Hurricane

Chapter 5

Slow traffic bypassed the Waccasassa Bridge where technicians worked to free the jammed truck-trailer. Heavy rain and traffic had made the detour more difficult. There was a policeman at each end of the detour. The last car in each small group that went through carried a sodden red rag on a stick to be given to the officer at the far end. They were able to pass alternate batches of passenger cars through at approximately twenty-minute intervals. It was dull, unpleasant duty.

The policeman on the south end of the detour was named Stark. He was bored, yet apprehensive of the increasing force of the wind. The rain was ceasing. But the gusts of wind were so strong that he often had to fight for balance. The radio in his car was turned high and the car was parked where he could hear it. At one-thirty he sent a batch of seven cars through and began to accumulate another group. The group of seven was large. The smallest group had been two. The storm was emptying the highways.

He prepared himself for the same repetitious questions when the first car pulled up, a dark-blue Cadillac, a new one. He flagged it down and went over to it. The driver rolled the window down. He was a balding, ginger-headed man with a red-faced look of importance.

“What goes on?” he demanded, raising his voice to carry over the wind sound. Stark recognized a local accent.

Stark repeated what he had said so many times. Detour. Bridge blocked by an accident. Shouldn’t be too long a wait. The detour was four miles long, sand and shell. Two wooden bridges. Have to take it slow.

The second car was a heavily loaded station wagon with a youngish couple and two kids. They asked the expected questions, got the same answers. He noticed as he stood next to the car on the righthand side, talking across the blonde woman, talking to her tired-looking husband, that the wind was making the halted car sway.

The next car was a welcome break in the monotony. Stark recognized it as a Mercedes-Benz, but he had never had a chance to get close to one. There was a couple in it, a good-looking athletic sort of guy and a girl who was not so good-looking, but looked like money.

After Stark had explained the delay, they talked about the car and then about the hurricane. Stark said, “They keep telling me it’s headed for Texas, but it feels like it’s coming here.” The gusts were beginning to seem solid enough to lean on. Now that the rain had practically stopped, the sky was a peculiar yellowish color.

The fourth car was a dark-green Plymouth with a husky hard-faced man traveling alone. He had fewer questions than the others. He did not seem to resent the delay. But he looked as if he was the type who would. Stark was wondering whether it would be smart to get a look at the driver’s license when the fifth car came up, a blue-and-white Dodge convertible with one woman in it. She was the best-looking woman of the day. Stark had been keeping a mental box score. She was pleasant to him, and it was almost a pleasure to answer the same tired old questions.

The next time he glanced toward the detour he saw the first of the group of southbound cars come lumbering and laboring up out of it onto the highway, straighten out and begin to pick up speed. There were six cars and the last one had the flag. He could see nothing coming along the windswept highway, so he gave the good-looking woman the flag and told her to take it slow.

He watched the cars disappear cautiously down the detour. A truly massive gust of wind came along. It slammed against him and drove him back. He had to turn and take several running steps to catch his balance. He cursed, more in awe than anger. He heard the sound of his radio over the wind noise and pushed through the wind toward his car.

“Stark? The hurricane has changed direction. It’s moving in on the coast and pushing one hell of a high tide in front of it. Don’t send any more cars through. Head south slowly and stop anything you find coming at you and turn ’em back. Tell them to find shelter. This could be a bad one. Block the road at Lebanon Station and keep in touch. I think we’re all going to be kept busy.”

Stark headed slowly south, dome light flashing, wind swaying the sedan. On impulse he pushed the siren and kept it on. The sound seemed frail and lost in the new high wail of the great wind.

The Australian pine was a huge one, very near the end of its life span and beginning to die. It stood on the north bank of the Waccasassa River, thirty feet west of the wooden bridge over the main part of the river.

The same gust that had driven Stark across the road struck the old tree moments before reaching Stark. There was a faint ripping, crackling sound, and the flat root structure was pulled slowly up on the west side of the tree. The tree fell slowly at first and then more quickly. It brought up square yards of black, soaked soil with it. It fell thickly, heavily, onto the north end of the wooden bridge. The great weight of it in free fall smashed the tough old timbers. The bridge folded and sagged, supported the weight for a few seconds, and then with small harsh noises as old spikes were pulled from weathered wood, bridge and tree sank into the swollen Waccasassa.

The caravan of six cars came nosing cautiously down the detour. The caravan crossed the first bridge, the blue Cadillac leading. The cars jounced over limbs that had fallen into the road. They passed the ugly deserted old house. The road turned slightly. The lead car came to the bridge and stopped.

“Damn!” Johnny Flagan said explosively.

“That tree came down right across the bridge,” Charlie Himbermark said excitedly.

“You can sure figure things out, Charlie.”

“Don’t take it out on me.”

“We got to get out of here.” He pushed his door open and got out and looked back. The cars were piled up behind him. He looked at the soft deep ditches on either side of the road. Johnny was thankful that nobody started leaning on the horn. He made his decision quickly. He walked back to the last car in line. A pretty woman was at the wheel. She looked nervous.

“We got to get turned around,” he yelled. “The bridge is out up there. Can you back this to that house back there and get it turned around?”

The woman nodded. Johnny went to each car in turn and got them started backing cautiously. It might be all right after all. Get out of here and go back south to the fork and cut over to 41 and head north again. Not too much delay. Not enough to be critical. He directed the traffic, keeping his heavy body braced against the wind, keeping the other cars from backing too close to the rudimentary driveway at the house until, one by one, they got turned around. He went back to his own car at a heavy-footed panting run. He backed up with fast reckless precision, spun the big car and headed south for not over thirty feet before he came upon the station wagon halted ahead of him.

“Now what?” he demanded and got out again. Some of the others had got out, too. They stood by the convertible and looked at the bridge they had just crossed.

Johnny Flagan saw the trouble and for the first time he felt a light brush of panic. He calmed himself with an effort. The lesser branch of the Waccasassa curved at the point where the bridge was placed. The water was very high and it was moving swiftly. Debris bumped against the bridge. On the far side the water had dug into the bank and the far end of the forty foot bridge had dropped nearly a foot and a half. It must have been ready to drop when they came over it. Flagan noted that, in spite of the heavy rain, the water was coming upriver rather than flowing toward the gulf. The tide must be coming in faster than the runoff.

He opened the car door and said to the woman, “Think you could make it? Get a little start and you maybe could plow up that little bitty hump over there.”

The woman’s face was white, her lips pressed tightly together. She shook her head.

Flagan made another decision. “Get out then and let me try. If it works you can come over in another car.”

Again she shook her head. He felt outraged. The fool woman would keep him from that life and death appointment in Georgia. He took her roughly by the arm and hauled her out of the car. He’d make the far side and holler back that he was going for help. He’d send help back and head for Georgia. It wasn’t like stealing. She could have the Cadillac if he messed up her car. There wasn’t time to explain that to her.

She pulled at him as he got into her car. He pushed her back and the combination of the push and the force of the wind knocked her down. A man was coming toward the car, a big husky man with a look of anger. Johnny Flagan pulled the door shut. The motor was running. He put the automatic transmission into low and headed across the bridge, picking up speed as he went. The far end was under water. Water sprayed up from the tires and was whipped away by the wind. He hit the far bank with an impact that drove him forward against the wheel. The front end bounced up high, came down with front wheels above the edge. He gunned it and felt the back wheels spin. He felt the bridge settle under the car. Now the hood was pointed up at such an angle he could not see the road. Still he raced the motor.

The bridge shuddered and dropped further. Water got a broader grip on the side of the car. The back end began to swing. Johnny Flagan yelled shrilly and got the door open as the car toppled off the bridge, breaking through the cracker-brittle railing. Something caught at him and pulled him under. He fought and ripped free as he sucked brackish water into his lungs. The great fear of his whole life was filling him like an unending scream. The other men of his family had drowned in the Gulf. He would have drowned had he been along. In his secret heart he knew that the fates had meant him to drown. He could not swim. He had never been in a boat since that drowning of long ago. He tried to scream under water. Then he broke through the surface. The current had spun him. He could not tell which bank he had tried to climb. He flapped at the water, coughing and choking. Something caught hold of him and he turned, reaching for it. There was an explosion against his chin. From then on it was like a gray dream. He was aware of being towed to the bank, of being dragged up onto the shore like some exhausted fish, but he could not move.

He was rolled over and hard hands pressed against his thick waist. He coughed the brackish water from his lungs. He twisted away from the punishing hands. After a time they left him alone. He lay with his cheek against the soaked ground, breathing heavily, recovering his strength.

And then he remembered. His right hand, half curled, was close to his eyes — a thick white hand with the curled reddish hair growing thickly on the back and between the knuckles of the fingers. He moved his hand cautiously. He moved it down and turned slightly onto his side so that he could reach into the left inside breast pocket of his suit coat. The envelope was there. It was sodden, but it was there. The ultimate disaster could yet be staved off.

He got laboriously to his feet, weaving under the impact of the wind. They had moved the cars close to the deserted house. The door was open: being in the front of the house, it was shielded from the wind. They were carrying things in from the cars, all of them working. A small boy appeared in the doorway of the house, staring out at the storm. He was quickly snatched back out of sight.

Flagan felt sick at his stomach. If he’d had any sense, he thought, he would have crossed the bridge on foot. He looked at the stream. Bridge and blue and white convertible were utterly gone. He plodded toward the house. He saw Charlie Himbermark come out and look toward him and then start walking toward him. Better come look out for me. Where has he been? He’d better remember who puts the butter on his bread.

Flagan decided to stand and wait for him. They’d go together. Go down the shoreline. Had to be a place to get across somewhere. When Himbermark got beyond the protection of the house, the wind caught at him, hastening him along in a ridiculous trot. Flagan saw some of the other people watching Himbermark, the couple from the foreign car, the big, dark sullen looking guy, the thin man from the station wagon.

And Flagan saw the tree that stood in the side yard of the house. He saw it start to fall. He knew in that moment where and how it would fall, and knew he could do nothing about it. He yelled, but the wind tore the words and flung them behind him. He saw Charlie Himbermark, warned in some unknown way, look back up over his shoulder and stare at the black wet trunk and try to turn and scramble out of the way. But his feet slid on the wet ground and the wind pushed against him and. in the slowest of motion, Flagan saw the black trunk touch the small frail man and, continuing, crush him down against the wet soil and then, shifting slightly, settle more inevitably, irrevocably against the earth.

Flagan turned and pressed his back against the wind and was ill. When he turned back a whirring palm frond struck his face, stem first, cutting him below the eye. He looked at the blood on his fingers and plodded toward the house. He had to clamber over the trunk of the tree. He did not look toward the place where it rested on the crushed body of Himbermark.

The highway patrolman at the north end of the detour had received the same orders as Stark. He was heading north, turning back traffic. The attempt to clear the bridge was suspended. The coastal power and phone lines had begun to go. Driven by hurricane winds, the tides began to hammer the beach resorts. There were last-minute evacuations of exposed keys. Radio stations switched to private generators.

Yet the main force of the hurricane had not yet reached the coast. The great property damage thus far was water damage. The huge tides smashed sea walls, sucking filled land out through the gaps in the shattered concrete, and the shore houses collapsed as fill was sucked out from under them.

Tidal water came up over beaches, across shore roads, moving into houses set hundreds of feet back from the normal high-tide mark. Thousands of sand bags were being filled as people fought to save their homes.

— Emergency Warning Service. All coastal facilities. 2:12 P.M. It now appears that the eye of the hurricane, Hilda, will intersect the coast line in the vicinity of Cedar Key and Waccasassa Bay. Unless there is a change in speed or direction, this intersection should take place at approximately 4:30. Evacuation of all exposed properties from Dead Man’s Bay to Tarpon Springs is recommended.

When Hal Dorn came back into the house. Jean looked up at him, half-smiling, hoping to show him by her expression that she could control her own fear. But when she saw the odd sick expression on his face, her half-smile faded and she got quickly to her feet and went to him.

“What is it, darling? What’s the matter?” She was afraid he was slipping back into resignation and defeat after showing such decisiveness when faced by this emergency.

Hal motioned for Mrs. Sherrel to join them. He sent Stevie back to the corner, to the blankets, out of earshot.

“It was the old fellow. Now I can’t even remember his name.”

“Himbermark,” Mrs. Sherrel said. “He told me it was Himbermark.”

“He was going to help his friend, Flagan. The one who took your car. Tree just came down on him. That big one at the side of the house. He didn’t have a chance.”

Jean gave a little cry of shock, and Virginia Sherrel closed her eyes for a long moment. Hal took his wife by the arm and said, “Stevie may ask about him. If he does, tell him that the old man went after help or something. Understand?”

“Yes, dear,” she said. She saw that the look of shock was gone from his face, saw that once again he seemed to be well in control of himself and the situation. It gave her a curious attitude toward this emergency, this entrapment — a feeling almost of gratitude.

When they had been driving north before it had happened, he had been so very different — remote, uncommunicative — driving along with his thin strong hands on the wheel, knuckles whitened by the strength of his grip. She had seen the odd color of the sky, gray, luminous, faintly yellowed. The look of the sky had made her sense how small they were and how very vulnerable.

All her life she had been vulnerable to the moods of the weather. A bright warm day meant holiday. Heavy winter snows made her feel hushed and secretive. On days of rain she wanted to weep. On this day she had been unable to keep her mind from returning constantly, gingerly, to the thought that they were moving swiftly toward some unimaginable catastrophe, some great disaster.

She remembered reading that, when the barometer was low, it induced an atavistic nervousness and tension in people. It seemed a primitive warning. And she told herself that, with a hurricane in the area, her sense of foreboding had its logical explanation — it was not strange she should feel alarm without any real basis for it. Also, there was another accountable factor. During the early months of pregnancy with both Stevie and Jan she had been moody, depressed. Only in the later months had she achieved a warm, deep sense of waiting and growing and flourishing.

Yet despite all rationalization she could not avoid the recurrent moments of something akin to panic. Once when the car had swayed with a new violence she had gasped. Then she had tried to tell Hal of her fears, but he had been curt with her, so curt and unpleasant she had turned away from him to look out the side window where the landscape was blurred by the warm sting of the tears in her eyes.

Then he had said, after a time, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“Yes, I suppose it’s all right. The magic forgiveness. The automatic forbearance. No, I don’t mean that either. Don’t pay any attention to me, Jeanie. I’m in foul mood. And now, for God’s sake, don’t say ‘That’s all right’ again.”

It had been easier to say nothing. He was too full of his own defeat. Too far into the blindness of self-pity. She wondered how and why he had lost his resilience, the core of his courage. Or had he been without it from the beginning — and she had simply not known it because this was the first time it had been tested?

She had felt shocked and ashamed of her own disloyalty. Hal had certainly not given up readily. He had maintained his spirits for a long time, even after he had undertaken the exhausting manual labor in the warehouse. Yet when he had given up, when he had wept, he had given up all the way, unlocking all the gates and surrendering all the turrets. She sensed that the collapse was related to his family, to his background. Defeat, to Hal, was the unthinkable thing — the thing that could not have happened.

As they had neared the blocked road, she had been wondering how much better it would have been for him had he not had the burden of wife, two children, and new child to come. Perhaps in his curtness and irritability there was a flavoring of resentment.

The policeman had explained about the detour when they had stopped behind the blue Cadillac. Stevie and Jan had begun to get a whining note in their voices during the boring wait, and she knew they were getting hungry. She had given them the box of fig newtons from the glove compartment with severe injunction to share fairly.

At last they were permitted to go ahead in cautious convoy. It was a primitive road that moved in aimless curves across scrub flats and then dipped toward heavier trees, crossed a precarious wooden bridge, passed a house set in a grove of big trees, a house that looked gloomy and brooding in the strange light. Hal had stopped when the Cadillac stopped, and they had looked ahead and seen the big tree down and the ruin of the second bridge.

During the next fifteen minutes, during the time they had backed and turned around, and found the other bridge impassable — during the episode of the car’s going into the river, the rescue, the moving of the remaining cars close to the house — Jean Dorn had lost her own fears as she had witnessed the transformation of Hal.

At first he had seemed annoyed, bleak, passive — as though he considered this as just another black weight added to the scales that had tilted so radically against him. And then the change had come. She had seen it come, and it had made her heart glad. She knew that he had forgotten himself and his own private problems. With forgetfulness had returned the habit of decision and command. His expression was changed. More alert, more intent. His posture was different. He moved and walked with a briskness. During that time he was not a defeated man.

It was Hal who moved quickly to help get the half-drowned man out of the river, beckoning to the husky blond man to help him. It was Hal who calmly surveyed the swollen river and turned and looked at the house and then, over the wind sound, called to all of them to get the cars close to the house. The others had accepted his decision without question, willing in emergency to respond to orders that made sense and were given in the proper tone by someone who worked hard along with them. Hal had organized the carrying-in of the luggage from the cars and had requested that all blankets, robes, heavy coats be brought into the house. And, somehow, while the work was going on, while they were settling in, he had not only managed to make them all known to each other, but he had created among them the feeling of being a group working wisely and well toward a common end.

It made Jean’s heart full to see this re-creation of the man he had been before he had learned about defeat. His was not an ersatz confidence, but rather the quiet control of a man used to accepting authority and responsibility. The group responded to him, and she was proud of him. Because of his efforts they had, in a short time, accepted the old house as refuge. Hal and the blond man, Bunny Hollis, had broken the lock of the old door. The inside floor was reasonably sound. All the windows were shuttered, but the shutters fit poorly and had cracked and spread in the weather so that pale light came into the rooms.

When Hal had introduced her to Virginia Sherrel, he had said, “Mrs. Sherrel lost all her luggage in that car, honey. Falling in the mud didn’t do her any good. Don’t you have something that would fit her?”

“This,” said Mrs. Sherrel, “seems to be dungaree weather, if you have some.”

Jean reached for a suitcase. “I have some, and a blue work shirt. They should fit, I think.”

Jean and Virginia and the kids were the only ones in the house when Jean had looked up and seen Hal come back in and had seen in the faint light the strange expression on his face. For several bad moments she thought he had reverted to his previous mood of passive resignation. Then he took the two of them aside from the kids and told them what had happened. Jean saw, with both relief and gratitude, that he had not changed back. He was still in charge, still able and alert. Virginia went back to find a place where she could change.

Hal Dorn turned and watched Flagan come into the room. Malden pulled the door shut. Flagan didn’t look at any of them. He walked over and sat down with his back against a wall. His wet clothes dripped water on the floor. He lowered his face against upraised knees. Hal ended the short, curious silence by saying to Malden, “Let’s take a look around and see what we’ve got here.”

Malden nodded. Hal realized how glad he felt about the interruption to the trip. This was better than driving and thinking the long bitter thoughts of discouragement. He knew that later it would be the same again, but for now it was good to have something to do, plans to make. With intelligence, and some luck, they should come out of this all right.