Murder in the Wind

by John D. MacDonald

  The caravan of six cars came nosing cautiously down the dirt road. It crossed the first bridge, the Cadillac in the lead. The cars jounced over limbs that had fallen into the road. The caravan passed the ugly old house. The road turned slightly. The lead car came to the bridge and it stopped.

  “God damn!” said Johnny Flagan in an awed tone.

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

  “You can sure figure things out fast, Charlie. Damn if you can’t.”

  “Don’t take it out on me, Johnny.”

  “We got to get out of here.”

  Johnny Flagan pushed his door open against the wind and looked back. The cars had piled up behind him and he cursed. He had no place to turn around. The ditch was too deep and soft on either side. Somebody started leaning on the horn.

  “Thanks,” Johnny said. “Thanks a lot. That helps out.”

  He got out of the car and the wind buffeted him, pushed him against the side of the car. As he passed each car he yelled, “Bridge is out!” and did not pause to answer questions. The last car in line was an aged panel delivery with a kid driving, a dumb-looking young girl sitting beside him.

  “The bridge is out,” he yelled. “We got to all get turned around. We can all turn around back in the yard of that house back there. You got to be the first one.”

  The kid nodded and backed the truck. The kid looked scared. He backed the truck too fast. Johnny stood, braced against the wind, and saw the kid waver from side to side on the greasy road and then slam the truck backward into the soft ditch, putting it in on enough of an angle to block the road. Flagan cursed softly. The rain had now stopped completely. The thin young fellow from the station wagon and the husky guy from the green Plymouth joined him.

  “We’ll have to horse it out of there,” Johnny Flagan said. The good-looking woman in the convertible had backed, following the panel truck, and she stopped when she saw the road was blocked. As the three men approached the truck, a man climbed from the back of the truck over the seats. The boy who had been behind the wheel got out and the young girl got out the other side. She had not been prepared for the force of the wind. It caught her and sent her stumbling forward. She tripped and fell and rolled across the road and came to rest in the opposite ditch, skirt wound high over pasty thighs, face twisted into sudden childish tears of pain and fright.

  The man who had climbed over the seats got behind the wheel. The three men and the boy caught hold of the truck. The husky man from the Plymouth got behind it, his back against the truck, legs braced against the ditch. The wheels spun and the truck moved and came out suddenly, braking to a stop before driving into the opposite ditch.

  It was then that the second tree came down. Johnny Flagan saw the movement out of the corner of his eye and looked up and yelled and trotted back out of the way. It was another pine, not as large as the one that had fallen on the bridge, but it was tall and a good two feet in diameter. It missed the truck. The trunk thudded against the road. The thin man from the station wagon tried to twist away from it, a heavy limb brushed his shoulder and sent him diving into the rear of the panel truck. He hit his head against the back of the truck, slumped onto the bumper, hung there for a moment, and rolled over onto his back in the road. The husky man hurried over to the crown of the tree and Johnny Flagan realized that the young girl had been there in the ditch. The man clawed down through the branches and as Johnny moved over to help him, the man pulled the girl out. She was still crying and there was a long scratch on her cheek, but she was otherwise unharmed. The man who had hit his head was trying to stand up. Johnny Flagan looked at the size of the tree, at the blocked road. A flying limb banged the side of the panel truck. Johnny ducked and cursed and saw the wind knock Charlie Himbermark sprawling on his back, and he suddenly began to feel the queasiness of alarm. It was a long time since Johnny Flagan had been afraid of anything.

  Boltay, at the north end of the detour, had received his orders and was headed north, turning back southbound traffic.

  The attempt to clear the main 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 from public power to their own generators.

  The casualties had begun.

  A child in Cedar Key monstrously sliced by a whirring flying piece of aluminum roofing. Two elderly women from Ohio electrocuted when a power line fell across their sedan. A fisherman at Horseshoe Point drowned while trying to adjust the mooring lines on his anchored boat.

  And 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 shattered concrete, collapsing shore houses. 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. People fought and worked to protect their homes.

  Emergency Warning Service. All coastal facilities. 2:12 p.m. It now appears that the eye of the hurricane 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 four-thirty. Evacuation of all exposed properties from Dead Man’s Bay to Tarpon Springs is recommended. Highway 19 is now impassable. Warning—this is a highly concentrated and violent hurricane.

  10

  As the wind had strengthened, Jean Dorn had not let her alarm show in her voice or her manner. The wind made driving more difficult. When she looked at Hal she saw that he was sitting very erect, his thin hands on the wheel at ten o’clock and two o’clock, knuckles white with the strength of his grip.

  At least there was not as much rain. The sky was more pale than before, a luminous gray in which there seemed to be a tinge of yellow. The look of the sky made her sense how small they were and how very vulnerable. Small car speeding north under the vast yellowish bowl of the sky. Looking down from the sky it would be a little box shape moving along a gray ribbon.

  She felt a tremor of completely irrational fear, and for a moment believed so strongly that they were moving swiftly toward some unimaginable catastrophe that she wanted to cry out to Hal to stop the car. She forced herself to relax. All her life she had been vulnerable to the moods of the weather. A bright warm day gave her a holiday mood. Heavy winter snows had made her feel hushed, secretive, tip-toe. On days of rain she had always wanted to weep.

  She remembered reading that when the barometer was low it induced an atavistic nervousness and tension in people. It was a primitive warning, and the animals responded to it also. With a hurricane in the area the barometer would be low, and it was not strange that she should feel alarm with no real basis for it. There was another factor, too. During the early months of pregnancy with both Stevie and Jan she had been moody, vulnerable. Only in the later months did she get that warm deep sense of waiting and growing and flourishing.

  Yet the sense of alarm had been very strong. Almost strong enough to …

  She looked again at Hal’s hands as the car swayed so violently that he had to slow down. His lips were thin and tight.

  “Maybe we ought to try the radio again,” she suggested. He nodded and she turned it on, waited for it to warm up. It buzzed but no station came on. She turned the needle across the dial and she could find no station, no sound except the constant buzz.

  “I guess … it’s broken.”

  “Oh, lovely!” he said. “All we need.”

  “Hal, darling, don’t …”

  “Shut up!”

  She turned her head sharply and stared at him, then turned and looked out the window, feeling the warm sting of tears in her eyes. She rode that way for perhaps five minutes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said abruptly.

  “It’s all right.”

  “Of course it’s all ri
ght. The magic forgiveness. Like turning on a tap. No, I don’t mean that either. Don’t pay any attention to me, Jeanie. I’m just in a vile mood. And now, for God’s sake, don’t say ‘That’s all right’ again.”

  She decided it would be better to say nothing. He was too full of his own defeat. Perhaps too too full. Too close to the edge of self pity. She wondered how and why he had lost his resilience, the core of his courage. Or was he without it in the beginning—and she had not known that because this was the first time it had been tested.

  She felt shocked and ashamed of her own disloyalty. Hal had certainly not given up readily. He had maintained his spirits for a long time. She remembered how, during the first two weeks at the warehouse, she would massage his sore aching back muscles each night and how they would joke about it. His hands had become toughened. They had a new harsh feel against her flesh, a hardness and masculinity that was not entirely displeasing.

  He had not given up for a long time. The trouble was that when he finally had given up, when he had wept, he had given up all the way, unlocking all the gates and surrendering all the turrets. Jean suspected that it had something to do with his family, with his father. Defeat, to Hal, was the unthinkable thing. The thing that could not happen.

  She wondered how it would be for him if he were alone, if he did not have this pressing burden of wife, two children, and new child to come. Already it seemed that she could sense his resentment.

  “Accident, I think,” Hal said. She looked ahead and saw the red flashing light.

  The policeman had them stop behind a blue Cadillac and he told them about the blocked bridge and the detour. Stevie and Jan had begun to get a whining note in their voices and Jean knew they were getting hungry. She opened the glove compartment, took out the box of fig newtons and handed it back to them, with severe injunction to share.

  It seemed a very long time before they were permitted to go ahead, along with the several cars that had stopped behind them, all of them following the blue Cadillac. It certainly wasn’t much of a road. It moved in aimless gentle 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 stopped when the Cadillac stopped, and Jean, looking ahead, saw the big tree down and the ruin of the second bridge. The other cars had stopped behind them. “We can’t get through,” Jean said.

  “Look!” Stevie yelled, leaning over the seat so that his head was between theirs. “Look at the bridge! Wow!”

  “Sit back there where you belong,” Hal ordered.

  The driver of the Cadillac got out of his car and looked back at the row of cars and then walked back by their car. He was a heavy soft-looking man in a cord suit, with a red face and a balding head. The wind made him walk as though he were drunk.

  Hal opened the wagon door and got out. “Where are you going?” Jean asked.

  He held the door open. The solid wind came into the car and it made her feel breathless. “… if I can help …” she heard him say. The door slammed hard and he was gone. She tried to look back. She could not see out the rear window because the station wagon was so loaded. She slid over behind the wheel and she could see them in the rear vision mirror fastened forward of the door—see Hal and two other men struggling against the wind as they walked to the rear of the line.

  “Where did he go?” Stevie demanded. “I want to go too.”

  “You stay right where you are. He’ll be back in a minute.”

  “But what is he doing?”

  “Hush, Stevie. Please. And give Jan another fig newton.”

  She saw the truck back wildly into the ditch and saw the men walk down to it, tiny figures in the round reflecting mirror. She hoped Hal would be careful. Jan started yelling angrily at Stevie. She turned around and settled the quarrel. When she looked back in the mirror she saw the tree falling. It was impossible drama in the small mirror, a scene from a gray movie, a thing that could not be happening. Hal was partly obscured by the truck. She saw him try to run as the tree came down, saw him come clear of the tree and dive headlong into the rear of the truck, and fall.

  She forced the door open against the wind, held it open with her body as she turned and shouted to the children, “Stay right here. Don’t try to get out.”

  Then she was running back toward Hal, feeling the wind buffeting her. It swerved her against a green Plymouth with no one in it, hurting her wrist when she braced herself. Hal was trying to get up. She ran to him. His face was strange and blank, showing neither pain nor surprise, but rather a dulled determination.

  She caught his arm and helped him and he got to his feet and staggered back and sat on the rear bumper of the truck. When she tried to talk the wind forced her lips apart, inflated her cheek, blurred her words.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right.” She could barely hear his words. He looked at her, and seemed to look through her, and there was a puzzled look deep in his eyes. She knew he was not all right. She looked around despairingly. The others seemed busy with their own self-assigned problems. Two of the men had climbed over the tree trunk and were walking toward the other bridge. No one seemed to know or care that Hal was hurt.

  A sharp painful memory of childhood came into her mind. Her parents had forbidden any attempt to swim out to the float. But the other kids were out there and she decided she could swim out. She had chugged along, pleased with herself, until she was about twenty feet from the float. And then things had gone wrong. No matter how hard she kicked, her legs had sunk so that she was upright in the water. She had kept paddling frantically, but the paddling merely served to keep her precariously afloat. She could move no closer to the float. She could see them there, brown in the sun, outlined against the blue sky, and they were not looking at her. She tried to call out to them, but her mouth and nose kept going under. She could even hear them laughing, and she saw Judy being tickled by the Gillton boy, but no one would look down at the desperate struggle happening so close to them.

  Then the world got all strange and soft and dreamy, and with arms that were loose as feathers, she was trying to climb a green ladder made of soft rounds of silk. Everything was faraway and unimportant, and then she felt sulky annoyance when something grabbed her roughly. Without transition she was then on the float in the bright angry sunshine, gasping and choking and coughing. Water ran out of her nose and mouth and then she was sick. They brought a boat out and took her ashore. Her parents had heard about it and were down on the beach waiting for the boat. She felt lonely and heroic. Her mother had hugged her and cried over her. Her father wore a face like thunder.

  Now she stood by her husband, her hand on his shoulder. She looked down at the swelling on the crown of his head, at the blood matting the dark hair. No one seemed to know or care that he was hurt.

  He said something and she leaned closer to him. “What, dear?”

  “Dizzy,” he said, frowning.

  “Can you get back to the car?”

  He looked up at her. “Where is it?”

  “Up there.”

  People had gotten out of the other cars. They came down to stare at the tree. They had to shout at each other to be heard. The wind suddenly became as strong as an arm pushing her back. It pushed her against the rear of the truck. A palm frond came whirring and rattling through the air and bounced on the road and skipped and cracked her shin painfully. She kicked it away and the wind slid it under the truck.

  The men came back and one man came over to her. He was about Hal’s age or a little younger. As he walked he braced himself strongly against the wind, planting his feet with care. He wore a bright blue and green sports shirt and gray slacks. His hair was cropped short and he was a powerful looking man.

  He came close to her and looked down at Hal and said, “Need help?”

  “He hit his head.”

  “I saw it. He hit pretty hard.”

  “He acts daz
ed. He didn’t know where the car is.”

  The man seemed to study her for a moment. He leaned closer to her, his mouth close enough to her ear so he could talk in almost a normal tone. “We looked at the other bridge. Even if we had anything to get this tree out of the way, I wouldn’t want to try it. The water is coming up fast. It’s over the bridge boards. Stuff is coming up the river and bumping into the bridge. The wind is pushing the Gulf toward us. If it keeps up this road is going to be under water. Do you understand?”

  She nodded quickly.

  “That house back there is on the highest ground. I think we all ought to try to wait it out there. That man over there thinks we ought to try to walk out.”

  “We can’t do that!” she said. “We’ve got two small children.”

  “Are they alone in the car?”

  “Yes. I had to leave them when I saw …”

  “Get back to them. I’ll get your husband into that house and then come after you and the kids.”

  She obeyed without question. When she was half way to the station wagon she looked back and saw the man helping Hal over the trunk of the fallen tree. The others stood in a small group and she saw them dodge violently when a palm frond was whirled over their heads.

  When she got to the car both Stevie and Jan were crying. Stevie stopped quickly when he saw her. She tried to pull the door open and could not. She went around and got in the other side of the car. Jan still wept. “Where’s Daddy?” Stevie demanded.

  “This is a bad storm and we can’t drive away in the car, darling, because the trees have fallen down. We’re going to wait in an empty house. A nice man is helping your daddy get to the house and then he’s coming to get us.”

  “Why does he have to help him?”

  “Daddy fell down and he hurt his head. Now don’t start crying again, Stevie. Please. Be a big brave boy.”