But Shasta Lumber had hired her, so she wasn’t about to complain. The pay-a buck thirty-five an hour-wouldn’t let her run the Rockefellers out of business any time soon. Along with what she had left from the insurance policy, though, it meant she could get on with her life.
The local school was full of loggers’ kids. It was full, period. Lots of couples with men back from the war had had babies about the time she’d had Linda. Quite a few of those little kids had littler brothers and sisters who’d fill the classrooms over the next few years. And half the women Marian saw on the streets of Weed seemed to be expecting.
As soon as she had the job, she moved from the motor court to a rented house close enough to the school so Linda could walk back and forth. It was a small place, only about half the size of the one the A-bomb had wrecked up in Everett. It did seem extra roomy at first, because she had such scanty furnishings. Thanks to that atom bomb and her stay at Camp Nowhere, she was starting from scratch.
She bought the undowithoutables-beds for her and Linda, a table and a couple of chairs, a dresser-new, and a little fridge and basic kitchen stuff to go with them. The stove was already in place, for which she was duly grateful. Everything else she got secondhand…except for the end table that sat on somebody’s front lawn waiting for the garbage men, which she’d rescued before they could take it away.
If you wanted wild living, Weed wasn’t the place to come. Well, there was one kind of wild living, but not one that appealed to Marian. After the loggers got paid, they filled the bars and drank and brawled and chased the kind of women who didn’t need much chasing till they ran out of money. That seldom took long.
Marian quickly learned to stay away from the small downtown on those days. Having to do that annoyed her when she wanted to bring Linda to a cartoon at the one local movie house, but you had to take a place as you found it, not as you wished it were.
One of the secondhand purchases was a tinny Philco radio with a dark brown Bakelite case. Or maybe the radio wasn’t so very tinny; maybe it was just that all the stations she could pick up came from far away, and she heard them through veils of static.
At night, she could get KFI all the way from Los Angeles. It reached Weed as clearly, or as fuzzily, as the smaller stations in places like Redding and Red Bluff and Klamath Falls. She missed television, but the nearest station was down in Sacramento, too far away for even the tallest antenna to bring in a signal. TV might come to Weed one of these days, but it wouldn’t be tomorrow.
Work was…work. She filed papers and typed letters and reports and inventories and whatever else the people who paid her put on her desk when they emerged from their fancy offices far down the hall. She ran a mimeograph machine, cranking out copies of forms. She did all the other things they told her to do.
Since she was the newest hire, she also inherited the percolator that sat on a hot plate all day long. The gal who had been in charge of it turned it over to her with nothing but relief. Marian didn’t mind. It gave her an excuse to stand up and stretch and take a short break every so often. Nobody groused about the coffee she turned out.
Like the other office workers, she brown-bagged lunch most of the time. It was cheaper. Once or twice a week, though, she would visit the diner where she’d stopped when she first came into Weed. For some reason she couldn’t fathom, Babs had taken a shine to her.
“You see? This ain’t such a bad place,” the waitress said, setting a bowl of beef stew in front of Marian. “You find yourself a fella here, you’ll have all the comforts of home.” She winked. Her heavily mascaraed eyelashes flapped like a crow’s wing.
“You may be right,” said Marian, for whom the thought of a fella was the last thing on her mind.
“Oh, you bet I am,” Babs said. “A man keeps you warm better’n a hot-water bottle every day of the week, and twice on Sundays. Twice on Sundays if he’s young enough, anyways.” She leered and laughed a filthy laugh.
“You’re awful,” Marian said.
“You can say whatever you want, sweetie. He told me I was pretty darn good.” Babs laughed again. This time, so did Marian. If you couldn’t lick ’em, you might as well join ’em.
A couple of days later, after picking up Linda from the school playground where she hung around till her mother got off work, Marian drove to the Rexall that was Weed’s one and only drugstore. She bought Band-Aids and Kotex. As she was getting ready to pay the druggist, she plucked a color postcard of Mt. Shasta from a little revolving rack on the counter and bought that, too.
“What do you need that for, Mommy?” Linda asked. “All you have to do is go outside and you can see the mountain.”
“I know,” Marian said. “But if I send the card to somebody who doesn’t live here, that person can see it, too.”
“Who would you send it to?”
“I don’t know. I’ll think of somebody. Or if I don’t, I’ll just keep it.” Marian gave the druggist a five-dollar bill. She put the change in her wallet and coin purse, stuck them back in her handbag, and went out to the car with her daughter.
Dinner that night was liver and onions. Marian liked it. She would have made it more often, but Linda didn’t. She’d got pickier after their stretch-and that was what it felt like: a jail term-in Camp Nowhere. The food there was as bland as the cooks could make it, when it wasn’t military rations that were born bland. Now strong flavors seemed all the stronger.
After pushing her share around her plate for a while, Linda said, “May I be excused, Mommy?”
Marian told herself she should make her daughter eat more. No matter what she told herself, tonight she didn’t have the energy. “Yes, go ahead,” she said. “You can play for a while, then we’ll get you ready for bed.”
“Okay!” Linda escaped while the escaping was good.
Moving more slowly, Marian cleaned off the table and the stovetop. She washed the dishes and put them in the drainer. She looked at the dish towels, then looked away. She didn’t have the energy to use them, either. The dishes would be dry in the morning any which way.
The postcard sat on the kitchen counter. She had the feeling it was eyeing her. She picked it up, found a pen, and started to write. This is where we’ve ended up, she said, and added her newly memorized address. It’s not too bad. It’s a long way from anything big. Times like this, that’s good. Hope you and your friends are doing well.
After she signed her name, she wrote out the address where the card needed to go: Fayvl Tabakman, Seattle-Everett Refugee Encampment Number Three. She could have written Camp Nowhere, but for all she knew half the refugee camps in the country carried the same nickname.
She found a three-cent stamp and stuck it on the card. That was wasting a penny, but she couldn’t lay her hand on two one-centers. To help raise money to fight the war, the penny postcard was now a thing of the past.
Next morning, she tossed the card into the wire basket for outgoing mail at Shasta Lumber. That was easier than using some of her lunch hour to find a mailbox or to walk to the post office. It was right by the bars and the pawnshop where she’d picked up some of the small things for the house.
Having got rid of the card, she forgot about it. She had a financial statement to type up, and those were always a nuisance: lots of tabs, complicated centering, and everything had to be perfect. She was still new enough in the job that she took special care to make sure it was.
–
Boris Gribkov didn’t think he’d ever seen Brigadier Olminsky smile. The man was either scowling or looking as if his stomach pained him. Right now, he combined the two expressions. “Comrade Pilot, a problem has presented itself,” he said.