Rachel sighed and drew her legs up under herself, her hands gripping the sides of the claw-footed bathtub, the muscles of her arms swelling as she raised herself up out of the bath water. Hector put a hand to the small of her back to help her up, then leaned forward and kissed her bottom.
He stood up behind her and began patting down her body with a big towel. He said, “We’ll get the radio on...see what we can learn from that. Sounds like the wind’s really picking up now. Time for us to be on the sharp.”
Rachel looked back over her shoulder, frowning. “What for, other than the wind?”
Hector said, “Storm surge — just in case the weather bureau gets it wrong and the eye passes over or nearer to us. If that was to happen, it could push a water wall across Bone Key. We’re not what you’d call much above sea level. A six- or seven-foot surge could be very bad news. And a twelve- or fifteen-foot surge, sustained, could put the whole Key underwater, perhaps for hours. Have to be prepared to move into the attic if that happens. I’ve got a shotgun stored up there, in case we have to blow a hole through the roof to get up on top of the house. If that’s still not high enough, I’ve got life preservers stashed up in the attic. We’d lash ourselves together, then find ourselves a tall palm tree to cling to until the waters receded.”
Rachel looked stricken. They were both still naked and Hector hugged her bare body tightly to his. He said, “Please don’t worry, Rachel. We’re talking worst-case-scenarios and never-going-to-happens here, darling. I’m just being that over-prepared Boy Scout, you know? More likely, the way we’ll pass this storm is doing more loving damage to one another’s most private parts.”
***
The radio was mostly crackle and static...through the pops and cracks, Hector determined the experts were still predicting the storm’s eye to pass over Matecumbe.
He hoped the veterans’ camps there had been evacuated in time. That Key was one of the lowest-lying in the chain of islands trailing down from the Florida panhandle southwesterly to Cuba. Matecumbe was also devoid of anything like real shelter other than the hotel and a few small houses...it was more Hooverville than town — a rag-tag collection of tents and shacks.
Hector checked the weather gauges hanging on his kitchen wall and shrugged off a chill. For the first time, he was truly concerned for Bone Key’s welfare. The house was sweltering — almost 90, but he couldn’t open the windows with the rain coming down as it was now. He estimated it must still be in the low- to mid-80s outside. But the barometer was what really unnerved him —it was at 29.392 inches and in free fall. Based on the falling barometer, if Key West was not in the storm’s direct path, then the true eye of the storm must be devastatingly hellish — a true killing wind.
Hector put on a brave face and mixed two mojitos and handed one to Rachel. She was sitting on the couch, her legs curled up under herself, sorting through Hector’s own hardcovers and bound pulp magazines containing his short stories.
Smiling, she took the drink from him. She sipped some and set it on the table by the couch. “You make the best ones,” she said.
He sat down next to her and looked over some of the covers of his books: Rhapsody In Black...The Big Siesta, The Last Key, Satan’s Daughter and Border Town. She picked up that last one and read aloud, ‘Whores die hard.’ Hard to stop reading there, granted,” she said. “But do you really, to use, Quentin Windly’s phrase, ‘Write what you live and live what you write?’”
“Isn’t that what we all do? Us artists, I mean.”
“Well, certainly it seems to be what you and Papa do.”
“We use our lives as touchstones. But there’s still plenty of invention there.”
“I was reading this story of yours,” she said. She began sorting through the pulp magazines he’d had bound into hardcovers. Here,” she said, “Black Mask Magazine. The story is called, ‘Hellcat.’ In it, your ‘hero,’ if he can truly be called that, Tom Reed, he pays a man to scare a woman so he — Tom — can pick her up in a bar.”
Uh-oh. Hector had written that story five years before...probably six or seven teeth ago, for Tito Castillo.
Hector searched Rachel’s face. He didn’t get the sense there was accusation there...maybe not even a recognition of the real possibility that Hector might have scammed her in just such a manner. He said, trying to look innocent and nonchalant, “Sometimes, and maybe more for me than others, life imitates art. I honestly don’t know what else to say.”
Rachel weighed that, then said, “At least you’re no Tom Reed, so maybe I’ll fare better than —” she scanned the yellowing pulp pages to refresh her memory, then said, “—than the luckless Becky Case.”
“Yeah. She was a wicked piece of work...worse even, than old Tom, if I’m remembering the right story.”
Hector closed the book, stacked them, and sat them on the coffee table. As he did that, something hit the roof, hard, and Rachel clutched at him. The lights flickered again. There was another crash, the sound of splintered wood, and Hector saw the glass pane of the window at the other side of the room was now fractured. “Something must have hit the storm shutter,” Hector said. “Must have penetrated the wooden slats and put enough pressure on the glass to crack that, too. Probably coconuts — the damned neighbors probably forgot to cut them down before the storm. With any luck, that was the last of them going.”
Rachel held him tighter as the thunder exploded overhead, rattling the windows in their cases and causing their drinking glasses to shake. “That sounds so close,” she said. “I really hate storms...even little ones.”
He could tell she meant it. Rachel was shaking out of proportion to the storm. The Big Blow was bad, but it was still nowhere near its peak, by Hector’s estimate.
There was another crash, this time out back. Hector gently freed himself from Rachel’s arms and flipped on the back porch light and cracked the back door, holding it tight against the buffeting wind. A lawn decoration from some neighbor’s yard had crashed into a tree out back. Hector shook his head. His fool neighbors hadn’t exercised due diligence and gathered up loose items that might be rendered killer projectiles by the big winds. Then Hector saw the dead fighting cock pinned to the palm tree — its beak driven into the trunk of the tree. Hector thought of Hem out there in the storm, standing suicidal watch over his beloved new boat, the Pilar, and wondered if he’d ever see Ernest again.
The lights flickered several times in quick succession, and now there was a strange, terrible howling sound, like a banshee or the soundtrack from some Universal horror picture. It was an inhuman, sustained screaming noise. Hector realized it was the wind. Something else crashed outside and struck the back door, nearly knocking Hector from his feet.
Hector saw that a pelican had been swept from some tree it had settled in and had been hurled against his back door. The pelican lay dead on his porch step, its neck twisted twice and many of its feathers stripped by the wind.
Another hard gust came and the door was torn from his hand. The wind blew through his house, extinguishing all of the candles just as the power failed again.
Hector felt frantic hands grabbing at him and turned to find Rachel, hysterical, tearing at him. “Make it stop,” she pleaded.
He twisted around in her arms just long enough to get both hands on the back door’s knob. He wrenched the door shut, struggling hard against the wind and blowing rain. He locked the door, brushed his wet hair back from his forehead and turned and opened his arms to Rachel. She hugged him close in his darkened kitchen. He felt her mouth close, her breath coming raggedly. She was on the verge of hyperventilating. She said, “Love me, Hector! Or something — do something to take it away.”
He shook her once, then kissed her hard. She responded hungrily, her tongue groping for his, her hands tearing at his wet clothes. He swept her up and carried into the bedroom.
***
The wind was still a howling constant, but it had been so for hours — Rachel had at least adjusted to that aspect of t
he storm.
Panting, her legs wrapped tightly around his own, she said between ragged breaths, “You were right about my father ...about what happened after my mother.”
“I didn’t saying anything like that,” Hector said, his skin crawling to hear it, now, while there bodies were still joined...while he was still spasming softly inside her. “Never said what I thought.”
“You thought it; I could see it in your eyes. Blue eyes don’t hide much, Hector. You said it yourself, or rather, you wrote it, in The Last Key. I knew you knew. It was a week after the funeral. I was still just a little girl, really. He came to me, awakened me in the middle of the night from sleep — from a dream about my mother, oddly enough. He said it was time for us to comfort one another...that he’d show me how.”
Hector was torn — the writer in him wanted her to push on and tell the terrible tale. Something he might be able to use. But the man who had come to care for Rachel — who was still inside her — needed the story to stop, right there. He said, “I can imagine the rest.”
Her eyes glistened in the light from the candle by the bed. “I suppose that’s true. You can probably imagine like few others ever could...writing the things that you do.” She turned away from him, and away from the flickering candle’s light. The wind was still a fierce scream and the house was shaking and vibrating with the wind and the hard, nearly sideways rain. “I don’t remember much more than that,” she said softly. “But I do know it was storming outside, during that first time. Not a storm like this one, not at all. I’ve never experienced anything like this — but a hard rain...thunder and lightning. Ever since, well, storms...”
“We’ll get through tonight, darling,” Hector said. “I’ll see you through it, I swear. And, in a few days, when it’s quiet, we’ll get ourselves on a boat and we’ll make a run to the other side of the Gulf...start searching for my next good place. Maybe New Mexico. We’ll look for somewhere it does little more than softly rain...and hardly ever even that.”
She turned again to face him, her hands reaching up and pressing tightly to his face, holding his head in the half-light where she could see his pale blue eyes. “Are you...? I mean....”
Hector, surprised to find that he was hard again inside her, said, “No more words.”
A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them. Still, you can’t listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.”— John Dos Passos
PANIC
12
Much of the first news came by word-of-mouth. It came from those with battery-operated short-wave radios. It came from the few fisherman crazy enough to put to sea soon after the storm passed by Key West.
It came from gutsy pilots who’d flown northward over the Keys and seen the miles-long devastation wrecked on the overseas railway and the rescue train sent too late by dithering federal employees — dispatched tardily through the storm-swept Keys to pick up the doomed veterans. And the poor people who got on that too-late train? Most of them were equally doomed — the train cars swept out into the ocean and then swamped.
Only the train’s engine remained sitting upright on the surviving stretch of tracks.
The first reports claimed that Matecumbe Key had been stripped down to its coral base and that everyone on the Key should be presumed dead.
The outside world heard tales of even greater devastation — with phone lines down, rumors ran rampant that Key West and many others of the Keys had been “blown away.”
A lot of wild, insanely false rumors were started.
But in terms of the actual devastation and loss of life? That was still beyond exaggeration or comprehension, in Hector’s initial estimation.
Later days only proved him right...at least to his own stricken mind.
They initially determined that the winds across Matecumbe had reached 200 miles an hour. The sustained tidal surge had been 15-feet, and they figured that some waves might have climbed 30-feet above the norm. Hector couldn’t conceive of that...or its likely results.
Whatever its actual depth, the high water was more than enough to drown nearly everyone on the Key.
And the winds that had come ahead of the storm surge would have been sufficient to drive sand at blasting force across clothing and skin — more than enough to strip someone caught outside and deprived shelter of their clothing. The wind had been strong enough to scour exposed skin and underlying muscle and soft tissue down to bone.
The barometer at Matecumbe had fallen to 26.35 — a new record low for the United States.
About five in the morning on Tuesday, Key West time, the barometer had finally begun climbing again.
The thrashing rain continued through much of Tuesday, but late that afternoon the rain eased and then stopped.
When it was finally safe to venture outside his house, Hector found that apart from the single, fractured storm shutter covering the sitting room window facing east, damage to his own cottage was minimal. There was minor scarring to the light-green stucco walls — apparently from the impact of coconuts, severed tree branches and dead birds. Most of the dead fowls were his neighbors’ fighting cocks.
Palm fronds were strewn several inches thick across his backyard and in the street. But Key West seemed to have come through intact for the most part — mostly fallen trees and wind damage.
Yet there were already a few missing persons’ reports being filed.
Rummies and homeless bums had gone missing — maybe swept off the docks and piers where they’d slept off their last drunks...maybe swamped in the rickety boats a few called home.
Rachel and Hector spent Wednesday morning into afternoon in Josie’s, eavesdropping on storm “war” stories that were pretty much the equivalent of their own and trying to forget the sound of the wind that had blown all Monday night through early Tuesday morning, so unnerving Rachel.
Early Thursday afternoon, having wrapped up his morning’s writing and just stepping out of his second shower of the day after a late morning spent in Rachel’s arms, there was a hard knock at his door. That voice:
“Lasso! It’s Hemingstein! Put on some old clothes — something you can burn later. And gather some gear. We’ve been mobilized.”
Hector frowned and zipped his pants and pulled on a T-shirt. He said to Rachel, “Best put something on.” He called outside, “What are you talking about?”
“All able-bodied men,” Hem yelled back. “We’re ordered up to Matecumbe — the water’s finally calm enough to mount a search-and-rescue effort.”
Hector was almost sorry he’d answered Hem’s call, now. He looked at Rachel. “I have to go.”
“Of course you do,” she said. “I’ll be fine. Go and do what you can to help.”
Hector said, “It’s probably just for the day. Be back tomorrow afternoon at the latest. I’ll get that pledge from Hem. Mi casa es su casa,” he said. “There’s an extra door key in the drawer to the right of the cutlery tray. I have credit at Josie’s too, so run a tab if you want.”
“I’ll be fine,” Rachel said, tying off the belt of his bathrobe, now gathered tight around her. “The weather is clear now.” She kissed him hard on the mouth. “Tell me what you need and I’ll help you pack, Hector. Those poor people, if they’re still alive, have waited long enough.”
Hector winked. “You’ve got a good heart.” He called to Hem, “Meet you at your boat in twenty minutes.” Then he held up a finger, remembering. He said to Rachel, “Something I want you to have, Rache.” He opened the drawer of the table by his bed and pulled out a small, velvet box and opened it. She smiled at the gold bracelet. He said, “It was my mother’s.”
She held out her hand and he clasped it to her wrist. “Damn — a perfect fit,” he said.
She gave him a long look. “It is. It is perfect.” She frowned and hugged him tightly, then pressed her palm to his temple. “Stay strong, Hec. What lies ahead could be terrible
to behold. Don’t let it get inside your head, promise me?”
***
Hector stood with Ernest on the flying bridge of the Pilar as her master piloted her north, skirting the perimeter of Long Key.
“It sounds like murder, Hector,” Hem said.
Ernest using Hector’s given name was unusual, so he figured Hem must be badly shaken. “They delayed and delayed sending down the train, those cocksucker FDR flunkies,” Hem said. “Federal government might as well have flown those poor bloody fucking vets out over the Atlantic and dropped them in to save a step. Fucking bureaucrats. Some cocksucking decision-maker was hankering to get down to Key West for his honeymoon to get his ashes hauled. Think that night of fucking was worth the deaths of half-a-thousand?”
“I’ve got no politics,” Hector said.
“This isn’t about politics, Lasso.”
They plowed on through choppy water. As they approached the camp, they could smell the bodies. Many of the dead were floating in the waters around the annihilated ferry slip.
At first, Hem tried to steer the Pilar around the floating corpses, but they lay so thickly in the water, face down and bloated, that Ernest eventually gave up, setting an idling course for one of the remaining piers where they might be able to tie fast. In time, they both stopped flinching at the sound of Pilar’s bow bumping bodies.
***
Hector and Hem were both covered in sweat and each had vomited in front of the other several times. Their stomachs were empty now and they’d tied strips of their own shirts around their mouths. They had poured rubbing alcohol and coffee and any other pungent thing they could find across the surface of the fabric tied around their faces — anything that might meet or overmatch the smell of decay from the victims strewn around the Key. Eventually someone had handed them gas masks.
Their gloves were slick with blood and puss from the bodies they’d been handling. The stench was made worse by the rotting carcasses of the big birds and scavengers that might have been consuming the corpses if the birds themselves hadn’t also fallen prey to the killer wind.
Toros & Torsos (The Hector Lassiter Series) Page 9