Lot and Lot's Daughter Page 7

  The highway was not as he had known it six years earlier when he had grunted to Erika, sleepy and awed, “Guess this is the place.” It was no longer a clean strip of nearly white concrete worm-patterned with black tar. Leaves and sand had blown across it steadily in the ceaseless wind from the ocean, to be caught and held at the near edge, building back a dune to snare the earth that was stamped and filtered into it by the rain. The compound was not disturbed; the concrete was buried now, anchored under ever-accumulating topsoil on which sparse grass and undernourished plants grew thinly but stubbornly, their taproots stunted by the slab below. The highway was still clearly defined, but no longer as what it was; now it was only a sick swath through the vigorous brush and woods.

  But the swath was not as it had been yesterday and the day before and last week and last year. The track of the interloper was plain and bold to see, insolently plowed through the soft detritus, imperiously proclaiming its roughshod advance on the vulnerable mass.

  He put a foot on the violated surface. The signs were plain, too plain. The ultimate meaning was obscure, obscure as the fate they represented, but the immediate story was crystal clear.

  Without a doubt the plump-to-plump U marks, coming from nowhere, going nowhere, were the tire treads of a jeep. They impressed themselves on the thin soil; man’s insignia on top of nature’s futile try at blotting out man’s insignia.

  The jeep with treads still thick enough to leave so firmly a distinguishing mark, was—what? Not, certainly, utter disorganization. Not after six years. Whoever rode that jeep might be a marauder and pillager, but as between them (or him) and Mr. Jimmon, it was the jeep which represented civilization and Mr. Jimmon savagery.

  “Why you don’t go on, huh, Dad?”

  “Mmmm,” answered Mr. Jimmon perfunctorily.

  Warily he moved forward. Neanderthaler sniffing the spoor of Cro-Magnon. Friday astonished by the print of Crusoe. What was implicitly engraved on the dirt? A jeep, yes; but what else? Who? Man or woman? Three or four men? Men of good will, seeking their fellows? Or fleeing from them? What was the personal history of the jeep’s occupants? What had they been six years ago, and for the six years past? Were they reconcilers or destroyers?

  Mr. Stanley, I believe. Believe what? Believe anything.

  Out of nowhere into nothing. Was it? No question the tracks were not quite in the center of what had once been a highway, premier numbered, paved, celebrated, maintained and budgeted for by the sovereign state of California. By ever so slight a deviation, but consistently, quite as though it were done by habit rather than intent, the tracks bore to the west side.

  West side. Rule of the road, except in the unlikely event the jeep driver was an Englishman or New Zealander inexplicably traveling an unpopular American highway, meant west was the right side. The jeep came from the north and was heading south. Logic.

  Still cautiously, as though the tracks themselves could suddenly materialize the vehicle and its occupants, he moved across the road and peered at the surface. Abruptly he spoke over his shoulder at the boy. “Were these marks here when you and Erika came home?”

  “Huh?”

  Patiently he repeated the question.

  “I want to go home now.”

  Had she warned him to reveal nothing? Would he have understood? It was a disadvantage not to be able to see the child’s face—but could he have divined anything from it anyway? And if she had wanted him not to come down here? Was the boy intelligent enough for deception?

  He trod delicately along the road’s edge; the ground was not quite soft enough to show her footprints. Besides, if she had seen the tracks and not wanted him to know she could easily have avoided walking on them. Why should he suspect her of hiding anything?

  The ill-concealed excitement. The novel request to take the boy along.

  Why? He would have expected her to rush back with the news, exultant. It must seem she had been right about survivors, he wrong; why didn’t she triumph? Or supposing she had second thoughts of the intruders’ goodwill, wouldn’t she yet have wanted to tell him of their existence?

  He stepped high over the impressions. Could they have been made after she returned? Not only was such pat timing highly doubtful, it left her elation unaccounted for. Nor was it reasonable to think the tracks had been made before she’d gone down to the ocean that morning; no one would drive a road so long unused for the first time at night. Logic said the jeep must have passed on its southward way while Erika searched the rocks for shellfish.

  Had its occupants seen her? There was no indication from the tire marks of a stop and start. He could take it for granted their existence was still concealed; unless the jeep returned it might remain so.

  He smothered the impulse to turn back. If she had suppressed a knowledge, mention would only harden whatever curious reaction she might have had. And if, improbably, she did not know of the jeep’s passage, nothing was to be gained by telling her. Yet.

  There was no further point in staring down at the tracks. Reluctantly he faced away from them and walked through the thin cover which ended in sand-rooted pine and cypress. “Have to let you down now,” he said over his shoulder; “hold on to my hand going between these rocks and we’ll be all right.”

  “Can’t.”

  “‘Can’t’? Why can’t you?”

  “You got your fishing rod in your hand.”

  Mr. Jimmon shifted the rod into the hand already encumbered by knife and flint and took the boy’s free one. Jir—David Alonzo Jimmon, junior—would be twenty-three now.

  The tide was low and still going out. Spume gurgled in the spongy rocks; subduedly now, explosively at high tide. “You sit down here,” he directed, putting his gear in a safe place, “and watch.”

  Carefully he picked his way over the craggy strand to an exposed point where the water alternately sucked and smashed at clusters of dark, dripping mussels. A long slimy tail of green seaweed puffed and dwindled like wet wool. Mr. Jimmon selected a promising hump of large shells, down low, and pulled. The Pacific, resenting the impudence, covered them promptly and wet him to his knees. The boy laughed.

  He went back and got his knife. As the next wave receded he stabbed, sawed and hacked at the tough fibers to which the mussels clung. After several more wettings he succeeded, panting, in retrieving a good-sized clump. Retreating, he opened the largest shell, cut a piece of the soft orange meat and gently worked it on his hook. He adjusted the float, and going forward, cast out as best he could with the light sinker and dangling line. The float bobbed some ten feet out.

  Stepping back to where the boy was playing with a tiny fiddler crab in a rocky tidepool, he gently reeled out line. The float moved erratically seaward. Glancing over his shoulder he confirmed his certainty that this spot was invisible from any part of the road.

  Currents tugged moodily at the rod’s tip, nodding it gravely, twitching it, pulling it slowly down and letting it slowly come back. The degree of civilization in man was inversely proportionate to his preoccupation with the business of getting food. For him it was an all-day chore, and an unavoidably direct one: he could perform no act—like writing insurance or welding aluminum—which could eventually be translated into calories. His relation with what he ate was always intimate.

  For the jeep riders it must be immediate too; their removal from his savage status was made clear when you considered how little time they must have to spend food-getting. They were the sportsmen who could spot game and bring it down as they sped along; they were the lords of survival who could find the still intact stores of canned goods and gorge voluptuously on such rare delicacies as solid-pack tomatoes or evaporated milk.

  The tug on the rod was suddenly sharp; the tip bent, the float bobbed back, moved in a swift arc. Mr. Jimmon pulled enough to set the hook and reeled in steadily, faintly excited by the struggle. “Bass,” he grunted with satisfaction.

  “Oooh, big fish,” said the boy as the line, having been drawn in till the float came agai
nst the eye, was flipped overhead with a gray and brown calico writhing on the hook. He laid the rod down precisely, detached the fish, left it flopping on the rocks, baited the hook again, cast, played the float seaward, caught the rod between his knees, took up the fish under the gills, scaled it despite its throes, gutted and cleaned it, cut off the head and threw the offal into the water.

  “Think you could do that?”

  “Don’t want to.”

  Mr. Jimmon pulled in another bass, slightly smaller, and threaded both on his string. Then he lost his bait. The tide was turning now; the float no longer eased its way outward but bobbed back and forth close to the spot where the cast had taken it. “But I have to get another fish,” he explained. “One for you and one for me and one Erika.”

  “Don’t want fish. I want to go home.”

  Home, thought Mr. Jimmon; these are the standards of the rising generation. Must do something about fixing up shelter. Jeep drivers can occupy luxury hotels—spiderwebs and neglect-yellowed sheets included. Those not radioactive or preempted by other jeep drivers. Which is the way to civilization? Unless Erika is right and jeep drivers are just looking for recruits to utopia. Jeep eat jeep.

  “Just one more,” he said.

  The tide began coming in more swiftly. Reluctantly he wound up his line, removed the float, lowered the leader and cast out again for bottom fish. If nothing else he might get a small shovel-nose, whose tail made good eating, boiled.

  “Good eating?” he repeated aloud. “I’m damned sick of fish. All kinds.”

  “What you say, Dad?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.”

  If the briefcase hadn’t broken he’d have brought along a heavier sinker. This one was far too light; he could feel it rolling and tumbling over the bottom with each swell. Bait probably gone by now too; ought to pull up and put on gristle. Fish didn’t care so much for it, but it stayed on.

  He wound up slowly; the line grew taut. Angrily he gave slack, hoping the ebb would pull the sinker or the hook out of whatever it was caught on. He gave lots of slack, then reeled in gently, steadily. Again the line tightened.

  The impulse to jerk, to try and snap it loose was almost irresistible, but as with the shotgun shells the thought of the diminishing store made him unnaturally prudent. (The jeep riders could be extravagant; the solitary Eskimo had to cherish his solitary possession.) If he had not cast out from a point there might have been a way of getting to seaward of the snagged tackle.

  A roller smashed against the rocks and the spray stung his face. If he didn’t get it loose soon it would be hopelessly caught. Or the line would fray through. He gave ample slack, hoping the big wave’s backwash might take the sinker with it. But when he reeled up, the line was still tight.

  “Another one gone,” he mourned. He let the line out for a last time, allowed it to lie limp in the foam, reeled in steadily against the ebb. The line pulled, he pulled. Then he wound up the broken line, shorn of leader, hook and sinker.

  “Come on, we’ll go home.”

  He gathered his knife, flint-and-steel, float, the two bass and the clump of mussels. Steamed, they were tasty enough.

  “Piggyback. I want to ride home piggyback.”

  “All right,” said Mr. Jimmon wearily. “Climb on.”

  When the lead sinkers were all gone he could use nuts from the station wagon. They should last his lifetime if he could get them off; before then his lines would be rotted through. He had been provident and thought of the future, but apparently he’d not thought far enough.

  One could almost sink into believing in some malicious design. The final irresponsibility of shifting cause and effect onto the shoulders of devils or gods. The retreat from payment for mistakes or rewards for intelligence. The Lord is my shepherd because I have the brains of a sheep.

  He trudged over the rocks and sand, the boy heavy and wearisome now. Nearing the highway he paused, watchful, like a dog scenting. No alien sights or sounds disturbed him. The faint smell of gasoline—was it his imagination? The parallel ruts lay stolid, unchurned; there were no other following or coming back.

  Stepping across them again he peered southward. Savior or destroyer? Mystery was danger; knowledge, the old cliché had it, was power. The presence of the tracks resolved nothing; neither Erika nor he had been proven finally right or wrong. But whatever the character of the jeep’s occupants, crude or gentle, sage or bumpkin, they portended no good to him. They represented a line of development in which he had no place.

  Suddenly his depression lifted, Cro-Magnon had not fathered modern man after all. There was survival and there were the blind alleys of evolution. There was no guarantee that by the standards which ultimately counted the jeep represented superiority and he inferiority. Or more aptly, fitness and unfitness. Tomorrow he would work on the dam. When that was finished he would make the shelter into a genuine cabin. The boy was four; soon he could be taught to read. For that matter there was much he could teach Erika.

  He had been supine; he acknowledged it freely. But from now on things would be different. Perhaps he had needed the shock of the jeep to shake him back into struggling. Force himself to learn to do things for which he had no talent.

  He took even more care than usual to avoid the scuffed path. Once the dam was built he could utilize the small clear patches for cultivation. Though the seeds were ruined he might still search out domesticated plants gone wild and coax them back.

  He had known the looters and ravishers would come; it was to avoid them he had the station wagon packed and waiting against the day of necessity. But wasn’t it true he had also foretold, dimly perhaps, the jeep and the way of life represented by the jeep? He had built no mammoth concrete shelter underground, nor had he tried to find refuge on some remote Pacific island. His had been the middle, sensible course, as befitted a survivor and the prototype of survivors.

  In time, might it not even be possible that the mutual reserve and distrust which had grown up between him and Erika would dissolve? That they were man and woman was far less important than that they were father and daughter.

  She was not outside the shelter, nor was the fire going. “Erika,” he called, hoping she had already mended the briefcase. “Erika?”

  “Erika,” echoed the boy.

  Mr. Jimmon eased him down from his back; put the fish and mussels next to the fireplace. He laid his rod beside the stream, unreeling all of the line that had been dampened, washing the salt water off carefully. Then he looped it loosely over the bushes to dry. Only then did he go inside. “Erika?”

  He took a handful of the dry moss kept in reserve and went back to the fireplace. Careless of her to let it go out that way, knowing from experience how long it took to make a new one. On the fourth try a spark struck from the flint-and-steel made a filament of moss glow; he blew it quickly into flame and fed it slowly with crisp pine needles. A quick start for once.

  When the fire was established he added small brush and laid on three medium-sized boughs. He scooped up a small quantity of water into the bottom of the kettle and dumped in the mussels. Then he set the two bass as close to the fire as he could without danger of them scorching.

  “The hunter home from the hill,” he muttered, returning to the shelter. Her watch was gone from its accustomed place. Now why would she.… The briefcase lay on the ground, unmended.

  The boy came in and stood beside him. “I’m hungry now. Where’s Erika?”

  “In a minute,” he answered; “in a minute.”

  “Hungry,” repeated the boy.

  Reluctantly Mr. Jimmon began his search. Rifle and shotgun were intact in their hiding places. So was the other fishing rod, something no one bent on robbery would have missed. And the two steel bows. He hesitated before looking further.

  The revolver’s cache was empty, and three separate repositories for its cartridges had been cleaned out. There was no possibility of doubting. There really never had been. Duty. Pity in her voice under the elation. Ruthlessn
ess-unsentimentality.

  Mr. Jimmon spoke gently. “Come on, Eric. There’s a fish for you and one for me; by the time they’re gone the mussels will be done.”

  It was the first time, so far as he could remember, that he’d called or even thought of the boy by name. Needs eggs and greens; warm covers at night.

  “Where’s Erika? I want Erika.”

  “I’m afraid Erika has gone away for a while,” said Mr. Jimmon soothingly. “Looking for something. You and I will have to make out as best we can without her. Come on now Eric, eat your fish; tomorrow we’ll look for gulls’ eggs. And there might be berries not too far away.”

  Mr. Jimmon regarded his own fish with distaste. His tooth had finally begun to ache. Badly.

  A Biography of Ward Moore

  Ward Moore was a talented novelist and short story writer who made significant contributions to the science fiction genre with his keen eye for storytelling. Moore is best known for his novel Bring the Jubilee (1953), an alternate history in which the South won the Civil War, a classic regarded by many as one of the finest of its category.

  Born Joseph Ward Moore on August 10, 1903, in Madison, New Jersey, he and his parents moved to Montreal, Canada, when Moore was five months old to be nearer to his maternal grandmother. He was brought him up in the Jewish faith, which is reflected in some of his works, particularly his two short stories, “Lot” and “Lot’s Daughter” (1953 and 1954). Moore grew up an isolated child, without much interest in school, except for the subjects of history and geography, but he found solace in books and began writing when he was eleven years old.

  After high school, Moore attended Columbia College. In early adulthood in the 1920s, he worked in a series of bookstores in different cities across the United States, reveling in his love of books and meeting fellow book lovers and writers. Moore once even described himself as a “bum” because of his constant changes in jobs, reportedly saying that at various times he had “raised chickens, clerked in bookstores, built houses, contract gardened, ghosted books, copy-edited, been a book review editor, proofreader, on relief and welfare.” In 1929, he settled in California, where he would remain for the rest of his life.