Murder in the Wind (13 page)

She forced the door open against the wind, held it open with her body as she turned and shouted to the children, “Stay right here. Don’t try to get out.”

Then she was running back toward Hal, feeling the wind buffeting her. It swerved her against a green Plymouth with no one in it, hurting her wrist when she braced herself. Hal was trying to get up. She ran to him. His face was strange and blank, showing neither pain nor surprise, but rather a dulled determination.

She caught his arm and helped him and he got to his feet and staggered back and sat on the rear bumper of the truck. When she tried to talk the wind forced her lips apart, inflated her cheek, blurred her words. “Are you all right?”

“I’m all right.” She could barely hear his words. He looked at her, and seemed to look through her, and there was a puzzled look deep in his eyes. She knew he was not all right. She looked around despairingly. The others seemed busy with their own self-assigned problems. Two of the men had climbed over the tree trunk and were walking toward the other bridge. No one seemed to know or care that Hal was hurt.

A sharp painful memory of childhood came into her mind. Her parents had forbidden any attempt to swim out to the float. But the other kids were out there and she decided she could swim out. She had chugged along, pleased with herself, until she was about twenty feet from the float. And then things had gone wrong. No matter how hard she kicked, her legs had sunk so that she was upright in the water. She had kept paddling frantically, but the paddling merely served to keep her precariously afloat. She could move no closer to the float. She could see them there, brown in the sun, outlined against the blue sky, and they were not looking at her. She tried to call out to them, but her mouth and nose kept going under. She could even hear them laughing, and she saw Judy being tickled by the Gillton boy, but no one would look down at the desperate struggle happening so close to them.

Then the world got all strange and soft and dreamy, and with arms that were loose as feathers, she was trying to climb a green ladder made of soft rounds of silk. Everything was faraway and unimportant, and then she felt sulky annoyance when something grabbed her roughly. Without transition she was then on the float in the bright angry sunshine, gasping and choking and coughing. Water ran out of her nose and mouth and then she was sick. They brought a boat out and took her ashore. Her parents had heard about it and were down on the beach waiting for the boat. She felt lonely and heroic. Her mother had hugged her and cried over her. Her father wore a face like thunder.

Now she stood by her husband, her hand on his shoulder. She looked down at the swelling on the crown of his head, at the blood matting the dark hair. No one seemed to know or care that he was hurt.

He said something and she leaned closer to him. “What, dear?”

“Dizzy,” he said, frowning.

“Can you get back to the car?”

He looked up at her. “Where is it?”

“Up there.”

People had gotten out of the other cars. They came down to stare at the tree. They had to shout at each other to be heard. The wind suddenly became as strong as an arm pushing her back. It pushed her against the rear of the truck. A palm frond came whirring and rattling through the air and bounced on the road and skipped and cracked her shin painfully. She kicked it away and the wind slid it under the truck.

The men came back and one man came over to her. He was about Hal’s age or a little younger. As he walked he braced himself strongly against the wind, planting his feet with care. He wore a bright blue and green sports shirt and gray slacks. His hair was cropped short and he was a powerful looking man.

He came close to her and looked down at Hal and said, “Need help?”

“He hit his head.”

“I saw it. He hit pretty hard.”

“He acts dazed. He didn’t know where the car is.”

The man seemed to study her for a moment. He leaned closer to her, his mouth close enough to her ear so he could talk in almost a normal tone. “We looked at the other bridge. Even if we had anything to get this tree out of the way, I wouldn’t want to try it. The water is coming up fast. It’s over the bridge boards. Stuff is coming up the river and bumping into the bridge. The wind is pushing the Gulf toward us. If it keeps up this road is going to be under water. Do you understand?”

She nodded quickly.

“That house back there is on the highest ground. I think we all ought to try to wait it out there. That man over there thinks we ought to try to walk out.”

“We can’t do that!” she said. “We’ve got two small children.”

“Are they alone in the car?”

“Yes. I had to leave them when I saw…”

“Get back to them. I’ll get your husband into that house and then come after you and the kids.”

She obeyed without question. When she was half way to the station wagon she looked back and saw the man helping Hal over the trunk of the fallen tree. The others stood in a small group and she saw them dodge violently when a palm frond was whirled over their heads.

When she got to the car both Stevie and Jan were crying. Stevie stopped quickly when he saw her. She tried to pull the door open and could not. She went around and got in the other side of the car. Jan still wept. “Where’s Daddy?” Stevie demanded.

“This is a bad storm and we can’t drive away in the car, darling, because the trees have fallen down. We’re going to wait in an empty house. A nice man is helping your daddy get to the house and then he’s coming to get us.”

“Why does he have to help him?”

“Daddy fell down and he hurt his head. Now don’t start crying again, Stevie. Please. Be a big brave boy.”

Stevie gulped the tears back and turned on Jan and said, fiercely, “Stop being a baby!”

Trees to the west of the car swayed dangerously. She looked ahead at the bridge and saw the water was much higher than before. It had spread out on the far bank covering where the road had been. The wind whipped the shallow water, pushing it eastward.

The big man came and forced the door open and got in. He was breathing hard. He nodded at Jean and turned around and grinned at the kids. “Hi,” he said. “We’ve got to do some camping out. My name is Steve. Steve Maiden.”

Stevie’s eyes went wide. “I’m Steve too!”

“And that’s Jan,” Jean said. “I’m Jean Dorn and my husband’s name is Hal. How is he?”

“He’s in the house waiting for you. We may be there some time and it may get cold. You better bring some warm stuff if you can manage it.”

Jean crawled back over the seat and pried a suitcase loose and got out sweaters and one of Hal’s jackets. She put the sweaters on the children, put her own on.

“All set?” Maiden said. “We better go out your side. You take the boy and I’ll carry Jan. Come on, honey. Climb over here.”

“Stay on this side of the cars,” Maiden said to her as she opened the door.

She went ahead holding Stevie by the wrist. Just as they got into the open beyond the rear of their car, a gust hit them and slammed Stevie against her ankles, knocking her down. She kept hold of his wrist and got to her feet and pulled him up. His eyes were wide with shock and fear and surprise. He said something but she could not hear him. He did better from then on. They passed all the cars and climbed over the tree trunk and soon they were in front of the house. The house cut the hard thrust of the wind. Maiden moved ahead of her, climbed the three shallow steps and pulled the door open. She followed him in and Maiden closed the door. The relative silence was abrupt. The house was shuttered and it was so dark inside that for a few moments she could see nothing. She tried to release Stevie but he clung to her hand.

There were several people talking at once. Their voices were thin with excitement, edged by fear. She began to make them out, and then she saw Hal over in a corner, sitting on the floor. Maiden took them over to Hal. He set Jan down.

Jean turned and said, “Thank you so much for…”

“I better go get in on this policy meeting, Mrs. Dora. Holler if you need me for anything.”

Jan and Stevie had moved close to Hal. Jean sat on her heels and took Hal’s hand. “How do you feel, darling?”

“I’m fine,” he said in a remote voice. “Just fine.”

“Did you hurt your head, Daddy?” Stevie asked.

In the gloom she saw Hal turn and look at Stevie, look at him in a puzzled way. When she realized what that look meant, fear closed tightly on her heart. Hal was looking at the child without the slightest tinge of recognition. She saw him look in the same way at Jan, and then turn and look at her. His lips opened as though he were about to say something, but his eyes clouded again and he looked down at the floor. Jean folded her coat and put it on the floor beside him. She eased herself down onto the coat, her back against the wall. She took Jan in her arms. She looked at the room.

It was a room with a low ceiling, a long room on the northeast corner of the house. It was paneled in a dark rough wood. The room was completely bare and there was a smell of wet rot. The wooden floor was heaved and buckled, and, near one wall, there were holes where the floor boards had rotted away. There was a small brick fireplace set into the south wall and, to the right of the fireplace, a staircase that went up. The walls of the staircase had been plastered, and the plaster had fallen away from the laths and lay like dirty snow on the stairs. There was a door to the left of the fireplace that led to another room, and another doorway in the west wall that led to what had apparently been the kitchen. She could see the edge of an iron sink, and a row of empty shelves, crudely made.

The others were arguing. Over and under the tones of their voices she could hear the voice of the wind. The wind pressed against the house. It found small cracks where it could enter. It entered and stirred the ancient dust. As it came in the small cracks, and as it twisted around the cornices, it made small wild sounds, full of a supersonic shrillness. The shrill sounds ebbed and pulsed with the changes of the wind. She thought that if she had to listen to that long, she would begin to howl like a dog. She thought she could feel a stirring of the hair on the nape of her neck. There were cracks in the old shutters. Thin gray bands of light shafted into the house, diffused by dust. She felt the stir of the bones of the old house when the wind swerved and smote it strongly. Over the wind sound there were other sounds from the outside world. Remote and inexplicable thuddings, rattlings, crashings. Something cracked sharply against the back of the house, silencing for a moment the voices of argument. And then they began again.

She moved closer to Hal and took his hand. He did not look at her. His thin brown hand lay slack in hers. She sensed the imminent fulfillment of her premonitions. At some other time perhaps a thing like this could have been a game, something to remember and talk about and laugh about. But not now. Not in a world newly soured by defeat. This was the end of something. An end far more specific and final than their decision to leave Florida.

She sat beside her husband and thought of marriage. You did not think of the big things, the epochal, the stirring. You thought instead of the trivia of marriage. The ludicrous. The absurd. Your mind was cluttered with little things. Like the time that Hal, that afternoon in Central Park, for no reason other than high spirits, had sprung up from the path and grasped a low limb and hung there, grinning down at her, then cautiously hung from one hand, made a face and scratched his ribs with the other hand, then dropped lightly beside her and kissed her in full view of the weary bench-sitters, not one of whom even smiled, but sat there looking at them with what Hal always called “the subway glaze.”

The little tragic things too. Turning off the Merritt Parkway in that first new car they had ever owned, and hitting the small brown dog. They had run back and the dog had dragged himself off onto the shoulder. Whining, the dog had bitten his own flank with great ferocity and, quite soon, had died. They had asked at a dozen houses and then given up trying to find who owned it. There was no tag, no collar. She remembered how quickly the flies had gathered. Hal had dug a hole with the tire iron and they had buried the small brown dog. It had saddened the day and the weekend for them.

And the time Stevie, sitting on the kitchen floor, had stared up at them, eyes bulging, face slowly turning blue. She had held him by the heels and Hal had thumped his back and then finally dug into his throat with his finger and loosened the small wooden wheel Stevie had swallowed. She remembered how weak they had both been after it was over.

And the morning when Hal had started out the front door and neither of them had known that the rain at dawn had frozen into an utterly transparent film over the walk. She remembered the way he had gone down, a wild flailing like a comedy sequence, and then the sickening crash onto hip and elbow, how he had looked back at her, face distorted with pain, then the humor fighting with the pain, overcoming it, until they both laughed like fools. But it had been a month before his arm was right again.

Trivia of marriage. Like the lurid pajamas he had bought himself for the first night of their marriage. And the wound he had inflicted on her. He swore that he had taken eleven pins out of the new pajamas, but he had missed the twelfth, the crucial one. The shocking stab of the pin had made her leap and yelp, and in that moment of confusion he had thought her an exceedingly apprehensive bride, rather than someone cruelly and ludicrously stabbed. She blamed his sense of decorum that had made him start with pajamas. And he had said that all he had expected was ten minutes of use out of them anyway, and he asked if there had been any pins in the gossamer nightgown of hers, and who was she to lecture about decorum after whooping and plunging like a singed heifer. She said that she would be grateful for a more kindly simile, so he changed it to spooked mare, but by that time they were beyond the point where the conversation could be continued with any coherence.

You remember little things most of all. She sat and listened to the eldritch whimper of the wind, and the tears ran down her cheeks, heavily, slowly, and she kept her head turned so that the children would not see that she was crying.