Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

He walked out before she could catch him, and moved quickly to the staircase and went down and was startled to find that, at ground level, the water came six inches above his knees. He looked into the parking area and was appalled to see that the cars parked nearest the front of the building, that part that faced the Gulf, had been moved by the water, had been jammed back into pillars and the cement block walls of the divided areas for utilities and laundry, and had been shoved back into each other. There weren’t many of them. The wind was whistling and howling through the parking area. He waded to where he could see over toward the Surf Club and Azure Breeze. It was like dusk, even though only about three o’clock on an August Saturday afternoon.

  There was solid water between him and the condominiums on the beach side of Beach Drive. Plantings were gone. The hard wind was rolling small white waves all the way across to Golden Sands. He could see drowned cars on Beach Drive, perhaps a dozen of them, with water up to the door handles. The wind drove brackish water into his face, stinging his eyes. He tasted the salt on his lips.

  Thrusting against the wind, he waded to his car, a lime green Chrysler New Yorker with a white vinyl top, white vinyl upholstery. The Churchbridge Buick which was usually parked next to him was gone and someone had put a red Datsun in that private slot, a car he remembered seeing out in the open lot behind the building. His Chrysler was flush against a pillar, and the Datsun was rocking and grinding against the left rear panels and fender. The wind and water had brought loose junk and trash floating in. A lot of it was caught in the angle between the front of the Datsun and the front half of the Chrysler. A big palm bole, broken off, was nudging and thudding at the front left fender of the Chrysler, surrounded by pieces of crates and pieces of redwood deck furniture, all afloat and bobbing in green torn leaves and green beach grasses, pieces of paper and plastic.

  He could not endure that thing gouging at his fender. He always kept his cars nice, washed and waxed, with polished chrome and blazing whitewalls. He saw that if he could work that tree trunk free, it would either go all the way on into the bay or would hang up and start bumping at something else. He clung to the Datsun as he worked his way around it, feeling it lift and rock as it was shoved against his car. He got hold of the palm trunk and tried to pull it back. It seemed to be stuck somehow. There was some kind of bright yellow thing under it. He reached into the murk of the water and got hold of the yellow thing and pulled it out from under the weight of the palm bole. It came to the surface and rolled and he saw in the flash of blue lightning that it was a life jacket strapped to a middle-aged woman. She rolled to float face up, her hair spread wide in the litter of grass and leaves and paper, dead eyes half open, and continued the slow roll to float once again face down, to move toward his car, to start to thud the top of her head high against his fender, lightly and persistently.

  When finally he was far enough up the first flight of stairs to be above the water, he stopped and leaned against the wall, gasping and gagging, eyes closed, holding his clenched fists against his big chest. Finally he was able to climb slowly to the second floor and walk down the open-air walkway to the Santellis’ apartment, holding the concrete safety rail with an unsteady hand.

  When they saw him come in, they all came to him, their faces open with their concern. He sat down and began to cry. As he cried he was furious with himself. He could not call it grief. He did not even know the damned old woman. He could not say he was crying for his car. That was idiotic. He did not tell them he was crying from fear, because he was not even sure that was it, until suddenly the first spasm of painful diarrhea cramped his bowels and he got to the bathroom in the nick of time.

  At three that afternoon, with the wind coming in ever more from the west, moving up the compass points as steady as a great clock, and increasing its velocity, the waves that marched against the shore became broader and higher and more muscular. One cubic yard of water weighs three quarters of a ton. The waves were breaking against Fiddler Key opposite Athens, and Seagrape Key to the north of the city, moving in at a speed of fifty miles an hour.

  A wave lifts, topples, smashes forward as the runoff from the previous wave is sucked back into it and lifted to add its mass to the new wave. Whatever a wave smashes, detaches and pries loose is brought back and lifted to become a part of the smashing force of the ensuing wave.

  By three o’clock the waves had hammered away a portion of the seawall in front of the Islander. Oncoming waves sucked the backfill out through the gap and out under the wall and pulled big slabs of smashed concrete down toward the Gulf, where the waves busily buried them. The sea will bury what it cannot lift, when the shore is sandy. The fine white-sugar sand of Fiddler Key moved easily. As the water coming back down the slope moved around each slab of concrete, it pulled the sand away from the sides; when it was sufficiently exposed, the water pulled the sand from under it, and it settled. Then the process was repeated. At last the slab was buried, and new waves jammed sand up the beach and washed it back, leaving a little more than before.

  The glass-enclosed lounge and restaurant began twenty-five feet back of where the seawall had been. The glass was tempered, and when a wave broke one panel it fell in hundreds of chunks no larger than bottle caps. The shrieking wind burst into the big room and blew away the doors at the east end beyond the bar and tumbled tables and chairs and service stands into a windrow that jammed the opening, in a wild circling of tablecloths, napkins and menus.

  Waves smashed the rest of the glass and reached in and gathered up every movable object. A wave would fill the room, almost to the ceiling, run through and thud against the east wall, and slide back, pulling everything with it. The next wave would lift those objects up its steep concave slope and hurl them at whatever had not yet been displaced. The bar was overturned, rolled, smashed. The back bar came down with all its mirrors and bottles glinting in the roaring murk. The supports tilted, the walls and ceiling came down. Big slabs of roofing and siding tumbled, slid, were hurled forward again. From the time the seawall was broached, the total destruction of the restaurant-lounge and adjacent kitchens took less than six minutes. The only objects protruding from the smooth slope of sand were the corner of a big color television set, one side of the largest kitchen range and one edge of the custom walnut bar. The destruction of the rest of the complex was proceeding as rapidly. Earlier the waves had washed out Beach Drive south of the Islander.

  As the sea gnawed the complex back, there were nine people who took refuge, first in the reception area and then above it in the resident manager’s apartment. They had not left soon enough. All of them had intended leaving. There was Harry, who had been on the desk, Skip the bartender, Pete, a restaurant supply salesman, Kitty, the waitress, a touring couple from Denver, and Liz, the tall executive secretary from Birmingham, and her two friends.

  The wind sound was constant, a whining roar, and the crash of waves was continuous thunder. They had to yell at each other, lips close to ear, to be heard. They heard breaking sounds from below. They saw the few cars in the wide lot being rolled over. They wept and screamed, unheard, and clung to one another as the building was pulled down. Not one lived one minute past that terrible moment when they were lifted up and up and up toward the toppling crest of the next wave.

  By then the sea was rolling all the way across the key in a half-dozen places. The small-boat rescues had retrieved nearly forty people from the key before the increasing strength of the wind made the bay far too dangerous. One launch, bringing ten back, broached and foundered near the wind-damaged bridge with, as was later determined, two survivors.

  At the National Hurricane Center, occupying the top two floors of the Computer Building on the University of Miami campus, a current reading of the pressure at the center of Ella was received, and it was a shocking nine hundred and thirty millibars. By using the tide forecast system devised by Conner and Kraft, this gave an estimated maximum tide of approximately fourteen feet. In addition, as confirmed by radar, the hurricane was stil
l changing direction and was now moving to the east of north, and if it continued on that course, the eye would cross the Florida beaches somewhere between Tampa Bay and Athens at 10 P.M. The appropriate warnings were sent out, with the knowledge that there was really very little remaining that anyone could do.

  Two tired graduate students took a break and walked out into the sultry late afternoon. There was hazy sunlight. It was very hot and humid, with a sticky and fitful breeze from the south.

  They sat on a bench in the shade. She slapped a mosquito off her wrist and said, “It’s like some kind of huge irony, you know?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “My parents live on Siesta Key in Sarasota.”

  “I know.”

  “Since I’ve gotten into meteorology, when I’ve been home I’ve told them to get off the key if the authorities order it. They say yes, yes, sure, honey. But they don’t … they didn’t believe. You can tell by their eyes. I told them how once there was fifteen feet of salt water in what is now downtown Tampa, and how it destroyed a whole fort there, and they say yes, yes, sure, honey. So, dammit, I wished there would be one that would come in and shake them up. I wished for this, Dave!”

  “Hey. Don’t cry, Sue.”

  “I’m sorry. But with this thing, even if they did go to the mainland, it could still get them. Figure the water levels yourself, my friend. Fourteen-foot tide. Plus the coordinating high tide. Plus all the rainfall and runoff. And what if the eye comes ashore north of them? Add on the storm surge and the seiche effect, and it’s all the way off the scale! You saw it up there. You saw those printouts. All they can say is twenty feet plus.”

  “They’ll be okay. On the mainland you have a lot of stuff in front of you to break the force of the waves. The water level will creep up. People will have a chance to move to a safer place.”

  “Oh, sure. So they are in a one-story motel, and like we heard, the Tamiami Trail is broken in forty places already, so all they do is climb up on the roof somehow and try to stay there in a wind blowing a hundred and fifty miles an hour, hard enough to blow bark off the damn trees!”

  “Sue, honey.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m okay. I just have to bitch to somebody. I wanted them to have a nice little hurricane, so they would have more respect. And we have to get this great big monstrous killer.”

  He patted her clumsily and kissed her beside the eye, and said, “We better get back up there.”

  The waves had plucked away the riprap, revetments, seawalls and backfill in front of Azure Breeze and the Surf Club. It was thudding against the very heavy reinforced wall that was a part of the seaward foundations of the Surf Club. At Azure Breeze the waves dug into the spaces between the support pilings. They smashed the thick slab between the pilings once they had undermined it. They pulled out pieces of the slab, and once they had reached far enough back under the building, they began the same process on the pilings that were used to bury the heaviest pieces of slab. The water, rushing back out, scoured sand away from the sides of the pilings, making deeper and deeper furrows which extended farther and farther down the beach slope.

  Loretta lay sweaty in the bed at Golden Sands, in the dishwater light of a dying day, listening to the awesome tumult of the great storm. Rain was crackling against the windows like hail. She could feel the building shake. There was an actual mist in the air of the bedroom, of rain pinched and driven through the tiniest openings by the monstrous gale. In the brightness of lightning preceding the unheard thunder, she could see the moist highlights on her breasts and belly and her upraised thighs. Interwoven in the frightening and deafening roar she could make out unknown thumpings, crashing, creakings.

  Damn fools not to get off in time, but no great harm done, she thought. Yesterday she had told him about leaving with Cole on Sunday. Wouldn’t make it now, of course. There would be three or four days of utter confusion. She’d told poor dear Gregory that it was really all in his best interest. If he persisted, his sweet little wife, with all her allergies, would take him back. She might make him eat a whole generation of crow, but she would take him back. Loretta was glad she had brought her two big suitcases up to the apartment. Had she left them in the trunk of the car she was going to put in storage, they might have been damaged, the way it looked out there when she had glanced at the world a couple of hours ago.

  She had become ever more convinced that taking off with Cole was the right thing to do. She had not realized how bored she had been running the office, manipulating people, maneuvering them. Nobody manipulates Mr. Cole Kimber. A mean bastard with a quick temper. Not at all acquiescent like Greg. Poor Greg. Poor sweet Greg, so very anxious to please her and win her favor. He had actually wept real tears when she told him she was leaving for a year. She had kissed his eyes and tasted the salt of his tears.

  It had become an excitement to her to think of leaving with Cole. It was an anticipatory fluttering, not unlike the onset, the first hint, of orgasm. It was like being a little kid in Ohio again, and putting your ear against the rail to hear the faraway funny droning whisper of the oncoming train. When it got so loud it was frightening you sprang back to safety and in a little while the great engine would come surging around the curve, unstoppable, all big wheels and pistons and black roaring energy, giving the first great hoohaw for the valley crossing ahead, steamy and rackety. Then there would be the long rhythmic clatter of the trucks over the expansion gaps in the rails. Finally it would go away, the crummy rocking on the roadbed, the sound fading into summer silence. Then you would go try to find the flattened penny you had left on the rail, find it among the rank grasses and the broken ballast stone.

  She turned and looked at Greg, asleep with his mouth agape. Poor boy, so worn out with loving he could sleep through hurricanes. She got up and stretched and yawned and walked to stare through the sliding glass door. She stared, first in confusion and then in growing consternation. Through the horizontal rain, it seemed to be all water down there, and it seemed to come to a very unlikely height, certainly high enough to be up to the roof of her car. She could not see through the rain as far as Beach Drive. She turned and yelled to Greg to come look, but saw that he could not even hear her, much less understand her. The sliding glass door seemed to be vibrating in some strange way, almost humming in its track.

  As she reached to put her fingertips against it, the plate glass blew inward. The sliding door tracks in the whole building were just a fraction wider than they should have been. Cole and Marty had jollied the young architect representing the large busy firm which had styled the building. Cole Kimber had used the minimum specification for plate glass allowed under the Southern Building Code. Some of the doors were substandard. This was one of them. The County Building Inspector’s personnel had been less than thorough. Golden Sands had gone up during the last of the big condo boom. They were busy.

  The sliding glass door was seven feet high and three feet wide. It is reasonable to assume that the wind gusted up to one hundred and fifty miles an hour when the door ruptured. Wind at this velocity exerts a force on an exposed surface of one hundred and twelve pounds per square foot. Winds had long since blown down or broken the anemometers in Palm County. The total force against the door was thus three hundred and fifty pounds in excess of one ton. The explosion of wind and shards of glass blew her back across the room, smashing her lower spine against the dressing table. When she fell, spraying blood from a dozen slashes, it pushed her half under the dressing table. When Greg McKay sprang from the bed, the wind knocked him down. He crawled to her and she looked up at him in a mildly puzzled way before her eyes hazed over and she was gone, all her cleverness and tricks, all her tics and habits, all her sales charm and her hungers, gone like a candle puffed out by a casual giant. Rain drove all the way across the room, washing and diluting the blood. Wind roared through the apartment and out the service door by the kitchen, hurrying across the bay toward the dark city. He crawled, clutching his clothing, to a sheltered alcove between bedr
oom and living room, and was able to stand up and dress. His hands were shaking, and though he could not hear his own voice except as a vibration in his throat, he suddenly realized he was saying, “Momma! Momma!”

  At 88 Bayview Terrace the only way Justin Denniver could hear his portable radio was to shut himself in a sturdy closet in the hall and turn the volume high and hold it against his ear. Then, over the continual roaring, he could hear the tiny insect voices of the excited men yelping about disaster.

  “… latest information … five and six feet of water over the keys … expect possible fifteen feet …”

  “Fifteen feet!” he said. In pitch blackness he held the radio out in front of him in both hands and shook it, as though to rid it of such nonsense. He was already standing in water above his ankles, and if there was nine more feet coming, there wouldn’t be much room in any one-story house. He listened again.

  “… extensive wind and water damage. It is no longer possible to stand up outside. Do not try to leave from wherever you are. Nothing is moving in all of Palm County. The flow of the injured and dying to the emergency rooms of the hospitals has ceased.… Hurricane Ella will cross the coastline—” It stopped. He shook it. He wondered if the batteries were dead. He held it against his ear and turned the tuning dial and soon brought in music from a strong distant station. Music! He wanted to drop it at his feet and jump on it.

  He went out and got Molly and yelled into her ear. He saw from her expression she wasn’t getting it. He took her by the wrist and hauled her to the closet and shut them in. She screamed into his ear, “My rugs! All my new rugs!”

  He turned her head around and yelled, “The water is going to get nine feet higher! Higher than this! Nine feet!”

  He had one hand on her shoulder, one on the back of her head. He felt her grow rigid.

  “What do we do?” she shouted.

  “We got to get out of here.”