Excerpt

From "Fear of Rain"

Mr. Flood bangs his fork on the side of his plate, and thunder rumbles outside the restaurant. He winks one watery, sky blue eye at me and peels back his smooth, white lips in a dirty joke smile.

"Won't be long now," he says, his voice a gravelly tenor. "Not long till my retirement party."

If you didn't know better, to look at him, you'd think he was just another little old man hobbling around downtown Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Just another Central Park bench sitting, Social Security check cashing, prescription picking up, stumbling on the curbs, taking too long to cross Main Street old timer. You'd never know the kind of power that boils inside him.

Maybe you'd see him bang his fork on the plate a second time, and you'd hear the thunder, louder than before, but you wouldn't connect the two. You wouldn't realize that he'd made it happen. You wouldn't know what he was about to do next.

But I know. I know all about what's coming.

It's the Big Night. He's wearing his lucky suit for the occasion—a powder blue leisure suit from the '70's with white piping around the collar, lapels, and pockets.

He's the closest thing I have to a father, and I'm part of this, too. Tonight's his retirement party and my graduation party wrapped up in one...though the people of Johnstown will call it something different altogether.

The ones who survive, anyway.

"I just hope I'm ready," I say, picking at the gray, gravy-drowned meat loaf on my own cracked plate. Mr. Flood has wolfed down his turkey dinner like a teenage football star and chased it with a double slice of graham cracker pie, but I'm way too nervous tonight to be hungry.

"You're more ready than I was in '36, Dee," says Mr. Flood, wagging his chicken hawk head on a neck so wishbone scrawny it looks like it ought to snap in two any second now. "I wasn't nearly as good a student as you, and look how that turned out! Seventeen feet of water!"

I shrug and sigh and twist my curly, black hair around my index finger. I know my whole eighteen years of life have been leading up to this night, but now that it's here, I kind of wish that it wasn't. "Stressed out" doesn't begin to cover the way I feel.

You'd be stressed out, too, if you were about to help destroy a city.

"Now drink up," says Mr. Flood, refilling my water glass from the pitcher that he had the waitress leave at the table. The ice chips tinkle as he pushes the sweating glass toward me. "It's almost time."

Him and his water drinking, I think, but then I do what I've done all my life, which is what he tells me. I already have to pee like crazy, but I still gulp down half the glass.

I can't even think about slipping off to the ladies' room. A full bladder is part of the magic, Mr. Flood always says. Filling yourself with water till you're ready to explode.

And then you do the same thing to the sky.

Mr. Flood refills my glass to the brim, and I roll my eyes, but I have another big drink. He just lifts the whole pitcher to his lips then, and it's maybe half full, and he chugs it.

Except for a little bit left in the bottom, which he swishes around a few times and then slowly pours out on the table.

The water trickles from the rim of the sideways turned pitcher and patters on the sticky, dull wood of the tabletop.

And at the same moment, the same exact moment, I hear it start to rain outside.

"One two, buckle my shoe," says Mr. Flood. "Three four, let it pour."

And that's how it starts. No one will ever know except me and Mr. Flood, but that's exactly how the whole thing starts.

The fourth Johnstown Flood.

"Check, please," he says to the ragged waitress.

#

Outside, I pop an umbrella, because it's really coming down, but Mr. Flood takes it away from me.

"Now who ever heard of a Flood using an umbrella?" he says disgustedly, and then he holds out my umbrella to a passing woman. "Here you go, Miss."

The woman is tall, with dark hair and a navy blue dress. She's holding her purse above her head in a lame attempt to block the rain. "I couldn't, thank you," she says with a smile, shaking her head. "You two need it as much as I do."

"We'll be fine," says Mr. Flood. "We don't have far to go. Please, take it."

The woman looks at me for approval, but I just shrug. She looks back at Mr. Flood and shakes her head again. "I really couldn't," she says.

But she doesn't walk away.

Mr. Flood steps toward her and presses the umbrella handle into her grip. "Go ahead," he says. "You're going to need it."

I can tell she feels guilty, but she doesn't try to hand the umbrella back to him. "It's really coming down, isn't it?" she says. "And they weren't even calling for rain tonight."

Mr. Flood nods and backs out from under the umbrella. "They'll really be kicking themselves after tonight," he says.

"Oh, they're always wrong anyway," says the woman. "What's the difference tonight?"

"A couple hundred million gallons," says Mr. Flood, and then he turns and hustles me off across the street.

"An umbrella. What were you thinking?" he says to me angrily. "Get your head in the game, girl. You're supposed to be welcoming the rain, not hiding from it."