Virginia Sherrel passed that test quickly and easily. She had the same flavor of frankness and lustiness that Dorothy had had. Yet it could be ersatz.
He did not hear the footsteps on the stairs behind him until they were quite close. The storm sounds had obscured them. He whirled quickly and saw that it was Virginia.
“Hi!” she said. “Jumpy nerves? I was wondering if you’d drowned down here. What are you doing?”
He moved over on the stair to give her room. “Measuring our intake. In another couple of minutes I’ll be able to tell you the rate.”
She sat beside him and looked at the water. “Good gosh,” she said. “Look at it! Wouldn’t it be awful if it was your own home, all your things, and you had to watch the water coming up and up?”
“Drowning the television? Sopping into the broadloom?”
“Well, not so much the actual
things
as the feeling of the place. You know. Fireside and everything. And thinking of having to hoe it all out afterward. Gook and slime. Say, it’s getting darker, isn’t it?”
He looked at his mark. He could barely see it. The water had almost reached it. “Quite a bit darker.”
He listened to the wind sound and heard that it had changed in character. It was less intermittent. It seemed steadier. And the sound had climbed the scale, had moved up another half octave. Within the constant screaming he could hear various soft lost sounds—thumpings and crashings and flappings as though outside there was some great sad imprisoned animal that fought dully for release.
Somewhere upstairs a door banged with a noise like a far-off shot and he thought he heard the tinkling of glass. He felt Virginia shudder and he took her hand, laced his fingers in hers.
She looked down at their hands, barely visible in the gloom. “Silly,” she said.
“What is?”
“I’m a big girl now, but it feels awfully damned good to have my hand held.”
It was something Dorothy could have said. Would have said under the same circumstances. The mark was touched by the water. He looked at his watch. “It’s coming up at the rate of a foot every twenty minutes. But it will slow down.”
“How come?”
“For every foot it rises, it has more land to spread over. It takes that much more water.”
“Hey, it’s getting really dark!”
“I think the bar cloud is coming.”
“Bar cloud? What’s that?”
“That’s the one that means the real business, Virginia.” Her face was pale in the darkness of the stairway. She shivered again and her fingers tightened on his.
“Now you’re getting me scared again,” she said.
On impulse he leaned over awkwardly and kissed her lips. She made no attempt to evade him. He moved slowly so as to give her a chance to turn her head if she so desired. Her lips were warm and soft. She put her arm around his neck and quickly, convulsively, increased the pressure of the kiss and then moved away from him.
“I suppose that’s heartening too,” she said.
“I guess that’s what I meant.”
“Once upon a time I was in a hurricane and a man kissed me,”
“Virginia, I didn’t mean to…”
She stood up. “Got to go see how the kids are doing.” She went up the stairs. The water had come up to his feet. He had to move up a stair. She had done everything right so far. He felt absurd to be testing her, weighing her. She was Virginia. She should not be measured against preconceived standards. It was an indignity to her to so measure her.
Three strong ones out of the group. Virginia, Flagan and himself. And one old man. And one vulnerable family group. And three mean kids. One very rough looking punk. With all the earmarks. One younger kid, more uncertain, but showing promise of turning out like the older one. And one moronic girl.
It would have to be Virginia and the two small kids. Somehow. Get them together, get them out, stay with them. If the house should go.
Suddenly the quality of the fading daylight changed. It became much more clear. The room brightened. The wind increased in violence. He was puzzled until he remembered from his reading that visibility becomes crystal clear just before the bar cloud and the worst of the storm arrives.
He decided that he would like to see a bar cloud. It should be visible from the room the newlyweds occupied. He went quickly up the stairs and knocked at their door. The man opened it. The wind sound was now so loud he couldn’t hear what the man said. He gestured toward the window. The man nodded. He went to the window and looked west. He saw it approaching, a massive black bar. It looked to be two miles up. It seemed to stretch as far as the eye could reach. It came on inexorably. He sensed the impossible force of the storm, the improbable violence. The look of that bar cloud made you want to grab something solid, close your eyes and hang on. It brought an atavistic fear to him. It made the hair prickle at the nape of his neck.
He turned and looked at the man named Bunny Hollis. The man stood with eyes wide, mouth and throat working, hands washing each other. The young and not very handsome bride went to her man and put her arms around him. He held her and put his head down into the hollow of her shoulder, his eyes shut and his shoulders hunched against an anticipated blow. The girl looked at Steve and there was a mute pleading in her eyes. Perhaps for understanding.
Another strong one,
he said to himself,
I miscounted. She has it too, though he hasn’t. I hope you make out, he thought. I hope, Mrs. Hollis, that you have strength enough for two. It looks as if you will need it. And soon.
“This is Station WAKJ transmitting on standby power. Our power lines went out at a few minutes after five. The time is now six-eighteen. Hurricane Hilda intersected the West Coast of Florida at six o’clock at the mouth of the Suwanee River, moving in an east northeast direction at approximately eight miles per hour.
“Though we have no reports from the area, it is believed that wind damage will be enormous in the area from Adams Beach to Rainbow Point. Lake City and Gainesville can be expected to undergo heavy winds, though not as heavy as at the coast line, since it is predicted that the storm will diminish in fury as it moves inland. It is already estimated that water damage along exposed coastal areas will run into the hundreds of millions. We received one report from Sundown Cove about twenty minutes ago. Because the intersection of the coast line came at a time when the tide would normally be high, water damage is… well, it’s just stupendous. The ham radio report we got said that the municipal pier has been carried away, that all waterfront homes and buildings have been destroyed, that the water has come up so high that huge combers have been breaking in the heart of the town, smashing the shops. The ham radio report said that loss of life has been heavy and that many residents have taken refuge in the bank building and in the Baptist Church.
“Folks, if you are within the range of my voice and you are in the path of this hurricane, take every possible precaution. This is a great calamity. A great tragedy. It will be many days before we know the full extent of the damage. About all we can do is pray for those folks at Stephensville and Steinhatchee, at Horseshoe and Cedar Key and Yankeetown. That’s mighty flat land through there. That water is being pushed a long way inland. We’ve had a report that it’s pretty deep across Route 19 in a lot of places.
“Just as soon as the wind makes it possible, planes will be going in there dropping in supplies, and helicopter rescues will be attempted, I’m sure. The Red Cross, of course, will be standing by, ready to go into the area just as soon as they can.
“Here’s another report. The eye of Hurricane Hilda has just crossed the town of Wilcox. Wait until I look at my map here. Yes, that would indicate that she has picked up a little forward speed. The report says the winds have diminished a bit. At Wilcox they’re down to a little less than a hundred miles an hour. And she seems to have turned a little bit more north, probably enough so that Gainesville will miss the worst of it, although they have winds of gale force there already, with gusts up to seventy miles an hour. As an amateur I’d just be willing to venture a guess that Hilda will keep on turning north and blow herself out somewhere up west of the Okefenokee.
“For those of you who called in before the phone lines went out, I have to tell you that until the emergency period is past we can’t use the facilities of this station for messages to loved ones. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. This is a small violent hurricane and nobody expected her to switch around and come in on us like she did. She really came in. They’ll be talking about this one for years. I want to tell you that just about the best thing you can do is stay safe until this goes by, and then get out there and do every doggone thing you can to help those who have really taken it in the neck.
“I’m under orders here to just keep on talking about this thing and give out the reports as they come in. And I can tell that before this night is over I’m going to have to say some things that are going to make me and a lot of people pretty sick at heart. It’ll all be built up again. They can’t lick us. But they can sure put us back on the ropes for a spell.
“Here’s a new one. A navy plane just bucked the heavy winds and followed the coast line all the way up. Visibility is pretty good in the wake of the storm. The pilot reports that the water is so high and came so far inland that he can’t pick up the familiar landmarks. The whole coast line looked altered to him. He thinks he located Cedar Key, but he wasn’t certain if he had the right place. If he had the right place, it took a whale of a beating. Pretty soon now the tide should drop and we ought to start getting a runoff of all that extra water.
“Right now I’ll play a record to sort of cheer you folks up and if anything important comes in, I’ll cut the record right off in the middle and let you have it, so keep listening. This is Pete Alderman over at WAKJ operating on standby power broadcasting a running account of Hurricane Hilda as a public service to West Coast Florida.”
They own the white houses on the low beaches. Houses with Florida rooms, jalousies, terrazzo floors, cypress paneling. They own the neat yards with protective sea wall, the graceful clump of coconut palm, the silvery punk trees. They claim not to understand the mental processes of Italian peasants who willingly live on the vulnerable slopes of Vesuvius. Yet they have builded their white houses as close as possible to a sleeping giant, to a placid shallow Gulf of Mexico. Gulf front land is the most costly. Their children swim in the safe shallow water, they sieve the small plaid coquina shells from the wet sand, they hunt for the blue-black discarded teeth of sharks—like small arrowheads with serrated edges.
At dusk they sit on their terraces and watch the sun slide down into the slate Gulf, and the glasses are cool in their hands and the west breeze makes a dry rattle in the palm fronds.
Their houses went very quickly.
First came the very slow deep swells that precede the hurricane. Then came the first fitful winds. They were evacuated then, and it seemed like a picnic. Take the jewel box and a few bottles and the portable radio. Board up the picture windows. Move inland to a motel. They had done it before. It was a hurricane party. It was excitement. Come back later and exclaim over the new contours of the beach, the salt-ruined plantings, the forgotten window where the rain had driven in.
This time it was not at all like that. A house went quickly. The water came up and up until the brute waves could smash directly against the sea wall. The sea wall stood. It stood until the solid water, cresting over it, sucked the fill from behind the wall, sucked it down through small openings in the wall. Soon, without backing, the sea wall twisted and crumpled. When the waves retreated they carried slabs of concrete and left them sprawled on the beach to be picked up by the next wave and hammered against what was left of the wall.
Now the pattern was clear. Each great wave came up, smashed, sucked back what had been torn loose. The fill was pulled from under the terrace. Then it was pulled from under the house. When enough of it was gone, the terrazzo block cracked and sagged under its own weight. The house broke in the middle and sagged into the hole. Furniture slid down toward the place where the spine of the house was broken. Now the waves struck the front of the house itself. They smashed the weakened structure. As each wave pulled back, sucked back out of the shell of the house it brought with it the things from within the house. Bright plastic dishes. An aluminum kitchen chair. Toys. Sodden books. And the next wave would lift, pick up the bright debris and smash against what was left. After the walls went, the roof slid down in one great piece, but was soon lifted, turned, dropped, broken.
Then the way was clear and for a time the waves reached and smashed and wiped the place clean of any sign that a house had been there. But the tide and the wind were increasing and soon the tips of the greatest waves could reach the next line of homes, the homes of the people who either could not afford the Gulf frontage, or had been wary of storms.
In the motels the hurricane parties were gay. Until the portable radios began to bring in the knowledge of the extent of the damage. Then they listened, turning the volume above the wind sound, sitting in the white glare of the gasoline lanterns, laughing no longer.
It struck in greatest violence along the least populated area of the West Coast. It could have as easily struck at the Venice-Sarasota-Bradenton area. Had it done so, damage would have been in the billions. Yet even so the high water caused much damage in that area, and more damage in the St. Petersburg-Clearwater area.
At Sundown Cove the huge combers, slightly flattened by the great winds, swept unimpeded from the Gulf, swept across the area where the municipal auditorium had been, where there had been stores and a supermarket and parking lots—swept across the area they had cleared and smashed against the stone flank of the bank building.
Johnny Flagan drank directly from the bottle and recapped it. He counted the drinks he had had. They seemed to have no effect. He wanted an effect. He wanted a glow of confidence and courage. He wanted to get to the point of where he could stop thinking of water and of swimming. He had never learned how to swim. That was the way the old man had gone. It made him think that after all these years the Gulf was coming in after him, reaching for him.