Famine Page 7

  ‘Good girl,’ breathed Shearson. ‘Good girl.’

  She lifted herself up a little, and from where he was lying Shearson could see the gingery pattern of pubic hair through the transparent nylon of her panties. But then she reached down between her legs, and pulled the nylon aside, exposing the glistening pink flesh of her vulva. And with an easy, rhythmic motion like a rider settling herself in a saddle, she couched the head of Shearson’s erection between her open lips, and sat down on him, quickly and easily, and right up to the hilt. He let out an odd chuffing sound, like the air brakes on a large truck.

  ‘You big pig,’ Della told him, with that same hooker’s smile. ‘You great gross hog of a man.’

  Shearson didn’t make love like other men: he was too fat for that. Instead, he expected his lovers to gallop on top of him, while he responded with a kind of wallowing undulation. But he was big enough to go very deep, and to stretch his women to their utmost, and while his body may not have been agile, he had hands that could twist and squeeze, or could just as arousingly touch and tickle and tease. While Della moved up and down on him, sliding up and down with ever-increasing excitement and tension, he gripped the round soft cheeks of her bottom and parted them like a diner breaking a soft bread-roll, and then sent his middle finger on a dark and erotic exploration of the doughy interior. Della, in spite of herself, in spite of everything she felt, found herself pushing her hips harder and deeper on to Shearson’s cushioned thighs, and it was only on the very brink of orgasm that she had a vivid and uncompromising insight into what she was actually doing, and that she saw Shearson’s fatness for what it was.

  Then – it was too late. Her body was already quaking; her breasts were already shuddering; and Shearson was ejaculating inside her in measured, laconic spurts of sperm.

  She climbed off him too quickly. He sensed her distaste. But he stayed where he was on the ottoman and watched her with dispassion as she stepped across the room and picked up her wrap. She found it easier to face him once she had covered herself up, although he had left her with a slimy reminder of his appetites which was sliding down her thigh.

  ‘Well,’ he said, easing himself up into a sitting position. ‘I suppose that means yes. What you did, I mean. I suppose that amounts to acceptance.’

  She nodded, her head jerking like a marionette. ‘Yes,’ she said, in her briskest liberated-female-reporter manner. ‘Yes, it does. I’ll send in my resignation to the Kansas City Herald-Examiner as soon as your fund raising committee is ready to roll.’

  ‘You’re a sensible girl,’ he said. ‘Will you pass me my undershorts? And my cigar?’

  She carried over his drooping white undershorts with as much grace as she could manage; and his cigar, pinched between finger and thumb like some kind of unpleasant dropping. He lit it again, and puffed up some figured clouds of pungent blue smoke.

  ‘This isn’t an easy world, Della,’ he said, as if he was trying to excuse himself for what he had just forced her to do. ‘We all have to go out and get what we want, as rough and as tough as we have to. It’s the only way.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’ll excuse me if I go to the bathroom.’ Shearson sat on the ottoman for a minute or two after she’d gone, and then heaved himself up and laboriously stepped into his undershorts. He was mopping the sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief when, in complete silence, his Puerto Rican manservant Billy appeared at the door. Billy was a small man, slender and nervous and narrow-chested, with a face as oval and white as a blanched almond.

  ‘Peter Kaiser on the telephone for you, sir.’

  Peter Kaiser was his personal assistant. Shearson waved his hand dismissively. ‘Tell him to call back in the morning. What time is it, Billy?’

  ‘Eleven, sir. He says it’s very urgent, sir.’

  Shearson took his cigar out of his mouth and frowned at the smouldering tip. For some reason, this one wasn’t burning right. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But this is the last call tonight. You understand that? Mrs McIntosh and I have a great deal of important business to discuss.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Billy, without a single hint of insolence. Shearson waddled over to his armchair, sat down, and picked up the telephone.

  ‘Peter?’ he said. ‘What the hell’s so damned urgent you have to call me at this hour? I have guests.’

  ‘I know. Senator. Billy told me.’

  ‘All right,’ said Shearson, in a patronising tone. ‘You can cut out the little-league superiority. All I want to know is why you’re calling.’

  ‘It’s to do with this blight. Senator. You know the wheat problems they’ve been having in Kansas?’

  ‘I do have a passing acquaintance with the problem,’ said Shearson. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve just been discussing a Blight Crisis Appeal with Alan Hedges. I was going to fill you in tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, the fact is. Senator, it’s worse,’ said Peter. Shearson sniffed. ‘Worse? What do you mean by worse? Worse than what?’

  ‘Worse than it was before. Much worse. I’ve had two urgent and confidentials from Dick Turnbull in the past three hours. The wheat blight is spreading like crazy. Dick estimates five hundred thousand acres already. And now we’ve got nine major farmers in Iowa reporting a similar kind of blight on their com and soybean crops.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ asked Shearson. ‘Com and soybean too?’

  ‘All the reports have been authenticated,’ said Peter. ‘There are six or seven more which haven’t been checked back yet, including two reports of fruit and vegetable blight in California.’

  Shearson rubbed his jowls thoughtfully. ‘What about the media?’ he asked. ‘Any trouble from them yet?’

  ‘Not too much, although the Wall Street Journal’s been pestering me for most of the evening. That may give us a little time – maybe until the morning – but we won’t be able to hold it back for very much longer. It seems like every darned crop in the whole darned country’s going rotten.’

  Shearson said, ‘Listen, Peter – I want you to keep a tight rein on what the media get to hear about. Right at the moment, I don’t want a panic. I’m trying to set up this appeal fund to help farmers whose crops have been destroyed by the blight, and if everybody starts running about like blue-assed baboons, then it’s going to spoil the whole presentation. The minute the public themselves start to feel threatened by what’s happening, they’ll lose all interest in giving aid to the farmers.’

  ‘Well, all right,’ said Peter, dubiously. ‘But what am I going to tell the press if they put it to me point-blank?’

  ‘Tell them there’s a crop blight crisis. Tell them it’s serious. But tell them we have whole teams of experts working on a solution, and we expect to be dusting with proven antidotes within the week. If they want figures, tell them we don’t anticipate anything worse than an eight per cent cereal crop shortfall.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Peter. ‘Supposing they go take a look for themselves?’

  ‘Use your head,’ retorted Shearson. ‘All press and television people are up against deadlines. You think they’re going to be able to take a look at the whole of Kansas before tomorrow morning’s editions? They’ll take one or two stock shots and leave it at that.’

  ‘All right, Senator, if you say so,’ said Peter. ‘Do you want me to keep you in touch throughout the night?’

  ‘Tonight, I’m busy,’ Shearson growled. ‘Call me at seven tomorrow morning. Oh – and there’s one thing you can do. Get in touch with the agricultural research laboratories and see how they’re progressing with their analysis.’

  ‘Okay, Senator. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

  Della appeared at the living-room door, with her hair brushed and her make-up restored. There was a faint stiffness about her smile, but Shearson was too pleased to notice it. ‘You wait till you hear what’s happened,’ he grinned. ‘It seems like every damned farmer in the whole middle West is getting hit by this blight. So if we play our cards right, if we can keep the public’s
personal anxiety way down low and their sympathy way up high, we might be in for more than we originally bargained for.’

  Della said, ‘Good,’ in an abstracted voice, and then walked over to the cocktail cabinet, where she poured herself three fingers of scotch, straight-up, and drank it back without blinking.

  Six

  It was a dry, hot, windy morning. The sky over southern Kansas was already the odd mauvish colour of burned notepaper. Ed drove Season and Sally along Highway 54 into Wichita with the air-conditioning in his Caprice stationwagon right down to freeze. Every time he glanced in his rear-view mirror he could see the three Gucci suitcases packed in the back, with the tags that read LAX.

  Season was wearing a smart camel-coloured suit, and her hair was tied back with a scarf. Sally had brought along her favourite dolly, a floppy and unsavoury rag creature with bright pink hair. Its name was Merry, for reasons that Ed and Season had never quite managed to understand.

  They didn’t talk much. There wasn’t very much to say. He had tried this morning to ask her not to go, as they lay – side by side in their soft curtained bed; but she had kissed him, and said that it was necessary for her own survival. He had made love to her, more doggedly than passionately, and afterwards she had lain there amongst the rose-patterned sheets and smiled at him gently, but still without changing her mind. He knew she had to go, too. She needed to remind herself that Kingman County wasn’t the whole world, and that South Burlington wasn’t the sum of her life and her intelligence.

  All he had said to her over breakfast was, ‘You’ll come back, won’t you, when you’ve made up your mind?’

  Sally had looked up from her bowl of Grape Nuts, puzzled. Season had touched her lips with her fingertip to tell Ed that he shouldn’t say any more. But a few minutes later, she had said, gently, ‘You know I will.’

  The early sun had shone through the window across the breakfast table, and with Dilys bustling at the stove in her gingham apron, the kitchen had taken on all the appearance of one of those happy 1950s television series, the ones where hearty neighbours kept popping in through a swing door, and everybody ate heaps of bacon and sausage-links and wheatcakes, and never suffered anything worse than an occasional misunderstanding.

  ‘I’ll call you when we get there,’ said Season, as they approached Wichita Airport. A DC10 was making its approach over on their right and it flashed silver in the morning light before it sank towards the runway. The going-away smell of airplane fuel penetrated the car’s air-conditioning, and Ed suddenly felt very lonesome and even frightened, as if he would never see Season again. Not to hold anyway, and not to love.

  He turned right into the airport, and drove them up to the terminal building. ‘I didn’t buy you anything to take with you,’ he said. ‘Do you want a book, a magazine, something like that?’

  Season shook her head. ‘I believe I’ll have quite enough thinking to do. And Sally’s never flown over the Grand Canyon before. We’ll keep busy.’

  He turned to her, and placed his hand over hers. ‘Well,’ he said hoarsely, ‘there’s one thing I’d like you to take with you.’

  She looked at him, but didn’t say anything. He lowered his head, because somehow that made it easier to hold back his emotion. ‘I’d like you to take my love with you,’ he said, wishing the words didn’t sound so much like a Valentine card. ‘And I’d like you to take my best wishes for everything that you do. I love you, Season, and there ain’t two ways about it.’

  She kissed him, and her lips were very warm, and she smelled of Joy. ‘I love you, too, Ed. Really dearly I do. And I’m going to miss you badly. But I know that when I get back, I’m going to have my head straightened out and everything’s going to be fine.’

  ‘Why don’t you come. Daddy?’ asked Sally. ‘You could take me swimming and everything, and Auntie Vee says we’ll go to the ocean.’

  Ed turned in his seat and took her hand. ‘I’ve got to harvest all of our wheat, honey, or we won’t have any food to eat for the next year. But maybe I’ll be able to come next time.’

  ‘I love you. Daddy,’ said Sally. ‘And Merry loves you, too.’

  Ed kissed her. ‘I love you, honey.’

  He got out of the car. The day was roastingly hot, even though it was only ten o’clock, and the sun rippled off the sidewalk in corrugated waves. He opened the back of the stationwagon, and hefted out their cases. A sky-cap with a bright red face and prickly hair was waiting to collect them.

  ‘Los Angeles?’ the skycap asked.

  Ed nodded. Then he went around to open the car doors for Season and Sally.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I won’t wait. I have an appointment with Dr Benson at the agricultural laboratory.’

  Season held him close. ‘Goodbye, Ed,’ she said, and she was crying. She took hold of Sally’s hand and the two of them walked quickly across the sidewalk and into the reflecting doors of the terminal. Ed stood watching them go, and then he slowly took out his handkerchief and rubbed the sweat from the back of his neck, and maybe some of the tension, too. He climbed back into his car and started the motor.

  For a moment, he closed his eyes.

  He hadn’t said much to Season this morning about the wheat blight. It was a little worse, he’d admitted, but he was sure they could get it under control. What he hadn’t told her was that Willard had come knocking at the kitchen door at six-thirty in the morning, while Ed had been sitting at the table drinking his first cup of coffee of the day and reading the papers, and that Willard had already been out with Dyson Kane on a circular helicopter tour of the whole spread.

  Willard had calculated that almost an eighth of their total wheat acreage had been blighted during the night, and that the disease was spreading even faster than before. If they didn’t find some way of curbing it by Monday or Tuesday, they were going to lose everything.

  Ed had shown Willard the news story in the Kansas City Herald-Examiner. Considering how widespread the blight had been, and how many major Kansas farms had been hit, the coverage had seemed almost offhand. It had rated only a second lead on page three, and ‘Our Agricultural Desk’ had simply reported that ‘several Kansas wheat farmers have noticed an unidentified blight on their late crops’, while ‘Our Washington Bureau’ had remarked with distinct unconcern that ‘federal researchers are busy analysing the blight and working on new methods for bringing it under prompt control.’

  In fact, Ed had been so disturbed by the paucity of the news story that he had already called Walter Klugman, who owned the neighbouring Penalosa Farm, and checked if his crops were just as seriously affected.

  ‘Oh, you bet,’ Walter had said. ‘If anything, mine’s worse than yours. I’ve got thirty per cent of my wheat crop turned rotten, and if the state don’t come up with something soon. I’m going to burn the whole damned spread.’

  Even when Ed and Willard had turned on the television for the early-morning news, the stories about the wheat blight had been dismissive and superficial. ‘Not a good year for the wheat farmers of Kansas and North Dakota,’ ABC had reported. ‘They’re bothered by a mystery disease which is turning hundreds of acres of harvest-ready crops into black, stinking decay. But federal scientists are said to have the problem in hand, and there’s also news that Kansas Senator Shearson Jones, known for years as the “Farmers’ Friend”, is planning on setting up an appeal fund to help those farmers who might face financial hardship because of the blight.’

  Willard, helping himself to a cup of coffee, had shaken his head and whistled. ‘Financial hardship? The way things are going, we’re all going to be wiped out.’

  As he drove over the Wichita Valley Flood Control gully, and along Douglas Avenue to the civic centre, Ed tuned into the news on his car radio. But there was nothing at all about the blight – just some long-winded story about a teacher from Wellington who was trying to bring back compulsory prayers. ‘We’ve been without God for nigh on thirty years,’ she was saying. ‘It’s time we turned our faces ba
ck in his direction.’

  Ed parked the stationwagon in the civic centre parking lot, and took his brown-tinted sunglasses out of the glove-box. Then he walked across the wide, glaring pedestrian precinct, until he reached the shiny office building which announced itself as the Kansas State Agricultural Laboratory – not only with a plaque of brushed stainless-steel, but with a bronze statue of a smiling family growing out of a giant ear of wheat.

  Inside, it was cold, echoing, and smelled of polish. A girl receptionist with bright red lipstick and a Titian-tinted beehive hairstyle directed Ed to the ninth floor. He stood in the elevator next to a man in a white lab-coat who was carrying a cardboard box marked ‘Infected Rodents’ and humming Peace In The Valley. There were times when he agreed with Season about Kansas. If you came from New York, or any city larger than Cleveland, you could quite readily believe that the Kansas state mentality was solid cereal from ear to ear.

  He walked along the ninth-floor corridor until he reached a half-open office door marked Dr Nils Benson, Head of Disease Control. He knocked.

  Dr Benson was standing by the window, peering at a 35mm colour slide. He shouted, ‘Come in!’ very loudly, and then swung around on his heels to see who his visitor was. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘It’s Mr Hardesty, isn’t it? Mr Hardesty of South Burlington Farm.’

  ‘You came around at Christmas when I was having that seedling problem,’ said Ed. ‘How are you doing?’

  Dr Benson shook his hand. He was a tall, sixtyish man with a marked stoop of the shoulders – mainly brought on by his chronic shortsightedness and his habit of attacking anything that interested him like a Greater Prairie Chicken. He wore large round eyeglasses, and his hair was fraying and white, but whenever he took his glasses off, he looked strangely boyish and young. It was common knowledge in Wichita that Dr Benson had lost his homely but vigorous wife to an interstate truck driver, and that for years he had suffered an alcoholic problem. Some of his unkinder colleagues called him ‘Booze Benson’.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Dr Benson, lifting a heap of Scientific Americans off his desk, hesitating a moment, and then dropping them on to the floor. The floor was already littered with stacks of alphabetical files, graph paper, magazines, books, and empty Kentucky Chicken boxes. On the walls there were federal information posters on the comparative effects of various fertilising agents.