Fallout

14

Back before she met Bill, Marian Staley had worked as a clerk-typist for Boeing. That was a big company to begin with, and it had swollen like an inflating balloon under the pressure of World War II. The Shasta Lumber Corporation wasn’t in the same league, or even in the one below.

But Shasta Lumber had hired her, so she wasn’t about to complain. The pay-a buck thirty-five an hour-wouldn’t let her run the Rockefellers out of business any time soon. Along with what she had left from the insurance policy, though, it meant she could get on with her life.

The local school was full of loggers’ kids. It was full, period. Lots of couples with men back from the war had had babies about the time she’d had Linda. Quite a few of those little kids had littler brothers and sisters who’d fill the classrooms over the next few years. And half the women Marian saw on the streets of Weed seemed to be expecting.

As soon as she had the job, she moved from the motor court to a rented house close enough to the school so Linda could walk back and forth. It was a small place, only about half the size of the one the A-bomb had wrecked up in Everett. It did seem extra roomy at first, because she had such scanty furnishings. Thanks to that atom bomb and her stay at Camp Nowhere, she was starting from scratch.

She bought the undowithoutables-beds for her and Linda, a table and a couple of chairs, a dresser-new, and a little fridge and basic kitchen stuff to go with them. The stove was already in place, for which she was duly grateful. Everything else she got secondhand…except for the end table that sat on somebody’s front lawn waiting for the garbage men, which she’d rescued before they could take it away.

If you wanted wild living, Weed wasn’t the place to come. Well, there was one kind of wild living, but not one that appealed to Marian. After the loggers got paid, they filled the bars and drank and brawled and chased the kind of women who didn’t need much chasing till they ran out of money. That seldom took long.

Marian quickly learned to stay away from the small downtown on those days. Having to do that annoyed her when she wanted to bring Linda to a cartoon at the one local movie house, but you had to take a place as you found it, not as you wished it were.

One of the secondhand purchases was a tinny Philco radio with a dark brown Bakelite case. Or maybe the radio wasn’t so very tinny; maybe it was just that all the stations she could pick up came from far away, and she heard them through veils of static.

At night, she could get KFI all the way from Los Angeles. It reached Weed as clearly, or as fuzzily, as the smaller stations in places like Redding and Red Bluff and Klamath Falls. She missed television, but the nearest station was down in Sacramento, too far away for even the tallest antenna to bring in a signal. TV might come to Weed one of these days, but it wouldn’t be tomorrow.

Work was…work. She filed papers and typed letters and reports and inventories and whatever else the people who paid her put on her desk when they emerged from their fancy offices far down the hall. She ran a mimeograph machine, cranking out copies of forms. She did all the other things they told her to do.

Since she was the newest hire, she also inherited the percolator that sat on a hot plate all day long. The gal who had been in charge of it turned it over to her with nothing but relief. Marian didn’t mind. It gave her an excuse to stand up and stretch and take a short break every so often. Nobody groused about the coffee she turned out.

Like the other office workers, she brown-bagged lunch most of the time. It was cheaper. Once or twice a week, though, she would visit the diner where she’d stopped when she first came into Weed. For some reason she couldn’t fathom, Babs had taken a shine to her.

“You see? This ain’t such a bad place,” the waitress said, setting a bowl of beef stew in front of Marian. “You find yourself a fella here, you’ll have all the comforts of home.” She winked. Her heavily mascaraed eyelashes flapped like a crow’s wing.

“You may be right,” said Marian, for whom the thought of a fella was the last thing on her mind.

“Oh, you bet I am,” Babs said. “A man keeps you warm better’n a hot-water bottle every day of the week, and twice on Sundays. Twice on Sundays if he’s young enough, anyways.” She leered and laughed a filthy laugh.

“You’re awful,” Marian said.

“You can say whatever you want, sweetie. He told me I was pretty darn good.” Babs laughed again. This time, so did Marian. If you couldn’t lick ’em, you might as well join ’em.

A couple of days later, after picking up Linda from the school playground where she hung around till her mother got off work, Marian drove to the Rexall that was Weed’s one and only drugstore. She bought Band-Aids and Kotex. As she was getting ready to pay the druggist, she plucked a color postcard of Mt. Shasta from a little revolving rack on the counter and bought that, too.

“What do you need that for, Mommy?” Linda asked. “All you have to do is go outside and you can see the mountain.”

“I know,” Marian said. “But if I send the card to somebody who doesn’t live here, that person can see it, too.”

“Who would you send it to?”

“I don’t know. I’ll think of somebody. Or if I don’t, I’ll just keep it.” Marian gave the druggist a five-dollar bill. She put the change in her wallet and coin purse, stuck them back in her handbag, and went out to the car with her daughter.

Dinner that night was liver and onions. Marian liked it. She would have made it more often, but Linda didn’t. She’d got pickier after their stretch-and that was what it felt like: a jail term-in Camp Nowhere. The food there was as bland as the cooks could make it, when it wasn’t military rations that were born bland. Now strong flavors seemed all the stronger.

After pushing her share around her plate for a while, Linda said, “May I be excused, Mommy?”

Marian told herself she should make her daughter eat more. No matter what she told herself, tonight she didn’t have the energy. “Yes, go ahead,” she said. “You can play for a while, then we’ll get you ready for bed.”

“Okay!” Linda escaped while the escaping was good.

Moving more slowly, Marian cleaned off the table and the stovetop. She washed the dishes and put them in the drainer. She looked at the dish towels, then looked away. She didn’t have the energy to use them, either. The dishes would be dry in the morning any which way.

The postcard sat on the kitchen counter. She had the feeling it was eyeing her. She picked it up, found a pen, and started to write. This is where we’ve ended up, she said, and added her newly memorized address. It’s not too bad. It’s a long way from anything big. Times like this, that’s good. Hope you and your friends are doing well.

After she signed her name, she wrote out the address where the card needed to go: Fayvl Tabakman, Seattle-Everett Refugee Encampment Number Three. She could have written Camp Nowhere, but for all she knew half the refugee camps in the country carried the same nickname.

She found a three-cent stamp and stuck it on the card. That was wasting a penny, but she couldn’t lay her hand on two one-centers. To help raise money to fight the war, the penny postcard was now a thing of the past.

Next morning, she tossed the card into the wire basket for outgoing mail at Shasta Lumber. That was easier than using some of her lunch hour to find a mailbox or to walk to the post office. It was right by the bars and the pawnshop where she’d picked up some of the small things for the house.

Having got rid of the card, she forgot about it. She had a financial statement to type up, and those were always a nuisance: lots of tabs, complicated centering, and everything had to be perfect. She was still new enough in the job that she took special care to make sure it was.

–

Boris Gribkov didn’t think he’d ever seen Brigadier Olminsky smile. The man was either scowling or looking as if his stomach pained him. Right now, he combined the two expressions. “Comrade Pilot, a problem has presented itself,” he said.

“I serve the Soviet Union, sir!” Gribkov said.

“Good. Excellent, in fact. That is what I wanted to hear,” Yulian Olminsky said, and Boris wondered what he’d just bigmouthed his way into. The senior officer wasted no time letting him know: “There has been a reactionary uprising in the Slovak region of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.”

“Has there?” Gribkov said tonelessly. Czechoslovakia had been the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic for only about three years. It was the last satellite to fall into orbit around the USSR. There were probably still some people left who didn’t care for their country’s new orientation.

Sure enough, Olminsky said, “Elements believed to be affiliated with Father Tiso’s Slovak Fascist regime have seized Bratislava. A disloyal military clique is cooperating with them. If they succeed in detaching Slovakia from its affiliation to the cause of class struggle and world revolution, it will damage Red Army logistics and worldwide socialist solidarity.”

“I see,” Gribkov said. Father Tiso had run Slovakia as a Nazi puppet state after the Germans grabbed Bohemia and Moravia in the aftermath of the Munich sellout. Even before committing to Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, Czechoslovakia executed him and a good many of his henchmen and tagged more of them with corrective-labor or jail terms.

As if plucking that thought from his ear, the brigadier said, “The regime here in Prague must have been too soft, or we wouldn’t have to put up with this pestilential nonsense now. They should have done a better job of eliminating that faction. Now we have to pay the price for it.”

“What does this have to do with me, sir?” Boris asked.

Olminsky’s frown said he was slower on the uptake than the senior man had hoped. “We can’t let the fucking Slovaks get away with this horseshit,” he answered. “Do you want the Hungarians and the Poles to start playing games, too? That would screw us in the mouth for real. And so we are going to wipe Bratislava off the face of the earth.”

“With an A-bomb?” Gribkov’s heart sank. Leonid Tsederbaum might have known what he was doing, all right.

But, reluctantly, Olminsky shook his head. “We have none to spare for the Slovaks, I’m sorry to say. So instead we will send many Tu-4s against the reactionaries with conventional bombs. Bratislava will still be destroyed.”

“Yes, sir.” Gribkov knew better than to show how relieved he was. The ten tonnes of bombs his plane carried might still kill hundreds of people. All the Tu-4s the USSR could afford to despatch would drop a couple of hundred tonnes of bombs and might kill thousands. One A-bomb was worth fifteen or twenty thousand tonnes of high explosives, and would surely kill tens of thousands.

This was war. It wasn’t quite wholesale slaughter. Boris wouldn’t want to add Bratislava to the nose art of murdered cities that the bomber in his mind carried.

Something else occurred to the pilot. “Excuse me, Comrade Brigadier, but will these revolting reactionaries-”

“That’s just what they are, damn them,” Olminsky broke in.

“Yes, sir,” Gribkov said patiently. “Do they have any air defenses? Flak? Fighters? What are we getting into?” He didn’t remind Yulian Olminsky that the Tu-4 was easy meat even for the leftover Soviet fighters the Czechoslovakian Air Force flew. Olminsky had to know it already. Or if he didn’t, he didn’t deserve the stars on his shoulder boards.

“There may be some flak under their control,” he answered now, sounding as if he didn’t like to admit it. “As far as we know, socially friendly forces are still in charge of the warplanes in Czechoslovakia. No one’s attacked the airstrip here, you’ll notice. Any more questions?” The way his eyebrows drew down and came together warned Boris had better not have any.

“No, sir!” he said, and saluted crisply. “I serve the Soviet Union!”

“Khorosho,” Olminsky said. “Now beat it. You’ll fly tonight.”

Gribkov tried not to let his face show what he was thinking as he walked back to brief his crew. That was a good idea for any Soviet citizen at any time, and all the more so when trying to digest news like this. He supposed the satellites were going to try to get out of the war their tutor had dragged them into. Germany’s less than eager allies had done their best to escape when things stopped going Hitler’s way.

As he told the men what the next mission would be, he watched their expressions freeze up the way his had when Olminsky told him. Dropping bombs on the enemy was one thing. Dropping them where a lot of people were your friends was another…wasn’t it?

Vladimir Zorin went through a cigarette in a few quick, harsh, deep puffs. “Well, this is something different, isn’t it?” he said. Not many questions could pack more possible meanings into them.

“Oh, maybe a little,” Gribkov answered: another handful of words with more than a handful of meanings.

The copilot ground the butt under his boot and lit a new smoke. “Shame Leonid isn’t here,” he said. “He could read the angles better than anybody else I ever knew.” Boris feared that Zorin was right. And what did that say about what the former navigator had done?

“We’ll deal with the rebels’ treason the way it deserves,” Yefim Arzhanov declared. The quick navigator, unlike the dead one, didn’t seem afflicted by doubts. Did that make him a lucky man or a fool? How much difference was there, when you got down to it?

They took off a little before midnight. Boris’ grip on the yoke eased off when he was sure the Tu-4 would stay airborne. Full of high-octane avgas and TNT, the bomber was itself a bomb that, if not quite of atomic proportions, would take out a big chunk of the landscape if one-or two-of the overstrained engines failed trying to lift it off the ground.

The plane circled up to bombing altitude while still over the Czech half of Czechoslovakia. Then it flew southeast. Gribkov wasn’t used to going in that direction on the way to a mission. It was the kind of route he might have to fly if unrest ever broke out inside the rodina. He didn’t even want to think about such a thing, much less do it.

As Olminsky had promised, no fighters rose up inside Czechoslovakia to assail the Tu-4 and its companions. Radar made finding Bratislava in the darkness far easier than it would have been during the last war. Then, on a long-range flight (which this, of course, wasn’t), you were lucky if your bombs came down within ten kilometers of their intended target. Destruction was more efficient now.

So was flak. The Slovak rebels did have guns down there on the ground. For all Boris knew, they were 88s the Nazis had given to Tiso’s men. Whatever they were, they had excellent direction. Shells started bursting below the incoming bombers, and then among them. A Tu-4 spun out of the sky, fire all up and down the wings.

“Drop the bombs!” Gribkov called to Alexander Lavrov as near misses buffeted the plane.

Away they went. Not thirty seconds later, a direct hit knocked out both starboard engines and killed the bomber’s pressurization. Gribkov had an oxygen mask on, or he would have slid straight into unconsciousness and death.

“Get out!” he screamed over the intercom. “Get out while you can!”

The hatch was by the main engineer’s station. The engineer and radio operator were already gone before Boris got back there. He jumped into the blackness. When he yanked the rip cord, his parachute opened. Shivering, he slid down, down, down toward whatever waited on the ground.

–

Ihor Shevchenko’s sergeant sent him a suspicious stare. Anatoly Prishvin had been doing that ever since Ihor wound up in his section. “I’ve got my eye on you, Ukrainian,” he said for the third time that day.

Rolling tobacco in a torn chunk of newspaper and lighting it seemed a better idea than answering. Ihor had heard cracks like that during the Great Patriotic War, too. Most of the time, ignoring them was the smartest thing you could do.

Most of the time, but not always. The sergeant did his best impersonation of a poisonous snake. He hissed angrily. His beady little eyes didn’t even blink. “I’ve got my eye on you,” he said yet again. “You hear what I’m telling you?”

“Oh, yes, Comrade Sergeant,” Ihor said after a deliberate puff. “I hear you real good.”

“Then act like it, you worthless fucker,” Prishvin said. “I know your kind. You were the traitors who went out and said hello to the Nazis with bread and salt.”

Some Ukrainians had done that when the Germans invaded in 1941. There had been a Ukrainian Waffen-SS division, though more of its men came from Poland than from the Soviet Union. Glancing at Prishvin out of the corner of his eye, Ihor could see why so many of his people had thought Hitler a better bet than Stalin. Hitler hadn’t starved millions of Ukrainians to death.

He hadn’t yet. But he started in as soon as he got the chance. Ihor said, “Comrade Sergeant, I fought the Fascists in the partisans and then in the Red Army. I was wounded in the service of the Soviet Union.”

“Da, da, da,” Prishvin said, by which he meant Nyet, nyet, nyet. “All you cocksuckers who can’t say G talk about what heroes you were. It’s all bullshit, too.”

“Would you like to see my scar?” Ihor asked, making as if to unroll his puttees and hike up his trouser leg.

“I don’t give a shit about your scar, on account of it won’t tell me whose gun gave it to you,” the sergeant said. “And you were screwing around in front of our lines just now. For all I know, you were screwing around with the Americans. If I could prove it, I’d shoot you myself. I know how to shoot my own dog.”

Any son of a bitch would, Ihor thought. He didn’t come out with it. He had no interest in cutting his own throat. All he wanted to do was get through the war in one piece and make it back to Anya at the collective farm outside of smashed Kiev.

It was funny. He’d been eager to fight the Hitlerites. He’d seen what they’d done to the Ukraine. They’d treated it even worse than Stalin had, and that wasn’t easy. But the Americans? As far as he knew, there were no Americans within a thousand kilometers of the Ukraine. Yes, they’d bombed it. But Stalin had also bombed America.

Rain started coming down on the field somewhere west of Paderborn. Sergeant Prishvin sent Ihor one more glare, then ambled off to spread joy and good tidings to some of the other soldiers in his charge. Ihor pulled his shelter half out of his pack and stuck his head through the slit. It was an old one, hauled from a storehouse where it had sat since the Great Patriotic War. The rubberized fabric had cracks and bald spots. It still did a better job of keeping the water off him than anything else would have.

He got a cigarette going, leaning forward so the brim of his helmet shielded the coal from the rain. Another man-a blackass from the Caucasus-also decked out in a rain cape spoke to him in halting Russian: “What you do to make sergeant love you so big, uh, so much?”

“I don’t know, Aram.” Ihor shrugged. “He likes my face, I guess. Or maybe I’m just lucky.”

“Ha! Some luck!” Aram Demirchyan snorted. Then he asked, “You got more smokes?”

“Sure.” Ihor gave him one. He’d taken the pack off a dead German civilian. One thing about the Red Army hadn’t changed a bit since the last war: the higher-ups expected you to do your own scrounging. They’d give you ammo, vodka, and a little food. For everything else, you were on your own.

“Spasibo.” Demirchyan’s stubbly cheeks hollowed as he took a drag. Some of the stubble was gray; he had to be four or five years older than Ihor. He’d also been through the mill the last time around. After blowing out a gray stream, he muttered, “Something should ought to happening to that cunt.”

“Who knows? Maybe something will,” Ihor answered. Noncoms and company-grade officers who made their men hate them sometimes had accidents. All the men who served under them said they were accidents, anyhow. Other people sometimes wondered, but war was war. Even good people wound up hurt or dead when they came to the front. Even good people occasionally caught a bullet or a grenade fragment from their own side, too. If that happened to the fuckers a little more often, well, proving such things wasn’t easy.

Demirchyan did some more muttering, this time in his own throaty language. Ihor thought he heard Sergeant Prishvin’s name in there. He didn’t think the Armenian was reciting love poetry.

“He give you a hard time, too?” Ihor asked.

Aram Demirchyan’s big, heavy-featured head bobbed up and down. “He give everybody hards times,” he said. “Even Russians. Russians don’t act Russian enough to happy him.”

A machine gun stuttered out a burst, a few hundred meters to the south. That was a Red Army Maxim. Ihor knew the sound as well as he knew that of his own voice. He was still getting used to the reports and deadly rhythms of the Yankees’ automatic weapons.

But the machine gun that replied wasn’t American at all. The rounds came back one after another, so close together that the shots merged into a single, horrible ripping roar.

“Ah, fuck ’em!” he exclaimed. “They’ve yanked one of Hitler’s saws out of storage.”

“MG-42 scare shit out of I,” Demirchyan said matter-of-factly.

“They scare the shit out of everybody on the wrong end of them,” Ihor said. The German machine gun with the ridiculous rate of fire and the quick-change barrel was still the finest piece of its kind, and kilometers ahead of whatever ran second. It had turned Wehrmacht squads into machine-gun crews and a few other guys to protect them with rifles and Schmeissers.

The Nazis made a fair number of weapons that were better than anything their foes used. In the end, they didn’t make enough of them, or have enough bastards in Feldgrau to use them. A T-34/85 might not be so fine a tank as a Panther, but when there were six or eight or ten Soviet machines for every German one….

In that case, you waited five or six years and then you fought another war.

“Listen to me! Listen hard, you drippy pricks!” Sergeant Prishvin yelled. “We’re going forward! We’re going to push back the men north of that fucking Nazi gun, we’re going to fire on it from a flanking position, and we’re going to put it out of action or make it retreat. Forward! Za rodina!”

Whether it was for the motherland or not, Ihor didn’t want to go forward. The machine gun might get him. Other enemy weapons might, too. Of course, the MGB would give him a bullet in the nape of the neck if he hung back. Out of his hole he came, chambering a round in his Kalashnikov.

The Red Army men moved by groups and rushes, each attack party covering the other’s advance. They’d learned from the Great Patriotic War’s suicidal charges. The ones who lived had, anyhow.

Anatoly Prishvin was a dickhead, but a brave dickhead. He led from the front, cursing his section on. Somebody in an American helmet popped up and aimed a rifle at him. Ihor shot the enemy soldier before he realized what he was doing.

“Wasting of good bullets,” Aram Demirchyan said when they flopped down behind a fallen chimney.

“I know,” Ihor agreed mournfully. To his surprise, they did make the machine-gun crew fall back. Prishvin didn’t thank him for dropping the American. That suited Ihor. The less he had to do with the sergeant, the better.

–

“Bedtime, Leon,” Aaron Finch said.

“No,” Leon told him. He wasn’t saying that because he said no all the time. He was getting over that. He was saying it because he didn’t want to go to bed. Uncle Marvin and Aunt Sarah and Cousin Olivia were over, which made the living room even more interesting than usual.

“Bedtime,” Aaron repeated, a little more firmly this time, so Leon could see he wasn’t kidding.

“Bounce is waiting,” Ruth added. The kid loved the bear so much, Aaron wondered if it was normal. Ruth and Dr. Spock assured him it was, so he let it go. Two-year-old and bear had all kinds of imaginary adventures. They were often noisy, so Aaron hoped like blazes they were imaginary, anyhow.

His wife’s ploy worked. Leon’s face lit up. “Bounce!” he said.

“Give everybody a good-night kiss,” Aaron said. Usually, that just meant him and Ruth, but now Leon had a whole round to make. Aaron’s younger brother took the pipe out of his mouth so his kiss would work better. Sarah moved her drink to keep Leon from knocking it off the coffee table. Olivia, who was fourteen, gave her cousin a big, smacking smooch. Leon squealed laughter.

Ruth took him back to the bathroom-he was getting potty-trained, but he hadn’t got all the way there yet-and to his bedroom.

“He’s a good kid,” Marvin said. “Must come from his mother’s side of the family.”

“Heh,” Aaron said. All the Finches had barbed wits. The barbs on Marvin’s were longer and more rebarbative than most. That crack would have been nothing in some tones of voice. Not in the one Marvin used.

Aaron glanced over at Sarah Finch. Is it her fault that Olivia’s a good kid? he wondered. But, though he did wonder, he didn’t come out and say it. That showed at least some of the difference between himself and his brother.

Ruth walked back into the living room. “He’s in there talking with Bounce,” she reported. “I think he’ll settle down.”

“It’s when the bear starts answering that you’ve got to worry,” Marvin said.

Sarah and Olivia laughed. Even Aaron chuckled. But Ruth said, “The bear does answer sometimes. Leon starts with this high, squeaky voice, and it’s Bounce talking. Leon’s smart. I just hope like anything he’s smart enough to stay out of trouble.”

“He’d better take after you, in that case. His father wasn’t.” Marvin pointed to the letter from Harry Truman that Aaron had framed.

“Do I have to get tsuris about that from you, too?” Aaron said. “Roxane and Howard already told me I should have bought that Russian a ticket to Vladivostok. First class, too.”

“Why don’t you get me another scotch, Aaron?” Sarah did her best to defuse things when Marvin started sniping. The trouble was, her best wasn’t good enough. Marvin didn’t pay attention to her most of the time.

If Aaron had been in her shoes, he would have bopped Marvin in the nose. But Sarah seemed resigned to being Marvin’s punching bag. Or maybe she even liked it. Some people did. How could you know for sure?

You couldn’t. He could fix Sarah another scotch. He got out of the rocking chair, plucked her glass from the coffee table, and took it into the kitchen, where he built her a reload. He took another Burgie out of the icebox for himself, too. Sometimes Marvin was easier to stand after a couple of beers.

By that logic, Sarah would never draw a sober breath if she had any sense. But if she was a lush, she was a quiet, discreet lush. Plenty of people went on like that for years and years.

Ruth raised an eyebrow when she saw him come back with the fresh beer as well as the scotch. To his relief, that was all she did.

Not at all to his relief, Marvin pointed to the letter again. “You know, you never should have got that,” he said.

“Daddy!” Olivia could sound indignant where Sarah didn’t dare. “Uncle Aaron did a brave thing, catching that Russian.”

“I suppose.” Marvin sounded as if he didn’t believe it for a minute. “But if Truman wasn’t a dumb shmo, there wouldn’t have been any Russians parachuting down into Glendale.”

“If pigs had wings, we’d all carry umbrellas.” Aaron didn’t feel like getting into it with his brother tonight. He lit a cigarette, even though he’d stubbed one out just a few minutes earlier. Tobacco lent a little calm-not a lot, but a little.

Or so people said. Marvin’s pipe didn’t seem to lend him any. “Truman never should have dropped those A-bombs on Red China,” he declared, as if Aaron claimed Truman should have done exactly that. “Stalin couldn’t just sit there after he did that. So of course he started dropping bombs of his own.”

“You may be right,” Aaron said. Ruth blinked-he seldom came even so close to agreeing with his brother. He didn’t intend to come that close tonight, either. He went on, “But don’t you think it’s close to a year too late to kvetch about it now? He did what he did, not what he might have done. We have to roll with the punches, not say he shouldn’t have thrown that left hook.”

“But anybody with the sense God gave a camel could have seen it had to mean trouble.” Marvin stuck out his chin. Yes, he was always ready to argue.

“I didn’t hear you complaining about it then,” Aaron said.

“That’s because you weren’t listening.” Marvin didn’t like it when anyone called him on anything. He never had. And he’d skated on thin ice often enough that he’d been called more often than he should have.

“No, it’s because you weren’t talking-for once,” Aaron retorted. His younger brother turned red. Once they got going, they might have been back in their folks’ home in Portland during the First World War. The years since then fell away like magic. Aaron added, “Hindsight makes you look smarter now than you did then.”

“Geh kak afen yam!” Marvin said furiously. When he-or Aaron-dropped into Yiddish like that, they were well and truly steamed. “You were an ass then, and you’re still an ass now.”

“Ass? I’ll tell you about ass! Tukhus means ass, and I’ll kick yours for you if you want!”

Both men jumped to their feet. Before they could go for each other, Ruth and Sarah and even Olivia jumped between them. It didn’t come to punches. It hadn’t for years, even if the potential was always there. Sarah said, “I think we’d better head for home,” which would do for an understatement till a bigger one burst like an atom bomb.

Ruth said most of the good-byes. Aaron managed a nod or two. The urge to smash in his brother’s capped front teeth ebbed even faster than it had swelled. And the emptiness it left behind made him feel stupid, almost sick.

“The two of you!” Ruth said after Marvin’s De Soto purred away. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“I am ashamed of myself-now.” Aaron might have been a hung-over drunk mourning his fall from the wagon. “But he always gets my goat.”

“You had nothing to do with getting his, of course,” his wife said.

“Who, me?” Aaron sounded more innocent than he knew he was. “Marvin gets everybody’s goat, though. Did I ever tell you he came to our older brother Sam’s wedding in blackface?”

“Vey iz mir, no!” Ruth said. “How old was he?”

“Thirteen, maybe fourteen,” Aaron answered. “He’s always been a piece of work. Sam’s wife still hasn’t forgiven him, not to this day.”

“And you have?” Ruth said-fondly, Aaron hoped. In another week or two, they’d see Marvin again. Things might go pow again, or they might not. How could you know till you knew?