Chapter SIX

The man in the winterized jeep unzipped a window, leaned out and yelled: "The burgess around here?"

The four soaked men working around the tow truck didn't even answer. One of them gestured down the road with an arm and they went back to trying to get a line to a car that had gone off the road. It was now roof-deep in the torrent that had once been a drainage ditch, and up to five minutes ago it had looked as though something was moving behind the windshield.

The man in the jeep spat into the rain and drove on. He finally found the burgess's car parked with its lights on, along with a couple of others, a few yards from the edge of the river. That was crazy, he thought, why didn't they park them up on the highway, twenty-five feet above the water? Then he remembered that he was on the highway.

"Man wants you, Henry."

The burgess turned around to face his chief of police. "If it's that Artie Chesbro again, tell him to take his goddamn car and--"

"No. Lloyd Eisele--don't know if you know him, he's got a dairy farm up in the hills."

"Then why didn't he have sense enough to stay there?"

"His boy's a radio ham, Henry. He's got a message for you."

Burgess Starkman snapped at the man: "Well?"

The dairy farmer said, "The kid has a contact with a phone line open to the Civil Defense Filter Center in Springfield. They want an estimate of damage; they want to know what help and supplies you'll need in the morning. And they've got instructions for you." He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it over.

Burgess Starkman said to his chief of police, "What do you think? Should I send somebody back with him to talk to them?"

"Sprayragen," said Chief Brayer promptly. "He's too old for this anyhow. Let him sit down for a while." He went off to get him.

The dairy farmer looked around at the cars, the fire engine, the men with flashlights and electric lanterns moving around in the downpour. "Something happen?" he wanted to know.

"You could say that," the burgess said wearily. "There was a boy's camp a mile up the river. It's gone now, and eight of the kids are missing. We put a boat in the water, and all that happened was we lost a boat." He glanced at the dairy farmer. "How'd you know where to find me? Have you been in Hebertown?"

The dairy farmer nodded.

"Is it bad there?"

The dairy farmer coughed. "You haven't been in town for a while, have you?" He didn't look at the burgess. "The water was up to the corner where the Moose building is--you know? Somebody told me all the stores on Front Street are gone."

He went on from there. By the time the chief of police got back with old Sprayragen the burgess had pieced together an ugly picture.

As the jeep turned around, Burgess Starkman yelled, "Oh, by the way--thanks!" He looked blankly at Brayer. "Did you hear what he said?"

"Enough." Brayer looked sick. He burst out, "God amighty, Henry, we're doing this all wrong. We ought to be back in town, running the show, instead of out here trying to do everything ourselves. We ought to have two-way radio on the pumpers, and a first-aid emergency truck, and an organization set up year-round with volunteers trained for emergency work. Sure, it'd cost a little money, but what the hell, the taxpayers'll stand for it. Something like this will make godfearing citizens out of them for a while anyhow."

"Sure," said the burgess gently. "Sure, Red. You finish up here and come on back to town and we'll start over." He left the chief of police there, with his thick mustache running water and his old face worried and indignant. As he headed back to the car where the Chesbros were waiting, he thought: Red's a good man and he's right, only he hasn't finished thinking it through yet. We need all those things all right. But after this--what taxpayers?

* * * * *

Artie Chesbro was sulking. If that power-mad son of a bitch Starkman had been willing to give him two lousy minutes of his time, they could have got the whole thing over with and he'd be back in Summit by now, getting a good night's sleep, instead of catching pneumonia sitting in the car. He couldn't even help out in their lousy Boy-Scout act--they'd chased him back to the car the second time he'd fallen in, on the pretext that they didn't have another flashlight to replace the one he'd lost. So there went a fine chance to get Starkman's ear. Thank God, he told himself virtuously, nothing like this could happen back in Summit. For two cents he'd turn around and head back and the hell with the burgess--the old Swanscomb place wasn't worth all this trouble.

Or anyway, it wouldn't be, if it hadn't been for the signed option agreement he'd given the men from Chillicothe, Ohio.... "Shut up that damn humming," he snapped at his wife.

Mrs. Chesbro laughed softly.

Chesbro didn't even notice the burgess until the door of the car opened. "How's it going, Henry?" he demanded cordially. "Hope you found those kids. Damn shame about the camp, but if they will build on low ground they have to expect something like this."

"Let's head back for town," said the burgess. He looked at the clock on Chesbro's dashboard. That couldn't be right! Two--three--four hours they'd been out here, he counted.

That was time enough to wash all of Hebertown away. He leaned back, and let himself be weary. He hadn't been up this late in--in--he couldn't remember.

Chesbro was at it again, he noticed abstractedly. It didn't take him fifty words to get from the flood to Topic A--why the borough of Hebertown should, ought and must give him the old Swanscomb place. But the burgess didn't mind. Chesbro was a saturation-talker; his tactic was to hammer, hammer, hammer away, never giving the other man a chance to get an adverse word in; and it wasn't too hard, after all, to listen to the rain on the car roof instead. He realized vaguely that that rain had been coming down awful hard for an awfully long time. Once, he remembered, they had had a big summer thunderstorm and Bess had read him out of the paper the amazing statement that more than four inches of rain had come out of that one storm. This had to be more than that. Much more.

What about Bess, by the way? Their house was high enough up, he calculated, there wasn't much chance of flood water reaching it. But had she stayed home? It wouldn't be like Bess to stay home by herself, especially when he didn't show up and the phones were down. She would have tried to cross the highway into the borough and found out that that was impossible. Then she would have--he checked off the possibilities--probably she would have gone to her sister's house. That was all right; good location. Barring some freak like a falling tree or a collapsing roof.

He leaned back, his mind slowly going blank and relaxed, under the soothing drone of the flapping windshield wipers and the pounding rain and Artie Chesbro's ya-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta. Mrs. Chesbro had let her head slump onto the burgess's shoulders. She was probably used to that maddeningly persistent voice. Maybe asleep.

He glanced down at her.

She wasn't asleep. Her eyes were squeezed shut with anguish and her mouth was suffering. Not with physical pain. The burgess realized slowly that she was not used to the maddening voice at all and had infinitely more reason to hate its clacking than he.

"Cigarette?" Artie Chesbro said again. Now what was the matter with the old son of a bitch? He said more loudly: "Cigarette, Henry?"

"Uh, sure." Chesbro grinned wisely; the burgess had just come across Polly in one of her queer moods. He reached over to the glove compartment. "Matches? Here, here's my lighter."

The burgess spun the wheel of the lighter and held the flaming wick to his cigarette for a long second while he took three puffs. Mrs. Chesbro moved over a little. The darkness outside and the momentary brightness inside the car turned the windshield into a mirror; he could see her tortured smile.

The brightness inside almost wrecked them. As the burgess snapped the lighter shut and you could see through the windshield again, Chesbro gasped and tramped on the brake; fast as he was, the car was already nosing into a surging stream that cut across the road.

The engine chugged and died. There was a long moment of silence. How little we know our land, the burgess thought, too tired for panic, filled with resignation. The hills and valleys we know and name, but the little draws in the hills down which the heavens drain into our river, we glance stupidly at them in a dry season and see nothing. But this torrent before us is one of those draws. No doubt we paid just enough attention to it--only where it crossed this road--to bury a culvert that would guide it in time of rain and thought we were through with it for all time. But the rain began and first it soaked into the pasture and woodlot duff until they could hold no more; the rain went on and raced in a sheet across pasture and cropland until it found the draw and gurgled into it and raced down the hillside safely channeled, hit the culvert with a gurgle and poured through and tumbled down the hill on the other side, and still the rain sheeted down and the culvert filled, and when it was gorged to the full the rain still fell, and the water rose above the culvert and blindly poured across the road six inches deep, a foot, a yard, and here we are. Try to get through and blue sparks will snap from the sparkplug terminals to the wet block, the vapor in the cylinders will not fire and Artie Chesbro's pride, his joy, his car, will soon be a coffin for three drowned bodies, costlier than any bronze sarcophagus.

But Chesbro was swearing and tramping on the starter. "Stay in!" he yelled as his wife half-opened the door. "I'll get this son of a bitch started or know the reason why!"

There was a lopsided chugging. One terminal was dry enough; it had been only spray. And then the motor roared. The car backed violently up the hill in the dark. "There was a side road," Chesbro panted. "Headed uphill. Can't turn around on this damn thing, we'd go into the ditch, but I can flip onto the side road when we come to it."

He felt good; this was what he was good at. From high school on he had been a fast, hard driver who delighted in tricky maneuvering; for years now he had been in the habit of passing anything on the road; it made him feel good and he felt good now. He backed the car, roaring, twisted full around in the seat and peering into the dark. He remembered a straightaway and a left curve; as the car backed into the curve he slowed a little but not much. And then they came to the side road. "What did I tell you?" he cried happily. "There's the son of a bitch right where I said it would be!"

He shifted and roared into the right turn up the hill. "Where does this take us, Henry?" he snapped, as from the bridge to the chartroom.

The burgess smiled in the dark. "I don't know, Arthur," he said. "How little we know our land...."

"Eh?" The old man was tired and rambling. Too bad; now it was all on his shoulders. But when he got at him later he'd remind him that he had, in a way, saved his life, that he didn't expect anything for himself, but that he wanted to do something for the community--

"There's a light!" screamed Mrs. Chesbro.

It seemed to be a filling station; there were the pumps and there was a two-storey frame building behind them. One of those crossroads groceries, Chesbro thought as they swept past.

"But aren't you going to stop, Arthur?" she asked.

"Nonsense, dear," he grunted. "We started for Hebertown and that's where we're going."

How little we know our land, thought the burgess again. For there, ahead in the twin beams, was a sheet of muddy water. Their speed was such that they plowed into it with a tremendous gush of spray. "We'll make it," Chesbro cried. Water rose chillingly inside the car to their calves as they plowed heavily forward and then lurched to a stop.

Chesbro said between his teeth: "Like last time." He ground the starter three times; the fourth time he tramped on the button nothing happened. The battery was shorted out.

"Here we are," Mrs. Chesbro said inanely.

Chesbro tramped on the dead button again and again.

"It's rising, isn't it?" said the burgess. "Let's get out and wade before we have to swim."

Hating him, his wife and himself, hating the car and the water, Arthur Chesbro opened the door; more water swirled in, seat-high. "Let's go," he said gruffly. "Five minutes and we'll be in that filling station, grocery, whatever it was."

He gingerly lowered himself into the water; it came to his waist and chilled the bone. "I'll lead," he said. "Come on."

Surprisingly there was a strong current; he had thought it would be a sort of pond. Instead it was a temporary catch basin for the living water that was thundering down from the heavens on its way to the river and finally the sea. They were simply in a low spot where water was detained for a while before rushing on. The same cubic yard of water could wash out a power line running along a high ridge, wash out a dirt road lower down on the hill, pour through a farmhouse lower down smashing the windows and depositing stinking mud on the floor, short his battery here, trapping the three of them, and still rage on with a long career of ruin before it. It was the secret of the flood's destructiveness.

Chesbro inched his way forward, taking care to keep the current abeam of him, feeling for the hardtop with his feet. The burgess and his wife held the skirt of his raincoat, one to a side.

He stepped on something slippery and crashed face-forward into the muddy water; it was the burgess who, with unexpected wiry strength hauled him upright again while he floundered.

"Fish or something," he sputtered.

They trudged forward, dead-tired after fifty feet of it, the current and the sullen resistance of the water itself, but the level was dropping about them as they climbed the rim of the basin in the land.

In ten minutes they kicked through inch-deep water to the road surface, wet only with the pelting rain. Silently they splashed along the road.

"Wait," the burgess said abruptly. They stopped. He still had Chesbro's lighter; he crouched and snapped it alight. "The water's still rising," he said. "Following right along behind us." As they stood there it lapped at the soles of their shoes.

Ten more interminable minutes--hard walking, their weight increased fifty per cent by their sodden clothes--and Mrs. Chesbro said: "There's the light."

They shambled into a trot by unspoken agreement. It suddenly seemed very important to them all that they should get to a warm, dry place, shed their clothes, eat, sleep.