Time is the Simplest Thing

TWENTY-TWO

Belmont was beginning to close up. All the houses, as they drove past, had been tightly shuttered, and in the business district, as they drove into it, the shop lights were going out.

Up the street a block or two, the marquee of the hotel still gleamed brightly in the dusk and just this side of it was a flashing sign that proclaimed the Wild West Bar still was willing to take on a customer.

“I don’t think,” said Harriet, “that we fooled those police too much.”

Blaine agreed. “Maybe not. But we had them stopped. There was nothing they could find.”

“I thought for a while they would pull us in.”

“So did I. But you sat there making gentle fun of them. That was hard to take. They were glad to get away. They must have felt like fools.”

He motioned at the flashing bar sign. “Maybe we should start with that.”

“As good a place as any. Likewise, about the only place there is.”

The bar was empty when they came into the place. The bartender had an elbow propped and was idly dabbing with a cloth at imaginary wet spots.

Blaine and Harriet hoisted themselves onto stools opposite the man.

“What’ll it be?” he demanded of them.

They told him.

He got glasses and reached for bottles.

“Little slow tonight,” said Blaine.

“Almost closing time,” said the man. “They don’t stick around. Soon as it gets dark folks get under cover. Everyone in this town.”

“Bad town?”

“No, not especially. It’s the curfew law. This place has got a tough one. Patrols all over the place and them cops are tough. They really make it stick.”

“How about yourself?” asked Harriet.

“Oh, I am all right, miss. The boys, they know me. They know the circumstances. They know I got to stick around just in case a late customer, like you, drops in. From the hotel mostly. They know I got to get the place tucked in and turn out the lights. They give me extra minutes.”

“Sounds tough, all right,” said Blaine.

The barkeep wagged his head. “For your own protection, mister. Folks ain’t got no sense. If it wasn’t for the curfew, they’d stay out to all hours where anything could get them.”

He stopped what he was doing.

“I just happened to think,” he announced. “I got something new. You might like to try it.”

“Like what?” asked Harriet.

He reached back and got the bottle, held it up to show them.

“Something new,” he said. “Straight out of Fishhook. They picked it up some outlandish place. Sap of a tree or something. Probably loaded with a lot of hydrocarbons. I got a couple of bottles off the factor at the Trading Post. Just to try, you know. Thought there might be some folks who might like it.”

Blaine shook his head. “Not for me. God knows what is in it.”

“Me, neither,” said Harriet.

The barkeep set the bottle back regretfully.

“I don’t blame you folks,” he said, giving them the drinks he’d made. “I took a nip of it myself. Just to test it out, you see, because I’m no drinking man.

“Not,” he added, quickly and parenthetically, “that I have anything against it.”

“Of course not,” Harriet sympathized.

“It was funny tasting stuff,” he said. “Not bad, you know. Not good, either. Had a musty tang. You might get to like it if you had a drink or two.”

He stood in silence for a moment, with his hands planted solidly on the bar.

“You know what I been thinking?” he demanded.

“Not the least,” said Harriet.

“I been wondering all this afternoon if that factor down at the Trading Post concocted that stuff up himself. Just as a sort of stinking joke, you see.”

“Oh, he wouldn’t dare.”

“Well, I imagine you are right, miss. But all of them factors are funny sorts of jerks. Folks don’t have much to do with them — socially, at least — but even so they manage to know more of what is going on than anyone in town. They must be listening all the time, for they have all the latest gossip.

“And,” said the barkeep, laying emphasis upon this horrid crime and this social failing, “they don’t never tell you nothing.”

“Ain’t it a fact,” Harriet agreed, enthusiastically.

The barkeep subsided into brooding silence.

Blaine took a wild shot in the dark. “Lots of folks in town,” he said. “Big doings?”

The barkeeper settled down into solid conversational stance and his voice dropped to a confidential level.

“You mean you ain’t heard about it?”

“No. Just got in town a couple of hours ago.”

“Well, mister, you won’t believe this — but we got a star machine.”

“A what?”

“A star machine. It’s one of them contraptions that parries use to travel to the stars.”

“Never heard of them.”

“No reason that you should. The only place they’re legal is in Fishhook.”

“You mean this one is illegal?”

“Couldn’t be no more illegal. The state police, they’ve got it down in the old highway shed. You know, the one on the west edge of town. Maybe you drove by it coming in tonight.”

“I don’t remember it.”

“Well, anyhow, it’s there. And then, on top of that, who should show up but Lambert Finn.”

“You don’t mean the Lambert Finn?”

“No one else. He’s up there, in the hotel right now. He’s going to have a big mass meeting out by the highway shed tomorrow. I hear the police have agreed to haul out the star machine so he can preach about it, with it standing there, right out in plain sight of all the people. I tell you, mister, that will be something worth your while to listen. He’ll spout more brimstone than you ever heard before. He’ll lay it on them parries. He’ll take the hide clean off them. They won’t dare to show their faces.”

“Not many of them around, most likely, in a town like this.”

“Well,” the bartender said, drawing out the word, “not many in the town itself. But there’s a place just a ways from here, down by the river. A place called Hamilton. It’s all parry. It’s a new town the parries built. Parries from all over. There’s a name for a place like that — I should know the name, but I can’t remember it. Like the place they used to keep the Jews in Europe.”

“Ghetto.”

The bartender smote the bar with a disgusted hand. “Now, why couldn’t I think of that? Yes, mister, that’s the word. Ghetto. Except in the old days it was in the poor part of a city and now its out in the country, in the poor part of the country. That land down by the river don’t amount to shucks. No place to build a town. But them parries like it down there. Long as they don’t bother no one, no one bothers them. Long as they stay in line, we leave them alone. And we know where they are, and they know we know. Any time things start going wrong, we know right where to look.”

He glanced at the clock. “If you folks want me to start another round, you’ll have time to gulp it down.”

“No, thanks,” said Blaine. He laid two bills on the bar. “Let it ride,” he said.

“Why, thank you, sir. I thank you very much.”

As they slid off the stools, he said: “If I were you, I’d get under cover as soon as possible. The cops will be down on top of you if they catch you out.’

“We will,” said Harriet. “And thanks for the conversation.”

“Pleasure,” said the barkeep. “Pleasure any time.”

Outside the bar, Blaine held the car door for Harriet, then walked around it to get in on the other side.

“The highway shed?” he asked.

“Shep, what would you do there? We’d just get into trouble.”

“I’ll figure out a way. We simply can’t leave that machine there for Finn to preach a sermon over.”

“So I suppose you figure you’ll just haul it off.”

“No, I guess not. It’s too big and clumsy. But there has to be a way. We have to put a crimp in Finn. Somehow, we’ve got to manage.”

“They’ll have a guard.”

“I don’t think so, Harriet. Locked and bolted, but no guard. There isn’t anyone who would stand on guard. This town is plenty scared.”

“You’re just like Godfrey,” she said. “Both of you go around sticking out your necks.”

“You thought a lot of Godfrey.”

“Yes, a lot,” she said.

He started up the engine and swung the car out into the street.

The old highway shed was black and silent and there was nothing to indicate there was anyone around. They rode past it twice to look it over, moving slowly, and it was the same each time — just the big shed standing there, a relic of the days when there were highways to maintain, when there was need of road machinery to keep their surfaces in shape.

Blaine pulled the car off the road and threaded it easily through a willow thicket, set it down and turned off the lights.

Silence closed down on them; the darkness pulsed with quietness.

“Harriet,” said Blaine.

“Yes, Shep.”

“You stay here. Don’t move. I am going up there.”

“You won’t be long? There’s nothing you can do.”

“I won’t be long,” he said. “Have we got a flashlight?”

“There’s one in the glove compartment.”

He heard her fumbling in the dark. The catch on the door of the compartment clicked and the tiny light inside came on. The flashlight lay amid a clutter of road maps, of sunglasses, of other odds and ends.

She handed it to him. He snapped it on to test it, and it worked. He shut it off again and got out of the car.

“Sit tight,” he told her.

“And you,” she warned, “be careful.”