Rally Round the Flag, Boys!

by Max Shulman

  She had never failed to show up before, and Harry was frankly worried. He waited fifteen minutes and then phoned home.

  “Hello!” cried Grace in a frantic voice.

  “Honey, what’s the matter?”

  “Oh, everything!” she replied angrily.

  Harry felt a bolt of fear plunge through his belly. “It doesn’t—it doesn’t have anything to do with—with Angela Hoffa, does it?” he stammered.

  “Angela Hoffa?” said Grace, puzzled. “Of course not. Why should it?”

  Harry’s heart came down from his glottis. “Then what’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I can’t talk now. Get a cab, will you?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Hurry!”

  She clicked the phone down. Harry went over to the taxi stand. The cabs in Putnam’s Landing were operated on a share-the-ride system. Six other passengers were dropped off before Harry, fuming with anxiety, reached his home a full hour later.

  His anxiety was not lessened by the sight of three vehicles parked in front of his house: a truck bearing the legend MINTON EVANS—LANDSCAPER; another truck saying WALDO PIKE—HARDWARE; and a 1948 Studebaker sedan belong to Dr. Magruder.

  Harry paid the cab driver, got out in the rain, walked through his front gate, and found the lawn missing.

  Missing. It was gone. There was no lawn.

  Harry’s house stood on the side of a hill that dropped steeply to a brook two hundred feet below. “How picturesque!” Grace had cried upon first seeing the location, and nothing would do except they buy this house.

  Picturesque it was without a doubt. But there were certain shortcomings. For one thing, there was not a level inch of ground for the kids to play on. Every time they went outside and threw a ball, it promptly rolled down the hill, into the brook, and out to sea. Harry figured that he had, at a conservative estimate, $500 worth of balls bobbing in Long Island Sound.

  Then there was the problem of the lawn. A dozen times they had planted grass seed, only to have the first rain wash it straight down the hill. Finally they called in Minton Evans, who, at horrendous expense, gouged out a terrace fifty feet below the house and built a stout retaining wall that held the grass for almost three weeks. Then he built a stouter retaining wall that did the job for two whole summers. Then he decided that the trouble was not in the wall but in the grass, and he sold them a quarter acre of turf, which cost only a trifle more than broadloom carpeting.

  Now Harry, his mouth agape with horror, stood in the drenching rain and stared at the raw brown earth which had been a lawn only this morning, and watched strips of turf slither sluggishly over the retaining wall and down the hill and into the brook.

  Minton Evans, dressed in a yellow slicker and rainhat, looking like an elderly, cupidinous Uneeda Biscuit boy, came walking over to Harry. “It’s that atom bomb,” he said.

  “What?” shrieked Harry. “An atom bomb fell here?”

  “No, no, no,” chuckled Minton. “I mean it’s them atom bomb explosions that causes all this dang rain. I’ve lived in these parts man and boy for more than sixty years and never seen so much rain!”

  “Listen,” cried Harry furiously, “you told me that turf was going to hold! You promised me!”

  “Mr. Bannerman,” said Minton reasonably, “it ain’t me settin’ off all them atom bombs.”

  “Oh, God damn it!” screamed Harry, stamping his foot in the mire. “Oh, God damn it to hell!”

  He slogged through the ooze and, ignoring the doormat, stormed into the house. Grace was sitting at the desk in the activities area writing a check, while Waldo Pike, hardware, stood behind her, his beady eyes bright with avarice.

  “Now what?” yelled Harry.

  “Oh, hello, dear,” said Grace.

  “Howdy, Mr. Bannerman,” said Waldo, not quite tugging his forelock.

  “What are you writing a check for?” roared Harry, brushing aside the greetings.

  “A new washing machine,” replied Grace.

  “What?” whispered Harry, aghast.

  “Well, dear,” said Grace, “I just got sick and tired of Mr. Pike coming around every week to repair the old one.”

  “Oh, did you?” snarled Harry. “I rather looked forward to his visits.”

  “Ah, you’re a card, Mr. Bannerman!” said Waldo appreciatively.

  “And you’re a thief!” yelled Harry. “This is the third time you’ve sold us a new washer. What the hell kind of machines are you bringing us?”

  “Oh, the machines are all right,” Waldo assured him. “It’s the sand.”

  “What sand?”

  “Your boys,” explained Waldo. “They go out and play in the sandbox, and their pockets get full of sand, and then Mrs. Bannerman puts their overalls in the machines, and the sand gets in the camshaft.”

  “Yeah?” said Harry accusingly. “Last time you told us it was the soap flakes. What’s it going to be next time—the water?”

  “Yes, sir, you’re a card!” said Waldo with an admiring smile. “Oh, by the way, when I was down the cellar, I noticed your power tool’s gettin’ pretty beat-up. Got some dandy new ones down at the store.”

  “You get out of here!” said Harry, advancing murderously on the hardware merchant.

  “Well, goodnight,” said Waldo and pocketed the check and departed.

  “My, you’re in a nice, pleasant mood,” said Grace sharply to Harry.

  “What kind of mood you expect me to be in when I come home and find myself teetering on the brink of bankruptcy?”

  “And what about me?” said Grace hotly. “I’m the one who had to be here and suffer through all of it—the washer breaking, the lawn floating away, the boy getting sick—”

  “What boy?” interrupted Harry.

  “Peter.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I don’t know. Dr. Magruder’s upstairs with him now.”

  “Oh, grand!” growled Harry and raced up the staircase. Grace followed close behind.

  Harry ran into Peter’s bedroom. There at the bedside sat old Doc Magruder, looking more like a Norman Rockwell picture than ever. Peter, on the other hand, looked like the picture of Dorian Gray. His face was covered with hideous red bumps and blotches. But underneath the afflictions he was chipper enough. “Hello, Papa dear,” he said happily.

  “What’s the matter with him?” said Harry to Doc.

  “Beats the dickens out of me!” answered Doc cheerfully.

  “Well, what do you think it is?” demanded Harry. “Eczema? Impetigo? Poison ivy? Psoriasis?”

  “What’s psoriasis?” asked Doc.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” snarled Harry and went over and kicked the wall.

  “Ain’t really a heck of a lot we know about skin diseases,” confessed Doc with a chuckle. “You’ve heard the old saying: some we treat externally, some we treat internally, but most we treat eternally.”

  Harry rumbled in his throat.

  “Keep bringing the boy to my office every two, three days,” said Doc to Grace. “We’ll try everything. Something’s bound to work sooner or later.”

  “Thank you, healer,” said Harry with a tight smile.

  “Forget it,” replied Doc. “Well, better be going. Getting on to suppertime.”

  Harry and Grace saw Doc to the door. Then Harry turned on his wife and said angrily, “Would you mind telling me why you called that old quack?”

  “But everybody uses him,” she answered.

  “Sure!” cried Harry, waving his arms. “And everybody uses Minton Evans and everybody uses Waldo Pike! Patsies, that’s what we are, the whole lot of us! And you know who’s the biggest patsy of all? Me—for letting myself get into this mess!”

  He turned on his heel, strode across the family area, into the activities area, and over to the bar. He yanked the cork savagely out of the first bottle that came to hand.

  “That’s right,” said Grace, walking bellicosely toward him. “Get drunk. You didn’t have e
nough on the train. Drink some more!”

  Harry paused. The train. What happened to all the good resolutions he had made on the train? Had he not made up his mind to be mature, responsible, family-oriented, civic-minded? Was this a way to start—by diving into a bottle of booze?

  He put the cork back in the bottle. “Grace, I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “Forgive me. I shouldn’t have lost my temper. After all, these little crises are part of being a father and home-owner and citizen, aren’t they?”

  “Huh?” said Grace, her mouth falling open.

  Harry concentrated for a moment, remembering his pretty speech. “Honey,” he said, “you see before you a new man—mature, responsible, family-oriented, civic-minded. So let’s celebrate this reformation. Let’s go to a country inn tonight and have a bird and a bottle, and then let’s go upstairs and spend the night and hold each other very tight and store up memories to sustain us in the days ahead.”

  “Boy, you are loaded!”

  “No, honey, I am perfectly serious. Is it a date?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Us. A country inn. Tonight.”

  “Have you taken leave of your senses?” she asked with considerable exasperation. “You know very well there’s a special town meeting tonight to hear Guido di Maggio.”

  Harry felt a red tide of rage come pumping up from under his breastbone. Resolutely he pushed it back. “What do you say we skip it, huh, honey?” he said, smiling.

  “Skip it!” she exclaimed. “You—of all people—to talk about skipping it? After we sent you down to Fort Totten to stop this thing, and you failed so dismally, do you think you can just wash your hands of the whole business?”

  The rage would not stay down. “Grace, God damn it, I don’t want to go to the town meeting! I want to make love to you tonight!”

  “Quiet!” she hissed. “The children!”

  “Grace,” he said in a lower voice, “why won’t you let me make love to you tonight?”

  “All right, Harry, we’ll go to the meeting and then we’ll come home and make love when we go to bed.”

  “No!”

  “Why not? Isn’t that when people make love? When they go to bed?”

  “I don’t care what people do! I’m talking about you and me—and why the hell we can’t ever get together.”

  Grace frowned. “Harry, I don’t understand you. Are you trying to suggest that I’m frigid or something?”

  “No, but—”

  “But what? Have I ever refused you when you wanted me?”

  “You’re damn right!” said Harry stoutly. “Plenty of times.”

  “Sure,” admitted Grace. “When the kids were pounding on the bedroom door. When there was an omelette on the stove. But I mean at night after we’ve gone to bed.”

  “I don’t want you at night after we’ve gone to bed.”

  “In Heaven’s name, why not?”

  “Because,” said Harry, “at night it’s not instead of something.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “All right, I’ll spell it out. At night when we make love, it’s just another item on a schedule … Eight A.M.—get the kids to school. Ten A.M.—Red Cross … Twelve noon—lunch. Seven P.M.—dinner. Twelve midnight—sleep with Harry … Well, I don’t want to be an item on a schedule, I want to be important enough to postpone things for, to rearrange things, to drop them if you have to.”

  “Oh, Harry, grow up!” she begged. “Will you please, finally, at long last, grow up?”

  “We have covered this subject too many times,” said he coldly. “We will not go over it again. Just answer one question: will you come to a country inn with me tonight?”

  “No.”

  “Grace,” he said quietly, “I love you. I love you with all my heart. Will you please come with me?”

  “Harry, stop being a damn schoolboy. There’s an important meeting tonight, and we have an obligation.”

  The red rage came again. It filmed his eyes and constricted his chest so he could scarcely breathe. “All right!” He spat the words. “All right, God damn it!”

  Out of the house he went. Hurling curses at his ex-lawn, he stomped over to the garage, got into the car, and zoomed out of the driveway like a projectile. Where he was going he knew not. But the car knew. It seemed to know also that Oscar Hoffa was away in Hollywood.

  Within a quarter of an hour Harry was knocking on Angela’s door. She opened the door. A triumphant smile lit her face. Harry stepped silently into the house. Angela closed the door. Harry reached for her, pulled her close, kissed her hard.

  “Angela, I want to go to bed with you,” he said, holding her.

  “So do I, darling,” she answered. “Oh, so do I!”

  She kissed him fiercely, her mouth wild, her nails digging. She took his arm, led him to the couch, sat down beside him, kissed him again.

  “I have to tell you something first,” she said.

  “Later.”

  “Now. I must.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going away for a few weeks.”

  “Where?”

  “Reno.”

  There is a process that freezes foods instantly. It cannot possibly work as fast as the chill which now shot through Harry, penetrating to the very marrow.

  “I am going to divorce Oscar,” she said.

  “Now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now,” said Harry, his tongue flapping like a pennant.

  Angela laughed. “Don’t be frightened, poor dear,” she said, stroking his cheek. “You have no responsibility. You just happen to be the guy I fell in love with. It’s my own fault—all mine. There’s no need for you to feel any obligation whatsoever.”

  “Oh,” said Harry, hearing distant noises of traps closing, nooses tightening, tumblers clicking shut.

  “I love you and I’m stuck,” said Angela with a brave little shrug. “It’s my misfortune and none of your own.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Harry. “Well, I guess I’ll be shoving off. Big town meeting tonight.”

  “You sweet idiot!” laughed Angela, placing herself athwart him. “You sweet, sexy idiot!

  “Don’t be frightened,” said Angela, working on his buttons. “Don’t worry about a thing.”

  13

  “Tonight,” said the Moderator, “I am going to step down and turn the meeting over to Lieutenant Guido di Maggio of the 992nd Anti-Aircraft Missile Battalion.”

  The Moderator left the platform and took a seat in the audience. Guido walked to the lectern. No applause greeted him. There was, in fact, an almost tangible emanation of hostility from the assembly. Except for the di Maggio family and Maggie Larkin, sitting together in the back of the hall, not a friendly face could be seen.

  Guido was not dismayed. He had prepared himself carefully for tonight’s test, and he was full of quiet confidence. “Good evening,” he said, not smiling. “I know you people pretty good, and I know you weren’t born yesterday. I’m not going to try to con you with fancy speeches. You ask questions, I’ll give you straight answers. Okay, who’s first?”

  The Moderator rose. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been on this side of the platform, so if nobody objects, I’d like to get the ball rolling. Lieutenant, tell us why, with the whole countryside to choose from, the Army decided to put the Nike base smack in the middle of Putnam’s Landing.”

  “We had to,” said Guido. “We didn’t want to, sir. We would have much preferred to pick some piece of land that nobody cared about. But you see, we’re part of a ring around Bridgeport—a group of batteries that protect Bridgeport no matter where an enemy attack might come from. It’s all figured out mathematically so that each battery overlaps the next one. You remove any one battery, you leave a great big hole in the defenses.”

  “Isn’t it better to have a hole in the defenses,” asked Willard Beauchamp, “than to put nuclear warheads right in the center of a heavily populated residential area?”

  “Let me set you
r mind at rest about one thing,” replied Guido. “It’s true the Defense Department has announced the development of a Nike with a nuclear warhead. But we will definitely not have them at Putnam’s Landing—not for several years at any rate. And when they do come—if they come—there will be adequate safeguards against radiation … But that’s for the future; right now all we’ve got is standard, conventional missiles.”

  “Isn’t that bad enough?” asked Rodney O’Sheel. “High explosives, fuming acids—that’s hardly the kind of thing we want in our community.”

  “Sir,” replied Guido, “a Nike base is no more dangerous than a gas station. All our explosives are stored deep underground. We have concrete bunkers and earthen walls eight feet thick around the fueling and firing areas. There is no danger whatsoever of injuring any property around the Nike base.”

  “No?” said Henry Steinberg. “How about the exhaust flames when you fire the Nike?”

  “First of all,” said Guido, “the Nike is never fired except in the event of an enemy attack. There is no practice firing … I’ll repeat that. There is no practice firing. The Nike will never be launched unless enemy planes are overhead—and if it is launched, there is a 500 foot safety zone around the launching site to take care of the exhaust flames.”

  The Moderator got up again. “All right, let’s say that there is an enemy attack and you have to launch a Nike. As I understand it, Nike is a two-stage rocket. The first stage goes after the target, while the booster falls back to earth. Now what’s going to prevent the booster from falling through somebody’s roof?”

  “The Nike is fired in a fixed trajectory,” said Guido. “It is not aimed from the ground. We send it up to a predetermined spot—in the case of Putnam’s Landing, it will be somewhere over Long Island Sound—and then radar guides the missile to the target while the booster falls back into the Sound.”

  “What if the missile fails to hit the target and then goes flying around till it runs out of fuel?” asked Willard Beauchamp. “Doesn’t it come crashing back to earth?”

  “No,” answered Guido. “If Nike runs out of fuel—or if it ever loses contact with radar control—it explodes itself automatically in the air.”