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  He pulled away from her. “The bank?”

  “You said. . . ?” she gestured casually.

  “My God, Net! I said so, sure. Portfolios full of negotiable stuff that I check, sometimes.

  You could slip out millions and borrow on it—cash it in—and nobody would know till somebody looked. Maybe six months, maybe a year, maybe longer. But that’s out!”

  “You got any different inspirations? Or better ones?”

  “That one isn’t even an idea. Look, Net. I appreciate the way you’re taking this. I-I-I guess I thought you’d just kick me out on the street if you got the facts. But I’m not borrowing from the bank without notice. No embezzlement. Defalcation. No. That would be strictly criminal. I could go to jail!”

  “Have you thought just where you stand now, and what could happen if you didn’t pay up Jake?”

  “I could lose my joh—”

  “Lose your job, my eye! Jake has put men in the Green Prairie River in a barrel of cement for less. That’s the only way he can keep his books in the black: making his collections tough.”

  “Maybe Hank Conner. . . ?”

  “Look, Beau. You borrowed five hundred from Hank last year. Remember? And eight hundred, two . . . three years before that.”

  “Sure. But—”

  “But what? Hank’s generous. He’s a damned good neighbor in a lot of ways. He’s come to your rescue five or six times. And you never paid him back a cent.”

  “Sure, but he knows I’m good for it. Someday I’ll—”

  “Someday you’ll—nothing! You don’t even know how much you’ve borrowed, over the years. Okay, go to Hank. If you get the twenty-five hundred, I’ll really think he’s crazy. If you don’t. . . .” She broke off. She had already said enough about his access to inactive portfolios.

  Enough for the moment. To Netta, raised in the wrongest part of that wretched territory on the wrong side of every track, being in trouble with Jake Tanetti was far more dangerous than lifting a few bonds from a bank—especially when one way or another you would make sure to get the bonds back before their absence was checked.

  Beau drew a long breath, exhaled, picked up the bottle, saw that Netta was not going to forbid him, and poured a highball. He breathed again and said relievedly, casting the whole burden away from himself and toward the woman, “Brother! Are we in a mess!”

  In the hall, the front door dosed with a click. Lenore came in, tiredly, her coverall over her arm. She set down the Geiger counter. “Is there anything unusual about the Baileys being in a mess?”

  “This time,” her mother said, “it’s a real one. Beau. . . !”

  His eyes implored. “Don’ t—Mother! Not to Len!”

  Netta brought to an end her state of uncompromising sympathy. Beau deserved to be punished. And so, for that matter, did Lenore. Just for being intractable. Just for passing up her opportunities. Just for refusing to do what a daughter should in behalf of parents who had sacrificed everything. Netta thought that if Lenore had any sense of obligation they wouldn’t be sweating now over any measly five thousand dollars.

  She said, “Your father, Lenore, has at last succeeded in making the priceless kind of horse’s behind of himself I always expected.”

  The girl dropped on the end of the divan near her parents and ran her fingers into her hair, pulling out pins, letting it fall. “Now what?”

  Netta told her in a few flat sentences.

  Lenore said nothing. Her eyes filled and overflowed. She didn’t look at her mother or her father. She just sat still, crying silently. Her anguish was a source of satisfaction to her mother, an intolerable spectacle for her father.

  “Don’t baby.” he kept saying. “Don’t cry. Net and I will find a way out of it. We always have.” But she kept on crying. After a while she rose and went to her room and left her parents sitting together, not talking. Beau had a drink.

  3

  The Green Prairie Civil Defense “practice alert” had repercussions.

  These repercussions had long heralded their approach, in complaints and criticisms, gripes and threatened suits. To be sure, Green Prairie took pride in its Civil Defense outfit for the reason that its state was one of the “top-ranking five” in the “National Ready Contest”—and the Green Prairie organization was the best in the state. The perpetual competition between the Sister Cities, like every eternal war between siblings, furnished a further motive for local pride and support: for the six hundred thousand inhabitants of River City, being citizens of another state, shared the views of its thrice-elected governor, Joseph Barston, that Civil Defense was “a waste of money, a squandering of public energy, a meddlesome civil intrusion into military spheres and, all in all, just one more Washington-spawned interference with the rights of common man.”

  Governor Barston had made the statement at a private banquet and off the record years before. Somehow it had found its way into print and it keyed a near-universal attitude in his bailiwick. Gentlemen in the state legislature, loath to enter into the costly, intricate affairs of Civil Defense, had been only too glad to follow the governor’s lead and table as many bills referring to “CD” as possible.

  As for the politicians of River City, though it was obviously the only worthy “enemy target” in the state, and though a hit across the river would damage them, their feeling was that for once they were off the hook. Competition with Green Prairie was a standing plank in the platform of every one of them. Here was a chance to compete by doing nothing. Instead of laboring mightily to construct a CD outfit equal or superior to that in Green Prairie, they had only to relax—and make jokes about the earnestly rehearsing citizens across the river.

  The truth was that after a number of years (and even though Green Prairie had rescue teams, hordes of auxiliary fire-fighters and police, tons of medical supplies and the like) almost nobody believed there was any danger. Few had believed it to begin with. The passage of many years of “cold war,” “border war,” satellite seizure, international tension, international relaxation, deals made and broken, peace offers, peace hopes, peace arrangements—along with the corresponding variations in American sentiment, national economy, draft laws and a thousand other domestic matters—had convinced most people everywhere that Russia” and China were without the technical means to wage a large scale war, would never undertake one, relied wholly on prickly politicking and small grabs to exhibit power, and did not warrant the anxiety of those few citizens who continued to predict that Armageddon was forever around the corner.

  Long before, Harry Truman, speaking as if still in the White House, had said that in his opinion the Soviet probably did not have even one real atomic bomb. The Sister Cities thought that kind of information, passed on to the people at the close of his Administration and thus having the sound of a “last-word” confidence, represented “one of the few good things Truman had done.” They were, after all, inland Americans. They had been “neutral” in spirit before the First World War and isolationist until the hour of Pearl Harbor. With the opening years of the Atomic Age, they returned to their habitual attitude.

  People for the most part have little imagination and less will to use it. The prairie cities were far away from the border of the sea; its level suggestion of distance and otherness beyond was not present before their landlocked minds. The air ocean over their heads they regarded as a kind of property; they thought, indeed, it differed wherever they were, so that a special blueness canopied the Sister Cities and their sovereign states. Everyone in the region felt that same way and talked about “Missouri skies” and “Kansas skies” as if the atmosphere had taken cognizance of political boundaries.

  Every day, many times over, planes left the local airports to fly nonstop hops longer than the distance from the Sisler Cities to the closest potential “enemy” air bases. But, such facts, determined by the simple shape of the planet, were dismissed with a single popular word: globaloney. It may be that people who live on flatlands retain the Biblical belie
f that the earth is Bat. Or perhaps people who live between great mountain ranges feel specially secure. At any rate, the River City citizens eschewed Civil Defense and the people of Green Prairie embraced it out of pride and for fun.

  Both groups felt that the “domestic Communists,” interminably quizzed by Congressional committees, were more a menace than all the Communists in Russia together with their weapons and intentions—an attitude which possibly had its basis in the unconscious fears of Americans during that long period. It was a time when Americans once again refused to face certain realities that glared at them with an ever-increasing balefulness.

  What actually precipitated the “Civil Defense scandal” was a trifle. When the snow’s right, however, a cap pistol can bring down an avalanche.

  Minerva Sloan, on the afternoon of the practice alert, attended a directors meeting in the Mercantile Trust Company which lasted until six o’clock. When she left the bank, she could not immediately find her limousine. A large, a very large woman-tall and fleshy, imposing, heavy-jowled and bemoled—an English bulldog of a woman—she paced the wide sidewalk angrily and at length. Because dinner at her home would not begin until eight-thirty (when ten guests would sit down to one of her famed repasts, followed by a musicale), Minerva went into the near-by White Elephant Restaurant and took a table at the windows, to watch for her delinquent chauffeur.

  Outside, heavy traffic poured south on Central Avenue between the towering skyscrapers of downtown Green Prairie, south toward the residential sections: during afternoon rush hour, Central Avenue was a one-way thoroughfare. Minerva ordered coffee and a doughnut and kept watching. Traffic—four lanes wide wherever trucks were not parked to unload goods, wherever buses were not loading people and wherever other chauffeurs, double-parked, were not waiting for homing businessmen—moved slowly and clamorously. Minerva scowled at this stasis of the big artery and thought poorly of Green Prairie’s city fathers, though traffic in her own city across the river was at least as loud, as slow, as frustrate. She dunked her doughnut angrily and not furtively because, being Minerva Sloan, she could do as she damn pleased.

  Finally, she saw her car and ran out peremptorily—also because she was Minerva Sloan and the waitress knew it and would collect from the bank. She held up her pocket-book to bring traffic to a stop and took her time about getting into her car.

  She sat back, unrelaxed. ‘Willis,” she said, “where were you?”

  “The police,” he answered, “made me move from Adams Avenue.”

  “Didn’t you tell them whose car. . . ?”

  “They were very apologetic, ma’am.” Willis’s gray head faced forward and his outspread ears reddened. His corded hands tightened a little on the wheel. He had expected her indignation but, even after thirty years, its majesty alarmed him.

  “Then, why did you move?” This inquiry was interrupted, suddenly, by the beginning growl of sirens. The limousine had gone less than a block meanwhile. One of the largest sirens was on top of the Sloan Building, which Minerva owned. It was a double-horn, revolving type, with a ten-horsepower motor. This was its first test. Officials hoped it would serve for the entire skyscraper section, penetrating every ferroconcrete tower in the municipal thicket, thrusting its noisy way through them to the warehouses on the bluffs above the river, and perhaps even traversing Simmons Park, to serve in the same harsh breath as a warning for the dwellers in hotels, apartments and apartment hotels along Wickley Heights Boulevard, which was the “gold coast” of Green Prairie. It subsequently proved that the horns were inadequate: they could be heard better in parts of River City than in Wickley Heights and not in the warehouse district at all. But their effect on Central Avenue was astonishing.

  As the beginning growl of the siren intensified, traffic stopped dead. Minerva had time to say, “What on earth is that?”

  Willis had time to shout back, “Air-raid practice.”

  Minerva’s infuriated rejoinder was lost in a crescendo of pitch and volume that yodeled through the streets, the vertical valleys, the stone labyrinths. Car doors, truck doors popped open.

  People ran toward the vaulted entries of the tall buildings, following instructions printed in the papers bidding them, if caught in their cars by the surprise alert, to pull to the curb, park and take cover. It was, of course, impossible to pull to the curb in the rush hour on Central Avenue: the whole street was a solid flux of molasses-slow vehicles. So people just stopped where they were, piled out, and entered those doors and arches marked “Shelter Area”—a designation which included virtually all the buildings and arcades for some blocks in every direction.

  The first sound-apex of the siren was not its best effort. Even so, Minerva was obliged to wait till the head-splitting scream diminished before she could make herself audible. “Willis,”

  she bawled, “get us out of this!”

  He seemed ready to oblige. “I’ll find an officer,” he said ·and jumped out with alacrity, considering his age.

  Minerva leaned back on the cushions of the car. The siren went up again and this time the noise, surging through the canyons of the city, was literally painful. Her ears ached. One of her fillings seemed to vibrate, hurting her tooth. She snatched the hand tassel and hung on as if she were bucking the sound while riding at a fast pace.

  The scream held until she thought she could not bear it and then descended the scale.

  Around her, now, was a sea of cars and trucks and buses, all untenanted. For a moment, she couldn’t see a soul. Then she caught sight of two men approaching, men with brassards and helmets.

  “Wardens,” she said with the utmost disdain. “Oh, the idiots! The meddlesome fools!”

  The wardens were looking into the cars. They spotted Minerva and swung through the stalled cars toward her—young fellows, strangers. They opened the door politely enough, if it could be called polite when rank invasion of privacy was involved. “Madam,” one of them said,

  “you’ll have to take cover.”

  Minerva sat like a she-Buddha. “I will not.”

  They were obliged to wait-wardens and the obdurate woman—for another crescendo of the siren. “Rules,” the spokesman of the paired youths then said. “If you’ll step into the Farm Industries Building here, it’ll all be over in twenty minutes.”

  “Twenty minutes! I haven’t got twenty minutes. I’m Minerva Sloan.”

  They looked blank. She supposed there were people in Green Prairie, newcomers and illiterates, who didn’t know her name. She waved brightly at the thirty-five-story stone edifice on the corner behind the limousine. “Sloan Building,” she bellowed. And then, because the tearing sound was rising again, she pointed at herself-at the center of her full-rounded bosom where a bunch of violets reposed between the much-lifted lapels of her beige gabardine suit.

  It didn’t mean anything to them. They in turn pointed to the entry of the Farm Industries Building, which was newer—and loftier—than her own structure. She shook her head and covered her ears with gloved hands. It helped. The pressure of sound finally waned.

  “We’ll have to call the police, if you refuse,” the warden said.

  “I wish to God you would!” she answered.

  They went away.

  The siren didn’t stop.

  Stopping it became a sort of willed goal for Minerva. She was shaken by it, physically, and emotionally also. If a thing like that went on very long, she thought, it would drive a person mad.

  It went on and on, and she sat alternately raging and cowering, growing desperate at first with the thought that she might be late for her dinner party, and soon becoming a little hysterical with the thought of nothing but the siren and its interminable, buzz-saw effect on her nerves.

  Willis, her chauffeur, seeking police, was approached by two burly air-raid wardens who promptly thrust him into a shelter, paying not the slightest attention to his protests. They then took up guarding positions among the late shoppers, early diners, truck drivers and motorists who were by and
large enjoying this change from regular habits.

  The paired wardens, who Minerva was later to claim had “forcibly restrained” her, found two policemen sitting in a squad car, smoking, gazing with rapt amazement at a city jam-packed with cars in which there was nobody at all. “Big fat woman in a limousine up the line won’t take shelter.”

  The cops eyed the wardens. “Carry her into a building,” one cop suggested.

  “Says she’s Minerva Sloan.”

  The cops both lost their grins. “Let her sit,” one said.

  The warden protested in an eager-beaver tone, “We’re supposed to get everybody—but

  everybody!—off the streets. And the police are supposed to help—if people refuse. . . .”

  The older cop batted his cap back on his head and blew smoke. “Look, bud. In this territory, if Mrs. Sloan says she won’t co-operate, there will be no co-operation, believe me.”