Slowly, Slowly in the Wind
Page 20
Maybe he was still taking a look for things that might fall. She could hear the boys yelping with glee. Elsie lost patience, or couldn’t think any more, and switched on the television. Channel 30 had no picture, just an excited voice saying, “. . . not try to fight the trees. We repeat the following important message: everyone is ordered to leave Golden Gate by copter if possible and at once. The roads are crowded—” A gasp betrayed the announcer’s terror. “An earthquake of unusual proportions is believed imminent. We repeat, all . . .” Wails and squeaks silenced the voice, as if a giant hand had twisted up the station controls or throttled the announcer himself. There was a loud, dull thud from the empty screen—then nothing.
Elsie turned to see Jack standing just inside the living room doorway. He had heard it. His headgear was off now, and his face paler than before. Their sons flanked him, one bandaged, one not, but both had the jaded smiles, both were calm now though their sneakered feet were planted more apart than usual to keep their balance in the shaking house.
“All right, let’s go,” Jack said. “Let’s get in the copters. No use trying to take stuff with us. We head east, okay, Elsie? East. Even if it’s the desert. There’ll be others. They’ll bring food and stuff—from somewhere.”
“All right, yes,” Elsie said. “But why didn’t you tell me—days ago? You knew.”
“C’mon, hon, no time for arguing,” Jack said. “You kids hop, y’hear me? Head straight east, don’t try to find us, just land where you see people. We’ll get together later. C’mon, Elsie, let’s go!” Jack trotted out after the boys.
A corner of the house collapsed, crushing the television and the sofa. Elsie walked out of her house. In the noise of distant sirens, explosions, she could not hear the hum of the boys’ two copters, but she saw them rise and point east.
Jack’s copter was in the driveway. “Get in your bus, hon! I started ’er for you!” He was standing with one foot on the copter step.
A tree fired at him—one of the poplars. Elsie saw the white jet shoot straight against the side of his head and fling him to the ground. Jack screamed. Another white bulge trembled as Elsie approached Jack, and at once she tiptoed, and bent low. Could the trees see, with a kind of radar?
Jack was trying to say something, but his jaw, half of it, had already been burnt away. He was dying, and there was nothing she could do. For a few seconds, Elsie endured a paralysis, clenched her teeth and looked upward, as if she expected some saving power to come from the heavens. She saw only a score of copters heading east, all flying unusually high.
“You all right, ma’am? Got a copter?” cried a voice behind her.
Elsie spun around and saw not far above her a copter with a rope ladder dangling, and the covered wagon device of the Forty-Niners on the side of the machine. A teenaged boy peered down from the driver’s seat, friendly, smiling, anxious. Elsie said, “Yes, thanks. I’m just taking off.”
“Can you manage him?” the boy asked quickly.
“He’s dead.”
The boy nodded. “Better hurry, ma’am.” He floated off.
There was a rumble from the north like a huge wind, and a sound of splitting—and this came closer. Underground explosions? Or the earthquake? To the north Elsie saw vast woods and orchards tip slightly to the left. Elsie moved nearer her gates.
A crack was coming towards her like a live thing. She could see fresh brown and yellow earth to a depth of one hundred feet in the widening gorge whose point advanced by leaps. The earth left of the gorge had all been lifted, but was now tilting to the left. The crack veered to the right of her property. She could still dash to her copter and make it, she realized—just. But she didn’t want to make it. What she witnessed seemed heroic, and right. A quick, fleeting thought of Jack came to her: He treated me just like the public, as if I were just—
Elsie turned to face the oak tree, her beloved young oak, which now quivered, pointing its crinkled white breast at her, as if gathering itself for its fatal spit. Elsie did not take her eyes from its pink center. Seconds passed, but it did not shoot.
The roar now was like that of a surf, and Elsie knew it was the sound of Golden Gate falling into the Pacific Ocean. Her house and land would go with it. Elsie clung to her iron gates, which themselves had tilted. Behind her and to her right, the oak shot its fiery sap, and bushes on her left burst slowly into flame. Elsie was glad the oak had fired before it drowned.
It was right, Elsie felt, right to go like this, conquered by the trees and by nature. How kind of the Forty-Niners—she thought as the iron bars jerked in her hands, bloodying her palms—to take a look at Rainbow, a district she knew the Forty-Niners hated because so many nuclear workers lived in it, just to see if they could be of assistance.
Now the wind whistled in her ears, and she was falling at great speed. A land mass, big as a continent, it seemed, big as she could see, was dropping—slowly for land but fast for her—into the dark blue waters.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. She was educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, published initially in 1950, proved to be a major commercial success and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite this early recognition, Highsmith was unappreciated in the United States for the entire length of her career.
Writing under the pseudonym of Claire Morgan, she then published The Price of Salt in 1952, which had been turned down by her previous American publisher because of its frank exploration of homosexual themes. Her most popular literary creation was Tom Ripley, the dapper sociopath who first debuted in her 1955 novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley. She followed with four other Ripley novels. Posthumously made into a major motion picture, The Talented Mr. Ripley has helped bring about a renewed appreciation of Highsmith’s work in the United States as has the posthumous publication of The Selected Stories, which received widespread acclaim when it was published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2001.
The author of more than twenty books, Highsmith has won the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland on February 4, 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.
PRAISE FOR PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
“Patricia Highsmith’s novels are peerlessly disturbing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night.”
—The New Yorker
“Murder, in Patricia Highsmith’s hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic . . . has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out.”
—Robert Towers, New York Review of Books
“For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there’s no one like Patricia Highsmith.”
—Time
“The feeling of menace behind most Highsmith novels, the sense that ideas and attitudes alien to the reasonable everyday ordering of society are suggested, has made many readers uneasy. One closes most of her books with a feeling that the world is more dangerous than one had ever imagined.”
—Julian Symons, New York Times Book Review
“Mesmerizing . . . not to be recommended for the weak-minded and impressionable.”
—Washington Post Book World
“A writer who has created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger. . . . Miss Highsmith is the poet of apprehension.”
&n
bsp; —Graham Greene
“Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there’s nothing quite like it.”
—Boston Globe
“Highsmith’s novels skew your sense of literary justice, tilt your internal scales of right and wrong. The ethical order of things in the real world seems less stable [as she] deftly warps the moral sense of her readers.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Highsmith writes the verbal equivalent of a drug—easy to consume, darkly euphoric, totally addictive. . . . Highsmith belongs in the moody company of Dostoevsky or Angela Carter.”
—Time Out
“No one has created psychological suspense more densely and deliciously satisfying.”
—Vogue
“Highsmith’s writing is wicked . . . it puts a spell on you, after which you feel altered, even tainted. . . . A great American writer is back to stay.”
—Entertainment Weekly
Copyright © 1972, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1977, and 1979 by Patricia Highsmith
Copyright © 1993 by Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich
First published as a Norton paperback 2004
This selection of short stories first published in volume form
in Great Britain, by William Heinemann Ltd 1979
First published in the United States of America by
Penzler Books 1985 (Warner Books, Inc.)
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections
from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Production manager: Amanda Morrison
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Highsmith, Patricia, 1921-
Slowly, slowly in the wind / Patricia Highsmith.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-393-32632-2 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS3558.I366S6 2004
813’.54—dc22
2004020387
eISBN: 978-0-393-34563-6
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