Time Out of Joint

one

From the cold-storage locker at the rear of the store, Victor Nielson wheeled a cart of winter potatoes to the vegetable section of the produce department. In the almost empty bin he began dropping the new spuds, inspecting every tenth one for split skin and rot. One big spud dropped to the floor and he bent to pick it up; as he did so he saw past the check-out stands, the registers and displays of cigars and candy bars, through the wide glass doors and on to the street. A few pedestrians walked along the sidewalk, and along the street itself he caught the flash of sunlight from the fender of a Volkswagen as it left the store's parking lot.

"Was that my wife?" he asked Liz, the formidable Texas girl who was the checker on duty.

"Not that I know of," Liz said, ringing up two cartons of milk and a package of ground lean beef. The elderly customer at the check-out stand reached into his coat pocket for his wallet.

"I'm expecting her to drop by," Vic said. "Let me know when she does." Margo was supposed to take Sammy, their ten-year-old, to the dentist for x-rays. Since this was April -- income tax time -- the savings account was unusually low, and he dreaded the results of the x-rays.

Unable to endure the waiting, he walked over to the pay phone by the canned-soup shelf, dropped a dime in, dialed.

"Hello," Margo's voice came.

"Did you take him down?"

Margo said hectically, "I had to phone Dr. Miles and postpone it. About lunchtime I remembered that this is the day Anne Rubenstein and I have to take that petition over to the Board of Health; it has to be filed with them today, because the contracts are being let now, according to what we hear."

"What petition?" he said.

"To force the city to clear away those three empty lots of old house foundations," Margo said. "Where the kids play after school. It's a hazard. There's rusty wire and broken concrete slabs and--"

"Couldn't you have mailed it?" he broke in. But secretly he was relieved. Sammy's teeth wouldn't fall out before next month; there was no urgency about taking him. "How long will you be there? Does that mean I don't get a ride home?"

"I just don't know," Margo said. "Listen, dear; there's a whole flock of ladies in the living room -- we're figuring out last-minute items we want to bring up when we present the petition. If I can't drive you home I'll phone you at five or so. Okay?"

After he had hung up he wandered over to the check-out stand. No customers were in need of being checked, and Liz had lit a cigarette for a few moments. She smiled at him sympathetically, a lantern-like effect. "How's your little boy?" she asked.

"Okay," he said. "Probably relieved he's not going."

"I have the sweetest little old dentist I go to," Liz chirruped. "Must be nearly a hundred years old. He don't hurt me a bit; he just scrapes away and it's done." Holding aside her lip with her red-enameled thumbnail, she showed him a gold inlay in one of her upper molars. A breath of cigarette smoke and cinnamon whisked around him as he leaned to see. "See?" she said. "Big as all get out, and it didn't hurt! No, it never did!" I wonder what Margo would say, he wondered. If she walked in here through the magic-eye glass door that swings open when you approach it and saw me gazing into Liz's mouth. Caught in some fashionable new eroticism not yet recorded in the Kinsey reports.

The store had during the afternoon become almost deserted. Usually a flow of customers passed through the check-out stands, but not today. The recession, Vic decided. Five million unemployed as of February of this year. It's getting at our business. Going to the front doors he stood watching the sidewalk traffic. No doubt about it. Fewer people than usual. All home counting their savings.

"We're in for a bad business year," he said to Liz.

"Oh what do you care?" Liz said. "You don't own the store; you just work here, like the rest of us. Means not so much work." A woman customer had begun unloading items of food onto the counter; Liz rang them up, still talking over her shoulder to Vic. "Anyhow I don't think there's going to be any depression; that's just Democratic talk. I'm so tired of those old Democrats trying to make out like the economy's going to bust down or something."

"Aren't you a Democrat?" he asked. "From the South?"

"Not any more. Not since I moved up here. This is a Republican state, so I'm a Republican." The cash register clattered and clanged and the cash drawer flew open. Liz packed the groceries into a paper bag.

Across the street from the store the sign of the American Diner Café started him thinking about afternoon coffee. Maybe this was the best time. To Liz he said, "I'll be back in ten or so minutes. You think you can hold the fort alone?"

"Oh sholly," Liz said merrily, her hands making change. "You go ahead on, so I can get out later and do some shopping I have to do. Go on, now."

Hands in his pockets, he left the store, halting at the curb to seek out a break in the traffic. He never went down to the crosswalk; he always crossed in the middle of the block, directly to the café, even if he had to wait at the curb minute after minute. A point of honor was involved, an element of manliness.

In the booth at the café he sat before his cup of coffee, stirring idly.

"Slow day," Jack Barnes the shoe salesman from Samuel's Men's Apparel said, bringing over his cup of coffee to join him. As always, Jack had a wilted look, as if he had steamed and baked all day in his nylon shirt and slacks. "Must be the weather," he said. "A few nice spring days and everybody starts buying tennis rackets and camp stoves."

In Vic's pocket was the most recent brochure from the Book-of-the-Month Club. He and Margo had joined several years ago, at the time they had put a down payment on a house and moved into the kind of neighborhood that set great stock by such things. Producing the brochure he spread it flat on the table, swiveling it so Jack could read it. The shoe salesman expressed no interest.

"Join a book club," Vic said. "Improve your mind."

"I read books," Jack said.

"Yeah. Those paperback books you get at Becker's Drugs." Jack said, "It's science this country needs, not novels. You know darn well that those book clubs peddle those sex novels about small towns in which sex crimes are committed, and all the dirt comes to the surface. I don't call that helping American science."

"The Book-of-the-Month Club also distributed Toynbee's _History_," Vic said. "You could stand reading that." He had got that as a dividend; although he hadn't quite finished it he recognized that it was a major literary and historical work, worth having in his library. "Anyhow," he said, "bad as some books are, they're not as bad as those teen-age sex elms, those drag-race films that James Dean and that bunch do."

His lips moving, Jack read the title of the current Book-of-the-Month selection "A historical novel," he said. "About the South. Civil War times. They always push that stuff. Don't those old ladies who belong to the club get tired of reading that over and over again?"

As yet, Vic hadn't had a chance to inspect the brochure. "I don't always get what they have," he explained. The current book was called _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. By an author he had never heard of: Harriet Beecher Stowe. The brochure praised the book as a daring exposé of the slave trade in pre-Civil War Kentucky. An honest document of the sordid, outrageous practices committed against hapless Negro girls.

"Wow," Jack said. "Hey, maybe I'd like that."

"You can't tell anything by the blurb," Vic said. "Every book that's written these days is advertised like that."

"True," Jack said. "There's sure no principles left in the world any more. You look back to before World War Two, and compare it to now. What a difference. There wasn't this dishonesty and delinquency and smut and dope that's going around. Kids smashing up cars, these freeways and hydrogen bombs... and prices going up. Like the price you grocery guys charge for coffee. It's terrible. Who's getting the loot?"

They argued about it. The afternoon wore on, slowly, sleepily, with little or nothing happening.

At five, when Margo Nielson snatched up her coat and car keys and started out of the house, Sammy was nowhere in sight. Off playing, no doubt. But she couldn't take time to round him up; she had to pick up Vic right away or he'd conclude she wasn't coming and so take the bus home.

She hurried back into the house. In the living room her brother, sipping from his can of beer, raised his head and murmured, "Back already?"

"I haven't left," she said. "I can't find Sammy. Would you keep your eye open for him while I'm gone?"

"Certainly," Ragle said. But his face showed such weariness that at once she forgot about leaving. His eyes, red-rimmed and swollen, fastened on her compellingly; he had taken off his tie, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and as he drank his beer his arm trembled. Spread out everywhere in the living room the papers and notes for his work formed a circle of which he was the center. He could not even get out; he was surrounded. "Remember, I have to get this in the mail and postmarked by six," he said.

In front of him his files made up a leaning, creaking stack. He had been collecting material for years. Reference books, charts, graphs, and all the contest entries that he had mailed in before, month after month of them... in several ways he had reduced his entries so that he could study them. At this moment, he was using what he called his "sequence" scanner; it involved opaque replicas of entries, in which the point admitted light to flash in the form of a dot. By having the entries fly by in order, he could view the dot in motion. The dot of light bounced in and out, up and down, and to him its motions formed a pattern. To her it never formed a pattern of any sort. But that was why he was able to win. She had entered the contest a couple of times and won nothing.

"How far along are you?" she asked.

Ragle said, "Well, I've got it placed in time. Four o'clock, P.M. Now all I have to do--" he grimaced, "is get it in space."

Tacked up on the long plywood board was today's entry on the official form supplied by the newspaper. Hundreds of tiny squares, each of them numbered by rank and file. Ragle had marked off the file, the time element. It was file 344; she saw the red pin stuck in at that point. But the _place_. That was harder, apparently.

"Drop out for a few days," she urged. "Rest. You've been going at it too hard the last couple of months."

"If I drop out," Ragle said, scratching away with his ballpoint pen, "I have to drop back a flock of notches. I'd lose--" He shrugged. "Lose everything I've won since January 15." Using a slide rule, he plotted a junction of lines.

Each entry that he submitted became a further datum for his files. And so, he had told her, his chances of being correct improved each time. The more he had to go on, the easier it was for him. But instead, it seemed to her, he was having more and more trouble. Why? she had asked him, one day. "Because I can't afford to lose," he explained. "The more times I'm correct, the more I have invested." The contest dragged on. Perhaps he had even lost track of his investment, the mounting plateau of his winnings. He always won. It was a talent, and he had made good use of it. But it was a vicious burden to him, this daily chore that had started out as a joke, or at best a way of picking up a couple of dollars for a good guess. And now he couldn't quit.

I guess that's what they want, she thought. They get you involved, and maybe you never live long enough to collect. But he had collected; the _Gazette_ paid him regularly for his correct entries. She did not know how much it came to, but apparently it ran close to a hundred dollars a week. Anyhow it supported him. But he worked as hard -- harder -- than if he had a regular job. From eight in the morning, when the paper was tossed on the porch, to nine or ten at night. The constant research. Refining of his methods. And, over everything else, the abiding dread of making an error. Of turning in a wrong entry and being disqualified.

Sooner or later, they both knew, it had to happen.

"Can I get you some coffee?" Margo said. "I'll fix you a sandwich or something before I go. I know you didn't have any lunch."

Preoccupied, he nodded.

Putting down her coat and purse, she went into the kitchen and searched in the refrigerator for something to feed him. While she was carrying the dishes out to the table, the back door flew open and Sammy and a neighborhood dog appeared, both of them fluffed up and breathless.

"You heard the refrigerator door," she said, "didn't you?"

"I'm real hungry," Sammy said, gasping. "Can I have one of those frozen hamburgers? You don't have to cook it; I'll eat it like it is. It's better that way -- it lasts longer!"

She said, "You go get into the car. As soon as I've fixed Uncle Ragle a sandwich we're driving down to the store and pick up Dad. And take that old dog back out; he doesn't live here."

"Okay," Sammy said. "I bet I can get something to eat at the store." The back door slammed as he and the dog departed.

"I found him," she said to Ragle when she brought in the sandwich and glass of apple cider. "So you don't have to worry about what he's doing; I'll take him downtown with me."

Accepting the sandwich, Ragle said, "You know, maybe I'd have been better off if I'd got mixed up playing the ponies."

She laughed. "You wouldn't have won anything."

"Maybe so." He began reflexively to eat. But he did not touch the apple cider; he preferred the warm beer from the can that he had been nursing for an hour or so. How can he do that intricate math and drink warm beer? she asked herself as she found her coat and purse and rushed out of the house to the car. You'd think it would muddle up his brain. But he's used to it. During his stint in the service he had got the habit of swilling warm beer day in, day out. For two years he and a buddy had been stationed on a minuscule atoll in the Pacific, manning a weather station and radio transmitter.

Late-afternoon traffic, as always, was intense. But the Volkswagen sneaked through the openings, and she made good time. Larger, clumsier cars seemed bogged down, like stranded land turtles.

The smartest investment we ever made, she said to herself. Buying a small foreign car. And it'll never wear out; those Germans build with such precision. Except that they had had minor clutch trouble, and in only fifteen thousand miles... but nothing was perfect. In all the world. Certainly not in this day and age, with H-bombs and Russia and rising prices.

Pressed to the window, Sammy said, "Why can't we have one of those Mercs? Why do we have to have a dinky little car that looks like a beetle?" His disgust was manifest.

Feeling outraged -- her son a traitor right here at her bosom -- she said, "Listen, young man; you know absolutely nothing about cars. You don't have to make payments or steer through this darn traffic, or wax them. So you keep your opinions to yourself."

Grumpily, Sammy said, "It's like a kid's car."

"You tell your father that," she said. "When we get down to the store."

"I'm scared to," Sammy said.

She made a left turn against traffic, forgetting to signal, and a bus beeped at her. Damn big buses, she thought. Ahead was the entrance to the store's parking lot; she shifted down into second and drove up across the sidewalk, past the vast neon sign that read

LUCKY PENNY SUPERMARKET

"Here we are," she said to Sammy. "I hope we didn't miss him."

"Let' go in," Sammy cried.

"No," she said. "We'll wait here."

They waited. Inside the store, the checkers finished up with a long line of miscellaneous persons, most of whom pushed the stainless-wire baskets. The automatic doors flew open and shut, open and shut. In the lot, cars started up.

A lovely shiny red Tucker sedan sailed majestically by her. Both she and Sammy gazed after it.

"I do envy that woman," she murmured. The Tucker was as radical a car as the VW, and at the same time wonderfully styled. But of course it was too large to be practical. Still...

Maybe next year, she thought. When it's time to trade in this car. But you don't trade in VWs; you keep them forever.

At least the trade-in is high on VWs. We can get back our equity. At the street, the red Tucker steered out into traffic.

"Wow!" Sammy said.

She said nothing.