Not This August Page 5

  Why speak of contraband?

  “What about it?” Justin asked warily.

  Rawson shrugged. “I want to pass it on to a fella I know, but I don’t especially want him to come to the Shiptons’. It isn’t bulky. I’d just like to drop it off here sometime and he’ll come by in a day or less and pick it up.”

  “Why me?” Justin asked flatly. “Do I look especially like a smuggler?”

  “Not especially,” Rawson grinned. “Mostly because you live alone. Also because you wouldn’t chisel on me. You’re a guy who can’t be bothered with doing things the crooked way. Old man Konreid lives alone, but he’d rip open the package as soon as I was out of sight, taste it, and then when my friend came, he’d pretend he didn’t know what he was talking about.”

  So it was liquor or drugs or something of the sort. Justin felt pleased that he had got the answer without crude questioning. Not that Rawson would have had anything to do with anything organized which might conceivably bring retribution. The man was a born scrounger, a cutter of not very important corners. He told him: “Drop it off when you want. Any time I can’t do a favor for a neighbor I’ll close up shop.”

  “Thanks, Billy,” the legless man said. “Push me off, will you?”

  At mail time Justin got to wondering if the Fourth of July was a national holiday in the North American People’s Democratic Republic, of which he was a citizen. The morning was shot anyway; he strolled up to the mailbox. It was an easier trip than it used to be. As a citizen of the North American People’s Democratic Republic he had lost a comfortable layer of fat at the waist.

  Betsy Cardew was waiting at the mailbox looking tired.

  He said: “Cultural greetings, comrade-citizeness-post-woman.”

  “Cultural greetings to you, comrade-citizen-milk-farmer. What the heck kept you?”

  “July fourth. I dithered around a couple of minutes wondering if you’d be here.”

  “Oh, the mail must go through,” she said vaguely.

  “Then where’s mine?”

  “As a matter of fact, you haven’t got anything today. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You got one of those quota increases?”

  “Yes. Fifty pounds more per week. I don’t know how I’m going to make it. They can’t really expect it from me, can they?”

  “They expect it. It went through two weeks ago in Pennsylvania. They’ve been picking up families who didn’t make the norm. Families with the biggest and best farms. They go South in trucks, men, women, and kids. Nobody seems to know where. Then they turn the acreage over to families from marginal farms that couldn’t possibly raise a cash crop. Billy, could you make your new norm with a farm hand?”

  “You know I can’t support a—”

  “This farm hand would have his board paid by the SMGU.”

  “That’s different. And what’s the catch?”

  “He’d be a little nuts. Wait a minute, Billy! Don’t let panic make up your mind until I tell you about him.

  “You know I’m a nurse’s aid three nights a week at Chiunga General. I was in surgery a week ago when they brought this guy in. His name’s Gribble. He was in shock and he’d lost plenty of blood. His hands were lacerated and there was a gash along his right forearm that cut the big superficial veins. But somebody, a cop I think, slapped a tourniquet on him and got him to the hospital. We sewed him up and gave him plasma and whole blood—he got a pint of mine—and smugly waited for him to wake up. He did, and he was nuts. Incoherent, disoriented. At that point I tottered off to home and bed.

  “When I came in on Wednesday afternoon, they had him transferred from surgery to psycho. Lieutenant Borovsky’s in charge of psycho, but I don’t think you have to know very much to handle a psycho ward Russian style. They have something they call ‘sleep therapy.’ This means you give the patient a twenty-four-hour shot of barbiturate. If he’s still nuts when he wakes up, you give him another one, and so on. Maybe there are angles to it that I don’t understand, but Borovsky’s English isn’t any better than my Russian.

  “I’d asked around during the day and found out what happened to Gribble. He was a stranger in town and he turned up at Clapp’s Department Store. He bought a pair of socks and a salesgirl noticed him standing around for maybe ten minutes inside, hanging back from the revolving door. The side doors were locked, and nuts to the fire laws. Clapp’s doesn’t aim to air-condition the whole town. Well, she’s seen eighty-year-old farmwomen do exactly the same thing, but she thought it was awfully funny for a middle-aged man. Finally Gribble made the plunge into the revolving door, and naturally it stuck halfway. The wooden tip from somebody’s umbrella jammed it. Gribble began screaming and pounding and in no time at all he had the glass smashed and his arm cut up. So they toted him away and the salesgirl said Mr. Clapp was livid because his plate-glass insurance is all whacked up by this new insurance-company consolidation that nobody seems to be able to collect from and also he had to open the side doors and turn off his precious air conditioning.

  “So much for that. I looked at Gribble’s papers in the hospital office. He’s a machine-shop setup man from Scranton. He was released as surplus last week by the Erie. He got a travel permit good to Corning to look for a job there. His hobbies are baseball, bowling, and fishing. He belongs to the American Federation of Machinists, the Red Cross, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Normal?”

  “Normal,” Justin said.

  “Phony. Because I went to see him in psycho. He was just coming out of his first twenty-four-hour-sleep. Mumbling and stirring. Then the mumbling got clearer. Gribble the normal machinist was reciting Molière in the original. As far as I could judge, his accent was very good. It was Act Two of Le Misanthrope. He seemed to be enjoying himself.”

  “Come on,” Justin said. “It happens every day. He heard the Molière once, maybe when he was a child, and it stayed in his subconscious. Under drugs—”

  “Naturally,” Betsy said, very cool and composed. “And tell me, doctor: when and where in his childhood did he hear the order of battle of the Red Armies as of April 17, 1965?”

  “No,” Justin said defensively.

  “Yes. I don’t remember it all, but after the Molière his face changed and he began to mutter the date. Then he began to rattle off the armies, the corps, the divisions. With commanders’ names and locations around El Paso. Map-grid locations. He was just swinging into ‘Appreciation and Development of Combat Situation, for Eyes of Combined Chiefs of Staff Only’ when Borovsky came strutting down the ward.

  “He beamed down at Gribble, the normal machinist, who by then was massing a Canadian Army Group, the 17th, I think, for a spoiling attack on the left flank of the Red bulge. ‘Patient motch batter,’ Borovsky said, and on he went. His English is 99 per cent bluff, thank the Lord. But the night-duty officer was Major Lange and I had to shut Gribble up before his inspection. He really talks it. I finally slapped Gribble awake and he began to cry.

  “ ‘Pull yourself together,’ I told him. ‘You’ve been talking about the wrong things in your sleep. They’ll give you another shot if they don’t think you’re better. You’re in the Chiunga General Hospital. Tell ’em you’re just nervous and tired. They want to get minor cases out of here if they can. Play along with them. Fit into the routine and you’ll be out of here fast.’

  “He understood me, the scared little guy. I don’t know what kind of personal hell he was going through, but I could see him pushing it away, hard, with every muscle. ‘Fit into the routine,’ he said at last. ‘This is the Chiunga General Hospital. I’m Gribble. I just got panicky stuck in the—that place. I’m better now. Just tired and nervous.’ Hysteria kept trying to break in between the words. And he wouldn’t let it.

  “ ‘Great,’ I told him. ‘Stay on the rails. Here they come.’ Borovsky was leading Lange through the ward. When they stopped at Gribble’s bed, Lange asked me what the devil I was doing there. Told him I might be able to ex
pedite the discharge of Mr. Gribble.

  “ ‘Discharge? What are you talking about? This man is seriously ill.’

  “Gribble spoke up then, bless him. ‘I don’t think I am, sir,’ he said apologetically. ‘I know I blanked out, but I feel all right now. Just a little nervous and tired.’ They didn’t notice that he had his eyes on me through it—I think that helped him.

  “ ‘Patient motch batter,’ that pompous ass Borovsky said.

  “Lange put him through the questioning. Gribble knew who he was and where he was and why he was there. Then there was a good deal of Russian between Lange and Borovsky, and then the major said to me: ‘It seems you were correct. He should not be in one of our beds. Have the clerical section arrange for outpatient status and board with some responsible family.’

  “That wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for, but then I thought of you.” She came to a dead stop.

  Billy Justin said slowly: “How long would he be on my neck?”

  “Until he’s discharged. Comparable cases have been discharged after two checkup visits—call it a month.”

  “Who do you suppose he is, Betsy?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t imagine. He wasn’t any government official up top; I know most of the faces. He couldn’t possibly be a field commander. Our Mr. Gribble would never rise to corporal in the field army. He’s some kind of planner, maybe a Pentagon colonel, though that doesn’t seem right either. Whoever he is, he’s had a shock that almost broke him. He’s a brave little man. And they’ll shoot him if they find out that he isn’t who he claims to be.”

  “He isn’t the only one they’ll shoot,” Justin said. She made some kind of reply and he shouted at her: “All right. I’ll be the responsible family. I’ll be his mother and his father and his goddamned old aunt Tissie.” She raised one hand feebly as he spewed his rage at her. “Send him along! Dump him here. You knew I couldn’t turn you down. Even if I thought I closed the books in Korea. Even if I’ve been wasting the best years of my life as a peasant. Billy’s a patriot, you can always count on him. You think it’s a game. You live in a white house on the hill and you’ve never been shot. You never lay in a field hospital with an infected wound eating your leg off; you never screamed when you saw them coming with the needle for your fifteenth penicillin shot in two days. You think it’s a game. So send your brave little man along, I’ll take care of him. But after what you’ve done, don’t ever speak to me again.”

  He turned from her stunned white face and limped down the hill.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Two Russian medics delivered Gribble the next afternoon. They looked about in a puzzled way and kept asking: “Sooproogah? Seen? Donkh?” Justin supposed they were wondering about the rest of the responsible family. “I don’t understand,” he told them, dead pan. Finally there was the receipt to sign and they drove away, still with the puzzled air.

  “You’re Gribble,” Justin said to the little man. He was trembling under the hot sun. He nodded and gave a frightened glance at the house.

  Justin, through an almost sleepless night, had decided on his approach. If the man wanted to be Gribble the machinist, then Gribble the machinist he would be. Justin wanted no confidences. Justin wanted Gribble to be a nervous-breakdown outpatient and nothing more. He also wanted the two medics to report that fermer Yoostin had no family and that patient Gribble should therefore be placed somewhere else, but he doubted that they would go so far.

  “Ever done any farming?”

  “No.”

  “Ever have a little vegetable garden?”

  “Yes. Oh yes. I’ve done that.”

  “Good. Well, I’ll show you your room.” He started for the house, Gribble lagging behind. When Justin entered the kitchen, he was climbing the two steps to the porch. And there he stood, before the screen door, with the look on his face of a man who has seen a cobra.

  “Come on in,” Justin said through the door.

  “I’d rather not unless I have to, Mr. Justin,” came from that mask of terror.

  Justin remembered that his blowup had occurred when he was trapped in a revolving door. And he was also wearily conscious of the endless petty inconveniences that would nag him if Gribble balked at every doorway.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you, Gribble,” he said with an edge on his voice. “It’s a perfectly ordinary fly-blown slummy bachelor’s kitchen.” The man smiled meagerly. Justin held the door open and waited; Gribble stepped convulsively over the threshold, closing his eyes for a moment. Justin closed the door quietly on Gribble’s rigid back; instinct told him that to let it slam in its normal violent fashion would immediately involve him in a pack of trouble.

  “Sit down and have some coffee,” he told the little man. Coffee was not casually drunk these days. If you had it, you saved it for a good jolt in the morning. But he had to make this man relax; otherwise life would be an unbearable round of walking on eggs.

  Gribble sat and said “Thank you” into his steaming cup.

  “It isn’t such a bad life here,” Justin said tentatively. “I think you’ll eat a little better than you would in town. You can hold back eggs and hide your chickens when they come around. And the work won’t be too hard with the two of us. Hell, wherever you are you have to work—it might as well be here.”

  “That’s right,” said Gribble eagerly.

  The conversation then petered out. They finished their coffee and Justin led the way to the porch. “The barn needs cleaning out,” he said. “I’ll show you where the—” He stopped. Gribble stood inside the kitchen and he outside, the screen door between them.

  Justin sighed and held the door open for the little man. With an apologetic smile Gribble lunged through the doorway, eyes shut for a moment.

  So it went through the afternoon. Gribble walked willingly into the barn and worked hard, but when Justin sent him to the tool shed built on the house for a trenching spade he was gone ten minutes. Justin went after him, swearing. It was, of course, the tool-shed door. Gribble was reaching for the handle, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to touch it.

  Justin opened the door grimly, yanked out the spade, handed it to Gribble, and closed the door. His resolution to let Gribble be Gribble cracked wide open. “What is all this?” he demanded.

  The little man said faintly: “I had a very disagreeable experience once. Very disagreeable.” He leaned against the tool-shed wall, his face white. “I’d rather not discuss it.”

  Justin, alarmed, said: “All right. We won’t. Let’s get back to the barn—if you can make it?”

  Gribble could make it. He worked through to dinnertime, hard and well. Justin cooked a wretched bachelor’s meal big enough for two and held the door for Gribble to come in and eat. He didn’t eat much; something was on his mind. He finally asked if he could have a cot on the porch instead of a bedroom.

  “Sure,” said Justin. “I’ll get a cot from the attic.” And to himself: I might have expected it.

  After dinner they had three hours of light and used it to haul water from the spring up the road to the tank in the cow barn. When he did the job himself, he could use nothing but a pair of galvanized pails. Gribble’s help meant that between them they could fill a hundred-pound milk can on each trip. Justin began to feel a little more optimistic about meeting the brutal new milk norm. Each of his cows would, for the first time since the pasture spring went dry in June, get all the water she wanted that night. In his cheerfulness he scarcely noticed Gribble except as the hand on the other handle of the hundred-pound can. But when they topped off the tank with their twenty-fourth load, an exhausted voice asked him: “Is there more to do?”

  Gribble was on the verge of collapse. “My God,” Justin said, “I’m sorry. You’re out of the hospital—I didn’t think. Cows come first,” he added bitterly. “Sure, we can knock off. I’ll get that cot.”

  The little man slumped on the porch steps while he set it up in the gathering darkness and then without a word fell onto the
dusty canvas. He was asleep in seconds. Justin thought, went for a cotton blanket, and spread it over Gribble to keep the flies off his face and hands and went to the road for a final smoke before turning in. There was a sawed-off tree stump he usually sat on where you could watch the sunset.

  Rawson was waiting there. “Hi, Billy,” the legless man said easily.

  “Hello.” Justin had his pouch out. Grudgingly he held it to Rawson. “Smoke?”

  “Thanks.” Rawson whisked a single cigarette paper from his breast pocket, dipped thumb and finger in the pouch. In a twirl and a lick he had a cigarette made. A tramp, Justin thought. A drifting bum with all the skills of a drifting bum. How easily he takes it! What’s it to him that he’s a drifter under the Reds or the United States? A perennial outlaw—and God, how I envy his peace of mind! Heavily he stuffed his pipe with dry tobacco. Rawson had lit his cigarette and politely passed him the burning match. He puffed the pipe alight. It tasted vile, but it was tobacco.

  Rawson was inhaling luxuriously. “Not bad,” he commented. “Your own stuff?”

  “About half. The rest is from Croley. There was a tax stamp on it, but I think it’s local stuff too. He probably refilled a pack with some junk he bought from a farmer.”

  “My, such goings on from the virtuous storekeeper. Well, I brought that package. A man’ll be by tonight or tomorrow.”

  “Well, let’s see it.”

  Rawson reached deep into the “boot” of his gocart, a space where his legs would have fitted if he’d had any. The package was small and dim in the fading light.