“Cack,” she said. Norvell winced. “If you can’t get tar paper, see if you can find something else to make shingles out of. Sheet tin will do.”
“So will the roof off a G.M.L,” Shep said sourly, but he made a note. He tossed a couple of rations to the waiting kids, who took them and pushed their empty truck away. He said, “Anything else?”
Virginia, suddenly a hostess, said, “Oh, I suppose not. Care for a drink?”
Norvell, for politeness’ sake, took a sip of the bottle Virginia produced—”Ration-jack,” she called it; got by trading firewood with the evil-eyed octogenarian in the house next door. He didn’t like it. The ration-jack tasted like the chewy fruit bars he had enjoyed until then, when he found them
in Ms ration pack; but the taste was overlaid with the bite of forty-proof alcohol. Beer was what he really_Jiked. They didn’t seem to have beer in Belly Rave.
Shep and Virginia were talking; Norvell let the conversation drift past him. He sat back, bone-weary. Physical weariness was a new thing to Norvie Bligh. He had never had it as a child, never had it at General Recreations.
Why was it that doing nothing involved physical labor, and doing actual creative, productive work—running a Field Day, for instance—involved only the work of the mind? Norvie admitted it to himself: Already he was taking on the coloration of Belly Rave. Like its other discouraged, hopeless inhabitants, he was living for the day and ignoring the morrow. Rations and a place to sleep. Perhaps it would not be long, he told himself wonderingly, before he would be one of the simians queueing up at Monmouth Stadium.
Unless he found something to do. But what was there to do? Work on the house? The essentials were done; the bars were up, the trash was carted out into the street, where by and by it would slump into a featureless heap like all the other middens along the road. The less urgent things to do couldn’t be done. You couldn’t fix the lesser roof leaks—no shingles. You couldn’t fix the stairs—no materials; no tools. And no skill.
He said excitedly, oblivious of the fact that he was interrupting, “Virginia! How about starting a garden? A couple of fruit trees—orange, maybe. A few rows of——”
Virginia laughed and laughed, almost hysterically. Even Shep chuckled. Virginia said, “Orange trees don’t grow around here, my dear husband. Nothing else does, either. You start digging out there and first you go through two feet of garbage and trash, then maybe six inches of cinder and filL Then you hit the real pay-dirt. Sand.”
Norvell sighed. “There must be something to do.”
Shep offered, “You could paint your dump, if you’re feeling ambitious. I know where there’s some house paint.”
Norvell sat up, interested. He accepted the bottle of ration-jack and took a small swallow. “Paint? Why not? No reason why we can’t keep the place looking decent, is there?”
Shep shrugged. “Depends. If you want to start some kind of a business, paint’s a good advertisement. If you want to just
drift, maybe you don’t want to advertise. You make yourself too conspicuous, people get ideas.”
Norvell said, dampened, “You mean robbers?”
Virginia reached for the bottle of ration-jack. “Cack,” she said dispassionately, taking a long swallow. “We aren’t painting.”
There was a long pause. In the G.M.L. bubble-house, Norvell reminded himself, Virginia had never let it be in doubt who was boss, but she had seldom demonstrated her power in front of outsiders.
But they weren’t hi the bubble-house any more.
/ want Arnie, Norvell cried to himself, suddenly miserable. It isn’t working out right at all, not the way he said it would. He said it would be a chance to express myself, to make something of my marriage, to be on my own. And it’s not that at all!
He reclaimed the bottle of ration-jack. It tasted by now quite disgusting; he fleetingly thought that he would never relish those fruit bars again; but he took a long pull.
Shep was saying, “—didn’t do so badly today. Stearns gave me a little trouble, and if Norvie hadn’t held a gun on nun I might not have got the stuff so easy.”