Time Out of Joint (16 page)

ELEVEN

The following morning, Junie Black called him on the phone.

"Were you working?" she asked.

"I’m always working," Ragle said.

Junie said, "Well, I talked to Mr. Hempkin, my attorney." Her tone of voice informed him that she intended to go into the details. "What a cumbersome business," she said, sighing.

"Let me know how it comes out," he said, wanting to get back to his puzzle solving. But, as always, he was snared by her. Involved in her elaborate, histrionic problems. "What did he say?" he asked. After all, he had to take it seriously; if she took it to court, he might be hailed in as the corespondent.

"Oh Ragle," she said. "I want to see you so badly. I want to have you with me. Close to me. This is such a grind."

"Tell me what he said."

"He said it all depends on how Bill feels. What a mess. When can I see you? I’m scared to come around your place. Margo gave me the worst look I’ve ever gotten from anybody in my life. Does she think I’m after you for your money, or what? Or is it just her naturally morbid mind?"

"Tell me what he said."

"I hate to talk to you over the phone. Why don’t you drop over here for a while? Or would Margo be suspicious? You know, Ragle, I feel so much better now that I’ve decided. I can be myself with you, not held back artificially by doubts. This is the most important moment in my life, Ragle. It’s really solemn. Like a church. When I woke up this morning I felt as if I had awakened in a church, and all around me was this sacred spirit. And I asked myself what the spirit was, and pretty soon I identified it as you." She became silent, then, waiting for him to contribute something.

"What about this Civil Defense business?" he said.

"What about it? I think it’s a good idea."

"Are you going to be there?"

"No," she said. "What do you mean?"

"I thought that was the idea."

"Ragle," she said with exasperation, "you know, sometimes you’re so mysterious I just can’t follow you."

He gathered, at that point, that he had made a mistake. Nothing remained but to drop the business about the Civil Defense classes. It was hopeless to try to explain to her what he meant and what he had thought when Mrs. Keitelbein approached him. "Look, June," he said. "I want very much to see you, as much as you want to see me. More, very possibly. But I have this goddamn puzzle to finish."

"I know," she said. "You have your responsibility." She said it resignedly. "What about tonight, after you mail off your entry?"

"I’ll try to call you," he said. But her husband would be home, so nothing could come of it. "Maybe later today," he said. "Late this afternoon. I think I can get my entry off early, today." He had had fair luck with it so far.

"No," she said. "I won’t be home this afternoon. I’m having lunch with an old friend. A girl friend. I’m sorry, Ragle. I’ve got so much I want to say to you and do with you. A whole lifetime ahead of us." She talked on; he listened. At last she said good-bye and he hung up, feeling let-down.

How hard it was to communicate with her.

As he started back to his room, the phone rang again.

"Want me to get it?" Margo called from the other room.

"No," he said. "It’s probably for me." He lifted the receiver, expecting to hear June’s voice. But instead an unfamiliar older female voice said haltingly,

"Is—Mr. Gumm there?"

"Speaking," he said. His disappointment made him gruff.

"Oh Mr. Gumm. I wonder if you remembered the Civil Defense class. This is Mrs. Keitelbein."

"I remembered," he lied. "Hello, Mrs. Keitelbein." Making himself hard, he said, "Mrs. Keitelbein, I’m sorry to have to—"

She interrupted, "It’s this afternoon. This is Tuesday. At two o’clock."

"I can’t come," he said. "I’m bogged down in my contest work. Some other time."

"Oh dear," she said. "But Mr. Gumm, I went ahead and told them all about you. They’re expecting to hear you speak about World War Two. I phoned every one of them up, and they’re all enthusiastic."

"I’m sorry," he said.

"This is a calamity," she said, plainly overcome. "Maybe you could come and not speak; if you could be at the class and just answer questions—I know that would please them so. Don’t you think you could find time for that? Walter can drop by and pick you up in his car; and I know he can drive you back home afterward. The class is only about an hour at the longest, so it wouldn’t be more than an hour and fifteen minutes at the very most."

"He doesn’t have to give me a ride," Ragle said. "You’re only half a block away."

"Oh that’s so," she said. "You’re just up the street from us. Then you surely ought to be able to make it; please, Mr. Gumm—as a favor to me."

"Okay," he said. It wasn’t that important. An hour or so.

"Thank you so much." Her relief and gratitude flooded through her voice. "I really appreciate it."

After he had hung up he got immediately to work on his entries. He had only a couple of hours to get them in the mail, and the sense that they had to be posted was, as always, dominant in him.

At two o’clock he climbed the flight of unpainted, sloping steps to the porch of the Keitelbein house and rang the bell.

Opening the door, Mrs. Keitelbein said, "Welcome, Mr. Gumm."

Past her he could see a shadowy collection of ladies in flowery dresses and a few ill-defined thin-looking men; they all peered at him, and he understood that they had been standing around expecting him. Now the class could begin. Even here, he realized. My importance. But it brought him no satisfaction. The one person important to him was missing. His claim on Junie Black was slight indeed.

Mrs. Keitelbein led him up beside her desk, the massive old wooden desk that he and Walter had lugged up from the basement. She had arranged a chair for him so that he would face the class. "Here," she said, pointing to the chair. "You sit there." For the class she had dressed up; her long silk robe-like skirt and blouse, with billows and lace, made him think of school graduations and musical recitals.

"Okay," he said.

"Before they ask you anything," she said, "I think I’ll discuss a few aspects of Civil Defense with them, just to get it out of the way." She patted him on the arm. "This is the first time we’ve had a celebrity at our meetings." Smiling, she seated herself at her desk and rapped for order.

The indistinct ladies and gentlemen became quiet. The murmur stilled. They had seated themselves in the first rows of the folding chairs that Walter had set up. Walter himself had taken a chair in the back of the room, near the door. He wore a sweater, slacks, and necktie, and he nodded formally to Ragle.

I should have worn my coat, Ragle decided. He had sauntered down in his shirt-sleeves; now he felt ill-at-ease.

"At our last class," Mrs. Keitelbein said, folding her hands before her on the desk, "somebody raised a question concerning the impossibility of our intercepting all the enemy missiles in the event of a full-scale surprise attack on America. That is quite true. We know that we could not possibly shoot down all the missiles. A percentage of them will get through. This is the dreadful truth, and we have to face it and deal with it accordingly."

The men and women—they responded as a body, images of one another—put on somber expressions.

"If war should break out," Mrs. Keitelbein said, "we would be faced, at best with terrible ruin. Dead and dying in the tens of millions. Cities into rubble, radioactive fallout, contaminated crops, germ-plasm of future generations irretrievably damaged. At best, we would have disaster on a scale never before seen on earth. The funds appropriated by our government for defense, which seem such a burden and drain on us, would be a drop in the bucket compared with this catastrophe."

What she says is true, Ragle thought to himself, As he listened to her, he began to imagine the death and suffering ... dark weeds growing in the ruins of towns, corroded metal and bones scattered across a plain of ash without contour. No life, no sounds ...

And then he experienced, without warning, an awful sense of danger. The near presence of it, the reality, crushed him. As it fell onto him he let out a croak and half-jumped from his chair. Mrs. Keitelbein paused. Simultaneously all of them turned toward him.

Wasting my time, he thought. Newspaper puzzles. How could I escape so far from reality?

"Are you feeling unwell?" Mrs. Keitelbein asked.

"I’m—okay," he said.

One of the class raised her hand.

"Yes, Mrs. F.," Mrs. Keitelbein said.

"If the Soviets send over their missiles in one large group, won’t our anti-missile missiles, by the use of thermonuclear war-heads, be able to get a higher percentage than if they are sent over in small successive waves? From what you said last week—"

"Your point is well made," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "In fact, we might exhaust our anti-missile missiles in the first few hours of the war, and then find that the enemy did not plan to win on the basis of one vast single attack analogous to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but planned rather to win by a sort of hydrogen ’nibbling away,’ over a period of years if necessary."

A hand came up.

"Yes, Miss P.," Mrs. Keitelbein said.

A blurred portion detached itself, a woman saying, "But could the Soviets afford such a prolonged attack? In World War Two, didn’t the Nazis find that their economy wouldn’t support the daily losses of heavy bombers incurred in their round-the-clock raids on London?"

Mrs. Keitelbein turned to Ragle. "Perhaps Mr. Gumm could answer that," she said.

For a moment Ragle did not grasp that she had addressed him. All at once he saw her nodding at him. "What?" he said.

"Tell us the effect losses of heavy bombers had on the Nazis," she said. "From the raids on England."

"I was in the Pacific," he said. "I’m sorry," he said. "I don’t know anything about the European Theater." He could not remember anything about the war in Europe; in his mind nothing but the sense of immediate menace remained. It had driven everything else out, emptied him. Why am I sitting here? he asked himself. I should be—where?

Tripping across a country pasture with Junie Black ... spreading out a blanket on the hot, dry hillside, among the smells of grass and afternoon sun. No, not there. Is that gone, too? Hollow outward form instead of substance; the sun not actually shining, the day not actually warm at all but cold, gray and quietly raining, raining, the god-awful ash filtering down on everything. No grass except charred stumps, broken off. Pools of contaminated water ...

In his mind he chased after her, across a hollow, barren hillside. She dwindled, disappeared. The skeleton of life, white brittle scarecrow support in the shape of a cross. Grinning. Space instead of eyes. The whole world, he thought, can be seen through. I am on the inside looking out. Peeking through a crack and seeing—emptiness. Seeing into its eyes.

"It’s my understanding," Mrs. Keitelbein said, in answer to Miss P., "that the German losses of experienced pilots were more serious than the losses in planes. They could build planes to replace those shot down, but it took months to train a pilot. This illustrates one change in store for us in the next war, the first Hydrogen War; missiles will not be manned, so there will be no experienced pilots to be depleted. Missiles won’t stop coming over simply because nobody exists to fly them. As long as factories exist, the missiles will keep coming."

On her desk, before her, lay a mimeographed sheet. Ragle understood that she had been reading from it. A prepared program made up by the government.

It’s the government that’s talking, he thought to himself. Not simply a middle-aged woman who wants to be doing something useful. These are facts, not the opinions of a single person.

This is reality.

And, he thought, I am in it.

"We have some models to show you," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "My son Walter made them up ... they show various vital installations." She motioned to her son, and he got to his feet and came toward her.

"If this country is to survive the next war," Walter said in his youthful tenor, "it will have to learn a new way to produce. The factory as we know it now will be wiped off the face of the globe. An underground industrial network will have to be brought into being."

For a moment he disappeared from sight; he had gone off into a side room. Everyone watched expectantly. When he returned he carried a large model which he set down before them all, on his mother’s desk.

"This shows a projected factory system," he said. "To be built a mile or so underground, safe from attack."

Everyone stood up to see. Ragle turned his head and saw, on the desk, a square of turrets and spires, replicas of buildings, the minarets of an industrial enterprise. How familiar, he thought. And the two of them, Mrs. Keitelbein and Walter, bending over it ... the scene had occurred before, somewhere in the past.

Getting up he moved closer to look.

A magazine page. Photograph, but not of a model; photograph of the original, of which this was a model.

Did such a factory exist?

Seeing his intensity, Mrs. Keitelbein said, "It’s a very convincing replica, isn’t it, Mr. Gumm?"

"Yes," he said.

"Have you ever seen anything like it before?"

"Yes," he said.

"Where?" Mrs. Keitelbein said.

He almost knew. He almost had an answer.

"What do you suppose a factory like that would turn out?" Miss P. said.

"What do you think, Mr. Gumm?" Mrs. Keitelbein said.

He said, "Possibly—aluminum ingots." It sounded right. "Almost any basic mineral, metal, plastic or fiber," he said.

"I’m proud of that model," Walter said.

"You should be," Mrs. F. said.

Ragle thought, I know every inch of that. Every building and hall. Every office.

I’ve been inside that, he said to himself. Many times.

After the Civil Defense class he did not go home. Instead, he caught a bus and got off downtown, in the main shopping district.

For a time he walked. And then, across from him, he saw a wide parking lot and building with a sign reading: LUCKY PENNY SUPERMARKET. What an immense place, he thought to himself. Everything for sale except ocean-going tugs. He crossed the street and stepped up onto the concrete wall that surrounded the parking lot. Holding his arms out to balance himself, he followed the wall to the rear of the building, to the high steel-plated loading dock.