Once before in his life, in Suwon, immediately after its recapture and before the Military Government people had begun to clean up, Randy had seen degradation such as this. But this was America. It was his town, settled by his forebears. He said, “We’ve got to do something about this.”
“Yes?” Dan said. “What?”
“I don’t know. Something.”
“Torches and gasoline,” Dan said, “except there isn’t enough gasoline. Anyway, these poor devils are as well off in their own houses as they would be in the woods, or in caves. No better off, mind you. But they have shelter.”
“In four months,” Randy said, “we’ve regressed four thousand years. More, maybe. Four thousand years ago the Egyptians and Chinese were more civilized than Pistolville is right now. Not only Pistolville. Think what must be going on in those parts of the country where they don’t even have fruit and pecans and catfish.”
As they approached the end of Augustine Road the houses were newer and larger, constructed of concrete block or brick instead of pitch-sweating pine clapboard. Between these houses grass grew shin-high, fighting the exultant weeds for sunlight and root space. There was less filth, or at least it was concealed by greenery, and the smell was bearable. In this airier atmosphere lived the upper crust of Pistolville, including Pete and Rita Hernandez and Timucuan County’s Representative in the state legislature, Porky Logan.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen Rita?” Dan asked.
“Not since before The Day—quite a while before.”
“Does Lib know about her?”
“She knows all about it. She says Rita doesn’t bother her, because Rita is part of the past, like Mayoschi’s in Tokyo. You know who worries Lib? Helen. Imagine that.”
They were at the Hernandez house. Dan stopped the car. He said, “I can imagine it. Lib is an extremely sensitive, perceptive woman. About some things, she has more sense than you have, Randy. And all rules are off, now.”
Randy wasn’t listening. Rita had stepped out of the doorway. In Hawaii Randy had seen girls of mixed Caucasian, Polynesian, and Chinese blood, hips moving as if to the pulse of island rhythm even when only crossing the street, who reminded him of Rita. She was not like a girl of Fort Repose. She was a child of the Mediterranean and Carribean, seeming alien; and yet certainly American. Her ancestors included a Spanish soldier whose caravel beached in Matanzas Inlet before the Pilgrims found their rock, and Carib Indian women, and the Minorcans who spread inland from New Smyrna in the eighteenth century. She had not gone to college but she was intelligent and quick. She had an annulled high school marriage and an abortion behind her. She no longer made such foolish errors. Her hobby was men. She sampled and enjoyed men as other women collected and enjoyed African violets, Limoges teacups, or sterling souvenir teaspoons. She was professional in her avocation, never letting a man go without some profit, not necessarily material, and never trading one man for another unless she thought she was bettering her collection.
Under any circumstances Rita was an arresting woman. Her hair was cut in straight bangs to form an ebony frame for features carved like a Malayan mask in antique ivory. She could look, and behave, like an Egyptian queen of the Eighteenth Dynasty or a Creole whore out of New Orleans. On this morning she wore aquamarine shorts and halter. Cradled easily under her right arm was a light repeating shotgun. She was smoking a cigarette and even from the road Randy could see that it was a real, manufactured filtertip and not a stubby homemade, hand-rolled with toilet paper. She called, “Hello Doctor Gunn. Come on in.” Then she recognized the passenger and yelled, “Hey! Randy!”
Dan put the car keys in his pocket and said, “Better bring the whiskey and honey, Randy. I never leave stuff in the car when I make a call in Pistolville.”
As he walked to the house, Randy noticed the Atlas grocery truck and a big new sedan in the Hernandez carport and a Jaguar XK-150 sports car in the driveway. A latrine had been dug behind the carport and partly shielded from the road by a crude board fence.
Rita swung open the screen door. “You’ll pardon the artillery,” she said. “The goons down the street are envious. When I hear a car or anything I grab a gun. They killed my dog. She was a black poodle, Randy. Her name was Poupee Vivant. That means Livin’ Doll in French. Cracked her skull with an ax handle while Peter was lying sick and I was off fetching water. I found the ax handle but not the body. The goddamn cracker scum! Ate her, I guess.”
Randy thought how he would feel if someone killed and ate Graf. He was revolted. And yet, it was a matter of manners and mores. In China men for centuries had been eating dogs stuffed with rice. It happened in other meat-starved Asian countries. The Army had put him through a survival course, once, and taught him that in an emergency he could safely eat pulpy white grubs found under bark. It could happen here. If a man could eat grubs he could eat dogs. Pistolville was meat starved and, as Dan had said, the rules were off. All Randy said was, “I’m sorry, Rita.”
Randy walked through the door and stopped, astonished. The two front rooms of the Hernandez place looked like show windows in a Miami auction house. He counted three silver tea services, two chests of flat silver, three television sets, and was bewildered by a display of statuary, silver candelabra, expensive leather cases, empty crystal decanters, table lighters, chinaware. Gold-framed oils and watercolors, some fairly good, plastered one wall. Table clocks and wall clocks raised their hands and swore to different times. “Great God!” Randy said. “Have you people gone into the junk business?”
Rita laughed. “It’s not junk. It’s my investment.” Dan said, “How’s Pete, Rita?”
“I think he’s a little better. He’s not losing any more hair but he’s still weak.”
Dan was carrying his black bag. It held little except instruments now. He said, “I’ll go back and see him.”
Dan walked down the hall and Randy was alone with her. She offered him a cigarette. Her perfume opened the gates of memory—the movies in Orlando, the dinners and dancing at the hotel in Winter Park, the isolated motel south of Canaveral, the morning they found a secluded pocket behind the dunes and were buzzed by a light plane and how the pilot almost side slipped into the sea banking around for a second look, and most of all, his apartment. It seemed so long ago, as if it had happened while he was in college, before Korea, but it was not so long, a year only. He said, “Thanks, Rita. First real cigarette I’ve had in a long, long time. You must be getting along all right.”
She looked at the bottle. “You didn’t bring me a present, did you, Randy?” The corners of her mouth quivered, but she did not quite smile.
He remembered the evenings he had come to this house, a bottle beside him on the seat, and they had gone tooting off together; and the evenings he had brought bottles in gift pack ages, discreet gratuities for her brother; and the nights in the apartment, sharing a decanter drink for drink because she loved her liquor. He realized that this is what she intended he remember. She was expert at making him feel uncomfortable. He said, “No, Rita. Trade goods. I’ve been in Marines Park, trying to trade for coffee.”
“Don’t your new women like Scotch, Randy? I hear you’ve got two women in your house now. Which one are you sleeping with, Randy?”
Suddenly she was a stranger, and he looked upon her as such.
Examined thus, with detachment, she looked ridiculous, wearing high heels and costume jewelry with shorts and halter at this hour of the morning and in this time of troubles. Her darkling ivory skin, once so satiny, appeared dry and mottled. Her hair was dull and the luster in her eyes reflected only spiteful anger. She looked used and tired. He said, calmly, “You can take your claws out now. I don’t feel them. My skin’s tougher.”
She licked her lips. They were puffed and brown. “You’re tougher. You’re not the same Randy. I guess you’re growing up.”
He changed the subject. “Where did you get all this stuff?” He looked around the room.
“Trading.”
“We don’t go there. They come to us. They know we still hold food. Even coffee.”
He knew she wanted the bottle. He knew she would trade coffee, but he would never again trade with her, for anything. He said:
“You said this was your investment. Do you think three television sets is a good investment when there isn’t any electricity?”
“I’m looking ahead, Randy. This war isn’t going to last forever and when it’s over I’m going to have everything I never had before and plenty besides, maybe to sell. I was only a kid after the last big war but I remember how my dad had to pay through the nose for an old jalopy. Do you know what that Jag cost me?” She laughed. “A case of beans, three bottles of ketchup, and six cans of deviled ham. For a Jag! Say, as soon as things get back to normal those three TV sets will be worth their weight in gold.”
“Do you really think things are going to get back to normal?”
“Sure! They always have, haven’t they? It may be a year, even two. I can wait. You look at those big new houses out on River Road. What built half of them? Wars. Profits out of wars. This time I’m going to get mine.”
He saw that she believed it and it was pointless to argue with her. Still, he was intrigued. “Don’t you realize that this war is different?”
She held out her left hand so that the sunlight glinted on the ring on her second finger. “It certainly is different! Look at this!” He looked at the big stone, and into it, and a thousand blue and red lights attested to its worth and purity.
It wasn’t costume jewelry, as he had surmised. It wasn’t glass surrounded by green paste. It was a diamond set in emeralds. “Where did you get it?” he asked, awed, an then he looked at her crescent ear clips and saw that they too, beyond a doubt, were diamonds.
Rita held the ring out, turning her wrist. She did not answer at once. She was enjoying their reaction. “Six carats,” she said. “Perfect.” She slipped it from her finger and handed it to Randy.
He took it automatically but he wasn’t looking at it. He was looking at her finger. Her finger was marred by a dark, almost black circle, as if the ring were tarnished brass, or its inside sooty. But the ring was clean bright white gold.
Dan came into the room, pawing in his bag and frowning. “I don’t know exactly—” he began, looked at Randy’s face, and failed to finish the sentence.
Frowning, Rita inspected the dark band. “It itches,” she said, and scratched. A bit of blackened skin flaked away, leaving raw flesh beneath.
“I asked you where you got this, Rita,” Randy said, a command.
Before she opened her mouth he guessed the answer. She said, “Porky Logan.”
The ring dropped to the floor, bounced, tinkled, and came to rest on the corner of a blue silk Chinese rug.
“Say, what’s the matter?” she said. “You act like it was hot!”
“I think it is hot,” Randy said.
“Well, if you think Porky stole it, you’re wrong. It was abandoned property. Anybody would take it.”
Dan took her hand and adjusted his bifocals so he could examine the finger closely. He spoke, his voice deep, enforcing calm. “Hold still, Rita, I just want to see that finger. I think what Randy meant was that the ring has been exposed to radioactivity and is now radioactive itself. I’m afraid he’s right. This looks like a burn—a radium burn. How long have you been wearing that ring?”
“Off and on, for a month I guess. I never wear it outside, only in the house.” She hesitated. “But this last week, I’ve had it on all the time. I never noticed—”
They looked down at it, its facets blinking at them from the soft blue silk as if it were in a display window. It looked beautiful. “Where did Porky get it, Rita?” Dan asked.
“Well, I only know what he told me. He was fishing in the Keys on The Day and of course he started right back. He’s smart, Porky is. He made a big detour around Miami. Well, he was passing through Hollywood or Boca Raton or one of those Gold Coast places and it was empty and right off the main drag he saw one of those swanky little jewelry shops, you know, a branch of some Fifth Avenue store and its windows were blown out. He said stuff was lying all over, rings and pins and watches and bracelets, like popcorn out of a busted bag. So he gathered it up. Then he dumped the hooks and plugs and junk out of his fishbox and went inside and filled it up. Porky said right then he was thinking of the future. He figured that money wouldn’t be worth anything but diamonds and gold were different. They never lost value no matter what happened.”
“Impregnated with fallout,” Dan murmured. “Suicide.” Rita’s hands crept upward to her neck and Randy noticed an oval mark in the hollow her throat, as if the skin were painted darker there. Then her hands flew to her ears. The diamond ear clips fell to the rug beside the ring. She moaned, “Oh, God!”
“What did you have to give Porky for those diamonds?” Randy asked softly.
“For the ring, hardly anything at all. For the rest of it we gave him canned meat and cigarettes and coffee and chocolate
“Is that all?” Dan asked.
“No, those are just the watches,” Rita said. “Pete’s been amusing himself, admiring them and winding them every day. There’s more stuff in my room—a couple of necklaces and a ruby and diamond brooch and—well, all sorts of junk.”
“Pete,” Dan said, “throw that kit in the corner, there. Rita, don’t touch anything you may have in your bedroom. There’s no point in your absorbing even another fraction of a roentgen. We’ve got to figure out a way to get the stuff out of here and get rid of it without damaging ourselves. We’ll be back.”
Rita followed them to the door, whimpering. She snatched at Dan’s sleeve. “What’s going to happen? Am I going to die? Is my hair going to fall out?”
“You haven’t absorbed nearly as much radiation as your brother,” Dan said. “I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen because radiation sickness is so tricky.”
“What about Pete? What’ll I do if Pete—”
“I’m afraid,” Dan said, “that Pete is slipping into leukemia.”
“Blood cancer?”
“Yes. I’m afraid you’d better prepare yourself.”
Rita’s hands fell from Dan’s arm. Randy watched her diminish, all allure, all bravado falling away, leaving her smaller and like a child. He said, quietly, “Rita, you’d better keep this, here. You’ll need it.” He gave her the bottle of Scotch.
As he pressed the starter Dan said, “Why did you give her the whiskey?”
“I feel sorry for her.” That wasn’t the only reason. If he had owed her anything before, he did no longer. They were quits. They were square. “Is she going to be all right?” he asked.
“I think so, unless a malignancy develops from the burn on her finger. Improbable but possible. Yes, she should be all right so far as radiation goes. The dose she absorbed was localized. But after her brother dies she’ll be alone. Then she won’t be all right.”
“She’ll find a man,” Randy said. “She always has.”
Porky Logan’s house stood at the end of Augustine Road, in a grove that rose up a hillside at the back of the house. It was a two-story brick, the largest house in Pistolville, so it was said. Porky’s sister and niece had been caring for him, but he lived alone. His wife and two children had departed Pistolville ten years before.
They found Porky on the second floor. He was sitting up in bed, unshaven chin resting upon blotched bare chest. Between his knees was a beer case filled with jewelry. His hands were buried to the forearm in this treasure. Dan said, “Porky!”
Porky didn’t raise his head. Porky was dead.
Dan stepped to the bed, pushed Porky’s body back against the pillows, and pried an eyelid open. Dan said, “Let’s get him out of here. That’s a furnace he’s got in his lap.”
Randy tried not to breathe going down the steps. It was not only the smell of Porky’s room that hurried him.
&nb
sp; Dan said, “We’ve got to keep people out of this house until we can get Porky and that hot stuff underground. How do we do it?”
“What about a sign? We could paint a sign.”
They found an unopened can of yellow paint and a brush in Porky’s garage. Dan used the brush on the front door. In block letters he wrote:
“DANGER! KEEP OUT! RADIATION!”
“You’d better put something else on there,” Randy said. “There are a lot of people around here who still don’t know what radiation means.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I’m positive of it. They’ve never seen it, or felt it. They hear about it, but I don’t think they believe it. They didn’t believe it could kill them before The Day—if they thought of it at all—and I don’t think they believe it now. You’d better add something they understand, like Poison.”
So under “RADIATION,” Dan printed “POISON.” He said, “One other. Bill Cullen.”
Bigmouth Bill was as they had left him, except that he held a bottle of cheap rum in his misshapen hands, and had been hitting it. Randy hovered at the door, so he could listen but not be submerged in the odors.
Dan said, “Bill, we’ve found out what’s making you sick. You’re absorbing radiation from the jewelry Porky traded for the whiskey. Porky’s jewelry is hot. It’s radioactive. Where is it?”
Alas, Babylon Page 21