Second Wind Part 6

Ro B I N A N D E v E LY N S South Florida home, though apparently nothing extravagant for the area, was to eyes disciplined to a one-room third-floor attic bed sit (tiny bathroom and alcove-kitchen), a dazzling revelation.

To start with, there was the brilliance of color. I was used to the blue-gray northern light already afflicting the afternoons of London W. 12, lat.i.tude between 51 and 52 degrees north.

In Sand Dollar Beach, at lat.i.tude 25 degrees, just north of the Tropic of Cancer but well north of the equator, pink was vibrant, turquoise blazed to the horizon on the sea and green palm trees swayed over white crumbling lacy waves.

I very seldom regretted the constraints I accepted in order to pay for my grandmother's comfort, but I felt, on that beautiful sparkling evening, that the English screaming seagulls fighting on the ebb tide came expensive.

I had thanked the Darcys for their invitation and they'd warmly greeted my arrival but, even allowing for the legendary generosity that Americans displayed by habit, I still wasn't sure why I was there in Sand Dollar Beach watching the golden sunset, drinking an exotic intoxicater and eating canapes the size of Frisbees.

Evelyn talked about diamonds, as Bell had foretold.

Evelyn, silver hair immaculate, wore s.h.i.+mmering ice-blue silk pants with a loose blouse of the same silk, embroidered all over with pearls and little silver tubes that my worldly grandmother had educated me to recognize as bugles.

Robin, full gla.s.s of icy concoction in hand, lazed back in a vast thickly cus.h.i.+oned garden chaise longue that horizontally supported his bare ankles and feet. Robin had called me

"Dr.

Stuart" while meeting my flight in Miami airport and "dear boy" when pressing a pina co lada into my hand, murmuring also

"Pineapple juice, coconut milk and rum. Suit you, I hope? " He wasn't sure of me, I thought, nor I of him. One could often perceive goodwill instantly. In Robin I saw a chess game.

We sat on a south-facing large terrace that overlooked the calm Atlantic Ocean on one side and was dramatically lit on the other by streaky gold clouds in a late afternoon sky.

Kris, who seldom drank alcohol even when not flying, restlessly wandered from terrace to lower-level deck pool and back again, searching the golden heavens as if in annoyed disappointment.

Robin Darcy said to him tolerantly,

"Kris, go inside and watch the Weather Channel. If the great G.o.d Odin is stalking about in the Caribbean, you won't see him up here for days. " I asked Robin if he and Evelyn had ever sat tight through a hurricane and was smiled at with sad pity for my naivete.

"You can't sit tight, " Evelyn a.s.sured me. "You get thrown about. I thought you were a meteorologist. I thought you knew things like that. " "He knows in theory, " Kris told them, pardoning me. "He knows how hurricanes form but no one knows why. He knows why they're called hurricanes, but not where they're going. He's a doctor of philosophy, which is rare for a weatherman, and he ought to be doing research like into the why, that no one knows, and not sitting drinking in the sun, but I'll tell you he's here now because I said I'd fly him through a hurricane's eye, and not because he's researching coconut milk with pineapple juice and rum. " Robin swiveled his eyes my way, also the hand holding his drink. "Is that a fact? " he said.

"I wouldn't have missed this evening for anything, " I replied. I raised my own drink towards the sun, but it was opaque like many questions and let no light through.

ROBIN, GENEROUS WITH his telephone as with his rum, listened with barely confined enthusiasm to my report on the weather brewing in the circle of sea named after the frightening Caribs, North American Indians, who invaded the islands and coastal lands, and ruled by torture there before Columbus and other European colonists drove them out in their turn.

There were still pirates, modern-dress variety, Robin said, infesting the warm blue waters as murderous predators, stealing yachts and killing the owners, though maybe they weren't quite as bloodsucking as in the past. He smiled, mentioning that the word Carib had the same linguistic root as cannibal.

I talked to the Hurricane Center in Miami, where a longtime telephone pal gave me an as-of-five-minutes-ago state of the upper winds, "Odin is coming along nicely, " he said. "There were signs of organization during the night. I wouldn't now say you've crossed the pond for nothing. Call me tomorrow, we might have more. This storm's mighty slow, forward movement only six miles an hour, if that. There are thirty-five-miles-an-hour sustained winds on the surface, but no eye yet. " To Robin I said,

"It's a toss-up. " "Heads it's a hurricane? " "Do you want it to be a hurricane? " I asked curiously.

It seemed to me that in fact he did, but he shook his bespectacled head and said, "No, I definitely don't. I've lived here in Florida for forty years, and I've gone inland from the coast every time evacuation's been advised. We've been lucky with water surge too. There's a reef parallel with the coast here about half a mile out and in some way it lowers the storm surge and inhibits the formation of large waves. Where there's no reef, it's the water, not the wind, that kills most people. " One couldn't live so long in a hurricane alley, I supposed, without learning a few deadly statistics, and on my second (glorious) evening in his house, Robin switched on the Weather Channel for us all to see how Odin was coming along.

Dramatically well, was the answer.

The pressure in the circling center of the tropical depression Odin, a happy television voice announced, had dropped 20 millibars in the past two hours. Almost unheard of! Now officially designated a vigorous tropical storm, Odin, generating winds around sixty-five m. p. h. , lay more than two hundred miles south of Jamaica and was traveling due north at seven miles an hour.

Robin absorbed the information thoughtfully and announced that on the next day we would all take a flight to Grand Cayman Island for a few days in the sun.

As we had spent the whole of that day swimming in the Darcy pool, drinking Darcy revivers and lying in the Florida sun, Robin had only one possible intention, to move, if not directly into the eye of Odin, at least to where it could see us.

Kris stalked with huge elastic strides around the sunny pool deck and the half-shaded terrace above. Odin, tracked by radar and satellites, was too small for his taste, too slow, and too far from land. Robin said dryly that he was sorry not to have been able to fix a better display.

Evelyn thought hurricane-chasing a dangerous and juvenile sport and said she wasn't going to Grand Cayman, she was staying comfortably at home, and Robin reminded her that f Odin intensified, and if Odin changed course, as hurricanes were liable to do from one minute to the next, it might be she who found the monster roaring on her doorstep, not us.

"What is more, " she continued firmly, ignoring the threat, "tonight for dinner we're having stone crabs, Florida's pride, and after that Kris can repeat to us the poem he's been muttering to himself all day, and after that you can watch hours of Weather Channel if you like, but don't wake me in the morning, I'm not catching any flight to anywhere. " "What poem? " Robin asked.

"There's no poem. I'm going for a swim, " Kris said immediately, and was still in the pool at sunset.

"He did recite a poem, " Evelyn complained, "why does he pretend he didn't? " I said from experience,

"Give him time. " In time he would either repeat his verses or tear them up.

It would depend on how he felt.

The stone crabs for dinner, with mustard sauce and green salad, beat fish pie with parsley sauce out of sight, and over coffee out on the terrace in soft silhouetting light, Kris said, without preliminaries, "I went to Cape Canaveral, you know. " We nodded.

"I'll fly through a hurricane, but those first astronauts sat on countless tons of rocket fuel and lit a match. So... well.

I wrote for them. I wrote about Cape Canaveral, about the past... about the future. " He stood up abruptly and carried his coffee cup to the end of the terrace. His voice came matter-of-factly out of the dark.

"There are lonely concrete launch pads there, deep set in dusty gra.s.s, They are circles scarcelyfre-marked, barely twenty feet across, Rockets stood there, waiting, men inside with trusting courage, For the Ift-off to the stars. " No one spoke.

Kris said, "Now shuttles roar routinely to a station up in orbit, Soon they'll print a cosmic schedule, issue a boarding pa.s.s, And who will spare a memory or even a pa.s.sing thank you To those circles in the gra.s.s? " More silence.

With a sigh, Kris said, "Many a windy year will blow across the Cape abandoned.

Ghosts of fear and b.u.mpy hearts will thin and fade and pa.s.s.

Weeds green the concrete circles. It'sfrom a launch pad out in orbit That men have gone to Mars. " Kris walked over and put his coffee cup on the table.

"So you see, " he said, a near-laugh lightening his concept, "I'm no John Keats. " Robin said judiciously, "An interesting apercu all the same. " Kris left Robin explaining an apercu to Evelyn and walked me to the edge of the terrace to look at the moon reflected in the pool.

"Robin's arranged a Piper in Cayman, " he said. "I've checked that I can fly it. Are you on? " "I can't afford much. " "Don't fuss about the money. Are you spiritually on? " "Yes. " "Great. " My unqualified agreement excited him. "I was sure that's why you came. " "Why is Robin so keen on us going to Odin? " Kris wrinkled his tall pale forehead. "Understanding why people do things, that's your sort of work, not mine. " "I liked your poem. " He grimaced. "You should go to the Cape. You'd never believe that the moon walks were sp.a.w.ned from those concrete slabs. " There were times, there were days, when the extremes of Kris's seesaw nature fell into balance, not just as always for his solo two-minute on screen weather forecasts, but also for a lasting peace. It was as if the careful pilot took over even after the wheels had landed. On the evening of the Cape Canaveral verses he sounded more levelheaded than I'd ever known him out of an airplane.

"Did you see Bell? " he asked.

"I talked to her on the telephone. " "Will she marry me, do you think? " I blew a breath of exasperation down my nose.

"First, " I said, "you'd better ask her. " "And next? " "Both of you practice keeping your temper. Count ten before you yell. " He thought it over and nodded. "You tell her, and I'll do it. " I nodded. I doubted that either would manage it, but an attempt was an advance.

In a typical non sequitur he conversationally asked,

"What do you know of Trox Island? " "Er. " I thought without result. "Does Bell like it, or something? " "Bell? It's nothing to do with Bell. It's to do with Robin and Evelyn. " I said

"Oh? " vaguely. "I've never heard of it. " "It seems that most people have never heard of it, " Kris said, "but suppose Robin wants you and me to fly to Trox Island, never mind through Odin's eye. " I said, puzzled, "Whyever should he? " "I think it's something to do with mushrooms. " "Oh no, Kris, " I protested. "I'm not risking my life for mushrooms. " "You won't be risking your life. In the past, dozens of planes have flown through hurricanes to gather essential and helpful information, and almost none has been lost. " Almost none, I thought, wasn't enormously rea.s.suring.

"So why mushrooms? " I asked.