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 The weather reports had been superseded by recitations of an official notice that said a hurricane watch had been declared for a stretch of Florida from the Keys up the Atlantic coast to Daytona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.”
