Stan's story
Despite its name, few insurance salesmen make it to No Claims Island. The only practical way on to it is with the weekly helicopter that hauls fuel and supplies across the muddy delta; once you've touched down there's nothing but a dozen poor farms; and the farmers are notoriously bad prospects, always falling off their horses at the edge of ravines or shooting each other in the Friendship Saloon on Saturday nights.
So when Elmer Dill of Reilly's Life and Accident made the crossing last summer, he did good business. Just how good he won't say, but he certainly sold a heap of life cover to Stanley Cleaver of Penitence Farm.
"So, Mr Cleaver, you want to insure your wife's life for ten million dollars."
"Yup. She's that dear to me. Ain't she, boy?" The last was addressed to the dog at his feet, who yawned.
"How did this island get its name?"
"Well, when the land hereabouts was first settled, not even the most desperate couples would stake a claim on the island. We got just two seasons out here in the middle of the delta - Duster and Flooder. First the crops wither in the heat, then they get washed away. It's a hard life."
The small salesman and the big-boned farmer performed the necessary pen and paper rites, and a week later the supply helicopter brought the receipt for Stan's first premium.
"Get your coat, lover. We're going into town. I've reserved a booth at Charlie's Eats."
Stan's wife Sally looked at him with suspicion. He had never again bought her a meal since the night, fourteen years ago, that she had first consented to have sex with him after three schooners of Charlie's applejack.
"Shall I wear the red dress then?"
"Yeah, hun. And the red shoes." He winked the wink she had not seen, or much missed, for the last eight of those fourteen years.
In fact Stan didn't trouble her unduly when they got back home. No sooner had she hitched up her red dress and he had accepted her invitation to "climb aboard" than he fell asleep. His unmoving and unmovable weight on top of her left her little choice but to lie there and review the evening in her mind. It had begun normally enough, with them watching the TV over the bar as it forecast the start of the rainy season next day. But then Stan had behaved quite uncharacteristically, and not because of Charlie's applejack either -- that had been banned long ago when a federal food inspector had sampled a bottle and temporarily lost his sight. No, Stan, normally the silent type, had backslapped and shaken the hand of everyone in the eatery and asked them to admire his lovely wife. At one point, on the jukebox which no-one had re-stocked for forty years, he found an old Bill Haley record, and pulled her up on the table to jive so furiously that crowds gathered outside in the street to watch through the window.
She never did find the answer to the mystery of Stan's behaviour. He woke up suddenly, she took the opportunity to uncouple her body from beneath him; she stood up; he reached for a spade concealed nearby and cracked open the back of her head with it. At that moment, the rains began.
Stan had it all worked out. First he checked that his dog was still shut in the back room asleep. Then he picked up his wife and carried her out through the glistening field towards the entrance to the great storm drain. He glanced at the distant farmhouse of his nearest neighbour beyond the rapidly-swelling stream. Could Ed or Laura Hackett be up and about at this hour? It was too dark and too rainy to see.
He pushed Sally head first into the mouth of the eighteen-inch diameter pipe -- just wide enough to accommodate her body and allow it to be swept forward by the flood waters which would soon be pouring through. The pipe fed into a larger gulley that carried the torrent through walls of solid rock to the sheer banks of the estuary a mile away.
Sally's body would tumble down into the rushing river and be carried off towards the ocean. Even if it became trapped in the reeds of the delta, Stan would be safe. Everyone on No Claims knew that to reach that shore from Penitence Farm would take five hours of hard hiking around the intervening crags. Another five to get back. Stan had already made sure he was widely seen with Sally up until their return home at 2am; all he had to do now was find some pretext to visit Ed and Laura at daybreak and his alibi would be established. Whoever had dragged Sally off over the mountain would have needed twice as long as that.
Dawn brought only meagre light to penetrate the clouds as they released their terrifying weight of water. Stan, in thigh boots and shiny waterproof, trudged through the mud of the little-used path leading to the Hackett place. In his hand was a rain-filled cup, for the cupful of sugar he proposed to borrow.
He stopped in bewilderment. A rainbeaten figure was struggling along the path towards him -- Ed! There was a brief silence before the neighbour found words.
"Wet enough for you, Stan?"
"How do you mean, Ed?"
"Oh, nothing at all, Stan. What time do you have? Damn rain stopped my watch."
Stan couldn't believe his luck. Ed was doing his work for him. "Well, Ed, it's six-thirty a.m. Yes sir, that's what my watch says. Take a look! Six-thirty. I set it by the TV not ten minutes ago. Six-thirty on the nail."
"Six-thirty, eh? Well, well." Both men agreed they'd better be on their way, out of the downpour.
Standing near the drain pipe, which thankfully was almost submerged by now, Stan heard the chorus of barks before he registered the sound of the approaching engine. Oh, Christ, Madge! He'd almost fogotten. Madge McDougall was a local kid who earned pin money walking the farmers' pet dogs. She stepped out of her wagon, dressed for a typhoon, with seven or eight baleful-looking animals straining at a set of leashes fanning out from her hand.
"Where's Crapper?" she asked. "Indoors, is he? Don't worry, you hold on to the dogs and I'll go fetch him."
By the time she returned with Stan's dog, the others had begun a curious snuffling and howling around the mouth of the drainpipe while Stan struggled to winch them back.
"What's the matter, Stan, have you got a dead body in there?"
Stan's face took on the expression people always adopt when they're jokingly accused of concealing a body and it's true.
Madge added Crapper to the string of leashes and strode off behind them into the rainy blur.
Stan knew there was something wrong. The rain's first massive onslaught was finally spent. But the water in his field wasn't draining away fast enough. By removing his clothes and anointing his hips and shoulders with some silicon gel left over from a plumbing job, he found that he could just about haul his frame along the interior of the pipe.
After some 400 yards of this excruciating progress, he switched on his flashlight. Yes, there in front of him, unmistakably, were Sally's feet and legs; he'd recognise them anywhere. The floodwater had pushed her red dress up around her armpits, but tightly wedged as he was in the pipe, he dared not let himself be aroused by the spectacle and possibly stick fast.
Something had prevented her exiting completely into the main gulley. With a surge of horror, Stan saw that a second, similar storm pipe joined the gulley at this point. From it protruded another body. Where there would have been ample space for a single body to wash through, two had jammed together and blocked the gulley.
He directed the flashlight at the other head. Staring back at him were the dead eyes of Laura Hackett.
The panic-fuelled reverse journey through the pipe was accompanied by a silent screaming in his head which drowned out all other sounds, such as those of the dogs returning from their walk. When Madge saw Stan emerge, naked, bloody and caked with mud, from the storm pipe, her all too real scream took over from the silent one. She let go of the dogs' leashes and said one word. "Kill!"
Seven or eight eager jaws seized whatever they could of Stan and dragged him here and there over the waterlogged field. Crapper, considerate enough not to attack his master, bounded off towards the gulley and began barking into the culvert.
"Madge, it's me. Stan." He got these words out just in time. Madge somehow managed to call the dogs off, then ran into the house to telephone for help. When she re-emerged, Crapper came dashing up to her, tail wagging, with a bright red dress in his mouth.
Some time later, two helicopters were quivering in the field, rotors churning. One was marked Ambulance, the other Police. Into one, Stan was being stretchered, saline drip attached, while paramedics clustered round him with wound dressings and anti-rabies shots. Into the other, handcuffed to two officers, was bundled Ed Hackett.
Far from there, Elmer Dill of Reilly's Life and Accident was filling in his commission claim. "Insured: (1) Sally Cleaver", he wrote. "Sum: $10,000,000". And then, "Insured: (2) Laura Hackett. Sum: $10,000,000."
Yes, the trip had been worth the effort. And, if he but knew it, No Claims Island had once again lived up to its name.