“Why, George!” Truman wagged a finger at him. “For a soldier without politics, seems to me you just came out with something political.”
“Yes, sir,” Marshall repeated woodenly, and said not another word.
It wasn’t as if he needed to. Sighing, Truman said, “Yeah, McCarthy scares the crap out of me, too. He doesn’t give a damn about anything but himself, and he doesn’t care how many lies he tells to get to the top.”
“That last is what concerns me. Give him a toothbrush mustache and a floppy lock of hair-”
“And he’d be even uglier than he is, which ain’t easy,” Truman broke in. “But Adolf was a teetotaler, and dear Joe pours it down good. Maybe he’ll torpedo himself while he’s loaded.” McCarthy hadn’t yet, though. It was probably too much to hope for.
–
SLOW! a new-looking sign by the side of US 97 warned in big black letters. BORDER CHECKPOINT AHEAD!
“Can you read that, Linda?” Marian Staley asked as she dropped the Studebaker into second.
And damned if Linda didn’t, even if she had to sound out checkpoint with exaggerated care. The Camp Nowhere kindergarten had taught her something after all.
“Will this be like the one we went through a couple of days ago?” Linda asked. “With the soldiers?”
“Probably. We’ll see in a minute,” Marian answered. She hadn’t expected that National Guardsmen from Washington would check the car before it crossed into Oregon, and that National Guardsmen from Oregon would check it again after it crossed from Washington. The two states might as well have been two different countries. The soldiers on each side of the border were as suspicious of those on the other as if they were foreigners.
So it proved here, on the frontier between Oregon and California. Each state’s National Guard was the main-almost the only-source of order that stretched all the way across it. With civilian authority only a memory, the military ruled the roost and feathered its nest.
“Show me your papers!” barked a gray-haired man with corporal’s stripes and a Model 1903 Springfield. He might have been a plumber before the Guard called him up, but what did that have to do with anything? Now he could give people orders, and shoot them for not obeying. He knew it, too. It was all over his face.
“Here.” Marian produced her Washington driver’s license, her discharge paper from Camp Nowhere, and the document the Oregon National Guard had stamped and given her when she drove into the state.
Mr. Two Stripes examined those. “You’ve got a Washington exit permit, too, right?” he said, his tone suggesting she’d be heading for the calaboose if she didn’t.
But she did. After rummaging in her handbag, she pulled out the permit and gave it to him. She had everything but a passport with a visa affixed. She didn’t need that…yet.
“Hrmp.” The National Guard corporal was visibly disappointed. “Lemme take this stuff to the lieutenant, have him check and see if it’s legit.”
“It is,” Marian said, but she was talking to his Eisenhower-jacketed back.
The lieutenant examined the papers, added another one, and gave them back to the corporal. That worthy returned them to Marian. “I guess you’re okay to pass on,” he said, as if suspecting she had an A-bomb in the trunk rather than the couple of duffels of stuff that represented all her worldly goods.
Two privates swung the bar across the road parallel to it so she could head south. As soon as she did, she had to go through the same rigmarole with the California National Guard. They really did have her open the trunk so they could inspect her chattels.
“No contraband, no contagion-that’s our motto,” said the noncom who pawed through her dirty dungarees and the Saturday Evening Post she’d bought in Klamath Falls.
Marian kept her mouth shut. You couldn’t tell these people off, no matter how much they deserved it. But if you didn’t, wouldn’t they just keep running things? What if somebody had told the Nazis where to go when they were just a bunch of barroom toughs? No Hitler?
Trouble was, if you just told people like that off with words, they’d give you a right to the chops or hit you over the head with a board. You needed to tell them off with machine guns. And doing that…Doing that was the reason Marian was a widow and a refugee.
Someone had once said people were the missing link between apes and human beings. By the way things looked, they still had a long way to go.
This particular uniformed anthropoid didn’t find anything illegal or contagious in Marian’s trunk. He slammed down the lid harder than he might have. He also plied a rubber stamp with might and main. “You are authorized to precede,” he said as he handed her the papers.
Don’t you mean proceed? she thought. Luckily, she didn’t say it. Remind a lug he was a lug and he’d make you sorry.
“Enjoy your stay in California,” he went on. Oh, sure! Marian swallowed that thought unvoiced, too. The National Guardsman went on, “What is your intended purpose here?”
None of your beeswax. No, that wouldn’t work, either, not unless you had a machine gun to back it up. Since Marian didn’t, she answered, “I want to find a place to settle down with my little girl.”
“I see.” The soldier didn’t say It’s got to be cover for setting out course markers for the Reds’ bombers, but his attitude suggested it. Grudgingly, he added, “Well, I told you you could precede, so go ahead.”
“Thanks.” Marian put the Studebaker in gear and drove south down US 97. She’d rarely been so happy as when the border checkpoint vanished behind her.
“Mommy?” Linda asked.
“What is it, honey? You need to go potty?” Marian said. Her daughter hadn’t since well before they went through the third degree from both sets of National Guardsmen.
But Linda shook her head. “I can wait. What I want to know is, how will you find a good place to stop?”
“I don’t know.” Marian had hardly even thought about it. “When we come to a place that seems all right, we’ll see how it is. If we like it, we’ll stay. If we don’t, after we decide we don’t we’ll go on. Does that sound okay?”
Linda considered with a gravity that didn’t seem childlike. “I guess that’s okay, yeah,” she said, so seriously that she might have come out with a different answer.
They drove on down US 97. The two-lane blacktop ran south and a little west. Ahead, a mountain began to swell on the horizon. “That’s Mount Shasta,” Marian said. Her right index finger brushed the inside of the windshield as she pointed. “It’s a volcano like Mount Rainier.”
“That’s good,” Linda said. You couldn’t always see Mt. Rainier from Everett; the way Washington weather worked, sometimes you couldn’t see across the street. Mt. Shasta was still at least fifty miles away, but it seemed clearer than Mt. Rainier did except on the best and brightest of summer days.
US 97 and US 99 joined at Weed, a small town almost in Mt. Shasta’s shadow. Marian stopped for lunch there. The diner she walked into was a step up from a greasy spoon. Both the cook behind the counter and the brassy, henna-haired waitress seemed friendly. Marian’s chicken plate was pretty good. Linda made her kid-sized burger disappear.
“What are the chances of getting work around here?” Marian asked the waitress.
“You type and take shorthand?”
“Yeah.” Type she could. Her Gregg was rusty as hell. People asked about it more than they made you use it. But if somebody did make her, she figured it would come back.
“Lumber companies need people for office work sometimes,” the waitress aid. “You can try your luck with them.”
“Maybe I will. Is there a motor court in town where the roaches and bedbugs won’t jump us?”
“Try Roland’s, right by the highway junction. Tell him Babs sent you, and he might give you a break on the rate.”