War Day

by Whitley Streiber; John Kunetka

  When that hot dust drifted down into the wheat and corn belts.

  America learned what it was to goddamn not eat.

  I figured we're all going to die anyway, so I'll just say the hell with rads and the hell with everything and go into salvage.

  Now, of course, it's a different story. We got a waiting list to enter the Salvor's Association. We've been regulated by the Army.

  But back when I started, people were scared of salvage work.

  They still thought in terms of prewar life expectancies. People still thought they ought to feel young at forty.

  Sally—that was my wife—she made my first rad suit. Sewed it herself out of an old swimming-pool cover. We used bonded lead epoxy in it that I made myself. I got the lead out of car batteries, just like everybody else. Stole 'em. I don't mind admitting it. I hurt people to get the lead for that suit, and I'm sorry. But most of 'em 346 WARDAY

  didn't last the winter anyway. I mean, we starved half to death and then the flu came, just when we were weakest. Darien probably lost half its people. Sally died in the spring of '89. Just so weak, anything would have taken her. We had noodle soup that winter, from the Connecticut Allocation when it got started up in January. I remember, Christmas of '88 we were living on soup made out of dandelion roots and salt and Fritos. We were just a little hungry.

  I went down into New York on the second salvor call in '89. I remember they had this big pier on the Hudson, Jersey side. All covered with plastic. About six government types. EPA, they said.

  They got us to fill out forms and wear dose cards. They checked our suits by putting a geiger counter in 'em, closing 'em up, then sticking 'em out on the end of the pier. If you could hear the counter, you stayed at home.

  They gave a geiger to one of every twenty men. Those counters were worth their weight back then, so half the men just took off. I mean, what's the use of cutting steel and stuff all day that's probably gonna be condemned hot anyway, when you can take a geiger counter worth maybe five hundred in gold on the black market and just walk away with it?

  The government men stood on the pier in their orange Uncle Sam rad suits and took potshots at the boats that were heading downriver instead of across to Manhattan. They just did it because they were pissed off. They didn't try to hurt anybody.

  You think of New York as being, like, empty in those days.

  Half burned out and empty and glowing like a goddamn hot cow.

  It's empty now. But then it was still full of people. Manhattan, anyway. Part of the Bronx. There were taxis running. Buses. The old stuff that hadn't been knocked out by EMP. There were cops all over the place. People were starin' at our rad suits. In those first couple of years, they'd condemn hot spots until they could be cleaned up, and people would just move to another building for a while.

  That first night in New York I went to see You We the Top and then we sat around at a place this guy knew, called the Monkey Bar, where this female impersonator sang and played the piano. A can of corned-beef hash was eighty dollars paper on the menu, so NEW YORK 347

  we decide, we'll share one can between ten of us. We'd come up a few bucks short, but they'd live with it, we figured. I remember that stuff to this day. God, it tasted good. One small mouthful, but it was the first meat I'd had in I don't know how long. The Monkey Bar, and that guy all dolled up singin' "Memories of You," and eating Armour Star corned-beef hash off expensive hotel china. Holy God.

  We slept in the basement of the B. Dal ton bookstore on Fifth Avenue. The Plaza Hotel and the old Gotham had teamed up and made the world's fanciest dormitory in there. You couldn't sleep above ground; you might get a dusting if the wind came from the east across the boroughs that did get hit. We were broke, but they let us in anyway. Salvors on their way downtown had credit. They figured we'd be back through, and God knows what we'd have with us.

  Salvors were taking the treasures of the world out of that city.

  That was the year Salvage Team Victor, Inc., took out seventeen hundred pounds of gold, all assayed and ready to go, from the vault of the Republic National Bank. So when people saw that our paper said One Chase Manhattan Plaza on it, they just said, "When you're on your way back, remember who gave you a free bed."

  I stayed in my rad suit the whole time. I was scared to death.

  Those people were all nuts in New York. There were people on the streets with the radiation trembles. People doing heaves right in the middle of everything. But they were staying put. There were actually only about a quarter of a million who stayed. But that's still a lot of people. They were the total New Yorkers, the ones who just couldn't imagine themselves anywhere else.

  You still had the tail end of the long fires then, so the whole place was full of smoke all the time. Smelled sort of like a mattress fire, or burning hair, when the wind came across the East River.

  And you wondered, am I gonna inhale a particle or two? Maybe a little cesium is gonna get in my mask, or a little strontium 90.

  Well, when we got to Forty-second Street, there was this barrier made of plywood, with skulls and crossbones stenciled on it. It went right down the middle of the street. You crossed it and there was nobody. They were living in the northern half of Manhattan and in the Bronx. The hits in Queens and Brooklyn had dusted low-

  •

  348 WARDAY

  er Manhattan with the dirty stuff. I remember we went through the barrier. We tried to laugh it off. Nowadays the problem is more uptown, from the chemical spills to the north. But back then it was radiation. Every step we took, the geiger burped some more.

  By Thirty-fourth Street it was going continuously.

  We were all set to walk to Wall Street when up comes the god-damnedest thing—a city bus all covered with black tarp. Comes right up the middle of Fifth Avenue, picking its way around the abandoned cars. They've been pulled here and there to make a path. It's slow going, but the bus is making it. The side streets were solid cars in those days, and so were all the avenues except Fifth and part of Sixth, and Broadway below Canal.

  Anyway, it's an ancient jalopy of a bus and the sign says "Spe-cial." So we get in. The driver's in one of those ancient city-issue rad suits, the olive drab ones from the civil defense stores that were put aside in the fifties. They weighed about a hundred pounds. He's slumped over the goddamn wheel. So what happens?

  We get on the bus and he says, "Hey, don't you guys know you're supposed to pay a fare?" The guy is at the end of the world and he wants a fare. It's a buck seventy-five each. Nobody had thought about deflation yet. We don't have the money, but before we can give him the bad news this jerk says, real rude, "You gotta have exact change. I'm not allowed to make change."

  We kind of displaced him by force and drove the damn bus ourselves. By the time we got to Broadway and Wall, where the cleared path stopped, we had a cop on our tail. Here comes this traffic cop, drags himself out of his car in his ridiculous heavy suit and writes us up a summons for "unauthorized commandeering"

  of the goddamn bus! Not stealing. It was crazy. I never did anything about the ticket and I never heard about it again. The people who used those old rad suits in New York were all dead by the end of '89 anyway, so I guess the ticket got forgotten.

  Now I'm starting to think about Warday. Three million people died in New York on that day, and the bombs damn well missed!

  Crap. Lemme tell you, we've been pullin' wire out of the World Trade Center for three months. Makin' a fortune!

  You know, this was a grand place years ago. The Consumer NEW YORK

  349

  Electronics Show was held at the new Convention Center in July of

  '86. We had a suite at the Waldorf. High times. Fat times.

  "Never think about Warday." That's my motto, and talking into your machine is making me violate it. I have a tough life. I don't wanta cry in my beer, but I've lost a hell of a lot. My wife. I had a boy—

  Oh, hell.

  Listen, this has gotta be the end of this thing. I
can't stand this.

  I work. I don't look back. I'll tell you about the salvage of One Chase Plaza some other damn time.

  PART FIVE

  Returning Home

  You cross with ease

  at 80 the state line and the state you are entering

  always treated you well.

  —Richard Hugo,

  "Goodbye, Iowa"

  The Children's Train

  Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia was an astonishing sight as we walked in, weary from the long bus ride that had brought us here from White Plains. We were planning to catch the Southern

  Crescent to Meridian, and from there take the bus to Dallas.

  There must have been a thousand children in the station. We had just been to Independence Park and put our hands on the Liberty Bell, which you can do now, and stood before Independence Hall, seeking to renew our hope. There were hundreds of people there, including a doubled family, where a man had taken on his neighbor's children when the parents died. Such mixing is much more common in this part of the country than in Texas, where we tend to focus down on the unit rather than look to our neighbors.

  The spirit of the frontier, perhaps, still influences our habits.

  There is at Independence Hall a daily schedule of recitations of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Get-tysburg Address. This is a program developed by the Philadelphia school system, and the speakers are children.

  We listened with the rest of the crowd to the hasty voice of a girl reciting the Bill of Rights. Her eyes darted as she spoke. She was as frail as a bird, and her tone was high and thin, but something in her delivery came from deep within her, and set the breathless, mumbled words to ringing.

  353

  354 WARDAY

  I had been thinking long thoughts of children as we walked through Philadelphia's quiet streets.

  Now, here in the station, I was surrounded by children who had not gotten the chance to double up. Quiet children, sitting in rows on the floor. Here and there, one slept in another's lap. Older kids attended babies. The cries of babies echoed in the huge waiting room. A supervisor moved among the rows.

  There was none of the hubbub of childhood among these kids.

  Their situation was serious, and they knew it.

  They were all dressed identically, in white T-shirts and jeans, girls and boys alike. On the back of their shirts were stenciled their names, years of birth, blood types, TB susceptibilities, and Pennsylvania ID numbers. I began noting down a sampling of their names, but stopped when I saw the way Jim was leaning against the wall. We'd both dreaded getting sick on our journey. We were exhausted from too many nights in trains and too much third-rate food. Stepping between the rows of kids, I went to him.

  "I'm sorry. I'm nauseated. I've got to lie down."

  "No—let's go outside. You'll be better."

  I did not say it, but I knew what had happened to him. The over-powering odor of unwashed people was stifling in that station. Out on the street he began to feel better.

  "Jim—"

  He stared off into the darkness. We both understood the stakes here. This scene was being repeated commonly all over the country. How many orphans are there? What are the support programs like? What are we doing to protect the future?

  We did not speak, not until long afterward, when we were on the train. The children were jammed into eight passenger cars behind us. We were in the through-car. Ahead of us were three

  "state cars" for people planning to leave the train in resident-only states, such as Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia.

  "I want to find out about the kids," Jim said.

  "You mean why they're on the train?"

  "Why they're on the train."

  Their presence worried him too. It must be an enormous undertaking to move so many children. Why was it being done?

  We started moving back toward their cars. When we opened RETURNING HOME 356

  the door we saw dim lights and hard seats, and smelled their odor again. These were not the normal Amtrak cars, but old commuters with ceiling fans and dim bulbs, obviously put on at the last moment. They rattled and swayed. The night wind bellowed in the windows. The trainmen were giving out blankets and sheets, which the children made into beds on the seats and the floor. There was a gravity among them that was deeply unsettling, as if this bedmaking were the most important thing in the world, and these blankets were valuable beyond price.

  Other passengers were coming back too, bringing food and water bags and whatever else they could spare. Soon the cooks appeared, bearing what later proved to be every scrap of Amtrak food in the train. But there were so many of them, and I know that the great majority must have gone hungry that night.

  Jim found one of the adult supervisors at the rear of the car.

  She could have been thirty years old, or fifty, it was hard to tell. A little boy slept with his head in her lap, a girl of twelve with her head on her shoulder. She held a baby in her arms. Another baby lay in the girl's arms. "We're writing a book," Jim said. "Can we talk to you?

  She smiled. "I guess so, if you don't wake anybody up. I got some mighty tired kids on this train."

  "Are you the only supervisor?"

  "Lord, no! I'd be dead! There are ten of us with this group, one for every hundred kids."

  "How did you get your job?"

  "Well, I have my Master's in early-childhood education from Bank Street, and I have a degree in child psychology. But I didn't get the job on qualifications. I was with the State Department of Social Work before the war. Afterward we found ourselves with tremendous numbers of orphans. It was natural that anybody in the Welfare Department who knew anything at all about kids, or just liked them, would end up doing what I'm doing."

  "Why are they on the train?"

  She smiled again. "These children are being transferred to an institution in Alabama. We've been informed by the Department of Agriculture that there's going to be another grain emergency by April, so we're evacuating them to a better-fed area. We do not 356 WARDAY

  want to go through another famine the way we went through the last one. My unit buried an awful lot of children. That will not happen again, not if there is any way on God's earth to prevent i t "

  We returned to our own car. An hour passed. For a while I stared at my own reflection in the window. Haggard, thin, cadaverous even. I hadn't shaved since I was at Quinn's, in California. I was greasy and grungy and totally exhausted.

  Jim read the Philadelphia Inquirer and then slept I felt frightened, as if the delicate balance of the future were swaying and trembling with the movement of the train.

  When I was twenty-two I went this way in a Volkswagen, on my way home from New York to San Antonio for a family reunion.

  Years later I went in my Mercedes, through the Smokies and across the back of the South, through the piney woods of Arkansas and the hot plains of northeast Texas.

  I went also in a bus, broke, hungry, to And work one year when it was too long between checks from publishers.

  My life has been punctuated by journeys between Texas and New York.

  I can remember coming this way with my father, and seeing barefoot children with fishing poles in the Cumberland Valley and longing from my luxurious Pullman drawing room to be one of them.

  To be a child.

  I am tired of trains, tired of travel. Now that it's almost finished, I wonder what will become of this new book. These days it is not easy to gain publication, and the distribution of books is a difficult process.

  I am very used to the rattle of trains, the smell of trains, the mood of travelers. In these past six weeks we have seen a fair sample of the country. And we have learned some things. America is changing, profoundly and probably irrevocably. In a few years there will be a kind of country here with as few references to us as we have to, say, the Kennedy years. Maybe fewer.

  There is death in this, certainly, and the collapse of old ways.

/>   But there is also this other thing, which I heard again and again, in the voices along the road. I know it, and yet I cannot seem to put it down in words, except that it is America in us, the promise and the RETURNING HOME 357

  children. It is the common dream of gold—the golden valley, the golden door, the gold in the hills, the gold at the end of the rainbow.

  The night deepens and the old diesel's horn sounds and sounds.

  This is another of those bumpy, slow routes around one of the dead areas, in this case Washington.

  I close my eyes. Music comes into my mind, soft and slow, the music of the swaying car and the dark. I remember, so well, when I was a child.

  Jim

  My Final Image

  When Whitley and I arrived in New York, I realized that, emotionally, I had reached the end of the journey. For me, New York ex-emplified the whole experience—both the folly of the war and the drama of our effort to recover.

  Morgan Moore didn't talk much about his present project, but I must say that the dismantling of the World Trade Center is a work of tremendous energy and vision. Everything is being done on a gigantic scale. Massive devices pull wiring out onto huge wheels, drawing it like the meat from a crab claw. Dozens of scaffolds hang down from the towers, with men on them loosening sheathing while others work with cranes, taking the plates to the ground.

  Inside the buildings, window crews dismantle the good glass, floor crews take up usable wood and linoleum, decoration crews remove furniture. Behind all this, Morgan Moore sits in his command trailer, manipulating a sophisticated new Toshiba computer and talking to his people over an elaborate communications system.

  I went as far as the thirtieth story in the elevator that they have rigged along the side of the South Tower. From there I saw the whole of New York Harbor, from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge between Staten Island and the black ruins of Brooklyn to the Statue of Liberty. I could see the arm and torch lying at the base of the great statue. Even if New York remains uninhabited, RETURNING HOME 359