Wow, did he feel good! Gollywhiskers! It was as if his lungs had opened and he had inhaled gallons and gallons of the purest air. He floated. Confronting McGinley he had been sweating, but now he was dry. He had been despondent, walking the boards of this floor where Junie once had run, but now he was serene. His body for the moment was blissfully relieved of its burden of hatred and chagrin, and his eyes were sharper and stronger and fully rested, as if he had had a good sleep last night in spite of the Fernes’ dog. His nose was keen.
This was the worst thing he had ever done. In the past he had addressed himself to all sorts of people on all sorts of issues, by mail and by telephone, but he had never before done such a thing as this, and he knew that it was a crime, and he therefore a criminal.
He realized, too, that now he was about to witness the consequences of his action. This seldom happened, although it had occasionally happened, notably in the case of Stanley Krannick, Luella’s husband. Brown had seen Stanley flee as a result of one simple anonymous letter. But in most cases, as, for example, with his letters to Former President Johnson, “Greatest Mass Murderer of Recent Time” (as Brown addressed him), Brown had no chance to see the reactions of his addressee. Possibly L. B. Johnson never even saw the letters Brown sent to him. Possibly they were forwarded directly to the F.B.I. and the Secret Service. “Please Forward,” someone scribbled on the envelope.
From the telephone booth he surveyed the scene. Nothing was happening. Perhaps Brown had made no such call at all, for whereas a few minutes ago his rage had reached unprecedented heights he was now so far relieved as to feel detached from himself. Aspects of his truest reality returned to him — it was evening, he should have a bite to eat, he should return to work, and he should speed to Luella afterward, to comfort her. Whenever Stanley came to town she became upset. What about voiceprinting? he thought. The authorites had techniques of voiceprinting these days, similar to fingerprinting. Anyhow, he had spoken in a disguised voice. He was protected, as if by flesh-colored gloves from Robert Kirk Ltd., dropping them nonchalantly into the wastebin on Madison Avenue. And then, because after all Brown had a little expectation of it, he saw, a moment before anyone else, a police car draw to a stop in front of the headquarters. At the same instant the “strong young man” who had escorted Brown from the presence of McGinley pressed firmly against the door of the telephone booth, opening it to a sufficient width to be able to say clearly and distinctly, “Sir, everyone must leave these premises. Please go quickly, but do not panic.”
The “strong young man” was James J. Phelps, Jr., a police officer moonlighting. He was about to become of enduring importance to Brown, upon whom he gazed briefly, swiftly, with recognition, as if they had met somewhere before, but continuing briskly then to other people, encountering them individually or in clusters and speaking to them clearly and effectively with the result that the crowd began to disperse in the safest possible way, emptying itself onto McAllister Street in obedience to Phelps’s command. Simply, Officer Phelps was a commanding person. He was tall and slender. His hair was black and his eyes were blue. His poise and his presence, not his badge, certified his authority.
Brown knew, after all, that nobody had “planted a big bomb.” That was a false report offered in a moment of frenzy by someone like himself at the pinnacle of his day’s rage, and he therefore sat calmly in the telephone booth, watching Phelps upon his rounds. There went Phelps into the men’s room, and soon out again, and now into — no, not into, only holding ajar the door marked Women and calling within, and continuing elsewhere, walking swiftly but inconspicuously into every corner of this headquarters, once Mordecai’s Toys, warning the people little by little, group by group, rather than by some broadcast which would have sent everyone at once into a race for the doorway.
Ah, see that! In haste now, Brown dashed from the telephone booth to be of assistance to Phelps, who had observed, as Brown had also observed, that the boy in the wheelchair, son of the candidate McGinley, had been left abandoned upon a low platform. Whether the boy had called for help, or whether Phelps, like Brown, had independently observed the boy’s difficulty, we have no need of knowing. We do know, however, that Brown and Phelps arrived at the same moment to assist the boy, together seizing the wheelchair and lowering it two steps to the floor, from which point the boy could propel himself.
“What’s the emergency?” Brown asked Officer Phelps.
“Possibly nothing,” Phelps replied.
“May I ask who you are?” Brown asked.
“May I ask who you are?” Officer Phelps replied. “May I ask what you were doing in the telephone booth?”
“Making a telephone call,” said Brown.
“But the phone was hung up,” said Phelps.
“I was done,” said Brown.
“Whom did you call?” asked Officer Phelps.
“Why, that’s a funny question,” said Brown. “I phoned my wife at her office.”
“Did you speak to her?”
“The line was busy.”
On the sidewalk near the police car McGinley stood among many people, none of whom yet knew what emergency had driven them from the headquarters. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Phelps, raising his hands above his head, “it will be better if you don’t crowd in too close around the store.”
“What the hell’s wrong?” McGinley asked.
“Possibly nothing,” said Phelps, “possibly an explosive.”
“You see what I’m up against,” said the candidate McGinley. “The radicals did it, the goddam colleges.”
“We don’t know,” said Officer Phelps, who himself had strong radical inclinations. “Ladies and gentlemen, it will be better for everybody if we move along just in case anything should actually be wrong in there.”
Here came another police car. Bomb scares these days were like false alarms in days gone by. In the old days it was fun to bring the firemen out. It warded off the dullness. Brown himself, with other boys, had once set fire to the grass on Solari Hill just to watch the firemen put it out. In some neighborhoods nowadays, having brought the firemen out, youths stoned them. Gone were the days of reverence for many things. Brown had taken Junie to many firehouses, and they had examined all the equipment together. So well known were Brown and Junie at the several firehouses that they had eventually been permitted to slide down the pole at the Sanchez Street firehouse, though it was strictly against the law. Two policemen emerged from the second car, one of them carrying a toolbag and a short stick. “He’s a bomb man,” said Officer Phelps to Brown.
“It must be dangerous work,” Brown said. Across the street the lights of the public library were going out.
“The night’s ruined,” McGinley said. “Where can I go and shake some hands?”
“Go home and get a good night’s sleep, Congressman,” said one of his campaign workers.
“You deserve it,” said another.
“I might go get my throat sprayed,” said McGinley, the candidate. This remark evoked laughter from his closer associates, who knew his euphemism: massage, he meant, but it was a gray area and he did not say it, it was slightly questionable. A good massage relieved his feelings, cooled his frustrations. “They’ve been harassing me all the way,” he said. “How many is this? This is the fifth or sixth time they phoned in a bomb scare.”
“Can’t they catch such people?” Brown asked Officer Phelps. “What about voiceprints?”
“What are voiceprints?” asked Officer Phelps.
Brown liked this Phelps. He was a very young man, extremely so, with a quality of humility about him. Observe how he avoided any pretense of knowing something he did not know.
McGinley smiled at Brown. “I hope I wasn’t rude in there,” he said. “I tell you, the strain of campaigning gets you down.” Oh yes, McGinley, smile, you’re staring right into the eyes of the fellow who phoned in the bomb scare, and you don’t even know it. Brown felt a certain satisfaction in this. Nobody could read minds. Look, for example, across the street, at the red-white-and-blue mailbox near the corner. In that famous mailbox (then painted green) some years ago Brown had mailed his first anonymous letter, addressed in that case to Luella’s husband, Stanley. Thus Junie was saved from Stanley.
But return to this side of McAllister Street — to the northeast corner — and here is the candidate McGinley, onetime Chairman of the Draft Board, who sent Junie to die in the war, so that Brown’s having mailed such a letter, and having saved Junie once, went finally for nothing, bringing grief and rage to Luella and to himself. Where is Stanley, Junie’s father? He is somewhere in the city tonight, having come down from Ukiah or Yreka to play golf. Officer Phelps will murder him. Where is Luella this moment, and who is she to McGinley, who sent her son to die? She is sitting in her storefront “real-estate office” on Geary Boulevard with a placard in her window advertising McGinley for Congress, and a McGinley button upon her bosom.
Oh yes, by the way, notice there, among the shuffling crowd, another James — James Berberick — known in one way to Luella, known in another to Brown, unknown to Officer James Phelps, whose first name he shares, although they have lived all their lives within three blocks of each other. Tomorrow night he will murder Congressman-elect McGinley. McGinley this moment consults his wristwatch by the light of the police car. Idly he winds his watch. He will wind it again in the morning. That will be all. “I’m going home,” McGinley said.
“I should be getting back to work,” said Brown to Officer Phelps.
“Where’s that?” asked Officer Phelps.
“The Chronicle,” said Brown.
“I thought so,” said Phelps, excited suddenly. “I know who you are now, this is wonderful, you’re Junie Krannick’s father.”
“Indeed I am,” said Brown.
“How’s Junie?” Officer Phelps inquired.
“I’m sorry to tell you that Junie is dead,” Brown replied.
“I see,” said Phelps. “I’m sorry I asked.”
“In the war,” said Brown.
“I guess so,” said Phelps.
They crossed McAllister together, walking past that very mailbox, once green, now red-white-and-blue, where Brown had mailed his first anonymous letter. He touched it as they passed. The wind had almost stolen the letter from his hand, but there was no wind now, the night was still, and they were standing a few moments later beside Officer Phelps’s automobile, illegally parked in the bus stop before the public library. Upon his front bumper he carried a distortion of a popular sticker: Police Your Local Support.
“How can you park here?” Brown asked.
“Mr. Krannick,” said Officer Phelps, “I’m a policeman.”
“Brown, not Krannick,” said Brown.
“Oh yes, I remember.”
But what did Phelps mean, really? Brown would mull it over. Did Phelps mean that a policeman might park anywhere at any time? If so, Brown must protest. Perhaps Phelps meant only that he was illegally parked in the line of duty. “Are you on duty now?” Brown asked.
“You’re a scrupulous man,” said Officer Phelps. “Yes, Junie was always remarking about it. Junie said you had a very sophisticated moral code, and he admired you greatly. I admire it, too, I must say, you don’t see much around these days in the way of sophisticated morals.”
Brown was moved to hear such a thing. “Junie said that?” he asked. “I am pleased, believe me.”
“How is Mrs. Brown?” asked Officer Phelps.
“Krannick, not Brown,” said Brown. “She’s quite well. I think I’ll go to her office right now in fact.”
“Her office out Geary?” asked Officer Phelps. “That’s right.”
“No, I should be getting back to work.”
“Get in,” said Officer Phelps.
“Well, that’s awfully darn nice of you,” said Brown.
But apparently Officer Phelps had not quite understood Brown’s intention, for instead of driving to the Chronicle he was driving toward Van Ness. “Maybe we got our signals crossed,” said Brown.
“I’m just stunned,” said Officer Phelps, thinking of Junie. “I’m absolutely speechless.”
“When did you see him?” Brown asked.
“I was just thinking. He was in uniform. I met him in Station G there at Eighteenth and Diamond. We were leaning our elbows on the table and talking.”
“It certainly pleases me that he said I had a ‘sophisticated moral code,’ ” Brown said. “I’ll write that down, you can be sure of that.”
“He was awfully proud of you,” said Officer Phelps, “because you were on the newspaper. Everybody some time or another wants to write it down.”
“Headlines writer, not really writer,” said Brown modestly. “People read me every day and never know my name. I’m anonymous. I have no power.”
“You were a wonderful father considering that you weren’t his natural father,” said Officer Phelps in his frank, youthful way.
“I was a wonderful father by any standard,” said Brown. “It’s the only thing I’m proud of.”
“He was a leader,” said Officer Phelps. “He was a rebel. He was a fighter, too. O.K., a Protestant kid in St. Ignatius had to be a fighter anyhow.”
“He wouldn’t fight in the war,” said Brown. “That’s what killed him. He wouldn’t carry a gun.”
“It was a belief,” said Officer Phelps, becoming enraged. “If you hold such a thing as a belief they’re supposed to exempt you, it’s like a religion, it’s something you inherit in your family.”
“They wouldn’t accept it,” said Brown. “They wouldn’t accept me as his father.”
“You were a more natural father than his natural father,” said Officer Phelps in fury.
“His natural father abandoned him when he was a year old,” said Brown.
“I was lucky,” said Officer Phelps. “Draft exemption for police. All you need is a little pull anyhow. McGinley made a fortune exempting people.”
“I can believe it,” said Brown, beside Phelps, speeding out Fulton beside the great park where he and Luella and Junie walked together five hundred Sundays, though Brown could remember, of all those Sundays, no particular Sunday, no single day apart from all others, none separate, all merged into one Sunday walking with Junie among the animals, the wheels, the bouncing balls, the wet trees, the shining glades.
“The park makes me taste potato soup,” said Officer Phelps. “We always had potato soup at picnics.”
“I remember my father frying bacon in a pan,” said Brown.
“The park makes me think of the expression ‘It’s a small world,’ ” said Officer Phelps, “because my father met another man walking along in the park, and the man said it. It fascinated me. Of course, it is a small world when you get right down to it.”
“When Junie was a baby his father nearly suffocated him one time,” said Brown.
“How was that?” asked Phelps, horrified.
“More than once,” said Brown.
“How?”
“By pinching his nostrils.”
“Don’t tell me any more,” said Officer Phelps, driving north on Park Presidio, to Geary, and illegally left on Geary, west to Luella’s. On Geary, near Narrow Alley, Officer Phelps parked beside a fire hydrant.
“The astronauts are in trouble,” Luella said, greeting Brown as he entered her “real-estate office” with James J. Phelps, Jr.
“He was a friend of Junie,” said Brown.
“Friend and admirer,” said Officer Phelps. “I’m in a state of shock, let me tell you that.” He was uneasy, awkward, and breathless with emotion.
“Have a chair,” Luella said. Her office had only two chairs, which inspired Officer Phelps to wonder how she could do much business here. Where did people sit while making deals? Her typewriter was an old upright Underwood, and yet it appeared new. On her desk lay several magazines and newspapers, but where were the contracts and maps and brochures you’d expect in a real-estate office? Her telephones were dust traps — they certainly weren’t telephones you picked up and set down a hundred times a day as you’d expect in a thriving real-estate office. And only two chairs, too. It didn’t check out. “I’ve been watching them all evening,” she said, “but you can’t see much. Mostly you see Cronkite’s face.”
“I can’t stand Cronkite,” said Brown.
“He’d like him better if we had a color TV,” said Luella. “They’re definitely in danger. They blew a gasket, Walter said, or the air rushed in their window. Their radio pressure, I think that was it.” On her bosom she wore a small watch dangling from a chain about her neck, and a McGinley button. It was a nice round bosom, Officer Phelps observed, although of course she was a very old woman. She’d need to be upward of forty at least to be Junie’s mother.
“It was wonderful the way we struck up a conversation,” said Phelps. “Then he mentioned something, and I knew he was Junie’s dad.”
“Step-dad,” said Brown.
“Right,” said Officer Phelps.
“Junie’s in Asia,” Luella said.
Officer Phelps glanced at Brown. In Asia? What was this?
“That’s how Luella prefers to put it,” said Brown, when she’s under a certain strain, as she is tonight.” Behind her chair he gently massaged her neck and shoulders, and she closed her eyes briefly, perhaps wearily or blissfully.
“Where did you run into each other?” she asked.
“In the McGinley headquarters,” said Officer Phelps.
“There was a bomb scare,” said Brown.
“Another?” she asked, opening her eyes but closing them quickly again lest she reveal her keen interest. Someone was taking the law into his own hands . . . her neck and shoulders were in Brown’s hands. She almost slept. Later tonight she will take Brown’s body into her hands — her wise, experienced hands — and send him sleeping, too, drawing his rage from him into her own hands, making his rage her own, and kill McGinley tomorrow night with the assistance of James Berberick, whom we saw a little while ago on the northeast corner of Larkin & McAllister Streets; and subsequently kill her husband Stanley Krannick, too, with the kind assistance of Officer Phelps, having captured each James with her magical hands. “Was anybody hurt?” she calmly asked.
“It was only a scare,” said Brown.
“Somebody phoned it in,” Officer Phelps explained.
“Then it didn’t go off,” she said.
“It didn’t go off because there wasn’t any bomb,” Brown said. On one finger he wore a rubber band to remind him to give her a deposit receipt from the Hibernia Bank, and he gave it to her and rolled the rubber band from his finger and dropped it into the wastebasket.
“It was just when he telephoned you,” said Officer Phelps.
“Telephoned me?” she asked.
“I telephoned you,” Brown said, “but there wasn’t any answer.”
“When was that?” she asked.
“Just an hour ago,” said Officer Phelps.
“I was here,” she said. “What was it you wanted?”
“I thought you spoke,” said Officer Phelps.
“You misunderstood,” said Brown.
“We spoke,” said Luella.
“She’s not herself,” said Brown. “When your son is murdered then nothing matters at all after awhile.”
“Murdered?” asked Officer Phelps.
“Well, killed,” said Brown. “I call it murdered.”
Officer Phelps heard this uneasily. He himself had lately often thought of war as murder, too. He had had no direct experience of war, but he had now some experience of police work, and he mistrusted the joy by which he imagined himself surrounded. “War is sadism,” he announced. He mistrusted the pleasure he received from people’s distress, especially from the distress of women. How explain this? — that in the presence of dead Junie’s mother his testicles tightened, his breathing grew short, and he felt his cynicism written upon his face. “Call it killed or murdered, either one,” he said. “I won’t argue. But I honestly don’t understand under the circumstances how you can vote for McGinley.”
“Oh that wheelchair,” said Brown, “it makes me nauseous the way he exploits that boy.”
“We don’t talk politics here,” said Luella.
“Because he came in here one day and shook her hand and called her ‘my pretty lady,’ that’s why she’s voting for him,” said Brown.
“Who wanted to bomb him?” Luella asked.
“We don’t know,” said Officer Phelps. “Probably nobody wanted to at all, somebody only wanted to phone it in and break up the meeting. I’ll tell you what these people do, though: they put ideas in other people’s minds. It’s the power of suggestion.”
“The wives refuse to be interviewed,” Luella said, turning her attention once again to the television. “One of the fathers was interviewed. He was on the verge of tears. If they can’t restore their radio pressure they’ll miss the earth. Is that possible? They’ll go floating in space forever.”
“Why should I worry about them?” Brown asked. “They’re only three people like any other three people. People are in trouble everywhere.”
“Thousands died in the war,” Luella said.
“Thousands are still dying every day somewhere,” said Officer Phelps, relieved to be able to show his true colors, showing them that he agreed with them, rejoicing within himself to have found such compatible people: he too hated war and astronauts and many things besides. Why should these three astronauts be selected for sympathy while many people were endangered elsewhere with never a word raised to advertise their condition? Why these three white astronaut Protestants? What about hardworking plumbers and bricklayers and even policemen working humbly against adversity and nature and bad health and despondency and fears? What about hospital workers? What about sewer workers? Here’s a test: do you so badly need to know the astronautical facts about the moon that you’d trade one good plumber for a hundred astronauts while all the shit in the world is backing up in your toilet?
“I shouldn’t have gone to his headquarters,” said Brown. “It only got me all upset. What ocean are they coming down in if they do?”
“Pacific,” said Luella.
“We have a neglected child on our block,” said Brown to Officer Phelps. “Give me your professional opinion, what should we do?”
“Report it,” said Officer Phelps.
“Do you remember . . .” Brown began, but he checked himself. He had been about to ask whether Luella remembered Mordecai’s Toys.
“I’m beginning to feel a little better now,” Luella said.
“When Stanley comes to town she goes far down,” said Brown, “but after he’s here a day or so she begins to come up again.”
“This is your husband you’re referring to?” Officer Phelps inquired. “You know, if he harasses you or anything of the sort you can lodge a complaint against him. We don’t put up with that sort of thing. I’ll be all the help I can.” How true! How true!
“He was a bad father,” Luella said.
“I can’t believe . . . Junie,” said Phelps. “I know I haven’t even begun to feel it yet. It will set in. I don’t know how I’ll stand it.”
“He saw Junie at Station G,” said Brown to Luella. “That was the last time they met.”
“You mustn’t dwell on such things,” said Luella to Officer Phelps. “You’ll be able to stand it all right, don’t worry. We all do.”
“Luella received a helpful letter,” said Brown.
“Yes, that’s my way,” she said. “When I’m feeling low and desperate I read my letter over again. It saved me from the brink.” She took it from her purse, where it had reposed some months in its mailing envelope now slightly creased and wrinkled, and she held it forth for Officer Phelps, who read it:
My Very Dear Mrs. Luella Krannick,
I am a good friend of yours in real-estate circles, but there’s no sense in your trying to identify me, as you can’t.
I only want to be helpful to you, so I say to you, my dear Luella, you must face the fact of the event regarding Junie in the horrible and needless war. All the men responsible for the war will be punished hereafter, we may be sure. In your grief you are not alone. Be comforted, and be free of vengeful thoughts.
Love God and your husband and your associates. Continue to do well in your business, and continue to enjoy the many pleasures of life available to a young and attractive person such as yourself.
With great personal affection,
A FELLOW REALTOR
“This is a very sensible letter,” said Phelps.
“We thought so,” said Brown.
“Take it with you and read it for consolation,” Luella said.
“But you’ll want it,” he said.
“Mail it back,” she said.
“I’ll bring it back,” he said.
“I’d like that,” she said.
I’d like that, he heard. He could imagine those words under other circumstances. Seen a certain way she was “a young and attractive person.” Hadn’t Benjamin Franklin said . . . what was it? . . . not an apple a day but, oh yes, the bodies of women are younger than their faces . . . and he’d say (Phelps, not Franklin), “May I give you a small kiss?” and she’d reply “I’d like that.” A kiss would be all. She hadn’t bad legs. At least sitting down she hadn’t, and a fine bosom too with the time on a watch dangling on a thin chain, and a McGinley button. He might ask her the time. Instead he blurted, “McGinley is warlike. Can’t you understand that?”
“Stanley killed him from the beginning,” she said.
“You see how Stanley’s got her all upset,” Brown said.
“If Stanley harasses you don’t forget I’m here,” said Officer Phelps. “That’s what we’re for for God’s sake.”
“We prefer not to say that,” said Luella.
“Say what?”
“God’s name,” she said.
“But your grammar is very good,” said Brown.
“At St. Ignatius,” said Officer Phelps, “they’ll drill you in grammar or die.”
“I’m not,” said Brown, replying to the television — to Cronkite. “I’m not ‘praying for their safe return.’ Even if I were a praying man any more I wouldn’t pray especially for them.”
“What about sewer workers?” asked Officer Phelps. “Maybe I’d pray for the safe return of sewer workers or coal miners, or how about children in Vietnam bombed by our Air Force?”
“That’s funny talk for a St. Ignatius graduate,” said Brown, but he spoke in an approving tone, and Phelps could see that Brown, far from being displeased with him, shared in some sense his having fallen away from strict obedience. Brown immediately confirmed the young officer’s suspicion, saying, “I trained for the ministry. I was on God’s team there for a while — that was our college slogan — but it ended up more team than God.” Let them drift in space, he thought. Let them gurgle out their frozen oxygen, become a small new meteorite, a frozen package of man-food, a delicacy to be discovered in a state of perfect preservation ten thousand years hence.
“Perfectly Preserved”
Scientists Discover Planet Earth
Foodstuff Said to be 10,000 Years Old
No, he thought, go to Florida. Down on one knee in the Florida swamps near the launch-pads, as he was sometimes down on one knee across the street from the White House, getting a good bead on the rocket in spite of the tall grass waving before his eyes — but perhaps he’d not need a bazooka at all. A rifle would do. (He had never fired a rifle, never seen a bazooka.) He’d get a good bead on the rocket’s vulnerable place, for even the best rocket was somewhere weakest — the elephant’s eye — down on one knee in the swamps while the voices were counting down backwards like the voices of mechanical toys purchased at Mordecai’s Toys . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . and there went the great rocket into the air but punctured by Brown’s rifle silent in that awful din. A leak! Yes, very definitely, hear the air all leaking out, p-sss p-sss p-sss p-ssssssss, the rocket was beginning to wobble and falter. What could the poor astronauts do? Nothing. No chance. The great rocket was over the grandstand now, falling down on all the dignitaries assembled for the launching, and thus Brown brought down with his one small rifle not only the rocket itself and its three occupants but all the distinguished spectators, too, including by chance almost everybody who was anybody among that government which formulated the policy of war against Vietnam, among them Mr. and Mrs. Former President Lyndon B. (“Greatest Mass Murderer of Recent Time”) Johnson, President and Mrs. Tricky Dick Slippery, General and Mrs. Creighton W. Abrams, Special Presidential Assistant and Mrs. McGeorge Bundy, Mr. and Mrs. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs William Putnam Bundy, Mr. and Mrs. Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Allen W. Dulles, Ambassador and Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, Mr. and Mrs. Walt Whitman Rostow, the Right Honorable and Mrs. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, General and Mrs. Maxwell Davenport Taylor, General and Mrs. William Childs Westmoreland, Former Draft Director General Lewis B. Hershey, and others who in Brown’s opinion had bypassed the United States Constitution and Congress, thus taking the law into their own hands in Texas style as no men were ever to have been entrusted to do, thereby singly and individually causing Luella’s son, Junie — Brown’s step-son — to be drafted and sent abroad and murdered, whose death Brown vowed to avenge, if only in his daily thoughts.
“God’s team needs more practice,” said Officer Phelps. “Let’s all calm down and go home and get a good night’s sleep,” said Brown, “if the dogs don’t bark all night.”
Luella stood. Phelps had the opportunity to observe her full, and she was trim for an old lady, and no mistake, and the time was on her bosom, and Officer Phelps said, “By the way, can you tell me what time it is?” She had a really neat bosom, this old chick. She consulted her bosom and told him the time, turned off the television, turned out the lights, and departed with her “husband” Brown and Officer Phelps, locking the door behind them.
On the sidewalk Phelps said, “I’m worried about this Stanley. If it upsets you I can do something about it. Anyhow, I’ll take his name,” standing poised there to jot down Stanley’s name on Luella’s envelope. “How do you spell Krannick?” he asked.
“It’s on the envelope,” Luella said.
“I want to make you easier in your mind,” said Phelps.
“I’m for that,” said Brown.
“I’d like that,” she said.
I’d like that, the policeman heard. Damn it all, she had a neat voice, this old chick. The way she said things! Then, too, there’s nothing like a woman in distress to quicken a fellow’s interest, no matter how old she is. “I’ll drop around,” he said. “Maybe around this time tomorrow night.”
“If you make it definite I’ll be here,” Luella said.
“Then I’ll be here, too,” he said.
“I’m sure,” she said, for she knew men.