Stormy Weather

  The product was a sturdy harness that allowed the stranger’s arms to wave free. Webo Drake tested the knots and pronounced them tight. “Can we go now?” he asked the one-eyed man.

  “By all means.”

  “What about the squirrel, sir?”

  “It’s all yours,” the stranger said. “Enjoy.”

  Jack Fleming coasted the car downhill. At the foot of the bridge, he veered off the pavement to get clear of the traffic. Webo Drake found a rusty curtain rod in a pile of trash, and Jack used it to hoist the animal carcass out of his father’s Lexus. Webo stood back, trying to light a cigaret.

  Back on the bridge, under a murderous dark sky, the kneeling stranger raised both arms to the pulsing gray clouds. Bursts of hot wind made the man’s hair stand up like a halo of silver sparks.

  “Crazy fucker,” Jack Fleming rasped. He stepped over the dead squirrel and threw the curtain rod into the mangroves. “You think he had a gun? Because that’s what I’m telling my old man: Some nut with a gun kicked out the car window.”

  Webo Drake pointed with the cigaret and said, “Jack, you know what he’s waiting for? That crazy idiot, he’s waiting on the hurricane.”

  Although the young men stood two hundred yards away, they could see the one-eyed stranger grinning madly into the teeth of the rising wind. He wore a smile that blazed.

  “Brother,” Jack said to Webo, “let’s get the hell out of here.” The tollbooth was unmanned, so they blew through at fifty miles an hour, skidded into the parking lot of Alabama Jack’s. There they used the one-eyed man’s ten-dollar bill to purchase four cold cans of Cherry Coke, which they drank on the trip up Card Sound Road. When they were finished, they did not toss the empties from the car.

  • • •

  A noise awakened Bonnie Lamb. It was Max, snapping open a suitcase. She asked what in the world he was doing, fully dressed and packing his clothes at four in the morning. He said he wanted to surprise her.

  “You’re leaving me?” she asked. “After two nights.”

  Max Lamb smiled and came to the bed. “I’m packing for both of us.”

  He tried to stroke Bonnie’s cheek, but she buried her face in the pillow, to block out the light. The rain was coming harder now, slapping horizontally against the windows of the high-rise hotel. She was glad her husband had come to his senses. They could do Epcot some other time.

  She peered out of the pillow and said, “Honey, is the airport open?”

  “I don’t honestly know.”

  “Shouldn’t you call first?”

  “Why?” Max Lamb patted the blanket where it followed the curve of his wife’s hips.

  “We’re flying home, aren’t we?” Bonnie Lamb sat up. “That’s why you’re packing.”

  Her husband said no, we’re not flying home. “We’re going on an adventure.”

  “I see. Where, Max?”

  “Miami.”

  “That’s the surprise?”

  “That’s it.” He tugged the covers away from her. “Come on, we’ve got a long drive—”

  Bonnie Lamb didn’t move. “You’re serious.”

  “—and I want to teach you how to use the video camera.”

  She said, “I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we stay here and make love for the next three days. Dawn to dusk, OK? Tear the room to pieces. I mean, if it’s adventure you want.”

  Max Lamb was up again, stuffing the suitcases. “You don’t understand. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance.”

  Right, Bonnie said, a chance to drown on our honeymoon. “I’d rather stay where it’s warm and dry. I’ll even watch Emmanuelle VI on the Spectravision, like you wanted last night.” This she regarded as a significant concession.

  “By the time we get to Miami,” said Max, “the dangerous part will be over. In fact, it’s probably over already.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Max, I don’t want to do this. Please.”

  He gave her a stiff, fatherly hug. She knew he was about to speak to her as if she were six years old. “Bonnie,” Max Lamb said to his new wife. “My beautiful little Bonnie, now listen. Disney World we can do anytime. Anytime we want. But how often does a hurricane hit? You heard the weatherman, honey. ‘The Storm of the Century,’ he called it. How often does a person get to see something like that!”

  Bonnie Lamb couldn’t stand her husband’s lordly tone. She couldn’t stand it so much that she’d have done anything to shut him up.

  “All right, Max. Bring me my robe.”

  He kissed her noisily on the forehead. “Thatta girl.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  Snapper and Edie Marsh got two rooms at the Best Western in Pembroke Pines, thirty miles north of where the storm was predicted to come ashore. Snapper told the motel clerk that one room would be enough, but Edie said not on your damn life. The relationship had always been strictly business, Snapper being an occasional fence of women’s wear and Edie being an occasional thief of same. Their new venture was to be another entrepreneurial partnership, more ambitious but not more intimate. Up front Edie alerted Snapper that she couldn’t imagine a situation in which she’d have sex with him, even once. He did not seem poleaxed by the news.

  She went to bed covering her ears, trying to shut out the hellish moan of the storm. It was more than she could bear alone. During the brief calm of the eye, she pounded on the door to Snapper’s room and said she was scared half to death. Snapper said come on in, we’re having ourselves a time.

  Somewhere in the midst of a hurricane, he’d found a hooker. Edie was impressed. The woman clutched a half-empty bottle of Barbancourt between her breasts. Snapper had devoted himself to vodka; he wore a Marlins cap and red Jockey shorts, inside out. Candles gave the motel room a soft, religious lighting. The electricity had been out for two hours.

  Edie Marsh introduced herself to the prostitute, whom Snapper had procured through a telephone escort service. Here was a dedicated employee! thought Edie.

  The back side of the storm came up, a roar so unbearable that the three of them huddled like orphans on the floor. The candles flickered madly as the wind sucked at the windows. Edie could see the walls breathing—Christ, what a lousy idea this was! A large painting of a pelican fell, grazing one of the hooker’s ankles. She cried out softly and gnawed at her artificial fingernails. Snapper kept to the vodka. Occasionally his free hand would turn up like a spider on Edie’s thigh. She smashed it, but Snapper merely sighed.

  By dawn the storm had crossed inland, and the high water was falling fast. Edie Marsh put on a conservative blue dress and dark nylons, and pinned her long brown hair in a bun. Snapper wore the only suit he owned, a slate pinstripe he’d purchased two years earlier for an ex-cellmate’s funeral; the cuffed trousers stopped an inch shy of his shoetops. Edie chuckled and said that was perfect.

  They dropped the prostitute at a Denny’s restaurant and took the Turnpike south to see what the hurricane had done. Traffic was bumper-to-bumper lunacy, fire engines and cop cars and ambulances everywhere. The radio said Homestead had been blown off the map. The governor was sending the National Guard.

  Snapper headed east on 152nd Street but immediately got disoriented. All traffic signals and street signs were down; Snapper couldn’t find Sugar Palm Hammocks. Edie Marsh became agitated. She kept repeating the address aloud: 14275 Noriega Parkway. One-four-two-seven-five. Tan house, brown shutters, swimming pool, two-car garage. Avila had guessed it was worth $185,000.

  “If we don’t hurry,” Edie told Snapper, “if we don’t get there soon—”

  Snapper instructed her to shut the holy fuck up.

  “Wasn’t there a Dairy Queen?” Edie went on. “I remember him turning at a Dairy Queen or something.”

  Snapper said, “The Dairy Queen is gone. Every goddamn thing is gone, case you didn’t notice. We’re flying blind out here.”

  Edie had never seen such destruction; it looked like Cas
tro had nuked the place. Houses without roofs, walls, windows. Trailers and cars crumpled like foil. Trees in the swimming pools. People weeping, Sweet Jesus, and everywhere the plonking of hammers and the growling of chain saws.

  Snapper said they could do another house. “There’s only about ten thousand to choose from.”

  “I suppose.”

  “What’s so special about 1-4-2-7-5?”

  “It had personality,” Edie Marsh said.

  Snapper drummed his knuckles on the steering wheel. “They all look the same. All these places, exactly the same.”

  His gun lay on the seat between them.

  “Fine,” said Edie, unsettled by the change of plans, the chaos, the grim dripping skies. “Fine, we’ll find another one.”

  Max and Bonnie Lamb arrived in Dade County soon after daybreak. The roads were slick and gridlocked. The gray sky was growling with TV helicopters. The radio said two hundred thousand homes were seriously damaged or destroyed. Meanwhile the Red Cross was pleading for donations of food, water and clothing.

  The Lambs exited the Turnpike at Quail Roost Drive. Bonnie was stunned by the devastation; Max himself was aglow. He held the Handycam on his lap as he steered. Every two or three blocks, he slowed to videotape spectacular rubble. A flattened hardware store. The remains of a Sizzler steak house. A school bus impaled by a forty-foot pine.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Max Lamb was saying. “Isn’t it amazing!”

  Bonnie Lamb shuddered. She said they should stop at the nearest shelter and volunteer to help.

  Max paid no attention. He parked in front of an exploded town house. The hurricane had thrown a motorboat into the living room. The family—a middle-aged Latin man, his wife, two little girls—stood in a daze on the sidewalk. They wore matching yellow rain slickers.

  Max Lamb got out of the car. “Mind if I get some video?”

  The man numbly consented. Max photographed the wrecked building from several dramatic angles. Then, stepping through the plaster and broken furniture and twisted toys, he casually entered the house. Bonnie couldn’t believe it: He walked right through the gash that was once the front door!

  She apologized to the family, but the man said he didn’t mind; he’d need pictures anyway, for the insurance people. His daughters began to sob and tremble. Bonnie Lamb knelt to comfort them. Over her shoulder she caught sight of her husband with the camera at his eye, recording the scene through a broken window.

  Later, in the rental car, she said: “That was the sickest thing I ever saw.”

  “Yes, it’s very sad.”

  “I’m talking about you,” Bonnie snapped.

  “What?”

  “Max, I want to go home.”

  “I bet we can sell some of this tape.”

  “Don’t you dare.”

  Max said: “I bet we can sell it to C-SPAN. Pay for the whole honeymoon!”

  Bonnie closed her eyes. What had she done? Was her mother right about this man? Latent asshole, her mother had whispered at the wedding. Was she right?

  At dusk Edie Marsh swallowed two Darvons and reviewed the plan with Snapper, who was having second thoughts. He seemed troubled at the idea of waiting weeks for the payoff. Edie said there wasn’t much choice, the way insurance worked. Snapper said he planned to keep his options open, just the same. Edie Marsh took it to mean he’d bug out on a moment’s notice.

  They had picked a house in a flattened development called Turtle Meadow, where the hurricane had peeled away all the roofs. Snapper said it was probably one of Avila’s routes. He said Avila had bragged of inspecting eighty new homes a day without leaving the truck. “Rolling quotas,” is what Avila called them. Snapper allowed that Avila wasn’t much of a roof inspector, as he was deathly afraid of heights and therefore refused to take a ladder on his rounds. Consequently, Avila’s roof certifications were done visually, from a vehicle, at speeds often exceeding thirty-five miles an hour. Snapper said Avila’s swiftness and trusting attitude had made him a favorite among the local builders and contractors, especially at Christmastime.

  Scanning the debris, Edie Marsh said Avila was damn lucky not to be in jail. That’s why he quit when he did, Snapper explained. The bones told him it was time. That, and a grand jury.

  Bones? said Edie.

  You don’t want to know, Snapper said. Honestly.

  They were walking along the sidewalk, across the street from the house they had chosen on the drive-by that morning. Now the neighborhood was pitch black except for the erratic flicker of flashlights and the glow of a few small bonfires. Many families had abandoned the crumbled shells of their homes for nearby motels, but a few men had stayed to patrol against looters. The men wore pinched tense expressions and carried shotguns. Snapper was glad to be white and wearing a suit.

  The house he and Edie Marsh had chosen wasn’t empty, dark or quiet. A bare light bulb had been strung from the skeletal remains of the roof, and the gray-blue glow of a television set pulsed against the plaster. These luxuries were explained by the rumble of a portable generator. Edie and Snapper had seen a fat man gassing it up earlier in the day.

  The street was either Turtle Meadow Lane or Calusa Drive, depending on which of the fallen street signs was accurate. The number “15600” was sprayed in red paint on an outside wall of the house, as was the name of the insurance company: “Midwest Casualty.”

  A big outfit, Edie noted. She’d seen the commercials on television; the company’s symbol was a badger.

  “A badger?” Snapper frowned. “The fuck does a badger have to do with insurance?”

  “I dunno.” Edie’s mouth was dry. She felt sleepy. “What does a cougar have to do with cars? It’s just advertising is all.”

  Snapper said, “The only thing I know about badgers is they’re stubborn. And the last goddamn thing we need’s a stubborn insurance company.”

  Edie said, “For heaven’s sake—”

  “Let’s find another house.”

  “No!” Weaving slightly, she crossed the street toward 15600.

  “You hear me?” Snapper called, then started after her.

  Edie wheeled in the driveway. “Let’s do it!” she said. “Right now, while it’s quiet.”

  Snapper hesitated, working his jaw like a dazed boxer.

  “Come on!” Edie tugged her hair out of the bun and mussed it into a nest in front of her face. Then she hitched her dress and raked her fingernails up both thighs, tearing tracks in her nylons.

  Snapper checked to make sure none of the neighborhood vigilantes were watching. Edie picked a place on the driveway and stretched out, facedown. Using two broken roof trusses, Snapper did a superb job setting the scene. Edie was pinned.

  From under the debris, she said, “Blood would help.”

  Snapper kicked a nail toward her left hand. “Take it easy.”

  Edie Marsh held her breath and scratched the point of the nail from her elbow to her wrist. It hurt like a bitch. She wiped her arm across one cheek to smear the blood for dramatic effect. On cue, Snapper began shouting for help. Edie was impressed; he sounded damn near sincere.

  Max Lamb congratulated himself for stocking up on video supplies before they drove down from Orlando. Other tourists had not come so prepared for the hurricane and could be seen foraging through luggage in a manic search for spare tapes and batteries. Meanwhile, pausing only to reload, Max Lamb was compiling dramatic footage of a historic natural disaster. Even if C-SPAN wasn’t interested, his friends in New York would be. Max was a junior account executive at a medium-sized advertising firm, and there were many persons whom he yearned to impress. Max was handy with the Sony, but it wouldn’t hurt to seek professional assistance; he knew of a place on East Fiftieth Street that edited home videos and, for a small extra charge, added titles and credits. It would be perfect! Once Bonnie settled down, Max Lamb would ask her about throwing a cocktail party where they could screen the hurricane tapes for his clients and his colleagues at the agency.

 
Max trotted with predatory energy from one wrecked homestead to another, the video camera purring in his hand. He was so absorbed in recording the tragedy that he forgot about his wife, who had stopped following three blocks ago. Max had wanted to show Bonnie how to use the camera so he could pose amid hurricane debris; she’d told him she would rather swallow a gallon of lye.

  For editing purposes, Max Lamb kept a mental inventory of his best shots. He had plenty of rubble scenes, and felt the need to temper the visual shock with moments of poignancy—vignettes that would capture the human toll, spiritual as well as physical.

  A mangled bicycle grabbed Max’s attention. The hurricane had wrapped it, as snug as a wedding band, around the trunk of a coconut palm. A boy no older than eight was trying to remove the bike. Max dropped to one knee and zoomed in on the youngster’s face as he tugged grimly on the bent handlebars. The boy’s expression was dull and cold, his lips pressed tight in concentration.

  Max thought: He’s in shock. Doesn’t even know I’m here.

  The youngster didn’t seem to care that his bicycle was destroyed beyond repair. He simply wanted the tree to give it back. He pulled and pulled with all his might. The empty eyes showed no sign of frustration.

  Amazing, Max Lamb thought as he peered through the view-finder. Amazing.

  Something jostled his right arm, and the boy’s image in the viewfinder shook. A hand tugged at Max’s sleeve. Cursing, he looked up from the Handycam.

  It was a monkey.

  Max Lamb pivoted on one heel and aimed the camera at the scrawny animal. Through the viewfinder he saw that the monkey had come through the storm in miserable shape. Its auburn fur was matted and crusty. A bruise as plump as a radish rose from the bridge of its broad velvet nose. The shoe-button eyes were squinty and ringed with milky ooze.