Condominium (41 page)

She could be grateful to Julian Higbee for one thing. He had stirred her up. She had looked around and looked at herself, and
realized it was time to go. What do you do when you are twenty-nine and reasonably attractive, fairly well educated, and know all the social moves, and never lasted more than three months in any job you tried to do? Well, you take things in order. Leaving comes first, and then the job comes out of necessity.

What are you prepared to do, Ms. Simmins? While growing up I lived in Germany, Hawaii, Panama, Japan, Guam and South Korea. After I quit college I roamed around and worked as a dishwasher, fruit picker, receptionist, barmaid, waitress, car rental agent, go-go girl, photographer’s model, magician’s assistant, swimming teacher, revolutionary, vagabond, part-time junkie, pollster, taxi driver, short-order cook, motel maid, car parker, hitchhiker, smuggler, checkroom girl, cigarette girl, thief, housekeeper and freelance companion.

In every position I held, dear sir, I left a little piece of that dear girl once known as Lovely Lynn Simmins, and now there is not a hell of a lot of me left. However, on balance, there is a little too much left to permit it to be plundered by that randy son of a bitch of a resident manager, thank you kindly for your attention.

After his long interview with Dr. Dromb about his prognosis for Thelma, Jack Mensenkott went back to Golden Sands, fixed himself a sandwich, changed and drove back to Martin’s Marina on Fiddler Key, close to the approach to the north bridge leading over to the city.

Leroy Martin was sitting behind his desk in the small office next to the showroom, wearing his orange baseball cap. Mensenkott had never seen the man without a hat on.

Leroy said, “You better set and have some coffee, Jack. The kid has got three to take off the rack and gas before he gets to yours.
Like I keep telling you, all you got to do is phone ahead and we can have her all set for you.”

“I wasn’t in a rush,” Mensenkott said. After he poured his coffee he looked out the big window to where a big redheaded young man was running the fork lift, reaching up to take a boat down out of the third level of the open steel rack of the in-and-out marina.

Leroy Martin pushed the button on the base of the microphone on his desk and said, “Joey?”

The redhead turned and looked toward the office when the amplified voice filled the area.

“After you get them three, get Mr. Mensenkott’s
Hustler
off of twelve-two.” He raised an eyebrow at Jack. “Gas?” Jack shook his head no. “Just set it in the water, Joey.”

Martin leaned back and said, “How’s the missus coming along?”

“Not so good. She had a setback and I had to take her in, and Dr. Dromb put her back in the hospital.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“I can’t see her until tonight, so I thought I might as well go fishing.”

“Nothing like it to keep your mind off your troubles. They say this Dromb is pretty good.”

“I wish he was more definite.”

“I guess with nervous problems they can’t get too definite. Like I was telling you before, after the last kid left the nest and my old lady got those spells, every place I took her, they loaded her up with Valium and Librium and so on. She got so she could damn near fall asleep standing up.”

“It has something to do with the way they cleared off that Silverthorn property. Now he thinks the reason she has … gotten strange again is because she found out they are not going to build anything there anyway. The dredge is gone. All plans are
suspended, and so it was all for nothing, all that destruction. That got to her.”

Leroy Martin frowned. “Funny it got to mean so much to her. I mean it was just jungly growth there and some mangrove and mud flats. Full of red bugs and mosquitoes.”

“The ecologists say that is a very productive kind of waterfront.”

Martin laughed. “Hey, you bet your sweet ass it is. Remember, I was born down here, more years ago than I’m going to admit. And when I was a little kid in the summertime, you could swang a quart can and catch you two quarts of mosquitoes.” He sighed, and sobered, and said, “Of course back then you could walk across the bay on the backs of the mullets, we had schools of them so thick.”

“It does seem a waste to clear it off and then drop the project.”

“Me, I wouldn’t worry too much about that Marty Liss dropping any kind of project. You can bet he’s got something in mind to do himself some good. Chances are he’s just squeezing out some kind of weak sister partner, scaring him out. Don’t you worry. They’ll build something on that land. It won’t set empty. Key land is too valuable for that. People thought I was crazy buying that extra land south of here fifteen years ago, and right now I’d give an arm if I’d bought twice what I did. I’d put up more racks in a minute.”

Mensenkott looked out the window and saw the fork lift trundling toward the launching area, carrying the
Hustler
between its lowered arms. It was a white Cobia with blue trim, one-fifty stern drive, center pedestal, bait well, casting platform, fighting chair.

“Where would you head today if you were me?” Jack asked.

“I was monitoring Channel Thirteen a while ago, and what looks best to me, you go north up the bay all the way past Seagrape
Key and go out Big Crab Pass—after you stop and get some bait at Buster’s place. Save you wasting time netting. There’s been a big school of blues messing around the pass, and some nice cobia out around the sea buoy. You ought to do just fine today.”

Minutes later Mensenkott, standing at the wheel at the center pedestal of the
Hustler
, made a fast white arc and cut through the center span of the north bridge between Fiddler Key and the mainland, trying to clear his mind of Dromb’s advice. Thelma, he said, is emotionally unemployed. Nobody depends upon her. Nothing depends upon her. She is in a geriatric community. Sell out, buy her a country place. She can raise vegetables, flowers, dogs, rabbits, children.…

Jack Mensenkott glanced up at the bridge as he went under. Two tanned girls sitting on a toolbox in the bed of a pickup truck waved at him and he waved back. He was conscious of how he looked piloting his fast and gleaming boat on this lovely day. Having found paradise, only a fool would move away.

And he had never caught a really good cobia. Not yet.

At six o’clock on Friday, the ninth of August, the decision was made by the Director of the National Hurricane Center at Miami to give tropical storm status to the disturbance in the eastern Atlantic and, because it was now a fair assumption that its winds were in excess of the required thirty-nine miles an hour, to designate it as Ella, the fifth on the list of approved names for this hurricane season.

Though the tropical storm still lacked the total organization seen in the structure of large hurricanes, some significant reports had been relayed from coastal radio stations as received by vessels of the British Volunteer Observing Fleet. There were eight vessels
near enough to the tropical storm so that their observations, transmitted in code as required every six hours, permitted the extrapolation of a constant wind speed in the northeast quadrant of Ella of from forty to forty-two nautical miles per hour, and increasing.

By satellite photograph interpretation, personnel at the Center placed the position of Ella at eighteen hundred hours EDST at 10 degrees north, 34 west. She had picked up her great gray skirts and hustled, making the same approximate time as a reasonably fast container ship. The cloud mass covered a larger area. Ella was drawing a line toward the Lesser Antilles, toward the Windward Islands, toward Barbados—toward the frail island barrier between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.

As the storm moved, gathering mass and tempo, it sent great rollers out ahead, moving across the glassy sea at four times its own speed. These swells had already reached the far islands. Normal cadence of the Atlantic waves breaking on these shores is eight per minute. This change in the constant, unremarkable sound of the sea is the ancient alert for all living things. The oily waves lift high and come racing in, and they turn, tumble, thud against reef and rock and sand like a great slow drum. The fiddler crabs move inland in small brown torrents, the larger claw held on high. The seabirds circle nervously, crying out, getting ready to head away from the oncoming drop in pressure. Fish turn ravenous, storing food against the tumbled days ahead. Primitive man looks at the streamers in the sky, hears the slow boom of the surf and feels an uneasy dread.

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.

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.