If the bustling wardens weren’t more careful they’d set fire to the row houses.
A solitary woman brandishing a torch had been the first to appear out back. She popped through one of the exits Owen had unlatched for himself and scanned the dark ways to either side, seeking the culprit. The torch was lifted on high as the warden peered into the depths of the weeds. Owen sat unmoving. The poor light of the torch wouldn’t reveal him at an eighth of a mile. The woman faced about and studied the doors along the back wall, then called a question into the house she had just left. There was no answer, and she went back inside. Owen waited. In the next few moments several. of his hatches were thrown open and the posse erupted in full cry. It had taken them that long to recognize his escape route.
Owen spotted Paoli at her door looking out on the hubbub. She seemed less than happy.
The scene again suggested fireflies dancing on a summer night. The fireflies came together in a group. Somebody organized a search, somebody came up with a plan that might have worked if he were still inside and if they had remembered to guard all the front doors. A warden was stationed at each doorway opening onto the weed patch, while two others with torches went inside to conduct a room-by-room search of the house. When that place was found to be empty of the fugitive, the searchers went next door to repeat the investigation. The wardens probed Paoli’s house, much to her dismay, and then the two houses beyond. When they came upon a locked door, they reversed themselves and worked up the line of row houses toward the harridan’s dwelling. That woman stood waiting for them with huge arms folded belligerently across her chest. Owen was reminded of a female wrestler he’d seen at a stag party in Indianapolis—the wrestler who had played the villain’s role.
Owen thought the zealous monitors were overdoing it a bit. He hadn’t removed that many front doors or unbolted that many rear hatches, but, what the hell, Jack, if they were happy in their work, give them an E for effort and let them fly the flag atop City Hall. A town took pride in the number of E flags they had flying.
The fat-bellied leviathan set up a clamor when they finally reached her door but, as best as Owen could judge, she wasn’t saying anything new. The voice was shrill and angry, but the vocabulary was a -disappointment. Given her temper and her forty-odd years of life, the witch should have accumulated enough crusty cusswords to fill a honey bucket. She trailed the wardens through her door, complaining all the way—but Owen was willing to bet that she never admitted to being responsible for him.
The door next to hers was suddenly opened and yet another curious neighbor popped out to learn the cause of the commotion. Owen sat up with pleased surprise.
The newcomer was Kehli, the brown-eyed, brown-haired mistress of the gravediggers.
Kehli had said that she was a near neighbor of Paoli’s, but she hadn’t mentioned being even closer to the loudmouthed ogre. Owen watched Kehli until the wardens came back empty-handed, and everybody gathered for a conference.
He slid off the pipe and made ready to crawl or take to his heels. The rucksacks were tucked under the largest pipe to avoid discovery.
The frustrated wardens were in a huddle beneath the massed torches, and their next line of action would depend on their imaginations or the belated realization of what they had failed to do. Owen waited, poised for flight. The complaining woman was stomping around them, waving those great hands. An Indiana cop would have shut Tier mouth in a hurry.
“Hot damn, they forgot! As sure as a weasel sucks eggs, they forgot to watch the front!”
The pack of huddled monitors broke in unison and again raced through the nag’s house with that woman hard on their heels—and the whole silly charade began anew. Owen crawled back atop the pipe to watch the show and found the audience of two were still with him. Paoli watched the antics from the far end of the arena and Kehli watched from the near end, his end. He counted the pipes nearby and noted the set that served her house.
The forces of law and order fashioned an artful dragnet to catch a slyboots. On this second mad go-around a warden stood guard at each of the doors, fore and aft, as they should have done at the beginning to prevent the fugitive from sneaking out the back as the pursuers entered the front, or to prevent him from skulking house by house just ahead of the dragnet, or to prevent him from doubling back and finding refuge in a place already swept clean. Slyboots approved of their acumen. It was a splendid maneuver by a fledgling police force only now learning to cope with their first crime wave, but the fledgling force realized the tardiness of their ways long before the search was completed to the last house.
They went into another huddle.
The dragnet had failed, the fugitive had eluded them once again. He was probably now long gone, over the road and into the trees—or else up the road and into the house of some innocent sleeping citizen. The wardens dispersed, tidying up their police detail by closing and bolting all the escape hatches. Darkness closed in once again. Paoli went indoors. Owen turned back to Kehli just as she was closing and locking her door. Even the terrible-tempered ogre had gone.
There were no returning sounds of crickets or night birds—there was only a dim sky glow that his grandfather used to call the zodiac light. He was alone.
Owen Hall was a clever man, quick to catch a nuance or read a sign. He was locked out—or rather locked in, inside the city ring. A pity he hadn’t thought to make a ladder for a daring escape over the rooftops.
Owen bided his time for an hour in the suspicion that the pink arms of the law might double back on him. He didn’t want to be caught near the row houses if the posse should suddenly erupt through any of the doors.
Jupiter served as his timepiece. ‘
He was fairly certain that he’d owned a wristwatch and fairly certain that he’d been wearing it that night when he met up with the Pennsy freight, but he hadn’t had one when he rejoined the world early this morning. Maybe the undertaker had stolen it. No matter. An old woodsman who read the science-wonder magazines had little need for a mechanical watch when the planets were in the sky. Jupiter or Saturn had served him well on many a nighttime fishing or camping expedition and now, with Jupiter just rising above the eastern rooftops, it was no problem to mark off an hour.
There was something funny about the stars though. The old familiar ones weren’t quite where they were supposed to be, and some of the configurations were—well, odd.
Owen stood on the topmost pipe to gain a better view over the rooflines.
For starters, something peculiar had happened to the Big Dipper. It appeared flatter than he remembered it and more open; the dipper itself now couldn’t hold nearly as much water as before, and the handle was twisted out of shape. And another thing—there were supposed to be eight stars in the formation, but now he could count only seven. He had prided himself on his sharp eyesight in the old days—he’d always been able to separate the double star in the dipper’s handle—but that double wasn’t visible now. Either the faint companion star had simply vanished from the sky or the woman who had reconstituted him last night had skimped on his eyeballs.
The polestar just wasn’t believable.
Owen went back to the Big Dipper for orientation, poor as it was, and then attempted to track an imaginary path across the sky from the Dipper’s lip to Polaris. The path failed to track straight; it refused to make the familiar connection. He found the Little Dipper with some difficulty (something had happened to it, too) and traced the handle northward to Polaris at the tip end—but Polaris wasn’t at the end where it should be. It had moved, or been pushed. Polaris was now over there, off the handle. (If an outdoorsman couldn’t trust the polestar, what could he trust?) The sky was confusing.
Owen sat down to puzzle the matter. He dug another biscuit out of his pack.
If only his memory was keener, if only all the empty little recesses of his past life could be filled in, an answer might be found. It was frustrating to have holes in his head. The Chicago Tribune had published scores of scientifi
c articles on scores of Sundays in his time, and the science-wonder magazines were always chattering about the future, but what had they said about the movements of the stars in times to come? There was a vague memory of something—something about Thurban having been the polestar five or six thousand years ago and about Vega becoming the polestar some twelve thousand years in the future—but confound it, the memory was too vague.
Drat! that drunken woman who’d made him. She not only skimped on his eyeballs, but she omitted some gray cells as well.
He looked over his shoulder to the north, studying Polaris again. There was the notion in mind that he might have been buried for five hundred or a thousand years, but could Polaris have moved that far in only five hundred or a thousand years? It didn’t seem likely. Something had to be altered. Either the two Dippers had changed and the polestar had jumped a country mile in a thousand years, or he’d been underground much longer than supposed.
Two thousand years? Three thousand? Why, that was fantastic. Of course, his bones could last as long as any old Egyptian king’s, but that was fantastic.
Every time he thought he had it figured, every time he was sure the situation was well in hand, something else came along to upset the apple cart. It was disconcerting. The least these women could do was have a calendar that a man could rely on—a calendar beginning with the big war—say, in 1939, when it really started—and working right up to today—his first day of his new life. A man would know at a glance how long he’d been out of circulation. A man could sit and figure the amount of his pension. The present situation was utterly ridiculous; nobody knew nothing, and what was a man left with? He was left holding a bucket of rancid chicken fat, that’s what.
If he ever got back to Indiana, he’d write a letter to President Roosevelt about this sorry state of. affairs. The President might want to mention it in his next fireside chat.
Owen glanced at Jupiter and calculated that his hour of margin had passed. The planet was well above the rooftops, but there was still no sign of a moon. He finished the biscuit in hand, gathered up his gear, and followed a set of pipes to Kehli’s door. As a test he first tried the doors to either side of his goal and found them both bolted. There was little point in testing any of the others, since they would all be the same. The loudmouthed posse would have alerted everybody up and down the length of Main Street by this time.
Owen knocked boldly on the lady’s door and waited. The wait was so long that he was beginning to wonder if he’d have to take the thing off its hinges or kick it open to gain admittance. Owen was raising his hand to knock again when it swung outward. He wore a big smile.
“Greetings, skate. Let’s congregate.”
Kehli stared at him with speechless wonder. She peered around and beyond him.
“Come on, now, remember me? I’m your favorite picnic guest.”
She seemed unable to speak.
“Cupcake, it’s me, Owen Hall. I’ve brought the party over to your house. Paoli pooped out early on.” He bounced through the open door and hauled the packs in after him, forcing the woman to move or be bowled over. “Are you in the party mood? What’s for supper?”
Incredulously: “What … what were you doing out there?”
“Watching the parade,” Owen replied. He stacked his gear against the wall. “I had a ringside seat, and that’s how I found you. Good thing you stepped out to take a look—I didn’t know your house number.”
“You are wearing—” She gestured at the clothing. “Why are you wearing … ?”
“I’m wearing Paoli’s gladrags. Mine got wet, you see, and I put them out on the grass to dry, but what with one thing and another I had to make these do. It’s a long story, cupcake. Now, what about supper?”
“I’ve eaten my evening meal.”
Pointedly: “I haven’t.”
Her confusion continued and Owen guessed it was caused by his unexpected appearance at her back door. He studied her face, attempting to read beyond the confusion, and suddenly wondered if there was room for a suspicion. She surely didn’t have another reason for— He stepped around her and peered into the back room, but there was no male waiting on the cot. The kitchen was empty but for a couple of candles burning on the table. Owen felt reassured.
He reached for her hands and held them in a firm, friendly grip. She was startled but didn’t pull away. He drew her into the kitchen.
“Kelly, a lot of things happened this afternoon and we had a bang-up blanket party, Paoli and me. Oh, we had a lovely wake! First, Paoli got plastered and fell off the chair, and then she got her clothes dirty in the oven, and then we went into the shower to clean up, and after that we stepped outside for a breath of air, and then—well, cupcake, we did just what comes naturally. The dolly was impressed.”
“Paoli was looped? Flying the kite?”
“And how!” He pulled the bottle from his pocket to exhibit the remaining contents. “She really appreciates the good stuff, and you can read that two ways.”
Kehli seemed equally impressed. Astonished, but impressed. “And did you … did you … ?”
“Yup. With bells on. Paoli had this hankering to see what a good ol* Indiana variant could do when the flag went down, so I did my best.” Owen paused to reflect on his modest accomplishments. “Hoo boy, did I ever deliver the telegram! Sort of surprised myself, I did, but then I never met a woman like Paoli before. Are all the women here like her? Are you?”
“I… I cannot answer that!”
“Well, Kelly, what I’m getting at is this: we were so busy, so long, and she was so tired afterward that we never did get around to fixing supper. She just wanted to sleep, but that’s natural, see? Now me, I’m starving.” He watched her face and decided it was very nice to see a woman blush by candlelight. .
“You are not willing to wait until morning?”
“I can’t. Cupcake, I said starving “It is too late. Evening meals are no longer being served because it is late. Only the morning breakfasts will be available.”
Desperately: “I like breakfast!” Visions of succulent bacon danced through his head. “Make it a double order and ask for some grits while you’re at it. Lots of whole wheat toast and grape jam, but no butter. I don’t trust that guy’s butter. Do you people know what coffee is around here?”
“I have not heard of coffee.”
The woman pulled free of his grasp and went to a box fitted into the kitchen wall. The contraption reminded Owen of an oven once again—an oven made of dark gray metal resembling pig iron. The box lacked a glass door for sighting, but it had a handle at the top and the usual row of buttons underneath. He supposed it was on the receiving end of one of those outside pipes—perhaps the large one he thought of as a furnace pipe.
Kehli ordered up his breakfast by push button.
“Now you’re cooking with gas, cupcake.”
Nothing happened immediately and the brown-haired woman leaned against the wall to wait.
“What’s holding up the show?” he demanded.
“Be patient. The food must be delivered and then this unit must heat it.”
“Right out of the old bean factory,” Owen nodded. “In some ways you babes have got this town organized to a fare-thee-well, but in other ways you fall flat on your faces. Just like the bureaucrats back home.”
“I am not understanding you again.”
“Who does, around this town?” He liked the way her brown hair curled down over the pink-clad shoulders. The gravedigger was a-lovely woman. “I’d be pleased to teach you American if I stay around, Kelly. We could make beautiful music together.”
“But you will not stay around to teach, Owen Hall. You must be reconstructed to eliminate the defects.”
He eyed her with quick concern. “You too, eh?”
“I am too what?”
“Never mind—but thanks for the warning. I’ll keep my guard up.”
A signal bell sounded above the oven and Kehli opened the door to retrieve his breakfast,
steaming hot and ready for serving. Owen moved up beside her and peered around her arm when he found that he couldn’t peer over her shoulder.
The woman seemed stunned. She made no move to reach in for the meal.
Owen stared at a broiled monkey wrench. The wooden handle was done to a crisp.
“Son of a gun! The turkey is home to roost.”
She cried with dismay, “What is that?”
“A monkey wrench. What did you think it was—a nutcracker?”
“But where … where did it come from?”
“From the bean factory, where else?” He inspected the smoldering handle with disapproval. “I’d send it back if we were eating in a fancy, expensive restaurant.”
She whirled away from the oven and Owen took a prudent step backward.
“Did you do that?”
“Guilty, your honor.”
“That is why-the processing plant was shut down— that is why the workmen were sent home early.”
“I thought it was the union hours.”
“Owen Hall, do you realize what you have done to the city?” Kehli seemed on the brink of tears and that purely surprised him; he didn’t know that amazons ever cried. “Do you realize that people may go hungry tomorrow?” “I’m going hungry tonight,” he reminded the woman. “There goes my supper unless you push the buttons again.”
“How many of those … things did you make?”
“Just one,” he said truthfully. “That one.”
“Owen Hall, you are a totally irresponsible variant. I fear your maker will be punished.”
“She ought to be strung up by her thumbs,” Owen responded. “Do you want to meet her? You’ll be sorry.”
“Was not Paoli your fabricator?”
“Paoli was not my fabricator. She didn’t make me, cupcake, I made her. That’s a joke.” He waggled a finger at the adjoining wall to indicate the apartment next door. “Fatstuff, in there, made me. Didn’t you leave a coffin on her doorstep yesterday?”
Ressurection Days Page 14