Not This August (11 page)

“C’m into the office,” Croley grunted, and they disappeared.

“Things are picking up all over,” a little old man said hopefully to Justin. “If the price’s right, I could use a dozen myself. Sick of scouring and patching the old cans. Don’t you think things are picking up?”

Somebody else snapped: “For Croley they are. Crooked skunk.” The little man looked alarmed and started to move away. The dangerous talker—Justin thought he was one of the Eldridge brothers from Four Corners—took the little man’s arm and began pouring into his ears a tale of how Croley paid off every week to a SMGU major who pretended to inspect his freezer room—

“Mebbe, mebbe,” the little man kept saying as he tried to get away.

Justin told himself:
There’s my man
. In Croley’s office. I wait for him to come out, I walk along as he heads for the bus, we whisper an appointment, and I meet him somewhere. And then, thank God, it’ll be over. No more bombardment satellite for me. A smooth conspiratorial group somewhere will take it over, do what has to be done. I’ll have done my share. I’ll watch and secretly know that someday I’ll be in the history books as the daring civilian who contacted the organization at the risk of his life…

It didn’t work out that way at all.

The bus driver called: “ ‘Board!” and the salesman appeared at the door of the little office, still talking to Croley and shaking hands. He talked Croley out through the door of the shop with him, swung up the steps of the bus still talking, and collapsed comfortably into a dirty oilcloth-covered seat while Justin gaped and the bus chugged off down the road.

Contact broken.

Justin found himself swearing, almost frenzied, as he stumped along the dirt track to the Shiptons’ woodlot. The flies were bad in the summer heat; he slapped viciously at them, missing oftener than not, knowing that frustration was making him behave like an idiot.
But he had to dump this load!

Rawson came into sight about where they told him he’d be. The crippled veteran was strapped into his gocart, leaning far out to bore a hole with a post auger. The Shipton milk quota had been stepped up again. To meet it they’d have to breed their heifers early; to feed the calves that would come they needed more pasture. So here was Rawson boring postholes to enclose land supposed to be set aside as woodlot for the future.

Justin hailed the legless man abruptly. Rawson gave the pipe handle of the auger a final turn and hauled it up, loaded with sandy clay, his huge shoulder muscles bulging. “Good day’s work,” he said proudly. “What brings you here, Billy?”

“I know where the bombardment satellite is,” Justin said flatly.

Rawson grinned. “Why, so do I. Poor old
Yankee Doodle
’s a few miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, what’s left of her. Too bad they didn’t get her up in time—”

“I mean the real one,” Justin said. “
Yankee Doodle
was deception. I know where the real one is. Rawson, you’ve got to put me in touch with your higher-ups. Don’t act dumb, Rawson! You’ve got something to do with the suitcase A-bombs. I saw that salesman who picked up the assembly from me that time. He was in Croley’s store but he was gone before I had a chance to talk to him.”

“Near by?” Rawson asked thoughtfully.

“Skip that. Just let me know who’s your boss and how to get in touch. I want to dump this business. I don’t know what to do with it, where to begin. I’ve got to turn it over to somebody.”

“You’re nuts,” Rawson said. “I don’t know about any A-bombs and you don’t know about any bombardment satellites lying around. What A-bomb was this—that liquor you helped me out with?”

“Liquor be damned! Who’s your boss?”

“Convince me, Billy. You haven’t yet. And if it’ll help you talk, you might as well know I used to be, in my time, the youngest general officer in the Corps of Engineers.”

“You’re in command?”

“Of what? I’m not giving information, Billy. I’m only taking today.”

So, Justin thought bitterly, I don’t get to lay it down. Instead I get involved deeper. Now I have the burden of Rawson’s identity on me—unless he’s lying or crazy. He began to talk.

Gribble, the psychosis, the satellite.

When there was no more to tell, the legless man said: “Very circumstantial. Maybe even true.”

“You’ll take it from here?” Justin demanded.

“Go home and wait, Billy. Just go home and wait.” Rawson shoved his gocart five feet farther down the line and stabbed his auger into the sod for the next post hole.

Justin started down the dirt path, the burden still on his back. He thought of blood-spattered cellar walls against which men exactly like him, but with less than a millionth of the guilty knowledge he possessed, were beaten and killed. When would they let Billy Justin be Billy Justin again? It went far back into childhood, his involvement. Were the old wars like this rolling, continuous thing of which he had been a part for as long as he could remember, this thing that would not end even now that it was ended? Item: childhood games. Item: high school R.O.T.C. Item: propaganda poster contests. Item: Korea (and an infected leg wound from a dirty, nameless little patrol). Item: War Three (and cows). Item: defeat and occupation. And still he was entangled in spite of his fatigue, his hundred-times-earned honorable discharge.

Justin waited through two weeks of summer drought and flies, having a minimum of talk with Gribble, collapsing every night in exhaustion. They came very close to meeting their milk norm.

The signal was a long blast of the mailwoman’s horn—it meant registered mail, an insured package or something of the sort. Justin climbed the steep, short hill to the mailbox suspecting nothing more. But Betsy Cardew told him: “Think up a good reason. You’re going into Chiunga Center with me.”

“Rawson?” he asked. She nodded. “Can you wait while I throw a bucket of water over myself and change my shirt?”

“I can’t. Please get in.”

They chugged the long mail route almost without conversing. She had nothing to say except that he would meet some people. He tried to tell her that she shouldn’t be mixed up in anything like this and she said she had to be. They had to have the mail carriers. And, after reflecting, he realized that they did. Mail carriers were daily travelers who met everybody and carried packages as part of the job. Mail carriers were essential, and if one of them happened to be a slim, clear-eyed girl entirely unsuited for torture and death in a cellar, so much the worse for her.

She showed no fear at the check points. The Red Army men who stopped her and signed her through on their registers were friendly. She said to them, “
Prohsteetye, chtoh behspohkohyoo vas
,” while Justin stared and the soldiers grinned.

“Very difficult language,” she told Justin as they drove on. “I’m making slow progress.”

“Those soldiers looked pretty sloppy to me.”

“Colonel Platov got a girl. Mrs. Grauer.”

Justin whistled. The Grauers were Chiunga Center aristocracy. Young Mr. Grauer was president by primogeniture of the feed mill, Mrs. Grauer was an imported Wellesley girl and very slim and lovely. The husband, of course, was whereabouts-unknown after surrendering his National Guard regiment in the debacle at El Paso. “Goes right to the house?” he asked.

“Right to the big red brick Georgian show place,” she said, concentrating on her driving. “I don’t know if they’re in love or not. There’s an awful lot of it going on.”

So Colonel Platoff had a girl and the soldiers at the check points had murky brass and had skipped shaving. The soldierly virtue was running fast out of SMGU 449. Justin was suddenly more conscious than ever that he smelled like what he was: a farmer in a midsummer drought.

Justin got out when they reached the post office by late afternoon. Betsy Cardew said she had two hours of sorting ahead of her, and would he meet her at her house on Chiunga Hill.

He wandered through the town unmolested. Mr. Farish, the bald, asthmatic young pharmacist, called to him from behind his prescription counter as he strolled down High Street. Mr. Farish and he had been fellow members of Rotary in the old days before the Farm-or-Fight Law; the membership of a freelance commercial artist made Chiunga Center Rotary more broad-minded and cultured than the other chapters down the valley. They valued him for it, especially Mr. Farish who daydreamed of escaping from pharmacy via an interminable historical novel he was writing.

Justin stepped into the store and nervously blurted out his cover story, an unconvincing bit about buying seed cake from the local feed store, Croley’s price being too high for comfort.

Mr. Farish, completely uninterested, waved the yarn aside and set him up a root beer. “Red Army boys are crazy about root beer,” he said. “Nothing like it where they come from.”

“How’re they behaving?”

“Pretty fair. Say, did you hear about Colonel Platov and Mrs.—?”

“I heard. Customer, Fred.”

It was a Red soldier with a roll of film. “
Sredah?
” he asked, grinning.

“
Pyatneetsah
,” Mr. Farish told him. “O.K.?”

“Hokay,” said the soldier. He contorted his face and brought out from the depths: “Soap?” And grinned with relief.

Mr. Farish sold him the soap and put away the film. “He wanted it on Wednesday and I told him Friday,” he said casually. “You saw how he took it, Billy. There’s no harm in them. Of course, you farmers are eating a lot better than we are here but after they get food distribution squared away—”

Justin gulped his root beer and thanked Farish. He had to find out about that seed cake, he said, and hurried out. The bald young man looked hurt by his abruptness.

The bald young idiot!

He headed for one of the elm-shaded residential streets and paced its length, his hands rammed into the pockets of his jeans. Farish didn’t know; Farish knew only that farmers were always griping. He didn’t realize that the problem facing the Reds in the valley was to squeeze the maximum amount of milk from it and any time spent batting the mercantile population around would be wasted. After the pattern was set, after the dairy farmers were automatic serfs, then they would move on the shopkeepers. Currently they were being used, and skillfully, to supply the garrison and the farms.

And still there was a nagging thought that these Red G.I.s were just human, and that their bosses were just human, that things seemed to be easing into a friendlier pattern of live and let live.

And beneath that one there was the darker thought that it was too good to last, that somehow the gigantic self-regulating system would respond to the fact that Red G.I.s were treating the conquered population like friends and that Colonel Platov had a girl.

An off-duty soldier and
his
girl were strolling the elm-shaded street with him, he noticed. The girl he vaguely recognized: one of those town drifters who serves your coffee at the diner one morning and the next day, to your surprise, is selling you crockery at the five-and-ten. Margaret something-or-other—

A sergeant bore down on the couple, and the soldier popped to attention, saluting. Without understanding a word Justin knew that he was witnessing a memorable chewing-out. The spitting, snarling Russian language was well suited to the purpose. When it ended at last, the chastened soldier saluted, about-faced, and marched down the street at attention, with Margaret something-or-other left standing flat-footed. The sergeant relaxed and smiled at her: “
Kahkoy, preeyatnyi syoorpreez!
”

Margaret had her bearings again. She smiled back, “
Da
, big boy. Let’s go,” and off they went arm in arm.

Justin walked back to High Street, deeply disturbed. He liked what he had seen. It was too good, too warmly human, to be true.

Mr. Sparhawk was established on a crate at the corner of High and Onondaga outside the bank preaching to a thin crowd, none of whom stayed for more than a minute. The pinched British voice and the bony British face had not changed in the months since Justin last saw him. Neither had his line:

“My dear friends, we have peace at last. Some of you doubtless believe that it would be a better peace if it had been won by the victory of the North American Governments than by their adversaries, but this is vain thinking. Peace is indivisible, however attained. It is not what it has come out of but what we make of it. Reforming ourselves from within is the way in which we shall reform society. In the lonely individual heart begins what you are pleased to call progress. I rejoice that there is a diminished supply of meat and pray that this condition will reveal to you all the untruthfulness of the propaganda that meat is essential to health, and that from this realization many of you will progress to vegetarianism, the first great ascetic step along the road to universal life-reverence…”

Justin could not stand more than a minute of it himself. He headed north along Onondaga Street toward Chiunga Hill and the big white house where Betsy lived. He knew why it hadn’t yet been requisitioned, even after the guilty flight of her father, the National Committeeman. The Russians were supposed to live like Spartans in their barracks, officers faring not much better than the troops. But he thought he scented a trend in town that would end only with the expropriation of every decent dwelling in the Center.

The second and third floors of the house were closed off. There was still plenty of room for Betsy and a Mrs. Norse, the last of the servants. She was tottery and deaf; actually the two women waited on each other. Betsy matter-of-factly offered Justin a bath, which he eagerly accepted. When he emerged from the tub, she called to him: “I’ve found some of my father’s gardening things for you to put on. I don’t suppose you want me to save your clothes?”

“No,” he called back, embarrassed. “You caught me by surprise today, you know. I was wearing them just to clean the barn—”

“Of course,” she said politely. “I’ll have Mrs. Norse burn them, shall I?”

Clean socks, underwear, and clean, faded denims—he had to take up six inches of slack with his belt—left Justin feeling better than he had in months. Mrs. Norse was noisy about the improvement. She remembered the day when a man wouldn’t dream of setting foot outside his bedroom unless he was decently clothed in stiff collar, white shirt, tie, and jacket. She told Justin about it and Betsy cooked dinner.