Alas, Babylon Part 3

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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.ses, 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 p.r.o.nouncement."

"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. Afrer 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 acc.u.mulate 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 circ.u.mstances that would allow him to ama.s.s 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 gla.s.ses. 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 hyper tension, 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, G.o.d!" 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 gla.s.s 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 ma.s.sive head, with the coa.r.s.e, 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 gla.s.s 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 fis.h.i.+ng weather, folks, and to prove it here's a story from Tavares, over in Lake County, Jones Corkle, of Hyannis, Nebraska, today caught a thirteen pound, four-ounce bigmouth in Lake Dora to take the lead in Lake County's Winter Ba.s.s Tournament. He used a black eel bait. A UP item from Was.h.i.+ngton 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 pa.s.sion 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 run 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 d.a.m.n 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 doorway, 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, G.o.d dam!" 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 gla.s.ses."

"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 doc.u.ments, abstracts, bundles of letters, a packet of Confederate currency, peeling photograph alb.u.ms. Lieutenant Peyton's log and a half-dozen baby books-all family memorabilia judged not valuable enough to warrant s.p.a.ce in a safe deposit vault but too valuable to throw away-and made s.p.a.ce 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 pa.s.sing 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 Canben^a. 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 s.h.i.+p 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 d.a.m.n sure we chase him out of radar range before we enter the Gulf of Iskenderun."

Chapter 4

Helen Bra's battle was over, and she had lost. The tickets were in her handbag. Their luggage-Mark had made them pack almost all the clothes they owned and paid an outrageous sum for the extra weight-was piled on the baggage cart already wheeled outside on the concrete, fine snow settling on it. She had lost, and yet fifteen minutes before plane time she still protested, not in the hope that Mark would change his mind. It was simply that she felt miserable and guilty. She said, "I still don't think I ought to go. I feel like a deserter."

They stood together in the terminal lobby, a tiny island oblivious to the human eddies around them. Her gloved hand held to his arm, her cheek was pressed tightly against his shoulder. He pressed her hand and said, "Don't be silly. Anybody with any sense gets out of a primary target area at a time like this. You aren't the first to leave, and you won't be the last."

"That doesn't make it right and it isn't right. My place is here with you."

He pulled her around to face him, so that her upturned mouth was inches from his own. "That's just it. You can't stay with me. If and when it comes I'll be in the Hole, protected by fifty feet of concrete and steel and good earth. That's where my place is and that's where you can't be. You'd be somewhere on the surface exposed. If you could come down into the Hole with me, then you could stay, darling."

This was something he had not said before, a fact she had not considered. Somehow it made her feel a bit better, yet she continued to argue, although dispiritedly. "Still, I think my job is here."

His fingers banded her arm and when he spoke his voice was flat, a direct order. "Your job is to survive because if you don't the children won't survive. That is your job. There is no other. You understand that, Helen?"

On the other side of the drafty terminal Ben Franklin and Peyton buzzed around the newsstand, each with a dollar to spend on candy, gum, and magazines. They knew only that they were getting out of school a week early, and were spending Christmas vacation in Florida. That's all Helen had told them, and in the excitement of packing, and greeting their father, and then packing more bags, there had been no questions. Helen said, "I understand." Her head dropped against Mark's chest. "If this business blows over you'll let us come right home, won't you?"

"Sure."

"You promise?" "Certainly I promise."

"Maybe we could be home before the next school term." "Don't count on it, darling. But I'll call you every day, and as soon as I think it's safe I'll give you the word."

The loudspeaker announced Flight 714 for Chicago, connecting with flights east and south.

The children ran over to them. Peyton carried a quiver and bow slung over her shoulder. Ben Franklin a cased spinning rod, his Christmas present from Randy the year before.

Mark shepherded them outside, and toward Gate 3. He lifted Peyton off the ground and held her a moment and kissed her, disarranging her red knitted cap. "My hair!" she said, laughing, and he put her down.

He noticed other pa.s.sengers filtering through the gate. He drew Ben Franklin aside. He said, "Behave yourself, son."