The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  Edwin and Teddy Barker had crept in among the bushes and were staring at the highway, guns ready.

  Gaunt squatted beside them.

  But no one came.

  No trucks hurtled down the road and stopped where the battered car leaned on its Hat tire.

  No armed men swarmed into the grounds, looking.

  Far back, to the south of the road, a smoke column rose. It grew in blackness and towered higher. Gaunt caught a glimpse of it and knew what it was and thought fiercely, briefly, of their dead.

  At that time, however, his mind was devoted to the other matter. And, again, he was giving his feelings expression without thought: his dusty, dirty, unshaven face was tear streaked.

  Yet he didn’t speak until the other two abandoned their tense watch and turned to him.

  Edwin had a clean-cut profile like Edwinna’s and blond hair like hers, though Edwin’s was thinner now: underweight. His eyes burned too brightly. His hands on his gun were tense and skinny. He mooched along under the bushes and put his arm around his father’s neck, hugged him. “God love you, you old hoot owl!” he said. “I turned up just about in the so-called nick of time! And Teddy, here! He was already stalking those guys south of you when I showed up in my car!”

  “I thought—you were dead.”

  A truck approached rapidly. They fell silent, hugged the ground, pointed their guns toward the road. It swept past.

  “You knew about me starting for New Guinea, though—”

  Gaunt told him—briefly. “And that’s all I knew.”

  Edwin said shakily, “A hell of a long while ago! I went to New Guinea. Where I once did a little flying, as you’ll recall. Our expedition took to the bush. Never found any women. Found snakes. Blackwater fever. Other things. The plane left me there with some Dutchmen, sick. It crashed on the way to Manila, apparently. I stayed sick for a year and a half and I’ve been coming back, the rest of the time, which is another story! Found out, a week ago, in Washington, you were supposed to be down here still. Got a presidential disposition for gas—a car—and came. Hell of a trip. When I reached the old plantation I was fired on. Guessed what that was! Pulled out in time and scooted. And ran into Teddy at his place. He had got out his ammo and squirrel guns to try to rescue you. We could see you lying there, from his bedroom window. We—”

  Teddy came through the bushes; when father and son had first embraced, he had crept away.

  “Look. I don’t know where to go in Miami now. Those guys may hang around our area for a while. Why not change the tire and get down in the Keys? Not many people there, these days. We can live. Ed needs rest; you can see that. Up here, unless the government can get things organized again, which doesn’t seem so hot a proposition, we won’t live too damned long.”

  Edwin looked at his father.

  Gaunt nodded.

  He pushed the dinghy from the mangrove-shrouded fragment of beach where it had lain hidden. Excepting for the absence of wind, it was an ordinary winter day. The sun was well up. White clouds stood against a torquoise sky, reminding him, momentarily, of the days when he’d lain on his back and anticipated death.

  Gaunt had a full beard now, reddish, shot with gray. His cheeks and lofty brow were brown, almost as brown as his irises. He wore faded shorts, nothing else.

  The shade temperature was in the middle seventies; the sun, much hotter. Gaunt shoved the boat on the sand. Its keel made a mark and he left the boat in the water while he erased that track with bare feet. Then he waded to the dinghy and stepped in. As far as the eye could see was salt water, vanishing along the horizon at the indeterminate pale-blue edge of the sky. Here and there on the motionless surface, low, level keys marked the otherwise indefinable line. The nearest was a mile away, a green eruption some acres in extent with snags of black trees in the jungle. Hurricane remnants. The farthest was a mere pencil line in the formless blue distance.

  From the hidden beach the bottom shelved gradually to a depth of three or four feet. The water over it was so limpid, so still, so unrefractive, that he could see a ‘cuda waiting in the weeds a quarter of a mile away as clearly as if it had been a hawk on a tree limb. He could see loitering schools of smaller fish and gaudy, nosing angels, orange starfish lying Bat, the curious hop of a heavy conch as it moved forward, anemones, eel grass, a ray half buried in the sand, a bonefish “mud” far to the right, and the distant dorsal of a young sand shark, cruising patiently.

  The boat had no oars. He picked up a long pole with a wooden cuff and propelled himself, still-standing, out on the bland breast of the sea. It was like movement in the air, a few feet above ground. Presently he came to a large pothole and looked down. On bottom were several rose conchs. He could also see, reaching out from the undercut edges of the hole, the antennae of crawfish. He put down the stob pole, picked up a spear with two prongs, stabbed and lifted. A large spiny lobster flipped and croaked on the tines. He yanked it off against the boat’s seat and stabbed again.

  When he had taken a third, he exchanged spear for pole, pushed back to the key, and concealed the boat again. He carried his quarry inshore by their antennae.

  Under dense mangroves on a small rise of ground stood two shelters, tarpaulins stretched between bamboo poles. Mosquito bars, dyed green, hung around them. Between them was a large, flat chunk of keystone and on that a hand-cut fireplace. Gaunt put a pot of water on the fireplace, lit a can of solidified alcohol under the pot and twisted off the crawfish tails. When the pot boiled, he dropped them in, adding salt. He cooked them for a few minutes, drained them, and, as soon as they had cooled, ate them. After that he lay down on one of the five sleeping places beneath the tarpaulins and closed his eyes.

  He was awakened by the return of Jim Elliot and Gordon from a fishing expedition.

  The two men and the boy carried several writhing groupers from their skiff, which had been deliberately half filled with water to keep the fish alive, to a small, salt pool in the center of the key. The groupers swam off with others of their kind. In lieu of ice, the pool served to keep fish indefinitely against bad weather or bad catches..

  “The big one,” Gordon said proudly of the fish, “would go ten pounds.”

  Gaunt agreed. “Easily.”

  “And we had one twice as big hooked for a while. We lost it.”

  “I lost it.” Jim smiled. “Got under a rock. What’s new?”

  “Nothing,” Gaunt said. “They’re overdue, though.”

  The eyes of the one-time lawyer were sympathetic. “Don’t worry. Plenty of things could delay them. They’ll show up.”

  “Sure.”

  “Great boy, your Edwin.”

  “A good lad.”

  Jim shook his head. “The things he’s been through! Gordon, I hope when you grow up you’ll be like your uncle Edwin. I hope you’ll travel halfway around the world to see your old man.”

  Gordon looked at the ground. He, like other youngsters, was embarrassed when the men talked to him about growing up. He was embarrassed because the men were embarrassed—or sad. They’d start being excited about what happened when a boy grew up and wind up being silent, or sorry, or even angry. It had something to do with the fact that there were no girls to grow up with the boys. Gordon understood it intellectually.

  Emotionally, it seemed foolish. Girls were no good, anyway. Growing up like this, like an Indian, on a key, hunting and fishing-what was disappointing about that?

  He said he’d be like Edwin and he saw the light die in his father’s eyes and he turned away. “Guess I’ll go around the key and see can I maybe find me another old turtle, or something.”

  Jim watched him go, sorrowfully.

  Gaunt said nothing.

  By and by he began to mix flour and corn meal. “We’ll take a look around and I’ll make a batch of johnnycake, if the coast’s clear. A dry twig fire doesn’t make much smoke, anyhow. Teddy and Edwin will probably be hungry when they come back.”

  Only Gaunt was awake when the third small b
oat coasted through the night to the remote island. He heard their voices. They were laughing. He hurried to the little draw where they kept the boat with the mast, using his flashlight sparingly.

  “Hi, pop!”

  The philosopher didn’t conceal his relief. “Thank God!”

  Teddy was out first. Then Edwin. The boat looked loaded in the moonlight.

  “We’ve got news!”

  “Big news!” Teddy said, as he made a rope fast on a root. “We went all the way to Key West!”

  Gaunt was frightened. “Pretty serious risk—”

  “None at all!” The three men followed the path to camp. Jim woke, called a soft greeting, and rose. Gordon slept on.

  “I’ve baked you corn bread—”

  Edwin touched his father’s back. “We’ve had plenty to eat. And we’ve got a boatload more. Dad! The worst’s over!”

  “Over?”

  “Yeah. We can light a fire. We can go back to shore. We can do about what we please. You remember, when Teddy and I went on the last forage, there were plenty of rumors around about stopping the hijacking? Restoring order? Well, they’re doing it!”

  “Who?”

  “The United States government, that’s who! Things got so bad everywhere that no one could stand it anywhere. Millions took to the woods, the way we did. And the gangs got fighting, of course. Around Thanksgiving, Washington started to clean them out.

  Militias that could be depended on began forming up, the way they did in colonial times.

  Men and boys came out of the woods again, and off the farms. And fought. Small armies started shoving into captive cities, by the middle of January. The whole thing faded, everywhere. There are stores open again, in Key West! Armed guards on the main streets but the people are shopping—carrying things openly! From here on in, it ought to be okay.”

  Teddy said, “I signed up to help, myself. Came back to say so-long. I’m going to be with an outfit that’s bulling its way back into Miami.”

  That, Gaunt thought, was the way it would be: an excess of brutality and barbarism, leading, through excessiveness, to the restoration of law. The pendulum might swing too far that way yet again: excess of law. Martial law. Stern law. Summary executions for trivial offenses. That was how it had always been with man. Too much of one evil, bringing in its wake a cycle of virtue, and finally such emphasis on the “virtues”

  that the effect of these, in turn, became evil.

  His son had been piling up wood to light their first night campfire. He struck a match. “You don’t want to go back, do you, Dad?”

  Gaunt shrugged. “I don’t know. Does it matter? I’m content. I’ve never been in such physical condition in my grown-up years. And it’s peaceful here.”

  Edwin nodded silently. The fire blazed up. Jim yawned. “Going to hit the hay again. Gordon and I were up at daylight.”

  “Me too.” Teddy Barker accompanied the attorney back toward the tarpaulins.

  His murmuring voice had the sound of fatigue but a note also of affection.

  It was Teddy who had gone back to Miami alone in Edwin’s car, not announcing his purpose, and returned to the island with Jim and the boy. The same Teddy, who, in the old days, had once referred to the lawyer in Gaunt’s presence as a “woofle-brained old futz.”

  For some time the philosopher and his son sat looking at the unfamiliar night fire.

  Their silent attention was a ceremonial in itself a private thanksgiving. And it was also a communion between the two who had been close together spiritually, intellectually, ever since spirit and intellect had appeared in the child.

  To both, their reunion was the only joyous event of the sad years; and they reveled in these days of companionship even while both knew how bleak the destiny ahead would be and how likely it was that this blank life was not permanent. Beyond doubt it would end in some savage new assault or else, as now seemed possible, in a resumption of hard tasks which might again separate farther and son.

  The fire lighted up the trees; it hollowed out amber holes where paths led to the boats; and it threw latticed, mobile shadows upward from the fronds of giant acrostichum ferns. Edwin stretched a frame as lean as his father’s, picked up a bottle of insect repellent, daubed himself and said, “A penny?”

  “What do we always think about?” Gaunt answered. “What’s lost.”

  Edwin grunted. “I wish I had your first report to read. And all you did on your second. I wish I’d talked to as many scientists as you did. I even wish I’d had a chance to sit in Jim’s fancy room.”

  “Nothing came of any of it—science or magic.” The younger man smiled. “‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,’” he quoted mockingly.

  “There were times, a few times, when I felt on the verge,” the philosopher went on, almost idly. “When something seemed about to happen, or to occur to me. And always, Paula was involved. Always, she seemed very close. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to ponder those moments. But the only common aspect of them was—” he broke off.

  “What? Was what, dad?”

  “Do you imagine a lunatic has instants when his lunacy recedes, is nearly solved?

  When, for minutes as lucid as his habit is deluded, he sees things sensibly, glimpses the truth of his condition?”

  Edwin put another log on the fire. “Some loonies. Sure.”

  “Well, translate that sensation to a general one. A feeling that all of us have been mad for ages. An inkling of the nature of the insanity. And a resulting glimpse of what sanity would be like. I’d get that idea, or sensation, or whatever. And then there’d come that ghostly impression of imminence, of presence. As if Paula and Edwinna were in a near room, going about things as always. As if the old world were there, only not quite seeable.”

  Edwin nodded. “Me too.”

  Gaunt was startled. “You?”

  “Sleepy?”

  “No! You said—?”

  “Would you like a cigarette?”

  “Good God, son—!”

  Edwin left the campfire and soon came back. He tossed a package into Gaunt’s lap. The older man turned it in his fingers, opened it, took a stick from the fire and lighted a cigarette with its glowing end. He inhaled deeply, lay back on his elbow and watched the smoke eddy toward the fire. Then he looked at the cigarette itself. “Key West?”

  Edwin nodded. “We told you. Things are getting organized.”

  “I should say so! This is my first in—I can’t recall.”

  “Two things,” Edwin began while his father listened eagerly, “occasionally give me that sensation you talk about. One’s negative. The other is positive. The first is this: When I ask myself if I’d take the world back the way it was, I usually say yes. But sometimes, no. When it’s no, I think why that is. Lots of reasons. Intricate reasons. Let me make ‘em as simple as I can. After all, I also have had time, stuck around the Pacific, to ponder. Number one, our whole idea of progress and rising standards and more people was cockeyed.”

  Gaunt nodded. “No future in it. Strip the resources off the planet. Leave nothing for any posterity—”

  “That. The cockeyedness of mass production. A plenty of having things and a total dearth of living a life. You were born, educated, and then what? You tended a machine. You sat in an office. You traveled to and from it. You aged and died. Most of your active self was spent in a long, nasty, unrewarding day. Dumb or bright, poor or rich, that was the schedule for nearly all. Crazy!”

  “Yet most of the men who retired were miserable.”

  “And slaves love chains. There were too many people. They exploited their ability to stay alive. Took no responsibility for selecting the stock. For dying. For anything but breeding. And then what? The more there were the harder and harder they had to work!”

  “What about shorter hours, bigger pay?”

  “What about full employment?” Edwin answered hotly. “Get everybody in the act. Make everybody spend his best hours five days a week doing some i
diotic damned thing. And why did we need a hundred and fifty million serfs for that?”

  Gaunt grinned. “It’s a thing I called the obscenity of purity. The old law of opposites in action. The people who insisted they were virtuous, insisted it was vicious to tinker with nature. With what they called nature. So they brought up their kids as chaste as they could, as ‘pure,’ as far from nature as the mind could get. Then their kids married.

  And what? ‘Go to it,’ they were ordered. The hell with reason and responsibility! The hell with foresight and logic. Breed like rabbits. Spawn. Throw into jail anybody opposed to that order! The effect? The Christian marriage bed was a social’ orgy that knew no let nor hindrance, no genetics, no restraint, no intellectual decency, whatever. Obscene, for a species with a brain. Truly obscene!”

  Edwin nodded to himself. “In my time there was even more to it than that.”

  “More?” Gaunt sounded dubious.

  “Sure. Back before the second World War, when I was a kid, the population experts showed how our birth rate was tapering off. In spite of the holy obscenity you mentioned, people were doing preventive things. Not the right people or the right things.

  But the birth rate was falling. Then—zoom! It shot up tremendously. All calculations off.

  Not enough schools, teachers, jobs, diapers, meals in sight, for everybody being born.

  Why was that? I’ve heard fifty reasons and not one was adequate. Not any ten.”

  Edwin kicked a small branch and watched sparks rise. “Listen. All through history, when nations have been in the grip of epidemic, or faced with conquest and slaughter, people have shown a last-minute tendency to copulate. Sometimes publicly, wildly, frantically. Why? Instinct, wouldn’t you say, if you saw any other animals than men do it? A fling at preserving the tribe. An attempt to beat the imminent disaster.

  Well?”

  “Good Lord,” Gaunt murmured.

  Edwin nodded. “Nobody could really explain why the young generation of America, before the Disappearance, suddenly changed its habits and took up breeding en masse. But nobody gave it a long-range, statistical squint from the instinctual point of view. You had a bunch of young people, not very bright, not well educated, given to conscious optimism and hope. But every day some graybeard told them that they could and probably would soon be blotted out in millions by atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, radioactive poisons, bacteriological warfare, nerve gases, all that. Unconsciously they were horribly frightened. How could they help that? So what? First their conscious goal became security, even though there was none in sight. Pensions, idiotic things like that.