Steel (11 page)

Ruth moved into the bedroom and got their coats and the two small suitcases they were allowed to take. All their furniture, their clothes, their books, their records—they had to be left behind.

When she went back to the living room, Les was turning off the record player.

“I wish we could take more books,” he said.

“They'll have libraries, honey,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “It just—isn't the same.”

He helped her on with her coat and she helped him on with his. The apartment was very quiet and warm.

“It's so nice,” she said.

He looked at her a moment as if in question, then, hurriedly, he picked up the suitcases and opened the door.

“Come on, baby,” he said.

At the door she turned and looked back. Abruptly she walked over to the record player and turned it on. She stood there emotionlessly until the music sounded, then she went back to the door and closed it firmly behind them.

“Why did you do that?” Les asked.

She took his arm and they started down the path to the car.

“I don't know,” she said, “maybe I just want to leave our home as if it were alive.”

A soft breeze blew against them as they walked and, overhead, palm trees swayed their ponderous leaves.

“It's a nice day,” she said.

“Yes, it is,” he said and her fingers tightened on his arm.

Bill opened the door for them.

“Hop in, kids,” he said. “And we'll get rolling.”

Jeannie got on her knees on the front seat and talked to Les and Ruth as the car started up the street. Ruth turned and watched the apartment house disappear.

“I felt the same way about our house,” Mary said.

“Don't fret, Ma,” Bill said. “We'll make out down thar.”

“What's
down thar?
” Jeannie asked.

“God knows,” said Bill, then, “Daddy's joking, baby. Down thar means down
there.
”

“Say, Bill, do you think we'll be living near each other in The Tunnels?” Les asked.

“I don't know, kid,” Bill said. “It goes by district.
We'll
be pretty close together I guess, but Fred and Grace won't, living way the hell over in Venice the way they do.”

“I can't say I'm sorry,” Mary said. “I don't relish the idea of listening to Grace complain for the next twenty years.”

“Oh, Grace is all right,” Bill said. “All she needs is a good swift kick where it counts once in a while.”

Traffic was heavy on the main boulevards that ran east for the two city entrances. Bill drove slowly along Lincoln Boulevard towards Venice. Outside of Jeannie's chattering none of them spoke. Ruth and Les sat close to each other, hands clasped, eyes straight ahead. Today, the words kept running through his mind:
we're going underground, we're going underground today.

*   *   *

At first nothing happened when Bill honked the horn. Then the front door of the little house jerked open and Grace came running wildly across the broad lawn, still wearing her dressing gown and slippers, her gray-black hair hanging down in long braids.

“Oh my God, what's happened?” Mary said as Bill pushed quickly from the car to meet Grace. He pulled open the gate in time to catch Grace as one of her slipper heels dug into the soft earth throwing her off balance.

“What's
wrong?
” he asked, bracing her with his hands.

“It's
Fred!
” she cried.

Bill's face went blank and his gaze jumped suddenly to the house standing silent and white in the sunshine. Les and Mary got out of the car quickly.

“What's wrong with—” Bill started, cutting off his words nervously.

“He won't go!” Grace cried, her face a mask of twisted fright.

They found him as Grace said he'd been all morning—fists clenched, sitting motionless in his easy chair by the window that overlooked the garden. Bill walked over to him and laid a hand on his thin shoulder.

“What's up, buddy?” he asked.

Fred looked up, a smile starting at the corners of his small mouth. “Hi,” he said quietly.

“You're not going?” Bill asked.

Fred took a breath and seemed about to say something else, then he stopped. “No,” he said as if he were politely refusing peas at dinner.

“Oh, my God, I
told
you, I
told
you!” Grace sobbed. “He's
insane!
”

“All right, Grace,
take it easy.
” Bill snapped irritably and she pressed the soaked handkerchief to her mouth. Mary put her arm around Grace.

“Why not, pal?” Bill asked his friend.

Another smile twitched momentarily on Fred's lips. He shrugged slightly.

“Don't want to,” he said.

“Oh, Fred, Fred, how can you
do
this to me?” Grace moaned, standing nervously by the front door, right hand to her throat. Bill's mouth tightened but he kept his eyes on Fred's motionless face.

“What about Grace?” he asked.

“Grace should go,” Fred answered. “I want her to go, I don't want her to die.”

“How can I live down there
alone?
” Grace sobbed.

Fred didn't answer, he just sat there looking straight ahead as if he felt embarrassed by all this attention, as if he was trying to gather in his mind the right thing to say.

“Look,” he started, “I know this is terrible and—and it's arrogant—but I just can't go down there.”

His mouth grew firm. “I won't,” he said.

Bill straightened up with a weary breath.

“Well,” he said hopelessly.

“I—” Fred had opened up his right fist and was uncrumpling a small square of paper. “Maybe—this will say—say what I mean.”

Bill took it and read it. Then he looked down at Fred and patted his shoulder once.

“Okay, pal,” he said and he put the paper in his coat. He looked at Grace.

“Get dressed if you're coming,” he said.

“
Fred!
” she almost screamed his name. “Are you going to
do
this terrible thing to me?”

“Your husband is staying,” Bill told her. “Do you want to stay with him?”

“I don't want to
die!
”

Bill looked at her a moment, then turned away.

“Mary, help her dress,” he said.

While they went to the car, Grace sobbing and stumbling on Mary's arm, Fred stood in the front doorway and watched his wife leave. She hadn't kissed him or embraced him, only retreated from his goodbye with a sob of angry fear. He stood there without moving a muscle and the breeze ruffled his thin hair.

When they were all in the car Bill took the paper out of his pocket.

“I'm going to read you what your husband wrote,” he said flatly and he read: “
If a man dies with the sun in his eyes, he dies a man. If a man goes with dirt on his nose—he only dies.
”

Grace looked at Bill with bleak eyes, her hands twisting endlessly in her lap.

“Mama, why isn't Uncle Fred coming?” Jeannie asked as Bill started the car and made a sharp U-turn.

“He wants to stay,” was all Mary said.

The car picked up speed and headed toward Lincoln Boulevard. None of them spoke and Les thought of Fred sitting back there alone in his little house, waiting.
Alone.
The thought made his throat catch and he gritted his teeth. Was there another poem beginning in Fred's mind now, he thought, one that started—
If a man dies and there is no one there to hold his hand—

“Oh,
stop
it, stop the car!” Grace cried.

Bill pulled over to the curb.

“I don't want to go down there alone,” Grace said miserably. “It's not fair to make me go alone. I—”

She stopped talking and bit her lip. “Oh—” She leaned over. “Goodbye, Mary,” she said and she kissed her. “Goodbye, Ruth,” and kissed her. Then Les and Jeannie, and she managed a brief, rueful smile at Bill.

“I hate you,” she said.

“I
love
you,” he answered.

They watched her go back down the block, first walking, then, as she got nearer to the house, half running with a childlike excitement. They saw Fred come to the gate and then Bill started the car and he drove away and they were alone together.

“You'd never think Fred felt that way, would you?” Les said.

“I don't know, kid,” Bill said. “He always used to stay in his garden when he wasn't working. He liked to wear a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and let the sun fall on him while he trimmed the hedges or mowed the lawn or something. I can understand him feeling the way he does. If he wants to die that way, why not? He's old enough to know what he wants.” He grinned. “It's Grace that surprises me.”

“Don't you think it was a little unfair of him sort of—
pushing
Grace into staying with him?” Ruth asked.

“What's fair or unfair?” Bill said. “It's a man's life and a man's love. Where's the book that tells a man how to die and how to love?”

He turned the car onto Lincoln Boulevard.

*   *   *

They reached the entrance a little after noon and one of the hundreds in the concentrated police force directed them to the field down the road and told them to park there and walk back.

“Jesus, would you look at those cars,” Bill said as he drove slowly along the road that was thick with walking people.

Cars, thousands of them. Les thought of the field he'd seen once after WWII. It had been filled with bombers, wing to wing as far as the eye could see. This was just like it, only these were cars and the war wasn't over, it was just beginning.

“Isn't it dangerous to leave all the cars here?” Ruth asked. “Won't it make a target?”

“Kid, no matter where the bomb falls it's going to smear everything,” Bill said.

“Besides,” said Les, “the way the entrances are built I don't think it matters much where the bomb lands.”

They all got out and stood for a moment as if they weren't sure exactly what to do. Then Bill said, “Well, let's go,” and patted the hood of his car. “So long, clunk—RIP.”

“In pieces?” Les said.

There were long lines at each of the twenty desks before the entrance. People filed slowly by and gave their names and addresses and were assigned to various bunker rows. They didn't talk much, they just held their suitcases and moved along with little steps towards the entrance to The Tunnels.

Ruth held Les's arm with clenched fingers and he felt a tautness growing around the edges of his stomach, as if the muscles there were slowly calcifying. Each short, undramatic step took them closer to the entrance, further from the sky and the sun and the stars and the moon. And suddenly Les felt very sick and afraid. He wanted to grab Ruth's hand and drive back to their apartment and stay there till it ended. Fred was right—he couldn't help feeling it. Fred was right to know that a man couldn't leave the only home he'd ever had and burrow into the earth like a mole and still be himself. Something would happen down there, something would change. The artificial air, the even banks of bulbed sunshine, the electric moon and the fluorescent stars invented at the behest of some psychological study that foretold aberration if they were taken away completely. Did they suppose these things would be enough? Could they possibly believe that a man might crawl beneath the ground in one great living grave for twenty years and keep his soul?

He felt his body tighten involuntarily and he wanted to scream out at all the stupidity in the world that made men scourge themselves to their own destruction. His breath caught and he glanced at Ruth and he saw that she was looking at him.

“Are you all right?”

He drew in a shaking breath. “Yes,” he said. “All right.”

He tried to numb his mind but without success. He kept looking at all the people around him, wondering if they felt, as he did, this fierce anger at what was happening, at what, basically, they had allowed to happen. Did they think too of the night before, of the stars and the crisp air and sounds of earth? He shook his head. It was torture to think about them.

He looked over at Bill as the five of them shuffled slowly down the long concrete ramp to the elevators. Bill was holding Jeannie's hand in his, looking down at her without any expression on his face. Then Les saw him turn and nudge Mary with the suitcase he held in his other hand. Mary looked at him and Bill winked.

“Where are we going, Papa?” Jeannie asked, and her voice echoed shrilly off the white tile walls.

Bill's throat moved. “I told you,” he replied. “We're going to live under the ground a while.”

“How long?” Jeannie asked.

“Don't talk anymore, baby,” Bill said. “I don't know.”

There was no sound in the elevator. There were a hundred people in it and it was as still as a tomb as it went down. And down. And down.

THE DOLL THAT DOES EVERYTHING

The poet screamed, “Devil spawn! Scrabbling lizard! Maniacal kangaroo!”

His scraggy frame went leaping through the doorway, then locked into paralysis. “
Fiend!
” he gagged.

The object of this mottled-faced abuse squatted oblivious in a snowbank of confettied manuscript. Manuscript delivered of sweaty gestation, typewritten in quivering agony.

“Foaming moonstruck
octopus!
Shovel-handed
ape!
” The blood-laced eyes of Ruthlen Beauson bagged gibbously behind their horn-rimmed lenses. At hipless sides, his fingers shook like leprous stringbeans in a gale. Ulcers within ulcers throbbed.

“
Hun!
” he raged anew, “
Goth! Apache!
Demented nihilist!”

Saliva dribbling from his teething maw, little Gardner Beauson bestowed a one-toothed grin upon his palsied sire. Shredded poetry filtered through his stubby fists as the semi-spheroid of his bottom hovered dampishly above each lacerated amphibrach with iambic variation.