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John D. MacDonald

Hurricane

Chapter 1

On the morning of Sunday, October fourth, the Caribbean Sea lay oily and still under a hot white sun. The water temperature was unusually high. The barometric pressure was low. There was an odd mistiness that merged sea and sky at the horizon line. This flat hot sea was the womb of hurricane.

The sun climbed higher. The heated air rose as a great column. Shortly after midday, in a fifty-square-mile area about two hundred nautical miles north of Barranquilla, the ascending heated air began an ominous spiraling movement, a counter-clockwise twisting. The sky in that area began to darken, and the first winds began.

Ships closest to the area made the first radio reports. Streamers of high cirrus clouds gave warning. Great, slow swells began to radiate from the area, moving with a surprising speed, traveling to the islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles, breaking on island shores in a cadence of five or six a minute as against the tropic norm of eight.

The Miami Weather Station collated the data from the ships at sea and from commercial airline flights. By Sunday evening it was labeled a tropical disturbance. On Monday morning it was termed an area of suspicion. A search aircraft emerged from the immature cone at 5:20 on Monday evening and radioed a report to Miami. And on the six o’clock news broadcasts the hemisphere was informed that the eighth hurricane of the season was gaining in strength and had been given the designation “Hilda.”

The hurricane gained in force and momentum. As it moved in the long curved path that would carry it in a northwesterly direction, it pushed hot moist air ahead of it, and the moisture of that air, cooled by great height, fell as heavy, drenching rains.

By Monday night, the wind velocities near the center were measured at eighty miles an hour. At fifteen to eighteen miles an hour the hurricane moved north-northwest toward the long island of Cuba. Miami began to prepare. Large windows were boarded up, and extra guy-wires were fastened to television aerials. Gasoline stoves were taken out of storage. Drinking water was stored. Radio batteries sold briskly. There was a flavor of excitement in the city.

On Tuesday, the sixth of October, Hilda changed direction, moving further west than had been predicted. Billions of tons of warm rain fell on Cuba, but the gusts which struck Havana reached a measured peak of only 55 miles an hour. The winds were stronger in Valladolid in Yucatan, as Hilda picked up her great gray skirts and edged through the hundred and fifty mile gap of the Yucatan Channel. Had she continued on that new line, she was a med at the Texas Gulf Coast, at Galveston and Corpus Christi. But the storm turned due north and then began to curve slightly east. In Key West there was heavy rain and not much wind. Precautions were relaxed in Miami. The cities of the Florida West Coast began to prepare as Miami had prepared.

By midnight the sky over Cuba was still and the stars were clear and bright. It was then that the sky over Key West began to clear. In Naples it was raining heavily, as in Fort Myers. The rain had just begun in Boca Grande. The rain did not begin in Clearwater until three in the morning...

Jean Dorn had been awakened by the rain at three o’clock. When the alarm awakened her again at seven, it was still raining. She turned off the alarm before it could awaken Hal. He should get as much sleep as possible; he would be driving all day. She pushed the single sheet back and got quietly out of bed, a tall blonde woman with a sturdy body which was just beginning to show the heaviness of pregnancy. Before she went into the bathroom she looked in at the children. Five-year-old Stevie slept on his back, arms outflung. Three-year-old Jan, still in a crib, stirred as she looked in, but Ker eyes were closed. In the gray light of the drab morning both children looked very brown from the long summer on the gulf beaches.

Yes, the children were brown and healthy and full of a vast surplus of energy, and the three days of keeping them cooped up in the car were going to be less than a joy.

In the morning stillness, while the others slept, she walked in and looked at the living room. There was nothing personal left in the room. They had shipped the few things they couldn’t bear to part with. The rest of the furniture would go with the house. Into the hands and the lives of strangers.

Jean Dorn tried to look at the room with complete impartiality, to see it as a stranger would see it. Yet she could not. Hopes had been too high. This room had become too much a part of her life, and a part of love. She tried to tell herself that she was too much obsessed with things, with possessions. A room and a house should not be this important.

She wished — and sensed the childishness of the wish — that even at this last bitter hour something would happen, something would change, and they could keep it. But there was no golden wand, no one to wield it. There had been other losses, other changes, but this was the first one that had about it the sour flavor of defeat.

She had not let Hal know how deep was her sense of loss at leaving this place. Yet she knew that he sensed it. No matter how she tried to conceal it, he would sense it because theirs was a marriage that was good and close. It had been close. And she thought of the effect this was having on him and she was frightened.

She wished that there could have been some way they could have known. Known way ahead, and with that knowledge they could have been wiser. They would have rented a smaller house rather than bought this one. They would have saved in many little ways and perhaps thus managed to hold on until the turning point came.

Yet neither of them, and particularly Hal, had anticipated defeat. They took for granted the permanence of fortune’s warm bright smile. She remembered before they had left the north the way Hal had grinned at Bob Darmon when Bob had said. “You know it could be rough down there. It might be tough to make a buck. You’re giving up a hell of a good job. Boy. You might take a real drop in your standard of living.”

Hal had grinned. “Don’t stress yourself, Robert. Dorn lands on his feet. It’s a survival instinct. It’s a substitute for the silver spoon I wasn’t born with.”

“If I were doing it,” Bob said gloomily, “I’d keep the job up here and send Stevie on down somehow for a year and see if the climate really helps him.”

“He’s too little to be away from home,” Jean had said indignantly. “I’d never send him away. Bob, we know Hal won’t make as much money. But we’re going to live more simply than we have here.”

And Hal had put his arm around her and looked down into her eyes and whispered, “We’ll make out, honey. Don’t let him get you down.”

“I’m not scared.”

Should have been scared, she thought. Should have had enough sense to be scared. Not on account of me. I can get over leaving the house. I can say good-by to this room right now and good-by to that chair I brought home that day in the station wagon and couldn’t wait for Hal to come home and help me, and I lugged it in and put it right there and stepped back, and it looked just the way I knew it would look.

For sale, furnished house. With a few bits and pieces of heart swept under the rug.

Not afraid for me. Afraid because of what it has done to him.

She turned resolutely away from the threatened sting of tears and left the room. They would have to put this place behind them. She hoped Bob Darmon would never learn how right he had been. Hal’s job in the north had been a good job — an intermediate consultant with Jason and Rawls, one of the larger industrial management firms in New York City. Though he had often complained that his work was a rat-race, Jean knew he enjoyed responding to the challenge of it. He objected to the prolonged out-of-town trips that kept him away from his family, but he took pride in the knowledge that the contracts they assigned him to were the tough ones.