The Complete Short Stories

A Place and a Time to Die

Shotguns levelled, the two men waited on the river bank. From the shore facing them, four hundred yards across the bright spring water, the beating of gongs and drums sounded through the empty air, echoing off the metal roofs of the abandoned town. Fire-crackers burst over the trees along the shore, the mushy pink explosions lighting up the gun-barrels of tanks and armoured cars.

All morning the ill-matched couple making this last stand together — Mannock, the retired and now slightly eccentric police chief, and his reluctant deputy, Forbis, a thyroidal used-car salesman — had watched the mounting activity on the opposite shore. Soon after eight o’clock when Mannock drove through the deserted town, the first arrivals had already appeared on the scene. Four scout-cars carrying a platoon of soldiers in padded brown uniforms were parked on the bank. The officer scanned Mannock through his binoculars for a few seconds and then began to inspect the town. An hour later an advance battalion of field engineers took up their position by the dynamited railway bridge. By noon an entire division had arrived. A dusty caravan of self-propelled guns, tanks on trailers, and mobile fieldkitchens in commandeered buses rolled across the farmland and pulled to a halt by the bank. After them came an army of infantry and camp-followers, pulling wooden carts and beating gongs.

Earlier that morning Mannock had climbed the water-tower at his brother’s farm. The landscape below the mountains ten miles away was criss-crossed with dozens of motorized columns. Most of them were moving in an apparently random way, half the time blinded by their own dust. Like an advancing horde of ants, they spilled across the abandoned farmland, completely ignoring an intact town and then homing on an empty grain silo.

By now, though, in the early afternoon, all sections of this huge field army had reached the river. Any hopes Mannock had kept alive that they might turn and disappear towards the horizon finally faded. When exactly they would choose to make their crossing was hard to gauge. As he and Forbis watched, a series of enormous camps was being set up. Lines of collapsible huts marked out barrack squares, squads of soldiers marched up and down in the dust, rival groups of civilians presumably political cadres — drilled and shouted slogans. The smoke from hundreds of mess fires rose into the air, blocking off Mannock’s view of the blue-chipped mountains that had formed the backdrop to the river valley during the twenty years he had spent there. Rows of camouflaged trucks and amphibious vehicles waited along the shore, but there was still no sign of any crossing. Tank-crews wandered about like bored gangs on a boardwalk, letting off fire-crackers and flying paper kites with slogans painted on their tails. Everywhere the beating of gongs and drums went on without pause.

‘There must be a million of them there — for God’s sake, they’ll never get over!’ Almost disappointed, Forbis lowered his shotgun on to the sandbag emplacement.

‘Nothing’s stopped them yet,’ Mannock commented. He pointed to a convoy of trucks dragging a flotilla of wooden landing-craft across a crowded parade ground. ‘Sampans — they look crazy, don’t they?’

While Forbis glared across the river Mannock looked down at him, with difficulty controlling the distaste he felt whenever he realized exactly whom he had chosen as his last companion. A thin, bitter-mouthed man with over-large eyes, Forbis was one of that small group of people Mannock had instinctively disliked throughout his entire life. The past few days in the empty town had confirmed all his prejudices. The previous afternoon, after an hour spent driving around the town and shooting at the stray dogs, Forbis had taken Mannock back to his house. There he had proudly shown off his huge home arsenal. Bored by this display of weapons, Mannock wandered into the dining room, only to find the table laid out like an altar with dozens of far-right magazines, pathological hate-sheets and heaven knew what other nonsense printed on crude home presses.

What had made Forbis stay behind in the deserted town after everyone else had gone? What made him want to defend these few streets where he had never been particularly liked or successful? Some wild gene or strange streak of patriotism — perhaps not all that far removed from his own brand of cantankerousness. Mannock looked across the water as a huge catherine-wheel revolved into the air above a line of tanks parked along the shore, its puffy pink smoke turning the encampment into an enormous carnival. For a moment a surge of hope went through Mannock that this vast army might be driven by wholly peaceful motives, that it might suddenly decide to withdraw, load its tanks on to their trailers and move off to the western horizon.

As the light faded he knew all too well that there was no chance of this happening. Generations of hate and resentment had driven these people in their unbroken advance across the world, and here in this town in a river valley they would take a small part of their revenge.

Why had he himself decided to stay behind, waiting here behind these few useless sandbags with a shotgun in his hands? Mannock glanced back at the water-tower that marked the north-west perimeter of his brother’s farm, for years the chief landmark of the town. Until the last moment he had planned to leave with the rest of the family, helping to gas up the cars and turn loose what was left of the livestock. Closing his own house down for the last time, he decided to wait until the dust subsided when the great exodus began. He drove down to the river, and stood under the broken span of the bridge which the army engineers had dynamited before they retreated.

Walking southwards along the shore, he had nearly been shot by Forbis. The salesman had dug himself into a homemade roadblock above the bank, and was waiting there all alone for his first sight of the enemy. Mannock tried to persuade him to leave with the others, but as he remonstrated with Forbis he realized that he was talking to himself, and why he sounded so unconvincing.

For the next days, as the distant dust-clouds moved towards them from the horizon, turning the small valley into an apocalyptic landscape, the two men formed an uneasy alliance. Forbis looked on impatiently as Mannock moved through the empty streets, closing the doors of the abandoned cars and parking them along the kerb, shutting the windows of the houses and putting lids on the rubbish bins. With his crazy logic Forbis really believed that the two of them could hold up the advance of this immense army.

‘Maybe for only a few hours,’ he assured Mannock with quiet pride. ‘But that’ll be enough.’

A few seconds, more likely, Mannock reflected. There would be a brief bloody flurry somewhere; one burst from a machine-pistol and quietus in the dust ‘Mannock—!’ Forbis pointed to the shore fifty yards from the bridge embankment. A heavy metal skiff was being manhandled into the water by a labour-platoon. A tank backed along the shore behind it, test-rotating its turret. Exhaust belched from its diesel.

‘They’re coming!’ Forbis crouched behind the sandbags, levelling his shotgun. He beckoned furiously at Mannock. ‘For God’s sake, Mannock, get your head down!’

Mannock ignored him. He stood on the roof of the emplacement, his figure fully exposed. He watched the skiff slide into the water. While two of the crew tried to start the motor, a squad in the bows rowed it across to the first bridge pylon. No other craft were being launched, In fact, as Mannock had noted already, no one was looking across the river at all, though any good marksman could have hit them both without difficulty. A single 75mm shell from one of the tanks would have disposed of them and the emplacement.

‘Engineers,’ he told Forbis. ‘They’re checking the bridge supports. Maybe they want to rebuild it first.’

Forbis peered doubtfully through his binoculars, then relaxed his grip on the shotgun. His jaw was still sticking forward aggressively. Watching him, Mannock realized that Forbis genuinely wasn’t afraid of what would happen to them. He glanced back at the town. There was a flash of light as an upstairs door turned and caught the sun.

‘Where are you going?’ A look of suspicion was on Forbis’s face, reinforcing the doubts he already felt about Mannock. ‘They may come sooner than you think.’

‘They’ll come in their own time, not ours,’ Mannock said. ‘Right now it looks as if even they don’t know. I’ll be here.’

He walked stiffly towards his car, conscious of the target his black leather jacket made against the white station-wagon. At any moment the bright paintwork could be shattered by a bullet carrying pieces of his heart.

He started the motor and reversed carefully on to the beach. Through the rear-view mirror he watched the opposite shore. The engineers in the skiff had lost interest in the bridge. Like a party of sightseers they drifted along the shore, gazing up at the tank-crews squatting on their turrets. The noise of gongs beat across the water.

In the deserted town the sounds murmured in the metal roofs. Mannock drove round the railway station and the bus depot, checking if any refugees had arrived after crossing the river. Nothing moved. Abandoned cars filled the side-streets. Broken store windows formed jagged frames around piles of detergent packs and soup cans. In the filling stations the slashed pump hoses leaked their last gasolene across the unwashed concrete.

Mannock stopped the car in the centre of the town. He stepped out and looked up at the windows of the hotel and the public library. By some acoustic freak the noise of the gongs had faded, and for a moment it seemed like any drowsy afternoon ten years earlier.

Mannock leaned into the back seat of the car and took out a paper parcel. Fumbling with the dry string, he finally unpicked the ancient knot, then unwrapped the paper and took out a faded uniform jacket.

Searching for a cigarette pack in his hip pockets, Mannock examined the worn braid. He had planned this small gesture — a pointless piece of sentimentality, he well knew — as a private goodbye to himself and the town, but the faded metal badges had about the same relevance to reality as the rusty hubcap lying in the gutter a few feet away. Tossing it over his left arm, he opened the door of the car.

Before he could drop the jacket on to the seat a rifle shot slammed across the square. A volley of echoes boomed off the buildings. Mannock dropped to one knee behind the car, his head lowered from the third-floor windows of the hotel. The bullet had starred the passenger window and richocheted off the dashboard, chipping the steering wheel before exiting through the driver’s door.

As the sounds of the explosion faded, Mannock could hear the rubber boots of a slimly built man moving down the fireescape behind the building. Mannock looked upwards. High above the town a strange flag flew from the mast of the hotel. So the first snipers had moved in across the river. His blood quickening, Mannock drew his shotgun from the seat of the car.

Some five minutes later he was waiting in the alley behind the supermarket when a running figure darted past him. As the man crashed to the gravel Mannock straddled him with both legs, the shotgun levelled at his face. Mannock looked down, expecting to find a startled yellow-skinned youth in quilted uniform.

‘Forbis?’

The salesman clambered to his knees, painfully catching back his breath. He stared at the blood on his hands, and then at Mannock’s face above the barrel of the shotgun.

‘What the hell are you playing at?’ he gasped in a weary voice, one ear cocked for any sounds from-the river. ‘That shot — do you want to bring them over?’ He gestured at the police jacket that Mannock was now wearing, and then shook his head sadly. ‘Mannock, this isn’t a fancy-dress party…’

Mannock was about to explain to him when a car door slammed. The engine of the station-wagon roared above the squeal of tyres. As the two men reached the sidewalk the car was swerving out of the square, bumper knocking aside a pile of cartons.

‘Hathaway!’ Forbis shouted. ‘Did you see him? There’s your sniper, Mannock!’

Mannock watched the car plunge out of sight down a side-street. ‘Hathaway,’ he repeated dourly. ‘I should have guessed. He’s decided to stay and meet his friends.’

After Forbis had torn the flag down from the hotel mast he and Mannock drove back to the river. Mannock sat uncomfortably in the police jacket, thinking of Hathaway, that strange youth who with himself and Forbis completed one key triangle within their society: Hathaway the misfit, head full of half-baked Marxist slogans, saddled with a bored wife who one day tired of living in rooming-houses and walked out on him, taking their small son; Hathaway the failed political activist, whose obsessed eyes were too much even for a far-left student group; Hathaway the petty criminal, arrested for pilfering a supermarket — though he soon convinced himself that he was a martyr to the capitalist conspiracy.

No doubt one sight of Mannock’s old police jacket had been enough.

An hour later the advance began across the river. One minute Mannock was sitting on the old rail-tie that formed the rear wall of Forbis’s emplacement, watching the endless parades and drilling that were taking place on the opposite shore, and listening to the gongs and exploding fire-crackers. The next minute dozens of landing-craft were moving down the bank into the water. Thousands of soldiers swarmed after them, bales of equipment held over their heads. The whole landscape had risen up and heaved forward. Half a mile inland vast dust-clouds were climbing into the air. Everywhere the collapsible huts and command posts were coming down, ungainly cranes swung pontoon sections over the trees. The beating of drums sounded for miles along the water’s edge. Counting quickly, Mannock estimated that at least fifty landing-craft were crossing the water, each towing two or three amphibious tanks behind it.

One large wooden landing-craft was headed straight towards them, well over a hundred infantrymen squatting on the deck like coolies. Above the square teak bows a heavy machine-gun jutted through its rectangular metal shield, the gunners signalling to the helmsman.

As Forbis fumbled with his shotgun Mannock knocked the butt off his shoulder.

‘Fall back! Nearer the town — they’ll come right over us here!’

Crouching down, they backed away from the emplacement. As the first landing-craft hit the shore they reached the cover of the trees lining the road. Forbis sprinted ahead to a pile of fifty-gallon drums lying in the ditch and began to roll them around into a crude emplacement.

Mannock watched him working away, as the air was filled with the noise of tank-engines and gongs. When Forbis had finished Mannock shook his head. He pointed with a tired hand at the fields on either side of the road, then leaned his shotgun against the wall of the ditch.

As far as they could see, hundreds of soldiers were moving up towards the town, rifles and submachine-guns slung over their shoulders. The river bank was crammed with landing-craft. A dozen pontoon bridges spanned the water. Infantry and engineers poured ashore, unloading staff cars and light field pieces. Half a mile away the first soldiers were already moving along the railway line into the town.

Mannock watched a column of infantry march up the road towards them. When they drew nearer he realized that at least half of them were civilians, carrying no weapons or webbing, the women with small red booklets in their hands. On poles over their heads they held giant blown-up photographs of party leaders and generals. A motorcycle and sidecar combination mounting a light machine-gun forced its way past the column, and then stalled in the verge. Chanting together, a group of women and soldiers pushed it free. Together they stamped on after it, bellowing and cheering.

As the motorcycle approached, Mannock waited for the machine-gun to open fire at them. Forbis was crouched behind a fuel drum, frowning over his sights. His large eyes looked like over-boiled eggs. A tic fluttered the right corner of his mouth, as if he were babbling some sub-vocal rosary to himself. Then in a sudden moment of lucidity he turned the shotgun at the motorcycle, but with a roar the machine swerved around Mannock and accelerated towards the town.

Mannock turned to watch it, but a man running past collided with him. Mannock caught his slim shoulders in his hands and set the man on his feet. He looked down into a familiar sallow face, overlit eyes he had last seen staring at him through the bars of a cell.

‘Hathaway, you crazy…’

Before Mannock could hold him he broke away and ran towards the approaching column striding up the dirt road. He stopped a few feet from the leading pair of infantrymen and shouted some greeting to them. One of the men, an officer Mannock guessed, though none of the soldiers wore insignia, glanced at him, then reached out and pushed him to one side. Within a moment he was swallowed by the mle of gong-beating and chanting soldiers. Buffeted from one shoulder to the next, he lost his balance and fell, stood up and began to wave again at the faces passing him, trying to catch their attention.

Then Mannock too was caught up in the throng. The drab quilted uniforms, stained by the dust and sweat of half a continent, pushed past him, forcing him on to the verge. The shotgun was knocked out of his hands, kicked about in the breaking earth by a score of feet, then picked up and tossed on to the back of a cart. A troupe of young women surrounded Mannock, staring up at him without any curiosity as they chanted their slogans. Most of them were little more than children, with earnest mannequin-like faces under close-cropped hair.

Realizing what had happened, Mannock pulled Forbis from the ditch. No one had tried to take his shotgun from Forbis, and the salesman clung to it like a child. Mannock twisted the weapon out of his hands.

‘Can’t you understand?’ he shouted. ‘They’re not interested in us!

They’re not interested at all!’