Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  “How? Where?”

  The world, he thought, always finds a way to screw you good. Build a house like a fort, anchor it deep so it will take anything that comes along, and they send you a flood higher than the house.

  “Maybe get across the bay in the boat.”

  They hurried to the windows that looked out onto the pool terrace, for a glimpse of the boat at the dock, on the davits, at the end of the lawn. At first they could not see through the rain. Then in a bright flash of lightning they saw the trees and bushes stripped of all leaves and small branches, tossing wildly, and they could see the davits stripped of any trace of a boat.

  They trotted back into the closet and closed the door. The heavy shutters were holding.

  “Maybe it won’t get that high,” she shouted.

  “Where’s that Winslow raft, that blowup thing?”

  “Garage rafters.”

  He could get through the kitchen into the garage. He brought back the raft and two life jackets. He had to take her back into the closet to tell her his plan.

  “We wait as long as we can. Inflate the raft, lie in the bottom of it, let the wind carry us as far up onto the mainland as it can. Find some shelter there. Okay?”

  Her response was to kiss him. Her lips felt uncharacteristically thin and cold. A few moments after they left the hall closet, the whole roof blew off the house. A shrieking gust got under the broad handsome overhang and lifted it up and hurled it out over the bay in one windmilling piece, tile and all. The wind felled them both. The walls started to go. He crawled to the raft and popped the inflators and it swelled, all plump and orange and reassuring. He fell into it as it started to float away from him. She managed to get to her feet and came running, wind-driven, to dive in beside him, her forehead smacking him just under the left eye, stunning him for a moment. She was trying to yell into his ear but he couldn’t understand her as they were out in the full shrieking roaring whistling fury of it, beginning to lift and fall on the chop as soon as they were fifty feet past the davits.

  Molly Denniver looked back toward the house, a stunted thing, half seen, being devoured by the wind, and the rain stung her face as she looked. She felt as if her life were being devoured too, all her impacts and purposes, her tastes and decisions being ripped and raveled, torn free and blown away beyond memory. She stuffed her face into a corner of the bounding raft, into a smell of rubber and plastic, and tried to weep.

  40

  ALL THE DRINKS were on the house at the Sand Dollar Bar hurricane party. Freddy Brasser marveled at the way he seemed to oscillate between very drunk and icy sober. Everybody smiled and nodded at everybody. Sometimes, between wind bellowings, you could hear a thin thread of music from Tom Shawn’s complicated radio. People talked in sign language, hoisted their glasses in frequent toast, hollered a word or two into often uncomprehending ears.

  Fred was astonished at the incredible noise of a hurricane. It seemed to fill the whole scale from supersonic to subsonic. It was like living inside a giant pipe organ, with a giant holding all the keys down at once, never letting up.

  He was overjoyed to finally recognize someone he had seen before, the manager at Golden Sands who had helped him get into his mother’s apartment after she was in the hospital, get the bags of trash hauled away and get the women to clean it all up. After the name was yelled in his ear three times, he went and got a pad and pencil and gave it to the man, and he printed his name in block letters: JULIAN HIGBEE.

  Fred beamed at him and printed his own name right underneath. Julian studied it and frowned and nodded. He seemed quite drunk. He stood in water, swaying, his arm around a tall woman with an oddly long neck and narrow sloping shoulders. She wrote her name on the pad in schoolgirl script. Francine Hryka. The name rang a bell. Darleen Moseby had said that the night waitress who had the little daughter and who took afternoon tricks was Francine Reeka. So this is how you spell Reeka.

  He printed a question. “Where are Dusty and Louise?”

  Francine worked her way out of Julian’s grasp and took him over to where two women sat on a table in a corner, their feet on the chairs. He could tell from the Hryka woman’s mouth movements which one was which. The little one was Dusty. They looked at him with a questioning hostility until the Hryka woman held out the pad with her thumbnail under FRED BRASSER. Then they both beamed and nodded and Louise pointed over toward Darleen and Dusty held out her small paw to be shaken.

  They all toasted each other and made gestures about the strength of the storm, and the water height in the room. Everybody looked strange in that white glare of the gasoline mantles. Darleen came sloshing over and hugged his arm and the four of them all laughed for no particular reason. He laughed because Darleen was better looking than any of the other three who worked out of the Sand Dollar. The others there seemed to be regulars. People from the Beach Village area. Clerks from the shops. An electrician. A female pharmacist. He tried to count them but he kept getting a different count. He decided it was about twenty-two.

  • • •

  The waves began consuming Beach Village after they had disposed of the fifteen or twenty small wooden beach cottages between the village and the beach, the oldest structures on the key. The light materials were whipped away by the wind. Heavier pieces were ground into splinters and kindling. Refrigerators, window air-conditioning units, television sets and dishwashers were buried in the sand. All the palm trees were broken off ten to fifteen feet above the ground. All the Australian pines fell eastward, and the firehose rain quickly hammered all soil off the roots as the wind broke away the larger roots and sailed them toward the bay.

  The middle of Beach Village was somewhat higher than the average height of the key, so it was not until after darkness fell that the sea began shattering the backs of the buildings which fronted on Beach Drive, facing toward the Sand Dollar Bar. The combination of wind pressure and wave impact took down cement block walls easily, and when they were gone, the waves began pulling out the contents of the big Walgreen’s, of McDonald’s, of Kathy’s Boutique, and the Self-Serv Amoco Station.

  Waves and wind mingled a broken sodden madness of magazine racks, sunglasses, Big Mac boxes, deodorants, Navajo bracelets, All-Weather Oil cans, charge slips, greeting cards, oil filters, laxatives, lighting fixtures, ceiling panels, kitchen plastics, pantyhose, windshield wipers, hair nets, car batteries, light bulbs, paper bags, serving trays, napkin holders, suntan lotion, seashell earrings, wading ponds, cash registers, tomato sauce, candy bars, Instamatics, razors, sandals, raw meat, seat covers and denture adhesive.

  There was a rhythm to each attack. The defenses would be penetrated. The bewildering array of oddments would be pulled out on momentary display, and with each ensuing wave there would be less of the display remaining. And then the side walls would begin to come down.

  With flashlight in hand, Roberta Fish, R.N., led Lorrie Higbee down a hospital corridor to a small treatment room. As it had no outside windows, and the heavy door fitted closely and well, once the door was shut, they could hear each other if they spoke loudly.

  Bobbie Fish put the flashlight on a stand with the beam pointing at the white ceiling, reflecting back to fill the room with a soft radiance. Lorrie backed up to a treatment table, braced the heels of her hands on it and hopped up, sighing her weariness.

  “That uniform seems to fit okay,” Bobbie said.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Tired?”

  “Pooped.”

  “You’re doing great, Lorrie. Really great.”

  “Not the way that son of a bitch was yelling at me.”

  “Don’t mind him. He’s okay. He’s a good doctor. I explained to him you weren’t trained. Just a volunteer. Don’t try to do anything you don’t understand. Okay?”

  “That kid nearly got me. You know the one?”

  “I know. I don’t know what was keeping him alive.”

  “Everything went all black and buzzy and I nearly went down. God, I didn’t know
it could be like that. You know, you think of being a nurse, you don’t think about things like that happening. No wonder you got on the sauce, Bobbie.”

  “That part of my life is over now.”

  “A lot of things are over.”

  “How did you get here? Julian bring you?”

  Lorrie looked bleakly amused. “I don’t know where he is. Fat chance of him bringing me here. Things haven’t been exactly great since he found out about us. No, I came over with Colonel Simmins and his wife and daughter and we must have gotten over the bridge minutes before they opened it and couldn’t close it. We went to the shelter at the Legion Hall, you know, a couple of blocks from here. So I came here. Because I couldn’t not come here. You understand that?”

  “Sure.”

  “I had to crawl. I had to hold onto buildings and fences and trees. I got knocked down. What happens? You put me to work.”

  “You came in looking like a kitten somebody’d tried to drown.”

  “Alley cat.”

  “There’s side rails on that table. Here. You pull up like this. There should be a pillow here someplace. Right. Here it is. Lorrie, dear, take a nap. Get some sleep. I’ll leave the door open so it won’t be this stuffy.”

  “What do you do about sleep?”

  “I’m used to going a lot of hours straight. I pace myself. If I can rest, I will. Because when things start moving again, when the ambulances can make pickups again and people can move on the streets, it’s going to make what you’ve seen already look like play school. We’ll work until we’re sleepwalking.”

  “Okay,” Lorrie said. “Okay.” She yawned.

  Roberta picked up the flashlight, and in her hunger to look more closely at Lorrie, she turned the beam on her. Lorrie stared calmly up, above the beam, toward Bobbie’s eyes. Lorrie’s hair was fastened back with a twist of wire from a hospital bouquet. Her face was not pretty, not even distinctive. Her eyes were too small and set too close to the thin bridge of the long nose. Her whole face was too narrow, the mouth small, chin ineffectual. Her eyebrows were dark and smooth and gentle. Her skin was flawless and pallid. There were smudges of weariness under the small dark eyes. Roberta looked upon her and felt her heart turn over.

  “You look about eighteen,” she said.

  “I wish I was eighteen again, for you. I was a lot prettier when I was eighteen. I really was.”

  “You look exactly the way I want you to look.”

  Lorrie bit at her lips and then said, “What is happening to us? In the middle of all the damned wind and in the middle of all those people yelling and moaning and bleeding, I think about you.”

  “Go to sleep. Get some rest.”

  “I don’t even know who I am anymore, Bobbie. I don’t even know.” With an air of petulance, Lorrie yanked up the other side rail, thumped the pillow with her fist, swung her legs up and stretched out. Bobbie kissed her lightly on the forehead, went out and braced the door back, and walked down the corridor toward the glow of the standby light circuits in the emergency areas.

  She thought of Gil, over there running his shelter area at the high school with his gentle and understanding competence. She thought of herself standing by her sink on a rainy morning, drinking the glass of tepid vodka so fast she threw it back up immediately into the sink, but kept the next glass down. She thought of wanting Julian in her so intensely she would phone down to the office and get the icy, hostile voice of little Mrs. Higbee. All four of them were people she had known in some other life she had once lived, and would soon entirely forget. She and Lorrie were the new people. She could work anywhere, and help Lorrie get her cap. And they could have their own place forever.

  Ella, nearing the coast, spun off small tornadoes. They were not as big or destructive as the ones of the midwest plains. Where they touched ground they were but twenty to fifty yards in diameter, with the winds around the center seldom exceeding two hundred and fifty miles an hour. The pressure differential between the center of the tornadoes and the area just outside them was at times a full pound of pressure. They were spun off the right front quadrant of the advancing eye.

  One of them moved directly across the Groves Mobile Home Estates three miles up Woodruff Creek from Fiddler Bay. By that time there had been considerable storm damage in the park. All the big longleaf pines were down, some of them squashing mobile homes and their occupants. The big live oaks on the banks of the creek had lost their leaves, and then their small branches and then their large branches, but most of them still stood, blunt broad shattered trunks, unlikely to survive. The creek had had a reverse flow ever since Saturday morning, salt water and rainwater moving east, inundating an ever-expanding area of the sloughs and ranchlands beyond the park.

  It was an old park, and most of the residents were there year round and saw no need to leave their homes for dubious shelter elsewhere. Their mobile homes had porches and Florida rooms and carports, along with extensive plantings. All the mobile homes had tie-downs in conformity with state and local ordinances. In preparation for the storm the residents had brought in everything they thought the wind might blow away. Water began coming into the units nearest the creek at about seven o’clock. By the time the trees were going down, the wind was too strong for anyone to venture out to help those who had been injured but not killed. The wind was plucking away at the mobile homes, looking for loose edges, for anything which could be peeled back and ripped away. Sometimes when the wind came at precisely the right angle and force it would create over the aluminum roof of a trailer that same negative force which provides lift to an airplane wing. It shifted some of them on their foundations and snatched the tops off others, immediately whipping everything out of the trailer which could be lifted and hurled.

  When the tornado moved diagonally across this deteriorating area, it created explosive forces. If one imagines a mobile home thirty feet long, twelve feet wide and eight feet high, and if one takes into account only the sides, ends and top, there are nearly one hundred and fifty thousand square inches of area. If outside pressure suddenly drops one pound per square inch, there is an abrupt outward push in all directions of seventy-five tons. Great shredded sheets of aluminum and fragments of paneling and insulation burst outward and were spun up into the dizzy debris of tornado.

  Twenty-one mobile homes disappeared as though demolition charges had been planted in them. A dozen others were rolled about. The wind smothered the groans of the wounded and the cries of the dying.

  It was later established that two tornadoes crossed the Athens Airport, one demolishing the hangar used by Execu-Craft along with the aircraft sheltered therein. That meant that only those private airplanes which had been flown out of the area before the storm survived. All those tied down were flipped over and blown away. The second tornado wrecked a security area, crossed the airport, picked up the engineless hulk of an abandoned DC-3, carried it across the Tamiami Trail in a westerly direction, against hurricane winds, and dropped it through the roof of a supermarket.

  Noble Winney owned a very good all-band receiver which he used to monitor foreign propaganda broadcasts, taping them off the air if he found them particularly significant. It worked on a line cord as well as on batteries, and in preparing for the long outage of power which might occur, he had purchased three fresh sets of batteries. The set had a headphone jack which he found necessary in order to hear anything over the incredible tumult of the storm.

  When he looked at the strained, pinched, wild-eyed expression on the face of his wife, Sarah, he was glad that she was unable to hear the hurricane bulletins which came over the air.

  The damage already in Key West, Everglades City, Fort Myers, Punta Gorda, Boca Grande, Athens, Venice, Sarasota, Bradenton, Anna Maria and the whole of Tampa Bay was so extensive, it was being called the hurricane of the century. They now believed the eye would cross the coast of Venice, possibly as early as nine o’clock. Winds were now coming out of the east in the Sarasota—Bradenton—Tampa Bay area with such force it
was said that the bays were almost completely emptied. The worst damage was believed to be south of Venice. There had been no communication at all from the Athens area since about four forty-five, not even from ham operators. A hurricane surge was expected just before the eye crossed the coastline, or at the same time as it crossed. The Red Cross and all other relief agencies were planning a massive aid effort to take effect as soon as the first cargo planes could get in. It was expected that the Athens area, as well as other areas along the West Coast, would be inaccessible by road except over some of the small secondary and tertiary highways leading toward the middle of the state. The huge rains plus the wind had caused the culverts under Route 41, the Tamiami Trail, to be blocked by fallen trees and debris from houses destroyed by the winds. “The water, piling up behind these obstructions, has washed away the highway in dozens of places. There is no electrical power and no phone service to the area. It is believed that the high percentage of elderly and infirm in the coastal population will increase the number of fatalities over what could be normally expected.”

  He reluctantly handed Sarah the earphones after she tugged at him again and gave him another imploring look. He picked up a flashlight and went into his workroom. Usually he was able to find comfort in the long rows of giant scrapbooks, in the look of work well done, orderly and cross-indexed. Now it all had a silent and lonely look. He could not identify the impression they made upon him until he remembered the incised tablets he had seen one time in a museum, a message carefully carved into stone which no living man could read.

  His records suddenly had an artifact look. Dead records, compiled by a forgotten man. At that moment he could recall no sudden insight, no discovered link, no shock of recognition in all that work. He felt bleak and deserted. The air inside the apartment was close, moist and sticky. His truss was uncomfortable. He had heartburn. His head itched. Maybe it was all meaningless, every single part of it.…

  Suddenly he remembered what Henry Churchbridge had said, and why Henry had refused to become involved. The work was of surpassing importance. Henry knew that. Henry had represented his government all over the world, and he was too aware of the dangers involved to even join a study and discussion group.