As he stood there a truly massive gust of wind came along. It slammed against him and drove him back. He turned and took several running steps before he caught himself. The force of it shocked him. He heard a rending crack, muffled by the wind noise, and a big limb fell onto the road, bounced and slid and was pushed over into the far ditch by the wind.
He leaned into the wind and walked to the car. He was on call. He called in and he heard the strain in the metallic voice at the other end:
“The hurricane has changed direction and it’s moving in on us, Stark. It’s pushing a high tide ahead of it and raising hell along the coast. No more cars go through that detour. Stay there and turn ’em back the way they came. Tell ’em to find shelter. Tell ’em to get the hell out of this. It looks like a bad one. Cruise south and stop everything coming at you and turn ’em around.”
Stark started the motor and swung around and headed slowly south, dome light flashing. The wind swayed the moving sedan. On impulse he pushed the siren and kept it on. The sound seemed buried and lost in the new high wail of the great wind.
The Australian pine was a huge one, very near the end of its life span and beginning to die. It stood on the north bank of the Waccasassa River, thirty feet west of the wooden bridge over the main part of the river.
The same gust that drove Stark across the road struck the old tree. It tilted, leaned. There was a ripping, crackling sound and the flat root structure was pulled slowly up on the west side of the tree. The tree fell slowly at first and then more quickly. It brought up square yards of black soaked soil with it. It fell thickly, heavily, onto the north end of the wooden bridge. The great weight of it in free fall smashed the tough old timbers. The bridge folded and sagged, supported the weight for a few seconds, and then with small harsh noises as spikes were pulled slowly from weathered wood, bridge and tree sank into the swollen Waccasassa.
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.
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 right. 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.