As he started to take off the shirt, he was annoyed by the wind-driven crests breaking into his face. He tried to hitch himself and realized that he could not. He stared at the trunk and up at the limbs and as he realized that the water was getting higher, panic came quickly. He fought hard, exhausting himself quickly, sobbing aloud as he fought. The trees were as unmovable as pillars of concrete. He rested for a time. The water was higher. He had to keep his chin tilted up in order to breathe.
With his head uptilted, he could see the thin shadows of the two raccoons. Animals would sometimes gnaw off a leg to escape a trap. He thought of his knife again. He took it out of his pocket and it slipped out of his trembling fingers and was gone. He looked woodenly upward. He sobbed again and hugged the rough trunk and tried to tear his leg free. The effort did not last long. From then on he struggled to breathe, straining up for each precious quarter inch of height, holding his breath when the chop broke over his face.
Several times he sucked in water and was able to expel it and find air. He held the trunk as high as he could reach. He thought that this could not be happening. It was not a true thing. Then he could find no more air. He expelled water and breathed in water and it filled his lungs. His lungs worked in spasms, sucking in and expelling the alien element, and he strained upward, and his eyes were wide open under the water. The lungs quieted and his hands slipped and the world faded quietly away from him. Caught there, his body trailed out in the current, three feet below the surface. When both trees went slowly down together, he was released and the current moved the body inland. The two raccoons swam sturdily toward other refuge, eyes alert in the bandit faces.
16
When the house shifted and turned and caught again, Flagan lifted his head and waited. He got to his feet. The house was steady again, but it was a precarious steadiness. He got to his feet and walked heavily into the hallway. It was tilted enough so that it was difficult to walk there. His right shoulder kept thudding against the wall. It was not that the slant was steep. He remembered a house at an amusement park long ago, and how Babe had giggled as she tried to go up the stairs. When a house was just a little off line, it affected your balance.
He had felt a curious lethargy since the death of Charlie Himbermark. It had made his own focus, his special interests, less intense. It had made him feel ridiculous and unimportant. It had made him feel as if it were important for him to explain something about himself to a disinterested bystander. Perhaps to Ruth. Explain himself carefully to that dark still face. It was incongruous to think of her. And he did not know what it was that he would tell her. Perhaps just say, I am me. I am Johnny Flagan and I am older than I had thought. Charlie’s death had seemed to uncover an area of gray weariness, the way a bandage might be taken from a wound that could not be healed. He wondered if he would walk on the streets again, waving, smiling, talking to friends. If so, it would not be quite the same. Why should the death of Charlie have such an effect, he wondered. Charlie was a nothing. An incompetent, irritating old man. Or am I just more aware of my own death? Aware of its inevitability even should I survive this monstrous roaring thing. Aware of this sagging much-used flesh, of broken blood vessels, of matronly belly and breasts. I who was so strong. Work the nets all day and tom-cat all night and be out there again in the pale morning, watching for the leap and flash of the mullet.
He heard the scream then. The long unforgettable scream of anguish and loss. It came from the room where the Dorns were. As he went in he felt the wrench and roar as part of the roof was torn away, felt the thrust of the unimpeded wind on his back that pushed him into the room.
Both children were crying, their voices inaudible in the storm. The Dorn woman lay half across her husband. Flagan went over to her and looked at the man’s still face, at the trickle of blood which had run from his left ear, and understood. He felt an overwhelming tenderness for this woman he did not know. He gently pulled her away from her husband. He had to reach around the back of the man’s neck to pry her right hand loose. When he did so he inadvertently touched the top of the man’s head and felt the queasy shift of the loose bone at the crown of his head. He thought, wonderingly, We’re not lasting well. Not well at all. We’re going one at a time here. The woman strained back toward the body on the floor, then turned into Flagan’s arms, trembling violently. He held her and wondered that he now held a woman he did not know, yet held her without lust, without need. Held her because she was afraid. Because they were both afraid.
There was another screeching, ripping sound, a faint thumping overhead. With his mouth close to the woman’s ear he said, almost shouting, “The kids! You got to look after the kids!” He repeated it and for a long time he thought he hadn’t reached her. Then she pulled away, not looking at him, and went to her children. The house shifted a little, less than before. He went over and pulled one of the blankets from underneath the man and spread it over him. The wind flapped it and tried to pull it away, but Flagan knelt heavily and tucked the edges under the body, wondering as he did so what sort of man this had been, this lean dark man with the tired face. It made him feel like a man of God to be performing this small service. He wished he knew words he could say.
As he straightened up he became aware of a new sound, a repeated thudding that shook the house, a thud that seemed to come at three- or four-second intervals. With each thud the house trembled. He looked at the woman and saw that she had heard it too. She knelt there, an arm around each child, looking at him, her head cocked to one side.
Flagan left the room hurriedly.
Betty Hollis watched her husband for a few moments, then stepped forward and slapped him as hard as she could, as hard as she could swing her arm. It hurt her hand. The blindness did not go away. She swung again and again. She stopped and looked at him. He came out of it like a person coming out of sleep. He looked at her and the madness of panic was gone from his eyes. His mouth worked. He looked ashamed. Her fingers had left white stripes on his cheek, stripes that were quickly changing to dark red.
She looked at him and she wanted to cry. She knew that if they lived, they would stay together. But the best part of it was over. They would stay together because he would not give up the money, and she would not give him up. But the good part was gone. She remembered a kind of candy she had always liked. It was from France. It came in a metal box and each piece was individually wrapped. You could tell what each piece was by the shape of it inside the tin foil wrappings. Her favorite had been the coffin-shaped pieces usually wrapped in green foil. They had bitter-sweet chocolate on the outside, and the inside was of chopped cherries in a sweet heavy liqueur. Once she had purchased three boxes out of her allowance. They were expensive. A school friend had gone up to her room while she was out, had opened every box and eaten every one of the special pieces. Every one.
She remembered that she had eaten all the rest of the candy in the boxes, but she had eaten it with sadness and regret and muted anger.
Now, in this marriage, the very best part was gone. They would both know that. It would color all the rest of it. He would forever be aware of her knowledge that he was something less than a man. It would change him like slow poison, and it would change their lovemaking. She knew she could never forget this scene, this horrid, babbling, jittering breakdown, this hulk of tan muscle with the wild scared eyes of a child. The hint of timidity, so long as he had kept his pride, had been endurable, even rather sweet. But breakdown was something far different. It was strange that it could not be excused, forgiven, forgotten. From now on it would be less a marriage of woman and man, more a marriage of woman and child. He had lost the right to demand possession. He could only beg for it, with humbleness.
But, diminished as he was, she still wanted all that was left of him. She saw the shame in him. She let him move close and put his arms around her. “Betty …”
She let him talk into her ear. She listened to the explanation. She did not give it her full attention. She was thinking of what they c
ould do to assure safety. And she listened to the odd thudding sound that was making the whole house tremble, an evisceral trembling, as of a home built near the tracks of a railroad where a train went endlessly by.
Steve Malden stood in the half shelter of the west wall of the bedroom and looked through the window hole where shutters and glass and frame had been. The room was open to the sky. The house was tilted to the east at about a six degree angle, he estimated. The water was perhaps a foot below the second floor level. It did not seem possible that it could come higher.
He saw movement and a flash of light behind him. Flagan came in with a flashlight. He turned it off as he neared the window. The sky was lighter in the west. A thrust of wind caught Flagan and he moved aside, away from the window, stood close to Malden. Together they looked out at the water. The water had come high enough, and enough trees had gone down so that the water was getting an almost unimpeded path. With such an open sweep the wind had picked up the water into waves now big enough to crest had not the wind kept the crests flattened. The waves thudded against the west wall of the house with stubborn regularity.
Flagan put his mouth close to Malden’s ear and yelled, “Last much longer?”
“Not with that going on.”
“Dorn is dead.”
Malden looked at Flagan, saw the unexpected look of grief in the man’s eyes. Flagan no longer looked like the man who had taken charge. He looked incapable of the exercise of authority. Not so much disheartened as uninterested. Malden wondered if the change in attitude had been due to the death of Himbermark. The two men had not given the impression of being very close.
“Let’s get everybody together,” Malden yelled into his ear. “Get some kind of a tool to get the doors off. Tear boards loose and find something to tie them together with. Neckties. Anything.”
The house shuddered again. The two men staggered and looked at each other and waited a moment, then headed for the door, each of them walking with odd caution, as though too heavy a footfall might be the last impetus needed to send the house sprawling and rolling into the current.
The only room still completely roofed was the one assigned to the Hollises. The eight of them gathered there. Malden closed the door. Though he still had to speak very loudly, it was relatively quiet. He turned the flashlight on the faces of the adults in turn.
“The house is going to go. I don’t know how soon. We’ve got to get hold of anything that will float. Bring it in here. Kick the shutters off that side window and be all ready for it. Mrs. Dorn will stay right here with the kids. The rest of us work. We have no tools. Do what you can.”
He looked at them again, at the frightened eyes. The Dorn woman looked dulled, apathetic. The Hollis man looked dazed. The smash of the water against the side of the house seemed stronger. But he could almost believe that the wind violence was less. If not less, at least it maintained the same steady raw-voiced note. He did not believe that it could have blown any harder than it was blowing ten minutes ago.
“Virginia, you and Mrs. Hollis gather up anything we can use as rope. Go through luggage. Anybody’s. The men gather boards and doors. Okay. Let’s move fast.”
He saw at once that Hollis was not going to be of much help. He seemed afraid to go into the exposed hall. Flagan went to work at once. Steve went to the room the Dorns had been in. He closed the door and then hurled himself at it until he had broken the hinges free of the old wood. He took the door back to the Hollis room. The wind, swirling down into the open hallway, made it difficult to handle. He found Flagan in the room with Himbermark’s body. Flagan was straining to rip up floor boards. Steve helped him, trying to keep the long boards from breaking as they pulled them up. It was too dark below to see where the water was, as it had covered the lower windows. Steve directed the flashlight beam down and saw the black surface of the water about eighteen inches below them. A palm tree rat swam there, eyes red in the beam.
He and Flagan carried the load of boards back. There were four flashlights. One of them was the type with a standard. It rested on the floor, the beam illuminating a corner. The three women knelt there with the two children, tying makeshift life belts to them. They were using belts and neckties from the luggage, and as floats they were using what watertight containers they had found among Jean Dorn’s household goods—a pressure cooker, cannisters, jars with screw tops.
Steve looked at them. It was a tableau demonstrating the eternal resiliency of women. He could hear their voices faintly above the wind, the thin nervous gay cajoling tone with which they tried to still the children’s fears, tried to make a game of it. It was a timeless tableau, because there had always been women and children and flood water. He looked at the curve of Virginia’s cheek in the yellow light, looked at the shape of her mouth, and loved her.
He put the boards down and went to the window and kicked the shutters loose, reached through, wrenched them off, pulled them into the room. The small amount of daylight left paled the flashlights. Dark water raced by.
As he started to look about to find something to lash the boards together, the house lurched again. It tilted at a greater angle, then seemed to stop. But Malden felt that it was still moving, very slowly, but moving. He knew it would go within moments.
He yelled at Flagan and took one of the doors and slid it through the window at an angle. He reached down over the sill and held it in the current. Flagan threw two boards onto it, but one of them was carried away.
Virginia came over quickly with the small girl, pushing Jean Dorn ahead of her. Jean hesitated. Steve thrust her through the window. She caught the door, held it as it tipped and nearly rolled her off. Virginia lowered the child to her and the woman managed to grasp the child. The buoyancy of the door would support no more. The strain on his hand was great. Jean screamed for the boy to be given to her. Steve released the door. It moved swiftly away on the current, the woman still staring at him, mouth open with her scream as the current turned the door, swirled it away, carried her off into the darkness.
The house tilted further, and Steve could feel the creaking and rending of the timbers of the frame. The new angle brought the water swirling into the room over the sill of the window. The small boy was yelling with terror. Flagan got the other door over to the window. Hollis thrust between Flagan and Malden, two heavy floor boards in his arms. One of the boards swung in the wind and hit Steve across the side of the head. He made an angry grasp for Hollis but the man was gone, moving quickly away into the night.
“Please!” the Hollis girl was screaming at him. “Please!” He let her go. She slid into the current, holding a single board, and as she disappeared he saw that she held her head high, looking ahead for her husband.
Virginia went on the door, quickly and without protest, supporting the small boy, giving Steve Malden one long direct look just before he released the door, half smiling as she went, leaving him with the memory of that half smile, of her dark water-pasted hair, the small boy safely in the crook of her arm, her firm brown hand holding the edge of the door as she lay across it.
The house moved quickly. The board floated within the room, moving toward the window. The house had tipped until water filled almost the whole frame, leaving only the top right corner clear. Flagan held a clump of boards with panic grip. Malden thrust him through the window and as he turned to grasp the two remaining boards, the house went over. He took a deep breath and felt the wallowing, elephantine roll of the house. He thrust for the window, but in the turn of the house he had lost his sense of direction. His fingers touched rough solid wall. He felt along it. The house was moving, grinding, bumping. He felt in increasing panic for the window.
Then the house lost, all at once, the form and structure of a house. It was crushed and became broken flotsam. He was caught for a moment between unseen things that pressed against him from either side. Then he was free and he came to the surface. When he tried to swim something thudded against his shoulder from behind, threatening to push him under. He r
olled and caught the edge of a huge section of roof, and pulled himself onto it. It was more than buoyant enough to support him. He crouched at the leading edge, staring forward, saw the dim shapes of tree tops coming toward him. The roof caught against the trees, swung slowly around and moved on.
It was now obvious that the wind was less violent. It was thinner, without the deep resonant notes. He moved to the center of the piece of roof and cautiously stood erect. He looked back toward the west. There was a low line of dark red fire across the horizon, the last glow of a moody sunset. In the slight path it made across the water he saw a struggling figure. He dived without hesitation, swam to the child, and by using all the power of his free arm managed to regain the section of roof.
He saw that it was the boy child, the one called Stevie, the one who had been with Virginia. He looked at the water. He could see nothing. He sat in the center of the piece of roof and held the trembling sobbing child. His raft wedged against something, moved, wedged itself more tightly. He did not investigate to see what had halted the raft. He sat and held the child. The roof piece shivered as the current touched it. The boy stopped sobbing. The red glow faded and it was night and he waited.
17
By dawn on the eighth of October, Thursday morning, Hurricane Hilda was blowing herself out in south central Georgia.
She had pushed great tides against the west coast of Florida. Never in the recorded history of the state had the sea come so far inland. The record was set in Hernando and Citrus counties where, due to the low level of the land, salt water came as far as seventeen miles inland.
Murder in the Wind Page 21