We spend the day battening down the bar. Tex has a system. He's done this before and it shows. We move a few perishables from the kitchen up to the apartment in coolerspacked with ice. We tape the windows we can't board. We drag the patio furniture inside and stack it against the far wall. We sandbag the ground-floor doors.
He talks the entire time. He tells me which walls are load-bearing and which ones flex. He shows me where the generator is and how to start it if we need it, and he makes me repeat the steps back to him until he's certain I've got it. I don't mind. It feels less like a test and more like he's making sure I'm not helpless if something happens to him. Nobody has ever planned for me like that.
By mid-afternoon the sky is a color I've never seen before — green-gray, churning, the clouds moving fast and low like they're being chased. The wind has been building all day in gusts that rattle the plywood over the windows, and Tex keeps checking his phone and frowning at the radar.
He doesn't tell me what he sees, but I can read his face well enough. It's bad.
The power goes out a little after sunset.
One second the lights are humming and the neon signs are glowing and the refrigerator is running. The next second, everything goes dark and silent and the only sound in the world is the wind.
It's disorienting. The bar feels different in the dark, bigger and emptier, and full of shapes that weren't there before. Tex finds flashlights within thirty seconds, which tells me he had them positioned where he could grab them blind. He hands me one without our fingers touching.
"And there goes the grid," he says. "That's going to be out for a while. Days, probably. Maybe weeks. Good thing we moved some food up. Gas stove still works so we cancook. We've got water. We've got flashlights and batteries and candles. We're in good shape."
He finds a battery-powered lantern and sets it on the bar, and the warm yellow light turns the room almost cozy. If you ignore the sound of the building being slowly hammered by 100-mile-per-hour winds.
I'm not prepared for the sound of the wind. It doesn't gust and pause and gust again. It's constant, a sustained roar that vibrates through the concrete walls and up through the floor into my feet and my legs and my chest. It sounds alive. It sounds personal, like something enormous and furious is leaning against the building and pushing with everything it has.
I'm standing near the interior wall of the bar, as far from the boarded windows as I can get. My hand is in my pocket on the knife. Not because the knife will help. Because it's the only thing I know how to hold when I'm scared.
And right now, I'm scared.
"Hey," Tex says. He's across the room, checking the tape on the windows with a flashlight. "You doing okay?"
"Fine."
"You're standing against that wall like you're trying to merge with it. I've seen cats in thunderstorms do that. They press their whole body against the wall."
"I'm fine."
"I know you're fine. You're the toughest cat I've got." He comes back to the lantern and starts pulling food from the cooler. "Let me make us a bite to eat. The gas still works and I've got bread and deli meat and about four different kinds of cheese because I'm a man of sophistication."
He makes sandwiches by lantern light, narrating the process like he's hosting a cooking show for an audience of one.
"Now, the key to a good hurricane sandwich," he says, layering turkey and Swiss cheese on sourdough, "is that it has to be a sandwich you can eat with one hand. Because the other hand is holding a flashlight. Or bracing yourself against a wall. Or, in one memorable case during Michael, holding onto a dog that washed in through an open window."
I look at him. "A dog came in during a hurricane?"
"Swear on my daddy's grave. Little old terrier mix, came right through the first-floor window when the plywood ripped off. Swam over to the pool table, shook himself off, and looked at me like it was my fault. I named him Hurricane and he lived here for three years until he passed away in his sleep on that same pool table. Best bar dog I ever had."
I don't know if this is true. I don't know if anything he tells me is true. But the way he says it, with that big, easy voice and those warm brown eyes catching the lantern light, it makes me want it to be true. It makes me want to live in a world where dogs blow through windows and live happy lives on pool tables.
I eat my sandwich while the wind screams and Tex talks.
Around eight o'clock, the building starts to shake in a way it hasn't before. Not the vibration of the wind, which has been constant for hours. This is different. A deeper movement, a shudder that runs through the foundation, and I feel it in my spine before I understand what it is.
"That's the surge starting to come in," Tex says. He's already moving toward the stairs. "I'm going to check the water level from the balcony. Stay here."
He goes up to the second floor and I hear the door to the exterior balcony open, hear the wind come roaring in like a freight train. I should stay where he told me to stay. That's what I do. I stay where I'm told. I don't make trouble and I don't ask questions.
I follow him upstairs anyway because he also said to stick with him.
The second-floor balcony faces the Gulf, or where the water used to end and the beach used to begin. That distinction doesn't exist anymore. Through the open door, in the beam of Tex's flashlight and the sickly gray glow of the storm, I can see water where there shouldn't be water.
The beach is gone. There is no beach.
There's just water, black and churning, moving inland with a patience that's more terrifying than speed. It's up to the base of the building. I can hear it hitting the first-floor walls, a constant, wet slap that sounds like a monster trying to get in.
