Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  As the water level dropped, portions of the keys emerged, and the runoff was restricted to narrower and narrower areas. Finally there were but three, and they were scoured deeply into the substance of the keys. They bit more deeply as the level dropped. One pass was formed a mile north of the southern tip of Seagrape Key. Two new passes ate through Fiddler Key. One was just to the north of the south bridge, so close that it took the bridge supports out on the key end and dropped the structure into the bay.

  Broad Pass, between Fiddler and Seagrape, was completely accreted with sand brought in by Hurricane Ella. A dune crossed from key to key where the channel had been. The second pass crossed from the Silverthorn tract to the Gulf, and in the hours before dawn it had eaten under Golden Sands, Captiva House and the Surf Club and collapsed them into its awesome current. For a time, each structure, in turn, had obstructed the flow, so that spray leaped high from the places where the current impacted against concrete corners and uptilted slabs and columns piled like jack-straws. But the tireless current worked around and under the jumbles, shifting them, turning them, breaking them up, burying them, sucking the contents out of the little concrete boxes, like a fox at the hen’s nest, and spewing the soft fragments out to sea.

  On Sunday morning there was a milky, hazy sunrise, and the winds were down to twenty miles an hour. Ella, her mortal balance upset, her fury fading without fuel, was grinding and churning her slow way past Orlando, heading for the Atlantic and her probable rejuvenation.

  There were early overflights by the Coast Guard, Red Cross teams, state officials, newspaper and television reporters. They reported the anticipated damages at Fort Myers and Naples and Key West, at Venice and Sarasota and the Tampa Bay area. Heavy wind damage. Wave damage along the waterfront.

  But the Red Cross observer radioed back a different message about Athens. “It looks like we’ve got a full-scale disaster here. Roads in and out of town are gone. I’d estimate heavy loss of life, and hundreds of millions of property damage. Incredible desolation on the keys. Bridges out. Buildings gone. We’re going to put down now near the terminal building and see if there’s any men and equipment here to get a major runway cleared. We can’t raise the tower. I will say right now that what we are going to need here is body bags, food, medicine, mobile kitchens, maybe an air evac hospital unit. It looks to me as if this whole damned place was underwater for a time. Water purification units will be needed. Portable generators. This one is a bitch. A real bitch.”

  The injured and dying had started to flood the hospitals before dawn, when the wind had gone down enough so people could venture out. With limited power, supplies, treatment was primitive. After the sun was up, people left the Sports Center shelter to go check on their homes. They were shocked by the naked look of the city. The leaves had been blown off the trees, shedded, mixed with muck, echoes plastered against anything which had withstood the winds. The muddy paste steamed and stank and dried pale in the early sunlight.

  Few of the cars in the Sports Center parking lot were operable. The ones which started were driven until the owners became convinced there was no clear street they could find which would lead them to their homes. The destruction sickened them. They drove back to the shelter. There was nowhere else to go.

  The dying of the sound of the wind had awakened Carlotta Churchbridge just before dawn, and she had awakened Henry. They had found shelter on the second floor of the old Holiday Inn in downtown Athens, two blocks east of the Athens Bank and Trust Company building. The wind was fading rapidly, and by the time the sun came up it was but a stiff breeze from the north. The phone was dead. Carlotta had said their first obligation was to find a way to get word to the kids they were all right. Henry, with the wisdom of other disasters, when he had been flown in to help with the details of embassy administration in times of crisis, suggested she wear shoes she could do a lot of walking in, and slacks. Their window faced the inner courtyard of the inn. All the pool furniture seemed to be stacked in a corner, in a tangle ten feet high, mixed with limbs and pieces of roofing. The once green lawn was mud. The pool was more than full.

  He wore a shirt with two breast pockets, and put the little Zeiss binoculars in one, the small Rollei in the other. They ate two of their apples and drank some of their water before they left the room.

  There was a hot dank smell in the stairwell, and they found that water had come up to the sixth step above lobby level. The still-wet steps were slimy, and she slipped and caught his arm for support.

  There was a bald man in a white shirt and dirty white pants behind the desk. He was carefully laying out sodden documents on the counter like someone setting up a game of solitaire.

  Henry said, “Excuse me, do you know where I could find a working telephone?”

  The man said, “This goddam mess! You ever see such a goddam mess? It’ll never get straightened out.”

  “Telephone?”

  “They won’t come in to work this morning. They’re supposed to be here, but they won’t come in. I’m the one they’ll hold responsible.”

  “Telephone?” Henry insisted. Carlotta touched his arm and drew him away.

  “He can’t hear you,” she said. “He’s in shock. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing.”

  They found their car. Carlotta gave a cry of dismay. They had parked it in a slot beside a camper. The camper had toppled onto it, crushing the roof down to dashboard level. Windblown trash was caught in the narrow wedge-shaped gap between the side of the camper and the crushed roof of the car. She was desolate. She loved the car. She talked to it when she drove it, patted it to encourage it to start, always parked it with careful precision.

  Holding his arm she kept up her complaint about the smashed car until they came upon the first body. Henry had hoped they could walk by it without her seeing it. But when she stopped and her hands clamped hard on his biceps, he moved her along quickly. It was the body of a young girl in her early teens. She had been pierced clear through, impaled upon a piece of two-by-four which had gone through her chest cavity from side to side. She had been washed into the twisted tangle of the ornamental iron fence which had encircled an old downtown building’s shallow grounds, and there the timber had wedged fast, holding her, face up, a foot off the mud.

  “Ah, Enrique, pobrecita … pobrecita…”

  He saw the tears on her face and stopped and said, “I think I better leave you back at the room.”

  “No! No! I have to be with you. I must be with you. I’ll be all right.”

  They saw other people moving about slowly, stunned, trying to comprehend the extent of disaster. When they reached the bank corner, he saw that a small car had been wind-rolled right into the bank lobby through the armored glass. A single small weak alarm bell was still ringing, and he guessed that it was on standby battery and probably had been ringing ever since the car had rolled in, across soaked rugs, to come to rest in a welter of crushed executive desks. A fat uniformed guard sat in an office chair just inside the gap in the bank windows, a shotgun across his lap, nodding and then coming awake with a start, nodding again.

  The streets at that important corner were impassable, blocked with downed trees, dead automobiles, drifts and windrows of broken junk and an astonishing number of bashed and shattered boats, ranging up to a good-sized ketch which lay across the street at an angle, sticks gone, hull crushed, the hood, grill and front bumper of a small red car peering out from under the weight that had crushed it.

  From the strength of Carlotta’s fingers he knew she had seen something else which dismayed her. He looked and saw, trapped in the angle of a wall, a heap of dirty white rags. Then he realized that it was a pile of a few dozen seabirds, gulls and terns mostly, and near them, drying in the early sunlight, were three large fish, their eyes popped from their heads and their flotation sacs bulging from their open mouths with the effects of the abrupt pressure change which had killed them. A little meeting of predators, grotesquely far from the sea and the beaches.

/>   He went into the lobby of the office section of the bank building and found the fire door unlocked.

  “I’d rather you wait for me here,” he said. “I just want to go up where I can see the key and the bridges.”

  “No. I’ll come along.”

  The air was close, damp and hot in the stairwell. As they climbed slowly, Henry could feel his shirt beginning to cling to his back. Sweat ran into his eyes, stinging until he had to stop and mop it away. He lost track of the flights. He tried a door and it would not open. They climbed to the next floor. Locked. By peering up the center of the stairwell he could see they only had a few more to climb. If they were all locked it was going to be a discouraging waste of time.

  At last one opened, and they went into the wide corridor. From the office numbers he saw they were on the twelfth floor. He led his wife to the west side of the building. There was a window at the end of the corridor. As they approached it they could see the morning Gulf out there, a dancing blue with tufts of white where the wind spilled the waves over.

  They reached the window and stood side by side. The window was slightly bleary. Salt had blown against it and dried.

  He put his arm around her waist and said, “Oh, dear God!”

  “But where is it?”

  “Orient yourself by the bridge. Jesus, look at the bridge! The whole lift part of it is gone, and the causeway at this end is gone. Out there, where it looks like a great big beach, that’s where Broad Pass was. It’s filled in. And one new pass is right where that Harrison report said it would be. See that condominium, dear, the tall one that’s sort of pale orange? That’s the one that was just toward the village from Azure Breeze.”

  “It’s really gone!” she said in a strange voice.

  “Four of them are gone. And maybe more too, further south. And certainly a couple are gone from the south end of Seagrape. There, you see what looks like some kind of ancient ruined fort on Seagrape? That’s the bottom of a condominium. That’s what’s left.”

  He remembered his binoculars and took them out, dried the lenses, adjusted them and focused them. He saw two helicopters hovering and dipping over Fiddler Key like slow questing insects. One hovered and moved slowly down until he could not see it any longer. He leaned close to the glass and found the south bridge had fallen, and saw the evidence of the brand new pass from bay to Gulf just this side of the ruined structure.

  He said, still searching the scene through the binoculars, “Actually, Fiddler lost its south end, below the south bridge, and picked up a mile of Seagrape. With Broad Pass filled in, it’s as if we’ve got four new keys, the south end of Fiddler, the middle of Fiddler, then the north end of Fiddler joined to Seagrape, and then the north end of Seagrape. Good Lord, dear, you should see the way the sand drifted across both keys. You know, I think Beach Village is just about entirely gone!”

  He lowered the binoculars. She was leaning against the corridor wall, tears running down her face. She tried to smile at him and couldn’t. “All those people,” she said. “All those people who wouldn’t leave.”

  “Not crying over the loss of all your pretties?” he said, trying to make small and gentle jokes, to break her mood of despair.

  “Foo. Things are things, no more than that.”

  “Easy for any rich Guatemalan person to say.”

  She sobbed and dived against his chest and he held her. “The sons will worry,” she said in a smothered voice.

  “Okay, we’ll go phone them,” he said cheerfully.

  As they plodded down the stairs he knew that there would be no phoning for quite some time. He had wanted to find other windows and look at the rest of the city and the shoreline, but he did not want to disturb her any more than he could help. Right now this whole area was in that strange hiatus that follows catastrophe, when all the complicated procedures of administration and communication have been shattered. Key people are missing. Nothing is in operating condition. The imperatives are food, water and medical attention, and the identification and disposal of the dead. At the moment no one would know who was responsible for what. Small men would run about blowing whistles and giving orders no one could obey. People would shuffle through the broken trash and wreckage, looking for family and friends. The probable resolution would be the declaration of a condition of emergency, the arrival of some kind of military command—to establish a command headquarters, appraise the situation, clear the airfield, make the streets passable, fly in the generators and the field hospitals and the Red Cross and the food and the water treatment plants and the medical supplies and the network news teams—and, as the situation began to improve, every busybody with any ghost of a reason for coming here to Athens.

  When they came out onto the street, a military jeep came along, threading its way between hazards. It had a tripod-mounted bullhorn and an officer passenger with a microphone held close to his lips. A huge resonated brass bellow was saying, “If you have food and water and shelter, stay where you are. Stay where you are. If medical treatment is needed, hang a white sheet or towel from a window or doorway where it can be seen from the street. An aid station will be set up for this area. You will be advised. If you have food and water and shelter, stay where you are. Stay where you are. Stay where you are.”

  Henry guessed they had opened the airport and flown these people in. More would be coming. There would be some very bad days ahead. He decided to take Carlotta back to the Holiday Inn and then go find where they were setting up and offer his services.

  They walked on the far side of the street from the dead girl-child. As they neared the Holiday Inn they saw a couple coming toward them. They looked vaguely familiar.

  “Who are they! Who are they!” Carlotta demanded.

  “They’re on the fourth floor. That’s all I know.”

  As the two couples approached each other, they all wore uncertain smiles. The man put his hand out. “I’m Howard Elbright. My wife, Edie. Aren’t you …?”

  “Churchbridge. Henry, and my wife, Carlotta. Six-G.”

  Edith Elbright said, “My God, wasn’t it horrible! I never imagined! We’re in the Holiday Inn. The salt water came right into the room.”

  “We’re there too. It was a very rough night,” Henry said.

  “We were wondering whether we should get off the key in case of a hurricane, and then that report about what might happen … that decided us, didn’t it, dear?”

  “We can’t get anything on the little radio. The batteries are dead. We were going to walk down and look across at the key and see if we could see—”

  “Se fué,” Carlotta said. “Excuse me. It’s gone. Gone.”

  “Gone!” Edith said blankly. “Gone?” Her face began to crumple. She reached out unsteadily to grasp her husband’s arm. “All our things. All our good things.”

  “Along with quite a few people,” Howard Elbright said with a note of reprimand.

  “Of course. I’m sorry. It’s just …”

  “The bridges are down,” Henry Churchbridge said. “And the four condos Harrison predicted would go down. There is a new pass where he said one might appear, and another near the south bridge. Broad Pass is completely out of water. If you could get over there, you could walk to Seagrape Key. But then you couldn’t get off Seagrape because there’s another new pass through Seagrape. And most of the one- and two-story buildings on Fiddler Key seem to be smashed or gone.”

  “What are we going to do?” Edith wailed.

  Carlotta patted her on the shoulder. “Come on, now. We’ll go back to our room. Second floor. The radio works. They don’t want us on the street. There’s a dead girl over there by that fence. Very sad. You don’t want to look at that. Come on, dear.”

  They turned back. Carlotta and Edie walked ahead. Henry and Howard strolled along behind them. “You were in government?” Howard asked politely.

  “State Department.”

  “I was a chemist. But it looks as if I might be going back to work.”

  �
�The legal tangle is going to be beyond belief,” Henry said, and tried not to feel too smug about not having to go to work again himself. There was not exactly a broad market for his talents.

  43

  ON THE LAST FRIDAY in September, Sam Harrison and Barbara Messenger picnicked on that truncated section of Fiddler Key between the two new passes—Saturday Pass, down near the remnants of the south bridge, and Harrison Pass, where the four condominiums built by Marty Liss had stood.

  They came out through Harrison Pass on an outgoing tide in the little catamaran Sam had salvaged from the mangrove islands and repaired. Once clear, they beached the cat south of the pass and pulled it up onto the beach before off-loading the towels, beer cooler, food basket, blanket and big yellow umbrella.

  It was a perfect tropical day. Breeze riffled the flat blue calm of the sea. Sandpipers ran along the wet sand, legs twinkling, as they stabbed for food. Gulls, on their way by, wheeled close to check them for edibles.

  They were on a broad, featureless beach. A quarter mile south there were more picnickers, men surf casting, children throwing Frisbees and running in and out of the warm water.

  In the early afternoon Sam saw Mick Rhoades approaching, walking down the gentle slant of beach past the tall, silent, moldering high rise which had been called Fiddler Shores Condominium. Mick wore white slacks and a white straw hat. He carried his white shirt over his arm. His torso was very brown and trim.

  Sam opened the cooler and took out a can of beer and held it up. Mick broke into a parody of exhausted running, grabbed the can and dropped into the shade of the umbrella.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be wearing the sling?” he asked.

  Barbara said, “He can have it out for an hour or so every day, to retain muscle tone. But he cheats.”

  Mick smiled at her. “How is Mr. M coming along?”

  “Very mean. As he improves, he gets meaner. He’ll be walking again by the end of the week. He ordered me on this picnic, a reward for enduring a lot of mean remarks. If you’re through for the day, why don’t you wait and sail back in with us?”