The burgess of Hebertown wasn't having any luck with his call to the
weather bureau. Because he was the burgess, he had got his own line to
the central office back in service; but the central office was having a
hell of a time getting through to any point outside.
If he had got through, he wouldn't have had much luck either, because
there were plenty of lines down, but practically all the ones that were
left were trying to get onto the same three instruments in the bureau's
outer office.
The chief of bureau was talking into one of them, kept open with a
direct line to the nearest Civil Defense filter center: "Charley?
Here's the latest. No chance of the rain stopping for at least several
hours, that's the big thing. Some places it's hitting an inch an hour.
There's all that wet air that Diane pulled in from the Atlantic, and
now the winds have pushed it up; when it gets cold the water has to
come out. How much?" He blinked at the phone; he had been in that
office for seventeen hours and, he suddenly remembered, he'd never got
around to having lunch sent up. "Call it ten inches, average through
the area affected. What?" He sat up straight. "Now listen, Charley!
I've busted forecasts and I've admitted it; but you can't hang this one
on me--"
The station duty forecaster, on the phone next to him, was saying:
"Sure, we're sticking by our forecast. Go ahead and print it. Flood
damage? No, I can't give you anything; not our line. Please, won't you
read the forecast? We said heavy rain. We said prospect of danger from
flooding because the soil is saturated--no room for the rain to soak
in, it has to run off somewhere. The only thing we didn't say was
'positively.'" He hung up, but didn't take his hand off the phone; it
would ring again in seconds. It didn't much matter what they printed,
of course; the newspaper that had been on the wire was in a town that
had grown rich from the two rivers that joined in its heart, and the
forecaster had his own feelings about what those two rivers might do.
He took his other hand off the clipboard and found he had crumpled
their copy for the last forecast into a ball. He tossed it in the
basket, hardly hearing his chief shouting into the phone next to him;
it didn't matter, he knew it by heart now anyhow, but as the phone rang
again, he made a dive and recovered the forecast. He smoothed it out
carefully. It might, he suddenly realized, be very important indeed,
over the next weeks and months when the investigating commissions and
legislative committees began sniffing through the debris.
* * * * *
Mrs. Chesbro came smiling into the burgess's office. "Excuse me," she
said. "I knocked, but you were busy on the phone--"
"Not very," said the burgess, slamming the instrument down. Now he
couldn't even get the central office again. "What can I do for you?"
He didn't know the woman. She was expensively dressed; the burgess,
whose wife read _Vogue_, realized that her flat-heeled leather shoes,
her matching waterproof tweed coat and cap, her neat leather gloves all
were imported and expensive. For the rest, she was a small blonde in
her twenties with a careful, conciliatory look on her face.
"I'm Mrs. Arthur Chesbro," she said. "Arthur and I drove over from
Summit to see you. Arthur let me off and then he decided he'd better
move the car to a little higher ground, the top of that little shopping
street you have, Sullivan Street, isn't it? After General Sullivan, I
suppose? And he'll be right along and then you two can get on with your
little talk."
The burgess looked at her vaguely, her chatter only half comprehended.
If she had been a man he would have said something like: "I'm sorry
but I'm tied up now; write me a letter and we'll make an appointment."
Since she was a woman his old-fashioned notions ruled that out.
"I didn't expect Mr. Chesbro," he began. "I've got so much on my
mind right now with the rain--" He noted with wry amusement that
he had started to say "flood" and changed the word. Civic pride or
superstition?--"that I don't think this is the best time for a meeting.
Could you go and head him off, Mrs. Chesbro? It can't be urgent."
"Arthur thinks it is," she said. "A man phoned him from New York that
this Mickey Groff is on his way and Arthur swore around the house for
fifteen minutes and then told me to get out the car and, well, here I
am." She could ask for a favor and keep her dignity. "I'm sure it won't
take more than a minute. Arthur says it's all cut and dried."
Chief Brayer came in without knocking. His black slicker streamed and
his mustache was limp. "Henry," he said to the burgess, "I make it
twelve feet and rising at the Sullivan Street bridge. In thirty-five
it was only eight feet and in thirty-nine it was only nine and a half.
What's going on down in the Hollow, God only knows. Anyway, I'd better
get down there with all the boys. All right?"
"Sure, Red. Get on down. Send somebody to my place in a car with a
trailer hitch; have 'em tow my boat down to the Hollow. It's all set up
on the trailer in the garage, ready to go." He grinned wryly. "I was
thinking I might take Bess up to Cayuga for a day on the water."
Mrs. Chesbro looked on blankly.
"Great," the chief said. "It's got a good spotlight, too. We'll need
that. If you don't mind a suggestion, Henry, I'd turn out the fire
department and have them standing by. You may need some able-bodied men
in a hurry. Twelve feet and rising--" He hurried from the office.
"Excuse me," the burgess said to Mrs. Chesbro, and tried the
interphone on his desk. It worked; so far the main to the north end of
the borough had not been flooded and shorted out.
"Fire chief," said the interphone.
"This is Henry, Chief. Red Brayer thinks, and I agree, that you should
sound the general alarm for the volunteers, that they should be
standing by in the engine house with their cars parked in the square.
The Hollow's filling up fast--at least it must be; the water's twelve
feet and rising at the bridge."
"Right, Henry. That all?"
"For the present, yes," the burgess sighed. He clicked the box off.
Immediately he heard the klaxon on top of the building hoot three
longs, then pause and hoot again and then again. It was the Emergency
Muster signal, and it would galvanize fifty men scattered throughout
the borough into dropping whatever they were doing, tearing to their
cars and speeding to the borough hall, or more exactly to its ground
floor left wing where the fire department--two LaFrance pumpers, one
ancient and one beautifully new, two full-time employees, the chief and
the driver--were housed. He hoped they wouldn't be too disappointed
when they found they'd be on a boring standby.
And now, he thought, he really ought to get out and drive around
on a tour of inspection. There wasn't any point to sticking in the
office with the phone out and the firemen and police already committed
to action. He had hoped for some usefulness out of the local radio
station, but it was silent, had been for an hour. The news of the
Hollow explained that; the transmitter tower, a modest spire, was
planted in a marshy field down that way. It had something to do with a
good ground, he had been told once, so they had a good ground and they
were now bugged out the one time they'd be able to do a public service
beyond broadcasting damnfool hillbilly music.
He was reaching for his raincoat, to the dismay of Mrs. Chesbro, when
a big man came in. The burgess recognized him as her husband, the
redoubtable Arthur Chesbro of Summit. He had, quite consciously, had
as little to do with Arthur Chesbro as possible, but there was an
irreducible minimum of contact with the man that couldn't be avoided.
He was all over the place in Summit, a closely neighboring borough, and
he had feelers out through the entire area. You heard of his interest
in this and that--bankrolling a resort, buying a professional building
a county away and turning it over _fast_, snapping up timber rights
to a farmer's woodlot and turning _them_ over to a firm from over the
state line; snatching an FCC television construction permit from under
the nose of heavy competition and then not building the station after
all for mysterious and profitable reasons. He was a leading citizen,
the burgess supposed, but he had nevertheless carefully avoided him
whenever possible. He was not really sure why, but once after a couple
of bourbons with Chief Brayer he had told the chief that he thought
Arthur Chesbro suffered from a case of moral and ethical halitosis.
Physically, Chesbro was a picture of success, rather soaked and winded
success at the moment, having hiked in the rain from Sullivan Street
and climbed the steep stairs to the burgess's second-floor office.
He grasped the burgess's automatically extended hand with a firm and
manly grip. "It's good to see you again, Henry," he intoned. "How's
Bess?"
"Fine, thanks."
"And that boy of yours in medical school?"
"Fine--uh, Arthur." He thought resignedly that you have to go along
with these characters. And maybe, for God's sake, Chesbro actually did
remember Bess and did remember hearing about Ted and actually did wish
them well. Maybe.
"I see you've met my wife, Henry. Well, it looks like quite a nasty
downpour, doesn't it?"
Now he's talking about the weather, for God's sake, to put me at my
ease and get the conversation going on a topic of universal interest.
Always start by talking about the weather; nobody's so shy or so stupid
that he can't think of something to say about the weather. Well, sir,
this time the maxim was going to backfire in Arthur Chesbro's red face.
"Glad you mentioned that, Arthur," the burgess said briskly. "I'm
leaving now. I'm afraid we're in for something worse than we got in
thirty-five and thirty-nine, and I'm going to cruise around and have
a look-see. I don't know why you came to see me on a dirty night like
this, but if you can't put it in a nutshell it'll have to wait."
Arthur Chesbro was disconcerted. "Didn't you see the story in the paper
yesterday, Henry?"
"I've been mighty busy," the burgess apologized, getting into his
raincoat.
"Well, it said, roughly--well, never mind the story. What I want to do
is take the old Swanscomb Mill off the borough's hands and put a tidy
rental into the communal pocket--_and_ hire a few of your local people."
"Sounds fine," the burgess said. He started for the door. "But there's
a fellow with a plant in Brooklyn who's interested too. I understood
he's coming out to see us about it, but I suppose this weather'll hold
him up. I think we'd better table this matter until I hear from him and
have a chance to compare the offers. Now, if you'll excuse me--"
"I never thought," said Chesbro flatly, "that I'd see a neighbor
selling out to foreign interests when he has a bid from a local man."
The burgess took his hand off the doorknob and looked at Chesbro
steadily up and down. "I don't like your language worth a damn,"
he said. "I'd give you a lecture on manners if I didn't have more
important things to do. You can find your way out, can't you?"
Chesbro's eyes dropped, but the burgess thought he could read a look of
calculation on his face. "Sorry," he said. "By the way, my car is just
up the hill. Can I help out?"
"Well," said the burgess, and thought. Might as well save climbing all
the way up West Street--and you couldn't brush off a man who was trying
to do you a favor, just because you thought he stank. "Obliged," he
said. "If you'll drop me at my house I'll pick up my own car."
He waited with Mrs. Chesbro while her husband dashed through the rain.
She didn't talk, which the burgess approved, and once when he met her
eye she gave him a tired smile. The burgess judged that she was onto
her husband, and seldom had anything to smile about.
* * * * *
For that matter, what did anyone have to smile about? The burgess
looked over his borough and hardly heard Artie Chesbro chattering
beside him. The street lamps at the bottom of West Street were out.
One of the big elms that framed the post office was trailing a pair
of enormous branches, broken-winged, across the street; they had to
detour far to the left to pass it. Well, there wouldn't be much traffic
tonight--and you couldn't tell, maybe he'd be lucky and the whole tree
would have to come down; and then they could get on with widening West
Street and the hell with the Garden Club.
They went up over the West Street hill and down the other side.
"--don't know if you've considered the importance of warehousing
facilities in attracting industry," Chesbro was saying in his ear. "War
plants? Sure. They're a dime a dozen, Henry, and they come and fold up
and then where are you? But you take a town that's got a reputation for
good, low-cost--"
The burgess felt entirely too surrounded by Chesbros, with Artie
babbling on one side and the wife, silent on the other. Then they
turned into Sycamore. The burgess leaned forward. Funny, he could
hardly see the highway junction at the bottom of the hill. They rolled
down at forty or so, and then everything happened at once. Something
jumped up out of the pavement ahead of them. "Watch out!" yelled the
burgess. "Jesus!" cried Artie Chesbro, slamming on the brakes and
skidding. It looked like a figure, some crazy kind of figure hard to
make out in the rain, that suddenly started to get up in the middle of
the road; it humped itself and flopped back, and then leaped high in
the air, higher than the roof of the car.
Mrs. Chesbro laughed out loud, nervously.
"Busted water pipe!" cried Artie Chesbro. "Look, Henry, it's a whole
fountain!"
It was a fountain, all right, but it wasn't anything broken. The
burgess swallowed hard. Not in '35, not even in '39, had the storm
sewers backed up hard enough and fast enough to send their manhole lids
flying into the air.