Alas, Babylon

It was difficult. From the days when they fished and hunted together, he had always felt close to Malachai. They could still work in the grove, side by side, and discuss as equals the weather and the citrus and the fishing but never any longer share any personal, any important matters. They could not talk politics or women or finances. It was strange, since Malachai was much like Sam Perkins. He had as much native intelligence as Sam, the same intuitive courtesy, and they were the same size, weighing perhaps 180, and the same color, cordovan-brown. Randy and Sam Perkins had been lieutenants in a company of the 7th (Custer) Regiment of the First Cav. Together, Randy and Sam had dug in on the banks of the Han and Chongchon, and faced the same bugle heralded human wave charge at Unsan, and covered each other’s platoons in advance and retreat. They had slept side by side in the same bunker, eaten from the same mess tins, drunk from the same bottle, flown to Tokyo on R. and R. together, and together bellied up to the bar of the Imperial Hotel. They had (if it were learned in Fort Repose he would be ostracized) even gone to a junior-officer-grade geisha house together and been greeted with equal hospitality and favors. So it was a strange thing that he could not speak to Malachai, whom he had known since he could speak at all, as he had to Sam Perkins in Korea. It was strange that a Negro could be an officer and a gentleman and an equal below Parallel Thirty-eight, but not below the Mason-Dixon line. It was strange, but this was not the time for social introspection. His job was to tell Malachai to brace and prepare himself and his family.

Randy took two tens and a five from his wallet and shoved them across the desk. `That’s for the week.”

`Thank you, sir,” Malachai said, folding the bills and tucking them into the breast pocket of his checked shirt.

Perhaps the difference was that Malachai had not been an officer, like Sam Perkins, Randy thought. Malachai had been in service for four years, but in the Air Defense Command, a tech sergeant babying jet engines. Perhaps it was their use of the language. Sam spoke crisp upstate-New York-Cornell English, but when Malachai talked you didn’t have to see him to know he was black. “Malachai,” Randy said, “I want to ask you a serious question.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What would you say if I told you I have very good information-about as good as you can get-that before long a war is coming?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me one bit.”

The answer surprised Randy. His swivel chair banged upright. “What makes you say that?”

Malachai smiled, pleased with Randy’s reaction. “Well, sir, I keep up with things. I read all I can. I read all the news magazines and all the out-of-state papers I can get hold of and some service journals and lots of other stuff.”

“You do? You don’t subscribe to them all, do you?” Malachai tried to control his grin. “Some I get from you, Mister Randy. You finish a magazine and throw it away and Missouri finds it and brings it home in her tote bag. And every day she collects the Cleveland papers and the business magazines from Mrs. McGovern’s. Mondays I work for Admiral Hazzard. He saves The New York Times and the Washington papers for me and the Naval Institute Proceedings and technical magazines. And I listen to all the commentators.”

“How do you find the time?” Randy had never realized that Malachai read anything except the San Marco Sun (“It Shines for Timucuan County”).

“Well, sir, there’s not much for a single, non-drinkin’ man to do around Fort Repose, week nights. So I read and I listen. I know things ain’t good, and the way I figure is that if people keep piling up bombs and rockets, higher and higher and higher, someday somebody’s going to set one off Then blooey!” “More than one,” Randy said, “and soon-maybe very soon.

That’s what my brother believes and that’s why he’s sending Mrs. Bragg and the children down here. You’d better get set for it, Malachai. That’s what I’m doing.”

Malachai’s smile was gone entirely. “Mister Randy, I’ve thought about it a lot, but there’s not a doggone thing we can do about it. We just have to sit here and wait for it. There’s not much we can lay up-” he patted his breast pocket. “This twenty-five dollars, with what Missouri brings home this evening, is it. Fast as we make it, it goes. Of course, we don’t need much and we’ve got one thing hardly anybody else has got.”

“What’s that?”

“Water. Running water. Artestian water that can’t be contaminated. You all only use it in the sprinkling system because it smells funny some say like rotten eggs. But that sulphur water ain’t bad. You gets to like it.”