Читать книгу Alas, Babylon - Harry Hart Frank - Страница 5

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Edgar Quisenberry, president of the bank, never lost sight of his position and responsibilities as sole representative of the national financial community in Fort Repose. A monolithic structure of Indiana limestone built by his father in 1920, the bank stood like a gray fortress at the corner of Yulee and St. Johns. First National had weathered the collapse of the 1926 land boom, had been unshaken by the market crash of ’twenty-nine and the depression that followed. “The only person who ever succeeded in closing First National,” Edgar often boasted, “was Franklin D. Roosevelt, in ’thirty-three, and he had to shut down every other bank in the country to do it. It’ll never happen again, because we’ll never have another s.o.b. like him.”

Edgar, at forty-five, had grown to look something like his bank, squat, solid, and forbidding. He was the only man in Fort Repose who always wore a vest, and he never wore sports clothes, even on the golf links. Each year, when he attended the branch Federal Reserve convention in Atlanta, two new suits were tailored, one double-breasted blue, one pin-stripe gray, both designed to minimize, or at least dignify, what he called “my corporation.”

First National employed two vice presidents, a cashier, an assistant cashier, and four tellers, but it was a one-man bank. You could put it in at any window, but before you took it out on loan, or cashed an out-of-town check, you had to see Edgar. All Edgar’s loans were based on Character, and Character was based on cash balance, worth of unencumbered real estate, ownership of bonds and blue-chip stocks. Since Edgar was the only person in town who could, and did, maintain a mental index of all these variables, he considered himself the sole accurate judge of Character. It was said you could gauge a grove owner’s crop by the way Edgar greeted him on Yulee Street. If Edgar shook his hand and chatted, then the man had just received a big price for his fruit. If Edgar spoke, cracked his face, and waved, the man was reasonably prosperous. If Edgar nodded but did not speak, nemotodes were in the citrus roots. If Edgar didn’t see him, his grove had been destroyed in a freeze.

When Randolph Bragg burst into the bank at Four minutes to three, Edgar pretended not to see him. His antipathy for Randy was more deeply rooted than if he had been a bankrupt. Bending over a desk as if examining a trust document, Edgar watched Randy scribble his name on the back of a check, smile at Mrs. Estes, the senior teller, and skid the check through the window. Randy’s manner, dress, and attitude all seemed an affront. Randy had no respect for institutions, persons, or even money. He would come bouncing in like this, at the last minute, and demand service as casually as if The Bank were a soda fountain. He was a lazy, insolent odd-ball, with dangerous political ideas, who never made any effort to invest or save. Twice in the past few years he had overdrawn his account. People called the Braggs “old family.” Well, so were the Minorcans old family—older, the descendants of Mediterranean islanders who had settled on the coast centuries ago. The Minorcans were shiftless no-goods and the Braggs no better. Edgar disliked Randy for all these, and another, secret reason.

Edgar saw Mrs. Estes open her cash drawer, hesitate, and speak to Randy. He saw Randy shrug. Mrs. Estes stepped out of the cage and Edgar knew she was going to ask him to okay the check. When she reached his side he purposely ignored her for a moment, to let Randy know that The Bank considered him of little importance. Mrs. Estes said, “Will you initial this, please, Mr. Quisenberry?”

Edgar held the check in both hands and at a distance, examining it through the bottom lens of his bifocals, as if it smelled of forgery. Five thousand, signed by Mark Bragg. If Randy irritated Edgar, Mark infuriated him. Mark Bragg invariably and openly called him by his school nickname, Fisheye. He was glad that Mark was in the Air Force and rarely in town. “Ask that young man to come here,” he told Mrs. Estes. Perhaps now he would have the opportunity to repay Judge Bragg for the humiliation of the poker game.

Five years before, Edgar had been invited to sit in the regular Saturday night pot-limit game at the St. Johns Country Club in San Marco, county seat and largest town of Timucuan. He had sat opposite Judge Bragg, a spare, straight, older man. Except for a small checking account, the Judge banked and did his business in Orlando and Tallahassee, so Edgar knew him hardly at all.

Edgar prided himself on his cagey poker. The idea was to win, wasn’t it? Judge Bragg played an open, swashbuckling game, as if he enjoyed it. On occasion he bluffed, Edgar deduced, but he seemed to be lucky so it was difficult to tell whether he was bluffing or not. In the third hour a big pot came along—more than a thousand dollars. Edgar had opened with three aces and not bettered with his two-card draw, and the Judge had also drawn two cards. After the draw, Edgar bet a hundred and the men who had taken only one card dropped out and that left it up to the judge. The judge promptly raised the size of the pot. Edgar hesitated, looked into the Judge’s amused dark eyes, and folded. As the Judge embraced and drew in the hill of chips, Edgar reached across the table and exposed his hand—three sevens and nothing else. Judge Bragg had said, very quietly, “Don’t ever touch my cards again, you son of a bitch. If you do, I’ll break a chair over your head.”

The five others in the game had waited for Edgar to do or say something, but Edgar only tried to laugh it off. At midnight, the Judge cashed in his chips and said, “See you all next Saturday night—if this tub of rancid lard isn’t here. He’s a bore and a boor and he forgets to ante.” That was the first and last time Edgar played at the St. Johns Club. He had never forgotten it.

Randy walked into the bank’s office enclosure, wondering why Edgar wanted to see him. Edgar knew perfectly well that Mark’s check was okay. “What’s the trouble, Edgar?” he asked.

“Isn’t it a little late to bring in a big check like this, and ask us for cash?”

The clock said 3:04. “It wasn’t late when I came in,” Randy said. He noticed other customers still in the bank—Eli Blaustein, who owned Tropical Clothing; Pete Hernandez, Rita’s older brother and manager of Ajax Super-Market; Jerry Kling, from the Standard station; Florence Wechek, with her Western Union checks and receipts. It was their custom to hurry to the bank just at three.

“It’s all right for business people to make deposits after closing hour, but I think we ought to have more time to handle an item like this,” Edgar said.

Randy noticed that Florence, finished at the teller’s window, had wandered within hearing. Florence didn’t miss much. “How much time do you need to cash a check for five thousand?” he asked. He was sure his face was reddening. He told himself he must not lose his temper.

“That isn’t the point,” Edgar said. “The point is that your brother doesn’t have an account here.”

“You don’t doubt that my brother’s check is good, do you?” Randy was relieved to find that his voice, instead of rising, sounded lower and steadier.

“Now, I didn’t say that. But it wouldn’t be good banking procedure for me to hand you five thousand dollars and wait four or five days for it to clear all the way from Omaha.”

“I endorsed it, didn’t I?” Randy loosened his shoulders and flexed his toes and fingers and looked intently at Edgar’s face. It would squash, like a potato.

“I doubt that your account would cover it.”

Randy’s account stood below four hundred. This had been little to worry about, with his citrus checks due on the first of the year. Now, considering Mark’s urgency, it was dangerously low. He decided to probe Edgar’s weakness. He said, “Penny-wise, pound-foolish, that’s you, Edgar. You could have been in on a very good thing. Give me back the check. I’ll cash it in San Marco or Orlando in the morning.”

Edgar realized he might have made an error. It was most unusual for anyone to want five thousand in cash. It indicated some sort of a quick, profitable deal. He should have found out why the cash was needed. “Now, let’s not be in a rush,” he said.

Randy held out his hand. “Give me the check.”

“Well, if I knew exactly why you had to have all this cash in such a hurry I might be able to make an exception to banking rules.”

“Come on. I don’t have time to waste.”

Edgar’s pale, protruding eyes shifted to Florence, frankly listening, and Eli Blaustein hovering nearby, interested. “Come into my office, Randolph,” he said.

After Randy had the cash, in hundreds, twenties and tens, he said, “Now I’ll tell you why I wanted it, Edgar. Mark asked me to make a bet for him.”

“Oh, the races!” Edgar said. “I very rarely play the races, but I know Mark wouldn’t be risking that much money unless he had a sure thing. Running in Miami, tomorrow, I suppose?”

“No. Not the races. Mark is simply betting that checks won’t be worth anything, very shortly, but cash will. Good afternoon, Fisheye.” He left the office and sauntered across the lobby. As Mrs. Estes unlocked the bank door she squeezed his arm and whispered, “Good for you!”

Edgar rocked in his chair, furious. It wasn’t a reason. It was a riddle. He repeated Randy’s words. They made no sense at all, unless Mark expected some big cataclysm, like all the banks closing, and of course that was ridiculous. Whatever happened, the country’s financial structure was sound. Edgar reached a conclusion. He had been tricked and bluffed again. The Braggs were scoundrels, all of them.

Randy’s first stop was Ajax Super-Market. It really wasn’t a super-market, as it claimed. Fort Repose’s population was 3,422, according to the State Census, and this included Pistolville and the Negro district. The Chamber of Commerce claimed five thousand, but the Chamber admitted counting the winter residents of Riverside Inn, and people who technically were outside the town limits, like those who lived on River Road. So Fort Repose had not attracted the big chain stores. Still, Ajax imitated the super-markets, inasmuch as you wheeled an aluminum cart around and served yourself, and Ajax sold the same brands at about the same prices.

Randy hated grocery shopping. None of the elaborate surveys, and studies in depth of the buying habits of Americans had a classification for Randolph Bragg. Usually he grabbed a cart and sprinted for the meat counter, where he dropped a written order. Then he raced up and down the aisles, snatching cans and bottles and boxes and cartons from shelves and freezers apparently at random, running down small children and bumping old ladies and apologizing, until his final lap brought him past the meat counter again. The butchers had learned to give his order priority, for if his meat wasn’t cut he didn’t stop, simply made a violent U-turn and barreled off for the door. When the checker rang up his bill Randy looked at his watch. His record for a full basket was three minutes and forty-six seconds, portal to portal.

But on this day it was entirely different, because of the length of his list to which he had been adding, the quantities, and the Friday afternoon shopping rush. After he’d filled three carts, and the meat order had already been carried to the car, he was still only halfway down the list, but physically and emotionally exhausted. His toes were mashed, and he had been shoved, buffeted, butted in the ribs, and rammed in the groin. His legs trembled, his hands shook, and a tic had developed in his left eye. Waiting in the check-out line, maneuvering two topheavy carts before and one behind, he cursed man’s scientific devilishness in inventing H-bombs and super-markets, cursed Mark, and swore he would rather starve than endure this again.

At last he reached the counter. Pete Hernandez, acting as checker, gaped. “Good God, Randy!” he said. “What’re you going to do, feed a regiment?” Until the year before, Pete had always called him “Mr. Bragg,” but after Randy’s first date with Pete’s sister their relationship naturally had changed.

“Mark’s wife and children are coming to stay with me a while,” he explained.

“What’s she got—a football team?”

“Kids eat a lot,” Randy said. Pete was skinny, chicken-breasted, his chin undershot and his nails dirty, completely unlike Rita except for black eyes and olive skin.

Pete began to play the cash register with two fingers while the car boy, awed, filled the big sacks. Randy was aware that seven or eight women, lined up behind him, counted his purchases, fascinated. He heard one whisper, “Fifteen cans of coffee—fifteen!” The line grew, and he was conscious of a steady, complaining murmur. Unaccountably, he felt guilty. He felt that he ought to face these women and shout, “All of you! All of you buy everything you can!” It wouldn’t do any good. They would be certain he was mad.

Pete pulled down the total and announced it loudly: “Three hundred and fourteen dollars and eighty cents, Randy! Gees, that’s our record!”

From habit, Randy looked at his watch. One hour and six minutes. That, too, was a record. He paid in cash, grabbed an armful of bags, nodded for Pete’s car boy to follow, and fled.

He stopped at Bill Cullen’s bar, short-order grill, package store, and fish camp, just outside the town limits. There was space for two cases in the front seat, so he’d lay in his whisky supply. Bill and his wife, a straw-haired woman usually groggy and thick-tongued with spiked wine, operated all this business in a two-room shack joined to a covered wharf, its pilings leaning and roof askew, in a cove on the Timucuan. The odors of fried eggs, dead minnows, gasoline and kerosene fumes, decaying gar and catfish heads, stale beer and spilt wine oozed across land and water.

Ordinarily, Randy bought his bourbon two or three bottles at a time. On this day, he bought a case and a half, cleaning out Bill’s supply of his brand. He recalled that Helen, when she drank at all, preferred Scotch. He bought six fifths of Scotch.

Bill, inquisitive, said, “Planning a big barbecue or party or something, Randy? You figure you’ll try politics again?”

Randy found it almost impossible to lie. His father had beaten him only once in his life, when he was ten, but it had been a truly terrible beating. He had lied, and the Judge had gone upstairs and returned with his heaviest razor strop. He had grabbed Randy by the neck and bent him across the billiard table, and implanted the virtue of truth through the seat of his pants, and on bare hide, until he screamed in terror and pain. Then Randy was ordered to his room, supperless and in disgrace. Hours later, the Judge knocked and came in and gently turned him over in the bed. The Judge spoke quietly. Lying was the worst crime, the indispensable accomplice of all others, and would always bring the worst punishment. “I can forgive anything except a lie.” Randy believed him, and while he could no longer remember the lie he had told, he never forgot the punishment. Unconsciously, his right hand rubbed his buttocks as he thought up an answer for Bill Cullen.

“I’m having visitors,” Randy said, “and Christmas is coming.” This was the truth, if not the whole truth. He couldn’t risk saying more to Bill. Bill’s nickname was Bigmouth and his lying not limited to the size of yesterday’s catch. Bigmouth Bill could spark a panic.

When he turned into the driveway, Randy saw Malachai Henry using a scuffle hoe in the camellia beds screening the garage. “Malachai!” he called. “How about helping me get this stuff into the house?”

Malachai hurried over. His eyes, widening, took in the cartons, bags, and cases filling the trunk and piled on the seats. “All this going up to your apartment, sir?”

“No. It goes into the kitchen and utility room. Mrs. Bragg and the children are flying in from Omaha tomorrow.”

As they unloaded, Randy considered the Henrys. They were a special problem. They were black and they were poor but in many ways closer to him than any family in Fort Repose. They owned their own land and ran their own lives, but in a sense they were his wards. They could not be abandoned or the truth withheld from them. He couldn’t explain Mark’s warning to Missouri. She wouldn’t understand. If he told Preacher, all Preacher would do was lift up his face, raise his arms, and intone, “Hallelujah! The Lord’s will be done!” If he told Two-Tone, Two-Tone would consider it an excuse to get drunk and stay that way. But he could, with confidence, tell Malachai.

With the meat packed in the freezer and everything else stacked in cupboards and closets Randy said, “Come on up to my office, Malachai, and I’ll give you your money.” He paid Malachai twenty-five dollars a week for twenty hours. Malachai picked his own days to mow, rake, fertilize, and trim, days when he had no fruit picking, repairing, or better paying yard jobs elsewhere. Randy knew he was never short-timed, and Malachai knew he could always count on that twenty-five a week.

Malachai’s face was expressionless, but Randy sensed his apprehension. Malachai never before had been asked upstairs to receive his pay. In the office, Randy dropped into the high-backed, leather-covered swivel chair that had come from his father’s chambers. Malachai stood, uncertain. “Sit down,” Randy said. Malachai picked the least comfortable straight chair and sat down, not presuming to lean back.

Randy brought out his wallet and looked up at the portrait of his bald-headed grandfather, Woodrow Wilson’s diplomat, with the saying for which he was known stamped in faded gold on the discolored frame: “Small nations, when treated as equals, become the firmest of allies.”

It was difficult. From the days when they fished and hunted together, he had always felt close to Malachai. They could still work in the grove, side by side, and discuss as equals the weather and the citrus and the fishing but never any longer share any personal, any important matters. They could not talk politics or women or finances. It was strange, since Malachai was much like Sam Perkins. He had as much native intelligence as Sam, the same intuitive courtesy, and they were the same size, weighing perhaps 180, and the same color, cordovan-brown. Randy and Sam Perkins had been lieutenants in a company of the 7th (Custer) Regiment of the First Cav. Together, Randy and Sam had dug in on the banks of the Han and Chongchon, and faced the same bugle-heralded human wave charge at Unsan, and covered each other’s platoons in advance and retreat. They had slept side by side in the same bunker, eaten from the same mess tins, drunk from the same bottle, flown to Tokyo on R. and R. together and together bellied up to the bar of the Imperial Hotel. They had (if it were learned in Fort Repose he would be ostracized) even gone to a junior-officer-grade geisha house together and been greeted with equal hospitality and favors. So it was a strange thing that he could not speak to Malachai, whom he had known since he could speak at all, as he had to Sam Perkins in Korea. It was strange that a Negro could be an officer and a gentleman and an equal below Parallel Thirty-eight, but not below the Mason-Dixon Line. It was strange, but this was not the time for social introspection. His job was to tell Malachai to brace and prepare himself and his family.

Randy took two tens and a five from his wallet and shoved them across the desk. “That’s for the week.”

“Thank you, sir,” Malachai said, folding the bills and tucking them into the breast pocket of his checked shirt.

Perhaps the difference was that Malachai had not been an officer, like Sam Perkins, Randy thought. Malachai had been in service for four years, but in the Air Defense Command, a tech sergeant babying jet engines. Perhaps it was their use of the language. Sam spoke crisp upstate-New York-Cornell English, but when Malachai talked you didn’t have to see him to know he was black. “Malachai,” Randy said, “I want to ask you a serious question.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What would you say if I told you I have very good information—about as good as you can get—that before long a war is coming?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me one bit.”

The answer surprised Randy. His swivel chair banged upright. “What makes you say that?”

Malachai smiled, pleased with Randy’s reaction. “Well, sir, I keep up with things. I read all I can. I read all the news magazines and all the out-of-state papers I can get hold of and some service journals and lots of other stuff.”

“You do? You don’t subscribe to them all, do you?”

Malachai tried to control his grin. “Some I get from you, Mister Randy. You finish a magazine and throw it away and Missouri finds it and brings it home in her tote bag. And every day she collects the Cleveland papers and the business magazines from Mrs. McGovern’s. Mondays I work for Admiral Hazzard. He saves The New York Times and the Washington papers for me and the Naval Institute Proceedings and technical magazines. And I listen to all the commentators.”

“How do you find the time?” Randy had never realized that Malachai read anything except the San Marco Sun (“It Shines for Timucuan County”).

“Well, sir, there’s not much for a single, non-drinkin’ man to do around Fort Repose, week nights. So I read and I listen. I know things ain’t good, and the way I figure is that if people keep piling up bombs and rockets, higher and higher and higher, someday somebody’s going to set one off. Then blooey!”

“More than one,” Randy said, “and soon—maybe very soon. That’s what my brother believes and that’s why he’s sending Mrs. Bragg and the children down here. You’d better get set for it, Malachai. That’s what I’m doing.”

Malachai’s smile was gone entirely. “Mister Randy, I’ve thought about it a lot, but there’s not a doggone thing we can do about it. We just have to sit here and wait for it. There’s not much we can lay up—” he patted his breast pocket. “This twenty-five dollars, with what Missouri brings home this evening, is it. Fast as we make it, it goes. Of course, we don’t need much and we’ve got one thing hardly anybody else has got.”

“What’s that?”

“Water. Running water. Artesian water that can’t be contaminated. You all only use it in the sprinkling system because it smells funny, some say like rotten eggs. But that sulphur water ain’t bad. You gets to like it.”

Until that moment, Randy hadn’t thought of water at all. His grandfather, in a year of freakish drought, at great cost had drilled nearly a thousand feet to find the artesian layer and irrigate the grove. And his grandfather had allowed the Henrys to tap the main pipe, so the Henrys had a perpetual flow of free water, although it was hard with dissolved minerals and Randy hated to taste it out of the sprinkler heads in grove and garden, even on a hot summer day.

“I’m afraid I’d never get used to it,” he said. He counted out two hundred dollars in twenties and thrust the money across the desk. “This is for an emergency. Buy what you need.”

The new notes felt slippery in Malachai’s fingers. “I don’t know when I can pay this back.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m not asking you to pay it back.”

Malachai folded the bills. “Thank you, sir.”

“See you next week, Malachai.”

Malachai left and Randy mixed a drink. You turned a tap and lo, water came forth, sweet, soft water without odor, pumped from some sub-surface pool by a silent, faithful servant, a small electric motor. Every family on River Road, except the Henrys, obtained its water in the same way, each with its own pump and well. More important than anything he had listed was water, free of dangerous bacilli, unpolluted by poisons human, chemical, or radioactive. Pure water was essential to his civilization, accepted like pure air. In the big cities, where even a near-miss would rupture reservoirs, demolish aqueducts, and smash mains, it would be hell without water. Big cities would become traps deadly as deserts or jungles. Randy began to consider how little he really knew of the fundamentals of survival. Helen, he guessed, would know a good deal more. It was a required subject in the education of Air Force wives. He decided to talk to Bubba Offenhaus, who ran Civil Defense in Fort Repose. Bubba must have pamphlets, or something, that he could study.

Downstairs Graf began to bark, an insistent, belligerent alarm announcing a strange car in the driveway. Randy went to the head of the stairs, shouted, “Shut up, Graf!” and waited to see who would knock.

Nobody knocked but the door opened and Randy saw Elizabeth McGovern in the front hall, bending over Graf, her face curtained by shoulder-length blond hair. She stroked Graf’s hackles until his tail wigwagged a friendly signal. Then she looked up and called, “You decent, Randy?”

One day she would barge in like this and he would be indecent. She bewildered him. She was brash, unpredictable, and sometimes uncomfortably outspoken. “Come on up, Lib,” he said. Like the Henrys, she was a special problem.

All through the summer and early fall Randy had watched the McGoverns’ house and dock go up, while landscapers spotted palms in orderly rows, laid down turf, and planted flower pots and shrubbery. On a sultry October afternoon, trolling for bass in the channel, he had seen a pair of faultlessly curved and tapered legs incongruously stretched toward the sky from the McGovern dock. Since she was lying on the canvas-covered planking, heels propped up on a post, the legs were all that could be seen from water level. He turned the prow toward shore to discover whose body was attached to these remarkable and unfamiliar legs. When his boat was almost under the dock he’d spoken, “Hello, legs.”

“You may call me Lib,” she’d said. “You’re Randy Bragg, aren’t you? I’ve sort of been expecting you’d call.”

When they’d become something more than friends, although less than lovers, he’d accused her of luring him with her lovely legs. Lib had laughed and said, “I didn’t know, then, that you were a leg man but I’m glad you are. Most American males have a fixation about the mammary gland. A symptom of momism, I think. Legs are for men’s pleasure, breasts for babies’. Oh, that’s really sour grapes. I only said it because I know my legs are my only real asset. I’m flat and I’m not pretty.” Technically, she was accurate. She was no classic beauty when you considered each feature individually. She was only beautiful in complete design, in the way she moved and was put together.

She came up the stairs and curled a bare arm around his neck and kissed him, a brief kiss, a greeting. “I’ve been trying to get you on the phone all day,” she said. “I’ve been thinking and I’ve reached an important conclusion. Where’ve you been?”

“My brother stopped at McCoy, flying back to Omaha. I had to meet him.” He led her into the living room. “Drink?”

“Ginger ale, if you have it.” She sat on a stool at the bar, one knee raised and clasped between her hands. She wore a sleeveless, turquoise linen blouse, doeskin shorts, and moccasins.

He tumbled ice into a glass and poured ginger ale and said, “What’s this important conclusion?”

“You’ll get mad. It’s about you.”

“Okay, I’ll get mad.”

“I think you ought to go to New York or Chicago or San Francisco or any city with character and vitality. You should go to work. This place is no good for you, Randy. The air is like soup and the people are like noodles. You’re vegetating. I don’t want a vegetable. I want a man.”

He was instantly angry, and then he told himself that for a number of reasons, including the fact that her diagnosis was probably the truth, it was silly to be angry. He said, “If I went away and left you here, wouldn’t you turn into a noodle?”

“I’ve thought it all out. As soon as you get a job, I’ll follow you. If you want, we can live together for a while. If it’s good, we can get married.”

He examined her face. Her mouth, usually agile and humorous, was drawn into a taut, colorless line. Her eyes, which reflected her moods as the river reflected the sky, were gray and opaque. Under the soft tan painted by winter’s sun her skin was pale. She was serious. She meant it. “Too late,” he said.

“What do you mean, ‘too late’?”

Yesterday, there might have been sense and logic to her estimate, and he might have accepted this challenge, invitation, and proposal. But since morning, they had lived in diverging worlds. It was necessary that he lead her down into his world, yet not too abruptly, lest sight and apprehension of the future imperil her capacity to think clearly and act intelligently. “My sister-in-law and her two children are coming to stay with me,” he began. “They get in tonight—in the morning, really. Three thirty.”

“Fine,” she said. “Meet them, turn the house over to them, and then pick yourself a city—a nice, big, live city. They can have this place all to themselves and while they’re here you won’t have to worry about the house. How long are they staying?”

“I don’t know,” Randy said. Maybe forever, he almost added, but didn’t.

“It won’t matter, really, will it? When they leave you can rent the house. If they leave soon you ought to get a good price for it for the rest of the season. What’s your sister-in-law like?”

“I haven’t told you the reason they’re coming.” He reached out and covered her hands. Her fingers, long, round, strong, matched her throat. Her nails were tinted copper, and carefully groomed. He tried to frame the right words. “My brother believes—”

Graf, lying near Randy’s stool, rolled to his feet, hair bristling like a razorback pig, tail and ears at attention, and then raced into the hallway and down the stairs, barking wildly.

“That’s the loudest dog I’ve ever met!” Lib said. “What’s eating him now?”

“He’s got radar ears. Nothing can get close to the house without him knowing.” Randy went downstairs. It was Dan Gunn at the door. An angular, towering man, sad-faced and saturnine, wearing heavy-framed glasses, awkward in movement and sparing of speech, he stepped into the hallway, not bothering to glance at Graf. Dan said, “You got a woman upstairs, Randy? I know you have because her car is in the driveway.” He removed his pipe from his mouth and almost smiled. “I’d like to talk to her. About her mother. Her father, too.”

“Go on up to the apartment, Dan,” Randy said. “I’ll just wander around in the yard.” He guessed that Dan had just come from a professional visit to the McGoverns. Lib’s mother had diabetes. He didn’t know what her father had, but if Dan was going to discuss family illnesses with Lib, he would politely vanish.

“I don’t think Elizabeth will mind if you sit in on this,” Dan said. “Practically one of the family by now, aren’t you?”

Going upstairs Randy decided that Dan, too, should know of Mark’s warning. If anybody ought to know, it was a doctor. And at the same time Randy realized he had not included drugs in his list, and the medicine cabinet held little except aspirin, nasal sprays, and mouthwash. With two children coming, he should’ve planned better than that. Anyway, Dan was the man to tell him what to get, and write the prescriptions.

Randy mixed Dan a drink and said, “Our medic is here to see you, Lib, not me. When he’s finished talking, I’ve got something to say to both of you.”

Dan looked at him oddly. “Sounds like you’re about to make a pronouncement.”

“I am. But you go first.”

“It’s nothing urgent or terribly important. I was just making the placebo circuit and dropped in to see Elizabeth’s mother.”

“The what?” Lib asked. Randy had heard Dan use the phrase before.

“Placebo, or psychosomatic circuit—the middle-aged retirees and geriatrics who have nothing to do but get lonely and worry about their health. The only person they can call who can’t avoid visiting them is their doctor. So they call me and I let them bend my ear with symptoms. I give them sugar pills or tranquilizers—one seems about as good as the other. I tell them they’re going to live. This makes them happy. I don’t know why.”

At thirty-five, Dan was a souring idealist. After medical school in Boston he’d started practice in a Vermont town and in his free hours slaved at post-graduate studies in epidemiology. His target had been the teeming continents and the great plagues—malaria, typhus, cholera, typhoid, dysentery—and he was angling for a World Health Organization or Point Four appointment. Then he’d married. His wife—Randy did not know her name because Dan never uttered it—apparently had been extravagant, a nympho, a one-drink alcoholic, and a compulsive gambler. She’d recoiled at the thought of living in Equatorial Africa or a delta village in India, and pestered him to set up practice in New York or Los Angeles, where the big money was. When Dan refused, she took to spending weekends in New York, an easy pickup at her favorite bar in the Fifties. So he’d been a gentleman and let her go to Reno and get the divorce. When her luck ran out she returned East, filed suit for alimony, and the judge had given her everything she’d asked. Now she lived in Los Angeles and each week shovelled the alimony into bingo games or pari-mutuel machines, and Dan’s career was ended before it had begun. A World Health or Point Four salary would barely pay her alimony and leave nothing for him, and a doctor can’t skip, except into the medical shadowland of criminal practice. He had come to Florida because the state was growing and his practice and fees would be larger and he thought he’d eventually accumulate enough money to offer her a cash settlement and suture the financial hemorrhage.

In Fort Repose, Dan shared the one-story Medical Arts Building with an older man, Dr. Bloomfield, and two dentists. He lived frugally in a two-room suite in the Riverside Inn, where he acted as house physician for the aging guests during the winter season. His gross income had doubled. While he delivered babies for Pistolville and Negro families for $25, he balanced this with ten-dollar house calls on the placebo circuit. In a single two-hour sweep up River Road, handing out placebos and tranquilizers, he often netted $100. It did him no good. He discovered he was inexorably squeezed between alimony and taxes. Taxes rose with income and the escalator clause in his alimony order took effect. Once, he and Randy figured out that if his gross rose to more than $50,000 a year he would have to go into bankruptcy. Dan could imagine no combination of circumstances that would allow him to amass enough capital to buy off his former wife and set him free to fight the plagues. So he was a bitter man, but, Randy believed, a kind man, perhaps even a great one.

Lib said, “You don’t consider our house a stop on the placebo circuit, do you?”

“No,” Dan said, “and yes. Your mother does have diabetes.” He paused, to let her understand that was not all that was wrong. “She called me today. She was very much upset. She wondered whether she could change from insulin to the new oral drug. You’ve been giving her her insulin shot every morning, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Lib said. “She can’t bear to stick herself and she won’t let my father do it. She says he’s too rough. Says Dad jabs her like he enjoys it.”

This was something Randy hadn’t known before.

Dan said, “She wants me to get her oranise because she says you’re talking about leaving her.”

Lib said, “Yes, I do intend to leave. I’m going to leave when Randy leaves.”

Randy started to speak, but checked himself. He could wait a moment.

Dan wiped his glasses. His face dropped unhappily. “I don’t know about experimenting,” he said. “Your mother is balanced at seventy units of insulin a day. A pretty solid shot. I don’t want to take her off insulin. She’ll have to learn to use the hypodermic herself. Now, let’s move on to your father.”

“My father! Nothing’s wrong with Dad, is there?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. He’s turning into a zombie, Elizabeth. Doesn’t he have any hobbies? Can’t he start a new business? He’s only sixty-one and, except for a little hypertension, in good shape physically. But he is dying faster than he should. The better a man is at business, the worse in retirement. One day he’s running a big corporation and the next day he isn’t allowed to run anything, even his own home. He wishes himself dead, and he dies.”

Lib had been listening intently. She said, “It’s even harder on Dad. You see, he didn’t retire by choice. He was fired. Oh, we all call it retirement, and he gets his pension, but the board eased him out—he lost a quiet little proxy fight—and now he doesn’t think he is of any use to anyone at all.”

“I felt,” Dan said, “it was something like that.” He was silent a moment “I’d like to help him. I think he’s worth saving.”

Now Randy knew it was time to speak. “When you came in, Dan, I was about to tell Lib what Mark told me today, out at McCoy. He is afraid—he is sure—that we are on the verge of war. That’s why Helen and the children are being sent down here. Mark thinks the Russians are already staged for it.”

Randy watched them. Comprehension seemed to come first to Elizabeth. She said, softly, “Oh, God!” Her fingers locked in her lap and grew white.

Dan’s head shook, a negative tremor. He looked at the decanter and Randy’s half-empty glass on the bar. “You haven’t been drinking, have you, Randy?”

“First today—since breakfast.”

“I didn’t think you’d been drinking. I was just hoping.” Dan’s massive head, with the coarse, wiry, reddish hair at the temples, bent forward as if his neck could no longer support it. “I guess that makes everything hypothetical,” he said. “How soon?”

“Mark doesn’t know and I can’t even guess. Today—tomorrow—next week—next month—you name it.”

Lib looked at her watch. “News at six,” she said. A portable radio no larger than a highball glass stood at the end of the bar. She turned it on.

Randy kept the portable tuned to WSMF (Wonderful San Marco, Florida) the biggest station in the county. The dance music faded and the voice of Happy Hedrix, the disk jockey, said:

“Well, all of you frozen felines, I’ve got to take the needle out of the groove for five minutes so the cubes—a cube is a square anyway you look at him, hah, hah—can get hip with what cooks around the sphere. So let’s start in with the weather. It’s sixty-nine outside our studios right now and the forecast for Central Florida is fair and mild with light to moderate east winds tomorrow, and no frost danger through Tuesday. That’s good fishing weather, folks, and to prove it here’s a story from Tavares, over in Lake County, Jonas Corkle, of Hyannis, Nebraska, today caught a thirteen pound, four-ounce bigmouth in Lake Dora to take the lead in Lake County’s Winter Bass Tournament. He used a black eel bait. A UP item from Washington says the Navy has ordered preventive action against unidentified jet planes which have been shadowing the Sixth Fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean. At Tropical Park today, Bald Eagle won the Coral Handicap by three lengths, paying eleven-sixty. Careless Lady was second and Rumpus third. Now, turning to news of Wall Street, stocks closed mixed, with missiles up and railroads off, in moderate trading. The Dow-Jones averages ...”

Lib turned off Happy Hendrix. She said, “What’s it mean?”

Randy shrugged. “That business in the Mediterranean? It’s happened before. I guess that’s one of the dangerous things about it. We get shockproof. We’ve been conditioned. Standing on the brink of war has become our normal posture.” He turned to Dan. “I think we should lay in some drugs—an emergency kit. How about prescribing for war, Doctor?”

Dan fumbled in his jacket pocket and brought out a pad. He moved slowly and seemed very tired. “I’ll give you both some,” he said, starting to write. “Stuff you can use yourselves without my help. And for your mother, Elizabeth, extra bottles of insulin. Also, I’ll order some oranise from a drug house in Orlando. Local pharmacy doesn’t carry it yet.”

“I thought you’d decided not to experiment with it on Mother?” Lib said.

“Insulin,” Dan said, continuing to write, “requires refrigeration.”

Dan dropped the prescriptions on the bar. “Good night,” he said. “I’m delivering a baby at the clinic at seven. Caesarian section. Life goes on. At least that’s what I’m going to believe until proved otherwise.” He rose and shambled out of the room.

Lib walked around the counter. “Hold me,” she said.

Randy held her, crushed her, strangely without any passion except fear for her. Usually he had only to feel her body, or brush his lips across her hair and smell what she called “my courting perfume” to become aroused. Now his arms were completely encircling and completely protective. All he asked was that she live and he live and that things remain the same.

She kept rolling her smooth head against his throat. She was saying no to it. She was willing and praying the clock to stand still, as Randy was; but, as Mark had said, this was against nature.

She raised her head and gently pushed herself away and said, “Thanks, Randy. I get strength from you. Did you know that? Now tell me, what should I do?”

“You’d better drive back to your house and speak with your mother and father.”

“I don’t think they’ll believe it. They don’t pay much attention to the international situation and Mother doesn’t ever like to talk about anything unpleasant.”

“They probably won’t believe it. After all, they don’t know Mark. Put it up to your father, as a business proposition. Tell him it’s like taking out insurance. Anyway, be sure and get Dan’s prescriptions filled.”

“I’ll get the medicines tomorrow,” she said. “Food isn’t a problem. Our cupboard isn’t exactly bare. What are you going to do, Randy? Hadn’t you better get some rest if you have to be at the airport at three-thirty?”

“I’ll try.” He took her into his arms again and kissed her, this time not feeling protective at all, and she responded, her fears contained.

They left the house as the distended red sun dropped into the river where it joined the wide St. Johns. She got into the car. He touched her lips again. “If you need me, call.”

“Don’t worry. I will. See you tomorrow, Randy.”

“Yes, tomorrow.”

Now at this hour, when the cirrus clouds stretched like crimson ribbons high across the southwest sky, in such a hush that not even a playful eddy dared stir moss or palm fronds, the day died in calm and in beauty. This was Randy’s hour, this and dawn, time of stillness and of peace.

His eye was attracted by movement in a clump of Turk’s-cap across the road, and then again, he saw the damn bird. There could be little doubt of it. Even at this distance, without binoculars, he could distinguish the white-rimmed eyes. Moving very slowly and in silence, drifting from bush to bush, he crossed the lawn.

If he could cross the road and Florence Wechek’s front yard without frightening it, he might make a positive identification.

Florence and Alice Cooksey watched him. Florence had been observing him from behind the bedroom blinds while he talked with the McGovern girl, and kissed her goodbye, a disgusting public exhibition. She had watched him stand in the driveway, hands on hips, alone and, for a long time, motionless. Then incredulously, she had seen him bend over and stealthily move toward her, and she had called Alice. “There he is!” she said triumphantly. “I told you so. Come and see for yourself. He’s a Peeping Tom, all right!”

Alice, peering through the louvers, said, “I think he’s stalking something.”

“Yes, me.”

They watched while he crossed the road, placing his feet carefully as a heron feeding on minnows in the shallows. “The sneak!” Florence said.

He reached Florence’s lawn and for a moment hid behind a clump of boxwood. “He’s going around the side of the house,” Florence said. “I think we can watch better from the dining room.” She ran into the dining room, Alice following.

Bent almost double, he advanced from the boxwood toward the Turk’s-cap. Suddenly he straightened, threw an imaginary hat to the ground, and Florence heard him say distinctly, “Oh, Goddam!” At the same time she heard Anthony shaking the cage on the back porch. Anthony had come home for the night. Then she heard Randy on the back porch. Anthony squawked. Randy swore, and shouted, “Hey, Florence!”

She opened the kitchen door and said, “Now look here, Randolph Bragg, I’m not having any more of your prowling around the house and staring at me while I’m dressing. You ought to be ashamed!”

Randy, mouth open, astonished, stared at the two birds, Anthony on the outside of the cage, Cleo fluttering within. He said, “Is that your bird?” He pointed at Anthony.

“Certainly it’s my bird.”

“What kind of a bird is it?”

“Why he’s an African lovebird, of course.”

Randy shook his head. “I’m a dope. I thought he was a Carolina parakeet. You know, the Carolina parakeet is, or was, our only native parrot. A specimen hasn’t been identified since 1925. They’re supposed to be extinct. If that isn’t one, I’m willing to admit they are.”

“Is that why you’ve been spying on me? I saw you at it this morning, with glasses.”

“I haven’t been spying on you, Florence. I’ve been spying on that fake Carolina parakeet.” He noticed Alice Cooksey standing behind Florence, smiling. Alice was one of his favorite people. He really ought to tell Alice about Mark, and what Mark predicted. Ought to tell Florence as well, but Florence still looked upset and angry. He said, “Now, Florence, cool off. I’ve got something important to tell you.”

“Bird watcher!” Florence shrieked. She slammed the kitchen door in his face and fled into the house.

Randy put his hands in his pockets and strolled home. The world was real crazy. He’d talk to Florence and Alice in the morning, after Florence settled down.

In his kitchen, Randy made himself a cannibal sandwich. Lib considered his habit of eating raw ground round, smeared with horseradish and mustard and pressed between slices of rye bread, barbarous. He’d explained it was simply a bachelor’s meal, quick and lazy, and anyway he liked it.

He trotted downstairs and examined the purchases lined on shelves and stacked in closets. Some of it was pretty exotic stuff for an emergency. Perhaps he should make up a small kit of delicacies. If the worst happened, this would be their iron rations for a desperate time. If nothing happened, it would all keep. He selected a jar of English beef tea, a sealed package of bouillon cubes, a jar of Swiss chocolates and a sealed tin of hardcandies, a canned Italian cheese and a few other small items. He placed them all in a small carton, wrapped the carton in foil, and took it up to the apartment. The teak chest in the office was a fine place to hide it and forget it. He rummaged through the chest, rearranging old legal documents, abstracts, bundles of letters, a packet of Confederate currency, peeling photograph albums. Lieutenant Peyton’s log and a half-dozen baby books—all family memorabilia judged not valuable enough to warrant space in a safe deposit vault but too valuable to throw away—and made space for the iron rations at the bottom.

At seven o’clock he listened to the news. There was nothing startling. He flopped down on a studio couch, picked up a magazine, and started to read an article captioned, “Next Stop—Mars.” Presently the words danced in front of his eyes, and he slept.

When it was seven Friday evening in Fort Repose, it was two o’clock Saturday morning in the Eastern Mediterranean, where Task Group 6.7 turned toward the north and headed for the narrow seas between Cyprus and Syria. The shape of the task group was a giant oval, its periphery marked by the wakes of destroyers and guided-missile frigates and cruisers. The center of Task Group 6.7, and the reason for its existence, was the U.S.S. Saratoga, a mobile nuclear striking base. In Saratoga’s Combat Information Center two officers watched a bright blip on the big radar repeater. It winked on and off, like a tiny green eye opening and closing. Interrogated by a “friend or foe” radar impulse, it had not replied. It was hostile. For thirty-six hours, ever since passing Malta, Saratoga had been shadowed. This blip was the latest shadower.

One of the officers said, “No use sending up a night fighter. That bogy is too fast. But an F-11-F could catch him. So we’ll let him hang around, let him close in. Maybe he’ll come close enough for a missile shot from Canberra. If not, we’ll launch F-11-F’s at first light.”

The other officer, an older man, a senior captain, frowned. He disliked risking his ship in an area of restricted maneuver while under enemy observation. He always thought of the Mediterranean as a sack, anyway, and they were approaching the bottom of it. He said, “All right. But be damn sure we chase him out of radar range before we enter the Gulf of Iskenderun.”