In other circumstances Dan Brenckmann would have enjoyed the fast drive along darkened, twisting roads; tonight, he distracted his mind from his immediate worries and kept his terrors in check by playing with the quirky old town and county names of this part of his country’s colonial history. However, it was not long before his thoughts turned inward. He had never been capable — or frankly, motivated — to match Walt junior’s, his older brother’s straight up and down practicality in all things. Walt was only fourteen months older but he had always been very much the big brother to his younger siblings; an example to Dan and Sam of how a life should be lived and of how the good old-fashioned virtues of hard work and steadfast application eventually overcame all obstacles. It had been Walter who had sat Dan down three years ago and asked him exactly what he thought he was ‘doing with his life?’
Walter had just earned his submariner’s ‘dolphins’ and although he had not been in uniform he was the sort of guy who was never really out of uniform. Crew cut, ready for parade with his mind sharpened like the blade of a brand new penknife, he was precisely the sort of man others willingly followed over the parapet in a war. Dan had resented that in his teens and he and Walt had never been that close until the last three or four years.
Dan had had no idea ‘what he was doing with his life’. Ma and Pa, mostly Ma, had tried to talk to him. Compared with Walt junior’s example, Ma and Pa must have often despaired about their younger sons, comforting themselves that Tabatha, the gregarious, bouncy, optimistic baby of the family at least would be around to brighten their declining years. Ma and Pa had given up on Sam, perhaps recognising that he was never going to settle down to the ‘normal’ life that they understood so well; and so Dan had become their focus. Dan at least might be redeemable. And so it had proved, albeit in a funny sort of way.
Dan was the least talkative, least social of the Brenckmann children, the happiest in his own company and thoughts, forever curious about the natural world around him and the history that spoke to him from every old building, every folk tale, every myth and legend of previous generations. His pipe dream was to go back to Germany to trace the history of the Brenckmanns one day; and he loved walking in the New England countryside poking around for the traces of the land’s first European settlers. He thought it was shameful the way that the legends, traditions and culture of the original native Americans — who had been in New England for millennia before the coming of the ‘white man’ — had been ignored, then decried, systematically belittled and shunned, and very nearly excluded from the consciousness of the nation. In an ideal world he would have been a historian, a writer of lost histories except he had failed to get the right grades and done the wrong classes at school, and then he had wasted a couple of years bumming around, working for the Democrats and trying to get a foothold in journalism in Boston when he ought to have been at college. Now he was two to three years older than most of the others in his college class, no great star and lagging miles behind each and every one of his contemporaries in the game of life as he belatedly strove to turn things around and to get back on track.
He had been far too busy trying to catch up for lost time in the last couple of years to pursue any kind of personal attachment or distraction. He had too many debts to repay and too many kindnesses to respect. Ma and Pa were paying his way through Yale, Pa had lined up an internship with a partnership in Quincy and at long last it was likely that one day, Walter Brenckmann Associates might actually become Walter Brenckmann and Son Associates. His future seemed assured, back under control, and yet he still dreamed of something more…
“You’ve gone all silent?” Gretchen Betancourt queried tersely.
“Maybe I’m just the silent type,” Dan sighed, breaking from his thoughts. Sitting comfortably in the front passenger seat of a car being driven by an intelligent, more than middlingly attractive woman who was so far out of his league that a less sanguine man would have ached, it was very nearly possible to block out the self-evident madness of the outside world. In the darkness of the Connecticut countryside one could forget for a while the fact that World War Three had just broken out and was raging, hopefully far away, even as they drove down eerily deserted country roads after midnight. “Maybe, it just occurred to me that I’ve been wasting my time the last thirty months trying to qualify for the Massachusetts Bar.”
“Huh!” The woman scoffed.
“Where are we going, Gretchen?”
“I don’t know.” This she said with angry indecision. Then reconsidered and allowed herself a moment to think things through. “My people have a place in the country at Wethersfield. It’s built into the side of a hill. We used to go there most summers years ago. We’d play in the workshop under the house.”
“We?” Dan inquired.
“My brothers and I.” When Dan said nothing, she went on. “Your brother is in the Navy, so was you father, what should we expect to happen now?”
The man tried not to laugh.
“I’ve got no idea. I don’t think anybody has, Gretchen. Logically, I suppose really bad things keep happening until one side has had enough or basically,” he sighed, “doesn’t exist anymore.”
“But the Government has a plan?”
Dan unhurriedly contemplated this oddly naive premise. He seriously thought about questioning it, pointing out its inherent implausibility but decided that in the circumstances it would not actually help very much. Gretchen Betancourt was not the sort of girl who gave a man very many opportunities to score cheap points but even so, this was not the time to bank those points.
“If we still have a Government,” he observed.
Gretchen pulled the Dodge off the road. The nearside types squelched into the grassy verge and the engine rumbled unhappily in the sudden quietness.
“Of course we still have a Government!” She insisted, badly wanting to be convinced.
They sat in the unnatural dark loneliness of the night, neither speaking again for perhaps two to three minutes.
“I had things planned out,” Gretchen said eventually, more in irritation than regret.
“How so?” Dan inquired flatly.
“You wouldn’t be interested.”
“Try me,” he invited her, quirking a smile in the gloom. “You might as well. The World may be coming to an end so what have you got to lose, Gretchen?”
Squally, angry rain had begun to splash across the Dodge and to blur the view through the windscreen. Heavy droplets hit the roof over their heads and nearby trees shook and trembled as gusts of wind brutally struck. Autumn in New England could be cruel when the weather came in from the North Atlantic; people were too easily seduced by the myriad panoply of dazzling, brilliant colours as summer ended, they forgot the brooding grey immensity of the ocean across which pilgrims, the persecuted, the starving and the dispossessed in their millions had journeyed to reach the harsh sanctuary of the New World.
“I was going to be something,” Gretchen confessed. “I was going to make my mark in the World. And now it is all ruined…”
Chapter 11
The air raid sirens had started up again around midnight. The horrible banshee ululating screeching had wailed across Bellingham for ten minutes before it wound down, and with a whimper died completely. Judy’s house was well away from any major thoroughfare, its windows closed not against fallout but the seasonal chill of the autumnal night air in the American North-West.