Wilson Tucker - The Long Loud Silence

Gary laughed at him and backed out.

They made no real effort to tell time, to calculate the passing days or weeks, but waited with unspoken consent for the coming of a warmer season.

It may have been late January, or perhaps early February when the remainder of the provisions stacked in the mail truck were transferred to the cabin. The transfer represented the halfway point in their remaining supplies but the season was far advanced and they had no fear of the storehouse's being exhausted before spring. After the truck was emptied, Oliver tugged at Gary's sleeve and motioned him away from the cabin. They strode down the beach in silence.

“Spill it,” Gary suggested after a time. “You've had something on your mind for days.”

“Bit difficult,” Oliver answered. He walked along with his eyes on the water, kicking up loose sand.

“First time I've ever seen you fumble with words. Come on, spill it. We're fifty-fifty, remember?”

“That's just it,” Oliver hesitated. “About our partnership…”

Gary stopped walking. “You want to break it up?”

“You guessed?”

“I guessed now, by the way you're acting. Why?”

Oliver turned to face him. “Corporal, something's come up. I think it best that we break up.” He frowned and kicked sand again. “Sally thinks so, too.”

“Spill it,” Gary ordered once more.

“Well… one of us is going to be a father.”

Gary held his silence, considering the news. It did not particularly surprise him, although he had not suspected it. He had formed the habit months earlier of taking Sally for granted, accepting her casually as no more than another woman, a convenient cook, a pleasant interlude. Now this new element had been added.

“One of us, huh?” he answered at last. “How do you act when this happens? Are we supposed to congratulate each other, or what?”

“I don't know,” Oliver said desperately. “It never happened to me before! And I don't know which of us is the father — that upsets me. Sally doesn't know, either.”

The beginning of a grin appeared on Gary's lips.

Oliver was quick to stop it. “I refuse to think of it in a humorous vein and I don't want any wisecracks! That's why I want to dissolve our partnership, corporal; right now, today . I want you to stop—”

“Oh the hell you do?”

“Corporal…” He hesitated and then plunged forward into the most difficult part of it. “ I want to be the father. Sally wants me… too.”

“You want to be? But I thought you said—”

“Don't play a dumb bastard! I did say it, and Sally is . You know what I mean. But both of us can't be the father, realize that — what’ll the kid think? I want to be the father, corporal — the only one.”

Gary regarded his partner with a momentary silence. So this was the end of the line. “All right,” he said. “I can take a hint.”

Almost bashfully, Oliver put out his hand. “Thanks, corporal.” He made no attempt to hide his relief or that he was pleased with the outcome. “Damned white of you! Sally and I talked this thing over; we didn't know what to do. The kid scares her a little bit but the thought of you and me fighting scared her more. I'll tell her everything is all fixed up.” He turned and started back toward the cabin, a wide grin pasted foolishly across his face. “And corporal — if you're down this way next winter, drop in and see us, will you? Stop in and see my kid?”

“Now don't rush me,” Gary objected. “I'll be around for a while yet.”

It had been a hollow, thoughtless promise. He left in less than a week, too aware of the sudden tension that sprang up between the girl and himself, and vaguely uncomfortable because of it. Both Sally and Oliver tried to pretend that nothing had changed, nothing was different and the old fifty-fifty partnership remained the bond between the trio. The pretending was false and the tension grew. Gary stayed away from the cabin as much as possible and seldom spoke to the girl.

“We've had some good times,” Oliver said reminiscently.

“Sure as hell have! I like to froze in those damned mountains, talking you into coming south.”

“Pretty good place to hide out.”

Gary loaded his pockets with ammunition and packed food in a shoulder bag, choosing a revolver and a heavy rifle for protection. At the final parting, he shook hands with a grinning Oliver and blew an empty kiss to the girl standing in the cabin door. She half lifted her hand to return it, and then stopped herself.

“Where do you think you'll go?” Oliver asked.

“Dunno. Work my way over to the river,” Gary guessed with an indifferent shrug. “Upstream, maybe.”

“No cable-crawling!”

“No cable-crawling,” Gary returned. “Keep your eyes open.”

“Will do.” He nodded somberly. “You do the same.”

Turning his back on them, Gary left the island and made his way by hand across the partially dismantled causeway. Once past the opening where the timbers had been torn up, he shifted the bag of food to a more comfortable position and strode off toward the distant, empty highway. There entered his mind a brief memory of the girl — a pleasant memory. He didn't look back to fit the memory to the person.

The partnership was dissolved.

GARY hugged the blacker shadows along the shore and waited without emotion for the sound of the shot, for the sharp crack of a carbine. The doddering old woman had been a fool to believe she could sneak across the bridge, either she was starved to the point of sheer desperation or she was a fool. The darkness of the night couldn't hide her, not any more, not when the troops guarding the other end of the bridge were equipped with infrared lamps and sniperscopes on their rifles.

This was the only bridge left intact along a six or seven hundred mile stretch of the Mississippi; he'd discovered that as he slowly worked his way north from New Orleans. Many of the spans that had been left open a year ago were now blown up, one more indication of the government's determination to maintain the barrier, to keep the quarantine. The troops now concentrated in strength at the western ends of the remaining bridges were hardened to their duty, almost calloused after a year of stopping the sneakers.

The old woman had no more chance of slipping across to the Iowa shore than a snowball in a cyclotron, not as much chance as ridding her body of the seeds of plague.

Gary crawled behind a concrete abutment and waited. He was careful not to expose his body on the roadway, not to cross over to the opposite side of the two-lane bridge. While he was too distant from the troops to be in any real danger, still some gun-happy soldier just might catch him in his 'scope and open fire. The old woman didn't know the army, didn't know their equipment as he did. In her foolish, hungry mind she might have thought she could cross over under the mantle of darkness. She should have known better, she should have known what quick death to expect after a year of it.

Or perhaps she no longer cared.

The old woman surely knew she couldn't live to reach the Iowa side — no one from the contaminated area crossed the river and lived more than a few seconds, a few minutes. She must have known it and counted on it. She was one of the unlucky thousands still struggling for an existence east of the river, and she would remain there until she died. There was no other real choice, no other future. But sometimes the death on the bridge was much preferred to the death in what remained of a home.

The rifle cracked in the blackness. Good night, old woman.

Gary lay still, waiting. There was no other sound for long minutes. He knew the routine now, had watched it many times during the daylight hours on his slow, plodding trip upstream from the Gulf. Some soldier garbed in a white radiation suit would walk out onto the bridge while his mates covered him, move the old body with a toe of his boot, searching for a spark of life. If there was still movement he would put a pistol shot through her head. Finally he would pick up the body and hurl it over the guardrail. And then the man in the white suit would retire to a small brick building at the opposite foot of the bridge.