The Flood Line

The call came in at four in the afternoon, right when the rain went from steady to stupid. Garth from the bait and tackle shop, voice tight on the line.

"Hayden, I got a wire down behind the shop. Live, I think. Creek's coming up and I need it capped before the water finds it."

I'm Hayden, fifty-four years old, electrician, thirty years in Kettle Ridge. I told him I'd come. What else do you tell a man with a live wire and a flood on the way?

I threw the truck tools in the cab and drove down Main Street with the wipers going full tilt. The creek that runs through town was already brown and fast, up over its first bank. Locals were stacking sandbags upstream like the town told them to. I parked in front of the shop, that narrow wooden building with the tin roof, and the rain hammered it like gravel.

Garth met me at the door. He's sixty, been running that shop longer than I've been licensed.

"Back here," he said, walking fast. "Watch the puddles."

The wire had come loose off a junction box behind the shop, hanging down near a fence post, still humming. I killed the feed at the meter first, then capped it proper with the box dried out and taped. Twenty minutes of work in the pouring rain, and my jacket was done for.

That's when I saw Phil.

He was around the side, stacking sandbags against the low corner, sleeves rolled up. Phil is fifty-two, sign painter by trade, works part-time for Garth. We go back two years. We dated casual for six months, then it just fizzled out and neither of us ever said why.

"Hey," he said, not stopping his work.

"Hey!"

Garth came back around with two more bags and dropped them. "I got to run upstream, help the Hendersons with their tarps. You two can finish the corner. Phil knows where the rest of the bags are." He looked at me. "Wire's good?"

"Good. Don't touch it for an hour anyway."

He nodded and was gone in the rain. And then it was just the two of us, the tin roof roaring, and Phil stacking bags like the world depended on his form.

We worked maybe ten minutes without a word. That's a thing about Phil and me. We can fill silence with nothing for hours.

"You look good," he finally said, not looking at me.

"It's the rain. Everybody looks good soaked and miserable."

He laughed at that, a real one. "Eighteen months since I seen you at the Grange dance. You just stopped showing up."

"Yeah, well." I pressed a bag into the wall. "You stopped too."

"Fair."

More rain. The corner was nearly done and I could feel the excuse to leave coming, and I didn't want it to come. That surprised me. Eighteen months since anybody touched me, unless you count the barber, and I'd gotten so used to dry I forgot it wasn't the natural state.

"Garth's got a radio in there," Phil said, nodding at the shop. "Come on, we earned ten minutes. I want to show you something anyway."

I followed him in. The shop smelled like bait and rubber boots, the way it always does. Phil went behind the counter and pulled out this old tape recorder, a big silver deck with a cracked handle. He set it on the counter like it was worth something.

"You know what this is?"

"Looks like a tape deck from before I was born."

"It's Garth's. He lets me mess with it on slow days. Somebody donated a whole box of old tapes, local radio broadcasts, weather bulletins, stuff from the eighties." He threaded a reel with careful fingers. "Listen to this one."

He hit play. The tape hissed, then a voice came through, scratchy and formal.

"This is a flood advisory for Kettle Ridge and surrounding valley, issued June fourth, nineteen eighty-five. The Kettle Creek is expected to reach..."

"June fourth," Phil said over it. "Same week, forty years back. Creek did the same damn thing."

"Listen to that guy talk. He sounds like a movie."

"He sounds like a man reading a paper out loud, because that's what he's doing." Phil turned it down low so it hissed under our voices. "Garth says they used to read the bulletins live, off teletype. No script."

"Wild." I sat on a stool. My jacket was dripping on the floor and neither of us cared. "You do this every rainy day?"

"Slow days. It's mostly slow days." He leaned on the counter. "You know, it's funny. Garth left on purpose, I think."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean he looked at us, looked at the rain, and decided two grown men could finish a sandbag wall without supervision." Phil shrugged. "Man's sixty years old, he doesn't miss much."

"He knows about us?"

"Everybody knew about us. We weren't exactly quiet for six months." He smiled, but it was a careful smile. "Then we got quiet. Real quiet. Eighteen months of waving across the street like neighbors who share a fence."

I didn't have an answer for that. The tape hissed. The announcer, forty years gone, said something about the creek cresting by morning.

"Why did we get quiet, Hayden?" Phil asked it plain, no joke in it. "I've tried to remember. Was there a fight?"

"There was no fight!"

"That's what I keep landing on. There was no fight. We just stopped calling, and then it got too awkward to start." He rubbed a thumb along the deck's cracked handle. "I'm fifty-two. I don't want to do another two years of that. I'd rather be awkward for five minutes and find out."

"Find out what?"

"Whether there's still anything there. That's what I'm asking, sort of. Badly."

The rain drummed the tin roof so hard it was almost loud enough to hide behind. Almost. I looked at him, this man I used to know by heart, and something in my chest woke up and stretched.

"I think about you," I said. "Not constantly. But when it rains, I think about you. That's stupid, probably."

"It's not stupid." He came around the counter slow, giving me every chance to move, and I didn't move. "I think about you when it rains too. You're the one who explained the gutter on my shop."

"Somebody had to. You were going to nail it wrong."

He stopped a step away. "So can I ask straight? Would you want to see where this goes again? Not tonight if you don't want. Just, see where it goes."

"Yeah," I said, and my voice came out lower than I meant. "Yeah, I would. Tonight too, if the creek cooperates."

Phil laughed, and the careful was gone out of his face. "Town's flooding, Hayden. Creek's going to cooperate all night."

I laughed too, and for the first time in a long time I wasn't counting the dry months. The tape rolled on under the rain, some dead announcer telling a town that's still standing to watch the water.

"Garth's going to come back with tarps," I said.

"Garth's going to come back, look at the sandbags, and leave again. I know this man." Phil checked the corner of the window, the creek visible past the lot, high and fast but not yet at the door. "We got time. We got all night, likely. Road upstream's already closed."

"Then we got time," I agreed.

He reached out and put a hand on my arm, just that, and it went through me like current. Eighteen months of nothing and one wet hand on a sleeve nearly took my knees out.

"Easy," he said, reading me the way he always did. "We got time, I said."

"I heard you. It's been a while, that's all."

"How long?"

"Eighteen months. Give or take a bad decision."

He didn't laugh at that, which I appreciated. He just squeezed my arm once and let go. "Okay. Then we go slow, and we go real."

Outside, the creek shoved at its banks. Inside, the tape hissed on, and Phil poured two cups of the bad coffee Garth keeps for emergencies, and we sat on stools at the counter of a bait shop in a flooding town like it was the most natural thing in the world.

It felt natural. That was the strange part.

I drank the coffee. It was as bad as promised, burnt and old, the kind of coffee that exists only because a man once decided shops should have coffee in emergencies. I drank it anyway.

"God," Phil said, making a face at his cup. "This stuff could caulk a boat."

"Garth's emergency supply. Technically we're having an emergency."

"We're having something." He set his cup down and turned on the stool to face me. "Can I say something honest before I lose my nerve?"

"Go ahead."

"I spent a lot of the last eighteen months thinking you'd lost interest. That's why I never called. I figured you woke up one morning and thought, well, that ran its course." He looked at the counter instead of at me. "And I was too proud to ask."

"That's not what happened."

"I know that now. But it took eighteen months and a flood to find out."

I put my cup down too. "I've been lonely, Phil. I'll say that plain since you're saying things plain. Eighteen months of nobody's