Condominium (27 page)

“Sapphiere.”

“That’s right. Sapper. Go look where that little throw rug got moved in front of the couch. God only knows what they spilt there. Hot tar, maybe. It’s got a hard shine on it like a parking lot.”

He went and looked and shouted to her—she had turned her radio up again—“Good thing we’ve got a security deposit.”

She turned it down. “What?”

He came to the kitchen door. “We’re holding four hundred dollars’ security deposit.”

Leanella leaned against the sink, long arms folded. She shook her head and said, “Folks sure change.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You run around working your white ass down to the bone these days. Anybody wants their nose blowed, you come on the run holding out the hanky.”

“What the hell is it to you?”

“Now that sounds like you used to be. Want to fire me? I got nine better jobs I can go to. God knows why I stay in this rotten place. Force of habit. Get to know where everything is and get to know what’s going on here and there. Like, you know, me and Coreen were talking about it, how the big nurse lady in Two-C,
Nurse Fish, after she and Miss Lorrie got friendly, she won’t let you run in and love her up no more.”

“Now God damn it, Leanella!”

“And unless you keep on the run all day long, Mr. Sullivan will maybe send somebody over to whip your ass again.”

He reached her in two strides, drawing his hand back.

“Let it go,” she whispered. “Pop me just one time, honky, and my man will have you talking soprano all the rest of your short life.”

He sighed and slumped and let his hand fall. He studied her. “Will you please help me do the inventory on this apartment for the Coopers?”

She thought and then nodded. “I surely will. See? Anything you want, when you ask nice and polite, you might just get it.”

“I don’t need any—”

“You watch it, now!”

He turned away and hurried down to the office. Pete McGinnity, president of the Condominium Association, was just asking Lorrie where he could find Julian.

“Can I help you, sir?” Julian asked.

“It’s just a suggestion, Higbee. I think we’re going to get a very big turnout for the meeting tomorrow, and I was wondering how we could get hold of some extra chairs.”

“I can get some from the company, Mr. McGinnity. It costs forty dollars for a hundred folding chairs, twenty to deliver and twenty to pick up.”

“About thirty more chairs ought to do it. Can’t you go get that many in the pickup? The Association can’t afford forty cents.”

“I’ve got a crew digging up that drain off the parking area to get it—”

“Before one thirty tomorrow?”

“Well … I guess so. Okay.”

“Good man!”

As soon as he left Julian said to his wife, “Dig out the inventory on Four-B. The Coopers in Youngstown own it. Honest to God, these people are going to drive me crazy. They are going to drive me right up the wall. The more I do for them, the more they want. And we’re not turning a dime out of this place anymore.”

“Here’s your inventory.”

He flipped the sheets. “Jesus! They listed everything.”

“Who’ll help you?”

“Leanella said she would. Maybe she can do it. Maybe not. She’s got a big mouth. You know that? She had something to say about your friend, the nurse.”

“I was damned close to being a nurse when I met you.”

“You tell your sad story to Leanella?”

“I wouldn’t have to. Those two know everything that goes on in this building. I don’t know how they know, but they know, every time. It’s like the old story, you know, about the wife being the last to know.”

“Isn’t it about time you let up on me?”

“You haven’t even earned the right to ask. You are a rotten bastard, Julie. Bobbie was going through a bad emotional time in her life and you came upon her when she was drinking and forced yourself on her and then blackmailed her into keeping on doing it with you.”

“That’s her version?”

“It’s what happened.”

“Then why was she phoning down here all the time, making you suspicious and making me nervous? Who was blackmailing who?”

“When she was drinking she … wanted to.”

“For God’s sake, Lorrie! I slipped once, okay? She called me up there to fix a leaky faucet and she was half dressed and ready, and you got to admit she is stacked. She was asking for it.”

Lorrie stood with folded arms, glowering at him between the dark shining wings of her hair. “If it wasn’t for that little number on the top floor over in the Captiva House, and if it wasn’t for that pretty old lady over in—”

“Now, honey, please. I got too much on my mind to handle all this fighting too. Can’t you just forgive and forget? Please?”

“I don’t know whether I’ll forgive you, but I know I won’t ever forget. Not that it really means that much more anyway.”

“Lorrie!” he cried, stung by the indifference in her tone.

“Go count things,” she said, turning away.

“It would really rack me up, honey, if you ever …”

Her small smile was bitter. “Have no fear. It’s never been all that great, lover.”

LeGrande Messenger lay in restless sleep in the master bedroom of penthouse apartment 7-A. He stirred and wakened enough to hear the distant rapid ticking of the Selectric II as Barbara typed the corrections on the final reports which would wind up the last of the Mexican involvements. He could hear afternoon thunder bumbling across the horizon.

It was tidy, he thought, to be able to dismantle the interwoven, intertangled business affairs of a lifetime instead of leaving it up to the platoons of bankers, attorneys, trustees and executors. It was tidy to be able to steal the time in which to do it, time achieved at the cost of pain which was sometimes bearable, sometimes ghastly. The clumsy folk who entered the scene after death could yank out
the wrong part first, toppling other parts in delicate balance. But he knew what had to come down first, and he could send the right people up into the superstructure and tell them which bolts and fastenings must first be loosened.

Corporations and companies, partnerships and syndications, fractional interests and majority interests. In each case you could take it apart most profitably if you knew just how it had been assembled in the first place.

… He was spending the weekend at his ranch north of Harlingen, renegotiating the overriding royalties on the oil leases with the Austin group and losing just enough to them in the Saturday-night poker game to keep them feeling expansive. He had showered and shaved on Monday morning and was just stepping into his pants when he heard the bray of the loud horn of Larry’s white Cadillac convertible, playing the first five notes of “Home on the Range.” The Austin group had left Sunday afternoon in the Bonanza. Larry would want to know how he’d made out.

He looked through the screen and saw that Bill and Ted were in the back seat, leaving the seat beside Larry, the driver, for him. Larry had turned around in the big area by the porch and was headed out. He shouted to them that he was coming, and when he had put his hat on, he gathered up the papers he had studied after going to bed and slipped them into the zipper case.

He hurried through the house to the front door, pausing to tell Lopez he’d be back in two weeks. He went out onto the porch and stopped at the top of the steps.

His three oldest and best friends were looking up at him expectantly. The top was down. They sat in the rusted ruin of a convertible nearly forty years old. Shreds of rubber dangled from the wheel rims. Parched grass grew tall under the car and beside it. His
three best friends were stained and yellowed bone, clad in dry shreds of skin and the rotted fabric of ranch clothes. With lips gone, their broad toothy smiles were a deadly welcome.

That ruined car had not moved in years. Yet he knew they were waiting for him and had been waiting a long time. He knew that he was meant to go around and get into that car beside the driver, and knew that if he did, it would start up and they would roar away. He backed away from the porch steps, yelling “No! Oh, no, please!”

He burst up out of the dream, sweaty and panting. He wondered if he had yelled aloud and he waited and, when Barbara did not come to him, knew that the yelling had been only in the dream.

He waited for the dream to fade, but it remained vivid in his mind. Larry, the rancher. Bill, the geologist. Ted, the banker. They had come up out of the ground, into his sleep, to take him on another of those trips they made, to look at something “interesting.”

Larry had been the first one to go. Predictably. A man of high blood pressure, vast appetites, great intensity. A noisy, red-faced, fat man, who all his life did a superb job of concealing a superior intelligence. After the coronary occlusion he lasted eight days under the oxygen tent. Bill went next. They took out his left lung at Ochsner in New Orleans, hoping to give him two or three years more, but all they gave him was six months of slow suffocation. Ted lasted until … my God, it was fifteen years ago he died. That long! Hit head on in Oklahoma by a drunken Indian in a pickup who came across the median. Three dead, one banker, one chauffeur and one Indian. Big funeral, but not as big as Bill’s, whose was not as big as Larry’s. And mine will be the smallest of all four. Messenger’s equation: Funerals are small if you outlive the people who would have attended.

So what does the dream mean? Come join us? No way to avoid it, men. Except temporarily, as I have been avoiding it, with three little operations and chemotherapy and a few series of cobalt.

He wished there was someone he could tell the dream to, who would appreciate it, who would have known all four of them well. But the only people who could have appreciated it, really and truly, were Larry and Bill and Ted, appreciated the ghastly humor of it.

Larry especially. He could almost hear Larry’s voice. “You mean the three of us was sitting there in that old car, in that gawd-forsaken old white Cad I had that time, with the steer horns on the front and the calfskin upholstery with the hair side up? Jesus, I loved that dang car. Stomp it to the floor, it’d go like whistlin’ piss. But that thang been crunched up into a little bale and recycled four or five times since those days. Me and Ted and Bill here, raised up from the daid to come grab you? That must have spoiled your undershorts for sure, Lee.”

What the world does, Lee thought, it pulls out your plugs. You sat there with a big switchboard and you could talk to them all and they could talk to each other—about you, if they happened to feel like it. The little ruby lights go out and you have to manually yank out the plugs and let them snap down into their secret places where the cobwebs grow on them. You can plug in and talk to strangers. But nobody knows what all the past was like for you, and nobody cares. And, if the truth be known, you do not really give a God damn what their lives were like either, if you were not a part of them. Comparing pasts is the most tedious conversational exercise known to mankind. Everybody was a cute baby, once upon a time.

We are all in the path of a slow-moving avalanche, a gray, rolling clutter of unidentifiable, unimaginable junk. We can stroll on
ahead of it, uneasy, but in no specific danger. If we look back and see some bright treasured object left behind, there is no time to dart back and rescue it. The avalanche rolls over it, grinding it down and out of sight forever. One day we tire or trip, we fall, and in moments we are covered, lost and forgotten.

Long ago, serving as a War Department consultant, he had stood in the light of a hot dawn in Calcutta in front of a hotel, waiting for a friend to come by in a jeep and take him out to Dum Dum airfield, where he hoped to hitch a ride on a C-88 headed for China. There were perhaps fifty people asleep on the broad sidewalk in front of the hotel, arrayed at random, ragged robes drawn up to cover most of the sleeping faces.

Soon three hotel porters in wine-colored uniforms came out carrying a fire hose. They clamped the brass fitting of the hose into the water outlet on the front of the hotel. Two porters handled the long brass nozzle while the third turned the water on with a large key. The flattened hose sprang to fatness, and the hard gout began to spray the sleeping people. Many of them sprang up with loud cries of rage and danced away from the stream of water, making ugly gestures and ugly faces at the impassive porters. Others got up more slowly, too weakened by the Great Famine of Bengal and by disease to escape being soaked and battered by the water. A very few crawled out of range. He counted eleven who did not move. The porters moved the hose to proper positions where, by directing the stream of water, they could roll the bundles of rags over and over, into the gutter. He wished the jeep would come. The still morning air smelled of rancid goat butter, charcoal fires, urine, sickness and hot wet sidewalk. But before the jeep came, a lorry came slowly down the street and men walked beside it, picking up bodies by wrists and ankles, and with a practiced and muscular
swing, heaving them over the high sideboards of the truck onto the bodies already collected. The hose had been rolled up and taken back inside. The eleven were thrown into the truck.

He was frightened by the utter inconsequence of the eleven deaths. If they had names, only they knew them. The bodies were not worth searching because there was no chance there was anything of value on any of them. They were not even worth inspecting to determine if they were dead or merely nearly so. They were dead who left no echoes, no resonance, no mourners. In that one instant when they passed from awareness to nothingness, they became one with all the nameless dead from all the pestilences of mankind from the very beginning.

His friend from the embassy came in the jeep. He told him about the hose. His friend said it happened all over the city every morning. He said they did not count how many were taken to the municipal burning ghats, but merely estimated them by the number of truckloads.

With sudden insight he realized that only a very few years need pass before he was one of the anonymous billions of the unknown dead. Postmortem identifications were brief and faded quickly. Perhaps by the time of the death of his youngest grandchild he would be utterly gone. Name, pictures, letters, marker. He would become a statistical micron. The great Bengal famine killed X million. In 19—X retired persons in Florida died.