Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  She went back to her queen-size bed, separated from Marty’s identical bed by the shared night table with its controls for the sliding doors, the draperies, the electric blankets, the rheostat for the lights, the dials for the sound system, the thermostat control for room temperature.

  Francie lay on her back with her hands up under her nightgown, fingers laced across her flat stomach, thinking about Troy and listening to Marty make that goddam popping sound with his lips every time he exhaled. If he wasn’t snoring, he was making that incredible popping noise. Really a creepy little person to be married to. So hairy. Troy wasn’t hairy all over like that. And where he did have hair it wasn’t all that black curly hair with white hairs in it. Troy was so damn beautiful in every way, in every part of him, perfect. She thought that after four years married to Marty, it was as if she had earned the right to Troy. Why not? She was getting older and older, every day. Marty would make a person old before their time. Lately he was worse than ever. Mean and nasty. Business problems of some kind. Worried about money. What would he do if she ran away with Troy Mallory? What would the people at the club say? What would her goddam mother say? Poor Troy. Doesn’t have a dime. Was seeded way up there before his knee went out on him. Now he can’t cover enough court to play the big money game. Look at that snitty little girl over there on the East Coast. Thousands and thousands. It isn’t fair. And Marty making me sign that agreement before we got married. Jesus, that was dumb of me. Troy is so sweet. Could I live the way I’d have to live? Waitress or something? Gee, I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I could, because this is true love, and it means for better and for worse and so on. Richer or poorer. Sickness and in health. My God, Troy is certainly healthy.

  She got up and went over and put the heel of her hand against Marty’s shoulder and gave him a hard push.

  “Whassawarra!” he said.

  “You’re doing that popping thing!”

  “Poppythin?”

  “Stop popping your mouth!”

  “Time sit?”

  “Twenny past six.”

  “Jesus, Francie! Go to sleep!”

  “I want to go to sleep. You are popping your mouth and I can’t!”

  “Gess room,” he muttered and rolled over. In thirty seconds he was popping again.

  She grabbed up her pillow and her light cotton blanket and left, banging the door. She went down the hall to the bigger guest room and lay atop the spread, cocooned in the yellow blanket.

  “Troy,” she said aloud in a sweet little voice. “Troy, darling, I love you so. I love you. I love you. I love you.”

  Maybe he is awake, listening to the rain pour down and remembering how much fun we had yesterday afternoon, and maybe he is saying he loves me too.

  Lee Messenger had awakened with a white crackling hissing pain at six on Friday morning, a pain that devoured all will and resistance, and he had awakened her at once to give him a shot. He fell into the Demerol sleep and was summoned out of it by the same merciless force a little after ten o’clock.

  When it increased beyond his capacity to endure it, he yelled and hurt his throat, and then said, “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I just … can’t …”

  She gave him the second shot, and when he was finally at rest she phoned the doctor. She said, “I really haven’t seen my husband like this before. It’s like a new dimension. It’s frightening.”

  “Well … normally I would say let’s wait a bit and see. But I’ve heard that Ella is turning north and we might have confusions going on here that would make it difficult to get him off the island and into the hospital later if I decided that’s where he should be.”

  “We’ll want that suite arrangement, one of those suites, at Physicians and Surgeons Hospital that I looked at before, if one is available. Otherwise, two private adjoining rooms, Dr. Wadkin.”

  “I’ll arrange an ambulance, and by the time you arrive with him, they’ll know where to put you, Mrs. Messenger.”

  She checked the sleeping old man, then phoned down to the office and said that an ambulance was coming to take Mr. Messenger to the hospital. She packed a bag for him, tears blurring her eyes as she wondered if he would wear these clothes and come home in them. She packed her own bag, then took the emergency money from the wall safe Lee had arranged to have installed before they had moved in.

  She wrote a note to Mrs. Schmidt, who was due to arrive at eleven, telling her to go ahead and do the cleaning, but there would be no one at the apartment to cook lunch or dinner for.

  As she waited for the ambulance, she remembered that Sam Harrison had said he would stop by in the afternoon. She phoned his room at the Islander and he answered immediately.

  “Sam? Barbara. Lee is pretty bad this morning, and with the storm coming, Dr. Wadkin thinks he might be safer and more comfortable in the hospital, so we’re going over there as soon as the ambulance gets here.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. What can I do?”

  “Nothing I can think of. He’s asleep now. We’ll both be staying at Physicians and Surgeons. It’s a private hospital.”

  “Both of you?”

  “I always stay with him when he has to be in. He frets if I’m not nearby. He thinks of business problems and what should be happening and he has no one to order about if I’m not there. And I’ve turned into a pretty fair practical nurse.”

  “I’m glad you’re both getting off the key and staying off. It’s beginning to look more and more possible the lady might come here for a visit.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “If I were you—”

  “I have to hang up. The ambulance is here. Talk to you later.”

  • • •

  “We interrupt our regular programming to bring you, as a public service, a message from the Palm County sheriff, Sheriff Alton Lowe.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I am your sheriff, and I want to thank the management of WATH-TV for giving me time on the air to give you this message. All of you who heard the six o’clock news and weather know that Hurricane Ella is now approximately three hundred miles almost due south of Key West and she’s on a heading now of a little bit west of north, which should take her right up into the Gulf. It looks like she’ll cross Cuba in the Isle of Pines-Havana area, which is too narrow a land area to do more than slow her a tiny bit for a little while. She has just about lashed the Cayman Islands to bits and she is giving Cuba hell, excuse me, right now.

  “It looks like we could be in for it, but if we all do our part and follow instructions, we can minimize the damage she might do to our area. We’ve got a couple of daylight hours left, and I want you to know that the odds are very strongly in favor of an evacuation of the offshore keys, right from the Ten Thousand Islands up to Tarpon Springs, a mandatory evacuation to start first thing tomorrow morning. Those of you that are elderly and infirm, or have little kids, and who want to stay in motels on the mainland, I’d truly suggest that it might be best to make your arrangments now and pack and get off tonight. We’ll get rain so heavy traffic might have problems moving tomorrow morning.

  “I hope most of you have gone through the hurricane checklist in the paper and gotten what you need to get. I want you to remember this. We could be without electric or drinking water for two or three days, and we’re in the heat of August, so guide yourselves accordingly. We’ve been lucky on hurricanes so long, we’re due for a big one. And if you’re a little scared and nervous about it, and anxious to do everything right and avoid harm and damage, that’s a good healthy attitude to have. Remember to pull the main switches when you leave your homes, and turn off all pilot lights, and turn off any bottled gas or underground tanks at the main valve. Keep your radios, if we lose power, turned on at all times for bulletins. Pick up all loose stuff around yards and in carports and on porches. Take in potted plants and hanging baskets and so on.

  “Ella accelerated and made a big curve up toward the north and she has now slowed a little in forward direction but she hasn’t lost a thing in intensity. I wa
nt to point out that even if she misses us clean and goes on past us up the Gulf, we are still going to get a lot of very dangerous winds and a lot of very high water and waves pushed by that wind.

  “I want to thank the station for having me on, and I wish everybody good luck in this emergency, and we’ll be all right if you follow orders and keep in touch.”

  The Eastern 727 came down at dusk through rain so thick Fred Brasser couldn’t see the runway lights from his window seat until moments before the wheels touched.

  When they had taxied close to the terminal he unclicked his belt and leaned close to the glass, but he could not see her among the small group of people waiting in the bright lights under the deep overhang of the terminal building.

  In fact he did not see Darleen Moseby until she danced up beside him as he was walking through the terminal and caught his arm and said, “Hey, you made it, you made it! You got loose!”

  He stopped and kissed her, and as he walked along with her, smiling his pleasure, he saw a stern middle-aged woman looking at him with curiosity and amused disapproval, and for an instant he saw Darleen through her eyes, but only for an instant.

  She had borrowed an old Chevy van to come out to the airport and get him. Lurid desert sunsets were painted on the side panels, and the interior was entirely carpeted—floor, walls and roof—in electric-blue shag. She wouldn’t let her Freddy get wet. She scampered through the dwindling rainsquall and brought the van around to the terminal and picked him up.

  “Whose is it?”

  “Some guy named Dave that hangs around the beach.”

  “Have you … been busy?”

  “No. Things are real slow. How long can you be here, hon?”

  “A week. I’ve got the money. You want it now? Here.”

  “Sure. I guess so. Thanks. But you know Tom isn’t really into this kind of thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know. Like a steady person. What he worries about, you’ll make me some kind of a deal, I’ll run out on him and go to Fort Worth or some weird place. He’s afraid if any of us get any kind of regular thing going with a mark.”

  “I’m a mark?”

  “Honey, you’re not really like a mark-type person to me. You are Freddy, and I really like you a lot. You’re more like a boyfriend, sort of. Okay?”

  “Okay, Darleen.”

  “Louise was going to take off with a guy she really liked one time. But Tom found out about it somehow and she finally admitted it to him, and so he broke her thumb.”

  “He what?”

  “Wow! Did you feel the wind then? It nearly blew us into the ditch, hon. Wow, I love storms. I really do. What? Oh, sure, he broke her thumb, reached out and grabbed it and twisted and zap, it broke, and she screamed bloody murder. It was in a cast for weeks. I’ll tell you one thing. She doesn’t make any plans about going away.”

  “I don’t like you staying with that mean son of a bitch.”

  “Oh, Tom is okay. He really is. Not to worry.”

  “Would you think maybe about coming to Fort Worth?”

  “Don’t get like that, Freddy. Don’t spoil things. I got us the same room again by the pool.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “It’s in your name like before. We’ll have us a ball, sweetie. Hey! Feel that wind? It’ll be cozy in bed listening to the rain and the wind. You know something? I’m starving. I know a good take-out place for Chinese. It isn’t much out of the way. How about we get some? Good! The shrimp flied lice is fantastic. Dig me out five bucks, hon.”

  He sat in the dark van outside the Chinese restaurant on Route 41 in the hot Florida night. Big trucks groaned by, their furies fading down through a minor scale as they drove south. Gusts of wind rocked the van, making a small motion he could feel. He remembered the two small dark moles on her lower belly, off center to the left, perhaps an inch above the curled, springy tuft of auburn brown. His erection was uncomfortably constricted by the entrapment of his jockey shorts, and he shifted in the seat to ease it, his heart bumping and his hands sweaty. He could see her in there through steamy glass, while a man packed the order. She stood erect, feet apart, hands shoved in the slash pockets of her tie-dye jeans, barefoot, wearing a yellow sweat shirt three sizes too big for her—a small jaunty figure whose life seemed almost entirely focused upon her own considerable appetites. He wondered how all this had happened to him, and why he did not give a damn where it was all heading.

  38

  BROOKS AMES HAD COFFEE in 4-D at seven o’clock on Saturday morning, with his two most trusted lieutenants, Jim Prentice and Ross Twigg.

  “Okay, this is it,” Brooks said. “Audrey phoned and said that she and Doris have got a good corner for the six of us at the Sports Center shelter. Hardly anybody else has arrived there yet off the keys. They drew six cots and got them unfolded and set up, and while Audrey was phoning, Doris was blowing up the air mattresses with that foot pedal pump you bought, Jim. Good idea, by the way. Helen hadn’t got there yet, but remember she was going to stop and get more canned stuff on the way. We’re thirty-three feet above sea level there and we should be okay. When our work is done here, you’ll drive the three of us to the Center, Jim. Any questions?”

  Ross Twigg, an adenoidal-looking man with the ghost of a cured stammer, said, “It doesn’t look like any storm coming.”

  “Now here is my master list, men. I have weeded out the vacant ones and the ones I know have left. I’m going to take them right from the bottom and work up. When I give a name I’ll pause, and if any of you know anything, you just speak up. Anything about their attitudes, even. Okay. Starting way at the bottom here we have the Higbees, Julian and Lorrie.”

  Jim Prentice said, “I saw her late yesterday afternoon and she was madder than hell at him. He took off early yesterday morning and she didn’t know where he was and hadn’t seen him.”

  “He take their car?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Then we’ll get her a ride with somebody. She’ll be sensible about getting off the island.”

  The faint music of the small radio stopped and there was the long high-pitched note to warn of a bulletin. Brooks held up a hand for silence and turned the volume up.

  “The eye of Hurricane Ella has just crossed Cuba west of Havana and is back over open water, about a hundred and twenty miles southwest of Key West. Winds of over a hundred miles an hour are savaging Key West at this moment, and the waterfront is being punished by huge, wind-driven seas rolling in out of the Straits of Florida. The course of this great hurricane remains north-northwest on a path which, if continued, will bring the eye within seventy miles of Fort Myers. Wind-driven tides are expected to be six to eight feet above normal by this evening from Fort Myers to Tampa Bay, and all exposed locations in the area should be evacuated without delay. Please keep tuned to WANS Radio, fourteen-ten on your dial. Further bulletins will be broadcast as they are received.” When the music began again, Brooks turned it down.

  “Looks worse and worse,” he said. “I am putting a T beside Lorrie Higbee’s name, Ross. That means you are the one finally responsible for remembering to get her evacuated. Okay, now for the first-floor apartments. Francine and Rolph Gregg? I don’t see any problem there. Major Phil DeLand and his wife, Roxy?”

  Prentice said, “They should be gone by now. Phil said he would never fool with these things. He’s been in a couple in the Pacific.”

  “Good man. Gus Garver. I talked to him yesterday. He picked up a sleeping bag and a batch of stuff on the checklist and he is leaving, or has left, to go over and stay at that Crestwood Nursing Home with Mrs. Garver. He said he was afraid those nits over there would run for cover and leave her alone if it got bad. The Rastows?”

  “Ready to go as soon as the orders came through,” Ross Twigg said.

  “Mrs. Boford Taller?”

  “She doesn’t drive. She’s going, or has gone, with Major DeLand and his wife.”

  “The Simmins family. Mark
, Edith and daughter Lynn.”

  “I spoke to him yesterday,” Jim said. “He pulled rank. He said that he was accustomed to making command decisions and he said he had made life-and-death decisions before, and he was experienced in weather patterns, and he would keep track of the storm through the bulletins and decide whether or not they would leave the key. He’s one bullheaded old bastard.”

  “I’ll go have a talk with him myself. Second floor. Frank and Marie Santelli?”

  “They think this is the safest place they can possibly be,” Twigg said. “They’ve got a hurricane party all cooked up. Them and the people next door to them, the Quillans, and Jack and Grace Cleveland from up on six. They don’t any of them believe the Harrison report, and they’ve got friends who’ve lived down here a long time and who tell them not to worry, it never amounts to anything.”

  “We’ll come back to that situation. Mr. and Mrs. Fish?”

  Prentice said, “She’s an emergency-room nurse at Athens Memorial, and they’ve moved the emergency-room staff right into the hospital to be available for twenty-four-hour duty. He’s in the school system and is helping operate the shelter in the high school.”

  “Fine. Mrs. Neale. Ah, I remember, she moved out. Something about misrepresentation. She’s suing the realtor. Mr. and Mrs. Kelsey?”

  Twigg said, “They told me they were ready to leave as soon as the word was passed that it was time. So they’re gone by now.”

  “Good. On the third floor we have the Truitts. They’re all set; I checked their emergency list. Schantz. They’re all set. Jim, did you learn what that goddam George Gobbin is going to do? He wouldn’t tell me a thing or let me check his stuff against the list. He kept giving me that Hitler salute business.”