Here is the first part of the story of Hurricane Frank, which grows and shrinks and becomes more and less done the more I pick at it.
Want to read more? There's plenty. Let me know.
Everything on these pages is drummey born and raised.
Sonny
When the local news shows aerial shots of the devastation from Hurricane Frank, everyone, the patrons, servers, and even Toni the hostess at the All Nite Sipper, stop and watch. The storm had missed their town of Pearl , Georgia that morning, but had rearranged most of Freeny and Dido, a few counties away. Sonny, the fry cook, futzes with the paper hat that never seems to stay balanced quite right on his head. The storm does not make him nervous, but the strangely silent diner certainly does.
Sonny understands most things in the simplest terms. He refuses to look at layers of meaning, and he has no use for metaphors. He wouldn't stretch his experience or understanding into the shapes that others expected. Everyone's quiet focus on the shots of the tragedy make Sonny nervous. It's like everyone was studying the scenes for some clues. What did they think they would see, he wonders, beyond the mud and the destructions? What would they learn from it that was impenetrable to him? Sonny usually asked when he didn't understand something, and when he liked something, he usually said so. But when he didn't like something, or it made him uncomfortable, he tried not to say anything at all. Sonny had learned that it was easier to let others think he was on their side, that they were all rowing in the same direction, away from the falls.
The diner's occupants watch what could have been them, could have been this very spot they were standing on, eating pie on, watching the TV on, wondering about their court date on, and they are all relieved and riveted and full of the misplaced fear that often comes with disasters. After a shot of Tattersall Gas in Opel , Alabama , smoldering, flattened, the pumps exploded, 10 people in the restaurant are immediately terrified. Though it didn't make sense, the diners are afraid because the hurricane struck a place they had been to once or twice, or even habitually. “I've gotten gas there!” they think. “That could have been me!” But it wasn't, they hadn't gotten gas there right then, they hadn't been swept up in the 130-mile-an-hour winds, or sucked into the hurricane's funnel and thrown about.
Everyone in the restaurant faces the same direction, towards the TV perched up in the corner like a gargoyle or a vulture. “So how come they name him Frank? What he got that so Frank about him?” Sonny asks no one in particular.
“Storm names are chosen before the season starts, Sonny. It's random.” Ruby the waitress says.
“Do they go' boy, girl, boy, girl'? How they know it a he?”
“It's not a ‘he.' It's not an anything.” Toni the hostess says.
“So the hurricane just like us. It got to grow into they name. It got to work hard to be a remembered Frank.” Sonny says. He only just, at that moment, begins to smell the smoke from the batch of fries burning in the kitchen, and so, in that instant, turns from the screen and hurries back to the kitchen and does not see the shot of Rudy Imenez holding onto life by his fingers while Hurricane Frank tugs at him, stretching him out. Sonny also does not hear Toni the hostess say. “I don't think it has to work anymore. I think we'll all remember this.”