“I wonder where they got it,” Stuart said.
“Ingenious,” the dying man said, “isn’t it? I suppose all the gasoline and kerosene are gone by now. Used right up. We’ll be seeing a lot of strange transportation from now on. Or rather, you will.”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Stuart said,
“I don’t feel sorry for myself or anyone,” the dying man said as he carefully laid out the chess pieces. “This is a nice set,” he said. “Made in Mexico, I notice. Hand-carved, no doubt… but very fragile.”
“Explain to me again how the bishop moves,” Stuart said.
Overhead, the Hamilton Air Force Base balloon loomed larger as it drifted closer. The two men in the basement bent over their chess board, paying no attention to it. Possibly it was taking pictures. Or possibly it was on a strategic mission; it might have a walkie-talkie aboard and was in contact with the Sixth Army units south of San Francisco. Who knew? Who cared? The balloon drifted by as the dying man advanced his king’s pawn two spaces to open the game.
“The game begins,” the dying man said. And then he added in a low voice, “For you, anyhow, Stuart. A strange, unfamiliar, new game ahead … you can even bet your pillow case of money, if you want.”
Grunting, Stuart pondered his own men and decided to move a rook’s pawn as his opening gambit—and knew, as soon as he had touched it, that it was an idiotic move.
“Can I take it back?” he asked hopefully.
“When you touch a piece you must move it,” Ken said, bringing out one of his knights.
“I don’t think that’s fair; I mean, I’m just learning,” Stuart said. He glared at the dying man, but the sallow face was adamant. “Okay,” he said resignedly, this time moving his king’s pawn, as Ken had done. I’ll watch his moves and do what he does, he decided. That way I’ll be safer.
From the balloon, now directly overhead, bits of white paper scattered, drifted and fluttered down. Stuart and the dying man paused in their game. One of the bits of paper fell near them in the basement and Ken reached out and picked it up. He read it, passed it to Stuart.
“Burlingame!” Stuart said, reading it. It was an appeal for volunteers, for the Army. “They want us to hike from here to Burlingame and be inducted? That’s fifty or sixty miles, all the way down this side of the Bay and around. They’re nuts!”
“They are,” Ken said. “They won’t get a soul.”
“Why hell, I can’t even make it down to LeConte Street to the relief station,” Stuart said. He felt indignant and he glared at the Hamilton Field balloon as it drifted on. They’re not going to get me to join up, he said to himself. Fork that.
“It says,” Ken said, reading the back of the proclamation, “that if you reach Burlingame they guarantee you water, food, cigarettes, anti-plague shots, treatment for radiation burns. How about that? But no girls.”
“Can you get interested in sex?” He was amazed. “Christ, I haven’t felt the slightest urge since the first bomb fell; it’s like the thing dropped off in fear, fell right off.”
“That’s because the diencephalic center of the brain suppresses the sex instinct in the face of danger,” Ken said. “But it’ll return.”
“No,” Stuart said, “because any child born would be a freak; there shouldn’t be any intercourse for say around ten years. They ought to make it a law. I can’t stand the idea of the world populated by freaks because I have had personal experience; one worked at Modern TV Sales with me, or rather in the service department. One was enough. I mean, they ought to hang that Bluthgeld up by his balls for what he did.”
“What Bluthgeld did in the ’70s,” Ken said, “is insignificant when compared to this.” He indicated the ruins of the basement around them.
“I’ll grant you that,” Stuart said, “but it was the start.”
Overhead, now, the balloon was drifting back the way it had come. Perhaps it had run out of little messages and was returning to Hamilton Field, over on the other side of the Bay or wherever it was.
Gazing up at it, Stuart said, “Talk to us some more.”
“It can’t,” Ken said. “That’s all it had to say; it’s a very simple creature. Are you going to play, or should I move your pieces? Either is satisfactory to me.”
With great caution, Stuart moved a bishop—and again knew at once that it had been the wrong move; he could tell by the dying man’s face.
In the corner of the basement, among the cement blocks, something agile and frightened plopped to safety, scurried and twittered with anxiety as it spied them. Stuart’s attention wandered from the board to the rat, and he looked about for his broom handle.
“Play!” Ken said angrily.
“Okay, okay,” Stuart said, feeling grumpy about it. He made a random move, his attention still on the rat.
VII
In front of the pharmacy in Point Reyes Station, at nine in the morning, Eldon Blaine waited. Under his arm he held tightly his worn briefcase tied together with string. Meanwhile, inside the building, the pharmacist removed chains and struggled with the metal doors; Eldon listened to the sound and felt impatience.
“Just a minute,” the pharmacist called, his voice muffled. As he at last got the doors open he apologized, “This was formerly the back end of a truck. You have to use both your hands and feet to make it work. Come on in, mister.” He held the high door aside, and Eldon saw into the dark interior of the pharmacy, with its unlit electric light bulb which hung from the ceiling by an ancient cord.
“What I’m here for,” Eldon said rapidly, “is a wide-spectrum antibiotic, the kind used in clearing up a respiratory infection.” He made his need sound casual; he did not tell the pharmacist how many towns in Northern California he had visited in the last few days, walking and hitching rides, nor did he mention how sick his daughter was. It would only jack up the price asked, he knew. And anyhow he did not see much actual stock, here. Probably the man did not have it.
Eyeing him, the pharmacist said, “I don’t see anything with you; what do you have in exchange, assuming I have what you’re after?” In a nervous manner he smoothed his thinning gray hair back; he was an elderly, small man, and it was obvious that he suspected Eldon of being a napper. Probably he suspected everyone.
Eldon said, “Where I come from I’m known as the glasses man.” Unzipping his briefcase, he showed the pharmacist the rows of intact and nearly-intact lenses, frames, and lenses in frames, scavenged from all over the Bay Area, especially from the great deposits near Oakland. “I can compensate almost any eye defect,” he said. “I’ve got a fine variety, here. What are you, near- or far-sighted or astigmatic? I can fix you up in ten minutes, by changing around a lens or two.”
“Far-sighted,” the pharmacist said slowly, “but I don’t think I have what you want.” He looked at the rows of glasses longingly.
With anger, Eldon said, “Then why didn’t you say so right off, so I can go on? I want to make Petaluma today; there’s a lot of drugstores there—all I have to do is find a hay truck going that way.”
“Couldn’t you trade me a pair of glasses for something else?” the pharmacist asked plaintively, following after him as he started away. “I got a valuable heart medicine, quinidine gluconate; you could most likely trade it for what you want. Nobody else in Marin County has quinidine gluconate but me.”
“Is there a doctor around here?” Eldon said, pausing at the edge of the weed-infested county road with its several stores and houses.
“Yes,” the pharmacist said, with a nod of pride. “Doctor Stockstill; he migrated here several years ago. But he doesn’t have any drugs. Just me.”
Briefcase under his arm, Eldon Blaine walked on along the county road, listening hopefully for the pop-popping noise of the wood-burning truck motor rising out of the stillness of the early-morning California countryside. But the sound faded. The truck, alas, was going the other way.
This region, directly north of San Francisco, had once been owned by a fe
w wealthy dairy ranchers; cows had cropped in these fields, but that was gone now, along with the meat-animals, the steer and sheep. As everyone knew, an acre of land could function better as a source of grains or vegetables. Around him now he saw closely-planted rows of corn, an early-ripening hybrid, and between the rows, great hairy squash plants on which odd yellow squash like bowling balls grew. This was an unusual eastern squash which could be eaten skin and seeds and all; once it had been disdained in California valleys … but that was changed, now.
Ahead, a little group of children ran across the little used road on their way to school; Eldon Blaine saw their tattered books and lunch pails, heard their voices, thought to himself how calming this was, other children well and busy, unlike his own child. If Gwen died, others would replace her. He accepted that unemotionally. One learned how. One had to.
The school, off to the right in the saddle of two hills: most of it the remains of a single-story modern building, put up no doubt just before the war by ambitious, public-spirited citizens who had bonded themselves into a decade of indebtedness without guessing that they would not live to make payment. Thus they had, without intending it, gotten their grammar school free.
Its windows made him laugh. Salvaged from every variety of old rural building, the windows were first tiny, then huge, with ornate boards holding them in place. Of course the original windows had been blown instantly out. Glass, he thought. So rare these days … if you own glass in any form you are rich. He gripped his briefcase tighter as he walked.
Several of the children, seeing a strange man, stopped to peer at him with anxiety augmented by curiosity. He grinned at them, wondering to himself what they were studying and what teachers they had. An ancient senile old lady, drawn out of retirement, to sit once more behind a desk? A local man who happened to hold a college degree? Or most likely some of the mothers themselves, banded together, using a precious armload of books from the local library.
A voice from behind him called; it was a woman, and as he turned he heard the squeak-squeak of a bicycle. “Are you the glasses man?” she called again, severe and yet attractive, with dark hair, wearing a man’s cotton shirt and jeans, pedaling along the road after him, bouncing up and down with each rut. “Please stop. I was talking to Fred Quinn our druggist just now and he said you were by.” She reached him, stopped her bicycle, panting for breath. “There hasn’t been a glasses man by here in months; why don’t you come oftener?”
Eldon Blaine said, “I’m not here selling; I’m here trying to pick up some antibiotics.” He felt irritated. “I have to get to Petaluma,” he said, and then he realized that he was gazing at her bike with envy; he knew it showed on his face.
“We can get them for you,” the woman said. She was older than he had first thought; her face was lined and a little dark, and he guessed that she was almost forty. “I’m on the Planning Committee for everyone, here in West Marin; I know we can scare up what you need, if you’ll just come back with me and wait. Give us two hours. We need several pairs … I’m not going to let you go.” Her voice was firm, not coaxing.
“You’re not Mrs. Raub, are you?” Eldon Blaine asked.
“Yes,” she said. “You recognized me—how?”
He said, “I’m from the Bolinas area; we know all about what you’re doing up here. I wish we had someone like you on our Committee.” He felt a little afraid of her. Mrs. Raub always got her own way, he had heard. She and Larry Raub had organized West Main after the Cooling-off; before, in the old days, she had not amounted to anything and the Emergency had given her her chance, as it had many people, to show what she was really made of.
As they walked back together, Mrs. Raub said, “Who are the antibiotics for? Not yourself; you look perfectly healthy to me.”
“My little girl is dying,” he said.
She did not waste sympathetic words; there were none left in the world, anymore—she merely nodded. “Infectious hepatitis?” she asked. “How’s your water supply? Do you have a chlorinator? If not—”
“No, it’s like sore throat,” he said.
“We heard from the satellite last night that some German drug firms are in operation again, and so if we’re lucky we’ll be seeing German drugs back on the market, at least on the East Coast.”
“You get the satellite?” Excitedly, he said, “Our radio went dead, and our handy is down somewhere near South San Francisco, scavenging for refrigeration parts and won’t be back probably for another month. Tell me; what’s he reading now? The last time we picked him up, it was so darn long ago—he was on Pascal’s Provincial Letters.”
Mrs. Raub said, “Dangerfield is now reading Of Human Bondage.”
“Isn’t that about that fellow who couldn’t shake off that girl he met?” Eldon said. “I think I remember it from the previous time he read it, several years ago. She kept coming back into his life. Didn’t she finally ruin his life, in the end?”
“I don’t know; I’m afraid we didn’t pick it up the previous time.”
“That Dangerfield is really a great disc jockey,” Eldon said, “the best I’ve ever heard even before the Emergency. I mean, we never miss him; we generally get a turnout of two hundred people every night at our fire station. I think one of us could fix that damn radio, but our Committee ruled that we had to let it alone and wait until the handy’s back. If he ever is … the last one disappeared on a scavenging trip.”
Mrs. Raub said, “Now perhaps your community understands the need of standby equipment, which I’ve always said is essential.”
“Could—we send a representative up to listen with your group and report back to us?”
“Of course,” Mrs. Raub said. “But—”
“It wouldn’t be the same,” he agreed. “It’s not—” He gestured. What was it about Dangerfield, sitting up there above them in the satellite as it passed over them each day? Contact with the world … Dangerfield looked down and saw everything, the rebuilding, all the changes both good and bad; he monitored every broadcast, recording and preserving and then playing back, so that through him they were joined.
In his mind, the familiar voice now gone so long from their community—he could summon it still, hear the rich low chuckle, the earnest tones, the intimacy, and never anything phony. No slogans, no Fourth-of-July expostulations, none of the stuff that had gotten them all where they were now.
Once he had heard Dangerfield say, “Want to know the real reason I wasn’t in the war? Why they carefully shot me off into space a little bit in advance? They knew better than to give me a gun … I would have shot an officer.” And he had chuckled, making it a joke; but it was true, what he said, everything he told them was true, even when it was made funny. Dangerfield hadn’t been politically reliable, and yet now he sat up above them passing over their heads year in, year out. And he was a man they believed.
Set on the side of a ridge, the Raub house overlooked West Marin County, with its vegetable fields and irrigation ditches, an occasional goat staked out, and of course the horses; standing at the living room window, Eldon Blaine saw below him, near a farmhouse, a great Percheron which no doubt pulled a plow … pulled, too, an engineless automobile along the road to Sonoma County when it was time to pick up supplies.
He saw now a horse-car moving along the county road; it would have picked him up if Mrs. Raub hadn’t found him first, and he would have soon reached Petaluma.
Down the hillside below him pedaled Mrs. Raub on her way to find him his antibiotics; to his amazement she had left him alone in her house, free to nap everything in sight, and now he turned to see what there was. Chairs, books, in the kitchen, food and even a bottle of wine, clothes in all the closets—he roamed about the house, savoring everything; it was almost like before the war, except that of course the useless electrical appliances had been thrown out long ago.
Through the back windows of the house he saw the green wooden side of a large water-storage tank. The Raubs, he realized, had their own supply of water.
Going outside he saw a clear, untainted stream.
At the stream a kind of contraption lurked, like a cart on wheels. He stared at it; extensions from it were busily filling buckets with water. In the center of it sat a man with no arms or legs. The man nodded his head as if conducting music, and the machinery around him responded. It was a phocomelus, Eldon realized, mounted on his phocomobile, his combination cart and manual grippers which served as mechanical substitutes for his missing limbs. What was he doing, stealing the Raubs’ water?
“Hey,” Eldon said.
At once the phocomelus turned his head; his eyes blazed at Eldon in alarm, and then something whacked into Eldon’s middle—he was thrown back, and as he wobbled and struggled to regain his balance he discovered that his arms were pinned at his sides. A wire mesh had whipped out at him from the phocomobile, had fastened in place. The phocomelus’ means of defense.
“Who are you?” the phocomelus said, stammering in his wary eagerness to know. “You don’t live around here; I don’t know you.”
“I’m from Bolinas,” Eldon said. The metal mesh crushed in until he gasped. “I’m the glasses man. Mrs. Raub, she told me to wait here.”
Now the mesh seemed to ease. “I can’t take chances,” the phocomelus said. “I won’t let you go until June Raub comes back.” The buckets once more began dipping in the water; they filled methodically until the tank lashed to the phocomobile was slopping over.
“Are you supposed to be doing that?” Eldon asked. “Taking water from the Raubs’ stream?”
“I’ve got a right,” the phocomelus said. “I give back more than I take, to everybody around here.”
“Let me go,” Eldon said. “I’m just trying to get medicine for my kid; she’s dying.”
“ ‘My kid, she’s dying,’ ” the phocomelus mimicked, picking up the quality of his voice with startling accuracy. He rolled away from the stream, now, closer to Eldon. The ’mobile gleamed; all its parts were new-looking and shiny. It was one of the best-made mechanical constructions that Eldon Blaine had ever seen.
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