Every day, many times over, planes left the local airports to fly nonstop hops longer than the distance from the Sisler Cities to the closest potential “enemy” air bases. But, such facts, determined by the simple shape of the planet, were dismissed with a single popular word: globaloney. It may be that people who live on flatlands retain the Biblical belief that the earth is Bat. Or perhaps people who live between great mountain ranges feel specially secure. At any rate, the River City citizens eschewed Civil Defense and the people of Green Prairie embraced it out of pride and for fun.
Both groups felt that the “domestic Communists,” interminably quizzed by Congressional committees, were more a menace than all the Communists in Russia together with their weapons and intentions—an attitude which possibly had its basis in the unconscious fears of Americans during that long period. It was a time when Americans once again refused to face certain realities that glared at them with an ever-increasing balefulness.
What actually precipitated the “Civil Defense scandal” was a trifle. When the snow’s right, however, a cap pistol can bring down an avalanche.
Minerva Sloan, on the afternoon of the practice alert, attended a directors meeting in the Mercantile Trust Company which lasted until six o’clock. When she left the bank, she could not immediately find her limousine. A large, a very large woman-tall and fleshy, imposing, heavy-jowled and bemoled—an English bulldog of a woman—she paced the wide sidewalk angrily and at length. Because dinner at her home would not begin until eight-thirty (when ten guests would sit down to one of her famed repasts, followed by a musicale), Minerva went into the near-by White Elephant Restaurant and took a table at the windows, to watch for her delinquent chauffeur.
Outside, heavy traffic poured south on Central Avenue between the towering skyscrapers of downtown Green Prairie, south toward the residential sections: during afternoon rush hour, Central Avenue was a one-way thoroughfare. Minerva ordered coffee and a doughnut and kept watching. Traffic—four lanes wide wherever trucks were not parked to unload goods, wherever buses were not loading people and wherever other chauffeurs, double-parked, were not waiting for homing businessmen—moved slowly and clamorously. Minerva scowled at this stasis of the big artery and thought poorly of Green Prairie’s city fathers, though traffic in her own city across the river was at least as loud, as slow, as frustrate. She dunked her doughnut angrily and not furtively because, being Minerva Sloan, she could do as she damn pleased.
Finally, she saw her car and ran out peremptorily—also because she was Minerva Sloan and the waitress knew it and would collect from the bank. She held up her pocket-book to bring traffic to a stop and took her time about getting into her car.
She sat back, unrelaxed. “Willis,” she said, “where were you?”
“The police,” he answered, “made me move from Adams Avenue.”
“Didn’t you tell them whose car…?”
“They were very apologetic, ma’am.” Willis’s gray head faced forward and his outspread ears reddened. His corded hands tightened a little on the wheel. He had expected her indignation but, even after thirty years, its majesty alarmed him.