A Place We Knew Well (10 page)

T
he
HONK-HONK
of a car horn in the driveway telegraphed its message:
Hurry up!
Avery opened his eyes, groggy and confused. His first thought—he was at the station and someone wanted gas on the double—didn't square with the fact that he was still in bed. He rolled over to squint against the view through the bedroom window: azure sky, clear and unclouded; the lake winking gently back at the sun. It was bizarre. How could the morning appear so normal after last night's dreadful announcement that the nation, the very notion of life as we knew it, had been manhandled to the brink of—what did Kennedy call it?—“the abyss of destruction.”

He sat up and rubbed his eyes and bristly cheeks with both hands. The President's speech had given frightful form and detail to his nightmares. What little sleep he'd gotten was fractured with awful images: Russian mechanics adjusting wires and winches to attach their nuclear horror atop long, red missiles and hoist them vertically against a range of green mountains. A cloud full of fireworks rising up into a foreboding mushroom shape across the lake, dwarfing the pale peaks of Edgewater High's gymnasium. Smoldering human forms bearing dog tags.

He'd tossed and turned until sometime after midnight, then been awakened just after two a.m. by the long, mournful whistle of a freight train approaching the crossing at Silver Star Road.

It wasn't the whistle that startled him. It was the sound, the low growling grasp of wheel on track, of a fully and heavily loaded
southbound
train.

Normally, trains headed south through central Florida were empty, or nearly so, their wheels clattering lightly on the rails, bound for a turnaround at the loading docks of Miami, the muck farms and sugarcane refineries on the shores of Lake Okeechobee, the giant phosphate mines due south in Polk and Hardee counties, or the big citrus packinghouses in Lake Wales and Orlando. For Avery, whose station was sandwiched between the Trail and the Southern Seaboard Railroad tracks, the difference in sound between an empty and a fully loaded freight train was as clearly distinguishable as a tenor and a bass.

And the two a.m. train wasn't only fully loaded, it was
long
! Half an hour long, at least. How many boxcars and flatbeds and engines did it take to make a train thirty minutes long?

When a second train whistled and rumbled by at three twenty-two, equally loaded but longer—forty-two minutes long!—Avery remembered the President's order to the armed forces to “prepare for any eventualities.” His brain churned with lists and images of the vehicles, ordnance, and armaments that were most likely rolling past them in the dark of this night.

At four forty-five, exhausted, a different image came to mind: his grandfather's face leaning in across the farmhouse table, giving Avery his eagle eye; his grandfather's knuckles reaching out across the bleached oak tabletop.

“That's enough, son,” he heard his grandfather say, heard his knuckles' quick rap, only twice, on the planked oak. “That's enough.”

After the terrible, too early death of his father, Avery's grandfather had come down off his West Virginia mountaintop to “serve as ballast for you and your mother, till she makes up her mind which way she wants to go.”

The fifth son of a coal miner, Old Pa had gone down to the Norfolk docks in 1885, lied about his age, and joined the Merchant Marines. He'd worked colliers mostly, transporting black tons of American coal to US ships and bases all over the world. He'd helped fuel Admiral Dewey's victory in Manila Bay and transported horses for Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders at San Juan Hill; though, a man of few words, he rarely spoke of it.

His quiet presence, however, had been the rudder of Avery's adolescence and provided the encouragement he'd needed to leave the farm and join the air force. Although Old Pa died in late '44, while Avery was en route to Tinian Island, the old man remained, in memory, a steadying force, helping Avery to finally fall off for a couple hours of fitful sleep.

Now reaching for his robe, he heard Charlotte—“Later, Mom. Tell Dad I said bye!”—and the bang of the front door as she flew out to catch her horn-honking ride to school.

He regretted sleeping in and not seeing her. More than that, he felt grieved. She should have come home smiling, happy to show off and even model her new dresses. He would like to have seen her twirling around in them, preening like a princess.

But instead she'd huddled beside him, pale and drawn, fists pressed against her lips, eyes blank with disbelief. Her one comment, an attempt at humor—“There goes homecoming!”—fell flat in the face of both her parents' barely suppressed horror.

Later, after Sarah insisted he unload her trunk (still full of the boxes she'd brought home from the shelter show) then disappeared into unpacking mode, he'd returned to the living room to check on Charlotte. She wasn't there or anywhere else inside the house. He'd finally found her outside in the backyard, staring up at the cloud-smudged dark. “I heard planes,” she told him. “Wanted to make sure they were ours.” He'd done his best to comfort her. But she'd seen too much out at the air base, and knew too much from the President's speech, to blindly accept his lame reassurances. He hoped she'd slept, which was more than he could say for Sarah. She, as far as he knew, had been up restocking the shelter most of the night.

When he entered the kitchen, Sarah was on the phone frowning, clearly annoyed by what she was hearing. She wore a faded housedress, and with no makeup, her hair pinned haphazardly out of her eyes, she seemed to have aged years overnight.

She acknowledged him with a distracted wave toward the dinette, where his breakfast was waiting: pancakes and link sausage tented with tinfoil.

“I understand, Edith, but I couldn't possibly…Well…” She sighed, her shoulders slumped with resignation. “If you insist, I'll take the Langford and First Baptist today; and the Cherry Plaza tomorrow. But after that…”

Avery studied her, wondering what Edith wanted now. Sarah looked and sounded exhausted. Her hand, making a note on the wall pad beside the phone, trembled. “Good-bye, Edith,” she said and stopped just short of slamming the receiver onto its hook.

“Now what?” he asked.

“General Betts”—Orange County's director of Civil Defense—“was so impressed with our committee's work at Sunday's show, he's asked us to inspect the public shelters, make sure they're organized properly.”

“Wants the Women's Club Seal of Approval, does he?” Avery asked, thinking, Now,
that's
a propaganda move if I ever saw one. “Complete with
Sentinel
photographers to reassure the general public the government's got their back?”

“Something like that, I s'pose.” She turned to open the cabinet door, popped the top off the brown vial, shook out two small yellow pills, and tossed them down without water.

He'd eaten a few bites but realized he had no appetite. Besides, he was running late. He thanked her for her efforts and rose to open the fridge and remove his lunch pail from the shelf where she always left it for him.

“Sorry I have to run, darlin'.” He leaned in to kiss her pale cheek. Her hair had an odd, musty smell. Like the shelter, he realized distractedly. “My best to the Dragon Lady.”

Good luck,
he might have added, but didn't. Clearly, the good general and Edith were sending her on a fool's errand, a PR stunt to keep the locals from panicking. But aren't we all fools today? Going through the motions of normal life—as if everything and everyone doesn't hang in the balance? As if the unspeakable—the unthinkable—isn't staring us in the face just across the Florida Straits?

N
ORMALLY ON
T
UESDAYS AND
Thursdays, Avery opened, Steve closed, and Emilio was off. But yesterday, to accommodate Friday and Saturday's homecoming events, he'd switched to a three-shift schedule to give Emilio the weekend off. Avery was glad he'd made the change. If today was anything like yesterday—and after the President's speech, how could it not be?—he'd need the extra help.

He barely had time to get the doors open and turn the lights on before the deluge began. The gas bell was ringing off the wall for fill-ups, top-offs, and a few random men in pickups looking to load up their fifty-five-gallon drums. Avery refused them, on account of they weren't regular customers and he wasn't inclined to support hoarding.

Rumors were rampant; everyone claimed an inside track.

Connie Diggs, who worked the Rexall counter across the street, told Avery with a nervous, sideways glance down the Trail, “You hear they're evacuating Miami? Everybody's s'posed to be packin' up and headin' north. 'Cept for the Cubans in Little Havana. They're refusin' to go.”

Avery doubted that one was true.

“Our boy's Spanish teacher?” whispered housewife Billie Watts, pink nose and lips twitching like a scared rabbit. “Been workin' nights out at McCoy, teaching the paratroopers basic phrases, for after their drop into Cuba.”

Avery considered that one credible.

Herb Benson, who ran the family fruit stand around the corner, stopped in to say, “My neighbor's an engineer out at Martin-Marrietta. They got the biggest building under roof in the state, y'know. And with what they're doing out there? Says they might as well paint a giant red bull's-eye on top.”

Probably right, Avery thought grimly. Any Sputnik spy satellite worth its circuitry would pick up the Beeline Expressway running stick-straight from the giant defense contractor's back door, less than ten miles south, to Cape Canaveral's coastal launch pads. Though, in Avery's mind, Orlando's SAC base at McCoy was the more likely target, and it was closer still.

Either way, Avery knew, a fifteen-megaton bomb like the one the US tested on Bikini would drop a lethal blanket of radioactivity over central Florida 40 miles wide and, depending on the wind, 220 miles long. Just last year, Khrushchev boasted the Soviets now had thirty- to fifty-megaton monsters in their arsenal—a bomb that big would sink the entire state.

At nine-thirteen, another southbound train rumbled by behind the station, the other side of Dr. Phillips's packinghouse. Avery heard it, clocked its length at twenty-two minutes, but was unable to leave the pumps to walk to the corner and watch it go by.

Steve arrived at ten, providing Avery with his first chance to call the depot in Tampa and ask about the fill-up of his own underground tanks.

“I don't know, Wes,” the dispatcher warned him. “Phone's ringing off the hook here. We got all our tankers out on deliveries, but you're—let's see now—number twenty-seven on the list. Tomorrow afternoon, maybe? I'll have to get back to you.”

Just after noon, Marjorie Cook wheeled into the parking space beside the office and got out, wallet in one hand, baby girl on her hip in the other. Both boys trailed behind her.

Avery was on his way out the door to return a customer's Texaco card and get the credit slip signed. “Be right with you,” he told her.

Back in the office, he noticed her eyes were red-rimmed. “I've come to settle up,” she said, handing off the baby to J.J., the bigger of the two boys, “and also to serve notice.”

“What do you mean?” Avery had opened the cash register and was retrieving her gas bill.

Marjorie pushed back damp curls off her forehead with the palm of her hand. She was dressed sloppily for her, in a man's plaid shirt and rolled-up jeans.

“Jimmy's on a long haul to Nebraska. Called home long-distance Friday night. Said there's all kinds of scary talk on his CB radio.”

The baby whimpered and waved her arms, wanting her mother. Marjorie handed over her keys instead, then, laying her wallet on the counter, fished a balled-up handkerchief out of her pocket and blew her nose. After that, the words boiled out in a rush.