Chapter 7

   When nuclear fireballs crisped Orlando and the power plants serving Timucuan County, refrigeration stopped, along with electric cooking. The oil furnaces, sparked by electricity, died. All radios were useless unless battery powered or in automobiles. Washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, fryers, toasters, roasters, vacuum cleaners, shavers, heaters, beaters-all stopped. So did the electric clocks, vibrating chairs, electric blankets, irons for pressing clothes, curlers for hair.
   The electric pumps stopped, and when the pumps stopped the water stopped and when the water stopped the bathrooms ceased functioning.
   Not until the second day after The Day did Randy Bragg fully understand and accept the results of the loss of electricity. Temporary loss of power was nothing new in Fort Repose. Often, during the equinoctial storms, poles and trees came down and power lines were severed. This condition rarely lasted for more than a day, for the repair trucks were out as soon as the wind abated and the roads became passable.
   It was hard to realize that this time the power plants themselves were gone. There could be no doubt of it. On Sunday and Sunday night a number of survivors from Orlando’s suburbs drove through Fort Repose, foraging for food and gasoline. They could not be positive of what had happened, except that the area of destruction extended for eight miles from Orlando airport, encompassing College Park and Rollins College, and another explosion had centered on McCoy Air Force Base. The Orlando Conelrad stations had warned of an air raid just before the explosions, so it was presumed that this attack had not come from submarine-based missiles or ICBM’s, but from bombers.
   Randy did not hear Mrs. Vanbruuker-Brown again, or any further hard news or instructions on the clear channel stations on Sunday or Monday. He did hear WSMF announcing that it would be on the air only two minutes each hour thereafter, since it was operating on auxiliary power. He knew that the hospital in San Marco possessed an auxiliary diesel generator. He concluded that this source of power was being tapped, each hour on the hour, to operate the radio station.
   Each hour the county Conelrad station repeated warnings to boil all drinking water, do not drink fresh milk, do not use the telephone, and, in the Sunday morning hours after the destruc tion of Orlando, warnings to take shelter and guard against fallout and radiation. There had been no milk deliveries and the telephones hadn’t worked since the first mushroom sprouted in the south; nor were there any actual shelters in Fort Repose. All Sunday, Randy insisted that Helen and the children stay in the house. He knew that any shelter, even a slate roof, insulation, walls, and roof, was better than none. There was no time to dig. The time to dig had been before The Day. After Orlando, digging seemed wasted effort. Anyway, there were so many other things to do, each minor crisis demanding instant attention. While radiation was a danger, it could not be felt or seen, and therefore other dangers, and even annoyances, seemed more imperative.
   At two o’clock Monday afternoon Helen was in Randy’s apartment, and they were listening to the hourly Conelrad broadcast, when Ben Franklin marched in and announced, “We’re just about out of water.”
   “That’s impossible!” Randy said.
   “It’s Peyton’s fault,” said Ben Franklin. “Every time she goes to the john she has to flush it. The tub in our bathroom is empty, and she’s been dipping water out of mother’s bathtub too.” Randy looked at Helen. This was a mother’s problem. “Peyton’s a fastidious little girl,” Helen said. “After all, one of the first things a child learns is always to flush the john. What’re we going to do?”
   Randy said, “For now, Ben Franklin and I will drive down to the dock and fill up what washtubs and buckets we have out of the river. You can’t drink river water without boiling it but it’ll be okay for the toilets. And from now on Peyton-all of us—can’t afford to be so fastidious. We’ll flush the toilets only twice a day. Then I guess we’ll have to dig latrines out in the grove because I can’t haul water from the river forever. Matter of gasoline.”
   Randy looked out on the grove, noticing a thin powder of dust on the leaves. There had been a long dry spell. The fine, clear, crisp days with low humidity were wonderful for people but bad for the orange crop. He would have to turn on the sprinklers in the grove. . . .
   He slammed his fist on the bar counter and shouted, “I’m a damn fool! We’ve got all the water we want!”
   “Where?” Helen asked.
   “Right out there!” Randy waved his arms. “Artesian water, unlimited!”
   “But that’s in the grove, isn’t it?”
   “I’m sure we can pipe it into the house. After all, that’s the same water the Henrys use every day. I think there are some big wrenches in the garage and Malachai will know how to do it. Come on, Ben, let’s go over to the Henrys’.”
   Randy and the boy walked down the old gravel and clay road that led from the garage through the grove and to the river. Randy’s navels had been picked, but the Valencias were still on the trees. They would not be picked this year. Matching strides with Randy, Ben Franklin said, “I just thought of something.” “Yes?”
   “I don’t have to go to school any more.”
   “What makes you think you don’t have to go to school? As soon as things get back to normal you’re going to school, young feller. Want to grow up to be an ignoramus?”
   Ben Franklin scuffed a pebble, looked up sideways at Randy, and grinned. “What school?”
   “Why, the school in Fort Repose, of course, until you can go back to Omaha, or wherever your father is stationed.”
   Ben stopped. “Just a minute, Randy. I’m not fooling myself. Nobody’s going back to Omaha, maybe ever. And I don’t think I’ll ever see Dad again. The Hole wasn’t safe, you know. Maybe you think so. I know Mother does. But I’m not fooling myself, Randy, and don’t you try to fool me.”
   Randy put his hands on the boy’s shoulders and looked into his face, measuring the depth of courage behind the brown eyes, finding it at least as deep as his own. “Okay, son,” he said, “I’ll level with you. I’ll level with you, and don’t you ever do anything less with me. I think Mark has had it. I think you’re the man of the family from now on.”
   “That’s what Dad said.”
   “Did he? Well, you’re a man who still has to go to school. I don’t know where, or when, or how. But as soon as school reopens in Fort Repose, or anywhere around, you go. You may have to walk.”
   “Golly, Randy, walk! It’s three miles to town.”
   “Your grandfather used to walk to school in Fort Repose. When he was your age there weren’t any school busses. When he couldn’t hitch a ride in a buggy, or one of the early automobiles, he walked.” Randy put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. “Let’s get going. I guess we’ll both have to learn to walk again.”
   They walked down to the dock, and then followed a trail that led through the dense hammock to the Henrys’ cleared land. The Henrys’ house was divided into four sections, representing four distinct periods in their fortunes and history. The oldest section had originally been a one-room log cabin. It was the only surviving structure of what had once been the slave quarters, and Randy recalled that his grandfather had always referred to the Henrys’ place as “the quarters.” In recent years the cabin had been jacked up and a concrete foundation laid under the stout cypress logs. The logs, originally chinked with red clay, were bound together with white-washed mortar. It was now the Henrys’ living room:
   Late in the nineteenth century a two-room pine shack had been added to the cabin. In the ‘twenties another room, and a bath, more soundly constructed, had been tacked on. In the ‘for ties, after Two-Tone’s marriage to Missouri, the house had been enlarged by a bedroom and a new kitchen, built with concrete block. It was a comfortable hodgepodge, its ugliness concealed under a patina of flame vine, bougainvillea, and hibiscus. A neat green bib of St. Augustine grass fell from the screened porch to the river bank and dock. In the back yard was a chicken coop and wired runs, a pig pen, and an ancient barn of unpainted cypress leaning wearily against a scabrous chinaberry tree. The barn housed Balaam, the mule, the Model-A, and a hutch of white rabbits.
   Fifty yards up the slope Preacher Henry and Balaam solemnly disked the land, moving silently and evenly, as if they perfectly understood each other. Caleb lay flat on his belly on the end of the dock, peering into the shadowed waters behind a piling, jigging a worm for bream. Two-Tone sat on the screened porch, rocking languidly and lifting a can of beer to his lips. From the kitchen came a woman’s deep, rich voice, singing a spiritual. That would be Missouri, washing the dishes. Hot, black smoke from burning pine knots issued from both brick chimneys. It seemed a peacefiil home, in time of peace.
   Ben Franklin yelled, “Hey, Caleb!”
   Caleb’s face bobbed up. “Hi, Ben,” he called. “Come on out.”
   “What’re you catching?” “Ain’t catchin,’ just jiggin’.”
   Randy said, “You can go out on the dock if you want, Ben, but I’ll probably need your help in a while.”
   Ben looked surprised. “Me? You’ll need my help?”
   “Yep,” Randy said. “A man of the house has to do a man’s work.”
   Preacher Henry dropped his reins, yelled, “Ho!” and Balaam stopped. Preacher walked across the dusty field, to be planted in corn in February, to meet Randy. Malachai came out of the barn. He had been under the Model-A. Two-Tone stopped rocking, put down his can of beer, and left the porch. Inside, Missouri stopped singing.
   Randy walked toward the back door and the Henrys converged on him, their faces apprehensive. Malachai said, “Hello, Mister Randy. Hope everything’s all right.”
   “About as right as they could be, considering. Everything okay here?”
   “Just like always. How’s the little girl? Missouri told me she was about blinded.”
   “Peyton’s better. She can see now and in a few days she’ll be allowed outside again. No permanent injury.”
   “The Lord be merciful!” said Preacher Henry. “The Lord has spared us, for the now. I knew it was a-comin’, for it was all set down, Alas, Babylon!” Preacher’s eyes rolled upward. Preacher was big-framed, like Malachai, but now the muscles had shrunk around his bones, and age and troubles deeply wrinkled and darkened his face.
   Randy addressed his words to Preacher, because Preacher was the father and head of the household. “We don’t have water in our house. I want to take up some pipe out of the grove and hook it on to the artesian system.”
   “Yes, sir, Mister Randy! I’ll drop my diskin’ right now and help.”
   “No, you stick with the disking, Preacher. I thought maybe Malachai and Two-Tone could help.”
   Two-Tone, who was called Two-Tone because the right side of his face was two shades lighter than the left side, looked stricken. “You mean now?” Two-Tone said.
   Malachai grinned. “You heard the man, Two-Tone. He means now.”
   The three men, with Ben Franklin and Caleb helping, required two hours to lift the pipes and connect the artesian line with the water system in the pumphouse.
   It was the hardest work Randy remembered since climbing and digging in Korea. The palm of his right hand was blistered from the pipe wrench, and a swatch of skin flapped loose. He was exhausted and wet with sweat despite the chill of evening. He was grateful when Malachai offered to carry the tools back to the garage. He said, “Thanks, Malachai. You know that two hundred bucks I loaned you?”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “Just consider the debt canceled.” They both grinned.
   Randy and Ben Franklin went back into the house. Randy turned on the tap in the kitchen sink. It gurgled, coughed, sputtered, and then spurted water.
   “Isn’t it beautiful!” Helen said.
   Randy washed the grime from his hands, the water stinging the broken blisters. He filled a glass. The artesian water still smelled like rotten eggs. He gulped it. It tasted wonderful.
   Just after dawn on the third day after The Day a helicopter floated over Fort Repose and then turned toward the upper reaches of the Timucuan. Randy and Helen, hearing it, ran up to the captain’s walk on the roof. It passed close overhead, and they distinguished the Air Force insignia.
   This was also the day of disastrous overabundance.
   That morning, when Helen apprehensively opened the freezer, she found several hundred pounds of choice and carefully wrapped meat floating in a noxious sea of melted ice cream and liquified butter. As any housewife would do under the circumstances, she wept.
   This disaster was perfectly predictable, Randy realized. He had been a fool. Instead of buying fresh meat, he should have bought canned meats by the case. If there was one thing he certainly should have forseen, it was the loss of electricity. Even had Orlando escaped, the electricity would have died within a few weeks or months. Electricity was created by burning fuel oil in the Orlando plants. When the oil ran out, it could not be replenished during the chaos of war. There was no longer a rail system, or rail centers, nor were tankers plying the coasts on missions of civilian supply. It was Sam Hazzard’s guess that few major seaports had escaped. After the first wave of missiles from the submarines, they could still be taken out by atomic torpedoes, atomic mines, or bombs or missiles from aircraft. It was Sam Hazzard’s guess that what had been the great ports were now great, water filled craters. Even those sections of the country which escaped destruction entirely would not long have lights. Their power would last only as long as fuel stocks on hand.
   They stared into the freezer, Helen sniffling, Randy numb, Ben Franklin fascinated. Ben dipped his finger into a pool of liquid chocolate and licked it. “Still tastes good but it isn’t even cool,” he said. “All that ice cream! I could’ve been eating ice cream all yesterday; Peyton, too.”
   Helen stopped sniffling. “The meat won’t spoil for another twenty-four hours. I’m going to salvage what I can.”
   “How?” Randy asked.
   “Boil it, salt it, preserve it, pickle it. I’ve got a dozen Mason jars in the closet. There may be more around somewhere. Perhaps you can get some downtown, Randy.”
   “Town and back means a half-gallon of gas,” Randy said. “It’s worth it, if you can just find a few. And we’ll need more salt.”
   “Okay, I’ll give it a try. Maybe I can find jars at the hardware store, if Beck is still keeping it open.”
   Helen reached into the freezer and lifted out two steaks, six pounders two inches thick. She brought out two more steaks, even thicker. “Steaks, steaks, steaks. Everywhere steaks. How many steaks can Graf eat tonight? How does Graf like his steaks, charcoal-broiled?”
   Graf, lying in the doorway between kitchen and utility room, ears cocked and alert at sound of his name, sniffed the wonderful odor of ripening meat in quantity.
   “He likes ‘em and I like ‘em,” Randy said, “and we’ve got a few sacks of charcoal in the garage. So let’s have a party. A steak party to end all steak parties. Literally, that is. We’ll have the Henrys, and the McGoverns.”
   “I’ve always believed in mixing crowds at my parties,” Helen said. “But what about mixing colors?”
   “It’ll be all right. I’ll ask Florence Wechek and Alice Cooksey and Sam Hazzard too. And Dan Gunn, if I can find him. And I’ll scrounge around for more charcoal. It’ll be a relief from cooking in the fireplace.”
   “Don’t forget the salt,” Helen said. “We’re going to need a lot to save this meat.”
   On this, the third day after The Day, the character of Fort Repose had changed. Every building still stood, no brick had been displaced, yet all was altered, especially the people.
   Earlier, Randy had noticed that some of the plate-glass store windows had cracked under the shock waves from Tampa and Orlando. Now the windows of a number of stores were shattered entirely, and glass littered the sidewalks. From alleyways came the sour smell of uncollected garbage.
   Most of the parking spaces on Yulee and St. Johns incongruously were occupied, but the cars themselves were empty, and several had been stripped of wheels.
   There was no commerce. There were few people. Altogether, Randy saw only four or five cars in motion. Those who were not out of gas hoarded what remained in their tanks against graver emergencies to come.
   The pedestrians he saw seemed apprehensive, hurrying along on missions private and vital, shoulders hunched, eyes directed dead ahead. There were no women on the streets, and the men did not walk in pairs, but alone and warily. Randy saw several acquaintances who must have recognized his car. Not one smiled or waved.
   Four young men, strangers, idled in front of the drugstore. The store’s windows were broken, but Randy saw the grim, unhappy face of Old Man Hockstatler, the druggist, at the door. He was staring at the young men, and they were elaborately ignoring him. They were waiting for something, Randy felt. They were waiting like vultures. They were outwaiting Old Man Hockstatler.
   Randy pulled into the parking lot alongside Ajax Super Market. It appeared to be empty. The front door was closed and locked but Randy stepped through a smashed window. The interior looked as if it had been stripped and looted. All that remained of the stock, he noticed immediately, were fixtures, dishes, and plastics on the home-hardware shelves. Significantly nobody had bothered to buy or take electric cords, fuses, or light bulbs. As for food, there seemed to be none left.
   Randy tried to remember where the salt counter had been, but salt was something one bought without thought, like razor blades or toothpaste, not bothering about it until it was needed. He thought of razor blades. He was low on them. Finally he examined the guidance signs hanging over the empty shelves. He saw, “Salt, Flour, Grits, Sugar,” over a wall to his left. The space where these commodities should have been was bare. Not a single bag of salt remained.
   As Randy turned to leave he heard a noise, wood scraping on concrete, in the stockroom in the rear of the store. He opened the stockroom door and found himself looking into the muzzle of a small, shiny revolver. Behind the gun was the skinny, olive colored face of Pete Hernandez. Pete lowered the gun and jammed it into a hip pocket. “Gees, Randy,” he said, “I thought it was some goddam goon come back to clean out the rest of the joint.”
   “All I wanted was some salt.” “Salt? You out of salt already?”
   “No. We want to salt down some meat. We thought we could save part of the meat in the freezer.” Randy saw a grocery truck drawn up to the loading platform behind the store. It was half-filled with cases, and Pete had been pushing other cases down the ramp. So Pete had saved something. “What happened here?” Randy asked.
   “We’d sold out of just about everything by closing time yesterday. When I tried to close up they wouldn’t leave. They wouldn’t pay, neither. They started hollerin’ and laughin’ and grabbin’. I locked myself in back here and that’s how come I’ve got a little something left.” Pete winked. “Bet I can get some price for these canned beans in a couple of weeks.”
   Randy sensed that Pete, perhaps because he had never had much of it, still coveted money. He said, “I’ll give you a price for salt right now.”
   Pete’s eyes flicked sideways. There was a cart in the corner. It was filled with sacks-sugar and salt. Pete said, “I’ve hardly got enough salt to keep things goin’ at home. We’re in the same boat you are, you know. Freezer full of meat. Maybe Rita will be salon’ meat down too.”
   Randy brought out his wallet. Pete looked at it. Pete looked greedy. Randy said, “What’ll you take for two ten-pound sacks of salt?”
   “I ain’t got much salt left.”
   “I’ll give you ten dollars a pound for salt.”
   “That’s two hundred dollars. Bein’ it’s you, okay.” Randy gave him four fifties.
   Pete felt the bills. “Ten bucks a pound for salt!” he said. “Ain’t that something!”
   Randy cradled the sacks under each arm. “Better go out the back way,” Pete said. “Don’t tell nobody where you got it. And Randy-”
   “Yes?”
   “Rita wonders when you’re coming to see her. She’s all the time talking about you. When Rita latches on to a guy she don’t let go in a hurry. You know Rita.”
   Randy rejected the easy evasion of excuses. One of the things he hadn’t liked about Rita was her possessiveness, and another was her brother. He was irritated because he had placed himself in the position of being forced to discuss personal matters with Pete. He said, “Rita and I are through.”
   “That’s not what Rita says. Rita says that other girl-that Yankee blonde-won’t look so good to you now. Rita says this war’s going to level people as well as cities.”
   Randy knew it was purposeless to talk about Rita, or anything, with Pete Hernandez. He said, “So long, Pete,” and left the market.
   Beck’s Hardware was still open, and Mr. Beck, looking tired and bewildered, presided over rows of empty shelves. On The Day itself everything that could be immediately useful, from flashlights and batteries to candles and kerosene lanterns, had vanished. In the continuing buying panic, almost everything else had disappeared. “Only reason I’m still here,” Mr. Beck explained, “is because I’ve been coming here every weekday for twenty-two years and I don’t know what else to do.”
   In the warehouse Beck found a dusty carton of Mason jars. “People don’t go in much for home canning nowadays,” Beck said. “I’d just about forgotten these.”
   “How much?” Randy asked.
   Beck shook his head. “Nothing. That safe is full up to the top with money. That’s all I’ve got left-money. Ain’t that funny-nothing but money?” Mr. Beck laughed. “Know what, I could retire.”
   Randy drove on to the Medical Arts Building. Here, he had expected to find activity. He found none, but he did see Dan Gunn’s car in the parking lot.
   There were reddish brown stains on the sidewalk and the green concrete steps. The glass in the front door was shattered and the door itself swung open. The waiting room was ominously empty. There was no one at the reception desk. Randy possessed a country dweller’s keen sense of smell. Now he smelled many alarming odors-disinfectant, ether, spilled drugs, spilled blood, stale urine. He called, “Dan! Hey, Dan!”
   “I’m back here. Who’s that?” Dan’s voice emerged muffled after echoing through a corridor.
   “It’s me-Randy.”
   “Come on back. I’m in my office.”
   In the corridor’s gloom Randy stumbled over a pair of feet, and he stepped back, shivering. A body lay athwart the doorway of the examination room, legs in the corridor, torso in the room, face up, arms outstretched. The face was half blown away, but when put together with the uniform, it was recognizable as Cappy Foracre, Fort Repose’s Chief of Police.
   Randy hurried on. A fireproof door hung crazily from one hinge. It had been axed open. Behind the door was the laboratory and drug storage. The smell of chemicals that came from the laboratory was choking and overpowering. Within, Randy glimpsed a hillock of smashed jars and bottles. The clinic had been wrecked, insanely and deliberately.
   He was relieved to find Dan Gunn standing in his office. Dan’s face was more deeply shadowed with fatigue and a two-day growth of beard, his shirt was torn, and he looked dirty, but he apparently was unhurt. Two medical bags were open on his desk. He was examining and sorting vials and bottles. Randy said, “What happened?”
   “A carload of addicts-hopheads-came through last night. About three this morning, rather. Jim Bloomfield was here, sleeping on the couch in his office. We’d split up the duty. He took one night, I took the next. You see, with no phones people don’t know what else to do except rush to the clinic in an emergency. Anyway, the addicts-there were six of them, all armed—came in and woke Jim up. They wanted a fix. Poor old Jim was something of a puritan. If he’d given them a fix he might’ve got rid of them.” Dan picked up a hypodermic syringe and slowly squeezed the plunger with his tremendous fingers. “I’d have given ‘em a fix all right-three grains of morphine and that would’ve finished them.” Dan dropped the syringe into one of the bags and shook his head. “That probably wouldn’t have been smart either. Three grains would kill a normal man but it wouldn’t faze an addict. Anyway, Jim told them to go to hell. They beat him up. They emptied these bags and found what they were after. That wasn’t enough. They took the fire ax and broke into the lab and drug storage. They cleaned us out of narcotics-everything, not only morphine but all the barbiturates and sodium amytal and pentothal and stimulants like benzedrine and dexedrine. What they didn’t take they smashed.”

   “What about Cappy Foracre?” Randy asked.
   “Some woman came in and heard the commotion and ran out and got Cappy. He was sleeping in the firehouse. Cappy and Bert Anders-you know, that kid assistant-came screaming over here. Literally screaming, with their siren going, the darn fools. So the hopheads were set for them. There was a battle. More like a fire fight, an ambush, I guess. Cappy caught a shotgun load in the face. Anders got one in the belly. Cappy was dead when I got here, about fifteen minutes later.”
   “And old Doc Bloomfield?” Randy asked.
   Dan swayed and rested his palms on the desk. His head bent. When he spoke it was in a monotone. “I drove Anders and Jim Bloomfield to the hospital in San Marco. I couldn’t operate here, you see. No anesthesia. Couldn’t even sterilize my instruments. Everything septic. Young Anders was dead when I got there. Jim was still alive. I thought he was going to be all right. Beaten up, maybe a rib or two caved in, maybe concussion. Still, he was able to tell me, quite coherently, what had happened. Then he slipped away from me. I don’t know why. He had lived a long time and after this thing happened maybe he didn’t want to live any longer.
   Maybe he didn’t want to belong to the human race any more. He resigned. He died.”
   Randy said, “The bastards! Where did they come from? Where did they go?”
   Dan Gunn shivered. The night had been chilly and it had warmed only slightly during the day and of course there was no heat in the building. He shook his head and slowly straightened, like a great storm-beset ship that has been wallowing in the trough of the sea but will not founder. “Where did they come from?” he said, slipping on his coat. “Maybe they broke out of a state hospital. But more likely they were hoods from St. Louis or Chicago driving to Miami or Tampa for the season. Probably they were addicts as well as pushers. The war caught them between sources of supply. So by last night they were wild for junk, and the quickest way to get it was to detour to some little town like this and raid the clinic. As to where they’re going, I don’t care so long as it’s far from here.”
   Randy resolved never again to leave the house unless he was armed. “You should carry a gun, Dan. I am, from now on.”
   Dan said, “No! No, I’m not going to carry a gun. I’ve spent too many years learning how to save lives to start shooting people now. I’m not worried about punishment for the addicts. They carry a built-in torture chamber. Eventually-I’d say within a few weeks-no matter how many people they kill they’ll find no drugs. After this big jag they’re bound to have withdrawal sickness. They will die, horribly I hope.”
   Dan closed the two bags. “So ends the clinic in Fort Repose. Can you give me a lift to the hotel, Randy? I think my gas tank is y.”
   “I’ll take you to your hotel only so you can pack,” Randy said. “On River Road, we’ve got food, and good water, and wood fireplaces. At the hotel you don’t have any of those things.” He picked up one of the bags. “Now don’t argue with me, Dan. Don’t start talking about your duty. Without food and water and heat you can’t do anything. You can’t even sterilize a scalpel. You won’t have strength enough to take care of anybody. You can’t even take care of yourself.”
   When they entered the hotel Randy smelled it at once, but not until they reached the second floor did he positively identify the odor. Like songs, odors are catalysts of memory. Smelling the odors of the Riverside Inn, Randy recalled the sickly, pungent stench of the honey carts with their loads of human manure for the fields of Korea. Randy spoke of this to Dan, and Dan said, “I’ve tried to make them dig latrines in the garden. They won’t do it. They have deluded themselves into believing that lights, water, maids, telephone, dining-room service, and transportation will all come back in a day or two. Most of them have little hoards of canned foods, cookies, and candies. They eat it in their rooms, alone. Every morning they wake up saying that things will be back to normal by nightfall, and every night they fall into bed thinking that normalcy will be restored by morning. It’s been too big a jolt for these poor people. They can’t face reality.”
   Dan had been talking as he packed. As they left the hotel, laden with bags and books, Randy said, “What’s going to happen to them?”
   “I don’t know. There’s bound to be a great deal of sickness. I can’t prevent it because they won’t pay any attention to me. I can’t stop an epidemic if it comes. I don’t know what’s going to happen to them.”
   Dan moved into the house on River Road that day. Thereafter he slept in the sleigh bed, the only bed in the house that could comfortably accommodate his frame, in Randy’s apartment, while Randy occupied the couch in the living room.
   That night, afterwards, was remembered as “the night of the steak orgy.” Yet it was not for the rich taste of meat well hung that Randy remembered the night. He and the Admiral and Bill McGovern cooked the steaks outside, and then brought them into the living room. Fat wood burned in the big fireplace and a kettle steamed on hot bricks. At a few minutes before ten Randy clicked on his transistor radio, and they all listened. Lib McGovern was sitting on the rug next to him, her shoulder touching his arm. The room was warm, and comfortable, and somehow safe.
   They heard the hum of a carrier wave, and then the voice of an announcer from the clear channel station somewhere deep in the heart of the country. “This is your Civil Defense Headquarters. I have an important announcement. Listen carefully. It will not be repeated again tonight. It will be repeated, circumstances permitting, at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning.”
   Randy felt Lib’s long fingers circle his forearm, and grasp tight. Around the group before the fire, all the faces were anxious, the white faces in the front row, the Negro faces, eyes white and large, behind.
   “A preliminary aerial survey of the country has been completed. By order of the Acting Chief Executive, Mrs. Vanbruuker-Brown, certain areas have been declared Con taminated Zones. It is forbidden for people to enter these zones. It is forbidden to bring any material of any kind, particularly metal or metal containers, out of these zones.
   “Persons leaving the Contaminated Zones must first be examined at check points now being established. The location of these check points will be announced over your local Conelrad stations.
   “The Contaminated Zones are: “The New England States.”
   Sam Hazzard, sitting in a prim cherry-wood rocker which, like Sam, had originated in New England, drew in his breath. The newscaster continued:
   “All of New York State south of the line Ticonderoga Sacketts Harbor.
   “The state of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland.
   “The District of Columbia.
   “Ohio east of the line Sandusky-Chillicothe. Also in Ohio, the city of Columbus and its suburbs.
   “In Michigan, Detroit and Dearborn and an area of fifty mile radius from these cities. Also in Michigan, the cities of Flint and Grand Rapids.
   “In Virginia, the entire Potomac River Basin. The cities of Richmond and Norfolk and their suburbs.
   “In South Carolina, the port of Charleston and all territory within a thirty-mile radius of Charleston.
   “In Georgia, the cities of Atlanta, Savannah, Augusta, and their suburbs.
   “The state of Florida.”
   Randy felt angry and insulted. He shifted his weight and started to get to his feet. “Not the whole state!” he said, at the same time realizing his protest was completely irrational.
   “Sh-h!” Lib said, and pulled him back to the rug.
   The voice went on, ticking off Mobile and Birmingham, New Orleans and Lake Charles.
   It moved into Texas, obliterating Fort Worth and Dallas, and everything within a fifty-mile radius of these two cities, and Abilene, Houston, and Corpus Christi.
   It moved northward again:
   “In Arkansas, Little Rock and its suburbs, plus an area of forty miles to the west of Little Rock.”
   Missouri, who through the whole evening had said nothing except in answer to questions, now said something. “How come they hit Little Rock?”
   The Admiral said, “There’s a big SAC base in Little Rock, or was.”
   The voice moved up to Oak Ridge, in Tennessee, and then spoke of Chicago, and everything around Chicago in northern Indiana, and crept up the western shore of Lake Michigan to Milwaukee, and Milwaukee’s suburbs. Inexorably, it uttered the names of Kansas City, Wichita, and Topeka.
   The voice continued:
   “In Nebraska, Lincoln. Also in Nebraska, Omaha and all the territory within a fifty-mile radius of Omaha.”
   There goes all hope of Mark, Randy thought. More than one missile for Omaha. Probably three, as Mark had expected. From the moment of the double dawn on The Day, he had known it was probable. Now he must accept it as almost certain. He looked across the circle, at three faces in the firelight. Peyton’s face was half-hidden against her mother’s breast. Helen’s face bent down, and her arms were around Peyton’s shoulders. Ben Franklin stared into the fire, his chin straight. Randy could see the tear path down Helen’s face, and the unshed tears in Ben’s eyes.
   The announcements went on, the voice calling out portions of states, and cities-Seattle, Hanford, San Francisco, all the southern California coast, Helena, Cheyenne-but Randy only half-heard them. All he could hear, distinctly, were the sharp sobs out of Peyton’s throat.
   Randy’s heart went out to them but he said nothing. What was there to say? How do you say to a little girl that you are sorry she no longer has a father?
   Close to his side Lib stirred and spoke, two words only, to Helen. “I’m sorry.” Randy had noticed, that evening, a tenseness between Helen and Lib. Nothing was said, and yet there was a watchfulness, a hostility, between them. So he was glad that Lib had spoken. He wanted them to like each other. He was puzzled that they didn’t.
   Then it was over. The radio stilled. More than ever, Randy felt cut off and isolated. Florida was a prohibited zone, and Fort Repose a tiny, isolated sector within that zone. He could appreciate why the whole state had been designated a contaminated area. There were so many bases, so many targets which had been hit, with resulting contamination. They had been extraordinarily fortunate in Fort Repose. The wind had favored them. They had received only a residue of fallout from Tampa and Orlando, and none at all from Miami and Jacksonville. Even a reasonably clean weapon on Patrick would have rained radioactive particles on Fort Repose, but the enemy had not bothered to hit Patrick. Standing on the other side of the room, Preacher Henry had been listening, but he did not fully understand the designation of contaminated zones or comprehend the implications. He did feel and understand the shock and grief the broadcast brought to the Braggs, and he sensed it was time for him to leave. He nudged Malachai, touched Two-Tone’s rump with his toe, caught the attention of Hannah and Missouri, and said, with dignity, “We be going now. I thank you, Mister Randy, for a real fine steak dinner. I hopes we can sometime repay it.”
   Randy rose to his feet and said, “Good night, Preacher. It was good to have you all.”
   On the fourth day after The Day, Randy, Malachai, and Two-Tone extended the artesian water system to the houses of Admiral Hazzard and Florence Wechek. Stretching pipe across the grove to the Admiral’s house was simple, but to provide water for Florence Wechek and Alice Cooksey it was necessary to dig through the macadam of River Road with picks.
   On the night of the sixth day the Riverside Inn burned. With no water in the hydrants, and the hotel’s sprinkler system inoperative, the fire department was all but helpless. Only a few reserve firemen showed up, and only one pumper was got into action, using river water. It was a puny effort, and far too late. The old, resinous wooden structure was burning brightly before the first stream touched the walls. Soon the heat drove the firemen away. A few minutes thereafter the last scream was heard from the third floor.
   Dan had been summoned an hour later, and Randy had driven him into town. By then, there was nothing to do except care for the survivors. They were few. Some of these died of smoke poisoning or fear-it was hard to diagnose-within a few hours. The burned were taken to San Marco in Bubba Offenhaus’ hearse-ambulances. The uninjured were lodged in the Fort Repose school. There was no heat in the school, or food, or water. It was simply shelter, less comfortable than the hotel, and within a few days more squalid.
   Dan Gunn suspected that the fire had started in a room where the guests were using canned heat in an attempt to boil water. Or perhaps someone had built a makeshift wood stove. It was, Dan said, inevitable.
   On the ninth day after The Day, Lavinia McGovern died. This, too, had been inevitable ever since the lights went out and refrigeration ceased. Since Lavinia McGovern suffered from diabetes, insulin had kept her alive. Without refrigeration, insulin deteriorated rapidly. Not only Lavinia, but all diabetics in Fort Repose, dependent upon insulin, died at about the same period as the drug lost its potency.
   Randy and Dan had done their best to save her. They had driven to San Marco hoping to find refrigerated insulin, or the new oral drug, at the hospital.
   It was eighteen miles to San Marco. Even driving at the most economical speed in his heavily horsepowered car, Randy estimated that the trip would consume three gallons of gasoline. He estimated he had only five gallons remaining in his tank, plus a five-gallon can in reserve.
   Randy made a difficult decision. By then, the Bragg home was linked to the houses of Admiral Hazzard, Florence Wechek, and the Henrys not only by an arterial system of pipes fed by nature’s pressure, but by other common needs. The Henrys’ Model-A was neither beautiful nor comfortable but its engine was twice as thrifty as Randy’s rakish sports hardtop. Sam Hazzard’s car gulped gasoline as fast as Randy’s. Dan’s was empty. The Model-A was even more economical than Florence’s old Chevy. Randy decided that henceforth the Model-A would furnish community transportation. So it was in the Model-A that Randy and Dan made the trip to San Marco. sliced, with vitamins re-injected, had cleaned the stores out of flour on The Day. He resolved, when he could, to trade for flour. It would be June before they could look forward to corn bread from Preacher Henry’s crop.
   Alice had bicycled from the McGovern house. Before she closed the Western Union office, Florence Wechek had salvaged the messenger’s bicycle. It was a valuable possession. Now that all their remaining gasoline was pooled to operate one car, the bicycle was primary transportation for Alice and Florence. Alice was for the first time in her life dressed in slacks, a necessity for bicycling. She accepted coffee and told of Lavinia’s death. Bill McGovern and Elizabeth, she said, were taking it well, but they didn’t know what to do with the body. They needed help with the burial.
   “I’ll go to see Bubba Offenhaus right away,” Dan said, “and try to arrange for burial. I’ve got to talk to Bubba anyway. I can’t seem to impress upon him the importance of burying the dead as quickly as possible. He suddenly seems to hate his profession.”
   “That’s not like Bubba,” Alice Cooksey said. “Bubba always bragged that he was the most efficient undertaker in Florida. He used to say, `When the retireds started coming to Fort Repose, they found a mortuary with all modern conveniences.’ “
   “That’s the trouble,” Dan said. “Bubba abhors unorthodox funerals. He almost wept when I insisted that the poor devils who died in the fire be buried at once in a single grave. We had to use a bulldozer, you know. Bubba claims Repose-in-Peace Park is ruined for good.”
   Randy had been silent since Alice brought the news. Now he spoke, as if he had been holding silent debate with himself, and had finally reached a conclusion. `”They’ll have to live here.”
   Helen set down her coffee cup. “Who’ll have to live here?” “We’ll have to ask Lib and Bill McGovern to stay with us.” “But we don’t have room! And how will we feed them?”
   Randy was puzzled and disturbed. He had never thought of Helen as a selfish woman, and yet obviously she didn’t want the McGoverns. “We really have plenty of room,” he said. “There’s still an empty bedroom upstairs. Bill can have it, and Lib can sleep with you.”
   “With me?”
   He could see that Helen was angry. “Well, you have twin beds in your room, Helen. But if you seriously object, Bill can sleep in my apartment-there’s an extra couch-and Lib can have the room.”
   “After all, it’s your house,” Helen said.
   “As a matter of fact, Helen, the house is half Mark’s, which makes it half yours. So the decision is yours as well as mine. Lib and Bill have no water and no heat and not much food left because almost all their food reserve was in their freezer. They don’t even have a fireplace. They’ve been cooking and boiling water on a charcoal grill in the Florida room.”
   Helen shrugged and said, “Well, I guess you’ll have to ask them. Elizabeth can sleep with me. But I hope it isn’t a permanent arrangement. After all, our food supply is limited.”
   “It is limited,” Randy said, “and it’s going to get worse. Whether the McGoverns are here or not, we’re all going to have to scrounge for food pretty quick.”
   Dan rose and said, “I’d better get going.”
   Randy followed him. He had cultivated the habit of leaving his .45 automatic on the hall table and pocketing it as he left the house, as a man would put on his hat. Since he never wore a hat, and never before had carried a gun except in the Army, he still had to make a conscious effort to remember.
   When they were in the car Randy said, “That was a strange way for Helen to behave. Don’t know what’s eating her.”
   “Not at all strange,” Dan said. “Just human. She’s jealous.” “That’s ridiculous!”
   “No. Helen is a fiercely protective woman-protective of her children. With Mark gone, you and the house are her security and the children’s security. She doesn’t want to share you and your protection. Matter of self-preservation, not infatuation.”
   “I see,” Randy said, “or at least I think I see.”
   They drove up to the front of the McGovern house. Randy said, “It’s pointless for both of us to go in. Nothing you can do here. While you get Bubba Offenhaus, I’ll tell them they’re going to move and get them going.”
   “Right,” Dan said. “Economy of effort and forces. Always a good rule of war.”
   Randy walked to the house, wondering a bit about himself. Without being conscious of it, he had begun to give orders in the past few days. Even to the Admiral he had given orders. He had assumed leadership in the tiny community bound together by the water pipes leading from the artesian well. Since no one had seemed to resent it, he guessed it had been the proper thing to do. It was like-well, it wasn’t the same, but it was something like commanding a platoon. When you had the responsibility you also had the right to command.
   The McGovern house was damp and it was chilly. It retained the cold of night. Lib, wearing corduroy jodhpurs and a heavy blue turtleneck sweater, greeted him at the door. She said, “I heard the jalopy and I knew it was you. Thanks for coming, Randy.”
   She held out her hands to him and he kissed her. Her hands felt cold and when he looked down at them he saw that her fingernails, always so carefully kept, were broken and crusted with dirt. Still she was dry-eyed and calm. Whatever tears she had had for her mother were already shed. Randy said, “Alice told us. We’re all terribly sorry, darling.” He knew it sounded insincere, and it was. With so many dead-so many friends for whom he had as yet not had time even for thought-the death of one woman, whom he did not admire overmuch and with whom he had never been and could not be close, was a triviality. With perhaps half the country’s population dead, death itself, unless it took someone close and dear, was trivial.
   She said, “Come on in and talk to Dad. He’s worried about how we’re going to bury her.”
   “We’re arranging that,” Randy said, and followed her into the house.
   Bill McGovern sat in the living room, staring out on the river. He had not bothered to dress, or shave. Over his pajamas and robe he had pulled a topcoat. Randy turned to Lib. “Have either of you had any breakfast?”
   She shook her head, no.
   Bill spoke without turning his head. “Hello, Randy. I’m not much of a success, am I, in time of crisis? I can’t feed my daughter, or myself, or even bury my wife. I wish I had enough guts to swim out into the channel and sink.”
   “That can’t help Lavinia and wouldn’t help Elizabeth, or anybody. You and Lib are going to live with me. Things will be better.”
   “Randy, I’m not going to impose myself on you. I might as well face it. I’m finished. You know, I’m over sixty. And do you know what the worst thing is> Central Tool and Plate. I spent my whole life building it up. What is it now? Chances are, just a mess of twisted and burned metal. Junk. So there goes my life and what good am I? I can’t start over. Central Tool and Plate is junk and I’m junk.”
   Randy stepped over and stood between Bill and the cracked window, so as to look into his face. “You might as well stop feeling sorry for yourself,” he said. “You’re going to have to start over. Either that or die. You have to face it.”
   Lib touched her father’s shoulder. “Come on, Dad.” Bill didn’t move, or reply.
   Randy felt anger inside him. “You want to know what good you are? That means what good you are to somebody else, not to yourself, doesn’t it? If you’re no good to anybody else I guess you’d better take the long swim. You know something about machinery, don’t you?”
   McGovern pushed himself in his chair. “I know as much about machine tools as any man in America.”
   “I didn’t say machine tools. I said machinery. Batteries, gasoline engines, simple stuff like that.”
   “I didn’t start at Central Tool as president, or board chairman. I started in the shop, working with my hands. Sure, I know about machinery.”
   “That’s fine. You can help Malachai and Admiral Hazzard. We’ve taken the batteries out of my car, and the admiral’s car, and hooked them on to the Admiral’s shortwave set so we can find out what cooks around the world. Only it doesn’t work right something’s wrong with the circuit-and the batteries are fading and I don’t know how we can charge ‘em.”
   “Very simple,” said Bill. “Power takeoff from the Model-A. It’ll work so long as you have gas.”
   “Fine,” Randy said. “That’s your first job, Bill, helping Malachai.”
   “Malachai? Isn’t he the brother of our cleaning woman, Missouri? Your yardman?”
   “That’s him. First-class mechanic.”
   Bill McGovern smiled. “So I’ll be mechanic, second class?” “That’s right.”
   Bill rose. “All right. It’s a deal. I’ll dress, and then-” He stopped. “Oh, Lord, I forgot. Poor Lavinia. Randy, what am I going to do about her-” he hesitated as if the word were crude but he could find no other-”body?”
   “We’re attending to that,” Randy said. “Dan Gunn has gone up to get Bubba Offenhaus. I hope Bubba will handle the burial. Meanwhile, I think you and Lib better start packing. We’ll have to make three or four trips, I guess. How much gas have you got in your car?”
   Lib said, “A couple of gallons, I think.”
   “That’ll be enough to make the move, and you won’t need the car after that. We can use the battery for Sam Hazzard’s shortwave set.”
   While they packed, Randy prowled the house searching for useful items. In a kitchen cupboard he discovered an old, pitted iron pot of tremendous capacity, and, forgetting the presence of death in the house, whooped with delight.
   Lib raced into the kitchen, demanding a reason for the shouting. He hefted the pot. “I’ll bet it’ll hold two gallons,” he said. “What a find!”
   “It’s just an old pot Mother bought when we were in New England one summer. An antique. She thought it would look wonderful with a plant. It looked awful.”
   “It’ll look beautiful hanging in the dining-room fireplace,” Randy said, “filled with stew.”
   The old pot was the most useful object-indeed it was one of the few useful objects-he found in the McGovern house. Twenty minutes later Dan Gunn returned, alone and worried. “Bubba Offenhaus,” he said, “can’t help us. Bubba would like to bury himself. He’s got dysentery. Running at both ends. He and Kitty were certain it was radiation poisoning. Symptoms are pretty much alike, you know. Both of them were in panic. He’ll get over it in a few days, but that’s not helping us now.” Randy said, “So what do we do?”
   Dan looked at Bill McGovern, fully dressed now but still unwashed and unshaven, for there was no water in the house except a jug, for drinking, that Randy had brought to them the day before. Dan said, “I think that’s up to you to decide, Bill.” “What is there to decide?” Bill asked.
   “Whether to bury your wife here or in the cemetery. You don’t have a plot in Repose-in-Peace but I’m sure Bubba won’t mind. Anyway, there’s nothing he can do about it, and you can settle with him later.”
   Bill McGovern turned to his daughter. “What do you say, Elizabeth?”
   “Well, of course I think Mother deserves a proper funeral in a cemetery. It seems like the least we can do for her. And yet “ She turned to Randy. “You don’t agree, do you, Randy?”
   Randy was glad that she asked. Intervening in this private and personal matter was brutal but necessary. “No, I don’t agree. It’s six miles to the cemetery. We’d have to make the trip in two cars because of the-because of Lavinia. That’s twenty-four miles’ worth of gasoline, round trip, and we can’t afford it. We will have to bury Lavinia here, on the grounds.”
   “But how-” Lib began.
   “Where do you keep the shovels, Bill?” “There’s a tool shed back of the garage.”
   While handing a shovel to Dan, and selecting one for himself, Randy examined the other tools. There was a new ax. It would be very useful. There were pitchforks, edgers, a scythe, a wheelbarrow. He would bring Malachai over before dark and they would divvy up the McGovern tools. In everything he did, now, he found he looked into the needs of the future.
   Between house and river, a crescent-shaped azalea bed flanked the west border of the McGovern property. The bitter blue grass had been carefully tended, and the bed was shaded from afternoon’s hot sun by a live oak older than Fort Repose. Looking around, Randy could find no spot more suitable for a grave. He stepped off six feet and marked a rectangle within the crescent. He and Dan began to dig.
   After a few minutes Randy removed his sweater. This was no easy job. Dan stopped and inspected his plans. He said, “I’m getting ditch digger’s hands. Very bad for a surgeon.” They continued to dig, steadily, until it was awkward working from the surface. Randy stepped into the deepening grave. They had made a discovery. A grave designed to accommodate one person must be dug by one person alone.
   When Randy paused, winded, Bill McGovern stepped down and took the shovel, saying, “I’ll spell you.”
   From above, Lib watched. Presently she said, “That’s enough for you, Dad. Remember the blood pressure. I don’t want to lose you too.” She stepped into the hole and relieved him of the shovel. After he climbed out, panting and white-faced, she thrust the shovel savagely into the sand. As she dug, her stature increased in Randy’s eyes. She was like a fine sword, slender and flexible, but steel; a woman of courage. It was not gentlemanly, but Randy allowed her to dig, recognizing that physical effort was an outlet for her emotions. When her pace slowed he dropped into the hole and took the shovel. “That’s enough. Dan and I will finish. You and your father had better go back to the house and get on with your packing.”
   “You don’t want us to help you carry her out, do you?” “I think it would be better if you didn’t.”
   Dan reached down and lifted her out of the hole.
   When the grave was finished, they wrapped Lavinia’s emaciated body in her bed sheets, Her coffin was an electric blanket and her hearse a wheelbarrow. They lowered her into the five-foot hole and packed in the sand and loam afterwards, leaving an insignificant mound. Randy knew that when spring came the mound would flatten with the rains, the grass would swiftly cover it, and by June it would have disappeared entirely.
   Randy called the McGoverns. There was no service, no spoken word. They all stood silent for a moment and then Bill McGovern said, “We don’t even have a wooden marker for her, or a sliver of stone, do we?”
   “We could take something out of the house,” Randy suggested, “a statue or a vase or something.”
   “It isn’t necessary,” Lib said. `The house is my mother’s monument.”
   This of course was true. They turned from the grave and back to their work.
   That evening Bill McGovern, with some eagerness, walked to the Henrys’ house and talked to Malachai. Together they went along the river bank to Sam Hazzard’s house and conferred with him on a plan for supplying power for the Admiral’s short-wave receiver.
   Dan Gunn drove to Fort Repose to visit the homeless, some of them sick or burned, lodged in the school.
   Randy and Lib McGovern sat alone on the front porch steps, Lib’s elbows on her knees, her chin supported by her hands, Randy’s arms encircling her shoulders. She was speaking of her mother. “I’m sure she never really comprehended what happened on The Day, or ever could. Perhaps I am only rationalizing, but I think her death was an act of mercy.”
   Randy heard someone running up the driveway and then he saw the figure and recognized Ben Franklin. “Ben!” he called. “What’s the matter?”
   Ben stopped, out of breath, and said, “Something’s happened at Miss Wechek’s!”
   Randy rose, ready to get his pistol. “What happened?”
   “I don’t know. I was just walking by her house and I heard somebody scream. I think Miss Wechek. Then I heard her crying.”
   Randy said, “We’d better take a look, Lib. You stay here, Ben.”
   Yellow candlelight shone from Florence’s kitchen. They went to the back door. Florence was wailing and Randy entered without bothering to knock.
   As he opened the screen door green and yellow feathers fluttered around his feet. Florence’s head rested on her arms on the kitchen table. She was dressed in a quilted, rose-hued robe. Alice Cooksey was with her, coaxing water to a boil on a Sterno kit. Randy said, “What seems to be the trouble?”
   Florence raised her head. Her untidy pink hair was moist and stringy. Her eyes were swollen. “Sir Percy ate Anthony!” she said. She began to sob.
   “She’s had a terrible day,” said Alice Cooksey. “I’m trying to make tea. She’ll be better after she’s had tea.”
   “What all happened?” Randy asked.
   “It really began yesterday,” Alice said. “When we woke up yesterday morning the angelfish were dead. You know how cold it was night before last, and of course without electricity there’s no heat for the aquarium. And this morning all the mollies and neons were dead. As a matter of fact nothing’s alive in the tank except the miniature catfish and a few guppies. And then, this evening-”
   “Sir Percy,” Florence interrupted, “a murderer!”
   “Hush, dear,” Alice said. “The water will be boiling in a moment.” She turned to Randy. “Florence really shouldn’t blame Sir Percy. After all, there’s been no milk for him, and very little of anything else. As a matter of fact, we haven’t seen Sir Perry in three or four days-I suppose he was out hunting for himself but a few minutes ago when Anthony flew home Sir Percy was on the porch.”
   “Ambushed poor Anthony,” Florence said. “Actually ambushed him. Killed him and ate him right there on the porch. Poor Cleo.”
   “Where’s Sir Percy now?” Randy asked.
   “He’s gone again,” Alice said. “He’d better not come back.” Randy was thoughtful. Hunting cats would be a problem. And what would happen to dogs? He still had a few cans of dog food for Graf, but he could foresee a time when humans might look upon dog food as a delicacy. He said aloud, but speaking to himself rather than the others, “Survival of the fittest.”
   “What do you mean?” Lib said.
   “The strong survive. The frail die. The exotic fish die because the aquarium isn’t heated. The common guppy lives. So does the tough catfish. The house cat turns hunter and eats the pet bird. If he didn’t, he’d starve. That’s the way it is and that’s the way it’s going to be.”
   Florence had stopped crying. “You mean, with humans? You mean, we humans are going to have to turn savage, like Sir Percy? Well, I can’t do it. I don’t want to live in that kind of a world, Randy.”
   “You’ll live, Florence,” Randy said.
   Walking back to his own house, Randy said, “Florence is a guppy, a nice, drab little guppy. That’s why she’ll survive.” “What about you and me?” Lib said.
   “We’re going to have to be tough. We’re going to have to be catfish.”

Chapter 8

   On a morning in April, four months after The Day, Randy Bragg awoke and watched a shaft of sunlight creep down the wall. At the foot of the couch, Graf squirmed and then wormed his way upward under the blanket. During the January cold spell Randy had discovered a new use for Graf. The dachshund made a most satisfactory foot warmer, mobile, automatic, and operating on a minimum of fuel which he would consume anyway. Randy flung off the blanket and swung his feet to the floor. He was hungry. He was always hungry. No matter how much he ate the night before, he was always starving in the morning. He never had enough fats, or sweets, or starches, and the greater part of each day was usually spent in physical effort of one kind or another. Downstairs, Helen and Lib would be preparing breakfast. Before Randy ate he would shower and shave. These were painful luxuries, almost his only remnant of routine from before The Day.
   Randy walked to the bar-counter and began to sharpen his razor. The razor was a six-inch hunting knife. He honed its edges vigorously on a whetstone and then stropped it on a belt nailed to the wall. A clean, smooth, painless shave was one of the things he missed, but not what he missed most.
   He missed music. It had been a long time since he had heard music. The record player and his collection of LP’s of course were useless without electricity. Music was no longer broadcast, any where. Anyway, his second and last set of batteries for the transistor radio was losing strength. Very soon, they would have neither flashlights nor any means of receiving radio except through the Admiral’s short wave. WSMF in San Marco was no longer operating. Something had happened to the diesel supplying the hospital and the radio station and it was impossible to find spare parts. This was the word that had come from San Marco, eighteen miles away. It had required two days for the word to reach Fort Repose.
   He missed cigarettes, but not so much. Dan Gunn still had a few pounds of tobacco, and had lent him a pipe. Randy found more pleasure in a pipe after each meal, and one before bedtime, than he had ever found in a whole carton of cigarettes. With tobacco so limited, each pipe was a luxury, relaxing and wonderful.
   He missed whiskey not at all. Since The Day, he had drunk hardly anything, nor found need for it. He no longer regarded whiskey as a drink. Whiskey was Dan Gunn’s emergency anesthetic. Whiskey, what was left of his supply, was for medical use, and for trading.
   He missed his morning coffee most. It had been, he calculated, six or seven weeks since he had tasted coffee. Coffee was more precious than gasoline, or even whiskey. Tobacco could be grown, and doubtless was being grown in a strip all the way from northwest Florida to Kentucky, Maryland and Virginia in the rural areas still habitable. Whiskey you could make, given the proper equipment and ingredients. But coffee came from South America.
   Randy tested his knife on a bit of paper. It was as sharp as he could ever make it. He went into the bathroom and showered. The cold water no longer chilled him as it had through January and February. He was inured to it. Soap he used sparingly. The house reserve was down to three cakes.
   He dried and stepped on the scales. One fifty-two. This was exactly what he had weighed at eighteen, as a freshman at the University. Even after three months on the line in Korea, he had dropped only to one fifty-six. He had lost an average of a pound a week for the past sixteen weeks, but now, he noted, his weight loss was slower. He had held one fifty-two for the past three days. He was leaner and harder, and, truthfully, felt better than before The Day.
   There was a knock on the living-room door. That would be Peyton. He slipped on his shorts and said, “Come in.”
   Peyton came in, carefully balancing the tiny pot of steaming water allotted for his morning shave. She set the pot before him on the counter as if it were a crystal bowl filled with flowers. “There,” she said. “Can I watch you shave this morning, Randy?” The sight of Peyton enriched Randy’s mornings. She was brash and buoyant, bobbing like a brightly colored cork in the maelstrom, unsinkable and unafraid. “Why do you like to watch me shave?” he asked.
   “Because you make such funny faces in the mirror. You should see yourself.”
   “I do.”
   “No, you don’t really see yourself. All you watch is the knife, as if you’re afraid of cutting your throat.”
   Dan Gunn came out of the bedroom, dressed in Levi’s and a blue checked sports shirt. Until The Day, Dan had used an electric razor. Now, rather than learn to shave with a knife or what ever was available, he did not shave at all. His beard had bloomed thick and flaming red. He looked like a Klondike sourdough or Paul Bunyan transplanted to the semi-tropics. On those rare days when his beard was freshly trimmed and he dressed formally in white shirt and a tie, he looked like a physician, outsized 1890 model.
   “You can’t watch today,” Randy told the child. “I want to talk to Doctor Gunn.” He poured his hot water into the basin and returned the pot to Peyton. Peyton smiled at Dan and left.
   Randy soaped and soaked his face. “Did you know that Einstein never used shaving soap?” he said. “Einstein just used plain soap like this. Einstein was a smart man and what was good enough for Einstein is good enough for me.” He scraped at his beard, winced, and said, “Einstein must have had an awfully good razor. Einstein must’ve used a fresh blade every morning. I’ll bet Einstein never shaved with a hunting knife.”
   Dan said, “I had an awful dream last night. Dreamed I’d forgotten to pay my income tax and was behind in my alimony and the Treasury agents and a couple of deputy sheriffs were chasing me around the courthouse with shotguns. They finally cornered me. They were arguing about whether to send me to the Federal pen or state prison. I tried to sneak out. I think they shot me. Anyway, I woke up, shaking. All I could think of was that I really hadn’t paid my income tax, or alimony either. What day is it, anyway?”
   “I don’t know what day it is but I know the date. April fourteenth.”
   Dan smiled through the red beard. “My subconscious must be a watchdog. Income tax day tomorrow. And we don’t have to file a return, Randy. No tax. No alimony. Let us count our blessings. Never thought I’d see the day.”
   “No coffee,” Randy said. “I would gladly pay my tax tomorrow for a pound of coffee. Dan, if you drive to town today I want to go with you. I want to trade for coffee.”
   Dan had evolved a barter system for his services. He charged a gallon of gas, if the patient had it, for house calls. Most families had somehow managed to obtain and conserve a few gallons of gasoline. It was their link with a mobile past, insurance of mobility in some emergency of the future. Sickness and injury were emergencies for which they would gladly dip into their liquid reserve. Dan made little profit. Perhaps half his patients were able and willing to pay with gasoline. Still, he managed to keep the Model-A’s tank nearly full, and on his rounds he was continuously charging batteries. Bill McGovern had instituted a system of rotating the batteries in the car. In turn, the charged batteries powered Admiral Hazzard’s short-wave receiver. Not only was the car transport for Randy’s water-linked enclave of families, it was necessary to maintain their ear to the world outside. Not that the world, any longer, said much.
   Dan said, “Sure, Randy, but it’s going to take all morning. I’ve got a bad situation in town.”
   “What’s the trouble?”
   From downstairs they heard Helen’s voice, “Breakfast!” “Tell you later,” Dan said.
   Randy was last to reach the dining room. There was a tall glass of orange juice at his place, and a big pitcher of juice in the center of the table. Whatever else they might lack, there was always citrus. Yet even orange juice would eventually disappear. In late June or early July they would squeeze the last of the Valencias and use the last grapefruit. From then until the new crop of early oranges ripened in October, citrus would be absent from their diet.
   He saw that this morning there was a single boiled egg and small portion of broiled fish left over from the night before. “Where’s my other boiled egg?” he said.
   “Malachai only brought over eight eggs this morning,” Helen said. “The Henrys have been losing chickens.”
   “What do you mean, losing them?”
   “They’re being stolen.”
   Randy put down his juice. Citrus, fish, and eggs were their staples. A drop in the egg supply was serious. “I’ll bet it’s an inside job,” he said. “I’ll bet that no-good Two-Tone has been swapping hens for liquor.”
   Lib spoke. “Malachai thinks it’s wild cats-that is, house cats that have gone wild.”
   “That’s not the worst of it,” Helen said. “One of the Henrys’ pigs is missing. They heard it squeal, just once. Preacher thinks a wolf took it. Preacher says he found a wolf track.”
   “No wolves in Florida,” Randy said. “No four-legged wolves.” The loss of hens was serious, but the loss of pigs disastrous. The Henry sow had produced a farrow that in a few weeks would add real meat to everybody’s diet. Even now they weighed twelve to fifteen pounds. Each evening, all food scraps from the Bragg, Wechek, and Hazzard households were carried to the Henry place to help feed the pigs and chickens. Every day, Randy had to argue with Helen and Lib to save scraps for Graf. Randy was conscious that the Henrys supplied more than their own share of food for the benefit of all. When Preacher’s corn crop ripened in June, the disparity would be even greater. And it had been Two-Tone, of all people, who had suggested that they grow sugar cane and then had explored the river banks in the Henrys’ leaky, flat bottomed skiff until he had found wild cane. He had sprigged, planted, and cultivated it. Because of the Henrys, they could all look forward, one day, to a breakfast of corn bread, cane syrup, and bacon. He was sure they would find a way to convert the corn to meal, even if they had to grind it between flagstones. “I don’t think we’re doing enough for the Henrys,” Randy said. “We’ll have to give them more help.”
   “What kind of help?” Bill McGovern asked.
   “At the moment, help them guard the food supply. Keep away the prowlers-cats, wolves, humans, or whatever.”
   “Can’t the Henrys do it themselves?” Helen asked. “Don’t they have a gun?”
   “They’ve got a gun-an old, beat-up single barrel twelve gauge-but they don’t have time. You can’t expect Preacher and Malachai to work as hard as they do every day and then sit up all night. And I wouldn’t trust Two-Tone. He’d just sleep. Do I hear volunteers?”
   “Me!” said Ben Franklin.
   Randy’s first impulse was to say no, that this wasn’t a job for a thirteen-year-old boy. Yet Ben was eating as much as a man, or more, and he would have to do a man’s work. “I thought you and Caleb were chopping firewood today?”
   “I can chop wood and stand watch too.”
   “Better let me take it the first night,” said Bill McGovern. “I wouldn’t want to see anything happen to those pigs.” Bill was thinner, as they all were, and yet it seemed that he had dropped years as well as weight. With his fork he touched a bit of fish at the edge of his plate. “You know, for years I looked forward to my vacation in the bass country. That’s why I built a house on the Timucuan when I retired. But now I can hardly look a bass in the face. I want meat-real red meat.”
   Randy had his decision. “All right, Bill, you can take the watch tonight, and we’ll rotate thereafter. I’m sure the Admiral will take a night too.”
   “Do I get a night?” Ben Franklin asked. His eyes were pleading.
   “You get a night, Ben. I’ll make up a schedule and post it on the bulletin board.” A bulletin board in the hallway, with assignment of duties, had become a necessity. In this new life there was no leisure. If everybody worked as hard as he could until sundown every day, then everybody could eat, although not well. Each day brought a crisis of one kind or another. They faced shortages of the most trivial but necessary items. Who would have had the foresight to buy a supply of needles and thread? Florence Wechek owned a beautiful new sewing machine, electric and useless of course. Florence, Helen, and Hannah Henry did the sewing for Randy’s community. Yesterday Florence had broken a needle and had come to Randy, close to tears, as if it were a major disaster, as indeed it was. And everybody had unthinkingly squandered matches, so that now there were no matches. He still had five lighter flints and one small can of lighter fluid. Luckily, his old Army lighter would burn gasoline, but flints were priceless and impossible to find. Within a few months it might be necessary to keep the dining-room fire going day and night in spite of unwelcome heat and added labor. Nor would their supply of wood last forever. They would have to scout farther and farther a field for usable timber. Hauling it would become a major problem. When Dan could no longer collect his gasoline fees and the tank in the Model-A finally ran dry their life was bound to change drastically, and for the worse.
   Staring down at his plate, he thought of all this.
   Lib said, “Randy, finish your fish. And you’d better drink another glass of orange juice. You’ll be hungry before lunch, if Helen and I can put a lunch together.”
   “I hate orange juice!” Randy said, and poured himself another glass.
   Dan drove. Randy sat beside him. It was warm, and Randy was comfortable in shorts, boat shoes, and a pullover shirt. He carried his pistol holstered at his hip. The pistol had become a weightless part of him now. He had dry-fired it a thousand times until it felt good in his hand, and even used it to kill a rattlesnake in the grove and two moccasins on the dock. Shooting snakes was a waste of ammunition but he was now confident of the pistol’s accuracy and the steadiness of his hand. In Randy’s lap, encased in a paper bag, was the bottle of Scotch he hoped to trade for coffee. They smoked their morning pipes. Randy said, “Dan, what’s this bad situation in town?”
   “I haven’t said anything about it,” Dan said, “because I can’t get to the bottom of it and I didn’t want to frighten anybody. I’ve got three serious cases of radiation poisoning.”
   “Oh, God!” Randy said, not an exclamation but a prayer. This was the sword that had been hanging over all of them. If a man kept busy enough, if his troubles and problems were immediate and numerous, if he was always hungry, then he could for a time wall off this thing, forget for a time that he lived in what had officially been designated a contaminated zone. He could forget the insidious, the invisible, the implacable enemy, but not forever.
   “This is very strange,” Dan said. “I can’t believe it’s caused by delayed fallout. If it were, I’d have three hundred cases, not three. This is more like a radium or X-ray burn. All of them have burned hands in addition to the usual symptoms, nausea, headache, diarrhea, hair falling out.”
   “When did it start?” Randy asked.
   “Porky Logan was the first man hit. His sister caught me at the school three weeks ago and begged me to look at him.” “Wasn’t Porky somewhere in the southern part of the state on The Day? Couldn’t he have picked up radiation then?” “Porky was perfectly all right when he got back here and since then he hasn’t received any more exposure than the rest of us. And the other two have not left Fort Repose. Porky’s a mess. Every time I see him he’s drunk. But the radiation is killing him faster than the liquor.”
   “Who else is sick?”
   “Bigmouth Bill Cullen-we’ll stop at his fish camp on the way to town-and Pete Hernandez.”
   “It couldn’t be sort of an epidemic, could it?” Randy asked. “No, it couldn’t. Radiation’s not a germ or a virus. You can eat or drink radioactive matter, like strontium 90 in milk. It can fall on you in rain. It can sift down on you in dust, or in particles you can’t see on a day that seems perfectly clear. You can track it into the house on your shoes, or pick it up by handling any metal or inorganic matter that has been exposed. But you can’t catch it by kissing a girl, unless, of course, she has gold teeth.”
   At the bend of River Road they caught up with Alice Cooksey riding Florence’s Western Union bicycle. Alone of all the people in Fort Repose, Alice continued with her regular work. Every morning she left the Wecheck house at seven. Often, ignoring the unpredictable dangers of the road, she did not return until dark. Since The Day, the demand for her services had multiplied. They slowed when they overtook her, shouted a greeting, and waved. She waved back and pedaled on, a small, brave, and busy figure.
   Watching the car chuff past, Alice reminded herself that this evening she must bring back new books for Ben Franklin and Peyton. It was a surprise, and a delight, to see children devour books. Without ever knowing it, they were receiving an education. Alice would never admit it aloud, but for the first time in her thirty years as librarian of Fort Repose she felt fulfilled, even important.
   It had not been easy or remunerative to persist as librarian in Fort Repose. She recalled how every year for eight years the town council had turned down her annual request for air conditioning. An expensive frill, they’d said. But without air conditioning, how could a library compete? Drugstores, bars, restaurants, movies, the St. Johns Country Club in San Marco, the lobby of the Riverside Inn, theaters, and most homes were air conditioned. You couldn’t expect people to sit in a hot library during the humid Florida summer, which began in April and didn’t end until October, when they could be sitting in an air-conditioned living room coolly and painlessly absorbing visual pablum on television. Alice had installed a Coke machine and begged old electric fans but it had been a losing battle.
   In thirty years her book budget had been raised ten percent, but the cost of books had doubled. Her magazine budget was unchanged, but the cost of magazines had tripled. So while Fort Repose grew in population, book borrowings dwindled. There had been so many new distractions, drive-in theaters, dashing off to springs and beaches over the weekends, the mass hypnosis of the young every evening, and finally the craze for boating and water-skiing. Now all this was ended. All entertainment, all amusements, all escape, all information again centered in the library. The fact that the library had no air conditioning made no difference now. There were not enough chairs to accommodate her readers. They sat on the front steps, in the windows, on the floor with backs against walls or stacks. They read everything, even the classics. And the children came to her, when they were free of their chores, and she guided them. And there was useful research to do. Randy and Doctor Gunn didn’t know it, but as a result of her research they might eat better thereafter. It was strange, she thought, pedaling steadily, that it should require a holocaust to make her own life worth living.
   At the town limits, Dan turned into Bill Cullen’s fish camp, cafe, and bar. The grounds were more dilapidated and filthier than ever. The liquor shelves were bare. The counters in the boathouse tackle shop were empty. Not a plug, fly, or hook remained. Bigmouth Bill had been cleaned out months before. His wife, strawhaired and barrel-shaped, stepped out of the living quarters. Randy sniffed. She didn’t smell of spiked wine this day. She simply smelled sour. Alone of all the people he had seen, she had gained weight since The Day. Randy guessed that she had cached sacks of grits and had been living on grits and fried fish. She said, “He’s in here, Doc.”
   Dan didn’t go in immediately. “Does he seem any better?” he asked.
   “He’s worse. His hands is leakin’ pus.”
   “How do you feel? You haven’t had any of his symptoms, have you?”
   “Me? I don’t feel no different. I’ve felt worse.” She giggled, showing her rotting teeth. “You ever had a hangover, Doc? That’s when I’ve felt worse. Right now I wish I felt worse so I could take a drink and feel better. You get it, Doc?” She came closer to Dan and lowered her voice. “He ain’t goin’ to die, is he?”
   “I don’t know.”
   “The old tightwad better not die on me now. He’s not leavin’ me nuthin’, Doc. He don’t even own this place free and clear. He ain’t never even made no will. He’s holdin’ out on me, Doc. I can tell. He had six cases stashed away after The Day. Claims he sold all six to Porky Logan. But he don’t show me no money. You know what, Doc? I think he’s got that six cases hid!”
   Dan brushed past her and they entered the shack. Bill Cullen lay on a sagging iron bed, a stained sheet pulled up to his bare waist. In the bad light filtering through the venetian shade over the single window, he was at first unrecognizable to Randy. He was wasted, his eyes sunken, his eyeballs yellow. Tufts of hair were gone from one side of his head, exposing reddish scalp. His hands, resting across his stomach, were swollen, blackened, and cracked. He croaked, “Hello, Doc.” He saw Randy and said, “I’ll be damned-Randy.”
   The stench was too much for Randy. He gagged, said, “Hello, Bill,” and backed out. He leaned over the dock railing, coughing and choking, until he could breathe deeply of the sweet wind from the river. When Dan came out they walked silently back to the car together. All Dan said was, “She was right. He’s worse. I’ll swear he’s had a fresh dose of radiation since I saw him last.”
   They drove on to Marines Park. The park had become the barter center of Fort Repose. Dan said, “Do you want to go on with me to the schoolhouse?”
   “No, thanks,” Randy said. He was glad he wasn’t a doctor. A doctor required special courage that Randy felt he did not possess.
   “I’ll pick you up here in an hour. Then I’ll see Hernandez and Logan and then home.”
   “Okay.” Randy got out of the car.
   “Don’t swap for less than two pounds. Scotch is darn near as scarce as coffee.”
   “I’ll make the best deal I can,” Randy promised. Dan drove off
   Randy tucked the bottle under his arm and walked toward the bandstand, an octagon-shaped wooden structure, its platform elevated three feet above what had once been turf smooth as a gold green, now unkempt, infiltrated with weeds and booby trapped with sandspurs. A dozen men, legs dangling, sat on the platform and steps. Others moved about, the alert, humorless smile of the trader on their faces. Three bony horses were tethered to the bandstand railing. Like Randy, some of the men carried holsters at their belts. A few shotguns and an old-fashioned Winchester leaned against the planking. The armed men had come in from the countryside, a risk.
   A third of the traders in Marines Park, on this day, were Negroes. The economics of disaster placed a penalty upon prejudice. The laws of hunger and survival could not be evaded, and honored no color line. A back-yard hen raised by a Negro tasted just as good as the gamecocks of Carleton Hawes, the well-to-do realtor who was a vice president of the county White Citizens Council, and there was more meat on it. Randy saw Hawes, a brace of chickens dangling from his belt, drink water, presumably boiled, from a Negro’s jug. There were two drinking fountains in Marines Park, one marked “White Only,” the other “Colored Only.” Since neither worked, the signs were meaningless.
   Hawes saw Randy, wiped his mouth, and called, “Hey, Randy.”
   “Hello, Carleton.” “What’re you trading?” “A bottle of Scotch.”
   Hawes’ eyes fixed on the paper bag and he moved closer to Randy, cautious as a pointer blundered upon quail. Randy recalled from Saturday nights at the St. Johns Club that Scotch was Hawes’ drink. “What’s your asking price?” Hawes asked. “Two pounds of coffee.”
   “I’ll swap you these two birds. Both young hens. See how plump they are? Better eating you’ll never have.”
   Randy laughed.
   “Being it’s you, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ve got eggs at home. I’ll throw in a couple of dozen eggs. Have ‘em here tomorrow. On my word. If you don’t believe me, you can take the birds now, as a binder.”
   “The asking price,” Randy said, “is also the selling price. Two pounds of coffee. Any brand will do.”
   Hawes sighed. “Who’s got coffee? It’s been three months since I’ve had a drink of Scotch. Let me look at the bottle, will you?”
   Randy showed him the label and moved on to the bandstand.
   The square pillars supporting the roof had become a substitute for the county weekly’s want-ad section and the radio station announcements. Randy read the notices, some in longhand, some hand printed, a few typewritten, pinned to the timbers.
   WILL SWAP Late model Cadillac Coupe de Ville, radio, heater, air-conditioned, battery run down but undamaged, for two good 28-inch bicycle tires and pump.
   DESPERATELY NEED evaporated milk, rubber nipple, and six safety pins. Look over our house and make your own deal. HAVE SMALL CANNED HAM, want large kettle, Encyclopedia Britannica, box l2 gauge No. 7 shells, and toothpaste.
   Randy closed his eyes. He could taste that ham. He had an extra kettle, the encyclopedia, the shells, and toothpaste. But he also had prospects of fresh ham if they could preserve the Henrys’ young pigs from marauders, wolves, or whatever. Anyway, it was too big a price to pay for a small ham.
   WANTED-Three 2/0 fishhooks in exchange for expensive fly rod, reel, assorted lures.
   Randy chuckled. Sports fishing no longer existed. There were only meat fishermen now.
   WILL TRADE 50-HP Outboard motor, complete set power tools, cashmere raglan topcoat for half pound of tobacco and ax.
   Randy saw a notice that was different:
   EASTER SERVICES
   An interdenominational Easter Sunrise Service will be held in Marines Park on Sunday, April 17th. All citizens of Fort Repose, of whatever faith, are invited to attend. Signed,
   Rev. John Carlin, First Methodist Church Rev. M. F. Kenny, Church of St. Paul’s Rev. Fred Born, Timucuan Baptist Church Rev. Noble Watts, Afro-Repose Baptist Church
   The name of the Rector of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, where there had always been a Bragg pew, was missing. Dr. Lucius Somerville, a gentle, white-haired man, a boyhood companion of Judge Bragg, had been in Jacksonville on the morning of The Day and therefore would not return to his parish.
   Randy wasn’t much of a churchgoer. He had contributed to the church regularly, but not of his time or himself. Now, reading this notice, he felt an unexpected thrill. Since The Day, he had lived in the imperative present, not daring to plan beyond the next meal or the next day. This bit of paper tacked on peeling white paint abruptly enlarged his perspective, as if, stumbling through a black tunnel, he saw, or thought he saw, a chink of light. If Man retained faith in God, he might also retain faith in Man. He remembered words which for four months he had not heard, read, or uttered, the most beautiful words in the language-faith and hope. He had missed these words as he had missed other things. If possible, he would go to the service. Sunday, the seventeenth. Today was the fourteenth, and therefore Thursday.
   He stepped up on the platform. The men lounging there, some of them acquaintances, some strangers, were estimating the shape of bulk of the sack he held, like a football, under his arm. Dour, bearded, hair unshorn or ludicrously cropped, they looked like ghost-town characters in a Western movie, except they were not so well fed as Hollywood extras, and their clothing, flowered sports shirts, shorts, or slacks, plaid or straw-peaked caps, was incongruous. John Garcia, the Minorcan fishing guide, asked the orthodox opening question, “What’re you trading, Randy?”
   “A fifth of Scotch-twelve years old-the best.”
   Garcia whistled. “You must be hard up. What’re you askin’?” “Two pounds of coffee.”
   Several of the men on the platform shifted their position. One snickered. None spoke. Randy realized that these men had no coffee, either for trading or drinking. No matter how well stocked their kitchens might once have been, or what they had purchased or pillaged on The Day and in the chaotic period immediately after, four months had exhausted everything. Randy’s community was far more fortunate with the bearing groves, fish loyally taking bait, the industrious Henrys and their barnyard, and some small game-squirrels, rabbits, and an occasional possum.
   John Garcia was trading two strings of fish, a four-pound catfish and small bass on one, warmouth perch and bream on the other. Garcia’s brown and weathered skin had shriveled on his slight frame until he seemed only bones loosely wrapped in dried leather. The sun was getting warm. With his toe Garcia nudged his fish into the shadow. “Wouldn’t trade for fish, would you, Randy?” he asked, smiling.
   “Fish we’ve got,” Randy said.
   “You River Road people do all right by yourselves, don’t you?” a stranger said. “If you got Scotch likker, you got everythin’. Us, we ain’t got nuthin’.” The stranger was trading a saw, two chisels, and a bag of nails. Randy guessed he was an itinerant carpenter settled in Pistolville.
   Randy ignored him and asked Marines Park’s inevitable second question, “What do you hear?”
   Old Man Hockstatler, who was trading small tins of aspirins and tranquilizers, salvage from his looted pharmacy, said, “I hear the Russians are asking that we surrender.”
   “No, no, you got that all wrong,” said Eli Blaustein. “Mrs. Vanbruuker-Brown demanded that the Russians surrender. They said no and then they said we should be the ones to surrender.” “Where did you hear that?” Randy asked.
   “My wife got it from a woman whose husband’s battery set still works,” Blaustein said. Blaustein was trading work pants and a pair of white oxfords and he was asking canned corn beef or cheese. Randy knew that as the sun got higher John Garcia’s asking price for his fish would drop lower. At the same time Blaustein’s hunger would grow, or he would be thinking of his protein-starved family. Before the fish were tainted, there would be a meeting of minds. John Garcia would have a new pair of work pants and Blaustein would have food.
   “What I would like to know,” said Old Man Hockstatler, “is who won the war? Nobody ever tells you. This war I don’t understand at all. It isn’t like World Wars One or Two or any other wars I ever heard of. Sometimes I think the Russians must’ve won. Otherwise things would be getting back to normal. Then I think no, we won. If we hadn’t won the Russians would still be bombing us, or they would invade. But since The Day I’ve never seen any planes at all.”
   “I have,” said Garcia. “I’ve seen ‘em while I was fishing for cats at night. No, that ain’t exactly right. I’ve heard ‘em. I heard one two nights ago.”
   “Whose?” Blaustein asked. Garcia shrugged. “Beats me.”
   This discussion, Randy knew, would continue through the day. The question of who won the war, or if the war still continued, who was winning, had replaced the weather as an inexhaustible subject for speculation. Each day you could hear new rumors, usually baseless and always garbled. You could hear that Russian landing craft were lined up on Daytona Beach or that Martian saucers were unloading relief supplies in Pensacola. Randy believed nothing except what he himself heard or saw, or those sparse hard grains of fact sifted from the air waves by Sam Hazzard. Randy had been leaning on the bandstand railing. He straightened, stretched, and said, “Guess I’ll circulate around and look for somebody who’s holding coffee.”
   John Garcia said, “You coming to the Easter service, Randy?”
   “Hope so. Hope to come and bring the family.” As he stepped from the bandstand he looked again at the two useless drinking fountains. There was something important about them that he could not recall. This was irritating, as when the name of an old friend capriciously vanishes from memory. The drinking fountains made his mind itch.
   He saw Jim Hickey, the beekeeper, a picnic basket under his long, outstretched legs, relaxed on a bench. Before The Day Jim had rented his hives to grove owners pollinating young trees. Before The Day, Jim’s honey was a secondary source of income; “gravy,” he called it. Now, honey was liquid gold, and beeswax, with which candles could be dipped, another valuable item of barter. Jim Hickey, who was Mark’s age, had learned beekeeping at the College of Agriculture in Gainesville. It would never make him rich, he had been warned, and until The Day it hadn’t. Now he was regarded as a fortunate man, rich in highly desirable commodities endlessly produced by tens of thousands of happy and willing slaves. “What are you trading?” he greeted Randy.
   “A bottle of Scotch. Are you holding coffee?”
   “No. I’ve been trying to trade for coffee myself. Can’t find any. All I hold is honey.” He lifted the lid of the picnic basket. “Lovely stuff, isn’t it?”
   It was lovely. Randy thought of Ben Franklin and Peyton, whose need and desire for sweets could not be wholly supplied by the sugar content of citrus. It would be weeks before Two Tone’s cane crop matured. Randy wondered whether he was being selfish, trading for coffee. It was true that he would share the coffee with the other adults on River Road, but the children didn’t drink it. There were no calories or vitamins in coffee and it was of no use to them. He forced himself to be judicial. When you examined the facts judicially, and asked which would provide the greatest good for the greatest number, there could be only one answer. Coffee would furnish only temporary and personal gratification. He said, “Jim, maybe I could be persuaded to trade for honey.”
   “I’m sorry, Randy. We’re Adventists. We don’t drink whiskey or trade in it.”
   This contingency Randy had never imagined. Half-aloud he said, “Well, I tried.”
   “I suppose you wanted the honey for Mark’s children,” Hickey said. “Yes. I did.”
   Hickey reached into the basket and brought out two square, honey-packed combs. “I wouldn’t like to see Mark’s kids go without,” he said. “Here. I’d give you more except my supply is ‘way down. There’s something wrong with my bees this spring. Half my broods are foul, full of dead pupae and larvae. At first I thought it was what we call sacbrood, or queen failure. I’ve been to the library, reading up on it, and now I wonder whether it couldn’t be radiation. We must’ve had fallout on The Day-after all, the whole state is a contaminated zone-and maybe it affected some of my queens and drones. I don’t know what to do about it. It isn’t something they taught us at the University.”
   Randy removed the bottle from his paper bag, locked it under his arm, and replaced it with the honeycombs. He was overwhelmed. He knew that Mark and Hickey had been in the same grade in primary school, but they had never been close friends. Hickey was no more than an acquaintance. He lived in a neat, sea-green, five-room concrete block house far out on the road to Pasco Creek. Randy, before The Day, rarely saw him, and then only to wave a greeting. Randy said, “Jim, this is the nicest, most generous thing I can remember. I just hope I can repay you some way, some day.”
   “Forget it,” Hickey said. “Children need honey. My kids have it every meal.”
   Randy heard the Model-A’s horn, raucous as an angry goose, and saw it pull up to the curb. Walking to the car, he noticed that it was a clear and beautiful spring day, a better day than yesterday. The spores of kindness, as well as faith, survived in this acid soil. Randy climbed into the car and showed the honey to Dan and explained how it had been given to him. “The world changes,” Dan said. “People don’t. I still have one old biddy in the schoolhouse who prunes and trims the camellias, and weeds the beds. They aren’t her camellias and nobody gives a damn about flowers any more, except her. She loves flowers and it doesn’t matter where she is or what happens she’s going to take care of ‘em. This same old lady-Mrs. Satterborough, she’s been spending her winters at the Riverside Inn for years-she picks up the telephone in the principal’s office every morning and dials Western Union. She thinks that one day the phone will be working just fine and that she’ll get off a telegram to her daughter. She’s certain of it. Her daughter lives in Indiana.”
   “I don’t understand how those old people stay alive,” Randy said. He knew that Dan brought them oranges by the bushel, and Randy sent them fish whenever there was a surplus catch.

   “Most of them didn’t. Death can be merciful, especially for the old and sick. I was about to say old, sick, and broke, but it doesn’t matter any longer whether you’re broke. Only five alive out of the Riverside Inn now. Maybe three will get through the summer. I don’t think any will get through next winter.” Driving north on Yulee, the business district, while deserted, seemed no more battered than it had the month before, or the month before that. A few optimistic storekeepers had prudently boarded windows, split by blast on The Day or broken by looters afterwards, against water and wind. On the two principal business blocks glass had been swept from the sidewalks. Abandoned cars, stripped of wheels, batteries, radios, and spark plugs, rusted in gutters like the unburied carcasses of giant beetles.
   They turned off Yulee into Augustine Road, with its broken macadam and respectable but decaying residences. They bounced along for a block and then Randy smelled Pistolville. Another block and they were in it.
   There had been no garbage collections since The Day. In Pistolville each but or house squatted in a mound of its own excretion-crushed crates and cartons, rusting tin cans, broken bottles, rotting piles of citrus rusks and pecan shells, the bones of fowl, fish, and small animals. A tallow-faced, six-year-old girl, clad in a man’s castoff, riddled T-shirt, crouched on the curb, emptying her bowels in the dust. She cried out shrilly and waved as the Model-A bounced past. A bearded, long-haired man burst out of a doorway and jogged down the street on bandy legs, peel—ing and eating a banana, turning his head as if he expected to be followed. At the corner a scrawny boy of eighteen urinated against a lamp post, not bothering to raise his eyes at the sound of the car. Buzzards, grown arrogant, roosted in the oaks and foraged in the refuse. Of mongrel dogs, cats, partihued pigs, chickens, and pigeons-all normal impediments to navigation on the streets of Pistolville-no trace remained.
   Once before in his life, in Suwon, immediately after its recapture and before the Military Government people had begun to clean up, Randy had seen degradation such as this. But this was America. It was his town, settled by his forebears. He said, “We’ve got to do something about this.”
   “Yes?” Dan said. “What?” “I don’t know. Something.”
   “Torches and gasoline,” Dan said, “except there isn’t enough gasoline. Anyway, these poor devils are as well off in their own houses as they would be in the woods, or in caves. No better off, mind you. But they have shelter.”
   “In four months,” Randy said, “we’ve regressed four thousand years. More, maybe. Four thousand years ago the Egyptians and Chinese were more civilized than Pistolville is right now. Not only Pistolville. Think what must be going on in those parts of the country where they don’t even have fruit and pecans and catfish.”
   As they approached the end of Augustine Road the houses were newer and larger, constructed of concrete block or brick instead of pitch-sweating pine clapboard. Between these houses grass grew shin-high, fighting the exultant weeds for sunlight and root space. There was less filth, or at least it was concealed by greenery, and the smell was bearable. In this airier atmosphere lived the upper crust of Pistolville, including Pete and Rita Hernandez and Timucuan County’s Representative in the state legislature, Porky Logan.
   “How long has it been since you’ve seen Rita?” Dan asked. “Not since before The Day-quite a while before.”
   “Does Lib know about her?”
   “She knows all about it. She says Rita doesn’t bother her, because Rita is part of the past, like Mayoschi’s in Tokyo. You know who worries Lib? Helen. Imagine that.”
   They were at the Hernandez house. Dan stopped the car. He said, “I can imagine it. Lib is an extremely sensitive, perceptive woman. About some things, she has more sense than you have, Randy. And all rules are off, now.”
   Randy wasn’t listening. Rita had stepped out of the doorway. In Hawaii Randy had seen girls of mixed Caucasian, Polynesian, and Chinese blood, hips moving as if to the pulse of island rhythm even when only crossing the street, who reminded him of Rita. She was not like a girl of Fort Repose. She was a child of the Mediterranean and Carribean, seeming alien; and yet certainly American. Her ancestors included a Spanish soldier whose caravel beached in Matanzas Inlet before the Pilgrims found their rock, and Carib Indian women, and the Minorcans who spread inland from New Smyrna in the eighteenth century. She had not gone to college but she was intelligent and quick. She had an annulled high school marriage and an abortion behind her. She no longer made such foolish errors. Her hobby was men. She sampled and enjoyed men as other women collected and enjoyed African violets, Limoges teacups, or sterling souvenir teaspoons. She was professional in her avocation, never letting a man go without some profit, not necessarily material, and never trading one man for another unless she thought she was bettering her collection.
   Under any circumstances Rita was an arresting woman. Her hair was cut in straight bangs to form an ebony frame for features carved like a Malayan mask in antique ivory. She could look, and behave, like an Egyptian queen of the Eighteenth Dynasty or a Creole whore out of New Orleans. On this morning she wore aquamarine shorts and halter. Cradled easily under her right arm was a light repeating shotgun. She was smoking a cigarette and even from the road Randy could see that it was a real, manufactured filtertip and not a stubby homemade, hand-rolled with toilet paper. She called, “Hello Doctor Gunn. Come on in.” Then she recognized the passenger and yelled, “Hey! Randy!”
   Dan put the car keys in his pocket and said, “Better bring the whiskey and honey, Randy. I never leave stuff in the car when I make a call in Pistolville.”
   As he walked to the house, Randy noticed the Atlas grocery truck and a big new sedan in the Hernandez carport and a Jaguar XK-150 sports car in the driveway. A latrine had been dug behind the carport and partly shielded from the road by a crude board fence.
   Rita swung open the screen door. “You’ll pardon the artillery,” she said. “The goons down the street are envious. When I hear a car or anything I grab a gun. They killed my dog. She was a black poodle, Randy. Her name was Poupee Vivant. That means Livin’ Doll in French. Cracked her skull with an ax handle while Peter was lying sick and I was off fetching water. I found the ax handle but not the body. The goddamn cracker scum! Ate her, I guess.”
   Randy thought how he would feel if someone killed and ate Graf. He was revolted. And yet, it was a matter of manners and mores. In China men for centuries had been eating dogs stuffed with rice. It happened in other meat-starved Asian countries. The Army had put him through a survival course, once, and taught him that in an emergency he could safely eat pulpy white grubs found under bark. It could happen here. If a man could eat grubs he could eat dogs. Pistolville was meat starved and, as Dan had said, the rules were off. All Randy said was, “I’m sorry, Rita.”
   Randy walked through the door and stopped, astonished. The two front rooms of the Hernandez place looked like show windows in a Miami auction house. He counted three silver tea services, two chests of flat silver, three television sets, and was bewildered by a display of statuary, silver candelabra, expensive leather cases, empty crystal decanters, table lighters, chinaware. Gold-framed oils and watercolors, some fairly good, plastered one wall. Table clocks and wall clocks raised their hands and swore to different times. “Great God!” Randy said. “Have you people gone into the junk business?”
   Rita laughed. “It’s not junk. It’s my investment.” Dan said, “How’s Pete, Rita?”
   “I think he’s a little better. He’s not losing any more hair but he’s still weak.”
   Dan was carrying his black bag. It held little except instruments now. He said, “I’ll go back and see him.”
   Dan walked down the hall and Randy was alone with her. She offered him a cigarette. Her perfume opened the gates of memory-the movies in Orlando, the dinners and dancing at the hotel in Winter Park, the isolated motel south of Canaveral, the morning they found a secluded pocket behind the dunes and were buzzed by a light plane and how the pilot almost side slipped into the sea banking around for a second look, and most of all, his apartment. It seemed so long ago, as if it had happened while he was in college, before Korea, but it was not so long, a year only. He said, “Thanks, Rita. First real cigarette I’ve had in a long, long time. You must be getting along all right.”
   She looked at the bottle. “You didn’t bring me a present, did you, Randy?” The corners of her mouth quivered, but she did not quite smile.
   He remembered the evenings he had come to this house, a bottle beside him on the seat, and they had gone tooting off together; and the evenings he had brought bottles in gift pack ages, discreet gratuities for her brother; and the nights in the apartment, sharing a decanter drink for drink because she loved her liquor. He realized that this is what she intended he remember. She was expert at making him feel uncomfortable. He said, “No, Rita. Trade goods. I’ve been in Marines Park, trying to trade for coffee.”
   “Don’t your new women like Scotch, Randy? I hear you’ve got two women in your house now. Which one are you sleeping with, Randy?”
   Suddenly she was a stranger, and he looked upon her as such.
   Examined thus, with detachment, she looked ridiculous, wearing high heels and costume jewelry with shorts and halter at this hour of the morning and in this time of troubles. Her darkling ivory skin, once so satiny, appeared dry and mottled. Her hair was dull and the luster in her eyes reflected only spiteful anger. She looked used and tired. He said, calmly, “You can take your claws out now. I don’t feel them. My skin’s tougher.”
   She licked her lips. They were puffed and brown. “You’re tougher. You’re not the same Randy. I guess you’re growing up.” He changed the subject. “Where did you get all this stuff?” He looked around the room.
   “Trading.”
   “I never see you in Marines Park.”
   “We don’t go there. They come to us. They know we still hold food. Even coffee.”
   He knew she wanted the bottle. He knew she would trade coffee, but he would never again trade with her, for anything. He said:
   “You said this was your investment. Do you think three television sets is a good investment when there isn’t any electricity?” “I’m looking ahead, Randy. This war isn’t going to last forever and when it’s over I’m going to have everything I never had before and plenty besides, maybe to sell. I was only a kid after the last big war but I remember how my dad had to pay through the nose for an old jalopy. Do you know what that Jag cost me?” She laughed. “A case of beans, three bottles of ketchup, and six cans of deviled ham. For a Jag! Say, as soon as things get back to normal those three TV sets will be worth their weight in gold.”
   “Do you really think things are going to get back to normal?”
   “Sure! They always have, haven’t they? It may be a year, even two. I can wait. You look at those big new houses out on River Road. What built half of them? Wars. Profits out of wars. This time I’m going to get mine.”
   He saw that she believed it and it was pointless to argue with her. Still, he was intrigued. “Don’t you realize that this war is different?”
   She held out her left hand so that the sunlight glinted on the ring on her second finger. “It certainly is different! Look at this!” He looked at the big stone, and into it, and a thousand blue and red lights attested to its worth and purity.
   It wasn’t costume jewelry, as he had surmised. It wasn’t glass surrounded by green paste. It was a diamond set in emeralds. “Where did you get it?” he asked, awed, an then he looked at her crescent ear clips and saw that they too, beyond a doubt, were diamonds.
   Rita held the ring out, turning her wrist. She did not answer at once. She was enjoying their reaction. “Six carats,” she said. “Perfect.” She slipped it from her finger and handed it to Randy.
   He took it automatically but he wasn’t looking at it. He was looking at her finger. Her finger was marred by a dark, almost black circle, as if the ring were tarnished brass, or its inside sooty. But the ring was clean bright white gold.
   Dan came into the room, pawing in his bag and frowning. “I don’t know exactly-” he began, looked at Randy’s face, and failed to finish the sentence.
   Frowning, Rita inspected the dark band. “It itches,” she said, and scratched. A bit of blackened skin flaked away, leaving raw flesh beneath.
   “I asked you where you got this, Rita,” Randy said, a command.
   Before she opened her mouth he guessed the answer. She said, “Porky Logan.”
   The ring dropped to the floor, bounced, tinkled, and came to rest on the corner of a blue silk Chinese rug.
   “Say, what’s the matter?” she said. “You act like it was hot!” “I think it is hot,” Randy said.
   “Well, if you think Porky stole it, you’re wrong. It was abandoned property. Anybody would take it.”
   Dan took her hand and adjusted his bifocals so he could examine the finger closely. He spoke, his voice deep, enforcing calm. “Hold still, Rita, I just want to see that finger. I think what Randy meant was that the ring has been exposed to radioactivity and is now radioactive itself. I’m afraid he’s right. This looks like a burn-a radium burn. How long have you been wearing that ring?”
   “Off and on, for a month I guess. I never wear it outside, only in the house.” She hesitated. “But this last week, I’ve had it on all the time. I never noticed-”
   They looked down at it, its facets blinking at them from the soft blue silk as if it were in a display window. It looked beautiful. “Where did Porky get it, Rita?” Dan asked.
   “Well, I only know what he told me. He was fishing in the Keys on The Day and of course he started right back. He’s smart, Porky is. He made a big detour around Miami. Well, he was pass ing through Hollywood or Boca Raton or one of those Gold Coast places and it was empty and right off the main drag he saw one of those swanky little jewelry shops, you know, a branch of some Fifth Avenue store and its windows were blown out. He said stuff was lying all over, rings and pins and watches and bracelets, like popcorn out of a busted bag. So he gathered it up. Then he dumped the hooks and plugs and junk out of his fishbox and went inside and filled it up. Porky said right then he was thinking of the future. He figured that money wouldn’t be worth anything but diamonds and gold were different. They never lost value no matter what happened.”
   “Impregnated with fallout,” Dan murmured. “Suicide.” Rita’s hands crept upward to her neck and Randy noticed an oval mark in the hollow her throat, as if the skin were painted darker there. Then her hands flew to her ears. The diamond ear clips fell to the rug beside the ring. She moaned, “Oh, God!” “What did you have to give Porky for those diamonds?” Randy asked softly.
   “For the ring, hardly anything at all. For the rest of it we gave him canned meat and cigarettes and coffee and chocolate
   “Is that all?” Dan asked.
   “No, those are just the watches,” Rita said. “Pete’s been amusing himself, admiring them and winding them every day. There’s more stuff in my room-a couple of necklaces and a ruby and diamond brooch and-well, all sorts of junk.”
   “Pete,” Dan said, “throw that kit in the corner, there. Rita, don’t touch anything you may have in your bedroom. There’s no point in your absorbing even another fraction of a roentgen. We’ve got to figure out a way to get the stuff out of here and get rid of it without damaging ourselves. We’ll be back.”
   Rita followed them to the door, whimpering. She snatched at Dan’s sleeve. “What’s going to happen? Am I going to die> Is my hair going to fall out?”
   “You haven’t absorbed nearly as much radiation as your brother,” Dan said. “I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen because radiation sickness is so tricky.”
   “What about Pete? What’ll I do if Pete-”
   “I’m afraid,” Dan said, “that Pete is slipping into leukemia.” “Blood cancer?”
   “Yes. I’m afraid you’d better prepare yourself.”
   Rita’s hands fell from Dan’s arm. Randy watched her diminish, all allure, all bravado falling away, leaving her smaller and like a child. He said, quietly, “Rita, you’d better keep this, here. You’ll need it.” He gave her the bottle of Scotch.
   As he pressed the starter Dan said, “Why did you give her the whiskey?”
   “I feel sorry for her.” That wasn’t the only reason. If he had owed her anything before, he did no longer. They were quits. They were square. “Is she going to be all right?” he asked.
   “I think so, unless a malignancy develops from the burn on her finger. Improbable but possible. Yes, she should be all right so far as radiation goes. The dose she absorbed was localized. But after her brother dies she’ll be alone. Then she won’t be all right.” “She’ll find a man,” Randy said. “She always has.”
   Porky Logan’s house stood at the end of Augustine Road, in a grove that rose up a hillside at the back of the house. It was a two-story brick, the largest house in Pistolville, so it was said. Porky’s sister and niece had been caring for him, but he lived alone. His wife and two children had departed Pistolville ten years before.
   They found Porky on the second floor. He was sitting up in bed, unshaven chin resting upon blotched bare chest. Between his knees was a beer case filled with jewelry. His hands were buried to the forearm in this treasure. Dan said, “Porky!”
   Porky didn’t raise his head. Porky was dead.
   Dan stepped to the bed, pushed Porky’s body back against the pillows, and pried an eyelid open. Dan said, “Let’s get him out of here. That’s a furnace he’s got in his lap.”
   Randy tried not to breathe going down the steps. It was not only the smell of Porky’s room that hurried him.
   Dan said, “We’ve got to keep people out of this house until we can get Porky and that hot stuff underground. How do we do it?”
   “What about a sign? We could paint a sign.”
   They found an unopened can of yellow paint and a brush in Porky’s garage. Dan used the brush on the front door. In block letters he wrote:
   “DANGER! KEEP OUT! RADIATION!”
   “You’d better put something else on there,” Randy said. “There are a lot of people around here who still don’t know what radiation means.”
   “Do you really think so?”
   “I’m positive of it. They’ve never seen it, or felt it. They hear about it, but I don’t think they believe it. They didn’t believe it could kill them before The Day-if they thought of it at all-and
   I don’t think they believe it now. You’d better add something they understand, like Poison.” and reached under the bed and snatched the boot. All she said as she went through the door was, `I hope you croak, you sneaky bastard. I’m going back to Apalachicola’.”
   Fascinated, Randy asked, “How does she expect to get to Apalachicola?”
   “I keep-kept the Plymouth in the shed. It was nearly full with gas, what was in the drum I had to service the outboards. I hope she wrecks.”
   Dan picked up his bag. His huge shoulders sagged. His face was unhappy behind the red beard. “Do you still have that ointment I gave you?”
   “Yes.” Bill turned his head toward the table.
   “Keep using it on your hands. It may give you relief.”
   “It may, but this will.” Bill tilted the rum bottle and drank until he gagged.
   Riding back on River Road, Randy said, “Will Cullen live?” “I doubt it. I don’t have the drugs or antibiotics or blood transfusions for him.” He reached down and patted his bag. “Not much left in here, Randy. I have to make decisions, now. I have drugs only for those worth saving.”
   “What about the woman?”
   “I don’t think she’ll die of radiation sickness. I don’t think she’ll keep that hot gold and silver and platinum long enough. She’ll either swap for booze or, being stupid, try one of the main highways.”
   “I think the highwaymen will get her if she’s headed for Apalachicola,” Randy said.
   It was strange that the term highwaymen had revived in its true and literal sense. These were not the romantic and reputedly chivalrous highwaymen of Britain’s post roads in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These new highwaymen were ruthless and evil men who lately had been choking the thin trickle of communications and trade between towns and villages. Mostly, according to word that filtered into Fort Repose, they operated
   So under “RADIATION,” Dan printed “POISON.” He said, “One other. Bill Cullen.”
   Bigmouth Bill was as they had left him, except that he held a bottle of cheap rum in his misshapen hands, and had been hitting it. Randy hovered at the door, so he could listen but not be submerged in the odors.
   Dan said, “Bill, we’ve found out what’s making you sick. You’re absorbing radiation from the jewelry Porky traded for the whiskey. Porky’s jewelry is hot. It’s radioactive. Where is it?”
   Bill laughed wildly. He began to curse, methodically and without imagination, as Randy had heard troops curse in the MLR in Korea. The pace of his obscenities quickened, he choked, frothed, and pulled at the rum bottle. “Jewelry!” he yelled, his yellow eyeballs rolling. “Jewelry! Diamonds, emeralds, pearls, tinkly little bracelets, all hot, all radioactive. ‘That’s rich!”
   “Where is it, Bill?” Dan’s voice was sharper.
   “Ask her. Ask the dough-faced bitch! She has ‘em, has the whole bootful.”
   “What do you mean?”
   “I’ve been hiding the stuff, figuring that if she got her hands on it she’d swap it all for a bottle of vireo. The jewels in one boot, the rum in the other. Believe it or not, this is the last of my stock.” He sucked at the bottle.
   “Go on,” Dan said.
   “I kept the boots, these boots here-” he gestured at a pair of hunting boots-”hid under the bed. It was safe, okay. You see, my woman she never cleaned anything, especially she never cleaned under the bed. Well, when she went out for a while I thought I’d take a look at the loot. You know, it was nice to hold it in your hands and dream about what you were going to do with it when things got back to normal. But she was watching through the window. She’s been trying to catch me and just a while ago she did. She walked in, grinning. I thought she was going to tell me the war was over or something. She walked in and reached under the bed and snatched the boot. All she said as she went through the door was, `I hope you croak, you sneaky bastard. I’m going back to Apalachicola’.”
   Fascinated, Randy asked, “How does she expect to get to Apalachicola?”
   “I keep-kept the Plymouth in the shed. It was nearly full with gas, what was in the drum I had to service the outboards. I hope she wrecks.”
   Dan picked up his bag. His huge shoulders sagged. His face was unhappy behind the red beard. “Do you still have that ointment I gave you?”
   “Yes.” Bill turned his head toward the table.
   “Keep using it on your hands. It may give you relief.”
   “It may, but this will.” Bill tilted the rum bottle and drank until he gagged.
   Riding back on River Road, Randy said, “Will Cullen live?” “I doubt it. I don’t have the drugs or antibiotics or blood transfusions for him.” He reached down and patted his bag. “Not much left in here, Randy. I have to make decisions, now. I have drugs only for those worth saving.”
   “What about the woman?”
   “I don’t think she’ll die of radiation sickness. I don’t think she’ll keep that hot gold and silver and platinum long enough. She’ll either swap for booze or, being stupid, try one of the main highways.”
   “I think the highwaymen will get her if she’s headed for Apalachicola,” Randy said.
   It was strange that the term highwaymen had revived in its true and literal sense. These were not the romantic and reputedly chivalrous highwaymen of Britain’s post roads in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These new highwaymen were ruthless and evil men who lately had been choking the thin trickle of communications and trade between towns and villages. Mostly, according to word that filtered into Fort Repose, they operated on the main highways like the Turnpike and Routes 1, 441, 17, and 50. So they were called highwaymen.
   They passed the empty McGovern place. It was already lushly overgrown. “You know,” Dan said, “in a few more months the jungle will take over.”

Chapter 9

   They buried Porky Logan Friday morning. It was a ticklish and exhausting procedure. Randy had to draw his gun to get it done. First, it was necessary to obtain the cooperation of Bubba Offenhaus. That was difficult enough. Bubba’s funeral parlor was locked and empty and he was no longer seen in town. Since he was Deputy Director of Civil Defense as well as undertaker, a public appearance exposed him to all sorts of requests and problems which frightened him and about which he could do nothing. So Bubba and Kitty Offenhaus could only be found in their big new house, a rare combination of modern and classic, constructed largely of tinted glass between antebellum Greek columns.
   When Randy found Bubba sitting on his terrace he looked like a balloon out of which air had been let. His trousers sagged front and rear and folds of skin drooped around his mouth. Dan explained about Porky. Bubba was unimpressed. “Let them bury him in Pistolville,” he said. “Plant him in his own back yard.” “It can’t be done that way,” Dan said. “Porky’s a menace and the jewelry is deadly. Bubba, what we’ve got to have is a lead lined coffin. We’ll bury his loot with him.”
   “You know very well I’ve only got one in stock,” Bubba said. “As a matter of fact it’s the only casket I’ve got left and probably the only casket in Timucuan County. It’s the deluxe model with hammered bronze handles and shield which can be suitably engraved, and reinforced bronze corners. Guaranteed for eternity and I’m damned if I’m going to give it up for Porky Logan.” “Who are you saving it for,” Randy asked, “yourself?”
   “I don’t see any point in you becoming insulting, Randy. That casket cost me eight hundred and forty-five dollars F.O.B. and it retails for fifteen hundred plus tax. Who’s going to pay for it? As a matter of fact, who’s going to reimburse me for all the other caskets, and everything else, that I’ve contributed since The Day?” “I’m sure the government will,” Dan said, “one day.”
   “Do you think the government’s going to restore Repose-in-Peace Park? Do you think it’ll pay for all those choice plots I’ve handed out, free? Like fun. I suppose you want to bury Porky in Repose-in-Peace?”
   “That’s the general idea,” Dan said.
   “And you expect me to use my hearse to cart the cadaver?” “Somebody has to do it, Bubba, and you’re not only the man with the hearse but you’re in Civil Defense.”
   Bubba groaned. The most stupid thing he had ever done was accept the Civil Defense job. At the time it had seemed quite an honor. His appointment was mentioned in the Orlando and Tampa papers, and he rated a whole page, with picture, in the Southeast Mortician. It was undoubtedly a bigger thing than holding office in the Lions or Chamber of Commerce. His status had increased, even with his wife. Kitty was Old Southern Family, which he had been raised in South Chicago. She had never wholly forgiven him for this, or for his profession. Secretly, he had considered Civil Defense a boondoggle, like handouts to foreign countries and spending millions on moon rockets and such. He had never imagined there would be a war. It was true that after The Day he and Kitty had been able to get supplies in San Marco that he wouldn’t have been able to get if he hadn’t been in Civil Defense. For one thing, he had been able to get gasoline out of the county garage. But the tanks had long been dry, all other official supplies exhausted. He said, “I’ve only got one hearse that will run and only a couple of gallons of gas in it. I’m saving it for an emergency.”
   `This is an emergency,” Dan said. “You’ll have to use it now.”
   Bubba thought of another obstacle. “It’ll take eight men to tote that lead-lined casket with Porky in it even if he’s lost weight like I have.”
   Randy spoke. “We’ll get them. Plenty of strong men hanging around Marines Park.”
   In the park they mounted the bandstand. Randy shouted, “Hey, everybody! Come over here!” The traders drifted over, wondering.
   Bubba made a little speech. Bubba was accustomed to speaking at service club luncheons and civic meetings, but this audience, although many of the faces were familiar, was not the same. It was neither attentive nor courteous. He spoke of community spirit and cooperation and togetherness. He reminded them that they had sent Porky Logan to the state legislature and he knew Porky must have been a friend to many there. Now he asked for volunteers to help bury Porky. No hands went up. A few of the traders snickered.
   Bubba shrugged and looked at Dan Gunn. Dan said, “This is in your own interest. If we leave the dead unburied we’re inviting an epidemic. In addition, in this case we must get rid of radioactive material that can be dangerous to anyone who finds it.”
   Somebody yelled, “Bubba’s the undertaker, ain’t he? Well, let him undertake it.”
   Some of the men laughed. Randy saw that they were bored and would soon turn away. It was necessary that he act. He stepped in front of Dan, lifted the flap of his holster, and drew out the .45. Holding it casually, so that it was a menace to no one in particular, and yet to each of them separately, he pulled back the hammer. His left forefinger jabbed at the faces of five men, big men. “You, Rusty, and you, Tom, and you there, you have just volunteered as pall-bearers.”
   They looked at him amazed. For a long time, no one had ordered them to do anything. For a long time, there had not even been a boss on a job. Nobody moved. Some of the traders carried handguns in hip pockets or holsters. Others had leaned shotguns or rifles against benches or the bandstand railing. Randy watched for a movement. He was going to shoot the first man who reached for a weapon. This was the decision he had made. Regardless of the consequences he was going to do it. Having made the decision, and being certain he would carry it out, he felt easy about it. He realized they must know this. He stepped down from the bandstand, his eyes holding his five volunteers. He said, “All right, let’s get going.”
   The five men followed him and he holstered his pistol.
   So they buried Porky Logan. With him they buried the contaminated loot in Porky’s carton and out of the Hernandez house. Also into the coffin went the fire tongs with which Dan Gunn had handled the jewelry. When the grave was filled and mounded somebody said, “Hadn’t there ought to be a prayer for the poor bastard?”
   They all looked at Randy. Randy said, “God rest his soul.” He added, knowing that it would be passed along, “And God help anybody who digs him up to get the stuff It’ll kill them like it killed Porky.”
   He turned and walked slowly, head down, to the car, thinking. Authority had disintegrated in Fort Repose. The Mayor, Alexander Getty, who was also chairman of the town council, was barricaded in his house, besieged by imaginary and irrational fears that the Russians had invaded and were intent on his capture, torture, and the rape of his wife and daughter. The Chief of Police was dead. The two other policemen had abandoned unpaid public duty to scramble for their families. The fire and sanitation departments, equipment immobilized, no longer existed. Bubba Offenhaus was frightened, bewildered, and incapable of either decision or action. So Randy had shoved his gun into this vacuum. He had assumed leadership and he was not sure why. It was enough trouble keeping the colony on River Road alive and well. He felt a loneliness not unfamiliar. It was like leading a platoon out of the MLR to occupy some isolated outpost. Command, whether of a platoon or a town, was a lonely state.
   When they returned to River Road at noon Randy’s boat shoes were stiff with caked clay of the graveyard. He was knocking them clear of clods, on the front steps, when he was attracted by movement in the foliage behind Florence Wechek’s house. Alice Cooksey and Florence were standing under a tall cabbage palm, steadying a ladder. At the top of the ladder, head and shoulders hidden by fronds, was Lib. He wondered why she must be up there. He wished she would stay on the ground. She took too many chances. She could get hurt. With medical supplies dwindling-Dan had already been forced to use most of their reserve-they all had to be careful. Everyone had chores and if one was hurt it meant added burdens, including nursing, on the others. A simple fracture could be compound disaster.
   Bill McGovern, Malachai, and Two-Tone Henry came around the corner of the house. Bill was wearing gray flannels raggedly cut off above the knees, tennis shoes, and nothing else. His right hand grasped a bouquet of wrenches. Grease smeared his bald head and fine white beard. He no longer looked like a Caesar, but like an unkempt Jove armed with thunderbolts. Before he could speak Randy demanded: “Bill, what’s your daughter doing up that palm?”
   “She won’t say,” Bill said. “She and Alice and Florence are cooking up some sort of a surprise for us. Maybe she’s found a bird’s nest. I wouldn’t know.”
   Randy said, “What’s the delegation?”
   Bill said, “It’s Two-Tone’s idea. Two-Tone, you talk.”
   Two-Tone said, “Mister Randy, you know my sugar cane will be tall and sweet and Pop’s corn will be up in June.”
   “So?”
   “Corn and sugar cane means corn whiskey. I mean we can make ‘shine if you says it’s okay. Pop and Mister Bill here, they say it’s up to you. I suggests it only on one account. We can trade ‘shine.”
   “Naturally you wouldn’t drink any, would you, Two-Tone?” “Oh, no sir!”
   Randy understood that they required something from him beyond permission. Yet if they could manufacture corn whiskey it would be like finding coffee beans. Whiskey was a negotiable money crop. In this humid climate both corn and sugar cane would deteriorate rapidly. Corn whiskey was different. The longer you kept it the more valuable it became. Furthermore, only a few bottles of bourbon and Scotch remained, and the bourbon was strictly medicinal, Dan’s anesthetic. Two-Tone, the no-good genius! Cannily, all Randy said was, “If you have Preacher’s permission, it’s all right with me. It’s Preacher’s corn.” Bill said, “I’ve already contributed my Imperial.”
   “You’ve what?”
   “Contributed the guts of my Imperial. You see, to make the still we have to have a lot of copper tubing. We have to bend condensing coils, and you have to have tubing between the boiler and condenser and so forth.”
   “What you’re getting at,” Randy said slowly, “is that you want me to contribute the gas lines out of my Bonneville.” “That’s right. The lines out of my car won’t give us enough length. And we have to have your lawn roller. You see, first we’ve got to build a mill to crush the cane. We have to get the juice and boil it down to molasses before we can make whiskey, or for that matter use it as syrup. Balaam, the mule, will walk a circle, a lever harnessed to his back to turn the roller on concrete slabs. That’s the mill. That’s the way they did it a couple of hundred years ago. I’ve seen pictures.”
   Randy knew it would work. He said, sadly, “Okay. Go into the garage. But I don’t want to watch.” It had been a beautiful car. He remembered Mark’s casual prediction that it wouldn’t be worth a damn to him. Mark had been wrong. Some of it was useful.
   Lunch was fish, with half a lime. Orange juice, all you could drink. A square of honeycomb. Dan and Helen were at the table. The others had already finished. Helen always waited for him, Randy noticed. She was so solicitous it was sometimes embarrassing.
   Dan looked at his plate and said, “A fine, thinning diet. If everybody in the country had been on this diet before The Day the cardiac death rate would have been cut in half.”
   “So what good would it have done them?” Randy said. He speared his honey and munched it, rolling his eyes. “We’ve got to do more trading with Jim Hickey. We’ve got to find something Jim needs.” Randy remembered what Jim had said about half his broods going foul since The Day and how Jim suspected radiation was responsible. He told Dan and Helen what Hickey had said.
   Dan stared at his plate, troubled. He cut into his honeycomb and tasted it. “Delicious,” he said, but his mind was elsewhere. At last he looked up and spoke gravely. “We shouldn’t be surprised. Who can tell how much cesium 137 showered down on The Day? How much was carried into the upper atmosphere and has been filtering down since? The geneticists warned us of damage to future generations. Well, Hickey’s bees are in a future generation.”
   Helen looked scared. Randy realized that this was a more serious matter to women than to men, although frightening enough to anybody. She said, “Does that mean-will it affect humans?”
   “Certainly some human genetic damage can be expected,” Dan said. “What will happen to the birth rate is anybody’s guess. And yet, this is only nature’s way of protecting the race. Nature is proving Darwin’s law of natural selection. The defective bee, unable to cope with its environment, is rejected by nature before birth. I think this will be true of man. It is said that nature is cruel. I don’t think so. Nature is just, and even merciful. By natural selection, nature will attempt to undo what man has done.” “You make it sound comforting,” Helen said.
   “Only an opinion, based on almost no evidence. In six or seven months I’ll know more. But to evaluate everything may take a thousand years. So let’s not worry about it. Right now I’ve got other worries, like tires. The tires on the Model-A are smooth, Randy, and I’ve got to make a couple of calls out in the country. Got any suggestions?”
   “I’ve been thinking of tires,” Randy said. “The tires on Florence’s old Chevy will fit the Model-A. Two of them are almost new. Let’s go over and make the change.”
   It was the custom of Randy and Dan to meet in the apartment at six each evening, listen for the clear channel station which would be heard at this hour if at all, and, if they were tired and the rigors of the day warranted, share a drink. At six on that Friday evening, Dan had not returned from his calls, so Randy sat at his bar alone with the little transistor portable. Life was ebbing from its last set of batteries. He feared the day when it would no longer pick up even the strongest signal, or give any sound whatsoever, and the day could not be far distant. So, what strength was left in the batteries he carefully rationed. Sam Hazzard’s all-wave receiver, operating on recharged automobile batteries, was really their only reliable source of information. He clicked on the radio, was relieved to hear static, and tried the Conelrad frequencies.
   Immediately he heard a familiar voice, thin and gravelly although he turned the volume full. “. . . against smallpox.” Randy knew he had missed the first item of news. Then he heard:
   There have been isolated reports of disorders and outlawry from several of the Contaminated Zones. As a result, Mrs.
   Vanbruuker-Brown, Acting President, in her capacity as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, has authorized all Reserve officers and National Guard officers, not in contact with their commanders or headquarters, to take independent action to preserve public safety in those areas where Civil Defense has broken down or where organized military units do not exist. These officers will act in accordance with their best judgment, under the proclamation of martial law. When possible, they will wear the uniform when exercising authority. I repeat this new . . .”
   The signal hummed and faded. Randy clicked off the set. Even as he began to assimiliate the significance of what he had heard he was aware that Helen was standing on the other side of the counter. In her hands she held a pair of scissors, comb, and a silver hand mirror. She was smiling. “Did you hear that?” he asked.
   “Yes. Today’s your haircut day, Randy. Today’s Friday.” Helen trimmed his hair and Bill McGovern’s fringe each Friday, and barbered Dan and Ben Franklin Saturdays.
   “You know I’m in the Reserve,” Randy said. “I’m legal.” “What do you mean?”
   “I had to pull my gun this morning to get Porky Logan buried. I had no authority. Now I do have authority, legally.” His thoughts on the proclamation, at the moment, went no further. “That’s fine. Now get into a chair.”
   He walked into his office. Because of the swivel chair, it was also the barbershop. Helen tied a towel around his neck and began snipping, deftly and rapidly. She was some woman, he thought. Under any conditions she could keep a household running smoothly. In ten minutes it was done.
   Her hand ruffled and then smoothed his hair. He could feel her breasts, round and warm, pressing against his shoulder blades. “You’re getting gray hairs, Randy,” she said. The timbre of her voice was deeper than usual.
   “W110 isn’t?”
   She rubbed and smoothed his temples. Her fingers kneaded the back of his neck. “Do you like that?” she whispered. “Mark loved it. When he came home, tense and worried, I always rubbed his temples and his neck like this.”
   Randy said, “It feels fine.” He wished she wouldn’t talk like that. She made him nervous. He put his hands on the arms of the chair and started to rise.
   She pulled him back and whirled the chair so that he faced her. Her eyes were round. He could see beads of perspiration at the corners of her nose, and on her forehead. “You are Mark,” she said. “Don’t you believe me? Here, look!” She lifted the mirror from the desk and thrust it before his face.
   He looked, wondering how he could gracefully escape, wondering what was wrong with her. It was true that his face, leaner and harder, looked like Mark’s face now. “I do look something like him,” he admitted, “but why shouldn’t I? I’m his brother.”
   Her arms pinning him with unexpected strength, she kissed him wildly, as if her mouth could subdue and mold and change him.
   His hands found her wrists and he forced her back. The mirror fell and smashed.
   “Don’t!” she cried. “Don’t push me away! You’re Mark! You can’t deny it! You’re Mark!”
   He struggled out of the chair, clamping her wrists, trying not to injure her. He knew that she was mad and he fought to control the panic within himself. “Stop it!” he heard himself shouting. “Stop it, Helen! Stop it! I’m not Mark! I’m Randy!”
   She screamed, “Mark!”
   The door was ajar. Through it came Lib’s voice, loud and welcome, “Randy, are you shorn? If Helen’s finished, come on out. I’ve got something to show you.”
   He released Helen’s wrists. She leaned against the desk, face averted, shoulders quivering, one hand stifling the sounds erupting from her mouth. He said, gently, “Please, Helen-” He touched her arm. She drew away from him. He fled into the living room.
   Lib stood at the porch door, her face somber, beckoning. She said quietly, “Up to the roof, where we can talk.”
   Randy followed her, knowing that she must have heard and grateful for her interference. It was something he would have had to tell Lib anyway. He would have to tell Dan too. This emotional earthquake could bring down their house. It was a problem for a physician.
   Up on the captain’s walk, Randy lowered himself carefully into a deck chair. The canvas would rot before summer’s end. His hands were shaking. “Did you hear it all?” he asked.
   “Yes. All. And saw some too. Don’t ever let her know.” “What’s wrong with her?” It was a protest rather than a question.
   Lib sat on the edge of his chair and put her hands on his hands and said, “Stop shaking, Randy. I know you’re confused. It was inevitable. I knew it was coming. I’ll diagnose it for you as best I can. It’s a form of fantasy.”
   Randy was silent, wondering at her detachment and cool ness.
   “It is,” she went on, “the sort of transference you find in dreams-the substitution in dreams of one person for another. Helen allowed herself to slip into a dream. I think she is a completely chaste person. She is, isn’t she?”
   “I’m sure of it, or I was.”
   “Yet she is a person who requires love and is used to it. For many years a man has been the greater part of her life. So she has this conflict-intense loyalty to her husband and yet need of a man to receive her abundance of love and affection. She tried to resolve the conflict irrationally. You became Mark. It was an hallucination.”
   “You’re talking like a professional, Lib.”
   “I’m not a professional. I just wanted to be one. I majored in psychology. Remember?”
   It was something she had told him but he had forgotten because it seemed incongruous and not in the least important. Lib looked like a girl who had majored in ballet and water-skiing at Miami rather than psychology at Sarah Lawrence. He knew that she worked for a year in a Cleveland clinic and had abandoned the job only because of her mother’s illness. When she spoke of this year, which was seldom, it was with nostalgia, as some girls spoke of a year in Europe or on the stage. He suspected it must have been the most rewarding year of her life, and certainly there must have been a man, or men, in it. Randy said, “Lib, do you think she’s crazy?”
   “Helen’s not psychotic. She’s under terrible strain. She let herself go, but only for a moment. She indulged a temporary fantasy. Now it is over. Now she will be ashamed of herself. The best thing you can do is pretend it didn’t happen. One day she’ll mention it to you, perhaps obliquely, and apologize. Eventually she’ll understand why she did it and the sense of guilt will leave her. One day, when we’re better friends, I’ll make her understand it. You know there is a man in the house for Helen-a perfectly fine man. I’m going to make that my special project.”
   Randy felt relieved. He looked out over the river, contemplating his ignorance of women and the peace of evening. On the end of the dock Ben Franklin and Peyton were fishing. It was understood that anyone, child or adult, could go fishing before breakfast or after assigned chores were done. Fishing was not only recreation but the necessary daily harvest of a crop providentially swimming at their feet. Presently the brass ship’s bell on the porch sang its sharp, clean, sea note. The bell was a relic of Lieutenant Randolph Rowzee Peyton’s longboats. It was the same bell that Randy’s mother had used to summon Mark and him from the river to wash for dinner. There was peace and continuity in the sound of the bell. The bell announced that there was food on the table and a women in the kitchen. So it was not only a message to the children but to Randy. Helen had pulled herself together. He watched Ben and Peyton, trailed by Graf, thread their way up through the grove. Graf still shared Randy’s couch but all day he shadowed the boy. This was right. A boy needed a dog. A boy also needed a father.
   When the children were close to the house Randy yelled down, “What’d you get?”
   Ben held up a string of bream and speckled perch. “Sixteen,” he shouted, “on worms and crickets. I got fifteen, she only got one.”
   Peyton danced in indignation, a slim shrill-voiced sprite. “Who cares about fish? If I grow up I’m not going to be a fisherman!”
   Helen called from the kitchen window. The children disappeared.
   Randy said, “Did you ever hear a little girl say `If I grow up’ before?”
   “No, I never did. It gives me the creeps.” “Not their fault,” Randy said. “Ours.” “Would you want children, Randy?”
   Randy considered the question. He thought of Jim Hickey’s bees, and Peyton’s “if,” and of cow’s milk you would not dare feed a baby in a contaminated zone, even if you had a cow, and of many other things.
   Lib waited a long time for an answer and then she leaned across the chair and kissed him and said, “Don’t try to answer now. I’ve got to go down and help with dinner. Don’t come downstairs for a few minutes, Randy. We’ve whipped up a surprise.”
   At seven, conscious that he had not heard Dan return, Randy went downstairs. The table was set as if for a feast-a white cloth, two new candles; a salad bowl as well as plate at each place. A laden salad-boat of Haitian mahogany rode on the circular linen lagoon. Garnishing the inevitable platter of broiled fish was a necklace of mushrooms. He tasted the salad. It was delicate, varied, and wonderful. “Who invented this?” he asked. He had not tasted greens in months.
   Helen had not met his eyes since he entered the dining room. She said, “Alice Cooksey. Alice found a book listing edible palms, grasses, and herbs. Lib did most of the picking.”
   “What all’s in it?”
   “Fiddlehead ferns, hearts of palm, bamboo shoots, wild onions, some of the Admiral’s ornamental peppers, and the first tomatoes out of Hannah Henry’s garden.”
   Lib said, “Wait’ll you try the mushrooms. That was Helen’s idea. It’s furury, for the last week they’ve been growing all over, right in front of our eyes, and only Helen recognized them as food.”
   “No toadstools I hope,” Randy said.
   Helen smiled and for the first time looked at him directly. “Oh, no. Alice thought of that too. I’ve been wandering around the hammock with an illustrated book in one hand and a basket in the other.”
   Now that she could see he was treating the incident in his office as something that hadn’t happened, she was regaining control of herself. He said, “Helen, you be careful in that hammock. And Lib, you stay out of palm trees. We don’t want any snake bites or broken legs. Dan has troubles enough.” He put down his fork. “Where is Dan?”
   Nobody knew. Dan was usually home before six. Occasionally, he was as late as this or later when he encountered an emergency. Still, it was impossible not to worry. It was at times like this that Randy truly missed the telephone. Without communications, the simplest mechanical failure could turn into a nightmare and disaster. He finished the fish, mushrooms, and salad, but without appetite.
   Randy fidgeted until eight and then said, “I’m going to see the Admiral. Maybe Dan stopped there for dinner.” He knew this was unlikely, but he tried in any case to visit Sam Hazzard each evening and watch him comb the frequencies. There were other reasons. He stopped at the Wechek and Henry houses like a company commander checking his outposts. He slept uneasily unless he knew all was well around his perimeter. More compelling, Lib usually went with him. It was their opportunity to have a little time alone. It was paradoxical that they lived in the same house, ate almost every meal elbow to elbow or across the bar in his apartment, slept within twenty feet of each other, and yet they could be alone hardly at all.
   Ben Franklin said, “Wait until I get the shotgun, Randy. I’ll go with you. It’s my night to stand guard.” He raced upstairs. Helen said, “Do you really think you ought to let him do it, Randy>“
   “It’d break his heart if I didn’t. I think he’ll be okay. Caleb is going to stay up with him and Malachai will be right there. Malachai will sleep with one eye open.”
   “Why are you letting him have your shotgun?”
   “Because if something comes around the Henrys’ yard I want him to hit it, not just pop away at it in the dark with a twenty-two. I’ve taught him how to handle the shotty. It’ll be loaded with number two buck. He’ll do all right.”
   Ben came out on the porch carrying the gun. Lib said, “Am I invited?”
   Randy said, “Certainly.” He turned to Bill McGovern. “If Dan shows up, give me three bells, will you?” Three strokes of the ship’s bell meant come home, but it was not an emergency signal. Five bells was the panic button. The bell could be heard for a mile along the shore and across water.
   Pale yellow lamplight showed in the Henrys’ windows. Randy knocked and Missouri, looking almost svelte in a newly acquired waistline, opened the door. “Mister Randy. I guessed ‘twas you. I want to thank you for the honey. Tasted mighty good. Will you come in and have some tea?”
   “Tea!” Randy saw a kettle steaming on a brick oven in the fireplace.
   “We calls it tea. I grow mints under the house and dry ‘em until they powders. So we has mint tea.”
   “We’ll skip it tonight, Mizzoo. I just came to put Ben Franklin on his stand. Caleb ready?”
   Missouri’s son stepped out of the shadows, teeth and eyes gleaming. Incredibly, he carried a six-foot spear.
   “Let me see that,” Randy said. He hefted it. It had been fashioned, he saw, from a broken garden edger, the blade ground to a narrow triangle. It was heavy, well balanced, and lethal. “Uncle Malachai made it for me,” Caleb said proudly.
   “It’s a wicked weapon, all right,” Randy said, and returned it to the boy.
   Malachai, carrying a lantern, joined them. Malachai said, “I figured that if Ben Franklin missed with the shotgun Caleb best have it for close-in defense, if it’s truly a wolf, like Preacher says.”
   Randy was certain that whatever had stolen the Henrys’ hens, and the pig, it wasn’t a wolf, but he wanted to impress Ben Franklin with the seriousness of his watch. “Probably not a wolf,” he said, “but it could be a cougar-a panther. My father used to hunt ‘em when he was young. Plenty of panther in Timucuan County until the first boom brought so many people down. Now there aren’t so many people, so there will be more panther.”
   They walked toward Balaam’s tired barn. The mule snorted and rattled the boards in his stall. “It’s only me, Balaam,” Malachai said. “Balaam, quiet down!” Balaam quieted.
   Randy pointed to the bench alongside the barn. “That’s your stand, Ben.” Bill McGovern had sat on the bench the previous night and seen nothing.
   “Stand?” Ben Franklin said.
   “That’s what you call it in a deer hunt. When I was your age my father used to take me hunting and put me on a stand. There are a couple of things I want you to remember, Ben. Everything depends on you-and you, Caleb-keeping absolutely still. Whatever it is out there, is better equipped than you are. It can see better and hear better and smell better. All you’ve got on it is brains. Your only chance of getting it is to hear it before it hears or sees you.” Randy looked at the sky. There were only stars. Later, there would be a quarter moon. “Chances are you’ll hear it before you see it. But if you talk, or make any sound, you’ll never see it at all because it’ll hear you first and leave. Do you understand?”
   “Yes, sir,” Ben said.
   “You’ll get cramped and you’ll get tired. So when you sit on the stand you move around all you want at first and find out just how far you can move without making any noise. You got shells in the chambers?”
   “Yes, sir, and four extra in my pocket.”
   “You’ll only need what’s in the gun. If you don’t get him with two you’ll never get him at all. And Ben-”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “Hold steady on it and don’t miss. We want to get rid of this thing or somebody will have to sit up all night every night.” Ben said, “Randy, suppose it’s a man?”
   This possibility had been restless in Randy’s mind from the first and he had not wanted to mention it, but since it was mentioned he gave the unavoidable answer. “Whatever it is, Ben, shoot it. And Caleb, if he misses I depend on you to stick it.” He turned to Malachai. “Thanks for lighting us out. We’re going on to Admiral Hazzard’s house now. Good night, Malachai.”
   “Good night,” Malachai said. “I sleep light, Mister Randy.” Lib took his hand and they walked to the river bank and down the path that led toward the single square of light announcing that Sam Hazzard was in his den. Randy chuckled, thinking of Caleb’s spear. “We have just witnessed an historic event,” he said.
   “What do you mean?”
   “North American civilization’s return to the Neolithic Age.” “I don’t think it’s funny,” Lib said. “I didn’t like the way you spoke to Ben Franklin. It was brutal.”
   “In the Neolithic,” Randy said, “a boy either grows up fast or he doesn’t grow up at all.”
   Sam Hazzard’s den was compact and crowded, like a shipmaster’s cabin stocked for a long and lonely voyage. It was filled with mementos of his service, ceremonial and Samurai swords, nautical instruments, charts, maps, books on shelves and stacked in corners, bound files of the Proceedings, The foreign Affairs Quarterly, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The admiral’s L-shaped desk spread along two walls. One side was preempted by the professional-looking shortwave receiver and his radio log. The radio was turned on, but when Randy and Lib entered the room all they heard was a low hum.
   Sam Hazzard was not as tall as Lib and his weathered skin was drawn tautly over fine bones. In slippers and dragon blazoned shantung robe-his implacable gray eyes shadowed and softened by the indistinct lighting and horn-rimmed glasses, cottony hair like a halo-he appeared fragile; a deception. He was tough as an antique ivory figurine which has withstood the vicissitudes of centuries, and can accept more. He said, “A place for the lady to sit.” He sailed a plastic model of the carrier Wasp—the old Wasp cited by Churchill for stinging twice in the Mediterranean and then herself stung to death by torpedoes-to the far corner of the desk. “Up there,” he ordered Lib, “where you can be properly admired. And you, Randy, lift those books out of that chair. Gently, if you please. Welcome aboard to both of you.”
   Randy said, “You haven’t seen Dan Gunn, have you?” “No. Not today. Why?”
   “He hasn’t come home.”
   “Missing, eh? That sounds ungood, Randy.”
   “If he comes home while we’re out Helen or Bill will ring the bell. Can we hear it in here?”
   “Yes indeed, so long as the window’s open. It always startles me.”
   Randy saw that the Admiral had been working. The Admiral was writing something he called, without elaboration, “A Footnote to History.” A portable typewriter squatted in the center of a ring of books. Research, Randy supposed. He recognized Durant’s Caesar and Christ, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, and Von Kriege by Clausewitz, indicating a footnote to ancient history. Randy said, “Any poop this evening?”
   “I suppose you heard the Civil Defense broadcast.”
   “I caught part of it. Then my batteries quietly expired.” The Admiral gave his attention to the radio. He turned the knob changing frequencies. “I’ve been listening for a station in the thirty-one meter band. Claims to be in Peru. I heard it for the first time last night. It put out some pretty outlandish stuff It doesn’t seem to be on yet, so we’ll try for it again later. I’ve just switched to five point seven megacycles. That’s an Air Force frequency I can tap sometimes. You’ve never heard it, Randy. Interesting, but cryptic.”
   The speaker squealed and whined. “Somebody’s transmitter is open,” the Admiral interpreted. “Something’s coming.”
   A voice boomed with shocking loudness in the small room: “Sky Queen, Sky Queen. Do not answer. Do not answer. This is Big Rock. This is Big Rock. Applejack. Repeat, Applejack. Authentication X-Ray.”
   Lip spoke, excitedly, “What is it? What does it mean?” Hazzard smiled. “I don’t know. I’m not up on Air Force codes and jargon. I’ve heard that Sky Queen call two or three times in the past month. Sky Queen could be a bomber, or a patrol plane, or a whole wing or air division. Big Rock-whoever that is-could be telling Sky Queen-whatever she may be-any number of things. Proceed to target, orbit, continue patrol, come home all is forgiven. I can’t even make an informed guess. However, I do know this. That was a good American call and so we’re still in business.” The smile departed. “On the other hand, it indicates that the enemy is still in business too.”
   “How do you figure?” Randy asked.
   “That `Do not answer’ phrase. Why does Big Rock order Sky Queen to be silent? Because if Sky Queen acknowledges the call then somebody might be able to take a radio fix on her, estimate speed and course, and vector fighters-or launch ground-to-air rockets to shoot her down.”
   Randy considered this. “Then Sky Queen is probably stooging around over enemy territory.”
   `hat’s good deduction but we can’t be certain. For all we know, Sky Queen may be hunting a sub off Daytona. It makes me wild, listening to the damn Air Force-you will please pardon me, Lib-but if the enemy is listening on this frequency it must make them wild too.”
   Lib asked, “What did that `Authentication X-Ray’ stand for?”
   “X-Ray is simply international code for the letter X. My guess is that before every mission they change the authentication letter so that the enemy can’t take over the frequency and give Sky Queen a false heading, or phony instructions.”

   “You know, I enjoyed hearing that,” Lib said. “It gave me a nice feeling. Big Rock has a solid Midwest accent.”
   Sam Hazzard moved a candle so that better light fell on his dials. “Big Rock won’t be back again tonight,” he said. “I’ve never heard him more than once a night. He makes his call and that’s it. I’ll try the thirty-one meter band again.”
   In the candlelight Hazzard’s hands shone with the silky, translucent patina of age and yet they were remarkably deft. They discovered a fascinating squeal. His fingers worked the band spreader delicately as a master cracksman violating a safe and he pressed his face forward as if he expected to hear tumblers click. Very gradually, a faint voice replaced the squeal. He turned up the power. They heard, in English with an indefinite accent:
   “Continuing the news to North America
   “The representative of the Argentine has informed the South American Federation that two ships with wheat have sailed for Nice, in southern France, responding to radio appeals from that city. The appeals from Nice say that several hundred thousand refugees are camped in makeshift shelter on the Cote d’Azure. Many are starving. The casino at Monaco and the Prince’s palace have been converted into hospitals.
   “In a Spanish-language broadcast heard here today, Radio Tokyo announced that the Big Three meeting in New Delhi has approved preliminary plans for flying desperately needed vaccines and antitoxins to uncontaminated cities in Europe, North America, and Australia.”
   “Big Three!” Randy said. “Who’s the Big Three?” “Sh-h!” said the Admiral. “Maybe we’ll find out.” The announcer continued:
   “China, where `Save Asia First’ sentiment is strong, urged that first priority for vaccine aerial shipments go to the Soviet Union’s maritime provinces, where typhus is reported. India and Japan felt that the smallpox epidemic on the West Coast of the United States, Canada, and in Mexico should receive equal priority. The universal shortage of aviation gasoline will make any quick aid difficult, however . . .”
   The squeal insinuated itself into the voice and subdued it. Hazzard caressed the band-spreader. “The atmospherics have been crazy ever since The Day.” Abruptly he asked Randy: “Do you believe it?”
   “It’s weird,” Randy said. “Maybe it’s a Soviet bloc propaganda station pretending to be South American, set up to confuse us and start rumors. I’ll admit I’m confused. I thought the Chinese were in it, on the other side.”
   “The Chinese never liked Russia’s preoccupation with the Med,” Hazzard said. “Maybe they opted out, which would be smart of them. It could be simpler. If they didn’t have nuclear capability we wouldn’t bother hitting them on The Day, and without nuclear weapons they wouldn’t dare stick their noses into a real war. If that was it, they were lucky.”
   “I noticed that station quoted Tokyo? How is it you didn’t hear Tokyo?”
   “I’ve never been able to pick up any Asiatic stations. I used to get Europe fine-London, Moscow, Bonn, Berne. Africa, too, especially the Voice of America transmitter in the Tangier. Not any more. Not since The Day.”
   The signal cleared. They heard:
   “. . . but as yet the Big Three have been unable to reopen communications with Dmitri Torgatz. According to Radio Tokyo, Torgatz headed the Soviet government while the Soviet Union’s capital was in Ulan Bator in Outer Mongolia. The medium-wave station operation from Ulan Bator is no longer heard.”
   “That doesn’t sound like Soviet propaganda to me,” Randy said. “Who is Dmitri Torgatz?”
   The Admiral glanced up at a shelf of reference works. He selected a slender book, Directory of Communist Leaders, found the name, and read: “Torgatz, Dmitri; born Leningrad 1903? Married, wife’s name unlisted; children unlisted; Director Leningrad Agitprop 1946-49; Candidate member Presidium 1950-53; Director water works, Naryan Mar, Siberia, since fall of Malenkov.”
   “Looks like they had a shakeup,” Randy said. “Looks like they had to reach way down and find a minor league bureaucrat.” “Yes. It’s surprising that Torgatz should be running Russia,” the Admiral said, “until you consider that a female, last on the list of Cabinet members, is running the United States.”
   Randy could see that Lib wasn’t listening. She was staring at the tassel of a sword resting on pegs behind his head, her lips parted, eyes unblinking. Her thoughts, he had discovered, frequently raced ahead of his or sped down dark and fascinating byways. When she concentrated thus she left the party. She murmured, “Smallpox.”
   Not understanding that Lib, mentally, was no longer in the room with them, Sam Hazzard inquired, “What about smallpox?”
   “Oh!” Lib shook her head. “I think of smallpox as something out of the Middle Ages, like the Black Plague. It’s true that every so often it cropped up, but we always slapped it down again. What happens now without vaccine? What about diphtheria and yellow fever? Will they start up again? Without penicillin and DDT, where are we? All good things came to us automatically. We were born with silver spoons in our mouths and electric dishwashers to keep them sanitary and clean. We relaxed, didn’t we? What happened to us, Admiral?”
   Sam Hazzard disconnected the radio’s batteries and pulled his chair around to face them. “I’ve been trying to find the answer.” He nodded at his typewriter and the books massed on his desk. “I’ve been trying to put it down in black and white and pass it along. Up to now, no bottom. All I’ve found out was where I myself-and my fellow professionals-failed. I’ll explain.”
   He opened a drawer and drew out a folder. “I called this `A Footnote to History.’ You see, I was in the Pentagon when we were having the big hassles on roles and missions and it occurred to me that I might be one of the few still alive who knew the inside of what went on and how the decisions were reached and I thought that future historians might be interested. So I set it all down factually. I set down all the arguments between the big carrier admirals and the atomic seaplane admirals and the ICBM generals and pentomic division generals and heavy bomber generals and manned missile generals. I told how we finally achieved what we thought was a balanced establishment.
   “When I finished I read it over and realized it was a farce.” He tossed the manuscript on the desk as if he were discarding unwanted fourth class mail.
   “You see, I confused the tactical with the strategic. I think we all did. The truth is this. Once both sides had maximum capability in hydrogen weapons and efficient means of delivering them there was no sane alternative to peace.
   “Every maxim of war was archaic. The rules of Clausewitz, Mahan, all of them were obsolete as the Code Duello. War was no longer an instrument of national polity, only an instrument for national suicide. War itself was obsolete. So my `Footnote’ deals with tactical palavers of no real importance. We might as well have been playing on the rug with lead soldiers.”
   The admiral rose and unkinked his back. “I think most of us sensed this truth, but we could not accept it. You see, no matter how well we understood the truth it was necessary that the Kremlin understand it too. It takes two to make a peace but only one to make a war. So all we could do, while vowing not to strike first, was line up our lead soldiers.”
   “That was all you could do?” Lib asked.
   “All. The answer was not in the Pentagon, or even in the White House. I’m looking elsewhere. One place, here.” He tapped Gibbon. “There are odd similarities between the end of the Pax Romana and the end of the Pax Americana which inherited Pax Britannica. For instance, the prices paid for high office. When it became common to spend a million dollars to elect senators from moderately populous states, I think that should have been a warning to us. For instance, free pap for the masses. Bread and circuses. Roman spectacles and our spectaculars. Largesse from the conquering proconsuls and television giveaways from the successful lipstick king. To understand the present you must know the past, yet it is only part of the answer and I will never discover it all. I have not the years.”
   Randy saw that the Admiral was tired. “I guess we’d better get back,” he said. “Thanks for an entertaining evening.”
   “Next time you come over,” Hazzard said, “I want you to look at my invention.”
   “Are you inventing something too? Everybody’s inventing something.”
   “Yes. It’s called a sailboat. It is a means of propulsion that replaces the gasoline kicker. I sacrificed my flagpole and patio awning to make it. The cutting and sewing was done by Florence
   Wechek and Missouri and Hannah Henry. I can now recommend them as experienced sailmakers.”
   “Thanks, Sam.” Randy grinned. “That’s a wonderful invention and will become popular. I know I’m going to get one right away, and I will use your firm of sailmakers.”
   They walked to the path along the river bank. Swinging at its buoy Randy saw the Admiral’s compact little cruiser with covered foredeck, useless kicker removed, a slender mast arcing its tip at a multitude of stars. There were many sailboats on Florida’s lakes, but Randy had seen very few in the upper reaches of the St. Johns, or on the Timucuan.
   “I love the Admiral,” Lib said. “I worry about him. I wonder whether he gets enough to eat.”
   “The Henrys see that he eats. And Missouri keeps his place neat. The Henrys love him too.”
   “As long as we have men like that I can’t believe we’re so decadent. We won’t go like Rome, will we?”
   He didn’t answer. He swung her around to face him and circled her waist with his hands. His fingers almost met, she was so slim. He said, “I love you. I worry about you. I wonder whether I tell you enough how I love you and want you and need you and how I am diminished and afraid when you are not with me and how I am multiplied when you are here.”
   His arms went around her and he felt her body arch to him, molding itself against him. “There never seems to be enough time,” he said, “but tonight there is time. When we get home.”
   She said, “Yes, Randy.” They walked on, his arm around her waist. “This is a bad time for love,” she said. “Oh, I don’t mean tonight is a bad time, I mean the times. When you love someone, that should be what you think of most, the first thing when you wake in the morning and the last thing before you sleep at night. Before The Day that’s how I thought of you. Did you know that? First in the morning, last at night.”
   Randy knew, without her saying it, that it must be the same for her as it was for him. At day’s end a man was exhausted physically, mentally, emotionally. Each sun heralded a new crisis and each night he bedded with old, relentless fears. He awoke thinking of food and fell onto his couch at night still hungry, his head whirling with problems unsolved and dangers unparried. The Germans, in their years of methodical madness, had discovered in their concentration camps that when a man’s diet fell below fifteen hundred calories his desire and capacity for all emotions dwindled. Randy guessed that he managed to consume almost fifteen hundred calories each day in fish and fruit alone. His vigor was being expended in survival, he decided. That, and worry for the lives dependent upon him. Even now, he could not exclude worry for Dan Gunn from his mind.
   The hodgepodge outlines of the Henry place loomed out of the darkness above them. They were within fifty yards of the barn and Ben Franklin was somewhere in that shadow, shotgun over his knees, enjoined to silence, alert to shoot anything that moved; and they were moving, silhouetted against the star-silvered river. He stopped and held Lib fast. “Ben!” he called. “Ben Franklin! Do not answer. Do not answer. This is Randy. We’re on our way home.”
   They walked on.
   “You know, you sounded just like that radio call on the Air Force frequency,” Lib said.
   “I did sound like that, didn’t I?” He smiled in the darkness, snapped his fingers, and said, “I think I know now what was going on. It wasn’t the way Sam thought. It was just the other way around. Big Rock was the plane, and Sky Queen the base. Big Rock had been somewhere and was coming home and was telling Sky Queen not to shoot, just like I told Ben Franklin.”
   “Perhaps you’re right. Not that it matters to us. I’ve heard them up there on still nights, but they never come low enough to see. The Admiral hears them talk on the radio but they never have a word for us. Maybe they’ve forgotten us. Maybe they’ve forgotten all the contaminated zones. We’re unclean. It makes me feel lonely and, well, unwanted. Isn’t that silly? Does it make you feel like that?”
   “They’ll come back,” he said. “They have to. We’re still a part of the United States, aren’t we?”
   They came to the path that led though their grove from house to dock. “Let’s go out on the dock,” Lib said. “I like it out there. No sound, not even the crickets. Just the river whispering around the pilings.”
   “All right.”
   They turned left instead of right. As their feet touched the planking the ship’s bell spoke. It clanged three times rapidly, then twice more. It kept on ringing. “Oh, damn it to hell!” Randy grabbed her hand and they started the run for the house, an uphill quarter mile in sand and darkness. After a hundred yards she released his hand and fell behind.
   By the time he reached the back steps Randy couldn’t climb them. He was wobbling and his knees had jellied, but before The Day he could not have run the distance at all. He paused, sobbing, and waited for Lib. The Model-A wasn’t in the driveway or the garage. He concluded that Dan hadn’t returned and something frightful had happened to Helen, Peyton, or Bill McGovern.
   He was wrong. It had happened to Dan. Dan was in the dining room, a ruined hulk of man overflowing the captain’s chair, arms hanging loose, legs outstretched, shirt blood-soaked, beard blood-matted. Where his right eye should have been, bulged a blue-black lump large as half an apple. His nose was twisted and enlarged, his left eye only a slit in swollen, discolored flesh. He’s wrecked the car, Randy thought. He went through the windshield and his face took along the steering wheel.
   Helen laid a wet dish towel over Dan’s eyes. Peyton, face white and pinched, stood behind her mother with another towel. It dripped. Except for Dan’s choked breathing, the dripping was for a moment the only sound in the room.
   Dan spoke. The words came out slowly and thickly, each an effort of will. “Was that you, Randy, who came in?”
   “It’s me, Dan. Don’t try to talk yet.” Shock, Randy thought, and probably concussion. He turned to Helen. “We should get him into bed. We have to get him upstairs.”
   “I don’t know if he can make it,” Helen said. “We could hardly get him this far.” Helen’s dress and Bill McGovern’s arms were blood stained.
   “Bill, with your help I can get him up all right.”
   So, with all his weight on their shoulders, they got Dan upstairs and stretched out on the sleigh bed. Bill said, “I’m going to be sick.” He left them. Helen brought clean, wet towels. Dan’s body shook and quivered. His skin grew clammy. He was having a chill. Randy lifted his thick wrist and after a time located the pulse. It was faint, uneven, and rapid. This was shock, all right, and dangerous. Randy said, “Whiskey!”
   Helen said, “I’ll handle this, Randy. No whiskey. Blankets.” He respected Helen’s judgment. In an emergency such as this, Helen functioned. This was what she was made for. He found extra blankets in the closet. She covered Dan and disappeared. She returned with a glass of fluid, held it to Dan’s lips, and said, “Drink this. Drink all you can.”
   “What are you giving him?” Randy asked.
   “Water with salt and soda. Much better than whiskey for shock.”
   Dan drank, gagged, and drank more. “Keep pouring this into him,” Helen ordered. “I’m going to see what’s in the medicine cabinet.”
   “Almost nothing,” Randy said. “Where’s his bag? Everything’s in there.”
   “They took it; and the car.” “Who took it?”
   `The highwaymen.”
   He should have guessed that it hadn’t been an accident. Dan was a careful driver and rarely were two cars on the same road. Traffic was no longer a problem. In his concern for Dan, he did not immediately think of what this loss meant to all of them.
   Helen found peroxide and bandages. This, with aspirin, was almost all that remained of their reserve medical supply. She worked on Dan’s face swiftly and efficiently as a professional nurse.
   Randy felt nauseated, not at the sight of Dan’s injuries-he had seen worse-but in disgust at the beasts who in callous cruelty had dragged down and maimed and destroyed the human dignity of this selfless man. Yet it was nothing new. It had been like this at some point in every civilization and on every continent. There were human jackals for every human disaster. He flexed his fingers, wanting a throat in them. He walked into the other room.
   Lib’s head lay across her arms on the bar. She was crying. When she raised her face it was oddly twisted as when a child’s face loses form in panic or unexpected pain. She said, “What are you going to do about it, Randy?”
   His rage was a hard cold ball in his stomach now. When he spoke it was in a monotone, the voice of someone else. “I’m going to execute them.”
   “Let’s get with it.”
   “Yes. As soon as I find out who.”
   At eleven Dan Gunn came out of shock, relaxed and then slept for a few minutes. He awoke announcing he was hungry. He looked no better, he was in pain, but obviously he was out of danger.
   Randy was dismayed at the thought of Dan, in his condition, loading his stomach with cold bream and catfish, orange juice, and remnants of salad. What he needed, coming out of shock, was hot, nourishing bouillon or broth. On occasion, when Malachai or Caleb discovered a gopher hole and Hannah Henry converted its inhabitant to soup, or when Ben Franklin successfully stalked squirrel or rabbit, such food was available; but not on this night.
   The thought of broth triggered his memory. He shouted, “The iron rations!” and ran into his office. He threw open the teak sea chest and began digging.
   Lib and Helen stood behind him and watched, perplexed. Helen said, “What’s wrong with you now, Randy?”
   “Don’t give him any food until you see what I’ve got!” He was sure he had tucked the foil-covered carton in the corner closest to the desk. It wasn’t there. He wondered whether it was something he had dreamed, but when he concentrated it seemed very real. It had been on the day before The Day, after his talk with Malachai. In the kitchen he had collected a few nourishing odds and ends, tinned or sealed, and dubbed them iron rations, for a desperate time. Now that the time was desperate, he couldn’t find them.
   He found the carton in the fourth corner he probed. He lifted it out, tore at the foil, and exposed it for them to see. “I put it away for an emergency. I’d forgotten it.”
   Lib whispered, “It’s beautiful.” She examined and fondled the jars and cans.
   “There’s beef broth in here-lots of other stuff” He gave up the carton. “Give him everything he wants.”
   Dan drank the broth and chewed hard candies. Randy wanted to question him but Helen stopped it. “Tomorrow,” she said, “when he’s stronger.” Helen and Lib were still in the bed room when Randy stretched out on the living-room couch. Graf jumped up and nuzzled himself a bed under Randy’s arm, and they slept.
   Randy awoke with a gunshot echoing in his ears and Graf, whining, struggling to be free of his arm. He heard a second shot. It was from the double twenty, he was sure, and it came from the direction of the Henrys’ house. He slipped on his shoes and raced down the stairs, Graf following him. He grabbed the .45 from the hall table and went through the front door. Now was the time he wished he had live flashlight batteries.
   The moon was up now so it wasn’t too difficult, running
   Helen found peroxide and bandages. This, with aspirin, was almost all that remained of their reserve medical supply. She worked on Dan’s face swiftly and efficiently as a professional nurse.
   Randy felt nauseated, not at the sight of Dan’s injuries-he had seen worse-but in disgust at the beasts who in callous cruelty had dragged down and maimed and destroyed the human dignity of this selfless man. Yet it was nothing new. It had been like this at some point in every civilization and on every continent. There were human jackals for every human disaster. He flexed his fingers, wanting a throat in them. He walked into the other room.
   Lib’s head lay across her arms on the bar. She was crying. When she raised her face it was oddly twisted as when a child’s face loses form in panic or unexpected pain. She said, “What are you going to do about it, Randy?”
   His rage was a hard cold ball in his stomach now. When he spoke it was in a monotone, the voice of someone else. “I’m going to execute them.”
   “Let’s get with it.”
   “Yes. As soon as I find out who.”
   At eleven Dan Gunn came out of shock, relaxed and then slept for a few minutes. He awoke announcing he was hungry. He looked no better, he was in pain, but obviously he was out of danger.
   Randy was dismayed at the thought of Dan, in his condition, loading his stomach with cold bream and catfish, orange juice, and remnants of salad. What he needed, coming out of shock, was hot, nourishing bouillon or broth. On occasion, when Malachai or Caleb discovered a gopher hole and Hannah Henry converted its inhabitant to soup, or when Ben Franklin successfully stalked squirrel or rabbit, such food was available; but not on this night.
   The thought of broth triggered his memory. He shouted,
   “The iron rations!” and ran into his office. He threw open the teak sea chest and began digging.
   Lib and Helen stood behind him and watched, perplexed. Helen said, “What’s wrong with you now, Randy?”
   “Don’t give him any food until you see what I’ve got!” He was sure he had tucked the foil-covered carton in the corner closest to the desk. It wasn’t there. He wondered whether it was something he had dreamed, but when he concentrated it seemed very real. It had been on the day before The Day, after his talk with Malachai. In the kitchen he had collected a few nourishing odds and ends, tinned or sealed, and dubbed them iron rations, for a desperate time. Now that the time was desperate, he couldn’t find them.
   He found the carton in the fourth corner he probed. He lifted it out, tore at the foil, and exposed it for them to see. “I put it away for an emergency. I’d forgotten it.”
   Lib whispered, “It’s beautiful.” She examined and fondled the jars and cans.
   “There’s beef broth in here-lots of other stuff” He gave up the carton. “Give him everything he wants.”
   Dan drank the broth and chewed hard candies. Randy wanted to question him but Helen stopped it. “Tomorrow,” she said, “when he’s stronger.” Helen and Lib were still in the bed room when Randy stretched out on the living-room couch. Graf jumped up and nuzzled himself a bed under Randy’s arm, and they slept.
   Randy awoke with a gunshot echoing in his ears and Graf, whining, struggling to be free of his arm. He heard a second shot. It was from the double twenty, he was sure, and it came from the direction of the Henrys’ house. He slipped on his shoes and raced down the stairs, Graf following him. He grabbed the .45 from the hall table and went through the front door. Now was the time he wished he had live flashlight batteries.
   The moon was up now so it wasn’t too difficult, running down the path. From the moon’s height he guessed it was three or four o’clock. Through the trees he saw a lantern blinking. He hoped Ben Franklin hadn’t shot the shadows.
   He wasn’t prepared for what he saw at the Henrys’ barn. He saw them standing there, in a ring: Malachai with a lantern in one hand and in the other the ancient single-barreled shotgun that would sometimes shoot; Ben with his gun broken, extracting the empty shells, the Admiral in pajamas, Preacher in a nightshirt, Caleb, his eyes white-rimmed, tentatively poking with his spear at a dark form on the ground.
   Randy joined the circle and put his hand on Ben Franklin’s shoulder. At first he thought it was a wolf. Then he knew it was the biggest German shepherd he had ever seen, its tremendous jaws open in a white snarl of death. It wore a collar. Graf, tail whipping, sniffed the dead dog, whined, and retreated.
   Randy leaned over and examined the brass plate on the collar. Malachai held the lantern closer. “`Lindy,’ “ Randy read aloud. “ `Mrs. H. G. Cogswell, Rochester, New York. Hillside five one-three-seven-nine.’ “
   “That dog come an awful long way from home,” Preacher said.
   “Probably his owners were visiting down here, or on vacation,” Randy guessed.
   “Well,” Malachai said, “I can see why we’ve been losin’ hens and how he could take off that pig. He was a mighty big dog, mighty big! I’ll get rid of him in the day, Mister Randy.”
   Walking home, Ben Franklin said nothing. Suddenly he stopped, handed Randy the shotgun, covered his face with his hands, and sobbed. Randy squeezed his shoulder, “Take it easy, Ben.” Randy thought it was reaction after strain, excitement, and perhaps terror.
   “I did exactly what you told me,” the boy said. “I heard him coming. I didn’t hardly breathe. I didn’t pull until I knew I couldn’t miss. When he kicked and I thought he was getting up I let him have the choke barrel. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known he was a dog. Randy, I thought it was a wolf!”
   Randy stopped in the path and said, “Look at me, Ben.” Ben looked up, tear streaks shining in the moonlight.
   “It was a wolf,” Randy said. “It wasn’t a dog any longer. In times like these dogs can turn into wolves. You did just right, Ben. Here, take back your gun.”
   The boy took the gun, tucked it under his arm, and they walked on.

Chapter 10

   Randy was having a pleasant, recurrent, Before-The-Day dream. He was awaking in a hotel in Miami Beach and a waitress in a white cap was bringing his morning coffee on a rolling table. Sometimes the waitress looked like Lib McGovern and sometimes like a girl, name forgotten, he had met in Miami. She was always a waitress in the morning, but at night she became an air-line stewardess and they dined together in a little French restaurant where he embarrassed her by eating six chocolate eclairs. She said, as always, “Your coffee, Randy darling.” He could hear her saying it and he could smell the coffee. He drew up his knees and hunched his shoulders and scrunched his head deeper into the pillow so as not to disturb the dream.
   She shook his shoulder and he opened his eyes, still smelling coffee, and closed them again.
   He heard her say, “Damn it, Randy, if you won’t wake up and drink your coffee I’ll drink it myself.”
   He opened his eyes wide. It was Lib, without a white cap. Incredibly, she was presenting him a cup of coffee. He reached his face out and tasted it. It burned his tongue delightfully. It was no dream. He swung his feet to the floor and took the saucer and cup. He said, “How?”
   “How? You did it yourself, you absent-minded monster. Don’t you remember putting a jar of coffee in what you called your iron rations?”
   “NO.”
   “Well, you did. A six-ounce jar of instant. And powdered cream. And, believe it or not, a pound of lump sugar. Real sugar, in lumps. I put in two. Everybody blesses you.”
   Randy lifted his cup, the fog of sleep gone entirely. “How’s Dan?”
   “Terribly sore, and stiff, but stronger. He had two cups of coffee and two eggs and, of course, orange juice.”
   “Did everybody get coffee?”
   “Yes. We had Florence and Alice over for breakfast-it’s ten o’clock, you know-and I put some in another jar and took it over to the Henrys. The Admiral was out fishing. We’ll have to give him his share later. Helen has earmarked the broth and bouillon for Dan until he’s better; and the candy for the children.” “Don’t forget Caleb.”
   “We won’t.”
   Again, he had slept in his clothes and felt grimy. He said, “I’m going to shower,” and went into the bathroom. Presently he came out, towel around his middle, and began the hopeless process of honing the hunting knife. “Did you know,” he said, “that Sam Hazzard has a straight razor? He’s always used one. That’s why his face is so spink and unscarred and clean. After I’ve talked to Dan I’ve got to see Sam.”
   “Why?”
   “He’s a military man and I need help for a military operation.”
   “Can I go with you?”
   “Darling, you are my right arm. Where I goeth you can go-up to a point.”
   She watched him while he shaved. All women, he thought, from the youngest on up, seemed fascinated by his travail and agony.
   Dan was sitting up in bed, his back supported by pillows, his right eye and the right side of his face hidden by bandages. His left eye was purpled but not quite so swollen as before. Helen sat in a straight-backed chair close to the pillows. She had been reading to him. Of all things, she had been reading the log of Lieutenant Randolph Rowzee Peyton, heaved up from the teak sea chest during last night’s burrowing for iron rations.
   “Well, you’re alive,” Randy said. “Tell me the tale. Start at the beginning. No, start before the beginning. Where had you been and where were you going?”
   “If the nurse will let me have one more cup of coffee just one-I’ll talk,” Dan said. He spoke clearly and without hesitation. There had been no concussion.
   Each day when he completed his calls it was Dan Gunn’s custom to stop at the bandstand in Marines Park. One of the bandstand pillars had become a special bulletin board on which the people of Fort Repose tacked notices summoning the doctor when there was an emergency. Yesterday, there had been such a notice. It read:
   Dr. Gunn
   This morning (Friday) two of my children became violently ill. Kathy has a temperature of l05 and is out of her head. Please come. I am sending this note by Joe Sanchez, who has a horse. Herbert Sunbury.
   Sunbury, like Dan, was a native New Englander. He had sold a florist shop in Boston, six years before, to migrate to Florida and operate a nursery. He had acquired acreage, built a house, and planted cuttings and seedlings on the Timucuan six miles upstream of the Bragg house.
   Dan pushed the Model-A fast up River Road. Beyond the Bragg place the road became a series of curves, following the serpentine course of the river. Dan had delivered the last two of the Sunburys’ four children. He liked the Sunburys. They were cheerful, industrious, and thoughtful. He knew that unless the emergency was real and pressing Herb would not have dispatched the note.
   It was real. It was typhoid. It was the typhoid that Dan had half-expected and completely dreaded for weeks, months. Typhoid was the unwelcome, evil sister of any disaster in which the water supply was destroyed or polluted and normal disposal of human waste difficult or impossible.
   Betty Sunbury said the two older children had been headachy and feverish for several days but not until Friday morning’s early hours had they become violently ill, a rosy rash developing on their torsos. Fortunately, Dan could do something. Aspirin and cold compresses to reduce the fever, terramycin, which came very close to being a specific for typhoid, until the disease was licked; and he had the terramycin.
   He reached into his bag and brought out the bottle, hoarded for this moment. He could have used the antibiotic a score of times to cure other patients of other diseases, but he had always made do with something else, holding this single bottle as a charm against the evil sister. Now it would probably save the Sunbury children. In addition, he had enough vaccine to innoculate the elder Sunburys, the four-year-old, and the babies, and just enough left for Peyton and Ben Franklin, when he returned to the house. Correct procedure would be to innoculate the whole town.
   Dan questioned the Sunburys closely. They had been very careful. Their drinking water came from a clear, clean spring bubbling from limestone on high ground across the road. Even so, they boiled it. All their foods, except citrus, they cooked.
   Dan looked out at the river gliding smoothly by. He was sure the river was the villain. “You haven’t eaten any raw fish, or shrimp, or shellfish, have you?”
   “Oh, no,” Herb said. “Of course not.”
   “What about swimming? Do you swim in the river?”
   Herb looked at Betty. “We don’t,” Betty said. “But Kathy and Herbert, junior, they’ve been swimming in the river since March.”
   “That’s it, I guess,” Dan said. “If the germs are in the river, it only takes one gulp.”
   Somewhere in the headwaters of the Timucuan, or in the great, mysterious swamps from which slender streams sluggishly moved toward the St. Johns, a typhoid-carrier had lived, undetected. A hermit, perhaps, or a respectable church woman in a small truck-farm community. When this person’s sanitary facilities failed, germ-laden feces had reach the rivers. Thus Dan reconstructed it, driving back toward town on the winding road.
   Dan was so absorbed in his deductions and forebodings that he failed to see the woman sitting on the edge of the road until he was almost abreast of her.
   He stepped on the brakes hard and the car jarred to a stop. The woman wore jeans and a man’s shirt. Her right knee was drawn almost up to her chin and she held her ankle in both hands, her body rocking as if in pain. A swatch of metallic blond hair curtained her features. Dan’s first thought was that she had turned her ankle; his second, that she could be a decoy for an ambush. Yet highwaymen rarely operated on unfrequented and therefore unprofitable roads, and had never been reported this close to Fort Repose. The woman looked up, appealingly. He could easily have switched gears and gone on, but he was a physician, and he was Dan Gunn. He turned off the engine and got out of the car.
   As soon as his feet touched the macadam he sensed, from her expression, that he had stepped into a trap. Whatever her face showed, it was not pain. When her eyes shifted, and she smiled, he knew her performance had been completed.
   Behind him a man spoke:
   “All right, Mac, you don’t have to go any further.”
   Dan swung around. The man who had spoken was one of three, all oddly dressed and all armed. They had materialized from behind scrub palmettos at the side of the road. The leader was squat, and wore a checked gold cap and Bermuda shorts. His arms were abnormally long and hands huge. He carried a submachine gun and handled it like a toy. His belly bulged over his waistband. He ate well. Dan said, “Look, I’m a doctor. I’m the doctor of Fort Repose. I don’t have anything you want.”
   The second man advanced on Dan. He was hatless, dressed in a striped sport shirt, and he gripped a baseball bat with both hands. “Get that, Mick?” he said. “He don’t have nothing we want! Ain’t that rich?”
   The third man was not a man at all but a boy with fuzz on his chin. The boy wore Levi’s, a wide-brimmed hat, high-heeled boots, and twin holster belts slung low. He stood apart from the others, legs spread, hefting a long-barreled revolver in each hand. He looked like an immature imitation of a Western bad man holding up the Wells Fargo stage, but he seemed overly excited and Dan guessed him the most volatile and dangerous of the three.
   The woman, grinning, got in the car, wrestled the back seat to the floor, and found the two bottles of bourbon Dan kept hidden there. “Just like you heard, Buster,” she said. “The Doc keeps a traveling bar.”
   “That’s my anesthetic,” Dan said.
   Without looking at the woman, the leader said, “Just leave the liquor in the car, Rumdum. We’ll take everything as is. Start walking, Doc.”
   Dan said, “At least let me have my bag. All the instruments and medicines I’ve got are in there.”
   The boy giggled. “How about lettin’ me put him out of his misery, Mick? He’s too ignorant to live.”
   The man with the machine gun took two steps to the side. Dan knew why
   The car’s gas tank was in his line of fire.
   The machine gun moved. “Get goin’, Doc.”
   Dan thought of everything that was in his bag, including the typhoid shots for Peyton and Ben Franklin. He took a step toward the car. He saw the baseball bat swinging and tried to close with the man, knowing he was foolish, knowing that he was awkward and clumsy. The bat grazed his face and he tripped and fell. As he tried to rise he saw the boy’s high-heeled boot coming at his eyes and the man with the bat danced to the side, ready to swing again. His head seemed to explode. In a final split-second of consciousness he thought, I am dead.
   He awoke dazed, almost totally blind, and unable to determine whether he had been shot as well as slugged and beaten. He waited to die and wanted to die. When he didn’t die he sat for a long time trying to decide which way was home. It required great effort to concentrate on the simplest matter. He would have preferred to stay where he was and complete his dying. But the sight of ants wheeling excitedly around the drying blood on the road made him uneasy. If he died there the ants would be all over him and in him by the time he was found. It would be better to die at home, cleanly. The sun was setting. The Sunbury house was east of Fort Repose. Therefore, he must go west. With the orange sun as his beacon, he began to crawl. When darkness came he rested, bathed his face in ditch water and drank it, too, and tried walking. He could walk perhaps a hundred yards before the road spun up to meet him. Then he would crawl. Thus, walking and crawling, he had finally reached the Bragg steps.
   When Dan finished, Randy said, “It had to come, of course. The highwaymen killed off travel on the main highways and so now they’ve started on the little towns and the secondary roads. But in this case, Dan, it sounds like they were laying for you personally. I think they knew you were a doctor, and you’d be going way out River Road to the Sunburys’, and certainly the woman knew you kept a couple of bottles of bourbon in the car.”
   “All they had to do,” Dan said, “was hang around Marines Park, look at the notices on the bandstand, and ask questions. I didn’t know any of them, but I think I’ve seen one before, the youngest. I used to see him hanging around Hockstatler’s drugstore before The Day.”
   “They didn’t have a car?”
   “No.”
   “I guess what they wanted most was transportation.”
   “They won’t get much. We had only two or three gallons of gas left.” He added, apologetically, “I’m sorry, Randy. I was careless. I shouldn’t have stopped. I’ve lost our transport, our medicines, and my tools.”
   Leaning over the bed, Randy’s fingers interlocked. He unconsciously squeezed until the tendons on his forearm stood out like taut wires. He said, “Don’t worry about it.”
   “Worst of all,” Dan said, “I’ve lost my glasses. I guess they smashed when that goon slugged me with the bat. I won’t be much good without glasses.”
   Randy knew that Dan’s vision was poor. Dan was forced to wear bifocals. He was very nearsighted. “Don’t you have another pair?” he asked.
   “Yes-in the bag. I always kept my spare glasses in the bag because I was afraid I might lose or break the pair I was wearing, on a call.” He sat up straight in bed, his face twisted. “Randy, I may never be able to get another pair of glasses.”
   Randy stood up. “I’ve got to start working on this, Dan.” “What are you going to do?”
   “Find them and kill them.” He said this in a matter-of-fact manner, as if announcing that he was going downtown to have his tires checked, in the time before The Day.
   Dan said, “I’m afraid you’re going at this wrong, Randy. Killing highwaymen is secondary. The important thing is the typhoid in the river. If you think things are bad now, wait until we have typhoid in Fort Repose. And it’s not only Fort Repose. It goes from the Timucuan into the St. Johns and downriver to Sanford, Palatka, and the other towns. If they are still there.”
   “All I can do about typhoid is warn people, which you have done already and which I will do again. I can’t shoot a germ. I’m concerned with the highwaymen right now, this minute. Next, they’ll start raiding the houses. It’s as inevitable as the fact that they left the main highways and ambushed you on River Road. Typhoid is bad. So is murder and robbery and rape. I am an officer in the Reserve. I have been legally designated to keep order when normal authority breaks down. Which it certainly has here.
   And the first thing I must do to keep order is execute the highwaymen. That’s perfectly plain. See you later, Dan.”
   Randy turned to Helen. “Take care of him. Feed him up,” he said, a command.
   Walking beside him toward the Admiral’s house, Lib found it difficult to keep pace. She had never seen Randy look and speak and act like this before. She held his arm, and yet she felt he had moved away from her. He did not seem anxious to talk, confide in her, or ask her opinion, as he usually did. He had moved into man’s august world of battle and violence, from which she was barred. She held tighter to his arm. She was afraid.
   The admiral, freshly shaven and pink-faced, was in his den, touching whale oil to the recoil mechanism of an automatic shotgun. “I was wondering,” he said to Randy, “whether you would be around here or I should come to you. How’s Dan?”
   “He’ll be all right. We lost the car and the medicines and the last of the bourbon but we didn’t lose our doctor. The most important thing we lost were his glasses. He’s very nearsighted.”
   “You forgot something,” the Admiral said, hardly looking up from his work. “We not only have lost transport but communications. We no longer have a way to recharge batteries. This battery I have now-” he nodded at the radio-”is good for perhaps another eight to ten hours. After that “ he looked up”nothing. Silence. What do you plan to do?”
   “I plan to kill them. But I don’t know how to find them. I came to talk to you about it.”
   Lib said, “May I interrupt? Don’t look at me that way, Randy. I’m not trying to interfere in your business. I just wanted to say I brought the Admiral’s coffee. While you’re talking, I thought I’d boil water and make a cup for him.”
   The Admiral said, absently, “Kettle’s in the fireplace.”
   She went into the living room. It was silly, but sometimes the Admiral irritated her. The Admiral made her feel like a mess boy.
   Sam Hazzard laid the automatic sixteen gently on the desk.
   “Ever since I heard about it, I’ve been thinking,” he said. “You have to go get them. They won’t come to you. Not only that, they may be a hundred miles from here by now.”
   “I think they’re right around here,” Randy said. “One of the gang was a local drugstore cowboy, now toting two real guns. And they don’t have enough gas to get far. I think they’ll try to score a few more times before they move on. Even when they’re gone, others will come. We have the problem whether it’s this particular gang or another gang. I’m going to try to form a provisional company.”
   “Vigilantes?”
   “No. A company under martial law. So far as I know I’m the only active Army Reserve officer in town so I guess it’s up to me.” “Then what do you do?”
   Lib came in and set a cup beside each of them. She found a clear space at the far end of the room-length desk, boosted herself up, and attempted to appear inconspicuous.
   “Suppose I organized a patrol on foot? Set up roadblocks?” Randy suggested.
   “The highwaymen were mobile, you’re not,” the Admiral said. “If they see an armed patrol, or a roadblock, they’ll simply keep out of your way.”
   Randy said, “Well, we can’t just sit here and wait for them.” “All this I’ve been thinking,” The Admiral said. “Also I was thinking of the Q-ships we used in the First World War.”
   Lib started to speak but decided it would be unwise. It was Randy who said, “I remember, vaguely, reading about Q-ships but I don’t remember much about it. Enlighten me, Sam.”
   “Q-ships were usually auxiliary schooners or wornout tramps, targets on which a German submarine captain wouldn’t be likely to waste a torpedo but would prefer to sink with gunfire. Concealed a pretty hefty battery behind screens that looked like deck loads. Drill was to prowl submarine alley unescorted and helpless looking. The sub sees her and surfaces. Sometimes the Q-ship had a panic party that took to the boats. Best part of the act. Soon as the sub opened fire with its deck gun the Q-ship ran up the flag and unmasked the battery. Blammy! It was quite effective.” “Very ingenious. But what has it got to do with highwaymen?”
   “Nothing at all, unless you can put a four-wheeled Q-ship on the roads around Fort Repose.”
   Randy shrugged. “We’re not mobile. Plenty of cars we could use-for instance, yours, Sam-but gasoline is practically nonexistent. We might have to cruise around for days before they tack led us. I might be able to requisition a gallon or two here and there but then the word would get around and they’d be watching for us.”
   Lib had to speak. “Could I make a suggestion? I think Rita Hernandez and her brother must have gasoline. They’re the big traders in town, aren’t they?”
   Randy had tried to wipe Rita out of his mind. They were even, they were quits. He wanted nothing from Rita any more. He said, “It’s true that if anybody’s holding gas, it’s Rita.”
   “Not only that,” Lib said, “but they have that grocery truck. Can you imagine anything more enticing to highwaymen than a grocery truck? They won’t really think it’s filled with groceries, of course, but psychologically it would be irresistible.”
   Sam Hazzard smiled with his eyes, as if light from within penetrated the opaque gray. “There you have it, Randy! Nice staff work, my girl!”
   “Also,” she said, “I think it would be a good idea if I drove. They’d be sure to think it was easy pickings with a woman driving.”
   “You will like the devil drive!” Randy said. “You will stay at home and guard the house, you and Ben Franklin.” And the two men went on talking and planning, as if they already possessed the truck with full tank, and she was left out of it again. At least, she thought, if it really worked, she had contributed something. The Admiral emphasized that whatever was done must be done quietly. Randy decided he could not go to the Hernandez house until after dark. It was not impossible that the highwaymen were holed up in Pistolville, or had contacts there. If Pistolville saw him drive off in Rita’s truck, the news would be all over town within a few hours. Finally, the Admiral asked the crucial question-would Rita cooperate? Was she discreet?
   “Rita wants to hold what she has,” Randy said. “Rita wants to live. She is realistic.”
   There was one more thing he must do before he left the Admiral. He sat at the typewriter and pecked out the orders.
   ORDER NO. l– TOWN OF FORT REPOSE
   1. In accordance with the proclamation of Mrs. Josephine Vanbruuker-Brown, Acting President of the United States, and the declaration of Martial Law, I am assuming command of the Town of Fort Repose and its environs.
   2. All Army, Navy, and Air Force reservists and all members of the National Guard, together with any others with military experience who will volunteer, will meet at the bandstand at 1200 hours, Wednesday, 20 April. I propose to form a composite company to protect this town.
   ORDER NO. 2
   1. Two cases of typhoid have been diagnosed in the Sunbury family, upper River Road. It must be assumed that both the Timucuan and St. Johns are polluted.
   2. All water will be boiled before drinking. Do not eat fruits or greens that have been washed in unboiled water.
   ORDER NO. 3
   1. Dr. Daniel Gunn, our only physician, has been beaten and robbed by highwaymen.
   2. The penalty for robbery or pillage, or for harboring highwaymen, or for failure to make known information concerning their whereabouts or movements, is death by hanging.
   All these orders he signed, “Randolph Rowzee Bragg, 1st. Lt. AUS (Reserve) (02658988).”
   Lib reading over his shoulder, said, “Why wait until Wednesday to form your company?”
   “I want the highwaymen to think that they have plenty of time,” Randy said. “I want them to laugh at us.”
   There were a number of ways by which Randy could have traveled the three miles to Marines Park, and then the two additional miles to the Hernandez house on the outer fringe of Pistolville. The Admiral had offered to take him as far as the town dock in his outboard cruiser, now converted to sail. But Sam Hazzard had not as yet added additional keel to the boat, so it would sideslip badly on a tack. Sam could get him to Marines Park all right, but on the return trip might be unable to make headway against current and wind and be left stranded. Randy could have borrowed Alice Cooksey’s bicycle, but decided that this might make him conspicuous in Pistolville. He could have ridden Balaam, the mule, but if he succeeded in persuading Rita to let him have the truck and gasoline, how would Balaam get home? Balaam didn’t fit in a panel truck. Besides, he was not sure that Balaam should ever be risked away from the Henry’s fields and barn. The only mule in Timucuan County was beyond price. In the end, he decided to walk.
   He set out after dark. Lib escorted him as far as the bend in the road. She had tacked his notices firmly to a square of plywood which he was to nail to the bandstand pillar. Thus, she had explained, they would not be lost or overlooked among the offers to trade fishhooks or lighter flints, and the pleas for kerosene or kettles. Across the top of the board she had printed, “OFFICIAL BULLETINS.”
   Randy wore stained dungarees, old brown fishing sneakers, and a floppy black hat borrowed from Two-Tone. His pistol was concealed in a deep pocket. When walking Pistolville at night, he wanted to look as if he belonged there.
   When he told Lib it was time to turn back, she kissed him. “How long will it take you, darling?” she asked.
   “Depends on whether I get the truck. Counting the stop at the park to nail up the orders. I should get there in less than two hours. After that, I don’t know. Depends on Rita.”
   “If you’re not home by midnight,” she said, “I’ll come after you. With a shotgun.” She sounded half-serious. In the past few weeks she had been more tender to him, embarrassingly solicitous of his safety, more jealous of his time. She was possessive, which was natural. They were lovers, when there was time, and place and privacy, and respite from fatigue and hunger and the dangers and responsibilities of the day.
   He walked on alone under the oak arch excluding starlight, secure in night’s black velvet cloak yet walking silently, eyes, ears, and even nose alert. So he had learned, in the dark hammocks as a boy hunting game, in the dark mountains as a man hunting man. Before The Day, except in hunting or in war, a five—or tenmile walk would have been unthinkable. Now it was routine for all of them except Dan and after Dan got out of bed it would become routine for him too. But all their shoes were wearing out. In another month or two Ben Franklin and Peyton would be without shoes entirely. Not only were the children walking (or running) everywhere but their feet inconsiderately continued to grow, straining canvas and leather. Randy told himself that he must discover whether Eli Blaustein still held shoes. He knew what Blaustein wanted-meat.
   Marines Park was empty. As he nailed up his order board an animal scuttled out from under the bandstand. At first he thought it a possum but when he caught its silhouette against the starlit river he saw it was an armadillo.
   Walking through the business section, he wondered whether armadillos were good eating. Before The Day he had heard someone say that there were several hundred thousand armadillos in Florida. This was strange, because before the first boom there had been no armadillos at all. Randy’s father had related the story.
   Some real estate promoter on the East Coast had imported two from Texas for a roadside zoo. Knowing nothing of the habits of armadillos, the real estate man had penned them behind chicken wire. When darkness fell, the armadillos instantly burrowed out, and within a few years armadillos were undermining golf greens and dumping over citrus trees from St. Augustine to Palm Beach. They had spread everywhere, having no natural enemies in the state except automobiles. Since the automobile had been all but exterminated by the hydrogen bomb, the armadillo population was certain to multiply. Soon there would be more armadillos than people in Florida.
   It was Saturday night, but in the business blocks of Yulee and St. Johns no light showed nor did he see a human being. In the residential area perhaps half the houses showed a light, but rarely from more than one room. He had not seen a moving vehicle since leaving home, and not until he reached the pine shanties and patchwork bungalows of Pistolville did he see a person. These people were shadows, swiftly fading behind a half opened door or bobbing from house to house. It was night, and Fort Repose was in fear.
   He was relieved when he saw lights in the Hernandez house. Anything could have happened since he and Dan had stopped there. Pete could have died and Rita could have decamped; or she could have been killed, the house pillaged, and everything she was holding, including the truck and gasoline, stolen.
   He knocked on the door.
   “Who is it?” Rita’s voice said. He knew she would have the shotgun up and ready.
   “Rand “ y.”
   She opened the door. She was holding a shotgun, as he guessed. She stared at his costume. “Come in. Looking for a handout?”
   “In a sense, yes.”
   “What happened? Your two women run you off?”
   As she laid down the gun the burn still showed on her ring finger. He said, “How’s Pete?”
   “Weaker. How’s Doctor Gunn?” “You heard about it, then?”
   “Sure. I hear all the bad news in a hurry nowadays. We call it lip radio.”
   The word had come to town, Randy guessed, via Alice Cooksey, earlier in the day. Just as Alice brought the town news to River Road, so each day she carried the news from River Road to town. Once spoken in the library, the news would spread through Fort Repose, street to street and house to house. He said, “You know Doctor Gunn lost his bag with all his instruments and what drugs he had left, and his glasses. So, if we can, we have to get those highwaymen and that’s why I came to you, Rita.”
   “They’re not Pistolville people,” she said. “These Pistolville crackers hardly have got gumption enough to rob each other. Now I heard them described and one of them-the young one with two guns-was probably Leroy Settle, a punk who lived on the other side of town. His mother still lives there, I think. Maybe if you stake out his house you’ll get a shot at him.”
   “I don’t want him in particular,” Randy said. “I want them all. I want them and everybody like them.” And he told her what his plan was, exactly, and why he must have the grocery truck and the gasoline, if she had any. He knew he must trust her entirely or not at all.
   She listened him out and said nothing.
   “If you are left alone here, Rita,” he said, “With all the canned food and other stuff you’ve got, you’re bound to become a target. When they’ve cleaned out what’s on the roads, they’ll start on the houses.”
   “I’m way ahead of you.” Her eyes met his steadily. She was evaluating him, and all the chances, all the odds. She made her decision. “I think you can get away with it, Randy.”
   “You’re holding gas, then?”
   “Certainly I’m holding gas. Fifteen gallons under the back steps. You can have it, and the truck. Anything you don’t use I expect back.”
   He rose. “What’re you going to tell people when they see your truck is gone?”
   “I’m going to tell them it was stolen. I’m going to tell them it was loaded with choice trade goods and that while I was in the bedroom, attending to Pete, somebody jimmied the ignition and stole it. And to make it sound good I’m going to let off a blast with this gun when you whip out of the driveway. The news will get around fast, don’t worry. It’ll get to the highwaymen and they’ll be looking for the truck. That should help, shouldn’t it?”
   “It should make it perfect.”
   “Go out the back way. Load the cans in the back of the truck, quietly. There’s enough gas in the tank to take you out River Road. I’ll salute you when you hit the street.”
   He said, “You’re a smart girl, Rita.”
   “Am I?” She held out her left hand to show the black circle left by the radioactive diamond ring. “I’ve got a wedding band. I was married to an H-bomb. Will it ever go away, Randy?”
   “Sure,” he said, hoping it would. “Dan will look at it again when he’s better.”
   He walked through the hallway and kitchen and out into the darkness. He found the three five-gallon cans under the back steps, opened the truck’s rear doors, and silently loaded the gaso line. He got in and stepped on the starter. The engine turned over, protesting. Rita had been careless, he guessed, and had forgotten to fill the battery with distilled water, for it was close to dead. He tried again and the engine caught. He nursed the choke until it ran smoothly, backed out of the Hernandez carport, turned sharply in the yard, shifted gears, and roared out on the street. He glimpsed Rita’s silhouette in the doorway, the gun rising to her shoulder, and for an awful instant thought she was aiming at him. Red flame leaped out of the muzzle. At the first corner he cut away from Augustine Road and followed rutted dirt streets until he was clear of Pistolville. He saw no other cars, in motion, on the way home.
   It was past eleven when he drove the truck into the garage and closed the doors so no casual passerby or visitor would see it. The lights were out in Florence’s house and in his own house only a single light burned, in his office window. That would be Lib, waiting up for him. He had urged the women to get to bed at their usual hour or earlier, for they planned to go to the Easter sunrise services in Marines Park.
   This was good. It was good that they should all be there, so that no one would guess of unusual activity out on River Road. From a less practical standpoint he felt good about it too. He was, as a matter of fact, surprised at their anticipation and enthusiasm. Many things had happened in the past few days and yet their conversation always come back to the Easter services. People hadn’t been like that before The Day. He could not imagine any of them voluntarily getting up before dawn and then walking three miles on empty stomachs to watch the sun come up, sing hymns, and listen to sermons however short. He wished he could walk with them. He couldn’t. It was necessary that he remain there to complete his plans with Sam Hazzard and also to work on the truck. Walking toward the house, he wondered at this change in people and concluded that man was a naturally gregarious creature and they were all starved for companionship and the sight of new faces. Marines Park would be their church, their theater, their assembly hall. Man absorbed strength from the touch of his neighbor’s elbow. It was these reasons, perhaps, that accounted for the success of the old-time Chautauquas. It could be that and something more-the discovery that faith had not died under the bombs and missiles.
   She wasn’t upstairs. She was waiting in the gloom of the porch. She said, “I saw you drive it in. It’s beautiful. Did you get the gas to go with it?”
   “Total of seventeen gallons including what’s in the tank. We can cruise for a day or two if we take it easy. Are you tired, darling?”
   “Not too.”
   “If you’re going to be up at five with the others you really ought to be in bed.”
   “I’ve been waiting for you, Randy. I worry. I’m not tired, really.”
   They walked through the grove down to the dock.
   The river whispered, the quarter-moon showed its profile, the stars moved. She lay on her back, head resting on her locked fingers, looking up at the stars.
   His eyes measured her-long, slender, curved as if for flight, skin coppery, hair silvered by the night. “You’re a beautiful possession,” he said. “I wish we had a place of our own so I could keep you. I wish we had just one room to ourselves. I wish we were married.”
   Instantly she said, “I accept.”
   “I’m not sure how we’d go about it. Last I heard the courthouse in San Marco wasn’t operating. For a while it was an emergency shelter like our school. I don’t know what they use it for now but certainly not for issuing marriage licenses. And the county clerk has disappeared. I heard in the park that he took his family and started for an uncontaminated zone in Georgia where he used to live.”
   Without moving her head she said, “Randy, under martial law, can’t you make your own rules?”
   “I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose so.” “Well, make one.”
   “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
   “I certainly am. It may be an old-fashioned, Before-The-Day attitude but if I’m going to have children I’d like to be married.” “Children! Are you going to have a baby?” Thought of the difficulties, dangers, and complexities of having a baby, under their present circumstances, appalled him.
   “I don’t know. I can’t say that I am, but then again I can’t say that I’m not, can I? I would like to marry you tomorrow before you go off chasing highwaymen.” She turned on her side, to face him. “It isn’t really convention. It is only that I love you very much, and that if anything happened-I don’t have any bad premonitions, dear, but you and I know that a bad thing could happen-well, if anything happened I would want the child to have your name. You’d want that too, wouldn’t you?”
   “Yes,” Randy said, “I would want that very much. I’m not going to put the truck on the road until late in the afternoon that’s when the highwaymen took Dan-so there’ll be time.”
   “That’s nice,” she said. “It’ll be nice to marry on Easter Sunday.”
   He took her hands and drew her up and held her. Over her shoulder he saw a pair of green eyes and a dark snout sliding downstream past the edge of the dock. It was spring and the gators were out of their holes. He had heard somewhere that the Seminoles ate Bator meat. Cut their tails into steaks. It was a source of meat that should be investigated. He knew he shouldn’t be thinking about food at this time but he was hungry again.

Chapter 11

   Elizabeth McGovern and Randolph Bragg were married at noon that Easter Sunday. The bride wore the same white silk dress she had worn to the sunrise service in Marines Park. She was unsteady on high heels, for she had not worn heels since The Day.
   The groom wore his Class A uniform with the bold patch of the First Cavalry Division on his arm and the ribbons of the Korean War and Bronze Star on his chest, along with the blue badge of the combat infantryman. He wore the uniform not because of the wedding but because it was required in the radioed orders to reservists assuming active duty, such as ambushing and killing highwaymen, which he presently intended to do.
   The bride was given away by her father, W. Foxworth McGovern, the retired Cleveland manufacturer. Bill McGovern, who had been helping Malachai cut gun ports in the thin steel sides and rear doors of the grocery truck, wore greasy dungarees. A chisel had slipped and one of his hands was bleeding.
   The best man was Doctor Daniel Gunn. He was clad in a tent sized, striped bathrobe. Grinning through his red beard, his head bandaged, a square gauze patch covering his right eye, he looked like a turbaned Mediterranean pirate.
   Among the guests was Rear Admiral Samuel P. Hazzard (USN, retired) who wore khaki shorts, a khaki hunting vest bulging with buckshot shells, and during the ceremony held his gold braided cap across his stomach.
   The matron-of-honor was Mrs. Helen Bragg, the presumed widow of Colonel Mark Bragg. She furnished the wedding ring, stripping it from her own finger.
   The ceremony was held in the high-ceilinged parlor of the Bragg house. The marriage was performed by the Reverend Clarence Henry, pastor emeritus of the Afro-Repose Baptist Church.
   Randy was certain it was perfectly legal. It was performed under his Order No. 4, written that morning in Sam Hazzard’s house.
   Malachai and Bill McGovern had been working on the truck, and Randy was breakfasting with Dan Gunn, when the women and children returned from Marines Park. The services had been wonderful, they said, but the news they brought was terrible. During the night highwaymen had raided the isolated home of Jim Hickey, the beekeeper, on the Pasco Creek Road. They had killed Jim and his wife. The two children had walked to Fort Repose and found their aunt’s home. Whether it was the same band that had beaten Dan Gunn was uncertain. The Hickey children were inarticulate and hysterical with fear and shock.
   Randy, raging for immediate retaliation, had raced to the Admiral’s house with the news. The Admiral’s experience in meeting the unpredictable and brutish pranks of war had saved them from premature or imprudent action. “Wasn’t this sort of thing exactly what we expected?” Sam Hazzard asked.
   “I suppose so, but dammit.”
   “I don’t think we should change our plans by so much as a minute. If we put out with the truck now we’ll just burn fuel for nothing. These people operate like beasts, Randy. Having gorged themselves in the night they sleep through the mornings, perhaps through the whole day.”
   Randy, recognizing the sense of this, had calmed himself. They had talked of the wedding, and the legal problems attending martial law, and the Admiral had helped him in framing Order No. 4. It read:
   Until county offices resume operations and normal communications are reestablished between this town and the Timucuan County seat, the following regulations will govern marriages and births in Fort Repose.
   1. Marriages can be performed by any ordained minister. Marriage licenses and health certificates are waived.
   2. Marriage certificates will be issued by the presiding minister, and will be valid when signed by the contracting parties, the minister, and two witnesses.
   3. So that a permanent record may be preserved, a copy of the certificate will be left at the Fort Repose Library. I designate Librarian Alice Cooksey custodian of these records. I designate Miss Florence Wechek her deputy.
   4. Birth records, signed by the attending physician or midwife, or by the mother and any witnesses if medical attention is unavailable, will be deposited in the same manner.
   One copy of this order is to be kept with the records in the library. This order is retroactive to The Day, so that any births or marriages that have occurred since The Day may be properly recorded.
   Randy signed Order No. 4 and said, “Well, when the rules are off you make your own.”
   “This is a good one,” Sam Hazzard said. “I wonder what they’re doing elsewhere?”
   “Elsewhere?”
   “There must be hundreds of towns in the same fix we’re in local authority collapsed or inoperative, communications out. I fancy that elsewhere they’re not doing so good.”
   “How could they be worse?” Randy was thinking of what had happened to Dan Gunn and the Hickeys.
   “They could be,” the Admiral said, positively.
   Randy had gone to see Preacher next. “Preacher,” he said, “you’re an ordained minister, aren’t you?”
   “I sure am,” Preacher said. “I am not only ordained but in my church I can ordain people.”
   “Would you mind marrying Miss McGovern and me? We don’t have a regular courthouse license, naturally, but I have fixed it up to make it legal under martial law.”
   “Miss McGovern told me you was going to wed, Mister Randy. I will be happy to marry you. I don’t need papers. I’ve joined maybe a thousand pairs in my life. Some had papers, some didn’t. Some stuck, some didn’t. The papers didn’t make the difference. It’s the people, not the papers.”
   So they were married, in a room filled with flowers of the season and furniture of less bitter centuries and people of all ages. Randy produced the certificate and when Preacher signed it he signed “Rev. Clarence Henry,” and Randy realized that this was the first time he had ever known Preacher’s full name although Preacher had always been there.
   Randy had found a large-scale county map in his desk and they had planned their movement as carefully as a Q-ship captain plotting his course through submarine alley. There were four roads that led out from Fort Repose. River Road stretched east along the Timucuan until it swung into a main highway to the beaches. The Pasco Creek Road ran north, the San Marco Road west, from the bridge across the St. Johns. A narrow, substandard road followed the St. Johns toward its headwaters.
   The map, with two crosses to mark where the highwaymen had stopped Dan Gunn and killed the Hickeys, lay on the garage floor. They bent over it, Randy tracing the route they would take. The highwaymen could be anywhere. They could be one band, or two, or more. They could be gone entirely. It was all guesswork, and yet it was necessary to plan the route so as to cover the most territory using the least amount of gas, for when the truck’s tank was empty, that would be all. There was no reserve, not anywhere. They would take River Road first because it was closest. After twelve miles a little-used lateral led toward Pasco Creek and they would go almost to Pasco Creek and then cut into the road for Fort Repose. Thus, by using the clay or washboard laterals, they could avoid retracing the same highway and save a few miles.
   On his hands and knees, his seagoing cap pushed back on his pink head, the Admiral murmured, “ `Give me a fast ship for I intend to go in harm’s way’-Paul Jones. Remember, Randy, this should be a very slow ship. The slower we go the less gas we use and the more chance they have of spotting us.”
   Randy was going to drive. Malachai, Sam Hazzard, and Bill McGovern were to be concealed in the body of the truck. Randy said, “I don’t like to drive slow but I can. I think about twenty miles an hour is right. Anything slower would look suspicious.”
   He checked the weapons. They were taking everything that might be handy-the automatic sixteen for the Admiral and the double twenty for Bill McGovern. Malachai would have the carbine. The big Krag, long as a Kentucky squirrel rifle and as unwieldy, would be in reserve. From Dan’s description of how the highwaymen had acted, Randy guessed that the fire fight, when it came, would be close in, and the shotguns of greater value than the rifles. He himself, alone behind the wheel, would have only the .45 automatic on the seat beside him. That, and the hunting knife which was almost, but not quite, razor sharp, in a sheath at his belt.
   Randy walked around the truck for a final look. He thought he was doing something that was familiar and then he remembered that he had seen aircraft commanders do this before takeoff He examined the tires. They were good. The battery water had been replenished and the battery run up. Malachai and Bill had done a good job on the gun ports, fairing them into the big, painted letters, “AJAX SUPER-MARKET.” On each side, one port in the “J” and one in the “M.” Camouflage. The holes cut into the rear doors, under the tiny glass windows, were more conspicuous. Randy went outside and returned with a handful of mud. He spread it on the edges of the ports, erasing the glint of freshly cut metal.
   It was four o’clock, the time to sortie. “You know your positions,” he said. “Sam, you have the starboard side. Bill takes the port. Malachai, the stern. If I see your fire can’t be effective from inside I’ll yell, `Out!’ and everybody gets out fast while I cover you.”
   Then, at the last second, there was a change.
   Malachai suggested it. “Mister Randy, I want to say something. I don’t think you ought to drive. I think I ought to drive.” Randy was furious, but he held his voice down. “Let’s not get everything screwed up now. Get in, Malachai.”
   Malachai made no move. “Sir, that uniform. It don’t go with the truck.”
   “They won’t see it until they stop us,” Randy said. “Then it’ll be too late. Anyway, all sorts of people are wearing all sorts of clothes. I’ll bet you’d see highwaymen in uniforms if they got their hands on them.”
   “That ain’t all, sir,” Malachai said. “It’s your face. It’s white. They’re more likely to tackle a black face than a white face. They see my face they say, `Huh, here’s something soft and probably with no gun.’ So they relax. Maybe it gives us that extra second, Mister Randy.”
   Randy hesitated. He had confidence in Malachai’s driving and in his judgment and courage. But it was the driver who would have to do the talking, if there was any talking, and who would have to keep his hands off the pistol. That would be the hardest thing.
   The Admiral spoke, very carefully. “Now Randy, I’m not trying to outrank you. You’re the Captain. You’re in command and it’s your decision. But I think Malachai is right. Dungarees and a black face are better bait than a uniform and a white face.” Randy said, “Okay. You’re right. You drive, Malachai. You take the pistol up front. Keep it out of sight. There is only one thing to remember. When they stop us they’ll all be watching you. They don’t know we’re here. They’ll be watching you and they’ll kill you if you go for your gun. So leave your gun alone until we start shooting.”
   Malachai grinned and said, “Yes, sir,” and they got in and departed. Looking through the glass in the rear door, Randy saw his wife and Helen and Dan on the porch. They were waving. Peyton was there too but she was not waving. She had her face buried in her mother’s dress.
   They drove east on River Road. After a few miles Randy told Malachai to look for signs of the place where Dan Gunn had been decoyed and beaten. They found a sign. Since there was no longer any care of the roads, the grass had grown high on the shoulders and in one place it was trampled. In a ditch, nearby, they discovered slivers of broken glass. Then they found the twisted and empty frame of Dan’s glasses. The frame was useless and yet Randy picked it up and shoved it in a pocket. A lawyer’s gesture, he thought. Evidence.
   They drove on, past the Sunbury home. Randy was tempted to order a stop to inquire about the children’s typhoid. Dan would want to know. He did not stop. The Sunburys were good people and he trusted them, but the truck was a secret, a military secret, and it was senseless to expose it.
   River Road was clear. Nothing moved on River Road. They took the lateral north. Even though Malachai avoided the worst potholes and drove with exasperating deliberation, it was rough riding. It shook up Bill McGovern and Sam Hazzard. They were older and they would tire.
   Near Pasco Creek they passed a group of inhabited shacks. Approaching them, Malachai called back, “People!”
   Randy turned and looked over Malachai’s shoulder. He could see, from behind the front seat, but not be seen. He saw two children scurry indoors and at another place a bearded man crouched behind a woodpile, training a gun on the truck. He made no hostile move, but the muzzle tracked them. It was obvious that few people traveled this road and those who did were not welcome.
   Randy was relieved when they turned into the better road toward Fort Repose. They were all stiff by then, for it was impossible to stand upright in the panel truck. The Admiral and Bill could sit cross-legged on the floor and view the landscape through their ports, but Randy had to half-crouch to see through the rear windows. When the truck reached higher ground, where the road was straight and they could see anything approach for nearly a mile, he told Malachai to stop. “We’ll take ten,” he said.
   He threw open the back doors and got out, groaning, feeling permanently warped. He walked, waving his arms and flexing his knees. Bill McGovern shuffled down the road, humpbacked. The Admiral tried to stretch, and a joint or tendon cracked audibly. He cursed. Malachai grinned.
   “Now I see why you wanted to drive!” Randy said. He looked both ways. Nothing was coming. He went back to the truck and found the thermos Lib had given him. He opened it, expecting water. It was sweetened black coffee. “Look!” he said. “Look what Lib-my wife did for us!” He knew it was the last of the jar.
   There was a cup for each, but they decided to take only half a cup then, saving the rest for the tag end of evening when they might need it more.
   They got back into the truck and continued the patrol, past the Hickey house, empty, door open, windows wantonly smashed. Randy noticed that the beekeeper’s car was gone. Jim Hickey, with such valuable trading goods as honey and beeswax, must have been holding gasoline. In the past month anyone who had it would have traded gas for honey. The objective of the highwaymen was probably the car and the gas, Randy deduced, rather than honey. This conclusion disheartened him. The highwaymen might be hundreds of miles from Fort Repose now.
   Nearing Fort Repose-they must avoid being seen in the town-they turned off on a winding, high-crowned clay road that ran two miles to an antique covered bridge across the St. Johns. Once across the river they would turn south and shortly thereafter hit the road to San Marco.
   Rattling over the clay washboard, it seemed hardly worth while to keep a watch from the back, and yet Randy did. Suddenly he saw that they were being followed. He had seen no car on the Pasco Creek Road before making the turn. They had passed no car on the clay lateral, nor any houses either. The car was simply there, following them at a respectable distance, making no effort to catch them and yet not dropping back. He recalled an abandoned citrus packing shed at the turn. It must have been concealed there. Randy called so that Malachai could clearly hear, “We’ve got company-about three hundred yards back.”
   He strained his eyes through the dirty little rear windows. It was difficult to make them focus, like trying to train a gun from a bouncing jeep, and it was almost dusk. It was a late model light gray hardtop or sedan and Jim Hickey had owned such a car but all makes looked pretty much alike and it seemed half of them were either light gray or off white. He called to Malachai, “Speed up a little. See what happens.”
   Malachai increased their speed to forty or forty-five. The car behind maintained its distance, exactly, as if it were tied to them. This proved nothing. This would be standard operating procedure for an honest citizen following a strange truck on a lonely, unfrequented road. He wouldn’t want to get too close, but he was probably in a hurry to get home before dark. So if the truck sped up, he would too. “Drop back to twenty,” Randy ordered.
   The truck slowed. So did the car. Again, this proved nothing except caution.
   Randy turned to Sam Hazzard and Bill McGovern. “This fellow behind us is either an innocent bystander or he’s herding us.”
   “Herding us?” Bill said.
   “Herding us into the gun of some pal up front.” They hit a smoother strip of road and Randy could see two men in the car. He thought the back was empty but he couldn’t be sure. “Two of them. Both men.”
   They rode on, silently. This was entirely different from a patrol in war when you went out in fear and despite your fear, hoping you would find no trouble. His only fear was that they might miss them, exhaust their gas in futile cruising, and lose their one best chance to wipe them out. This was a personal matter and a matter of survival. It was like having a nest of coral snakes under the house. You had to go in after them and kill them or certainly one day they would kill a child or your dog. In a matter such as this, the importance of your own life diminished. So he prayed that the men behind were highwaymen.
   In a minute or two he knew that they were, because the opposite end of the narrow, covered bridge was blocked. They were being herded into a cul-de-sac and the tactical situation was changed and their plan useless. There would be no field of fire from the side ports of the truck. The fight would have to be made entirely from front and rear. He said, “Keep going. “They had to drive right into it. If they stopped short of the bridge and jumped out to make their fight at a distance then the highwaymen could shoot and run. They had to get in close.
   Malachai kept going.
   “Sam, you and Bill take the ones in back,” Randy said. “I’ll help Malachai in front. Forget the sides.”
   The Admiral and Bill crawled to the rear. Randy crouched behind Malachai’s back. He checked the carbine. It was ready. He shifted an extra clip to his shirt pocket where it would be handiest.
   The block at the opposite end of the bridge was their Model-A, its boxy profile unmistakable. A man waited at each bumper. You could ram the car but you could not ram the men so this tactic would do no good. Randy recognized them from Dan’s description. The one with gorilla arms and the submachine gun stood at the front. The gun was a Thompson. The man with the bat was on the other side. He carried a holstered pistol, too, but from the way he hefted the bat, like a hitter eager to step to the plate, the bat was his weapon. Four men, then, instead of three. And no woman. Understandable. The personnel of these bands probably changed from day to day. “Right up to them,” he told Malachai. “Close.”
   The wheels hit the first planks of the bridge and Malachai slowed.
   Randy saw the muzzle of the Thompson rise. This was the one he had to get. He pushed the butt of the carbine into Bill McGovern’s ribs. He said, “Let them come right up to you. Let ‘em come right in with us if they want. We’ve got troubles up front.”
   Bill nodded. The rhythmic timpani beat of tires on planks stopped. They were twenty feet from the Model-A. The man with the bat advanced toward the left side of the truck. The Tommy gunner stayed where he was. In his light Randy doubted that they could see anything in the truck body but he did not stir. He was immobile as a sack. He whispered, “Make the son of a bitch with the gun come to us. Make him move, make him come.”
   The man with the bat was three feet from Malachai and five feet from the carbine’s muzzle. If he looked into the truck cab Randy would have to shoot him and in that case the Tommy gunner might get them all. There was nothing more Randy could say or do. He could not even whisper. It was all up to Malachai now.
   The man whacked his bat viciously against the door. “What you got in there, boy?”
   “I ain’t got nuthin, boss.” Malachai whined. From the set of his right shoulder Randy knew Malachai had his right hand on the .45, but he was acting dumb and talking dumb, which was the way to do.
   The Tommy gunner moved a step closer and two steps right so he could observe Malachai. He said, “Come on, Casey. Get that dinge outta there!”
   The man with the bat said, “Step down, you black bastard!”
   Randy knew that the man couldn’t use the bat while Malachai stayed in the truck and he prayed Malachai would wait him out. He watched the gunner. Please, God, make him take one more step so I won’t have to try through the windshield. A shot through the windshield was almost certain to miss because of light refraction or bullet deflection. It would be foolhardy and desperate and he would not do it.
   The gunner said, “Drag him out or blow him out. I don’t care which.”
   Malachai cringed and cried, “Please, boss!” The fear in his voice was real.
   The man with the bat put his hand on the door handle. At the instant he turned it, Malachai uncoiled, hurling himself through the door and on him, pistol clubbed.
   The gunner took two quick steps and the Thompson jerked and spoke. The gunner’s thick middle was in Randy’s sights and he squeezed the trigger, and again, and again before the Thompson’s muzzle came down and the gunner folded and began to fall. When he was on his face he still twitched and held the gun and tried to swing it up and Randy shot at him again, carefully, through the head.

   He had not even heard the shotguns but when Randy crawled over into the front seat and got out, looking for another target, the battle was over. Close behind the truck two figures lay, their arms and legs twisted in death’s awkward signature. The Admiral stood over the man who had held the bat, his shotgun a foot from his head. Malachai was curled up as if in sleep, his head against the left front tire. It had lasted not more than seven seconds.
   Malachai choked and groaned and Randy dropped to his knees beside him and straightened him and lifted his head. Malachai choked again and Randy turned Malachai’s head so the blood could run out of his mouth and not down his windpipe. He tore open Malachai’s shirt. There was a hole large as a dime just under the solar plexus. In this round well, dark blood rose and ebbed rhythmically, a small, ominous tide.
   The Admiral said, “Shall I get rid of this scum?”
   Randy said, “Just a minute.” He picked up the bat and forced himself to think ahead. First, Malachai. Get Malachai home in a hurry so Dan could do something if there was anything to be done. Dan didn’t have his tools, or much eyesight. He might make do with one eye if he had the tools these men had stolen. Randy ran to the Model-A. It was empty. The doctor’s bag wasn’t there.
   He walked back to the truck where Sam Hazzard stood over their captive. One side of the man’s face was scraped raw. Malachai’s plunge had carried the long-jawed, twisted-mouth face along the bridge planking. “Where’s the doctor’s bag?”
   The man said nothing. Randy saw his right hand moving. He still had a holstered weapon. Randy tapped him on the nose with the bat. “Keep your hand still.” The Admiral leaned over, unbuckled the holster, and took the weapon. A .38 police special. “Talk,” Randy said.
   The man said, “I don’t know nuthin’.”
   Randy tapped his face with the bat, harder. The man screamed. Randy said, “Where’s the black bag?”
   The man said, “She took it. Rumdum took it.” “Where is she?”
   “I don’t know. She goofed off with somebody last night maybe it was this morning-I don’t know-goofed off with some bastard with a bottle.”
   Randy called, “Bill! Where’s Bill?”
   Bill McGovern was on the other side of the truck. He said, “I’m here, Randy.”
   “Bill, go look in that car and see if you can find Dan’s bag. And be sure those two back there are good and dead.”
   Malachai choked again. Randy tried to ease him over on his side but he began to bleed more from the stomach wound so he had to let him be.
   Sam Hazzard said, “I don’t think this one’s doing us any good. He’s just holding us up. I think we should convoke a military tribunal right now and pass sentence. I vote he be executed.”
   “So do I,” Randy said, “but I want him to hang. If he makes any trouble let him have it, Sam, but I’d like to have him alive.” Bill came back with a cardboard carton. “Nothing in that car, except this. A little food in here. A few cans of sardines and corned beef hash and a box of matches. A couple of boxes of ammunition. That’s all. Not a sign of Dan’s bag. And the sedan is finished. It was in our line of fire and it looks like a sieve with all that buckshot through it. There’s gasoline all over the road.” Randy started the Model-A and looked at the fuel gauge. It showed almost empty. He backed it away from the bridge entrance, put the key in his pocket, and left it. He said, “We’ll lift Malachai into the truck and get going. First, I’ll collect their weapons and ammo.” He was thinking ahead. There would be other highwaymen and this was armament for his company. “What about these?” Bill asked, pointing his shotgun at the bodies.
   “Leave them.” He looked up. The buzzards already attended. “I’ll come back tomorrow or we’ll send somebody. Whatever they leave-” he watched the black birds wheeling and swooping-”we’ll give to the river.”
   One of the highwaymen trailing them had been Leroy Settle, the drugstore cowboy. When Randy examined his two guns he was surprised to find that they were only .22 caliber, lightweight replicas, except in bore, of the big frontier .45’s. His companion’s pistol apparently had gone into the river, for it wasn’t on the bridge although he had a pocketful of ammunition.
   Then Randy leaned over the leader. He saw that his shots had all been good, the three in the belly making a neat pattern, diagonal ticktacktoe. When he picked up the Thompson the dead man’s arm astonishingly rose with it, clinging as if his fingers were glued to the stock. Randy jerked it free and saw that it was glue, of a sort. The man’s hands were smeared with honey.
   It was after dark when Randy wheeled up to the front steps of the house. As he cut the engine he heard Graf barking. All the downstairs windows showed light. Lib burst out of the door and ran down the steps, saw him at the wheel, and was there with her arms and lips when he got out.
   Preacher Henry appeared, and Two-Tone, Florence Wechek and Alice Cooksey, Hannah and Missouri, the children. Dan Gunn came out, robe flapping, carrying a lantern. They had all been waiting.
   The Admiral and Bill were in back with the prisoner and Malachai. Bill stepped out, holding a pistol, and then the man with the bat, called Casey, prodded by Sam Hazzard’s shotgun. Sam climbed down and that left Malachai. Malachai had been unconscious after the first mile. Until they reached Fort Repose, the road had been very bad.
   Randy said, “Killed three, grabbed this one. They got Malachai through the middle. Look at him, Dan. Is he still with us, Sam>“
   The Admiral said, “He was a minute ago. Barely.” Randy said, “Ben Franklin, get some clothesline.”
   “We going to hang him right now?” Ben asked, not casually but still as if he expected it.
   “No. We’ll tie him.”
   Dan crawled into the truck. He held up the lantern, shook his head in exasperation, and then tore the patch away from his right eye. The eye was still swollen but not entirely shut and any assistance to his left eye was helpful. He crawled out and said, “He’s in shock and shouldn’t be moved and ought to have a transfusion. But we have to move him if I’m to do anything at all. On what?”
   There was a discarded door in the toolhouse. They moved him on that.
   They laid Malachai on the billiard table in the gameroom and then massed lamps and candles so that Dan would have light.
   Dan said, “I have to go into him. Massive internal hemorrhage. I’ve got to tie it off or there’s no chance at all. How? With what?” He leaped on the edge of the table, swaying not in fatigue or weakness but in agony of frustration. He cried, “Oh, God!” Dan stopped swaying. “A knife, Randy?”
   “My hunting knife, the one I shave with? It’s sharp as a razor, almost.”
   “No, Too big, too thick. How about steak knives?” “Sure, steak knives.”
   The short-bladed steak knives even looked like lancets. The Judge and Randy’s mother had bought the set in Denmark on their summer in Europe in ‘fifty-four. They were the finest and sharpest steak knives Randy had ever used. He found them in the silver chest and called, “How many?”
   “T’wo will do.”
   From the dining room Helen called, “I’ve put on water to boil-a big pot.” The dinner fire had been going and Helen had piled on fat wood so it roared and Dan would soon have the means of sterilizing his instruments.
   Randy put them into the pot to boil. After that, at Dan’s direction he put in his fine-nosed fishing pliers. Florence Wechek ran across the road for darning needles. Lib found metal hair clips that would clamp an artery. Randy’s six-pound nylon line off the spinning reel would have to do for sutures. There was enough soap to cleanse Dan’s hands.
   Dan went into the dining room, fretting, waiting for the pot and his instruments to boil. It was hopeless, he knew. In spite of everything they might do sepsis was almost inevitable, but now it was the shock and the hemorrhage he couldn’t lick. He wondered whether it would be possible to rig up a saline solution transfusion. They had the ingredients, salt and water and fire; and somewhere, certainly, rubber tubing. He would not give up Malachai. He wanted to save Malachai, capable, quiet, and strong, more than he had ever wanted to save anybody in his years as a physician. So many people died for nothing. Malachai was dying for something.
   In the gameroom Helen was at work, quick and competent. She had found their last bottle of Scotch, except what might remain in Randy’s decanter upstairs, and was cleansing the wound with it. Randy and Lib stood beside her. The pool of blood in the round hole ebbed and did not rise again.
   The water was boiling in the big iron pot when Randy walked into the dining room and touched Dan’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s all over.”
   In a dark corner of the room where she thought she would be out of the way and not a bother, Hannah Henry had been sitting in an old scarred maple rocker. The rocker began to move in slow cadence, and she moaned in this cadence for the dead, arms folded over her empty breasts as if holding a baby except that where the baby had been there was nothing.
   Dan Gunn went into the gameroom and saw that Randy was correct, that Malachai was gone. His shoulders felt heavy. He was aware that his head throbbed and eyes burned. There was nothing more to do except empty the makeshift sterilizer with its ridiculous makeshift tools. He did this in the kitchen sink. Yet when he saw the knives and the pliers and the hair clips steaming he realized they were not really so ridiculous. If he was very careful and skillful, he could make do with such tools. They had not and probably could not have saved Malachai. They might save someone else. A century ago the tools had been no better and the knowledge infinitely less. Out of death, life; an immutable truth. Helen was at his side. He said, “Thanks, Helen, for the try. You’re the best unregistered nurse in the world.”
   “I’m sorry it was for nothing.”
   “Maybe it wasn’t for nothing. I’ll just keep these and try to add to them. I wonder if we could find a small bag somewhere? Any little traveling bag would do.”
   “I have one. A train case.”
   “We’ll start here, then, and build another kit.” His eyes hurt.
   Who in Fort Repose could build him another pair of glasses, or give him new eyes?
   At nine o’clock that night Randy’s knees began to quiver and his brain refused further work and begged to quit, a reaction, he knew, to the fight on the bridge and what had gone before and after, and lack of sleep. It was his wedding night. He had been married at noon that same day, which seemed incredible. Noon was a life ago.
   But now that he was married, he thought it only right that he and Lib have a room to themselves and the privacy accorded a married couple. All the bedroom space was taken and he hated to evict anyone. After all, they were all his guests. Yet since it was inevitable that beds and rooms be shifted around, the victim would have to be Ben Franklin, since Ben was the junior male. Ben would have to give up his room and take the couch in Randy’s apartment and Mr. and Mrs. Randolph Bragg would move into Ben’s room.
   He was sitting on his couch, trying to still his quivering legs, face in his hands, thinking of this. Lib sat behind the bar drinking a warm limeade. She was thinking of the problem also but was reluctant to mention it, feeling that it was the husband’s duty and she should allow him to bring it up.
   Her father came in, a thin and wan Caesar in his sandals and white robe. Bill McGovern had been standing guard over the trussed prisoner, wondering the while that he had killed a man that day and felt no guilt at the time or after. It was like stepping on a roach. He had just been relieved by Two-Tone Henry, who had left his house of mourning to assume the duty. Bill asked for Dan. Randy lifted his head and told him that Dan, exhausted by being too long on his feet, slept. “Well, I’ll tell you, then, but I don’t suppose it will do any good tonight.”
   He spoke directly to his daughter. “I didn’t know what to give you for a wedding present, Elizabeth. There’s a good deal of real estate in Cleveland but I don’t suppose it’ll ever be worth much now. There are bonds and stock certificates in our safe deposit vault right here in Fort Repose, and the cash-well, the Confederate money in Randy’s chest is just as good. You can have the house and property down the road, if you want it, but I don’t think anybody can ever live there unless electricity comes back. So I thought, what can I give Lib and Randy? I talked it over this morning with Dan. He made a suggestion and we decided to give you a present jointly, from the best man and the father of the bride.”
   Bill looked from one to the other and saw they were interested. “We are jointly making you a present of this whole apartment. Dan is going to move in with me.”
   Lib said, “That’s perfectly wonderful, Father!”
   Bill said, hesitantly, “Only, if Dan’s asleep I don’t think we ought to disturb him, do you?”
   “No, not tonight,” Lib said. She kissed her father, and she kissed her husband, and she went across the hall to her old room. Randy fell across the couch and slept. Presently Graf jumped up beside him and snuggled under his arm.
   At noon Monday the man with the bat was hung from a girder supporting the bandstand roof in Marines Park. All the regular traders and a number of strangers were in the park. Randy ordered that the corpse not be cut down until sunset. He wanted the strangers to be impressed and spread the word beyond Fort Repose.
   While he had not planned it, on this day he accepted the first enlistments in what came to be known as Braggs Troop, although in orders he called it the Fort Repose Provisional Com pany. Seven men volunteered that day, including Fletcher Kennedy, who had been an Air Force fighter pilot, and Link Haslip, a West Point cadet who had been home on Christmas leave on The Day. He created them provisional lieutenants of infantry. The other five were even younger-boys who had finished six months of Reserve training after high school or had been in the National Guard.
   After the execution, Randy posted the notices he had typed earlier and brought to the park in his uniform pocket. The first read:
   On 17 April the following highwaymen were killed on the covered bridge: Mickey Cahane, of Las Vegas and Boca Raton, a gambler and racketeer; Arch Fleggert, Miami, occupation unknown; Leroy Settle, Fort Repose.
   On 18 April Thomas “Casey” Killinger, also of Las Vegas, and the fourth member of the band which murdered Mr. and Mrs. James Hickey and robbed and assaulted Dr. Daniel Gunn, was hung on this spot.
   The second notice was shorter:
   On 17 April Technical Sergeant Malachai Henry (USAF, reserve) died of a wound received on the covered bridge while defending Fort Repose.

Chapter 12

   Early in May a tube in the Admiral’s radio flared and died, cutting off the voice of the world outside. While these communications had always been sketchy, and the information meager and confusing, the fact that they were gone entirely was a blow to everyone. The Admiral’s short-wave receiver had been their only reliable source of news. It was also a fount of hope. Each night that reception was good some of them had gathered in the Admiral’s den and listened while he conned the wave lengths, hoping for news of peace, victory, succor, reconstruction. While they never heard such news, they could always wait for the next night with hope.
   After consulting with the Admiral and the Henrys, Randy posted a notice on his official bulletin board in Marines Park. He asked a replacement for the tube and offered handsome payment-a pig and two chickens or a five-year file of old magazines. A proper tube never came in. Before The Day the Admiral had been forced to order replacement tubes directly from the factory in New Jersey, so he had not been optimistic.
   Even had they been able to acquire a new tube, the radio could not have operated long, for the automobile batteries were depleted and it was in May that gasoline vanished entirely.
   In June Preacher Henry’s corn crop ripened, the sweet yams swelled in the ground, and the first stalks of Two-Tone’s sugar cane fell to the machete. June was the month of plenty, the month in which they ate corn pone and hoe cake with molasses. In June they all fleshed out.
   It was in June, also, that they ran their first batch of mash through the still built by Bill McGovern and Two-Tone. It was an event. After pine knots blazed for three hours under a fifty-gallon drum, liquid began to drip from the spout terminating an intricate arrangement of copper tubing, coils, and condensers. Two-Tone caught these first drops in a cup and handed it to Randy. Randy sniffed the colorless stuff It smelled horrible. When it had cooled a bit he tasted it. His eyes watered and his stomach begged him not to swallow. He managed to get a little down. It was horrid. “It’s wonderful!” he gasped, and quickly passed the cup on.
   After all the men had taken a swallow, and properly praised Two-Tone’s inventive initiative and Bill’s mechanical acumen, Randy said, “Of course it’s still a little raw. With aging, it’ll be smoother.”
   “It ought to be aged in the wood,” Bill said. “Where will we get a keg?”
   “It’ll be a cinch,” Randy said. “Anybody who has a keg will trade it for a couple of quarts after it’s aged.”
   But for Dan Gunn, the corn whiskey was immediately useful. While he would not dare use it for anesthesia, he estimated its alcohol content as high. It would be an excellent bug repellent, liniment, and preoperative skin antiseptic.
   One day in July, Alice Cooksey brought home four books on hypnotism, and presented them to Dan Gunn. “If you can learn hypnotism,” she suggested, “you might use it as anesthesia.”
   Dan knew a number of doctors, and dentists too, who commonly practiced hypnotism. It had always seemed to him an inefficient and time-consuming substitute for ether and morphine but now he grasped at the idea as if Alice had offered him a specific for cancer.
   Every night Helen read to him. She insisted on doing his reading, thus saving his eyes. They no longer had candles or kerosene but their lamps and lanterns burned furnace oil extracted from the underground tanks with a bilge pump. It was true that furnace oil smoked, and stank, and produced yellow and inefficient light. But it was light.
   Soon Dan hypnotized Helen. He then hypnotized or attempted hypnosis on everyone in River Road. He couldn’t hypnotize the Admiral at all. He succeeded in partially hypnotizing Randy, with poor results, including grogginess and a headache. Randy attempted to cooperate but he could not erase everything else from his mind.
   The children were excellent subjects. Dan hypnotized them again and again until he had only to speak a few sentences, in the jargon of the hypnotist, snap his fingers, and they would fall into malleable trance. Randy worried about this until Dan explained. “I’ve been training the children to be quick subjects, because in an emergency, they have their own built-in supply of ether.” “And if you’re not around?”
   “Helen is studying hypnotism too.” He was thoughtful. “She’s becoming quite expert. You know, Helen could have been a doctor. Helen isn’t happy unless she’s caring for someone. She takes care of me.”
   A week later Ben Franklin developed a stomachache which forced him to draw up his right knee when he tried to lie down. The ache was always there and at intervals it became sharp pain enveloping him in waves. Dan decided Ben’s pain was not from eating too many bananas. It was impossible to take a blood count but the boy had a slight fever and Dan knew he had to go into him.
   Dan operated on the billiard table in the gameroom, after putting Ben into deep trance. Dan used the steak knives, darning needles, hair curlers, and nylon line, all properly sterilized, and removed an appendix distended and near to bursting.
   In five days, Ben was up and active. After that Randy, somewhat in awe, referred to Dan as “our witch doctor.”
   In August they used the last of the corn, squeezed the last of the late oranges, the Valencias, and plucked the last overripe but deliciously sweet grapefruit from the trees. In August they ran out of salt, armadillos destroyed the yam crop, and the fish stopped biting. That terribly hot August was the month of disaster.
   The end of the corn and exhaustion of the citrus crop had been inevitable. Armadillos in the yams was bad luck, but bearable. But without fish and salt their survival was in doubt.
   Randy had carefully rationed salt since he was shocked, in July, to discover how few pounds were left. Salt was a vital commodity, not just white grains you shook on eggs. Dan used saline solutions for half a dozen purposes. The children used salt to brush their teeth. Without salt, the slaughter of the Henry pigs would have been a terrible waste. They planned to tan one hide to cut badly needed moccasins, and without salt this was impossible.
   As soon as they were out of salt it seemed that almost everything required salt, most of all the human body. Day after day the porch thermometer stood at ninety-five or over and every day all of them had manual labor to do, and miles to walk. They sweated rivers. They sweated their salt away, and they grew weak, and they grew ill. And all of Fort Repose grew weak and ill for there was no salt anywhere.
   In July Randy had gone to Rita Hernandez and she had traded five pounds of salt to him for three large bass, a bushel of Valencias, and four buckshot shells. She had traded not so much for these things, Randy believed, but because he had helped her arrange decent burial for Pete, and provided the pallbearers to carry him to Repose-in-Peace-Park. Since July, he had been unable to trade for salt anywhere. In Marines Park, a pound of salt would be worth five pounds of coffee, if anyone had coffee. You could not even buy salt with corn liquor, potent if only slightly aged.
   In August the traders in Marines Park dragged themselves about like zombies, for want of salt. And for the first time in his life Randy felt a weird uneasiness and craving that became almost madness when he rubbed the perspiration from his face and then tasted salt on his fingers. Now he understood the craving of animals for salt, understood why a cougar and a deer would share the same salt lick in the enforced truce of salt starvation.
   But even more important than salt was fish, for the fish of the river was their staple, like seal to the Eskimo. It had been so simple, until August. Their bamboo set poles, butts lodged in metal or wooden holders on the ends and sides of their docks, each night usually provided enough fish for the following day. In the morning someone would stroll down to the dock and haul up whatever had hooked itself in the hours of darkness. If the night’s automatic catch was lean, or if extra fish were needed for trading, someone was granted leave from regular chores to fish in the morning, or at dusk when the feeding bass struck savagely. Their poles grew in clumps, they had line aplenty, hooks enough to last for years (fishing had been the pre-Day hobby of Bill McGovern and Sam Hazzard as well as Randy) and every kind of baitworms, crickets, grasshoppers, tadpoles, minnows, shiners-for anyone capable of using a shovel, throw net, or simply his hands.
   Randy had more than a hundred plugs and spoons and perhaps half as many flies and bass bugs. He had bought them knowing well that most lures are designed to catch fishermen rather than fish. Still, on occasion the bass would go wild for artificials and in the spring the specks and bream would snap up small flies and tiny spoons. So fish had never been a problem, until they stopped biting.
   When they stopped they stopped all at once and all together. Even with his circular shrimp net, wading barefoot in the shallows, Lib beside him hopefully carrying a bucket, Randy could not net a shiner, bream, cat, or even mudfish. Randy considered himself a good fisherman and yet he admitted he didn’t understand why fish bit or why they didn’t. August had never been a good month for black bass, true, but this August was strange. Only during thunderstorms was there a ripple on the river. A molten sun rose, grew white hot, and sank red and molten, and the river was unearthly still and oily, agitated no more than Florence’s aquarium. Even at crack of dawn or final light, no fish jumped or swirled. It was bad. And it was eerie and frightening.
   In the third week of August when they were all weak and half-sick Randy spoke his fears to Dan. It was evening. Randy and Lib had just come from the hammock. For an hour they had crouched together under a great oak waiting for the little gray squirrels to feed. They had been utterly quiet and the squirrels had been noisy and Randy had blasted two of them out of the tree with his double twenty, a shameful use of irreplaceable ammunition for very little meat. Yet two squirrels was enough to give meat flavor to a stew that night. What they would have for breakfast, if anything, nobody knew. They found Dan in Randy’s office, with Helen trimming his hair. Randy told them about the two squirrels and then she said, “Dan, I’ve been thinking about the fish. I’ve never seen fishing this bad before. Could anything big and permanent have happened? Could radiation have wiped them out, or anything?”
   Dan scratched at his beard and Helen brushed his hand down and said, “Sit still.”
   Dan said, “Fish. Let me think about fish. I doubt that anything happened to the fish. If the river had been poisoned by fallout right after The Day the dead fish would have come to the surface. The river would have been blanketed with fish. That didn’t happen then and it hasn’t happened since. No, I doubt that there has been a holocaust of fish.”
   “It worries me,” Randy said.
   “Salt worries me more. Salt doesn’t grow or breed or spawn. You either have it or you don’t.”
   Helen swung the swivel chair. Dan was facing the teak chest. Suddenly he lifted himself out of the chair, flung himself on his knees, opened the chest and began to dig into it. “The diary!” he shouted. “Where’s the diary?”
   “It’s there. Why?”
   “There’s salt in the diary! Remember when Helen was reading it to me after I was slugged by the highwaymen? There was something about salt in it. Remember, Helen?”
   Randy had not looked into the log of Lieutenant Randolph Rowzee Peyton for years, but now it was coming back to him, and he did remember. Lieutenant Peyton’s Marines had also lacked and needed salt, and somehow obtained it. He dropped on his knees beside Dan and quickly found the log. He skimmed through the pages. Lieutenant Peyton, as he recalled it, had run out of salt in the second year. He found an entry, dated August 19, 1839:
   “The supply boat from Cow’s Ford being much overdue, and my command lacking salt and suffering greatly from the heat, on 6 August I dispatched my loyal Creek guide, Billy Longnose, down the St. Johns (sometimes called River May) to discover the cause of delay. Today he returned with the information that our supply boat, beating its way upstream, had put into dock at Mandarin (a town named to honor the oriental nation from which it imported its orange trees). By ill luck, on that night the Seminoles raided Mandarin, putting to death a number of its inhabitants and burning the houses. The master of the supply boat, a civilian, and his crew, consisting of a white man and two Slaves, escaped to the woods and later reached St. Augustine. However, the boat was pillaged and then burned.
   All other privations my men can endure except lack of water and lack of salt.”
   The next entry was dated August 21. Randy read it aloud:
   “Billy Longnose today brought to the Fort a Seminole, a very dirty and shifty-eyed buck calling himself Kyukan, who offered to guide me to a place where there is sufficient salt to fill this Fort ten times over. So he says. In payment he demanded one gallon of rum. While it is unlawful to sell sprints to the Seminoles, nothing is said about giving them drink. Accordingly, I offered the buck a half-gallon jug, and he agreed.”
   Randy turned the page and said, “Here it is. Twenty-three April”:
   “This day I returned to Fort Repose in the second boat, bringing twelve large sacks of salt. It was true. I could have filled the Fort ten times over.
   “The place is near the headwaters of the Timucuan, some twenty-two nautical miles, I should judge, up that tributary. It is called by an Indian word meaning Blue Crab Pool. The pool itself is crystal clear, like the Silver Springs. I thought it surrounded by a white beach, but then discovered that what I thought sand was pure salt. It was quite unbelievable. In this pool there were blue crabs, such as are found only in the ocean, yet the pool is many miles inland, and two hundred miles from the mouth of the St. John, or May.”
   Randy closed the log, grinned, and said, “I’ve heard of Blue Crab Run but I’ve never been there. My father used to go there when he was a boy, for crab feasts. He never mentioned salt. I guess salt didn’t impress my father. It was always in the kitchen. He had plenty.”
   The next morning the Fort Repose fleet set sail, five boats commanded by an admiral whose last sea command had also been five ships-a super-carrier, two cruisers, and two destroyers.
   By August most of the boats in Fort Repose had been fitted with sails cut from awnings, draperies, or even nylon sheets for the lighter outboards, and with keels or sideboards, and hand carved rudders. For the expedition up the Timucuan, Sam Hazzard chose boats of exceptional capacity and stability. Randy’s light Fiberglass boat wasn’t suitable, so Randy went along as the Admiral’s crew. With the south wind blowing hot and steady, they planned to reach Blue Crab Pool before night and be back in Fort Repose by noon the next day, for their speed would double on their return voyage downstream.
   Their five boats crewed thirteen men, all well armed. It would be the first night Randy had spent away from Lib since their marriage, and she seemed somewhat distressed by this. But Randy had no fear for her safety, or for the safety of Fort Repose. His company now numbered thirty men. It controlled the rivers and the roads. Knowing this, highwaymen shunned Fort Repose. The phrase “deterrent force” had been popular before The Day and effective so long as that force had been unmistakably superior. Randy’s company was certainly the most efficient force in Central Florida, and he intended to keep it so.
   Sitting at the tiller, gold-encrusted cap pushed back on his head, the wind singing through the stays, the Admiral seemed to have sloughed off a decade. “You know,” he said, “when I was at the Academy they still insisted that we learn sail before steam. They used to stick us in catboats and make us whip back and forth on the Severn and learn knots and rigs and spars. I thought it was silly. I still do, but it is fun.”
   They reached a curve of the river and Randy watched the captain’s walk on his roof disappear behind the cypress and palms. It was fun, he thought, and it was quiet. In a sailboat a man could think. He thought about the fish, and what had happened to them, for his stomach was empty.
   Peyton Bragg was bored, disgusted, and angry. She had helped Ben Franklin plan the hunt. She had even walked to town with Ben and helped him locate the books in the library that told about armadillos. The armadillo, they had learned, was a nocturnal beast that curled up deep underground in daylight hours. In the night he burrowed like a mole just under the surface, locating and eating tender roots and tubers, in this case the Henrys’ yams. The exciting thing they learned was that in his native Central America the armadillo was considered a delicacy. The armadillo was food. Then, when it came time for the hunt, Ben had refused to take her along. A girl couldn’t stay out all night in the woods, Ben said. It was too dangerous for a girl. She would have presented her case to Randy for judgment, but Randy was gone with the Admiral, and her mother agreed with Ben.
   So Ben had gone off that evening with Caleb and Graf. It was Ben’s contention that Graf was the key to armadillo hunting, and so it had proved. In Germany the dachshund was originally bred as a badger hound, which meant that he could dig like mad and would fearlessly and tenaciously pursue any animal underground.
   Ben had been armed with a machete and his .22 rifle, but it was Caleb’s spear that had been the effective weapon against armadillos. They had gone to the yam patch in the moonlight. The whole patch was plowed with armadillo runs. Ben introduced Graf to an opening and Graf, sniffing and understanding at once, had wormed his way into the earth. Presently there came an awful snarling and growling from a corner of the patch. Locating the armadillo from Graf’s sounds, Caleb prodded it with his spear, and the armadillo burst out. This eruption so surprised Ben that he shot it. The others, he decapitated with the machete.
   In the morning, five armadillos had been laid out in the Henrys’ barn. Two-Tone and Preacher cleaned them, and Peyton had eaten armadillo for breakfast. She would have choked on it, except that it was tender and delicious and she was starving. Ben Franklin was credited with discovering a new source of food, and was a hero. Peyton was only a girl, fit for sewing, pot washing, and making beds.
   Peyton threw herself on the bed and stared at the ceiling. She wanted to be noticed and praised. She wanted to be a hero. She recently had been talking to Lib about psychology, a fascinating subject. She had even read one of Lib’s books. “I’m rejected,” she told herself aloud.
   If she wanted to be a hero the best way was to catch some fish. She set her mind to the problem, why won’t the fish bite? She had heard the Admiral say that the best fisherman on the river was Preacher Henry and yet she knew that Randy hadn’t talked to Preacher about the no-fish. If anybody could help, Preacher could. She got up, smoothed the bed, and sneaked down the back stairs. This was her day to sweep upstairs. She would finish when she got back.
   Peyton found Preacher in the cool of his front porch, rocking. Preacher was getting very old. He didn’t do much of anything any more except rock. Preacher was the oldest person Peyton had ever seen. Now that he had grown a white beard, he looked like a dark prophet out of the Bible. Peyton said, “Preacher, can you tell me something?”
   Preacher was startled. He hadn’t seen her slip up on him, and her voice had broken his dream. He started to rise and then sank back into the chair. “Sure, Peyton,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
   “Why don’t the fish bite?”
   Preacher chuckled. “hey do bite. They bite whenever they eat.”
   “Come on, Preacher. Tell me how I can catch some fish.” “To catch fish, you got to think like a fish. Can you think like a fish, little girl?”
   Peyton felt injured, being called a little girl, but she was a child of dignity, and it was with dignity that she answered. “No, I can’t. But I know that you can. You must, because you’re a great fisherman.”
   Preacher nodded in agreement. “I was a great fisherman. Now I feel too poorly to fish. Nobody thinks of me any more as a great fisherman. They only think of me as an old man of no use to anyone. You are the first one to ask, `Why don’t the fish bite?’ So I’ll tell you.”
   Peyton waited.
   “If it was very hot, like now, the hottest I ever remember, and you was a fish, what would you do?”
   “I don’t know,” Peyton said. “I know what I do. I take showers, three or four a day. Outside with nothing on.”
   Preacher nodded. “The fish, he wants to stay cool too. He don’t hand around the shore there-” his arm swept to indicate the river banks-”he goes out into the middle. The water close to the shore, it’s hot. You put your hand in it, it feels like soup. But out in the middle of the river, way down deep, it’s nice and cool. Down there the fish feels lively and hungry and he eats and when he eats he bites.”
   “Bass?”
   “Yes. Big bass, ‘way down deep.”
   “How would I get them? Nobody’s been able to net any bass bait-no shiners.”
   “That’s the trouble,” Preacher said. “The little fish he gets hot too and so he’s out there in the middle deep, being chased by the big fish like always.”
   Peyton thought of something. “Would a bass bite a goldfish?”
   Preacher looked at her suspiciously. “He sure would! He’d take a goldfish in a second if one was offered! But it against the law to fish with goldfish. But if I did have goldfish, and if it weren’t against the law, and if I did fish out in the deep channel, then I wouldn’t use a bobber. I’d just put a little weight next my hook so that goldfish would sink right down where the big bass lie.”
   Peyton said, “Thank you, Preacher,” and skipped away, not wishing to incriminate him further, if it really was true that goldfish were illegal. She went home, found a bucket on the back porch, and then walked across River Road for a talk with Florence Wechek. She and Florence were good friends and often had long talks, but about simple subjects, such as mending.
   Florence wasn’t home-she was probably in town helping Alice at the library-but the goldfish were. She watched them swimming dreamily, ignoring her in their useless complacency. “In with you,” she said, and dumped fish and water into the pail.
   She borrowed Ben Franklin’s rod and reel and made for the dock. She was forbidden to go out in Randy’s boat alone, but since she was already involved in one criminal act, she might as well risk another.
   At noon Randy had not returned and Elizabeth McGovern Bragg climbed to the captain’s walk where she could be alone with her fears and anxiety. Her father and Dan Gunn had walked to town that morning. With some volunteers from Braggs Troop, they had begun to clean up and repair the clinic. So there was no man in the house and she was afraid for her husband. He had told her there would be no danger but in this new life the dangers were deadly and unpredictable. She kept her face turned steadily to the east, where the Admiral’s striped-awning sail should appear at the first bend of the Timucuan.
   She told herself that she was silly, that Randy and the others, if they found the place at all, might tarry there for hours. They would undoubtedly feast on crab, and she couldn’t blame them. They might find it difficult to load the salt. Anything could delay them.
   From the grass behind the kitchen Helen called up, “Lib!” She leaned over the rail. “Yes?”
   “Is Peyton up there with you?” “No. I haven’t seen her.”
   “Is she out on the dock?”
   Lib looked out at the dock and saw that Randy’s boat was missing. Before she told Helen this she scanned the river. It was nowhere in sight; Randy had sailed in the Admiral’s cruiser, and the boat should be there.
   At five that evening the Fort Repose fleet sighted Randy’s house. There was no doubt that it had been a triumphant voyage. The five boats were deep with salt, the thirteen men were filled with boiled crabs, lavishly seasoned, so they were all stronger and felt better, and in every boat there were buckets and washtubs filled with live crabs.
   The Admiral ran his boat alongside Randy’s dock and turned into the wind. “You unload what salt you want here,” Sam Hazzard said, “and that washtub full of crabs, and I’ll sail back with the Henrys’ share, and mine.”
   Randy unloaded. He had expected that Lib would be down at the dock to greet him, or certainly watching from the captain’s walk. Coming home with such rich cargo, he was chagrined. He lifted the washtub to the dock and then two fat sacks of salt. Fifty pounds, at least, he thought. It would last for months and when it was gone there was an unlimited supply waiting on the shores of Blue Crab Pool. He said, “So long, Sam. See you tonight.”
   The Admiral pushed away from the dock and Randy picked up the washtub, deliberately spilled some of the water that had kept the crabs alive, and walked to the house.
   The kitchen was empty except for four very large black bass in the sink. He lifted the largest. An eleven-pounder, he judged. It was the biggest bass he had seen in a year. It was unbelievable.
   There was a plate on the kitchen table heaped with roasted meat. It looked like lamb. He tasted it. It didn’t taste like lamb. It didn’t taste like anything he had ever tasted before, but it tasted wonderful. He thought of the crabs, and their value dwindled to hors d’ouevres.
   It was then he heard the first sobs, from upstairs, he thought, and then a different voice weeping hysterically somewhere else in the house. In fear, he ran through the dining room.
   Three women were in the living room. They were all crying, Lib silently, Florence and Helen loudly. Lib saw him and ran into his arms and wiped her tears on his shirt. “What’s happened?” he demanded.
   “I thought you’d never come home,” Lib said. “I was afraid and there’s so much trouble.”
   “What? Who’s hurt?”
   “Nobody but Peyton. She upstairs, crying. Helen spanked her and sent her to bed.”
   “Why?”
   “She went fishing.”
   “Did Peyton catch those big bass?”
   “Yes.”
   “And Helen spanked her for it?”
   “Not that. Helen spanked her because she took out your boat and drifted downstream. We didn’t know what had happened to her until she rowed home an hour ago. She said she couldn’t make it sail right.”
   Randy looked at Helen. “And what’s wrong with you?” “I’m upset. Anybody’d be upset if they had to spank their child.”
   Florence wailed and her head fell on her arms. “What’s wrong with her?”
   “Somebody or something came in and ate her goldfish.” Florence raised her head. “I think it must have been Sir Percy. I’m sure of it. I did love that cat and now look how he behaves.” She wept again.
   Randy said, “Isn’t anybody going to ask me whether I got salt?”
   “Did you get salt?” Lib asked.
   “Yes. Fifty pounds of it. And if you women want it, you’ll take the wheelbarrow down to the dock and lug it up.”
   He went into the kitchen to clean the beautiful bass and put the crabs in the big pot. It was all ridiculous and stupid. The more he learned about women the more there was to learn except that he had learned this: they needed a man around.
   Then he found a tattered goldfish in the gullet of the eleven pounder. He examined it carefully, smiled, and dropped it into the sink. He would not mention it. There was enough trouble and confusion among all these women already.
   So ended the hunger of August. In the fourth week the heat broke and the fish began to bite again.
   In September school began. It was impractical to re-open the Fort Repose schoolhouse-it was unheated and there was no water. Randy decided that the responsibility for teaching must rest temporarily with the parents. The regular teachers were scattered or gone and there was no way of paying them. The textbooks were still in the schoolhouse, for anyone who needed them.
   Judge Braggs library became the schoolroom in the Bragg household, with Lib and Helen dividing the teaching. When Caleb Henry arrived to attend classes with Peyton and Ben Franklin, Randy was a little surprised. He saw that Peyton and Ben expected it, and then he recalled that in Omaha-and indeed in two thirds of America’s cities-white and Negro children had sat side by side for many years without fuss or trouble.
   In October the new crop of early oranges began to ripen. The juice tasted tart and refreshing after months without it.
   In October, armadillos began to grow scarce in the Fort Repose area, but the Henrys’ flock of chickens had increased and the sow again farrowed. Also, ducks arrived in enormous numbers from the North-more than Randy ever before had seen. Wild turkeys, which before The Day had been hunted almost to extermination in Timucuan County, suddenly were common. Randy fashioned himself a turkey call, and shot one or two every week. Quail roamed the groves, fields and yards in great coveys. He did not use his shells on such trifling game. But Two-Tone knew how to fashion snares, and taught the boys, so there was usually quail for breakfast along with eggs.
   One evening near the end of the month Dan Gunn returned from his clinic, smiling and whistling. “Randy,” he said. “I have just delivered my first post-Day baby! A boy, about eight pounds, bright and healthy!”
   “So what’s so wonderful about delivering a baby?” Randy said. “Was the mother under hypnosis?”
   “Yes. But that’s not what was wonderful.” Dan’s smile disappeared. “You see, this was the first live baby, full term. I had two other pregnancies that ended prematurely. Nature’s way of protecting the race, I think, although you can’t reach any statistical conclusion on the basis of three pregnancies. Anyway, now we know that there’s going to be a human race, don’t we?”
   “I’d never really thought there might not be.” “I had,” Dan said quietly.
   In November a tall pine, split by lightning during the summer, dropped its brown needles and died and Randy and Bill felled it with a two-man saw and ax. It was arduous work and neither of them knew the technique. It was at times like this that Randy missed and thought of Malachai. Nevertheless they got the job done and trimmed the thick branches. The wood was valuable, for another winter was coming.
   Randy went to bed early that night, exhausted. He woke suddenly with a queer sound in his ears, like music, almost. He looked at his watch. It was a bit after midnight. Lib slept quietly beside him. He was frightened. He nudged her. She lifted her head and her eyes opened. “Sweetheart,” he said, “do you hear anything?”
   “Go to sleep,” she said, and her head fell back on the pillow. It bounced up again. “Yes,” she said, “I do hear something. It sounds like music. Of course it can’t be music but that’s what it sounds like.”
   “I’m relieved,” Randy said. “I thought it was in my head.” He listened intently. “I could swear that it sounds like `In the Mood.’ If I didn’t know better I could swear it was that great Glenn Miller recording.”
   She kicked him. “Get up! Get up!”
   He flung himself out of bed and opened the door to the upstairs living room, lit by a lamp on the bar, turned low. It was necessary to keep fire in the house for they no longer had matches, flints, or lighter fluid. Randy thought, it must be the transistor radio, started up again, but at the same time he knew this was impossible because he long ago had thrown away the dead batteries. Nevertheless he picked up the radio and listened. It was silent yet the music persisted.
   “It’s coming from the hall,” Lib said.
   They opened the door into the hallway. The rhythm was louder but the hall was empty. Randy saw a crack of light under Peyton’s door. “Peyton’s room!” he said.
   He put his hand on the door handle but decided it would be gentlemanly to knock first. After all, Peyton was twelve now. He knocked.
   The music stopped abruptly. Peyton said, in a small, frightened voice, “Come in.”
   Peyton’s room was illuminated by a lamp Randy had never seen before. Peyton didn’t have a lamp of her own. On Peyton’s desk was an old-fashioned, hand crank phonograph with flaring horn. Stacked beside it were albums of records.
   Randy said, softly, “Put it on again, Peyton.”
   Peyton stopped plucking at the front of her pajamas, hand me-downs from Ben Franklin, just as Ben’s pajamas were hand-me downs from Randy, so fast did children grow. She started the record, from the beginning. Hearing it, Randy realized how much he had missed music, how music seasoned his civilization. In the Henry house Missouri often sang, but in the Bragg house hardly anyone could carry a tune, or even hum.
   Over the rhythm, Lib whispered, “Where did you get it, Peyton? Where did it come from?”
   “The attic. I went up the little ladder in the back hall. Mother will be furious. She told me never to go up there because the rungs were cracked and I might fall.”
   “Your mother was up in the attic a few months ago. She didn’t see anything.”
   “I know. I was crawling around behind the big trunk and there was a door, a board door that looked like part of the wall. I opened it and there was another room, smaller.”
   Randy said, “Why did you do it, Peyton?”
   “I don’t know. I was lonely and there wasn’t anything else to do and I’d never been up there. You know how it is. When you’ve never been some place, you want to go.”
   Randy opened one of the albums. “Old seventy-Bights,” he said, his voice almost reverent. “Classic jazz. Listen to this. By Tommy Dorsey—`Come Rain or Shine,’ `Stardust,’ `Chicago,’ Carmen Cavallaro’s `Stormy Weather.’ Also `Body and Soul.’ Artie Shaw’s `Back Bay Shuffle.’ All the best by the best. I guess I’m certain this must have been Father’s collection. I’ve never seen this machine before, but I remember the records.”
   “In the Mood” ended. Randy said, “Turn it over, Peyton. No. Put on this one.”
   “You’re not angry, Randy?” Peyton said. “Angry! I should say not!”
   “I found some other stuff in there too.” “Like what?”
   “Well, there’s an old-time sewing machine-the kind you work with your feet. There are some big kerosene lamps, the kind that hang. This one on the desk I found up there, too. All I had when I went up was a little stub candle. Then there’s an old potbellied stove and a lot of iron pipe. Oh, and lots of other junk. I left it because I wanted to try the record player. The only other thing I brought down I brought for you and Dan, Randy. It’s there on the bed.”
   Randy picked up the black leather case. It looked familiar. He had seen it before. He opened it and saw the two matched straight-edge razors that had belonged to his father.
   He leaned over and kissed the top of Peyton’s head. “Don’t worry about what your mother will say,” he told her. “I’ll handle everything for you. If I had medals to give, I would pin one on you, Peyton, right now.”
   In this manner, Peyton became a heroine.