Crisis!

by James Gunn

“Not that she could tell. She said he seemed cheerful. Whistled while he tied her up. Said not to worry, I would be back at six o'clock—that I was like a quartz watch, always right on the second. He hated that.” She paused and waited in the darkness. When he didn't say anything, she asked. “Is there anything else?"

  “Do you have any of his personal belongings?"

  “I threw them out. I didn't want anything to remind me of him. Or to remind Shelly either, I guess. Except this.” She handed Johnson another white oblong.

  He took it into the light. It was the picture of a blond young man in tennis clothing, looking up into the sun with the net and court behind him, squinting a little, laughing, strikingly handsome and vital and alive, as if time had been captured and made to stand still for him and he would never grow old.

  “Can I keep the pictures?” Johnson asked.

  “Yes,” she said. Her disembodied voice held a nod. “Can you find Shelly for me?"

  “Yes,” he said. It was not boastful nor a promise but a statement of fact. “Don't worry. I'll see that she gets back to you.” That was a promise. “May the future be kind,” he said. Then he walked out of the light into the darkness. His footsteps sounded more distant on the path until the night was still.

  * * * *

  Los Angeles was a carnival of life, a sprawling, vivid city of contrasts between the rich and the poor, between the extravagant and the impecunious, between mansions and slums.

  The smog was gone, removed not so much by the elimination of automobile exhaust fumes but by the elimination of the automobile. Except for the occasional antique gasoline-powered machines that rolled imperiously along the nearly deserted freeways, the principal method of transportation was the coal-fueled steam-powered bus. The smokestacks, too, had been stopped, either by smoke and fume scrubbers or by the Depression.

  Watts was sullen. Unlike an earlier period when minorities had felt that they were being cheated of an affluence available to everyone else, the citizens shared what was clearly a widespread and apparently growing distress and general decline in civilization. The riots of discrimination were clearly past, and the riots of desperation had not yet begun.

  Through this strange city went a man who did not know his name, troubled by a past he could not remember and visions of a future he could not forget, trying to put together a portrait of a man who had as many images as there were people who knew him, seeking the vision that would reveal a place where a man and a child might be unnoticed, asking questions and getting always the same replies.

  At a Spanish bungalow with peeling pink stucco, “No, we don't know him."

  At a walled studio with sagging gates, echoing sound stages, and decaying location sets that looked like a premonition of the society outside its walls, “No, we haven't used him in years."

  At a comfortable ranch house in the valley, surrounded by orange trees, “The police have been here twice already. We've answered all their questions."

  At a tennis club still maintaining standards and the muted sprong-sprong of court activity, “He hasn't been around for months."

  At a high school where hopeless teachers tried to impart knowledge whose value they no longer found credible to listless students who were there only because society had no other place for them. “We can show you only the yearbooks,” and in them pictures of a face without character and listings of activities without meaning.

  And then, unexpectedly, at a bar along the Strip, half-facade and half-corrupt, like a painted whore, “Yeah, I seen him a couple of months ago, him and a fellow with a cap on—you know one of those things with a whatchmacallit on the front ... yeah, a visor—like a sea captain, you know—yeah, Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. Reason I remember—it wasn't his style, you know. It was always girls with him. You could see him turn up the charm like one of those things that dim and brighten lights ... a rheostat?—yeah. I guess. With guys he was cool, you know?—like he didn't care what they thought of him. But with this guy it was different. Like he wanted something from the guy.... No. I didn't hear what they was talking about. I had sixty-seventy customers in here that night. The noise you wouldn't believe sometimes. You're lucky I remembered seeing him."

  A search of the dock area, all up and down the coast, until finally at the small boat marina near Alamitos Beach State Park, a marina with many empty docks, “Steve? Sure, he borrowed my cruiser for a couple of hours about two weeks ago.... No, he didn't tell me where he was going, but I trusted him and he brought it back. Of course I didn't think he was running dope past the border. There's no point in that now, is there? What with the new laws and everything? Anyway, he was gone only a couple of hours.... Well, I gave him the keys about one o'clock in the afternoon, and he was back with them before four.... Sure I'm certain about the time. I remember—I told him I was having a party on board that evening, and I had to get her cleaned up and provisioned. Matter of fact, I asked if he wanted to join the party—a guy like Steve gives a party real class, and the girls come back—but he couldn't.... You can push her up to thirty knots, but she's a real fuel eater at that speed.... No, I didn't see anybody with him. May have been, but I didn't see anybody. Want to look at the boat? Why not? I bought it from a fellow in Long Beach five years ago when fuel got so expensive. Now I hardly ever go out in it. Use it sort of like a floating bar and bedroom...."

  Brass rails, gleaming teak decks, white paint shining in the sun, the spoked wheel, touch it, feel its response, sense the directions it has gone, the hands that have held it and steered the boat. The cabin below, all compact and efficient, bunks and tables, kitchen and head, immaculate, haunted by ghosts, crowded together here laughing, crying, drunken, reckless, desperate....

  And back to the dock, certain now, seeing a vision of a place available by water within an hour's range of the cruiser, at most thirty nautical miles from the small boat marina....

  And at the head of the dock, waiting for him, a tall, slender woman, dark-haired, dark-eyed, good-looking but a bit more haggard now. “So,” she said, “he took her away by water. I would never have suspected him of having that much imagination."

  Johnson looked at her and saw the past. “You didn't give him credit for much."

  “You don't seem surprised at seeing me,” she said.

  “No."

  She hesitated, looking down at her feet in their red canvas shoes that matched her red slacks. “I guess I owe you an apology,” she said finally.

  “No."

  “I suspected you,” she went on, looking up at him, letting him see her guilt. “The police suspected you too—of having had some contact with Steve, of being his emissary, at least of knowing him, perhaps where he was living, perhaps being willing to sell him out."

  “You have reason to suspect people,” Johnson said. The odor of fish and oily salt water surrounded them.

  “So we had you followed. And you did the police work to find him. You don't know how difficult this is for me, do you?"

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You did it better than the police. You found him. Maybe you really are what you say you are."

  “That's a reasonable assumption."

  “The world isn't reasonable,” she complained. “People aren't reasonable. You did find him, didn't you? Tell me that you found him."

  “I found him,” Johnson said simply, “but I haven't gone to him yet. I haven't got Shelly back for you yet."

  “I'm not asking you to tell me where he is,” Ellen McCleary said, a bit unsteadily, looking at Johnson's face hopefully, “but I'm asking you to take me with you."

  “I can get Shelly back without damage to her or your former husband if I go alone,” Johnson said. “With you along the chances get much slimmer."

  She got angry at that. “Who are you to say? What do you know about him or me or Shelly? What right have you to meddle in our lives?"

  “Only the outcome can justify any of us,” he said. “Good intentions, emotional involvements, rights—all these are only th
e absolution we give ourselves for lack of foresight. Look out there.” He motioned toward the smooth blue swells of the Pacific gleaming with highlights in the sunshine. “Quite a difference from your wasteland. That's fertility. That's promise. We came from the sea, and in the sea lies our future."

  “My desert is not as lifeless as it looks,” she said. “We get energy from it, energy we need, energy we must have."

  “The lowest kind of energy—heat. You waste a lot when you have to pump it up into electricity."

  “Like all energy it comes from the sun."

  “Not all,” he said. The wind was coming in off the ocean and blowing away the old smells of rot and waste. “I won't take you with me. You can have me followed, of course, but I ask you not to do that. What will it be? Your desert of old memories or my sea of hope?"

  She shook her head slowly, helplessly. “I can't promise."

  “Then neither can I,” he said, and left her standing at the edge of the water as he walked quickly to the street and the nearest public transportation.

  * * * *

  The ferry ride was a pleasant interlude, a break in the feeling of urgency that drove Johnson. He could not hurry the ship, and he existed for the moment, like the smiling young man in the tennis clothes, outside of time. From San Pedro Bay to Santa Catalina, he watched the blue water curl under the bow, white and playful, and the smooth blue surface of the Pacific extending undisturbed to the end of the world.

  Johnson studied it as if he had never before seen the protean sea or the creatures that lived in it—small darting fish, dark shapes changing instantly into silver when pursued by large solitary predators, and distantly, across the horizon, the gray unbelievable backs of whales. The breeze, laden with salt, blew across his face and tugged at his hair and clothing, and he smiled.

  He left the ferry at Avalon as soon as the ship had tied up in its slip.

  Few people got off the ferry—the pleasure business was an early casualty of the Depression—and Johnson paid no attention to them. He rented a bicycle from a stand at the end of the pier and pedaled up the main road among the wooded hills, got off and walked the bicycle where the hills were too steep to ride, stopped for a moment when he had reached the high point, with Black Jack Peak to his right and the Pacific spread out in front of him again like hope regained, then coasted rapidly down the hills, past Middle Ranch and along the west coast where the ocean flashed blue between the trees.

  Just short of Catalina Harbor, he stopped, pulled the bicycle off the road and behind some trees, and walked up through the woods along a barely discernible path until the trees began to thin and he found himself close to a small clearing with a small cabin in the middle. As Johnson stood without moving, the sound of a child's happy voice came to him and then a man's deeper voice followed, surprisingly, by a third voice and a fourth, the child's squeal of laughter, and a man's chuckle.

  Johnson moved through the last of the trees into the dust of the clearing. Now he could see the front porch of the cabin. On the edge of the porch sat a child with short dark hair and lively blue eyes. She was dressed in a red knitted shirt and dirty jeans. Her feet were bare, her hands were squeezed ecstatically between her knees, and she stared enraptured at finger puppets on the hands of a light-haired young man.

  In a hoarse voice the young man chanted:

  "Today I'll brew, tomorrow bake;

  Merrily I'll dance and sing.

  Tomorrow will a baby bring:

  The lady cannot stop my game...."

  The little girl shouted with delight, “Rumpelstiltskin is my name!"

  The young man was laughing with her until he saw Johnson. He stopped laughing. The puppets fell off his fingers as he reached behind him. The little girl stopped laughing, too, and looked at Johnson. In repose her face looked a great deal like the face of Ellen McCleary with the young man's blue eyes and spontaneity.

  “Hello,” Johnson said. He moved forward slowly, like a man moving among wild animals, so as not to frighten them into flight or attack.

  “Don't tell me you've come to read the meter,” said the young man sitting on the porch, “or that you just wandered here by mistake."

  Johnson eased himself down in the center of the clearing with his back to the ocean that gleamed through the trees a deeper blue than the sky. He sat cross-legged and helpless in the dust and said, “No, I came here to talk to you, Steve Webster."

  Webster brought his right hand out from behind him. It had a revolver in it. He supported the butt on his knee and pointed it in Johnson's general direction. “If you're from my wife, tell her to leave me alone—me and Shelly—or she'll regret it.” Webster's voice was harsh, and the little girl stirred nervously beside him, looking at her father's face, down at the gun, and then at Johnson.

  “I've talked to your former wife,” Johnson said, “but I'm not here in her behalf alone. I'm here as much for your sake as hers, but mostly for Shelly's sake."

  “That's a lot of crap,” Webster said, straightening the gun a little.

  “You're frightening your daughter,” Johnson said to him.

  “She wasn't frightened before you came,” Webster said.

  “I realize that you and your daughter have been happy together,” Johnson said. He spread his hands as if he were weighing sunbeams on his palms. “But how long can it last? How long before the authorities locate you?"

  Webster waved the ugly gun in the air as if he had forgotten he held it. “That doesn't matter. Maybe they'll find us tomorrow, maybe never. Now we're happy. We're together. Whatever happens can never change that."

  “Suppose,” Johnson said, “it could last forever. You can't always be a little girl and her father playing games in a cabin in the woods. Shelly will grow up without schooling, without friends. Is that the thing to do for your daughter?"

  “A man has got to do what he thinks is right,” Webster said stubbornly. “Now is all any of us have got. Next month, next year, maybe something else will happen. Something good, something bad—you can't live for that. Nobody knows what's going to happen."

  Johnson's lips tightened but Webster didn't seem to notice.

  “Nobody's found me yet,” Webster said, and then his eyes focused on Johnson again. “Except you.” He noticed the gun in his hand and pointed it more purposefully at Johnson. “Except you,” he repeated.

  The little girl began to cry.

  “Wouldn't that spoil it?” Johnson said. “Having Shelly see me shot by her father?"

  “Yeah,” Webster said. “Run inside the cabin, Shelly,” he said, looking only at Johnson. The little girl didn't move. “Go on, now. Get in the cabin.” The little girl cried harder. “See what you're making me do?” he complained to Johnson.

  Johnson put his hands out in the dust in a gesture of helplessness. “I'm not a threat to you, and you can't save anything by getting rid of me. If I can find you, others can. In any case, you couldn't stay here long. You'll need food, clothing, books. Word about a man and a little girl living here is bound to get out. You'll have to move. The moment you move the police will spot you. It's hopeless, Steve."

  Webster waved the gun in the air. “I can always choose another ending."

  “For yourself? Ellen said you might do that."

  “Yeah?” Webster looked interested. “Maybe for once Ellen was right."

  “But that's not the way it ought to be,” Johnson said. “You're old enough to make your own decisions, but you ought to leave Shelly out of this. She's got a right to live, a right to decide what she wants to do with her life."

  “That's true,” Webster admitted. He started to lower the gun to his knee again, and then lifted it to point at Johnson again. “But what does a little girl know about life?"

  “She'll get bigger and able to make her own decisions if you give her a chance,” Johnson said.

  “A chance,” Webster repeated. He raised the gun until it pointed directly at Johnson, aiming it, tightening his finger on the trigger. “That's
what the world never gave me. That's what Ellen never gave me."

  Johnson sat in the dust, not moving, looking at the deadly black hole in the muzzle of the gun.

  Gradually Webster's finger relaxed. He lowered the revolver to the porch beside him as if he had forgotten it. “But you're not to blame,” he said.

  “I suppose I'm to blame,” a woman's voice said from the edge of the clearing. Ellen McCleary stepped out from among the trees.

  Webster seemed surprised and delighted to see her. “Ellen,” he said, “it was good of you to come to see me."

  “Mommy,” Shelly said. She tried to get up and run to her mother, but Webster held her wrist firmly in his hand and would not let her go.

  “That's all right, Shelly,” Ellen said, moving easily toward the porch where her former husband and her daughter sat. She no longer seemed tired, now that she had reached the end of her search. “Let Shelly go,” she said to Webster.

  “Not bloody likely,” he said.

  “Not to me,” Ellen said. “Let her go with this man."

  Webster glanced at Johnson. Neither of them said anything.

  “Let's leave Shelly out of this,” Ellen said. “It's between us, isn't it?"

  “Maybe it is,” Webster said. His fingers loosened on Shelly's wrist.

  The little girl had stopped crying when her mother appeared. Now she looked back and forth between her parents, on the edge of tears but holding them back.

  “We did it to each other,” Ellen said; “let's not do it to Shelly. She's not guilty of anything."

  “That's true,” Webster said. “You and I—we're guilty, all right."

  “Go to Mr. Johnson, Shelly,” Ellen said. Her voice was quiet but it held a quality of command.

  Webster's hand fell away, and he pushed the little girl affectionately toward Johnson. “Go on, Shelly,” he said with rough tenderness. “That man's going to take you for a walk."

  Johnson held out his arms to the little girl. She looked at her father and then at her mother, and turned to run to Johnson.

  “That's a kind thing to do,” Ellen said.