“Indeed you should have. . . save you a long dusty walk-but we’ve got plenty of room, don’t worry about that.”
She took me inside to meet her parents, who greeted me warmly and made me feel definitely overdressed. Their faces showed their age but their bodies had no sag and few wrinkles.
Since dinner was an occasion, they let the chickens live and instead opened a can of beef, steaming it along with a cabbage and some potatoes. To my plain tastes it was equal to most of the gourmet fare we’d had on the dirigible and in London.
Over coffee and goat cheese (they apologized for not having wine; the commune would have a new vintage out in a couple of weeks), I asked what kind of work I could do.
“Will,” Mr. Potter said, “I don’t mind telling you that your coming here is a godsend. We’ve got five acres that are just sitting out there, fallow, because we don’t have enough hands to work them. You can take the plow tomorrow and start breaking up an acre at a time.”
“More potatoes, Daddy?” Marygay asked.
“No, no.. . not this season. Soybeans-cash crop and good for the soil. And Will, at night we all take turns standing guard. With four of us, we ought to be able to do a lot more sleeping.” He took a big slurp of coffee. “Now, what else. . .”
“Richard,” Mrs. Potter said, “tell him about the greenhouse.”
“That’s right, yes, the greenhouse. The commune has a two-acre greenhouse down about a click from here, by the recreation center. Mostly grapes and tomatoes. Everybody spends one morning or one afternoon a week there.
“Why don’t you children go down there tonight.. show Will the night life in fabulous Freehold? Sometimes you can get a real exciting game of checkers going.”
“Oh, Daddy. It’s not that bad.”
“Actually, it isn’t. They’ve got a fair library and a coin-op terminal to the Library of Congress. Marygay tells me you’re a reader. That’s good.”
“Sounds fascinating.” It did. “But what about guard?”
“No problem. Mrs. Potter-April-and I’ll take the first four hours-oh,” he said, standing, “let me show you the setup.”
We went out back to “the tower,” a sandbag hut on stilts. Climbed up a rope ladder through a hole in the middle of the hut.
“A little crowded in here, with two,” Richard said.
“Have a seat.” There was an old piano stool beside the hole in the floor. I sat on it. “It’s handy to be able to see all the field without getting a crick in your neck. Just don’t keep turning in the same direction all the time.”
He opened a wooden crate and uncovered a sleek rifle, wrapped in oily rags. “Recognize this?”
“Sure.” I’d had to sleep with one in basic training. “Army standard issue T-sixteen. Semi-automatic, twelve-caliber tumblers-where the hell did you get it?”
“Commune went to a government auction. It’s an antique now, son.” He handed it to me and I snapped it apart.
Clean, too clean.
“Has it ever been used?”
“Not in almost a year. Ammo costs too much for target practice. Take a couple of practice shots, though, convince yourself that it works.”
I turned on the scope and just got a washed-out bright green. Set for nighttime. Clicked it back to log zero, set the magnification at ten, reassembled it.
“Marygay didn’t want to try it out. Said she’d had her fill of that. I didn’t press her, but a person’s got to have confidence in ther tools.”
I clicked off the safety and found a clod of dirt that the range-finder said was between 100 and 120 meters away.
Set it at 110, rested the barrel of the rifle on the sandbags, centered the clod in the crosshairs, and squeezed. The round hissed out and kicked up dirt about five centimeters low.
“Fine.” I reset it for night use and safetied it and handed it back. “What happened a year ago?”
He wrapped it up carefully, keeping the rags away from the eyepiece. “Had some jumpers come in. Fired a few rounds and scared ’em away.”
“All right, what’s a jumper?”