TWO O’CLOCK, EASTERN WARTIME

by John Dunning

  There was an awkward moment as she crouched in the door.

  “I don’t mean to sound like a mother hen, but we’ve got a lot riding on this show. We want it to be good. You remember Miss O’Hara . . .”

  “Of course. How’ve you been?”

  Holly nodded but said nothing. She knows something’s happening, he thought. How could she not know?

  Becky leaned into his line of vision. “Are you coming in now?”

  “Not quite yet.”

  “What’s wrong with you? Is there something I can do?”

  “No. It’s something I’ve got to do.”

  The repairman came to the driver’s window. “I think that does you.”

  “Good. What do I owe you?”

  “Your five covers it.”

  Becky hadn’t moved. Holly’s eyes hadn’t left his face.

  He shrugged. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to go.”

  He stopped at the hardware store and bought a shovel. Bought an axe and a gasoline lamp and some other things.

  One more stop. He pulled in under a sign that said CAMERAS WATCHES FIREARMS JEWELRY. The south beach pawnshop.

  Inside, he turned and looked back through the glass. A car had stopped out on the road and sat idling there.

  He bought himself a gun, an old army .45 revolver, which came with its original holster and belt. Bought a box of shells, and as he paid the man he saw that she had turned in and parked beside his car.

  He didn’t try to hide anything: there wasn’t much use in that. He came out, opened his door, and threw the gun on the seat.

  They sat in their separate cars, a few feet apart with their windows down. Then her voice floated over the gap.

  “What’s going on, Jack? What’s with the shovel? . . . What’s with the gun?”

  “I’m taking a little time off. Going camping. Clear my head.”

  She leaned toward him. The sun hit her face.

  “You’ve found him, haven’t you?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “But you know where he is.”

  “I know what I think. That’s all I know.”

  “I know what I think too.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Now they’ll kill you too.”

  He shrugged and smiled. Said maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t.

  “I’m coming with you, Jack. There’s no way you can stop me.”

  “Hell,” he said. “I wouldn’t even try.”

  ( ( ( 33 ) ) )

  THEY had no plan. The sun had begun to settle in the west but this had no meaning. Time had stopped: there was no longer any day or night, there were no jobs urgent enough to draw them away, they had no duties except to this. A spiritual understanding had risen between them and there was no need to explain. She didn’t ask how he’d learned what he’d learned and to him the mystery of her behavior had ceased to matter. Answers would come later.

  He had stopped at the Pinewood depot, which was open at midafternoon, and asked directions from the ticket man. Eight miles straight back down the tracks, or if you wanted to go by car, five miles back to the old road trace and follow it in from there. “Good thing I’ve been saving my gas,” he said.

  He stopped at the general store but she had no interest in the bag of merchandise he had stashed in the backseat. She trembled briefly as they headed out on the road south but he made no effort to comfort her. They sat like strangers, separated by the full width of the front seat.

  The cutoff was just about where he expected it, and they were swallowed whole by the forest, a vast timberland clogged with underbrush. The road was bad, with water-filled holes almost axle deep, in places little more than a trail. It would winnow down but then, as he nudged the car on into the trees, the branches would part and the trace appear again, and this kept happening until the branches would not move and the road choked off.

  “I guess we walk now.”

  He had talked the shopkeeper out of a gunnysack to put his groceries in. It made a heavy bundle but he could carry it, hurled over his shoulder with the drawstring wrapped around his fist. She watched him strap on his gun but said nothing about it; only when he heaved the sack over his shoulder did she come to life. “What can I carry?” she said, and he gave her the axe. She asked what it was for and was satisfied with his simple answer: “In case we need it.”

  They struck out through the woods. The way remained dense but never impassable. There were paths left by hunters who had come and gone for years, and occasionally they came across traces of the road—short, clear stretches no worse than the road behind them. Here they made good time, until it vanished again in a snarl of saplings and underbrush. But there was always a path and he knew there would be.

  It was getting on toward four o’clock by the clock in his head. The woods were pale but they still had five hours before the full night would catch them. He didn’t have much hope of finding anything tonight, and meanwhile Kidd would be looking for him at the station and across town the same thing would be happening with her. The band would fret when show time came and there was no Holly to sing their songs. And what about tomorrow? Her absence would be noticed at the station as well, and people would put two and two together. Now we are linked, he thought. Like it or not, this will make our continued separation a needless gesture.

  He guessed it was half a mile to the tracks and that was about right. Soon he got his first glimpse of the rails through leaves fluttering in the breeze. Still there was no talk: she followed him on the narrow path, keeping pace at a distance of twenty yards, and at this distance she followed him out of the woods and up the short incline to the roadbed of the New Jersey Railroad.

  He turned south, walking just inside the rail, taking the crossties two at a time. She walked on the other side and the margin made a statement. Don’t talk to me, please, I couldn’t bear it. Just give me these moments and this space to myself. The funny thing was, he could say the same thing to her: that now, after weeks of longing to talk, the dark mission that had finally drawn them together had left him, for the moment, with nothing to say. He looked back over his shoulder. She was losing ground on the crossties, taking two steps to his one and watching carefully where she put her feet. Those shoes she wore were not for walking, and already her dress was torn at the hem and streaked with mud.

  The tracks gave off a shimmery heat. The roadbed was long and straight and unpromising, stretching on for at least two miles without a turn. Surely they’d come to the old town site before then. Certainly the Schroeders had not come all this way with a prisoner or a dead man. Suddenly he had doubts, his first real bout of second-guessing. Then in the shimmer he saw the sign and his hunch came back with a rage of certainty.

  He dabbed his eyes on his shirtsleeves, dreading what the next few hours or tomorrow might bring. In the distance the sign took on substance and shape. The letters began to form, M . . . A . . . Y . . . , and he looked back to find Holly far away but still coming.

  He stepped over the rail and slid down the roadbed. Walked off into the woods and at once found the trace of the old road. It began to dawn on him now, the size of the job he’d taken on: how even a man who knew where a grave site was could miss it by being a few feet off in any direction. He put his bag on the ground and as a first step undertook a circumferential definition of the town on the west side of the tracks. He wasn’t sure why he did this—even if Maynard meant what he now knew it meant, it was no sure thing that the grave was within its limits—but it gave him something to do until she arrived. He paced off the road and came back again, and she stood looking at the wilderness that surrounded them.

  “Are we there?”

  “I think so.”

  She hadn’t questioned anything and didn’t now. “Just give me a few minutes to rest in the shade. Then you can tell me what I can do and how we can get started.”

  He took a small roll of light canvas from his bag and spread it on the ground for her to lie on. She had a headac
he, which had begun on the long walk up the tracks, but he had aspirin and a soft drink in his bag. “You think of everything, Jack,” she said, but he passed this off as the simple woodsmanship of a camper who had forgotten everything at least once in his life. She took the aspirin and he left her there, to continue his walk north along the trace.

  He tried to imagine what the town had looked like sixty years ago, to see beyond that conglomeration of dots on a fading page of newsprint. He stopped and looked back, a sense of place came over him, and he could almost see that corridor through the trees by the traces that were left.

  His first job was to walk it: north and south, then east and west, looking for oblong places, sinkholes that might have settled in six months, ridges of earth or uneven ground about the size of a man’s body. Perhaps a break in the ground cover, a small patch that had grown back evenly or not at all, would tell him where to begin. He couldn’t get careless and let impatience ruin it: had to walk over ground he had already covered, see with new eyes, not miss what he sought because he was too eager to find rather than see. His first pacings were in rows only a foot apart, up and down like a farmer behind a plow. An hour passed and the woods grew shadier. In another hour he had crossed the trace into continuous shadow and the going was slower. Now he needed to stop more often, get down on his knees and examine the darkening earth before moving on.

  He carried a spiral notebook, marking possible sites on a crude little map. Nothing had grabbed him yet, but he’d come upon half a dozen places that had earned marks on his paper. These he’d revisit, probably tomorrow, if he found nothing better: do some digging and see what each of them held. He was well off the road in deep woods when he saw a little recess. He got down and dug his fingers into the earth and decided that this would be his main effort in the final two hours of the day.

  He stripped off his shirt and went to work. Soon he had a hip-deep hole that quickly became impossible to see in its black bottom. But the work was discouraging: his shovel began hitting roots and other entanglements that had been in the ground for a long time. He thought he’d go on for a while longer and look at the evidence fresh in the morning. Then he heard something behind him and Holly was standing over him at the edge of the hole.

  “God, I must’ve died. How long was I sleeping?”

  “Oh, an hour or so.” He stopped and rested on his shovel. “How’s the headache?”

  “I’m fine now.” She leaned closer, her face a shadow now, her voice disembodied, coming at him from the trees. “Is this where he is?”

  “I don’t think so. It was worth looking at, but probably not.”

  “Let me shovel.”

  He shook his head. “Those shoes of yours wouldn’t last five minutes. And if I can say so without tootin’ my own horn, I was born to this labor.”

  “Then what can I do?”

  “Go across the tracks and search the ground over there while there’s still a little light. Look for anything that might be . . . you know.”

  “A grave,” she said evenly.

  She stood there for another moment as if she had something more to say but didn’t know how to get at it. Then she looked at the sky, yellow over the trees. “We’re gonna get rain.” She smelled the air. “All my life I’ve been able to tell when rain’s coming. It’s a feeling in the air.”

  “I hope you’re wrong this time.”

  “Yeah.” She looked at the sky. “But I’m not.”

  Still she stood there. She said, “Jack, I . . . ,” but when nothing else came he said, “Go on now. See what you can do while there’s still a little light left.” He watched her walk out toward the tracks, then went back to work. But soon he gave it up. He had hit a bed of clay, and there was no way anything would be buried under that.

  The train passed, going north. They’re late tonight, he thought. The clock in his head told him that this time last night he was already well on his way into town.

  He carved out a campsite with his axe, deep enough in the woods that it couldn’t be seen from the tracks. Then he built and lit a fire, broke out a fry pan and the half-dozen small pork chops that he’d had the storekeep pack in ice and wrap in butcher’s paper. Soon he had supper going, with a can of beans simmering in the coals. The woods were dark, but if he looked across the way there was still a rosy light on the face of the forest. He took his flashlight and went to the edge and called her in.

  She was nervous now and excessively polite. She praised his supper lavishly, touched by the trouble he had taken with the tin plates and the real forks and the real food. It was simple food, he said: it was the woods that gave it such out-of-this-world taste. In the quiet that followed he said, “We won’t eat this well tomorrow night. If we’re out here that long.” Still nothing was said about their obligations. They sat cross-legged on opposite sides of the fire and occasionally their eyes met in the smoke.

  “I wonder what they’ll think,” she said at last. “If we don’t show up tomorrow. Or if we do.”

  “They’ll have to seriously consider canceling that radio show.”

  “Or getting another singer.” Abruptly she changed the subject. “I saw a snake, in the tall grass across the railroad.”

  “You’ll have to be careful with those bare ankles.”

  “Are they poisonous?”

  “I believe there are a couple that get up this far. Cottonmouths . . . timber rattlers. They’re more common down south, but you’ll see ’em occasionally right up into New England.”

  They seemed to want to talk about everything but the thing that had brought them here. Far away thunder rumbled. “That’s the rain moving in,” she said. “I told you we’d get it, the air’s heavy with it.”

  He himself felt no such heaviness but he figured he’d better take her word. He fetched his canvas roll and walked out into the forest until he found a place for a lean-to, with a tie-up to two saplings and tall fat pines on either side. In fifteen minutes he had the canvas staked down and tied at the top, with a trench dug around it so the water would run off and not leak in from the bottom. He made her a soft bed of grass and leaves and gave her the gunnysack filled with pine needles for a pillow. He would sleep sitting up, propped against one of the pines about two feet away. “Just like the Waldorf,” he said as the rain began.

  She crawled inside. The darkness in the lean-to was infinite. He flicked his light to get his bearings and saw her stretched out on her side with her head propped up on her hand, watching him. “We should be fine here,” he said, settling back against the tree. He turned off the light and was engulfed by the earth.

  Her voice came out of nowhere. “How can you sleep like that?”

  “I’ve been studying mind control. That’s all it really is.”

  The rain hit the canvas in great fat drops, and soon he could hear the water running off into his little ditch. “Are you getting wet?” Her voice was everywhere in the black universe. He said, “No, I’m fine,” and this was mostly true. A little water wouldn’t bother him; he had slept in circumstances far worse than this, and he was tired, and tomorrow was going to be hard, and he hoped he had the strength of mind to put it all away for now and rest easy. He stretched out his legs with the flashlight at his side and the gun belt rolled up in his lap.

  “Jack?”

  He opened his eyes. Realized the silliness of that and closed them.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Nothing to be sorry about.”

  “Do you want to talk about any of it?”

  “We’ve got some things to talk about. But they’ve kept for a while, they’ll keep a little longer.”

  The rain was steady. It was good sleeping weather but suddenly he knew that sleep would not come as easily as he’d hoped. He heard her stir on the bed and turn over.

  “Do you really think he’s here?”

  “I don’t know. I’m playing a hunch.” But he couldn’t leave it like that. “Yeah, I do,” he said. “I think he’s here.”

&n
bsp; “It’s not going to be easy, finding him.”

  “It’s hard to tell. We got such a late start today.”

  “The woods are thicker across the tracks. They grow right down to the road.”

  His eyes flicked open and he was wide awake. “What road?”

  “There’s a dirt road that comes in from the east.”

  “It’s probably another one of the old streets.”

  “No, this is more than a trace. It goes way out, away from the tracks. I walked along it but I never found the end. I think it goes all the way to the sea.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Well, it goes somewhere. What else is out there?”

  The town, he thought. The radio station, Harford’s place. Old Tom Griffin’s cottage not far from the white marsh district. All due east of here: a long ride on a bad country road, but some dirt roads will astonish you.

  They were quiet now and in a while the rain passed. Her breathing was regular and deep. He rested but could not sleep. Always that road would appear and pull his mind back to full awareness. At last he knew he wouldn’t sleep until he had seen it for himself, and he rolled out of the lean-to and followed his light down to the railroad and across to the other side. He found the road and followed it through the trees for a mile or more. It grew stronger as he went, leading him out of the woods at a little creek bed that opened into a long marshy slough. The clouds were breaking up and the world was silver, and the road went on.

  ( ( ( 34 ) ) )

  HE opened his eyes after four hours’ hard sleep. The world was dark but dawn was coming. The clock in his head never worked better than in deep sleep, a truth he had never understood. Day after day he would open his eyes and instantly know what the time was and how long he had slept.

  He was lying on the mat in the lean-to and Holly lay sprawled across him with her arms around his shoulders. He had come in around one thirty and she’d been awake, insisting that they change places. “You sleep, I’ll sit up awhile,” she had said, but sometime in the night she had fallen asleep and here they were, locked together like old lovers, with his arms wrapped around her.