Without a Hero

ACTS OF GOD

HE’D BEEN MARRIED BEFORE, and now he was married again. The last wife, Dixie, had taken the house, the car, the dog, the blender and his collection of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey records. The wife before that, Margot, had been his first, and he’d known her since he’d worn shoulder pads and spikes and she cried out his name from the sidelines, her big chocolate eyes wide with excitement and the black bobbed hair cutting a Spanish fringe across her brow; she’d taken the first house, the children and his self-respect. Muriel was different. She was a force upon the earth, an act of God, demanding, unshakable, born a queen, an empress, born to dictate and command. She took everything that was left.

And there wasn’t a whole lot of that. Willis was seventy-five years old — seventy-six, come October — he had some money in CDs and an undeveloped lot or two, he owned a pair of classic 1972 Ford Fairlanes—“classic” being a code word for junk — and he was so weak in the hips he had to work on his feet for fear he wouldn’t be able to get up again once he sat down. And work he did. He was a builder, a master builder, and he’d been in the trade for sixty years, working with the pride and compulsion his mother had instilled in him in a bygone era. No retirement villages for him, no putting greens or clubhouses. If you’re not working you might as well be dead, that’s how he saw it. And it wasn’t as if he had a choice — Muriel would never let him retire, or rest even. She worked him like a mule and he bowed his head and did what was expected of him.

For her part, Muriel had been married four times, counting the present arrangement. She’d pretty well forgotten the middle two husbands — tired men, tired under the eyes, in the blood, in bed — but the first had been a saint. Handsome, a saxophone player with wavy dark hair and a perfect little Ronald Colman mustache — and rich, too. His father owned a whole constellation of rental properties and a resort in the Catskills, with a lake and a casino and quaint little bungalows that looked as if they’d been lifted off their foundations in the English countryside and transported, lock, stock and barrel, to Gaudinet Lake. The shoulders on that man, Lester Gaudinet…she didn’t know why she’d ever divorced him. Of course, she had Willis now, and he was all right — if she kept after him. Still, as she sat through the long afternoons with a bottle of Petite-Sirah, clipping things from the newspaper, baking roasts and hams and pies enough for an army though she wouldn’t eat two bites herself and Willis, even with his appetite, couldn’t begin to make a dent in them, she couldn’t help pining, just a bit, for Lester Gaudinet and the lilting breathy rhapsody of his saxophone, and she couldn’t help feeling that at sixty-eight, life had begun to pass her by.

It was a close brooding morning in late September, and Willis was up at six, as usual, washing last night’s dishes, sweeping up, sneaking a half-eaten leg of lamb coated with a greenish fluorescent fuzz into the trash. He fetched the newspaper from the front lawn and was about to sit down over a cup of coffee and a slice of toast when he discovered that they were out of Vita-Health Oat Bran Nutri-Nugget bread. Each morning for her breakfast, which Willis prepared with care and trepidation before hurrying off to the job site, Muriel had two slices, lightly toasted and dry, of Vita-Health Oat Bran Nutri-Nugget bread with a two-minute, twenty-seven-second egg, six ounces of fresh-squeezed Florida orange juice and three thimble-sized cups of espresso. If she was difficult in the evening, when all he wanted was to collapse in front of the TV with a tall scotch and water, she was impossible in the morning, crawling out of the blood-red cave of her insomniac’s sleep like a lioness poked with a stick, and he’d long since learned the survival value of presenting her with the placebo of a flawless breakfast. Willis squinted in vain into the cavernous depths of the breadbox and understood that he had a full-blown crisis on his hands.

A sunless dawn was breaking beyond the windows and it filled the kitchen with a sick hopeless light. For a moment Willis stood there at the counter, gaping round him as if he didn’t recognize the place, and then he got hold of himself and fastened on the thought of the twenty-four-hour Quick-Stop on the corner. Would they have it? Not a chance, he decided, mentally browsing the bright but niggardly shelves — beer they had, yes, cigarettes, pornographic magazines, candy, videotape, gum — but who needed bread? He could already picture the six stale loaves of Wonder bread stiffening in their wrappers, but he fished his Mets cap out of the closet, stepped out the front door and crossed the dewy lawn to the car, figuring he had nothing to lose.

Outside, as he stood fumbling with the keys at the door of Muriel’s car — they called it Muriel’s car because she’d insisted on buying the thing though she’d been raised in the city and had never been behind the wheel of a car in her life — he was struck by something in the air. What was it? There was a raw smell of the ocean, much stronger than usual, and the atmosphere seemed to brood over him, heavy, damp, the pull and tug of a thousand tiny fingers. And the birds — where were the birds? There was no sound except for the rattle of a truck out on the highway…but then he really didn’t have time to dawdle and smell the breeze and linger over the little mysteries of life like some loopy-eyed kid on his way to school, and he ducked into the car, fired up the mufflerless engine with a roar and shriek that set every dog in the neighborhood howling — and there was noise now, noise to spare — and rumbled up the road for the Quick-Stop.

The man behind the counter gave a violent start when Willis stepped through the door but relaxed almost immediately — the store had been robbed once or twice a week for as long as Willis could remember, and he supposed they had a right to be nervous. He shuffled up to the counter, patting his pockets unconsciously to locate his wallet, keys and checkbook, and said, “Bread?” making a question of it. The clerk was small, slight, dark-skinned, and he peered up at Willis in mute incomprehension, as if he’d been speaking another language, which in fact he had: Willis didn’t know what the man was — Pakistani, Puerto Rican or Pathan — but it was apparent that English was not his first language. “Pan?” Willis tried, tossing out a nugget of the Spanish he’d picked up in Texas during the war, The man stared at him out of deep-set eyes. He must have been twenty-one — he’d have to be to work here — but to Willis, from the perspective of his accumulating years, the man was a boy, absurdly young, twelve, ten years old, a baby. The boy/man raised a languid arm and pointed, and Willis moved off in the direction indicated. Pasta, kitty litter, nachos…and there it was, sure enough — bread, sandwiched between the suntan oil and disposable diapers. A sad little collection of hot-dog buns, pita bread, tortillas and a single fortified nut loaf greeted him: there was no Vita-Health Oat Bran Nutri-Nugget bread. What did he expect, miracles?

When he shuffled back into the kitchen, running late now, the fortified nut loaf tucked like a football under his arm, he had a shock: Muriel was up. There were telltale traces of her on the counter, at the door of the refrigerator and on the base of the coffeemaker. He saw where yesterday’s grounds had been flung at the trash can and dribbled down the wall behind it, saw where she’d set her cup down on the stove and where she’d torn through the cabinet in search of her pills and artificial sweetener; in the same moment the muted rumble of the TV came to him from the next room. He was fumbling with the espresso machine, hurrying, the framers due at seven-thirty and the plumber at eight, when she appeared in the doorway.

Muriel’s face composed itself around the point of her Scotch-Irish nose and the tight little pout of her stingy lips. She was short and busty, and the tips of her toes peeked out from beneath the hem of her nightgown. “Where the hell have you been?” she demanded.

He turned to the stove. A jolt of pain shot through his hips — there was weather coming, he could feel it. “We were out of bread, sweetie,” he said, presenting the side of his face to her as he spooned the eggs from their shells. “I had to go down to the Quick-Stop.”

This seemed to placate her, and she subsided into the living room and huddled over her coffee mug in front of the TV screen. Willis could see the TV from the kitchen, where he popped the toast, brewed the espresso and squeezed the oranges. A chirpy woman with a broad blond face and hair that might have been spun sugar was chirping something about weight loss and a new brand of cracker made from seaweed. Willis arranged Muriel’s things on a tray and brought them in to her.

She gave him a hard look as he set the tray down on the coffee table, but then she smiled and grabbed his arm to pull his face down, peck him a kiss and tell him how much he spoiled her. “Got to go, sweetie,” he murmured, already backing away, already thinking of the car, the road, the house by the ocean that was rising before his eyes like a dream made concrete.

“You’ll be home for lunch?”

“Yes, sweetie,” he murmured, and then he made a fatal miscalculation: he lingered there before the glowing ball of the TV. The weatherman, in a silly suit and bow tie and mugging like a shill, had replaced the chirping confection of a woman, and Willis lingered — he’d smelled the weather on the air and felt it in his hips, and he was briefly curious. After all, he was going to be out in it all day long.

It was at that moment that Muriel’s cry rose up out of the depths of the couch as from the ringside seats at a boxing match — harsh, querulous, the voice of disbelief and betrayal. “And what do you call this?” she boomed, nullifying the weatherman, his maps and pointers and satellite photos, the TV itself.

“What, sweetie?” Willis managed, his voice a small scuttling thing receding into its hole. The windows were gray. The weatherman blathered about wind velocity and temperature readings.

“This, this toast.”

“They didn’t have your bread, sweetie, and Waldbaum’s won’t be open for another hour yet—”

“You son of a bitch.” Suddenly she was on her feet, red-faced and panting for breath. “Didn’t I tell you I wanted to go shopping last night? Didn’t I tell you I needed things?”

They’d been together for two years now, and Willis knew there was no reasoning with her, not at this hour, not before she’d had her eggs and toast, not before she’d been sedated by the parade of game shows and soap operas that marched relentlessly through her mornings. All he could do was slump his shoulders penitently and edge toward the door.

But she anticipated him, darting furiously at him and crying, “That’s right, leave me, go on off to work and leave me here, you son of a bitch!” She was in a mood, she could do anything, he knew it, and he shrank away from her as she changed course suddenly, jerked back from him and snatched up the breakfast tray in an explosion of crockery, cutlery and searing black liquid. “Toast!” she shrieked, “you call this toast!?” And then, as he watched in horror, the tray itself sailed across the room like a heat-seeking missile, sure and swift, dodging the lamp and coasting over the crest of the couch to discover its inevitable target in the grinning, winking, pointer-wielding image of the weatherman.

Later, after Willis had gone off to work and Muriel had had a chance to calm herself and reflect on the annihilation of the TV and the espresso stains on the rug, she felt ashamed and repentant. She’d let her nerves get the better of her and she was wrong, she’d be the first to admit it. And not only that, but who had she hurt but herself — it was like murdering her only friend, cutting herself off from the world like a nun in a convent — worse: at least a nun had her prayers. The repairman — in her grief and confusion she very nearly dialed 911, and she was so distraught when she finally got through to him that he was there before a paramedic would even have got his jacket on — the repairman told her it was hopeless. The picture tube was shot and the best thing to do was just go out to Caldor and buy herself a new set, and then he named half-a-dozen Japanese brands and she lost control all over again. She’d be god-damned and roasted three times over in hell before she’d ever buy anything from a Jap after what they did to her brother in the war and what was he, the repairman, an American or what? Didn’t he know how they laughed at us, the Japs? He hit his van on the run and didn’t look back.

It was 10:00 A.M. Willis was at work, the weather was rotten and she was missing “Hollywood Squares” and couldn’t even salve her hurt with the consolation of shopping — not till Willis came home, anyway. God, he was such a baby, she thought as she sat there at the kitchen table over a black and bitter cup of espresso. He’d been a real mess when she’d met him — the last wife had squeezed him like a dishrag and hung him out to dry. His clothes were filthy, he was drunk from morning till night, he’d been fired from his last three jobs and the car he was driving was like a coffin on wheels. She’d made a project of him. She’d rescued him, given him a home and clean underwear and hankies, and if he thanked her a hundred times a day it wouldn’t be enough. If she kept the reins tight, it was because she had to. Let him go — even for an hour — and he’d come home three days later stinking of gin and vomit.

The house was silent as a tomb. She gazed out the window; the clouds hung low and roiled over the roof, strung out like sausage, like entrails, black with blood and bile. There was a storm watch on, she’d heard that much on the “Morning” show, and again she felt a tug of regret over the TV. She wanted to get up that minute and turn on the news channel, but the news channel was no more — not for her, at any rate. There was the radio — and she experienced a sudden sharp stab of nostalgia for her girlhood and the nights when the whole family would crowd around the big Emerson console and listen to one program after another — but these days she never listened; it just gave her a headache. And with Willis around, who needed another headache?

She thought of the newspaper then and pushed herself up from the table to poke through the living room for it — if there was anything serious, a hurricane or something, they’d have a story on the front page. She was thinking about that, fixating on the newspaper, and she forgot all about the TV, so that when she stepped through the door, the sight of it gave her a shock. She’d swept up the broken glass, feeling chastened and heartbroken, but now the shattered screen accused her all over again. Guiltily, she shuffled through the heap of papers and magazines stuffed under the coffee table, then poked through the bedroom and finally went outside to comb the front lawn. No newspaper. Of all days, Willis must have taken it to work with him. And suddenly, standing there on the hushed and gray lawn in her housecoat and slippers, she was furious again. The son of a bitch. He never thought of her, never. Now she had the whole drizzling black miserable day ahead of her — TV-less, friendless, joyless — and she didn’t even have the consolation of the newspaper.

While she was standing there out front of the house, poking halfheartedly under the bushes and noticing how shabby a job the gardener had done — and he’d hear from her, by god he would — a big brown UPS van glided into the driveway with a gentle sigh of the brakes. The driver was a young man, handsome, broad-shouldered, and for a minute she had a vision of Lester Gaudinet as he was all those many years ago. Lester Gaudinet. And where was he now? God knew if he was even alive still…but how she’d like to see him, wouldn’t that be something?

“Mrs. Willis Blythe?” The man had crossed the lawn and he stood at her elbow now, a parcel tucked under his arm.

“Yes,” she said, and the wind came up and took her hair out of its bun.

The man held out a clipboard to her, pages flapping. “Sign here,” he said, handing her a pen. and she saw a list of names and signatures and the big red X he’d scrawled beside the space for her name.

She took the clipboard from him and smiled up into his sea-green eyes, into Lester’s eyes, and she couldn’t help trying to hold on to the moment. “Rotten day,” she said.

He looked tense, anxious, looked as if he were about to lunge out of the blocks and disappear down a cinder track. “Hurricane weather,” he said. “Supposed to miss us except for some rain later on — that’s what the radio says, anyway.”

She held the clipboard in her hand still and she bent forward to sign the form, but then a thought occurred to her and she straightened up again. “Hurricanes,” she said with a little snort of contempt. “And I suppose it’s called Bill or Fred or something like that — not like in the old days, when they had the sense to name them after women. It’s a shame, isn’t it?”

The UPS man was shuffling his feet on the spongy carpet of the lawn. “Yeah,” he said, “sure — but would you sign, please, ma’am? I’ve got—”

She held up her hand to forestall him. God, he was handsome — the image of Lester. Of course, Lester had the mustache and he was taller and his eyes were prettier, brighter somehow…“I know, I know — you’ve got a million deliveries to make.” She gave him a bright steady look. “It’s women that’re like hurricanes, they used to understand that”—was she flirting with him? Yes, of course she was—“but now it’s Hurricane Tom, Dick or Harry. It just makes you sick, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I know, but—”

“Okay, okay already, I’m signing.” She inscribed his delivery sheet for him in the neat geometric script she’d mastered in parochial school in another age and then turned her coquette’s smile on him — why not, was she so old it was impossible? Not in this world, not with the things that went on on TV these days. She touched his arm and held it a moment as he handed her the package. “Thank you,” she murmured. “You’re so handsome, do you know that?”

And then he stood there like an oaf, like a schoolboy, and he actually blushed. “Yes, yes,” he stammered, “I mean no, I mean thank you,” and then he was darting across the lawn with his clipboard flapping and the wind took her hair again. “Have a nice day!” she called, but he didn’t hear her.

Inside, she examined the package briefly—The Frinstell Corporation, the label read — and then she went into the sewing room to fetch her scissors. The Frinstell Corporation, she thought, running it over in her mind, and what was this all about? She was forever clipping things out of magazines and sending away for them — once-in-a-lifetime offers and that sort of thing — but Frinstell didn’t ring a bell. It took her a moment, the scissors gleaming dully in the crepuscular light of the kitchen, and then she had the tape slit up the seam and she was digging through the welter of tissue paper stuffed inside. And there — oh yes, of course — there was her genuine U.S.-Weather-Service-Approved Home Weather Center mounted on a genuine polished-walnut veneer plaque — thermometer, barometer and humidity gauge all in one — with a lifetime guarantee.

It was a pretty sort of thing, she thought, holding it up to admire it. Polished brass, good bold figures and hash marks you didn’t need binoculars to read, made in the U.S. of A. It would look nice up on the wall over the fireplace — or maybe in the dining room; the walnut would match the color of the dining set, wouldn’t it? She was on her way into the dining room, the genuine Home Weather Center in hand, when she noticed that the barometer needle was stuck all the way down in the left-hand corner. Pinned. She shook it, patted the glass lens. Nothing. It was stuck fast.

Suddenly she couldn’t help herself — she could feel the rage coming up on her, a rage as inevitable and relentless as the smashing of the sea on the rocks — and how many pills had she swallowed and how many doctors, not to mention husbands, had tried to quell it? The Frinstell Corporation. Cheats and con artists, that’s what they were. You couldn’t get anything anymore that wasn’t a piece of junk and no wonder America was the laughingstock of the world. Not ten seconds out of the box and it was garbage already. She was seething. It was all she could do to keep from smashing it against the wall, stamping it underfoot — dope addicts, hopheads, the factories were full of them — but then she remembered the TV and she held on till the first hot wave of fury passed over her.

All right, she would be rational about it, she would. It had a lifetime guarantee, didn’t it? But what a joke, she thought bitterly, and again she had to restrain herself from flinging the thing into the wall — a glass of wine, that’s what she needed. Yes. To calm her. And then she’d wrap the thing up in the box and send it right back to the bastards — they’d see how fast their own shit came sailing back to them, they’d see whether they could put anything over on her…she’d have Willis down at the post office the minute he came in the door. And she’d be damned if she’d pay postage on it either. Return to Sender, that’s how she’d mark it. Damaged in Transit, Take Your Garbage and—

But then she glanced up at the clock. It was quarter to twelve already and he’d be home any minute now. Suddenly all the rage she’d generated over the Frinstell Corporation was gone, extinguished as quickly as it had arisen, and she felt a wild rush of affection for her man, her husband, for Willis — the poor guy, out there in all kinds of weather, working like a man half his age, providing for her and protecting her…and she’d been hard on him at breakfast, she had. What he needed was a nice lunch, she decided, a nice hot lunch. She set the Home Weather Center back in the box as gently as if she were lowering a baby into its crib, and then she wrapped the package up again, retaped the seams, and went to the cupboard. She poured herself a glass of wine from the jug and then fastened on a can of split-pea-and-ham soup — she’d heat that for Willis, and she’d make him a nice egg salad on toast….

Toast. But they were out of bread, weren’t they? There was nothing but that sawdust-and-nut crap he’d tried to pawn off on her for breakfast. She thought about that for a moment and a black cloud seemed to rise up before her. And then, before she knew it, the fury of the morning swept over her again, the tragedy of the TV and the cheat of the Home Weather Center doubling it and redoubling it, and by the time she heard Willis’s key turn in the lock, she was smoldering like Vesuvius.

If she was testy in the morning, if she lashed into him for no reason and jumped down his throat at the slightest provocation, by lunchtime she was inevitably transformed, so that an all-embracing cloud of maternal sweetness wrapped him up as he stepped through the door, and then ushered him out again, half an hour later, with a series of tender lingering hugs, squeezes and back pats. That was the usual scenario, but today was different. Willis sensed it even before he shambled down the hallway to discover her in the kitchen fussing over a can of soup and a box of saltines. He saw that she was still in her nightdress and housecoat, a bad sign, and he recognized the stunned, hurt, put-upon look in her eyes. He just stood there at the kitchen door and waited.

“Willis, oh, Willis,” she sighed — or no, moaned, bleated, wailed as if all the trials of Job had been visited on her in the five hours since he’d seen her last. He knew the tone and knew it was trouble — anything could have set her off, from a stopped-up drain to the war in Bosnia or teary memories of her first husband, the saint. “Honey,” she cried, crossing the room to catch him up in an embrace so fierce it nearly ruptured his kidneys, “you’ve got to help me out — just a little favor, a tiny little one.” Her voice hardened almost imperceptibly as she clung to him and swayed back and forth in a kind of dance of grief: “Everything is just so, so rotten.”

He was seventy-five years old and he’d been working since the day he climbed out of the cradle. Most men his age were dead. He was tired. His hips felt as if an army of mad acupuncturists had been driving hot needles into them. All he wanted was to sit down.

“Honey, here,” she said, cooing now, nothing but concern, and she led him awkwardly to the table, still half-clinging to him. “Sit down and eat; poor man, you’re probably starved. And exhausted, too. Is it raining out there?”

It was a question that didn’t require an answer, a variant on her luncheon monologue, a diversion to distract him from the true subject at hand, the crisis, whatever it was — the shattered TV screen, was that it? — the crisis which required his immediate attention and expertise. And no, it wasn’t raining, not yet, but it was blowing like holy hell out there and his morning had been an unmitigated disaster, a total waste of time. The framers hadn’t showed — or the damn plumber, either — and he’d spent the whole morning in the skeleton of the house, which was already behind schedule, watching the wind whip the waves to a froth and batter the seawall as if it were made of cardboard instead of concrete. He’d called the sons of bitches five or six times from the pay phone out front of the bank, but they weren’t answering. Pups, that’s what they were, afraid of a little weather. He glanced up and the soup appeared on the table before him, along with a platter of sardines, six neat squares of cheddar, saltines, and a glass of apple juice. Muriel hovered over him.

He took a sip of the juice, fingered his spoon and set it down again. Why forestall the inevitable? “What’s the trouble, sweetie?” he asked.

“I know you’re not going to like this, but you’re going to have to go to the post office for me.”

“The post office?” He didn’t want to go to the post office — he wanted to get back to the torn earth and wooden vertebrae of the rising house, to the mounds of rubble and refuse and the hot sudden smell of roofing tar. He thought of the doctor and his wife who’d hired him, a young couple in their forties, building their dream house by the sea. He’d promised them fifty-five hundred square feet with balconies, sundeck and wraparound view in six months’ time — and here two months had gone by already and the damn frame wasn’t even up yet. And Muriel wanted him to go to the post office.

“It’s the Home Weather Center,” she said. “It’s got to go back. And I mean today, immediately, right now.” Her voice threatened to ignite. “I won’t have it here in the house another minute…if those bastards think they can—”

She was working herself up, her ire directed for the moment at the Home Weather Center, whatever that was, and the unnamed bastards, whoever they were, but he knew that if he didn’t watch himself, if he didn’t look sharp, the full weight of her outrage would shift to him with the sudden killing swiftness of an avalanche. He heard himself saying, “I’ll take care of it, sweetie, don’t you worry.”

But when he glanced up to gauge her reaction, he found he was talking to himself: she’d left the room. Now what? There were sounds from the dining room — a fierce rending of tape and an impatient rustle of tissue paper, followed by the sharp tattoo of her approaching footsteps — and before he could lift the spoon to his lips she was back with a cardboard box the size of an ottoman. She swept across the room and dropped it on the table with a percussive thump that jarred the soup bowl and sent the juice swirling round the rim of the glass. Outside, the wind howled at the windows.

“Just look at this, will you?” she was saying, her elbows leaping as she tore the package open and extracted a long slim wooden plaque with three gleaming gauges affixed to it. He had a moment of enlightenment: the weather center. “Did you ever see such junk in your life?”

It looked all right to him. He wanted soup, he wanted sleep, he wanted the doctor’s house to rise up out of the dunes and bravely confront the sea, perfect in every detail. “What’s wrong with it, sweetie?”

“What’s wrong with it?” Her voice jumped an octave. “Are you blind? Look at this”—a blunt chewed fingernail stabbed at the middle gauge—“that’s what wrong. Junk. Nothing but junk.”

He frowned over the thing while his soup got cold and then he fished his glasses out of his shirt pocket and studied it. The barometer needle was pinned all the way down at twenty-eight inches — he’d never seen anything like it. He lifted the plaque from the table and shook it. He inverted it. He tapped the glass. Nothing.

Muriel was seething. She went off into a tirade about con men, cheats, the Japanese and what they’d done to her brother, not to mention the American economy, and all he could do to calm her was agree with everything she said and croon “sweetie” over and over again till his soup turned gelid and he pushed himself up from the table, tucked the package under his arm, and headed out the door for the post office.

The wind was up, whipping the treetops like rags, and the smell of the ocean was stronger now, rank and enveloping, as if the bottom of the sea had turned over and littered the shore with its dead. A trash can skittered down the street and a shopping bag shot across the lawn to cling briefly to his ankles. As he settled into the car, the package beside him, the wind jerked the door out of his hand and he began to realize that there would be no more work today. At this rate he’d be lucky if what they’d put up so far was still there in the morning. No wonder the framers hadn’t showed: this was a real blow.

He dodged trash-can lids and branches that glided magically across the road, the car pulling him along to the post office as faithfully as an old horse. The streets were deserted. He encountered exactly three other cars, all with their lights on and all going like hell. By the time he got to the traffic light outside the post office and sat there for an eternity watching the stoplight heave on its wires, it was so dark it might have been dusk. Maybe it was a hurricane after all, he thought, maybe that was it. He would have turned on the radio, but the damn thing had never worked to begin with, and then, two months ago, some jerk had smashed out the window on the driver’s side and made off with it.

Sitting there watching the stoplight leap and sway over the deserted pavement, he felt a sudden sense of foreboding, a quick hot jolt of fear that made him gun the engine impatiently and inch forward into the intersection. He was thinking he’d better get home and see to the windows, see to Muriel — he’d been caught in a hurricane in Corpus Christi once and they’d been without lights or water for six days. He remembered an old woman sitting in the middle of a flooded street with a bloody strip of somebody’s parlor curtains knotted round her head. That was an image. And he and his buddies with two cases of tequila they’d fished out of the wreckage of a liquor store. He’d better get home. He’d better.

But then the light changed and he figured he was here already and might as well take care of business — there’d be hell to pay at home if he didn’t, hurricane or no — and he pulled into the lot, parked the car and reached for the package. Five minutes, that’s all it would take. Then he’d be home.

As he came up the walk — and it was blowing now, Jesus, dirt or sand or something in his eyes — he saw the postmaster, and a bearded guy with a ponytail scurrying around with a sheet of plywood big enough to seal off a shopping mall. The postmaster had a hammer in his hand and he was shouting something to the other one, but then a gust took hold of the plywood and sent them both sprawling into the bushes. Willis hunched himself and snatched at the Mets cap, but it was too late: it shot from his head and sailed up over the trees like a clay pigeon. Hurrying now, he fought his way through the heavy double doors and into the post office.

There was no one at the counter, no one waiting in line, no one in the building at all as far as he could see. The lights were all up full and the polished floor ran on down the corridor as usual, but the place was eerily silent. Outside, the sky raged at the plate-glass windows, a wild spatter of rain driving before it now. Willis hit the handbell, just to be sure no one was back there in the sorting room or on the toilet or something, and then he turned to go. Muriel would have to understand, that was all: they were closed down. There was a hurricane coming. He’d done all he could.

He’d just pulled back the inner door when the big plate-glass window in the lobby gave way with a pop like a champagne cork, followed by the splash of shattering glass. Leave the damn package, his brain told him, drop it and get on home and lock yourself up in the basement with Muriel and the cat and a case of pork and beans, but his legs failed him. He just stood there as a window shattered somewhere in the back and the lights faltered and then blew. “Hey, you, old man!” a voice was shouting, and there was the postmaster, right beside him, his face drawn and white, hair disheveled. The bearded man was with him and their eyes were jumping with excitement. In the next moment they had Willis by the arms, wind screaming in his ears; a flurry of white envelopes lifted suddenly into the air, and he was moving, moving fast, down a hallway and into the darkness and the quiet.

He could smell the postmaster and the other one, could smell the wet and the fear on them. Their breath came in quick greedy pants. Outside, way in the distance, he could hear the muted keening of the wind.

“Anybody got a match?” It was the postmaster’s voice, a voice he knew from the roped-off line and the window and the gleaming tiled expanse of the lobby.

“Here,” came another voice and a match flared to reveal the pockmarked face of the bearded man and a cement-block storage room of some kind, mailbags, cardboard boxes, heaps of paper.

The postmaster fumbled through a cabinet behind him and came up with a flashlight, one of those big boxy jobs with a lighthouse beam at one end and a little red emergency light at the other. He played it round the room, then set the flashlight down on a carton and cut the beam. The room glowed with an eerie reddish light. “Holy shit,” he said, “did you see the way that window blew? You didn’t get cut, did you, Bob?”

Bob answered in the negative.

“Man, we were lucky.” The postmaster was a big bearish man in his fifties who’d worn a beard for years but now had the pasty stubbly look of a man newly acquainted with a razor. He paused. The wind screamed in the distance. “God, I wonder if Becky’s okay — she was supposed to take Jimmy to the dentist, to the orthodontist, I mean—”

Bob said nothing, but then both of them turned to Willis, as if they’d just realized he was there.

“You okay?” the postmaster asked him.

“I’m all right,” Willis said. He was, wasn’t he? But what about the car? What about Muriel? “But listen, I’ve got to get home—”

The postmaster let out a little bark of a laugh. “Home? Don’t you get it? That’s Hurricane Leroy out there — you’ll be lucky if you got a home left to go to — and whatever possessed you to come out in this mess? I mean, don’t you listen to the TV? Christ,” he said, as if that summed it all up.

There was a silence, and then, with a sigh, Bob eased himself back into a cradle of folded cardboard boxes. “Well,” he said, and the faint red light glinted off the face of the pint bottle he extracted from his shirt, “we might as well enjoy ourselves — looks like we’re going to be here a while.”

Willis must have dozed. They’d passed the bottle and he’d got a good deep burning taste of whiskey — a taste Muriel denied him; she was worse than the Schick Center when it came to that, though she sipped wine all day herself — and then Bob had begun to drone on in a stopped-up, back-of-the-throat sort of voice, complaining about his marriage, his bad back, his sister on welfare and the way the cat sprayed the bedposts and the legs of the kitchen table, and Willis had found it increasingly difficult to focus on the glowing red beacon of the light. He was slouched over in a folding chair the postmaster had dragged in from one of the offices, and when awareness gripped him, Bob was enumerating the tragic flaws of the auto-insurance industry, his face ghastly in the hellish light. For a moment Willis didn’t know where he was, but then he heard the wind in the distance and it all came back to him.

“With only two accidents, Bob? I can’t believe it,” the postmaster said.

“Hell,” Bob countered, “I’ll show you the damn bill.”

Willis tried to get up but his hips wouldn’t allow it. “Muriel,” he said.

The two faces turned to him then, the bearded one and the one that should have been bearded, and they looked strange and menacing in that unnatural light. “You all right, old-timer?” the postmaster asked.

Willis felt like Rip Van Winkle, like Methuselah; he felt tired and hopeless, felt as if everything he’d known and done in his life had been wasted. “I’ve got to”—he caught himself; he’d been about to say I’ve got to go home, but they’d probably try to stop him and he didn’t want any arguments. “I’ve got to take a leak,” he said.

The postmaster studied him a moment. “It’s still blowing out there,” he said, “but the radio says the worst of it’s past.” Willis heard the faint whisper of the radio then — one of those little transistors the kids all wear; it was tucked into the postmaster’s breast pocket. “Give it another hour,” the postmaster said, “and we’ll make sure you get home all right. And your car’s okay, if that’s what’s worrying you. Nothing worse than maybe a branch on the roof.”

Willis said nothing.

“Down the hall and to your left,” the postmaster said.

It took him a moment to fight the inertia of his hips, and then he was emerging from the shadows of the storage room and into the somber gray twilight of the hallway. Nuggets of glass crunched and skittered underfoot and everything was wet. It was raining hard outside and there was that rank smell in the air still, but the wind seemed to have tapered off. He found the toilet and he kept on going.

The lobby was a mess of wet clinging paper and leaves, but the doors swung open without a hitch, and in the next moment Willis was out on the front steps and the rain was driving down with a vengeance on his bare bald head. He reached automatically for the Mets cap, but then he remembered it was gone, and he hunched his shoulders and started off across the parking lot. He moved cautiously, wary of the slick green welter of leaves and windblown debris underfoot, and he was wet through by the time he reached the car. A single crippled branch was draped over the windshield, but there was no damage; he swept it to the ground and ducked into the driver’s seat.

His mind wasn’t working well at this point — perhaps it was the shock of the storm or the effects of the whiskey and his nap in the folding chair. The keys. He fumbled twice through his pants and jacket before he finally found them, and then he flooded the engine and had to hold his foot to the floor while the starter whined and the rain smeared the windshield. Finally he got the thing going with a roar and jerked it into gear; it was then that he discovered the tree blocking the exit. And now what? The specter of Muriel rose before him, pale and trembling, and then he glanced up to see the postmaster and Bob planted on the steps and gawking at him as if he’d just dropped down from another planet. What the hell, he thought, and he gave them a jaunty wave, revved the engine and shot up over the curb and into the street.

But here the world was truly transformed. It was as if a big hand had swept the street, slapping down trees and telephone poles, obliterating windows, stripping shingles from the roofs. The road that led out to the highway was impassable, churning with shit-brown water and one of those little Japanese cars awash in it, overturned on its roof. Willis tried Meridian Street and then Seaboard, but both were blocked. An oak tree that must have been five hundred years old had taken the veranda out of the house where Joe Diggs had lived before he passed on, and there were live wires thrashing the shattered shaft of a telephone pole out front. Even through the tattoo of the rain on the roof Willis could hear the sirens, a continuous, drawn-out wail of grief.

He was worried now — this was as bad as Corpus Christi, worse — and his hands trembled on the wheel when he turned into his own street and found the entrance buried in rubble and vegetation. The house on the corner — the Needlemans’—was untouched, but across the street, on his side, the Stovers’ place had lost its roof. And the street itself, the placid tree-lined street that had attracted Muriel in the first place, was unrecognizable, a double row of maples laid down flat like a deck of cards. Willis backed out of the street, water running up to his hubcaps, and made a left on Susan and then another left on Massapequa, trying to make it around the block and come up on the house from the far side.

He was in luck. Neither street seemed to have suffered much damage, and he was able to make his way round a fallen telephone pole at the entrance to Massapequa by climbing up over the curb as he’d done at the post office. And then he was turning into Laurel, his own street, dodging refuse and swinging wide to avoid the clogged storm drain at the corner. People were out on their lawns now, assessing the damage — he saw Mrs. Tilden or Tillotson or whatever her name was trying to brace up a cypress that clung to her front porch like a wet mustache. It was almost comical, that little woman and that big limp tree, and he began to relax — everything was going to be okay, it was, there was hardly any damage on this end — and there was the fat guy — what was his name? — holding his head and dancing round the carcass of his crushed Cadillac. Yes, he said aloud, everything’s going to be all right, and he repeated it to himself, making a little prayer of it.

He was more afraid of Muriel now than of the storm — he could hear her already: how could he leave her in the middle of a hurricane? Where had he been? Was that liquor on his breath? The damage he could take care of — he was a builder, wasn’t he? It was just a matter of materials, that was all — bricks, lumber, drywall, shingles. And glass. The glaziers would be busy, that was for sure. As he eased past a lawn mower standing forlornly in the middle of the street and crept round the big sweeping curve that gave him his first view of the house, he was expecting the worst — shutters gone, a hole in the roof, the elm lying atop the garage like a crippled beast — but the reality made his heart seize.

There was nothing there. Nothing. Where the house had stood not two hours ago, the elm towering over it, the two-car garage in back with his tools and workbench and all the rest, there was now a vacant lot. The yard had been swept clean but for the torn and crenellated foundation, filled with rubble like some ancient ruin. Panic seized him, shock, and he hit the brake instinctively, sending the car into a fishtail that carried him across the street and slammed him into the curb with a jolt.

Trembling, he pried his fingers from the wheel. There was a throb of pain above his right eye where he’d hit the rearview mirror. His hands were shaking. But no, he thought, looking up again, it couldn’t be. He was on the wrong street, that was it — he’d got turned around and fetched up in front of somebody else’s place. It took him a moment, but then he swung the door open and stepped tentatively into the litter of the street, and there was the number on the curb to refute him, there the mailbox with his name stenciled across it in neat white letters, untouched, the red flag still standing tall. And that was the Novaks’ place next door, no doubt about it, a sick lime green with pink trim….

Then he thought of Muriel. Muriel. She was, she was…he couldn’t form the thought, and he staggered across the lawn like a drunk to stand gaping into that terrible hole in the ground. “Muriel,” he bleated, “Muriel!” and the rain drove down at him.

He stood there a long while, head bowed, feeling as old as the stones themselves, as old as the gashed earth and the dead gray sky. And then, the car still rumbling and stuttering behind him, he had the very first intimation of a thought that sparked and swelled till it glowed like a torch in his brain: Dewar’s and water. He saw himself as he was when Muriel first found him, wedded to the leatherette stool at the Dew Drop Inn, and his lips formed the words involuntarily: “Make mine a Dewar’s and water.” The house was gone, but he’d lost houses before — mainly to wives, which were a sort of natural disaster anyway; that he could live with — and he’d lost wives, too, but never like this.

It hit him then, a wave of grief that started in his hips and crested in his throat: Muriel. He saw her vividly, the lunchtime Muriel who rubbed his shoulders and fussed over him, making those little crackers with anchovy paste and avocado…he saw her turning down the sheets on the bed at night, saw her frowning over a crossword puzzle, the glasses perched on the end of her nose — little things, homey things. With a pang he remembered the way she’d kid him over the TV programs or a football game and how she’d dance round the kitchen with a bottle of wine and a beef brisket studded with cloves of garlic…and now it was over. He was seventy-five — seventy-six, come October — and he stared into that pit and felt the icy breath of eternity on his face.

His jacket was wet through and his arms hung limp at his sides by the time he turned away and limped back over the sodden lawn, a soldier returning from the wars. He dragged himself across the street to the car, and all he could think of was Ted Casselman, down at the Dew Drop — he would know what to do — and he actually had the door open, one foot poised on the rocker panel, when he glanced up for a final bewildered look, and a movement on the Novaks’ porch caught his eye. All at once the storm door swung back with a dull flash of light and there she was, Muriel, rescued from oblivion. She was in her housecoat still and it was bedraggled and wet, and her long white hair hung tangled round her shoulders so that she was like some old woman of the woods in a children’s tale. Anna Novak hovered behind her, a tragic look pressed into the immobile Slavic folds of her eyes. Muriel just stood there, gazing across the street to where he hovered at the door of the car, half a beat from release.

The wind came up then and rattled the branches of the trees that were still standing. Someone was calling a dog up the street: “Hermie, Hermie! Here, baby!” The rain slackened. “Willis!” Muriel suddenly cried, “Willis!” and the spell was broken. She was coming down the steps, grand and invincible, her arms spread wide.

What could he do? He dropped his foot to the pavement, ignoring the pain that shot through his hip, and opened his arms to receive her.