“I don’t want him in particular,” Randy said. “I want them all. I want them and everybody like them.” And he told her what his plan was, exactly, and why he must have the grocery truck and the gasoline, if she had any. He knew he must trust her entirely or not at all.
She listened him out and said nothing.
“If you are left alone here, Rita,” he said, “With all the canned food and other stuff you’ve got, you’re bound to become a target. When they’ve cleaned out what’s on the roads, they’ll start on the houses.”
“I’m way ahead of you.” Her eyes met his steadily. She was evaluating him, and all the chances, all the odds. She made her decision. “I think you can get away with it, Randy.”
“You’re holding gas, then?”
“Certainly I’m holding gas. Fifteen gallons under the back steps. You can have it, and the truck. Anything you don’t use I expect back.”
He rose. “What’re you going to tell people when they see your truck is gone?”
“I’m going to tell them it was stolen. I’m going to tell them it was loaded with choice trade goods and that while I was in the bedroom, attending to Pete, somebody jimmied the ignition and stole it. And to make it sound good I’m going to let off a blast with this gun when you whip out of the driveway. The news will get around fast, don’t worry. It’ll get to the highwaymen and they’ll be looking for the truck. That should help, shouldn’t it?”
“It should make it perfect.”
“Go out the back way. Load the cans in the back of the truck, quietly. There’s enough gas in the tank to take you out River Road. I’ll salute you when you hit the street.”
He said, “You’re a smart girl, Rita.”
“Am I?” She held out her left hand to show the black circle left by the radioactive diamond ring. “I’ve got a wedding band. I was married to an H-bomb. Will it ever go away, Randy?”
“Sure,” he said, hoping it would. “Dan will look at it again when he’s better.”
He walked through the hallway and kitchen and out into the darkness. He found the three five-gallon cans under the back steps, opened the truck’s rear doors, and silently loaded the gasoline. He got in and stepped on the starter. The engine turned over, protesting. Rita had been careless, he guessed, and had forgotten to fill the battery with distilled water, for it was close to dead. He tried again and the engine caught. He nursed the choke until it ran smoothly, backed out of the Hernandez carport, turned sharply in the yard, shifted gears, and roared out on the street. He glimpsed Rita’s silhouette in the doorway, the gun rising to her shoulder, and for an awful instant thought she was aiming at him. Red flame leaped out of the muzzle. At the first corner he cut away from Augustine Road and followed rutted dirt streets until he was clear of Pistolville. He saw no other cars, in motion, on the way home.
It was past eleven when he drove the truck into the garage and closed the doors so no casual passerby or visitor would see it. The lights were out in Florence’s house and in his own house only a single light burned, in his office window. That would be Lib, waiting up for him. He had urged the women to get to bed at their usual hour or earlier, for they planned to go to the Easter sunrise services in Marines Park.
This was good. It was good that they should all be there, so that no one would guess of unusual activity out on River Road. From a less practical standpoint he felt good about it too. He was, as a matter of fact, surprised at their anticipation and enthusiasm. Many things had happened in the past few days and yet their conversation always come back to the Easter services. People hadn’t been like that before The Day. He could not imagine any of them voluntarily getting up before dawn and then walking three miles on empty stomachs to watch the sun come up, sing hymns, and listen to sermons however short. He wished he could walk with them. He couldn’t. It was necessary that he remain there to complete his plans with Sam Hazzard and also to work on the truck. Walking toward the house, he wondered at this change in people and concluded that man was a naturally gregarious creature and they were all starved for companionship and the sight of new faces. Marines Park would be their church, their theater, their assembly hall. Man absorbed strength from the touch of his neighbor’s elbow. It was these reasons, perhaps, that accounted for the success of the old-time Chautauquas. It could be that and something more—the discovery that faith had not died under the bombs and missiles.
She wasn’t upstairs. She was waiting in the gloom of the porch. She said, “I saw you drive it in. It’s beautiful. Did you get the gas to go with it?”
“Total of seventeen gallons including what’s in the tank. We can cruise for a day or two if we take it easy. Are you tired, darling?”
“Not too.”
“If you’re going to be up at five with the others you really ought to be in bed.”
“I’ve been waiting for you, Randy. I worry. I’m not tired, really.”
They walked through the grove down to the dock.
The river whispered, the quarter-moon showed its profile, the stars moved. She lay on her back, head resting on her locked fingers, looking up at the stars.
His eyes measured her—long, slender, curved as if for flight, skin coppery, hair silvered by the night. “You’re a beautiful possession,” he said. “I wish we had a place of our own so I could keep you. I wish we had just one room to ourselves. I wish we were married.”
Instantly she said, “I accept.”
“I’m not sure how we’d go about it. Last I heard the courthouse in San Marco wasn’t operating. For a while it was an emergency shelter like our school. I don’t know what they use it for now but certainly not for issuing marriage licenses. And the county clerk has disappeared. I heard in the park that he took his family and started for an uncontaminated zone in Georgia where he used to live.”
Without moving her head she said, “Randy, under martial law, can’t you make your own rules?”
“I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose so.”
“Well, make one.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“I certainly am. It may be an old-fashioned, Before-The-Day attitude but if I’m going to have children I’d like to be married.”
“Children! Are you going to have a baby?” Thought of the difficulties, dangers, and complexities of having a baby, under their present circumstances, appalled him.
“I don’t know. I can’t say that I am, but then again I can’t say that I’m not, can I? I would like to marry you tomorrow before you go off chasing highwaymen.” She turned on her side, to face him. “It isn’t really convention. It is only that I love you very much, and that if anything happened—I don’t have any bad premonitions, dear, but you and I know that a bad thing could happen—well, if anything happened I would want the child to have your name. You’d want that too, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” Randy said, “I would want that very much. I’m not going to put the truck on the road until late in the afternoon that’s when the highwaymen took Dan—so there’ll be time.”
“That’s nice,” she said. “It’ll be nice to marry on Easter Sunday.”
He took her hands and drew her up and held her. Over her shoulder he saw a pair of green eyes and a dark snout sliding downstream past the edge of the dock. It was spring and the gators were out of their holes. He had heard somewhere that the Seminoles ate Bator meat. Cut their tails into steaks. It was a source of meat that should be investigated. He knew he shouldn’t be thinking about food at this time but he was hungry again.
Chapter 11
Elizabeth McGovern and Randolph Bragg were married at noon that Easter Sunday. The bride wore the same white silk dress she had worn to the sunrise service in Marines Park. She was unsteady on high heels, for she had not worn heels since The Day.
The groom wore his Class A uniform with the bold patch of the First Cavalry Division on his arm and the ribbons of the Korean War and Bronze Star on his chest, along with the blue badge of the combat infantryman. He wore
the uniform not because of the wedding but because it was required in the radioed orders to reservists assuming active duty, such as ambushing and killing highwaymen, which he presently intended to do.
The bride was given away by her father, W. Foxworth McGovern, the retired Cleveland manufacturer. Bill McGovern, who had been helping Malachai cut gun ports in the thin steel sides and rear doors of the grocery truck, wore greasy dungarees. A chisel had slipped and one of his hands was bleeding.
The best man was Doctor Daniel Gunn. He was clad in a tent sized, striped bathrobe. Grinning through his red beard, his head bandaged, a square gauze patch covering his right eye, he looked like a turbaned Mediterranean pirate.
Among the guests was Rear Admiral Samuel P. Hazzard (USN, retired) who wore khaki shorts, a khaki hunting vest bulging with buckshot shells, and during the ceremony held his gold braided cap across his stomach.
The matron-of-honor was Mrs. Helen Bragg, the presumed widow of Colonel Mark Bragg. She furnished the wedding ring, stripping it from her own finger.
The ceremony was held in the high-ceilinged parlor of the Bragg house. The marriage was performed by the Reverend Clarence Henry, pastor emeritus of the Afro-Repose Baptist Church.
Randy was certain it was perfectly legal. It was performed under his Order No. 4, written that morning in Sam Hazzard’s house.
Malachai and Bill McGovern had been working on the truck, and Randy was breakfasting with Dan Gunn, when the women and children returned from Marines Park. The services had been wonderful, they said, but the news they brought was terrible. During the night highwaymen had raided the isolated home of Jim Hickey, the beekeeper, on the Pasco Creek Road. They had killed Jim and his wife. The two children had walked to Fort Repose and found their aunt’s home. Whether it was the same band that had beaten Dan Gunn was uncertain. The Hickey children were inarticulate and hysterical with fear and shock.
Randy, raging for immediate retaliation, had raced to the Admiral’s house with the news. The Admiral’s experience in meeting the unpredictable and brutish pranks of war had saved them from premature or imprudent action. “Wasn’t this sort of thing exactly what we expected?” Sam Hazzard asked.
“I suppose so, but dammit.”
“I don’t think we should change our plans by so much as a minute. If we put out with the truck now we’ll just burn fuel for nothing. These people operate like beasts, Randy. Having gorged themselves in the night they sleep through the mornings, perhaps through the whole day.”
Randy, recognizing the sense of this, had calmed himself. They had talked of the wedding, and the legal problems attending martial law, and the Admiral had helped him in framing Order No. 4. It read:
Until county offices resume operations and normal communications are reestablished between this town and the Timucuan County seat, the following regulations will govern marriages and births in Fort Repose.
1. Marriages can be performed by any ordained minister. Marriage licenses and health certificates are waived.
2. Marriage certificates will be issued by the presiding minister, and will be valid when signed by the contracting parties, the minister, and two witnesses.
3. So that a permanent record may be preserved, a copy of the certificate will be left at the Fort Repose Library. I designate Librarian Alice Cooksey custodian of these records. I designate Miss Florence Wechek her deputy.
4. Birth records, signed by the attending physician or midwife, or by the mother and any witnesses if medical attention is unavailable, will be deposited in the same manner.
One copy of this order is to be kept with the records in the library. This order is retroactive to The Day, so that any births or marriages that have occurred since The Day may be properly recorded.
Randy signed Order No. 4 and said, “Well, when the rules are off you make your own.”
“This is a good one,” Sam Hazzard said. “I wonder what they’re doing elsewhere?”
“Elsewhere?”
“There must be hundreds of towns in the same fix we’re in local authority collapsed or inoperative, communications out. I fancy that elsewhere they’re not doing so good.”
“How could they be worse?” Randy was thinking of what had happened to Dan Gunn and the Hickeys.
“They could be,” the Admiral said, positively.
Randy had gone to see Preacher next. “Preacher,” he said, “you’re an ordained minister, aren’t you?”
“I sure am,” Preacher said. “I am not only ordained but in my church I can ordain people.”
“Would you mind marrying Miss McGovern and me? We don’t have a regular courthouse license, naturally, but I have fixed it up to make it legal under martial law.”
“Miss McGovern told me you was going to wed, Mister Randy. I will be happy to marry you. I don’t need papers. I’ve joined maybe a thousand pairs in my life. Some had papers, some didn’t. Some stuck, some didn’t. The papers didn’t make the difference. It’s the people, not the papers.”
So they were married, in a room filled with flowers of the season and furniture of less bitter centuries and people of all ages. Randy produced the certificate and when Preacher signed it he signed “Rev. Clarence Henry,” and Randy realized that this was the first time he had ever known Preacher’s full name although Preacher had always been there.
Randy had found a large-scale county map in his desk and they had planned their movement as carefully as a Q-ship captain plotting his course through submarine alley. There were four roads that led out from Fort Repose. River Road stretched east along the Timucuan until it swung into a main highway to the beaches. The Pasco Creek Road ran north, the San Marco Road west, from the bridge across the St. Johns. A narrow, substandard road followed the St. Johns toward its headwaters.
The map, with two crosses to mark where the highwaymen had stopped Dan Gunn and killed the Hickeys, lay on the garage floor. They bent over it, Randy tracing the route they would take. The highwaymen could be anywhere. They could be one band, or two, or more. They could be gone entirely. It was all guesswork, and yet it was necessary to plan the route so as to cover the most territory using the least amount of gas, for when the truck’s tank was empty, that would be all. There was no reserve, not anywhere. They would take River Road first because it was closest. After twelve miles a little-used lateral led toward Pasco Creek and they would go almost to Pasco Creek and then cut into the road for Fort Repose. Thus, by using the clay or washboard laterals, they could avoid retracing the same highway and save a few miles.
On his hands and knees, his seagoing cap pushed back on his pink head, the Admiral murmured, “‘Give me a fast ship for I intend to go in harm’s way’—Paul Jones. Remember, Randy, this should be a very slow ship. The slower we go the less gas we use and the more chance they have of spotting us.”
Randy was going to drive. Malachai, Sam Hazzard, and Bill McGovern were to be concealed in the body of the truck. Randy said, “I don’t like to drive slow but I can. I think about twenty miles an hour is right. Anything slower would look suspicious.”
He checked the weapons. They were taking everything that might be handy—the automatic sixteen for the Admiral and the double twenty for Bill McGovern. Malachai would have the carbine. The big Krag, long as a Kentucky squirrel rifle and as unwieldy, would be in reserve. From Dan’s description of how the highwaymen had acted, Randy guessed that the fire fight, when it came, would be close in, and the shotguns of greater value than the rifles. He himself, alone behind the wheel, would have only the .45 automatic on the seat beside him. That, and the hunting knife which was almost, but not quite, razor sharp, in a sheath at his belt.
Randy walked around the truck for a final look. He thought he was doing something that was familiar and then he remembered that he had seen aircraft commanders do this before takeoff. He examined the tires. They were good. The battery water had been replenished and the battery run up. Malachai and Bill had done a good job on the gun ports, fairing them into the big, painted le
tters, “AJAX SUPER-MARKET.” On each side, one port in the “J” and one in the “M.” Camouflage. The holes cut into the rear doors, under the tiny glass windows, were more conspicuous. Randy went outside and returned with a handful of mud. He spread it on the edges of the ports, erasing the glint of freshly cut metal.
It was four o’clock, the time to sortie. “You know your positions,” he said. “Sam, you have the starboard side. Bill takes the port. Malachai, the stern. If I see your fire can’t be effective from inside I’ll yell, ‘Out!’ and everybody gets out fast while I cover you.”
Then, at the last second, there was a change.
Malachai suggested it. “Mister Randy, I want to say something. I don’t think you ought to drive. I think I ought to drive.” Randy was furious, but he held his voice down. “Let’s not get everything screwed up now. Get in, Malachai.”
Malachai made no move. “Sir, that uniform. It don’t go with the truck.”
“They won’t see it until they stop us,” Randy said. “Then it’ll be too late. Anyway, all sorts of people are wearing all sorts of clothes. I’ll bet you’d see highwaymen in uniforms if they got their hands on them.”
“That ain’t all, sir,” Malachai said. “It’s your face. It’s white. They’re more likely to tackle a black face than a white face. They see my face they say, ‘Huh, here’s something soft and probably with no gun.’ So they relax. Maybe it gives us that extra second, Mister Randy.”
Randy hesitated. He had confidence in Malachai’s driving and in his judgment and courage. But it was the driver who would have to do the talking, if there was any talking, and who would have to keep his hands off the pistol. That would be the hardest thing.
The Admiral spoke, very carefully. “Now Randy, I’m not trying to outrank you. You’re the Captain. You’re in command and it’s your decision. But I think Malachai is right. Dungarees and a black face are better bait than a uniform and a white face.” Randy said, “Okay. You’re right. You drive, Malachai. You take the pistol up front. Keep it out of sight. There is only one thing to remember. When they stop us they’ll all be watching you. They don’t know we’re here. They’ll be watching you and they’ll kill you if you go for your gun. So leave your gun alone until we start shooting.”
Alas, Babylon Page 27