I may as well put the bad news first: Devon Baird didn't make it through the winter. Cammie took it hardest, though she, like the rest of us, knew what was coming after his hair fell out and the chelate medicine wasn't available to the public until after his bone marrow had quit producing red corpuscles. It seemed that I wasn't destined to have a foster son after all.
But "destiny," I believe, is a word we use to hide incompetence. I may have a son or daughter one day, because in Kate I've found one hell of a wife.
It hadn't occurred to me that I might ring any chimes for a young woman until early December when I was in Napa, registering the old VW transporter in case its prewar owner showed up. I recognized Dana Martin instantly as she slid the forms to me. She had been an FBI intermediary cutout years before, but sleek and sharp as she was, Dana didn't recognize me at first.
When she did: "Good Lord, Harve," she marveled. "You're a hell of a specimenand ten years younger, minus the beard and thirty kilos of suet." Same old Dana; even her compliments came with a built-in backhand.
"Living off the land isn't easy even in a mild winter," I reminded her. She seemed interested in prolonging our chance encounter and wondered out loud how often I got into Napa. I said not often, and she constructed an ingenue's pout for me, and I bugged out feeling like an escapee from a small predatorwhich was more truth than fancy. I kidded myself that I was only in a hurry to barter my three bushels of processed acorns for seed and a plow attachment for our third-hand garden tractor. But on my way back to our place near Yountville, I thought about Dana Martin some more and the comparison with Kate came unbidden, and from that moment forward I was a lapsed bachelor.
I said as much to Kate that evening. She only smiled and said, "I was beginning to wonder about you," and her mouth was warm and hungry. We legalized it in January.
Why a woman of Kate's youth and vitality would want to make such a commitment to me was a mystery until the night she asked me what I knew about the bouillon ballot.
"You might not want to know," I said.
"Which means that you do. I thought as much. That lonesome vote for Devon the first time; that was you, wasn't it?"
I cocked an eyebrow, enjoying her quest and the way she went about it. "That would be telling on Ern and Shar."
"Screw the tenants, buster. I'm dead sure it was you. You're not the kind to weasel out of a tough decisionbut I wanted to hear it from you."
"All right. It was me; but the way you hollered afterward, the others must've thought it was you."
"I don't care. It wasn't right that three of us placed the burden on one. But I damn sure voted the second time, Harve. Not that it matters, but I bet the second abstention was Ern's."
"You lose."
"Then Shar"
"Shar, nothing. It was mine."
For once Kate was astonished. "Do you mean to sit here under my fanny and tell me you abstained just to teach us a lesson? That's petty!"
"Not to teach anything," I protested. How the hell did I let myself get into these things? "Kate, after your protest, I saw shame on three faces. I felt sure you would all toughen yourselves on the next ballotand if you felt tough, chances were you'd vote for tough logic. For Devon. But if all four were the same there'd be no secret to the ballot, and you three were obviously touchy about making your decisions known. So . . ."
"So you gave us something to hide behind." Her head was wagging sideways, but on her face was loving acceptance.
"If you wanted it," I shrugged.
"I want it still. Very few men realize how much a woman will do for a man she can depend on. Long legs and a tight gut are nice, but give me a man I can depend on. Fortunately I can have it all unless you start eating too much again." And then she found my mouth and used it mercilessly, I'm happy to say.
Wenot only three surviving McKays and two Rackhams but the surviving eighty million Americansaren't out of trouble yet, though the armistice is a month old now and the radiation count is slowly receding from a small fraction of a rem in many regions. The chance of bone tumors, leukemia, and other long-term damage has leaped by an order of magnitude, which means we have a small chance of dying that way within the next twenty years. Compared to life expectancy when this republic was young, those odds look bearable. Since the depletion of stored blood, accident victims get whole-blood transfusions or none at all. That's why a blood-group tattoo on the inner forearm is becoming popular. During the past winter there was a shortage of protein, and we see very few cats or dogs these days. Spot is one of those few, because he doesn't solo very far from our designated turf.
You could say with too much justification that Spot is a perfect example of the kind of luxury nobody can afford in this postwar world. If I'd expected the war, perhaps I'd have turned him over to the people at Oregon's Wildlife Safari.
Well, I didn't; and I won't. In the past few months he has learned to maul an intruder and to dodge strangers with sticks that go bang, and he patrols our tender new crops to bag the beasties that would otherwise damage them. That's the only protein supplement he gets, and if he doesn't like living on cereal grains, well, tough; neither do the rest of us. But soybeans will grow here, and by this fall we may not need to boil acorns or find new ways to flavor alfalfa sprouts.
Do I feel defensive about Spot? Yes. Does he pull his weight? Probably not, but maybe so. Gaunt as he is, he submits to the small saddlebags Cammie sewed for him. They'll hold the seine and the fish when we hike to the reservoir, or twenty pounds of whatever else we don't want to tote when one of us goes foraging. Besides, he's becoming known. Anyone who has seen him cover a hundred yards in three seconds will tend to be circumspect at double that distance.
High-tech luxuries like holovision and many medicines will be in short supply for a long time, and as Bay Area suburbs cool down, they become vast junkyards ripe for reckless foragers. City stripping can be downright foolhardy even in some places the bombs missed. Like Milwaukee, where typhus ran its course; and Lexington, where typhoid began in a public shelter and swept the county. I suspect we're through building beehive cities, those great complex organisms that proved so dreadfully vulnerable. If the current plans are any guide, the feds and state officials will rebuild many sites as ring cities surrounding the ruins.
The federal gummint doesn't interfere much with a state's regional decisions now, and since the rural population pulled through in such good shape, the political climate is just what you'd guess: conservative. Kate and I persuaded the McKays to stay on here at the Gallo acreage because that makes us all one household, and taxes are easier on us this way. Currently we're required to pay twenty-four hours of labor into the skills bank every seven daystwo twelve-hour days each week. If you think I put my time in as a part-time cop, think again; I cussed and cajoled a wood stove for years, and on the days when I cook for Napa County nabobs, they look forward to gourmet meals. Of course I always bring some of it home! Why should a planning commissioner eat better than my wife does?
As for the McKays? Cammie's in school again, training in radiology, which is going to be a crucial skill. Shar is a lab technician in the nearby hospital that used to be a veteran's home and now manufactures its own coarse penicillin. So we don't lack for some basic pharmaceuticals. And Ern, when he isn't engineering the new water-purification plant, is scrounging materials on his own to convert timber by-products into fuel and lubricants. If any one of us becomes a plutocrat during reconstruction, it'll be Ern McKay. I figure he's earned it.
When anyone asks Kate what she does, she says she's my physical therapist; keeps me skinny. God knows that's true enough, and no complaint, but she has a very special talent with little kids. Anyone who thinks a Yountville first-grader can't be adept at postwar survival skills simply hasn't watched her students dress out a chicken, or repair a bike, or create sandals from worn-out tire casings. An intriguing progression of skills there: Kate got some of it from counterculture folks, who got it from travels among the Mexicans, who learned it by rummaging among the castoffs of the rich yanquis.
So it's my wife Kate, more than any of us, who'll be the key to the future of this country. We adults are survivors by definition; our first priority now is to make our next generations expert at pulling through.