The Resort (31 page)

“With what?”

“Take a branch about this long.” Henry extended his arms. “Here, I’ll show you.” He picked up a dry branch. It was too long. He put one end on the ground, stomped hard on it about a foot from the end, breaking it. “There,” he said. “That’s about the right length.” He tied his handkerchief around the end. “Use your T-shirt. Tear it up. Make two torches. This way we’ll have three of them so we can run in opposite directions, lighting them. You take a third of the area, Jake, and I’ll take the rest, skipping every other pile. Blaustein can follow right behind me, lighting the alternate piles. That’ll be quickest. Got it?”

Jake held his fingers against his mouth to command Henry’s silence.

He turned to look. They all saw the two Cliffhaven-uniformed men walking just beyond and to the right of the building where the score was kept. The men were looking over in their direction.

“They can’t see us,” Jake whispered.

“They always capture everybody,” Blaustein said.

“Shut up,” Jake said. Then to Henry, “You’d better not risk going out there.”

“They’re leaving,” Henry said. He picked up the stick he had used to demonstrate how to make a torch. “I’ll take this with me, just in case.”

“Don’t be foolish,” Jake said. “You’ll be caught.”

“If I don’t return, just do as I said.”

Henry waved at them with his free hand. Only Jake returned the wave. He wondered what Blaustein was thinking.

Henry wove his way through the woods for several hundred yards in the direction of the building that housed the lockers. There would be a long way to crawl to get there unnoticed. Crawling was much more exhausting than running. Besides, how could he crawl carrying this big stick? He could throw the stick away. Suppose he needed it. He could run to the building. That would attract attention. At the edge of the woods, he looked for activity between himself and the building. None. He would chance walking, calmly, as if he belonged there. If someone spotted him, he’d simply run back to the woods, and they’d light the brush fires immediately. If only they’d had a chance to rehearse this!

If the building housing the lockers had its front door locked, how would he get it open? Were there windows? He couldn’t remember.

His heart skipped when he saw the open door. First, a feeling of elation, followed by alarm. If the door was open, one of the Cliffhaven people must be in there. He could hear the sounds he had heard during his four-hour ordeal.

This is not a sensible thing to do,
he thought, as he walked in the door. The Cliffhaven man—he looked like Clete from the back—was fussing with someone at the other end of the room. The man turned around. It wasn’t Clete, someone a bit older, with a moustache.

“What are you doing here?” the moustache said.

It was the young man against Henry’s stick.

“Hey, you must be Brown,” the man said.

The moustache doesn’t seem frightened.
He doesn’t know I’m going to try to kill him,
Henry
thought.

“Give me that stick,” the moustache said.

He’s used to people obeying.

The moustache was walking straight toward him.

The woman he’d been shoving around was crouched against the far wall, staring at Henry.

He is assuming that I am passive like the others, Henry thought. He’s a fool.

When they were five feet apart, the man stopped. “Give me that stick.”

“Sure,” Henry said and, in the same moment, stepped forward with his left foot and, holding the stick as if it were a baseball bat of his youth, swung it with all the strength he could muster against the man’s head. The man’s left arm came up to ward off the blow, and Henry’s stick glanced off the man’s forearm, hitting his cheekbone with a sickening crack.

“You son of a bitch,” the man said, tottering a step or two backward, spitting blood. The club, now in the position of readiness for a tennis backhand, came back around with a force Henry didn’t know he had. It hit the man in the right jaw, and with an inarticulate cry he collapsed at Henry’s feet.

Henry watched the blood ooze from the man’s mouth, reddening the ends of his moustache. The blood dribbled onto the concrete floor, assuming the shape of a large red amoeba, searching.
I hope he doesn’t die.

Except for the woman hunched against the far wall crying, the place was suddenly silent. What had the people inside the lockers made of the commotion?

“Listen to me,” Henry shouted. “You are being freed. I am going to open the lockers. Margaret! Are you here, Margaret?”

The babble of voices from inside the lockers made it impossible to distinguish any one voice.

“Please,” Henry shouted against the din. “Go to the center of the resort, near the dining hall. You’ll be safe from the fire there. Don’t go near the woods or you’ll burn to death! Margaret?”

He couldn’t hear for the noise. Suddenly, he caught the body at his feet stirring. Blood was now bubbling out of the nose as well as the mouth and ears. Henry could not bring himself to club the man again. He started opening the lockers one after the other as quickly as possible, glancing at the prostrate form in the middle of the room. That man needed a hospital.

Out of the lockers started to emerge pathetic creatures, men and women without wills, some in great pain from the cramped confinement.

Henry opened the lockers one after another, his arms working in rhythm. The occupants tumbled or slid or fell to the ground in front of him.

Where was that freckle-faced man who’d been put in for eight hours? The eight hours were long up, he’d be somewhere else. God, how long have some of these people been in here, days?

“Don’t be crazy,” Henry shouted. “You’re free. Get going. Move out the door. Head for the dining hall.”

It was then he heard her voice and his name, just a few lockers away. With a twinge of guilt he skipped the next three or four lockers and opened the one he thought the sound came from. The man inside was dead.

Quickly, Henry opened the next locker and it was Margaret. He had never seen her bereft of life and strength. She came forward into his arms, and he
eased her onto the floor. Her
lips were dry, her legs stiff and aching from the cramped quarters.

Henry looked up to see one man trying to crawl back into his locker.

Henry grabbed him by his shoulder. “No, no,” the man wailed. He was out of his mind.

“Let’s go!” Henry shouted, waving them toward the door. Then he knelt beside Margaret.

“Can you walk?”

She nodded. “Sure. Just give me a minute.”

“We have to get out of here.”

Henry shouted at the others. “You’ve got to get out of here. Move!” The idiots wouldn’t leave.

A tall, sinewy man of about thirty came up to Henry and said, “I opened the rest of the lockers, but they seem afraid to leave the building. Some are too sick.”

“When did you get put in?” Henry asked.

“Just a couple of hours ago. I’m okay.”

He didn’t look like the others. He might be strong enough.

“Can you help me with this woman?” Henry asked.

“Sure thing.”

Together they helped Margaret to her feet. She rubbed her thighs. “I’ll be okay,” she said.

“We’ll have to make time getting to the woods,” Henry said to the sinewy man.

Outside they moved as rapidly as they could. Suddenly, a thought hit Henry as if it were a hammer blow. He hadn’t thought of the people in the locked rooms. If the fire reached the buildings, they’d be burned alive.
You couldn’t help everyone.
Perhaps help from outside would come before the building caught.

Safely in the woods, they stopped to catch their breath just as Henry spotted Jake, waving. He ran over to him.

Jake had just finished securing Blaustein to a sapling with his own belt.

“He tried to get away,” Jake said. “You can’t trust him. Is that your wife?”

Henry nodded.

“Who’s the other one?”

“I don’t know.”

Margaret and the younger man had now come over.

“Margaret,” Henry said. “This is Jake. He’s been helping me.”

Jake nodded.

The other man stretched his hand out to Henry. “My name’s Shamir,” he said.

“Henry Brown. My wife, Margaret. This is…”

Jake held his hand out. “Jake Fetterman.”

Henry said, “How long have you been in Cliffhaven, Shamir?”

“Since last week. I’m doing fine. I’ve been in the lockers twice already.”

“What did you do?” Henry asked.

“The staff member who took me to my room the first night said something about me not looking Jewish, so I said he didn’t look too Jewish either, something like that, and before I knew it we were arguing, and I told him to just do his job and shut up. So what he did was get permission to put me into the lockers for four hours before I had unpacked my bag.”

“Terrific. Who steered you to this place?” Henry
asked.

“Well, I’m a photographer. I was hitchhiking from San Francisco to San Diego. I’ve done it lots of times, not to save money particularly, to meet people. Somebody in Frisco suggested Cliffhaven, great views for a photographer.”

“Did they get whoever was driving you?”

“No, no,” Shamir said. “When I saw the Cliffhaven sign, I asked to be let out. I walked up here carrying my small bag, and boom, I’m a prisoner. They took my cameras, two good ones. This one they didn’t see.” Shamir took a tiny Minolta out of his change pocket.

“I have some terrific pictures, if I can get out of here, I thought, so I waited till dark, then walked down the road same as I came.”

“Trusties brought you back?”

“You, too?” Shamir asked.

Henry nodded.

“What’s your plan?”

“We’re going to set fire to these woods. How many brushpiles, Jake?”

“I did six or seven more, good ones, before I saw that bastard Blaustein trying to sneak away.”

“One moment,” Shamir said to Henry. “Can you point to where your furthest brushpile is in that direction?”

“I think about there,” Henry said, pointing.

“And in the other direction?” Shamir asked.

Henry nodded to Fetterman. Jake pointed to where he had erected the last brushpile.

“Excuse me,” Shamir said, “but if you’re aiming at a conflagration, you may not have extended the line of brushpiles far enough around the circle. A bomber dropping ammonium nitrate—if one got here soon enough—could extinguish the blaze in two or three passes.”

“How do you know this?” Henry asked.

“Just what I read. Never been involved in fire fighting, but I put in two years with the Air Force.”

“Whatever fire-fighting equipment Cliffhaven has,” Henry said, “I’m sure they don’t have airplanes.”

“Listen, if this forest goes up, the fire fighters’ll have to call in all the help they can get, including military. These woods are bone-dry. Tens of thousands of acres went up a year ago.”

“Cliffhaven won’t call in outside help.”

“Then we have to,” Shamir said.

“All the phones go through the switchboard.” Henry looked over at Blaustein, tied to the tree. “Isn’t that so?”

Blaustein coughed, said nothing.

Henry walked over to within two feet of the tied man.

“What’s the matter, you sick?”

Blaustein shook his head.

“Then talk. Is there a phone that doesn’t go through the switchboard?”

Blaustein coughed again.

Henry raised his hand, then slapped Blaustein’s face hard.

“You didn’t have to do that,” whimpered Blaustein.

“Answer me.”

“There’s a direct telephone in Mr. Clifford’s house, the last building over.”

“I hope the lines don’t burn before we can get to it,” Shamir said. “Well, then, shall we do another
group of brushpiles
along that way?”

“No,” Henry said. “We’ll go with what we have. If they come looking for us in these woods, we might find ourselves caught before we light a single one. That’s a chance we can’t take.” He glanced over toward Margaret. “Can you help?”

“Sure,” Margaret said.

“Okay,” Henry said. “Let’s start at the two extremes and work our way toward here. Shamir, Jake, we’ll each light a fourth, then meet back here. Let me have a match, Jake.”

“I don’t smoke,” Jake said. “Don’t you?”

Henry looked at Shamir, who shrugged his shoulders. “You mean,” Henry said, “after all this, we have nothing to light the torches with?”

18

Mr. Clifford usually arranged for his meetings with the staff in a corner of the dining hall so that he could stand on the raised corner level and see the faces of everyone he was talking to. Today he felt the same exhilaration he had felt when he had heard that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Nothing stimulated him like the prospect of battle. His face had better color than usual. Even Abigail would have thought him commanding as he waited for silence in response to his raised hands.