A minute later he helped four other people trying to push one of the hampers outside to be emptied. They managed to muscle it to the doorway and others held open the lobby doors so they could force it outside and Luna and two other people joined in and they pushed and pulled it into the sidewalk current, but when they tried to tip it over the floodwaters plucked it away from them and down the street it zoomed, wheels up and sinking until it stopped against a car left parked against the curb.
The manager sloshed in from his office with the news that the highway had been washed out both north and south of town, which meant that Tuxpan was now isolated and on its own. “And the airport too is closed, of course,” he said. He looked at Hood. “Maybe Senor Bravo, we may let some of the older people and children come to your room for safety?”
Hood thought of the money that was Erin McKenna’s life but he did what he had to do. “Yeah. Sure.”
Hood and Luna led them up the stairs and unlocked the door and let them in-six elderly, four children and their mothers. The children climbed onto the beds and started jumping up and down while the oldsters tried to shoo them off so they could sit. Luna talked calmly to the children in Spanish while he found a pad of hotel stationery, several postcards and two pens from the desk drawer, a handful of plastic wrist restraints from his travel bag and a dispenser of dental floss from his shave kit, all of which he delivered to the two older kids with orders to share and to play quietly. They looked at the items, then back to Luna hopefully. Then they nodded and quieted down and Hood could see that they were respectful of the thick-necked, muscular bull of a man that was Valente Luna. One of the girls was already wrapping the floss around one of the pens in a decorative flourish.
In the bathroom Hood made sure the suitcase was still locked and he told himself if he just stayed vigilant and alert the money would be fine and the hurricane would pass and he would be in Merida in two days, on time and ready to deal. He could feel the wind shivering the roof and took some comfort that the Floridita had been pictured on the walls of the breakfast cafe, having withstood the flood of 1999, and would surely survive this.
He went back into the crowded room and looked out one of the windows. A drowned cow floated down the middle of the street toward the river. Then a wooden chair painted yellow and a small Airstream travel trailer and a white minivan. There were clots of foliage racing past and a large king palm bobbing upright on the ballast of its rootball and a larger palm tree snapped off mid-trunk. A man rode a truck tire down the rapids, centered on the wheel and holding on to the treads for his life, the tire spinning wildly and flipping over and back and over and back again in utter torture of him. A blue sedan. A Brahma bull. A refrigerator with magnets and stickers somehow still attached to the door.
Hood felt the wind hurling itself against the building again and he thanked God it was built of concrete blocks. He hoped they had used good rebar and lots of it. He knew that so long as the roof held, the danger wasn’t the wind but the water undercutting the foundation enough for the heavy concrete to collapse.
He waited for one of the families to come out of the bathroom, then checked on the suitcase and it was all right so he came back and looked out again to where the wind blew the palm trees flat and blew the rain flat too. It looked like they were not being blown at all but rather sucked in by some great beast with its mouth tight to the horizon.
By evening both the children and oldsters were either asleep or wanting food so some of the mothers raided the downstairs kitchen and returned with loaves of bread and a pot of cold tortilla soup from the refrigerator, a bowl of cooked rice, a large tray of flan, bagsful of beers and sodas, flatware and plates.
Hood sat dutifully on the toilet beside the suitcase, dinner plate on his knees, listening to the rain lash the walls and thinking of Beth Petty back in Buenavista.
After an unusually violent flurry of rain and wind, he rose and went into the room and stared through a window to the street. The floodwater was almost to the tops of the ground-level doorways now, its ownership of Tuxpan nearly complete.
An hour before sunset the room shook violently, then pitched toward the flooded street. It felt to Hood as if one corner of the foundation had been pulled away. He lost his balance and fell to one knee. Several of the others fell fully and hard, and the children yelped out, terrified. There was a great grinding roar from below, then the windows burst. Hood knew they were going over and braced himself. A long moment passed. Then, as if saved by invisible brakes, the Floridita came to a shuddering stop and now hung precariously in midair over the street. Hood and everyone else in the crowded room instinctively flattened themselves to the floor but gravity pulled them forward toward the gaping glass-toothed window openings and the raging brown torrent below. He crawled back into the bathroom and found the suitcase slid nearly to the downside wall, outstretched on its handcuff chain. Luna crawled in too and saw the luggage and they gave each other wordless looks and Hood felt the building start to fall again.
He climbed onto the suitcase and reached his arms around it and held on tight. Again he heard the great shear of the foundation parting and again the room hurtled downward. But the Floridita fell faster this time, and it was still accelerating as it whooshed into the floodwaters below, then burst apart like a tower of dominos.
Hood landed hard in the water and held fast to the money. He felt the water pipe break free. He took a deep breath as the current took him down. He had ridden bodyboards in the Pacific and now he tried to use the same balance to control the suitcase but he was rolling over and over in the current and knew his breath would not last long. He grabbed a handle and dropped through the torrent to the street and felt his feet touch bottom then lift off, and when they hit bottom again he sprang skyward and at the apex of his feeble jump managed to suck in one blessed lungful of air.
Nearer the surface the nylon suitcase established buoyancy. Hood held on with one hand and with the other he pulled himself toward an orange tree gliding past and when he grabbed a branch it lifted and pulled him and the suitcase along, floating not sinking. He breathed hard and looked futilely for Luna. Instead he saw one of the children from the Floridita down current, bashing valiantly to stay afloat and crying, and Hood, kicking for all he was worth, was able to steer his barge so the boy could take the nearest handle. The suitcase with its plastic-wrapped million in cash and the orange tree were lifesavers as Hood and the boy careened down the middle of the flooded street, past the last buildings to where the town ended, then swiftly accelerating straight and deep into the raging Tuxpan River.
They raced. Far ahead through the gray evening and the pelting rain loomed the Navy frigates and the Pemex tankers and the barges and beyond them rose the towers of the oil platforms. From across the suitcase the boy looked at Hood in wordless terror. Hood could see a black dog paddling amidst the logs and brush and suddenly they were among hundreds of rose bushes in blooms of many colors, all in identical black plastic pots, dipping and bobbing wildly, the flowers bowed but stubbornly undestroyed.
Hood felt their slow clockwise pivot as they raced mid-river. He tried to kick the crude barge toward the nearest shore but he sensed no influence over their speed or bearing.
— Are we going to die?
— We will live.
— How?
— We’re not ready to die.
— Who will save us?
— Whatever you believe in will save you.
— When?
— We’ll reach the harbor soon. The water will be slower and we will swim to shore.
— I don’t like the dark.
— It’s not dark yet, but some of the lights in the harbor are on. See.