A Place We Knew Well Read online

  At this, he opened the envelope and handed Avery a metal dog tag on an aluminum linked chain.

  The sight of Charlotte’s name stamped in tin, above her birth date and address and blood type, made Avery want to retch.

  “And, of course,” Kayhill was continuing, “we have very reasonable rates on juvenile policies, especially…”

  Clutching the tag in one hand, Avery shot his other hand out flat in front of Kayhill’s face. Stop right there, it said. Not another word.

  Kayhill stopped.

  Incensed—not just at Kayhill, but at all of this…insanity!—Avery got up, punched the fist holding Charlotte’s dog tag into his pant pocket, and walked out.

  Striding to the truck, still fuming over Kayhill’s gall—“juvenile policies” be damned!—he railed against it being a Monday.

  Any other day, Steve would be at the station and they could hash this out together. Steve could be caustic, his language colorful. But he prided himself on, and Avery counted on, his ability to “maintain an even keel.” What’s Steve thinking about all this? Avery wondered, checking his watch. Is he still in New Smyrna with Lillian, or on his way home?

  For a brief moment, Avery considered dropping by the VFW. It might be good, he thought, to belly up to the bar with other veterans and talk over the day’s ominous developments. Maybe someone had been out to the base PX and had a real update. Then again, the VFW was often overrun by negative blowhards who argued, in almost every case, that we should “just go ahead and nuke the bastards” and be done with it.

  As perhaps the only local who’d actually laid eyes on Hiroshima, Avery had no patience with Bomb-worshippers. Unlike them, he carried his own involvement with the deaths of all those Japanese civilians like a deadweight, a guilt-laden drag on an otherwise upright life. He had, suddenly, no taste for drinking with potential warmongers.

  Instead, he drove home. The empty carport, no sign of Sarah’s Buick, surprised him. But then he remembered Sarah’s plan to take Charlotte shopping. He sat in the truck a moment, and rejected his initial idea to toss Kayhill’s dog tags into the trash. Not about to risk either Sarah or Charlotte finding them, he stashed the tags in his leather bank pouch, locked it in the glove compartment, then, for good measure, locked the truck.

  In the kitchen, prominently placed in the middle of the fridge, he saw the container of leftover tuna casserole, plus Sarah’s note: 350 degrees for 20 minutes.

  He put it in the oven, took his shower, then returned to the kitchen and ate his meal standing at the sink, watching the bland cloud-choked sunset.

  As he was rinsing his plate, the phone on the wall next to the fridge rang. A young man’s voice, a nervous cracking tenor, asked, “Is Charlotte home?”

  “Not right now. Take a message?”

  “Well, sure. Thanks. Could you tell her Todd Jenkins called? I’ll call again later?”

  “No problem,” Avery said and hung up.

  Jenkins was the son of Mabel from church, who’d admired Charlotte’s looks after the service yesterday. He was also a short, pimply-faced drag racer who chain-smoked Marlboros in an effort to look tough. Hot Toddy, Steve called him, having replaced the clutch in the boy’s ’50 Ford Crestliner twice in the past six months.

  “No way, Ho-zay,” Avery announced to the empty kitchen.

  Immediately the phone rang again. Now what?

  “Hey, Cap.” It was Steve. “Heard the news?”

  “President’s announcement, y’mean? In”—Avery eyed the kitchen clock—“forty-two and a half minutes?”

  “Yeah, well, I’m back. Just talked to Leo. Poor kid’s pretty bent outta shape over what’s goin’ on. Thought I’d swing by the station, watch the speech with him.”

  “Oh, Lord. Leo! Good idea.” Imagine being here while your family was stuck there in the crosshairs of all that firepower out at McCoy? And God knows how many other American bases, too. Avery shook off a small icy shiver.

  “Talk atcha tomorrow,” Steve said, signing off.

  At quarter till, Avery was in the living room, television on, listening to Chet Huntley and David Brinkley’s run-up for President Kennedy’s speech. Huntley in New York was his usual cool cucumber, but Brinkley, outside the White House in Washington, scowled concern. Though, Avery thought, it doesn’t appear he knows any more than the rest of us.

  At two till, Avery saw the Buick wheel past the front window into the carport, heard two car doors slamming and Sarah calling from the kitchen, “Has he started yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  Sarah and Charlotte burst into the room, arms full of shopping bags.

  “It was all the talk at Colonial Plaza,” Sarah explained in a rush. “Stores up and down the mall setting up televisions in their windows. Baer TV had five color consoles in theirs!”

  “Mom, shhhhh!” Charlotte dropped down on the sofa beside him. “Here he is.”

  The first thing that struck Avery was the President’s face. Normally handsome, debonair, smiling, John Kennedy’s face was grim; his jaw hard, his eyes steely grave.

  He began simply, “Good evening, my fellow citizens,” and pulled no punches: “This Government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military build-up on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere….”

  Avery’s churning stomach suddenly stilled. He heard Charlotte’s sharp intake of breath and felt Sarah’s trembling fingertips press his shoulder. In his mind’s eye, he saw the solemn transfer of the black film boxes on the flight line at McCoy, imagined the chain of custody from the photo developers and interpreters to the Joint Chiefs to the President’s own hands. No doubt, that was why he’d returned to Washington.

  Unmistakable evidence, Kennedy was saying, of the Soviets’ urgent transformation of Cuba into a strategic Soviet base with large, long-range, and clearly offensive weapons of sudden mass destruction.

  The words “sudden mass destruction” flooded him with an acute, seething anger. And Kennedy’s listing of potential targets: “Washington, DC, the Panama Canal, Cape Canaveral, Mexico City,” felt like a body blow.

  Clearly, Kennedy was angry, too—especially over Soviet foreign minister Gromyko’s repeated assurances just last Thursday that there was no need for offensive weapons in Cuba and that the Soviet Union would never become involved in such a thing.

  “False,” Kennedy practically spat, “a deliberate deception!”

  The U-2s’ cameras must have caught them red-handed. But what in the world do we do about it? Avery sat frozen, staring at the screen.

  “We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of world-wide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth—but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time.”

  Ashes in our mouth, Avery thought. And remembered well that same taste on his tongue.

  The President outlined his immediate course of action to effect the withdrawal and elimination of the missiles: a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba, continued and increased close surveillance, plus orders to the US armed forces to “prepare for any eventualities.”

  Kennedy warned the Soviets that any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere would provoke “a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” Finally, he called upon Khrushchev personally to “halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless and provocative threat to world peace” and to “move the world back from the abyss of destruction.”

  Sandwiched between his wife and daughter, Avery felt chilled to the marrow. On his left, Sarah trembled, twitchy with nerves. On his right, Charlotte had shrunk into stillness, like a field mouse sensing the dark overhead flight of a night owl.

  The President�
��s sign-off, “Thank you and good night,” left Avery wondering. Who in the country, or in the world, could possibly have a good night when the two superpowers were locked in a dangerous face-off, potentially on the brink of what scientists called MAD—Mutually Assured Destruction?

  It was madness all right. He’d seen ample proof of it at Hiroshima seventeen years ago. But that bomb—Little Boy, they called it—was a mere fledgling compared with the hundred-times-more-powerful thermonuclear bombs perched atop missiles on both sides today. Bombs that, like hell’s chickens, had come home to roost just ninety miles south of Florida’s Key West. Less than five hundred miles—eight to ten minutes in missile time—from his living room.

  The HONK-HONK of a car horn in the driveway telegraphed its message: Hurry up! Avery opened his eyes, groggy and confused. His first thought—he was at the station and someone wanted gas on the double—didn’t square with the fact that he was still in bed. He rolled over to squint against the view through the bedroom window: azure sky, clear and unclouded; the lake winking gently back at the sun. It was bizarre. How could the morning appear so normal after last night’s dreadful announcement that the nation, the very notion of life as we knew it, had been manhandled to the brink of—what did Kennedy call it?—“the abyss of destruction.”

  He sat up and rubbed his eyes and bristly cheeks with both hands. The President’s speech had given frightful form and detail to his nightmares. What little sleep he’d gotten was fractured with awful images: Russian mechanics adjusting wires and winches to attach their nuclear horror atop long, red missiles and hoist them vertically against a range of green mountains. A cloud full of fireworks rising up into a foreboding mushroom shape across the lake, dwarfing the pale peaks of Edgewater High’s gymnasium. Smoldering human forms bearing dog tags.

  He’d tossed and turned until sometime after midnight, then been awakened just after two a.m. by the long, mournful whistle of a freight train approaching the crossing at Silver Star Road.

  It wasn’t the whistle that startled him. It was the sound, the low growling grasp of wheel on track, of a fully and heavily loaded southbound train.

  Normally, trains headed south through central Florida were empty, or nearly so, their wheels clattering lightly on the rails, bound for a turnaround at the loading docks of Miami, the muck farms and sugarcane refineries on the shores of Lake Okeechobee, the giant phosphate mines due south in Polk and Hardee counties, or the big citrus packinghouses in Lake Wales and Orlando. For Avery, whose station was sandwiched between the Trail and the Southern Seaboard Railroad tracks, the difference in sound between an empty and a fully loaded freight train was as clearly distinguishable as a tenor and a bass.

  And the two a.m. train wasn’t only fully loaded, it was long! Half an hour long, at least. How many boxcars and flatbeds and engines did it take to make a train thirty minutes long?

  When a second train whistled and rumbled by at three twenty-two, equally loaded but longer—forty-two minutes long!—Avery remembered the President’s order to the armed forces to “prepare for any eventualities.” His brain churned with lists and images of the vehicles, ordnance, and armaments that were most likely rolling past them in the dark of this night.

  At four forty-five, exhausted, a different image came to mind: his grandfather’s face leaning in across the farmhouse table, giving Avery his eagle eye; his grandfather’s knuckles reaching out across the bleached oak tabletop.

  “That’s enough, son,” he heard his grandfather say, heard his knuckles’ quick rap, only twice, on the planked oak. “That’s enough.”

  After the terrible, too early death of his father, Avery’s grandfather had come down off his West Virginia mountaintop to “serve as ballast for you and your mother, till she makes up her mind which way she wants to go.”

  The fifth son of a coal miner, Old Pa had gone down to the Norfolk docks in 1885, lied about his age, and joined the Merchant Marines. He’d worked colliers mostly, transporting black tons of American coal to US ships and bases all over the world. He’d helped fuel Admiral Dewey’s victory in Manila Bay and transported horses for Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders at San Juan Hill; though, a man of few words, he rarely spoke of it.

  His quiet presence, however, had been the rudder of Avery’s adolescence and provided the encouragement he’d needed to leave the farm and join the air force. Although Old Pa died in late ’44, while Avery was en route to Tinian Island, the old man remained, in memory, a steadying force, helping Avery to finally fall off for a couple hours of fitful sleep.

  Now reaching for his robe, he heard Charlotte—“Later, Mom. Tell Dad I said bye!”—and the bang of the front door as she flew out to catch her horn-honking ride to school.

  He regretted sleeping in and not seeing her. More than that, he felt grieved. She should have come home smiling, happy to show off and even model her new dresses. He would like to have seen her twirling around in them, preening like a princess.

  But instead she’d huddled beside him, pale and drawn, fists pressed against her lips, eyes blank with disbelief. Her one comment, an attempt at humor—“There goes homecoming!”—fell flat in the face of both her parents’ barely suppressed horror.

  Later, after Sarah insisted he unload her trunk (still full of the boxes she’d brought home from the shelter show) then disappeared into unpacking mode, he’d returned to the living room to check on Charlotte. She wasn’t there or anywhere else inside the house. He’d finally found her outside in the backyard, staring up at the cloud-smudged dark. “I heard planes,” she told him. “Wanted to make sure they were ours.” He’d done his best to comfort her. But she’d seen too much out at the air base, and knew too much from the President’s speech, to blindly accept his lame reassurances. He hoped she’d slept, which was more than he could say for Sarah. She, as far as he knew, had been up restocking the shelter most of the night.

  When he entered the kitchen, Sarah was on the phone frowning, clearly annoyed by what she was hearing. She wore a faded housedress, and with no makeup, her hair pinned haphazardly out of her eyes, she seemed to have aged years overnight.

  She acknowledged him with a distracted wave toward the dinette, where his breakfast was waiting: pancakes and link sausage tented with tinfoil.

  “I understand, Edith, but I couldn’t possibly…Well…” She sighed, her shoulders slumped with resignation. “If you insist, I’ll take the Langford and First Baptist today; and the Cherry Plaza tomorrow. But after that…”

  Avery studied her, wondering what Edith wanted now. Sarah looked and sounded exhausted. Her hand, making a note on the wall pad beside the phone, trembled. “Good-bye, Edith,” she said and stopped just short of slamming the receiver onto its hook.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  “General Betts”—Orange County’s director of Civil Defense—“was so impressed with our committee’s work at Sunday’s show, he’s asked us to inspect the public shelters, make sure they’re organized properly.”

  “Wants the Women’s Club Seal of Approval, does he?” Avery asked, thinking, Now, that’s a propaganda move if I ever saw one. “Complete with Sentinel photographers to reassure the general public the government’s got their back?”

  “Something like that, I s’pose.” She turned to open the cabinet door, popped the top off the brown vial, shook out two small yellow pills, and tossed them down without water.

  He’d eaten a few bites but realized he had no appetite. Besides, he was running late. He thanked her for her efforts and rose to open the fridge and remove his lunch pail from the shelf where she always left it for him.

  “Sorry I have to run, darlin’.” He leaned in to kiss her pale cheek. Her hair had an odd, musty smell. Like the shelter, he realized distractedly. “My best to the Dragon Lady.”

  Good luck, he might have added, but didn’t. Clearly, the good general and Edith were sending her on a fool’s errand, a PR stunt to keep the locals from panicking. But aren’t we all fools today? Going through the
motions of normal life—as if everything and everyone doesn’t hang in the balance? As if the unspeakable—the unthinkable—isn’t staring us in the face just across the Florida Straits?

  —

  NORMALLY ON TUESDAYS AND Thursdays, Avery opened, Steve closed, and Emilio was off. But yesterday, to accommodate Friday and Saturday’s homecoming events, he’d switched to a three-shift schedule to give Emilio the weekend off. Avery was glad he’d made the change. If today was anything like yesterday—and after the President’s speech, how could it not be?—he’d need the extra help.

  He barely had time to get the doors open and turn the lights on before the deluge began. The gas bell was ringing off the wall for fill-ups, top-offs, and a few random men in pickups looking to load up their fifty-five-gallon drums. Avery refused them, on account of they weren’t regular customers and he wasn’t inclined to support hoarding.

  Rumors were rampant; everyone claimed an inside track.

  Connie Diggs, who worked the Rexall counter across the street, told Avery with a nervous, sideways glance down the Trail, “You hear they’re evacuating Miami? Everybody’s s’posed to be packin’ up and headin’ north. ’Cept for the Cubans in Little Havana. They’re refusin’ to go.”

  Avery doubted that one was true.

  “Our boy’s Spanish teacher?” whispered housewife Billie Watts, pink nose and lips twitching like a scared rabbit. “Been workin’ nights out at McCoy, teaching the paratroopers basic phrases, for after their drop into Cuba.”

  Avery considered that one credible.

  Herb Benson, who ran the family fruit stand around the corner, stopped in to say, “My neighbor’s an engineer out at Martin-Marrietta. They got the biggest building under roof in the state, y’know. And with what they’re doing out there? Says they might as well paint a giant red bull’s-eye on top.”

  Probably right, Avery thought grimly. Any Sputnik spy satellite worth its circuitry would pick up the Beeline Expressway running stick-straight from the giant defense contractor’s back door, less than ten miles south, to Cape Canaveral’s coastal launch pads. Though, in Avery’s mind, Orlando’s SAC base at McCoy was the more likely target, and it was closer still.