The hurricane screams sounded like the time in Florida. Reporter for the Times on assignment into the eye of the storm. Hurricane Andrew battered the coast in violent fashion, and it was my design not my duty to stand outside the motel room belching frantic words into the microphone while my pal, Andy the Cameraman, stood in the relative safety of the doorway and filmed me. Being slammed. The pitch of the wind-scream more than deafening, it frightened us to death. But in the interest of some romantic vision, swirls of Hemingway and Thompson and Frame, I stood there and received my punishment. The screams, the high-pitched diabolical groans, the frantic mania of nature, I took back with me as memory. We have those screams on tape. You can hear them. We, Andy and I, often watch video and be shaking our heads. We post the screams. Lucky to be alive. And it was not the stop sign that flew by my head that I remember, that I see now on film, not the bovine billboard that spun and slammed into the side of the motel, not the tractor trailer that slowly then swiftly tipped over and slid on its side along the soaked street, not the houses absorbed by the slashing sea: it was those fiendish sounds. They haunt my sleep. They protest murder, they portend, they accuse.

Esmeralda when she died sounded like that furious typhoon howl. Houghton, too. You see deaths like theirs in horror movies. Again Andy filmed it. Again I breathed in the middle of the piercing, bellowing nature, in the mud and shit of life, fear, and death row. They got pretty fat on death row.