“I’ll move it.” Charles pushed back his chair to go to the third floor, where his brother would be tuning in his ham radio as his part in the drill.
Beth stopped him. “Don’t bother. Your dad’s forgotten he’s sector warden, now. Ed McWade’s supposed to drive him.” She hurried out on the porch and repeated the fact to her husband.
“Just as well Ed is coming,” Mr. Conner said. “That monstrosity probably wouldn’t start.”
The automobile—without fenders, with a homemade engine hood—did not look operable. It had been repaired with wire and sticks and painted by hand in half a dozen different colors. These hues were superscribed with initials, emblems, symbols, slogans and wisecracks, so that it resembled a tourist attraction rather than a vehicle.
“Here comes Ed,” Mr. Conner cried, and raced down his driveway, waving. The effort caused his crimson arm band, on which the word “Warden” was stenciled in white, to slide off his unused arm. When he bent to retrieve it, his World War I helmet clattered on the sidewalk. At the same time, Mrs. Conner called, “You forgot your whistle!” and ran indoors to get it. The lieutenant hastened down the walk to help his father reassemble his gear.
At the dinner table, alone in the presence of a feast, Nora made a hasty survey and passed herself the jam. She piled an incredible amount on half a slice of bread, tossed her two braids clear for action, and contrived to crowd the mass into her mouth. She was still masticating when her mother and older brother, having dispatched the paterfamilias, returned to the table.
“Everything’s cold,” Mrs. Conner said ruefully.
“Far from it,” her son answered. “Best meal I’ve looked at in six months.” He sliced a square of thick and juicy beef. “Best I’ve ever tasted!”
Her rewarded look was warm, but it vanished as she noticed the diminished aspect of the jelly dish. “Nora…!”
In the car as he sped down Walnut Street beside Ed, Henry Conner was thinking about the wild-strawberry jam and the roast beef, too. His companion had identical sentiments:
“Caught me,” he said, as he slowed to cross Lakeview Road, “just as we were sitting down to dinner.”
“Me, too. Guess they figured everybody would be doing the same. Ought to be a good turnout, on account of it.”
Ed slammed on the brakes in time to avoid the chemical engine of Hook and Ladder Company Number 17. It pounded across the intersection, its lights on in spite of the fact that the sun still shone, its clanging bell drowned by a whoop of the siren. “Something else to think about,” Henry yelled, letting his nerves down easy. “When those sirens are going, you can’t hear car horns or even fire-truck hells!”
Ed wiped a little diamond dust of sweat from his forehead. “Could have been closer, Hank.”
“Oh, sure.”
The sedan turned into South Hobson Street and slowed. The school was only four blocks distant and converging Civil Defense cars were piling up, even though volunteer “police” were blowing whistles urgently and urgently waving their arms, and even though Hobson Street was “one way” during this surprise drill. They could see, now, hundreds of cars parked and being parked in the playgrounds of the South High School. They could see the “wrecked” corner of the gymnasium where, later in the evening, the fire fighters and rescue squads would rehearse under conditions of simulated disaster, including real flames and chemical smoke. The very numbers of the congregating people stimulated them. That stimulus, added to a certain civic pride and the comparative verisimilitude of the occasion, helped Hank Conner and Ed McWade to forget they were middle-aged businessmen, middle-class householders, who for weary years had periodically and stubbornly pretended that their city in the middle of America was the target of an enemy air raid.
Before Ed parked the car, Henry leaped out and went to his post to assemble his block wardens. One of them, Jim Ellis, proprietor of the Maple Street Pharmacy, was incensed. “You know what, Hank? This is my druggist’s night off. I had to shut down the prescription department since I can’t be there to roll pills myself! Probably cost me twenty, twenty-five bucks. Maybe customers, even. People don’t like to come in a drugstore and not get a prescription filled on the dot. Next time we have one of these fool rehearsals—”
“You shouldn’t be here, anyway, Jim. How come?”
“I said that. I phoned headquarters when the letter about this new drill came. They told me whenever the sirens went to report here at the school—”
“Well, I’ll be responsible for that. You get your car and go back to the pharmacy. All the pharmacists in my area, by God, are going to stay in the stores. What zigzag chump ordered you here? In a real raid you’d be indispensable at the store.”
“That makes sense!”
Hank nodded and his easy voice rose to a pitch of command: “Sykes! Evans! Maretti!
Get Jim’s car cleared and see him around to Baker Avenue! Hold everything up till he’s out of the parking yard!”
A woman wearing a warden’s arm band rushed up from a knot of people gathered around a placard that said, “Station Forty-two.” She cried anxiously, “Mr. Collins! I left rolls in the oven!”
Henry drew a breath, expelled it. “How often do we have to go through the routine, Mrs.
Dace? You’re supposed to check all those things before you jump in a car and start for your post.
You’ll have to get a phone priority slip and tell your neighbors to turn off the gas—”
“It’s a coal range.”
“All right! To turn down the drafts and haul out the pans.” Hank began searching the school grounds for somebody connected with telephone priorities. He wondered with a kind of good-humored annoyance how in hell the citizens of Green Prairie would learn to save lives when they couldn’t remember to salvage biscuits.
In that segment of the attic which had long ago been converted into “the boys’ room,”
Ted Conner worked feverishly amidst a junklike jumble of wires, dimly glowing tubes, switches, dials, condensers, transformers and other paraphernalia with which gifted young men—specialists at the age of sixteen or so—are able to communicate with one another, often over distances of hundreds of miles. Ted Conner was a member in good standing of the American Radio Amateurs’ Society. He was also a volunteer member of Civil Defense, Communications Division.
To Ted, more than to any other person in the family (and partly because his function was the most realistic), the rise and fall of the siren spelled excitement. It was his instant duty to rush to his post, which meant his radio set. It was his assignment to get the set going and tune in headquarters. It was his additional assignment, every five minutes on the second, to listen for thirty seconds to his opposite number in Green Prairie’s “Sister City,” directly across the river.
Ted was going to be big like his grandfather Oakley, a blacksmith. He had his mother’s light-brown hair—as did Nora—and his father’s clear, blue eyes, as also did his sister. Only Chuck had the Oakley brown eyes; but Chuck hadn’t inherited the size, the big bones and the stature; Chuck was slender. Ted sat now with one leg hooked over the arm of a reconstructed swivel chair, his blue eyes shining, his usually clumsy hands turning the radio dials with delicacy. He was oblivious to everything in his environment: the pennants and banners on the wall; the stolen signs that said, “Danger,” and “Do Not Disturb,” and “Men”; the battered dresser and its slightly spotted mirror framed in snapshots-snapshots of girls in bathing suits and girls with ukuleles and a burning B-29.