by Anthology
I pulled up before the roadside cafe. "Won't you change your mind and come in? At least for a cup of coffee?"
"No."
I went in angrily and ate. Who was she, to treat me like a hired chauffeur? A mere pickup, I raged, a stray woman found on a street. By God, she would have the courtesy at least to address me, her benefactor, civilly or else I'd abandon her here on the highway and return to Los Angeles. I finished my meal full of determination and strode back purposefully toward the car. She was still sitting rigid, staring through the windshield. I got in.
"You know--" I began.
She did not hear me. I turned on the ignition, pressed the starterbutton, and drove ahead.
Soddeneyed with lack of sleep and outraged at her taciturnity, I breakfasted alone on the soggiest wheatcakes and the muddiest coffee I have ever demeaned my stomach with. The absence of my customary morning paper added the final touch to my wretchedness. But one would have thought to look at my companion that she had been refreshed by a lengthy repose, had bathed at leisure, and eaten the most delicate of continental breakfasts. There was not a smudge on her suede gloves nor a speck upon her small hat and the mascara on her eyelashes might have been renewed but a moment before.
The road curved through vast hummocks of sand, which for no good reason reminded me of the grass in its early stages. Reminded, I wanted to know what the latest news was, how far the weed had progressed in the night. Thoughtlessly, without remembering her interdiction, I turned the knob. "Kfkfkk," squeaked the radio.
"Please," she said, in anything but a pleading tone, and turned it off.
Well, I thought, this is certainly going too far. I opened my mouth to voice the angry words but a look at her stopped me. I couldnt help but feel her imperviousness was fragile, that harsh speech might shatter a calm too taut to be anything but hysterical. I drove on without speaking until the hummocks gave way again to smooth desert. "We'll soon be in Yuma," I announced. "Arent you going to tell me your name?"
"It isnt important," she repeated.
"But it's important to me," I told her boldly. "I want to know who the beautiful lady was whom I drove from Los Angeles to Yuma."
She shook her head irritably and we crossed the bridge into Arizona.
"All right, this is Yuma. Now where?"
"Here."
"Right here in the middle of the road?"
She nodded. I looked helplessly at her, but her gaze was still fixed ahead. Resignedly I got out, took her bags from the turtle and set them beside the road, opened the door. She descended, smoothed her gloves, straightened the edge of her veil, brushed an immaterial speck from her coat and, after the briefest of acknowledging nods, picked up her grips.
"But ... can't I carry them for you?"
She did not even answer this with her usual headshake, but began walking resolutely back over the way we had come. Bewildered, I watched her a moment and then got into the car and turned it around, trying to keep her in sight in the rearview mirror as I did so. It was an awkward procedure on a highway heavy with traffic. By the time I had reversed my direction she was gone.
27. Due either to Le ffaçasé's perverse sense of humor or, what is more likely, his excessive meanness with money, my collect telegram asking for funds to return from Yuma received the following ridiculous reply: KNOW NO SANGUINARY WEENER INTELLIGENCER NO ELEEMOSYNARY INSTITUTION EAT CAKE. The meaning of the last two words escaped me and it was possible they were added purely to make the requisite ten. At all events Le ffaçasé's parsimony made a very inconvenient and unpleasant trip back for me, milestoned by my few valuable possessions pawned with suspicious and grasping servicestation owners.
When I left, a map of the downtown district would have resembled the profile of a bowl. Now it was a bottle with only a narrow neck still clear. The weed had flung itself upon Pasadena and was curving back along Huntington Drive, while to the south the opposing pincer was feeling its way along Soto Street into Boyle Heights. It was only with the greatest difficulty that I passed through the police lines into the doomed district.
If I had thought deserted Beverly Boulevard a sad sight only three days before, what can I say about my impression of the city's nerve center in its last hours? Abandoned automobiles stood in the streets at the spot where they had run out of gas or some minor mechanical failure had halted them. Dead streetcars, like big game stopped short by the hunter's bullet, stayed where the failure of electricpower caught them. The tall buildings reeked of desertion as if their emptying had dulled some superficial gloss and made them dim and colorless.
But contrast the dying city with the wall of living green, north, west, and south, towering ever higher and preparing to carry out the sentence already passed, and the victim becomes insignificant in the presence of the executioner. I was reminded of the well where Gootes died for here except on one small side the grass rose like the inside of a stovepipe to the sky; but I suffered neither the same despair nor the unaccountable elation I had upon that hill, perhaps because the trough was so much bigger or because the animate thing was not beneath my feet to communicate those feelings directly.
There had evidently been some looting, not so much from greed as from the natural impulse of human nature to steal and act lawlessly as soon as police vigilance is relaxed. Here and there stores were opened nakedly to the street, their contents spilled about. But such scenes were surprisingly rare, the hopelessness of transporting stolen or any other possessions acting as a greater deterrent than morality. One way or another, as the saying has it, crime does not pay.
Few people were visible and these were divided sharply into two categories: those clearly intent upon concluding some business, rushing furiously, papers, briefcases or articles of worth in their hands; and those obviously without purpose, dazed, listless, stumbling against the curbstones as they shambled along, casting furtive glances toward the green glacier in the background.
The newspaper office contained only people of the first type. Le ffaçasé had come out of his sanctuary for the first time within memory of anybody on the staff. Still collarless, snuffbox in hand, he napoleonically directed the removal of those valuables without which the newspaper could not continue. He was cool, efficient, seemed to have eyes everywhere and know everything going on in the entire building. He spent neither greetings nor reproaches on me, indeed was not looking in my direction but somehow sensed my presence through his back, for he said without turning round, "Weener, if you have concluded your unaccountable peregrinations remove the two files marked E1925 and E1926 to Pomona. If you mislay one scrap of paper they contain--the bartering of a thousand Weeners being an inadequate equivalent--your miserable substance will be attached to four tractors headed in divergent directions. Don't come back here, but attempt for once to palliate the offense of your birth and go interview that Francis female. Interview her, not yourself. Bring back a story, complete and terse, or commit the first sensible act of your life with any weapon you choose and charge the instrument to the Intelligencer."
"I havent the slightest idea where Miss Francis is to be found."
He took a pinch of snuff, issued orders to four or five other people and continued calmly, "I am not conducting a school of journalism; if I were I should have a special duncecap imported solely for your use. The lowest copyboy knows better than to utter such an inanity. You will find the Francis and interview her. I'm busy. Get the hell out of here and handle those files carefully if you value that cadaver you probably think of as the repository of your soul."
I am not a drayman and I resented the menial duty of sliding those heavy filecases down four flights of stairs; but at a time like this, I thought philosophically, a man has duties he cannot shirk; besides, Le ffaçasé was old, I could afford to humor him even if it meant demeaning myself.
With one of the cases in back, I sadly regarded the other one occupying most of the front seat. If she had at least given me her name I would have searched and searched until I found her. This train of tho
ught reminded me of Le ffaçasé's command to find Miss Francis and so I concentrated my attention on getting away from the Intelligencer office.
It was no light labor; the stalled streetcars and automobiles presented grave hazards to the unwary. The air smelt of death, and nervously I pressed the accelerator to get away quickly from this tomb. I crossed the dry riverbed and made my way slowly to Pomona, delivered the files, and reluctantly began seeking Miss Francis.
28. It was practically impossible to discover any one person among so many scattered and disorganized people, but chance aided my native intelligence and perseverance. Only the day before she had been involved with an indignant group of the homeless who attributed their misfortunes to her and overcoming their natural American chivalry toward the weaker sex had tried to revenge themselves. I was therefore able to locate her, not ten miles from the temporary headquarters of the Daily Intelligencer.
Her laboratory was an abandoned chickenhouse which must have reminded her constantly of her lost kitchen. She looked almost jaunty as she greeted me, a cobweb from the roof of the decaying shed caught in her hair. "I have no profitable secrets to market, Weener--youre wasting your time with me."
"I am not here as a salesman, Miss Francis," I said. "The Daily Intelligencer would like to tell its readers how you are getting on with your search for some cure for the grass."
"You talk as if Cynodon dactylon were a disease. There is no cure for life but death."
Since she was going to be so touchy about the grass--as if it were a personal possession--(why, I thought, it's as much mine as hers)--I substituted a more diplomatic form of words.
"Well, I have made an interesting discovery," she conceded grudgingly and pointed to a row of flowerpots, her eyes lighting as she scanned the single blades of grass perhaps an inch and a half high growing in each. The sight meant nothing to me and she must have gathered as much from my expression.
"Cynodon dactylon," she explained, "germinated from seeds borne by the inoculated plant. Obviously the omnivorous capacity has not been transmitted to offspring."
This was probably fascinating to her or a gardener or botanist, but I couldnt see how it concerned me or the Daily Intelligencer.
"It could be a vitamin deficiency," she muttered incomprehensibly, "or evasion of the laws regarding compulsory education. These plants indicate the affected grass may propagate its abnormal condition only through the extension of the already changed stolons or rhizomes. It means that only the parent, which is presumably not immortal, is aberrant. The offspring is no different from the weed householders have been cursing ever since the Mission Fathers enslaved the Digger Indians."
"Why, then," I exclaimed, suddenly enlightened, "all we have to do is wait until the grass dies."
"Or until it meets some insuperable object," supplemented Miss Francis.
My faith in insuperable objects had been somewhat shaken. "How long do you think it will be before the grass dies?" I asked her.
She regarded me gravely, as though I had been a child asking an absurd question. "Possibly a thousand years."
My enthusiasm was dampened. But after leaving her I remembered how certain types of people always look for the dark side of things. It costs no more to be an optimist than a pessimist; it is sunshine grows flowers, not clouds; and if Miss Francis chose to think the grass might live a thousand years, I was equally free to think it might die next week. Thus heartened by this bit of homely philosophy, just as valid as any of the stuff entombed in wordy books, I wrote up my interview, careful to guide myself by all the stifling strictures and adjurations impressed upon me by the tyrannically narrowminded editor. If I may anticipate the order of events, it appeared next day in almost recognizable form under the heading, ABNORMAL GRASS TO DIE SOON, SAYS ORIGINATOR.
29. The small city of Pomona was swollen to boomtown size by the excursion there of so many enterprises forced from Los Angeles. Ordinary citizens without heavy responsibilities when uprooted thought only of putting as much distance as possible between themselves and their persecutor; but the officials, the industrialists, the businessmen, the staffs of great newspapers hovered close by, like small boys near the knothole in the ballpark fence from which theyd been banished by an officious cop.
The Intelligencer was lodged over the printshop of a local tributary which had agreed to the ousting with the most hypocritical assurances of joy at the honor done them and payment--in the smallest possible type--by the addition to the great newspaper's masthead of the words, "And Pomona Post-Telegram."
Packed into this inadequate space were the entire staff and files of the metropolitan daily. No wonder the confusion obviated all possibility of normal routine. In addition, the disruption of railroad schedules made the delivery of mail a hazard rather than a certainty. Perhaps this was why, weeks after they were due, it was only upon my return from interviewing Miss Francis I received my checks from the Weekly Ruminant and the Honeycomb.
It may have been the boomtown atmosphere I have already mentioned or because at the same time I got my weekly salary; at any event, moved by an unaccountable impulse I took the two checks to a barbershop where, perhaps incongruously, a wellknown firm of Los Angeles stockbrokers had quartered themselves. I forced the checks upon a troubledlooking individual--too taciturn to be mistaken for the barber--and mumbling, "Buy me all the shares of Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Concentrates this will cover," hurried out before sober thought could cause me to change my mind.
For certainly this was no investment my cool judgment would approve, but the wildest hunch, causing me to embark on what was no less than a speculation. I went back to the desk I shared with ten others, bitterly regretting the things I might have bought with the money and berating myself for my rashness. Only the abnormal pressure of events could have made me yield to so irrational an impulse.
In the meantime things happened fast. Barely had the tardiest Intelligencer employees got away when the enveloping jaws of the weed closed tight, catching millions of dollars' worth of property within. The project to bomb the grass out of existence, dormant for some weeks, could no longer be denied.
Even its most ardent advocates, however, now conceded reluctantly that ordinary explosives would be futile--more than futile, an assistance to the growth by scattering the propagating fragments. For the first time people began talking openly of using the outlawed atomicbomb.
The instant response to this suggestion was an overwhelming opposition. The President, Congress, the Army, Navy and public opinion generally agreed that the weapon was too terrible to use in so comparatively trivial a cause.
But the machinery for some type of bombing had been set in motion and had to be used. The fuel was stored, the airfields jammed, all available planes, new, old, obsolescent and obsolete assembled, and for three days and nights the great fleets shuttled backandforth over the jungled area, dropping thousands of tons of incendiary bombs. Following close behind, still more planes dropped cargoes of fuel to feed the colossal bonfire.
Inverted lightning flashes leapt upward, and after them great, rolling white, yellow, red and blue flames. The smoke, the smell of roasting vegetation, the roar and crackle of the conflagration, and the heat engendered were all noticeable as far away as Capistrano and Santa Barbara.
Down from the sky, through the surface of the grass, the incendiaries burned great patches clear to the earth. The weed, which had resisted fire so contemptuously before, suddenly became inflammable and burned like celluloid for days. Miles of twisted stems, cleaned of blade and life, exposed tortured nakedness to aerial reconnoiter. Bald spots the size of villages appeared, black and smoldering; the shape of the mass was altered and altered again, but when, long after, the last spark flickered out and the last ember grew dull, the grass itself, torn and injured, but not defeated or even noticeably beaten back, remained. It had been a brilliant performance--and an ineffective one.
The failure of the incendiary bombing not only produced ruefully triumphant Itold
yousos from disgruntled and doubly outraged propertyowners, but a new crop of bids for the Intelligencer's reward to the developer of a saving agent. From suggested emigrations to Mars and giant magnifying glasses set up to wither the grass with the aid of the sun, they ranged to projects for cutting a canal clear around the weed from San Francisco Bay to the Colorado River and letting the Pacific Ocean do the rest. Another solution envisaged shutting off all light from the grass by means of innumerable radiobeams to interrupt the sun's rays in the hope that with an inability to manufacture chlorophyll an atrophy would set in. Several contestants urged inoculating other grasses, such as bamboo, with the Metamorphizer, expecting the two giants of vegetation, like the Kilkenny cats, would end by devouring each other. This proposal received such wide popular support there is reason to believe it got some serious consideration in official quarters, but it was eventually abandoned on the ground that while it gave only a single slim chance of success it certainly doubled the potential growths to contend with. The analogy of a backfire in forest conflagrations was deemed poetic but inapplicable.
More comparatively prosaic courses included walling in the grass with concrete; the Great Wall of China was the only work of man visible from the moon; were Americans to let backward China best them? A concrete wall only a mile high and half a mile thick could be seen by any curious astronomer on the planet Venus--assuming Venerians to be afflicted with terrestrial vices--and would cost no more than a very small war, to say nothing of employing thousands who would otherwise dissipate the taxpayers' money on Relief. A variant of this plan was to smother the weed with tons of dry cement and sand from airplanes; the rainy season, due to begin in a few months, would add the necessary water and the grass would then be encased in a presumably unbreakable tomb.
But the most popular suggestion embodied the use of salt, ordinary table salt. From their own experience in backyard and garden, eager men and women wrote in urging this common mineral be used to end the menace of the grass. "It will Kill ennything," wrote an Imperial Valley farmer. "Its lethal effect on plantlife is instantaneous," agreed a former Beverly Hills resident. "I know there is not anything like Salt to destroy Weeds" was part of a long and rambling letter on blueruled tabletpaper, "In the June of 1926 or 7 I cannot remember exactly it may have been 28 I accidentally dropped some Salt on a beautiful Plumbago...."