TWO O’CLOCK, EASTERN WARTIME

by John Dunning

  Perhaps it was only radio that had held them together.

  In the early fifties the older ones began dying off, beginning with Maitland and Stallworth. Kidd went into early television. Hazel ended her days in an institution. Rue married a producer at Columbia, retired from the profession, and had three children. Her old boyfriend Jimmy Brinker had gone into the army with no special status, giving up his claim to conscientious objection. He came home with a Purple Heart and had a good acting career in Hollywood. Occasionally he crossed paths with Ali Marek, who got some calls when black faces were needed but was seldom offered anything better.

  Waldo died in 1958. Eli marched in Selma and was arrested many times. That same year, 1965, Becky Hart joined the Peace Corps, and was still, at that writing, somewhere in Africa.

  Everyone accounted for but Jordan and Livia. Livia had left the island with her two boys in 1946, and no one ever heard from her again.

  ON a hot day in 1971, a large truck turned into the drive and pulled up in the north parking lot. The two men wore cowboy hats and the sounds of horses could be heard from the back of the truck. The young man, who might have been thirty or as old as forty, opened the back of the truck to check on the horses. The older man, gray bearded and much larger, walked around the building and went inside. A young receptionist looked up from her switchboard and said, “May I help you, sir?” and he told her he just wanted to look around. “I used to work here.”

  He left after a few minutes. Not much of it was the same. The picnic area was gone and the big studio downstairs had been ripped out and replaced by meeting rooms. You don’t need a studio like that if all you’re going to do is play records.

  As they drove away the young man said, “Well, how was it?”

  The older man shook his head and held his peace.

  The changes went far beyond the station. The road into the island was a four-laner now, with houses off in the trees, an occasional gas station, and even an A & P down near the bridge. The bridge itself was a shining thing of steel and cement, and the town had spread, engulfing the radio station and filling the dunes with houses.

  They drove south along the coast. The changes were vast, sweeping, total. Forests turned into amusement parks. Chain motels, a new freeway, a never-ending run of townships and suburbs.

  “Stop here,” the older man said.

  He got out and walked, across the railroad tracks and the frontage road. He was standing in the middle of a shopping center parking lot. After a while the younger man came up to join him.

  “He’s buried here,” the old man said. “I can’t tell where exactly. But someplace right about here.”

  He took off his cowboy hat and mopped his brow. “Let’s get the hell out of here. I want to get these horses off this truck.”

  • • •

  Ringer was the name he went by now. After racing under that name for many years in the West, he had decided to try his luck at the small tracks in West Virginia, Maryland, and Rhode Island. He had done well. His specialty was the bad-legged claimer, breathing new life into the old horse that everyone else thought was finished.

  He had made some money but he didn’t like the East anymore. Next year he might actually try California. No one was looking for him now.

  He had sent most of the horses on with the others. It was a three-day drive, and each night they stopped at a public stable and bedded down, and in the morning they were on the road again.

  The radio was full of reports from Vietnam. Three hundred old men and children had been massacred at a place called My Lai. It had been covered up for a year. A man named Calley was taking the blame for it, but there were disturbing reports that the massacre had been ordered by officers who wanted a large body count.

  “Nothing ever changes,” the older man said. “People are the same all over.”

  “It’s a good thing I was never called up,” said the young man. “I swear to God I’d go to Canada before I’d fight in this goddamn war.”

  “In some ways it’s like the Boer War. A powerful, arrogant country goes where it shouldn’t. Thinks it can win in a month. Then gets sick of it when the boys come home in bags. We never seem to learn anything.”

  They drove out of Kansas, into Nebraska. At some point the young man said, “Well, did you get it out of your system?”

  The older man laughed.

  “I imagine it would’ve been easier if Mamma had come with you.”

  “No. She had the good sense not to.”

  They were pushing it now. They reached the racetrack, Ak-Sar-Ben, just before dark.

  “I’ll get the horses out,” the older man said. “You go on to the apartment and tell your mother we’re here.”

  By nine o’clock his chores were done. He sat alone in the tack room, surrounded by his present, lost in his past. It happened to him a dozen times a week . . . he’d be shoeing a horse or standing on the backstretch rail with a stopwatch in his hand and suddenly his spirit was in another time and place, a cornfield of microphones, a world of soundstages and production rooms and the boundless energy of stories without sight. A thousand creative possibilities crossed his mind. If his new world was steady, his old one was as infinite as the universe.

  He heard a noise out in the shedrow: her voice as she stopped to fondle the old saddle pony. He was aware of her in the doorway, saw her shadow as she moved into the light, felt her hands on his shoulders. “You sentimental old bugger,” she said, and he laughed and leaned over and kissed her hand.

  She joined him there and they sat drinking the beer she’d brought. She said nothing more, left him to his thoughts. She knew where he had gone, and she was still beside him long minutes later, when his mind came back to the here and now. He stared at the picture on the wall, a framed him-and-her shot, taken at the ranch they had bought in Idaho. The camera had caught them at sunset, their faces in silhouette. A gift from their son, who had inscribed it with his favorite lines, from the poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril. Beyond the sundown is tomorrow’s wisdom. Today is going to be long, long ago.

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  MORE than twenty-eight thousand Boer women and children died in Kitchener’s camps. As many as twenty-two thousand British boys came home in coffins.

  One of the central characters was based in part on the early life of Fritz Duquesne, as described by Clement Wood in his 1932 biography, The Man Who Killed Kitchener.

  Ireland remained neutral throughout Hitler’s war. Churchill was outraged when the Irish closed their ports to British convoy escorts. Dublin was sometimes described as a nest of German spies.

  Dark Silver was a racehorse in the author’s own life.

  Jack Dulaney’s radio show is obviously inspired by Destination Freedom, Richard Durham’s groundbreaking series on WMAQ, Chicago. Durham was a black writer of great artistic courage who needed no guiding white hand to produce his powerful scripts.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Dunning, acclaimed writer, bibliophile, radio expert, and passionate student of the mystery novel, is the Nero Wolfe Award–winning author of Booked to Die and The Bookman’s Wake (a New York Times Notable Book of 1995), finalist for the Edgar and the Gold Dagger, and winner of the Colorado Book Award. These books have been translated into a half-dozen languages and were bestsellers in Japan.

  Dunning, in his own words, “splits his time between hunting books and writing them.” He owned the Old Algonquin Bookstore in Denver from 1984 to 1994 and is a well-known figure in the world of antiquarian books. Today he continues to sell rare books on the Internet at http://www.abbooks.com/home/OLDALGON and travels to tradeshows as a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America.

  In preparing Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime, Dunning relied upon his other great passion: old-time radio. A nationally recognized expert, he is the author of the definitive work on the subject. On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio was published in 1998 by Oxford University Press. For many years, Dunning was the host of the
weekly Denver radio show “Old-Time Radio,” and he has appeared on National Public Radio on the subject of radio, book collecting, and literature. An advocate for the preservation of classic broadcast entertainment, the author has a personal archive of high-quality tapes of some 40,000 shows.

  Born in 1942 and educated in the Charleston, South Carolina, public schools, Dunning decided to pursue his writing career early on. By his own admission a “hard knocks story,” this career took many turns, each of which provided the author with fantastic material for his fiction. Beginning as a glass cutter in the late 1950s, Dunning soon found himself working as a racetracker in Colorado and California and as a horse trainer in Idaho (the track lifestyle makes an important appearance in Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime). On the strength of his natural writing ability, Dunning became a reporter for the Denver Post, a position he held through the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this time he also worked freelance, including a stint as the campaign press secretary for U.S. Representative Pat Schroeder. In the 1980s, Dunning was the book editor of This Week in Denver, a biweekly city magazine. Since the publication of Booked to Die in 1992, the author has focused upon writing his unique brand of thrillers. He is married to Helen Dunning and is the father of two grown children. Today he lives in Denver, Colorado.