Alas, Babylon Read online

  There had been snickers and snorts from the rim of the crowd, and his listeners, except for the reporters from Tampa, Orlando, and the county weekly, had drifted away. In later speeches, elsewhere, he attempted to explain his position, but it was hopeless. Behind his back he was called a fool and a traitor to his state and his race. Randolph Rowzee Bragg, whose great grandfather had been a United States Senator, whose grandfather had been chosen by President Wilson to represent his country as Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extrordinary in time of war, whose father had been elected, without opposition, to half a dozen offices, Randolph was beaten five-to-one in the Democratic primaries for nomination to the state legislature. It was worse than defeat. It was humiliation, and Randy knew he could never run for public office again. He refilled his mug, this time with more bourbon than coffee, and Missouri, his maid, shuffled in the hallway and knocked. He called, “Come in, Mizzoo.”

  Missouri opened the door, pushing a vacuum cleaner and carrying a pail filled with cans, bottles, and rags. Missouri was the wife of Two-Tone Henry, neighbor as well as maid. She was six inches shorter than Two-Tone, who was just Randy’s height, five-eleven, but Two-Tone claimed she outweighed him by a hundred pounds. If this was true, Missouri weighed around two-forty. But on this morning, it seemed to Randy that she had dwindled a bit. “You dieting, Mizzoo?” he said.

  “No, sir, I’m not dietin’. I got nerves.”

  “Nerves!” Missouri had always seemed nerveless, solid, and placid as a broad, deeply rooted tree. “Two-Tone been giving you a bad time again?”

  “No. Two-Tone been behavin’. He down on the dock fishin’ right now. To tell you the truth, Mister Randy, it’s Mrs. McGovern. She follow me around with white gloves.”

  Missouri worked two hours each morning for Randy, and the rest of the day for the McGoverns, who lived half a mile closer to town. The McGoverns were the W. Foxworth McGoverns, the Central Tool and Plate McGoverns, formerly of Cleveland, and the parents of Lib McGovern, whose proper name was Elizabeth. “What do you mean, Mizzoo?” Randy asked, fascinated.

  “After I dust, she follow me around with white gloves to see has I dusted. I know I cleans clean, Mister Randy.”

  “You sure do, Mizzoo.”

  Missouri plugged in the vacuum cleaner, started it, and then shut it off. She had more on her mind. “That ain’t all. You been in that house, Mister Randy. You ever seen so many ashtrays?”

  “What’s wrong with ashtrays?”

  “She don’t allow no ashes in ’em. That poor Mister McGovern, he has to smoke his cigars outside. Then there was that roach. Big roach in the silver drawer. Mrs. McGovern opened that drawer yesterday and saw that roach and screeched like she’d been hit by a scorpion. She made me go through every drawer in the kitchen and dining room and put down fresh paper. Was that roach sent me to Doctor Gunn yesterday. Mrs. McGovern she can’t ’bide bugs or little green lizards and she won’t go out of the house after dark for fear of snakes. I don’t think the McGoverns going to be with us long, Mister Randy, because what’s Florida except bugs and lizards and snakes? I think they leave around May, when bug season starts good. But Miss McGovern, she won’t want to leave. She stuck on you.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  Missouri smiled. “Questions she asks. Like what you eats for breakfast.” Missouri glanced at the decanter on the bar. “And who cooks for you. And does you have other girls.”

  Randy changed the subject. “You say you went to see Doctor Gunn. What’d he say?”

  “Doctor says I’m a complicated case. He says I got high blood, on account of I’m heavy. He says it’s good I’m losin’ weight, because that lowers the high blood, but frettin’ about Mrs. McGovern white-glovin’ me is the wrong way to do it. He says quit eatin’ grits, eat greens. Quit pork, eat fish. And he gives me tranquil pills to take, one each day before I go to work for Mrs. McGovern.”

  “You do that, Mizzoo,” Randy said, and, carrying his mug, walked out on to the screen upstairs porch overlooking grove and river. He then climbed the narrow ship’s ladder that led to the captain’s walk, a rectangle sixteen by eight feet, stoutly planked and railed, on the slate roof. Reputedly, this was the highest spot in Timucuan County. From it he could see all the riverfront estates, docks, and boats, and all of the town of Fort Repose, three miles downstream, held in a crook of sun-flecked silver where the Timucuan joined the broader St. Johns.

  This was his town, or had been. In 1838, during the Seminole Wars, a Lieutenant Randolph Rowzee Peyton, USN, a Virginian, had been dispatched to this river junction with a force of eighteen Marines and two small brass cannon. Lieutenant Peyton journeyed south from Cow’s Ford, its name patriotically changed to Jacksonville, by longboat. His orders from General Clinch were to throttle Indian communications on the rivers, thus protecting the flank of the troops moving down the east coast from St. Augustine. Lieutenant Peyton built a blockhouse of palm logs on the point, his guns covering the channel. In two years, except during one relief expedition overland to New Smyrna, he fought no battles or skirmishes. But he shot game and caught fish for the garrison pot, and studied botany and the culture of citrus. The balmy weather and idyllic life, described in a log now in a teak chest in Randy Braggs office, inspired the Lieutenant to name his outpost Fort Repose.

  When the wars subsided, the fort was decommissioned and Lieutenant Peyton was assigned to sea duty. Four years later he returned to Fort Repose with a wife, a daughter, and a grant from the government for one hundred acres. He had picked this precise spot for his homestead because it was the highest ground in the area, with a steep gradient to the river, ideal for planting the oranges just imported from Spain and the Far East. Peyton’s original house had burned. The present house had been built by his son-in-law, the first Marcus Bragg, a native of Philadelphia and a lawyer eventually sent to the Senate. The captain’s walk had been added for the aging Lieutenant Peyton, so that with his brass spyglass he could observe what happened at the junction of rivers.

  Now the Bragg holdings had dwindled to thirty-six acres, but thirty were planted in prime citrus-navels, mandarins, Valencias, and Temples—all tended and sold in season by the county co-operative. Each year Randy received checks totaling eight to ten thousand dollars from the co-operative. Half went to his older brother, Mark, an Air Force colonel stationed at Offutt Field, Headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, near Omaha. With his share, plus dividends from a trust established by his father, and his occasional fees as an attorney, Randy lived comfortably. Since he drove a new car and paid his bills promptly, the trades people of Fort Repose thought him well-to-do. The rich newcomers classed him with the genteel poor.

  Randy heard music below, and knew that Missouri had started his record player and therefore was waxing the floor. Missouri’s method was to spread the wax, kick off her shoes, wrap her feet in rags, and then polish by dancing. This was probably as efficient, and certainly more fun, than using the electric waxer. He dropped into a deck chair and focused his binoculars on Preacher Henry’s place, looking for that damn bird in the hammock of pines, palmettos, and scrub oak. The Henrys had lived here as long as the Braggs, for the original Henry had come as slave and manservant to Lieutenant Peyton. Now the Henrys owned a four-acre enclave at the east boundary of the Bragg groves. Preacher Henry’s father had bought it from Randolph’s grandfather for fifty dollars an acre long before the first boom, when land was valued only for what it grew. Preacher was hitching his mule, Balaam—the last mule in Timucuan County so far as anyone knew—to the disk. In this month Preacher harrowed for his yam and corn planting, while his wife, Hannah, picked and sold tomatoes and put up kumquat preserves. He ought to go down and talk to Preacher about that damn bird, Randy thought. If anyone was likely to observe and recognize a Carolina parakeet floating around, it was Preacher, because Preacher knew all the birds and their calls and habits. He shifted his glasses to focus on the end of the Henrys’ rickety dock. Two-Tone had five bamboo poles out. Two
-Tone himself reclined on his side, head resting on his hand, so he could watch the corks without effort. Preacher’s younger son, Malachai, who was Randy’s yardman, and reliable as Two-Tone was no-account, was not about.

  Randy heard the phone ringing in his office. The music stopped and he knew Missouri was answering. Presently she called from the piazza, “Mister Randy, it’s for you. It’s Western Union.”

  “Tell her I’ll be right down,” Randy said, lifted himself out of the deck chair, and backed down the ladder, wondering who would be sending him a telegram. It wasn’t his birthday. If some thing important happened, people phoned. Unless he remembered that the Air Force sent telegrams when a man was hurt, or killed. But it wouldn’t be Mark, because for two years Mark had been flying a desk. Still, Mark would get in his flying time each month, if possible, for the extra pay.

  He took the phone from Missouri’s hand and braced himself. “Yes?” he said.

  “I have a telegram, Randy—it’s really a cable-from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It’s signed by Mark. It’s really very peculiar.” Randy let out his breath, relieved. If Mark had sent the message, then Mark was all right. A man can’t pick his relatives, only his friends, but Mark had always been Randy’s friend as well as brother. “What’s the message say?”

  “Well, I’ll read it to you,” Florence said, “and then if you want me to read it again I’ll be glad to. It says, ‘Urgent you meet me at Base Ops McCoy noon today. Helen and children flying to Orlando tonight. Alas, Babylon.’” Florence paused. “That’s what it says, ‘Alas, Babylon.’ Do you want me to repeat the whole thing for you, Randy?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I wonder what ‘Alas, Babylon’ means? Isn’t it out of the Bible?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.” He knew very well what it meant. He felt sick inside.

  “There’s something else, Randy.”

  “Yes?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing. I’ll tell you about it next time I see you and I hope not in those loud pajamas. Goodbye, Randy. You’re sure you have the message?”

  “I’m sure,” he said, hung up and dropped into the swivel chair. Alas, Babylon was a private, a family signal. When they were boys, he and Mark used to sneak up to the back of the First Afro-Repose Baptist Church on Sunday nights to hear Preacher Henry calling down hell-fire and damnation on the sinners in the big cities. Preacher Henry always took his text out of the Revelation of St. John. It seemed that he ended every lurid verse with, “Alas, Babylon!” in a voice so resonant you could feel it, if you rested your fingertips gently on the warped pine boards of the church. Randy and Mark would crouch under the rear window, behind the pulpit, fascinated and wide-eyed, while Preacher Henry described the Babylonian revels, including fornication. Sometimes Preacher Henry made Babylon sound like Miami, and sometimes like Tampa, for he condemned not only fornication—he read the word right out of the Bible—but also horse racing and the dog tracks. Randy could hear him yet: “And I’m telling you right now, all wife-swappers, whisky-drinkers, and crap-shooters are going to get it! And all them who come out of those sin palaces on the beach, whether they be called hotels or motels, wearing minks and jewels and not much else, they is goin’ to get it! And them fast-steppers in Cadillacs and yaller roadsters, they is going to get it! Just like it says here in the Good Book, that Great City that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, that Great City was burned off the face of the earth in an hour. Just one hour. Alas, Babylon!”

  Either Preacher Henry was too old, or the Afro-Repose congregation had tired of his scolding and awful prophecies, for he no longer preached except on those Sundays when Afro-Repose’s new minister, a light-skinned college graduate, was out of town. Randy and Mark never forgot Preacher Henry’s thundering, and from it they borrowed their private synonym for disaster, real or comic, past or future. If one fell off the dock, or lost all his cash at poker, or failed to make time with a promising Pistolville piece, or announced that hurricane or freeze was on the way, the other commiserated with, “Alas, Babylon!”

  But in this telegram it had very special and exact meaning. Mark had secured leave at Christmas season last year, and flown down with Helen and the two children, Ben Franklin and Peyton, for a week. On their last evening at Fort Repose, after the others were in bed, Mark and Randy had sat here, in this office, peering into the bourbon decanter and the deep anxieties of their hearts, trying to divine the future. Christmas had been a time of troubles, a time of confusions at home and tensions abroad, but in his whole life, Randy could recall no other sort of time. There had always been depression, or war, or threat of war.

  Mark, who was in SAC Intelligence, had rolled the old fashioned globe, three feet through, from its place in the window bay, so that the desk lamp shone on it. It was a globe purchased by their grandfather, the diplomat, before the First World War, so that the countries, some with unfamiliar names, seemed oddly scrambled. The continents and seas were the same, which was all that mattered. As Mark talked, his face became grave, almost gaunt, and his index finger traced great circle routes across the cracking surface-missile and bomber trajectories. He then drew a rough chart, with two lines that intersected. The line that continued upward after the intersection belonged to the Soviet Union, and the time of the intersection was right then.

  “How did it happen?” Randy had asked. “Where did we slip?”

  “It wasn’t lack of money,” Mark had replied. “It was state of mind. Chevrolet mentalities shying away from a space-ship world. Nations are like people. When they grow old and rich and fat they get conservative. They exhaust their energy trying to keep things the way they are—and that’s against nature. Oh, the services were to blame too. Maybe even SAC. We designed the most beautiful bombers in the world, and built them by the thousands. We improved and modified them each year, like new model cars. We couldn’t bear the thought that jet bombers themselves might be out of style. Right now we’re in the position of the Federal Navy, with its wooden steam frigates, up against the Confederate iron-clad. It is a state of mind that money alone won’t cure.”

  “What will?” Randy asked.

  “Men. Men like John Ericsson to invent a Monitor to face the Merrimac. Bold men, audacious men, tenacious men. Impatient, odd-ball men like Rickover pounding desks for his atomic sub. Ruthless men who will fire the deadheads and ass-kissers. Rude men who will tell the unimaginative, business-as-usual, seven carbon sons of bitches to go take a jump at a galloping goose. Young men because we’ve got to be a young country again. If we get that kind of men we may hack it if the other side gives us time.”

  “Will they?”

  Mark had spun the globe and shrugged. “I don’t know. If I think the balloon is about to go up I’m going to send Helen and the kids down here. When a man dies, and his children die with him, then he is dead entirely, leaving nothing to show.”

  “Do you think they’d be safer here than in Omaha? After all, we’ve got the Jax Naval Air complex to the north of us, and Homestead and Miami to the south, and Eglin to the northwest, and MacDill and Tampa to the southwest, and the Missile Test Center on Canaveral to the east, and McCoy and Orlando right at the front door, only forty miles off. What about fallout?”

  “There isn’t any place that’ll be absolutely safe. With fallout and radiation, it’ll be luck—the size of configuration of the weapons, altitude of the fireball, direction of the wind. But I do know Helen and the children won’t have much chance in Omaha. SAC Headquarters has got to be the enemy’s number one target. I’ll bet they’ve programmed three five-megaton IC’s for Offutt, and since our house is eight miles from the base any kind of near-miss does it”—Mark snapped his fingers—“like that. Not that I think it’ll do the enemy any good-command automatically shifts to other combat control centers and anyway all our crews know their targets. But they’ll hit SAC Headquarters, hoping for temporary paralysis. A little delay is all they’d need. I’ll ha
ve to be there, at Offutt, in the Hole, but the least a man can do is give his children a chance to grow up, and I think they’d have a better chance in Fort Repose than Omaha. So if I see it’s coming, and there is time, I’ll send Helen and the kids down here. And I’ll try to give you a warning, so you can get set for it.”

  “How?”

  Mark smiled. “I won’t call you up and say, ‘Hey, Randy, the Russians are about to attack us.’ Phones aren’t secure, and I don’t think my C-in-C, or the Air Staff, would approve. But if you hear ‘Alas, Babylon,’ you’ll know that’s it.”

  Randy had forgotten none of this talk. A week or so later, thinking about Mark’s words, Randy had decided to go into politics. He would start in the state legislature, and in a few years be ready to run for Congress. He’d be the kind of leader Mark wanted.

  It hadn’t worked out that way. He couldn’t even beat Porky Logan, a gross man whose vote could be bought for fifty bucks, who bragged that he had not got beyond the seventh grade but that he could get more new roads and state money for Timucuan County than any half-baked radical, undoubtedly backed by the burrheads and the N.A.A.C.P., who didn’t even know that the Supreme Court was controlled by Moscow. So Randy’s fiasco had been inspired by that night, and now the night bore something worse.

  He wondered what Mark was doing in Puerto Rico, and why his warning had come from there. It should have come from Washington or London or Omaha or Colorado Springs rather than San Juan. It was true that SAC had a big base, Ramey, in Puerto Rico, but—It was no use guessing. He’d know at noon. Of one thing he was certain, if Mark expected it to come, it would probably come. His brother was no alarmist. Randy sometimes allowed emotions to distort logic, Mark never did. Mark was capable of calculating odds, in war or poker, to the final decimal, which was why he was a Deputy Chief of Intelligence at SAC, and soon would have his star.