by John Dunning
Then their hearts sank as their destination rose from the forest. It was Andersonville all over again, a wicked-looking stockade wide open to the elements with walls at least a dozen feet high and a stream running through it that would soon be like the one in Georgia, reeking of filth and crawling with disease and death. Carnahan sat on the ground with his hat in one hand and the other hand empty, and as night came on he felt the crushing weight of despair in the lost souls around him.
Dulaney took the first step: wrote a sentence that defined his story.
This is a tale of survival in the prison camp at Florence, during a terriblewinter in the final year of the war.
Rain washed over Florence as he began to write. All across the compound the fires flickered out, and the ground the men sat on was slick with mud. In the last of the firelight he saw the haggard face of Carnahan’s companion and it was Kendall.
( ( ( 5 ) ) )
HE dreamed that there was no war. There had been a war, but not this war. He had figured out who had killed Carnahan and why, but a thousand years had passed and what he had once known had faded away. His mind opened to the blackness of another summer morning.
His first conscious thought was of that script. The one nobody wanted to talk about. Somehow I’ve got to read it, he thought.
He rolled out of bed and crept from the room without a sound. Holly found it remarkable that a man his size could do this, get up and be gone and never wake her. “You should’ve been a burglar, Jack,” she told him. “But why don’t you nudge me once in a while so I can send you off properly?”
Send me off to the wars, he thought now. To some old war for a cause never quite understood and now long forgotten. Was that what he’d been thinking?
There had been a war, but not this war. His conscious mind had always been slower than the mind of his dreams to understand such things. The mind of his sleep pushed him to write things he never knew he knew, and left it to his conscious mind to haggle over what it all meant.
The script he had just written was different from all the others. It was his first sixty-minute piece, but more than that: it was the first thing he had written for a purpose far greater than the script itself.
Context. But what he really wanted was to see that other script.
A script that had been written the year March Flack disappeared. Accepted and sent up to mimeo, then never produced. Now Kidd wanted it on the air but was leery of the consequences. A radio novice, Jordan Ten Eyck, had given him an answer. Wrap it in context.
His Civil War story was the first piece of the context Kidd needed. Later this week he’d write the tough one, the Japanese family at Tanforan, Americans ripped out of their homes by their own government and put in a prison camp, for the crime of having Japanese faces.
Impossible to do, unthinkable to ignore.
There had been a war, but not this war. But what war and how old? Had he been dreaming of the old World War, of Gettysburg and Bull Run, of the Crimea, the Hundred Years, the Crusades, of Troy?
He thought he had been dreaming of March Flack. He had solved the mystery of Carnahan by linking it to March, not the other way around. You couldn’t ask what March had had to do with Carnahan, you could never make it make sense that way—not when you added the Germans and all the stuff about a war that didn’t exist when March Flack was here. Instead you had to ask what Carnahan and Kendall could possibly have had to do with March Flack. This seemed to suggest that March had been the only death with a purpose and all the others had been cover-up. That there had been no war at all at the root of it. That the motive might have been anything from a personal grudge to a madman’s annoyance with the way March Flack said his lines. That the connection to Hitler might be incidental or imagined, and the Germans were involved by nationality, common interest, or circumstance, take your pick.
He was back where he started. There had been a war, but not this war. March Flack had been in the old World War: so had Harford and Tom Griffin. We were at war with Germany but it was a far different Germany from the one we fight today. And still it makes no sense.
The Germans had to be more than incidental. They had known about the murders of both Kendall and Carnahan and had at least been willing accessories to keep them quiet. One of them, George, had certainly been present when Carnahan died. So I’m back to square one, Dulaney thought. Except for the dream. Except for this new script, and the hunch that something in that old script will lead me somewhere else.
To the old war, he thought, for no particular reason.
( ( ( 6 ) ) )
HE had the day free. It was Sunday and there was no Negro show, because this week they were moving to Friday. He gathered his gear for a trip he had been planning in secret. He wasn’t carrying much— the two canteens, the gun strapped round his belly, a few fruits and nuts knotted hobo style at the end of a stick. It was four thirty, give or take. Carnahan’s watch confirmed this as he clipped the fob to a belt strap and slipped it into his watch pocket.
He wrote her a note—GOING TO CHECK SOMETHING. GONE FOR THE DAY. DON’T WORRY—and left it on the table. She would be furious tonight when she learned where he’d been. He’d be lucky if she didn’t banish him to his own bed, in the room downtown that he so seldom used these days.
The sky was overcast as he stepped out onto the deck. There was a rumble in the east and he cursed his luck, that of all the days he had to choose one with weather.
It didn’t matter, he was going anyway. Think of those poor bastards at Florence and Andersonville, who slept in the rain for weeks and months, and maybe your own ordeal will seem rather ordinary and small.
He started the car and pulled out quickly. He didn’t worry that she would hear him: she was a hard sleeper and it had been a long night at the club. She had only been asleep for an hour and he doubted that the world would see her much before noon.
It would be another hour before the station signed on, so he had to fish for some kind of life on the radio dial. He found a clear all-nighter from somewhere, a guy playing records and trying to stay awake in the three-minute intervals between the music. This was good enough: even the Andrews Sisters at five o’clock in the morning broke his solitude.
He cleared the town and headed west across the bridge as news came on at the top of the hour. The eight Nazis put ashore by submarines were now on trial for their lives in Washington. Two were naturalized Americans, bund activists throughout the thirties; the others had lived in the States, knew their way around, and spoke fluent English. They had given Hoover a full account of Germany’s plot to conduct sabotage in America. It had been in the works for years, long before the two countries were actually at war. German Americans had been recruited by the German embassy, and by consulates everywhere, to go back to Germany for training and to get their assignments. Could that be what March Flack had learned? . . . It sounded thin, even to himself, yet he knew they were all somehow linked— March and the Germans, the Schroeders, that crazy Yorkville girl, Kendall, and Carnahan. All dead and linked to the war and to one another.
He looked back over the white marsh, fluttering like ghosts of fireflies in the first gray light from the east. He thought of Carnahan. Turned west toward Pinewood and thought of Holly.
( ( ( 7 ) ) )
RAIN was falling in the woods near Maynard. In wartime, on a clear day on the beach, dawn would be breaking at six o’clock, but the day was not clear and he had only the sheen on the two steel rails to guide him. The rain was steady and he was thankful for the lightweight slicker he had brought. The gun on his hip swung in time with his step but it didn’t weigh him down. It had the opposite effect, able to hearten and keep him.
The dawn went straight from black to gray. There wasn’t a sound other than the drip from the trees, and that was a constant.
He had come today for a different purpose but he did stop to check on Carnahan’s grave. Five minutes later he reached Holly’s road through the woods. He turned east to the sea, drawn by the promis
e of daylight. The ground was wet, with puddles and stretches of deep slop, but it didn’t slow him much. He walked on the grass where the ground was hard.
The woods fell away—he remembered that from the one time he’d walked it—and the land broke into sloughs and stretches of open mudflat. This wasn’t like the marsh over by the coast: it was more like an inland swamp, with pools of stagnant water and dead trees sticking up from the bog. The road ran on a backbone of high ground that looked artificial: probably the remains of an access road to the beach, laid down when Maynard was at its hell-raising best. But there was no place to hide a body here, and that answered one of his questions. The old Maynard town site was the first place with the double attraction: isolation and firm ground.
He came upon pieces of causeway, old planks that kept the road going. He had come well past the point where he’d walked that night in the moonlight, but the country didn’t change much. Only once did he look back, and the distance to the woods was equal to the same dark shadow ahead.
He smelled the waterway off to the south; then he saw it, a dull slate color that matched the sky. In time the land began to change; the woods ahead took on a more definite shape, and the small shelf of land flattened and widened. He had come eight miles from Maynard and the world was solid again.
Underbrush reappeared: scrubby stuff, sickly and poor. But it gained strength with every step, a sure sign that he was finished with the swamp. The beach was still some miles away but he had proved his point, that the old Maynard township could be reached by car, on a road that must skirt very near Harford’s place. There it was now, the paved state highway running north and south in the distance, with a thick new wall of trees beyond it to the east.
Harford’s could only be north of here. He looked back once as he started up the highway. You’d never know that dirt road was there: a hundred cars would pass without one taking notice. Five minutes later he saw another dirt road cutting away to the right: this one well maintained and graded. A row of mailboxes was there at the side. Four of them had names, the fifth only a number. That’s my boy, he thought.
Harford’s place was a good three miles in from the highway. The road was slippery and he was slowed by the mud, but he reached the gate sometime after nine. Now what? If he went in and got caught, what would he say? There were no easy answers, and he was still standing there contemplating it when he heard a car coming.
It was Kidd’s car, he knew it well. He stepped behind a tree as the passenger door opened and Maitland got out to open the gate. Then Maitland got back in the car and they went on up the wooded road. Dulaney stood there for another minute and decided to go in.
The woods deepened, the trees grew thick and tall. The road turned sharply and brought him into a long straightaway. He covered this at the same relentless gait; the road dipped left and the trees began thinning out. He came into the marshlands, and far across the way he saw the flashing red lights of the radio station.
The perspective was different from this side. The marsh was riddled with hard-packed pathways, all the trails old Griffin used when he went back and forth. The road followed the edge for a while, then turned west again into the forest. He looked back across the milewide expanse and the billowing rain blotted the tower until only a hint of red flashing in the soup told where it was.
He moved on. Again the trees closed in and the forest looked ancient and enormous. He might have stepped back a thousand years, to the age of Arthur, or half a step to Shakespeare’s day. If a man wanted to imagine himself in a forest of ancient Cornwall, or a wood near Stratford, this was a good place to do it.
A small cottage rose out of a dark misty glade, an almost supernatural bit of timing. Stone walls and a thatched roof sharpened the image already in his mind and he went ahead slowly. The windows were shuttered and the path leading through the small front yard was steeped in shadow. He saw other cottages as he came closer, replicas of this one off in the woods. The Elizabethan image deepened: it was part of Mrs. Harford’s dream, never used by the theater crowd she had hoped to bring here. Only the cottage at the far end showed any sign of life. The shutters were open and he saw a wagon in a little shed behind the house. So this is where the old man lives, he thought. This is where he practices his craziness.
He gave it a wide berth as he went by. The road came across a small hill and suddenly there was a drastic change in groundskeeping. Fences appeared on both sides and the trees began to thin and he could see green fields like a landscape from the horse country of Florida or Kentucky. He climbed through the fence and struck out across the field, sprinting between the trees till he could walk up to the edge of a barn at the far western edge of the compound.
He could hear horses inside and then, beyond the door, he found himself in a long shedrow with stalls on both sides—a walk-through barn with doors on both ends. He walked past the horses to the far door, cracked it open, and saw the main house only sixty yards away. There was Harford: he had come out to the edge of the porch and looked to be explaining something to the others. Dulaney could see a large building under construction a quarter of a mile away. It was going to be big enough to house an entire network broadcasting operation. Out on the grass was the apparatus for a tower, and steel beams that looked like bones in an elephants’ graveyard. He saw trucks, many half loaded with pipes and tools and tarp-covered equipment.
He escaped the way he had come, through the back door and across the field. He melted into the woods and settled again into the dogged gait of a foot soldier. As he came past the cottages he was stopped short by the sound of the old man’s coughing. He sees me, Dulaney thought; he’s watching even if I can’t see him. But there was nothing to do about it and he moved on down the road.
The rest of the day was a gray blur. He stayed on the main roads for the long walk back: it was faster than trying to cross the swamp again and hike back up the slippery railroad tracks. It was two miles to the Pinewood cutoff, then he turned into the long road west. He reached Pinewood late that afternoon and struck out to the south. By the time he got to the old Maynard road the rain was coming down in sheets. He retrieved his car and called it a day. He had come thirty miles.
He tried Holly’s number from a phone box in Pinewood but she wasn’t in. He prepared himself for a serious ass chewing when he saw her. She still wasn’t home when he arrived on the beach, so he stopped at his own place for a shower and some dry clothes. He ate alone, his only real meal of the day, at the fish house not far from the station. Night had fallen as he drove down the beach.
He reached her house at nine and she was there. She jerked open the door and the fear in her face turned at once to anger.
“You bastard! Where the hell have you been?”
But the scolding was brief and his crime forgiven. Pardon arrived in a glass without ice, and she sat quietly and sipped her own as he told her about the day. Later she rubbed his back and kissed the top of his head and he wrapped his arm around her legs and held her close.
( ( ( 8 ) ) )
HE dreamed that there was no war. Got up at three and exploded into his work, as if the answer to everything lay in some unwritten script still hidden away in his mind. Finished the sixth chapter of Dark Silver and immediately began jotting down notes for the most difficult of his prison camp stories. Tried to picture the Doi family at Tanforan but got off on the wrong foot, trying too hard to think like a Japanese. They are Americans, he told himself, and even if they were not it would still be the same. This was his credo in everything he wrote: people are the same all over. Believe that and you can cross any barriers of race and sex.
Now he saw a colored infantry regiment hunkered in the sand in the final moments before a battle. He knew it at once: a nasty little piece of history that romantics liked to dignify with words like glory. There had been nothing glorious about it, just an army of colored men thrown into hell, proving their worthiness to be free by leading the charge themselves. At once he knew his Friday show had to be changed.
They had decided to open with the life of Scott Joplin, a pleasant half hour highlighted by a ragtime collage on Leland’s piano—a little too close in proximity and theme to Blind Tom Bethune for his taste, but Waldo wanted a safe show. He knew Waldo was nervous: they were going to ruffle some white feathers just by being on in a prime hour, there was no sense pushing it too far. But this was opening night, no time to be timid. Kidd hadn’t put them there to do “nice” shows or to entertain white people with nostalgic piano interludes. This was opening night, for Christ’s sake, and in that predawn vision he knew what he wanted to do.
He started over to the station, went past Mrs. Flack’s dark bungalow, and headed across the dunes. The sand sucked at his feet, the red light drew him on, and his mind sizzled with all the creative and tactical problems he faced. The story he had suddenly seen could not be told in a single half hour. It needed two parts, the first to get the characters down and make the audience care, the second to capture some semblance of that desperate charge into certain death. This meant he’d have to inform Waldo and the cast, get Zylla involved because now he’d need a mighty score instead of that piano backdrop, bring in Livia with her bombs and artillery, and all this had to be done in four days or less so that Friday could be cleared for table readings and rehearsals. All of it fell on his shoulders but he did not fear it. It made him alive.
( ( ( 9 ) ) )
INCREDIBLE Monday. The day he became his own master in radio. For eight hours he didn’t move from his desk, except to stretch and go to the john.
Waldo called at nine. “Eli said you wanted to talk to me.”
