Condominium (54 page)

“Valuable?”

“Lee bought him at a London auction ten years ago and bid him in for ninety thousand dollars. I think he’d be worth three times
that now. But it really isn’t the money. Lee loves the style and the elegance of that beast, the way he holds his head. I brought a couple of the other pieces that are special favorites and forgot him, and I so want Lee to know that I was … very competent about leaving and packing and so on. The bull is in a glass case on the bedroom wall.”

“I will see that you keep your reputation.”

“It’s pouring again.”

“It comes and goes. The wind is stiffening. Coming a little more from the south. How’s everything here?”

“Lee is not doing very well. They can’t seem to find anything that will dull the pain. They have to keep knocking him out. He hates that. He’d so much rather be alert. Come on in.”

He carried the heavy suitcases in and she had him put them down in an alcove between the two rooms. She said she would unpack the items later, hoping they wouldn’t need them. In hushed voice of explanation she showed him the suite. The hospital room was large, and had its own bath, with grab rails by the tub, shower and toilet. The other portion of the suite, of similar size, was divided into a small bedroom and bath, and a sitting room with a small kitchen alcove. There was an intercom in her bedroom and in the sitting room which picked up any sound from the hospital room. She turned it on and he could hear, amplified, the guttural breathing of the unconscious old man.

“Anything else you want from the apartment?”

“Nothing else, thank you. I can’t believe there could be a real danger of … everything going.”

“You don’t believe the report?”

“With one part of my mind, yes. With another … I just don’t know.”

“There certainly isn’t any great flood of people coming off the key.”

“Do be careful, Sam. If things look rough, don’t bother with the damned bronze. Okay?”

“Okay.” He wanted to kiss her on the cheek. He reached to put a hand on her shoulder, leaning toward her as he did so, and then stopped. It was an awkward moment for both of them. She gave him a flat and meaningless smile which did not reach her eyes, and he left.

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.