Harry Turtledove - Fallout

Groaning and snorting, the locomotive pulled the train out of the station. Like many of the men it carried, it had seen better years. Yes, they were heading west, toward the fighting. Vodka came out to dull that grim fact. So did cards and dice, to redistribute whatever wealth the soldiers had. Ihor nodded to himself. No, not a goddamn thing had changed.

–

Herschel Weissman tapped the order form on the clipboard with a blunt, nicotine-stained forefinger. “The refrigerator and the washing machine go to this address,” he said. “It’s right near Manchester and Vermont.”

“I know where it is, boss,” Aaron Finch answered quietly.

“Sure you do.” The man who’d founded and still ran Blue Front Appliances nodded. “The trouble is, Jim will, too. Don’t let him give you any tsuris, you hear?” That he let a Yiddish word creep into a conversation other people might overhear showed how important he thought the point was.

Aaron nodded. He was a lean, weathered, medium-sized man five months away from his fiftieth birthday. Ridiculously thick glasses perched on his formidable nose. His eyes were so bad, they’d kept him out of the Army in World War II.

He’d joined the merchant marine instead. The only thing the guys who put together freighter crews cared about was a pulse. They couldn’t afford to be fussy, and weren’t. On the Murmansk run, in the Mediterranean, and in the South Pacific, he’d seen as much danger as most Army or Navy men. After the war, it got him exactly no benefits. That disgusted him, but what could you do?

“I’ll deal with Jim,” he promised. “I’m not jumping up and down about going to that part of town myself, you know. I’ll do it, but I’m not jumping up and down.”

One of the two atom bombs that hit Los Angeles landed downtown. The other tore up the harbors at San Pedro and Long Beach. The delivery address was closer to the first of those. It was out of the zone that had seen a lot of damage, but not very far out. From the Glendale warehouse, the truck would have to go through or around that zone to get there.

Herschel Weissman clicked his tongue between his teeth. It wasn’t quite Et tu, Brute?, but it might as well have been. “Aaron, we really need any sale we can get, wherever it is,” he said. “Those goddamn bombs blew up our business along with everything else.”

“Sure, sure.” Aaron nodded again. He understood that at least as well as his boss did. He’d seen his hours cut because Blue Front was hurting. When you had a wife and a two-year-old back home, that pinched hard. He would have felt only half a man if Ruth had to go out looking for work because he couldn’t make ends meet on his own.

“Tell you what,” Weissman said. “I’ll give you double time for the run. You don’t have to tell Jim about that.”

Aaron paused to light a Chesterfield. He went through two or three packs a day, and the little ritual gave him a moment to think. “Give him what you give me, or else don’t bother giving me anything,” he said after his first drag. “I won’t be doing anything he isn’t.”

Weissman didn’t call him a shlemiel, but his face did the talking for him. That was bound to be one reason he headed the company and Aaron drove a truck and lugged heavy appliances around. But Aaron didn’t care. He had his own stubborn notions about what was fair and what wasn’t. Herschel Weissman must have seen as much. He lit his own cigarette and sighed out smoke. “All right. Double time for both of you. Now get lost.”

Even with double time, Jim Summers wasn’t thrilled. “Them atoms’ll cook you from the inside out,” he said. He had a Deep-South drawl and maybe a sixth-grade education. Whatever he knew about atoms, he’d got it from comic books.

Which didn’t mean he was wrong. “We’ll take the long way around, like we did when we went to Torrance,” Aaron told him. “We won’t go through downtown.” You could do that again; some of the roads were open, and they were working hard on rebuilding the freeways. But even Aaron’s lively curiosity didn’t make him want to try it.

Jim raised an eyebrow. His weren’t as bushy as Andy Devine’s, but they were in that ballpark. “If you don’t want to try it, anybody who does has got to be nuts,” he said.

“I’ll try not to dance on the lawns and swing from the telephone poles,” Aaron said dryly.

“You better not. They’ll come after you with a butterfly net if’n you do.” To Jim Summers, irony was what his wife used to put the creases in his gabardine work pants.

Aaron drove the big blue truck west to Sepulveda before swinging south. That took him past the veterans’ cemetery and UCLA to the east and an enormous refugee camp to the west. Things in the camp were supposed to be getting better, but he could still smell it as he piloted the truck past it. Too many people hadn’t bathed or flushed often enough for too long.

He wanted to turn east at Wilshire so he could see more of what the bomb had done. They were almost through tearing down the shattered Coliseum. They hadn’t got around to Wrigley Field yet, a mile or so farther south. The PCL Angels were sharing Gilmore Field with the Hollywood Stars. No one seemed to have any idea where the Rams and Trojans and Bruins would play come fall. The look Jim sent him, though, persuaded him not to go east till he had to.

That was at Manchester, most of an hour south of Wilshire. Even then, Jim pulled a bandanna from his trouser pocket and tied it over his nose and mouth. “You look like a bank robber in a bad horse opera,” Aaron said. His younger brother, Marvin, had worked in the movies for a while-till people noticed how annoying he could get, Aaron had always thought. Some of the Hollywood slang he’d brought home rubbed off.

“I don’t give a shit if I look like a camel in the zoo,” Jim said. “I don’t want to breathe none o’ that radio-action crap.”

Aaron thought about correcting him, but decided that was more trouble than it was worth. So was asking how good a screen that none too clean, cheaply woven bandanna made.

The house taking delivery of the washer and refrigerator hadn’t got any damage. A colored family was moving in down the block. Jim Summers sighed. “I reckoned the bomb took out most o’ the niggers here,” he said mournfully. “Guess I was wrong. Oh, well.” He didn’t like Jews, either. Because Aaron carried an ordinary-sounding last name (it had been Fink till his father anglicized it), he’d never realized his partner was one. No one had ever claimed he was long on brains.

Wrestling the appliances down the ramp from the truck to the street and then into the house was part of what made the job so much fun. Aaron knew he’d feel it in his back and shoulders when he got home tonight. He was sure he wouldn’t have ten years earlier. This getting old business was for the birds.

“Thank you very much,” said Mrs. Helen McAllister, who’d ordered the icebox and washer. She gave them lemonade made from lemons off a tree in her back yard. After she signed all the paperwork and wrote Aaron a check, she added, “Did you see the coons buying Joe Sanders’ place? My God! This is the other side of Manchester! Who ever thought they’d come this far?”

Since Aaron had nothing to say to that, he kept his mouth shut. Getting into political arguments with customers wasn’t smart. Jim Summers didn’t argue with Mrs. McAllister. He agreed with her. He sympathized with her. Aaron practically had to drag him out of the house and back to the truck.

“Couple more spooks buy around here, poor gal’s house ain’t gonna be worth the paper it’s printed on,” Jim said.

“It’s not our business any which way,” Aaron said.