Not This August (7 page)

“Ever done any farming?”

“No.”

“Ever have a little vegetable garden?”

“Yes. Oh yes. I’ve done that.”

“Good. Well, I’ll show you your room.” He started for the house, Gribble lagging behind. When Justin entered the kitchen, he was climbing the two steps to the porch. And there he stood, before the screen door, with the look on his face of a man who has seen a cobra.

“Come on in,” Justin said through the door.

“I’d rather not unless I have to, Mr. Justin,” came from that mask of terror.

Justin remembered that his blowup had occurred when he was trapped in a revolving door. And he was also wearily conscious of the endless petty inconveniences that would nag him if Gribble balked at every doorway.

“Nothing’s going to happen to you, Gribble,” he said with an edge on his voice. “It’s a perfectly ordinary fly-blown slummy bachelor’s kitchen.” The man smiled meagerly. Justin held the door open and waited; Gribble stepped convulsively over the threshold, closing his eyes for a moment. Justin closed the door quietly on Gribble’s rigid back; instinct told him that to let it slam in its normal violent fashion would immediately involve him in a pack of trouble.

“Sit down and have some coffee,” he told the little man. Coffee was not casually drunk these days. If you had it, you saved it for a good jolt in the morning. But he
had
to make this man relax; otherwise life would be an unbearable round of walking on eggs.

Gribble sat and said “Thank you” into his steaming cup.

“It isn’t such a bad life here,” Justin said tentatively. “I think you’ll eat a little better than you would in town. You can hold back eggs and hide your chickens when they come around. And the work won’t be too hard with the two of us. Hell, wherever you are you have to work—it might as well be here.”

“That’s right,” said Gribble eagerly.

The conversation then petered out. They finished their coffee and Justin led the way to the porch. “The barn needs cleaning out,” he said. “I’ll show you where the—” He stopped. Gribble stood inside the kitchen and he outside, the screen door between them.

Justin sighed and held the door open for the little man. With an apologetic smile Gribble lunged through the doorway, eyes shut for a moment.

So it went through the afternoon. Gribble walked willingly into the barn and worked hard, but when Justin sent him to the tool shed built on the house for a trenching spade he was gone ten minutes. Justin went after him, swearing. It was, of course, the tool-shed door. Gribble was reaching for the handle, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to touch it.

Justin opened the door grimly, yanked out the spade, handed it to Gribble, and closed the door. His resolution to let Gribble be Gribble cracked wide open. “What is all this?” he demanded.

The little man said faintly: “I had a very disagreeable experience once. Very disagreeable.” He leaned against the tool-shed wall, his face white. “I’d rather not discuss it.”

Justin, alarmed, said: “All right. We won’t. Let’s get back to the barn—if you can make it?”

Gribble could make it. He worked through to dinnertime, hard and well. Justin cooked a wretched bachelor’s meal big enough for two and held the door for Gribble to come in and eat. He didn’t eat much; something was on his mind. He finally asked if he could have a cot on the porch instead of a bedroom.

“Sure,” said Justin. “I’ll get a cot from the attic.” And to himself: I might have expected it.

After dinner they had three hours of light and used it to haul water from the spring up the road to the tank in the cow barn. When he did the job himself, he could use nothing but a pair of galvanized pails. Gribble’s help meant that between them they could fill a hundred-pound milk can on each trip. Justin began to feel a little more optimistic about meeting the brutal new milk norm. Each of his cows would, for the first time since the pasture spring went dry in June, get all the water she wanted that night. In his cheerfulness he scarcely noticed Gribble except as the hand on the other handle of the hundred-pound can. But when they topped off the tank with their twenty-fourth load, an exhausted voice asked him: “Is there more to do?”

Gribble was on the verge of collapse. “My God,” Justin said, “I’m sorry. You’re out of the hospital—I didn’t think. Cows come first,” he added bitterly. “Sure, we can knock off. I’ll get that cot.”

The little man slumped on the porch steps while he set it up in the gathering darkness and then without a word fell onto the dusty canvas. He was asleep in seconds. Justin thought, went for a cotton blanket, and spread it over Gribble to keep the flies off his face and hands and went to the road for a final smoke before turning in. There was a sawed-off tree stump he usually sat on where you could watch the sunset.

Rawson was waiting there. “Hi, Billy,” the legless man said easily.

“Hello.” Justin had his pouch out. Grudgingly he held it to Rawson. “Smoke?”

“Thanks.” Rawson whisked a single cigarette paper from his breast pocket, dipped thumb and finger in the pouch. In a twirl and a lick he had a cigarette made. A
tramp
, Justin thought. A
drifting bum with all the skills of a drifting bum
.
How easily he takes it! What’s it to him that he’s a drifter under the Reds or the United States?
A
perennial outlaw—and God, how I envy his peace of mind
! Heavily he stuffed his pipe with dry tobacco. Rawson had lit his cigarette and politely passed him the burning match. He puffed the pipe alight. It tasted vile, but it was tobacco.

Rawson was inhaling luxuriously. “Not bad,” he commented. “Your own stuff?”

“About half. The rest is from Croley. There was a tax stamp on it, but I think it’s local stuff too. He probably refilled a pack with some junk he bought from a farmer.”

“My, such goings on from the virtuous storekeeper. Well, I brought that package. A man’ll be by tonight or tomorrow.”

“Well, let’s see it.”

Rawson reached deep into the “boot” of his gocart, a space where his legs would have fitted if he’d had any. The package was small and dim in the fading light.

The set of his muscles, the leverage of his arm should have warned Justin to brace himself when the package was handed over, but he was disarmed by the smallness of the thing. He took the package, found it amazingly heavy, fumbled it for a moment, and dropped it, almost on his toe. It sank an inch into the not particularly soft ground.

“Oops!” Rawson said apologetically. “I should have warned you it was heavy.”

“Yes,” Justin said. “And maybe you should have warned me it was an atomic bomb.”

“Just part of one,” Rawson said.

“You know Betsy Cardew?” Justin asked, looking at the package by his toe, wondering vaguely about radioactivity, wondering whether he ought to move his toe.

“Of course. Mailwoman.”

“Are you and she in this together?”

“In what?” Rawson asked blandly.

“We are not amused, Rawson. This thing—” He choked. “I got beautifully mad at her. I’m still sore. I think she’s a silly kid who had no right to get me involved. You—you know the score. So—why me, Rawson?
Why me?
”

The legless man said brutally: “If you think I’m going to flatter you, you’re going to be disappointed. It’s you, Justin, because we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. Our best and bravest are in Siberian labor camps now, or mining uranium in the Antarctic. Why
you
, indeed! Have
I
got any business scooting around after dark with a suitcase bomb in my lap?”

“But what’s it all for?” Justin almost begged. “What can we do? Suitcase bombs, yes, but then what?”

“That,” Rawson said, “is none of your business, as a moment of thought will convince you. Will you handle the transfer or won’t you?”

“I will,” Justin said bitterly. “Thanks for your confidence in me. I hope it’s well placed.”

“So do I, Justin. So do I. Will you push me off?”

He went creaking down the road.

Justin relit his pipe and studied the dying sunset. Then he picked up the heavy little package, walked to the barn, and hid it behind a bale of hay. It was not very well hidden. He wanted to be able to get it fast and get it off his hands fast. Furthermore, he knew very well that no amount of energy spent in hiding unshielded uranium or plutonium would safeguard it against search with a scintillation counter.

He stepped quietly past Gribble, sleeping on the porch, and went upstairs to his bedroom. He did not intend to sleep that night—not while waiting for an unknown person to pick up an atomic-bomb subassembly for use in some insane, foredoomed scheme of sabotage.

He tried to read but could not. He smoked the last of his tobacco in two unwanted pipefuls.

Insane, the whole business! There were supposed to be 5 million occupation troops east of the Mississippi alone. Their own third-rate shopping place, Chiunga Center, was garrisoned by the 449th Soviet Military Government Unit, which, when administrative transport and medical frills were ripped off, turned out to be a reinforced infantry regiment: about one thousand fighting men armed to the teeth.

And what could you do?

Well, you could denounce Rawson and turn his bomb over to the 449th SMGU. You could denounce Betsy Cardew—nit-witted rich girl who used sex and your vestigial pride to unload a deadly menace on you. You could get written up as a patriotic citizen of the North American People’s Democratic Republic, get a life pension as a Hero of Socialist Labor. And then there would be nothing for you to do but cut your throat in self-loathing.

In spite of himself he fell asleep at 3:00 A.M., with the 40-watt bulb shining on his face and the unread book open across his chest.

He woke with a panicky start at eight-thirty. What was wrong? Something was terribly wrong.

At the window he saw the cows turned out to pasture. But they should have been bellowing, unmilked, for an hour or more—

But the milk cans were stacked on the loading platform for the pickup truck. Gribble had milked them! With only a few words from yesterday afternoon to go on he had worked the milking machine and turned the cows out.

And that meant he had been in the barn, where—

Justin dashed downstairs, his heart thudding, and then slowed deliberately to a walk. He found the little man in the yard before the barn scouring the milker and pails. “Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning, Mr. Justin. I don’t know if I did the right thing, but the cows were stamping around and I remembered what you told me—it wasn’t hard.”

“You did exactly the right thing. I couldn’t get to sleep last night. And when I did, I guess I couldn’t wake up. I’m sorry I left it all to you. Have you been in the—kitchen?”

Gribble smiled nervously and shook his head.

“I’ll fix breakfast.”

Justin kept himself, by an effort of will, from walking into the barn, in plain sight of Gribble, and looking to see whether that bale of hay had been disturbed. He turned to the house, started the stove, and cooked oatmeal. Half a pint of withheld butterfat made oatmeal breakfast enough for a morning’s hard work. When it was cooked, he called Gribble, who stopped on the porch apologetically until the door was held open for him.

They ate silently.

“Mind washing up?” Justin asked at last. “I’ll be working in the kitchen garden.” As he left, he latched back the screen door, feeling like a fool.

He was heading not for the garden but for the barn when the chug of a worn-out truck sounded along his road. It was Milkshed arriving ahead of time, he absently supposed, and went over to the loading deck to give a hand with the cans. But it wasn’t the Milkshed truck that rounded the turn. It was a worn blue panel job throbbing and groaning out of all proportion to its size. On the near panel was lettered:
Bee-Jay Farm Supplies and Machinery, Washington, Penna
.

It stopped by the milk cans and a nondescript driver leaned out. “This the Justin place?”

“Yes. I’m Justin. You have anything for sale, mister?”

“Might let you have some plastic pipe.”

“Got an electric pump to go with it? My spring’s downhill from the barn.”

“Yes, I guess I passed it. Sorry about the pump, but we don’t have them yet. Maybe by next spring, the way things are going.”

“That’s good to hear. You know you’re the first salesman I’ve seen here in three years?”

“That’s what they all say. Bee-Jay’s an enterprising outfit. We got the first A-440 passes in the state. Say, are you by any chance a friend of Rawson’s?”

Justin knew then who he was. “I know him,” he said. “I guess I shouldn’t take the pipe if I can’t use it right away. Seen Rawson lately?”

“I heard he was somewhere around here. He didn’t happen to leave anything for me, did he?”

“Just a minute.” He went to the barn aware that this was the moment of decision. There was no reason why Rawson and Betsy
couldn’t
be framing him. There was no reason why Gribble
couldn’t
be a planted witness for corroboration. The heavy package was behind the bale of hay where he had put it in darkness. He couldn’t possibly know whether Gribble had found it and replaced it or not. And now, picking it up, carrying it, handing it silently to the man in the truck, he had completed his treason to the North American People’s Democratic Republic. He had received, harbored, and transmitted fissionable material. His head was in the noose from that moment on.

He felt all the better for it.

“Good old Rawson,” the Bee-Jay man chuckled, hefting the package. “Well, Mr. Justin, I’ll try to pass by again—with a pump.”

“Do that,” Justin said steadily. “And if you ever feel any need to call on me, do it. I’m available. For anything.”

The man smiled blandly. The starting motor cranked and strained for fifteen seconds before the engine caught and the little truck lurched off down the road. Justin followed it with his eyes until it was over the next crest and out of sight.

He turned to find Gribble staring at him from the corner of the barn. Justin wasn’t frightened; the time for that was past. He realized that he would feel physical fear before long while he waited in some schoolhouse cellar for the MVD to come clumping in with truncheons and methodically reduce him to a blob of pain, shrieking confessions on demand. But he did not fear the fear to come.