Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  He roamed around restlessly, admitting to himself that he wished he was still working, so he could get out of this place eight or nine hours a day, stop off after work, have a few beers, come home and damn well expect supper on the table and get it.

  He was listening to the sound of the wind and the roar of the surf, waiting for the storm to begin to let up. It had to. It couldn’t get any worse than this. It had been getting worse than he thought possible for hour after hour, but this had to be the absolute top.

  The storm surge threw solid water up over his windows when it thudded against the story below and cleaned it out of everything movable. He knew he was actually on the fourth floor, if the idiots had counted the floors right the way they should have. There was just the one wash of solid water, seen in the flashlight beam, and then it was gone. But to reach these windows, it had to be one hell of a wave. He went close to the windows and angled the flashlight beam, but could not make out the water level in the boiling spray and wind-whipped scud. That big wave had made one heavy thudding sensation. He felt sick. All his life he had wanted to live beside the ocean. He had never counted on its being like this. It was like something that wanted to grab you. It had a personal interest. It came after you.

  He knew the car was gone. Paid for and gone. Probably washed right off the lot into the bay. Have to file a claim. Comprehensive coverage. So some snot could file it away, wait three months and send you a check for half what it was worth, with no chance of ever finding anybody who’d give you a fair shake. It’s the rules, Mr. Branhammer. That’s the law, Mr. Branhammer. It’s the regulations, Mr. Branhammer. Sign here, please.

  He was filled once again with that terrible anger. He wanted to smash the whole world with his hands. He wanted to kill something. Nothing ever turned out the way you wanted it to turn out. Nothing. Never. Anywhere.

  The hurricane surge shouldered into Martin Liss’s house, burst through the upstairs windows and washed them out the bedroom door and down the hall past the guest rooms and out onto the frame deck which overlooked the curved driveway and the entrance. Martin managed to lunge to one side and catch a rung of the metal ladder fastened to the side of the house, the ladder that led up to the widow’s walk above, an architect’s fancy, a bit of seaside kitsch. He had Francie by the wrist and for a moment he did not think he could hold her against the pull of the water. It felt as if his shoulders were being pulled loose. Yet he managed. He got her closer and boosted her up the ladder ahead of him. He urged her up until he could climb free of the water. He could feel a slight and ominous shifting and movement as he clung to the ladder. He was certain his house had been nudged off its foundations, and he realized that if it started to go, it could very easily roll on them.

  Francie sagged down and he realized she could not stick her head up over the edge of the roof without the wind trying to blow it off. They could not get their heads close enough together to communicate by yelling or sign language, and the ladder was too narrow, the wind too fierce even in semi-shelter for him to crawl up beside her. The ladder was so straight, up and down, clinging to it put too much strain on the hands and arms. When she sagged again, he moved his head to one side, edged his right shoulder up under her soft rump and took some of her weight.

  So, he thought, I can do this much. A fat, half bald, very short man can do at least this much. What else? If the house goes, it goes. What you do about it, you do what you can.

  The house shifted again. All this water running in, he thought, is going to run out sometime. It is going to leave in a bigger and bigger hurry. And the house won’t take that. Not weakened and shifting. So we got to make a move or ride it out into the bay later and drown. She put too much weight on him. He gave her a sharp pinch in the butt and slapped his hand back onto the rung. She took a lot of the weight off fast and did not put as much back. He felt a smile stretch his lips and he thought, Are you crazy, Marty Liss? Grome used you for a pigeon. He ruined you. You’re going to jail. You got a young wife taking the wrong kind of tennis lessons. Your house is breaking up. You can’t think of a thing to keep yourself from drowning, and you got a cramp in your leg, and she’s sitting too heavy on your shoulder again, and you’re smiling? What at?

  After Cole Kimber had given up trying to drive the secondhand custom motor home out of the way of the oncoming storm, he gave careful thought to finding a safe place to park, where water wouldn’t rise high enough to drown it, where no buildings would fall on it, and where no flying debris would scar the glossy vanilla-white-with-red-trim surface of his new pet. He was anxious to have Loretta see it, but by the time he got nervous about her being out on the key, the phones were all out and the bridge was jammed open. It began to look as if they wouldn’t be leaving Sunday. It might take three days before the area got straightened out and the roads were cleared.

  He decided the best place was around in back of Gandey and Mason’s warehouse on School Road. It was an L-shaped structure with the point of the L facing west. Bug Mason had once had a warehouse blow down in a storm years ago, and when he had given Cole the contract on this one, he had made certain this one wasn’t ever going to blow down. The building was high enough to shelter the vehicle from anything that might come blowing on the wind. It was dangerous but not impossible driving when he tucked the vehicle into the protected corner, backed it in snugly, turned the motor off. The little Onan generator was mounted in a cargo compartment that opened from the rear, but it started from the inside and was husky enough to run the small air-conditioning unit, the inside lights, and one burner on the tabletop range, as well as the small water pump. He drew the heavy curtains and made himself comfortable. The screaming and roaring of the wind around the corners of the warehouse muffled all sound from the generator. Eddies and whirlpools of wind rocked the big camper in a gentle and almost continuous motion. He tried to listen to the CB, but had to turn the volume so high that the speaker diaphragm broke down into a meaningless clatter of sound.

  He stretched out on the wide bed and read road maps and travel brochures. He napped, woke up and scrambled some eggs and made a tall bourbon and water, then cleaned up and napped again. Each time he woke up the storm sounded worse.

  He was napping again when the storm surge reached the School Road area, bringing in eight to ten feet of water which came curling around the corners of the warehouse to meet in whirling turmoil in the corner where he had parked. There was enough buoyancy in the buttoned-up body to enable the water to lift it and skid it around so that it faced the building before tipping it over. When the generator was killed, he was plunged into darkness. When it went over, a side window was shattered against the edge of the curbing of the parking area, and the water rushing in ended the meager flotation effect. He was completely disoriented, thrashing about in darkness, water rising swiftly around him. He knew he had to find a door and open it and get out. He could not see. Nothing around him was familiar. Surfaces, edges, drawer pulls. He felt exasperated, put-upon. Planned everything so beautifully, and now this. Where the hell is the door? He felt glass overhead. He got up onto some solid object. He did not know what it was. He braced himself and got his shoulders against the glass. The last of the air was going fast. He took a couple of deep breaths and held his breath and pushed against the glass. When he made a final mighty effort, instead of the glass giving way, the front of the storage locker he was standing on collapsed. His feet went down into it. He could not yank his right leg loose. He bent down to try to free it and moved slowly, as in a dream. It doesn’t make any difference, he thought. Not any at all. He was breathing. His lungs pumped the water in and out. He saw lights behind his eyes. He slid down without panic or urgency, telling himself he would take another little nap and rest up and then try again.

  The McGinnitys, Davenports and Forresters had three pleasant adjoining units at the Travel Motor Lodge, just south of the Athens City limits on Route 41 and a mile north of where Woodruff Creek had backed up and washed out the highway.

  Th
ey had all made a special effort to bring things which would make their stay as pleasant as possible. They had imagined drinking wine and playing cards by candlelight, safe from the storm outside. But water blew in at dozens of little places, sopping the rug and steaming the air. When they tried to get some ventilation, the candles blew out. They could not hear the radio, and they could not play bridge except by writing down the bids and holding them up. Mr. Davenport began having severe attacks of angina, and Mrs. Davenport kept loading him up with nitro, and everybody pretended he was not going to get any worse, because there was absolutely nothing they could do if he did. The constant hard whining whistling roar frazzled their nerves. The women wandered about, picking up the wet towels from the doorsills, wringing them out in the toilets and replacing them. Pete McGinnity drank too much wine. They all fretted about what might be happening to their homes and possessions out on the key.

  At about eight thirty Hadley Forrester discovered, with their strongest flashlight, that there was about a foot of water outside, and that was why it was coming under the doors so insistently. The others could not believe it. They had to look too.

  When, a little while later, the storm surge swept in over Route 41, the smashing tonnage of water broke down the doors and broke all the windows in the entire length of the motel, and covered it to a depth which left the top of the motel sign out of water and put the long flat roof about three feet under.

  It was later estimated that the great surge moved in at a relatively constant depth for about six or seven minutes, was held in stasis there for a few minutes by the seas pounding behind it, and by the velocity of the wind, and then began to move out, slowly at first, then more rapidly than it came in, scouring and guttering, sluicing its way back into the bays and the Gulf. Where the coastal plain had the least elevation, the surge had moved a considerable distance inland, generally up to the contour level of thirty feet above mean high tide. It had come slopping right up to the very doorway of the most secure shelters, and brought two and three feet of water into many others less favorably located.

  The runoff quickly exposed all the places it had smashed and covered, tugging movable objects along with it, carrying them for varying distances as it receded.

  It left Pete McGinnity wedged under his Cadillac, his mouth packed with mud.

  In a small and handsome house five blocks from the bay in the northern part of the city of Athens, Nancy McKay had been spreading newspapers in the hall to soak up the rain spray being blown in around the door when the storm surge reached her home. The house faced west. The wall of water had dwindled to a depth of about three feet above her floor level.

  It burst the door from the hinges and knocked her down and floated her backwards into the living room on the muddy crest. She struggled up and was knocked down again by wind and water. She grabbed a chair and got to her feet. Everything was floating and blowing. Everything was mud and stench, leaves, sand, dirt, papers and oily water. Soon it receded, carrying magazines, sofa cushions, throw rugs, books and wastebaskets out the front door, leaving them on the steps, on the lawn and in the driveway.

  It took all her strength to shut the doors opening onto the front hall and thus close out the worst of the wind. She trudged through the rain to her bedroom. Dirty puddles were draining down into the spread. All his shoes had drifted out of the closet and lay in random pattern on the carpeting they had selected together.

  She sat on the wet bed, hunched, elbows cupped in her palms. She knew that Greg was dead and the house was spoiled, so she reached down into herself for tears and found she had none left.

  42

  THE STORM SURGE brought water up onto the long porch of the Crestwood Nursing Home and into the ground floor, up to a depth of two feet in the rooms of the patients.

  Gus felt the thud when it struck the frame structure. He got up quickly and went down the hall and down the stairs, carrying the big camp lantern with the adjustable one-mile beam set for its widest pattern.

  The surge had knocked the front door open, and the huge incoming wind was adding to the panic. Heavy old nurses were galloping and stumbling around the main hallway like the buffalo he had seen once in Africa, spooked by lions. He went to work on the door, and one of the quicker-witted women, half again his size, came to help him, motioning to the others. They managed to brace it shut with a steel chair from the office waiting room.

  A big nurse grabbed at him and yelled something he couldn’t understand. His engineer’s mind had been at work on the problem of the volume of water and the contour of the land. Water could not get this deep on anything but the most temporary basis, merely because it had such a vast land area beyond the city which it could spread out and cover. This had to be some kind of tidal wave. Clamping the flashlight in his armpit, he tapped his wristwatch, then held up five fingers, then held both hands out, palm down, and made a lowering motion. She nodded and some of the anxiety went out of her face and she sloshed off to tend her patients. The water came halfway up to the fourth step on the staircase. That was his mark. He looked at it from time to time, and when he saw that the dirty water had begun to recede, he went back to Carolyn’s room just in time to intercept an old old man in the act of stealing the food. In the bright light of the gasoline lantern, he was stuffing it into a pillowcase. When Gus put the light on him the old man stood motionless and then began to take the stuff back out of the bag and put it back on the bureau. When he was finished he stood with his underlip protruding, tears running down his face, and his right hand held rigidly out, palm up. Gus finally realized what the old fellow was waiting for, so he gave the hand a hearty whack with his own, and the old man fled, head down.

  Gus sat back in his chair beside the bed. Carolyn put her hand out and he took it. He looked at her eyes. There was no particular recognition, no fright, no tension. Her face was slack and the eyes looked out of it, bland as wet polished agate. He was glad she was peaceful. She had been irritable for hours, and he had guessed that it was because the television set had not worked since the power went off. She missed the meaningless movement and sound.

  He clicked the camp light off, pumped up the pressure in the lantern and sat down to work out a rough estimate of elevations. There was a lot of guesswork involved. This was very flat country. The problem was to get a reasonable estimate of how high that crest had been out on Fiddler Key. He finally found a minimum he could accept. Twenty feet. He could remember no observation of terrain which could cut this estimate. If Apartment 1-C was still standing, it was sluiced pretty clean. Good thing Carrie would never know that. She had loved the place. He had removed all the small stuff of value, relying on Sam Harrison’s analysis of where a new pass would cut through the key. But now, of course, Harrison’s model was inoperative. Harrison had been computing forces almost in balance—the trapped water trying to escape the barricades of the land itself and the silted passes. With this incalculable tonnage of water inland of the key, the forces were far out of balance, so the sea could cut through at will, in one, three or nine places, gouging torrential channels, guided more by the volume of upland runoff and bay bottom contour than by the width or height of the alternate portions of the narrow key.

  Another factor, he remembered, would be the sand shoved up by the hurricane tides and waves. Huge bars would be pulled apart and shoved ashore, millions of cubic yards of sand and shell, and the random dispersal of the new dunes on the key would affect the location of the new passes the sea would cut through it.

  No computer model of a storm of this magnitude could be set up in such a way that the contours of the keys could be predicted in advance. One could only say that they would be changed in major ways. Carrie’s hand made small twitching motions, and he knew she was asleep. He wondered what dream possessed her, what shape pursued her through the tilted hallways of her damaged brain. The great forces of the world we live in, he decided, are wind, water, fire and time. They change all they touch. He gently disengaged her hand and stood up, head to one s
ide, listening to all the deafening tumult, and then went out of the room to hunt up the old nurses and see if there was anything else he could do to help them through the night.

  When the storm surge began to run off at increasing velocity, the turbulence reached down through the high level of the hurricane tides and ripped at the surface of the key, setting up whirlpools around major obstructions, guttering the sand and marl and shell. By then the eye of the hurricane was crossing the coastline. At its forward speed of fifteen miles per hour, it took two hours to cross the small city of Venice, one hour to cross Sarasota, fifteen minutes to cross Boca Grande. Winds in the eye dropped to twenty miles an hour. The surf thundered unabated. The sky was clear overhead, and in starlight the huge strange side walls of the cylindrical eye were visible. When the hurricane winds resumed after the eye passed, they came out of the north and, hour by hour, began diminishing.

  North of the eye, as the winds changed from east to northeast, the Gulf came tumbling back into the wind-depleted bays. South of the eye, in Palm County, the final great runoff began at one in the morning on Sunday, August eighteenth. All the water, backed up at places such as the headwaters of Woodruff Creek for as much as ten miles from the Gulf, added all its volume to the increasing speed of the dropping levels of bay and Gulf.

  For a time the waters flowed across all portions of Fiddler Key and Seagrape Key, turning the hurricane waves back into an erratic and very steep chop, with the wind blowing the spray from the wave crests toward the south.