Nicolas cocked his revolver, and stepped out into the store. He said, ‘Put up your hands,’ but at first nobody heard him.
Louder, he said, ‘Put up your hands!’
The man at the freezer cabinet turned around, slowly lifting one arm up, but keeping a tight hold on his plastic bag of frozen food with the other hand. He was young, maybe thirty-two, with a moustache and horn-rim eyeglasses. He looked like an ordinary suburbanite, not at all like a robber.
Nicolas edged his way along the shelves, keeping his back to the serried cans of tuna and eggplant, his revolver held high in both hands. As he moved around, he was able to catch sight of a blonde woman in a fawn tracksuit, standing beside his display of bottled fruits, and another young man, unshaven and dark, a Greek possibly, or an Italian, in army fatigues.
Nicolas said, ‘You lay down the stuff and you get out of here. You understand me? I’m used to dealing with bums.’
The man by the freezer cabinet said, ‘Mister – there’s no way we’re bums.’
‘You’re not bums? What are you doing looting my store, if you’re not bums? Now, get out of here.’
The woman said, ‘We’re sorry. But it’s the food crisis.’
‘Just get out,’ said Nicolas, waving the revolver towards her.
‘You don’t understand,’ the man by the freezer cabinet told him. ‘There’s hardly any food left. This is the last place, just about. How are we going to feed our kids? We’ve got kids.’
Nicolas looked from one face to the other. It wasn’t hard to see that they were as frightened as he was. These weren’t the hard, amused faces of shakedown artists, or street hoodlums. These were just ordinary people caught in a desperate and unfamiliar act. He felt sorry for them, almost. But he felt protective towards Dolores, and himself, too; and, after all, the food in this delicatessen was his, not theirs, no matter how many kids they had.
‘Go,’ he admonished them.
There was an uncomfortable pause, but then the Greek-looking man in the army fatigues reached down behind the bread rack and lifted up a shotgun. It wasn’t the kind of shotgun you saw on the streets, sawed off, with hardly any stock. It was a long-barrelled hunting gun, still shiny with oil.
Nicolas veered the revolver across the store. ‘Drop it,’ he said. ‘Put it down, or I’ll shoot you.’
The Greek-looking man said, ‘This food in here – you think that you’re going to keep it all to yourself? All of it? Just because you’re a storekeeper you think you’ve got some God-given right to survive while everybody else starves?’
Nicolas didn’t even want to think about it. He said, ‘I’m giving you three. You understand me? Three, and then I shoot.’
The Greek-looking man, still holding the shotgun, looked across at the man by the freezer. A question passed between them, unspoken but obvious. Nervously, instantly, Nicolas fired.
The first shot missed. The revolver bucked in his hands, and he heard the bang of broken glass at the back of the store, followed by a sudden rush of green olives from three broken jars. He fired again, before he could allow himself to think, and the Greek’s shoulder burst apart in a spray of gory catsup. The girl shrieked, a silly short shriek that made Nicolas frown at her as if he couldn’t believe anything so ridiculous. And then there was a deep, deafening bavvooom! and Nicolas realised with strange slow horror that the Greek had fired back at him with his shotgun, and that he’d been hit, badly hit, in the belly and the thighs. He was shocked, off-balance, hurt. He felt as if someone had splashed blazing kerosene between his legs, as if he was burning and burning and would never stop.
In perceptual slow-motion, he looked down towards his legs, and saw that his pants were in bloody ribbons, that his thighs were as black and raw as hamburger meat, and that the remains of his penis were dangling from a thin shred of skin. He collapsed, both physically and mentally. His mind folded in on itself like a Chinese conjuring trick, and he pitched to the floor. He was aware of somebody shouting, and bright lights, and the feel of the plastic floor-tiles against his cheek, but that was all.
Dolores came down the stairs and into the store as the three looters were climbing out through the shattered window. She saw Nicolas lying doubled up against the shelves that ran the length of the middle of the store, and the blood that was sprayed all around him. She could hardly make out the looters at all, because she was half-blinded by the car lights, but the looters saw her.
She screamed, ‘Stop! Stop!’ although she didn’t want them to stop at all. One of them hesitated, holding a shotgun one-handed, its stock tucked under his arm. Dolores stared at him for a moment, at his almost invisible silhouette, and then marched formidably across the store towards him, clambering through the shattered window in her baby-doll nightie, her feet slashed by broken glass, until she was out on the sidewalk. The car meanwhile was backing off the sidewalk, bouncing on to the road, and getting ready to take off.
Dolores said to the Greek-looking man with the bloody arm and the army fatigues, ‘You’ve killed my husband.’
The man said tensely, ‘Back off. You hear me? Just back off.’
‘You’ve killed my husband,’ said Dolores, simply. It seemed important to tell the man what he had done. ‘He came from Serifos. There are blue skies there, and blue sea. Now look.’
She turned back towards the darkened store. She couldn’t see Nicolas in the shadows, but she knew he was there. ‘His name was Nicolas Andreas Prokopiou.’
A hoarse voice from the car shouted, ‘Gerry! For Christ’s sake!’ And somewhere in the air, far away, Dolores could hear the whoop of a police siren. She took two or three steps forward, and the man with the shotgun took two or three steps back.
‘Gerry!’ screeched the blonde woman’s voice from the back of the car.
There was one more second of uncertainty, and then the Greek-looking man raised his shotgun, and shot Dolores at almost point-blank range in the face. He had meant to blind her, so that she could never recognise him again, but before tonight he had only used his shotgun for hunting rabbit. He had never seen what it could do to a human being from only two feet away. It almost blew her head off, in a fountain of blood that jumped five feet in the air. She teetered around, spun and then fell.
The Greek-looking man ran to the car, threw the shotgun in through the open window, then tugged open the door and climbed in himself.
The woman said, ‘You’re out of your mind! If I’d known you were going to do something like that, I wouldn’t have come! Do you hear me? You’re crazy!’
‘Just shut up,’ snapped the man in the plaid jacket, as he pulled away from the kerb, with the car tyres shrieking like strangled chickens.
They tried to make their way towards Lisbon Avenue, so that they could escape from the centre of Milwaukee through Wauwatosa, and eventually out on Appleton Avenue to Menomonee Falls, where they had come from. But even though Sergeant Kyprianides hadn’t been around to answer Dolores’s call for help, the Milwaukee Police Department had surrounded the city in force. There were road blocks on all the major highways out of town, and as they reached the intersection of Lisbon and North, they saw police lights flashing up ahead of them, and the spotlights of police helicopters flickering from street to street like August lightning.
The man in the plaid jacket jammed on the brakes, and the station wagon slithered to a halt.
‘What do we do now?’ he demanded. ‘They’ve blocked the road.’
‘Either we leave the food and walk, or we try to break our way through,’ the Greek man told him.
‘How can we leave the food?’ asked the woman. ‘We need that food. If we don’t have food, we’re going to starve. For God’s sake, Chris, we even killed for it.’
‘Gerry killed for it,’ said the man in the plaid jacket. ‘I didn’t. I didn’t want any killing.’
‘Oh, no?’ said Gerry. ‘I seem to remember it was your idea to bring the shotgun along.’
‘As a deterrent,’ said Chris angrily. ‘
I didn’t mean for you to me the damned thing.’
‘What do you think I was going to do with it?’ shouted Gerry. ‘A gun is a gun. If you don’t use it, there’s no point in taking it along.’
‘Will you two stop it,’ said the woman, as if they were two bickering nephews.
The police helicopter spotted them sooner than they expected. Chris was just about to get out of the car and check that the tailgate was properly closed when the night was suddenly roaring with noise, and a piercing blue-white halogen lamp filled the station wagon with unearthly Close Encounters kind of light.
The helicopter circled the rooftops above them for a few minutes, and then an amplified voice commanded, ‘You people – get out of the vehicle – make sure you get out slow and careful – and lay your hands on the roof.’
Chris looked across at Gerry, who was sitting in the back seat with his shotgun across his knees. The flackering of the helicopter rotors was so loud that they didn’t even attempt to speak. They just looked at each other and the whole of their high school beginnings were in that look, the friendship that had lasted through business college, and military service, and settling down in Menomonee Falls – Chris at the University of Wisconsin, and Gerry at Michigan & Muskego Insurance. The friendship that had brought them here together tonight, in this reckless adventure that had been conceived out of fear, and bravado, and a suburban dread of going short. Some families may starve, friend, but not mine.
Chris looked at Gerry’s bloodstained shoulder. ‘We’re going to have to surrender,’ he said.
‘And abandon the food?’ asked Gerry. ‘Meekly step out, with our hands up, and abandon the food?’
‘What else can we do?’ asked Chris, as the blue-white light fogged the interior of the station wagon, and the racketing bull-horn demanded yet again that they should step out of the vehicle.
‘We can fight,’ hissed Gerry.
‘Fight? Against a helicopter? Are you nuts?’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Gerry. ‘A helicopter is the most vulnerable thing you can imagine. Didn’t they teach you that in the service? One shotgun blast in the rotor, and you’ll bring them straight down.’
‘I’m not sure I want to bring them straight down.’
‘Either you bring them straight down, or we starve, and go to prison,’ said Gerry.
There was a moment in which none of them spoke. The helicopter roared lower, circling around the station wagon, and Gerry’s face, already white from shock and loss of blood, appeared as livid as a phantom in the spotlight, with hair that flared blue as a devil’s.
The woman said, ‘We’d better get out. If we don’t get out soon, they’ll start shooting, and the last thing I want to do is die by default.’
Chris held out his hand towards Gerry. Without hesitation, Gerry hefted up the shotgun from the back seat of the station wagon, and handed it over. The woman’s name was Madeleine Berg, and she was the divorced mother of three children. She said, ‘Chris, we’ve been neighbours for a few years now. Let’s call this thing quits.’ Chris broke the shotgun open, ejecting the spent cartridges. He reloaded it, and then he said, ‘Maddy, if you want to get out now, then get out. This food’s going back to Menomonee Falls.’
Madeleine turned around and looked at Gerry. None of them knew what they really wanted to do. They were dazzled by light and deafened by noise, and the amplified voice from the helicopter was telling them to get out of their vehicle now! – you get me? – now! or face the consequences.
‘Aim to one side of the light,’ Gerry suggested. ‘That way, you’ll be certain to hit the rotors.’
Chris glanced at them both. ‘Wish me luck, then,’ he said. He unlatched the station wagon door.
He didn’t even have time to aim. He had already waited too long, and as the minutes had passed by, the police marksman on board the helicopter had been growing edgy. As soon as the car door opened, and Chris showed his face, a small blizzard of machine-gun bullets banged into the metal roof. None of them hit Chris directly, but one of them drove a shard of metal as long and thin as a ballpoint pen straight into his right eye. Chris felt his eye burst, and he dropped to the sidewalk in sheer horror at what had happened to him.
The helicopter raged around the station wagon in a circle. Then the marksman opened fire again, and raked the vehicle’s roof and hood with over a hundred racketing shots. One of the last bullets hit the gas tank, and as Gerry and Madeleine were cowering in their seats, a hungry wave of superheated air, mixed with blazing gasoline, rolled through the length of the car. Gerry’s last vision of anything was Madeleine, with her hair frizzed by fire, the skin of her face already blackened, staring at him in agony and fright. Then his own world was consumed in excruciating pain, and he breathed in fire.
The helicopter hovered around the blazing station wagon for a few minutes, and then angled away over the rooftops. This was the ninth party of looters the police had stopped tonight, and now they were searching for more.
In his smashed-open store under the elevated highway, Nicolas Prokopiou lay half-conscious and bleeding. He heard the helicopter as it passed overhead, but it was just one more blurry noise in a night of chaos. Fire sirens whooped in the distance, and there was a crackle of shooting from the direction of Marquette University.
He closed his eyes and thought of Serifos. The dense blue skies, the dark blue seas. The fishing boats with their sun-faded paint, tied up with salt-faded ropes. The days when he had stood by the harbour, his hair ruffled by the wind, and dreamed all kinds of dreams.
A few minutes before dawn, he died. He suffered very little pain, and his death was like falling asleep. It wouldn’t have comforted him to know that Dolores was already dead, with half of her head blown away in crimson spatters and her body lying exposed on the sidewalk in her pink baby-doll nightie. Nor would it have comforted him to know that Chris, the looter, had survived; and was shivering under heavy sedation in hospital, blinded and burned, while his wife and children waited apprehensively at home for the food that he was going to bring.
Two
That same night, at the Hughes Supermarket on Highland Avenue in Hollywood, Mike Bull was organising his defences. Mike Bull was the supermarket manager, and the medium-sized twenty-four-hour store at the intersection between Franklin and Highland was his first important appoin’I’ment. Before he had been promoted, three months ago, he had been fruit and vegetable manager of a branch further downtown. N ow, at the age of thirty-one – a stocky, terse, but good-humoured bachelor with a face as pudgy as Mickey Rooney – he was running his own ship, and he was determined that night that the rats weren’t going to clamber aboard.
He hadn’t seen Ed Hardesty’s television appearance – nor the frantic and frightened news programmes that followed. But within twenty minutes, a laconic customer with long greasy blond hair and frayed denim shorts had advised him to blockade the store. ‘You should hear the TV, man. Walter Cronkite reckons we’re all going to be starving by Thanksgiving. And you know what that means, don’t you? Folks are going to start stocking up on every damn thing they can get.’
Mike had looked around the store. It was his business to sell what was in it, and if people came in and cleared his shelves, then no matter what the reason, he should be pleased. But the prospect of a food panic made him uneasy. The tough and the young would clear the place out, and leave the weak and the elderly without supplies.
He beckoned his under-manager, Tony, across to his office. Tony was Italian, young, and combed his hair a lot. Tony wanted to make it in the movies, and as far as he was concerned, retail selling was a total pain in the ass. But he liked Mike, and he didn’t like being yelled at, and so he came and stood in Mike’s office with an expression that was almost co-operative.
‘Have you heard the news?’ Mike asked him, rolling up his shirtsleeves.
‘News?’ asked Tony.
‘Yeah. It seems like these crop blights we’ve been hearing about – all those excuses why t
hey couldn’t deliver the grapes and the tomatoes and the celery and all of that stuff – well, it seems like we’re in for some kind of a national famine.’
‘That bad, huh?’ asked Tony.
‘That’s what I hear,’ said Mike.
Tony scratched the back of his neck. It was quite obvious that he didn’t understand the implications of what Mike had told him at all.
‘I’m going to close the store,’ said Mike.
Tony frowned at his digital watch. ‘It isn’t time yet.’
‘I know. But it may soon be too late, unless we close this place up.’
‘Too late?’ asked Tony, baffled.
‘Sure. I mean – what would you do, if you heard that there wasn’t going to be enough food for you and your family during the coming months?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tony. ‘Stock up, I guess.’
‘Exactly. And that’s what people are going to start doing tonight, as soon as they realise how serious this situation’s going to be. Take a look at it now – have you ever seen so many people here on a Sunday evening? And look at those people there – those shopping carts are filled to the top.’ Tony peered through the window of the office into the store. ‘I guess you’re right,’ he said, slowly. ‘Look at that woman there – she’s got herself a train of three carts tied together.’
‘That settles it,’ said Mike. ‘I’m going to close the place up.’
‘What for?’ Tony wanted to know. ‘If things go on this way, we could make ourselves three times the weekly turnover, all in one night.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Mike told him. ‘We’ve got a responsibility to the whole community around here – not just the first fifty people with enough wit and enough money to clear the place out. And even if we do sell everything tonight, there’s no guarantee that we can restock until next week. If at all.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, but I think you’re wrong,’ said Tony. Mike looked at him sourly. ‘You can think what you like, but right now I’m the manager and I say we close. So get to it. And make sure you put up the steel shutters.’
Famine Page 22