When Ben asked why she was walking and not driving, she shrugged her shoulders and said she felt like walking, that’s why. Plenty of cars and plenty of time should she decide to drive.
Ben knew better than to question the logic of the young (do the young have logic?), so he let that slide.
“How come, Ben,” she asked, “we’re not all falling over dead from radiation sickness? I mean, I thought great clouds of that stuff would be floating around.”
“Clean bombs,” he replied.
“It is, after a fashion.” Then he told her of the tape he’d heard, and of the Rebels and of the triple cross.
“All that is so confusing to me. Coups. Takeover. Rebels. You’re really a commander of a Rebel army, Ben Raines?”
“I guess so.” He chuckled.
“Where are they?”
“I have no idea, Jerre. It wasn’t my idea.”
“I heard rumors of the Rebels. Just a little bit. Are they radical people?”
“I don’t believe so. Law-and-order types, I’m sure. But Bull Dean was no radical.”
“But he advocated the overthrow of the government, Ben. That’s pretty radical, don’t you think?”
Ben slowly nodded his head. “Yes… yes, that’s true. But one would have to know the Bull, what made him tick. He would not have assumed power for any length of time. What Bull wanted was a return to law and order and morals and discipline. He wasn’t a Castro or some two-bit dictator; just a man who believed very strongly in a government of the people, for the people, and more importantly,
“I don’t believe we’ve had that type of government in a long time, Ben. Do you?”
“No,” he said quickly and flatly. “Government got too big—too powerful. Agencies like the IRS had entirely too much power. Same with most government agencies. Well, it’s all moot, now.”
“But… what’s that line, Ben, about ashes?”
“Tabb. ‘Out of the dead, cold ashes, life again.’”
“Snap judgment time, Ben Raines.” She looked at him, her gaze serious. “I think you’re a pretty good man— decent guy. I think you’ll probably link up with those Rebels.”
“No way, Jerre.”
“Yeah, I think you will, Ben. You’ll have to get your shit together first. But after that… yeah, you will. I’ve read some of your stuff. You’re a dreamer and a romanticist and you’d like to go back about a hundred years—have those kinds of laws. Hell, Ben, maybe you’re right. Maybe that’s what the country needs. No harm in trying, is there?” She winked at him. “General.”
“You’re a nut.” He smiled at her.
“But I’m pretty.”
“Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah, you sure are.”
“Gonna be dark soon, Ben.”
“Yes.” He looked at her ankle. Some of the swelling was gone. “We’ll find a place to sleep down the road. You’ll be all right—safe.”
“I know it.” She spoke the words as though she trusted him. “But the dark scares me,” she admitted. “It didn’t used to scare me until…” She let her sentence trail off to an awkward end. She sat staring into the rushing waters.
“Your parents?”
“It… it was dark when I got back home. Back to Cumberland. I found them in the back yard. All swelled up and gross-looking. I just sat in the den and bawled and hollered. I never felt so alone in my life. Then the guy who lived next door—he made it through, never got sick, or anything—he came over. He lost his whole family and it didn’t seem, at first, to bother him. He said he was going to take care of me, just like I was his daughter. I believed him, so I went with him.” She kicked dirt into the creek.
“He tried to get me drunk later on that night; said it would make me feel better. Then I knew what he was all about. Guys think they’re so smooth, but given a little time, most girls can see through them. If the girl’s got any sense. So I knew what was coming.
“Later on—I thought he’d gone to bed—I tried to slip out of his house, but he was watching for me. We had quite a tussle there on the floor; I marked him pretty good.” She put those startlingly Prussian blue eyes on Ben. Honest eyes. “I’m not a virgin, Ben Raines, but I don’t give it away wholesale, either. And that bastard really pissed me off. I think, had he played it right, I probably would have gone to bed with him. He was a handsome man, and I’d always thought him a nice person. Not that I cared anything about him, but… it would have been… well, someone to hold you—you know. I mean, everything was all screwed up. I don’t know how to explain it.”
Ben knew, but he remained silent, letting Jerre tell it all, her way.
“Finally, he hit me. Boy, did he pop me! When I came out of it, he was ripping my panties off me and talking really wild stuff. Said I was gonna be his private pussy. All kinds of stuff. I got really scared then. Not only because he was trying to rape me, but because I knew then he was really bonkers.
“We were by the fireplace, on the carpet, and when he stood up to take off his pants, I rolled away and grabbed a poker.” Again, she gazed at him. “I think I killed him, Ben. Something popped when I hit him. I don’t think he was breathing. But I wasn’t about to stick around to do any nursing; I’ll tell you that for a fact! I just took off. Got in my dad’s car and left.
“And do you know where I went? Where the damned car quit on me? Smart me! To Wheeling. Talk about a case of the dumb-ass. There was a mob of thugs roaming around. And you know they spotted me. You ever seen one little blond-headed girl trying to break the four-minute mile while being chased by fifty guys, all with their peckers out?”
Despite the gut-wrenching fear Ben knew she must have experienced, the panic within her at the time, he had to laugh at the way she told her story.
“And one of those guys was
“I don’t know that we think about it all the time,” Ben said slowly. “But a man is damned sure ready at a second’s notice.” He felt a little ashamed of himself, for he had already mentally undressed Jerre. He rose from the bank and held out his hand. She took it, her small hand soft in his. He pulled her to her feet.
“We’d better get on the road, Jerre. Find us a place to spend the night. Fix us some dinner.”
“All right,” she said quietly, her eyes studying him.
Ben had fixed a tub of water in which she could soak her ankle, and then had set about cooking dinner. She had eaten as if she had not had a morsel of food in days. Ben then shooed her off to bed.
He lay in his bed that night, and had to smile at all that Jerre had said that afternoon and evening. She was, Ben concluded, a teen-age character. Purely one of a kind, with the open honesty that Ben liked in people. He remembered how she had looked at his weapons, then at him.
“You really know how to shoot all these things?” she had asked.
Ben admitted that he not only did, but had done so, and he told her of the things that had happened to him since leaving Louisiana.
She shuddered as Ben told her of the men in Cairo and what they had planned for him. “That’s gross, Ben!”
He recounted his search for his family, described the men and women in Cairo who would not fight for their lives or property, and his experience with his brother in Chicago, and what he and his friends were planning to do.
She had replied, “It wasn’t just blacks chasing me in Wheeling; some of those guys were pretty decent- looking men. But I think I can understand how your brother and his friends feel.”
“Oh?”
“Sure. That doesn’t mean I agree with them—I don’t; I think they’re wrong. But I don’t believe blacks and whites will ever get along. I mean, it’s too late, now. But that’s the way I feel.”
Ben thought of Kasim, and agreed with her. Then he thought of Cecil and Lila and Salina, and silently
