Amanda Yskamp​

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She’d gotten the place cheap. A fixer on the Russian River’s 10-year flood plain, raised up on pilings, with enough room for Jack, her 13 strays, and Ruth, herself. Sure, she had the mortgage, but there was no way of saying what an achievement this was for her after years of barely making it. She was just shy of 30 but had spent much of her life lost to men or drinks or drugs, drifting. And now while Ruth still couldn’t plan 10 years ahead, she thought she’d have at least a few safe, dry years ahead of her. Wouldn’t you know it, just her luck, the big one struck their first winter there before they’d hardly even landed, much less settled in for keeps. 

 

--26 ft.--

The storm started with a nearly solid downpour, but on day 2 that had eased and all along the river people lulled up a bit, fooled by the sun and the holiday spirit in those jolly days between Christmas and New Year’s. When the crabmen came back with word of a front high as a tsunami and darker than soot, it traveled faster than the radio’s storm advisories. The folks in the low-lying neighborhood were faced with the choice: flood in or flood out.

 

--32 ft.--

“Flood in,” Jack said for the third time in two minutes. He got stuck sometimes. Ruth’s sister Helen had always said he was simple as a song.

“Like we have a choice.” Ruth was filling old pie pans with cat food. 

A heart of gold from an abused childhood might explain the array of foundling cats ranging with feral tempers and wisdom Ruth had taken in to foster. She kept them caged until socialized, then she found them homes.

“How the hell would we get all these guys out? Where would we go?” She squatted by the first of the cages that took up half the living room and slid the pie pan in. 

“But don’t worry, the realtor told me this place flooded only once, up to here,” she touched the line drawn a few inches above the baseboard. 

“We’ll be fine.” That was like Ruth’s mantra given all the times she’d repeated it since she’d gone to retrieve Jack from her sister’s. Now that the jig was up, and everyone knew everything, the challenge would be how fine they could live with the open truth.

 

--32.5 ft.--

“Flood in,” Jack said, “Doesn’t that kind of call the water in?” He was doing his figuring at the table. Math was his subject, so much so, that even on holiday he liked to keep busy. The rest of the 8th grade curriculum was over his head. He was drawing an elaborate numbered grid across a page from the newspaper with a ruler and colored pencils.  

“The main thing is you choose whether you’re going to get out while you still can, or weather the storm through. We can weather anything probably, right? We’ve got this house together, you and me, and we can just stay right here. Nope. We’re not leaving. Not us. It took me long enough to tell –”

“And you told because I asked you finally.”

“Because you asked me finally.”

“Because I kind of knew.”

“You always knew.”

“Not always, I didn’t always, but I thought I knew. For one thing, I look more like you.”

“You do. Around the eyes.”

“So I asked, and you told.”

“So I told you, then I went and got you.”

“And so…”

“And so.”

“We….”

“We.”

“Flood in!” They said as one.

 

--34 ft.--

It looked like a Hollywood version of shipwrecking deluge, a nearly unrelenting curtain of sound and saturation. Ferocious white noise surrounded them, the roof rumbled and pulsed, the eaves funneled cataracts. They stood together under the overhang at the top of the stairs while Ruth smoked her 2nd cigarette and watched the water level practically climb tread by tread before their eyes.

“At least we still have electricity,” Jack said, but when they tried the lights next, they didn’t. Lightning crashed, and they clutched each other, laughing. By kerosene lamp, they ate tuna for dinner, the feral cats from their pie plates, tuna sandwiches for Jack and Ruth, coke for him, for her, beer. 

 

 

--35 ft.--

When the water had reached the next to last step, Ruth said, “penultimate, that means next to last.”

“I know. Mama told me. I mean. Well, you know who.”  

“Oh she did, did she?”

But it was getting too close for comfort; no mantra could assuage. 

“What are you going to do now, genius?” Ruth asked, but to herself. She generated a nearly endless curtain of words to soothe the strays (baby voice), Jack (her version of maternal), and herself (bracing, sometimes insulting). 

“Aun –” he stopped himself, his mouth stretched one way, up and to the right side, then down and left. 

“Rue,” she told him, offering him the pet name only her mother had used. Her father, he’d called her Princess, but that fake, shiny lure had died with him 10 years ago. Good riddance. 

“We better get the cats up high,” Jack said. Riled and fomented, they’d taken turns hissing and caterwauling in a rhythm nearly human.  

“You’re right, Jack. Of course.”

“How about there,” he said, pointing. There was a space of 3 or 4 feet between the tops of the kitchen cabinets and the canted cabin roof. 

“Of course he’s right, flood high if you’re going to flood in. But 10-year flood plain, my ass. 10 years, right. That’s a fine welcome to the neighborhood,” Ruth muttered, but Jack had already climbed onto the dishwasher.

“Hand me one.” Jack was big for 13, but ungainly. Ruth had never seen him do anything physical before. Truth be told, he looked most like her father, their father— same black hair and a build that was stocky and a bit unfocused— but she’d learned to look past that to Jack’s unerring sweetness.

“They’re pretty heavy, Jack.”

“Okay, then just slide one over. Rue.” She smiled and did as he asked, starting with Inky, who, even as the most socialized of the lot, still bit sometimes. She gripped the cage carefully and slid it over to where Jack crouched, his green corduroy pants dipping to show a few inches of stomach. Jack reached for it and the whole thing listed sharply. Inky’s paws tangled in the bedding and he crashed against the bars. Ruth’s palm caught the cage’s sharp corner just as Jack met her eyes through the chrome frame: first blood. 

“Damn it all to hell!” Ruth screamed, but quickly dropped her voice, cooing “Oh, not you, don’t worry, you’ll be fine, shhh, shhh,” to soothe Inky, whom they righted and raised to the rafters, each holding an end.

Later, Rue and Jack stood sentry again in the doorway at the top of the stairs, where he smoked the first cigarette of his life. It’d been modelled to him enough that he knew not to cough, to take the smoky taste, the burn in his chest, like suppressed tears. Oh, what the hell, Ruth thought. She’d started at his age too, earlier. Something or other is going to get you in the end. As for the rain, it just wouldn’t stop.

 

--37 ft.--

“Get a bag together, just in case,” she told herself.

“In case,” Jack said and she started. He was standing right behind her again.  

“But we’re flooding in, remember? You said, flood in.”

The kitchen felt almost like a circus now, the cats on the cabinets above their heads, pacing, growling, swishing their tails.

“Oh yeah, we are.” Ruth said and stroked Jack’s crewcut backwards, forwards, backwards again, the nap felt like the velvet of cinema upholstery. He looked at her steadily, his blue eyes clear and wide. She wasn’t used to such attention, someone waiting for her to lead. How should she know what was the best thing to do?

“I said it, and I meant it. We’re good right here,” she said, and Jack went into the kitchen for a snack. 

 

--5-7 ft.--

For the last few summers, after Ruth had reappeared and had a semi-permanent address, Helen dropped Jack at his “aunt’s” house for two months. From the day of his arrival, Ruth had wasted no time with small talk. If she was going to keep him in the dark about the main thing, him being hers by her father, she owed it to Jack to be straight about the rest. She tried to love him as she thought a mother would, or could, being the damaged woman she was. In the river rental, when she’d just begun to take in strays, they would swing in the hammock and she’d tell him nearly everything she thought he needed to know and sing all the songs in her large repertoire until he got the words. He couldn’t carry a tune, but that didn’t matter. 

“Oh, so now she’s got you singing Leadbelly, huh?” Helen said when he’d climb into the car. “What next?” She was the older, steadier sister. Married, employed, glad for the summer off, glad to have him back at summer’s end. Those songs filling the miles, she kept her eyes on the road for the long ride home. 

 

--39.5 ft.--

Ruth strained to hear if the storm was stopping or just catching its breath for a redoubled squall. That’s when she caught the rumbling of motorboats. Ruth climbed up on the porch rail to see.Coming up the flooded road like some backwoods gondolier, a coastguard with a megaphone called orders to evacuate. In the boat was Martin Landers, Ruth would find out his name later, but right then he was just a man in a boat being loud.

“The dam at Stewarts’ Bend is out, repeat, the dam at Stewarts’ Bend has washed out, worse is coming! Everyone is ordered out!” The words came to her garbled, but she got the gist. 

“Jack,” Ruth said. He wasn’t behind her this time.

“Jack!” She called into the house. 

He wasn’t in his bedroom where he’d been playing with his Legos, last she’d seen him. The room had taken on one inch of dirty water, the plastic bricks bobbed around like bright colored cereal.

“Jack! Where are you? Change of plans! We’re flooding out!” Ruth called and ran around the wall to the kitchen. There he was, up on the cabinet, crouched in the gap between two cages, his knees clutched to his chest, a lock of black hair covering most of his face. 

“In. You said in.” He said quietly.

It was just too much. It must have been too much for the cheap laminate to bear, a big boy plus the cages on top, plus the stack of dishes and glasses and mugs within. In the silence, there began a low whine. Ruth thought it might be Jack himself, but then the sound grew to a kind of shriek as the wood ripped loose from the screws anchoring the cabinet to the wall, and the whole thing collapsed, crashing onto the counter and off onto the floor, with cats and shattering glass and dish-shards and Jack buried and banged up, but basically alive. 

 

“In,” he said just audibly, reaching his finger to touch Dolly’s fur where it poked through the bars of the fallen cage. 

“Come on, Jack,” Ruth said, lifting him from the wreckage, doing what she knew she had to. “This is the part where we live.” She got him standing, though he’d made himself all but dead weight. He stood there beside her, drooping, looking down. 

“But what about the kitties? We can’t just leave them here,” he said. 

Skunk and Dolly and Inky circled their toppled cages like freaked tigers. The others took up the chorus. How had she forgotten them? Her thoughts for the first time had been only for Jack.

“You’re so right, son, right as rain. The kitties. The cats.” 

Before Ruth and Jack went out to stand on the last step to meet the guard— Jack repeating“ultimate” over and over— Ruth bent down to unlatch the first two cages. Then climbing onto the counter gingerly, her slippers completely soaked, she reached up to open the others’ cages, all the while murmuring in her sweetest voice, “there you go, don’t worry, you’ll be fine. Wild things like you, you’ll make it on your own. Just keep going higher.”

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