Condominium (64 page)

“I can make a guess. In time, after everybody gives up, maybe a slow process of condemnation, a lawyer’s permanent festival, and then turn it into a park. A wilderness park. A marine park. In time they will come around to Lee Messenger for a signature and he can sign away a chunk of the empty air … let me see, right about in that direction … seventy to eighty feet in the air, the exact size and shape of the apartment you once had. Along, of course, with one forty-seventh of the land at the bottom of the pass.”

“I see. And there is a bird flying through it. See? Does it know it is trespassing? A wilderness park might be nice, you know. But they should have somebody here to keep people from leaving the beach looking grubby.”

She looked down the length of the key, squinting in bright sun. “Will they have to tear down the buildings? There’s dozens and dozens of them still standing.”

“I would imagine they’d fence them and put up warning signs so as not to be sued. Conspicuous nuisance problems.”

“Look, there is a sort of green fuzz beginning to show above the high-water line, Sam. Things are beginning to grow again. It will be nice here, you know? I wish there would be huge lush vines growing up these condominium towers some day, like some giant kind of ivy, so that it would all be like those old Mexican ruins in Yucatán. A park can be a memorial to … I can’t say greed and stupidity, really. There was something else, wasn’t there? A kind of autohypnosis.”

“And human optimism and strange tax advantages. And too much time between hurricanes.”

They went back to their portable shade. She sat in grace, looking down, drawing patterns in the sand. He felt as if he dared not draw a deep breath for fear of alarming her in some way. She had a bewildering vitality about her. She was all his magic for all time, but there were no moves he could make. He could not conceive of ever being without her.

She looked at him suddenly, a quick glance which slanted through his heart. He saw the tears in her eyes.

“Barbara,” he said in the rustiest of voices.

“No. Just something I want to say. Something I’m learning. I’m only a little way along. It’s hard for me to learn. I’m going to need some time.”

She stabbed her spread fingers into the sand, picked up a handful, let it trickle out of her fist.

Looking down she said, “What you do is either take no risks or you take them all. I took a risk with you without knowing it, sending you after that fool bull. I can knock on the tin roof of that Ford Fairlane and holler down to those people in there. I can ask them things. Are you sorry you had love? Are you sorry you birthed these three dead kids? My God, when does being a tragic figure turn into a pose? How much bleakness can I stand in my life?” She tried to smile at him then. “What I guess I am trying to say is keep in touch, Sam. Keep in touch. Now please, please, go for about a fifteen-minute hike down the beach.”

He walked. His arm was beginning to tire again, so he put it in the sling. When he looked back she was sitting in Buddha fashion, back straight, a distant bright-haired woman looking out at the innocent and harmless sea.

There was a great rush of baitfish a hundred feet offshore, as something predatory came up under them. Seven pelicans went by, with slow beat and then long glide, close to the water. A gray crab ran sidelong down the beach and popped into its hole. He stopped and looked at a place just above the high-tide mark where a tendril had poked its way out of the sand, unfurling three small pale-green leaves. From that point he could see the city and its tall white bank buildings. Thunder grumbled far away, and he turned and saw that it had become dark in the north, and the breeze was now coming from that direction. He headed back to the woman, lengthening his stride as he saw, in the distance, that she had collapsed the umbrella and was stowing it on the catamaran.

JOHN D
.
MACDONALD
was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel
The Executioners
, which was adapted into the film
Cape Fear
. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.