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.
When he got up at last to make an inspection he saw, to his dismay, that not only had a lot of the boats been washed out of the bottom level and washed away, but that some had been blown out of the top tiers. Gusts rocked the Hustler.
He debated using the spare dock lines aboard to lash the Hustler to the steelwork, and decided it would be advisable. As he began, using every handhold, he looked west and suddenly saw the front slope of the storm surge approaching. There were roofs in it. There were cars in it with their lights on. He took a deep breath and hugged the steel beam in front of him, locking his arms around it. He took a very deep breath. All he could think about was how the hell the television news services could possibly show forty million living rooms what a thing like this was really like.
Too late, he realized the weight of the surge was turning the rectangle of tiers into a parallelogram, bearing him back and down and slowly crushing him from groin to hairpiece, yards under the black salt water.
• • •
When the surge struck Golden Sands, it was moving in just a little bit south of west, spray whipping off the top of it.
After the shattered parts of Azure Breeze had broken up, the storm waves on the elevated hurricane tides came rolling across the key unimpeded and threw the stalled cars aside. The average depth of the water on Beach Drive was over nine feet, with the waves breaking there and rolling in white tumult across the tennis courts and pool and landscaped lawns, to smash against the so-called first floor, above the submerged parking and utilities and manager’s apartment. When the front windows had started to go, the Furmonds, Linda and Gerald, had fled up the stairs.
There, on the fifth floor, Gerald Furmond, praying to God to forgive him, broke into 5-E, a furnished apartment which had not been rented for some time. They were thirsty and hungry. Gerald took fresh water from a toilet tank and Linda found a tin of potato chips in a kitchen cupboard. The kitchen seemed, in a relative sense, the quietest place. They brought in cushions from the couch and sat on the floor, side by side, leaning back against cupboard doors. The big flashlight was on the countertop above them, broad beam aimed down. Each had a Bible. They thumbed through them, looking for words about tempests and disasters, pointing out passages which seemed useful and heartening. They had been saved in one sense, and were totally confident their lives would be spared, because they had not yet had enough chance to spread the Word. They rejoiced in being so selected. Until they had been saved, three years before, their marriage had been unrewarding. Gerald had been a fornicator, sinning with women in his office and women at the country club, and even with some of her friends. She had stayed with him for the sake of the children, for the sake of that last daughter to graduate, three years ago in June. She had sought her own comfort in the wrong places, in strong drink and in gambling at the bridge table every afternoon.
It was an out-of-doors graduation at the State University, and when the sudden rain came, the students ran for shelter under the old trees. The lightning that struck one tree stunned a half dozen of them, but Patricia Furmond was the only one it killed.
It was a sign, of course. It had to be accepted as a sign. They had to take from it the message sent by the Lord. At first they could not understand. They could not accept. The world was without sense or purpose. But they knelt and prayed together and fasted together and wept together and knelt together until after the nightmare weeks they were saved, were taken into the bosom of the Lord, and learned the ecstasy of His mighty presence. Every part of their relationship had been enriched beyond measure. To each of them, in the hungers of the flesh, the other was an instrument of the divine rites of holy marriage. They were closer than they had ever been before. Their past lives meant nothing.
When the surge smashed into the structure, they felt it and could not understand what had happened. It shook them. A high cupboard opened and dishes streamed out, smashing unheard on the vinyl floor. They looked into each other’s eyes, waiting for it to happen again, but it did not. She smiled and nodded and he touched her cheek, and they turned back to the Scriptures.
The surge emptied out most of the apartments on the second floor. It broke through the front windows, rolled through the apartments, broke through the rear walls and windows, smashed the concrete railing off the rear walkway and continued on, velocity undiminished. The surge and the wind cleaned the apartments out, right back to that stage in the construction of the building when basic appliances were being installed. The continuing surge filled the second floor to the ceiling, with the water force pulling away the carpeting, the padding under the carpeting, the paneling, the wall sockets, eating each apartment down to the basic structure of reinforced concrete, column and beam and slab.
Long before it hit, Jack Cleveland had recovered from his weeping. By now the others were as terrified as he had been. Grace Cleveland and Marie Santelli sat in a deep couch, their arms around each other. Tammy Quillan had passed out on the floor and her husband had rolled her out of the way and seemed to be trying to join her as soon as possible. Frank Santelli had held up well until he had discovered, when the rain slackened for a few minutes, that Azure Breeze was gone. The others looked too. The Surf Club was there. You could see a few feeble lights in some of the windows. You could see other condominiums farther down the beach. But Azure Breeze was gone, as completely gone as a front tooth. And that had panicked Frank. He decided they had to get off the key right now. But he came back after ten minutes, sopping wet, bruised and trembling.
Jack Cleveland was in the rear bedroom when the storm surge hit and cleaned out the second floor of Golden Sands. His first startled impression was that there had been some kind of explosion. He found himself underwater, in strong conflicting currents, with unknown objects bumping against him. He had played water polo for several years when he was young. He had good lung capacity. He worked his way upward and burst out into black night, stinging wind, long enough to take a breath before he was rolled under again. He managed the same feat several times, noti
cing that the water was becoming less turbulent. Waves weren’t bashing him under. He came to the surface and in a stutter of lightning he saw a building at his right, perhaps a hundred feet away, and he was astonished at his own velocity as he was carried by it. Something caught at his feet, and he kicked free. He was slammed into some upright flat surface with a force that drove the wind out of him. A little later his feet touched and he tried to stand and was hurled forward. He stood in shallower water and ran thrashing out of it and was wind-driven into a thick tree trunk, flattening his nose as he hit it. Hugging the tree, he moved around behind it, knowing if he let go, the wind would blow him away.
Sobbing for breath, gagging over the blood that ran into his throat from his mashed nose, he peered with slitted eyes around the side of the tree into the wind, trying to make out where he was. A chain of lightning cooperated. He was so disoriented that at first he could not comprehend. He had to interpret the afterimage as he pulled his face back into shelter and leaned his cheek against the rough wet bark. The cluster of buildings off to the right of him and ahead of him, that had to be downtown. So he was inland, on the mainland, maybe a mile inland. And way out there, straight ahead, was Fiddler Key. Or whatever was left of it. “Son of a bitch!” he said softly, and the wind blew into his mouth and puffed his cheeks out.
Frank Branhammer had given up trying to communicate with Annabelle in any way. She stayed right there on the bed, curled up in a damn ball, knees hiked up to her chest and her arms wrapped around her fool head. Goddam fool woman. Work every day of my life and try to make up to her for us losing all three of the kids, get a nice place like this, and she acts like somebody kicked her. Walks around snuffling, looking tragic. Told her and told her, if a man works his ass off all his life he’s got a right to live as good as anybody, as good as these smirking little educated pricks that want to steal the place away from you after you bought it. Fucking woman isn’t happy unless she’s crying her eyes out, over a dog, or the kids, or not having some place where she can have an orange tree.
Condominium Page 47
