Success, Mississippi

“We’re gonna have to go to Grandma’s. The old place is better suited for this storm. When the water rises, our place won’t work. We’ll get flooded out. We gotta go up with her on higher ground.” Robin said.

“And what about the store?” Jack, her son, answered back.

“What about the store?”

“If we flood, it’ll flood. We live next to the store.”

“I know that. But I’m more worried about our lives — trying to survive. The store… well, it ain’t alive.”

“It’s where we get all our money from. I mean, without that store we’ll starve.”

“Now’s not the time, Jack. Start packing up some clothes. I’ll go load everything I can from the kitchen into a box.” she said.

“Mom, you know it’s been a tough year, you ain’t insured that store — ‘f’any thing should happ…”

“Not now, Jack!” Robin barked back at her 14 year old son. She was a single mom and had him young, at 17. So now they talked to each other more like siblings would than a mom and son. They loved each other very much but they were more partners in each other’s affairs than maybe a mom and son would be. Rather than give and take orders, they fussed with each other about how things should be done. Normally, she liked the back and forth but with the storm bearing down on the town, she was panicked. She didn’t feel that right now there was time for discussion.

The store Jack was talking about was their small gift shop in Biloxi, Mississippi. As far as business, this year was especially hard, even though about once a month or so there would be a rush for some type of event: Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day (but not really Father’s Day), and the end of the school year. And then the usual stuff would get them some more regular business: birthdays, anniversaries, funerals — the things that you wouldn’t expect but that were generally celebrated around town — the trappings of life.

Even with flowers, cards and candy to sell, the summer had been especially tough. A string of storms kept the weather unusually inclement. Coupled with an economic recession, tourists hadn’t been quite so plentiful nor had they been quite so generous. Now here they were, winding down the summer season with any of the tourists that had come having all gone home for the most part. The summer had indeed been wet. The tropical storm season was even worse than usual. The tropical storm season was actually nine months of the year. Now, at the turn of the 21st century, hurricanes would start in March and go until December. The storm season frequently produced well over 30 storms in a year. Per custom, after the 21st storm the naming convention for storms went alphabetically with the names of Greek gods.

Now, Hurricane Rhode, the 36th storm of the year, was coming up through the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and was heading straight for the Mississippi and Alabama border, right on to Highway 10. The gales that were coming were certainly scary but that wasn’t what worried Robin most. Rhode’s storm surge was supposed to be huge. Even with boarded up windows, the water was going to run up and through the beaches and right into downtown Biloxi. From what Robin read and saw there was no way to keep everything safe from the rising water. And the water brought disease and rot — things that you couldn’t manage comfortably even after 100mph winds had flown by.

She was still hollering at Jack, telling him they needed to get up in the hills to her mom’s house, which was inland and elevated in Success, a hamlet due north. Her mom was older and retired. Widowed, she lived humbly off her dead husband Jack’s pension, the same man after whom her grandson had been named. She didn’t have much to offer in Success but she had the house some four hundred or more feet above sea level and inland enough such that Robin and Jack could stay safely for a few days while the water rose and the storm passed. “Just go get some clothes and meet me in the car,” she reiterated to Jack in a tense tone of voice. “Everybody’s leaving. It’s gonna be a shit show out there. I know it usually takes less than a half hour to get there but I don’t wanna mess around. Not like this. Not with that wind picking up. And we’re gonna need to put the storm boards in place over the windows too.”

Jack knew when to just do what she said. He was turning in to a teenager, full of his own ideas and rife with attitude but he also knew when not to push her. And this time he just did what he was told. He went to his room and filled up a bag with socks, underwear, shirts and shorts. Then he went back to the kitchen where Robin was finishing up filling a second box full of canned food. Next to it were all the perishables in the refrigerator: vegetables, chicken, a frozen roast from the freezer and a big bowl full of leftover spaghetti they’d made just the night before expecting it to last a few days, even with Jack’s growing appetite. And that was it. They each threw a gym bag worth of clothes in the back of her 2076 Jeep Solar4x4, an aging model but it did the trick on the highways and trips camping in the Mississippi bayou lowlands. They set the boxes of food in the back seat and then both buckled up and headed to Grandmas.

“Grandma? Grandma!?” Jack said as he came into the old house where he and Robin had both grown up. Diane was a small woman, just over five feet tall. Her slumping posture made her even shorter than that. She had curly grey hair that she no longer colored now that she was in her early sixties. She had always been an anxious woman and had developed an arrhythmia over the last few years. She had a small limp in her gait from when she’d broken her ankle camping with her husband, Jack, and Robin many years ago when Robin was just a little girl. With these ailments and increasing age Robin worried about her mother living alone in such a rural area. So, the door was always unlocked. Robin had convinced her to leave the door open at all times in the event someone had to come in for an emergency and check on her.

“I’m back here, Jacky,” her voice wound its way through the house. Jack knew the location of the voice. It was out on the back patio past his mother’s old room. He had also lived there until he was four, before he and his mother moved down to Biloxi. He couldn’t remember that far back but he had fond memories of the house nonetheless. He passed his grandmother’s bedroom down the long corridor of the house until he got to the back patio. “I just been waitin’ for you to get here,” she continued, “so we can put down all the boards for tonight. They say the storm’s gonna hit us first thing in the morning.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll just go get started now.”

“Not until I get my hug. Get over here. First thing’s first. Then you and your mother can go hooking down the window shutters.” Jack gave his grandmother the hug she sought. She held him for a second looking him up and down, “You are the spitting image of your grandfather! So precious!” Then Jack went outside to the patio to start putting down the hurricane boards and fastening them with their latches.

After finishing the patio windows he moved around to the living room windows that lined the eastern side of the house looking out over the bluff on which the house sat. They came down easy, because they had to put them down at least three to four times a season, at least. This was not a new chore for Jack and so he was able to quickly finish that side of the house. The work had recently become even easier for Jack since he was growing. Since his recent growth spurt he didn’t even need the step ladder anymore to reach the flaps. He just edged up on his tiptoes and unhooked the boards before lowering them into place. On the other side of the house he ran into Robin who was finishing the bedroom windows on the west side. The whole process took less than forty-five minutes. As they were finishing some early rain began to drizzle. The winds had been picking up for some time but this was the first of the precipitation that they’d been able to feel.

That night, Robin took the leftover spaghetti and reheated it. She also made a salad with the lettuce and tomato she had brought from her house. They all sat at the dinner table where Robin drank from one of the bottles of wine she had also packed into her box.

“You think the store’s gonna be alright, Honey?” Diane asked her daughter. Diane had always worried about her daughter opening up that shop. She said it was risky to own your own business. “If the customers didn’t cheat you, the government would,” she’d always say. But once Robin bought the store she stopped short of ever saying, “I told you so.” Robin had appreciated that. Robin could feel that her mom knew she struggled with the shop. But she also knew that her mother was also proud that Robin never quit on her commitment.

“I don’t know, Mom. The property management company came by to put everything down on the store and the house. I’m not really fixin’ to worry about it. This storm’s gonna be a rough one and we’re lucky just to be here, safe enough to ride it out.” Jack looked at her and the gaze was enough to say everything between them. Jack knew that the goods in the store weren’t insured. The last year had been so tough the stock had dwindled anyway so there wasn’t much to insure; certain items collected dust on the shelves and to save money, ensuring what was in the store was a corner Robin had decided to cut. Jack, being a curious young man, read up on it and had insisted to his mom that in the event anything had to be cut, she shouldn’t stop paying the insurance. She had not listened to him. Although both of them knew he might have been right. Still, now was not the time to review the issue yet again. Jack just looked at his mother and went about eating his spaghetti.

“What happens if the store don’t bounce back?” Diane asked her daughter again.

“I don’t know Momma. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. I’m running out of options, I guess. The store’s gonna flood tomorrow, I don’t doubt that for a second. People aren’t coming to the beach anymore, even before the seasons got shorter. The folks in town don’t have much money for the extras, flowers, chocolates and cards and stuff. I’m really not sure. And then all I can really think about right now is making sure Jacky and I are ok.”

“Oh baby, you could lose the store.”

“I could but I’m not sure what to do. People don’t have any money to shop at the store. I can’t get enough people to even come to town anymore.”

“So what are you gonna do?”

“Like I said Ma, I’m just gonna get through tonight.”

“What about you, Jacky?” Diane said, turning to her grandson.

“I don’t know, Grandma. It’s been so quiet. I got all my homework done working the register this spring. No one was in. And then yeah, the weather has been terrible. All the storms this year kept people away. Now that I’m older, Ma and I have talked about how we can improve things but I don’t know what to do either. Whatever Mom needs, I just try and help out.”

“You’re such a good boy, Jacky. Just like your grandpa. He was a good man. I just can’t get over how much you two are alike.”

Robin was tense, they could all sense it, because of how dire the situation seemed. The storm really emphasized how few options she had and how little help there was for her to make it as a business owner in this environment. She was clearly working her way through the whole bottle of wine quickly, which she managed to finish while her and Jack did the dishes after dinner. Diane sat in the living room knitting as Jack and Robin washed the dishes in the kitchen.

“Mom, you’re gonna lose the store.”

“I know, Jacky.”

“What are we going to do then?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure what there is to do at that point. It reminds me of the time Grandma broke her ankle.”

“You never told me this story, Mom.”

“There’s not too much to tell. It’s just, just that I don’t really know what happened and it just reminds me of this… of not knowing what’s going to happen.” Jack looked up at her as he put another plate in the cupboard and went back to the dishrack. “When I was seven your Grandpa Jack insisted we all go out camping. Grandma didn’t much want to go because she doesn’t really like being outdoors. She likes it inside a lot more. But we drove up to De Soto to camp for the night anyway. And I remember Dad had plenty to drink that night. And he was up with Mom by the fire. They had put me to bed but I was still scared of sleeping by myself, so I stayed up just staring at the top of that tent as the shadows from that fire danced off the ceiling. I was scared but watching the shadows move, well I remember that being mesmerizing to me. Dad was sawing at away at his harmonica and making up a new lyric everytime to some dumb old tune: Yankee Doodle, Oh Susana, Dixie — old classics that I recognized because he’d sing them to me sometimes when he put me to bed.” Jack was listening intently, slowly drying dishes and putting them away as his mother finished washing them in the sink.

“So all of a sudden I hear Grandma scream. She lets out some crazy shriek. And my eyes are wide open now. Then I hear her yell, ‘Copperhead!’ But Daddy says, ‘Calm down now, calm down. Don’t fucking wake up that little girl,’ with that old whiskey slur Dad used to get. And I hear him shush her as he gets up and walks over to where she pointed. Then he just starts laughing at her, ‘You dumb bitch,’ he says again with all that whiskey talking, ‘that ain’t no copperhead. That’s a not that big a snake, and that’s just a little scarlet. Ain’t nothing but a harmless scarlet snake.’ Well that don’t matter to Grandma none — she just says for him to get it the hell away from her and something about how that’s why she don’ like campin’. But your Grandpa, he could be real mean and heartless. Rather than helping her out and just getting rid of the snake he’s gotta do it his way. He’s gotta be a jerk about it like boys do sometimes. So I guess he picks up the snake because I hear Grandma tell him to put that damn thing down. Then I see him chasing her across the camp because of the shadows I see moving in the tent. He’s following her and she’s screaming and he says, ‘Don’t let that little snake fool ya… can’t let it getcha!’ and as he’s chasing her around I hear scream again cuz she falls.”

Jack just nods his head with that look of amazement when older kids hear family stories for the very first time, internalizing what he’s being told about the old family dynamic; things that captivate kids when they realize they’re being trusted with valuable information. “Then what happened?” he asked.

“Well, she’s yelling something about her ankle being broken. And that’s when I come to the door of the tent and ask if Mommy was alright. And once that whiskey gets flowing through Grandpa he could be a snake himself. And he hisses back at me, ‘Get your ass back in bed. Ain’t nothing you can do for your momma.’ So I just go back in to try and sleep but I can’t. I hear them arguing. She saying she needs a doctor. And he’s saying it ain’t broken, ‘It ain’t that bad. Quit fussin’. Finally, I hear him say that he won’t do it. He’s too drunk and he ain’t driving her anywhere. He tells her to get some ice from the ice chest and quit yammering. At sunrise they can pack up and go see a doctor. And there’s Mom, getting terrorized by Dad, then she gets hurt and she’s asking for help and he’s too damn drunk and stupid to actually get her help. I fell asleep once things quieted down a few minutes after mostly because I was so scared of getting yelled at by Daddy again.

“But the next morning, we get up, strike camp and drive Grandma to the emergency room. She’s still squealing and swears it’s broken. The whole way down Daddy is still telling her to calm down and quit hollerin’ and makin’ such a fuss. Sure enough, the doctor in Hattiesburg says it’s real bad. And after the x-rays comeback he’s talking about a potential surgery. And Daddy says they can’t afford the surgery for just a sprain. Then he gets to arguing with the doctor about it. Well, the point of the story is, they don’t get the surgery. Grandma’s ankle never heals quite right and that’s just the way things are some times. Sometimes, you find out things ain’t fair or right and… well, you just gotta deal with the pain. And that’s what Grandma did. Grandpa always felt bad but he never said anything about it. And Grandma’s always been a little embarrassed about her limp. But what are you gonna do? Sometimes you just get some bad news and some bad luck and all you can do is just live with it… and well, that’s what we’re doing right now Jack. We’re here, we’re alive, and we’re gonna live with it.”

They could hear the rain slowly getting more violent outside the windows. Although dampened by the slats they had put down earlier, the storm was certainly increasing. They finished off the last couple dishes and drained the sink. Jack was still a little stunned by the family history lesson and he quickly and quietly took his phone and went into the living room to sit with his grandmother, giving her a sympathetic hug when he saw her in there. She patted him on the elbow, “I love you, Jacky. You’re a good boy.”

Robin went in and just looked at the two of them exhausted, “I’m going to go to bed. I think I had too much to drink and I want to be awake in the morning when things are at their worst.”

“Night, Mom,” Jack said

“Sleep tight, Sweetie. The beds are all made.” Robin kissed her mother on the forehead after she’d said that. She kissed Jack on the cheek and then she went in and went to try and sleep it all off: the anxiety, the intoxication, the frustration, the helplessness, the hopelessness.

To Robin’s surprise, she had no trouble falling into a deep sleep that night, wrestling with her anxious dreams. The rain pounded harder and harder outside, ceaselessly, throughout the whole night. What started off as a drunken sleep morphed into a very, very real dream which started out with her talking to her mom, Diane. Diane sat on the edge of her bed in her old room that she’d grown up in there on that Mississippi hillside.

“Mom, I never thought it would be like this.”

“Be like what dear?” Her mother moved closer to her on the bed eventually sitting next to Robin’s head as it rested on the pillow.

“This is all so hard. I have no support. I have no business, no savings, no help. Jack’s never had a father. I’ve never had any extra money. I’ve been on my own. Dad died with barely the pension.”

“Don’t speak ill of your father dear. He was a kind man.”

“No, no, Mom. It’s just that I feel like without getting to go to college. Having the baby so young… you know, without any real help to get ahead, I’ve just been left to struggle.” The dream started to take hold of her as her mother slowly crawled into bed with her. As her mother crawled into bed she could see the face of her mother change. Slowly her mother’s face became her father’s. As this happened, Robin asked, “Where’s Jack, Mom? Is he asleep?”

“He’s in the other room, Honey.” But this was no longer her mother’s voice. This was certainly the voice of her father, Jack. As she looked over, two red beady eyes looked at her and Robin gulped hard. “Are you saying I didn’t care for you?” the voice asked.

“Dad? Where did Mom go?”

“Your mother can’t help you now, Sweetie. This is just the way it is.” Beneath the covers she felt her father’s body press up against her. She could feel his erection pushing up against her hip. Her father began to move his hands all over her face, and he pushed his body up on top of hers. “Do you remember me, Darling. All those years ago?”

“Daddy, what are you doing to me? Let me go… let me go!” She felt the fingers on his other hand reach down into her crotch. They extended like roots into soil as they tried to make their way into her.

“Your dearest, Jacky? You must remember me.” Robin looked up at the ceiling of her room and her dream as it broke open into a sky of torment, the rain coming down through the roof and the sky howling mad with wind and precipitation. She struggled to move any inch of him but she felt paralyzed as this patriarchal phantasm of a body contorted and spread all over her, holding her down and fastening her to the bed. “It was me baby,” the voice slithered. His tongue emerged, forked like a snake and slithered loosely up, down and around her face, moistening her eyes, nose and ears. “I was the one who gave you, Jacky. Remember? That one night, so many years ago, in this very room. I came in and took from you what I would let no one else have.” And even in the dream Robin came to realize she was reliving her own father raping her. The trauma of the moment seemed to be unleashing the horrors trapped from some 15 years ago. The snake-like monster that had her paralyzed in her old bed was bringing back the feelings of powerlessness and fear from when her father had raped her. “Jacky is my boy… Jack, Jr… is… mine… all this time, mine,” the serpentine monster continued. “And you were mine. You are mine, forever to control. There was no freedom I could afford you. This baby was your trap, holding you tight to my house here, this child was the key to surrender your freedoms and your opportunities.”

Suddenly she felt this monster’s penis move towards her vagina. She screamed as loud as she could. She looked to the night sky and grabbed a thunderbolt from the heavens and plunged it deep into this beast of her father. Electricity splattered everywhere as bolts of lightning bounced off the walls of the room. The rain poured down from the hurricane and into the room where everything dampened and soaked further with water. She leapt from the bed and stood over the murdered monster, “You cannot have my life. You cannot starve me. You cannot keep me bound! You do not control me!” she yelled.

At that moment a wolf stood in the doorway snarling. The hungry and emaciated creature sniffed the electrified room as the dreaming Robin, somehow still fast asleep, panted and grunted above the slain serpent creature.

“What will you do with me?” the wolf snarled at her. “What can you do to the hungry wolf who will eat you from the inside?”

“Eat me from the inside?” she asked the hungry wolf.

“I have come to eat your soul. The snake may have tried to take your freedom but I am here for your soul.”

Robin clutched the lightning bolt tighter now as the wolf entered the room, snout to the ground, the blood of her snakelike father tickling it’s nose, sniffing the remains of the long, snakelike phantasm. In it’s scratchy and ravenous voice the wolf said, “I will feed on your heart, on your belly, on your spleen and kidneys. I will devour you from the inside out. I will grow strong from the core of your being. I am the one who will take whatever hope you may have left.”

They circled about each other in the room as the rain came down onto the floor, each step of theirs creating a squishy and sponge-like percussive rhythm into the cacophony of the dream. They moved about each other waiting for the other to make a move. The winds howled above while the walls shook, whatever items unfastened flew about their heads in the tempestuous conditions. Suddenly the wolf leapt at her, jaws apart and seeking her neck. With the lightning bolt still in her hand she stabbed the wolf in the chest, it’s warm and soaking body landing on her. A blackened blood emerged from the wolf as it spent it’s final few breaths heaving on top of Robin, “I am your soul. I am of your flesh. I feed on what is mine… you have killed yourself.” There Robin lay looking up, smothered by the wolf when she again remembered her father raping her. She lay back, tears streaming from her face thinking of her son, Jack, now aware that her son was also her brother.

She sobbed under the open roof, a blackened and bloodied lightning bolt in her hand where she had slain the monsters that claimed her freedom, her independence, the monsters that had taken her young life from her and yet, tonight, were back for more… but now they were both dead. The hurricane above was so powerful as it moved overhead it almost felt like a stillness, the wind and rain moving so quickly it seemed almost static, indecipherable to her eye.

Robin awoke in the morning looking up at the ceiling of her room, a crack had opened to a leak where the rainwater was slowly dripping in. Regardless, she was comforted by the fact that the dream had passed. She felt around herself and realized she was wet but more than just from the leak overhead. Her waist was wet and her pajamas were wet. She looked down the length of the bed and felt an arm pressed on her chest and realized that Jacky must have come in during the night to crawl into bed with her as he often did. She began to lift his arm but it felt stiff and cold. She quickly sat upright and scanned the room. There she saw the horror from the night before. Jack was there, on the floor next to her resting up against the bed, blood everywhere clearly coming from a stab wound in his chest. He was certainly dead. She felt nothing and her mind was blank, although she was trembling in shock and fear.

She rose to her feet looking at her dead son. Then, on top of the bed she saw more blood everywhere, so much blood that the sheets were a dark, dark crimson hue. Her mother Diane was face down on the end of the bed, stiff, the rigor having set in as well. The room was blood laden, awash everywhere and staining the floor; splattered high up on the walls. On the floor Robin noticed her beauty pageant trophy from when she was fourteen years old. It was also crimson from top to bottom with what she assumed was the blood of both her mother and her son. She let out a horrified scream as she came to realize that what she had dreamt the night before was more hallucination than dream. She could see the flashes of the drunken conversation with her mother who had taken that evening to try and tell Robin the truth about what had happened so many years ago. Then, when Jack had come to see what happened, she had apparently killed him too. The rage and anger in her had overwhelmed her in the moment, the trauma of her youth and opportunity being stolen from her by her father.

She was certainly in shock. She stumbled to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She fixed her hair and pulled it back in a ponytail. She took her shirt and tucked it into her pajamas. The blood red color covered almost every inch of her. She washed her face and brushed her teeth with the extra toothbrush she kept there at her mom’s.

The eye of the hurricane was overhead as she peeked out the door. There was a stillness as the winds had stopped and the skies directly overhead had cleared. Who knew how long this would last before the storms returned. But Robin got into her old 4x4 and drove back down into town. She drove down back into Biloxi to see the damage to the house and business. There in the shopping area where her house and business were she could see the waters about knee high. The water level ran up about half way high to the door of her business. She knew there was nothing there she could save. She had no insurance to protect her. She had no stake in the property, almost as if she were just keeping the store front busy until someone else came by to try their hand at making a living selling cheap trinkets. In that one vision, that moment of existence, and her present circumstance she could see her whole life washed away in the hurricane.

The sheriffs’ cars were downtown inspecting all the damage. A couple 4x4s were driving up and down the street as well, water halfway up the tire rims, their wake pushing up against doors and windows of the local businesses. Robin parked her car in the back of the store by the house where she usually did. Now she slowly waded her way to the front door of her business in her bloody pajamas and tucked-in shirt. She stood looking in the window of her store front, dripping with rain water, blood rehydrating and combining with the flood water; everything in her life at that moment washing away. Then she took stock of her life there in the eye of that storm. A county sheriff who knew her came up and put his hand on her shoulder, “You ok, Robin? You’re all covered in blood.”

Robin shivered and pulled away. Then she stood toe-to-toe with the sheriff, the water up to their knees. Robin began to sob as she put her hands out for the cuffs, “I have nothing left. They’re dead. They’re up in Success at my mom’s. They’re dead. My mom, my brother and my father. They’re all up there somewhere… Take me with you. I got nowhere else I can go now.”