Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  He came awake with a gasp, yanked back out of the hedgerows of that deadly war now fading so swiftly back into the myths of history and dropped into the new bed in the new bedroom. Elda was right over there in her bed, spread-eagled, facedown. (How in hell could she breathe with her face stuffed in the goddam pillow?) The sheet was pushed down below her bare behind, down to mid-thigh. As he looked over at her, he suddenly realized that the roaring grinding noise had not stopped when the dream had stopped. He got out of bed, creaked as he stretched, and went over to the windows. By pressing his cheek against the screen and looking north, he saw two big yellow bulldozers move along the edge of the parking area toward the jungle. The trucks and flatbed trailers which had brought them there were parked in the Golden Sands lot.

  It puzzled him. Were they going to widen the path, clear the easement? He pulled on his trousers and shirt and sneakers, made sure he had his keys and let himself out of the apartment. As the fire door swung shut behind him and he started down the concrete stairs in semidarkness, a voice above and behind him said, too loudly, “Identify yourself, mister.”

  He stopped and looked up into a bright flashlight beam, and the now-familiar voice said, “Oh, good morning, George.”

  “Brooks? Brooks Ames? You startled hell out of me.”

  Ames came down the stairs. He wore a straw ranch hat, khaki shirt and shorts, and a red armband with the letters G.S.P. embroidered in white, and had a white ID tag pinned to his shirt pocket which said CAPTAIN B. G. AMES. The grip of a handgun protruded from his black leather holster. Around his neck he had a red woven cord with a black whistle at the end.

  “Up early, eh?” Brooks said.

  “I see you got your armbands and whistles.”

  “You say that as if it was some kind of a joke, right? There are fourteen of us, George, volunteers, working our shifts, keeping this place safe and secure. We should be getting your thanks, not a lot of cheap sarcasm.”

  “We all sleep sounder knowing you brave boys are on duty.”

  “There’s no point in our trying to talk to each other. We can’t communicate. You have absolutely no idea of what is going on in the world. None at all. You are naïve. That’s it. Naïve.”

  “I’m a bleeding heart, Brooks. I’m a pinko crime coddler. And while you’re standing here educating me, there are big trucks illegally parked in our lot. Go blow your whistle at them.”

  “The hell you say!”

  “I saw them out my bedroom window.”

  Ames went plunging down the stairs, and George Gobbin had the vision of Ames bursting out the rear door, blowing his whistle and firing into the air.

  By the time he reached the lot there were two more trucks there, and a pickup truck turning in. There were men in yellow hard hats. There were brush hooks and chain saws. The sky was turning pink in the east, beyond the bayside thickets. Some other early-rising residents had gathered. George saw Stanley Wasniak, the secretary of the Association, and went over to him and said good morning and asked him what was going on.

  “Hi, George. I just talked to the foreman. They’re going to clear off everything between here and the bay. He said he guessed somebody maybe is going to build something on it, but he doesn’t know what.”

  “I guess you fellows will take steps to find out?”

  Wasniak had to raise his voice to be heard over the sudden staccato of chain saws. It sounded like people warming up for a motorcycle race. “You people want your noses blowed or your backs scrubbed, just get hold of your Association officers.”

  “What the hell is everybody so touchy about?”

  Wasniak leaned closer. “I am goddam sick of being held responsible for every goddam thing that happens around here. I came down here to retire, not be driven up the goddam walls by all you goddam people.”

  George stared at him for a moment and turned silently away and began walking back toward the rear entrance to Golden Sands. After a dozen steps Wasniak caught him by the arm.

  “Look, I’m sorry. It’s just one thing after another. It’s not you, George. It’s nothing about you. You should know how many times every day somebody is at me about something.”

  “It’s okay, Stan.”

  “I got snookered into this. What I want to do is sell and move out and get some peace and quiet. Sure, I’ll try to find out what’s going on, and I’ll let you know.”

  “What’s going on is land clearing,” Gus Garver said as he approached them. “The whole fourteen acres between here and the bay shore.”

  “Are you sure?” Wasniak asked.

  “I talked with a guy driving one of those little cats.”

  “Little!” said George Gobbin.

  “Well, comparatively speaking. They’re big enough for this job. Pretty good outfit, I’d say. That equipment has seen a lot of hard use, but somebody is keeping a close watch on maintenance.”

  “Clearing all of it?” Wasniak asked, wonderingly. “All those nice old trees and stuff?”

  Garver said, “The land is so low it will need some fill, and if you put a couple feet of fill around the trees, it kills them. You can wall the fill away from the trunks, but that takes a lot of time and money. So the efficient thing to do is topple all that stuff, scrape it into big piles, douse it with oil and light it.”

  “But, dammit, we bought here on account of all that green out there,” Wasniak said.

  “Say good-bye to it,” Garver said with a tight smile. “All the courts and lawyers are out of business on Saturday, and they got enough people here to do it fast. Anyway, what does it say in your deed about the scenery? Is it guaranteed?”

  Wasniak shook his head slowly. “I hate to face my wife,” he said, and walked slowly toward the rear entrance to Golden Sands. In a few moments George nodded silently at Garver and then headed back to his apartment.

  When he let himself in, Elda was still asleep and still in the same position. He wondered that the chain saws didn’t wake her up. He cranked the awning windows shut, muffling the sharp edge of the sound, turned off the fan and cracked the air-conditioning outlets, feeling coolness against his sweaty face. He fixed instant coffee and sat at the breakfast bar with the seven o’clock news whispering over the transistor radio as he looked at the paper. The thing about condominium living, he thought, was the difference between the brochures and the reality. In the brochures there were smiling friendly people in groups, having swimming parties and steak roasts and making shell ashtrays together, happy as clams, always smiling and hugging. And they all looked about forty. Move in and you were in the middle of a batch of suspicious, testy, cantankerous old folks, their faces pursed into permanent expressions of distaste, anxiety and hidden alarm.

  What we should have done, he thought, was hang onto ten of those two hundred and forty acres, a piece on the back corner the farthest from the interstate link, that piece that fronted on Birch Road and had the foundation of the old farm that had burned before I was born, near the survivors of the orchard gone wild, near the oak grove, and with a stretch of Birch Creek cutting across the corner.

  What we should have done was use some of the money and built a snug place tucked under the hill away from the north winds. We could have built a wing on it for a couple to look after the place. Then we could have driven into the city every now and again, and we could have had dinner with old friends and had them out to the place. Could have kept the same doctors and dentist and bank, and traded at the same places where we’ve been known all our lives. Could have gone down the street in the summertime and people would have said hi and asked about the kids and grandkids. We would have been near where her folks are buried, and mine.

  That’s what we should have done.

  What made us come down here? Nobody knows us, really. Nobody knows who we are. Nobody gives one fart in a whirlwind about George and Elda Gobbin. We mill around here with a couple million old foops who came down to take up room and die in the sunshine. For the sake of some hot watery sunshine full of gasoline st
ink, we became like refugees. It’s as if we were driven out of our own home place, off our own land, to wander in strange places among strangers, treated with indifference and disrespect, and the only way to go home again is to die here and be shipped back. He was surprised to feel the sting in his eyes and the catch in his breathing.

  19

  NANCY MCKAY WAS BADLY bloated as a result of her allergic reaction to most kinds of insect bites. In spite of all her precautions she had been bitten three days ago, apparently by some kind of a spider. At least after having been sat upon, the tan smear looked as if it could have been a spider. They always had the house sprayed heavily and frequently, but somehow a spider had gotten into Nancy’s bathroom and had been sitting upon, or crossing, the closed lid of the toilet when she got out of her shower, toweled herself and then sat down to dry her feet. She felt the sting and had called to Greg in alarm and he had come through from his bath to examine the body and to look at the underside of her buttock where a small red welt was already forming. He made certain that the hypo and the digitalis were ready and waiting, and then phoned the office and said he would be late coming in. When it became apparent she would not get an extreme reaction this time, he went to work.

  Now, three days later, she was at the peak of this particular incident. She was mildly bloated from head to toe, had a rash across breasts and belly, and had red puffy eyes and a runny nose. Ordinarily she was a slender pretty woman with good bones, dark hair and quick-moving grace. Now she looked, Greg guessed, as she had looked at three or four years old, her face round, petulant and sad. She had her elbows on the breakfast table, the fat fingers of both hands wrapped around her teacup.

  “Today we close on Two-E,” he told her.

  “You say it as if we ought to buy champagne or something. What it does to me, it breaks my heart. That’s what it does.”

  “Come on, honey.”

  “Come on and what? You took a twenty-thousand-dollar loss on Two-D when that Mrs. Neale bought it, and now it’s the same thing again with this old couple. We’re really getting rich, right?”

  “Nancy, honey, I’ve been through it—”

  “A hundred times and I’m too stupid to understand? All I know is that a big piece of our security is going right down the drain. I can’t see why we couldn’t hang on and wait. My God, there will be plenty of people moving to Florida and they’ll have to have housing, won’t they?”

  “Eighteen thousand a year interest and maintenance and carrying charges? And damn few rentals? Look, we agreed. Both of us. Not just me. I talked it over with you when we went in, and I talked it over with you about cutting our losses. You agreed both times.”

  She sighed and tried to smile. “I know. I get to thinking about things and I can’t turn my brain off, and I guess I work myself up. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t worry. You’re a lawyer. So we made a mistake. Some day we’ll laugh about it. Maybe.”

  “Sure we will.”

  “I want to ask you if we couldn’t keep just one of them, the last one left. But I guess that would be dumb, huh? It would be, you know, as if my money, the part I put in, wasn’t really gone.”

  “We could probably handle one, if Mrs. Rosen can rent it often enough.”

  “No. Let’s not. Let’s get out of all three of them. How come you call her Mrs. Rosen now? Why not Loretta?”

  “Gee, honey, I don’t really know. I didn’t realize I was doing it. Maybe I don’t feel as friendly as I used to, on account of the beating we’re taking. Maybe that’s it.”

  She walked him to the door to the carport and he gingerly enfolded her in his arms, the unfamiliar softness and bulk of her, and patted her and told her everything would work out just fine for them. Just fine and dandy.

  As he held her he felt a great consuming tenderness toward her, an empathy so achingly sweet it brought tears to his eyes as he looked beyond her dark hair to the kitchen bulletin board. It seemed incredible to him that after three short weeks of the affair with Loretta, his mind could be so filled with the ten thousand erotic images of her, some of them frozen, some in a frantic motion. He could see her eye so close to him he could just manage to focus upon it, an eye swollen and staring, emptied by sensation. He saw her on hands and knees, saw the planes of her brown back and the fragile narrowness of her waist as she craned her head to look back over her shoulder at him, eyes narrowed almost shut, mouth a-twist in a fixed grimace. Gregory tenderly held his swollen wife and told her in his love voice that he did indeed love her, and everything would be just fine. Just dandy, old girl.

  • • •

  Loretta phoned Greg McKay at his office at ten o’clock.

  “Bad, bad news, darling,” she said in her gritty, resonant voice. “Brace yourself.”

  “Such as?”

  “The dear little old Duckworth couple went over there to Golden Sands to admire the property they were going to close on today. So now they don’t want it. They don’t want it so badly they are perfectly willing to forfeit the five-hundred binder sitting in my escrow. They don’t want it no how, no way, dearest.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “I thought they were exaggerating. I just drove up the key and took a look. They’re clearing that Silverthorn tract behind Golden Sands. It’s Herb Major’s outfit and he’s got just about every piece of equipment he owns out there. They’ve been working all weekend, and it is beginning to look mighty baldheaded out behind there. Also, Marine Projects has barged a couple of draglines in and off-loaded them on the bay shore. They’ve been shoving all the greenery into about ten gigantic piles and pretty soon now they are going to pour on the oil and start burning. The people there are really terribly upset and I can’t blame them. All I’ve been able to find out so far is that something called the Letra Corporation, a Florida corporation, contracted for the work, has all the necessary permits in hand, apparently, and it’s full steam ahead to build, so help me, a condominium project. Somebody must be out of their tree on this one. Sweetie, we lost the Duckworths. And it is going to play hell finding anyone else while that project is going on. It really diminishes your values there. I’m sorry. We moved as fast as we could.”

  “Why can’t I get as worried as I should be, Loretta?”

  “Because you are in a wonderful, wonderful stupor. Just like me. I missed you so. You know that.”

  “I know it.”

  “I was so damned horny all weekend, I could hardly stand it. I have about fifteen marvelous things I’ve thought up to do to you. Do you mind?”

  “Lunch hour?”

  “In good old Two-F. F for frolicking. Twelve thirtyish, eh?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “I’m feeling fantastically oral,” she said and hung up. She took a deep breath and held it, sighed a long sigh, picked up her private line again and phoned Cole Kimber’s office. The girl put her right through.

  “Hey, there, Loretta baby,” said Cole. “Long time. I was thinking about you just the other day, about the great times we had, you and me. And I was wondering if—”

  “No way.”

  “You don’t mind I keep asking?”

  “Hell, it flatters a lady. What I called about, I figured you would know if anybody would. What is … I mean who is the Letra Corporation? It couldn’t be that damn Marty Liss, could it? I know he had an option on that tract once upon a time, but I thought perhaps it fell through.”

  “What would the information be worth to you?”

  “Not what you’d like it to be worth.”

  “It figures. Well, for old times’ sake, I’ll tell you that Marliss, Marty’s corporation, sold out all its rights and permissions to Letra, and Marty, as an individual, sold his rights in the option to Letra. And the president of Letra is Lew Traff.”

  “So Marty made a deal with himself and got rich?”

  “He didn’t do bad. He didn’t do bad at all.”

  “But Cole, really, has Marty got holes in his head? A big project in these times? We’ve all
fallen off the mountain, and it will be a long slow climb back. Who’ll build the damn thing?”

  “Me.”

  “You’re crazy too?”

  “For cash, baby, not for credit and not for any piece of any action. And on cost plus, money in front all the way.”

  “Make sure Marty isn’t printing the money in his back room.”

  “It’s nice clean green money, out of Atlanta.”

  “So a bank has gone crazy?”

  “Maybe a couple of them. They’re making a nice interest. So far.”

  “It really seems unreal,” she said slowly, frowning. “How do you read the whole condominium situation? You know, you are really a very shrewd person.”

  “Little old me? I didn’t know that was why you liked me.”

  “Come off it, dear. Really. Seriously. I’m in the real estate business. I would like to keep eating. And I would like to know which way to jump.”

  When he spoke his voice was heavier, more thoughtful. “Don’t ever say ol’ Cole Kimber told you this. The Chamber of Commerce would cancel my birth certificate. The way I read it, we slid over the edge, and a little ways down we grasped onto a little bush. Now the roots are slowly pulling loose and the only way we can go is down, a lot farther than you could guess, honey girl.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I have been turning every little thing I’ve got into cash. I’ve been selling my equipment and leasing it back, even. And I am right on the edge of selling Kimber Construction and taking on a consultant contract until I get this Harbour Pointe thing built or they stop construction. I’ve sold my boat.”