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Heavy Machinery At a time like this there should be an adage. A concise, pithy saying, packed with timeless wisdom. Something peculiar to family traditions, passed down by a grandfather or old uncle in a throaty, smoke-rasped voice. He wanted a terse string of words that would replenish his depleted resilience and make him feel like anything other than the dolt he felt like now, sitting in the hospital emergency room, getting stitched up after running the forklift he’d been driving for years off the edge of the loading dock. While the nurse trimmed off the excess thread, bandaged his injured forearm, and applied a much smaller bandage to his forehead, all Frank Bullard could conjure was common clap-trap about picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and getting back in the saddle. He’d never ridden a horse in his life. “There we go,” said the nurse. She tilted her head to the right, examining her work. “Good as new, Mr…. Ballard, is it?” “Bullard,” Frank said. “Well, you’ll be good as new in no time, Mr. Bullard,” the nurse said. “Thanks,” Frank said. His forearm throbbed and the stitches tugged at the skin under the wrapping when he pushed himself off the examination table. He hadn’t been good as new in years. He wasn’t born good as new. All told, he could have come out of this in far worse shape. Frank gently flexed his sore elbow and rubbed the spot on his upper arm where the nurse had given him a tetanus shot. Several alternative scenarios for his accident occurred to him in the time it took to walk from the examination room to the hospital pharmacy and then to the exit. He imagined broken legs, compound fractures of the arm, a cracked skull, concussion and periodic memory loss, a body crushed under the dense, intransigent weight of the forklift, a long, stultifying convalescence, barely scraping by on disability pay. Worse, getting canned for recklessness on the job, and being forty-seven, out of work, and completely dependent on Barbara’s income with their daughter in her second year of college. The rain had begun again while the nurse finished dressing Frank’s arm. He cradled the injured forearm in his left hand and sat on one of the benches under the canopy at the hospital entrance to wait for Quentin. The actual scenario of the forklift accident was remarkable only in how thoroughly mundane it was. Greasy fingers and nothing more. At the end of his lunch break, Frank had still felt hungry. On the way back to the load of clothing driers he left waiting on the forklift before lunch, he wolfed down the half of a sausage-egg biscuit he had leftover from the bag of three he’d picked up for breakfast on his way to work that morning. His fingers were slick with grease when he climbed into his seat and cranked up the motor. It was a turn he’d made a thousand times. At least. More. Leaning out to see around the stack of drier boxes and line up with the trailer while wiping the grease from his fingers onto his work pants was just enough to be too much. The steering wheel slipped from his fingers, for only a moment—long enough for the forklift to veer away from the trailer opening, clip the edge of one of the open trailer doors, and topple from the loading dock to the ragged concrete below. The fall was a short one—five feet—but enough to splatter the load of driers, irreparably damaging two of them, to snap one of the tines from the forklift, and for Frank to take a four-inch gash in his forearm and one nasty little bump on his forehead. Greasy fingers—and a little carelessness after all—nothing more. The bench Frank sat on was placed too close to the edge of the canopy for complete protection from the weather. He watched the rain splatter the toes of his work boots and held his hand over the bandage as a fine mist settled on his forearm. The ground was already sodden and spongy, unable to absorb this latest round of rainfall. There would be no place for the water to go. As long as something-something and the creek don’t rise. He couldn’t remember the first part, but still, wasn’t that an adage? If so, it offered no guidance, Frank realized, merely confirmation of a general helplessness. If this rain kept up much longer, the creek near Frank’s house was damn sure going to rise, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. He needed to get home, if only to stand by helplessly and watch the ensuing threat to his property. What else was there for a man to do? As long as your forklift rolls steady and the creek don’t rise. He thought, perhaps, he had overestimated the value of an adage. Frank could feel the dampness of the rain inside his boots when Quentin pulled up to the hospital entrance. “They get you all stitched up there, Frank?” The driver’s side window of Quentin’s car was rolled down about two inches, and he held his mouth up to the opening and spoke loudly over the din of the falling rain and the slap of his windshield wipers. The end of one of the rubber wiper blades had slipped out of its bracket, and the exposed metal screeched across the windshield glass. Like it or not, Frank would have to get in the car with this damn kid yet again. He needed a ride. It was probably unfair, Frank thought, to be so annoyed by Quentin. Since Quentin had been working the loading docks on the same shift as Frank, he couldn’t recall the kid ever being anything but a good worker, couldn’t recall him ever behaving in any way other than what Frank would call decently. They had never socialized outside of the factory. Of course they hadn’t—Frank had twenty years on the job, and Quentin was young, a recent hire, a generation younger than Frank, no more than a year or two older than Frank’s daughter, Samantha. Still, they’d always been friendly and cordial co-workers. And it was, after all, Quentin who first came to Frank’s aid, leaping from the dock and rushing to him while the others lingered on the dock for a few seconds, gaping at Frank still strapped into the floundered forklift. “Frank? Frank, you okay?” Shaken and disoriented as he had been at the moment, Frank could still hear the sincere concern in Quentin’s voice as the kid switched off the forklift’s ignition, unfastened the safety harness, and started to pull Frank free of the operator’s seat before the others on the dock collected themselves enough to come to his aid as well. And it was Quentin who wrapped the gash in Frank’s arm with gauze from the first aid kit one of the others had fetched and he who insisted most fervently to Dexter Stevens, the shift foreman, that this little bit of gauze just wasn’t gonna do it and that Frank needed to get to the emergency room and that he’d be glad to take him. Truth was, Frank owed Quentin his thanks, yet, as he ducked out of the rain, keeping his bandaged arm tight to his side, and slid into the passenger seat, he would have preferred an alternative to another car ride, short as it would be, with this hard-working, helpful, decent kid. “All fixed up?” Quentin asked as he closed his window and shifted into gear. Frank lifted his bandaged arm a few inches as if to display more clearly what was already plainly visible. “Looks like it,” he said. “Took a few stitches.” “They give you anything for it?” Frank patted the small plastic vials of antibiotics and pain killers lodged in the front pocket of his jeans, provoking just enough of a rattle to confirm there were pills in the vials. “And a tetanus shot, too,” he said. “That’s good,” Quentin said, looking over his shoulder for other cars as he pulled away from the hospital entrance and fully into the falling rain. “You don’t never want to mess with infection. That can get nasty, worse than the injury. No, don’t want to be fooling around taking chances with that.” If Barbara had been available to pick him up that day, Frank might have been spared the wait at the edge of the rain at the hospital entrance, maybe, might even have been able to get back to work for another hour or so at the end of the shift. He’d have felt no particular obligation for special gratitude toward Barbara, and beyond a basic explanation of his injury and reassurance that it was nothing, that he was okay, he wouldn’t have felt compelled to make convivial conversation. Such was simply what husbands and wives did for each other. Nothing special. But Barbara wasn’t available today, wouldn’t be until much later in the evening. Frank knew she’d be tied up all afternoon showing the old plastics plant outside North Penley to a group of investors, Canadians, he thought she had said. She had seemed especially excited, anxious last night, talking about her appointment the next day. This would be the first shot her company had given her with commercial and industrial real estate. “That’s where the real money is,” she had said. Little as Frank knew about the real estate business, he did know about factories, and he knew it would have to take a long time to examine the old plant. While he waited for Quentin, he had called her cell phone from the telephone at the hospital information desk. She was “out of the office” so much these days, spent so much time “showing properties,” her cell phone was about the only way he’d be able to reach her if he needed to. “It’s my life line,” she had said, adding that he “really should catch up with the times and carry one, too.” He got her voice mail and left a message, briefly recounting the accident and assuring her that he was a little banged up but fine. Frank wondered if he had a right to be bothered by the fact that since Barbara got her broker’s license two years ago, she hadn’t been available much of that time. He thought he’d rather be proud of her for the success she’d had in the same way he thought she was proud of him for all his years as a stable, capable provider, good at his job and dependable. He should be proud of her and grateful for the extra money she was bringing in—some months, more than he made—especially now with Samantha in college. Frank’s arm hurt, but the pain was bearable. He was still a little light-headed from the knock he took when his head hit the concrete, but not so much he couldn’t drive himself home now, once Quentin delivered him back to his car in the plant parking lot. Driving now would be no different than if he’d had a beer or two, a bit shaky but still quite capable. The windshield wipers screeched and flapped. Quentin leaned forward, hunched over the steering wheel, concentrating on the wet road and straining to see clearly through the downpour. “Damned if it doesn’t look like we’re gonna get doused again,” Quentin said, looking both at the falling rain and through it to the slick pavement. It had been less than a month since the Fremont River that bisected town, and its tributary creeks, swollen with the run-off from inordinate early autumn rains, had jumped their banks and flooded the main section of downtown Wyandot and the lower lying areas adjacent to the streams. Many of the businesses in the downtown area were closed, still cleaning up and assessing the damage. Homes in the flooded areas were marked by growing middens of flood-sodden household belongings piled in front of the houses. FEMA trailers and PODS containers were newly settled into place in the parking lot of the washed-out Kroger in the center of town. Building contractors, giddy at the prospects, swarmed over town amid warnings about price gouging from local and state officials. The gloss of the disaster here in their little corner of Ohio, for a few days the headline story in national newspapers and on the cable news networks, had worn off as the residents of Wyandot fought with their insurance companies and settled into the daunting task of cleaning up and reclaiming their lives. And now the rains were back. “Hope it ain’t as bad as the last go-round,” Frank said. “Ground’s so saturated, there won’t be much place for the water to go but up and out.” “Oh, it couldn’t be as bad as the last time,” Quentin said. “That’d just be too much. Couldn’t be.” “I hope you’re right.” Frank shifted in the seat to keep his bandaged arm from bumping against the door. “Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, eh?” Quentin said. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. Yes, that sounded about right, Frank thought, though now that he had the complete adage intact, he didn’t find any particular encouragement or solace in it. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. The Fremont River was rising, that much Frank could see as Quentin drove over the bridge and turned onto Benton Avenue in the direction of the plant on the edge of town. Churned up and muddy brown, the river was swelling with run-off but was still within its banks. The concern for the moment would be the creek that fed into the river and its condition about a mile from there, by Frank’s house. He’d need to get home soon. “Well, at least I didn’t move stuff back in the basement yet after the last time,” Quentin said. “That’s lucky.” Despite the fact that the rains and the rising waters were the obvious issue at the moment, Frank still needed to know. “So, you numb-nuts manage to get along without me while I was lounging around the emergency room?” “Oh, sure,” Quentin said. Nothing in his voice gave any indication that he thought the tone of his response could possibly matter one way or the other to Frank. There was no guile, no attempt even to frame his response in the context of the good-natured, male workplace banter that had shaped Frank’s question. Quentin was asked a simple question, and he gave a simple answer. There was no need for anything else but the truth. “They had ‘er up and running fine by the time I got back,” Quentin continued. “Even got that busted tine back on. We got that truck loaded and most of another one yet before shift change.” Frank pressed his arm tightly in against his belly, unconsciously, as if to hold in the knot of disappointment in his gut over the fact that work had proceeded smoothly in his absence. Never, of course, would he have admitted his disappointment openly, or even consciously to himself, but the feeling was there, lodged behind his stomach like a stone. Though he would certainly never have bragged overtly about such a thing, he was proud of his facility with the forklift, his ability to pack the trailer of a semi truck full, without wasting an inch of space. He needed the relevance, the significance his skill accorded him. He was necessary. It was who he was as a working man, and it pained him to hear his absence had no discernible effect. Frank looked out the passenger window at the sheets of rain, irritated that Quentin’s guilelessness made him unaware that such things mattered to someone like Frank. “Who ran the lift?” Frank asked. “Dexter was trying to, but he wasn’t making much of go of it,” Quentin said. “I think he’s forgotten how to do real work since he got promoted. I took over for him when I got back.” The rear end of Quentin’s car fishtailed just slightly on the wet pavement when he hit the brakes and turned into the lot in front of McLaren’s Carry-Out. Frank winced when his bandaged arm bumped the arm rest and turned from the passenger window to Quentin, his question about their sudden change of course inscribed clearly on his face. “Almost forgot,” Quentin said. “Promised the wife I’d get her some nuts on the way home. Ever since she’s been pregnant, she’s had her cravings. You know how that is.” Quentin grinned and raised his eyebrows, giving Frank a knowing look. “Lately, it’s been red-skinned peanuts, and they got to be McLaren’s, nothing else.” In addition to the usual convenience store fare of beer and soda, chips and jerky, overpriced bread and milk, magazines and lottery tickets, McLaren’s ran a sort of side business, roasting and selling a surprisingly wide variety of nuts, and this side business had developed a loyal following around town. “Gotta get her a couple of scratchers, too,” Quentin said. “Be right back.” Quentin hunched over against the rain as he scrambled from the car, slammed the door, and ran into the store. The car windows began to fog up almost immediately after Quentin left, and Frank looked at the collecting condensation as one more thing about Quentin that bothered him just now. What in hell was this damned kid doing, stopping to waste money on expensive peanuts and lottery tickets, with a pregnant young wife at home, probably in one of those little two-bedroom jobs on the east side of town, not much more than a stone’s throw from a river that was most definitely rising? A capable man needed to be home to watch over his family and property. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. Frank began to wonder if the pain medication they’d given him in the emergency room was affecting him. He wasn’t, by nature, a short-tempered man, but this decent kid who was going out of his way to help him was irritating the snot out of him. Then again, given how embarrassed he was by his carelessness, which had led to his forklift taking a nose dive off the loading dock, Frank guessed he’d be annoyed by just about anyone right now, and if he was to feel entitled to this irritation, he’d best pay for the privilege. He opened the car door, tucked his injured arm under his good arm, and trotted through the rain into McLaren’s. Driving himself home from the plant after Quentin had left him at his car, Frank swerved slightly out of his lane, having taken his eyes from the road a moment too long to look at the rising water only a few feet below the low bridge over Stroud’s Creek. He was probably too weary from the accident, the pain medication, and his ride with Quentin to be driving alone through heavy rainfall, but there were fortunately no oncoming cars. He was only a block from home now. Quentin had been grateful, perhaps overly so, when Frank bought him a six-pack of Heineken at McLaren’s as a way of showing his appreciation for Quentin’s help that day. “Oh, you ain’t gotta do that,” Quentin had said at the check-out counter in the store as he paid for a huge package of peanuts and two lottery scratcher cards. “What are friends for, eh?” Frank had only thought of Quentin as a co-worker, never a friend. “It’s the least I can do,” Frank said. It was the least he could do, a bargain price to justify his lingering exasperation with this decent, eager kid. “Um, the good stuff,” Quentin said. As he dug out his wallet to pay for the beer, Frank thought he noticed an odd grin on his face as Quentin looked down at the two scratcher cards he held. “So, you gonna see if you won anything?” Frank asked. “No, the wife likes to do it. The scratchers are part of her cravings, that and these peanuts. She’s hoping we’ll win enough to fix up the room for the baby. Somebody’s gotta win, eh?” Frank realized that it was just that eagerness that so irked him about this kid at the moment. Quentin was eager, optimistic, hopeful. He had faith in things. He believed in possibilities. He believed unequivocally in the future. “I can’t wait to be a dad,” Quentin had said when he dropped Frank back at his car in the plant parking lot. “Hell, I hope we can have two or three more.” Frank thought he must have looked forward to the life ahead of him when he was Quentin’s age. He remembered for certain how good he felt when he got hired on at the plant and could recall being happy when Barbara said yes. He could still feel the joy that swept over him when Samantha was born, a healthy, fat, beautiful baby girl. “Got all her fingers and toes,” he had said. He recalled his surprise that she was born with such a shock of startlingly black, thick hair. Often he would gently roll a strand of her hair between his thumb and forefinger, the hair silky and soothing against his rough, meaty flesh. The touch of her astonishing hair on his skin pulled him in, and he would lean down to smell its delicate scent as he checked the steadiness of her breathing as she slept in her crib. Her hair had remained thick and black until she started turning it into a science project early in high school, experimenting with a long series of different hair colors and styles. When she returned to school last month, it was short, bleached pale blonde, with a streak of magenta down one side. But as for Quentin’s relentless enthusiasm, Frank was sure he was never so all-fired foolish and giddy about it all. It was just what people did in their lives. A job, a wife, a child, a home—it was the story he’d been told, the one he had listened to and knew. It made sense, provided a reasonable, practical shape for a life. He had followed the plan and never given it a second thought. Frank never played the lottery. Frank recovered, pulled quickly back into his lane, and turned onto Blue Heron Drive, which ran parallel to Stroud’s Creek, both the creek and street perpendicular to Frank’s street. His was the second house on his street, but he drove four or five houses past his own and parked by the curb. When the creek flooded last month, the water had come up a foot deep in his garage and surrounded the house and on up around the next two houses as well, the water just a couple inches shy of getting inside. Though Frank’s neighborhood appeared to sit on level ground, the houses on the other side of the street sat lightly lower, and Tony and Gena’s house directly across from Frank’s took in over a foot of water. In this part of Ohio the high ground could be a matter of twelve inches. The creek was nearly full now, and if it jumped its banks again—and it looked to Frank like it would—he’d have a better chance of being able to get to his car and get out if he left it farther up the street. He slogged back down the block to his house. By the time he got into his garage, he was dead tired, a little light-headed still, and soaked to the bone, including his bandaged arm. A deep, sonorous sigh issued from Frank’s lungs when he sat down on the steps leading up to the kitchen from the garage to remove his wet work boots and socks. He was shivering and his bandaged arm throbbed when he jerked his head up and looked around the garage. Squinting at the clock on the wall above his workbench, he realized he had nodded off for nearly an hour. He’d gotten one boot off before he’d slumped against the side of the cupboard by the steps. His good arm had been propped on his knee, while his bandaged arm had dropped to his side, filling with blood. Frank shook his head, flexed his tingling arm, and tugged off the remaining boot and wet socks and left them in a pile on the steps. He walked over the cold concrete of the garage floor and leaned his face to one of the small, square windows in the garage door. As he’d feared, the creek was well out of its banks. Less than a month since the last time, and they were flooded again. The rain had slacked off, but the coffee-brown water was out of the creek, across Blue Heron Drive, and working its way up Frank’s street. Half his driveway and a portion of his yard were already submerged, and the water was still moving. Across the street, the water was only a couple feet from Tony and Gena’s house, and Tony was outside trying to get the sandbags left over from the previous episode laid along the front of his garage door again. “Lord willing and the creek don’t rise,” Frank muttered. “Yeah, right.” The adage was becoming a nuisance. Dried off and wearing fresh clothes, Frank walked into the kitchen. Just an old forklift, used for loading new appliances onto semi truck trailers at a manufacturing plant that would probably be relocated from Ohio to Mexico in another year or two, he thought to himself. Seems I’m the only one who gave a damn whether or not I did a good job driving that thing. Guess I was making a little too much of it all. By the clock it was time for his next antibiotic, and Frank ran a glass of water from the tap, shook a pill from one of the two plastic vials he’d set on the window sill above the kitchen sink, and dutifully swallowed it. By the throbbing in his forearm, it was time for a pain pill. Frank picked up the other vial, gripped the cap with his fingertips, then paused, looked at the vial, and set it unopened back on the window sill. With the waters of an angry, flood-glutted creek rising around his house, this was surely a time for a man to be clear-headed and wide awake. A little pain should hardly be too much to bear. The answering machine on the counter blinked out that one message waited to be heard, and Frank pushed the play button. It was Barbara. “Frank? Honey, you there?” Barbara’s voice was faint and distorted, but Frank could understand her. “You left a message on my voice mail, but I couldn’t make out what you said. Something about a forklift? Look, honey, I’m going to be….” Barbara’s voice trailed off, her attention drawn elsewhere. “Excuse me? Yes. All the duct work was renovated and inspected last year,” she said to someone else before speaking again to Frank. “Anyway, I’m going to be late. The clients got in from Toronto late because of the weather, so we’re going to be at least another hour or two. It’s been raining like crazy up here. How bad is it there? Please tell me the creek hasn’t flooded again. Call me.” Frank called her cell and got her voice mail again. He spoke loudly and plainly, told her that he was home, that he was fine, and that the creek was indeed out of its banks again and that she should drive in from the east side of town and park up the street because Blue Heron Drive was already flooded and water was halfway up the driveway again. After hanging up, Frank went back out to the garage, stuffed his feet into his old hip boots, threw on a rain slicker, and walked outside to check the water inching further up his driveway. Since he’d looked out the garage window when he woke up, the rain had ceased, and the pace of the water’s rising seemed to be slowing. At Tony’s house on the low side of the street, the front yard was submerged, and the water had moved up into the yard of the next house. The water appeared to be no more than a few inches from Tony’s garage door. He hadn’t seen Frank come out of his garage, his back to Frank as he labored to stack his pallet of sandbags. Frank stared at the lapping edge of brown water for a minute, then at the crack of light cutting through the clouds low in the sky to the west. He puffed out his cheeks, blew a slow, firm stream of air out of his lungs, and made a cautious, calculated guess that the creek had pretty much crested by now. Oh, it couldn’t be as bad as the last time. Making a bet with himself that Quentin might have been right after all and that he could get away without sealing off his own garage door, Frank waded across the flooded street to see if he could give Tony a hand. “Getting pretty goddamned old, isn’t it, Frank. Thanks,” Tony said, as Frank set a sandbag in place and turned to get another. “You can say that again,” Frank said, trying not to wince too openly from the pain in his arm as he hefted another bag of sand. “I’m starting to get an idea of what it must have been like for those folks down in New Orleans. Least it’s not that bad.” Tony placed his hands on his lower back and stretched for a moment, looking out across Blue Heron Drive, where a churning band of water marked the course of the creek bed. “I suppose not,” Tony said. “But it’s damned bad enough. Hell, here we are, trying to keep this shit out of a garage that’s piled full of the mess the last flood made. Hardly seems worth it. Just be saving shit.” “Well, maybe,” Frank said. “But don’t forget that stack of new sheetrock you’ve got in there.” Frank recalled looking out his front window a few days earlier and seeing Tony, sitting on an igloo cooler in his open garage, staring blankly at the sodden mound of carpet and other household furnishings beside a stack of new sheetrock resting on a pair of saw horses. “Figures,” Tony said. “Can’t even get started on one mess before another comes along. You think your place is going to be okay?” Tony nodded toward Frank’s house as he carried another sandbag to the pile. “I think so,” Frank said. “It looks as though it’s come as far up as it’s gonna. But we’d best go ahead and finish this up, just in case.” “I appreciate it, Frank. You’re a good neighbor,” Tony said. “And wouldn’t you just know it. I had tickets to see the Bucs play Michigan in Columbus this Saturday. Damn. Looks like that’ll be three hundred dollars down the drain. Not to mention the flood insurance I bought last week that doesn’t go into effect until next month. Figures.” Tony nodded and pointed at the little square of gauze on Frank’s forehead. “What happened?” he asked. “Looks like you took a knock.” “Just a little mishap at work,” Frank said. “It’s nothing.” Their breath becoming more labored as they laid into their task, Frank and Tony worked in silence for a few more minutes. Tony finally spoke when only a few sandbags remained to be set in place. “Oh, for god sakes. There’s always one damn fool, isn’t there?” Frank followed Tony’s line of sight to a dark blue minivan, trying to chug fender-deep through the water covering Blue Heron Drive. Frank recognized the van as the one regularly parked in a driveway a few houses further up Blue Heron. Neighbors he didn’t know. Being so close to the creek, the water over Blue Heron was still stirred up and visibly moving. Waves slapped the sides of the minivan as it lurched a few more feet through the flood and stalled out. Frank insisted Tony stay right where he was. Tony’s garage was only three or four sandbags shy of being secured and besides, Frank was the one wearing hip boots. Frank glanced at the water level on his driveway as he sloshed through the thigh-deep water toward the minivan. The water remained at the same spot it had been when he came out to help Tony. It had stopped rising. It wouldn’t be as bad this time. A man and a woman sat in the front seats of the minivan, and Frank could hear the woman screaming as he approached, though he couldn’t make out her words. She was twisted around in her seat, feverishly freeing her toddler from its safety seat in the back. A small dog danced on the woman’s lap, barking frantically. The man sat locked in place, both hands clutching the steering wheel, and Frank could see the man’s jaw clamped shut as he got closer. Only a few yards from the van now, Frank saw that the woman had gathered her child, who had begun to cry, into one arm and was trying to collect her frantic dog with the other as she pushed her door open, allowing a few inches of flood water to swirl into the van’s interior. “Oh my god, we’ve got to get out of here,” the woman screamed as she opened her door, pushing and kicking at it with her feet. The man’s hands jerked away from the steering wheel, balled into fists, and struck at the wheel three or four times before he too set to opening his door and fleeing the van. “Goddamn it, Brad. Goddamn you, why do you do these things?” the woman yelled. She held the crying child tightly to her shoulder with one arm and the squirming dog under her other arm as she delivered one final kick to door and stepped from the van into the water. She stumbled against the current. To right herself and regain her footing, she reached for the door of the van, and her terrified dog leapt from under her arm. The dog splashed desperately for a few strokes then began to swim directly toward the stronger current above the creek bed. “Peanut,” the woman screamed. “Peanut, no!” Frank made two strained, quick strides through the water and lunged toward the madly paddling dog. He felt the weight of the water press into his chest as he splashed in and sank to his neck. His hip boots filled instantly with water, and he cringed from the pain beating in his arm, but somehow he came up with a fistful of scruff and collar and yanked the dog out of the flow. The dog was soaked and shivering in terror, still squirming, trying to escape what it couldn’t understand. Frank held it to his chest with both arms and trudged toward the couple by their van. He was astonished by just how heavy his legs felt in waders full of flood water. “Oh, thank you, thank you,” the woman said, stroking her child’s head and wading toward the more shallow water. “Bless you. Oh, Peanut. Bad dog.” The man had made his way around the stalled van, and Frank held the little dog out to him while all three of them continued moving toward the shallower water, abandoning the van for now. “Oh, thank you so much,” the woman said again. A miserable scowl on his face, the man grabbed the dog from Frank’s outstretched arms. “Little rat,” the man snarled. “Always hated this goddamn dog.” Frank cradled his throbbing arm against the pain and waded further up the street, while the woman clutched her child and rained her gratitude down on him and the man looked angrily between him and the wide-eyed, squealing dog he carried roughly under his arm. Little doubt, Frank realized, that this particular neighbor would just as soon have preferred that Frank had minded his own damn business and let the little mutt go on and drown. The sweat pants and flannel shirt Frank had put on felt good against his chilled skin, dried off now for the second time this afternoon. Gray, fading light of dusk dimmed the window as he sank exhausted onto a chair at the kitchen table and washed a pain pill down with beer despite the very definite warnings not to drink alcohol or operate heavy machinery plainly printed on the label of the plastic vial. He’d be operating no more heavy machinery today. “Good work, Frank,” Tony had said when Frank dragged himself back up the street in his waterlogged hip boots. “Looks like you saved the day.” Frank took another long swallow of beer and set the can on the table. The red light on the answering machine was blinking again with a call that must have come in while he was out in the flood. He pushed himself up from the table, shuffled to the counter and hit play. It was Samantha. “Mom? Dad? You there?” Her voice flowed over Frank like clear, clean water. “Dad, you there? Aren’t you home from work yet? I called mom’s cell, but I just got, like, her voice mail. Left a message. You guys okay? Wyandot’s, like, all over CNN again. Says there’s more flooding. You okay? What’s going on there today? Call me. Stay high and dry, ha-ha. Call me. Someone? And jeez, dad, come on, get a cell phone like everyone else in the world.” Frank lifted his beer can from the table, took another drink, and punched in Samantha’s number. He got her voice mail. “Hi sweetheart,” he said after the beep. “It’s dad. Yeah, we got soaked again, but not so bad this time.” Frank provided a decidedly abbreviated version of events, assured her that they were all okay here at home, that her mother would be home later, and told Samantha to call when she could. From a shelf in the den, Frank retrieved one of their older photo albums, laid it with a thud on the kitchen table beside his empty beer can, and opened to a section of pictures from when Samantha was in grade school and her hair was still long and black. Frank’s gaze lingered over a photograph Barbara had taken of Samantha sitting on his lap, grinning widely, “helping Daddy” drive the old riding mower back and forth across the lawn. He remembered her asking, “Daddy, can I draw pictures in the grass with the mower someday if I learn to drive it as good as you?” Frank marveled at the thickness of her black hair in the sunlight, lush and barely contained by two bright green barrettes. His fingertips dabbed at the tiny bands of green on the image as his eyelids began to flutter and droop. When Barbara tromped into the kitchen an hour later, grumbling about the flood and the pile of wet clothes in the garage and those damned Canadians, that’s where she found him, beside an empty beer can, slumped over old photographs of their daughter, his forehead resting on the tattered bandage on his forearm, his breathing deep and steady.
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