TWO O’CLOCK, EASTERN WARTIME

by John Dunning

  He served to Poindexter and again they won the point when Poindexter went back for an easy return and got tangled with Barnet, who was out of place in his eagerness to get at it.

  Rue cupped her hands for a bullhorn effect, and when she bellowed, “Thirteen-seven!” the crowd laughed and cheered all at once.

  Livia zipped the ball over the net. Barnet made the return and suddenly found himself in another standoff with Jordan. A frenzied volley of shots brought the crowd to a screaming pitch, but Barnet choked and missed again. Jordan knew then that the game was all but won.

  He was everywhere now. He had taken away Barnet’s game and was running him ragged. His legs were young and his heart was strong, and Barnet looked older with each point he lost. When Poindexter came up to help, Barnet pushed him away. Jordan took the point and glared through the net. He could see the pain in Barnet’s face and he knew how desperate Barnet must be to call time. But when he said, “You’d better take five, old man,” he knew Barnet would die first. When pride calls the shots, judgment goes out the window.

  The score was thirteen-all when Barnet twisted his ankle and came up limping. Enough, Jordan thought: I’ve made him eat enough for one night.

  “I think we have a draw here,” he said to Livia.

  “Absolutely.” She was flushed with victory. “It’s a draw, Clay.”

  “The hell with that. You stop, you fault. You fault, you lose.”

  “Then that’s what we do.”

  She gave Rue a hug and walked off the court. Jordan went around the net but Peter Schroeder had already disappeared.

  ( ( ( 12 ) ) )

  “STAY with me,” Livia said. “I’ll get you in ahead of the crowd.”

  They were checked through the door by a pert redhead wearing a badge that said HI, I’M BECKY HART. “Hullo, Liv. I hear you dropped anchor on the all-American boys tonight.”

  “This is our anchor. Mr. Jordan Ten Eyck.”

  The redhead’s tiny hand disappeared in his. “My spies tell me your performance was virtuoso, Mr. Ten Eyck. Welcome to the club.”

  They walked across the lobby to the door marked STUDIOS. The hallway beyond was still half dark, with some light coming through the glass in the studio doors. “This is Studio A,” Livia said. “We do the band broadcast here. In ten minutes this place’ll be a madhouse.”

  They stepped into a large room, two stories high with an observation balcony stretching around it at the second-floor level. The soundstage was flanked by a bandstand, with a banner on the wall behind it that said JUD WILLIAMS AND HIS WINDY CITY SEVEN. There was a small open dance floor and beyond that, an audience section of two hundred seats. Off to the right, the director’s booth was alive with lights. Stoner sat behind the glass, talking with an older bearded man who kept demanding microphone levels through an intercom speaker. “The director’s a fellow named Dedrick Maitland,” Livia said. “We just got him from Chicago. Supposedly he’s good with audience shows like this one.”

  Behind them the door opened and Becky Hart came in. “Gangway, mates, we’re about to unleash the mob.” She moved along the far wall, turning on the overhead lights and picking up scraps of trash. “The band must be here,” Livia said, and Jordan felt his heartbeat.

  “Come on, we’ve got a little time left. I’ll show you the other studio.” She squeezed past on her tiptoes, her hair brushing his cheek, and talked her way out into the hall. “We’ve got a pretty good group here, Jordan. Gus and Rue and Jimmy are wonderful people. So is Becky. She wants to be a producer, a tough racket for a girl to crack. But she knows a good half hour when she hears one.”

  “Don’t believe anything she says, Jordan,” said Becky, coming along behind them to light up the hallway. “I’m only in it for the money.”

  They laughed as Becky moved past. “We’ve got two distinct camps here, as you may have begun figuring out. On our side it cuts across all the disciplines. The common ground is that we all love great radio. Rue, Gus, Becky, me, Jimmy—we meet once a month and eat dinner together. Read to each other—anything we’ve picked up that has unusual possibilities for the air. Of course, then the problem is actually getting it on the air—the age-old battle between money and art. Trying to convince Barnet that something can be intelligent and still be salable, and hope he’ll let us steal an hour from the network and dare the wrath of the gods. That’s what Becky meant when she said, ‘Wel come to the club.’ You’re one of us now, whether you like it or not.”

  She pushed open a door and they went into a small room filled with the sounds of shoveling. First a shovel, then a spade in hard earth, the steel singing as it cut the ground under the boot. “We’re burying a man alive tonight,” Livia said. “This is Studio B. We do the horror show here every Saturday night, right after the band broadcast.”

  The room was in darkness except for a small circle of light around the soundstage. Two full-length microphones were set up about five feet apart, and two suspended overhead. The room had a standard single-floor ceiling and no section for an audience. Some of the cast had already arrived and were seated around a table across the room. Jimmy Brinker was there, still wearing the sweatshirt and the baseball cap. Poindexter was now decked out in his army working dress and looked more openly hostile than ever. Jordan recognized some of the actors from outside—the two men and the woman named Hazel—and another woman, in her sixties, with elegant silver hair. The director’s booth was dark yet, but off to one side, in a cordoned area packed with turntables and gadgetry, sat an enormous fat man sipping from a coffee cup and playing with sound records. “Old Poindexter,” Livia said softly. “My boss.”

  The shoveling went on, with various tools in various earths as the fat man lifted the needle and tried one band after another. At last he found a spade to his liking and he let it run, like an announcement of the grave diggers’ ball, while he got up and refilled his coffee cup with something from a brown paper bag that probably wasn’t coffee.

  “The story’s about a man who disappears,” Livia said, “and how they finally learn what really happened to him.”

  “What did happen to him?”

  “Got buried alive near a swamp in Louisiana. Voodoo country.”

  He didn’t know if he should say what he was thinking. Then he said it: “He’s got the wrong shovel.”

  She looked at him sharply. He shrugged and said, “I wouldn’t tell you your job, but you don’t find many stones in the ground down there. He’s got some pretty hard spadework going on for that kind of earth.” Shrugged again. “For what it’s worth from a guy who doesn’t know much about radio but has done a bit of shoveling.”

  She didn’t say anything at first. Then: “You’re right, of course. I tried to tell him this afternoon it didn’t sound right. But what do I know? Besides, I’ve got other things to worry about.”

  A long pause, then she said, “Actually, this is a pretty unhappy show all around. I had a fierce argument with Clay when the script came down from mimeo. Right away he wanted Pauline to play the missing man’s widow. Pauline’s the older woman with the gray hair . . . Pauline Flack. Her husband did disappear, in real life. I think it’s unconscionable to put her in that part and I said so. Even if she does need the money.”

  “What did Barnet say to that?”

  “Just that I should shut up, mind my own business, and do what I’m told. And he’s right, I’ve got plenty to do without worrying about Pauline. We’ve got a graveyard scene with all kinds of sound going on at once. We’ve got wind, a church bell, people walking, and clods of dirt hitting the box. The sounds of the box itself bumping against the sides of the hole. Dirt crumbling and falling down. The preacher rustling the pages of his Bible. Then there’s thunder and it starts to rain, and I’ve got the sounds of all those damn umbrellas going up. It’s not my job to worry about Pauline, but I like her. She’s a lovely woman, and it annoys me that Clay won’t use her for anything and then calls her for a part like this. She must be damned desperate for the
money.”

  Rue came in. “Got any miracles for us tonight, Liv?”

  Livia shook her head and Rue went on down to the soundstage. Someone up front laughed and the grave digger started anew. Livia said, “Come on, I’ll introduce you around. You can form your own opinions from here on.”

  He met the acting aggregation: Hazel Kemble, Grover Eastman, and Tate Stallworth. Hazel was a woman of fifty-something with a puckish face and piercing blue eyes. Her chestnut hair was beginning to pale as the Japs closed off shipping routes from the Far East and put dye on the short shelf with stockings and spare tires. She had once played a monarch on NBC for Ponds cream: “Maude Adams was the star and I was the queen,” she said. Livia said, “Hazel comes from a long line of theater people,” and Hazel said, “Yes, my great-great-aunt was Fanny Kemble. My family is as distinguished as the Barrymores.”

  “You know the crowd,” said Eastman; “the Staten Island Kembles and the Barrymores of Myrtle Avenue.” He was tall and thin, slightly puffy under the eyes, and even before he spoke, his presence seemed that of a mean spirit. “Don’t let her feed you that malarkey; she tries it on everyone. The closest she ever got to Maude Adams was when she went to see Peter Pan in nineteen-oh-two.”

  Hazel gave him a smile laced with acid. You fool, she said with her eyes.

  Stallworth was in the same age bracket, faintly reminiscent of Kendall with his thick speckled mustache. “Don’t get the wrong idea about these two,” he said. “They’ve been having a mad love affair for years.”

  Eastman gave a barking laugh and blew a kiss.

  “You’ve met Jimmy,” Livia said, and he shook hands with Brinker.

  “And Alger,” Livia said, but he felt no encouragement from young Poindexter to do more than a slight nod.

  “This is Pauline Flack.”

  Mrs. Flack said, “Hello,” and shook his hand. Livia said, “Jordan is a writer,” and Mrs. Flack asked what he’d be writing. Her voice was very British and genuine. Jordan told her that he hadn’t actually been hired yet, and as they talked he noted that her elegant dress was fraying at the edges and the stitching was starting to go in the toe of her left shoe.

  “This is our little company,” Rue said.

  “All enjoying our lean years together,” said Hazel.

  A sudden silence fell over the room. Then old Poindexter started the shoveling again and Hazel’s temper boiled over. “Well, what are you all staring at? We’re all in the same boat here and there’s no use crying over it. None of us will ever see New York again.”

  “Some of us never have,” Rue said. “But we will.”

  “Then you’d better get on the next bus north while you’ve still got your looks. If you’re willing to sleep around, maybe you’ll get somewhere.”

  “That’s our gal,” said Eastman. “Always in form.”

  “Some of us are going to do wonderful things,” Rue said. “Jimmy is a shining talent. And Tate can do any dialect.” She looked at Jordan. “He can play a Chinaman with a shirt laundry or a colored porter on the fast train to Chicago.”

  “Yassah, boss,” said Stallworth, a mockingly bad Negro. “But tonight I play the hero, an all-American white boy. I get the girl too.”

  “But not before she’s ravished by the monster,” said Hazel in a soft voice so different from her own. “Please, Mr. Wyent,” said the young virgin who had taken her over. “Oh, please don’t hurt me again.”

  “Isn’t she a goddamn marvel?” said Eastman.

  Mrs. Flack looked from face to face, her own face impassive.

  “I play the heroine,” Hazel said. “I’m the daughter of the missing man. Rue screams for me at the climax. Nobody screams like Rue.”

  “My one great talent,” Rue said with a sour little grin.

  The door opened and in came the fat woman of the volleyball game.

  “I believe you’ve met Evie,” Livia said.

  “Hi, Jordan, nice game,” said Evie with a wicked laugh.

  “Evie does the cooking show. And a few voices here and there.”

  “On the air I’m Laura Leaf,” Evie said. “I am eternally slender, my loveliness the stuff of legend. I will cook for you all year, Jordan, if you can get Rue to send out her picture to my fans.”

  The shovel sounds had stopped and now old Poindexter pulled himself out of the chair and came over to join them.

  “Jordan . . . my boss, Maurice Poindexter.”

  Hazel launched another attack. “Maurice makes us sound so good. Of course, Livia helps him enormously. She’s a towering talent, wouldn’t you say so, Maurice?”

  Young Poindexter bristled. But the old man sipped from his cup and said, “Oh, she’s an artiste, no doubt about it.”

  “Livia came up with the crowning touch last week,” Hazel said. “The hot water bottle filled with motor oil sounded just like a real heart bursting. Didn’t you think so, Maurice?”

  “You’re far more expert on that subject than I could ever be. I’ve never heard a heart burst. If you say that’s how it sounds, who am I to argue?”

  “Livia’s been taking classes in the art of sound effects,” Hazel said. “Did you know there’s a class up at NYU? Who would’ve believed it, that our little business would come of age in such a big, big way? And Livia’s so dedicated, as I’m sure Maurice will tell you. She goes up to the city twice a week to learn her technique.”

  Livia moved out of Poindexter’s vision and made a cut-it motion across her neck. But Hazel just smiled and said, “She’s learning things that might otherwise take her years to know.”

  Rue cleared her throat. “So here we are. Where’s Clay?”

  “Went to get his ankle taped,” Evie said. She put a hand to the side of her face and said, “Personally, I think he’s faking.”

  Old Poindexter looked at Jordan. “So, you’re our new writer.”

  “I wouldn’t say that yet. I talked to Mr. Kidd, that’s about all.”

  “Do you write drama?”

  “Prose till now.”

  “But you do deal with the stuff of human nature.”

  “I try.”

  “As a student of human nature, what’s your opinion of Mr. Barnet’s injury? Do you think he was faking?”

  “I was kidding, Maurice,” Evie said.

  “All I’m doing is asking Mr. Jordan for his opinion.”

  “It looked real to me,” Jordan said.

  “Let’s get a cross section of opinion,” Poindexter said. “Let’s hear from Mr. James Brinker on the subject of Mr. Barnet’s injury.”

  “Leave him alone, Maurice.”

  “Miss Nicholas enters the fray. Why is it that every time Mr. Brinker is asked a difficult question, Miss Nicholas leaps to his rescue? What about that, Mr. Brinker? What’s your opinion of Mr. Barnet’s injury?”

  “I don’t know,” Brinker said.

  “He doesn’t know,” Poindexter said.

  “He never does,” said his son. “He never knows anything when it comes to putting up or shutting up.”

  Jordan couldn’t stop what he said next. “Why don’t you save some of that piss for the jerries, kid? You’ll need it when you get to France.”

  There was a moment of shock. He could feel it going around the room. The kid said, “Listen, you,” and balled up his fist and started around the table. But a motion from his father brought him up short.

  “I heard some news today,” said old Poindexter as if nothing had happened. “I think Mr. Brinker will find this interesting. They’ve changed the rules for the conscientious objector status. It’s not going to be enough anymore to profess a profound moral aversion to war. Now you’ll have to prove a belief in a transcendent creator deity as well. Do you believe in God, Mr. Brinker?”

  “Sure. Doesn’t everybody?”

  “I sense a facetious undertone there, Mr. Brinker. Perhaps you’d rather not talk about God, now that we’re in a real shooting war. But what about Mr. Jordan? Do you believe in a transcendent creator deit
y, Mr. Jordan?”

  “Jordan is my first name.”

  “Mr. . . . what is it, Ten Eyck? Mr. Ten Eyck, then.”

  “Mr. Ten Eyck was my father.”

  The old man smiled venomously. “A clever man we have among us. He should do well writing Harford’s radio plays. But does he believe in God?”

  “That’s between me and the draft board.”

  “He looks able-bodied enough,” said young Poindexter.

  “Be careful, boy,” Jordan said, pointing a finger. “I’m damned able-bodied, if you really want to know.”

  “Yes, Alger, hush. If Mr. Jordan doesn’t want to discuss his beliefs, let him hold his peace. It’s Mr. Brinker’s beliefs I’m interested in just now. He wasn’t shy about expressing them last year, before the war became our war. Perhaps you remember that day. Some of you were discussing religious philosophy and Mr. Brinker certainly sounded doubtful about the transcendent deity then. What was it he said? . . . That perhaps some space traveler stopped here a billion years ago and emptied its garbage on the landscape. And our species was spawned in a garbage dump.”

  “We were kidding around that day,” Brinker said.

  “Well, I’m sorry I’m not laughing. You see, my son is about to go off to war, where people will try to kill him. I don’t seem to be amused by much these days.”

  Brinker smiled sadly. “I wish I could help you with that. Would it make you feel any better if I went too and got myself killed?”

  “Actually, you know, it would.”

  Rue stiffened. “You’re a pig, Maurice. That’s an awful thing to say.”

  At that moment Barnet arrived, hobbling in on crutches. He saw Jordan at once. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “We’ve just been talking,” said old Poindexter. “You were the topic of the moment, Clay. You and volleyball.”