Death Benefits (18 page)

While she was talking, Walker saw that there were some other managers walking the aisles, some of them getting novices set up at desks with hurried instructions, and others handling questions. He moved toward one of the empty desks, but Joyce handed the telephone back to the vice president and caught up with him. She guided him away from the desks and up the aisle, talking rapidly.

“John, did you bring your suitcase?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Thanks for the warning. Where do you want me to sit?”

“We don’t know yet if the hurricane will make it to the mainland, but it just brushed the edge of the Dominican Republic. It tore roofs off brand-new buildings and caused floods that took roads with them. The Miami office doesn’t have enough people, so we’re trying to rush reinforcements in ahead of the storm.”

“Me?” said Walker. He stared at the activity around them. There were already people with their hands up.

Joyce saw them too. “You were on the list from upstairs. Obviously you don’t have to—”

“I’ll go,” he said. “What do I do?”

“Meet the others at the airport as soon as you can. Delta Air Lines.” She took a step toward a confused-looking twenty-year-old typist. She stopped and looked back at Walker. “Keep your receipts.”

Walker watched her turn her attention to the new problem, then hurried toward the elevators. When he arrived at the airport, Bill Kennedy came across the polished floor to meet him. Walker could see that Kennedy already had a ticket in his coat pocket.

“We can’t fly to Miami,” Kennedy said cheerfully. “They’re afraid their planes will get stuck on the runway when the storm hits.”

“What are your tickets for?”

“Atlanta.”

“Atlanta? That’s got to be five hundred miles away.”

“Six hundred sixty-three,” said Kennedy. “That’s what they said, and they’re an airline, so they must know.”

“Can’t we do better than that?”

Kennedy shrugged. “Better? From a rational perspective, Anchorage would be a lot better.” He put his arm around Walker’s shoulders and turned him toward the ticket counter. “Look who’s here.”

Walker recognized Marcy Wang, Maureen Cardarelli, and a few of the new people who had just completed training to be agents. “So?”

“We’re all young and unmarried. It’s a squadron of the unloved, the unwanted, and the cheaply dispensable. It’s an insurance company, for Christ’s sake—they’re weighing risk against reward. They know they’re liable to lose somebody. Atlanta is only an hour from Miami if planes are flying when we get there. If they’re not . . . ”

“What about Orlando?”

“Orlando? Don’t know him. Let him die.”

“Florida. That’s only a couple of hundred miles from Miami, and there are huge numbers of flights. Has anybody checked to see if they’re still on?”

“Beats me,” he said. “The flight leaves for Atlanta in a few minutes, so if you want to go . . . ”

Walker stepped to the counter, where a middle-aged man was waiting. “Are the flights to Orlando still scheduled?”

The man looked at him judiciously. “At this time, there haven’t been any cancellations.”

“Are there any leaving soon that I can still get on?”

The man clicked his computer keys, stared, then clicked some more. “There’s one in twenty minutes.” He turned his attention to Walker. “There are lots of passengers who haven’t checked in yet. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but they’re expecting a hurricane in Florida. I could sell you a ticket. You’ll probably get on, if it goes. I have to say that I think the no-shows are probably right. If the plane takes off, it may be diverted. If it lands in Orlando, you may regret it.”

“I know,” said Walker. “I have to try. It’s an emergency.”

The man seemed to be making an effort to say no more. His eyebrows slowly rose as he clicked in the reservation and started to print the ticket. At last he said quietly, “I happened to be working there when Andrew came in. You haven’t seen an emergency until you’re stuck in one of those things.”

Walker took his ticket and returned to the waiting area to tell the others, but they were gone. He looked up at the schedule on the television screen, and saw the flight for Atlanta blinking. In a moment, the notation changed to
DEPARTED
.

Walker hurried through the airport to his gate, and got in line to board the flight for Orlando.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, Walker was making his way through the Orlando airport toward the baggage claim. As he reached the escalator to take him down to the lower level, he heard a sweet female voice announce, “All incoming flights have been canceled.”

A few minutes later, Walker was in a rental car driving out of Orlando on the turnpike toward the southeast, staring across the flat country at a small, distant bank of puffy white clouds just above the horizon.

19

Walker found an all-news station on the rental car’s radio and kept it on as he drove. The weather reports had been superseded by recitations of an official notice that said a hurricane watch had been declared for a stretch of Florida from the Keys up the Atlantic coast to Daytona Beach. It was followed by a long list of the communities that fell within those boundaries. Since Walker still had not reached the first of them, he began to feel increasingly uneasy, especially after he heard the revision that extended the watch all the way up to Jacksonville.

When he reached the coast, the sun was shining brightly on the road ahead, and the white surf stood out from the sea as it did in every picture of Florida he had ever seen, but the puffy white clouds in the distance had changed. They seemed to be piling on top of one another, growing into towers. Somewhere beyond them, something very big was happening, something that he had never seen before. It was as though he could see the night following the sun in from the east, slowly rolling in over the ocean and darkening it across the whole horizon.

The voice on the radio said, “The Weather Service has just upgraded the hurricane watch to a hurricane warning. Hurricane Theresa is now seventy miles east-southeast of the Florida coast, moving at approximately twenty miles an hour. It contains extremely heavy rains, and winds up to one hundred and sixty miles an hour. All residents are advised to take immediate precautions, and to expect that the storm will make landfall within the next four hours. I repeat. The hurricane watch has been changed to a hurricane warning . . . .”

It was shortly afterward that Walker noticed that the lanes coming toward him were filling up rapidly. He noticed that some of the cars were heavily loaded with luggage. He supposed that most of these people probably were tourists who had decided that this might be a good time to move on to the next stops on their itineraries. But before long, traffic on Walker’s side began to thin out and move faster, so the contrast was more and more clear. He kept remembering that these were people who had spent time in this part of the country. Many of them probably had been through hurricanes before. If they were leaving, driving in the other direction began to seem more and more like idiocy. He could be sitting in a hotel in Atlanta with the others, drinking mint juleps and watching weather reports on the television above the bar. He had been too clever for that.

The words of the radio announcements did not change much for the next half hour. It was the voices that changed. The announcers were sounding less slick and jovial, reading their scripts carefully now with a sober, measured enunciation. They began to add a short paragraph about the Emergency Broadcast System. A few minutes later, advice was inserted from some official agency that low-lying coastal areas could be subject to damaging waves, particularly during high tides. Then they read a list of cities that were precisely like that, all the names that evoked college spring vacations: the Keys from Key West to Key Biscayne, Coral Gables, Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach, Boca Raton, Palm Beach, and sixty or seventy that he had never heard of, most of them with the words “beach,” “island,” or “shores” in them somewhere.

By the time Walker reached North Miami Beach, the announcers were reading addresses of buildings that had been designated as shelters for those who wished to leave their homes, and warning others that official evacuation orders might be issued. It was not the radio that undermined Walker’s confidence. What bothered him most was being nearly the only one driving southward past the hundreds of cars moving steadily north, while the enormous, dark shape over the ocean to his left grew bigger and darker.

He had never been within a thousand miles of a hurricane, and had paid attention to them only in the most detached way while he was growing up. They were television pictures of palm trees bent in the wind. After he had gone to work at McClaren’s, he had learned a bit from checking the facts in Kennedy’s vulnerability assessment of south Florida, but it was becoming clear to him that his imagination had failed him.

The report had been about money—about dollar values of specific properties and projected replacement costs—and not about small clouds in the distance that grew into horizon-to-horizon black masses that rolled in and killed you. He sensed that he had better be indoors before the spectacle turned into an experience.

Walker had to stop at a telephone booth to look up the address of the McClaren regional office. He paged through the telephone book and found it, then pushed a couple of quarters into the phone and dialed. A recording came on of a soothing female voice: “You have reached McClaren Life and Casualty. We’re sorry, but due to increased calling volume, all our lines are busy. Please hold and the next available representative—” He hung up. Of course their lines were busy. That’s why he had been sent down here. He got back into the car and drove until he found a gas station.

He filled the tank and bought a good local road map, then asked the man at the cash register for directions. The man gave a nervous glance over Walker’s shoulder. “Gee, I’m sorry, but there are five customers behind you, and more coming in every second. You can wait if you want, and I’ll try.”

Walker stepped aside to let the next person take his place, then moved down the line and stopped. The faces in the line bore that mixture of sullenness and eye-avoiding stolidity that seemed to come over people forced to wait. He held up his map. “Can anybody give me directions to Seventh?”

“Street or Avenue?” It was a man in late middle age with a Spanish accent who stood near the end of the line.

“Uh . . . Street.” He added, “Seventy-five eleven Northwest Seventh.”

The man raised his hand to point out the window with the package of flashlight batteries he had picked up while he was waiting. “Streets are east-west, avenues are north-south. And they get duplicated. There’s a Southwest, Northwest, Southeast, Northeast. Northwest Seventh Street is down there about ten, fifteen blocks. What’s your cross street?”

Walker looked at his map again. “I think . . . Southwest Tenth Avenue. Is that possible?”

“Sure it is,” said the man. “Down there ten, fifteen blocks. Turn right and keep going about a mile.”

“Thanks,” said Walker. “Thanks a lot.” He reached to shake the man’s other hand, but there was a big package of cookies in it.

The man smiled. “Better get going, though. It could get here soon.”

Walker stepped outside and felt a stirring in the air, not a gradual increase in the breeze, but a solid mass of air that hit him as it passed across the blacktop, then was gone. It startled him, a sudden slap from the hurricane, and not a playful pawing. It felt like a test, a first pass from something that wanted to eat him. He stepped to the car, and as he opened the door the wind arrived, this time like an invisible wall. His hair blew and fluttered, and the colored pennants strung on a wire overhead began to flap and make snapping noises, straining until the wire was as taut as a bowstring. There was a steady hissing sound that he knew was just air whistling across the openings of his ears.

He got in and slammed the door, and there was silence. He brushed the hair out of his eyes, then started the engine and drifted out onto the road. He followed the directions the man had given him, searching for each street sign with extreme care, straining to reach beyond the distance he could see in order to make out as early as possible that one sign had too many letters, the next too few. When he saw Northwest Seventh Street and managed to complete the right turn onto it, he felt his chest swell in gratitude. The man who had gotten him here had said there was only a mile to go, and now it was a straight line, with no possibility of a mistake.

The wind blew harder, the sudden onrush of air making the car rock slightly, and he overcompensated by gripping the steering wheel in surprise, then slowly, tentatively, loosened his grip. He could hear invisible specks of dust ticking against the window beside him as he searched for Tenth Avenue.

He saw it. The low brick building could have been anything—a store, a restaurant. But beside the door he could see a small brass plate like the one on the agency in Pasadena. He turned into the driveway and continued around the building to a parking lot that looked as though it would hold about twenty cars. There were only two in the lot.

He looked up at the sky, and decided he didn’t have time to ponder why there weren’t more cars. He could see the underbelly of the storm now, like a dark gray ceiling closing overhead. He opened the car door with surprising difficulty as the wind pushed against it, pounded down the button, let it shut, and leaned back against the wind to control his speed as he trotted to the door of the building.

He swung it open and slipped inside, then experienced the blessed quiet again. He straightened his collar and pushed back his hair as he looked around. The room had the same aged quality of all the McClaren’s offices, as though a single decorator had gone around the country buying up the antique furniture in each city and placing it in the same patterns. His eye caught movement, and he turned to see a short, bald man in his early sixties standing at the window. He had half-turned to place a steady, appraising gaze on Walker. He wore a three-piece suit that must have been tailored for his slim, narrow-shouldered frame, so he looked like a wizened boy. “I see the wind is up.” The accent was a soft, genteel southern elongation of vowels that Walker associated with Charleston.

“It certainly is,” said Walker. He stepped closer. “My name is John Walker. I’m from the San Francisco office.”

The small man stepped forward in a leisurely way and shook Walker’s hand, then stood with his hands clasped behind him and rocked twice on his heels. “Ah, our reinforcements. I’d been led to believe that there was a bit more to you, numerically speaking. I’m Charles Evans, regional manager.”

“The others flew into Atlanta,” said Walker. “They should be on their way.”

“I sincerely hope not,” said Evans. “The storm would catch them out. Have you ever been in a hurricane?”

Walker glanced toward the window. He thought he heard the wind picking up. “Not yet.”

Evans said, “Well, this one won’t be as bad as it could be.”

Walker brightened. “No?”

“That’s the whole premise of our business, isn’t it? It’s never as bad as it could be. If it ever were . . . ” He left Walker to complete his sentence. “You came at a calm moment. When the front rolled into sight, people stopped calling insurance companies and turned to conveying their concerns to the Almighty. I sent home everybody who lives close enough to get there. Miss Turley and I are the only ones left, so you may as well ride it out with us.”

Walker said, “I’d be happy to have something to keep me occupied. Is there any paperwork I can get started on?”

Evans looked at him through the corner of his eye, amused. “McClaren’s has had a presence here since the turn of the century. As soon as hurricane season begins, we prepare all the paperwork.”

“You go to all that trouble just in case?”

“I can see you really haven’t been in a hurricane. The first thing that happens is that the power goes off. You’re returned to a more primitive era, without computers or copiers.”

“Of course,” said Walker. “I’m sorry. They called me in the middle of the night, and I guess it took most of my brainpower to get here.”

“Well, you’re here now, so all we’ve got to do is wait it out.” The sound of the wind began to mount noticeably. Evans turned and stared out his window. “Here it comes.”

Walker stepped closer and looked. He could see a line of rain like a curtain sweeping toward them across the parking lot, turning the pavement dark and shiny with a hissing sound, throwing a thousand little splashes on the hood and roof of his rental car, then exploding against the office window like the spray of a hose.

Evans reached to the side of the window and pressed a button, and a metal shutter slowly lowered to cover the glass. Then Evans went to the other windows on that side of the building and repeated the process. “That should do it for the present,” he said. “The winds move clockwise, so it’s possible that later on they’ll hit the building from the other side.”

The lights gave a small, sick flutter, and then went out. “Ahead of schedule,” said Evans.

Walker went to the other side of the room, where there was a small unshuttered window, and stood looking out at what had replaced the late afternoon. The sky was an opaque dark gray, and below it a sourceless twilight, as though light had simply been trapped there when the sky closed up. Puddles seemed to Walker to rise up from the ground, with the wind sending wrinkly wavelets across it, then lifting spray off the surfaces to add it to the rain.

Somewhere, lost in the steady beat of rain and wind, Walker thought he heard a voice. It grew louder and louder. “. . .  has reached the mainland with strong winds and extremely heavy rain. The possibility of flooding—” A middle-aged woman with silver hair appeared from the hallway, holding a flashlight and a portable radio. She turned off the radio. “The phones are dead too.”

Evans said, “Miss Turley, this is John Walker from the San Francisco office, come to save us from the ravages of nature.”

“Here. Have a flashlight,” she said. “We’ve got plenty. If you run out of batteries, they’re in the cabinet over there. If you would like some coffee, get it now or it will be cold.”

Walker took the flashlight. “Thanks,” he said.

“Well, I’m going to see if I can sleep with all this racket,” she said. “All hell has to break loose and knock out the phones before a person can get some rest.” She was still talking when she passed too far down the corridor to be heard.

Evans said to Walker, “I think I’ll try to get a nap myself. As soon as the weather lets up, we’re all going to be very busy.” As he stepped away, he said over his shoulder, “There are couches in the offices.”

Walker stayed at his window, watching as more of the hurricane came in. The wind was screaming along the eaves of the building now, and in the street Walker could see it lofting leaves and wet papers and bits of unidentifiable debris high into the air. He could still see an occasional car pass by on the street, crawling along with headlights on and windshield wipers flicking back and forth frantically, the tires already making rooster-tail wakes in the puddles. He watched each one as long as he could see it, hoping the person inside was very close to where he was going. After twenty minutes had passed, he saw no others. The people had given their city up to the hurricane.