A Town Is Drowning Read online

  She had him. She could feel it, and she was never wrong. Let him nibble at the bait a while; let him taste it and want it, and bite down into it all by himself—bite down on that buried “we” that would hook him, deep and clean and gasping.

  It had looked like a mighty dull autumn, but things were looking better, thought Sharon Froman contentedly. True, if she was going to help this interesting Mr. Chesbro with the curious wife it woud mean deferring work on her novel again. Too bad. But she didn’t mind the sacrifice. She had made it often enough before.

  Regional organization. Hammer hard. Grants from the government? Sure. Tax breaks from the northern states, panicky attempts to match whatever the South might offer? Sure, thought Artie Chesbro; he could arrange that easily. And then?

  No more waiting for the legislature to approve or for the assayers to report or for any of the other soul-killing delays that had been the sum of his life; he would be in, he would be at the top of something big. Where he had always wanted to be. Where he deserved to be.

  He looked across to where his wife had gone. And her, he thought, satisfied, she would learn at last! Everything he had had to put up with from her, over. Just because her father had a little money she’d thought she owned him—him! Artie Chesbro!

  He cleared his throat. “We’d better get some sleep, Miss Froman,” he told the girl. “We’ve got to talk about this in the morning. I think there’s a good deal in it— for both of us.”

  Mrs. Goudeket almost pounded the floor with her fists. Again on her feet! Always this Miss Froman would land on her feet! Without hard work, without virtue, always by black magic being in the right place, always by the smiling face and the straightforward look fooling the one person she had to fool. And this time it wasn’t one man, it was two. So let Mickey Groff slip through one snare, she had Artie Chesbro caught in another. God, You call this fair? she demanded.

  Better she should have left her at Goudeket’s Green Acres. What could she have caught there? That star of stage and screen and brissim, Dave Wax? The horse-wire expert, Mr. Semmel? But no! She had to throw the girl out—into this!

  Mrs. Goudeket moaned and put her fingers in her ears to shut out the maddening words.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  That star of stage, screen and brissim shouted fuzzily at the door: “Go to hell! Let me sleep!”

  “Dave!” It was Mr. Semmers voice. “There’s some men here. They want to talk to you.”

  Dave Wax made an obscene suggestion to Mr. Semmel. He was a tummeler, not the manager of the hotel; let Mrs. Goudeket come back and talk if somebody should do it—“Wait a minute. What’d you say, Semmel?”

  The concessionaire repeated it. “The flood’s over?” demanded Dave Wax. “The roads are dry?” He staggered over to the window to see the miracle for himself.

  Semmel let himself in. “They came in a boat.”

  “Oh.” But it was no surprise. It was still raining. “All right. I’ll come down.”

  He found himself hurrying in spite of himself. It was only a couple of minutes before he was hurrying through the lobby. He saw with a shock that the sofas and chairs in the lobby were occupied—guests too panicky to sleep in their rooms, too exhausted to stay awake; they were sprawled and snoring.

  The men from the boat were in the kitchen drinking coffee that the cooks had somehow contrived to make. “I’m Brayer—Hebertown police chief. You people all right here?”

  “All right?” You call a hundred and sixty scared, sore guests all right? You call wondering if the whole damn place is going to float away all right? “I guess so,” Dave Wax said slowly. He was almost afraid to ask: “How-how is it outside?”

  The man rubbed at his mustache. “It’s a flood,” he said succinctly. “Ask me in the morning. Anyway, we’re beginning to get a little organized.” His voice took on a mechanical, rehearsed quality. “Don’t let anybody drink water unless it’s been boiled for ten minutes. Use up everything you can that’s in the refrigerators tomorrow morning. What’s in the freezers ought to be good till tomorrow night, if you don’t open them too often. What you don’t eat by then, don’t eat. Throw it away. You probably don’t have any water pressure, do you? Your own electric pump, I guess? All right; you’ll have to set up latrines—use chamber pots if you have to. Dump them in the river to empty them—you’re far enough away from everything here.”

  “Wait a minute.” Dave was a little slow to grasp the implications of it. “You mean even by tomorrow night we won’t have the power back?”

  “I’ll consider us very lucky,” the police chief said heavily, “if Hebertown ever has power again.”

  He got up. “They say that by daybreak the weather will be clear enough for helicopters. If you need anything—a doctor if there’s an emergency, anything like that—hang a white sheet out of a window and keep somebody standing by. When a helicopter or boat patrol comes by they’ll see it and investigate; then you wave another sheet at them and they’ll see that somebody gets here.”

  Dave Wax and Mr. Semmel watched Brayer and his boatman chug away. “Hebertown Chief of Police,” said Wax. “Isn’t he a little out of his jurisdiction?”

  “He said they were looking for somebody. Wanted to know if we’d picked up any refugees. God forbid.” Mr. Semmel shook his head firmly. “A mess. Now, in New Hampshire there would never—”

  It was cracking daylight when Brayer got back to Hebertown. He sat down in the police station, now an emergency shelter with men, women and children sprawled all over everywhere, and dazedly pushed away the coffee somebody offered him. He hoped he would never see another cup of coffee again.

  He said heavily, “Henry’ll turn up. I have a lot of confidence in Artie Chesbro’s instinct for self-preservation; he’ll find a place to hole up in.”

  “Sure, Red.” The head of Hebertown’s Civil Defense Squad, an organization with an honorable history extending back nearly four hours, dug his fingers into the bags under his eyes and tried to stay awake. He owned a ready-to-wear establishment on North Front, and he had once allowed the Red Cross to use his second-floor storeroom as a fund-drive headquarters, a record of achievement which had done very little to fit him for staying up all night. “I went down at eleven o’clock to look at the water,” he said meditatively. “I didn’t want my cellar flooded again, like in thirty-nine, so I shoveled dirt up against the windows, and then I went home to bed.” He laughed. He had gone by his store again two hours later—in a boat—and had had to bend down to look through the windows of the loft the Red Cross once had used. “I heard on the radio a list of all the cities that were hit—the worst ones. They didn’t even mention Hebertown…Say, what are you going to tell Bess Starkman?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Gray light filtered through the dirty panes of the second-floor window. Arthur Chesbro woke slowly, aching in every bone. When he opened his eyes stickily and peered across the grimy little room he could not at first believe what he saw.

  “Polly!” he choked, amazement and outrage blended. His wife, apparently unclothed, was snuggled close to old Harry Starkman, under a single blanket.

  She looked up, smiling. “Hush.” she said. “I finally got him to sleep. His chest sounds terrible and he has a fever, but if he sleeps he can’t be too bad—for now.”

  She got up gracefully, managing to swirl the blanket around her without showing, Chesbro hoped, too much. Then he noted that the youngster from the hotel was gawking. He cleared his throat loudly and the kid looked away.

  Mrs. Goudeket grunted to her feet. “Fever?” she asked. “Let me.” She went to the sleeping old man and felt his forehead. “He’s burning up,” she announced grimly. “An old man to walk through the rain and then he got his lungs full of gasoline fumes. I suppose it’s pneumonia.

  They were silent.

  “Excuse me,” said Mrs. Goudeket. “I’m going downstairs, nobody should follow me until I come back.”

  Mickey Groff thought: sensible woman. Somebody had to speak u
p. He stood for a moment over Sam Zehedi. The poor guy had died hard, fighting it; his eyes were ugly and his mouth contorted. His face in the dim light was bluish, the hue of a swimmer’s lips when he’s been in too long on a cool day.

  Groff went to the window. Some time during the night the rain had lightened; it pattered now instead of drumming. There was mist. He struggled with the window and managed to inch it open against the swelling of its frame and old incrustations of paint. Fresh air swept gratifyingly through the storage room—and then he thought of the burgess.

  Sharon Froman understood his glance. She threw her blanket over the old man and said, “He’ll be all right.” She stretched stiffly. “The old woman’s taking forever,” she said.

  Arthur Chesbro said firmly, “Mrs. Chesbro will be the next to go downstairs. To find her clothes and put them on.”

  Polly Chesbro grinned amiably. “This thing is scratchy,” she said.

  Groff leaned out and peered through the mist. All he could tell was that there was water below; how much of it the enigmatic surface did not say.

  Mrs. Goudeket puffed up the stairs, a big carton in her arms. “Cheese wafers,” she announced. “Somebody open them.”

  Polly glided to the door, sculptural in her improvised robe, and went down the stairs.

  McCue, with the appetite of youth and an athlete, tore open the corrugated cardboard and began gobbling wafers from the first carton he came to.

  “Manners, Dickie.” Sharon Froman smiled. He swallowed his mouthful convulsively and eyed her.

  “Help yourself,” he said coldly. “You’re no cripple.”

  “Why Dickie” she purred. “After all we’ve been to each other!”

  Mrs. Goudeket looked up. “What’s this?” she snapped.

  Sharon looked amused and said nothing.

  “I don’t know what she’s talking about,” McCue said. The tone automatically indicted, tried, convicted and sentenced him for unlawful cohabitation. “I’ll talk to you later,” Mrs. Goudeket promised grimly.

  Dick McCue found the cheese wafers were ashes in his mouth. He chewed mechanically and wondered how he had managed to get simultaneously on all these s.o.b. lists when all he wanted was a little innocent fun for free—

  He glanced at Sharon sullenly and saw she was chatting animatedly with Chesbro about a publicity campaign enlisting all media, the possibility of newspaper and magazine space and radio-TV time being donated if they played their cards right. “Tear their heartstrings out.” she urged. “Get editorials; I’ve got some contacts in New York. You’d be The Man Who Saved the Valley, Mr. Chesbro.’

  ‘

  “Call me Arthur,” he said. “We’re going to be working closely together; I can see that. My prestige and your ideas—”

  Polly Chesbro came upstairs in her suit and raincoat; they were wrinkled and damply steaming out the smell of wool but they were no longer sopping. She was carrying her blanket; she draped it over the sighing form of the burgess. His breathing was almost a crow. “He’ll never make it without penicillin fast,” she commented, helped herself to a box of the wafers and began to eat methodically.

  Mickey Groff looked around; nobody was making a move for the stairs. He stepped over the body of Sam Zehedi and went down. First outside into the drizzle, where water was ankle-deep. He attended to his needs and went back into the store. A bottle of pop caught his eye and he was suddenly burning with thirst. He tore off the cap on a wall opener and gulped it down as fast as the stuff would gurgle from the narrow neck; after a queasy moment he ran for the door and made it in time. The pop gushed up again violently. He sat down, swaying, on the wooden step up to the door and retched a couple of times experimentally. He’d have to be careful eating and drinking for a while. He had got a stiff dose of the fumes.

  Zehedi’s blue-green, well-worn panel truck was just visible down the road in water to the hubcaps, looking bulky and competent. The goddam thing. And there stood the two gas pumps, goddam them too, and if you could only get the pumps to work you could pump gas from their underground tank into the truck and away they’d buzz, getting somehow into town where the old man could be pumped full of penicillin and dosed with oxygen as needed instead of dying like a sick dog in this kennel.

  He went wearily upstairs and said, “Next.”

  Sharon got up and said, “Excuse me, Arthur.”

  “Keep out of the cash drawer,” Mrs. Goudeket said sourly.

  “Did you leave anything?” Sharon asked, wide-eyed. Arthur Chesbro laughed a laugh which turned hastily into a cough when Mrs. Goudeket glared his way.

  McCue said suddenly, “I think the rain’s stopped.” They crowded to the window; he was right. The drizzle had ended and the mist was clearing.

  “Good,” Chesbro said. “They’ll be able to get helicopters up. It’s only a matter of time now until they spot us.”

  Groff said, “I don’t think the old man can wait.”

  Chesbro spread his hands eloquently. “What can we do?”

  “Pack him in on our backs,” Groff said.

  Chesbro said soothingly, “I don’t think that’d be practical, Mickey. We’re all exhausted, we’ve all had a touch of gas poisoning. We know more or less where we are and we know which way the town is, but we don’t know what lies between us and the town. We may just circle around until we drop from exhaustion. There’s a better chance of us being spotted if we stay in this place.”

  “We’re three able-bodied men,” Groff said, his temper rising. “We can take turns. A helicopter’s just as likely to spot us on a road as it is to spot us here. Chesbro, I’d like to sit here and wait to be rescued too; I don’t have a yen to go sloshing through the water with Starkman on my back either. But I don’t think he can wait. We’ve got to do everything we can.”

  “I’ve got my manuscript to carry,” Sharon said apologetically.

  “We’ll do everything we can,” Chesbro said reasonably. “But what’s the sense of endangering all of us uselessly? The trip wouldn’t be good for him. And the women—my wife isn’t strong, Mickey, she shouldn’t be subjected to—”

  “Arthur,” said his wife. “Shut up.”

  She smiled pleasantly at the gathering. “Who’s going to be the first to pack him?”

  Naturally that’s me, of course, Dick McCue thought sourly, sliding in the mud. I’m an athlete, so they figure I’m Superman or somebody. He missed his footing and nearly fell. They might just as well have carried him pickaback as on this door, wrenched out of the upper rooms…From behind him Mickey Groff called: “Time for you to take over, Chesbro.”

  McCue relinquished his end of the improvised stretcher to Artie Chesbro. His arms felt wrenched out of their sockets, and they had covered five hundred yards, at the most.

  The rain hadn’t really stopped, not quite. There was still water to be wrung out of the scudding stratus, and it came down in little bursts of droplets. Polly Chesbro stumbled along beside the sick man, trying to keep the rain off him when it came, ready with a smile when his eyes jolted open and, for a moment, he stared wonderingly about him.

  It was going to be a long trip. They had had to skirt around a sort of contour line instead of following the road. Polly wondered briefly if there would come a point where the road dipped down into the streaming water, and there wasn’t any useful hill handy. She didn’t know this road at all; had seen Hebertown only once or twice before last night; had only the vaguest impression of what the terrain might be like. For that matter, none of them knew much about the country they were hiking across. On this Day, her mind inscribed in a crabbed hand, our Party suffered the Loss of Its two Aboriginals, reposing our Destiny to the care of the Greatest Guide of All.

  Mickey Groff was remembering the .Ligurian coast of Italy. The American bombers had smashed it flat from Anzio to Genoa, and Groff had thought proudly, a little selfishly, that no such destruction could ever come to his own country. But this was as bad, at least as bad. They had come across few houses, but ther
e were ominous objects sailing down stream that once had been houses and barns and all the other structures man builds and his enemies sweep away. He tried to reconstruct the terrain as it must have been before the flood, but there was a rightness about the broad sheets of water that made it impossible. They were there; they must always have been there. Why did people build their homes down near the water, anyhow? Was a burbling brook in the back yard worth having if suddenly, unpredictably, it could destroy your home?

  He wondered if the War Department was able to look itself in the face that morning, remembering the careful charts the colonels had shown him that called for dispersal, concealment, removal of such essential industries as his own. Suppose, they had said gravely, New York should take a bomb; you’d be out of commission; you must move out of the city to where you can be safe, since the production of your shop is of great importance to the country’s defense. And they had showed him the maps, marked “Secret,” of the instrument plants in Connecticut, the explosives factories in the Delaware valley, the electronics laboratories along the Jersey streams.

  Two-forty-eight, two-forty-nine, two-fifty. “All right, Dick,” he told the golf pro, “you can take over for a while.” He surrendered the back end of the stretcher and looked around.

  “Wait a minute!” he ordered sharply. “What’s that up there?”

  There was a private dirt road slanting down toward them, and something was moving. They all set up a waving and bellowing, and a group of horsemen appeared on the rim of the highway and came toward them, three or four of them, picking their way through the mud.

  “The United States Cavalry,” said Polly Chesbro clearly, “is charging to the rescue.”

  Two of the riders were men in chaps and sombreros and the third was a thirteen-year-old girl. They goggled unbelievingly at the litter bearers. They were from a dude ranch up in the hills, and they were on their way to Hebertown to complain because their lights and phone were off.