Free The Marauders by Tom Cooper

the water.

    In retrospect, maybe the story he’d written for Mr. Banksey was more a memoir. Except that wasn’t exactly right either, because wasn’t a memoir supposed to be pure truth? In the story, or whatever Wes had written for Mr. Banksey, truth and fact bled together, a muddle of confabulation.
    Everything Wes wrote in the story about the hours before the storm was picture-perfect true. Wes’s father boarding up the downstairs windows. The vans and trucks loaded with suitcases and children lurchingpast their house. The way the tree shadows in the yard grew tensely still and the way the air outside tightened like a held breath.
    And Wes’s mother, begging his father to leave.
    The storm would peter out and turn away at the last minute, Wes’s father insisted. Just like the rest of them.
    “You’ve gone
braque
,” Wes’s mother said.
    Anger brought out my mother’s French
, Wes had written in his story.
    In the margin, Mr. Banksey wrote,
Good stuff
.
    When the storm hit, it didn’t sound like a freight train, the way Wes often heard it described in other hurricane stories. It sounded like nothing he’d ever heard.
A kraken’s roar
, was what he wrote. A cannonade of debris hammered the house while a deluge slashed down from the sky, rain filling the street and yard, rising so deep it topped the rosebushes and hydrangeas. Soon the water lapped up the porch steps and seeped under the front door. At first it was only an inch or two, but within an hour a foot of muddy swirling water filled the the bottom story and Wes and his parents were sloshing through the house. Somewhere a levee had broken and Jeanette was swallowed in a rolling storm surge.
    When the power blacked out Wes and his parents went upstairs with flashlights and gallon water jugs. They sat on pillows on the floor and played Scrabble by lantern light while Max, head on forepaws, cowered under the bed.
    They played Scrabble: Wes would later marvel at this.
    At one point during the game Wes’s mother used the word STUBBORN .
    Wes’s father told her that she had quite a wit. He was trying to act calm, but Wes could tell from the hard set of his shoulders that he was scared.
    A few minutes after, his mother spelled DUMB with her tiles.
    “Okay,” his father said. “I get it.”
    Sometime after midnight the wind wrenched a piece of plywood from one of the downstairs windows and the glass shattered, wave after wave of water surging into the house.
    That was when they stopped playing Scrabble and started praying.
    Dawn found them on the roof of the house. All Baratarians kept axes in their attics in fear of storms like this, and Wes’s father busted a hole through the ceiling so they could climb through. Max paced back and forth along the roof peak, whimpering and wagging his tail and staring down into the tumultuous water. The hurricane had turned the streets into swift canals full of spinning debris. Scraps of lumber and rags of plastic, trash can lids and window shutters. Cars and trucks were completely underwater, but the sky was oddly tranquil, gray like an old nickel.
    Before the storm, Wes’s father had roped his pirogue to the frontyard oak tree. The only smart thing he did. The little boat jounced in the water, but it was intact and afloat. Wes’s father got a hundred feet of nylon anchoring rope out of the attic and tossed the line like a lasso, trying to snag the pirogue. He missed the first time and the second. On Wes’s father’s third toss Max scrambled down the roof, tail wagging, and launched into the water.
    Instantly the wild current sucked him away and under.
    Wes would never know if what happened next was an accident, or if his mother meant to go after the dog. She went skidding down the slope of the roof on her behind and caught herself on the gutter with her tennis shoes. The pipe gave, twisting away from the house with a great metallic shriek, and then she went tumbling into the water.
    “Oh shit,” she said while