Грэм Мастертон - Famine

Her ‘Saturday evening rush’ might be no more hectic than a single truck driver, stopping on his way to Fort Sumner for a cold Miller and a cheeseburger. Or it could be a bewildered California family in a Winnebago Chieftain, already unnerved by the wildness of the countryside, and now trying to find their way back to Route 66 and eventual civilisation. At best, it could be six or seven airmen from Cannon AFB near Clovis, all neat and polite and hungry as hell. Mary had switched on the juke-box, and it was playing The Very Thought Of You. Outside, the sun had just gone down, and the sky was the rich dusty purple of blueberries. There was a soft breeze blowing from the south-west, from Lincoln County and the Capitan Mountains, and the air carried that distinctively Western smell of dry aromatic weeds, and history, and dust.

Shortly before nine o’clock, an ageing lime-green Cadillac pulled off the blacktop and circled around Mary’s stony front yard. It stopped, and out clambered a family of five – Mr and Mrs Donald Abbott, of Portales, New Mexico, and their three young children – all on their way back from a visit to Mrs Abbott’s mother in Santa Fé.

Mr Abbott was slight, stooping, and bespectacled. He had celebrated his forty-second birthday a week ago, and he worked for the Roosevelt County health department. At his age, he should have been a district supervisor, except that the county’s chief health executive didn’t particularly like his face. What’s more, he had held out for better medical facilities for underprivileged families at a time when it was politically embarrassing.

Mrs Abbott was plain and friendly, with a face that was as forgettable as a single bagel in a bagel bakery. Their children – Duane, ten; Norman, eight; and Betsy, six – were no more memorable than little bagels. A police officer later described them as ‘Mr and Mrs Average, and Average Kids.’ But it was better, in a way, that they were. Fewer people would have been shocked if it had been a Spanish family, or a black family, or a family of Mescalero Apaches.

Mr Abbott opened the screen door of Mary’s Diner and held it back while his family trooped in. Mary said, ‘How are you, folks?’ and came around the counter in her blue checkered apron, carrying the dog-eared menus that her six-foot nephew Stephen had Xeroxed for her at his used-car office in Las Vegas. The Abbotts sat a corner table, and ordered hotdogs all round, with onion rings.

While they were eating, Mr Abbott told Mary that they were hoping to take the children to Los Angeles later in the year, so that they could see the ocean and Disneyland. Mary told them that her late husband, Morton, had lived in New Mexico all of his life, and had never once seen the ocean. He had seen John Slaughter once, in 1919, when he was a small boy, but that was all.

Mr and Mrs Abbott drank two more cups of coffee, while the children played Osmond songs on the juke-box. At a quarter to ten, the family left, and Mary stood at the diner door to watch them drive off towards Clovis. Then she went back inside to clean up.

Shortly after dawn on Sunday morning, a trumpet-player who had been entertaining the previous evening at a party at the air base came across the lime-green Cadillac parked beside the road about a mile and a half east of Floyd. He would have driven past it in his Volkswagen without stopping, except that he badly needed a first cigarette, and his car had no lighter. He could see that the Cadillac was occupied, so he pulled in just in front of it, and walked back. It was a cold morning, and the windows of the Cadillac were partially misted up.

The trumpet-player knocked on the driver’s window. There was no response so he knocked louder. They were probably all asleep. He shivered in the morning air and chafed his hands together.

It was only when he knocked a third time that he realised something had to be wrong. Twice, he shouted, ‘Hey in there! Hey, open the door!’ but there was no answer. He could vaguely make out a man and a woman and three children, but they were all lolling back in their seats as if they were dead.

Frightened, the trumpet-player ran back to his own car and took out a tyre-iron from under the seat. He took it to the Cadillac’s door, and tried to prise it open, but the lock was too strong for him. He stood panting beside the car, unsure what to do, and he was still there when an air force truck came past. He flagged it down, and it crunched to a halt a little way down the road.

‘There’s something wrong!’ he shouted out. ‘It looks like they’re dead in there! I can’t open the door!’

A tall young airman in a peaked cap and fatigues jumped down from the truck and walked over to take a look for himself. Then, without a word, he loosened a shovel from the truck’s side panel, swung it back, and smashed the Cadillac’s side window.

The children in the back appeared to be dead. They were curled up like fumigated baby mice, their eyes closed, and their faces white. The broken glass lay on them like splinters of ice. In the front, the driver was alive, but barely conscious. His wife was face-down on the seat.

‘Doctor…’ whispered the driver. ‘For God’s sake… doctor…’

The young airman loped back to his truck, and unclipped his radio microphone. The trumpet-player heard him saying, ‘… whole family, that’s right… no, I can’t see what’s wrong with them… just about a mile or two outside of Floyd… you know the road?’

A white-painted fighter-bomber thundered above them as it came in from a dawn exercise. The trumpet-player shielded his eyes against the sun, and then turned away, his hands on his hips in a gesture of helpless resignation. The driver of the Cadillac had closed his eyes now, and was lying back breathing harshly through his mouth. The trumpet-player didn’t know whether he ought to take the man’s spectacles off or not.

The young airman came back and said, ‘They’re sending an ambulance from the base. They said not to touch them, in case they have something contagious.’

The trumpet-player nodded. He was glad he had decided against taking off the spectacles. ‘The kids, too,’ he said, indicating the back seat of the car. ‘Whatever it was, it really must have hit ’em hard.’

The airman said, ‘Suffocation, maybe. They could have had a leak in their muffler. When that carbon monoxide gets into the car, boy, you don’t even realise what’s happening to you. A friend of mine killed himself that way. You know, with the rubber hose.’

The trumpet-player held his hand over his mouth. There was no sound out here except for the whining of the wind in the Cadillac’s antennae, and the laboured breathing of the driver. There were a few brief rumbles of jet engines from the air force base, but they died away as quickly as summer thunder.

‘Some place to die, huh?’"said the airman.

The trumpet-player nodded. He was beginning to feel very cold now, and he was wishing that he had never stopped. It was so incongruous and so tragic to see this family sitting in their car that it brought tears to his eyes. ‘Do you have a light?’ he asked the airman.

The airman shook his head. ‘Don’t smoke. Easier not to, you know, with all that airplane fuel around.’

‘ Doctor… ’ whispered Donald Abbott.

‘A doctor’s coming,’ said the airman, loudly. ‘Don’t worry, old buddy, you’re going to make it.’ Then he looked at the trumpet-player and pulled a face, as if to say, what does it matter? The poor guy’s going to die anyway.

Under the tepee-like roof of Shearson Jones’s hallway, the television lights had been set up, and the cameras fixed into position. The whole morning had been chaos, with television people rearranging the furniture and reeling out hundreds of feet of cable and leaving styrofoam cups of coffee wherever they went. Shearson, in his mahogany-panelled study, had stayed well out of their way, except to talk for a half-hour to the director about how he was going to present his appeal, and how the broadcast should look. ‘Quiet and simple, with folksy dignity, that’s what I want,’ he had insisted. ‘There’s no way we should look like we’re rattling a tin cup under anybody’s nose.’