‘Okay,’ said Ed. ‘You’ve got something to drink out here? Do you want me to send some sandwiches down?’
‘I could go a couple of BLTs,’ smiled Dyson. ‘Unfortunately, we don’t have any L and we’re all out of Ts. But you can send one of the kids down with a round of B.’
‘You’ve got it,’ Ed had said, and driven the wagon the rest of the way up to the farmhouse, with red dust trailing from the wheels.
Apart from occasional bands of scavengers. South Burlington Farm hadn’t seen much of the disastrous rioting and burning that had scarred America on Sunday evening and Monday morning. Kansas wheat farmers, those who lived on their spreads, were quiet and reserved and dogged, and they met disaster with quiet God-fearing bitterness, rather than hysteria. Out here in Kingman County, there had been too many droughts and too many lost crops for folks to panic when they heard there were tough times up ahead.
Still, Willard had taken sensible precautions. As well as arranging a guard-duty roster, he had brought in some of the farmworkers from outlying houses, and given them temporary accommodation in his own cottage, and in the apartments over the stables and the garages which used to be occupied by stable-boys, in the days before motor-tractors and Jeeps. He had put Jack Marowitz in charge of rationing, and Jack had divided up the remaining food supplies on the farm according to their nutritional value and the size of the farmworkers’ families. Four families had chosen to leave, and join their relatives in Hutchinson and Emporia and Lehigh; and since most of the acreage was blackened now, and rotting, and there wasn’t the slightest prospect of a harvest, even a drastically reduced one, Willard had given all of them permission to go. In all. South Burlington Farm had been left with twenty-three men, women, and children, apart from Ed, Della, Karen, Peter Kaiser, and the obese and slumbering senior senator for Kansas.
Ed had called his mother in Independence five times, hoping to get her to join them, but each time the phone had rung and rung and nobody had answered. He had had to give up.
Peter Kaiser said, ‘You can’t hold us here for ever, you know. Sooner or later you’re going to have to do something positive.’
‘That’s for Della to decide,’ Ed told him. ‘She represents the law around here.’
‘It doesn’t matter to me if she represents the International House of Pancakes. She can’t legally hold us without formal charges and without giving us the chance to call a lawyer.’
Ed crushed his cigarette out in an ashtray that had been given to him in New York by Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. ‘Where else are you going to go?’ he demanded. ‘Out there – where people are tearing each other to shreds for the sake of a few cans of baked beans?’
‘I have to get back to Washington,’ Peter protested, sulkily. ‘I have to get back and there isn’t a damn thing you can do to stop me.’
‘Talk sense, for Christ’s sake,’ Ed told him, ‘If there was any kind of law and order out there – don’t you seriously think that someone would have come looking for Senator Jones by now? A senator disappears, nobody knows where he is, and it’s hardly even mentioned on the news. It’s a jungle outside of this farm, Mr Habeas Corpus Kaiser, and a bright young man like you ought to have the sense to realise it.’
Peter abruptly stood up. ‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘I’m going to walk out of here and you can’t stop me.’
Della stepped forward, her hands on her hips, her big breasts swaying under her shirt. ‘If you so much as take one step out of this room, Mr Kaiser, I’ll blow your head off.’
‘You wouldn’t dare,’ said Peter.
‘Wouldn’t I? This state is under martial law. You’re a dangerous suspect attempting to escape FBI custody.’ Peter shook his head. ‘I think you misunderstood me. You wouldn’t dare because, without me, you wouldn’t have a case. I’m your evidence, apart from those papers you stole, and you know it. So I’m not frightened of you, Mrs J. Edgar Hoover. Not one bit.’
He turned, and walked determinedly towards the door in his flapping khaki pants. Della, almost casually, reached for the pump-gun which she had left propped against the bureau in the corner. She raised it, pumped the action, and said softly, ‘Freeze, Mr Kaiser. You’re under arrest, and if you attempt to get away I’m going to have to shoot you.’ There was a formality in the way Della spoke to him that made Peter hesitate. Halfway through the door, he paused, and looked at her over his shoulder. She was standing with the gun raised to her shoulder, the sights marking his head. He licked his lips, as if he had just finished drinking a bowl of particularly nasty tomato soup.
He stood where he was for what seemed like a whole minute. Then he turned around, and went back to the sofa. ‘The day they started hiring whores for cops, that was when the whole legal system went down the tubes,’ he said. ‘Can you believe this hooker, being a cop?’
Della kept the gun levelled at him, but Ed stepped forward and laid his hand on the barrel. ‘That’s enough, Della. You may be an agent of the law, but this is my house, and that’s my sofa, and I don’t particularly want to have holes blown in it.’
He raised the barrel of the pump-gun until it was pointing at the ceiling, although she tried to resist him. He looked her straight in the eyes and said, ‘You understand? Because this is the time when people are going to start making their own laws, like they did in the frontier days.’ Della didn’t answer, and lowered the gun. Peter Kaiser, from his place on the sofa, watched them both closely, but said nothing at all.
That night, Thursday, Ed was woken up by the deep, distant coughing of shotguns. He sat up in bed, and listened. There was another shot, and another. He shook Della’s shoulder, and said, ‘There’s a firelight going on out there. Can you hear it?’
She raised her tousled head from the pillow. ‘It sounds like it’s coming from the main gate,’ she said.
Ed swung out of bed, and switched on the light. He tugged on his jeans and a T-shirt, and opened the top drawer in his rococo-style bedside table. Della, pulling on an old red sweater of Season’s, watched him sharply as he took out a Colt .45 automatic, and checked the magazine.
‘What’s that?’ she asked. ‘A family heirloom?’
That’s right,’ he told her. ‘My father bought it to keep my mother in line. Now, let’s get out there and see what’s going on, shall we?’
Peter Kaiser was already on the landing when they opened their door, in a large pair of blue undershorts with green flowers splattered all over them. Blinking at Ed, he said, ‘I heard shooting. Did you hear shooting?’
‘Just keep your head down,’ said Della. ‘Don’t forget you’re a valuable witness.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Peter.
Ed ran ahead of Della downstairs, and opened up the front door. They crossed the verandah under a sky that was dark and windy and heavy with cloud, and Ed led the way across to the farm’s Wagoneer. He swung himself up into the driver’s seat and started the engine without even waiting for her, or opening the passenger door to let her in.
‘There’s no mistaking that you’re the boss around here,’ she complained, as she clambered up, and laid her pump-gun down on the Jeep’s floor.
Ed twisted the Wagoneer around the asphalt in a squittering curve, and then roared off towards the entrance road and the main gates.
‘They’re threatening my farm,’ he snapped, thrusting his hand into his hair and brushing it back off his forehead. ‘Don’t you understand that? Or have you never owned anything you cared that much for?’