by Pat Frank
Dan put the car keys in his pocket and said, "Better bring the whiskey and honey, Randy. I never leave stuff in the car when I make a call in Pistolville."
As he walked to the house, Randy noticed the Atlas grocery truck and a big new sedan in the Hernandez carport and a Jaguar XK-150 sports car in the driveway. A latrine had been dug behind the carport and partly shielded from the road by a crude board fence.
Rita swung open the screen door. "You'll pardon the artillery," she said. "The goons down the street are envious. When I hear a car or anything I grab a gun. They killed my dog. She was a black poodle, Randy. Her name was Poupée Vivant. That means Livin' Doll in French. Cracked her skull with an ax handle while Pete was lying sick and I was off fetching water. I found the ax handle but not the body. The goddamn cracker scum! Ate her, I guess."
Randy thought how he would feel if someone killed and ate Graf. He was revolted. And yet, it was a matter of manners and mores. In China men for centuries had been eating dogs stuffed with rice. It happened in other meat-starved Asian countries. The Army had put him through a survival course, once, and taught him that in an emergency he could safely eat pulpy white grubs found under bark. It could happen here. If a man could eat grubs he could eat dogs. Pistolville was meat starved and, as Dan had said, the rules were off. All Randy said was, "I'm sorry, Rita."
Randy walked through the door and stopped, astonished. The two front rooms of the Hernandez place looked like show windows in a Miami auction house. He counted three silver tea services, two chests of flat silver, three television sets, and was bewildered by a display of statuary, silver candelabra, expensive leather cases, empty crystal decanters, table lighters, chinaware. Gold-framed oils and watercolors, some fairly good, plastered one wall. Table clocks and wall clocks raised their hands and swore to different times. "Great God!" Randy said. "Have you people gone into the junk business?,
Rita laughed. "It's not junk. It's my investment."
Dan said, "How's Pete, Rita?"
"I think he's a little better. He's not losing any more hair but he's still weak."
Dan was carrying his black bag. It held little except instruments now. He said, "I'll go back and see him."
Dan walked down the hall and Randy was alone with her. She offered him a cigarette. Her perfume opened the gates of memory - the movies in Orlando, the dinners and dancing at the hotel in Winter Park, the isolated motel south of Canaveral, the morning they found a secluded pocket behind the dunes and were buzzed by a light plane and how the pilot almost sideslipped into the sea banking around for a second look, and most of all, his apartment. It seemed so long ago, as if it had happened while he was in college, before Korea, but it was not so long, a year only. He said, "Thanks, Rita. First real cigarette I've had in a long, long time. You must be getting along all right."
She looked at the bottle. "You didn't bring me a present, did you, Randy?" The corners of her mouth quivered, but she did not quite smile.
He remembered the evenings he had come to this house, a bottle beside him on the seat, and they had gone tooting off together; and the evenings he had brought bottles in gift packages, discreet gratuities for her brother; and the nights in the apartment, sharing a decanter drink for drink because she loved her liquor. He realized that this is what she intended he remember. She was expert at making him feel uncomfortable. He said, "No, Rita. Trade goods. I've been in Marines Park, trying to trade for coffee."
"Don't your new women like Scotch, Randy? I hear you've got two women in your house now. Which one are you sleeping with, Randy?"
Suddenly she was a stranger, and he looked upon her as such. Examined thus, with detachment, she looked ridiculous, wearing high heels and costume jewelry with shorts and halter at this hour of the morning and in this time of troubles. Her darkling ivory skin, once so satiny, appeared dry and mottled. Her hair was dull and the luster in her eyes reflected only spiteful anger. She looked used and tired. He said, calmly, "You can take your claws out now. I don't feel them. My skin's tougher."
She licked her lips. They were puffed and brown. "You're tougher. You're not the same Randy. I guess you're growing up."
He changed the subject. "Where did you get all this stuff?" He looked around the room.
"Trading."
"I never see you in Marines Park."
"We don't go there. They come to us. They know we still hold food. Even coffee."
He knew she wanted the bottle. He knew she would trade coffee, but he would never again trade with her, for anything. He said:
"You said this was your investment. Do you think three television sets is a good investment when there isn't any electricity?"
"I'm looking ahead, Randy. This war isn't going to last forever and when it's over I'm going to have everything I never had before and plenty besides, maybe to sell. I was only a kid after the last big war but I remember how my dad had to pay through the nose for an old jalopy. Do you know what that Jag cost me?" She laughed. "A case of beans, three bottles of ketchup, and six cans of deviled ham. For a Jag! Say, as soon as things get back to normal those three TV sets will be worth their weight in gold."
"Do you really think things are going to get back to normal?"
"Sure! They always have, haven't they? It may be a year, even two. I can wait. You look at those big new houses out on River Road
. What built half of them? Wars. Profits out of wars. This time I'm going to get mine."
He saw that she believed it and it was pointless to argue with her. Still, he was intrigued. "Don't you realize that this war is different?"
She held out her left hand so that the sunlight glinted on the ring on her second finger. "It certainly is different! Look at this!"
He looked at the big stone, and into it, and a thousand blue and red fights attested to its worth and purity.
It wasn't costume jewelry, as he had surmised. It wasn't glass surrounded by green paste. It was a diamond set in emeralds. "Where did you get it?" he asked, awed, and then he looked at her crescent ear clips and saw that they too, beyond a doubt, were diamonds.
Rita held the ring out, turning her wrist. She did not answer at once. She was enjoying their reaction. "Six carats,", she said. "Perfect." She slipped it from her finger and handed it to Randy.
He took it automatically but he wasn't looking at it. He was looking at her finger. Her finger was marred by a dark, almost black circle, as if the ring were tarnished brass, or its inside sooty. But the ring was clean bright white gold.
Dan came into the room, pawing in his bag and frowning. "I don't know exactly-" he began, looked at Randy's face, and failed to finish the sentence."
Frowning, Rita inspected the dark band. "It itches," she said, and scratched. A bit of blackened skin flaked away, leaving raw flesh beneath.
"I asked where you got this, Rita," Randy said, a command.
Before she opened her mouth he guessed the answer.
She said, "Porky Logan."
The ring dropped to the floor, bounced, tinkled, and came to rest on the corner of a blue silk Chinese rug.
"Say, what's the matter?" she said. "You act like it was hot!"
"I think it is hot," Randy said.
"Well, if you think Porky stole it, you're wrong. It was abandoned property. Anybody would take it."
Dan took her hand and adjusted his bifocals so he could examine the finger closely. He spoke, his voice deep, enforcing calm. "Hold still, Rita, I just want to see that finger. I think what Randy meant was that the ring has been exposed to radioactivity and is now radioactive itself. I'm afraid he's right. This looks like a burn - a radium burn. How long have you been wearing that ring?"
"Off and on, for a month I guess. I never wear it outside, only in the house." She hesitated. "But this last week, I've had it on all the time. I never noticed-"
They looked down at it, its facets blinking at them from the soft blue silk as if it were in a display window. It looked beautiful.
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"Where did Porky get it, Rita?" Dan asked.
"Well, I only know what he told me. He was fishing in the Keys on The Day and of course he started right back. He's smart, Porky is. He made a big detour around Miami. Well, he was passing through Hollywood or Boca Raton or one of those Gold Coast places and it was empty and right off the main drag he saw one of those swanky little jewelry shops, you know, a branch of some Fifth Avenue
store and its windows were blown out. He said stuff was lying all over, rings and pins and watches and bracelets, like popcorn out of a busted bag. So he gathered it up. Then he dumped the hooks and plugs and junk out of his fishbox and went inside and filled it up. Porky said right then he was thinking of the future. He figured that money wouldn't be worth anything but diamonds and gold were different. They never lost value no matter what happened."
"Impregnated with fallout," Dan murmured. "Suicide."
Rita's hands crept upward to her neck and Randy noticed an oval mark in the hollow of her throat, as if the skin were painted darker there. Then her hands flew to her ears. The diamond ear clips fell to the rug beside. the ring. She moaned, "Oh, God!"
"What did you have to give Porky for those diamonds?" Randy asked softly.
"For the ring, hardly anything at all. For the rest of it we gave him canned meat and cigarettes and coffee and chocolate bars and stuff like that. You know how Porky ate. For Chrissakes, Doc, what are you going to do about this?" She stared at her finger.
"What else did Porky give you besides the diamonds?" Dan asked.
"All sorts of stuff. He gave us a double handful of watches just for a case of pork and beans. Pete has-" She looked down the hallway. She said, "Pete!" and led them to his room.
Pete Hernandez didn't look as bad as Bill Cullen, but he looked bad enough, his scalp scabby as with mange, face erupting, and hands swollen. He pushed himself back on his pillows, startled, as they came in.
Rita said, "Pete, take off those watches."
"Are you nuts?" Pete was wearing a gold watch pushed up absurdly on each skinny arm. Pete looked at their faces and said, "Why should I take off my watches?"
Dan leaned down and stripped them off and tossed them on a table. The flexible gold straps left black insigma. "They're radioactive. That gold is a hot isotope of gold They've been poisoning you. Look."
Pete looked down. "It's just dirt. It's the heat. I've been sweating."
Randy asked the question, "Where's the rest of Porky's jewelry, Pete?"
Pete looked at Rita, his dulled black eyes uncertain and appealing. He said, "They just want to get our gold and stones, Rita."
"Randy doesn't lie, Pete, and I don't think Doctor Gunn would steal anything from anybody."
Pete curled his arm to reach under his pillow.
Dan said, "Oh, good Lord," pitying him.
From under the pillow Pete brought out a plastic toilet kit.
"Open it," Dan said.
Pete unzipped it. It was packed full, watch bands twisting and cur ling like golden snakes.
"Is that all?" Dan asked.
"No, those are just the watches," Rita said. "Pete's been amusing himself, admiring them and winding them every day. There's more stuff in my room - a couple of necklaces and a ruby and diamond-brooch and - well, all sorts of junk."
"Pete," Dan said, "throw that kit in the corner, there. Rita, don't touch anything you may have in your bedroom. There's no point in your absorbing even another fraction of a roentgen. We've got to figure out a way to get the stuff out of here and get rid of it without damaging ourselves. We'll be back."
Rita followed them to the door, whimpering. She snatched at Dan's sleeve. "What's going to happen? Am I going to die? Is my hair going to fall out?"
"You haven't absorbed nearly as much radiation as your brother," Dan said. "I don't know exactly what's going to happen because radiation sickness is so tricky."
"What about Pete? What'll I do if Pete-"
"I'm afraid," Dan said, "that Pete is slipping into leukemia."
"Blood cancer?"
"Yes. I'm afraid you'd better prepare yourself."
Rita's hand fell from Dan's arm. Randy watched her diminish, all allure, all bravado falling away, leaving her smaller and like a child. He said, quietly, "Rita, you'd better keep this, here. You'll need it." He gave her the bottle of Scotch.
As he pressed the starter Dan said, "Why give her the whiskey."
"I feel sorry for her." That wasn't the only reason. If he had owed her anything before, he did no longer. They were quits. They were square. "Is she going to be all right?" he asked.
"I think so, unless a malignancy develops from the burn on her finger. Improbable but possible. Yes, she should be all right so far as radiation goes. The dose she absorbed was localized. But after her brother dies she'll be alone. Then she won't be all right"
"She'll find a man," Randy said. "She always has."
Porky Logan's house stood at the end of Augustine Road
, in a grove that rose up a hillside at the back of the house. It was a two-story brick, the largest house in Pistolville, so it was said. Porky's sister and niece had been caring for him, but he lived alone. His wife and two children had departed Pistolville ten years before.
They found Porky on the second floor; He was sitting up in bed, unshaven chin resting upon blotched bare chest. Between his knees was a beer case filled with jewelry. His hands were buried to the forearm in this treasure. Dan said, "Porky!"
Porky didn't raise his head. Porky was dead.
Dan stepped to the bed, pushed Porky's body back against the pillows, and pried an eyelid open. Dan said, "Let's get out of here. That's a furnace he's got in his lap."
Randy tried not to breathe going down the steps. It was not only the smell of Porky's room that hurried him.
Dan said, "We've got to keep people out of this house until we can get Porky and that hot stuff underground. How do we do it?"
"What about a sign? We could paint a sign."
They found an unopened can of yellow paint and a brush in Porky's garage. Dan used the brush on the front door. In block letters he wrote:
"DANGER! KEEP OUT! RADIATION!"
"You'd better put something else on there," Randy said. "There are a lot of people around here who still don't know what radiation means."
"Do you really think so?"
"I'm positive of it. They've never seen it, or felt it. They hear about it, but I don't think they believe it. They didn't believe it could kill them before The Day - if they thought of it at all - and I don't think they believe it now. You'd better add something they understand, like Poison."
So under "RADIATION," Dan printed, "POISON." He said, "One other. Bill Cullen."
Bigmouth Bill was as they had left him, except that he held a bottle of cheap rum in his misshapen hands, and had been hitting it. Randy hovered at the door, so he could listen but not be submerged in the odors.
Dan said, "Bill, we've found out what's making you sick. You're absorbing radiation from the jewelry Porky traded for the whiskey. Porky's jewelry is hot. It's radioactive. Where is it?"
Bill laughed wildly. He began to curse, methodically and without imagination, as Randy had heard troops curse in the MLR in Korea. The pace of his obscenities quickened, he choked, frothed, and pulled at the rum bottle. "Jewelry!" he yelled, his yellow'eyeballs rolling. "Jewelry! Diamonds, emeralds, pearls, tinkly little bracelets, all hot, all radioactive. That's rich!"
"Where is it, Bill?" Dan's voice was sharper.
"Ask her. Ask the dough-faced bitch! She has 'em, has the whole bootful."
"What do you mean?"
"I've been hiding the stuff, figuring that if she got her hands on it she'd swap it all for a bottle of vino. The jewels in one boot, the rum in the other. Believe it or not, this is the last of my stock." He sucked at the bottle.
"Go on," Dan said.
"I kept the boots, these boots here-" he gestured at a pair of h
unting boots - "hid under the bed. It was safe, okay. You see, my woman she never cleaned anything, especially she never cleaned under the bed. Well, when she went out for a while I thought I'd take a look at the loot. You know, it was nice to hold it in your hands and dream about what you were going to do with it when things got back to normal. But she was watching through the window. She's been trying to catch me and just a while ago she did. She walked in, grinning. I thought she was going to tell me the war was over or something. She walked in and reached under the bed and snatched the boot. All she said as she went through the door was, 'I hope you croak, you sneaky bastard. I'm going back to Apalachicola'."
Fascinated, Randy asked, "How does she expect to get to Apalachicola?"
"I keep - kept the Plymouth in the shed. It was nearly full with gas, what was in the drum I had to service the outboards. I hope she wrecks."
Dan picked up his bag. His huge shoulders sagged. His face was unhappy behind the red beard. "Do you still have that ointment I gave you?"
"Yes." Bill turned his head toward the table.
"Keep using it on your hands. It may give you relief."
"It may, but this will." Bill tilted the rum bottle and drank until he gagged.
Riding back on River Road
, Randy said, "Will Cullen live?"
"I doubt it. I don't have the drugs or antibiotics or blood transfusions for him." He reached down and patted his bag. "Not much left in here, Randy. I have to make decisions, now. I have drugs only for those worth saving."
"What about the woman?"
