While Charlie looked at the books on the shelves in the big living room, Andy went into the small root cellar that was three steps down from the pantry, scratched a wooden match on one of the beams, stuck his finger into the knothole in one of the boards that lined the sides of the little dirt floored room, and pulled. The board came out and Andy looked inside. After a moment he grinned. Inside the cobweb-festooned little bolt-hole were four mason jars filled with a clear, slightly oily looking liquid that was one-hundred-percent pure white lightning-what Granther called “father’s mule-kick.”
The match burned Andy’s fingers. He shook it out and lit a second. Like the dour New England preachers of old (from whom she had been a direct descendant), Hulda McGee had no liking, understanding, or tolerance for the simple and slightly stupid male pleasures. She had been a Puritan atheist, and this had been Granther’s little secret, which he had shared with Andy the year before he died.
Besides the white lightning, there was a caddy for poker chips. Andy pulled it out and felt in the slot at the top. There was a crackling sound, and he pulled out a thin sheaf of bills-a few tens and fives and some ones. Maybe eighty dollars all told. Granther’s weakness had been seven-card stud, and this was what he called his “struttin money.”
The second match burned his fingers, and Andy shook it out. Working in the dark, he put the poker chips back, money and all. It was good to know it was there. He replaced the board and went back through the pantry.
“Tomato soup do you?” he asked Charlie. Wonder of wonders, she had found all the Pooh books on one of the shelves and was currently some where in the Hundred Acre Wood with Pooh and Eeyore.
“Sure,” she said, not looking up.
He made a big pot of tomato soup and opened them each a tin of sardines. He lit one of the kerosene lamps after carefully drawing the drapes and put it in the middle of the dining table. They sat down and ate, neither of them talking much. Afterward he smoked a cigarette, lighting it over the chimney of the lamp. Charlie discovered the card drawer in Grandma’s Welsh dresser; there were eight or nine decks in there, each of them missing a jack or a deuce or something, and she spent the rest of the evening sorting them and playing with them while Andy prowled through the camp.
Later, tucking her into bed, he asked her how she felt.
“Safe,” she said with no hesitation at all. “Goodnight, Daddy.”
If it was good enough for Charlie, it was good enough for him. He sat with her awhile, but she dropped off to sleep quickly and with no trouble, and he left after propping her door open so he would hear her if she became restless in the night.
3
Before turning in, Andy went back down to the root cellar, got one of the jars of white lightning, poured himself a small knock in a juice glass, and went out through the sliding door and onto the deck. He sat in one of the canvas director’s chairs (mildewy smell; he wondered briefly if something could be done about that) and looked out at the dark, moving bulk of the lake. It was a trifle chilly, but a couple of small sips at Granther’s mule-kick took care of the chill quite nicely. For the first time since that terrible chase up Third Avenue, he too felt safe and at rest.
He smoked and looked out across Tashmore Pond.
Safe and at rest, but not for the first time since New York City. For the first time since the Shop had come back into their lives on that terrible August day fourteen months ago. Since then they had either been running or hunkering down, and either way there was no rest.
He remembered talking to Quincey on the telephone with the smell of burned carpeting in his nostrils. He in Ohio, Quincey out there in California, which in his few letters he always called the Magic Earthquake Kingdom. Yes, it’s a good thing, Quincey had said. Or they might put them in two little rooms where they could work full-time to keep two hundred and twenty million Americans safe and free… I bet they’d just want to take that child and put it in a little room and see if it could help make the world safe for democracy. And I think that’s all I want to say, old buddy, except… keep your head down.
He thought he had been scared then. He hadn’t known what scared was. Scared was coming home and finding your wife dead with her fingernails pulled out. They had pulled out her nails to find out where Charlie was. Charlie had been spending two days and two nights at her friend Terri Dugan’s house. A month or so later they had been planning to have Terri over to their house for a similar length of time. Vicky had called it the Great Swap of 1980.
Now, sitting on the deck and smoking, Andy could reconstruct what had happened, although then he had existed in nothing but a blur of grief and panic and rage: it had been the blindest good luck (or perhaps a little more than luck) that had enabled him to catch up with them at all.
They had been under surveillance, the whole family. Must have been for some time. And when Charlie hadn’t come home from summer daycamp that Wednesday afternoon, and didn’t show up on Thursday or Thursday evening either, they must have decided that Andy and Vicky had tumbled to the surveillance. Instead of discovering that Charlie was doing no more than staying at a friend’s house not two miles away, they must have decided that they had taken their daughter and gone underground.
It was a crazy, stupid mistake, but it hadn’t been the first such on the Shop’s part-according to an article Andy had read in Rolling Stone, the Shop had been involved and heavily influential in precipitating a bloodbath over an airplane hijacking by Red Army terrorists (the hijack had been aborted-at the cost of sixty lives), in selling heroin to the Organization in return for information on mostly harmless Cuban-American groups in Miami, and in the communist takeover of a Caribbean island that had once been known for its multimillion-dollar beachfront hotels and its voodoo-practicing population.
With such a series of colossal gaffes under the Shop’s belt, it became less difficult to understand how the agents employed to keep watch on the McGee family could mistake a child’s two nights at a friend’s house as a run for the tall timber. As Quincey would have said (and maybe he had), if the most efficient of the Shop’s thousand or more employees had to go to work in the private sector, they would have been drawing unemployment benefits before their probationary periods were up.
But there had been crazy mistakes on both sides, Andy reflected-and if the bitterness in that thought had become slightly vague and diffuse with the passage of time, it had once been sharp enough to draw blood, a many-tined bitterness, with each sharp point tipped with the curare of guilt. He had been scared by the things Quincey implied on the phone that day Charlie tripped and fell down the stairs, but apparently he hadn’t been scared enough. If he had been, perhaps they would have gone underground.
He had discovered too late that the human mind can become hypnotized when a life, or the life of a family, begins to drift out of the normal range of things and into a fervid fantasy-land that you are usually asked to accept only in sixty-minute bursts on TV or maybe for one-hundred-ten-minute sittings in the local Cinema I.
In the wake of his conversation with Quincey, a peculiar feeling had gradually crept over him: it began to seem that he was constantly stoned. A tap on his phone? People watching them? A possibility that they might all be scooped up and dropped into the basement rooms of some government complex? There was such a tendency to smile a silly smile and just watch these things loom up, such a tendency to do the civilized thing and pooh-pooh your own instincts…
Out on Tashmore Pond there was a sudden dark flurry and a number of ducks took off into the night, headed west. A half-moon was rising, casting a dull silver glow across their wings as they went. Andy lit another cigarette. He was smoking too much, but he would get a chance to go cold turkey soon enough; he had only four or five left.