Condominium (56 page)

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 bedroom 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.”

“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.

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?”