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Weizak laughed. “You’re a card, Hawk, you know that?”
“I am,” Harold agreed, still smiling. He began to relace his boots. “A wild card.”
Chapter 56
Stu spent the next day at the power station, wrapping motors, and was cycling home at the end of the workday. He had reached the small park opposite the First National Bank when Ralph hailed him over. He parked his cycle and walked over to the bandshell where Ralph was sitting.
“I’ve kind of been looking for you, Stu. You got a minute?”
“Just one. I’m late for supper. Frannie’ll be worried.”
“Yeah. Been up to the power station wrapping copper, from the look of your hands.” Ralph looked absent and worried.
“Yeah. Not even workmen’s gloves do much good. My hands are wrecked.”
Ralph nodded. There were maybe half a dozen other people in the park, some of them looking at the narrow-gauge railway train that had once gone between Boulder and Denver. A trio of young women had spread out a picnic supper. Stu found it very pleasant just to sit here with his wounded hands in his lap. Maybe marshalin...
“How’s it going out there?” Ralph asked.
“Me, I wouldn’t know—I’m just hired help, like the rest. Brad Kitchner says it’s going like a house afire. He says the lights will be back on by the end of the first week of September, maybe sooner, and that we’ll have heat by the middle of the month. Of course, he’s pretty young to be making with the predictions…”
“I’ll put my money on Brad,” Ralph said. “I trust im. He’s been gettin a lot of what you call on-the-job training.” Ralph tried to laugh; the laugh turned into a sigh which seemed fetched up from the big man’s bootheels.
“Why you so down at the mouth, Ralph?”
“I got some news on my radio,” Ralph said. “Some of it’s good, some of it… well, some of its not so good, Stu. I want you to know, because there’s no way to keep it secret. Lots of people in the Zone with CBs. I imagine some were listening when I was talking to these new folks coming in.”
“How many?”
“Over forty. One of them’s a doctor, name of George Richardson. He sounds like a fine man. Level-headed.”
“Well, that’s great news!”
“He’s from Derbyshire, Tennessee. Most of the people in this group are sort of mid-Southern. Well, it seems they had a pregnant woman with them, and her time come up ten days ago, on the thirteenth. This doctor delivered her of them—twins, she had—and they were fine. At first they were fine.” Ralph lapsed back into sil...
Stu grabbed him. “They died? The babies died? That what you’re trying to tell me? That they died? Talk to me, dammit!”
“They died,” Ralph said in a low voice. “One of them went in twelve hours. Appeared to just choke to death. The other went two days later. Nothing Richardson could do to save them. The woman went loony. Raving about death and destruction and no more babies. You want to make sure Fran isn’t around when they come in, Stu...
Stu let go of Ralph’s shirt slowly.
“This Richardson, he wanted to know how many pregnant women we had, and I said only one that we know of right now. He asked how far along she was and I said four months. Is that right?”
“She’s five months now. But Ralph, is he sure those babies died of the superflu? Is he sure?”
“No, he’s not, and you gotta tell Frannie that, too, so she understands it. He said it could have been any number of things… the mother’s diet… something hereditary… a respiratory infection… or maybe they were just, you know, defective babies. He said it could have been the Rh factor, whatever, that is. He just couldn’...
“Glen and I talked about that,” Stu said bleakly, “the day I met him. July Fourth, that was. It seems so long ago… anyway, if it was the superflu that killed those babies it probably means that in forty or fifty years we can leave the whole shebang to the rats and the houseflies and the sparrows.”
“I guess that’s pretty much what Richardson told them. Anyway, they were some forty miles west of Chicago, and he persuaded them to turn around the next day so they could take the bodies back to a big hospital where he could do an autopsy. He said he could find out for sure if it was the superflu. He saw enough of it a...
“Yeah.”
“But when the morning came, the babies were gone. That woman had buried them, and she wouldn’t say where. They spent two days digging, thinking that she couldn’t have gone too far away from the camp or buried them too deep, being just over her delivery and all. But they didn’t find them, and she wouldn’t say where no m...
“I can understand that,” Stu said, thinking of how much Fran wanted her baby.
“The doctor said even if it was the superflu, maybe two immune people could make an immune baby,” Ralph said hopefully.
“The chances that the natural father of Fran’s baby was immune are about one in a billion, I guess,” Stu said. “He sure isn’t here.”
“Yeah, I guess it couldn’t hardly be, could it? I’m sorry to have to put this on you, Stu. But I thought you’d better know. So you could tell her.”
“I don’t look forward to that,” Stu said.
But when he got home he found that someone else had already done it.
“Frannie?”
No answer. Supper was on the stove—burnt on, mostly—but the apartment was dark and quiet.
Stu came into the living room and looked around. There was an ashtray on the coffee table with two cigarette butts in it, but Fran didn’t smoke and they weren’t his brand.
“Babe?”
He went into the bedroom and she was there, lying on the bed in the semigloom, looking at the ceiling. Her face was puffy and tear-streaked. “Hi Stu,” she said quietly.
“Who told you?” he asked angrily. “Who just couldn’t wait to spread the good news? Whoever it was, I’ll break their damn arm.”
“It was Sue Stern. She heard it from Jack Jackson. He’s got a CB, and he heard that doctor talking with Ralph. She thought she better tell me before someone else made a bad job of it. Poor little Frannie. Handle with care. Do not open until Christmas.” She uttered a little laugh. There was a desolation in that sound th...
He came across the room and lay down beside her on the bed and stroked her hair off her forehead. “Honey, it’s not sure. No way that it’s sure.”
“I know it’s not. And maybe we could have our own babies, even so.” She turned to look up at him, her eyes red-rimmed and unhappy. “But I want this one. Is that so wrong?”
“No. Course not.”
“I’ve been lying here waiting for him to move, or something. I’ve never felt him move since that night Larry came looking for Harold. Remember?”
“Yes.”
“I felt the baby move and I didn’t wake you up. Now I wish I had. I sure do.” She began to cry again and put an arm over her face so he wouldn’t see her doing it.
Stu took the arm away, stretched out beside her, kissed her. She hugged him fiercely and then lay passively against him. When she spoke, the words were half muffled against his neck.
“Not knowing makes it that much worse. Now I just have to wait and see. It seems like such a long time to have to wait and see if your baby is going to die before it’s spent a day outside of your body.”