Fallout Read online

  She’d drunk less than any of the men, too. Yitzkhak lit a cigarette. With all the potent booze he’d put down, she marveled he didn’t burst into flames. “So long. Good luck,” he said, and ambled away. It was also a wonder he didn’t stagger or fall, but he didn’t.

  Neither did Moishe. “Keep your eyes open. Americans, they trust too much,” he said. That struck her as making good sense. Whether it would when she was sober…she’d see. Moishe also went off, under his own power and steady enough for all practical purposes.

  That left Fayvl. He fiddled with the skin at the end of a fingernail. “You take care of yourself and your little girl, your oytser, here,” he said.

  “I will,” Marian answered quietly. “I’ll do my best, anyway.”

  “All you can do is all you can do. I tell myself that a lot. Sometimes almost I believe it for a little while.” Tabakman’s eyes were a million miles and a million years away. He shook himself like a retriever coming out of a cold lake. “You need anything, you have any kind trouble, you get hold of me, hear? I help you any way I can, promise.”

  “Thank you.” Marian didn’t know what he could do. Maybe he didn’t know himself. She did believe he would try.

  “Well, I should ought to go.” He touched a finger to his cloth cap, first at her, then at Linda. After that, he heaved himself to his feet. Like his friends, he moved better than he had any business doing. He looked back once, but only for a second.

  “He’s a funny man,” Linda said.

  “Is he?” To Marian, Fayvl Tabakman was about the least funny man she’d ever met. “Why do you think so?”

  “Because he’s sad all the time, only he doesn’t want anybody to know,” Linda answered.

  Marian gaped at her daughter. Out of the mouths of babes, she thought. She couldn’t have summed up Fayvl any better in one sentence herself if she’d tried for a week.

  The next morning, she and Linda set out, going up the gravel road down which trucks brought supplies into Camp Nowhere. The camp had sprung up in what was a meadow. It was where people in Everett had clumped together after the Russian bomb went off.

  Eventually, the gravel road ran into a real paved one. After a while, she came to Snohomish. It also showed damage from the bomb. She kept on driving south, sticking to roads that stayed well inland. If she veered back to the coast, she’d end up in Seattle, and Seattle was the last place she wanted to be.

  She and Linda stopped for lunch at a roadside diner. She ordered a BLT. Linda had a kid’s hamburger and French fries. “This is yummy!” she said. And so it was. Ordinary food in an ordinary place seemed wonderful when you’d got used to the slop they served up at the refugee camp. Marian did have to remind herself to pay before she left. She hadn’t needed to think about that for a while. But you got what you paid for, sure as hell.

  —

  “This is Moscow speaking.” The voice came out of a speaker mounted on a wooden pole in front of the government building in what passed for Smidovich’s town square. Vasili Yasevich and a few other people paused to listen to the news.

  “Moo!” one of the men said. Everybody who heard him chuckled. This broadcaster’s southern accent did make him sound something like a cow. From things Vasili had heard, Radio Moscow no longer originated in the city it claimed as its own. And the newsreader had replaced another man who’d sat in that seat for a long time.

  If you were a Russian, you already knew that—knew it and took it for granted. No, you did if you were a Soviet citizen. Vasili was as Russian as anybody in Smidovich—more Russian than the Jews and slant-eyed natives who shared the place with people like him. But he was having to learn how to be Soviet as he went along.

  “In its valiant assistance to the forces of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army continues to storm forward against the American imperialists and their lackeys in Korea,” the newsreader said. “Backing up its allies, the Soviet Long-Range Bomber Force, part of the ever-victorious Red Air Force, had previously punished the reactionary running dogs with doses of atomic fire.”

  “Good. That’s very good,” the fellow beside Vasili muttered, to himself but intending to be heard by others. Vasili was used to news with a lot of propaganda stirred in—both the Japanese who ran Manchukuo and the Red Chinese who took over from them had seasoned the stew that way. But Stalin’s workers’ paradise used more than even he could stomach.

  After two coughs, Roman Amfiteatrov murmured, “Please excuse me.” Then he went back to the news: “In Western Europe, progressive forces headed by that vanguard of proletarian triumph, the glorious Red Army, continue to regroup after the vicious and cruel onslaught staged by Truman’s clique of rabid capitalist hyenas. The advance is expected to resume in short order.”

  When Stalin dropped A-bombs on Korea, that was patriotic and heroic. When Truman dropped them on Germany, that was vicious and cruel. Vasili was cynical enough to doubt that the American radio reporters saw things the same way. He did wonder how many of these Soviet citizens doubted as he did.

  He wondered that for a little while, anyhow. Then he saw Grigory Papanin strutting along without a care in the world—and without any of his tough-guy henchmen. Vasili forgot about the mooing voice coming out of the speaker. As unobtrusively as he could, he followed Papanin. If the son of a bitch thought he could tell Vasili how to work, pretty soon he’d decide he could horn in on the money Vasili made, too.

  Sure as the devil, Papanin figured he was the biggest turd in this little town. He might have been, till Vasili got here. Now he’d find out he wasn’t any more. Or I’ll find out I’m in over my head, Vasili thought. With a shrug, he pushed that aside. Such doubts, unlike the ones about newsreaders, did you no good.

  Papanin didn’t even look behind him as he took his one-man parade down a dirt street. He thought such arrogance was his by right. Vasili thought he was a jerk.

  He gained ground on the bigger man as fast as he could while staying quiet. His right hand went into his jacket pocket—not for the straight razor, but for a knuckleduster he’d got from a white-bearded Jew as part payment when he put a new floor in the old man’s house.

  He tapped Grigory Papanin on the right shoulder from behind with his left hand. “Huh?” Papanin said as he turned to see who dared bother him. His face changed when he recognized Vasili. “You—” he began.

  “Yeah, me, dickface,” Vasili said, and hit him in the nose, as hard as he could, with the brass knuckles. Cartilage mashed under metal. Blood squirted. Grigory Papanin squealed like a bull calf when it was suddenly made into a steer. His hands flew to the wounded part.

  Vasili did his best to turn Papanin into a steer, all right. His booted foot caught the other man square in the crotch. Papanin squealed again, on a higher note this time, and folded up like a concertina.

  Another kick, this time in the pit of Papanin’s stomach. Had Vasili had such footwork all the time, he might have played forward for ChSKA Moscow or Dinamo Kiev. Papanin sagged down to the dusty street.

  Nobody sprinted out of the shops and cabins to either side, screaming for Vasili to stop beating up that poor man. Nobody yelled for the militia to come arrest him. That silence told him everything he needed to know about how popular Grigory Papanin was in Smidovich.

  Once Papanin went down, Vasili booted him in the ribs three or four times. He hoped he broke some of them. He thought he did. He didn’t believe in anything so stupid as a fair fight. He fought to win, and to teach a lesson the other guy would never forget.

  Papanin was tough. Battered as he was, he tried to reach into his own jacket pocket for whatever equalizer he stashed there. Vasili stomped on his hand. Papanin screamed. Vasili plucked out the toy himself: a Tokarev automatic, Red Army issue.

  “Naughty,” he said mildly. “Mine now—spoil of war.”

  What Papanin called him then was a minor masterpiece of mat. Vasili gave him the critical acclaim it deserved: another kick in the ribs. He flipped hi
s razor open and let the steel glitter.

  “Now listen to me, you dumb pussy,” he said. “You fuck with me again, you try telling me how to run my business, next time you’re dead. Not just messed up—dead as your nose. I’ll gut you like a hog, too, and use you for sausage casings. You hear what I’m telling you?”

  When Papanin didn’t answer fast enough, Vasili kicked him one more time. “I hear you,” the local choked out, and was noisily sick.

  “Khorosho,” Vasili said, and then, “You’re disgusting, you know that?” Shaking his head, he walked away.

  Papanin wouldn’t bother him for a while. He’d be weeks getting over what he’d walked into this morning. After that? He was tough, but how tough was he really? If he didn’t kill Vasili, he’d be dead himself. He had to see as much. He might leave bad enough alone. Vasili could hope so. If not, he’d deal with it.

  As he walked back toward the center of Smidovich, a plump man came out of a shop that sold fur hats and mittens. He looked at Grigory Papanin, who was up on his hands and knees but not making any effort to get back on his feet. His eyes were wide as millstones as they swung back to Vasili. “You—did that?” he asked.

  “I sure did,” Vasili answered. He hadn’t expected to come away with a pistol, but he wasn’t complaining.

  “But—But—” The plump man groped for words. At last, he found some: “But he was the toughest guy in town.”

  “Maybe he used to be,” Vasili said, “but he isn’t any more. I don’t like starting fights. If somebody else does, though, he’d better know I’ll finish them.”

  “Bozhemoi! I guess so!” The man who sold fur hats looked at Papanin again. With puke and blood all over his face and with his nose mashed flat, he wasn’t an appetizing sight. “He’s lucky you didn’t finish him, though I’m not so sure he’d call it that right now.”

  “If he leaves me alone, I’ll leave him alone, same as I would anybody else,” Vasili said. “If he doesn’t, it’s the last stupid stunt the fucker ever pulls.”

  “Are they all like you in Khabarovsk?” the hat-seller asked—like most of the townsfolk, he’d already heard about Vasili’s story.

  “Nah.” Vasili shook his head. “I’m one of the soft ones. Why do you think the Yankees bombed us?” He laughed out loud when the plump man crossed himself.

  —

  Aaron Finch used plenty of Mum before he put on his Blue Front shirt. “It won’t help,” he said resignedly. “A day like this, I’ll be shvitzing all over, not just under my arms.”

  “So I’ll wash the shirt after you get home,” Ruth said. “I still don’t think this is as bad as St. Louis weather.” With her brothers and sister, she’d come out to Los Angeles when her mother and father died within months of each other right after the war. Aaron understood that. Staying where they were would have been like living in a haunted house.

  “St. Louis never gets this hot,” he said, trying not to let her remember the bad times. “It’s supposed to be 105 today. Just what I want to do—shlep stoves and iceboxes and washing machines around.”

  “But St. Louis is so muggy,” Ruth said with a twisted civic pride. “This is dry heat. It doesn’t feel as bad.”

  “It gets past 105, it’s bad any which way,” Aaron said. He’d been in the black gang aboard a Liberty ship in the South Pacific, so he wasn’t a virgin when it came to heat and humidity. He did marvel that the L.A. area often got its hottest weather a week or two after fall officially started, but he’d seen before that that was how things worked around here.

  “Well, come on to the kitchen and I’ll fix you breakfast.” Ruth didn’t have the relentless Finch urge to grab the last word. Aaron sure did; his brother Marvin had an even worse case. She was easier to get along with the way she was. He did wonder now and then how she put up with him. Sometimes, though, you just had to count your blessings.

  Breakfast was two eggs fried in the grease from sausages, with buttered toast and jam and coffee. If you were going to shlep appliances, you needed some ballast in there. And a cigarette was extra nice after food.

  Leon came out of the bedroom right before Aaron took off for work. He was carrying his Teddy bear. He’d got Bounce for his second birthday, and ever since had had to be forcibly separated from the bear. He would have taken it into the bathtub if Ruth had let him get away with it.

  Stooping to kiss him, Aaron said, “See you tonight, Leon. I’ve got to go to Blue Front.”

  Leon held out the Teddy bear. “Say bye-bye to Bounce.”

  “So long, Bounce.” Aaron shook hands with the fuzzy plush toy. He was damned if he’d kiss it. Luckily, Leon seemed satisfied.

  As soon as he went out the front door, Ruth locked it behind him. His hand went into the right front pocket of his gabardine work pants to pull out his keys. He was halfway down the concrete walk, the keys in his hand, before he looked up toward the old Nash parked in front of the house.

  Except it wasn’t parked in front of the house. It was gone.

  He looked up the street and down the street, as if he could have left it in front of some other house by mistake. He hadn’t, of course. Not only was it gone, it had had somebody else’s help in going.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said. Glendale didn’t have any refugee camps, but it was full of people who’d fled north after the A-bomb hit downtown L.A. Some filled cheap hotels and roominghouses. Others slept in their cars or on bus benches or in the bushes in parks.

  Some of them peddled whatever they had. Some did such odd jobs as they could find. Aaron didn’t look down his nose at those people; he’d lived that way himself during the Depression. Some of the women hustled, more because they had no other way to get money than because they wanted to.

  And some people stole. Crime in town had zoomed up like a V-2 the past few months. If your choice was between going hungry or seeing your kids go hungry and lifting what didn’t belong to you, you’d steal, all right.

  Shaking his head, Aaron turned around and went back to the house. “Daddy!” Leon said when he opened the door. He was gladder to see Aaron than Aaron was to be seen.

  “What did you forget, honey?” Ruth asked.

  “Gurnisht,” he answered. “Look out the front window. What don’t you see?”

  She looked. For a second, it didn’t register, as it hadn’t with him. Then her hands flew to her face. “The car!”

  “Right the first time,” he said. “You win sixteen dollars. Wanna try for thirty-two?”

  “It’s not funny!”

  “No kidding, it’s not.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Aaron had been working that out for himself. He ticked things off on his fingers. “Call the boss, tell him I’ll be late. Call the cops. Get through the rest of the week somehow. If the car isn’t back by Friday, go buy one Friday night or Saturday morning.”

  “We can’t afford it,” Ruth said, which was true.

  “We can’t afford to be without one,” Aaron said, which was also true. He feared he’d never see the Nash again. Odds were it already sat in some shady garage, getting butchered for spare parts. With a sigh, he went on, “I’ll get something cheap, something where I can do a lot of the work myself.”

  “Okay.” Ruth stopped. “No, it’s not okay. The nerve of that SOB!” That was about as close as she ever came to really cussing.

  “Uh-huh.” Aaron went to the phone and dialed the Blue Front warehouse. He got the switchboard girl. “Hi, Lois, it’s Aaron. Put me through to Mr. Weissman, will you?”

  “Hang on a second,” she said.

  After a few clicks and pops, a man’s voice came on the line: “Weissman here.”

  “Boss, it’s Aaron. I’m sorry, but I’ll be late today. Some mamzer went and swiped my car.”

  “Gevalt!” Herschel Weissman said, which was just what Aaron was thinking. “Okay. Try and get in as soon as you can, will you? Looks like things are finally picking up a little.”

  “Alevai omayn.
I’ll do my best. Thanks. ’Bye.” Aaron reached for the phone book to find the number for the Glendale police. That one he didn’t have memorized. He got transferred to a sergeant in the robbery detail.

  That worthy took his name and address and the car’s license number and description. Then he said, “Well, Mr. Finch, we’ll do the best we can.” His voice trailed away on the last few words.

  “What do you think my chances are?” Aaron asked.

  A pause. A sigh. “I’ll tell you, they aren’t great,” the sergeant said. “These stolen cars, most of the time they don’t get left on the street.” He figured the Nash was in one of those garages, too.

  “Okay,” Aaron said, though it wasn’t. “Let me know if you find it, that’s all.” He hung up, then checked the phone book for another number.

  “Now who are you calling?” Ruth asked.

  “Yellow Cab.” Aaron didn’t even think about Glendale’s creaky bus system. It didn’t deserve thinking about, either. Nor did walking, not in weather like this, not when he was going to be doing hard physical work all day. Maybe tomorrow, if it cooled down some.

  “You could call Marvin and Sarah,” Ruth suggested. “A cab’s expensive.”

  “No, thanks. This won’t be too bad—it isn’t that far.” He dialed for the taxi. “Besides, a cab just costs me money. If I go and call Marvin, I guess he’ll be there, yeah.” Marvin often found himself “between projects,” as he put it. But…“He’ll cost me aggravation, though, and he never lets me forget when he does me a favor.”

  The cabbie showed up ten minutes later. “Yeah, I know where Blue Front’s at,” he said when Aaron told him where he needed to go. He eyed Aaron’s shirt. “Looks like you know where it’s at real good.”

  “You might say so,” Aaron answered. “I would’ve gone there on my own this morning, only somebody took off with my car.”

  “Ouch! That stinks, buddy,” the cab driver said as he put his Plymouth in gear. “It’s all that riffraff from Los Angeles, is what it is. Them bums, they’d steal the paint off a stop sign if they could work out how to pry it loose.”