’s throat through the epiglottis into the trachea with one deft turn of the wrist. Then gave her a wink, and moved off about his duties.

And what profound thought had passed through Sarah’s mind? I’ve heard that forty percent of male nurses are gay. Does that mean that sixty percent of them aren’t? Even today, she felt rueful about that. Banality didn’t go with her image of herself.

The Saab pulled up. Burke’s broad freckled face grinned at her and she jumped in.

“Be raining like hell later on,” he opined.

“Well, take 1-10. It’s the quickest.”

“Uh-uh,” he said. “Driving that goddamn road would put me to sleep fast.”

True, the interstate was hypnotic, a concrete arrow flying through a tunnel of pines. But Sarah frowned. She liked to think she hated the hospital caste system, with docs issuing orders to RNs like Burke who knew more than they did. In fact, she issued orders even at home in their condo, and was always somewhat shocked when he ignored them.

What had her therapist warned her against — letting her free-floating anxiety turn her into a control freak? Believing nobody could do anything properly unless she told them how? With some effort, she took a deep breath, composed her cameo profile that she kept ivory-pale, even on the beach, with layers of sunblock.

Outward calm defends against inward impulse. Right.

A strong gust struck and the car shimmied, the tires squeaking a little. A tremor also ran through the causeway, as if the Las Vegas outfit that built the casino hadn’t been up on the problems of construction on an oozy continental shelf. But Burke, driving as usual with two strong stubby fingers, seemed to control the car without effort.

At the end of the causeway a red light had gotten stuck. Creeping past was the impacted traffic of the Strip, a slow river of steel and lights. Burke flashed his grin at a startled driver in the eastbound lane, slipped between two SUVs, touched the brake to let an eighteen-wheeler thunder past, spun the wheel, slid into an opening only a bit longer than the car — and there they were, heading west.

“How do you do that?” Sarah demanded, but got only a wink in return.

God, the man lives by his reflexes, she thought. How odd of me to fall in love with an animal — I don’t think he thinks at all. Even sitting still he radiated energy, and she relaxed, warming herself at the fire.

Ignoring garish lights, a patter of rain, Tom drifted through the empty halls and emptier rooms of the Grey Star Hotel. The Sun & Buns Motel existed in a perpetual glare of neon, and chains of reflected light from the swimming pool danced across shadowy walls and ceilings.

He made a conscious effort not to hate the squealing kids and their beefy parents, taking a final dip before bedtime. After all, he’d been a kid here too — though it was a long, long time ago.

Daddy owned the Star, and Tom couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t played and worked here. When he was eight or nine years old, he’d been earning nickels running errands for seersucker-clad gents who sat in green rocking chairs on the downstairs gallery. They called him Short Stuff and wanted lemonades brought to them, or juleps, or cigarettes, or matches; their wives sat beside them, wearing wide straw hats and summer dresses of pale linen. The ladies wanted things too, only they called him Honey and usually didn’t tip him at all.

In those days people swam in the Gulf, not in chlorinated pools, and the water wasn’t polluted, or if it was it didn’t seem to bother anybody. Summer began in May, and by June Tom’s initial sunburn had peeled off. By July he was brown as a pecan shell and living like an amphibian — half in, half out of the water every day. Christ, he could still smell those days, half briny water, half piney woods. Pale heat haze gathered on the horizon, grasshoppers chirruped in the brown grass, mirages danced on the white roads.

At night when the Gulf was smooth as mercury under a summer moon, Daddy put him to work carrying pitchers of ice water up the long curving stairs. He remembered the hot little rooms, the black electric fans rattling and turning, men lolling in their BVDs and handing out more nickels that felt greasy, passing from one sweaty palm to another. And the women, in straining bras or filmy nighties, with no bras at all….

Meals had been serious rituals — breakfasts with the sweet toasty smell of pancakes and bitter black steam from the big silver coffeepots, the waiters hefting trays with dishes under silver covers, the chink and rattle of metal and china competing with the hum of conversation and the muted roar of cyclone fans. Ample luncheons, spread out on long tables, and more ample dinners. The business of calling in Rotunda, the cook — yes, her name really was Rotunda, and she lived up to it — to take credit for the meal.

He remembered her standard joke, kept in reserve for the inevitable lady who would say, “Oh, Rotunda, what do you put in your gumbo to make it so good?”

“Black fingers!” Rotunda would snap, and the whole room would break up in laughter….

The kids at the Sun & Buns were squealing loud tonight. Tom sighed; sometimes he felt he had very little to say anymore, except a sigh. He moved through another empty room, past the shimmer of a mirror (or the shimmer of a memory?) on the wall, out onto the upper galley. In the far distance, mounted on the sands of what had been Pelican Island, the ziggurat of the Win or Lose Casino flashed and glittered across the black water, where once there had been only the little lights of spear fishermen, bobbing and winking.

Why hang around? he wondered for the nth time. The world he knew wasn’t coming back, nor most of the people, not after the deadly year when Hurricane Dolores had finished them. What was he waiting for? Did he go on clinging to memories because so little else was left?

Sadly, he felt the waste of his energy, the way it drained away, a little every day. He looked out toward the dark Gulf but could see nothing, not even the shape of death, though he had seen that once coming ashore from its home in the deep sea, where shifting white sand polished forever the bones of the lost.

The Strip fell behind, with its parade of towering hotels, ice-cream-colored condos with sapphire pools, seafood restaurants with flashing neon crabs and flounders. The Saab gained speed, plunging after its headlights into the darkness of coastal suburbia.

Sarah snuggled against the leather of the bucket seat. It was nice along here, driving down an avenue of oaks. To the left, the Gulf’s long creamy curves of breakers assaulting the sand. To the right, endless bungalows with lamps glowing in the windows, and just occasionally a small off-the-beaten-track motel that catered to families with more kids than money. Half asleep, Sarah seemed to catch a glimpse of an old plantation-style building, and that surprised her — she’d thought Hurricane Dolores had destroyed all the old places.

“There’s Dad’s church,” she murmured, pointing, and Burke said, “What?” and then dutifully, “Oh, yeah. The church. I’m glad you brought me there, Honey.”

The cameo profile never changed, but she wondered briefly why she had brought him there. He’d wanted to go to Cozumel for their vacation, but no, the coast it had to be. Sarah had pitched it on the joys of gambling and seeing the Cirque du Soleil, knowing how he loved anything with color and movement.

Actually, she had reasons of her own. Deep reasons, hardly to be put into words — wanting him to understand her, to know who she was and how she came to be. Somehow, that part of the program hadn’t worked too well.

Oh, Burke had said all the right things while they stood, hand in hand, in the ugly new church with the cheap stained glass and the varnished pine pews. He didn’t believe in religion any more than she did, but he felt at home in a redneck cathedral. Gazing at the memorial plaque Mama had put up, the small white bas-relief copied from an old photograph, and the inevitable stupid motto, in this case The Spirit Giveth Life.

Sure it does.

Burke comforted her when she wept and listened patiently to the story of how Mama survived the hurricane, losing everything — absolutely everything — but her life in the process. How she’d found a job as a records clerk in the Hospital Center; how in time she’d somehow gotten together the money to put her daughter through LSU Medical School before trailing off, far too young, into the mist of Alzheimer’s.

Burke had listened, had sympathized, had not really understood. She could almost hear him confronting Fate with his small store of functional commonplaces: Death and madness, that’s really tough; still, everybody’s got troubles; you help out when you can and otherwise forget it. Brooding drives you nuts, and what good does that do, anyway?

He was such a simple beast, really; not dumb, but simple. She clung to his simplicity as a rock in a troubled world. Yet at the same time it sent her up the wall, because there were things, important things, that he just couldn’t see. Such as the fact that she had imbibed, almost literally with her mother’s milk, the sense that life hangs by a hair — always.

Her therapist had chided Sarah for living always with “a sense of the presence of death.” But Sarah didn’t see that as an illusion; death was ever-present. If the therapist doubted it, she should spend Saturday night in an emergency room.

“Oh, shit,” said Burke quietly.

Sarah believed that if a large asteroid plowed into the Earth — which wouldn’t surprise her in the least — Burke would say the same thing. Not even with an exclamation point. Just, “Oh, shit.”

“What is it?”

For answer he spun the steering wheel. The Saab cornered, not exactly on two wheels but squealing, and shot through a channel in the median that Sarah hadn’t even known was there. Burke floored the accelerator and there they were, hauling ass back toward the casino.

“WHAT IN THE HELL?” she demanded, when she’d caught her breath.

In the reflected light of the dashboard he spared her a grin and said, “Sorry,” in a tone that meant he wasn’t sorry at all.

It was that porcelain serenity of hers — like a boy, he just had to make it crack. On the gift he’d given her last Christmas, the card had read, “For my FPMD, Love, Burke.” That, he explained, meant Fucking Perfect Medical Doctor. The porcelain had cracked then, too.

Now he said, “I left my checkbook in the safe at the hotel. And don’t tell me I’m dumb because I know it already.”

“No, Honey, I wouldn’t say you were dumb. Idiotic, maybe.” They roared back toward the fizz and sparkle of the Strip, while Sarah tried hard to return her face to its customary cool perfection.

Somehow the emptiness of the Grey Star’s rooms was the hardest thing for Tom to take.

So much had been lost that night in August 1969, when Dolores came ashore. The acres of white linen, the scarred but still serviceable bedroom suites that Daddy had always called suits, thousands of pieces of cutlery, hundreds of burnished pots from the kitchen, a glittering wealth of glassware.

But that was only the superficial loss. More painful were the personal things — like the photo albums that recorded his parents’ lives and his own. The mother he hardly remembered, drowned in a boating accident when he was six. Daddy posing as a fisherman, as a grinning host with long-forgotten guests, as a pillow-stomached Santa Claus. Pictures of Tom himself, in scout uniform with his troop, in swimming trunks with a hammerhead shark he’d landed when he was sixteen.

Pictures of girls, plenty of them. His whole love life had been bound up with the Grey Star. At fourteen he’d lost his cherry in Room 203 — afterward, he seldom passed it in the hall without a quick grin — with a chambermaid named Betty Lou Something, of whom he remembered little but the feel of her heels in the small of his back and the fact that her mouth tasted of spearmint gum.

There’d been others. By his late teens he’d learned to identify at a glance those female guests for whom the phrase “room service” had a special meaning. From a brief stint in the army after Korea he’d returned to the hotel with broadened shoulders and perfected technique. He could see himself now, striding through the halls, eyes bright and dick half-hard, a few packs of Fuck-A-Duck rubbers in one pants pocket and a jar of cold cream in the other. Hotel, hell. When he was warm and twenty-something, the Grey Star had been a garden of delights.

Then responsibility fell on his shoulders. Daddy, taking an early-morning dip in the Gulf, trod on the spur of a stingray, went into toxic shock, and drowned a hundred yards from shore in water only three feet deep. Suddenly the all-day, almost all-night business of running the hotel was Tom’s problem, and he began to look for a partner.

How surprising that he’d been sensible enough to pick a neighbor and high school friend, Madge Conroy, who was not taken in by his redneck ladykiller ploys. Even now, hovering on the upper gallery and gazing into empty rooms, Tom remembered ruefully just how deftly she could deflate him, and his own surprise at how little he resented it. Maybe he’d simply had enough randy twits by that time and at last wanted a real woman with common sense and strength and, yes, a bit of cunning.

For she did want him, she wanted to marry him and be the mistress of the Grey Star, the local version of the Grand Hotel. What a surprise to find out that was what he wanted, too — to find himself deciding at last to stop being a happy asshole and grow up.

Tom had actually been fetching up the ghost of a smile, remembering Madge, when the thought of how short a time they’d had together wiped it away and returned him to his customary dismal rut.

All roads lead to Rome. All paths, if you follow them long enough, to sorrow. Of that at least he felt sure.

THE DESK CLERK at the Hotel Grandview demanded four pieces of ID, then returned Burke his checkbook and unbent sufficiently to warn him and Sarah that NOAA had put this part of the coast under a tornado watch.

“Maybe we should stay the night,” Burke suggested.

“No, I’m on call tomorrow.”

“Edwards can take it for you.”

“He’s not good enough.”

Burke had his mouth open to say, “He’s as good as you are, maybe better,” but then closed it. There were limits to what even he could say to her.

There she stood, face as placid as a glass of cold buttermilk, and inside all those little devils warning her that unless she saw to everything, nothing would get done, or at least wouldn’t get done right. Burke had never in his life known anxiety of this loose, unfocused, random kind — this fear that went in search of something to justify its own unease.

Well, that was Sarah for you. He’d laugh her out of it when he could, and otherwise put up with it. Some people had problems with their nerves, some didn’t — that was all.

“Okay, then, let’s go,” he said. Do it or don’t do it, shut up and get moving: Burke’s mantra fit all circumstances.

So they repeated their earlier drive westward through the traffic of the Strip, this time with lightning starting to flicker and the sounds of heavy surf just audible over the hum of wheels.

Of course, the fact that Madge got pregnant had been crucial to their decision to marry. The early BC pills hadn’t been all that reliable…or had she, just possibly, skipped the pill in hopes of jogging him to a decision?

They were starting the planning phase when a rather ordinary hurricane named Dolores wandered into the Gulf of Mexico. At first they paid no attention; he and Madge had both grown up on the coast and thought of hurricanes as one more annoying fact of nature, like humidity or sandflies.

They were still debating their wedding, hung up between the expense of a church ceremony and a quickie civil splicing — maybe with a flight to Vegas thrown in, only then who would run the Star in their absence? — when the storm, sucking energy from the gumbo-warm Gulf water, exploded into a monster.

It headed for New Orleans, and they both felt sorry for the city, still recovering from Hurricane Betsy four years earlier. But hurricanes were unpredictable beasts, and Tom urged Madge to visit her relatives in Natchez until it was over.

“Not unless you come too,” she said.

Tom had no intention of going anywhere; the Grey Star needed him, and it was a strong old building that had shrugged off dozens of storms in the past. So, instead of running, they planned a hurricane party, inviting friends and laying in a good supply of bourbon and gin and candles and kerosene.

Tom and the waiters spent a day tacking plywood over the windows and testing the bolts on the long louvered shutters that opened on the galleries. Then he sent the whole staff to their homes, where they were also needed. He was glad that everyone had behaved so responsibly and worked so hard when Dolores veered suddenly and headed for the coast.

He and Madge awoke that morning to greenish filtered light, the rattle of sashes, the hoarse breathing of the wind. They went outside on the upstairs gallery and stared out to sea. The horizon had already vanished and the steam of August had blown away on burly gusts that pounded the shutters and made the plywood flex.

As the morning advanced their guests arrived, shedding wet slickers and talking extra loud to be heard over the howl and creaking of the storm. Tom and Madge took a last walk, leaning into the wind, their clothes plastered to their bodies in front and flying like pennons behind.

The Gulf was already topping the seawall, and rain and spray mixed together stung their faces and the taste of salt seeped between their lips. Royal palms lined the drive, fronds rattling, and they clung to a trunk and gazed enraptured at the gray waves tossing white manes like wild horses.

Back inside, two guests had to help them push the heavy door of the hotel shut. Tom bolted it top and bottom.

“This storm’ll be a good one,” he promised, and went off to the empty kitchen to dish up scrambled eggs on the long black range the staff called Old Smokey.

Rotunda’s pots were swinging erratically from hooks, clanging and clashing randomly like wind chimes for the tone-deaf. Tom stopped and frowned; windows and shutters and plywood were all tight. He had no feeling of movement, and yet — could the building itself be quivering?

This time there was no bantering between Sarah and Burke. Both were thinking of the things that had delayed them so long after they left the hotel this morning — visiting the church, taking that last fling at the casino, the way the slots paid off for a while before betraying them, Burke forgetting his checkbook…they should be home by now, resting up for tomorrow.

Instead, he was driving with two hands because the alternations of gust and lull made the car shudder. He was driving slower, too, because pools had gathered on the road, and he didn’t want to hydroplane. Rain drummed on the roof with erratic fingers.

Sarah slid her left hand into the pocket of his crinkly summer jacket and leaned back, looking past his dark silhouette at the Gulf. Somehow the familiar white lines of foam were looking odd, flattened — as if a big helicopter were hovering overhead, blowing off the tops of the waves. Then a flicker of strange reddish lightning revealed something that made her suck in her breath.

“What is that?” she demanded.

Burke glanced, whistled, and turned onto a rain-slick ramp leading into a dumpy little motel called the Sun & Buns. Sarah leaned across him and they both stared at the apparition.

Out in the Gulf an immense dark something was migrating toward the east. Lightning flickered again and the thing seemed flat, a cutout, a demon in two dimensions.

Burke said, almost reverently, “That’s the biggest damn spout I ever saw.” A moment later he added, “It’ll hit the casino.”

Tom saw the headlights of the car that had pulled off the road and stopped, and he understood: they were spectators too. Then he stared as if he’d seen a ghost. It was — surely it couldn’t be—

It was her, and another kind of storm was threatening, a tornado moving over the Gulf and sucking up water like an immense siphon, heading not for the land but for an easier target, a building that was huge but shoddy and weak, perched insecurely on a sandspit….

He’d barely grasped the stunning coincidence when the casino vanished and emerged sparking and flickering like the world’s biggest Roman candle. Then all the lights went out and the casino, or whatever was left of it, disappeared in the darkness that enfolded its destroyer.

A bizarre cluster of lightning in the shape of a crab flared in the clouds with long crooked bolts flickering out of it. Tom had a brief vision of a black column heading out to sea. Then a shattering crash of thunder flung him back, back into the haunted corridors of the Grey Star, overwhelmed by memory.

Sarah was the first to come out of the trance. She tapped Burke on the shoulder and he started as if waking from some profound dream.

“Honey,” she said in a voice from which all tension was absent, “be careful going back, okay? There’ll be power lines down all over.”

He stared at her, thinking how many times he’d seen her in the ER, wearing a green cap and bending over a black man with two nine-millimeter slugs in him, saying quietly, “It’s all right. You’ll be all right,” and making him believe it by the sheer power and authority of her stillness.

That was why she continued to work in the ER, wasn’t it? Because external crisis gave her inner peace? Or was that only psychobabble?

“Right,” he said, finding his usual refuge in action. He spun the wheel, and for the second time that night gunned the Saab back toward the Strip, now lightless except for a distant erratic spark.

TOM WANTED to shout, to hold them back — her and her friend, whoever he was — to make them share the sudden inundation of terrible memories that for long moments held him in a kind of trance.

In the dark late afternoon on that day so long ago, the lightning had changed color, just like tonight. Even after thinking about it for so many years, he still didn’t know why. Maybe ionization caused by the storm, turning the whole sky into some sort of fluorescing neon tube?

Whatever. The point was, on that August day in 1969 the storm’s eyewall was nearing the shore with wind so strong that nobody would ever know exactly what the velocity was, because at 200-plus mph the anemometers all blew away.

Powerlines went down and the lights went out. Tom fought his way to the garage, where the gasoline generator stood beside the Volkswagen van with GREY STAR HOTEL — Mississippi’s Finest painted on the side panels. A few pulls at the cord set the machine chugging and trembling, and he slipped out of the garage through a back door, because opening the big doors in the teeth of the wind would have been impossible.

Overhead the lightning flickered red and green and the wind was no longer howling but emitting a steady, numbing roar like the exhaust of a thousand jet planes. It was stripping the royal palms and Tom saw the broad fans whirling overhead like the wings of dismembered angels.

Back inside the hotel, lights flickered dim and unsteady, but that contributed to the party’s flavor. As he shed his streaming rain gear and tried to catch his breath, he noted people playing the slots, talking, laughing. Couples were dancing in the dining room, others had gathered at long tables piled with cold food. Jack and Jim — Daniels and Beam, that is — were making their usual contribution to the evening’s entertainment.

Was there also an undercurrent of fear, people raising their heads, staring uneasily at the wind-hammered shutters? Sure. No peril, no fun. Nothing to remember, to brag about later on, when the storm was over.

Some guests wanted to get a look at the action outside, and two or three burly guys unbolted and opened and held the big front door while their ladies crowded around to look. Then somebody screamed. It didn’t sound to Tom like an I-am-thrilled type of scream and he hastened across the lobby and looked over the women’s heads.

The bare trunks of the royal palms were vibrating like metronomes against the strobe lamp of the sky. But what mesmerized the onlookers was a huge branch that had torn loose from an oak tree. Christ! The thing must have been forty feet long and two feet thick at the butt. Caught in an eddy of the wind, the branch was whirling upright on the sodden lawn of the Grey Star, spinning and pirouetting like a toe dancer. Then a sudden uprush lofted it and flung it like a javelin at the door of the hotel.

The crowd scattered like rabbits, the door slammed back against the wall and the oak limb, corrugated black and streaming water with a few green leaves still attached, crashed through the opening and hit the front desk where Daddy had received guests and smashed it to matchwood.

Standing by the stairs, clinging to the balusters, Tom gaped at the sheer size of the thing. Good Christ, it must weigh half a ton, and if the wind could play with a thing like that—

Nobody had died or even been hurt and yet the party had definitely gone sour. They huddled together in the dining room like cattle under a storm. When some woman starting screaming again, Tom, fearing panic, grabbed her and covered her mouth with the palm of his hand — and it was Madge, who never screamed at anything — and she bit him, not meaning to, just a reflex of fear. When cold water surged up over his ankles, Tom realized what had scared her.

Again the lights went out. The garage must have blown away, taking the generator along.

In the sudden cold wet darkness Madge calmed down, perhaps because things were so bad she imagined they couldn’t get any worse. She helped Tom find and light candles and a couple of storm lanterns, taking comfort from the glowing crescents of flame springing up on the wicks. When she saw that his hand was bleeding, she exclaimed something he couldn’t hear and pulled his handkerchief from his hip pocket and started bandaging him.

She had just tied the knot when, one after another, the shutters and the French doors blew out, cracking like ordnance and scattering like lost kites.

Wind screamed through the room and tablecloths flew wildly and dishes scattered and smashed against the walls. Tom fought his way to one gaping doorway and clung to the frame with both hands. He was thinking with manic calmness, Well, sometimes the wind does that — creates a partial vacuum and things blow out instead of in—

And all the time he was watching a huge mound of black water rising beyond the oaks, crest etched by red lightning, foam sliding down its face. So that’s what death looks like, he thought. I’ve always wondered.

The wave hit, and the Grey Star began to come apart.

There was a gap in time. How had Tom gotten out, with Madge in tow? The wave itself must have carried them along, and maybe the wind and water blew out the back door or the barricaded rear windows or the wall itself, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember. All he knew was that they were suddenly outside and alive, but helpless as driftwood on the rush of the water.

And where had the rope come from? The detail troubled him, because he knew every item, every roll of toilet paper, every scrap of string in the Grey Star, and he couldn’t remember ever seeing the rope before. And yet suddenly there it was in his hand, wet and coarse and strong, and when they caught hold of the branchless trunk of a hundred-year-old oak that stood in back of the hotel, he was able to tie Madge on.

Things were flying through the air and splashing into the water and Tom clung to her, protecting her body with his own. In a momentary lull he turned his head to see what had happened to the Grey Star. Is that my life? he wondered, staring at the shifting heap that weltered on the black water.

A new gust hit and the remaining slates from the roof went spiraling up and vanished. He pressed his wet cold face against hers, searching for words of comfort, but all he could do was whisper over and over, “It’s all right. We’ll be all right.”

Something struck him a tremendous blow on the back of the head. He had no actual memory of drowning.

When they reached the Strip, Burke and Sarah found it littered with downed signs and sputtering wires, the air still restless with a spastic wind jerking at flags and dangling streetlights.

“Could be worse,” Burke opined, unruffled.

The buildings though dark looked unhurt. Wide-eyed people gathered behind unbroken windows, like painted backdrops, and watched as Burke guided the Saab through the mess, twice climbing onto sidewalks to get through.

Sirens were howling and braying somewhere; the spout had only grazed the coast and the emergency services, the cops and firemen and

EMTs, were alive and on the move.

In fact, state cops had already reached the causeway, where a massive redneck in yellow raingear halted Burke and Sarah.

“You all cain’t go out there.”

“We work in an ER,” said Burke. “Doctor and nurse. You got a use for us?”

Naturally, the cop assumed that Burke was the MD.

“Well, thank you, Doc,” he said. “The casino roof is fell in. We called the Trauma Center in Nawlins and they scramblin’ some helicopters. We got ambalances comin’ in from Biloxi and Gulfport, but I reckon we can use everybody. Just watch out. It’s black as the inside of a well-digger’s asshole out there — ‘scuse me, ma’am.”

Burke and Sarah exchanged a quick grin and he turned onto the causeway.

A huge swell had submerged it to a depth of three inches or so, but now the surge began to withdraw, foaming around the stanchions of the guardrails, making deep grumbling sounds as it sucked tons of sand from around the piers beneath the roadway.

Ahead of them, on the concrete apron in front of the casino where Sarah had waited for the Saab, a blue light was revolving. At least one cop car was there already.

“They’ll have to bring the survivors outside,” said Sarah. “Building’s been weakened, whatever’s left of it — what is left of it? Can’t see a damn thing. Civilian triage is easy, you go for the worst cases first. Military triage, that’s different, you save the ones who’re savable and let the rest go…. “

“I know, Honey.”

But she went on, speaking calmly, like a penitent reciting unimportant sins to an indifferent priest, arranging things in her mind. Burke’s loafer-clad foot touched the gas and the car moved a little faster, now that the roadway was clear and shining black in the headlights.

THAT SIEGE OF MEMORY had sucked the last bit of energy out of Tom; surely now he could fade finally into the night.

The image of the Grey Star he had inhabited for thirty years was going too, losing shape and luminosity, dimming with its master. The motel built on the plot of land where the hotel had stood was dark for once, its lights extinguished by the destruction of transformers further down the coast, and people crowded out of their rooms, talking in awed tones.

A little boy and a girl saw a strange silvery something reflected in the water of the swimming pool and tried to point it out. But nobody was paying attention to them, and in any case the image of columns and galleries was growing dim, like a cloud lit by a waning moon.

Just short of the nescience he now longed for, Tom looked a last time out to sea. A memory struggled, just managed to take form. She was there, she was there, and something else, too…the sand had been scoured out, down to the underlying clay, and something white gleamed — something too small and far and deep beneath the waves for any eye to see. But then Tom had not been seeing with his eyes for thirty years.

Only the mind, fading like an old thin moon but still faintly alight, only the mind could see it and pursue.

“Anyway, we can start the triage,” said Sarah. “Oh, Christ!”

An injured man had popped up directly in front of them, frantically waving his arms — a skinny, soaked guy with a face fishbelly white, and thin, somehow ancient-looking rags hanging black and pulpy from his arms.

Burke pumped the brake like a driver skidding on ice, but a skein of water was again washing over the roadway and denied them traction. The Saab spun gracefully to the left, passing sideways by the man, flinging a long curved wave aside and coming to rest facing back toward the land.

The water receded, drawing back into the Gulf, streaming off the causeway. And there he was again, facing them as before, pointing seaward with both long skinny arms — and they had to be skinny, Sarah now saw, for they were nothing but long beautiful white bones, radius and ulna, fish-picked and sand-scoured — and the face was not a face, it was a cratered moon.

For once Burke was helpless, confronting something that all his experience and common sense told him couldn’t be. He simply didn’t know what to do, except stare and forget to breathe. Then Sarah felt a shudder beneath them, tore her eyes from the apparition and, following its gesture, looked back.

The causeway was beginning to heel slowly over, twisting like a Möbius strip, the movement starting at the casino where some connection had torn loose and continuing down its length toward the shore. A dreadful noise rose from pilings buckling as the structure collapsed, and the tarmac of the roadway split with a sound of fireworks, throwing black chunks into the air.

“Burke,” she said quietly.

He turned and stared at her. The cameo face had never been stiller, more concentrated, more commanding.

“Drive. Do it now.”

He slipped his foot from brake to gas pedal and the Saab slid smoothly forward, passing by the man a second time. Only Sarah caught a glimpse of a human face revisiting the white scoured skull for just an instant, before the whole figure vanished behind them, following the collapsing roadway down into the night and the sea.

Standing at the brink, Burke and Sarah and the cop looked at the wreckage of the causeway twisting down into black water still agitated by scurrying cat’s-paws. Sirens whooped and whistled, now close at hand, pausing intermittently to bray like a herd of superbeasts.

Sarah was weeping, her eyes half blind, her nose red and clogged — porcelain shattered, perfection lost. She shivered in the circle of Burke’s arm, feeling and sharing the tremors passing through his body.

The cop said, “Doctor, that was some smart drivin’ you did there. You and your lady friend are some lucky. You all ought to thank your father in heaven.”

“Oh, I do,” whispered Sarah. “I do.”