Hurricane

Chapter 3

Johnny Flagan stood shaving in the light of cold fluorescence in his bathroom. He was a suety man in his fifties, with gingery gray hair surrounding a bald spot the size of a coaster. He had once been a strong man, but the years had run through the puffy body; the years of the cigars and the bourbon and the hotel room parties. There were brown blemishes on his lard-white shoulders and back, a matronly cast to his hips. But all the drive was still there, the hint of harshness.

He was an amiable looking man. Sun and whisky-kept his soft face red. He smiled easily and had the knack of kidding people. He wore round glasses with steel rims, and the glasses were always slipping a little way down his blunt nose, and Johnny Flagan would look over his glasses at you and grin wryly about his morning hangover, and you would never notice that the grin did nothing to change the eyes. The eyes were small and blown and watchful.

If you walked down the street with him, you would soon come to believe that he knew more than half the people in Sarasota.

— But what does he do?

— You mean Johnny Flagan? What does he do? Well, he’s got a lot of interests, you might say. He was in on some pretty good land development stuff on the keys. He’s got a fellow runs a ranch for him down near Venice. Santa Gertrudis stock, it is. He’s got a piece of a juice plant over near Winter Haven. Then he’s director on this and that. And he’s got some kind of interest in savings and loan stuff. Hell, Old Johnny keeps humping.

— Successful and honest, I suppose.

— Successful, sure. You understand, I’m not a fellow to talk about anybody. Gossip. That kind of thing. But you go throwing around that word honest, and there’s a lot of people got different ideas of what it means. Johnny’s a sharp one. I don’t think he ever in his whole life done anything he could get hisself jailed for, but you get on the other end of a deal from him, and you got to play it close. Like that lime, it was seven, eight years ago, there was this old fellow down Nokomis way didn’t want to let loose of some land Johnny wanted to pick up. Both Johnny and the old man were pretty sure the State Road Department was going to put the new road right through his land. Well, sir, one day these young fellow’s come to the old man’s house, and they’re hot, and they want a drink of water. They got transits and so on, all that surveying stuff, and the old man gives them the water, and they get to talking, and it turns out they’re surveying for the road and it just doesn’t come nowheres near the old man’s land. Very next day the old man unloads his land on Johnny, trying to keep a straight face. Inside fourteen months the new road cuts right across the land and Johnny has himself a bunch of prime commercial lots. That old man just about drove them nuts up there in Tallahassee, but he never could find out just who those surveyors were. Sure, Johnny’s honest, but he’s, well — sharp.

— He lives right here, does he?

— Near all his life. Married one of the Leafer girls. They never had any kids. She stood him as long as she could, I guess about eleven years, and then they got divorced. He’s one to, like they say, play the field. He talked her into taking a settlement, and it wasn’t much of a one they say. Johnny is almost a native. His daddy, Stitch Flagan, come down here from Georgia forty years ago and went broke in celery and went into commercial fishing and got drownded out in the Gulf with Johnny’s two brothers way back thirty years ago. Johnny would have got the same medicine but he didn’t go along night-netting the macks that time on account of a girl down around Osprey he was chasing. Now he lives alone out there on St. Armands Key, has him a woman that comes in to clean up three, four times a week. Couple of times a year he gives a hell of a big party. Most nights you find him around town someplace. The Plaza or the Colony or Holiday House or the Hofbrau. Everybody knows him. And I guess he tips pretty good...

Johnny Flagan blew the sandy stubble out of the razor, coiled the cord, put the razor in the toilet-article case he used on trips. He padded out to the phone and called the airline office again to ask about flights. “Not a chance, eh?” he said disgustedly. He hung up and cursed with considerable feeling. He looked up Charlie Himbermark’s home phone number and called him.

“Charlie? Johnny Flagan.”

“Yes, Mr. Flagan.”

“They’ve grounded the flights. We got to drive up there. Pick you up in about forty-five minutes.”

“Isn’t it raining pretty hard to...”

“Charlie, I got to go up there. You be ready.”

“Yes, Mr. Flagan.”

He hung up. Charlie was going to be great company on this kind of a trip. Cold little fish. All he knew was accounting, but he certainly knew that.

Johnny wondered what Charlie would say and do if he knew the real reason for the trip. Charlie believed in following all the rules, cutting no corners. That was why he made such a good assistant. The books were always in apple-pie shape.

Johnny Flagan dressed quickly and finished packing. He went into the bedroom closet and opened the wall safe and took out the thick manila envelope. He took it out into the pale gray light and opened it and ran his thumb across the thick pad of currency.

He stood there for a moment and thought of all the things that could happen if for any reason he couldn’t get this cash up to Danboro, Georgia, before tomorrow noon. It made him feel weak and sick to think of the consequences. He and Stevenson and Ricardo would all be in the soup for sure.

It had been a calculated risk. Flagan knew he was worth somewhere around a half-million. But it wasn’t cash. It was tied up in land that was increasing in value day by day. He and Stevenson and Ricardo owned the majority shares in the little savings and loan company in Danboro, and they had been in on speculative land ventures together in the Sarasota area. Then a few weeks ago a new opportunity had opened up. Flagan couldn’t swing it alone. He couldn’t handle any part of it without selling off land he wanted to keep. So he’d flown up and explained the deal to Stevenson and Ricardo. They were in the same spot he was in. Temporarily overextended. So they had decided to take the calculated risk of taking the cash out of the cash reserves of the savings and loan company without making any ledger entry. Flagan had used the cash to buy in. Ricardo had a connection whereby he would learn in advance of any sneak audit. The deal didn’t move as fast as Flagan had expected. Yesterday Stevenson had called up, more upset than Flagan had ever heard him, and told him about the audit due tomorrow. Johnny couldn’t get the money back out of the new venture. Stevenson told him how much they would need to cover. So Johnny Flagan had spent a busy afternoon, and he had sold some choice land parcels he had meant to hold on to, and now had the money in cash.

There was no point in thinking of what might happen if the money didn’t get up there. It would get there, and it would go in the vault, and it would be counted, and the audit would give them a clean bill. There were some other things that had to be done up there sooner or later, and so it would kill two birds to take Charlie along this time.

But if Charlie learned what was going on, he would fall over in a dead faint. Charlie was a dry, pallid, emotionless little man in his early sixties. He was a wizard with figures. He had been with the trust department of a big New York City bank until his wife died, and Charlie’s health had broken, and he had come to Florida with too small a pension. He had worked for Johnny Flagan for twelve years. Johnny didn’t pay him generously, but every once in a while he had a chance to deal Charlie in on something, and it all added up.

Johnny drove cautiously across the rickety Ringling Bridges through the heavy rain in the big, dark-blue Cadillac. He had a quick breakfast in town and picked Charlie up at his rooming house over behind the Post Office. The envelope of money made a bulge in the inside pocket of Johnny’s rayon cord suit-jacket. It was comforting to feel it there. Little Charlie Himbermark scampered out through the rain and put his suitcase over in the back seat beside Johnny’s. They got out of town at seven, and Johnny Flagan pushed the big car hard as they headed north on 301 toward the Sunshine Skyway which would put them on Route 19.

About eleven miles north of the town of Crystal River on Route 19, on Florida’s West Coast, State Route 40 crosses 19 at a village called Inglis. Forty does not continue far to the west after it crosses; just three miles, to a place called Yankeetown on Withlacoochee Bay. The Gulf of Mexico is that close to 19 at that point.

As Route 19 continues north, it swings inland through Lebanon, Lebanon Station, Gulf Hammock. When it reaches Otter Creek, six miles north of Gulf Hammock, it is twenty-two miles from the Gulf. Cedar Key, on the Gulf, is twenty-two miles due west on Route 24 from Otter Creek.

In the relatively straight six miles of Route 19 between Gulf Hammock and Otter Creek, the highway crosses the Waccasassa River. Not much of a river. Not much of a bridge across it.

Ten miles west of the bridge the Waccasassa River empties into Waccasassa Bay, an almost triangular indentation of the Gulf of Mexico into the flank of the state. The shores of this bay are dreary and uninhabited. Thick mangrove grows down to the salt flats. Behind the mangrove the land is sodden, marshy, flat. High tides overflow into the flats, obscuring the slow curling course of the Waccasassa River. In the Gulf Hammock area Route 19 is barely six feet above the level of these tidal flats.

The bridge over the Waccasassa is a relatively modern concrete highway bridge, two lanes wide, not over a hundred feet long. It was built some years ago to replace a rickety wooden lane-and-a-half structure with timbers that flapped and rumbled under the wheels of the vehicles. At the time the bridge was being replaced, through traffic was detoured around it on an obscure road, four miles long, that roughly paralleled the highway and ran to the west of it. If headed north, you had to turn west off Route 19 about a mile before you came to the bridge. It was a narrow sand road, and it angled sharply away from Route 19 for over a mile. It turned north then and crossed a narrow wooden bridge over a vagrant loop of the sleepy Waccasassa, and about three hundred yards further, crossed a second bridge over the main river. Two and a half miles further on, after bearing almost imperceptibly east, the sand road rejoined Route 19.

When the new bridge was built, construction lasted well’ into the tourist season, despite State Road Department assurances that it would be done by Christmas. As a consequence, many southbound tourists went over the detour down the narrow sand road that wound through sparse stands of pine and then cut through the heavy brush near the river. Many of the tourists had cameras and a few of them, more aware of pictorial values than most, stopped on the stretch between the two wooden bridges to take a picture of a strange old deserted house quite near the sand road. It was a ponderous and ugly old house built of cypress, decorated with the crudest of scroll saw work. It was weathered to a pale silvery gray. The shuttered windows were like blinded eyes. The house sat solidly there and you thought that once upon a time someone had taken pride in it and had ornamented it with the scroll work.

Then the bridge was opened, and there was no one to take pictures of the house; no one even to see it except for the infrequent local fishermen who knew the times when snook came up the Waccasassa from the Gulf and could be caught from the larger of the two wooden bridges.

It was almost noon on- Wednesday, the seventh of October, when the concrete highway bridge became blocked.

Dix Marshall had picked up the load in New Orleans, and it was consigned to Tampa. He knew from the way the rig handled that they had loaded it as close to the limit as they dared. The inside rubber on the two rear duals was bald and it felt to him as though the whole frame of the tractor was a little sprung. It had an uneasy sideways motion on long curves to the left. But the diesel was a good one; new and with a rough sound, but with a lot of heart. That was a break. It was six hundred and sixty-five miles from New Orleans to Tampa, and he hadn’t got a very good start out of New Orleans. He’d felt so upset after the scrap with Grace that he’d almost asked the dispatcher if he could have a helper on the run. There was the usual bunk behind the cab seat. But the company didn’t like to pay double wages for a run this short if it could be helped.

He wanted this one to be a short trip because he wanted to get back and work out some kind of a better understanding with Grace.

Dix Marshall was a small man in his early thirties with thick shoulders and husky tatooed arms. He had been driving a rig since ’46 when he got out of the army, and he had been married to Grace for the past seven years.

He drove toward the dawn thinking about Grace, feeling sick about the whole mess and wondering what a guy was supposed to do. He felt that, if he could talk to her again, he could make her understand.

She was still cute. Heavier than when he’d married her, but dark and built real good. Everything had seemed to be going along fine until this last year when she had started to work on him to get off the rigs and get a steady job. She wanted him at home more. But she couldn’t get it through her head that he had some seniority, and the pay was good, and his record was good and, anyway, he liked the work. They’d started to fight. And kept it up. If he got off the trucks, what was there? An apprentice mechanic, maybe.

Then, just lately, he’d begun to hear things he didn’t like. She was hitting the neighborhood bars while he was on the road. Some of his friends gave him the word. They were apologetic about it, but they thought he ought to know. He’d seen it before. There was always somebody around to offer to buy the drinks and sooner or later she’d take on a reckless load and bring one of them home. He’d seen it happen.

So this last fight had been rugged. She, screaming about the life she had to live. “Why shouldn’t I go where I can talk to people?” she said. “You want me to sit in the house with the kids every night of my life?” And he had yelled back at her and they had hammered and jabbed words at each other for hours. He seemed unable to make her understand.

When he thought of how he hit her once, the first time he had ever hit her, he wanted to cut his right hand off. There was a tiny nick on his middle knuckle — she had tried to cry out just as he had struck her, and her tooth had nicked him. He wanted the trip to be over. He wanted to hurry back, and this time they’d talk quietly, and he would make her understand.

He ran into the rain south of Tallahassee. It was a hard rain. He started the wipers, turned on his running lights and cursed the rain. It would slow him down. But not as much as it would slow down a less experienced driver, or one with slower reflexes. He pushed the big rig along as fast as he dared — thundering south through the rain, throwing up spume from the big duals, staring ahead through the murkiness and worrying about Grace.

South of Otter Creek he came up on the car, came up on it too fast. It was a sedan of a gray color that blended too well with the rain. It did not have lights on.

The big blue and yellow rig was traveling at fifty-five miles an hour when Dix Marshall saw the faint bulk of the slow-moving sedan. Within a fractional part of a second, he had known that he could not hope to slow down in time. He had to make his choice instantaneously: Cut to the right and take his chances on the sloppy shoulder; cut to the left and risk a head-on with something coming the other way, or put on all the brakes he had and hope to hit the sedan lightly enough not to kill whoever was in it.

During the three quarters of a second it took, Marshall to make his decision, the big rig traveled nearly sixty feet. He jammed his foot down on the gas and gave a blast with the big air horns and swung left, risking the head-on. At the speed he was traveling he would not be in the left lane more than two long seconds.

He leaned forward and stared ahead, looking for the twin glow of oncoming dim lights. He plunged past the gray sedan. He saw something ahead of him and he snapped the big rig back into the right lane, cutting dangerously close to the sedan. As he cut back he saw that the object he had seen was the thick concrete railing of a bridge. It was the bridge over the Waccasassa, but he did not know that. He felt the skid of the two sets of duals on the rear of the trailer. He saw the thick rain-wet railing on the right side, saw the rain bouncing from it, haloing it. The trailer kept skidding, and he felt it slam against the concrete. It did not seem to be a hard impact. But in the next moment the cab was angled toward the concrete on the left side and he felt the dizzy sense of the whole rig tipping. As it went over he suddenly seemed to get the words right in his mind, the exact way he could tell Grace and make her understand.

The heavy cab smashed into the thick railing, burst through it, and pieces of reinforced concrete as big as bushel baskets fell into the river. By then cab and trailer lay on their right side, sliding with a raw noise of ripping metal, sliding, wedging the big trailer crosswise across the bridge, jamming it solidly between the two bridge railings. The tractor, having punched its hole through the east railing, was nipped off by the continuing motion of the trailer and fell into the shallow’ river, making one further quarter-turn as it fell, landing with the four heavy wheels in the air, then settling, sighing, suckling against the mud of the bottom, air bubbles bursting against the rain-lashed surface.

A few minutes later a car of the Florida State Highway Patrol, traveling north, braked sharply as the young driver saw the curious obstruction across the road. The driver put on the red flashing dome light and got out and inspected the barrier. It took him a moment to figure out that it was the roof of a big cargo trailer. He climbed onto the bridge railing and eased his way past, and he saw how forcibly the trailer had wedged itself into that position. It would be a long difficult job getting it free and out of the way.

Three cars were piled up on the other side. The elderly and indignant couple in the gray car that was the first in line said it had just happened. The patrolman went down onto the river bank, stripped down to his underwear and went into the river. On the second try he got the door open and brought the driver out of the cab and towed him ashore. The left temple area and the whole left frontal lobe was crushed, and the driver was dead.

He dressed, hurried back to his car and radioed in and told of the situation. After a short delay, he was told that he should check the old detour and see if it was still passable. Truck traffic would be rerouted at Otter Creek on the north and Inglis on the south. Other cars would be dispatched at once and, if he reported the detour passable, passenger cars should be routed over it. Wreckers were being dispatched to the scene.

The patrolman drove over the route and radioed in that it was okay for one way traffic. By then cars were beginning to pile up at both ends. The other trooper arrived. They set up their routing system, sending the cars through from each end in alternate batches, telling them not to straggle, but take it slow on the sand road, and on the wooden bridges.

And so passenger traffic rolled cautiously over the old detour, over the two wooden bridges, by the grim old house between the bridges, back out onto the highway. They felt their way through a half-world of gray driving rain. They inched across the old timbers of the bridges. The big pines swayed. The wind sound increased. The two patrolmen, parked four miles apart, blocked the highway and the red dome lights flashed in the murk. They were glad traffic was thin.

Virginia Sherrel drove north through the Wednesday rain in the blue-and-white Dodge convertible that she and her husband, David, had picked out together for the vacation they were to take — the vacation that David had finally taken alone. She drove north alone, the way David had driven south.

She had not liked the idea of an urn. The very word had the sound of a funeral bell. Bell? Fragment of an old pun: the New Hampshire farmhouse, on honeymoon. They had walked too far, and it had begun to rain, and they had run back. And David had knelt and taken the hem of her tweed skirt and twisted the water out of it and, smiling up at her, said, “Wring out wild belle.”

Not the sound of “urn.” And the urn itself had made a sound when the undertaker, with an almost grotesque callousness, had taken one down from a shelf and opened the screw top with a shrill grating sound and then held it out to her — and she, caught up in the wicked pantomime, had leaned forward a bit and stared inanely down into it and said, “No, I don’t think so.” Not for David.

So it was a box. A flat bronze box, not quite as long or as deep as a cigar box. With a discreet border design, a small catch. The undertaker had snapped the catch three times.

It was in the trunk compartment of the car, and she knew how it was wrapped. Back in the hotel in Sarasota she had closed the room door behind her and made certain it was locked, and then she had untied the cord, unwrapped the cardboard box.

Inside the cardboard box, the bronze box lay wrapped in tissue, resting on a nest of tissue. As she unwrapped it she thought of the presents they had given each other. David had once said, “I think I really like to see you unwrap presents. Such intense absorption! And all the sensuous little delays, such as untieing knots instead of cutting them.”

And this is your final present, David.

She lifted the bronze box and looked wonderingly at the fine grayish ash. She touched it lightly with her finger. It was soft and a few flakes adhered to the moisture of her finger tip, and she brushed them off. Here is all of you, my love. She closed the lid and it snapped as it had in the undertaker’s showroom. She wrapped it in the tissue, closed the cardboard box and wrapped it in the brown paper. She went over and stretched out on the bed. Gift from David. Gift of himself.