Hurricane

By J. B. Hogan

Sometime before dawn, the first rain came. In steady, driving torrents it hammered on roofs, filled drainpipes, overtaxed gutters. In wind-whipped, jalousy-rattling sheets it penetrated cracked windows and termite-riddled walls, drenching anything it could reach.

While his wife put up a good three or four days worth of canned groceries, Dan McGuire fiddled with an old radio, trying to find a weather report. If the sound was good, he or Julie could understand enough Spanish to tell if things were going to get really bad or not.

"Have you heard anything yet?" Julie asked, coming inside.

"No, damn it," Dan said, I can’t seem to get a good station in. I want to know when this thing is going to get really bad. If it is."

He went back to adjusting the radio dial. Finally, a signal came in clear and strong. The announcer was giving the weather.

"Hot damn," Dan said proudly, "got it. Being an old Morse intercept operator pays off at last."

"What’s he saying?" Julie asked.

"Listen," Dan said, "you know it better’n me." They concentrated until the announcer had definitely moved on to another topic.

"I know he said there were big waves and a lot of rain," Julie said.

"Yeah," Dan said," and I thought he said something about seventy-five to a hundred miles from somewhere. I didn’t get the rest."

"Huh, uh," Julie said, "me neither. Maybe that’s how close it is to us now."

"Hmm," Dan said, "could be. If that’s it, we may still be in for it."

"Maybe," Julie said.

"Well, it’s not here yet," Dan said, "what do you say we eat something."

"Like what?"

"Oh, I don’t know. How about cheese sandwiches and cokes."

"Yech."

"Well, I don’t know then," Dan said, "what do you want?"

"I don’t know. How about some chicken from the Pio-Pio?"

"Pio-Pio. I’m not going out for chicken!"

"OK. OK. I’ll make something here. But you have to go outside and get the stuff."

"Wow," Dan said, "thanks . . . all right, but get me a jacket." Julie went to the closet and pulled out a flannel shirt.

"Here," she said.

Dan put on the shirt and went into the other indoor room. He stood by the door looking through its wooden slats at the outside dining and living area. Rain erratically came through the big gate and the wooden louvres running vertically above each side wall. Much of the tile floor was wet.

Dan watched the rain falling in the backyard, bending the many plants nearly to the ground with its incessant pouring. He felt the cool air and the mist from the rain as it came through the side louvres and was scattered, minutely, into the air. He liked watching and feeling the rain and he stood at the door for several minutes. Finally, he pushed open the door and hurried out to the refrigerator.

* * *

The winds and rain lasted for three days but the hurricane never came. It went north of Boca Tierra missing the island by many miles. To Dan and Julie the battered plants and inundated backyards and the muddy running gutters in their neighborhood were the only tangible evidence of the storm.

"Wasn’t much of a hurricane, was it?" Dan said, tossing a three-pack of flan into the grocery cart at the Isla Grande supermarket.

"I guess not," Julie agreed, eyeing the flan sideways, "but we were probably really lucky."

"I suppose," Dan said, "but it sure wimped out after all the build up. All it did was make everything really wet. Big deal."

In the checkout line a few minutes later, Julie thumbed through a copy of the daily San Sebastian Star, the island’s only English language newspaper.

"Dan," she said, "look at this. It says there was a bunch of people killed in the storm."

"Killed?" Dan asked. "Killed? How?"

"In the storm. Look."

Dan took the paper and scanned the front page. Twelve persons had drowned, he read, in in-country flooding caused by the huge storm system that passed by Boca Tierra.

The dead were all farm people, campesinos, whose houses of cheap wood and scrap tin -- built, squatter style, into the side of forest hollows -- had been swept away by flash floods rushing off the jungle hills in the interior.

Centered on the front page was a graphic photograph of local authorities pulling the bloated body of a woman from a muddy, swollen stream. Dan handed the paper back to Julie.

"You want to get it?" she asked.

"I don’t know," he said.

"I’ll put it back," Julie said.

"No," Dan said, "don’t. I hadn’t thought about anything like this, that’s all. It never occurred to me."

"No," she said. The checker totaled their bill.

"I never thought about something like this," Dan repeated.

"We haven’t lived here very long," Julie said.

"There’s a lot of stuff we don’t know." Dan shook his head.

"Seis, ochenta y siete," the checker said. "Six dollars and eighty-seven cents."

Julie handed him the money. He rang up the sale.