Condominium (55 page)

Sam had seen the pile beside a fence, with tarpaper held down by cement blocks sheltering the pile from the rain. Wind had gotten under the tarpaper and rolled the blocks off and whipped the tarpaper away. Now the wind was lifting the sheets, one at a time, and sailing them off into the gray murk over the bay.

They crouched by the skiff until the last sheet was gone, and then launched the boat. They loaded Sam’s suitcase, Jud’s backpack, a pair of oars and a manual bilge pump. Sam stood in water up to his knees, holding the boat steady while Jud mounted the outboard on the transom. Sam could see all the white water out in the bay.

He hoped Jud knew that with that kind of following wind and following chop, if he tried to turn the skiff, she would broach in moments. He hoped the bilge pump had good capacity. He hoped there were no more piles of wallboard or lumber being flipped out there from the key to the bay.

The motor caught. He leaped in, whacking his kneecap painfully against the gunwhale, crouched, snatched up the bilge pump and was ready when the top of a white wave came sloshing in over the side as the wind eddied and tilted the skiff.

AT TWO O’CLOCK
on Saturday afternoon, Darleen Moseby shook Fred Brasser awake in Room 30 of the Beach Motel. He came reluctantly up out of sleep, conscious first of being very hot and sweaty, then of a very loud whistling roaring sound as if an airplane were dive-bombing the motel, and finally aware of her narrow angry eyes.

“Chrissake, Freddy! Damn you anyway! I’ve been shaking you and shaking you until my arm is nearly wore out. You sleep like some kind of dumb pig.”

“What’s happening?”

“What’s happening is the wind and the surf are so loud nobody can hear himself think hardly, and the electric has gone and I’m like melting away, all over sweat. It’s like I can’t breathe. And it keeps raining oftener and oftener as if the sky broke. I’m getting scared. You look out that window, hear? Just look out there.”

He went to the window and looked out. The entire swimming
pool area was covered with water. Wind was riffling it and rain was dappling it. The chairs were all gone. The metal tables were bolted down. Their tops were a foot above the level of the water.

“My God!” he said.

“Look at that damn lightning. Just wait a sec and you’ll see some. It’s
blue
. It’s some crazy blue color, and you can’t hear the thunder even. On the TV, before the electric went out, they were saying everybody get off the key. What I want to do, hon, get dressed and we’ll wade over to the Sand Dollar, because they’re having a hurricane party, and if I’m with a lot of friends I won’t be as scared as I was here with you out like a light.”

He came back to bed and caught her as she got up and pulled her back, trying to roll her onto her back. “No!” she said loudly, over the storm roar. “Let go, huh? Please?”

When he began rubbing her breasts, she hit him with her fists, pulled free and ran into the bathroom. He tasted blood between his teeth. When she came out of the bathroom he was dressed too. He thought of the depth of the water and thought of leaving his shoes, then wondered what sharp things might be under the water and decided to keep them on.

“I’m sorry I had to pop you, Freddy,” she said, and kissed him lightly. “You’re beginning to puff up.” She laughed. “That was a pretty good shot, huh?”

“We’ll be okay here, Darleen.”

“In a rat’s ass, we will. I want my friends around me. Come on. You’ll have a good time. I promise. They’re wonderful people, a lot of them. It’s a real hurricane party.”

They went down the corridor toward the front of the motel, splashing through five or six inches of water inside. Once outside, they were not in the grip of the wind until they got out to where the curb and the street began. The wind caught them from behind
and on the right side, shoving them faster than they could wade. They both went down and scrambled up, spluttering, and held each other and walked bent over and well braced, feet wide apart.

She poked at him and gestured, wide eyed. He looked, and saw a yellow VW floating across the street at an angle, coming to rest against the shuttered front of a dress shop.

The Sand Dollar was shuttered too, and after knocking and getting no response, Darleen led him down the side alley and around to the rear and in through the rear door. About twenty people yelled their greetings above the sound of the storm. There was a foot of water inside the bar-lounge. Lou and Tom Shawn were tending bar. Several gasoline lanterns cast their hard shadows and white glare. Darleen led him around and introduced everybody, but in all the noise and confusion he did not catch very many of the names.

By the time Jack Cleveland had decided they ought to merge the two hurricane parties he knew about—the Santellis’ party which was, after all, only the six of them, and the Leffingwell party over there on the beach, on the eleventh floor of Azure Breeze, which was at least twenty people, if old Deke Leffingwell had his way—the phone had gone out. The wind was whistling and moaning and roaring and the rain was being driven in flat gray sheets against the windows.

Good old Deke had been in the class ahead of him at Ohio State. Done damn well too, if that apartment was any clue. It had to go at at least a hundred eighty-five, maybe two hundred thou. And any fool could tell Marcia had used an expensive decorator.

Jack felt slightly numb around the mouth and decided he would slow down on the drinks for a time. This little party was turning
into a drag. Grace was getting scared of the wind and weather, and it was affecting Marie Santelli. It wasn’t bothering Tammy Quillan a bit. The damn woman was so tight you couldn’t understand a word even when she came up and yelled in your ear, as she kept doing more and more often the last hour.

He wished he could get over there and see good old Deke and see how that party was coming along. Well, why the hell not?

He went over to Grace and leaned toward her ear and said, “I left some good wine in the car trunk. I’m going down and get it out.”

“You can’t go down there now!”

“Why not? Take it easy! Be right back.”

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 still 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.