Chapter 5 Tex #2
I stand at the bottom of the stairs and take a long look.
I let myself feel the heartbreak for a second before I put it away.
Crying won't help. The hardwood floors are buckled and warped, pulling away from the subfloor in long, curling strips.
The pool tables are turned on their sides, shoved against the far wall by the force of the water.
The jukebox is face-down in the mud. The neon signs are dark, some of them cracked, the BIG TEX'S ROADHOUSE sign hanging by one chain.
The gift shop display is scattered, racks toppled, keychains and shot glasses spread across the floor in a soggy mess.
The bar top is still there. Dad built it to last. He bolted it to a concrete footer he poured himself, and the water couldn't move it. But it's been submerged for hours and the wood is dark and swollen. I know from Michael that saltwater does things to wood that you can't always fix.
I walk over to it and put my hand on the surface. It's wet and gritty with sand. Closing my eyes for a second, I think about my dad standing behind this bar. Pouring drinks, telling stories, knowing every regular's name. This was his bar and his bar top. He built it with his hands.
"Well," I say, and my voice comes out a little rough but I clear it and keep going. "Guess we're remodeling. Again."
I turn around. Stormy is standing behind me, near the stairs, looking at the destruction with an expression I haven't seen on his face before.
It's not fear. It's not that careful, calculated blankness he wears like armor.
It's softer. Sadder. Like he understands what this place means to me and he's sorry it's hurt.
He's hurting for me.
"Stormy," I say. He looks over at me. "I'm glad you're here with me." I say it straight, no joke attached, no deflection. Just the truth. "You being here, through all of that last night, it meant more than you probably know. So, thank you."
He shrugs and looks down at the floor. "I didn't do anything."
"You were here. That's not nothing. That's a hell of a lot more than nothing and I appreciate it."
He looks at the wrecked bar and back at me. He nods, once, and says so quiet I almost miss it.
"I'm glad I was here too."
I put that away in a place where I keep things that matter. Then I clap my hands together, which echoes through the empty, waterlogged bar and makes a sound like a gunshot. Stormy flinches and I immediately feel terrible.
"Oh, damn, sorry. I didn't mean it to be so loud.
Okay. Here's the plan." I start moving through the bar, stepping over debris, assessing.
"Water damage is going to get worse the longer everything sits wet.
Mold is a bitch and it comes in fast. We need to get the standing water out of here, get air flowing through, and start pulling up anything that's going to mold.
Floors, drywall, insulation. If it's wet and it can come out, it comes out.
We can't do anything about the power but we can open doors and get a cross breeze going.
Once the power comes back on, we'll run dehumidifiers in here. Sound like a plan? Are you with me?"
"Yes. Where do you want me to start?"
"Grab a mop from the supply closet. Should be in the back, second door on the left. Mop won't do much with this amount of water but it'll get the film off the surfaces and that'll help. I'm going to start pulling up the floorboards near the entrance where the buckling is worst."
He heads for the supply closet without hesitation. I watch him go and think about the kid who stood under that overhang three days ago with a wet jacket and no plan. I look at the kid moving quickly across my wrecked bar like he belongs here now, and he's the same person, but he's not.
I'm damn glad he's here.
We get to work. The sun is fully up now and it's already hot, that instant, punishing heat that comes after a hurricane when the clouds clear.
There's nothing between you and the sun but humidity so thick you could wring it out.
The bar doors are propped open and the air moving through is hot and heavy.
I'm on my hands and knees pulling up buckled floorboards when I get an idea.
"Hold on," I say, standing up. "This is unacceptable. We cannot do manual labor in silence. It's un-American."
Stormy looks at me from across the bar, mop in hand, wet hair stuck to his forehead. "What?"
"Hang on." I go to the supply room and dig through the emergency kit until I find the battery-powered radio I bought at the hardware store.
I bring it out, set it on the bar top, and start scanning through channels.
Static, static, an emergency broadcast, more static, a preacher yelling about end times, more static, and then, like a gift from God himself, the opening riff of "Sweet Home Alabama" blasting through the little speaker with more enthusiasm than audio quality.
"There it is!" I crank the volume up as far as it goes, which isn't far, but in the empty bar it bounces off the concrete walls and fills the room. "Now we're working. You can't clean up a hurricane without a soundtrack. It's in the Florida constitution. I looked it up."
I go back to pulling floorboards, singing along at full volume because I have never once in my life been embarrassed about my singing voice, even though I should be. Sheila says I sound like a garbage disposal trying to harmonize, but what I lack in talent I make up for in commitment.
"There's a whole other verse," I tell Stormy over my shoulder. "Most people don't know the second verse. I'm going to sing it for you. You're welcome."
I don't actually know the second verse. I make up words that are approximately in the right rhythm and nowhere near the right lyrics, and I deliver them with the confidence of a man performing at Madison Square Garden.
The song ends. The DJ, broadcasting from what sounds like a closet somewhere, plays Tom Petty next. And then the station settles into a run of classic rock that's so perfect for hurricane cleanup it feels curated. Bon Jovi. The Eagles. AC/DC. Fleetwood Mac.
Stormy mops. I pull floors. The radio plays. And somewhere during "Don't Stop Believin'," I look up and see a sight that stops me cold.
Stormy is smiling.
Not the ghost-smile I've seen before, the muscle twitch at the corner of his mouth that disappears before it fully forms. A real smile.
Small, careful, like his face is testing it out and isn't sure about the fit, but real.
His lips are curved and his eyes are lighter and he's looking down at the mop, not at me, like he doesn't know he's doing it.
The song is the reason. Journey belting out that chorus in this wrecked, waterlogged bar in the middle of a disaster zone while a battery radio crackles and the sun pours through the open doors. Everything is destroyed and somehow nothing feels hopeless.
It's so absurd it's funny, and Stormy is smiling at the absurdity of it. I would give everything I own to keep that expression on his face.
I don't say anything or point it out. I've learned that much. You don't tell a stray cat it's purring. You just let it happen naturally.
I go back to my floorboards. The radio keeps playing.
The sun keeps climbing. The heat gets much worse.
The sweat rolls and the work is backbreaking, but I catch him smiling once more before noon.
It's during "Bohemian Rhapsody," when I do all the voices, including the operatic section, with hand gestures.
"You're ridiculous," he says.
I almost drop the board I'm carrying. Not because of what he said but because of how he said it. Casual. Unguarded. The way you'd talk to someone you've known for more than three days. The way you'd talk to a friend.
"I am absolutely ridiculous," I say. "Thank you for noticing. Most people figure that out a lot faster."
"You make it pretty obvious."
"I'm going to choose to take that as a compliment."
"It wasn't."
I stare at him. He's got the mop handle in both hands and the corner of his mouth is twitching. I realize that he's messing with me. He's giving me a hard time. I love it. This scared, silent kid who wouldn't speak three days ago is standing in my wrecked bar, making a joke at my expense.
"Stormy," I say. "Was that sass? Did you just sass me? In my own bar? During a natural disaster?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You absolutely do. That was sass. Sheila's going to be thrilled.
She's been waiting for backup. It's been her versus me for years and she's been winning but she's tired, Stormy.
She needs a tag team partner. You two are going to destroy me and I'm going to deserve every second of it. Oh yeah, she's going to love you."
Hope flickers across his face at "she's going to love you." It's quick and gone.
We work through the afternoon. The heat is relentless. I stripped my shirt off hours ago and Stormy rolled his sleeves up, which is apparently his version of the same thing. We drink warm water from the containers we stored upstairs and eat sandwiches standing up. Then we go right back to it.
He talks more. Not a lot. Not like me. But more than yesterday, more than the day before. He asks questions about the bar. Practical questions, task-oriented, the kind of questions a person asks when they're invested in the outcome. When they care about what happens to a place.
"The pool tables might be okay," I tell him, examining one that's been shoved against the wall. "The slate tops are heavy enough that the water couldn't flip them all the way over. If the felt is ruined, we can re-felt them. The frames are solid oak. They'll need to dry out but they'll survive."
"Your dad picked these out?" Stormy asks, running his hand along the rail of the overturned table.
I look at him. He's never asked me about my dad before. He's never asked me about anything personal.
"Yeah. He drove to Pensacola to pick them up from a bar that was closing down.
Got both of them for five hundred bucks and drove them back in a borrowed flatbed.
They barely fit. He had to take the doors off to get them inside, and Sheila said if he scratched her new paint job on the doorframe, she'd kill him.
He scratched the doorframe. She didn't kill him. But she made him repaint it twice."
Stormy's hand is still on the table rail. He's touching the wood the way I touched the bar top this morning.
"We can fix them," he says.
We.
I turn away and pick up a crowbar and go back to pulling floorboards because I don't want him to see how happy that makes me.
By late afternoon, we've cleared most of the standing water, pulled up the worst of the buckled flooring, and opened every door and window that isn't boarded up.
The cross breeze is helping, pulling the damp air out and replacing it with hot, salty air that's barely better but at least it's moving.
The radio has been playing for hours and we've worked through classic rock, country, and are now deep into an oldies station playing Motown.
I'm stacking ruined floorboards in the parking lot when I look back into the bar through the open doors.
Stormy is sweeping again. Same broom, same steady strokes, same careful, methodical rhythm.
But he's different. His shoulders are lower.
His grip on the broom is loose, not white-knuckled.
His head bobs, just barely, to the Temptations song coming through the radio.
He looks up and catches me watching. I expect him to freeze, to go blank, to pull the armor back on. He doesn't. He holds my gaze for a second, and the corner of his mouth lifts, and then he goes back to sweeping.
I stand in the parking lot in the sun, surrounded by wreckage, and I think about the weeks and months of work ahead of us to rebuild.
And I think about the kid inside my bar, sweeping the floors, bobbing his head to Motown, looking like he belongs there.
We can rebuild. It might take a while, but we'll do it.
Because the most important thing in this building made it through the storm.