Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [56]
Somehow, we needed to channel the water so that it cascaded around the house, where it could gush freely down the hillside toward the harbor below us. I no longer cared about flooding. I was worried about the entire house sliding down the hillside once the soil became too soggy to support a foundation. As the afternoon wore on and the rain pelted ever harder with the rising wind I shoveled trenches and troughs—in front of the house, on the slope of the driveway, on the dirt road itself—trying with some desperation to convince the water that it really wanted to go somewhere else. My hands, accustomed as they were to the soft tap-tap of the keyboard, were soon bloodied and calloused. The rain was overwhelming, a pounding blizzard of water. Eventually, there was nothing more we could do. I had dug as much as I could. Sylvia had been busy keeping the new trenches free of dirt and debris. Thankfully, most of the water was now flowing alongside the house. What had begun as a steady stream was now a frightful torrent of white water. We stood for a long moment, considering the trenches we had cleared. In a few hours, we had managed to destroy the landscaping around the house.
“The landlord won’t be happy,” Sylvia said.
“We’ll just tell him we had to sacrifice the land to save the land.”
Inside the house, we listened to the radio. “Cyclone Paula,” said a soothing voice, was “moving to the southeast with sustained winds of 180 kilometers an hour. It can be mapped on the cyclone tracking map in quadrant G-4.” The telephone book was handily equipped with a cyclone tracking map, and as the evening progressed we plotted the storm’s movements with each weather update. The eye was expected to pass over Efate shortly after 1 A.M. The wind had risen to a strong gale, and we stood on our covered patio watching the palm fronds fold in like blown umbrellas.
As a gloomy, howling darkness descended we attached the last shutter over the glass sliding door leading to the patio. We had now officially battened down the hatches. The wind fetched up alarmingly, and looking through the slats in the shutters, I could see branches and twigs flying through the night. By 11 P.M., the power had been lost. In the darkness, we listened to the shortwave radio. The eye of the storm was now on a direct course for the north part of the island. The house had begun to shudder, buffeted by ferocious winds. I was beginning to worry about the roof. The wind had passed through the howling stage, lingered briefly in screaming mode, and was now hurtling like a rumbling locomotive.
“Isn’t this amazing?” I said.
I was somewhere in that sweet spot between wonder and fear. We opened the glass sliding door and peered through the slats.
“All three banana trees are gone,” Sylvia noted.
“Papaya trees too,” I said. “And look, there goes the gardening shed.”
At that instant, before we could stop him, Pip leapt through the slats and vanished into the night.
“Tell me the cat didn’t just do that,” I said.
“We have to get him!” Sylvia pleaded. “He’s just a kitten.”
I looked at her. “PIP!” she yelled frantically. “PIP!”
Where had this come from? I wondered as the rain seeped in. At best, Sylvia had always been ambivalent about the cat. She didn’t despise it, but as far as I could tell, she had no great affection for it either.
“You have to go find him,” she pleaded.
“But there’s a cyclone,” I observed. “In cyclones, people are supposed to stay inside a shelter. They’re not meant to wander about in hundred-mile-per-hour winds looking for lost kittens.”
“He’s just a kitten,” she protested. “Go get him.”
“But…it’s windy.”
“PIP!” Sylvia yelled through the slats. “PIP!”
Stupid cat, I thought as I grabbed a flashlight. I left the house through the front door, the only exit left without a shutter, and crept around the side of the house, keeping the walls between me and the full brunt of the storm. Still, the wind and rain were such that I was soon drenched. The trees were bent and anarchic. I reached the small expanse of our backyard, then stuck my hand out and felt the