My Mercedes continued to give me an indecent amount of pleasure.
At one point there, through a misunderstanding, I was suspected of abducting and murdering a little girl. So the state police scientists impounded the Mercedes, and they went over it inch by inch with fingerprint powder and a vacuum cleaner and so on. When they gave it back to me, along with a clean bill of health, they said they had never seen anything like it. The car was seven years old then, and had over a hundred thousand miles on it, but every hair in it and every fingerprint on it belonged to just one person, the owner.
"You aren't what we would call real sociable," one trooper said. "How come you got a car with four doors?"
*
Polka-dot brownies: Melt half a cup of butter and a pound of light-brown sugar in a two-quart saucepan. Stir over a low fire until just bubbly. Cool to room temperature. Beat in two eggs and a teaspoon of vanilla. Stir in a cup of sifted flour, a half teaspoon of salt, a cup of chopped filberts, and a cup of semisweet chocolate in small chunks.
Spread into a well-greased nine-by-eleven baking pan. Bake at two hundred and thirty-five degrees for about thirty-five minutes.
Cool to room temperature, and cut into squares with a well-greased knife.
*
I think I was about as happy as anybody else in Midland City, and maybe in the country, as I waited for all the lawsuits to come to a head. But there you have a problem in relativity again. I continued to be comforted by music of my own making, the scat singing, the brainless inward fusillades of "skeedee wahs" and "bodey oh dohs," and so on. I had a Blaupunkt FM-AM stereophonic radio in my Mercedes, but I hardly ever turned it on.
As for scat singing: I came across what I consider a most amusing graffito, written in ball-point pen on tile in the men's room at Will Fairchild Memorial Airport one morning. It was dawn, and I was seized by an attack of diarrhea on my way home from work, just as I was passing the airport. It was caused, I'm sure, by my having eaten so many polka-dot brownies before going to work the night before.
So I swung into the airport, and jumped out of my four-door Mercedes. I didn't expect to get into the building. I just wanted to get out of sight. But there was another car in the parking lot at that unlikely hour. So I tried a side door, and it was unlocked.
In I flew, and up to the men's room, noting in flight that somebody was running a floor-waxing machine. I relieved myself, and became as calm and respectable as any other citizen again, or even more so. For a few moments there, I was happier than happy, healthier than healthy, and I saw these words scrawled on the tiles over a wash basin:
"To be is to do"--Socrates.
"To do is to be"--Jean-Paul Sartre.
"Do be do be do"--Frank Sinatra.
EPILOGUE
I HAVE NOW SEEN with my own eyes what a neutron bomb can do to a small city. I am back at the Hotel Oloffson after three days in my old hometown. Midland City was exactly as I remembered it, except that there were no people living there. The security is excellent. The perimeter of the flash area is marked by a high fence topped with barbed wire, with a watchtower every three hundred yards or so. There is a minefield in front of that, and then a low barbed wire entanglement beyond that, which wouldn't stop a truly determined person, but which is meant as a friendly warning about the mines.
It is possible for a civilian to visit inside the fence only in daylight. After nightfall, the flash area becomes a free-fire zone. Soldiers are under orders to shoot anything that moves, and their weapons are equipped with infrared sights. They can see in the dark.
And in the daytime, the only permissible form of transportation for a civilian inside is a bright purple school bus, driven by a soldier, and with other soldiers aboard as stern and watchful guides. Nobody gets to bring his own car inside or to walk where he likes, even if he has lost his business and all his relatives and everything. It is all government property now. It belongs to all the people, instead of just some of them.
We were a party of four--Felix and myself and Bernard Ketchum, our lawyer, and Hippolyte Paul De Mille, the headwaiter from the Oloffson. Ketchum's wife and Felix's wife had declined to come along. They were afraid of radioactivity, and Felix's wife was especially afraid of it, since she was with child. We were unable to persuade those superstitious souls that the whole beauty of a neutron bomb explosion was that there was no lingering radiation afterwards.
Felix and I had run into the same sort of ignorance when it was time to bury Mother next to Father in Calvary Cemetery. People refused to believe that she herself wasn't radioactive. They were sure that she would make all the other bodies glow in the dark, and that she would seep into the water supply and so on.
For Mother to be personally radioactive, she would have had to bite a piece out of the mantelpiece, and then fail to excrete it. If she had done that, it's true, she would have been a holy terror for twenty thousand years or more.
But she didn't.
*
We brought old Hippolyte Paul De Mille along, who had never been outside Haiti before, on the pretext that he was the brother of a Haitian cook for Dr. Alan Maritimo, the veterinarian, and his wife. Alan was a maverick in the Maritimo family, who had declined to go into the building business. His entire household was killed by the flash. Ketchum had put together fake affidavits which entitled Hippolyte Paul to pass through the gate in a purple school bus with the rest of us.
We went to this trouble for Hippolyte Paul because he was our most valuable employee. Without him and his goodwill, the Grand Hotel Oloffson would have been a worthless husk. It was worth our while to keep him happy.
But Hippolyte Paul, in his excitement about the trip, had volunteered to make us a highly specific gift, which we intended to refuse politely at the proper time. He said that if there was any ghost we thought should haunt Midland City for the next few hundred years, he would raise it from its grave and turn it loose, to wander where it would.
We tried very hard not to believe that he could do that.
But he could, he could.
Amazing.
*
There was no odor. We expected a lot of odor, but there was none. Army engineers had buried all the dead under the block-square municipal parking lot across the street from police headquarters, where the old courthouse had stood. They had then repaved the lot, and put the dwarf arboretum of parking meters back in place. The whole process had been filmed, we were told--from parking lot to mass grave, and then back to parking lot again.
My brother Felix, in that rumbling voice of his, speculated that a flying saucer might someday land on the mass grave, and conclude that the whole planet was asphalt, and that parking meters were the only living things. We were sitting in a school bus. We weren't allowed to get out at that point.
"Maybe it will look like the Garden of Eden to some bug-eyed monsters," Felix went on. "They will love it. They will crack open the parking meters with the butts of their zap-pistols, and they will feast on all the slugs and beer-can tops and coins."
*
We caught sight of several movie crews, and they were given as the reason we weren't to touch anything, even though it might unquestionably have been our own property. It was as though we were in a national park, full of endangered species. We weren't even to pick a little flower to sniff. It might be the very last such flower anywhere.
When our school bus took us to Mother's and my little shitbox out in Avondale, for example, I wandered to the Meekers' house next door. Young Jimmy Meeker's tricycle, with white sidewall tires, was sitting in the drive-way, waiting patiently for its master. I put my hand on the seat, meaning to roll it back and forth just a few inches, and to wonder what life in Midland City had been all about.
And such a yell I heard!
Captain Julian Pefko, who was in charge of our party, yelled at me, "Hands in your pockets!" That was one of the rules: Whenever men were outside the school bus, they were to keep their hands in their pockets. Women, if they had pockets, were to do
the same. If they didn't have pockets, they were to keep their arms folded across their bosoms. Pefko reminded me that we were under martial law as long as we were inside the fence. "One more dumb trick like that, mister," he told me, "and you're on your way to the stockade. How would you like twenty years on the rockpile?" he said.
"I wouldn't, sir," I said. "I wouldn't like that at all."
And there wasn't any more trouble after that. We certainly all behaved ourselves. You can learn all kinds of habits quickly under martial law.
The reason everything had to be left exactly where it was, of course, was so that camera crews could document, without the least bit of fakery, the fundamental harmless-ness of a neutron bomb.
Skeptics would be put to flight, once and for all.
*
The empty city did not give me the creeps, and Hippolyte Paul actually enjoyed it. He didn't miss the people, since he had no people to miss. Limited to the present tense, he kept exclaiming in Creole, "How rich they are! How rich they are!"
But Felix finally found my serenity something to complain about. "Jesus Christ!" he exploded as our second afternoon in the flash area was ending. "Would you show just a trace of emotion, please?"
So I told him, "This isn't anything I haven't seen on practically every day of my adult life. The sun is setting instead of rising--but otherwise this is what Midland City always looked like and felt like to me when I locked up Schramm's Drugstore at dawn:
"Everybody has left town but me."
*
We were allowed into Midland City in order to photograph and make lists of all the items of personal property which were certainly ours, or which might be ours, or which we thought we might inherit, once all the legal technicalities were unscrambled. As I say, we weren't allowed to actually touch anything. The penalty for trying to smuggle anything out of the flash area, no matter how worthless, was twenty years in prison for civilians. For soldiers, the penalty was death.
As I say, the security was quite wonderful, and we heard many visitors who had certainly been more horribly bereaved than we were praise the military for its smart appearance and efficiency. It was almost as though Midland City were at last being run the way it should have been run all along.
But, as we were to discover on the morning of our third and final day, where the minefield outside the fence ended, highly treasonous opinion of the Federal Government began. The farmers on the fringe of the flash area, in the past as politically inert as mastodons, had been turned into bughouse social commentators by the flash.
They had lost their shopping centers, of course.
So Felix and I and Ketchum and Hippolyte Paul were having breakfast at the Quality Motor Court out by Sacred Miracle Cave, where we were staying, and where our purple school bus would pick us up, and two farmers in bib overalls, just like old John Fortune in Katmandu, were passing out leaflets in the coffee shop. The Quality Motor Court was not then under martial law. I understand that all motels within fifty miles of Midland City have now been placed under martial law.
These two said the same thing over and over again as they offered their leaflets: "Read the truth and then write your congressman." About half the customers refused to even look at the leaflets, but we each took one.
The organization which wanted us to write our congressmen, it turned out, was "Farmers of Southwestern Ohio for Nuclear Sanity." They said that it was all well and good that the Federal Government should be making idealistic plans for Midland City, as a haven for refugees from less fortunate countries or whatever. But they also felt that there should be some public discussion, that "the veil of silence should be lifted" from the mystery of how all the previous inhabitants had wound up under the municipal parking lot.
They confessed that they were fighting a losing battle in trying to make anybody outside of southwestern Ohio care what had happened to someplace called "Midland City." As far as the farmers knew, Midland City had never even been mentioned on a major network television show until after the flash. They were wrong about that, incidentally. It was certainly network news during the Blizzard of 1960, but I can't remember any other time. Power went off during the blizzard, so the farmers had no way of knowing that Midland City had finally made the TV.
They missed it!
But that didn't weaken the argument of their leaflet, to wit: that the United States of America was now ruled, evidently, by a small clique of power brokers who believed that most Americans were so boring and ungifted and small time that they could be slain by the tens of thousands without inspiring any long-term regrets on the part of anyone. "They have now proved this with Midland City," said the leaflet, "and who is to say that Terre Haute or Schenectady will not be next?"
That was certainly the most inflammatory of their beliefs--that Midland City had been neutron-bombed on purpose, and not from a truck, but from a missile site or a high-flying airplane. They had hired a mathematician from, they said, "a great university," to make calculations independent of the Government's, as to where the flash had originated. The mathematician could not be named, they said, for fear that retaliatory action would be taken against him, but it was his opinion, based largely on the pattern of livestock deaths on the outer perimeter of the flash, that the center of the flash was near Exit 11 on the Interstate, all right, but at least sixty feet above the pavement. That certainly suggested a package which had arrived by air.
Either that, or a truck had been hauling a neutron bomb in an enormous pop-up toaster.
*
Bernard Ketchum asked the farmer who had given us our leaflets to name the clique which had supposedly neutron-bombed Midland City. This was the answer he got: "They don't want us to know their name, so they don't have a name. You can't fight back against something that don't have a name."
"The military-industrial complex?" said Ketchum archly. "The Rockefellers? The international conglomerates? The CIA? The Mafia?"
And the farmer said to him, "You like any of them names? Just help yourself. Maybe that's who it is, maybe it ain't. How's a farmer supposed to find out? It's whoever it was shot President Kennedy and his brother--and Martin Luther King."
So there we had it--the ever-growing ball of American paranoia, the ball of string a hundred miles in diameter, with the unsolved assassination of John F. Kennedy at its core.
"You mention the Rockefellers," said the farmer. "If you ask me, they don't know any more'n I do about who's really running things, what's really going on."
*
Ketchum asked him why these nameless, invisible forces would want to depopulate Midland City--and then maybe Terre Haute and Schenectady after that.
"Slavery!" was the farmer's prompt reply.
"I beg your pardon?" said Ketchum.
"They aim to bring slavery back," said the farmer. He wouldn't tell us his name, for fear of reprisals, but I had a hunch he was an Osterman. There were several Ostermans with farms out around Sacred Miracle Cave.
"They never gave up on it," he said. "The Civil War wasn't going to make any difference in the long run, as far as they were concerned. Sooner or later, they knew in their hearts, we'd get back to owning slaves."
Ketchum said jocularly that he could understand the desirability of a slave economy, especially in view of all the trouble so many American industries were having with foreign competition. "But I fail to see the connection between slaves and empty cities," he said.
"What we figure," said the farmer: "These slaves aren't going to be Americans. They're going to come by the boatload from Haiti and Jamaica and places like that, where there's such terrible poverty and overpopulation. They're going to need housing. What's cheaper--to use what we've already got, or to build new?"
He let us think that over for a moment, and then he added, "And guess what? You've seen that fence with the watchtowers. Do you honestly believe that fence is ever coming down?"
*
Ketchum said he certain wished he knew who these sinister forces were.
"I'll make a wild guess," said the farmer, "and you're going to laugh at it, because the people I'll name want to be laughed at until it's too late. They don't want anybody worrying about whether they're taking over the country from top to bottom--until it's too late."
This was his wild guess: "The Ku Klux Klan."
*
My own guess is that the American Government had to find out for certain whether the neutron bomb was as harmless as it was supposed to be. So it set one off in a small city which nobody cared about, where people weren't doing all that much with their Uves anyhow, where businesses were going under or moving away. The Government couldn't test a bomb on a foreign city, after all, without running the risk of starting World War Three.
There is even a chance that Fred T. Barry, with all his contacts high in the military, could have named Midland City as the ideal place to test a neutron bomb.
*
At the end of our third day in Midland City, Felix became tearful and risked the displeasure of Captain Julian Pefko by asking him if we could please, on the way to the main gate, have our purple school bus make a slight detour past Calvary Cemetery, so we could visit our parents' grave.
For all his rough and ready manners, Pefko, like so many professional soldiers, turned out to have an almond macaroon for a heart. He agreed.
*
Almond macaroons: Preheat an oven to three hundred degrees, and work one cup of confectioners' sugar into a cup of almond paste with your fingertips. Add three egg whites, a dash of salt, and a half teaspoon of vanilla.
Fit unglazed paper onto a cookie sheet. Sprinkle with granulated sugar. Force the almond paste mixture through a round pastry tube, so that uniform gobs, nicely spaced, drop onto the glazed paper. Sprinkle with granulated sugar.
Bake about twenty minutes. Tip: Put the sheet of macaroons on a damp cloth, paper side down. This will make it easier to loosen the cookies from the paper.
Cool.
*
Calvary Cemetery has never been any comfort to me, so I almost stayed in the purple school bus. But then, after all the others had got out, I got out, too--to stretch my legs. I strolled into the old part of the cemetery, which had been all filled up, by and large, before I was born. I stationed myself at the foot of the most imposing monument in the bone orchard, a sixty-two-foot gray marble obelisk with a stone football on top. It celebrated George Hick-man Bannister, a seventeen-year-old whose peephole was closed while he was playing high school football on the morning of Thanksgiving in 1924. He was from a poor family, but thousands of people had seen him die, our parents not among them--and many of them had chipped in to buy him the obelisk.