Acting alone, the Vice-President sent desperate appeals for canned, dried, and frozen foods to the EEC nations, to Japan, China, and even to the USSR. The first response, even from our allies, was guarded. If the United States was really on the verge of economic and social collapse, then it was almost inevitable that the future of world politics would be heavily centred on the Soviet Union, and few nations were keen to mortgage their future by helping the United States too enthusiastically.
The Soviet Union ‘regretted the crisis in the United States of America, but unfortunately had no surplus foodstuffs to spare.’ The Vice-President ripped up their telegram, but conceded that at least they had shown the good grace not to mention the Afghanistan grain embargo.
At seven o’clock on Thursday morning, the Vice-President announced on television that the sale of all canned foodstuffs was banned, although he was humane enough to suggest that ‘those who have no other food whatsoever’, and who were obliged to eat canned foods, should ‘exhaustively inspect the exterior of any can for pinholes, possibly concealed by wax.’ Over seventy-six new cases of botulism had been reported during the night, all of them fatal.
For the first time in its history, Time magazine was published that week with a black border around its cover, instead of its traditional red. It was probably appropriate, because it was the last-ever edition. Its cover story: Famine, USA.
Federal experts now estimated that even the best-stocked American homes had only sufficient usable foodstuffs to carry their families through three more weeks. Most poorer urban families, however, were down to their last few cans – and now cans were under suspicion, too, they virtually had no food to eat at all.
Heavily-guarded food distribution centres were set up in the major cities, giving out packages that had been flown into New York, Boston, Washington, Los Angeles, Houston, Seattle, and Chicago from Britain and Denmark. American families who just two weeks ago had been eating steak, sweet potatoes, corn, fresh fruit, and any variety of ice-cream they wanted, now found themselves reduced to dried eggs, British chocolate, malt extract, margarine, and small cans of Danish processed pork. In Houston, three men were shot by National Guardsmen when they tried to break into the food distribution centre on Harrisburg Boulevard with machine-guns.
Time said, ‘This week, Americans are feeling their first real pangs of hunger. After only two weeks of blight and catastrophe, they are actually beginning to understand what it means to go without.’
During the three hours that followed the Vice-President’s announcement of a ban on canned foods, there were more than 17,000 suicides or attempted suicides throughout the United States. The Harvard psychologist Dr Leo Wolpers called it ‘the Total Despair syndrome.’ He said: ‘People have lost their confidence in tomorrow.’
Hundreds of thousands of Americans tried to escape the country by boat and a harrassed Coastguard spent hours trying to turn back dinghies and catamarans and fishing smacks, all overloaded with desperate people with suitcases. Many of the boats were so overcrowded that they sank as soon as they reached the open sea. The Boston Globe printed on its back page, without caption and without comment, two photographs side by side – one of the Vietnamese boat people and one of the American boat people.
In the House, Representative George Meacher of Tennessee asked in an emotional speech how this ‘magnificent democracy of ours, founded on liberty, freedom, and honour, could be brought low in two weeks by a virus, an isotope, and a disease of the gut?’ Nobody could answer him.
Looting, homicide, arson, rape, and cases of ‘crazy and suicidal driving’ were reported ‘by the thousand.’ Most police forces could do nothing more than patrol the streets and try to keep their cities and suburbs as quiet as possible. A woman died in childbirth on the sidewalk outside the Waldorf-Astoria in New York because there were no doctors available, no ambulances, and most of Park Avenue was blocked with abandoned cars. In San Quentin prison, eighty-six inmates who attempted to escape because they were mad with hunger were shot dead. Two half-naked teenage girls from respectable Back Bay families were found wandering around downtown Boston in a state of shock after being kidnapped from outside their homes and raped more than twenty times each by marauding white hoodlums.
Thursday was the day that most newspapers stopped printing, that the last few gas stations closed down, that power blackouts began to darken thousands of square miles of the eastern seaboard. There was a terrible wildness in the air, a terrible panic, that nobody who lived through the first days of the famine could ever forget. One journalist remembered climbing Coit Tower in San Francisco and staring out for hours over a city that ‘flowered with foes, and echoed with shots, and howled with the sirens of the helpless police.’ Above everything, though, he said ‘I could hear the cries and shrieks of a people who felt as if they had been abandoned by democracy, abandoned by capitalism, abandoned by peace, and abandoned by plenty… a people who more than anything else felt they had been deserted by God.’
During Thursday, the phone rang again and again at the Snowmans’ house on Topanga Canyon. Nobody answered it until late on Thursday evening, when a motorcycle cop who had been checking houses for squatters and looters picked it up and said, ‘They’ve all gone. This is the police.’
‘Are they all right?’ asked the voice at the other end.
‘Who knows, friend? We’ve got chaos here, a bad brush foe burning. They could be anyplace at all.’
‘Nobody’s left a forwarding address?’
The cop gave a cursory look around. ‘Not that I can see,’ he said. ‘It looks like they just lit out. They didn’t even lock the doors.’
There was a pause, and then the voice said, ‘Can you do me a favour?’
‘Sure, you name it.’
‘Can you write on the wall someplace that Ed Hardesty called, from South Burlington Farm in Kansas, and that I’m going to try to make my way to LA?’
The cop took out his pencil and jotted the message down. ‘South Burlington?’ he asked.
‘That’s right.’
‘Okay, then, I got you. I’ll do that.’
‘Thanks a whole lot. If this situation ever mends itself, come around to the house you’re at and claim yourself a case of whisky.’
The cop grinned. ‘To tell you the truth. I’m a vodka man.’
Ten
Ed carefully set the telephone back in its cradle, and looked across the living-room at Karen. Then, while she watched him, he stood up and walked to the window, staring out at the front yard of South Burlington Farm the same way he used to when he was a boy.
‘Well?’ asked Karen. ‘Weren’t they there?’
‘That was a cop,’ Ed told her, taking out a cigarette and lighting it slowly. He breathed out smoke. ‘He said the house was empty. Even the doors had been left unlocked.’
‘They’ve probably gone to stay somewhere safer,’ Karen suggested. ‘The way I heard it on the news, a whole lot of people are banding together to protect themselves from looters, and Hell’s Angels, and people like that. Maybe they’ve found some kind of sanctuary.’
Ed leaned against the window-pane. Outside, the sun was gradually eating its way into the roof of the stables opposite, and the sky had flushed the colour of ripe strawberries. To a city dweller, an evening like this on a Kansas wheat farm would have looked idyllic. To a farmer, the overwhelming silence, right in the peak of the early harvesting season, was ominous. The tractors were all parked and covered with tarps; the stables were empty and quiet. A single door banged and banged in the warm breeze that had risen on the prairie.