Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  The slow waves thumped against Barbuda, against Saint Kitts, Antigua, Grand Terre, Dominica, Martinique, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Grenada, Tobago. The waves rolled through Guadeloupe Passage, Dominica Channel, Saint Lucia Channel, Saint Vincent Passage. Old men began to work their fishing boats up the inlets, using the high tides to get them as far up as possible, and then making them fast to the old trunks and roots which had lived through all the storms of lifetimes. Small boats were sunk in deep protected coves and filled with even more rocks after they were sunk. Island families began to store water, food, candles. Roofs were fixed. Sheds were tied down. Loose boards were gathered and stowed safely away.

  The wind and rain had not yet begun along those barrier islands. The radios had not yet broadcast warnings to them. But people could see the hurakán bands in the sky and hear the slow sea, and it quickened pulses, created a bowel flutter of queasy anticipation. The more primitive the island area, the more practiced and practical were the preparations, and the more suitable the structures to the great force oncoming.

  The curving chain of islands from South America toward the Bahama reefs is the tips of ancient volcanoes which once erupted along that fault line. Hurricanes have slammed into these islands for thousands of years. Their mountain jungles are impenetrable due to the tangled overgrown blowdowns of previous storms. Few trees have the time and luck to grow tall on the exposed hills. The huge hurricane rains have gullied the slopes of the mountains, washing deep into the limestone and volcanic rock. Where the trees are so well rooted that great winds do not topple them, those same winds of over a hundred miles an hour will peel the bark off the trunks and the trees will die, turning the color of hard dull silver, then rotting and being devoured by the jungle insects.

  Uncounted thousands have died on these islands in the great winds and in the flooding surge of the hurricane tides.

  31

  HOWARD D. ELBRIGHT, the retired chemist from 4-C, got up before dawn on Saturday without waking Edie, dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and long pants, ate two slightly stale sugar doughnuts, drank some reheated coffee, sprayed repellant on all exposed areas, gathered up his gear and crept out, hoping not to be intercepted this time by one of Brooks Ames’s volunteer army. Once one of them had come silently up behind him and yelled Halt! and Howard had dropped his tackle box and spilled hooks, lures, leaders and sinkers all over the walk just outside the exit to the parking lot.

  By the time the east began to gray, he was standing on the newly formed shoreline of the bay, far out on the curving finger of land the dredge and draglines had created where the oyster bars used to be, and with the skill learned over the past three months, he was casting a brand new lure as far out toward the channel as he could manage. Mosquitoes whined around his ears, looking for an un-sprayed place on which to feast.

  The lure was six inches long and an inch in diameter, of plastic colored purple, orange, white and vivid green, in broad stripes. There was a transparent scoop on the front of it, three sets of gang hooks dangling underneath and several kinds of rotors and propellers at the bow and in the stern.

  The old man at Discount Tackle had said, “This here thang is called an Original Wobblethrasher, and it is guaran-goddam-teed to git you a snook if you use it right. The first thing to do right is larn how to say snook. You see it rhymes with look, not with duke. There’s damn fools come down here thinking that to rhyme it with duke makes them sound more like authentical Florida, but it has damn well always been snook like goes with look. What you got to do with this, you got to get out there right about dawn, a little before, and you heave this Original Wobblethrasher way to hell out and you get it to make just as much noise as you can when you bring it back in. Make this sucker bang around out there, then leave it set quiet a few seckints, then smash it around some more. The old he-snook, all that racket gets him irritated, and pretty soon, you do it just right, he’ll come on up and he’ll try to snap it right in half to shut it up. That comes to three dollar twenty-eight with the tax.”

  “I’ll try it. I guess a Florida cracker should know.”

  “Cracker? Me? Shit, mister, I come down here from Harrisburg, Indiana, seventeen years ago and I wisht every year I’d stayed home. Lots of luck.”

  What had sounded plausible in the tackle store seemed absurd in actual practice. Certainly only an idiot fish would bite upon a gaudy piece of mechanical junk like that. He could see and hear the nuisance it was creating out on the dark silence of the bay. Yet he hated to admit that three dollar twenty-eight with the tax had gone for something that now seemed like a laborious practical joke. Whad you say you catch him on, Elbright? Why, I used my Original Wobblethrasher, of course! His wrist was beginning to tire from working the heavy lure. The sky was pink in the east. His doughnuts were not digesting. He kept worrying about money. He missed the protective jungle at his back, and the sense of being isolated from the condominium culture. He kept wondering lately why they had made such a mandatory rule in the corporation about retirement. People doing applied research in chemistry could be all through at forty or at eighty. When your head quit, it was time to quit. If it hadn’t quit, you were wasted when they retired you. He kept wondering how some of the unfinished projects were going. Those damned kids were probably messing them up, missing the obvious, goofing off, and—

  A silvery something as long as his leg and as big around as his thigh came up under the Original Wobblethrasher and took it up, up and up, silhouetted against the pink light, and came down like a horse falling overboard. And the spinning reel made a whining screaming sound as something went scooting eastward.

  “My God,” Howard whispered. “My God!”

  He knew that the monster was going to take out all his line and keep right on going. He kept the tip up, kept the pressure on. The line stopped going out. He got some of it back in, and the monster then headed south, along the shoreline, and Howard followed it, blundering in and out of the shallows, stumbling and worrying.

  By the time all of the rosy sun was above the horizon, gleaming on the banks, hotels and condominiums of waterfront Athens, the big silver fish lay in the shallows at Howard’s feet, gills working, tail beating languidly. It had huge flat shiny eyes, a long snout, undershot jaw, concave nose and a narrow line, black against silver, from gills to tail on each side.

  He had his little scale in his tackle box. He gently put the blunt hook under the beast’s chin and lifted it up. Almost but not quite thirty-two pounds. The terminal gang hook of the Wobblethrasher was in the corner of the fish’s mouth. He studied the situation, and then, with his pliers, he cut off the two of the three hooks which were through the flesh of the fish. He could install a new gang hook on the plug. The sunlight was getting bright and hot. He noticed that while maneuvering the fish, he had gotten some sand and shell fragments on the snook’s big flat eye. He picked the beast up and took a couple of steps into the water and lowered the fish and swashed its head back and forth to wash the grit off the eye and the silver scales. The fish made a shuddering motion. The big flat tail waved weakly, and the gills worked as the fish gulped.

  Howard looked over toward the city, his face pinched into a strange scowl. “Oh, shit,” he said. “Oh, shit anyway,” he said, and straightened up, looking down at the beast. It rolled onto its side and almost went belly up, but regained stability with a smack of its tail on the water. It turned laboriously, like a newly crippled person working a wheelchair, and moved slowly slowly out toward the deeps, and in moments he could not see it.

  Well, that is it with the fishing, he thought. Another bunch of toys for the back closet of my mind. And what am I offered for this Original Wobblethrasher upon which the Honorable Howard E. Elbright, now deceased, caught a great snook on a Saturday morning in an August long long ago? Caught it and then released it, much to his own confusion, because in his heart of hearts, the Honorable Howard D. Elbright wanted to eat that fish. He wanted Edie to stuff it with rice and tomatoes and green peppers and bake it and
serve it up.

  As he walked back toward Golden Sands, torn sneakers squelching in time to his stride, he realized that if they had not brought in the yellow machines and killed everything on those fourteen acres, he would not have released the snook. He could not properly determine the cause-and-effect equation at work, but knew it was so.

  By ten o’clock on Saturday morning, retired Professor Roger Jeffrey had reached the second checkpoint of the Summer Invitational Century. As a member of the Route Committee of the Athens Cycle League he had helped lay out the hundred-mile course which began and ended in the big empty parking lot of Kennedy High School. The kids at the checkpoint had parked the van in the shade. They grinned and waved him on. Jeffrey squinted off into the heat waver on the long flat stretch of county road and could see, at least a mile ahead, the bright clothing of the pack of young people who had started out at much too fast a pace. He had gained a little on them, and as the day wore on he knew he would gain more. A lot of them would never finish, taken out by cramps, exhaustion, or bad falls.

  This was the first real test of the machine he had purchased with the check from Mrs. Brasser. He felt a pang of guilt when he remembered how he had extorted eight hundred and twenty-five dollars from the wretched woman. She had been too obviously afraid of his reporting her destruction of the Voyageur. The guilt feeling had lessened with her death, and since the visit from one Frederick Brasser, a vulgar lout who became almost insulting in his demands to know why his mother had written him a check in that amount, the guilt was almost undetectable.

  The new machine was lovely. A Panasonic Touring Deluxe in a beautiful deep wine red, with a mirror finish. Shimano Dura-Ace cotterless alloy cranks, alloy quick-release hubs, pedals, and Oro freewheel. A Shimano Crane GS rear derailleur, and Titlist front gear wheel. Alloy micro-adjusting seat post, Dia-Compe brakes, Gran Compe alloy stem with recessed bolt and alloy drop bars. By the time the dealer had altered the basic machine to fit the professor’s requirements, the total cost came to six hundred and thirty-five. The only thing old on it was the comfortable leather seat rescued from the shattered Voyageur.

  He had begun to sweat heavily in the morning heat. Without breaking his cadence or speed, he took two salt tablets with several swallows of water from his water bottle, took the terrycloth pad from under his Bell helmet, soaked it with water once again and shoved it back under the helmet. Within ten minutes he was less conscious of the heat. Maurine had told him quite a few times that he was an old fool to do a century in Florida in August. He told her he was quite competent to take care of himself. He told her he had been doing it for seventy-one years and planned to keep on indefinitely. He told her she was a tottery baleful old woman married to a spry dirty old man, and she could spend Saturday in the cool gloom watching that tube until her brain turned to fish paste if she chose, but he was going to be on the open road, with the wind in his hair, under the broad blue of God’s sky.

  “Hey, Prof!”

  The loud voice startled him. He had not heard the bike coming up beside him. “Hello, Rich.” Rich coached track at Kennedy and was perhaps the best and most durable bicyclist in the League.

  “Aren’t you pouring it on a little heavy for this kind of heat?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Don’t you push it too much, hear? Hey, you got the padded tape, I see. How’s it working?”

  “Great. No numb hands.”

  “The whole machine looks great, Prof. Fits you great. How much you carrying in those gumwalls?”

  “Eighty-five.”

  “Should be about right.”

  They came upon a young man and woman at the side of the road. He was sitting down, wearing an agonized expression. She was kneading and knuckling the calf muscles of his right leg.

  “See you later,” Rich said and braked and turned off to help the pair.

  Cramps would take some of them all the way out, and slow down some of the others. The toes of his right foot felt odd. He reached down and loosened the strap on the leather-covered clip, then pulled the plastic knob and tightened it again, but not as much as before. He wiggled his toes while stroking and in a little while they were normal again.

  From time to time he shifted his position on the handlebars. He counted his cadence against the sweep second hand on his watch and found that he was precisely on sixty-five, right where he should be. At this gear ratio, he knew from his memorized chart that he should be making 20.5 miles per hour. His record century time was six hours seven minutes, or 6.116 hours. That translated to an average speed of 16.35 miles per hour. If he really wanted to be an old fool, he would try to best his previous time. To best it in this heat would mean riding right through the customary rest stop at the fifty-mile mark.

  A small pain appeared in his left knee and began to sharpen with each stroke. He experimented, changing slightly the angle of his foot against the rat-trap pedal. He did not like cleats because they ruled out these small adjustments. The pain diminished and went away, as did his anxiety.

  Ahead the pack was closer, more visible. The road went between fenced ranchlands. Lazy cattle, drowsing in the heat, would lift their heads sharply, stare at the lead pack, then wheel and go thundering across the pastureland. He wanted to be the lead machine, the one to startle the cattle. The cattle were used to cars and trucks, took them for granted, were startled out of their bovine wits by quiet gleaming wheels hissing down upon them.

  Sweat ran into his left eye and he toweled it away. There were a lot more machines behind him than ahead of him, he knew. One hundred and thirty-one starters. And maybe fifteen ahead of him. All young. Ah, youth, that precious commodity always wasted on the young.

  A giant beetle bounced off his lips, stinging him and making his eyes water.

  Time? Ten forty. Breathe deeply. The muscles need the oxygen. Suck it in. Just air. No beetles.

  The century, he thought. A cheap analogy for life. One of those tiresome comparisons Hawkinson was probably still pulling back there in some classroom. Little pains happen. You adjust. A lot of it is dull stuff indeed, but you make the effort. Man and machine become one organism, stroking away, correcting, favoring, compensating, and trying to enjoy the little moments of magic that come along. At the end of it, you get off the bike, or fall off, or are pushed off, and that is that. Peggy Brasser did not get off, or fall off, or get pushed off. She rode into a wall. Or over a cliff.

  Golden Sands was full of people riding their private machines to God knows where. All upset now. Committees and protests and confrontations. Any man who has spent most of his life on a faculty cannot get very concerned about committees and protests and confrontations. You do that when you are young—instructor or assistant professor. In time you learn that if you make the right-sounding excuses at the right time, all the others will be out there in front of you, driving off the wild animals, killing snakes, draining the swamps. Those whose interests are the same as yours will usually do all the work necessary to protect yours as well as their own. Can’t help doing so. When their job is done, thank them with great earnestness and sincerity, and that will ready them to go out and do the chores the next time too.

  He caught up with the next straggler from the group ahead. A fat girl. One of the little group of housewives who had joined the League. Bright red straining face, mouth agape. She had a heavy machine, an old black Raleigh three-speed. He could hear her breathing.

  “Take a break in the shade,” he called to her. She seemed not to hear him. A little while later he looked back for her and she was not there. He thought she had sought the shade of one of the infrequent pine trees, and then saw her far back, flattened on the road, the bike down nearby. He missed one stroke as he debated turning back, then realized how soon the others would be along. And in a few more minutes he would be among the pack of leaders. He counted them. Eleven machines. And the professor makes one dozen. Some of them were singing. Good, he thought. Takes a lot of good breath to sing. About six miles to the halfway point,
where we turn south. They’ll all stop. Get off there and fill the water bottles. Keep moving around. Get back on. Leave as inconspicuously as possible.

  Gus Garver headed north along Beach Drive to the north bridge, easing his gray Toyota wagon along in the slow traffic tempo of a summer Saturday. The little wind and rain storm in the night had washed away a lot of the dead fish, covered others with sand, moved the floaters south. The air was fresh and clean, and the summer season people thronged the beaches, along with the inland locals.

  The traffic clotted and stopped, and Gus, by force of long habit, went into his stomach exercise, putting the tough heels of his hands on his thighs, pushing down hard, holding the tension until arms, thighs and belly muscles fluttered. A little family threaded their way between the cars, heading for the beach: a tall stringy knuckly young man with a vacuous adenoidal expression, face and neck and arms to above the elbow deep brown from outdoor labor, the rest of his upper torso fish-belly white turning pink with the first blush of sunburn; a two-hundred-pound young woman in a flowered cotton beach robe, all of a soft spilling and joggling and wobbling of self-indulgent flesh with each step, her features tiny and delicate in the middle of her great moon face, her mouth a righteous little possessive red rosebud as she clutched the arm of her husband with her baby-fat hand; four kids of indeterminate sex, all towheads from three to seven, the smallest smeared with food, the eldest belting a smaller one, another one yelling with the desolation of heartbreak. They carried their food and their toys and their private conviction that things could have been a lot better, with a little more luck.