by Ward Moore
He removed the cowhide that served him as a blanket, with distaste. It stank worse daily. It would soon have to be discarded though it was the closest he had come to tanning leather successfully. “Faith,” he said. “Pure, blind faith. Baseless.”
“We survived, didn’t we? Then there are others.”
“We aren’t herding cattle,” he pointed out. “And we have advantages others lack.”
“Have we? Is that why we live like this?”
“Better to live like this than not at all.” He rose from the mattress. A pair of shorts, already worn frail, had been inexpertly improvised by Erika from the last of his pajamas. When they were gone he would have to suffer the harshness of ill-cured leather to chafe his flesh.
“We don’t have to live like this,” she said flatly. “Somewhere—not too far away, even—people must be living decently.”
“Faith,” he repeated; “faith. Wood on the fire? Don’t want to have to start a new one.”
“There’s wood on the fire,” said Erika. “And hot water.”
The goatskin pants and jacket were as crudely fashioned as the shorts—more so perhaps, since the material was harder to work. The hair had come off in mangy patches; the hide beneath was rough and stiff, not soft and supple as it should have been. Only the sandals came anywhere near being satisfactory. Mr. Jimmon didn’t know what had made their deerskin thongs flexible and free from decay; the hide from which he’d cut them rotted like all the others. They held the soles, made from a tire—the one punctured on the last mile of the trip and left on the spare wheel instead of being repaired at all costs in time or money—firmly and comfortably against his feet, so that he could run, if need be, as easily as in the boots or shoes, now worn out and discarded.
Dressed, he rubbed the back of his hand against his jaw. “Shaving day again,” he muttered.
“I want something to eat,” whined the boy.
“Dad will take care of it,” said Erika. “In good time.”
“Wonder,” reflected Mr. Jimmon. “Would it really be too late to make some sort of calendar? Guess at the date? May or June. And keep it up from now on?”
Erika paused in her activity. (What does she find to keep busy with, he wondered. Women’s work is never done—but what do they do without vacuum cleaners and other labor-saving devices to keep them occupied?) “What would be the good? As soon as we come across people who haven’t gone native we’ll find out the real date.”
He got out the straight-edged razor. Forethought. Safety blades would have long since been blunted into worthlessness. He stropped it tenderly, unskillfully. “What is a ‘real date’? A convention agreed on by civilized communities. What civilized communities are there to agree to conventions?”
“Enough,” she answered. “If we were to look for them.”
“Want something to eat,” repeated the boy.
Razor in hand, Mr. Jimmon walked from the shelter to the flat stones that served as fireplace a few feet beyond. Lifting the blackened kettle off the coals he kicked the fire-eaten boughs together before settling it back in place. He dipped a stiff rag into the hot water, watching it go limp, and swathed it around his jowls.
“Aaaah,” he muttered luxuriously. “Ummmm.”
Soap. Not hard to make; he’d explained the theory to Erika often enough. You rendered fat to tallow and mixed it with sifted wood ashes. There were always plenty of ashes and he did succeed now and then in shooting an animal. Still they had no soap. The decencies of life slipping away. Daren’t let down too far.
He shaved slowly and carefully before the rear-view mirror from the station wagon. The hot water softened the gray and white hairs enough to permit cutting without scalping the skin raw, but it was still painful. “Ought to make soap,” he muttered.
The boy had followed him outside and was watching intently. “Dad,” he said, not asking, just idly stating. Mr. Jimmon felt the obligation to reply but found no ready words. He turned his face slightly away in the direction of the brook delicately winding between the trees. It was normally so shallow that dripping water from it was a nuisance. A little farther upstream was a natural basin; he had intended to dam it ever since they came to the end of their flight here.
He wiped the razor thoroughly dry on the sleeve of his jacket and put it down on the rock. “You going to need this warm water any more?” he called to Erika.
She came to the opening of the shelter, her blonde hair unevenly streaked with sunburn and drawn tightly back from her forehead. The line of her jaw from ear to chin was delicately firm. Caught unexpectedly, Mr. Jimmon looked full at her before dropping his eyes.
The top of a dress of Molly’s was tucked into a pair of Levis, also Molly’s. She was thin—slender was perhaps the better word—but not over-thin, like her mother. On a good diet she might even fill out the slight hollow in her cheeks. Perhaps not; there was an intensity about Erika, emphasized in her eyes that indicated a tendency to sparseness.
Six years, seven years; he couldn’t say to her, How old are you now Erika, twenty, twenty-one? The time had been longer for her than for him, much longer. One of the reasons she clung to the fantasy of civilized survivors. Hopeless, dreary otherwise. And what did he cling to? Daily food-getting. Hanging on.
“What am I supposed to do with it? Do the dishes we didn’t bring along because you wouldn’t burden yourself with things? Wash the clothes we don’t have any more? Mop the dirt floor? Sterilize something?”
He had sterilized the knife with which she’d cut the cord. “All right. All right. I only asked.”
He took up the kettle by the bailer and emptied it. Aluminum, even heavy cast aluminum like this, was going to wear out soon. He remembered how he’d debated between it and the cast iron one. A single mishap with cast iron, one drop on one sharp rock and.… The aluminum, even if it developed a pinhole or two, would still be useful. Despite her unjust taunts about dishes and the dirt floor (how did one go about making concrete if there were no bags of cement to be bought?) he had foreseen intelligently.
Must be close to seven already. If his watch hadn’t stopped permanently. Moisture-proof; return to manufacturer. Hers had lasted nearly a year longer, though it had been little more than an ornament. Its sole function now; she wore it sometimes as jewelry. Her only trinket. (Molly had never been one of those gem-loving women, give her her due.) Remind her not to leave it hanging up in plain sight like that.
Time to eat; was he really hungry? Or habit? If it were possible to eat breakfast now, instead of just the first meal of the day. Real breakfast. Chilled grapefruit with a maraschino cherry in the center. Cornflakes and cream with sugar. Sugar. Bacon and eggs. Eggs fresh from a domestic hen in a commercial henhouse, not gulls’ like Erika sometimes found. And.…
Six years since the smell of coffee last stung his nostrils. Nevertheless his taste buds responded to the memory and his mouth watered. “Wonder,” he said aloud.
“What?”
She was still standing in the doorway. Opening, really; it couldn’t be called a doorway since it was only the place where he had not built the wall. Before the rains came he must make it into a genuine doorway, perhaps even provide a door of some sort. No real reason to reproach himself for having been too busy to do it before, rather stress what he had accomplished. No need to be ashamed of the shelter’s smallness, meanness, inadequacy; how many other civilized men without training, preparation or experience—or even for that matter, taste for it (he recalled Molly’s contemptuous, “You were never the rugged outdoor type, David”)—could have done as well?
“Few,” he muttered.
He became conscious of her look. “Are you going to go after food, or stand there talking to yourself? It’s getting to be a habit.”
“Um. Might go after rabbits.”
Her derisive glance was not totally unkind. “That case I’ll go down to ocean and see what I can find.”
He followed her through the unfinished wall. To one side the seats fr
om the station wagon served as beds for her and the boy; his own grass pallet was opposite. From the ingenious concealment of a length of bark fastened to the true wall he drew out the rifle swathed in rags.
“Thought you said rabbits.”
“Mmm.” For a moment, holding one hand on the stock, the other on the barrel, he indulged the fantasy of coming suddenly on a deer and dropping it with a cool shot. Too late in the day, though of course it was always possible to be lucky. He smiled wryly as he replaced the rifle.
“All right.” He reached under the seat and drew out another bundle. He broke open the shotgun. The bore looked clean; he poked a rag through it anyway. The ammunition was concealed in several caches; even if two or three were discovered he wouldn’t be stripped clean. Shells and cartridges were not intermixed; finding a cache of one wouldn’t lead intruders to search for the other weapon. Always one jump ahead of the looters. You had to be.
“We’re going now, Dad.”
“All right. Maybe I’ll get something.” Was he merely obstinate in starting off to hunt when experience had shown the only sure way to get food was from the ocean? He selected six shells, letting his fingers fondle them briefly, putting one in the breech of the shotgun. From still another hiding place he retrieved the briefcase. It had been ancient when he discarded it many years ago, an old-fashioned zipperless impediment with a handle, straps, and cranky lock. How it got packed among articles which had been so carefully chosen was an ironical mystery. Ironical, because the obsolete pouch had proven much more valuable than so much he had then thought essential, like the rain-ruined government pamphlets or the never-planted seeds.
He slipped the rawhide strips attached to the handle over his shoulder, put the other five shells, his knife, and flint in the case, and tied the substitute straps. Man the survivor went forth to hunt dangling a briefcase.
The dull, high fog was chilly. If he knew how to make mortar without cement he could have built a fireplace inside the shelter. Warm. Cozy. Cook in the rain. Shelter, they called it honestly; neither would say it was anything more.
The never-accounted-for pile of logs, all roughly of a size, had arbitrarily determined the site when he and Erika had come upon it at the end of the flight. If either of them had been inclined to superstition (some of his old paternal pride in her warmed fleetingly) they might have taken it as some kind of sign. He had laboriously felled and cut and trimmed an equal number to make the three and a half walls. Neither smooth nor snug nor square. The logs had looked so true it hadn’t seemed possible they could fail to fit neatly together like children’s blocks. But when one was laid on another after the ends were notched to interlock, the unnoticed swellings around the knots, the faint twists and curves, made large uneven gaps.
He’d known what to do: one filled the chinks with moss, and daubed heavy mud in and over the cracks to make a tight surface. Unfortunately the moss always dried up and blew away, the sandy mud refused to cling and dropped off persistently as it was applied. In the end Erika had stuffed in grass; as the logs weathered and shrank she used more grass.
He followed the stream upward for a short distance, then struck eastward between the redwoods. People who used to write stories about what would happen instinctively agreed with Erika, leaping for shock-cushioned fancies. Like living in deserted mansions, enjoying unlimited supplies of canned goods from abandoned markets, banding together with like-minded survivors—one of them was always a reservoir of esoteric knowledge about the economy of the American Indian, agronomic chemistry, textile manufacture—to rebuild civilization. Limited imagination, unable to envisage realities.
After they had arrived (“Any further will be too close to Monterey.…”) and hidden the station wagon, obliterating the tire-marks for the half mile from the highway, they listened daily to the car’s radio. Months earlier he had told them just what was bound to occur after It happened. Molly—he barely stopped himself thinking poor Molly—had been so incredulous, even when they were fighting the rest of the refugee traffic to escape, but the announcer sounded as though he were repeating what Mr. Jimmon had said in their living room. Erika never remembered the accuracy of his predictions now.
The redwoods gave place to live oak, pine and some trees he had not been able to identify. Then the growth ended abruptly on the edge of rolling hills where the grass had barely begun to fade. Had he been wrong in not trying to corral some of the cattle then roaming here? The overwhelming difficulties of catching, herding, penning, caring for them came back to impress him anew. He had done the only feasible thing: shot those he could, one at a time. (Erika’s sneer at pioneers who shot cows was unjust; she ate her share of the meat.) Now they’d disappeared. All.
As Erika thought, into a herd salvaged by someone interested in more than today’s loot and food? The news they listened to so raptly denied the likelihood. The gutted, uninhabitable shell of Los Angeles had become a trap; not only of radiation sickness, but typhoid, meningitis, unnamed plagues—Mr. Jimmon wouldn’t have been surprised if one were cholera—swirled among those not in the first wave of escapers. Following the earlier fugitives they brought their sores and lesions to attack a surrounding population already disorganized and hungry. The attempt to set up dislocation camps ended when the national guardsmen were massacred by the frenzied victims.
The radio had been detailed and explicit about destruction in Europe and Asia. (“Eleven classified bombs destroyed Leningrad last night …” “Nothing remains of Marseilles except …” “While Copenhagen and Bristol were being reduced, Archangel and Warsaw …”) News of disaster at home had to be deduced by grudging hints. Chicago and Detroit were hit the same day; the destruction of New York had gone on interminably. One had to piece the cautious items together to begin to understand.
It must be a couple of years since he’d seen any cattle. Miles away, how many he could only guess, were ranch house, stables, corrals, outbuildings. Beyond them were thousands of other grazing acres. The heroic fictional man (homo gernsbacchae) would have found the house, rounded up the cattle, started all over.
And been a fine target for the first passing looters.
When San Francisco went there had been ways of estimating the extent of the disaster. Normally bare State Highway I suddenly became burdened with southbound traffic. He had been sure their hideout would be invaded and overrun, but motorists apparently thought only of getting as far away as possible. What would they do after another hundred miles, when they came within the radius of devastation made by those escaping from Los Angeles? Turn for the Pacific like lemmings?
The radio could get only one station after that. For perhaps a month they heard from Monterey that disaster was being coped with: it would be no time before complete network service was restored; meanwhile, the civilian population was not to panic or heed enemy-spread rumors. Tabulations of dislocated persons was going on rapidly; lost friends and relatives were being listed; reunion would be sped by calmness and fortitude.
Something moved in the grass to his right. A rabbit? Wildcats? The breeze? Standing still, he raised the shotgun level with his hip. There was no further movement. Wariness? Illusion?
Keeping the gun firmly at the ready, he moved one foot ahead of the other. The grass was tall; it was barely possible some large, dangerous animal crouched, waiting to spring. His eyes strained ahead to locate the exact spot, to fire at the betraying sign. He lifted his left foot, set it down silently, lifted the right.
He was thus off balance for a fraction of a second when the largest jackrabbit he’d ever seen bounded out of the grass in frantic hops. Even as he brought the shotgun to his shoulder he knew he couldn’t possibly hit the leaping creature. Stumbling, he willed his finger to relax on the trigger, but it was too late. He fell heavily, sprawling; the gun roared next to his ear, at the same time he felt the briefcase twist and break open.
The grass was not yet dry enough to be brittle; for a long moment he lay where he’d fallen, unwilling to struggle. Another ir
replaceable shell wasted, another simple task bungled.
Mr. Jimmon lay quietly, thinking. Civilization, no matter how you defined it, was a delicate, interdependent mechanism. Suppose he had been not an insurance broker but an Admirable Jimmon, the Elizabethan universal man borne out of time: crack shot, first-class woodsman, mechanic, improviser, chemist, physicist, farmer. Would anything have been qualitatively different? Wasn’t it an imperative that all men had to sink to a common level before there could be any new raising? To believe as he had believed, or thought he believed, that it was possible to preserve in himself and Erika—and the boy? that was a nice question—an isolated vestige of decencies, amenities, attitudes, techniques of mid-twentieth century life without a supporting network of goods and services, mines and factories, was a delusion. A remnant of the primitive idea that man could get help from spirits or a watchful god to overcome obstacles, as though man had anything to depend on but mankind. If mankind sank, man sank with it; the variations in depth were insignificant.
He had known all along; they had known it all along. Wendell had asked promptly, “You mean we can steal cars and things?” All collapse was total collapse. Hiding from the looters and rapists—the rebuilders of tomorrow—did not preserve an enclave from a lost world, it merely kept the present one a little more, an infinitesimally little more, brutal than it might have been.
He sighed and picked himself up. Another shell wasted, another step closer to the moment when he would have no shotgun, no weapon at all except the two bows and arrows. Even on the terms he had originally imagined saving himself and Erika he was failing; each wasted shell narrowed the gap between them and other survivors.
The briefcase.… He looked down; it lay on the grass, shoulder strap and jury-straps broken through. He picked it up; the knife and flint were inside, the shells were spilled around.