Is this how the World ends?
Underneath a table in a bar in the boondocks at the back end of nowhere?
Outside in the street a car was cruising up and down.
“All citizens are advised to stay indoors!”
“Stay away from windows!”
“If you have a basement, go to it NOW!”
In the bar those who wanted to had already stumbled and crawled down into the beer cellar, a dank, claustrophobic hole in the ground filled with plumbing and barrels that had not actually been used for years. Breathing the mould-fouled air down there was possibly as hazardous as inhaling low-level atomic fallout.
Or that was what Sam told himself; he hated small, confined spaces especially when he was crammed into them with a lot of other people. He did not even like crowded elevators.
“My place has a basement,” Judy declared in a tiny voice.
“How far away is it?”
“A mile. Twenty minutes. I don’t have a car.” She thought about this. “No, that’s wrong. Mikey left his old Plymouth in the garage when he went away. But I never learned to drive.”
This made up Sam Brenckmann’s mind.
If they stayed here much longer they would be frozen with fear like practically everybody else in the bar; and helpless.
“You want to get out of this place?”
“Isn’t it dangerous outside?” Judy realised how dumb this sounded, sniffed a half-hearted, very nervy giggle.
“Yeah!” The man grunted wryly.
They scrambled to their feet. Sam paused only to grab the handle of his guitar case in his right hand. Curious, dead looks followed the couple out of the bar. They hesitated on the boardwalk, their eyes adjusting to the relative gloom. Surreally, the street lighting was still on.
“We keep close to the houses,” Sam suggested. “Try not to look at anything above the roof lines. We don’t want to be out in the open, okay?”
“Okay,” the woman agreed. She took a deep breath, clasped his left hand in her right hand. Everything that would have seemed bizarre, unlikely and stupid a few minutes ago now seemed like the natural, normal thing. The most complicated things were now horribly, contrarily simple. A single flash in the sky had turned the World upside down and nobody was going to be putting it back the way it was any time soon. “Where were you staying?”
“A hostel down by the waterfront,” Sam replied, the words choking in his throat. He had been travelling light so there was nothing he needed or wanted to collect from the less than genteel, falling down old hotel which had creaked in the wind and resonated with the groans and complaints of the local hookers and their clients at odd hours throughout the night. “They wouldn’t let me take all my stuff this morning unless I paid for last night’s room. So I left it. I was doing my best to drown my sorrows when you arrived.”
Not that he would have succeeded in drowning much of anything in particular with the small change he still had in his pockets. Never mind; as his Ma always said, ‘it is the thought that counts’.
“How come you know so much about this?” Judy asked breathlessly as they ran across the street and hurried east hugging the sides of buildings.
“What to do if the World ends, you mean?”
“Yes!” She retorted tersely.
“My Pa was in the Navy in the War. He was a destroyer skipper during the Korean War. My brother, Walter Junior, he’s in nuclear submarines.”
“Oh.” Judy hadn’t expected that. “How come you’re…”
The woman’s voice trailed off because she thought better of what she had been about to say.
Sam chuckled.
“A drop out musician?”
“No, well,” Judy honestly did not know what she meant, “not exactly…”
“My other big brother is at Yale. The klutz wants to be a lawyer like Pa. My little sister went up to Buffalo this fall. She wants to be a teacher. I’m kind of the black sheep of the family!”
They had stopped in a narrow gap between two houses.
“What?” The man asked. The woman was giving him a really weird, questioning look and he did not know what to make of it. The night was strange enough without trying to fathom somebody else’s special weirdness. And besides, he was suddenly scared shitless.
Judy let go of his hand.
“I don’t know! The thing is I just started feeling crazy yesterday. Then I saw you in town. Mooching around. And busking outside the Mount Baker Theatre before the Bellingham PD moved you on.”
Sam smiled at the memory. The cops out in the boondocks tended to come in one of two varieties: jerk or human being. The cop who had moved him on yesterday afternoon had been a reasonable guy. He had looked at the blue jeans, at his faded and threadbare army surplus greatcoat, his crumpled shirt and at the growth of stubble on Sam’s chin and still seen the man beneath. The cop had definitely been a fellow member of the human race.
‘Son, why don’t you just get a regular job?’
It could have been his Pa talking. In his adolescent years he longed to have a father at whom he could rage, who would shout at him or raise his hand but Pa had never been like that even though Sam knew, in retrospect, he must often have driven him to despair.
The cop had sat beside him on the boardwalk.
‘It ain’t nothing personal, son,’ the cop had explained slowly, patiently, ‘but you can’t play your music here. The patrons will complain. They’ll start up on my boss and then he’ll start up on me. That’s the way things work. I don’t like it any more than you do but the long and the short of it is that you’ve got to move on.’
The cop had been middle-aged, running to fat, tired, paternal.
Sam had moved on.
“Do you get crazy very often?” He asked Judy.
“No. I just felt it,” she confessed uncomfortably. “Maybe it was all the stuff about Cuba on the TV and the radio. Oh, and the President’s speech last week. I just knew something bad was going to happen. And now it has!”
Sam had not been listening to the news — he did not as a rule — but even he had known something bad was in the wind; like an approaching storm cloud circling on the horizon.
“That doesn’t make it your fault.”
There was a distant flash like fork lightning. Far away, the sky flickering, returning to black in a moment. Instinctively, the man and the woman flattened themselves against the nearest wall.
They said nothing, waiting.
Then there was another flash in the southern sky.
“How far south is Seattle?” Sam asked hoarsely. He was thinking about the Boeing Plants and the giant Bremerton Navy Base. Seattle had actually been in ’the news’ that he affected not to care about a lot that year. Century 21 Exposition, popularly known as the Seattle World’s Fair had been winding down when he and the Limonville Brothers had stopped over in the city the week before last. They said ten million people had visited the ‘exposition’, mainly to enjoy the fairgrounds or to see the view from the top of the futuristic looking Space Needle tower, or to browse the new art galleries, or take in a show at one of the new theatres. Seattle had used Century 21 Exposition to rebrand itself, to shrug off its mid-twentieth century reputation as a drab hub of the war industries that had helped to beat Hitler and Japan; and to shout to the World that there was more to Seattle than the Puget Sound navy yards and the Boeing bomber factories. Unfortunately, while the Soviets would not care about some latter-day cultural civic renaissance; they probably cared quite a lot about the Navy yards and the Boeing aircraft plants.