Not This August (8 page)

He told Gribble easily: “The first salesman in three years. He had some pipe but he didn’t have a pump. Maybe by spring, he said. I guess things are picking up all around.”

“Yes,” Gribble said vaguely, his eyes full of tears.

They worked steadily through the morning and afternoon. Gribble spent two hours on the milk cooler, which had been grunting, gurgling, and creaking for a month, on the verge of a breakdown. Whatever else he was besides—quoter of Molière, Pentagon colonel—he was unquestionably an able refrigeration mechanic and bench hand. He serviced the motor and coils, disassembled the pump, cut new gaskets from a discarded inner tube, filed a new cam from scrap metal and installed it. The cooler whispered happily and the red line of the thermometer dropped well below the danger mark for the first time that summer. He showed Justin his work, dimly proud, and then joined him in cultivating the knee-high field corn until it was time to haul water from the spring again. They had a late supper at three-thirty: a dubious piece of boiled salt pork, potatoes from the barrel in the cellar, milk. It was then that Gribble asked whether Justin happened to have anything to drink.

“Some local brandy,” Justin said, wondering. The little man was tightening up again. If you were an artist you saw him as taut cords vibrating in the shape of a human body. He had seemed almost happy and slack when he showed Justin the cooler…

“Could I please—?”

Justin got the carelessly hidden bottle of Mr. Konreid’s popskull. Gribble methodically poured himself half a tumblerful, not bothering to rinse his glass of its skim of rich milk. Methodically he drank it down, his Adam’s apple working. “Rotten stuff,” he said after a long pause. Justin was about to be offended when he somehow realized that Gribble didn’t mean his liquor in particular. “I was partly tanked when I had that trouble in the—department store.” The taut strings were relaxing a little. “But sometimes you haven’t got anything else and you have to get to sleep.”

Uninvited, he refilled his tumbler to the halfway mark. Justin protested: “Man, what’s the good of getting drunk in the afternoon? We have another milking and the corner fence post is sagging; that’ll take both of us to fix. Pour that back in the bottle, will you? You can have it after supper if you can’t sleep.”

Gribble methodically drank it down. “No point in fooling around,” the little man said gravely. “You pretend you’re somebody else, fine. But you know you aren’t, especially when you’re trying to sleep. You’re still the fellow who closed the door. But that was only half the job, Justin. Funny part is if you do the first half—that is if you’re a fellow like me—then you can’t do the second half. They never thought of that. I must have looked pretty good on the profile. Hard-bitten, waspish executive and all that. But I didn’t fool the combat boys. I went right out of Prudential—you should have seen my office, Justin!—and right into the Pentagon. I told them—what do you say?—I told them: ‘Alert, capable executive desires connection with first-class fighting force. Feels his abilities are not being used to the utmost capacity in present employment.’ I went through the lieutenants and captains like a hot knife through butter. I’ve handled kids like that all my life. G-1 checked me through. You know why? Because G-1’s just office management in uniform. We talked the same language. I was exactly like them so they thought I was
good
. So I got my appointment with Clardy. Three stars. Colonel Hagen—imagine having a chicken colonel for a
secretary
—Hagen briefed him first, told him I was talent, hard-boiled talent, kind of talent they needed fast for a battalion, then a regiment, then maybe a division. You go up fast in wartime if you’ve got the stuff. So Clardy talked to me for a few minutes and then he turned to Hagen. As if I wasn’t there. Cussed Hagen out for wasting his time. ‘Good Lord, Colonel, get him something in G-1 or G-4, but don’t ever give him a combat command. Look at him! Can you imagine
him
committing troops?’

“You see, Justin? He was on to me in two minutes. They never say it, even among themselves, but they know combat command doesn’t take brains. They talk about brilliant field generals, but when you try to find out what the brilliance was it’s always this: G-1 gets the brilliant general his men; G-2 gets the brilliant general his information, G-3 trains the men and plans the attack, G-4 gets the supplies. Then the brilliant general says ‘Attack!’ and it’s another victory.

“You know, you don’t need brains to say ‘Attack!’ Plenty of them have brains and they don’t seem to do them any damage, but brains aren’t essential. What you need’s character. When you’ve got character, you say ‘Attack!’ at the right time. And Clardy saw in two minutes that I didn’t have it. That I’d wait and hang back and try to think of ways around when there aren’t any ways around at all. That when G-3 told me it was time to attack I wouldn’t take his word for it, I’d hem and haw and wonder if he really believed what he was telling me. Clardy saw clean through me, Justin. I’m a man who can cheerfully commit a battery of IBM card punches to the fray and that’s all.”

The little man lurched to his feet and stared, red-eyed, at Justin. Waiting.

Slowly and unwillingly Justin said: “What do you want, Gribble? What am I supposed to do about all this?”

Staring, Gribble said: “Very cagy, Justin. But you’ve got to help me. I know you’re committed. I milked the cows this morning. I’m a picture straightener; I always have been. So I started to straighten that bale of hay. Package behind it—heavy package. So heavy it’s got to be gold or lead or plutonium. And I know it isn’t gold or lead.

“The farm salesman came by. I looked in the barn—no package. You’re in it, Justin. You’ve got to help me. I can’t help myself. Five thousand of them! And then, of course, I couldn’t pull the second half of the job. Clardy was right…”

He stood up, swaying a little. “Come along, Justin. You’ve got to do something for me.”

Gribble lurched through the doorway, past the latched-back screen door, down the cement walk to the road.

Justin followed slowly. “It’s about fifteen miles,” Gribble said over his shoulder.

I’ve got to go along, Justin told himself. The little man’s guessed—and he’s right—that I’m a traitor to the People’s Democratic Republic. He might tell anybody if it takes his fancy. Perhaps, he bleakly thought, I’ll have to kill him. Meanwhile he doesn’t get out of my sight.

“What do you want me to do, exactly?” he asked Gribble in a calm, reasonable voice.

The little man said abruptly: “Open a door.”

They walked for two hours, Gribble in the lead and mumbling.

Justin tried at first to get him to make sense, then to at least accept a cover story. “We’re going to Bert Loughlin’s about a calf, Gribble. O.K.? Will you tell them that if we get stopped? Bert Loughlin’s about a calf—”

“Cobalt,” Gribble said, preoccupied.

Six miles along the road they were overtaken by a wagon, Eino Baaras at the reins. He was returning from Clayboro to Glencairn—“Little Finland”—with locust poles. He scowled at them and offered a ride.

“Thanks,” Gribble said. “We’re going to see Bert Loughlin about a calf.”

Baaras shrugged and waited for them to get up before he said: “Loughlin ain’t got no calf.” He touched up the team and the wagon rolled.

“Selling, not buying,” Justin said.

“Loughlin ain’t got no money,” Baaras said unconcernedly.

“Maybe something to swap,” Justin said. He was clenching his fists. What came next?
Loughlin ain’t got nothing to swap. Where you really headed, Yustin?
But Baaras just dipped some snuff, spat into the dust, and said nothing.

Silent Finns, Justin thought suddenly, drowsy with the afternoon heat. Worse for them than for us. They’ve been followed halfway around the world by the neighbors they fled while we sat and waited and perhaps were happy in our blindness…

He dozed for a while; Gribble shook him awake. “We get off here, Mr. Justin.” The wagon had stopped and Baaras was sardonically waiting.

“Thanks,” he said to the Finn, and looked uncertainly at Gribble for a lead. The little man started up a rutted and inconsiderable wagon track that angled from the blacktop. Justin followed him, disoriented for a moment. Then he realized that they were on the west side of Prospect Hill and heading up it.

Baaras looked at them, shrugged, and drove on. Justin thought flatly: A
total
botch. I said the wrong thing, we got off at the wrong place. I couldn’t have botched it worse if I’d been waving a flag with TRAITOR embroidered on it. The only thing to do now is wait and hope. Baaras is going to talk about my peculiar goings on, and the people he talks to will talk. Eventually it’ll get to somebody like Croley and that means I’m dead.

Meanwhile you keep climbing Prospect Hill.

The Hill was about 2,500 feet high and heavily wooded. It was supposed to be owned by one of the great New York real-estate fortunes. Farmers who tried to buy small pieces adjoining their fields for woodlots were rebuffed. A fair-sized local mutual insurance company which tried once to buy a big piece for development got an interview in New York City and a courteous explanation that the Hill was being held against the possibility that the area would experience major growth. The president of the company considered that interview one of the high points of his life, and Justin had heard all about it. So had practically everybody who’d spent ten minutes with the president.

The Hill was posted against hunting and fishing, but not fenced in. Farmers around it had more or less fenced it out with their own wire, but there were gaps like the one Gribble had found. Kids and hunters stayed clear of the Hill for the most part. Among the kids there was a legend that the Vanderbilts—or was it the Astors?—would jail you for twenty years if you got caught trespassing. And the hunters knew that the Hill had no springs and only one intermittent stream. It was against local custom to carry a canteen for a day’s hunting; you were heavily joshed for dressing up like a Boy Scout. So you pretty much stayed away—

But what wheels had worn the twin ruts up the Hill?

Justin kicked at an angle of crushed rock. It should have flown up and away from the loose gravel it was embedded in and Justin should have strode on feeling infinitesimally better for the release of tension. It didn’t happen that way at all. The rock stayed where it was and blinding pain shot through Justin’s foot. While he stopped and swore, Gribble turned. “Wasting time,” he said mildly.

“In a minute,” Justin said. The pain was dying down, but he wasn’t ready to go on walking. He stooped and tried to wiggle the fang of rock protruding from the gravel, work it loose, and throw it away. It had wounded him and it must surely die.

The rock wouldn’t wiggle. Evidently it was a protruding corner of a really big chunk. He pawed at the loose gravel to investigate. It wasn’t loose gravel. His fingers skidded over the surface without disordering a single one of the round and oval glacier-ground stones.

“Come on,” Gribble said impatiently, and resumed climbing. Justin followed thoughtfully. The rutted, worn secondary road, this road that was clearly on the very verge of breaking up, was a very remarkable road indeed. It looked bad. It
was
bad. It would give the springs of a truck a very hard time.

But it would never get worse. It would never break up. It was a good road disguised as a bad one. Reinforced concrete a yard down, no doubt. On top of that the crushed rock and gravel mortared into position. A heavy-duty highway that would pass air reconnaissance and even a ground patrol.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Gribble was muttering ahead of him.

A heavy-duty highway to where?

“Gribble,” he said.

The small man turned on him in fury. His voice was an almost womanish screech. “Leave me alone, Justin! Don’t distract me. This thing’s hard enough without you yammering and yipping at my heels. I’m fighting with myself to keep from turning around and running down the hill. I could break down right now if I let go. I could have a fine time crying and kicking and screaming and letting the clouds close in on what I have to do. But—I—won’t.
Shut up and follow me!
”

Justin followed, confused and burning with resentment. He had been in contact with psychopaths before and, as now, it was never pleasant. A girl in the ad agency, years ago, at the next drawing table to his, took six months to go thoroughly insane, a little more each day. Toward the end there were worried conferences behind her back, long wrangles about when eccentricity slips over into mania, and always the stolid, unimaginative conferee who spoke what was in everybody’s mind: “All she has to do is get hold of herself; she doesn’t
have
to act like a nut.” Naturally in the age of Freud no really informed person spoke those words; naturally you were shocked to hear them. But oh, the resentment that filled you when you had to humor and defer to and make your life miserable because of a crackpot!

A faded sign nailed to a tree pointed up the peculiar road: PROSPECT VISTA, it said, which made no sense at all. A prospect is a vista and a vista is a prospect. Justin could have said something about it but dared not, bullied into silence by the little man who wouldn’t control himself.

The road shot suddenly upward and ended at a big, littered clearing. The litter was the debris of a housing development that had never come to pass. Justin never knew it was there. This was Prospect Vista, a big rain-dimmed sign said. Below, in smaller letters, the sign announced split-level homes, no down payment, seventy dollars a month, pay like rent.

Bulldozers had been at work tearing out trees and piling them like jackstraws. Dirt streaks had been hoed out of the forest duff long ago—long enough for underbrush and scrub to spring up again in barbed-wire tangles. The bulldozed roads-to-be were now more impassable than they had been before the bulldozers came. But hopeful signs marked them: Onondaga Avenue intersected Seneca Street where they stood on the clearing’s edge.

Sewer trenches were dug clear down to hardpan, an elephantine checkerboard converging on the principal landmark of Prospect Vista, which was a huge hole, obviously the excavation for a treatment plant. And that was as far as things had got. Here and there was a load of rusty pipe or pencil rod to reinforce concrete that had never been poured. Gravel and sand stood in low cones dotted through the clearing. In the years that passed, they had found their angle of repose and would slump no lower. It occurred to Justin that one pile of gravel may be alive and another dead. These were dead.