Re: Shadowing Let's Speak Japanese Ebook 20
Linda Berens
The subject was on my mind. I had recently returned from a magazineassignment at Offutt Field, Headquarters of the Strategic Air Command,several SAC operational bases, and the Missile Test Center on CapeCanaveral. More to the point, I had been discussing just such apossibility with several astute British staff officers. The British havelived under the shadow of nuclear-armed rockets longer than we. Also,they have a vivid memory of cities devastated from the skies, as havethe Germans and Japanese.
A man who has been shaken by a two-ton blockbuster has a frame ofreference. He can equate the impact of an H-bomb with his ownexperience, even though the H-bomb blast is a million times morepowerful than the shock he endured. To someone who has never felt abomb, bomb is only a word. An H-bomb's fireball is something you see ontelevision. It is not something that incinerates you to a cinder in thethousandth part of a second. So the H-bomb is beyond the imagination ofall but a few Americans, while the British, Germans, and Japanese cancomprehend it, if vaguely. And only the Japanese have personalunderstanding of atomic heat and radiation.
It was a big question. I gave him a horseback opinion, which provedconservative compared with some of the official forecasts publishedlater. I said, "Oh, I think they'd kill fifty or sixty millionAmericans--but I think we'd win the war."
In Fort Repose, a river town in Central Florida, it was said thatsending a message by Western Union was the same as broadcasting it overthe combined networks. This was not entirely true. It was true thatFlorence Wechek, the manager, gossiped. Yet she judiciously classifiedthe personal intelligence that flowed under her plump fingers, andmaintained a prudent censorship over her tongue. The scandalous and theembarrassing she excised from her conversation. Sprightly, trivial, andharmless items she passed on to friends, thus enhancing her status andrelieving the tedium of spinsterhood. If your sister was in trouble, andwired for money, the secret was safe with Florence Wechek. But if yoursister bore a legitimate baby, its sex and weight would soon be knownall over town.
Florence awoke at six-thirty, as always, on a Friday in early December.Heavy, stiff and graceless, she pushed herself out of bed and paddedthrough the living room into the kitchen. She stumbled onto the backporch, opened the screen door a crack, and fumbled for the milk cartonon the stoop. Not until she straightened did her china-blue eyes beginto discern movement in the hushed gray world around her. A jerky-tailedsquirrel darted out on the longest limb of her grapefruit tree. SirPercy, her enormous yellow cat, rose from his burlap couch behind thehot water heater, arched his back, stretched, and rubbed his shoulderson her flannel robe. The African lovebirds rhythmically swayed, headspressed together, on the swing in their cage. She addressed thelovebirds: "Good morning, Anthony. Good morning, Cleo."
Their eyes, spectacularly ringed in white, as if embedded in mint LifeSavers, blinked at her. Anthony shook his green and yellow plumage andrasped a greeting. Cleo said nothing. Anthony was adventurous, Cleotimid. On occasion Anthony grew raucous and irascible and Florencereleased him into limitless freedom outside. But always, at dusk,Anthony waited in the Turk's-cap, or atop the frangipani, eager to flyhome. So long as Cleo preferred comfortable and sheltered imprisonment,Anthony would remain a domesticated parrot. That's what they'd told herwhen she bought the birds in Miami a month before, and apparently it wastrue.
Florence carried their cage into the kitchen and shook fresh sunflowerseed into their feeder. She filled Sir Percy's bowl with milk, andcrumpled a bit of wafer for the goldfish in the bowl on the counter. Shereturned to the living room and fed the angelfish, mollies, guppies, andvivid neons in the aquarium. She noted that the two miniature catfish,useful scavengers, were active. She was checking the tank's temperature,and its electric filter and heater, when the percolator chuckled itscall to breakfast. At seven, exactly, Florence switched on thetelevision, turned the knob to Channel 8, Tampa, and sat down to herorange juice and eggs. Her morning routine was unvaried and efficient.The only bad parts of it were cooking for one and eating alone. Yetbreakfast was not her loneliest meal, not with Anthony ogling andgabbling, the six fat goldfish dancing a dreamy oriental ballet ondiaphanous fins, Sir Percy rubbing against her legs under the table, andher cheery friends on the morning show, hired, at great expense, toinform and entertain her.
As soon as she saw Dave's face, Florence could sense whether the newswas going to be good or bad. On this morning Dave looked troubled, andsure enough, when he began to give the news, it was bad. The Russianshad sent up another Sputnik, No. 23, and something sinister was going onin the Middle East. Sputnik No. 23 was the largest yet, according to theSmithsonian Institution, and was radioing continuous and elaborate codedsignals. "There is reason to believe," Frank said, "that Sputniks ofthis size are equipped to observe the terrain of the earth below."
Florence gathered her pink flannel robe closer to her neck. She glancedup, apprehensively, through the kitchen window. All she saw werehibiscus leaves dripping in the pre-dawn ground fog, and blank gray skybeyond. They had no right to put those Sputniks up there to spy onpeople. As if it were on his mind also, Frank continued:
Florence flipped to Channel 6, Orlando, and country music. She did notunderstand, and could not become interested in, the politics of theMiddle East. Sputniks seemed a closer and more personal menace. Her bestfriend Alice Cooksey, the librarian, claimed to have seen a Sputnik oneevening at twilight. If you could see it, then it could see you. Shestared up through the window again. No Sputnik. She rinsed the dishesand returned to her bedroom.
As she wrestled with her girdle, Florence's thought gravitated to theequally prying behavior of Randy Bragg. She adjusted the venetian blindsuntil she could peer out. He was at it again. There he was, brazenlyimmodest in checked red and black pajamas, sitting on his front steps,knees akimbo and binoculars pressed to his eyes. Although he was perhapsseventy-five yards distant, she was certain he stared directly at her,and could see through the tilted louvers. She ducked back against thebedroom wall, hands protecting her breasts.
Almost every evening for the past three weeks, and on a number ofmornings, she had caught him at it. Sometimes he was on the piazza, asnow, sometimes at a second-floor window, and sometimes high up on thecaptain's walk. Sometimes he swept the whole of River Road with hisglasses, pretending an interest elsewhere, but more often he focused onher bungalow. Randolph Rowzee Bragg a Peeping Tom! It was shocking!
Long before Florence's mother moved south and built the brown-shinglebungalow, the Braggs had lived in the big house, ungainly andmonolithic, with tall Victorian windows and bellying bays and broadbrick chimneys. Once it had been the show place of River Road. Now, itappeared shabby and outmoded compared with the long, low, antisepticcitadels of glass, metal, and tinted block constructed by richNortherners who for the past fifteen years had been "discovering" theTimucuan River. Still, the Bragg house was planked and paneled withnative cypress, and encased in pine clapboard, hard as iron, that mightlast another hundred years. Its grove, at this season like a full greencloak flecked with gold, trailed all the way from back yard to riverbank, a quarter mile. And she would say this for Randy, his grounds werewell kept, bright with poinsettias and bougainvillea, hibiscus,camellias, gardenias, and flame vine. Florence had known Randolph'smother, Gertrude Bragg, well, and old Judge Bragg to speak to. She hadwatched Randolph graduate from bicycle to jalopy, vanish for a number ofyears in college and law school, reappear in a convertible, vanish againduring the Korean War, and finally come home for good when Judge Braggand Mrs. Bragg were taken in the same year. Now here was Randy, one ofthe best known and most eligible young men in Tumucuan County, even ifhe did run around with Pistolville girls and drink too much, a--what wasit the French called it?--a voyeur. It was disgusting. The things thatwent on in small towns, people wouldn't believe. Florence faced thebureau mirror, wondering how much he had seen.
Many years ago a man had told her she looked something like Clara Bow.Thereafter, Florence wore her hair in bangs, and didn't worry too muchabout her chubby figure. The man, an imaginative idealist, had gone toEngland in 1940, joined the Commandos, and got himself killed. Sheretained only a vague and inexact memory of his caresses, but she couldnever forget how he had compared her to Clara Bow, a movie star. Shecould still see a resemblance, provided she sucked in her stomach andlifted her chin high to erase the fleshy creases in her neck--except herhair was no longer like Clara's. Her hair had thinned, and faded tomottled pink. She hurriedly sketched a Clara Bow pout on her lips, andfinished dressing.
When she stepped out of the front door, Florence didn't know whether sheshould cut Randy dead or give him a piece of her mind. He was stillthere on the steps, the binoculars in his lap. He waved, grinned, andcalled across lawn and road, "Morning, Miss Florence." His black hairwas tousled, his teeth white, and he looked boyish, handsome, andinoffensive.
She walked to the carport, head averted as if avoiding a bad odor, herstiff carriage a reprimand, and did not answer. He really was nervy,sitting there in those vile pajamas, trying to sweet-talk her. All theway to town, she kept thinking of Randy. Who would ever guess that hewas a deviate with a compulsion to watch women dress and undress? Heought to be arrested. But if she told the sheriff, or anybody, theywould only laugh at her. Everybody knew that Randy dated lots of girls,and not all of them virgins. She herself had seen him take RitaHernandez, that little Minorcan tart from Pistolville, into his houseand, no doubt, up to his bedroom since the lights had gone on upstairsand off downstairs. And there had been others, recently a tall blondewho drove her own car, a new Imperial with Ohio plates, into thecircular driveway and right up to the front steps as if she owned theplace, and Randy. Nobody would believe that he found it necessary toabsorb his sex at long range through optic nerves and binoculars. Yet itwas strange that he had not married. It was strange that he lived alonein that wooden mausoleum. He even had his office in there, instead of inthe Professional Building like the other lawyers. He was a hermit, and asnob, and a nigger-lover, and no better than a pervert. God knows whathe did with those girls upstairs. Maybe all he did was make them takeoff their clothes and put them on again while he watched. She had heardof such things. And yet--
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