Hammerhead Ranch Motel

30

Today the hurricane arrived.

Events stacked up fast, and suddenly it was too late.

It began dark, breezy and chilly. Looked awful but no serious wind yet. Then, in the span of a minute, a stinging rain came onshore and the shallow area of the beach began to roil with whitecaps. The wind increased unevenly. It moved onto land in a series of body-punching gusts. People can brace and still walk against a steady wind, but the sudden bursts caught a dozen guests at Hammerhead Ranch between buildings and made them stumble like they were drunk.

The surfers were swept out to sea, cheering with delight.

Lenny wandered stoned out of the bar and across the parking lot, staring up at the dark sky. Just then, three black sedans with NASA emblems on the doors raced down Gulf Boulevard and whipped into the parking lot of Hammerhead Ranch.

All the sedans’ doors opened at once, and a platoon of G-men in mirror sunglasses jumped out. Dark suits, white shirts, wires running from tiny transistor earphones into their collars.

“We’re looking for Lenny Lippowicz.”

“You found him.”

Lenny was gang-tackled.

“Where’s our moon rock?” They stuffed him inside the lead sedan and drove away.

The wind increased.

Some motel guests jumped in cars and tried to get off the island, but the bridges were barricaded and it was a challenge getting back, their cars pushed sideways lane to lane. A power line popped loose and snaked and sparked at a bus stop. The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the load, and the faint outline of large objects started moving across the road. A blow-up kiddie pool sailed in front of a car like a flying saucer. The cloth awning from the entrance of a pizza restaurant came off, aluminum frame and all, and tumbled across Gulf Boulevard. Crazy stuff suddenly appeared out of the blinding rain, plastered on the windshields. Shoe insole, Turkish menu, colostomy bag, Hemingway.

One of the guests missed the driveway and struck a sign support at Hammerhead Ranch. He jumped out of the car, left it running and sprinted for the motel. The rest of the guests were already barricading the rooms. They slid dressers to the doors and pulled mattresses off the box springs, leaning them against the windows. The electrical fuses blew in sequence like a zipper, with a loud pow-pow-pow. The lights went on and off several times and then out for good.

Zargoza and his men stacked steel desks along the western side of the boiler room, trying not to show fear. City and Country hid in their closet. The International Olympic Committee was jammed into another room, praying in a symphony of tongues. Art Tweed stood in an open doorway, watching the storm approach, not afraid to die.

In room one, Serge chomped with appetite from the bag of fortune cookies. “What a rush!”

The door of room ten was barricaded with cardboard boxes containing thousands of zebra-striped beepers. Huddled in the bathroom were the Diaz Boys, except for Juan, who was curled on the floor outside the door holding a metal garbage can lid for a shield.

Juan pounded on the locked door. “C’mon, let me in!”

“No room.”

“It’s because I’m the cousin, isn’t it?”

“Ridiculous!”

Twenty minutes after the first gusts, everyone was packed in tight wherever they had decided to ride it out. Some sat with knees up against their chests, rocking nervously. It was five P.M. and pitch black. Without power there wasn’t just no light, but no artificial noise-no TV or air-conditioning, no radio, no hum of electronic anything. Nobody was talking either. Nothing left to do but hang on. The wind howled against the building and the trees, and waves slapped the pylons of The Florida Room down on the beach. Every few seconds the noise of something unidentified breaking or snapping off was heard in the distance-people in the rooms trying to identify the sound of what just went. The concrete construction of Hammerhead Ranch inspired confidence, but the building was still producing far too many noises for anyone to relax. It didn’t sound like something of cement, more like a wooden ship. There was a rolling, creaking sound-twenty carpenters with claw hammers slowly prying galvanized nails out of soft pine. Glass broke and then a scream-the window in someone else’s room giving out.

It was Johnny Vegas’s room, and the scream was from the beautiful naked woman who ran in the bathroom, refused to come out and started crying.

Hammerhead Ranch was in the worst possible location. The center of Hurricane Rolando-berto was coming ashore fifteen miles north at the Pasco County line. As the storm spun counterclockwise, the deadliest bands of wind tightened and whipped around from the southeast corner of the system right into Hammerhead Ranch. The creaking of the building increased, and more glass shattered. The wind rushed around the motel and jammed up under the eaves. The sound was a roar now, and attention stayed on the windows. Once the glass goes, the hurricane is inside the room, and everything becomes a missile. The panes of rooms thirteen and fourteen shattered, and books and cups and letter trays assaulted Zargoza and his goons. There was a final crash-bang drumroll, and the roof peeled off the motel like the tongue of an old boot. It hung straight up for a second, the guests staring into the sky in disbelief. Then it cracked in half and the top part did a backflip into the side of the condominium next door. Two more gusts and the rest was gone too.

Now everyone was trapped in their rooms by their own barricades, and they tore at the desks, tables, dressers, chairs and mattresses blocking the exits. The same idea hit everyone at the same time: Get to the bar!

The bartender was already inside, quaking in the kitchen. The shutters were fastened hard, and he had no way of seeing the wave of refugees heading his way. Zargoza was first to arrive, and he didn’t mess with preliminaries. He blew the lock with a.44.

The guests piled in, and Serge and Zargoza slid an arcade game in front of the door. Some of the guests had quieted down, some still whining, many clearly a short push away from a total crack-up.

Serge took charge.

“Please calm down,” he said, confidently strolling to the middle of the room. “I want everyone to just chill. What happened to the motel is not going to happen here. This place was built like Gibraltar. The wood’s half petrified. It’s heavy as lignum vitae-some of it won’t even float anymore. Those joists are true four-by-sixes, and the builders cross-nailed it for extra strength. Look at this…”-he walked over and pointed up at the angle joints where the roof met a corner of the room-“…this is ship construction. It’s meant to survive storms at sea, so I think it’s a safe bet it’ll make it on land. You don’t need to worry at all. We got our own generator out here and some stored water. We’re in good shape…”

People let out sighs. They gave Serge eye contact, nodding in agreement as he spoke-Serge reining in their hysteria, getting the runaway stagecoach back under control.

Zargoza leaned against the cash register, arms crossed, still holding the.44 in one hand. He thought: This guy’s good.

A small boy raised his hand.

Serge pointed to him. “We have a question in back?”

“What’s the difference between a hurricane and a typhoon?”

“I’m glad you asked that, son,” said Serge. “You see, both hurricanes and typhoons are cyclonic storms. Hurricanes occur in the Atlantic Ocean, and typhoons in the western Pacific region, often in the South China Sea. Did you know that cyclonic storms turn counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere but clockwise in the southern?”

“Wow!” said the boy. “No, I didn’t.”

“Want to see something neat?” said Serge.

“Sure do!”

He followed Serge into the bathroom. Serge raised the lid of the toilet and flushed.

“See?” he said. “It flushes counterclockwise, just like a hurricane. That’s because we’re in the northern hemisphere. You go down to Argentina or Chile, and all the toilets flush clockwise.”

“Wow!” said the boy.

They walked back into the main bar area. Serge looked over at the goons and the Diaz Boys, and he noticed Zargoza was having a rough time keeping a lid on them.

“Will you listen to the man!” Zargoza pleaded. “He was right about this building, wasn’t he? It’s holding up like a missile silo! Not a creak.”

He caught Serge in the side of his vision. “Serge! Hey, come here! You talk to ’em. You’re good with that sort of thing. Tell ’em there’s nothing to worry about.”

“He’s right,” said Serge. “Everyone’s going to be okay. This your first hurricane party?”

The Diaz Boys and the goons nodded.

“Good, good,” said Serge. “Nothing to it. I was telling Lenny about my first hurricane party back in ’65. That was Betsy, killed seventy-four. Donna, back in ’60, killed one forty-eight, but I wasn’t born yet. Then there was Okeechobee in ’28, killed eighteen hundred out at the lake, but the big one was Galveston in 1900, six thousand perished.”

The men turned a whiter shade of pale.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Serge said with an awkward laugh. “Getting off-track. Like I was saying, you want to keep thinking good thoughts. My first hurricane party was a blast. We were over on the east coast in Riviera Beach, just above West Palm. When she started to blow, we cut the power in the house so there wouldn’t be a fire. We lit candles and played Monopoly in the hallway. We had a big metal drum of Charles Chips and we listened to our little transistor radio for the mounting death toll down in Fort Lauderdale and Miami…”

The goons went green.

“Oops, sorry again,” he said. “How about a movie? The VCR still works ’cuz of the generator and I just happened to bring some great Florida flicks.”

He held up a gym bag full of videocassettes.

Serge got the VCR going and popped in a tape. “The important thing now is to keep your minds occupied, not to think about your situation.”

Serge hit play and they began watching Key Largo, the story of a group of criminals riding out a hurricane in a Florida motel.

Everyone in the bar fell quiet as the wind roared around The Florida Room.

Edward G. Robinson was getting nervous on the screen, asking Lionel Barrymore about the hurricane.

“Hey, old man, how bad can it get?”

“Well, worst storm we ever had was back in ’35,” said Barrymore. “Wind whipped up a big wave and sent it busting right over Matecumbe Key. Eight hundred washed out to sea.”

Zargoza looked worried. He turned to Serge. “They’re kidding about that hurricane, aren’t they? I mean, that’s just Hollywood movie fiction, right?”

“Oh, no,” said Serge. “It was the real thing-the only force-five hurricane ever to hit the state.”

Serge let it sink in. The building was solid, but the wind hummed all around, and now that they were in an elevated structure, it blew under them too. The shutters held fast, but when the wind was at the right pitch, they resonated with a loud rat-a-tat.

Zargoza stared at Serge with eyes that had stopped blinking.

“They sent a train down from the mainland to evacuate those in the path,” said Serge. “But it got a late start, and the engineer decided in Miami to turn the train around. He said, ‘I ain’t goin’ down there and loading up a bunch of people and then back out of a force-five hurricane. When I’m leaving, I’m gonna be balls-out, facing forward.’ So he puts it in reverse and heads on down, and the train gets to Snake Creek, which divides Plantation Key from Windley Key, where they now have that Tropical Isle place. You’ve been there, haven’t you? It’s like if Disney had a spring break exhibit. But before it was like the Florida I remember as a kid.” The lack of medication floated Serge in a sea of memories. “…just-mowed lawns on a Saturday afternoon, splitting coconuts open on the sidewalk, catching stingrays…”

“What about the hurricane?” snapped Zargoza.

“Oh, yeah. So the train picks up a bunch of people at Snake Creek. The front edge of the storm is already over them, blowing like mad, and the barometer is something insane like twenty-six inches. It’s solid monsoon conditions, but the engineer presses on. There are more helpless people up ahead in the Matecumbe Keys. The hurricane thickens when they get to the last stop, and the engineer loads up the rest of the stranded residents. Then he stokes his engines and fires them full speed, back to Miami.

“They only get a few miles when the meat of the unnamed hurricane slams the islands. The Keys aren’t any more than six or eight feet at their highest elevation, and the railroad trestles aren’t any higher. They were wide open…”

Serge took another sip of water. He studied Zargoza; the hook was set.

“As the train races out of the Keys, the passengers are petrified. The train seems big and heavy and safe, but outside the wind is building to two hundred miles an hour. Nobody knows what the passengers might have seen-maybe a thirty-foot wall of water coming at them at fifty miles per hour. Or maybe they had no warning at all-the next thing they knew, the train was slapped off the tracks like a toy…”

Zargoza’s mouth had gone dry from hanging open.

“They couldn’t dig graves fast enough so they set fire to big mounds of bodies back at Snake Creek. The sky was black with the smoke. The islands were flat, and every tree was uprooted or snapped. There was one family who survived because the hurricane knocked their whole house off the foundation in one piece and it surfed the storm surge out into Florida Bay.”

“…And for months afterward corpses were found in the mangrove swamp,” said Barrymore.

The Diaz Boys began talking excitedly among themselves.

Serge pointed at the TV. “Hey, you’re missing the movie.”