Shearson, gripping the arms of his chair to support himself, slowly rose to his feet He stood there for a moment swaddled in his bathrobe, breathing loudly and hoarsely with the exertion of getting up.
‘Mr Hardesty,’ he said, ‘my late father once told me never to argue with fools, ignoramuses, or people with loaded guns. Since you fall into all three categories, I don’t think I have any alternative but to comply with your wishes. Mrs McIntosh – shall we light out for Los Angeles?’
Della, furious, stalked out of the living-room ahead of any of them. ‘Well, now,’ Shearson said to Ed, pulling down his eyelid with his finger in a gesture of shared confidence, ‘I seem to have made the right decision. Anything that infuriates an agent of the FBI can’t be all bad.’
At the same time that Ed Hardesty’s farmworkers were trying to hold off the raiders who threatened South Burlington, a small and simple tragedy was taking place in a dilapidated frame house on the outskirts of Fort Wayne, Indiana. The house had once been neat and proud, part of a row that had all belonged to International Harvester workers, foremen and supervisors and chief engineers. Now it was overshadowed by unkempt sycamores, and a rusty rundown Nash was parked in the driveway. This was where the welfare cases lived; the tired single-parent wives with their second-hand strollers and their dime-store dresses; the paraplegic husbands who could do nothing more than nod and shuffle, and whose sick pay had long since run out.
Number 8 was the home of John Frederick Walters, his wife Elizabeth, and their three daughters, Alice, Wendy and Jenna. Alice was the oldest, at six; Wendy was three and Jenna was six months.
John Frederick Walters, who always gave his name as ‘John Frederick Walters’, was thirty one, and a skilled electrician. At least, he used to be a skilled electrician, until 1972, when he was rewiring a house in the better part of Fort Wayne, and the owner came back half-drunk from a business reception, pulled the main switch, and electrocuted him. He was lucky to be alive. But there was a twisted burn all the way down the right side of his chest, and even after months of hospitalisation his left hand still felt a little numb, and he still dragged his left leg in an odd, teetering walk that made people in supermarkets give him a wide berth, in case he collided with their carts. Until the famine crisis on Sunday, he had worked in a Thriftee Superstore on Paulding Road, but it had been burned to the ground in the early hours of Monday. Now he was holed up with his family at Number 8, with no electricity, no telephone, no mail, and only a transistor radio with weak batteries to keep him in touch with the horror that was sweeping the outside world.
He was still sitting in his yellow-papered living-room at midnight on Thursday, listening to an extended news bulletin about the day’s disasters. Thirty-six people had died when their overloaded airplane had snagged power lines over Columbus, Ohio – turning their attempted getaway from the United States into a mass cremation. Anything up to 100 people were feared dead after fire had swept a condominium in Miami from a looted supermarket next door. Washington was almost unapproachable – the US Marines had sealed off every highway from the outside world, and were threatening to shoot interlopers on sight. The President was out of his oxygen tent, but his doctors had told him he had to rest for two or three more days at the least. It was ‘expertly estimated’ that between seven and eight hundred Americans had died during the day from violence directly related to the food shortages.
From the outside world – from Europe, from the Far East, from the Third World – there was awkwardness and hesitation. They stood by while America slowly collapsed from within, like unwilling witnesses to a coronary. The Queen had sent a message expressing ‘the grave concern of the British people’, but the reluctance of America’s erstwhile allies to assist her was becoming increasingly and embarrassingly obvious. Already, trade envoys from Italy, Sweden, and West Germany had made special visits to the Soviet Union, and the dollar was no longer being quoted on the world money markets. The Secretary of State, in a rare fit of temper, talked of alliances that had taken ‘fifty years and one hundred fifty billion dollars to build; and only fifty minutes to tear down.’
John Frederick Walters listened to all this carefully, leaning close to his indistinct radio set. It was a hot, airless night in Fort Wayne, and most of the rioting and looting that had ravaged the town during the earlier part of the week had died down. There were no more supermarkets to break into; no more police cars to burn; and the fear and panic were collapsing of heat exhaustion. Still, John Frederick Walters could hear police sirens howling eerily out over on Tillman Road, and he knew that if he went to the top of the house, to Alice’s room, and opened the window, he would be able to see the Lutheran Hospital burning over on Fairfield Avenue. He had heard it from Old Oliver, his next-door neighbour, that seventy people had died in that fire, suffocated in their beds like fumigated bugs.
He heard the stairs creak. He switched off the radio set and sat up straight, his thin hands laced together in his lap. He was a very thin man altogether – although he had weighed almost 185 pounds before his electrocution. His face was pale as water-chestnuts, and he had odd straw-coloured hair that stuck up at the back, as if it were charged with static. He looked an electrocuted man – as if his brain were still in that black hiatus between switch on and switch off – as if his bodily fluids were in stasis – as if his nerve-endings were recoiling and recoiling from that first fry of voltage.
His wife Elizabeth was standing in the living-room door. Her face was angular and white; her eyes as shifty and haunted as Edith Piaf, or a painting by Munch. She wore a cheap new quilted robe with orange flowers on it, Woolco’s ritziest. The last time he had taken her out was in February of 1972, for her birthday, when they had gone to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, and eaten Chinese.
She said, ‘Jenna’s hungry.’
John Frederick Walters looked at her. He wondered why she had come all the way downstairs at midnight to tell him that. He knew Jenna was hungry. They had scraped out the last can of formula that morning, diluting it as much as they could, and now there was nothing. There were no emergency food centres in Fort Wayne. If you wanted anything at all, you had to drive to Indianapolis, and the Rambler’s battery had been flat for weeks. Besides, what chance did a cripple have of fighting his way through to the food supplies?
‘Have you tried breast-feeding her?’ asked John Frederick Walters.
‘I tried. But there’s hardly anything there. I haven’t eaten in two days myself, John Frederick. I can’t give milk out of nothing at all.’
John Frederick Walters reached for the red Lark packet by the radio. There were two cigarettes left in it and he shook them, wondering if he ought to have one now, or if he ought to save both of them for later. In the end, he slid one out, tucked it between his lips, and lit it one-handed with a folded matchbook. He puffed smoke.
‘There’s nothing left, Elizabeth. That can of franks we gave the kids today, that was it, and from what the news has been saying, we shouldn’t even have risked that. They could go down with disease, die.’
Elizabeth stayed where she was in the doorway, nibbling at her lower lip. She peeled the skin off it in strips until it bled. ‘I don’t understand it,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t anybody care? You’d think they’d come around with food parcels. I mean – we’ve got three children here. What are we going to do?’
‘The whole town’s a wreck,’ said John Frederick Walters. ‘No police, no ambulance service, nothing. How the hell can anybody expect them to bring around food parcels?’