by Dick Francis
“The tube. That was different. It was totally safe.”
“Oh really?”
“Well, almost.”
“I’ll fly you safely through Hurricane Nicky.”
To his enormous disappointment, however, he didn’t get the chance. Hurricane Nicky, although intensifying to a Category 3 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with circulating wind speeds between 111 and 130 miles an hour, not only didn’t wait around for Kris to arrive in the States, but turned northwards before it reached the American eastern seaboard at all, and blew itself out harmlessly over the cold waters of the North Atlantic.
Kris nevertheless set off to Florida, with the rocketry at Cape Canaveral as his priority, followed by contacts with the National Hurricane Tracking Center in Miami; but no storms at all, to his great disappointment, were shaping up in their chief spawning ground, west of Africa.
During an otherwise uneventful week there he sent me a fax to say he was now staying for a few days with the people we met at Caspar Harvey’s lunch, as arranged.
I couldn’t remember at first whom he meant. The lunch itself had receded in my mind, semi-eclipsed by the poisoning of the filly, but a backwards-looking search came up tentatively with the Darcys; Robin the brains and Evelyn the pearls.
Confirmation quickly followed. Kris dispatched, “This is a casual place. Robin and Evelyn are adamant they want you to join us on Monday, to stay for a few days, so send a yes-thank-you pronto. Just to remind you, the minor disturbance now forming in the Caribbean will be called Odin if it develops. I intend to fly through it. Won’t you come?”
The minor disturbance in the Caribbean, I judged from a swift trawl of the chaotic conditions there, would probably collapse into a fizzle, saving the name Odin for another day.
Next morning, though, the winds south of Jamaica gained speed, and the barometric pressure dropped to well below a thousand millibars, an ominously low reading considering that the average was nearer 1013. A wind sheer aloft that had been preventing an organized circling movement had disintegrated and stopped tearing the upper atmosphere apart, and the minor disturbance, as if taking stock of the possibilities, had begun a slow invitation to a dance.
Kris transmitted, “Odin is now designated a tropical storm. Pity it’s not yet a hurricane, but come on Monday anyway.” He included directions to reach the Darcys, and welcoming messages from both.
The Monday ahead was the beginning of my official leave.
I pondered over the meager savings I’d intended to devote to walking in Sicily, and then telephoned Belladonna Harvey. I learned about the state of the filly (feeble but on her feet, test results still not available); the state of Oliver Quigley (lachrymose); the state of her relations with her new employer Loricroft (he was chasing her); and the state of her father (fuming). And how was Kris doing, she finally wanted to know, as he’d been missing from the screen for a week.
“He went to Florida.”
“So he did.”
“He wanted you to go.”
“Mm.”
“He’s staying with Robin and Evelyn Darcy. They’ve asked me to join them. Is that odd?”
There was a pause before she said, “What do you want to know?”
With a smile that I knew reached my voice, I asked, “For a start, what does he do? ”
“Evelyn tells everyone he sells mushrooms. He never denies it.”
“He can’t sell mushrooms,” I protested.
“Why not? Evelyn says he sells all the sorts of mushrooms the food world’s gone mad about. Portobello, cèpes, chanterelles, shiitake, things like that. He has them freeze-dried and sealed in vacuum packs and they’re making him a fortune.” She paused. “Also he sells grass.”
“He what?”
“He sells grass. I don’t mean that sort of grass. You may laugh, but in Florida they don’t grow garden grass from seed. The climate’s wrong, or something. They plant sods instead. They lay lawns like laying carpets. Robin Darcy has a sod farm. Don’t laugh. That’s what it’s called, and it’s a million-dollar business.”
I said slowly, “You also said he was born clever.”
“Yes. He was. And I told you not to be fooled. He goes around in those thick black eyeglass frames looking like a rather inadequate and cuddly little ninny, but everything he touches turns to gold.”
“And do you like him?” I asked.
“Not really.” She answered without hesitation. “He’s Dad’s buddy, not mine. He’s too calculating. Everything he does has a purpose, but you only realize that later.”
“And Evelyn?” I asked.
“She’s his front man, like I told you. Well, woman. I’ve known them for ages, on and off. Robin and Dad have always talked farming, though you wouldn’t think mushrooms and sod have much in common with birdseed, which is Dad’s major industry.”
I said vaguely, “I thought your father grew barley.”
“Yes, he does. It makes great whisky. He doesn’t grow the birdseed. He buys every variety of seed by the hundred tons and has a factory which mixes them and sells them in small packets to people who keep budgerigars and things. You might say that both Robin Darcy and my father make millions four ounces at a time.”
“So ... er ... Evelyn?” I murmured again.
“She and my mother get on fine. They both adore jewelry. If you talk diamonds to Evelyn you’ll be her friend for life.”
Bell hadn’t persuaded me pro or con, but the thought of Florida, so far unvisited, easily won, and it was at that point that I thoughtlessly told my grandmother that Kris wanted to fly with me through a hurricane.
“Don’t go, Perry. It gives me the heebie-jeebies....”
But I’d kissed her and given her anxiety no weight. It was years, by then, since the slow paralysis of the Phoenix-to-London flight, and no heebies or indeed jeebies had since that dreadful journey raised a threatening head.
“I’ll come back safety.” I assured her, and flew to Florida on the cheapest ticket I could find.
Robin and Evelyn’s South Florida home, though apparently nothing extravagant for the area, was to eyes disciplined to a one-room third-floor attic bedsit (tiny bathroom and alcove-kitchen), a dazzling revelation.
To start with, there was the brilliance of color. I was used to the blue-gray northern light already afflicting the afternoons of London W.12, latitude between 51 and 52 degrees north.
In Sand Dollar Beach, at latitude 25 degrees, just north of the Tropic of Cancer but well north of the equator, pink was vibrant, turquoise blazed to the horizon on the sea and green palm trees swayed over white crumbling lacy waves.
I very seldom regretted the constraints I accepted in order to pay for my grandmother’s comfort, but I felt, on that beautiful sparkling evening, that the English screaming seagulls fighting on the ebb tide came expensive.
I had thanked the Darcys for their invitation and they’d warmly greeted my arrival but, even allowing for the legendary generosity that Americans displayed by habit, I still wasn’t sure why I was there in Sand Dollar Beach watching the golden sunset, drinking an exotic intoxicater and eating canapés the size of Frisbees.
Evelyn talked about diamonds, as Bell had foretold. Evelyn, silver hair immaculate, wore shimmering ice-blue silk pants with a loose blouse of the same silk, embroidered all over with pearls and little silver tubes that my worldly grandmother had educated me to recognize as bugles.
Robin, full glass of icy concoction in hand, lazed back in a vast thickly cushioned garden chaise longue that horizontally supported his bare ankles and feet. Robin had called me “Dr. Stuart” while meeting my flight in Miami airport and “dear boy” when pressing a piña colada into my hand, murmuring also “Pineapple juice, coconut milk and rum. Suit you, I hope?”
He wasn’t sure of me, I thought, nor I of him. One could often perceive goodwill instantly. In Robin I saw a chess game.
We sat on a south-facing large terrace that overlooked the calm Atlantic Ocean on one side and was
dramatically lit on the other by streaky gold clouds in a late afternoon sky.
Kris, who seldom drank alcohol even when not flying, restlessly wandered from terrace to lower-level deck pool and back again, searching the golden heavens as if in annoyed disappointment.
Robin Darcy said to him tolerantly. “Kris, go inside and watch the Weather Channel. If the great god Odin is stalking about in the Caribbean, you won’t see him up here for days.”
I asked Robin if he and Evelyn had ever sat tight through a hurricane and was smiled at with sad pity for my naiveté.
“You can’t sit tight,” Evelyn assured me. “You get thrown about. I thought you were a meteorologist. I thought you knew things like that.”
“He knows in theory,” Kris told them, pardoning me. “He knows how hurricanes form but no one knows why. He knows why they’re called hurricanes, but not where they’re going. He’s a doctor of philosophy. which is rare for a weatherman, and he ought to be doing research like ‘into the why, that no one knows,’ and not sitting drinking in the sun, but I’ll tell you he’s here now because I said I’d fly him through a hurricane’s eye, and not because he’s researching coconut milk with pineapple juice and rum.”
Robin swiveled his eyes my way, also the hand holding his drink. “Is that a fact?” he said.
“I wouldn’t have missed this evening for anything,” I replied. I raised my own drink towards the sun, but it was opaque like many questions and let no light through.
3
Robin, generous with his telephone as with his rum, listened with barely confined enthusiasm to my report on the weather brewing in the circle of sea named after the frightening Caribs, North American Indians, who invaded the islands and coastal lands, and ruled by torture there before Columbus and other European colonists drove them out in their turn.
There were still pirates, modern-dress variety, Robin said, infesting the warm blue waters as murderous predators, stealing yachts and killing the owners, though maybe they weren’t quite as bloodsucking as in the past. He smiled, mentioning that the word Carib had the same linguistic root as cannibal.
I talked to the Hurricane Center in Miami, where a longtime telephone pal gave me an as-of-five-minutes-ago state of the upper winds:
“Odin is coming along nicely,” he said. “There were signs of organization during the night. I wouldn’t now say you’ve crossed the pond for nothing. Call me tomorrow, we might have more. This storm’s mighty slow, forward movement only six miles an hour, if that. There are thirty-five-miles-an-hour sustained winds on the surface, but no eye yet.”
To Robin I said, “It’s a toss-up.”
“Heads it’s a hurricane?”
“Do you want it to be a hurricane?” I asked curiously.
It seemed to me that in fact he did, but he shook his bespectacled head and said, “No, I definitely don’t. I’ve lived here in Florida for forty years, and I’ve gone inland from the coast every time evacuation’s been advised. We’ve been lucky with water surge too. There’s a reef parallel with the coast here about half a mile out and in some way it lowers the storm surge and inhibits the formation of large waves. Where there’s no reef, it’s the water, not the wind, that kills most people.”
One couldn’t live so long in a hurricane alley, I supposed, without learning a few deadly statistics, and on my second (glorious) evening in his house, Robin switched on the Weather Channel for us all to see how Odin was coming along.
Dramatically well, was the answer.
The pressure in the circling center of the tropical depression Odin, a happy television voice announced, had dropped 20 millibars in the past two hours. Almost unheard of! Now officially designated a vigorous tropical storm, Odin, generating winds around sixty-five m.p.h., lay more than two hundred miles south of Jamaica and was traveling due north at seven miles an hour.
Robin absorbed the information thoughtfully and announced that on the next day we would all take a flight to Grand Cayman Island for a few days in the sun.
As we had spent the whole of that day swimming in the Darcy pool, drinking Darcy revivers and lying in the Florida sun, Robin had only one possible intention: to move, if not directly into the eye of Odin, at least to where it could see us.
Kris stalked with huge elastic strides around the sunny pool deck and the half-shaded terrace above. Odin, tracked by radar and satellites, was too small for his taste, too slow, and too far from land. Robin said dryly that he was sorry not to have been able to fix a better display.
Evelyn thought hurricane-chasing a dangerous and juvenile sport and said she wasn’t going to Grand Cayman, she was staying comfortably at home: and Robin reminded her that if Odin intensified, and if Odin changed course, as hurricanes were liable to do from one minute to the next, it might be she who found the monster roaring on her doorstep, not us.
“What is more,” she continued firmly, ignoring the threat, “tonight for dinner we’re having stone crabs, Florida’s pride, and after that Kris can repeat to us the poem he’s been muttering to himself all day, and after that you can watch hours of Weather Channel if you like, but don’t wake me in the morning, I’m not catching any flight to anywhere.”
“What poem?” Robin asked.
“There’s no poem. I’m going for a swim,” Kris said immediately, and was still in the pool at sunset.
“He did recite a poem,” Evelyn complained, “why does he pretend he didn’t?”
I said from experience, “Give him time.”
In time he would either repeat his verses or tear them up. It would depend on how he felt.
The stone crabs for dinner, with mustard sauce and green salad, beat fish pie with parsley sauce out of sight, and over coffee out on the terrace in soft silhouetting light, Kris said, without preliminaries. “I went to Cape Canaveral, you know.”
We nodded.
“I’ll fly through a hurricane, but those first astronauts sat on countless tons of rocket fuel and lit a match. So ... well ... I wrote for them. I wrote about Cape Canaveral, about the past ... about the future.”
He stood up abruptly and carried his coffee cup to the end of the terrace. His voice came matter-of-factly out of the dark.
“There are lonely concrete launch pads there, deep set in dusty grass,
They are circles scarcely fire-marked, barely twenty feet across,
Rockets stood there, waiting, men inside with trusting courage,
For the lift-off to the stars.”
No one spoke.
Kris said,
“Now shuttles roar routinely to a station up in orbit, Soon they’ll print a cosmic schedule, issue a boarding pass,
And who will spare a memory or even a passing thank-you,
To those circles in the grass?”
More silence.
With a sigh, Kris said,
“Many a windy year will blow across the Cape abandoned.
Ghosts of fear and bumpy hearts will thin and fade and pass.
Weeds green the concrete circles. It’s from a launch pad out in orbit
That men have gone to Mars.”
Kris walked over and put his coffee cup on the table.
“So you see,” he said, a near-laugh lightening his concept, “I’m no John Keats.”
Robin said judiciously, “An interesting aperçu, all the same.”
Kris left Robin explaining an aperçu to Evelyn and walked me to the edge of the terrace to look at the moon reflected in the pool.
“Robin’s arranged a Piper in Cayman,” he said. “I’ve checked that I can fly it. Are you on?”
“I can’t afford much.”
“Don’t fuss about the money. Are you spiritually on?”
“Yes.”
“Great.” My unqualified agreement excited him. “I was sure that’s why you came.”
“Why is Robin so keen on us going to Odin?”
Kris wrinkled his tall pale forehead. “Understanding why people do things, that’s your sort of work, not mine
.”
“I liked your poem.”
He grimaced. “You should go to the Cape. You’d never believe that the moon walks were spawned from those concrete slabs.”
There were times, there were days, when the extremes of Kris’s seesaw nature fell into balance, not just as always for his solo two-minute onscreen weather forecasts, but also for a lasting peace. It was as if the careful pilot took over even after the wheels had landed. On the evening of the Cape Canaveral verses he sounded more levelheaded than I’d ever known him out of an airplane.
“Did you see Bell?” he asked.
“I talked to her on the telephone.”
“Will she marry me, do you think?”
I blew a breath of exasperation down my nose.
“First,” I said, “you’d better ask her.”
“And next?”
“Both of you practice keeping your temper. Count ten before you yell.”
He thought it over and nodded. “You tell her, and I’ll do it.”
I nodded. I doubted that either would manage it, but an attempt was an advance.
In a typical non sequitur he conversationally asked, “What do you know of Trox Island?”
“Er.” I thought without result. “Does Bell like it. or something?”
“Bell? It’s nothing to do with Bell. It’s to do with Robin and Evelyn.”
I said “Oh?” vaguely. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“It seems that most people have never heard of it,” Kris said, “but suppose Robin wants you and me to fly to Trox Island, never mind through Odin’s eye.”
I said, puzzled, “Whyever should he?”
“I think it’s something to do with mushrooms.”
“Oh no, Kris,” I protested. “I’m not risking my life for mushrooms.”
“You won’t be risking your life. In the past, dozens of planes have flown through hurricanes to gather essential and helpful information, and almost none has been lost.”