Chapter 9 #2
They’d witnessed Beaudine’s arrival, and every rescue he’d made all the way down Main. They watched the man who’d kept Blackjack running and had made everyone’s lives easy but his own. The man they’d shamed. The man they’d shunned.
When his truck and trailer finally drove out of view of the camera with the load full of people, they still waited—needing proof with their own eyes that he somehow had managed to get them home.
An hour and ten minutes after he disappeared, Stuart Watts let out a whoop. “There he comes! There he comes!”
They saw the truck and the slight sway of the flatbed he pulled behind him before they realized he was driving with his head out of the window.
The room went silent. The closer he came, the clearer they could see him.
When he was so close that they saw the ice on his eyelashes, the sleet that had frozen in his hair and on his clothes, and witnessed his face frozen into a ghostly white, it took a moment to realize his skin was so cold that frost had settled, and the reason he drove with his head hanging out the window was because his windshield was a frozen slab of cloudy white ice.
“Sweet Mother of God,” Tex muttered, then got up and walked out of the room.
Stuart Watts was crying.
Dub had his face in his hands, and Lowell Arnold was too dumbstruck by the heroism they’d just witnessed to speak.
“What if he doesn’t make it home?” Stuart whispered.
Dub’s head came up. “Don’t say that! Don’t effing say that.
If God took him through that, He’ll also get him home!
We shamed him. We blamed him. I watched him come undone on the floor of his kitchen and didn’t offer to help him up.
I pulled him out from under that cot in his cell and dumped him back at the ER alone.
I will never get past what we did to him,” he shouted, and walked out of the room.
In that moment, Lowell Arnold felt their allegiance to him fading. All the wrong decisions had piled up to an unforgivable level.
By midnight, the wind and rain had passed, leaving the world frozen in a deadly, haunting beauty.
On November second, a Chinook blew through the valley, moving the warmer air across the mountain and melting ice from trees and power lines, thawing everything the sun touched. Power was restored.
The hospital was overrun with parents bringing children in for X-rays and stitches and getting casts on hairline fractures. One little boy with a broken arm had to be put to sleep to get it reset because it had gone too long without treatment.
Floy had spent the past two days like a hibernating bear, eating little, sleeping more. His face had blistered from the freeze, giving him the appearance of having been too close to a flame, but it didn’t hurt anymore, and it would heal.
Then Judge Benton called.
“Floy, I’ve been asked on behalf of the town to inquire as to your health and ask if there is anything they can do to help if you are in need.”
“Why?” Floy asked.
“Because you’re a hero in their eyes, and in their words, they are too ashamed of how they treated you before to say it to your face.”
Floy sat because the admission startled him in a way he had not expected.
“Well, I guess that’s good to know. You can assure them that I have freezer burn worse than a two-year-old package of hamburger meat, but nothing crucial was broken, so I should heal just fine.
I’m glad the kids and parents are okay. That was all that mattered then, and it’s all that matters now. ”
Judge sighed. “They still need to face you. They want to. I am but the go-between. Will you come to Edison’s Eats at noon this coming Sunday?”
Floy thought about it. “If the weather holds, then . . . yes, I guess.”
“Excellent,” Judge said. “At noon. In the back banquet room.”
Floy disconnected. He didn’t know his daring rescue had been captured on video or that it had gone viral within an hour of the first social media posting because the power lines had been down, and he’d been too miserable to do anything but feed himself and sleep.
He didn’t know about the witnesses in Blackjack who’d been stranded inside buildings watching it happen.
Or that every business with exterior security cameras had caught him rescuing kids on video.
Every home security camera in Blackjack that had been aimed at their neighbors’ houses had captured him carrying children across the yards and helping adults stay upright all the way to safety—that is, until the power went out and the images ended.
He didn’t know that the national weather bureau would wind up calling it a storm of the century, naming it the day Halloween tricked a little town on a Kentucky mountain by turning it into solid ice.
The same morning Judge called, power had been restored up on the mountain, and Beau and Razor had watched the videos with a combination of horror and an admiration they could not name.
Then Beau sent Floy one text.
Are you okay?
Floy responded with a thumbs-up emoji.
Razor sent a text of his own.
Your rescue is all over social media. Watch the video. Proud of you, dude.
Floy frowned. All over social media? What did that mean?
His fingers were still too sore and cracked for much texting, so he opened his laptop and began searching social media until he found it.
Within seconds, his gut knotted, and he was back in that state of anxiety and fear that he wouldn’t be fast enough to save them.
But it was that last video from the police traffic cam of him leaving town that truly shocked him.
That was me?
He looked like a man who had already died and left his ghost to be the one who got him home.
That same night he had bad dreams and then woke up grateful it was over.
Except it wasn’t.
The next day, a news crew from a Louisville TV station pulled up into his driveway, flanked by two police cars from town.
He saw them turning in and realized he was meeting company with a four-day growth of black whiskers and in a faded gray-green sweatshirt with the image of a green frog wearing a straw hat and playing a guitar.
He was wearing an even older pair of jeans that looked like they’d melted around his long legs and tight butt cheeks just for the pleasure of it.
He went to the door in his sock feet with no apologies and a glare that bypassed the van and went straight to the cops.
“What?” he asked.
Tex ducked his head. “I sure hate to bother you, Floy, but these people came to the PD wanting to interview you about the rescue, and the chief told us to show them where you lived.”
Floy inhaled, then looked at the guy with the microphone and the one with the camera. “Where are y’all from? Clearly somewhere they never heard of phones.”
Walt Devoe, the journalist blinked, called out by their extreme lack of manners as nicely as he’d ever experienced, and quickly waved the cameraman away.
“My sincere apologies, Mr. Beaudine. You are so right. I made a knee-jerk reaction to get the scoop on the most heroic story to ever hit our newsroom. I’m Walt Devoe, Louisville Evening News.
We would really appreciate an interview.
It can be as brief as you want, but you deserve to be recognized, and it would be my absolute honor to do it. ”
Floy snorted a little. “And . . . you talk pretty, so what the hell. Come on in. Wipe your feet at the door.” Then his glance moved to the two officers. “Tell Lowell the ambush was a bust, and he’s still an ass.”
Tex grinned. “Will do.”
Floy blinked. The grin was unexpected. If there was trouble brewing in Whoville, that would be a plus. Then he turned around and followed the crew into the house and closed the door.
“There’s more light in the kitchen,” he said, and led the way, then went to change out of his frog shirt to a deep black sweatshirt that matched his hair and whiskers.
He finger-combed his hair and came back to the kitchen to watch them setting up, thinking this might be the best free advertising Floy’s Fix-It would ever get.
After the intro, the first thing Walt asked as they began recording was, “Have you seen the video?”
A muscle ticked at the corner of Floy’s jaw. “Yes, I have.”
“What did you think when you saw it?” Walt asked.
“That I was dead and just didn’t know it.”
“That’s quite a shocking statement. Would you care to elaborate on it?” Walt said.
“Sometimes, when you are in the middle of chaos, or coming so close to dying that you aren’t even afraid of it anymore, you have no idea of what is physically happening to you.
Then you look in a mirror or see a photo of yourself after the fact and don’t recognize your own face.
That was what I thought in that moment.”
“That’s most enlightening, Mr. Beaudine. We see that you live a distance from town. How did you even know what was happening?” Walt asked.
Floy shrugged. “I guess it began after the rain turned to sleet and began freezing on the ground as soon as it hit. I could hear a scream I thought was the wind until I stepped out on the front porch and realized it was people. Children. Screaming so loud that I could hear them above the storm. Scariest sound I’d ever heard.
I called a friend in town. He told me what was happening. I went to help.”
“Why did you think you could succeed where others were failing?”
Floy shrugged. “I run a business called Floy’s Fix-It.
I’ve been in business here for over twenty years.
I have two full-time employees. I’m a bonded and licensed electrician, plumber, carpenter, contractor, and I’m a fair mechanic.
I just know how to fix things, and I stay prepared for emergencies. ”
“Seriously? Why so many specialties?” Walt asked.