“She’s not the only one,” Sears said, surveying the rather sparse crowd. “If it wasn’t for the choir, I’d be home glued to my TV set like everyone else.”
“Me, too,” Avery told him.
Aware that the networks had promised coverage of the next wave of Soviet ships approaching the blockade, the pastor kept things short. Avery knew the Twenty-third Psalm by heart, but tonight its verses struck him differently than at any time before.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…”
How is it possible not to fear evil? With a monster like Castro jailing innocent people, and the world’s superpowers poised on the brink of mutually assured destruction? When this very minute, less than ten miles away, flight crews were camped under fully loaded planes ready to start World War III at a moment’s notice? When a brave young man’s mother and grandparents could be among the first to die?
“…for Thou art with me. Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.”
Seen a whole lot of rods and staffs passing by the station this week—no comfort to me at all. Was he a bad Christian for thinking these things?
“Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over.”
Right over the top, I’d say. The scalding guilt he’d resolved to set aside—at least for the night—flooded back.
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.”
Or hours. Does God know how much time we have left?
“And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
Hope to get there later rather than sooner.
As usual, the minister’s remarks were followed by prayer requests from the congregation. Avery was struck by the ordinariness of the requests: for this person’s mother who’d fallen and broken her hip, that one’s husband who was in the hospital, that one’s neighbor diagnosed with lung cancer. Finally, one woman asked a prayer for her nephew “on a ship at sea.”
Avery considered standing and suggesting that “we all say a prayer for the President, our nation, and the world.” But quite possibly, he decided, the Catholics had that one covered. Instead he said, “I have a young friend whose family is trapped in Castro’s Cuba.”
Pastor Billy Wigginthal pursed his lips, then raised a palm and intoned, “Let us pray….”
Avery bowed his head, closed his eyes, and hoped that God was listening to the world’s prayers for peace. Would He also hear one man’s plea to deliver me from megaton bombs and platinum-blond bombshells?
Avery sat alone at the kitchen dinette trying to read between the lines of the Sentinel’s upbeat coverage of yesterday’s events: ARMS SHIPS APPARENTLY TURNED BACK. KHRUSHCHEV SEEKS SUMMIT TALK. A map showed the “Cuban Missile Sites” at San Cristóbal, Guanajay, Sagua la Grande, and Remedios. Inside, there were a few of the photos that had appeared in yesterday’s New York Times. But as usual, there was no mention of the locally based U-2s, or of the US military’s maximum DefCon Two readiness for all-out war. He scowled out the window at the fog creeping snail-like off the lake—not as thick as yesterday’s but still an annoyance—when a sudden movement caught his eye.
It was a man—some kind of workman in blue jeans, shirt, cap, plus a wide leather tool belt—trundling a load of wooden stakes into Avery’s backyard. What the Sam Hill? The guy walked right past the window like he owned the darn place!
Avery set down his coffee mug and strode to the back door. Mindful that Sarah was still in bed, he resisted the urge to yell from the steps. Instead, he walked out after the guy until he was close enough to ask, “Can I help you?”
“Nah,” the guy called over his shoulder, “I got it.” And continued on his way.
“Got what, I’d like to know.”
At that, the guy stopped and turned. And Avery saw, for the first time, the logo on his shirt pocket for Bob’s Pools & Igloos.
“Oh, hi,” the guy said. “I’m here to stake out your igloo. Called your wife yesterday. She said to walk right in.”
“My wife? Not possible.”
“Well, sure, got the paperwork right here,” the guy said. He turned back to the wheelbarrow, removed a file folder, walked up to where Avery was standing, and handed it over.
Avery glanced over the contract for “One airtight, watertight, radiation-tight Igloo Fallout Shelter”…color: pool blue…price: an astounding $1,474.83!…signed by: his neighbor Roger Stout.
“You got the wrong place. Roger Stout lives”—he pointed toward their shared hibiscus hedge—“thataway.”
“Oh.” The guy’s face fell. “Next door, huh?”
“Yup,” Avery said, returning the paperwork. What in the world was Roger thinking?
The guy seemed to scan the gentle green slope of Avery’s backyard with regret. “Sorry about that,” he said.
Watching the fellow collect his load and roll back the way he’d come, Avery wondered, And what if I wasn’t here to stop him? He shook his head. Fifteen hundred bucks for a gol-durn igloo? Roger’s nuts!
Back inside the kitchen, he packed his lunch and checked the clock. He’d planned to stop by the cottage—alone today—to check the whole house, put up the FOR RENT sign, and, he’d noticed yesterday, run the mower over the front and back lawns. Rather than disturb Sarah with his good-bye, he left her a note: Good morning. Please call me when you’re up. Love, W.
At the cottage, he checked all the rooms to make sure that Marjorie had left things shipshape. She had. On his way out back, he stopped beside the kitchen table. Here, right here, was where they’d stood, and right there by the door was where she’d…You’re nuts, too, he scolded himself. This missile business seems to have knocked the whole world off its rocker.
Outside, he pulled out the mower, checked the tank, and gave the back lawn a quick once-over.
Beneath the window of the master bedroom, he stopped to inhale the heady scent of the gardenia bushes in bloom and to smile at the memory of what young Charlotte had always called her “favorite story.”
How many times had he or Sarah had to tell it to her? How, after bailing out of his B-29, he’d written a thank-you note to Inspector 833 for the rubber raft that saved his life. How she’d replied, “You’re most welcome,” and shyly, or slyly, provided her home address. How Avery had responded with an eager letter of his own. How they’d fallen in love, not at first sight, but with no sight at all until Avery arrived at the Tuscaloosa train station in his airman’s uniform to see Sarah in her dark coat and single gardenia corsage. How exactly one year—to the very day!—after they married, Charlotte had arrived as planned.
Avery frowned at the only part of the story that wasn’t true. Their marriage was, in fact, the exact same age as Charlotte. Poor Kitty had gone into labor in the middle of the night before the wedding. Charlotte was born at the moment Avery and Sarah stood at the altar exchanging their vows. The next day, they’d taken her on their Florida honeymoon. They’d never really been without her.
Inhaling the rich perfume of the gardenias, Avery pictured newlywed Sarah pulling him to the window to point out the bushes she’d planted outside their bedroom. “Seven of them, see?” she’d said. A baker’s half dozen—which, including Charlotte, was the number of children they’d planned. God, we were young, Avery thought, remembering his gawky, ham-handed farmer’s passion for his elegant young wife. How he couldn’t believe his incredible luck that she was actually his.
In public, Sarah was as smoothly polished as one of those glossy green buds. But privately—in those days, a look, a nod would do it—Sarah unfurled: buttons, hairpins, limbs flung wide across the bed; skin as petal-soft and pale white as those blooms.
“The scent of gardenias,” Avery confessed to her once, “sets off a craving in me I can hardly stand. I want to know every inch of you, like a bee knows a blossom.”
“More like a horny toad knows a sow bug.” She’d laughed, hooking long legs around his hips. She had a low, throaty laugh back then, indulgent and
inviting. When was the last time he’d heard her laugh like that?
For some reason, they’d never gotten around to transplanting the gardenias to the new house. Their larger yard at the lake had everything else—azaleas, camellias, hibiscus, poinsettias, bougainvilleas, flame vine to burn—but not a gardenia anywhere.
What would she think, he wondered, if he transplanted these bushes for her? Would she take it kindly, as a remembrance of their earlier, happier days? Or would she view it—like her abdominal scar—as a too painful reminder that the biggest of their plans had gone awry?
Avery shoved the mower around to the front. What did it mean, for instance, that after all their years of lovemaking, she’d suddenly refused him with, “Oh, Wes, what’s the point?” The point?
Now mowing the strip of lawn beside the driveway, Avery passed the place where, this time yesterday, Kitty had parked her Imperial. It was an easy bet, he decided, that Kitty had roses—row after row of them—outside her bedroom window. But unlike gardenias, he realized, roses have thorns, don’t they? Like cats have claws. And weren’t three ex-husbands proof of that?
—
“HOW’S IT GOING?”
Steve, as usual, updated Avery in as few words as possible.
“Shifter’s here. Lube job there. Figure we’re outta ethyl by noon. Oh”—his eyelids flickered annoyance—“preacher came by, whinin’ for a fill-up. Told him he’d have to talk to you.”
Avery helped himself to a cup of station coffee.
“Nothin’ in the Slantinel, as usual. Don’t mind—” Steve peered across the street, felt for his Camels. “—like to check the Rexall, see if the Times is in.”
“Fine by me,” Avery said, wincing at his first sip. Steve’s coffee was navy-style. Strong enough to jump into your cup, thick and black enough to grease a ship shaft.
As Steve walked off to cross the Trail, Avery scanned the fuel chart. Each morning, whoever opened the station stuck the tanks with the fuel gauge and recorded the results. Even with the five-gallon limit, business was up 74 percent. At the current clip, he figured, without more gas from the depot, we’re out of business sometime tomorrow. Or Saturday at the latest.
Avery dialed the depot in Tampa.
“Join the crowd, Wes,” the dispatcher told him. “Every Texaco on the Trail is hollering for fuel. We got a ship from Port Arthur past due since Monday, but the navy’s jamming the lanes on both ends. Don’t know what to tell you.”
Avery hung up, frustrated, just as Pastor Billy Wigginthal wheeled his frost-white, three-year-old Rambler wagon (a gift from the congregation) into the pumps.
“Morning, Brother Wes,” Wigginthal called cordially.
“Reverend,” Avery replied warily, noting the three suits in plastic Parisian Dry Cleaners bags hanging in the rear window. At last night’s deacons’ meeting, Wigginthal had announced his need to visit his ailing mother in Atlanta this weekend.
“In a bit of a fix here,” Wigginthal said.
Avery was silent. Wigginthal was the kind of guy who was always “in a bit of fix.” Enthusiastic, Sears-catalog-handsome, charismatic with the young people and old ladies, Wigginthal had been a welcome change from his fire-and-brimstone predecessor. Early on, however, the young preacher’s constant requests—for a new sound system, new aisle carpeting, new choir robes to match the new aisle color—had revealed a lack of financial prudence.
In fact, Wigginthal was the reason the church fathers had pressed Avery into service as a deacon. “We need a man with a head for figures, Wes. Someone who can manage the church budget, reel young Billy in.” Avery had reeled; but over the past six-plus years, Wigginthal had shown himself to be a slippery fish—with a voracious appetite in a variety of areas. Newlywed when they arrived, his wife was now expecting their fifth child.
“My poor mother,” Wigginthal continued. “I talked to her on the phone last night and she sounded so bad, I decided to fly instead of drive. Called Herndon first thing this morning and they told me the military’s controlling air traffic. Most flights in and out of Orlando are either way late or outright canceled.”
“You don’t say.” Could that be true?
“So I gotta drive. But the tank’s half-empty. I really need a fill-up.”
Avery crossed his arms in front of his chest. The drive to Atlanta was 438 miles straight north. He did the math out loud. “You got a twenty-gallon tank half-full. That’s ten gallons. Another five’ll give you fifteen. At 33 miles per gallon open road, that’s 495 miles. Get you there with a couple of gallons to spare.”
Wigginthal screwed up his face in protest. “But Nashville’s nearly seven hun…”
Avery stood, statue-still, while the preacher caught himself in his own lie. Nashville, the freshly pressed suits, the sick-mother excuse all added up to one thing: Pastor Billy had the seven-year-itch for a larger congregation and this weekend was, undoubtedly, a new church tryout in Tennessee.
“Well.” Wigginthal dropped his eyes and his chin, cleared his throat. “When you put it that way, I guess five gallons’ll do just fine.”
“Anything more,” Avery remarked pleasantly, “I’m sure you can trust the Good Lord to provide.” Privately, he had no quarrel with an ambitious preacher, but a lying one was on his own.
—
WHEN STEVE RETURNED, CIGARETTE in one hand, New York paper in the other, Avery had phoned Cliff Davis, a fellow Rotarian and travel agent, to confirm Wigginthal’s claim.
“Not just Orlando, Wes. The FAA’s either canceled or delayed all civilian flights south of the twenty-ninth parallel—bottom two-thirds of the state. Cruise ship departures, too,” Davis said. “Till this thing blows over, I’m outta business.”
“Come tomorrow, I’m right behind you,” Avery told him, hanging up. With the navy blocking the Gulf shipping lanes, the army commandeering the railways and overtaking the highways, and now the air force shutting down the sky, state commerce was in free fall with no chute. Like it or not, we’re in the middle of an armed camp, he decided. It was starting to feel like Tinian Island, which he preferred not to think about. He’d seen more than a few airmen go nuts on that island from all the worry, the uncertainty, the…
Steve was glaring at him with belligerent eyes.
“What?” Avery asked.
“Saw the preacher come and go.”
“Yup.”
“Get what he wanted?”
“Nope.”
“Good” was all Steve said, heading out to his service bay.
Avery turned to stare out the window, chewing his lip. In some ways, you couldn’t pick two people more un-alike than his best friend and his wife. Yet they were identical in confusing what was to him the difference between a simple kindness and a softhearted, or softheaded, gullibility. To Avery, the difference between helping out a person in genuine need, like Marjorie Cook, for instance, and playing the patsy for a lying Billy Wigginthal was night and day.
And where does giving Kitty what she asked for fit in? the goad inside his head wanted to know. Avery shook off the question. The world was hardly black and white. And this week especially, everything seemed a different shade of gray.
—
BY TWELVE-THIRTY, STEVE had finished his lube job and stood, half watching the pumps, half reading the Times, while Avery worked under the lift, wrestling the Chevy’s new shifter rods and side arms into place.
“Fella named Lippmann says here, only three ways to get those missiles outta Cuba,” Steve was saying. “Invade and take ’em out. Blockade and starve ’em out. Or, according to him, sit down with the Soviets and trade ’em out—their missiles outta Cuba for our missiles outta Turkey. What d’ya think?”
“We’ve got missiles in Turkey?” Avery asked.
“Says here we do.”
“Good old-fashioned horse trade, tit for tat? Works for me. Think Khrushchev would go for it?”
“Think he’d rather have a war?”
Under the Chevy’s carriage, Avery flash
ed on the two faces of the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev. On one hand, there was the Krazy Komrade, the short, fat cartoon Communist who pounded his shoe on the table and taunted Americans, “We will bury you!” On the other, there was the grinning Nikita, the former peasant farmer who’d toured Iowa a few years back, shucking ears of American seed corn. Was Khrushchev, whose farmer’s roots lay deep in Ukrainian soil, capable of pushing the button that would destroy the earth?
Of course, you were a farmer, too, back in ’45, he chided himself, and more than willing to help firebomb over two hundred thousand Japanese to smithereens.
Beneath the Chevy, Avery shuddered. If Khrushchev is anywhere near as obsessed with winning as we were, we’ll all wind up burned to a crisp.
By twelve forty-five, their supply of Fire Chief gas was gone. Steve offered to finish up the shifter’s boot while Avery got out the brush and red paint to add OUT OF ETHYL to the A-frame signs at both entrances. While he was at it, he created two more sets of signs. One for tomorrow afternoon:
CLOSED
3–6 PM
FOR HOMECOMING
PARADE
And a second set for Saturday night:
CLOSED
AFTER 6 PM
FOR HOMECOMING.
GO EAGLES!!!
As he spread the signs over the tire racks to dry, his thoughts meandered from how to steer clear of Kitty at Friday’s parade to Charlotte and Emilio’s weekend plans.
“How’d it go with Emilio last night?” he asked Steve.
“Pretty down at the mouth till your little girl showed up. Perked him right up, I’ll tell ya.”
“Charlotte?”
“Brought Leo an album she found at the record shop.”
“Elvis?”
“Nah. You didn’t hear the story?”
Avery shook his head. Charlotte had been deep in her homework when he’d returned from church and in a rush, as always, this morning.
“I guess most of the guys out at the camp are pretty homesick. Younger ones especially miss their mamas. So at lights-out, they play a record over the loudspeaker, some quartet—like the Cuban Andrews Sisters—that reminds them of their mamas and their aunties back home, helps ’em go to sleep. But last week, some harebrain broke the record.”
A Place We Knew Well Page 15