The waitress returned, passing an order up to the cook and encouraging June and company to sit, and the group walked all together toward what they thought of as their booth. Later, as they were finishing up their meal, an army jeep pulled up outside the diner and a military policeman entered. The waitress was nowhere in sight; the MP called out, “How much coffee you got in this place?”
“A whole goddamned urnful,” answered the cook from the kitchen.
“I’ll take it all, and the urn as well.”
The cook’s face appeared in the cubby. “Urn’s not for sale.”
“Uncle Sam needs that coffee,” said the MP, and he held up a fold of bills.
“Uncle Sam is welcome to every drop of coffee I’ve got. But he’s going to have to get his own urn, because I need mine, and all the time, too.”
The soldier hemmed and hawed but eventually went away with a thermosful of coffee. It was his own thermos, and he was disappointed that his gesture had not been actualized. Ida thought perhaps the man had played out a scenario in his mind of arriving in Bay City ahead of the riot with the urnful of fortifying and piping hot coffee for his comrades, and that they would give three cheers in appreciation of his ingenuity. The cook called over from his cubby, “Ever notice what a uniform does to a young man’s self-worth?”
“Yes, we have,” said June and Ida simultaneously.
After dinner, the two women and Bob and the dogs returned to the hotel, where they found Mr. More and Mr. Whitsell at the front desk, leaning in to listen to the radio coverage from Bay City. The riot had not yet commenced officially but was slowly coming into its own as dusk evolved to nighttime. An almost bored-sounding newscaster depicted the setting: “There are no sides, that I can see. All the lumbermen look strikingly like one another, no visible sign of which camp, which concern each man represents. They are walking about in clusters, up and down the main drag of Bay City, and engaging in skirmishes and brawls here and there; but these have been quickly put down by the National Guardsmen, working together with area law enforcement who are on the scene to lend a hand.” Mr. More pointed at the radio and whispered, “That’s our sheriff!”
Mr. Whitsell was shaking his head, and he wore a look of concern so pronounced that Mr. More had to ask him what was the matter. He answered, “I should feel quite a lot safer if the sheriff were here to protect us against encroachment. Why must he range so far from home? Doesn’t Bay City have its own sheriff to tend its own flock?”
“They do, of course,” said Mr. More. “Probably it’s that the sheriff felt drawn in by the professional imperative. He’d no sooner miss a chance to help a neighbor than rob a bank.”
“And while he’s off playing the helpful hero, where are we? Vulnerable to whichever vicious element who happens past. Why, a bandit could come in here and slay the lot of us in our beds and get away clean, with no figure of authority to hinder his spree.”
“Mightn’t you take solace in the unlikeliness of that event?” Mr. More asked.
“I might not!” answered Mr. Whitsell, and with a surprising bitterness.
Alice emerged from the small door behind the front desk, pulling on her cardigan and smoothing down her hair. Mr. More asked that she heat up some milk for Mr. Whitsell, but she said no, she was sorry but she couldn’t, she was already late.
“You are not going to that movie again?” he said.
“I am.”
“But how many times can you see the same story unfold?”
“However many times it takes.” She ducked under the front desk and threaded her way through the group, poking Bob in the stomach as she passed.
Mr. More went to heat up some milk for Mr. Whitsell, who stood forlornly to the side of the others. Ida and June and the dogs returned to the auditorium to resume their rehearsals. Bob went away to his room and changed into his pajamas and sat on the edge of his bed, listening to the coverage of the Bay City situation, which in darkness had devolved to riot proper: “The five-and-dime’s on fire,” said the newscaster. “No one’s paying it any mind, it’s just — on fire. Across the street, meanwhile, a group of men is working to overturn a jeep. Their faces are very red, and there’s much shouting going on among them, determined to get the job done. Now another group is attempting to set the post office alight. Why? And where is the fire department? Okay, hold on, the first group has got the jeep over on its side, and they’re pleased with themselves. Yes, congratulations all around, men, my goodness, what a sight.” There came a wail of sirens, men shouting in the background. “The National Guard are assembling in a line at the end of Bay Road. It is inevitable that the lumbermen and Guardsman will meet in the street.” The newsman began shouting question to the Guardsmen as they passed him by but was ignored or rebuffed. Bob heard someone say, “The town’s burning down and this jerk wants my impression of the scene.” The newsman took this in stride. “Emotions are running high tonight,” he explained.
The coverage droned on. Bob stepped away from his bed and to the window. Alice was standing out front of the movie theater, wrapped up in her own arms and peering down the road. Above the theater marquee and to the south Bob could just make out the tiny, flickering fires of Bay City. He was looking at an epicenter of violence from his safe distance while hearing the sound from within the violence through the radio. Alice looked miserable, huddled into herself; Bob was opening the window to invite her to listen to the riot in his room when she stood up straight and waved, and now here was the young man from the market, Tommy. As he approached, Alice spun around and rushed to the ticket booth to purchase their tickets. Walking into the theater, Tommy draped a lazy arm over Alice’s shoulder, while she clung to his midsection. Bob couldn’t see if they climbed the stairs to the balcony or not, but they certainly had the look of the balcony bound.
This sorry little narrative infected Bob, so that a blue mood came over him. For the first time since his departure he found himself thinking of his home in Portland, in particular the cosmos of his bedroom. He turned off the radio and shut off the lights and lay down in bed. It was a long time before he fell asleep and when he woke up it was seven o’clock in the morning and the window still was half open and the curtain was puffing its belly out at him and a great noise of commotion was coming up from the street.
A GREAT NOISE OF COMMOTION WAS COMING UP FROM THE STREET. Voices calling, shouting, automobile horns honking, endlessly; Bob assumed the riot had arrived and lay in bed asking himself how to prepare for and react to such a thing. Then he began to wonder why the voices didn’t sound angrier. He stood away from the bed and moved to the window; he caught the puffed-out curtain in his hands and drew it to the side.
The streets were filled with people. Cars were stopped on the highway, the roadside overrun; there was no center or border to the activity, and there was nothing like a violence taking place. It was as if an anthill had had its top kicked off and now there was motion all across the area, a giddy chaos, with every individual following his or her own line, place to place, picking out a friend and moving through the scrabble to meet up with them, to grasp, to rave. Bob dressed and hurried down the stairs and through the hotel to stand at the top of the blue-painted steps and consider the spectacle. Mr. More exited the hotel. “That’s it, then, eh?” he asked Bob, before walking down and into the crowd. Bob watched him greeting this and that person, shaking hands and agreeing as the mass ate him up. Now Bob walked down the blue steps; instantly he was tossed about and pushed this and that way and it would have been frightening but for how everyone was behaving. People patted his head and shook him by the shoulders; a red-faced woman with gray teeth and tears running down her cheeks seized him and kissed his forehead. A young man was strutting about and blowing a trumpet in the air; he leveled the horn at Bob’s face and blew a comical, trembling note, and Bob could smell his sour, stranger’s breath. It was as if everyone knew everyone else but they hadn’t seen one another in a long while and were made ecstatic by the grand reunion. Bob passed a group of men standing in a circle around a pickup truck. They were listening to the news report coming from the truck’s radio; a man with a British accent was shout-reading a bulletin. Bob understood by what this man was saying that the war had ended. The men surrounding the truck threw their hands up and cheered.