Mrs. Goudeket looked at her appraisingly. All she said was, "I guess
he's pretty busy."
Mickey Groff coughed. "Uh, the diner up the hill is in business, Mrs.
Goudeket. We were just about to go up and get something to eat. Would
you like to come along?"
"Why not? Then I got to find a car to get back to the hotel. Imagine,"
she laughed. "One hundred and sixty guests, and the only one there to
keep an eye on them is Dave Wax. Believe me, Goudeket's Green Acres
is one place they'll never come back to again!" She was very gay
about it, Groff thought.... If you didn't look too closely. He had a
sudden picture in his mind of what the last twenty-four hours meant
to Goudeket's Green Acres and to Mrs. Goudeket herself. One hundred
and sixty guests. At, say, five dollars per day per head. Over eight
hundred dollars a day; and out of that you could pay for the putting
green and the swimming pool, pay the salaries of the cooks, trumpet
player and chambermaids and busboys, pay the installments on the
mortgage and the electric bill. And squeeze out a profit; enough to
keep you for a year on what you made in a summer. But, although your
one hundred and sixty guests could cancel themselves out overnight,
reservations or no reservations, you couldn't cancel the trumpet player
or the mortgage or the putting green....
They had to wait in line, but they finally got a booth in the diner.
The menu was soup, sandwiches, and stew--apparently slapped together in
a hurry out of what would otherwise have spoiled in the refrigerator.
There still was no power; evidently the diner was operating its stoves
on bottled gas.
But it tasted good to all three of them. Outside the diner again, with
coffee in cartons for Groff and Polly Chesbro for them to drink at
their leisure, Mrs. Goudeket said, "Listen, what are you going to do
now? You still have business here, Mickey?"
Groff shrugged. "That's what I came up for. But I doubt I can do
anything about it today."
"So stay overnight at Goudeket's Green Acres," she said hospitably.
"You think we can get back there?"
"Must be somebody with a car. I can pay."
Groff looked around. There were a lot of cars, and not many of them
were going. As he watched, a big sedan chugging down the road with a
load of dirty-faced children coughed and stopped. A man in a Legion
cap, red-eyed and bearded, got out and wearily opened the door for the
kids. They apathetically began to trudge down the hill to the temporary
hospital.
"Out of gas," Groff said. "They're all running out of gas."
And then one car that was not out of gas, a low-slung sports job, came
rocketing along the road, took a turn too fast and skidded on the
mud-slick street. Its fishtail swerved left into a fire hydrant with
a crash that made the dishes behind the diner counter rattle. On the
rebound the car's remaining energy sent it nosing to the right through
the plate window of a clothing store. By then it was burning fiercely
from the tail. Two figures, dark in the glare of burning gas, spilled
frantically from the bucket seats and flailed their way through the
smoke and jagged glass.
"Come on!" Groff yelled, a general invitation to perhaps half a dozen
weary, red-eyed men standing about with coffee cartons of their own.
They ran for the smoky blaze; it beat fiercely against Groff's forehead
and cheeks. He found himself almost racing crazily into the flames
before he stopped. Groff peered into the holocaust and saw nothing.
A man tugged his arm, drawing him back a couple of yards. The man said,
preoccupied: "That was Ed von Lutz's little car. A Porsche. Ed's got a
garage, he had that thing for advertising."