The man in the filling station was clearly of two minds about it, but
finally he buttoned up his raincoat and pulled on his hat and came out
to Mickey Groff's car. "Sorry to make you come out in the rain like
this," Groff said. "Fill it up, will you?"
He rolled up the window and picked out the least soaked wad of Kleenex
to wipe the mist off the inside of the windshield. The car radio
stopped playing show tunes and began to talk about freezer food plans.
Groff snapped it off and leaned back to watch the turning dials on the
gas pump. By the time the man had put back the cap and sloshed around
to the window Groff had the exact change ready in his hand. "How far is
it to Hebertown?"
"Five miles," the attendant said, and went inside without counting the
money. As Groff pulled out he saw the lights go out on the pumps and
the big sign overhead.
You couldn't blame him, he thought; there weren't enough cars out in
this rain to make it worth while. He had been lucky to find even one
station open.
It was nearly impossible to see the road, no matter how hard the
windshield wipers worked. Rain was spraying in somehow; all the windows
were closed tight, but Groff could feel the thin mist on his face. He
rolled around a long, downgrade curve, and when he touched the brake
for a moment there was a queasy slipping sensation; the rain was coming
down faster than it could flow off the highway.
Foolish to drive all the way to Hebertown, Groff reflected; but the
only alternative, actually, was to take a bus. The railroads didn't
bother much with this little out-of-the-way corner of the state. And
that was something to keep firmly in mind when he talked to the burgess
the next morning, he reminded himself. An industry-hungry town could
make you some tempting offers; there was a firm promise of a tax break
and bank credit, and the suggestion that maybe a suitable factory
building could be turned over to you for nearly nothing at all. But you
had to keep freight differentials in mind too; and what about labor
supply? Well, no; he crossed that off. That was the whole point of the
burgess's cooperative attitude; Hebertown had plenty of available labor
ten months of the year, it was only when the vacationers came up from
New York and the other big cities that local unemployment and the state
of the local tax rolls ceased to be a problem. Still, what about that?
Were you supposed to close down in the months of July and August?
He shifted in his seat, forcing himself to lean back--it did no good
to peer into the rain--and tried to relax. Mickey Groff was a big man
and not used to sitting. It gave him a cramped, unwelcome feeling of
confinement.
There was a light ahead; it turned out to be a store with a neon sign
that said _Sam's Grocery_, but it gave Groff enough help to let him
pick up his speed to nearly thirty-five miles an hour. He had been
nearly an hour covering the last twenty miles, he saw irritably. Of
course, it didn't matter--it meant just one hour less to spend sitting
in the lobby of the Heber House, since there wasn't a thing he could do
until the next morning in this rain. But why did he have to pick this
particular Thursday to come up?
He passed the store, and at once the road was invisible in front of him
again. He tramped on the brake, slipped and skidded, and straightened
out. That was foolish, he told himself. He carefully slowed as the road
curved again....
Not enough. It was the other car's fault, of course; he saw the lights
raging at him down the middle of the road and automatically pulled over
quickly. At once he felt the sidewise slip and sway of the skid, but
it was too late to do anything about it.
* * * * *
It _could_ have been worse. Thank God there was a good wide shoulder
right there. The only thing was, he seemed to be stuck in the mud.
Mickey Groff wasn't much of a waiter. There wasn't a showdog's chance
of a car stopping to help him, of course--even if one came by, they'd
hardly be able to see him. Anyway, Sam's Grocery couldn't be more than
a quarter of a mile back along the road, and from there he could phone
for a wrecker--or at worst, if the wreckers had their own problems on
a night like this, for a cab to get him into Hebertown. Once the rain
stopped, it wouldn't be much of a problem to get pulled out of the mud.
He almost changed his mind when he stepped out into the rain, but by
the time he had locked the car door behind him it was too late--it was
hard to imagine how he could get any wetter than he was. Mickey Groff
had heard of rain coming down in sheets, but he had never experienced
it before. This was something beyond all expectations; in ten seconds
he was wet to the skin, in a minute he was drenched as a Channel
swimmer. There was wind with the rain, too; part of the time it came
swiping at him from the side, stinging into his eyes, infiltrating his
ears, slipping up the cuffs of his sodden sleeves. By the time he got
around the curve in the road he was shaking with chill.
After ten minutes of staggering through the storm he wondered why he
couldn't see the lights of the store. Then he saw why, and it was like
a fist under the heart; the lights were out. There was the store just
ahead, but the neon was black, the windows were black, there was only
the faintest suggestion of a glimmer at the edges of the glass.
He went stumbling across a little gravel parking lot with water
sloshing around his shoes and banged on the door. Then he saw that
there was a light in the back of the store; it was a candle. He tried
the door handle and it opened.
Inside, the noise of the rain changed and dulled; instead of a
slashing at his ears it was a drumming overhead. A man came out of a
storeroom at the back, carrying a gasoline lantern, and the whole store
brightened and began to look more normal.
"Oh," said Mickey Groff. "Your power's out. I thought maybe you were
closing up."
The man said sourly, "I might as well be. Jesus, did you ever see
weather like this in your life? I been here--"
"Have you got a phone?" Groff interrupted.
"Phone's out too."
Groff sluiced some of the water off his face and hair. "Well," he
said. Somehow it hadn't occurred to him that the phones might not be
working. There wasn't much sense in going back to the car again; he
knew a mudded-in wheel when he saw one. You could push blankets and
boards under those rear wheels all night and the mud would just swallow
up what the wheels didn't slide right off. "Maybe you can help me,"
he said. "I'm stuck in the mud down the road and I've got to get into
Hebertown."
The grocer glanced at him appraisingly and then bent to adjust the
flame on the gasoline lantern. "I'm all alone here," he mentioned.
Mickey Groff waited.
"I hate to close up before time," the grocer said virtuously. "I'd like
to help you out--You stuck bad?"
"Pretty bad. Anyway, I can't rock it out. I was hoping to call a tow
truck from Hebertown."
"I got a pickup truck with four-wheel drive," the grocer said
thoughtfully. "You're welcome to wait here till I close if you want to.
Wouldn't be more than a couple of--"
"How about ten bucks if you do it now?"
The grocer's eyes flickered, but he shook his head. "You don't know
the people around here," he complained. "They wait till I'm just ready
to close, and bingo, two-three cars come zooming up. Milk for Junior,
catfood for the cat, coffee, they gotta have coffee, they wouldn't
bother me if it wasn't so jeezly important. Sit down and wait, mister.
It's only--" He squinted at the advertising clock above his door,
shadowed from the flare of the pressure lamp by a stack of tall cans on
a top shelf--"It's only half an hour."
Mickey Groff thought of lying to the man, giving him a story about a
medical emergency or a big deal with a deadline, something he couldn't
decently brush off for the sake of two or three catfood customers.
Then, because he didn't like to lie, he shrugged, made a disgusted
grimace at himself in the near-dark and sat down in a spindle-back
chair to wait out the thirty minutes. He knew what the trouble was;
it was the old thing. He had been born, apparently, geared up about
twenty-five per cent faster than most people. This was very handy in
some ways; he was a Rising Young Businessman at thirty and pretty soon
now he'd be a Rising Young Industrialist. His picture had been printed
in _Nation's Business_ along with eleven other promising youngsters
who owned their own plants, and one day it would appear alone. He knew
it and he knew it would be due to his built-in overgearing. But that
didn't make it any easier to sit and wait for the catfood customers.
The storekeeper--as most people did--sensed his mood. "Like to look at
the paper?" he asked, and handed him an eight-page sheet. It was the
latest--yesterday's--issue of the _Hebertown Weekly Times_. Groff had
studied the last four issues preceding it, as well as those of a dozen
other country papers, trying to get the feel of the communities they
served. On one of those communities he would soon have to stake his
play for the jump from forty employees to a hundred.
He held the paper up to the lamplight and read the main headline,
covering the three right columns. The chair crashed behind him as he
snapped to his feet. "God damn it to hell!" he said.