War Day

by Whitley Streiber; John Kunetka

  that statue ought to be restored—even moved, maybe to Philadelphia.

  Moore has twelve workmen, all paid in gold on the basis of the market value of their salvage. Some of these men, skilled wire-pull-ers for example, can make the extraordinary salary of ten gold dollars a week.

  But I could not love Morgan Moore's salvage operation. I could only think of the city before the war, with the sun on its towers and the throngs in its streets. It was a great work of art, New York, made up of millions of sophisticated, convoluted lives.

  I find that I cannot really say much about it It was Whitley's home, and fortunately writing about it has been his responsibility.

  Instead, I am going to turn to other events that occurred toward the end of our journey.

  We were unable to arrange a flyover of Washington. The Army refused without giving a reason. I think maybe the military is ashamed of losing the capital city.

  Our money was nearly gone, which didn't matter much, since we couldn't leave the train once we crossed the Mason-Dixon line and entered the South, an area of the country almost as economically healthy as California. As long as one stays in the through-car there's no problem, so we watched Virginia and Tennessee pass by the window. We had neither the funds nor the emotional energy to do a repetition of California and become fugitives.

  Watching the towns go by, the flash of a main street or a town square, big, leafy trees, kids waving from the backs of horses, I felt something I have never felt before, that under the circumstances was rather curious. I did not feel alienated at all. even though I could not walk freely down those streets, nor even set foot on this soil. I guess I understood. They can't afford too many immigrants. There have to be controls. I hope that what I felt never leaves me. It was a closeness to my fellow human beings, as if the very concept of the stranger were false. As if the borders, the restrictions, all were also false.

  We belong to one another; in a sense we are married one to all.

  Before the catastrophe we had failed to notice this. But we all have as much of a stake in everybody else as we have in ourselves.

  The thought of this great marriage brings me down to a much 360 WARDAY

  smaller one. Perhaps if Quinn Yarbro doesn't find Vivian, I will create some kind of a monument for her. A monument for one person still makes sense, I think, if she was your person.

  In my mind I am trying to assemble the elements of my journey into some whole image: the people, their voices and faces and stories; the landscapes; the documents; my perceptions and what I feel about all of it.

  The vision that remains of the journey is complex. It is a great mass of haunting images, of suffering and work, of people who keep on even when they ought to be unable.

  I was affected by smiles. Before the war there were never such smiles. They can shatter you, the smiles of the Americans.

  I listen to the rattle of the train. Beside me, Whitley rests from working on his own notebook. His head lolls onto the seat.

  I realize that a radio is playing.

  A radio?

  Well, there are a lot more of them around these days than there were even a couple of months ago.

  The music is soft, repetitive, peaceful. Typical popular music. I know the album: Brian Eno's Persistence of Vision.

  I close my eyes. For a while, I'll sleep also. May my dreams be peaceful.

  Georgia Patrol

  The kids ran into trouble at the patrol station three miles across the Georgia border.

  People in through-cars aren't supposed to get out in restricted-immigration states, but a restless murmur went among us when we saw them being herded off the train and into holding pens.

  The Georgia Patrol wears green. They look like park rangers, not at all terrifying like the California Immigration Police. But they herded a thousand children into a fenced enclosure suitable for perhaps three hundred. They crowded them there in the blazing sun, the ten supervisors among them. A tall black man stood just inside the gate, clutching a sheaf of papers. We could see his mouth moving as he obviously tried to reason with the patrol officers.

  "This is outrageous," a woman said.

  A man went to the door of the car. "What's going on?"

  He was ignored.

  Jim got up. He took out his Herald News identification and strode out onto the platform. Most of the other passengers followed him, myself included.

  "I'm a reporter," Jim said, flashing his papers. "Can I see the commanding officer, please?" The patrolman to whom he spoke shook his head, but in disgust, not refusal.

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  "Just what we need," he said. "Do you travel with 'em or what?" I

  "I think the press has a right to know what's going on here.

  These kids are bound for Alabama. Why are you taking them off the train?"

  Another patrolman came over. His underarms were wet. He was haggard, his face covered with sweat. "I'm Captain Howell,"

  he said. "These children are not bound for Alabama. They're going back to Pennsylvania."

  "The hell they are, Bob Howell," a man's voice boomed out. We all turned to see a stocky gentleman in a cream-colored suit coming down off the Georgia car.

  "Lord, if it isn't T.K. What the hell are you doin' all the way up here in Toccoa?"

  "I just come from a meetin' of the Southeast Funeral Directors in Greensboro. Look here, Bob, I want to know what's goin' on.

  You can't just herd them kids into that hot corral. You'll have some dead babies on your hands, man."

  "They can't go any farther. We got a bulletin from Alabama about them. They haven't got room for them down there."

  "We've got papers," the leader called from the enclosure.

  "We've got all the authorizations we need."

  "What he has is a permit from Pennsylvania. The Northeastern states send these kids down here without so much as a by-your-leave. They figure we won't turn away a bunch of helpless orphans. You know how many of these kids have come down this one rail line in the past six months? Eighteen thousand and change. We can't handle 'em, T.K. We've got to send 'em back."

  The children, I noticed, were scarcely aware of the drama on the platform. They were going about making their new place as endurable as they could, tying blankets to the fencing to create sun shades. The babies and the little ones were kept in the shaded areas, watched over by the supervisors and the older kids.

  The woman we had talked to on the train came to the edge of the enclosure. "We're going to need water and milk," she called.

  "We can't stay in this sun without water and milk."

  A woman on the platform began to cry. She wept bitterly, her RETURNING HOME 363

  fists clenched, her body bent as if the least weight would break her in the middle.

  "Do you have supplies for them, Captain Howell?" Jim asked.

  "There's plenty of water. And we can give them a few gallons of milk for the babies."

  "They sure must be hungry, Bob," his friend T.K. said.

  "We don't have a budget to provide food for detainees."

  "I hate to hear you talk like that, Bob. It makes you sound like a nasty little peacock, and I don't think you're really that way at all."

  "Look here, T.K., I've got a job to do—a job you wouldn't do when you were asked."

  "I'm in a critical profession, Bob, as you well know. I'll tell you something, if you can't find a way to provide for these kids, you shouldn't be in this job yourself. Now you find them more than water and milk. They need food. They've gotten little enough on the train."

  "I can't go all out for every bunch of orphans—"

  "The hell you can't! And don't you dare say 'orphan' like it was a dirty word. Kids like these are the future and honor of this country. There's no shame in being an orphan, Bob. Look at 'em. They oughta get medals, the way they behave. Now you take care of 'em or I swear I'll see you outa that pretty uniform inside of a week!"

  The people on the platform broke out
into applause. The captain promised to provide the children with food, and to let them wait for the northbound Crescent under the trees beyond the platform.

  As our train pulled out, I found myself full of a mixture of anger and a curious sort of hope. I saw something in those kids that is strong. And I saw strength also in the way the passengers jumped in on their side.

  The train picked up speed past Toccoa, and we moved on toward Atlanta through the warm October morning.

  "T.K." turned out to be a funeral director from Savannah. His opinion was that one of the other Southern states would probably agree to take the children. "There's a lot more to it than you might think. And old Bob Howell's a good man. That uniform's gone to his head a little bit, but he'll do his duty."

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  WARDAY

  We never found out what happened to the children.

  On the road, one gets used to lost people. You see roadies all the time, walking the bus routes, following the railroad tracks, or just hiking across the countryside.

  But you also encounter another type on the road, those whom it seems nothing can stop, who keep on no matter what happens to them, those who will not give up.

  It isn't that they aren't afraid. They all have their nightmares.

  But when they wake up, they find a way to go on.

  No doubt the children do the same.

  Interview

  T. K. Allerton, Funeral Director

  What happened in Savannah, the way the war hit us, was that the radio and the TV went off. I remember I was in the showroom with some clients, and all of a sudden, no Muzak. I thought, hell, the bastard's on the fritz, and went on with my consultation.

  After I'Fd sold the funeral I went back into the office and found Frances Tolliver trying to get the Apple to boot the database management program. She said the computer had made this funny popping noise and that was it. So I told her to call Computerland and we then discovered that the phones were out. I turned on the radio in my office and couldn't get a sound out of it.

  That was the first sign of the war in Savannah. We never got a scratch, and we've never suffered any fallout. We were damn confused for about a week. But we knew, we all just knew, that all hell had broken loose. A lot of people couldn't start their cars. My broker's line to New York was dead, and it stayed dead. There was no TV. Even the civil defense sirens weren't working. And out at the airport—you couldn't get anything beyond an ultralight into the air.

  Of course, cars can be hot-wired, and soon people were on the road again. People went up to Charleston and down the coast toward Florida, hunting for news.

  Meanwhile, things began to happen to my business. At first I 365

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  just kept going, no real problems. No computer, but that was only an inconvenience for us. The phone was a pain in the neck, but we got used to that, too.

  But coffins are shipped by rail, and no trains were coming in.

  Plus there was the bank rush. I participated in it when the Southern & National stopped taking checks. I tried to get at my money.

  The banks just handed out all the cash in Savannah and closed their doors. They were electronic basket cases from the EMP. I had about eighty thousand in the S&N, and I ended up with two thousand. Better than some did. Some people didn't get a dime.

  And there was no more FDIC insurance, although we didn't know that at the time.

  First off, I got a lot of heart attack and accident situations, where people who were on the edge died. I think about half the people with pacemakers, which was about eight hundred in Savannah, died on the spot when the EMP blew out their units. The rest of them either kept up without the pacemaker or they somehow were shielded, like sitting in a car, that plus the body itself shielded the pacemaker enough, apparently. Accidents, there were a lot of those. There were fires. People couldn't get the fire department on the phone. In those days right after the war, we were still living as if nothing much had happened. There was no panic. There was no idea how much things were going to change.

  People were strong and confident in those days. They're good now, and we've learned something about just how tough we can be if we've got to be, here in America, but in those days we were basically happy people. There was none of this talk like there is now that the human race is sort of fundamentally defective. And of course movements like the Extinctionists and the Destructuralists didn't exist.

  You were proud of your government in those days. America was the land of the free, from sea to shining sea. Not like it is now, a jumbled-up whatnot. Do we even have a President? I don't think the Europeans and the Japs even want us to become self-governing again. Don't quote me on that. Or you probably can't say it anyway—look at you, smiling at me! You can't say that, can you?

  A couple of days after the war, I had all of a sudden sixty de-ceased in the fridge. Sixty! We stacked them in there like logs. Lat-

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  er I found out how lucky Savannah was we didn't lose our electric power. God knows what they did with the cadavers where they had no refrigeration.

  All of mine were either accidents or, like I said, pacemaker. I never worked so hard in my life as I did that couple of weeks after the war. I was in real trouble. No coffins, low on formaldehyde. I had to go to the county and get body bags. Can you imagine that?

  Here I was, selling the most beautiful funerals in Savannah, and all of a sudden I'm doin' body bags.

  Had to. They would've stunk. I was just draining away the blood and putting in a weak solution of formaldehyde. I'd display

  'em in a real fine casket, and then take 'em to the cemetery in it.

  When everybody went home, we'd bag 'em and bury 'em. Had to be that way.

  I got a carpenter to start making me boxes. He'd use pine, and sand 'em down. Shellac 'em if he could. So for a while I was turning out a fairly good funeral again. The boxes were just boxes, but the smell of uncured pine is a good smell. I've got it in my brain, that smell.

  It was about six weeks after the war that we got a visit from the National Guard in Atlanta. They called a meeting of all the VFW and the American Legion and the Sons of the Confederacy and the Rotary Club and the Lions and all those clubs, down at the Hilton. General Trowbridge was the speaker. He announced that an organization called the Georgia Patrol had been formed by the Governor, and this group was supposed to keep refugees out of the state. I thought that was awfully harsh. I don't have anything against people who need help. But then he started talking about radiation poisoning and looters, and things like people with rabies, and fleas carrying unknown diseases, and all of that. Then he tells about the problem with medical supplies, how the plants have been damaged or are irradiated. Most of them were in the Northeast, and those that weren't are hardly shipping to Georgia, even if they are operating, and I see that we really are in a hell of a mess.

  So then he says there is going to be a voluntary sign-up, that they need five thousand able-bodied men from Savannah for the Georgia Patrol. They are going to be covering the border complete.

  The patrol would consist of a hundred thousand people, and they 368 WARDAY

  were just to keep the foreigners outside of the state altogether, except if they were known to have business here.

  I realized as he talked that he and the Governor and all of 'em in Atlanta were nuts, to think a state in virtual economic chaos could field an army that size and supply it with food and weapons and all—it was damn foolishness,

  They must have thought we'd lost the war, and they didn't want to say it, but they were preparing a last-ditch defense of Georgia in case the Russians showed up.

  But hell, if it was a last-ditch defense, I was damn well going to do my part. So on that assumption I joined up. As soon as I put down my job, funeral director, I got an earful about how I could carry a card as an auxiliary, but I couldn't go on patrol because mine was an essential service, and under the Emergency Services Act passed that week by the legislature, I had to st
ay in my present business and I had to follow new regulations being worked out now.

  I left that meeting mad and all confused. What regulations?

  And what about the Georgia Association of Funeral Directors?

  Were they involved, had they been consulted?

  I buried fifty people that week, and found myself selling cremations real hard because fuel for the digging tools was getting scarce.

  In those days the mail was still working, but it was slow, slow, slow. Not like it is now. You mail a letter in the morning collection here in Savannah, and it will be anywhere in Georgia in the afternoon. One thing that goes real good is the mail. Mail's as good as the phone is bad. I mean, I still can't get used to phone-call rationing. Hell, I was going to call my coffin company up in Illinois to special-order a real good casket, and here I find myself on a waiting list, the operator says ten days! That was Monday. How the mighty have fallen! I remember the days when you hardly even thought about the phone.

  Well, no damn more.

  So, getting back, let's see, they started in dropping like flies.

  Then we got gas-pressure trouble. The furnace won't take 'em in my crematorium. I call the other guys and they all got the same problem. What the hell, we're in trouble. We get together, and ev-

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  erybody's in the same boat as me, doing maybe four times his usual business, no coffins, no preservatives, not even any damn cosmetics! And trouble with the digging tools and nobody to fix the damn things because you used to take 'em up to Atlanta for that and now it's a long drive and they might not be able to help you, and on and on like that. We're paying people fifty cents an hour to predig graves. We figure we can get some stoop labor if we just make some posters and put 'em up.

  We each put up a poster, a meeting down on Cotton Exchange, fifty laborer jobs at half a dollar an hour. Can you imagine? The minimum wage was two-fifty, then. But there was no federal government now, was there? And we did not have that much money. It was a wild time, then. People would buy and sell stuff for peanuts.