It was 11 A.M. when he reached the north bridge onto Fiddler Key. Police in yellow rain capes were checking the cars going out to the key, turning some of them back.
Sam remembered he had forgotten to turn in his key to his room at the Islander when he paid his bill. His single carry-on bag was in the trunk of the rental car. He fished for the key and held it up when it was his turn. “Going to get my stuff and check out, Officer.”
“Well … okay. But don’t hang around out there to see the sights, friend. Anybody you see at the motel, tell them the time to get off is now.”
“I’ll do that. I saw you turning cars back.”
“People wanting to go out there and gawp, for God’s sake. Sightseers. And would you believe a van with four kids and four surfboards? Okay, move it along.”
As he went over the crown of the bridge a sudden hard gust of wind wrenched at the car, pushing him over toward the curbing at the right. There were fast-moving clouds going by, very low. The whole day was in shades of gray and silver, all the leaves in tumult, car lights and street lights on. A half mile south of the north bridge, where Beach Drive curved slightly toward the beach, he got his first good look at the Gulf, and it startled him. Great humps of green-gray murky water were gliding in, lifting higher, curling and smashing against revetments, seawalls, pilings, groins, and sending solid water and spray high into the air. The spray was being wind-driven across the drive. Even in the slow-moving car he believed he could feel the repetitive thud as each line of combers broke hard against Fiddler Key.
For perhaps half a minute a watery sunlight shone down through an opening in the fast-moving cloud cover, making rainbows above the beach, and then the rain came, slowing the light traffic to a crawl. A sheriff’s car appeared behind him, speaking with its huge electronic voice. “Leave the key! All residents are ordered off Fiddler Key. Leave the key! This is an order! Everybody has to get off the key at once. Now!” It would stop and the siren would whoop for thirty seconds and the voice would begin again. But the rain dimmed it, and the wind whipped the words away, tearing them to ragged shreds.
There were several inches of water across the road at the entrance to Golden Sands, and he made the turn carefully, leaning close to the windshield to see. He parked as close to the rear entrance as he could get. There were three or four cars in the lot in the rear, and apparently quite a few parked under the building. He punched the elevator button, then realized that if the power went out while he was between floors, that would be where he would wait out the hurricane.
He did not see anyone as he went up the seven flights. The Messenger apartment was cool, and it was nice to be out of the worst of the wind and rain noise for a little while. He found the bronze bull in the glass wall case in the master bedroom, along with some small bottles which seemed to be fashioned of jade. He told the bull that he did not look like a quarter of a million dollars. But then, an object is worth what a willing buyer will pay for it. And the bull, as Barbara had pointed out, had class. He had a valiant stance. He looked alert.
He put the jade bottles in his pocket, and he wrapped the bull in a hand towel from the nearest bathroom. Then he prowled, very aware that She had lived here. This was the cave of the She, touched with all her scents and fancies, imprinted with her dreams and doubts, marked by her oblique passions and mysterious purposes. Riddles to unravel. Fractionate her life scents in the cracking tower of your heart, and give it all a name. Intimate lace, a sleekness of nylon, two gentle hairs caught in a brush, a dignity of shoes, a crackle of silk, a smudge of lips.
He went to stand at the sliding doors and look out at the sea, visible once again between rains, feeling as faintingly enamored as any schoolboy, summoning up erotic images of the She.
Car lights crawled north along Beach Drive. In the dark of the oncoming noon he saw that many apartments in Azure Breeze and the Surf Club were lighted. Packing to go, my friends? Or celebrating the staying. Wind drummed the big glass doors. He turned off the lights and picked up the towel-wrapped Chinese bull and left.
Between outside door and car door, wind caught him and took him two hurried steps before he braced himself against the car. He drove through a couple of inches of water in the parking lot and out through the deeper water on Beach Drive. A few hundred yards north, traffic stopped. Rain hammered down. It bounced a foot high off the hood of his car as the wind whipped it off toward the northeast. He turned the car radio up to compensate for the rain noise.
“… repeat, the drawbridge at the north bridge to Fiddler Key is stuck in the open position. It opened a half hour ago to let a vessel through and the heavy winds damaged the mechanism so that the bridge tender cannot close it. All traffic waiting at the north end of Fiddler Key should turn around and go down to the south bridge. Repeat, the drawbridge at the north bridge to Fiddler Key is stuck in …”
A fat man, his face warped by anxieties, slapped at the window at Sam’s left. Sam turned the radio down and opened the window.
“The bridge is stuck open.”
“I just heard it,” Sam shouted. “I thought they weren’t supposed to open the bridges after evacuation starts.”
The man shrugged. “They aren’t. Some kind of foul-up. Maybe they were letting a Coast Guard boat through. Makes no difference.”
“What?”
“Makes no difference. There’s a palm tree down across a couple cars up ahead anyway. And some people hurt with trash flying through the air.”
Sam saw the Civil Defense insignia on the man’s jacket. “What do you want me to do?”
“Don’t try to turn around unless you can turn into a driveway. There’s a lot of them in the ditch up ahead, no way to get them out, blocking traffic up there. I get these cars behind you to back up, you can all turn around there in front of the Seven-Eleven.”
“Nice of you!”
“I can’t get out until you get out, buddy. Two-lane and deep ditches along this part of the key.”
About six miles to the south bridge. Two miles to Beach Villa and four more to the bridge. And, he thought, I will be passing the Islander once again.
But once he was opposite the entrance to Golden Sands, he came upon a group of stalled-out cars, three heading south, two heading north, all up over the hubs. Before all momentum was gone, he pulled the shift into low, roared the engine and tried to make it around the stalled cars by riding the shoulder. The right side of the car tipped down into the ditch, and he crunched into a driveway culvert and stalled out. End of car. He got out, steadying himself against the wind. He could look out at the wild seascape between the Azure Breeze and the Surf Club. Wind was blowing the crests off the big waves, whipping the sea to a white foam which blended with the sky very close offshore. He opened the trunk, unzipped his suitcase and put the bull and the jade inside, zipped it and slung the strap over his shoulder.
Old couples with staring eyes and white fearful faces peered at him through smeared windshields and side windows. He waded to each car on the downwind side and yelled through car windows, cautiously opened a few inches, that if they stayed there they would drown. He told them the water would get deeper. He pointed and told them to head for that tall condominium on the bay shore south of Golden Sands. He told them to crawl if they had to, but make it there and go in and go to the top floors and see if anybody would take them in. He could not tell if they were going to do it. They seemed frozen in some strange apathy of terror. Their automobiles were familiar. They did not want to step out into the soaking gray hell of rain and wind, into kneedeep water covering invisible hazards. He stopped cars coming from the north and told them the same. The road was blocked. He moved to where he could hail any car coming from the south and direct it to where it could turn around and, hopefully, cadge a ride. Finally a car came along, a brown young man with big wrists driving a battered old Land Rover.
He shouted to Sam, “Any chance of getting through?”
“None. Bridge is stuck open anyway.”
“
I know. Hoped it was fixed. Road’s washed out south of the village, just beyond the Islander there. Jesus! Got any ideas, mister?”
“No good ones.”
“I was afraid of that. The thing to do is get something that’ll float and cross the bay on it. That’s what I’m going looking for. Get in, if you want.”
Sam climbed aboard and the young man turned the Land Rover and went back to the village, throwing water high on either side. They turned left in the middle of the village, heading for the bay shore. They passed old frame houses, old trees. He turned right and left again, and stopped at an old small-boat marina. It seemed abandoned. It was a little quieter this far away from the Gulf, but it was still roaring like distant freight trains.
“I’m Jud.”
“Sam.”
“Sam, they tooken the boats off yesterday, moved them way up Woodruff Creek, but you see here, they got some little stuff rolled over and tied. So let’s bust into that shed there.”
They found an old Johnson 25 with a dented housing chained to a stand. Sam spotted the big cutters and chopped through the chain. Jud put the outboard into a drum after checking the gas. It coughed and died, coughed and died. He cursed it and took the housing off and began tinkering with the carburetor.
Sam noticed a faded red-white-and-blue pay phone booth in the lee of the marina building. He shut himself into it, out of the wind roar, and found to his surprise that it was working. He looked at the shreds of a phone book and found the Athens Times Record. After three busy signals, he got through to Mick Rhoades.
“Who?” Mick asked. “Who?”
“Harrison. Sam Harrison. The engineer.”
“Looks like I should have taken a chance and run your report.”
“Too late now. Listen. I’m on Fiddler Key.”
“They said the phones are out.”
“This one isn’t.”
“We’ve got two reporters over there somewhere. What’s going on? What are you doing over there anyway?”
“Shut up, Mick. There’s no way to get off the entire northern two and a half miles of the key except by boat. People are trapped between a busted bridge and a washout. I’m at a small marina behind the village and we’re trying to get an outboard working so we can cross the bay by boat. There are a lot of old people trapped in their cars near the approach to the north bridge. The water is coming up fast. A lot of the cars are abandoned.”
“But Ella is still way south of here!”
“Just listen. Okay? Get hold of the authorities. Maybe if the Coast Guard or Coast Guard Auxiliary could get some heavy-duty boats running a ferry service near the north bridge they could get some of those people off before the wind gets too bad.”
“Communications are terrible, Sam. All we’re getting on the citizens’ band channels is a lot of roaring, people stepping on each other’s broadcasts. You keep fading.”
“Did you hear me about the boats?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“See what you can do? Mick? Mick?”
The connection was dead. He tried the operator. The second time he tried he could not even get a dial tone.
The wind pulled at him as he ran over to the drum where Jud had mounted the outboard. Jud was fastening the housing back on, and gave him a tight grin and glanced skyward as if in prayer. He gave a hard pull on the starter rope and the outboard caught. As it sputtered he adjusted it to run smoothly. Jud turned it off, patted it and loosened the transom clamps.
They decided on a sixteen-foot skiff that looked as if it would have enough freeboard to take a lot of rough water. They cut the lines to the stakes holding it down, rolled it over, and were about to clumsy it down the slope to the muddy beach when Sam caught hold of Jud and forced him down just as a big four-by-eight sheet of some sort of wallboard went sailing by, close overhead.
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.
39
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 shu
ttered 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.”
Condominium Page 43
