The postmaster studied him a moment. “It’s still blowing out there,” he said, “but the radio says the worst of it’s past.” Willis heard the faint whisper of the radio then — one of those little transistors the kids all wear; it was tucked into the postmaster’s breast pocket. “Give it another hour,” the postmaster said, “and we’ll make sure you get home all right. And your car’s okay, if that’s what’s worrying you. Nothing worse than maybe a branch on the roof.”
Willis said nothing.
“Down the hall and to your left,” the postmaster said.
It took him a moment to fight the inertia of his hips, and then he was emerging from the shadows of the storage room and into the somber gray twilight of the hallway. Nuggets of glass crunched and skittered underfoot and everything was wet. It was raining hard outside and there was that rank smell in the air still, but the wind seemed to have tapered off. He found the toilet and he kept on going.
The lobby was a mess of wet clinging paper and leaves, but the doors swung open without a hitch, and in the next moment Willis was out on the front steps and the rain was driving down with a vengeance on his bare bald head. He reached automatically for the Mets cap, but then he remembered it was gone, and he hunched his shoulders and started off across the parking lot. He moved cautiously, wary of the slick green welter of leaves and windblown debris underfoot, and he was wet through by the time he reached the car. A single crippled branch was draped over the windshield, but there was no damage; he swept it to the ground and ducked into the driver’s seat.
His mind wasn’t working well at this point — perhaps it was the shock of the storm or the effects of the whiskey and his nap in the folding chair. The keys. He fumbled twice through his pants and jacket before he finally found them, and then he flooded the engine and had to hold his foot to the floor while the starter whined and the rain smeared the windshield. Finally he got the thing going with a roar and jerked it into gear; it was then that he discovered the tree blocking the exit. And now what? The specter of Muriel rose before him, pale and trembling, and then he glanced up to see the postmaster and Bob planted on the steps and gawking at him as if he’d just dropped down from another planet. What the hell, he thought, and he gave them a jaunty wave, revved the engine and shot up over the curb and into the street.
But here the world was truly transformed. It was as if a big hand had swept the street, slapping down trees and telephone poles, obliterating windows, stripping shingles from the roofs. The road that led out to the highway was impassable, churning with shit-brown water and one of those little Japanese cars awash in it, overturned on its roof. Willis tried Meridian Street and then Seaboard, but both were blocked. An oak tree that must have been five hundred years old had taken the veranda out of the house where Joe Diggs had lived before he passed on, and there were live wires thrashing the shattered shaft of a telephone pole out front. Even through the tattoo of the rain on the roof Willis could hear the sirens, a continuous, drawn-out wail of grief.
He was worried now — this was as bad as Corpus Christi, worse — and his hands trembled on the wheel when he turned into his own street and found the entrance buried in rubble and vegetation. The house on the corner — the Needlemans’—was untouched, but across the street, on his side, the Stovers’ place had lost its roof. And the street itself, the placid tree-lined street that had attracted Muriel in the first place, was unrecognizable, a double row of maples laid down flat like a deck of cards. Willis backed out of the street, water running up to his hubcaps, and made a left on Susan and then another left on Massapequa, trying to make it around the block and come up on the house from the far side.
He was in luck. Neither street seemed to have suffered much damage, and he was able to make his way round a fallen telephone pole at the entrance to Massapequa by climbing up over the curb as he’d done at the post office. And then he was turning into Laurel, his own street, dodging refuse and swinging wide to avoid the clogged storm drain at the corner. People were out on their lawns now, assessing the damage — he saw Mrs. Tilden or Tillotson or whatever her name was trying to brace up a cypress that clung to her front porch like a wet mustache. It was almost comical, that little woman and that big limp tree, and he began to relax — everything was going to be okay, it was, there was hardly any damage on this end — and there was the fat guy — what was his name? — holding his head and dancing round the carcass of his crushed Cadillac. Yes, he said aloud, everything’s going to be all right, and he repeated it to himself, making a little prayer of it.
He was more afraid of Muriel now than of the storm — he could hear her already: how could he leave her in the middle of a hurricane? Where had he been? Was that liquor on his breath? The damage he could take care of — he was a builder, wasn’t he? It was just a matter of materials, that was all — bricks, lumber, drywall, shingles. And glass. The glaziers would be busy, that was for sure. As he eased past a lawn mower standing forlornly in the middle of the street and crept round the big sweeping curve that gave him his first view of the house, he was expecting the worst — shutters gone, a hole in the roof, the elm lying atop the garage like a crippled beast — but the reality made his heart seize.
There was nothing there. Nothing. Where the house had stood not two hours ago, the elm towering over it, the two-car garage in back with his tools and workbench and all the rest, there was now a vacant lot. The yard had been swept clean but for the torn and crenellated foundation, filled with rubble like some ancient ruin. Panic seized him, shock, and he hit the brake instinctively, sending the car into a fishtail that carried him across the street and slammed him into the curb with a jolt.
Trembling, he pried his fingers from the wheel. There was a throb of pain above his right eye where he’d hit the rearview mirror. His hands were shaking. But no, he thought, looking up again, it couldn’t be. He was on the wrong street, that was it — he’d got turned around and fetched up in front of somebody else’s place. It took him a moment, but then he swung the door open and stepped tentatively into the litter of the street, and there was the number on the curb to refute him, there the mailbox with his name stenciled across it in neat white letters, untouched, the red flag still standing tall. And that was the Novaks’ place next door, no doubt about it, a sick lime green with pink trim….
Then he thought of Muriel. Muriel. She was, she was…he couldn’t form the thought, and he staggered across the lawn like a drunk to stand gaping into that terrible hole in the ground. “Muriel,” he bleated, “Muriel!” and the rain drove down at him.
He stood there a long while, head bowed, feeling as old as the stones themselves, as old as the gashed earth and the dead gray sky. And then, the car still rumbling and stuttering behind him, he had the very first intimation of a thought that sparked and swelled till it glowed like a torch in his brain: Dewar’s and water. He saw himself as he was when Muriel first found him, wedded to the leatherette stool at the Dew Drop Inn, and his lips formed the words involuntarily: “Make mine a Dewar’s and water.” The house was gone, but he’d lost houses before — mainly to wives, which were a sort of natural disaster anyway; that he could live with — and he’d lost wives, too, but never like this.
It hit him then, a wave of grief that started in his hips and crested in his throat: Muriel. He saw her vividly, the lunchtime Muriel who rubbed his shoulders and fussed over him, making those little crackers with anchovy paste and avocado…he saw her turning down the sheets on the bed at night, saw her frowning over a crossword puzzle, the glasses perched on the end of her nose — little things, homey things. With a pang he remembered the way she’d kid him over the TV programs or a football game and how she’d dance round the kitchen with a bottle of wine and a beef brisket studded with cloves of garlic…and now it was over. He was seventy-five — seventy-six, come October — and he stared into that pit and felt the icy breath of eternity on his face.