The Shadow of Armageddon

by LeMay, Jim

  “And well he should,” said Keller. “Hanna’s a blessin’ t’ all a us.” And he proposed a toast to her that they all shared.

  After one round, the gang members, except for Matt, went up to their rooms. The discussion about the stash had considerably dampened their spirits. Billy’s men went as well. Matt wasn’t quite ready for bed. He went to the bar where Bernie was washing the pint canning jars in which he served beer and ordered three of the establishment’s favorite products: a shot of whiskey, a pint of dark beer, and a joint.

  Bernie was probably in his late forties, a little older than Matt, and displayed a lot of stamina and strength for someone carrying around a little extra weight. He seemed to

  be on duty day and night and could wrestle the big kegs of beer into place behind the bar without help.

  “So where you guys from?” asked Bernie, in his role of conversational bartender.

  “Oh, here and there,” said Matt, “like most of our type. But we usually winter over at Nellie’s Fair.”

  “So why’d you decide to give us a try?”

  Matt shrugged. “Looking for new places, new markets. Y’ know.”

  “Yeah, we get lots a curiosity seekers.”

  Was the man being sarcastic? The market was one of the smallest Matt had seen. It primarily attracted local farmers, and the finest products he had seen were the Coleridge Looms garments which were well-made enough quality to find welcome in markets at least as far away as Nellie’s Fair. Of course he was glad that the market didn’t attract a lot of scroungers and traders, some of whom might have carried news of their whereabouts to their enemies.

  “That kind of surprises me,” he said. “With all due respect to your town, this misses being a big market by far. And the Mayor’s little blue book hampers us making a decent profit.”

  Bernie let out a hearty laugh. “Of course they don’t come for the town. But Haas House isn’t in the town, it’s across the river, and it belongs to me, not the Mayor. No doubt her people’d like to get rid of my sinful establishment, but that ain’t never gonna happen.” He set down the jar he had been polishing, picked up a pint of beer he had been sipping – a porter like Matt’s – and held it up to admire its color. “No, they don’t come ’cause they care about the fucking town. They come to my place. They come for the beer!”

  Matt laughed. He suddenly liked this man. He raised his jar, and Bernie clinked his against it. Matt had intended to go up to the room as soon as he finished this round but got involved in conversation with Bernie and stayed for another, of beer only, which Bernie bought. And then for another round that Matt bought. According to Bernie, his beer was known far and wide. He sold it to homesteads and settlements over a broad area. Matt had to admit that Bernie’s porter was the finest he had tasted since before the Last Days. He was definitely feeling its effects when he finally stumbled up to bed.

  * * * *

  There wasn’t much for John or the other young guys to do around the stall except to restock it periodically. When not needed for that, for the first few days John explored the town, which didn’t take long. It consisted of the original nine houses the Coleridges had built, the community center that the mayor now occupied, and about two score small houses that had been built since the Last Days. The population was, Billy had said, about two hundred or so. Of course, because of people visiting the market the population was currently much higher.

  This was far larger than any community John had ever seen, even without the market crowd, including Kane’s Cove. The population of Newcastle had never exceeded a dozen during his lifetime, and people in the river town had numbered, as far as he could remember, about twenty before they all left. There were a few isolated families living near Newcastle, but there had been few occasions to visit them or for them to visit the town.

  The streets of Coleridge Gardens formed a rectangle overlooking the river, with three longer streets running north and south and the two short ones east and west. These were connected to the east-west road that crossed the bridge (that had unimaginatively come to be known as Bridge Road) by a short entry street with a median down the center named Coleridge Way. The nine houses faced the northernmost east-west street, the five model homes to the west of it, the other four to the east. The community center was on the northeast corner of that street and Coleridge Way. When the subdivision was first built, the median in Coleridge Way, the streetscape on each side of it, and a broad strip of open space along Bridge Road had been elaborately landscaped. The only remaining evidence was shrubbery gone wild and a few trees.

  The longer streets were lined with smaller two- to four-room dwellings, some of them sturdy log structures and some little more than huts, where most of the townspeople lived. The only building on the central north-south street was a long low one where, John later learned, Coleridge Looms garments were produced. The market was held south of the southernmost east-west street. Stalls consisted of both tents and lean-tos.

  John found the market to be the most interesting part of Coleridge Gardens. There was a huge variety of merchandise. Farmers sold produce from the backs of carts or from the stalls, every kind of vegetable John had ever seen and many he hadn’t, as well as eggs and live chickens, butter and cheese, flour and corn meal. Some people had homemade implements for sale: wooden bowls, cups, dishes, spoons, forks, and even table knives; iron tools and horseshoes; household items made from what had been trash before the Last Days, such as food containers and automobile parts. One stall featured bows and arrows and related accouterments: quivers, leather arm guards, bowstrings, and the like. John smiled as he thought of Jackie’s crude weapon and resolved to tell him of this stall. There were candles, rather smelly ones of tallow and more expensive beeswax candles. There was soap, ranging from harsh kinds that almost abraded the skin like Maude made to softer varieties. Some were even scented. How he would love to take some of this sweet-smelling soap to Maude! With a pang he realized he missed her and the others, even crotchety Clarence.

  There were animal hides for sale, some rather poorly cured smelly ones, and leather goods and clothing made from buckskin. Hats of many kinds were on display, made of knitted wool, leather, and animal hides, the latter reminiscent of Billy Kane’s. He saw buckskin moccasins and sandals made from leather or the remnants of automobile tires. There were blankets and towels, and woolen clothing for every age and sex, coats and serape-like ponchos like those favored by scroungers. The best and most expensive of the clothing was suspended from racks and laid on tables just outside the Coleridge Looms building where they were made.

  He saw a few items he didn’t recognize, like the black sooty stuff that looked like partially-burned wood. At his question the woman selling it explained that it was charcoal, wood burned in the ground under intense heat without the presence of oxygen, which could then be used as a fuel that burned at much higher temperatures than regular wood. He soon found out one of its uses. At the foot of the hill toward the river, surrounded by the Coleridge Gardens folks’ stubbled fields, he saw pens full of livestock – sheep, hogs, cattle, horses, donkeys, mules, and some strange-looking animals that he later learned were called llamas. A blacksmith had set up a forge under a large cottonwood tree near the pens and was shoeing horses for the some of the visitors to the market and selling iron tools he had wrought. The smith used charcoal in his forge. The man’s great strength and the processes involved in utilizing the forge and bellows fascinated John. He returned several times over the next few days to watch the fellow and his young apprentice, a boy not much older than John, at work. There were food venders selling fish, chicken, beef, pork, lamb, and wild game, roasted, smoked, or cured; sausages, cheeses, a variety of breads and sweets, fruit drinks – none alcoholic! – and foods he’d never heard of such as pizza and pasta. Even though his food was provided in the cost of his stay at Bernie’s (for which the gang fortunately paid) he couldn’t resist spending some of his meager store of cash to try the pasta. He had trouble keeping it on hi
s fork until he got it to his mouth, but the sauce was delicious. He couldn’t sort out all the flavors, but he recognized some kind of meat, tomatoes, onions, and garlic. He decided he would have to have this again some day. (A few night’s later Bernie’s women featured spaghetti for dinner.)

  One stall sold nothing but granular stuff that he soon discovered was salt. The man and woman selling their salt, as they kept an eye on their three small children, were tall and painfully thin. When John heard someone call the man Fats, he realized that this was the man who had traded his salt for Billy’s whiskey, Fats Tanner.

  Scroungers had rented six of the stalls. Billy’s group had the smallest amount of truck to sell; scrounging wasn’t their chief means of livelihood. Billy was primarily a farmer and whiskey distiller who occasionally performed land surveys. Most of the money he earned at the market came from the load of grain that he sold directly to the mayor which she used to feed her Coleridge Looms employees and the whiskey he sold to Bernie, and more clandestinely, to the Mayor and other private citizens. Mitch’s gang rented the stall next to Billy’s. The two other gangs staying at Bernie’s had rented two stalls each.

  A variety of people visited the market. There were the local citizens of Coleridge Gardens, of course, and farmers from the surrounding area. Most of those from out of town lingered at the market for a few days, catching up on gossip and news with friends they only saw a few times a year, or even just once a year at the market. They could afford some leisure time during this break between the busy harvest season and the preparations for winter they would soon commence. Most of them stayed in the fields to the west by the river or south of town, in tents or in their carts or wagons. There were traders, too, who bartered or paid precious nellies for goods to take to other markets, or brought goods from other markets to sell here. Matt and the others had worried that they would run into some of the latter from Nellie’s Fair that might recognize them, but they didn’t see any. As they had hoped, the market was too small to attract traders from so far away.

  The market was a lively mixture of sounds of the crowd, the beasts in the livestock pens, hawking hucksters, and playing children. There was also a mélange of contradictory smells: human sweat, the odor of the animal pens, poorly tanned hides, leather, tallow, soap, and roasting food.

  Sometimes his senses overloaded to the point that he had to get away for awhile. At those times he would wander down by the river or take Bridge Road into the main part of Trevelyan, the town of which Coleridge Gardens had been a suburb. Exploring its main street, he once noticed a church that appeared remarkably intact. Looking in through a window he saw that it had been cleaned very recently and a bouquet of wild flowers sat in a vase on a low table before the altar. Apparently church services were still held here.

  Sometimes Kincaid accompanied John as he roamed Coleridge Gardens or Trevelyan, but for the most part the younger men stayed at Bernie’s to play pool or cards or pitch horseshoes beside the house. He often thought of the beautiful blond girl who had accompanied the mayor to their stall, Alicia, her daughter he was sure, and watched for her among the crowd but never saw her.

  Other members of the gang not occupied at the stall spent their evenings in Haas House; they found nothing else of interest to do in Coleridge Gardens. The front door opened into a small foyer and then into the bar, made long by removing the partition between two rooms. There was a bar made of doors laid across barrels and crates that ran along almost the entire left side of the room. A variety of different types and styles of stools, some made since the Last Days, faced the bar, and the shelves behind it contained the glass pint canning jars Bernie used as drinking vessels and bottles of whiskey and wine. The ends of two tapped kegs protruded through the wall. Bernie drew light-colored beer from one keg and dark beer from the other. Several signs such as, “Hangovers professionally installed and maintained” and “It only takes one beer to get me drunk – I don’t remember if it’s the eighth or ninth” adorned the back wall beside the shelves. Along the other side of the room were tables and chairs. At the rear of the room were two large round tables that usually hosted card games.

  At the rear of this room, another one about half its length, situated at right angles to it, served as a dining room at mealtime and an extension of the bar at other hours. This room was used for any special events Bernie might decide to put on. Most of these occurred during the fall and winter when farmers had more time on their hands. On most Saturday nights, one or another of the groups of local musicians usually showed up to play there. Billy said they were even worse than Ed Baines, but only because there were more of them, three or four to each group, while Baines played alone. In the summer Bernie had fish fries most Friday nights.

  Beyond the dining/special events room was a smaller room, containing only a pool table and, against the wall, racks for pool cues and shelves to hold drinks. The doorways of these rooms had been widened to make them seem almost like one large room. They were fairly dark at night, lighted mainly with candles – reefer haze made them seem even dimmer – though Bernie lighted brighter tallow lamps to hang over table for card games.

  The bar had a distinctive, at first annoying, smell: the rancid burning of tallow candles, infrequently washed human bodies (based on his experience here and at Kane’s Cove, John decided that personal cleanliness was not a high priority outside Newcastle), stale beer, and cooking food, all overlaid by the sweet, herbal scent of marijuana. After a few days, though, it became a comfortable, almost exotic, scent. Those three rooms were the only ones open to the public on the first floor. In the area bounded on two sides by the

  bar, dining room, and poolroom, which looked to be fairly good size, was the kitchen. The brewery was in the basement. On the second floor there had originally been six bedrooms with two baths, divided by a hallway that ran the length of the house. These had been linked together as the rooms downstairs had, by taking out nonstructural walls and widening doors, into four large bedrooms. These were currently rented by Mitch’s and Billy’s gangs and two others. Bernie had also subdivided the detached two-car garage beside the house into two bedrooms. One was currently occupied by a group of three traders, the other vacant. There was also a small apartment above the garage.

  Bernie and the three women who worked for him slept in rooms on the third floor. The adolescent boy, Joey, slept in the apartment above the garage when it was vacant and in the brewery when it was rented. These were Bernie’s only permanent employees. He hired two other men to work during the harvest market, burly young farmers from north up the river who were free for the fall after they brought their crops to market. One of them worked with Joey in the stables and the other helped with brewing. They also protected the grounds and hung around as bouncers in the bar at night.

  In spite of these two young men’s help, Bernie and the three women always looked tired. John heard Bernie tell Matt that he’d had four women the season before but the youngest one, Millie, had left with a scrounger gang in the spring. He’d been short handed before she left, but now they were nearly overwhelmed. He could easily use at least two more people.

  “And Luke,” he said – that was one of the burly young men, “is thinking of getting married next summer so he won’t be back. You’ll prob’ly meet his girl, Karen. She comes down about once a week to spend the night with him.” John found out later that Luke and the other farmer, Jake, shared the apartment above the garage with Joey when it was vacant and the brewery when it was not. “We’re expectin’ another gang in; they’re a week late. Then we’ll really be swamped. There’s another one that comes toward the end of the market, but it’s only an old man and a few boys and they don’t stay with me. The old bastard’s too cheap. They stay out under the bridge. We only take care of his horse.”

  The grounds behind the house were much more extensive than John had originally thought. The latrine and bath house were there, as well as a large garden and some fruit trees. There were also pens and coops for the fowl Be
rnie raised for food and eggs: chickens, geese, and turkeys. Bernie had given up raising hogs years ago because of the extra work their care entailed. Joey was responsible for this area as well as the stables and corrals, though Bernie and his women helped him with the garden.

  Except for the younger people of Mitch’s and the other gangs, Bernie’s was nearly empty during the day but he and the women stayed busy; that was when he took care of brewing and the women cooked and cleaned. After the dinner dishes were cleared from the tables and washed, two of the three women took off work for the evening. They took turns working at night, though, so that one always helped Bernie.

  At night the place filled up. Most of the scroungers not busy at their booths hung out drinking, smoking, and playing pool or cards. Some of the farmers who lived outside

  Coleridge Gardens visited Bernie’s as well as some of the townsfolk, though the latter slipped in well after dark. It seemed that Bernie and his woman could hardly keep up with their clientele. The two young farmers were too inept to be of much help except for washing glasses and bringing kegs of beer up from the brewery.

  The two younger women, on the nights they were officially off duty, usually kept busy in another capacity. A stairway in a hidden little niche between the pool room and the kitchen led up to the second and third floors, the latter having once been the servants’ quarters, to allow servants to come and go unnoticed. One of the two women would periodically appear at the doorway to the servants’ stairway and invite a guest or customer to follow her upstairs. This might happen several times a night. It was to be some time before John understood these transactions, and when he did it stirred those strange new yearnings that whined within him in the presence of women.

  * * * *

  They spent the next three days tending the market. And on the following morning, Matt, Lou, Doc, and Stony left early to either retrieve the stash or to discover that they had to live without it. They borrowed mules from Billy to pull two of Stony’s carts to retrieve the gold if it were indeed still there, though of course they didn’t tell him the nature of their mission.