Condominium (38 page)

“No doubt.”

“I’ll bring the final billing over to Benjie just as soon as it can be typed up. I’ll ask that the twenty-five five be escrowed along with my percentage of same until we see if Mike can get pumping elsewhere sooner. Frankly I think his chances are zip.”

“Great.”

“Benjie
does
have enough money?”

“If you hurry, pal. If you hurry on over and get the hell in line, maybe Letra can pay in full. If not, you can sue Letra.”

“Now just a goddam min—”

Marty hung up, pressed the bar on the intercom and said, “Get Mr. Wannover in here right away.”

That was the day it began. The National Hurricane Center in Miami had not yet named the storm. They had not yet even heard of it because there was nothing yet for the satellite cameras to pick up and relay to the weather stations. The beginning was in a somnolent superheated few hundred square miles of ocean off the west coast of Africa and south-southeast of the Cape Verde Islands. The mechanism of the great engine appears to be deceptively simple. When there is a long period of calm, with no weather fronts to distort the effects of the high temperature of the waters, the heated air will rise. Air on all sides of that upward current will move in to fill the low-pressure area thus created.

Once there is a sufficient volume of air involved in this phenomenon, it can sometimes begin, quite slowly at first, to turn in a counterclockwise direction, an effect of the drag of the earth’s rotation, the way a speeding truck will create whirling dust devils along the dry shoulder of a highway.

As the hot air, heavy with moisture, is pulled in, drawn high and whirled out of the heart of the storm, its moisture is condensed by the cold of high altitude and falls in torrential tons ahead of the disturbance. The disturbance begins moving slowly west and slightly northwest. This one’s earliest center was at approximately 5 degrees north, 20 degrees west, almost equidistant from Liberia and the Cape Verde Islands. The conditions were ideal for the formation of what could become a mature hurricane, one whose distinctive whirling cloud pattern could fill the entire Gulf of Mexico from rim to rim.

As yet the spinning motion in this disturbance was unpronounced and uncertain. Below it there flowed the constant trade winds of summer, from east to west. Above it, in mid-Atlantic, the clockwise rotation of the winds around the Bermuda high sent a constant wind westerly. The disturbance had begun in the doldrums and only began to move west and begin its turning, hesitant though it was, when a ridge of the trade winds reached up into that area where it was, curling into a trough, into a westerly wave that imparted an initial momentum, along with the spin of the planet. Once the disturbance began moving west, there was nothing in the way all across that broad ocean.

The water temperature was 29 degrees Celsius.

The barometric pressure at its center was dropping.

Altocumulus clouds were beginning to form.

ON THURSDAY
, in the early afternoon, Fred Brasser telephoned his wife, Ginny, in Fort Worth and said, “Mom died last night, hon.”

“Oh, dear. How terrible for you.”

“I tried to get Jud but I can’t reach him. What if you try, okay? I got a lot of odds and ends to do here.”

“Sure. What should I tell him?”

“Tell him that the bleeding never did start again after they got it stopped okay the second time. But yesterday, just before I got there, she went into a coma on account of she had complete liver failure. They put her into intensive care and tried a lot of different stuff, but she just stayed like that until she died about eleven.”

“Why didn’t you phone me last night?”

“Well, it was pretty late by the time I had a chance to. I was able to see her a couple minutes every hour. That’s the rule they got
here. She looked dead long before she was really gone. She looked really terrible, hon.” His voice broke.

“Poor baby.”

“Well, you tell Jud there’s no need of him coming here. I’m trying to set up a service on Monday up home, and there’s no reason to have any kind of service here. From what I can figure out, nobody would come. We never ought to let her live here. Anyway, she’s legally a Florida resident, and I’ve located a copy of the will she had made down here after Dad died. Tell Jud that the two of us are co-executors, and I’ve asked the lawyer that made up the will, a fellow named McKay, to take over the tax and estate problems. He seems bright and okay. The way it looks, I ought to be able to fly home Saturday, and then we and the kids can fly up there Sunday or early on Monday, depending.”

“Where will you be staying tonight? The apartment again?”

“No. It sort of spooks me. Kind of dumb, I know, but it does.”

“I can see how it might.”

“I’m staying at a little place here on the key right in Beach Village called the Beach Motel, Room Thirty. Here’s the phone number off the key tag: 824-4696.”

“Got it. Thanks dear. Anything else?”

“Tell Jud the problem in the estate will be converting the apartment into money. It’s almost impossible to sell one of these things right now, and there are other complications I won’t go into. I’m meeting the appraiser at the apartment right after I get some lunch.”

“No fried food, sweetie.”

“Okay, okay. Sorry to drop all this on you.”

“I don’t mind. You just take care of yourself and hurry home as soon as you can. We all miss you. And I’m terribly sorry about
Peggy. She was always wonderful to me and to Marie. Always so generous.”

After he hung up he stepped out of the booth and mopped his forehead, and pulled his sports shirt away from his body. He walked across the parking area of the Beach Mall Shopping Plaza. The asphalt felt soft underfoot. He went into the McDonald’s on the far side of Beach Drive and got two Big Macs and two Cokes to go. He walked south on the shoulder of the road and turned in past the Beach Motel swimming pool. When he unlocked the door to Room 30, Darleen Moseby came to the bathroom door and looked out at him, smiling. She wore the shirt she had made him buy for himself when he took her out to Woolco last Friday so she could get that kind of lipstick she couldn’t get anywhere else. It was a gauze shirt in a kind of gray-white cotton with yellow flowers embroidered all over the shoulders and yoke.

“Sure smells jus’ fine, Freddy. I’m rinsing out stuff. You lay it out over there, huh?”

When she came hurrying out to eat with hungry pleasure, he was pleasantly yet uncomfortably aware that all she had on was that shirt. It was long on him, and so it came down to her knees.

He said, “Look, I had to tell her where I am so she can tell my brother. So if the phone rings and I’m not here …”

“Hell, no person would phone me here.”

“How about Tom Shawn?”

“Well, Tom would know I wouldn’t answer the phone anyway. God, I was starving to death!”

“You know, you look like you were about twelve years old.”

“Don’t sweat it, Freddy. They won’t get you on statutory. Honest to God, I’m twenty-three damn years old. Wanna see my driving license?”

“No. I just meant you’re small-boned and … young looking. How … how long have you been—”

“Freddy! I
warned
you!”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry.”

“Why I’m a hooker and how long I’ve been a hooker and so on, all that is a lot of shit. It doesn’t mean anything. The only thing that means anything is I think you’re a nice guy, and I’m glad you came along, and as long as you keep on paying, we can both be happy and have some fun, and that’s all that counts, isn’t it?”

“That’s all that counts.”

“I’m real sorry about your mother. But I guess she brought it all down on herself.”

He finished the last of his Coke and looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go meet that appraiser. On the furniture and personal stuff.”

“Gee, that’ll be kind of depressing. You want some cheering up before you go?” She looked blandly at him and ran her tonguetip along her lower lip and winked. Though as flirtation it was obviously habitual and mechanical, he felt such a surge of primal lust that it dazed him. He did not see how he could ever get his fill of this smooth ripe little person.

“When … when I come back.”

“I’ll prolly be out there by the pool again, so you put on your swim trunks we bought you and come out, and bring the oil and I’ll cover you good so you won’t start to burn again.”

As he drove off he could not believe he had been with her only a week. Last Thurday evening he had gone to the Sand Dollar Bar to have some words with whoever had been selling more drinks to a woman than she could obviously handle. The bartender, a skinny red-faced fellow named Lou, said that the owner, Tom Shawn, was usually on afternoons and that was when Peggy Brasser usually came in. Tom Shawn usually stopped by in the evening for a little
while and helped out on the bar if he was needed. Lou said he’d heard Mrs. Brasser was sick and he was sorry to hear it. He said he hoped she’d be out of the hospital soon. Meanwhile, have one on the house, sir. Least we can do for the son of a good steady customer.

He sat at the bar and drank, and after a long time he found he was telling some girl all about himself. She looked more elegant than she sounded. She wore too much eye makeup. She listened well. She seemed very interested in him. Then he was somewhere at a table for two, having dinner with that same girl, Darlene Moseby, and buying wine. And without transition they were in a room and he was sitting on the bed and saw her tuck money in her purse and then kneel and unlace his shoes and tug them off, grinning up at him, makeup all scrubbed away, winking up at him and calling him good old Freddy boy.

So he had given her a hundred dollars on Thursday night and, after cashing a check, another hundred on Friday night. Then they had made a deal for a full week, and she had waited until Monday for the five hundred she charged by the week. He had found out a few things about her. She lived with Shawn behind the Sand Dollar in a small frame house. Shawn seldom had need of her. There were four of them, but she was the only one who stayed in the cottage. The other three were Dusty and Louise and Francine. Dusty and Louise lived together. Francine lived with her mother and her kid. Tom took a cut from all the business they pulled, and he kept the freaks off them and kept it quiet in the bar, and gave presents here and there.

If I go home Saturday, he thought, that just about uses up the five hundred. If I go home Saturday I will have to make up a reason to come back.

•  •  •

The appraiser was an old man who breathed loudly. He brought a girl with him who wrote down the items and values on a yellow legal pad. The girl had thick glasses and a sweaty smell. He wouldn’t look at the jewelry. He said Mr. Brasser should take that to a jeweler for appraisal. His breathing seemed a sound of constant disdain, as though he were sick unto death of having spent his life tottering around amid the tastelessness of other people’s belongings.

When he had finished he sat at the breakfast bar in the kitchen and added up his totals on a pocket computer.

“It looks like eighteen hundred and ten,” he said. “You’ll get a typed original and three copies, all certified.”

“Please give them to Mr. McKay along with your bill.”

“Of course. Come, Alicia. Good-bye, sir.”

“How do you think I should dispose of these things?”

The old man turned and smiled for the first time. His teeth were large and stained. “Let your fingers do the walking,” he said. “People who will make offers advertise in there.”

She was prone on the sun cot in her orange string bikini. He went in and changed to swim trunks and oiled the front of himself and all the reachable areas and took the bottle outside. He moved another sun cot close to hers. The scrape of the aluminum legs on concrete woke her and she started up, dazed by heat, sun and sleep.

“Oh, hi. Yeh, gimme the bottle.”

She sat up and leaned over him and slathered his back. When she did the backs of his thighs she sneaked her hand under him and gave him a quick tweak and giggled. He lay prone near her for twenty minutes while his need for her got ever sharper. He woke her and they went inside, out of sun heat into coolness, out of
bright dazzle into shadows. There was sun heat still in her body, and she was golden and slippery with sun oil.

When they rested she said, “You don’t get enough at home, huh?”

“I always thought I did.”

“She pretty?”

“What?”

“Hey, your wife. Is she pretty?”

“Sure. She’s a good-looking woman.”

“Your little girl is how old, did you say?”

“She’s ten. Lolly is ten.”

“Be nice to her.”

“Huh?”

“Always be nice to her, Freddy. No matter what. You’re her daddy. What I mean is, I was fourteen, you know? And there was this boy fifteen, we thought we were in love like nobody ever was before. We weren’t really going to screw, you know? But we fooled around and we got closer and closer, making each other come and so on, and one night we were too close and he shoved and in it went and we screwed like crazy for a month and then he started going out with my best girl friend. Boy, I was really going to show
him
! And everybody, you know? So I took off with a couple of guys going up to Atlanta. That turned into some weird kind of life-style. I got onto speed and I was down to like eighty pounds there at one point, and I’m still confused about a lot of it. And I picked up a bad dose that played hell to cure it. Don’t look nervous, Freddy baby. I’m a healthy girl. When I came up out of nowhere I wanted to come home and I called my daddy collect to ask him to wire money. I’d been gone the best part of a year by then. You see, my ma took off when I was little and he married again and I’ve got half-brothers and half-sisters. Somebody got him to the
phone to ask if he’d take a collect call from Darleen Moseby, his daughter, and I heard him say to the operator, ‘Tell that cheap little cunt I never had no daughter name of Darleen.’ And I heard him hang up. It broke my heart, Freddy. It really and truly did, you know? That’s what I mean about be nice to your little girl no matter what.”