Alas, Babylon Read online

  Randy knew there were a thousand things he should be doing, but he couldn’t think of any of them. He became aware of a rhumba rhythm in the living room, and presently Missouri skated into view, feet bundled with waxing cloths, shoulders moving and hips bouncing with elephantine elegance, intent on her polishing. He yelled, “Missouri!”

  “Yessir?” Her forward motion stopped, but her hips continued to wobble and feet shuffle.

  “Quit that struttin’ and make up the three bedrooms on the front. Colonel Bragg’s family will be here tomorrow.”

  “Oh, ain’t that nice! Just like last year.”

  “No, not like last year. The Colonel’s not coming with them. Just Mrs. Bragg and Ben Franklin and Peyton.”

  Missouri peered through the door at him. “Mister Randy, you don’t look good. Them telegrams are yellow death. You get bad news or something? Ain’t nuthin’ happen to Colonel Mark?”

  “No. I’m driving over to McCoy to meet him at noon.”

  “Oh, that’s good. How come the children up north get out of school so quick?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll dust good, and make up the beds, and put towels and soaps in the bathrooms just like last year.”

  “Thanks, Mizzoo. That’s fine.”

  “Caleb’s going to be happy to see Ben Franklin,” Missouri said. Caleb was Missouri’s son, and just Ben’s age, thirteen. Last year, Randy had let them take the boat out on the river, fishing, just as Randy, as a boy, had fished with Caleb’s uncle, Malachai, except that twenty years ago the boat was a skiff, powered by muscle and oars, instead of a sleek Fiberglas job with a thirty horse kicker.

  Missouri gathered up her cleaning materials and left Randy alone with his nightmare. He shook his head, but he didn’t wake up. The nightmare was real. Slowly, he forced his mind to function. Slowly, he forced himself to imagine the unimaginable….

  He must make a list of the things Helen and the children would need. He recalled that there was nothing stocked in the big kitchen downstairs, and little in the utility room except some steaks in the freezer and a few canned staples. My God, if there was going to be a war they’d need stocks of everything! He looked at his watch. He had yet to shave and dress, and he must allow an hour and a half for the drive to McCoy, ten miles south of Orlando, when you considered the main highways clogged with tourists, and Orlando’s infuriating and hopeless traffic tangle on a sunny payday less than three weeks before Christmas. And there might be some delay at the McCoy gate. He decided to give himself two hours on the road.

  Still, he could start the list, and there was one thing he should do right away. Ben Franklin drank a quart of milk a day and Peyton, his eleven-year-old sister, even more. He telephoned Golden Dew Dairy and revised his delivery order drastically upward. This was Randy’s first act to meet the emergency, and it was to prove the least useful.

  Chapter 2

  Randy left the house in time to see Missouri wedge herself under the wheel of the Henrys’ Model-A Ford, an antique—so certified with a “Q” tag issued by the state—but kept in perfect running order by Malachai’s mechanical ingenuity. “I haven’t finished but I got to go now,” she said. “Mrs. McGovern, she holds the clock on me. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  The Model-A, listing to port with Missouri’s weight, bounced down the pebbled driveway. Randy got into his new Bonneville. It was a sweet car, a compromise between a sports job and a hardtop, long, low, very fast, and a lot of fun, even though its high-compression engine drank premium fuel in quantity.

  At eleven, approaching Orlando on Route 50, he turned on the radio for the news. Turkey had appealed to the UN for an investigation of border penetrations by Syria. Syria charged Israel with planning a preventive war. Israel accused Egypt of sending snooper planes over its defenses. Egypt claimed its ships, bound from the Black Sea to Alexandria, were being delayed in the Straits, and charged Turkey with a breach of the Montreaux Convention.

  Russia accused Turkey and the United States of plotting to crush Syria, and warned France, Italy, Greece, and Spain that any nations harboring American bases would be involved in a general war, and erased from the earth.

  The Secretary of State was somewhere over the Atlantic, bound for conferences in London.

  The Soviet Ambassador to Washington had been recalled for consultation.

  There were riots in France.

  It all sounded bad, but familiar as an old, scratchy record. He had heard it all before, in almost the same words, back in ‘57 and ‘58. So why push the panic button? Mark could be wrong. He couldn’t know, for certain, that the balloon was going up. Unless he knew something fresh, something that had not appeared in the newspapers, or been broadcast.

  Shortly before noon Florence Wechek hung her “Back at One” sign on the office door and walked down Yulee Street to meet Alice Cooksey at the Pink Flamingo. Fridays, they always lunched together. Alice, tiny, drab in black and gray, an active, angry sparrow of a woman, arrived late. She hurried to Florence’s table and said, “I’m sorry. I’ve just had a squabble with Kitty Offenhaus.”

  “Oh, dear!” Florence said. “Again?” Kitty was secretary of the PTA, past-president of the Frangipani Circle, treasurer of the Women’s Club, and a member of the library board. Also, she was the wife of Luther “Bubba” Offenhaus, Chief Tail-Twister of the Lions Club, Vice President of the Chamber of Commerce, and Deputy Director of Civil Defense for the whole county. He owned the most prosperous business in town, the Offenhaus Mortuary, and a twin real estate development, Repose-in-Peace Park.

  Alice lifted the menu. It fluttered. She set it down quickly and said, “Yes, again. I guess I’ll have the tunafish salad.”

  “You should eat more, Alice,” Florence said, noticing how white and pinched her friend’s face looked. “What happened?”

  “Kitty came in and said she’d heard rumors that we had books by Carl Rowan and Walter White. I told her the rumors were true, and did she want to borrow one?”

  “What’d she say?” Florence put down her fork, no longer interested in her chicken patty.

  “Said they were subversive and anti-South—she’s a Daughter of the Confederacy—and ordered me to take them off the shelves. I told her that as long as I was librarian they would stay there. She said she was going to bring it before the board and if necessary take it up with Porky Logan. He’s on the investigating committee in Tallahassee.”

  “Alice, you’re going to lose your job!” Kitty Offenhaus was the most influential person in Fort Repose, with the exception of Edgar Quisenberry, who owned and ran the bank.

  “I don’t think so. I told her that if anything like that happened I’d call the St. Petersburg Times and Tampa Tribune and Miami Herald and they’d send reporters and photographers. I said, ‘Kitty, can’t you see your picture on the front page, and the headline—Undertaker’s Wife Cremates Books?’”

  This was the most fascinating news Florence had heard in weeks. “What happened then?”

  “Nothing at all. If I may borrow an expression from one of my younger readers, she left in an eight-cylinder huff.”

  “You wouldn’t really call the papers, would you?”

  Alice spoke carefully, understanding fully that everything would soon be repeated. “I certainly would! But I don’t think I’ll have to. You see, publicity would hurt Bubba’s business. One third of Bubba’s customers are Negroes, and another third Yankees who come down here to live on their pensions and stay to die.” She lifted her bright, fiercely blue eyes and added, as if repeating one of the Commandments: “Censorship and thought control can exist only in secrecy and darkness.”

  “And that was all?”

  “That was all.” Alice tried her salad. “What’ve you been doing, Florence?”

  Florence could think of no adventure, or even any news culled from the wire, that could compete with telling off Kitty Offenhaus—except her experience with Randy Bragg. She had pledged herself not to say anything about Randy to anyo
ne, but she could trust Alice, who was worldly-wise in spite of her appearance, and who might even, when younger, have encountered a Peeping Tom herself. So Florence told about Randy and his binoculars and how he had stared at her that morning. “It’s almost unbelievable, isn’t it?” she concluded.

  “It is unbelievable,” Alice said flatly. “But I saw him at it!”

  “I don’t care. I know the Bragg boys. Even before you came here, Florence, I knew them. I knew Judge Bragg well, very well.” Florence remembered vague reports, many years back, of Alice Cooksey having gone with Judge Bragg before the judge married Gertrude. But that made no difference to what went on in the Bragg house now. “You’ll have to admit that those Bragg boys are a little peculiar,” Florence said. “You should have seen the cable Randy got from Mark this morning. Urgent they meet at McCoy today. Helen and the children flying to Orlando tonight—you know those children can’t be out of school yet and the last two words didn’t make any sense at all. ‘Alas, Babylon.’ Isn’t that crazy?”

  “Those boys aren’t crazy,” Alice said. “They’ve always been bright boys. Full of hell, yes, but at least they could read, which is more than I can say for the children nowadays. Do you know that Randy read every history in the library before he was sixteen?”

  “I don’t think that has anything to do with his sex habits,” Florence said. She leaned across the table and touched Alice’s arm. “Alice, come out to my house tonight for the weekend. I want you to see for yourself.”

  “I can’t. I keep the library open Saturdays. That’s my only chance to get the young ones. Evenings and Sundays, they’re paralyzed by TV.”

  “I’m open Saturday mornings, too, so we can drive in together. I’ll pick you up when you’re through tomorrow evening. It’ll be a change for you, out in the country, away from that stuffy room.”

  Alice hesitated. It would be nice to visit with Florence, but she hated to accept favors she couldn’t repay. She said, “Well, we’ll see.”

  When Alice returned to the library, three old-timers, too old for shuffleboard or the Lawn Bowlers Club, were bent over the periodical table. Like mummies, she thought, partially unwrapped. One of the mummies leaned slowly over until his nose fell into the fold of Cosmopolitan. Alice walked over to the table and made certain he still breathed. She let him nap on, smiled at the other two, and darted into the reference room, with its towering, topheavy stacks. From the first stack, religious and spiritual works in steady demand, she brought down the King James Bible. She believed she would find the words in Revelation, and she did. She read two verses, lips moving, words murmuring in her throat:

  And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning,

  Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.

  Alice put the Bible back on its shelf and walked, head down, to her cracked oak desk, like a schoolmarm’s desk on a dais, in the main hallway. She sat there, staring at the green blotter, at the antiquated pen and the glass inkwell, at the wooden file filled with readers’ cards, at the stack of publishers’ spring lists. Alone of all the people in Fort Repose, Alice Cooksey knew Mark Bragg well enough, and had absorbed sufficient knowledge of the world’s illness through the printed word, to understand that the books she had ordered from those spring lists might never be delivered. She had small fear of death, and of man none at all, but the formlessness of what was to come overwhelmed her. She always associated Babylon with New York, and she wished, now, that she lived on Manhattan, where one could die in a bright millisecond, without suffering, without risking the indignity of panic.

  She picked up the telephone and called Florence. She would come out for the weekend, or even longer, if Florence was agreeable. When she set down the phone Alice felt steadier. If it came soon, she would have a friendly hand to hold. She would not be alone.

  The Air Police sergeant at McCoy’s main gate questioned Randy, and then allowed him to call Lieutenant Colonel Paul Hart, a squadron commander, and friend of Mark’s. Hart had been to Fort Repose to fish for bass, first as Mark’s guest, and later, on several occasions, as a guest of Randy, so he was something more than an acquaintance. Randy said he had had a wire from Mark to meet him at noon, and Hart said, “He whistled through here yesterday. Didn’t expect him back so soon. Anyway, drive to Base Ops. We’ll go out on the line and meet him together. Let me talk to the Air Police. I’ll clear you through.”

  Driving through the base, Randy sensed a change since his last visit, the year before. Physically, McCoy looked the same. It felt different. The Air Police questioning had been sharper, and more serious. That wasn’t the difference. He realized something was missing; and then he had it. Where were all the people? McCoy seemed almost deserted, with less activity, and fewer men and fewer cars than a year ago. He saw no other civilians. He saw no women, not even around the clubs and the BX. The most congested area on the base was the steps and lawn in front of the alert barracks opposite wing headquarters, where standby crewmen, rigid and stiff in pressure suits, talked and smoked. Trucks, tail gates down, were backed to the curb. Drivers slouched over their wheels as if they had been there a long time.

  He drove onto Base Operations and parked close to the flight-line fence. Last year he had seen B-47’s, tankers, and fat transports stretching their wings, tip to tip, the length of the line-miles. Now, their numbers had dwindled. He counted fewer than twenty B-47’s, and guessed that the wing was in Africa or Spain or England on ninety-day foreign duty. But this could not be so, because Paul Hart, winner of bombing and navigation trophies, a Select Crew Aircraft Commander, would have led the flight.

  Hart, a stocky, bandy-legged man with punched-in nose, a fighter’s chin, and an easy grin, met him at the door of Operations. “Hi, Randy,” he said. “Just checked the board. Mark will touch down in eight minutes. How’s the fishing?”

  “It’s been lousy.” He looked up at the wind sock. “But it’ll get better if this high sticks around and the wind holds from the east. What’s he flying?”

  “He’s not flying anything. He’s riding soft and plush in a C-One-thirty-five—that’s the transport version of our new jet tanker—with a lot of Offutt brass. Other brass, that is. I hear he gets his star soon. Only promotion I’ll ever get is to a B-Five eight.”

  “Penalty for being a hot pilot,” Randy said. “What’s going on around here? Looks like a ghost town. You boys shutting up shop?”

  “You haven’t heard about SAC’s interim dispersal?”

  “Vaguely, yes, on some of the commentaries.”

  “Well, we’re not shouting about it. We try to keep half the wing off this base, because where we’re standing right now is a primary target. We farm out our planes to fighter fields and Navy fields and even commercial airports. And we try to keep ten percent of the wing airborne at all times, and if you look down there in front of the jumbo hangar you’ll see four standby Forty-sevens, bombed up and ready to go. Damn expensive way to run an air force.”

  Randy looked. They were there, wings drooping with full tanks, bound to earth by slender umbilical cords, the starter cables. “I didn’t mean the planes so much as the people,” Randy said. “Where’s everybody?”

  “Oh, that.” Hart frowned, as if deciding how much could be said and what words to use. “The papers know about it but they aren’t printing it,” he said finally, “and the people around Orlando must know about it by now so it can’t be any great secret. We’ve been on sort of a modified alert for four or five weeks. Maybe I should call it a creeping evacuation. We’ve cleared the area of all civilian and nonessential personnel, and we’re encouraging everybody to move their families out of the blast zone. You see, Randy, we can’t expect three to six hours’ warning any more. If we’re lucky, we might get fifteen minutes.”

  Randy nodded. He n
oticed long red missiles slung under the wings of the standby B-47’s. He recognized them, from the newspaper photographs, as the Rascal, an air-to-ground H-bomb carrier. “Is that red baby much help?” he asked.

  “That red baby,” Hart said, “is what we call the crew-saver. The Russkies are no dopes. They’ll try to stop us with missiles air-to-air and ground-to-air, beam-riders, heat-seekers, sound finders, and, for all I know, smellers. It’ll be no milk run but with the Rascal—and some other gadgets—we don’t have to write ourselves off as a kamikaze corps. We won’t have to penetrate their inner defense zones. We can lay off target and let that red baby fly. It knows where to go. Do you know what?”

  “What?”

  Paul Hart’s smile had vanished, and he looked older, and when he spoke it was gravely. “When the whistle blows, I’ll have a better chance if I’m in my aircraft, headed for target, than if I’m sitting at home with my feet propped up, drinking a Scotch, and Martha rubbing the kinks out of my neck—and our little place on the lake is five miles from here. So I’m a man of peace. I wish Martha and the kids lived in Fort Repose.”

  Randy heard the low whine of jet engines at fractional power and saw a cigar-shaped C-135 line up with the runway in its swoop downward. Presently it wheeled into a taxi strip and braked in front of Operations. A flag, three white stars on a blue field, popped out of the cockpit, indicating that a lieutenant general was aboard, and alerting McCoy to provide the courtesies due such rank.

  The three-star general was first down the ramp, his pink cheeked aide scurrying about his heels like an anxious puppy. Mark was last off Randy waved and caught his eye and Mark waved back but did not smile. Coming down the ramp and across the concrete, knees bare in tropical uniform, Mark looked like a slightly larger edition of Randy, an inch taller, a shade broader. At thirty feet they looked like twins, with the same jet hair, white teeth behind mobile lips, quizzical eyes set deep, the same rakish walk and swing of shoulders, cleft in chin and emphatic nose with a bony bump on the bridge. At three feet, fine, deep lines showed around Mark’s eyes and mouth, gray appeared in his black thicket, his jaw thrust out an extra half-inch, his face was leaner. At three feet, they were entirely different, and it was apparent Mark was the older, harder, and probably wiser man.