Condominium (59 page)

Those damned doom merchants could have been right, all along. All that weeping and wailing and wringing of hands about how criminally dangerous it was to build out there on those beautiful damned keys. They called it transient land. Hell, a lot of Fiddler Key had the same contour it had back in the thirties. The market factors all the risks in any situation. When you have to pay up to twenty-five hundred a foot for beach-front land zoned high rise, you have to know the risk is very small. If the risk was big, the price would be dirt. Everybody knows that. It made for a wonderful lifestyle out there. Turn the key in the door and go on a nice little cruise, no need to worry. No noisy kids racing around. No dogs crapping in the grass. No cats stinking up the corridors. Little tennis and swimming to keep in shape. Get a small boat and keep it right at your own dock, and ride out there into the Gulf and hook into those great silver kings.

The waves and wind had broken the French doors into the dining room, and the water came in there. Standing in the living room he could see the current that flowed through the arched doorway
from the dining room. This place was going to be a mess when the water went down. Wouldn’t be any plantings left at all. The pumps, air conditioning, intercoms, wiring—everything would be shot.

He felt almost amused. Everything else is shot. Why not the house too? Martin Liss, the fall guy. Blame him for the hurricane too, while you’re at it. Stick his ass in the slam, and let him rot there. All those red hots need a victim. Here’s Marty. He’ll do fine. Everything he has touched his whole life has ultimately turned to shit. Marriages, kids, home, business. Marty the high roller. Now the dice come up craps every time. Snake eyes. Snake-bit.

Suddenly Francie grabbed his arm from behind and yanked him around to face her. She stood yelling at him, face and posture ugly, slacks, shirt and hair water-pasted flat against her, makeup gone. She was pointing behind her, and making fists, and stomping her foot in the living-room water. He felt very oppressed by her and irritated by her. He could not understand one word she was saying. Whatever she thought he was supposed to do, he had no interest in doing.

In a languid manner designed to infuriate her, he gave her the finger. Without hesitation, she tried to kick him in the groin, and perhaps would have succeeded had not the water slowed the beginning of the furious attack. He turned just in time and her foot thumped his thigh. There were pictures in the back of his head, of her and the young tennis pro, and they lent additional force to his openhanded blow. The heel of his hand caught her on the angle of the jaw and she dropped face down into the water.

She made a few vague movements and he thought how very easy it would be to place his foot, in its nonslip boat shoe, on the nape of her neck and keep her down. It gave him a rush of pleasure, an almost sexual feeling, to think about doing it. If he waited, he might not have to do anything.

At that instant an object came through the heavy glass of the picture window that faced the bay. It bombed through the glass at a flat angle and struck close behind him, as the wind thrust the rest of the glass out of the frame and ran shrieking around the room, blowing paintings off the walls and objects off the tables. He braced himself against the wind and picked Francie out of the water. She came up gagging and coughing, but he could not hear the sounds she was making. Arm around her, he helped her toward the stairs. He looked behind him and saw that the object which had come through the window was a dead great blue heron. It looked too frail to have broken the glass. It looked as if it was made of sticks and string, like a model of a bird. The sticks were crumpled. He remembered something about how you can shoot a candle through a pine board if you have enough velocity.

It truly shocked him to see the dead bird. He had not thought about the birds being in any danger. They could fly away, couldn’t they? But they didn’t. They were as dumb and helpless as people, and evidently the storm was killing them too. Halfway up the stairs Francie pulled away from him, clutched the railing, bent over and spewed water from her mouth and nose.

He realized she was just a kid. A dumb young little wife with no sense at all. Soap opera addict. Terrible bridge player. Dangerous on the highways. Stinking temper. Built pretty good. Okay in the sack. Just a kid. You get what you go looking for. You want a kid, you get a kid. It isn’t so much marriage as it is a sort of rental deal. Make a premarital agreement. When it busts up, if you’ve kept careful track, you can even figure out what each piece of ass cost you, on the average.

He patted her and she looked at him and tried to smile. They went on up the stairs together. It was probably okay not to be able to talk because of all the roaring going on. Maybe if they’d both
been mutes, he thought, it would have been a better marriage all around.

The great surge had built up in the Gulf, built by the greatest winds working on the water as the shoreline shallowed. It was like a broad bulge moving toward shore. It had been enhanced in size by the seiche effect, which can occur when the pressure in any area is so low that the water is actually sucked up to a greater level, as though a gigantic soda straw had been put to use. The surge was not in itself a wave. The hurricane waves remained, moving at the same rate or a little faster than the surge. It was a black blister a few miles in diameter, swollen to fifteeen feet above the already high level of the hurricane tides.

A surge like this, though not as large or as high, had drowned almost four hundred people in Louisiana in 1957. Other surges had sent fifteen feet of water over Bimini in 1935 and drowned four hundred in the Florida Keys in that same year. In November of 1932 a hurricane surge drowned twenty-five hundred people in Santa Cruz del Sur, Cuba. On Semptember 8, 1900, a hurricane tide and storm surge killed six thousand people in Galveston, Texas.

The surge moved just ahead of the eye and a little south of it.

The moving light awakened Sam Harrison. Incredible torrents of storm sound assaulted his ears and he marveled that he had slept through any of it. He was in her bed in Suite B. He thought it might be a nurse and then saw that it was Barbara. When the light came near his face he smiled up at her.

She sat on the edge of the bed and showed him the thermometer
in the light of the small flashlight, shook it down, looked at the reading and then put it under his tongue as he opened his mouth to receive it. She fumbled for his good wrist and found his pulse.

He wanted to laugh and cry and beat his head on the wall. Some tower of strength he had become. Big help to the Messenger family.

He would tell her some day about that two-mile ride across the broad part of Palm Bay. It hadn’t taken long, because every time Jud tried to slow down they began to wallow dangerously in the following sea. Each time Jud tried to turn, they shipped water. So it had been a straight shot across the bay, wide open, bailing, peering ahead through the gray-silver curtain of windblown rain, looking for one of those little bay islands that might be in the way, looking for floating junk which could rip them open. Then something loomed up ahead of him and he yelled and they zoomed through thick plantings which stung their flesh, and slid to a stop on a green lawn a few feet from a pool enclosure.

He wished he could tell her of his idiot journey to her side, the four-mile trek in the thrusting gloom of great winds and driving rain, all the way from that bay-front house to the P&S Hospital. No traffic. Nobody on the streets. Junk whirring and hurtling by. Stinging rain, so thick you could drink it. Rivers in the streets, with waves on them. One day he could tell her about it. Sense said seek shelter. Crawl into a hole. Keep your head down. Something else said to get to Barbara and stay with her. Be with her. Know she was okay.

Nearly made it. Got within two hundred feet of the place when that limb came along, God knows from where, from how far away. Big around as his thigh. Fifteen feet long. Had that last open space to cross. Some instinct made him turn as he scurried, the wind pushing him. Turned and threw his arm up to ward off the vague
shape. Like getting hit by a falling truck. Broken wrist, broken shoulder, probably broken ribs. Head lacerations. Stayed right there, flat out in the rain, sick and hurting. Finally able to try to crawl. Gathered up the bag of belongings. Crawled a hundred miles and finally came to a door on the lee side and kicked it until it opened and they pulled him in.

Emergency generator service dead. Everything dead. Lanterns and candles and flashlights. Splinted his arm. Taped his shoulder and ribs. Immobilized the arm. Stitched the scalp lacerations. Put dressings on them, like a turban. Got it across to him there were no rooms left and they would stow him in the hall. Couldn’t get his message across to them until he tricked a little nurse into coming close enough so he could grab the nape of her neck with his good hand and then yell into her ear. She went and got Barbara Messenger. An orderly wheeled him up and they put him in Barbara’s bed, and he had dropped out of the world at once.

After she read the temperature, he beckoned her down and felt a lot of resistance in her as he brought her ear close to his lips.

“Lee?” he yelled.

Her lips touched his ear as she shouted, “Same!”

“Sorry got hurt!” he yelled.

“Glad you’re here!” she responded.

And on that he felt himself in that faint dizziness of pre-sleep and said to himself, No! It can’t be. Not in the middle of …

But it was and he was gone again.

There was a place at one of the front windows of the Sand Dollar Bar where the shutter had warped or shrunk, leaving a half-inch gap where one could look out through the wet window at the swarmy night. Fred Brasser kept going back there and looking out
every once in a while. Once he tried to report that McDonald’s Golden Arches were gone, and even though he wrote it down, he could not get anybody very interested in that phenomenon.

Now that the ice had run out, he had started drinking white wine. It was still cool. He carried a bottle around by the neck, taking a stingy little sip every once in a while, guarding against getting too drunk. It was dangerous to get drunk. The water inside was up to his crotch, and there was a scum floating around on it made of ashes and cigarette paper, Sand Dollar cocktail napkins and what seemed to be sawdust. If a person got too drunk, he thought, or too tired, they could drown in here. In a sense, he thought, my mother drowned in here. And that is a pretty profound observation there, Freddy old buddy. Keep your cool, Freddy, because that gas-jockey type over there is certainly doing a lot of handling of your five-hundred-dollar-a-week merchandise. And from the forearms on that kid, if you object, and he objects to your objection, there is a third way you could get to drown yourself in here.

He roamed back to the window and put the wine bottle inside his shirt, with the cork back in it, so he could use both hands cupped against the window to see out. He saw that it wasn’t raining at the moment. Good! And then, in a vivid play of lightning, he saw a dark gleaming wall that stood higher than the fronts of the shops across the street. When lightning came again, the storefronts were gone and the wall was crossing the street toward him. He knew then what it was, deadly, incredible, inexorable, coming to gobble him up because of his dreadful dirty lust, and his selfishness, and his rotten little soul.

The front of the frame building crashed in, and all the members of the party were borne upward, as the water smashed the hot lanterns. They were borne upward between the beams, and past the
glass floats and fishnets, up to the high peak of the roof above the beams, where there was a small window with wooden louvers for ventilation. Tom Shawn was jammed through the window by the pressure of the water, even though he was larger than the opening. Several others followed him through as the rear wall went over and the boiling surge continued on, smashing the cottage behind the bar, carrying the debris, including all of Darleen Moseby’s stuffed animals, including all the party people, out across the streets and small houses behind the village and out into the bay, the bodies suspended in the depths of the surge, wrenched and tugged this way and that by the currents, bounced against the mud and shell bay bottom and rolled along with the other debris from Fiddler Key.

When the surge hit the lower floors of the Tropic Towers Condominium, Drusilla Bryne was cautiously padding her way back to the deep pillowed couch in the living room from the kitchen, bearing two tall vodka tonics with the last of the ice, using the lightning to help her find her way, and hoping the rather nice man could see well enough without his glasses to appreciate how she must look coming toward him, naked in the quick bright flashes, as with those strobe lights that time.

In the impact of the untold tons of force, the top of the building snapped like a slow brutal whip. It snapped Drusilla off her feet and she fell painfully on hip and elbow, to remain terrified and motionless, waiting for the building to come down. But it did not. Cursing to herself she felt for the shrunken ice cubes, put them back into the glasses and headed back to the kitchen to try again, wondering how Marty Liss was doing over on the mainland.

•  •  •

Earlier, after his car had been rolled into the bay and the marina building had started to go, Jack Mensenkott had crawled and clawed and plunged his way to the nearest segment of the in-and-out marina, a structure of open structural steel fifteen boat-spaces long and four high. He had looked around for Martin and the clerk, but had not seen them again. With water swirling to midthigh he had climbed up out of it to the second level and there had carefully worked his way over to where his own boat, the
Hustler
, lay in the padded rack.

The sea cocks had been pulled on all the boats to let the rain run out. He stretched out in the
Hustler
, below the grasp of the wind. The noise made it difficult to think clearly. From time to time unknown objects would thud against the steelwork, and he could feel rather than hear the impact.