“Sorry. They asked me not to say.” He fished for a change of subject. “How did you arrange the meeting, get in touch with them? If it’s all right for me to know.”
“I suppose so. Believe it or not, our conspiracy has a complete secret telegraphic network covering most of the United States. I didn’t believe them when they told me, but it’s true. Like finding out that you don’t have to dig a tunnel under the English Channel; there’s one already dug. The senator found out about the wires when he was on the crime commission. They call them ‘dry wires.’ They’re the old Postal Telegraph network from before your time and mine. Public clocks in all sorts of places used to get correcting pulses over the wires. When Western Union absorbed Postal Telegraph, they just blanked off their clock wires because radio had come along by then and any disk jockey could give you Naval Observatory time. I located one of the painted-over terminals in the Lackawanna station. Ticket clerk there’s in with us. All you need to activate a link of the circuit are a battery, a key, and a buzzer. He covers the wire for us. A brave man, Billy…”
“We’re all heroes,” he said bitterly.
“Yes, I suppose we are. Would you like a drink?”
“I ought to start for home. Maybe I can hitch a ride.”
“Nonsense. Stay the night and take the Keoka bus. If you stay for breakfast it’ll improve your cover story. I think I told you—there’s a lot of it going on.”
“I think what you said was, ‘It isn’t love, but there’s a lot of it going on.’ ”
“Something like that. There isn’t much love around these days. A lot of loneliness, a lot of monotony, a lot of shattered pride.”
“I’ll take that drink, please,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
They walked together down Chiunga Hill toward the town, savoring the still cool morning. The reservoir off to the north was a sheet of blue glass and the pumping station a toy fort in the clear air.
“I’m glad they never bombed us,” Betsy said. “I really like this place.”
He thought of reminding her what a scorched-earth guerrilla campaign meant, but did not speak.
“Convoy,” Betsy said, pointing down at the highway. The buglike trucks must be hauling supplies—but the tanks? “Maneuvers somewhere,” she said.
They walked on in silence, and Chiunga Hill Road became Elm Street and they joined other morning walkers to work. A letter carrier in gray said: “Morning, Miss Cardew. What do you suppose those trucks are up to?”
He meant the convoy. Instead of by-passing the town they had turned off the highway and were rolling down High Street, three blocks farther on.
“Maybe they’re going across the bridge to the Tunkhannock road, Mr. Selwin. Mr. Selwin, do you know Mr. Justin?”
“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” the old man said. “You a farmer, Mr. Justin?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a lucky man, then, I can tell you that. At least you get all you want to eat. Say, Mr. Justin, I hear that sometimes you people up in the hills have a few eggs or maybe a chicken or some butter left over and I happen to know a family with a little girl that’s real sick with anemia. Blood needs building up. Now if I could fix it up with you—”
Justin shook his head. “I can’t get away with it, Mr. Selwin. I’m very sorry. And by the way, the farmers may be eating better than the city people, but they’re sweating it right out again making milk. The norm’s always moving up, you know. Soon as you catch up, it jumps again.”
“He’s telling the truth, Mr. Selwin,” Betsy said. “Ask any of the rural carriers. Surely those trucks aren’t stopping for our little traffic light, are they?”
“They never have before,” Mr. Selwin said. They were now only a block from High Street. The postman peered over his glasses at the standing trucks. “But then,” he said, “they don’t seem to be regular Red Army trucks. Instead of the red star they have—let’s see—MBA. What’s MBA mean?”
“In the first place,” Betsy said slowly, “it’s MVD.”
“Beats me, Miss Cardew. I don’t know how you and the other young people do it.” He winked at Justin privately.
“They’re the border guards. And the political police,” Betsy said.
Two trucks turned out of line on High Street and came roaring down their way along Elm. Justin got only a glimpse of young faces and special uniforms. Green, with polished leather.
They can’t have come for us, thought Justin incredulously. There’s a regiment of them. Fifty personnel-carrier trucks, command cars, half a dozen medium tanks. They can’t have come for Betsy and me!
Walking in frozen silence, they reached High Street. The main body of the convoy was parked there, the young men in their special uniforms impassive under the eyes and whispers of five hundred work-bound men and women. At the far end of High Street, on the old bridge across the Susquehanna, stood two of the tanks. The four other tanks were crawling northeast from High along Seneca. Nothing was in that direction except the high school—the 449th SMGU garrison.
A fat man in a high-slung command car got up, looked at his watch, and blew a whistle three times. The convoy erupted into action. People laughed shrilly; it was comical to see almost one thousand young men who had been stock-still a moment ago begin to climb out of their trucks, hand down equipment, consult maps and lists, snap salutes, and pass low-toned commands and acknowledgments.
A pattern appeared. Justin knew it from Korea. There are only so many ways to occupy a town. This outfit was doing it the expensive, foolproof sledge-hammer way. The strings of sixteen burdened men in double column were machine-gun sections streaming out to the perimeter of the area; they would set up a pair of cross-firing guns at each main road into the Center. The squads double-timing ahead of them would be pickets linking the machine-gun points. And there was a mortar section, sagging under their bedplates and barrels and canvas vests stuffed with bombs; they were on their way to the Susquehanna bridge embankment to reinforce the pair of tanks. A cheap little mortar bomb would sink a rowboat unworthy of a 155-millimeter shell from the tank; a white phosphorus bomb would be more effective against forbidden swimmers than machine-gun fire.
And the specialist squads moved down to the railroad station to hold all trains, and into the small A.T. & T. building to take charge of communications, and into the Western Union office with its yellow and black hanging sign and varnished golden-oak counter and scared nineteen-year-old girl clerk.
And riflemen consulted maps and went and stood like traffic cops, a pair at every intersection, sweeping the crowded sidewalks with stony eyes.
Beside Justin, Mr. Selwin gibbered: “It must be some kind of drill, don’t you think? Just what you call a dry run, don’t it look like?”
A vast relief was blossoming inside Justin. “I think so,” he said. “I can’t imagine what else it could be. Just practice in case.” In case of me—but not yet.
A sound truck rolled down the street, stopping at each corner to make an announcement in Russian and one in English. They saw the crowds melt from the sidewalk and into shops as it approached; from three blocks away they caught the English: “All persons off the streets at once and await further inspections. Persons on the street in three minutes will be shot—”
They dived for a store the instant it sank in. The store happened to be Mr. Farish’s pharmacy. “Thank God,” said Betsy. “A place with coffee.” Her voice shook.
The sound truck stopped only a couple of yards away at the intersection and bellowed in Russian and English. The score or so of people crowded into the store debated on the Russian announcement. They more or less agreed at last that the announcement had been orders for all SMGU troops to report at once to the high school athletic field.
Bald young Mr. Farish was behind his soda fountain making and serving coffee mechanically. When he got to Justin, Betsy, and Mr. Selwin, he twinkled: “Little break in the monotony, eh?”
Mr. Selwin said: “I ought to be in
the sorting room. I’ve been late before this year, no fault of my own. It’s going to look awfully bad.”
The coffee was some terrible synthetic or other.
Betsy said from the window: “They’re arresting the SMGU men—I think.” Everybody crowded up to see a couple of regular-detachment people being marched along by MVD troops. The green-uniformed young men had taken the regulars’ tommy guns.
“It’s something like a visit from the inspector general,” said a man who actually took a short step through the door onto the sidewalk to see better. “Only—Russian.” One of the MVD men posted like traffic cops yelled at him and brandished his rifle. He grinned and ducked back into the store.
“Russians don’t scare me any more,” he announced. “You know what I mean. I thought it was the end of the world when they came, but I learned. They’re G.I.s, and so what?”
A woman looked around, scowled, and said: “Speak for yourself.”
It precipitated a ten-minute debate in the crowded little store. Chiunga Center had not yet decided on the relationship between itself and the Russians. “We might be across the Mississippi,” said somebody. “How’d you like to have a bunch of Chinks swaggering around? Yeah, the Russians aren’t so different from Americans. It says in the Times they both have characters shaped by frontiers…” A Toynbeean’s view was that the occupiers would be softened and democratized by their contact with the occupied.
Through it all Justin and Betsy stood in a rear corner, their hands nervously entwined. Mr. Selwin left them long enough for a worried glance through the window. While the old man was gone, Justin had time to mutter: “Have you got a blade? I could buy one for you.”
“I have one,” she said, barely moving her lips.
Mr. Selwin came back. “I believe it’s all over,” he said. “The streets are clear and those soldiers are just standing there and I ought to get to the sorting room.”
“Better not, Mr. Selwin,” Betsy said.
“You don’t understand, Miss Cardew. You just took a mail job because you had to work at something. I’ve got thirty-two years in and absences don’t look good when a man’s my age. They start to say you’re slipping. Young people don’t understand that. I believe I’m going to ask that soldier if I can go now.”
“I wouldn’t, Mr. Selwin,” Justin told him.
Selwin went anyway. He shouted from the doorway at the pair of riflemen: “Is it all right now? We go? Free?” They stared at him.
Some of the other Americans stranded in the store called out hopefully in Russian. The faces of the young men in green didn’t change. “Better not,” a man told Mr. Selwin.
Mr. Selwin said: “I’ll try a few steps out. It all seems to be over anyway.”
He stepped out tentatively, keeping his eye on the Russians. They simply watched incuriously. The postman turned and grinned for a moment at the people in the store and took a couple of cautious steps down the street, then a couple more.
One of the Russians raised his rifle and shot Mr. Selwin in the chest. The big bullet blasted a grunt out of the old man, but after he fell he was silent. Apparently the sentry had been waiting for Mr. Selwin to step past the glass window of the drugstore to brick wall that would provide a backstop.
The man who wasn’t scared any more said slowly: “I think this is a different kind of Russian we have here.”
A middle-aged woman began to whoop and sob with hysteria. Mr. Farish yelled: “Don’t let her knock those bottles over, please! I’ll get some ammonia spirits—”
He fed them to her from a glass, nervously stroking his bald head. She calmed down, took the glass in her own hands and gulped, coughing.
They heard the boom of the sound truck in the distance again, and another sound: machine guns, a pair of them firing short, carefully spaced bursts. “It isn’t combat firing,” Justin said in bewilderment. “It sounds as if they’re shooting for badges on a range.”
Then a spattering of rifle shots confused the sound and then the truck rolled down High Street and drowned out the small arms with its yammer.
“All persons registered with the 449th Soviet Military Government Unit are ordered to report at once to the athletic field. Stragglers will be fired on. All persons registered…”
After the case of Mr. Selwin they did not hesitate. The shops along High Street erupted civilians who streamed toward the field, some of them running.
The field was clear on the other side of town from High Street. The congestion as they neared it was worse than it had ever been for a Saturday football game, even the traditional rivalry of Chiunga Catamounts versus Keoka Cougars. The bellowing sound truck dimmed behind them. The queer and prissy bursts-of-four machine gunning became louder, with the occasional spatter of rifles still occurring now and then.
Green-uniformed MVD men were posted around the field, gesturing the crowd through. One man was going the wrong way; he charged out of the gate beneath the stands, stumbling and caroming off the incoming civilians. Justin dodged and yanked Betsy aside as the man leaned over and was sick. Then the crowd swept them on through the narrow gate. They popped out inside on the cinder track that circled the field; MVD men gestured them along. The small bleachers across the field from them and the small stands sloping back behind them were full; these late arrivals were to be standees.
The field itself was crowded with something Justin at first—idiotically—took to be a dress parade. As he and Betsy shuffled sideways along the cinder track under the pressure of more arrivals, his eye gradually sorted out the two thousand odd soldiers on the field.
First there were the disarmed men of the 449th rigidly at attention behind their officers. They were drawn up in a solid block of companies that stretched from the north goal line to the 30-yard line. Everybody was there, down to the medics in their hospital coats and the cooks and bakers in their whites.
Then he saw the tanks, one at each corner of the field, their machine guns and cannon depressed to fire point-blank into the 449th. Then he saw the green-uniformed MVD men with rifles and tommy guns and a pile of new dead directly before them on the 50-yard line.
Machine guns roared above his head. Betsy screamed and clapped her hands to her head. The muzzle blast was terrific—
He turned and saw where they were coming from. A pair of them was mounted in the little press box hung from the roof of the stands, the box where the Valley News used to cover the games and WVC-TV used to broadcast the traditional rivalry each year. The guns hammered with that firing-range artificiality for a while and then stopped. Justin noticed that directly in front of them in midfield five soldiers of the 449th lay butchered.
Somebody in the field bawled: “Roh-tah—gay!”
MVD men began to hustle officers and men from one of the company blocks. All the officers, one enlisted man in four. The uneven rifle shots were explained while the selection was going on. One of the enlisted men broke loose and ran, screaming, when a green-uniformed youth tapped his chest. He was shot down as he sprinted sweatily toward the bleachers. The rest moved like zombies to the killing ground. In a few seconds they too were sprawling and screaming while the plunging fire from the press box hacked up the carefully tended sod of the stadium.
The word was traveling from early arrivals in the stands to those who had come late and were jammed onto the track. “They made a big speech in Russian and English first,” a man next to Justin reported after whispers with his neighbors. He spoke to Justin, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the charnel heap in the infield. His face and voice were just a little insane. “Fella says they called the 449th traitors to international socialism. Stuff about sloth, negligence, corruption, disgrace to the Army. Then they shot all the top brass, starting with Platov. Say, did you hear about Platov and Mrs.—?”
“I heard,” Justin said. He turned away.
“Rohtah gay,” Betsy whispered. “Company G. That’s only the fourth in their alphabet. They’ll be busy all morning.”
They were.
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At noon the last of the job was done. The weeping, or blank-faced, or madly grinning survivors of the 449th were loaded onto trucks and the field PA system cleared its throat.
“Proclamation. To the indigenous population of the area formerly under control of the 449th Soviet Military Government Unit. You are ordered to inform all persons unable to attend the foregoing demonstration of what has happened. You are advised that this is the treatment that will be accorded to all such betrayers of international socialist morality as the late Platov and his gang of bourgeois-spirited lackeys. You are advised that henceforth this area will be under the direction of the Meeneestyerstvoh Vnootrenikh Dyehl, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. You are advised that all laws and rules of the occupation will be rigidly enforced from this moment on. You are ordered to disperse within ten minutes. Troops will fire on stragglers.”
This might have been intended to precipitate a panic and an excuse for slaughter. It did not. Justin, sated with the horror of the morning’s work, still had some room for pride in him when the people in stands and bleachers rose and slowly filed from the stadium, turned their backs on the green-uniformed young monsters and their pile of carrion without cringing.
Justin walked with Betsy to the post office and left her there with a silent squeeze of the hand.
At the restaurant that doubled as bus station an old woman told him: “No busses been along all morning, mister. Should of been the Keoka bus at eight, ten, and twelve. And this fella in the green with the fancy belt, he walked in and he ripped down the bus schedule right off the wall. I guess he didn’t speak English, but then I guess he didn’t have to, did he?”
“I guess not,” Justin said.
He went out and started the fifteen-mile walk home under the broiling midsummer sun.
BOOK 3
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Justin was scything down the dry grass of autumn for winter feeding to the cows. Behind him Gribble followed with a rake and a hoarded ball of twine ends, making bundles they could carry to the barn.
Not This August Page 10
