“Oh, everything will be fine. Sunny. Lots of sun,” Rockney said without looking up from Toto II, who finally bit Rockney between the thumb and forefinger.
“Owww! Dammit!” said Rockney, and he grabbed Toto II by the hair on the back of his neck and snapped his head back. Toto growled and yelped, and Rockney said “Fuck” on the air. He struggled with the dog and fell off his chair, and they both disappeared behind the anchor desk, where there was more growling and cursing. The anchorman dropped his face into his hands; the anchorwoman froze with her mouth open. The station’s switchboard lit up.
T hree dark government sedans raced in single file across the state on Interstate 4 toward Tampa Bay. The occupants wore suits, sunglasses. Stern faces, nobody spoke.
L enny and Serge made their standard supply run to Island Grocery in the afternoon, oblivious to the hurricane fear gripping the rest of the population.
“What’s happening?” said Lenny, standing in an aisle, looking at the empty shelves. “It’s like communism!”
Canned goods, bottled water, potato chips-all gone. Lenny whimpered when he saw the empty beer section.
“We better get moving,” said Serge. They drove to the mainland and hit three grocery stores, but the story was the same. They kept driving around.
“We’re in luck!” said Serge, pointing. “The video store’s still open.”
Lenny hit the brakes and swung into the parking lot.
The place was empty, and the pair had their pick of movies. Serge grabbed Palmetto, Strip Tease, Out of Sight, The Mean Season, Ruby in Paradise, Body Heat, Some Like It Hot and Key Largo.
“This is great!” said Serge. “All Florida, from camp to classic.”
They jumped in Lenny’s Cadillac and headed back to the island. Nobody was going in their direction-everyone was coming the other way over the bridge, the cars in a solid line, standing still. People got out of their vehicles to see the cause of the holdup. Someone’s car had stalled at the foot of the bridge. Over the driver’s protests, six people pushed the vehicle off the road and it rolled down the embankment into the water. The driver yelled. A weeping woman held a swaddled infant on the shoulder of the causeway. The car was full of clothes and personal belongings that floated up in the passenger compartment as the water line rose in the car. Then just the top of the roof showed, and a bunch of bubbles, and it went under. The traffic resumed without a skipped note, indifferent to the stranded family.
“I smell panic,” said Serge. “These are different animals now. They’re starting to winnow out the weak at the fringe of the herd. We need to hurry or this could affect our snack situation.”
“Affirmative,” said Lenny, and he accelerated. They raced around to convenience stores, grabbing whatever was left, packs of cheese and crackers, Fiddle Faddle, fortune cookies.
They tooled along the Gulf Coast, bobbing their heads to the radio, riding the now.
Serge suddenly bolted up in his seat, and tremors made high-frequency waves in his cheeks. Spitfoam bubbled at the corners of his mouth.
“What’s wrong?” Lenny asked. Serge couldn’t answer, and Lenny pulled over and made an emergency stop on top of a stray cat.
Serge looked like he might be swallowing his tongue, so Lenny grabbed his head and started jimmying his clenched jaws with the car keys. Serge’s muscles began to uncoil and the spell soon passed. Lenny released.
Serge returned to normal and looked around as if he had been rudely awakened.
“What was that?” asked Lenny.
“Flashback.”
“ Vietnam?”
“No. The Garo Yepremian pass.”
Lenny quickly remembered and shook with the willies.
“The game was in the bag!” said Serge. “Fourteenzip in the fourth quarter-I was dick-dancin’ on broken glass…”
“We still won,” said Lenny. “Let it go.”
Serge reached in his pocket and pulled out the crack vial that had stored his street tranquilizers. “I’m all out.”
“You want me to try to find a drug hole or maybe break into a veterinary clinic?”
“No way,” said Serge. “This is the only way to experience a natural disaster-throw a little schizophrenia in the soup.”
As they drove, they saw plywood up everywhere. A few people sat outside in chairs and cradled rifles and shotguns, ready for the early-bird looters. It was getting lonely and eerie, like one of those bad sixties sci-fi movies Serge had seen as a child, life after the nuclear war.
Some people had spray-painted the numbers of their insurance policies on the plywood. Others wrote messages directed at the hurricane itself: “Go away, Rolando-berto!”
“Who’s picking the names for these storms?” said Lenny.
There were no other cars anymore, and Serge and Lenny continued on toward the motel, sitting low, rocking out to Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time” blasting from the stereo and echoing off the empty buildings, the only sound in the streets.
W hen Lenny and Serge made it back from the supply run, Florida Cable News was playing on the television over the bar. But everyone in The Florida Room was facing the other way, looking out the windows at the purple sky and the pounding surf rolling in from the Gulf. The waves were enormous and the largest splashed near the back steps of the bar.
“You think something’s going on we haven’t heard about?” asked Lenny. “A tropical storm or maybe a hurricane?”
“No way,” said Art Tweed, pointing back at the bar. “We’ve had the TV on all day. They would have said something.”
So all they did was close the shutters on the windward side and devote themselves to the haste of drinking that accompanies inclement weather at a tropical resort.
An hour later, however, they could ignore the signs no longer. They were faced with the most accurate predictor yet of hurricane landfall.
The surfers showed up.
30
Today the hurricane arrived.
Events stacked up fast, and suddenly it was too late.
It began dark, breezy and chilly. Looked awful but no serious wind yet. Then, in the span of a minute, a stinging rain came onshore and the shallow area of the beach began to roil with whitecaps. The wind increased unevenly. It moved onto land in a series of body-punching gusts. People can brace and still walk against a steady wind, but the sudden bursts caught a dozen guests at Hammerhead Ranch between buildings and made them stumble like they were drunk.
The surfers were swept out to sea, cheering with delight.
Lenny wandered stoned out of the bar and across the parking lot, staring up at the dark sky. Just then, three black sedans with NASA emblems on the doors raced down Gulf Boulevard and whipped into the parking lot of Hammerhead Ranch.
All the sedans’ doors opened at once, and a platoon of G-men in mirror sunglasses jumped out. Dark suits, white shirts, wires running from tiny transistor earphones into their collars.
“We’re looking for Lenny Lippowicz.”
“You found him.”
Lenny was gang-tackled.
“Where’s our moon rock?” They stuffed him inside the lead sedan and drove away.
The wind increased.
Some motel guests jumped in cars and tried to get off the island, but the bridges were barricaded and it was a challenge getting back, their cars pushed sideways lane to lane. A power line popped loose and snaked and sparked at a bus stop. The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the load, and the faint outline of large objects started moving across the road. A blow-up kiddie pool sailed in front of a car like a flying saucer. The cloth awning from the entrance of a pizza restaurant came off, aluminum frame and all, and tumbled across Gulf Boulevard. Crazy stuff suddenly appeared out of the blinding rain, plastered on the windshields. Shoe insole, Turkish menu, colostomy bag, Hemingway.
One of the guests missed the driveway and struck a sign support at Hammerhead Ranch. He jumped out of the car, left it running and sprinted for the motel. The rest of the guests were already barricading the rooms. They slid dressers to the doors and pulled mattresses off the box springs, leaning them against the windows. The electrical fuses blew in sequence like a zipper, with a loud pow-pow-pow. The lights went on and off several times and then out for good.