Not This August Page 12

  “How could it fail to, William? During pranayama one is sometimes so freed of distractions that one floats about the room, though I admit I’ve not done that yet or seen it. Surely a truncheon across the shins could be only a minor nuisance to one deeply engaged in pranayama, don’t you think?”

  “As long as it works.”

  Sparhawk sighed regretfully: “William, old man, I can see you’re struggling with it as a difficult idea. If only you were a bit along in Zen, how simple it would be! I’d merely kick you in the bum by surprise or unexpectedly shout ‘Fiddle-dee-dee!’ in your ear and it would all come to you. What a mess you’ve made of your life, William. No Zen at all. The time you’ve wasted!”

  Justin clenched his fists and said: “I’m not going to waste any more time, Mr. Sparhawk. Take me with you.”

  The old man asked coldly, suddenly alert, “Is this what you call a rib, William?”

  “I’m perfectly sincere. I want to go with you. To Washington, Pennsylvania.”

  “My dear boy, it doesn’t matter where one goes. But I’m afraid a vestigial attachment to worldly vanities keeps me from enjoying this joke of yours. If you’ll excuse me, I must say my prayers and turn in.”

  “He means it!” Gribble suddenly squalled, terrified. “Don’t leave me, Justin, don’t leave me alone here, they’ll beat me up to find out where you went and they’ll shoot me in the cellar—”

  “Work it out for yourself, Gribble,” Justin said gently. “I’m going. I’ve got to. Tell them any lies you like and if they don’t work, die like a man. Before you tell the truth.”

  Sparhawk rose from his padmasana posture, excitement in his eyes. “You do mean it, William?” he asked tremulously. “This isn’t a joke?”

  Justin said: “I’m not joking. Not about risking my life. I want to go with you.”

  And, he said to himself, by this token you cease to be a peasant, an animal. It’s important that you set out on your military mission, of course. But it’s more important that you set out on any mission at all and by that token become once more a man.

  “Mr. Sparhawk,” he said diffidently. The old man was silently praying, but turned to smile beatifically at him. “Mr. Sparhawk, I know you make a point of early departure, but could we stay here until mail time tomorrow? I want to say good-by.”

  “I understand.” The old man beamed at his convert. “I think we can permit it.”

  Good-by, Betsy Cardew. What might have been will never be.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  They had been five days on the road and covered twenty miles as the crow flies, eighty on the back roads chosen from an old Texaco map, when they met their first Reds.

  Sparhawk was drilling Justin when it happened; they were in a quiet clearing outside Leona, Pennsylvania, which the old man thought suitable for contemplation.

  Justin, under his direction, contorted himself into the joint-wrenching padmasana and was trying not to snicker at the order which followed. It was to look at the space between his eyebrows and meditate upon the syllable “Om.” The soldiers, a ten-man squad, came out of the woods at that point.

  The soldiers looked at them and roared with laughter. Their sergeant and Mr. Sparhawk were able to converse after a fashion in mixed English and Russian. Justin did not succeed in looking at the space between his eyebrows or in meditating upon the syllable “Om.” Locked in the padmasana, he watched the parley between the two men and meditated on the Conveyor. From time to time one of the soldiers would poke him curiously and grin: “Galyootsinahtsya.”

  The parley ended; the soldiers left. The tremendous fact was that they had been intercepted, had been unable to show documents justifying their presence, and yet had not been arrested.

  “How did you do it, Mr. Sparhawk?” he gasped.

  “Satagraha,” Mr. Sparhawk said absently. “Soul force. It works, you know. Most of the time, that is. Their tendency is to assume that one’s probably all right and that anyway it’s no business of theirs. Marked contrast with the MVDs, whose assumption is that one probably isn’t all right and that everything’s business of theirs. But let’s not chatter, William. You’re supposed to be in the padmasana. Supposed to be, I say with reason. What is the padmasana? It is the right foot on the left thigh, the left foot on the right thigh, holding the right great toe with the right hand, the left great toe with the left hand, the hands coming from behind the back and crossing, the chin resting on the interclavicular space, the sight fixed on the space between the eyebrows—failing that, the tip of the nose. In one respect you succeed, William; you have managed to look at the tip of your nose. You must try harder.”

  Justin, his eyes aching from being crossed on his nose, his neck aching, his thighs and arms and back aching, tried harder. Mr. Sparhawk slid easily into the posture and went on: “When the command of padmasana has been attained, you will find there is no longer suffering from cold, heat, hunger, thirst, fatigue, or similar afflictions…”

  It was nice that the old man believed it all, Justin thought as he ached. His belief, even expressed in pidgin Russian, shone transcendently through the words and had got the pair of them tacitly certified as harmless lunatics.

  Their second week on the road, trending generally southwest into the Allegheny Valley, found them one night approaching a run-down farmhouse. There was no light to be seen. A starving mongrel dog snapped at them when they climbed to the littered, unswept porch; Justin drove him off with a stick while Mr. Sparhawk rapped politely on the door. There was no answer. Mr. Sparhawk rapped again and the unlatched door swung open, creaking. By moonlight through a window they saw an old man sprawled on the floor.

  Mr. Sparhawk took over with crisp efficiency. Pulse, skin, and a hoarse rattle in the chest told him, he said, that the man was suffering pneumonia and starvation. They brought the cot from his bedroom into the kitchen and built a roaring fire in the stove. They made gruel and spooned some down the sick man’s throat, and for a couple of hours while they watched he seemed to rally. He died at midnight, though, and they buried him in the morning in his dooryard. Justin had to keep driving off the dog and was careful to put a layer of heavy stones on the grave.

  The weather was hardly brisk yet—at least to men who had been through the war years on scant fuel rations. The old man must have been ready to go from the first bug that got into his system. But it was a foretaste of the coming winter, which would do the Reds’ work thoroughly and well. It would kill Americans by the million, and would leave open to settlement new acres by the million.

  Who said there were no continents left to discover? A dozen winters would come and go, and finally the Russians would come and find a land almost as bare of humanity as Columbus had.

  While Mr. Sparhawk whispered a meditation of St. John of the Cross by the graveside, Justin methodically searched the farmhouse and struck gold. A hard lump in the old man’s pillow turned out to be a tin box crammed with sewing needles, thread, razor blades, and a can of black pepper. He distributed the treasures among his pockets and returned to the grave, where he joined in the meditation.

  The signpost said they were three miles from Clarion and the map said this was a town of some size lying astride a national highway. It was to be avoided. They had lost a week traveling by a stop to get in the corn crop of a sick old couple. They worked from sunrise to sunset for seven days, and when the golden ears were neatly stored in the cribs, were told they were a pair of heathen and had better git before they got the law put on them.

  “Rub of the green, William,” Mr. Sparhawk said philosophically as they trudged away.

  Justin was glad to get away on any terms. The work had been nothing to him; he was inured to fatigue and hunger. The lost week had been agony, every hour of it. Finally Mr. Sparhawk was forced to say gently: “Washington, Pennsylvania, won’t run away, William. Surely we are doing as much good here as we could do there?”

  And that meant shut up. There Justin had to leave it. It was barely possible that the ol
d man might continue to tolerate his presence, might even act as a cover story if he knew that Justin was using him to establish communications with a revolutionary army. It was certain that he could not do it without losing his appearance of blissful sincerity and gentle mania which had carried them through every brush with the occupation.

  It was three miles out of Clarion, perhaps halfway on the road to Washington, Pennsylvania, that they met the kid gang. They leaped on Justin and Mr. Sparhawk from the roadside; perhaps some of them swung down cinematically from tree limbs. There may have been two dozen of them, between eight and fifteen years of age. They gave the two travelers the treatment they gave all travelers whom they surprised and outnumbered; they beat and kicked them viciously, robbed them, stripped them to their underwear and moved on, laughing and shoving. Mr. Sparhawk after moving his jaw tentatively mumbled between bruised lips: “You did well not to resist, William. Such groups have been known to kill.”

  “I couldn’t resist, damn it!” Justin snorted. “The little demons were all over me. I’d like to meet just four of them in a dark alley sometime. I think I’ve got a couple of broken ribs—”

  He and Mr. Sparhawk helped each other to get up; they hobbled down the road.

  “Look,” Justin said, alarmed, “this’ll take us to Clarion. Township seat, ten thousand people, U. S. 322, a Red garrison for sure. Let’s figure a detour.”

  “We must find a garrison of the occupying forces,” Mr. Sparhawk said serenely. “We must report this incident. We owe it to those boys; we must stop them before they do irreparable damage to their souls. I have, thank God, been privileged to report five such wandering bands and each one was rounded up within a day or two. Whatever penalties were exacted from them, they were at least stopped in their careers.”

  The mad reasoning on alien values would work. Justin knew it. They would be two lunatics wandering into town half naked in late October, gently and without acrimony urging that the authorities pick up the kid gang without ado—for the good of their souls.

  On to Clarion, Pennsylvania.

  Early November brought a cold snap and wet, heavy snow. They were floundering, calf-deep, by afternoon along a blacktop between Leechburg and North Vandegrift, about two hundred miles beeline from Norton, about fifty miles from Washington, Pennsylvania. It was clear that the journey would soon be over. Justin had lost twenty pounds and gained an impatient respect for Mr. Sparhawk’s innocent tenacity.

  He had seen a countryside under lock and key, reverting sullenly to the ancient peasant status never known before on the continent. They had by-passed manufacturing towns—Mr. Sparhawk believed in reasonable caution until his disciple’s spiritual qualities were more highly developed—and so had not seen the worst.

  A woman in an ancient Model A sedan stopped and called to them: “Want a lift, boys?” It was the first time this had happened in their month on the road. She had a gas-ration sticker on her windshield and the trunk of the car, which was a trunk and not a streamlined cavern, stood half open. It was crammed with canned goods.

  The woman was fat, red-faced, and smiling. Strangely, her fat was not the waxy, loosely attached “potato fat” of an all-starch diet; it was firm plumpness. In the fall of the year 1965 it meant villainy.

  “No thank you, madam,” Justin said automatically.

  Beside him Mr. Sparhawk looked mulish. “I think we ought to, William,” he said gently. “Madame, we’ll be pleased to ride with you.” Resignedly Justin got in.

  She outtalked Mr. Sparhawk for ten miles. She was the widowed Mrs. Elphinstone. She had a farm worked by six good-for-nothing orphans she boarded for the county out of the goodness of her heart. She didn’t believe in saying anything about a person if you couldn’t say anything good, but—

  It was common knowledge about the Baptist preacher and Miss Lesh.

  But that shouldn’t surprise you because Mister Lesh had died in a madhouse even if they called it a rest home. When it’s in the blood, there’s nothing you can do.

  Mr. Tebbets, the lawyer, was drunk again when she was in town.

  Everybody knew he bought it from Mrs. Grassman, whose husband drank himself to death on home brew, and somebody should tell the authorities before more damage was done.

  But it was probably Mr. Tebbets’ conscience that drove him to drink, the way he swindled the Murdocks out of their insurance money.

  Not that Tebbets was the worst of the gang; she wasn’t a prude, dear no, but the way his crony Dr. Reeves carried on before right-minded people ran him out of town, why she herself knew a girl who had been given gas by Dr. Reeves for an extraction and woke to find her brassière unhooked.

  Though it was hard to see why the little slut—it was Margie Endicott—should care, since every boy in the senior high had done at least as much.

  And if the truth were known—

  She saw a couple walking along the road and stopped the car. They were a farmer and his wife; each carried a sack. “Hello, Elsie,” the man said nervously. His wife looked murder and said nothing.

  “Why, Ralph and Kate, imagine running into you here! Where you going?”

  “Little walk,” the man muttered.

  The woman was staring at their sacks, licking her lips. “The Ladies,” she said, “are getting up a little luncheon, I meant to tell you. Times being what they are, we’re all chipping in on the eatables. You’re invited of course, Kate.” Her voice became shrill and childish. “Now I was just wondering if you’d like to save a trip by handing over any little thing you have with you—for the Ladies.”

  “We haven’t got anything,” the farmer’s wife said sharply.

  “My goodness, isn’t that too bad? I heard somebody around your way butchered a hog and I thought you might have some old scraps of it. For the Ladies.”

  The farmer rummaged in his sack and pulled out a four-pound flitch of bacon. Naked hatred was in his eyes. He chucked it into the car beside the woman. “Come on,” he said to his wife flatly. She shouldered her sack and they walked on through the swirling snow.

  Justin knew he was riding with a woman who one of these days would be murdered.

  She started the car. “The Perkinsons,” she said. “Worthless, lawless trash. I’ve got half a mind to tell Lieutenant Sokoloff they’ve been butchering without a permit—but forevermore, who doesn’t?” She turned around as she drove to smile at her passengers. “What I say is the important thing is not to get caught at it.” The car eased into the right-hand roadside ditch before she turned back to her driving; she squawked, spun the wheels, and killed the motor.

  “Isn’t that awful? I wonder if you boys’d try what you can do. I’ll just stay here in case you need help from the engine—”

  They got out in the snow and heaved and looked for rocks to lay as a tread under the spinning wheels and from time to time asked her to try driving out. They got snow spun into their faces and bruised their fingers on frozen rocks. They talked in whispers. The woman’s ruddy face was hanging out the window; she was watching with interest.

  “Blackmailing old—”

  “Steady on, William.”

  “We shouldn’t have got in the car.”

  “Is her salvation unimportant for some reason known to you? We must give each person we meet his or her chance.”

  “The only way you can save that type is with a firing squad. The neighborhood gossip, the village terror, hand in hand with the Reds. She’ll get hers the way Croley’s going to.”

  “Mr. Croley has been charitable to me.”

  “Sure. Croley’s smart enough to play all the sides—not like her.” Justin pounded a rock under the wheel with another rock. “Give her a try, ma’am,” he said aloud.

  “I certainly hope it works, boys,” she said. “I’m getting awfully chilly.” She roared the motor, let in her clutch, and was off in a shower of slush and small stones.

  Justin waited for her to stop on the road for them but she chugged on. When the Ford vanished around a dis
tant curve, he did some swearing and wound up: “At least we don’t have to listen to her any more.”

  “No,” Mr. Sparhawk said, and for a moment Justin thought the look he gave him was compassionate.

  The woman must have hurried home and put in a phone call. Half an hour later a pair of Red jeeps overtook them. An hour later they were being booked for sabotage, counter-revolutionary wrecking, and sedition in what had once been the principal’s office of the Leechburg Consolidated School.

  The next day they were on the Conveyor.

  Justin sat in the dark and absently rubbed his aching neck. The session had lasted for six hours, and Lieutenant Sokoloff had been yawning at the end of it. It was not surprising; Sokoloff was merely a cop and he himself was merely a vagrant against whom a routine accusation had been brought. Sokoloff would sleep now for eight hours; Justin would be kept awake and presumably irritated just below the threshold of pain by irregular switching on and off of the lights, peering guards with raucous orders, the steel-pipe bunk without bedding, to corrugate his back.

  Then, rested and refreshed, Sokoloff would plump himself into a padded swivel chair, Justin would sit bolt upright on a too-low stool, the dazzling light would be switched on, and the interrogation would proceed.

  The bright cell lights flashed on and a soldier’s heavy face peered through the bars. He pounded on them with a night stick and growled, “Prisoner hobey hord-erss,” and stood waiting. Justin obediently went and lay down on the steel-pipe cot, face up, hands at his side, and closed his eyes. The light beat through his eyelids. The transverse pipes bit into his heel tendons, his calfs, thighs, buttocks, back, neck, and skull. Orders were being obeyed. He was not being physically tortured. He was merely lying on a bunk, and if the bunk was somewhat uncomfortable, what in heaven’s name could you expect to find in a detention cell? Their strange passion for legality again—a sort of legality, at least.

  It showed up strongly in the questions during interrogation. Justin was at sea several times until he inferred the hypothesis behind such a question as: “Did the prisoner ever take part in the workers’ struggle before organized assistance to the clandestine N.A.P.D.R. began to arrive?” What Sokoloff wanted to know was had Justin been a Communist before the war. Justin had not been a Communist before the war, and if he answered “No” to the question as Sokoloff phrased it, he was saying a great deal more than that he had not been a Communist before the war. He was admitting Sokoloff’s premise about “organized assistance to the clandestine N.A.P.D.R.” He was agreeing with Sokoloff that the war was not a war of aggression at all but an internal revolution by the Communist Party with some assistance from the Soviet Union and the Chinese People’s Republic. Therefore he could not answer such questions yes or no, and therefore Sokoloff became very angry and turned the light that glared in his eyes brighter. But that wasn’t torture, of course. Could one expect an interrogation room to function without a light by which notes could be jotted and the expression of the prisoner observed?