These were the pre-Katrina rains, the boiling-black-cauldron colors of swollen clouds above us, pregnant with their wash. We spent those afternoons leaning forward over the steering wheel, the wipers dancing back and forth frantically while the waves of rippled rainwater seemed made to cripple us. In silence we drove on towards the Texas border underneath that thunderous canopy, and it was shortly thereafter that a thousand people died in one of the worst storms in our history.
I’d been down there for two weeks, down in the south, driving with Baiden from Baton Rouge to El Paso and back, chain smoking in a fever dream of daisy fields and die-hard drunks who couldn’t get enough of a northern boy’s accent. Every night we danced along the branches of inner city Texas streets, bar-hunting for blondes before backtracking towards the truck with half-empty bottles we’d borrowed while the bartenders back was turned.
We stopped in Conroe just as the wet blanket of a storm was on the verge of sliding in over the sun-blue dome, our shadows soon to be lost underneath the cold cobalt grey above, the sound of smoldering powerlines buzzing in an omniscient way that always makes you wonder whether it’s the electricity or the bugs.
In San Antonio we stumbled around the river walk with our hands reaching out to grasp the warm stone of the old buildings, fully aware and dirty and drunk under the swinging scythe of the midsummer sun that bore down like an alien spotlight.
I bought a pair of nikes from a shirtless east-european who called himself the Genius Love Poet, the full chest-tattoo leaking over his shoulders and traveling down both of his arms like a swirling colorful stream. The shoes were ruined in the rains that followed hours later, rains that were ravenous for the surface of the earth, starving for ground, seeking only to soak.
In Dallas I woke up laying down on a loveseat that belonged to some southern belle who called herself Sahara, my feet dangling over the edge like crooked fishing wire, the drone of the living room AC like a ships motor cutting through the silence. Outside the rain had started to come down in rivers, rivulets slashing violently down the sliding glass door of Sahara’s living room, collecting there at the cement patio, gleaming in the low light.
“Well well,” she said from another room. I opened my eyes to shards of glass, the throbbing in my head a catastrophic strobe light. “Thought you’d never wake up, boy.”
Her voice floated slow like mist over rolling hills.
“I don’t remember anything.”
“Aw, honey,” she said, walking into the room wearing short shorts and a tank top revealing a flat tanned stomach and a belly button ring. “That’s alright.” Kneeling beside me, taking my hand, she said, “We had a good time nonetheless. But ya’ll need to get back home. There’s a big storm coming.”
Coming through Austin the sky looked like a broken mirror, like cracks in a cellophane ceiling. We did shots of Captains with a rodeo clown named Jeremy, the three of us regularly erupting into the Pearl Jam classic with the same name until the bartender told us to get the hell out.
“You all gotta see ‘a bats,” he said as we carried him out. “’A bats, man, I’ll tell’a what, ‘a bats.”
“The bats?”
“Under’a bridge. ‘Ats where ‘a bats live. ‘Ats right, ‘ats right.”
We checked him into a cheap motel and put a puke bucket by the side of his bed, and by the time he’d woken up we’d long dissolved into the shadows of the night, our silhouettes long under the screaming street lamps of the city.
On the last night we drove through a torrential rain towards the airport, everything hazy and blurred by the curtains of rain that perpetually had followed us. Across the highway, and across the river, there stood an enormous factory, its tubes and slides and towers lit up by ten thousand lights, and in the distance there it seemed to be some ancient façade or some futuristic castle.
“Is it on fire,” I said, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.
“Eh?”
“Is that thing, across the river, is it on fire?”
“No,” he said, struggling to see through the rain. “It’s not. Go back to sleep.”
“Alright,” I said, begrudgingly.
“We’ll be at the airport in an hour.”
A week later he was dead, and the factory across the river on fire was gone, knocked down in the storm.
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