The Folly

By Harry Day

Inlander Gilligan "Gilli" Booray moves to the barrier island Potato Beach on the Atlantic coast, finds work at a little food shop, makes new friends and learns to surf, only people begin to disappear in the ocean.  Not until a major hurrican bears down on the island does a horrific realization reveal itself to Gilli and his new friends as they try to survive the impending disaster of Hurricane Folly.  Sexy, funny yet twisted and disturbing. 65,000 words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Day By Day
• Release date: May 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224488209

Book preview

The Folly

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Harry Day

This novel is a work of fiction.  All author’s rights reserved. 2015

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This novel is dedicated to the people who took me in on Folly Beach and made me one of their own.

Preface 

When the braver ones fell asleep late that night, the Folly made up her mind with her last wobble to head towards Potato Beach.  The hurricane sensed a vacuous weakness, an entrance, a void in its blind search to rage with its one hundred and sixty mile per hour winds, rain and immense energy, to push down on the sea and create a depression on the ocean’s surface where the water pushed outwards, but mostly towards where she had chosen to go... onshore.

So that was it.  We had no idea.

The day before, we taped all the windows in case of flying glass.  We had a radio, extra batteries, a flashlight and some candles, a lighter, matches, plenty of canned and dry food, jugs of water and outside we moved almost everything the wind might pick up and hurl like a missile to the back of the house.  Carlos had a bag of pot.  The winds were already up to minimal hurricane force on Potato Beach.  The waves were big, messy and powerful or what surfers called victory at sea conditions.  The one thing we were sure of was the coastline would hit high tide before dawn when the Folly was expected to move past or come ashore.  Hurricane Folly was just under a hundred miles offshore and wobbling when we went to sleep.  It left everyone wondering which direction it would move over night.  Those of us who stayed on the island gambled that it would wobble towards Cape Hatteras, since it had been moving up coast anyway.  Whether it wobbled back out to sea or towards shore was anyone’s guess.  The men from the Weather Channel were on Potato Beach broadcasting live, trying to predict what it would do.  Because the Folly was so close to passing the window of being able to hit Potato Beach, and the lines of cars on the highways leading inland were at a stand still all day, many locals chose to ride the Folly out at home. 

Most of the lifelong surfers stayed simply to surf the waves after the Folly passed and the winds blew offshore.  The waves would stand straight up with the wind pushing against their faces and the surfers would be there to ride them.  They knew the tall, hollow waves would not last very long with the strong offshore winds.  Most surfers were excellent swimmers, their boards were buoyant and they never had plans to evacuate.

But by dark the evening before, the sea had grown too rough to surf.  Every wave was topped with foaming white water, rolling over the top of the ocean surface, heaving up and down, until they crashed in an awful shore break over the rain packed sand.  Waves pitched up in all shapes and size and the wind blew from up coast and pushed the strong currents south, parallel to the beach.  We watched huge, long lines of white water power ashore, right up into the sand dunes that protected Front Street along the beach.  There was a long row of beach houses built high on poles all along the shoreline.  It was not odd for the bigger waves to push over the dunes and underneath the houses.  Massive amounts of sand moved with the northerly winds and sliding water.  The sand moved down beach, out onto the ocean floor or into a newly formed spit of a sand bar at the south end of the island.  Trash cans, palm fronds and other debris blew down the streets as if they were stray dogs running after invisible cars.

Sara and I sat in the living room with Simon as we watched the Weather Channel.  Simon flipped over to the local news and back again.  Carlos locked himself in his room and took some sedatives from a buddy at work who often used them for back pain from clam farming in the marshes.  We knew a lot of people who said they were staying on the island.  They said the hurricanes almost always moved up coast, past Potato Beach and on to the Outer Banks or back out to sea.  Only one time in the long history of Potato Beach and Charleston, South Carolina did a hurricane make a direct hit.

Less than ten years before, Hurricane Hugo came sweeping up, stalled, wobbled and ran directly over Fort Sumter at the entrance to Charleston Harbor.  North of the harbor mouth, several beach communities were wiped out.  South of the harbor, the water came in over the dunes and flooded in from the marshes and houses were wrecked by the heavy winds but few lost their lives on Potato Beach... unlike Sully’s Island and Isle of Palms to the north.

Every year hurricanes swept past the island and the locals on Potato Beach stayed in their homes, or at least in the houses built up off the ground where short term flood waters from heavy rains covered the usual low spots.  Most of the older homes were built on concrete slabs along Cooper Street, which ran the length of Potato’s only elevated ridge.  These people usually also stayed and when there was a hurricane, there was a hurricane party, but it wasn’t one big party.  There were small parties scattered all over the island, usually in the safer known houses and always up off the ground.

Our beach house was a rental on Cooper Street.  The street ran along the high ridge of the island and our rental house was tucked under two very old live oaks filled with Spanish moss.  It was a two story duplex.  It was old enough to be built on a concrete slab.  To say the house was old would be an understatement.  The house was easily fifty years old, or more, and it looked it.  The downstairs sometimes flooded when there was heavy rain, but the tidal creek in the back only rose up into the corner of the yard and never near the house.  The worst storm surge recorded, made by Hugo, did not quite come up to the stop sign on Third Street.  Third Street ran horizontal to Cooper and started at the beach and led upslope to Cooper Street, just beside and across from our crushed oyster shell driveway.  Instead of continuing to the back of the island, Third Street turned into a sandy trail and pushed back through the island jungle for a few blocks before the pavement picked back up.  In the middle of the sandy path was a little bridge spanning over the tidal creek.

We rented the upstairs and three college students rented the downstairs, which was a little lower than the street before the house.  They had already evacuated the island.  There was a massive natural hedge across Cooper from the house and there was another house on the other side of the hedge so we felt pretty secure in our beach house on the highest elevation of the island.  Of course we knew a few feet of change in the ocean was a tremendous amount of water.  High tides could be plus five feet above regular sea level.  Add on a six foot storm surge and that made eleven extra feet of sea water.  Make it a twelve foot surge and any house on Potato Beach would be in trouble, but that was unheard of up and down the East Coast.  Of course any foot of surge still did not include the height and energy of the incoming waves on top of the surge.

Unless the roof blew off, we felt certain we would be safe from the ocean.  Our beach house was shielded from the onshore winds by the giant hedgerow.  We were also shielded from the winds from up or down the beach by a large house on one side and a large undeveloped lot filled with old oak trees, island scrub and vines climbing all over on the other.  We figured if we were wind sheltered and on the high ridge of the island, we were safe.  The surge could not charge in from behind the house.  The only wind that could do us harm was if the hurricane passed onshore north of Potato Beach, then the wind would come from the inland side, but there was a jungle of trees beyond our empty back yard to act as shelter and the only house behind us was far beyond the tidal creek.  It was a very big house built up off the ground.

We felt we were high, dry and confident as we hunkered down in the living room that night.  We watched the television all afternoon until the power went out.  We turned on the radio and lit a candle and waited to see what the Folly was going to do.  It was all in Mother Nature’s hands... that and our instinctive ability to survive.

1

How I ever came to live on Potato Beach happened rather suddenly.  I’d never heard of the place or even lived on a beach before.  It seemed exotic to me.  I knew nothing of surf or surfing or beach culture, and for an inlander, as I was called, it really opened my eyes to the world.  I later found that the beach most anywhere in America held roughly the same culture as any other beach anywhere.  All the women wore trendy bathing suits that might as well be underwear worn in public, to me, and the better looking the female, the skimpier the bikini.  The surf was nice too.  The ocean was very mysterious.  I looked out from the beach, out over the ocean, and for as far as I could see there was water.  This was not mysterious, but I knew under all that water lived all the sea life... fish, rays, sharks, whales, dolphins, sunken boats, crashed airplanes, the bones of lost and drowned people... this I found mysterious because I could not see it.  I never cared for the sand.

I would never have moved to Potato Beach if a friend of mine hadn’t married another friend and then brought all our mutual friends from across the South together for a big wedding and celebration in the Mississippi Delta.  An old friend from college had moved to Charleston, South Carolina a few years back and he and his brother came over to Mississippi for the big Delta wedding.  My friend’s brother, Carlos, spoke of how he lived in a beach house two streets from the ocean on a barrier island with only a single bridge connected it with the mainland.  It was nicknamed the Edge of America and it was pretty much a redneck riviera but all types came to the beach in the summer and that included all the college girls.  The College of Charleston was in the middle of downtown and the girl to guy ratio was seven to one.  Carlos talked that part up pretty good.  I was sold and when he said they had an extra room in their rental house and I could move in with them, I was all for it.  I had nothing going on at the time, I was a few years out of college and in between jobs so I packed up my Jeep and moved.

Carlos talked about the beach and surfing, though he did not surf, and all the women in their bikinis.  It was the middle of June and summer was in full swing and the beaches were packed.  He told me how he had these three young lady friends, only he didn’t know which one he wanted to get involved with in a relationship, so he was friends with them all until he could figure it out.  He hadn’t gone beyond being friends with any of them.  All of them were single and looking for that better thing, that greener grass, that knight in shining armor.  Carlos thought he could be that man to any one of them.  He had found them, but it appeared to me later they were not interested in Carlos, not in his way, so he smoked a lot of pot with them, and became this low key, spiritual shaman type, only without the mystique.  In time I became friends with all three young ladies.  He was horribly awkward around them but they still liked him.  He would do anything for them and he would never harm a soul in general.  They especially liked his pot.

Anyway, like I said, Carlos asked me at the wedding, after hearing I had moved out West to Oregon and then moved back to Mississippi, after being robbed three times and mugged once the previous summer, if I wanted to move in with him and his friend on Potato Beach.  I was currently living with a crazy person named Curtis who looked exactly like an overweight Chevy Chase.  He had more identity problems then a typical psyche ward patient and he could count cards at two deck blackjack in the Mississippi casinos.  I used to take Curtis to and from the casinos while he got drunk and played two deck blackjack.  I sat next to him and bet when he said bet and folded when he said fold.  I would win hundreds of dollars each trip until they would cut him off.  Sometimes he would call me from the casino and pay me a hundred bucks from his winnings to come drive him home.  Sometimes I would stay and play and win a month’s rent and sometimes I just took the money and drove him home.  We lived in an apartment on a local lake, but the invitation to live by the ocean was too great to pass up.

After the wedding, Carlos’ brother drove home to Charleston.  He had a steady job and did not live with Carlos.  I loaded up my Jeep with a skeleton of the belongings I’d taken to Oregon and drove Carlos to Potato Beach a week later and moved into the beach house.  Of course Carlos failed to tell his roommate Simon that I was moving into their place.  Carlos told him I was coming to visit the beach for a few weeks.  When we arrived and I brought in my bags of clothes and quilts, well, Simon was pissed off at Carlos.  Simon wasn’t from the beach any more than Carlos or I was.  Simon was from Pennsylvania.  He had assimilated to the beach culture and was tan and wore a pony tail even though his hair was thinning out with age.  He was a nice guy much like Carlos and he was also single.  That made three of us.  He had moved to coastal South Carolina for marine biology, a field that was tough to find work.  He found work but he spent most of his time studying microscopic life thru a microscope and it was tedious, or so he said.  He rarely got to go out in the ocean and he hated the job, but it paid and he hoped it would change for the better the longer he worked there.  It never did.

After staying there a week or so, Simon decided I was cool enough to stay for the summer and if it all worked out, I could stay longer.  He let me use his spare longboard for surfing and I was quickly on my way to becoming a beach bum.  I still looked like a Barney to the locals though.  A Barney was what the local surfers called people from inland, like an inlander, or one who was straight from the barn or the farm.  I didn’t care.  I didn’t look like them, I didn’t dress like them, I did not surf, and I did not give a damn.

I remember the day I first met Sara Pane, one of Carlos’ lady friends.  She was by far his favorite and he was madly in love with her.  She did not feel the same way, but Carlos figured being friends with her was close enough and that maybe, in time, he would catch her in a weak moment.  I would obliterate this plan in time.  Carlos wanted to go by and visit her before Simon drove us to the other end of Potato Beach to check out the surf.  Simon had a small truck and I was sitting in the back with the surfboards.  I was wearing aviator sun glasses and a western t-shirt with a big bear paw printed on the front, old jeans and my sandy red hair looked like I had cut it myself.  I had.  She came bouncing out of her house, saw me in the back, laughed and asked who I was.  Carlos told her.  I just watched her from behind my sun glasses and smiled.  She was drop dead gorgeous, short, but not too short, tan, muscular but not too muscular, curvy and she had reddish brown hair and a great smile.  Carlos asked if she wanted to go down the beach with us and she declined, but she did take one last look at me before going back inside her little apartment. 

She said, "You don’t give a damn how you look, do you?"

I replied, smiling, Nope.

2

I’m that kid in the chicken coop and I got the croup from a little breath of germy air blown up by the southern breeze off the old Delta lakes somewhere far inland.  I snorted and sneezed and pollenly wheezed and blew out a bit of phlegm and smiled and looked into my father’s eyes, one of them temporarily blinded by a yellow spot of funky gunk slipping down his reading glasses.  Nice, I thought.

Sorry, I said, as we went back to digging.  We were looking for muscles.  Not the kind on body builders, athletes or meat heads... we were looking for shellfish.  My father loved clams, but we weren’t by the ocean, we were by a lake looking for muscles, and with the water level down, they should have been easier to find.  They were impossible to find.  We dug and dug for hours and found nothing.  We wiped sweat from our brows.  I just sweated and sweated and sweated.  We’ll never find what we’re looking for, I said, and then I woke up and I really wiped the sweat from my brow.  My pillow case was soaked, as were my sheets, and I thought, will these nightmares ever end? 

My name is Gilligan ‘Gilli’ Booray.  I despised my name.  If I were my parents I would have chosen something like Hiramicus Caesar Bob.  I loved the name Bob.  It spelled Bob backwards.  It drove me mad.  I was empty then, aside from the nightmares.  Most people knew me as Gilli.  I moved around alot before moving to Potato Beach.  I was an active young man, tall and thin, but athletic enough.

There was some terrific draw that brought me to the Atlantic Ocean.  I had been there once before when I visited Carlos’ brother.  He didn’t live on the beach but the coastal city of Charleston was nice enough.  There was alot to do.  I was not in a hunt for money or business.  I was not the suit and