Striking the Balance

“Hey, it’s food,” Rachel Hines said. “I don’t even mind the beets, not any more. I just shovel it all down; I quit worrying about it as soon as I put on the uniform.”

She filled out that uniform in a way the Army bureaucrats who’d designed it hadn’t had in mind. Despite her talk of gluttony, she wasn’t the least bit fat. If she hadn’t been so all-around good-natured, she would have had half the men in the company squabbling over her. There were times when Auerbach had been tempted to pull rank himself. Even if she’d been interested, though, that would have created as many problems as it solved, maybe more.

He glanced over to Penny again. He felt responsible for her, too. He also had the feeling more was there than met the eye. With Rachel, what you saw was what you got-he couldn’t imagine her holding anything back. With Penny, he got the feeling her present unhappiness masked something altogether different. He shrugged. The other possibility was that his imagination had gone and run away with him.Wouldn’t be the first time, he thought.

To his surprise, she did take back the plate and start eating again, not with any great enthusiasm but doggedly, as if she were fueling a car. With what she’d been giving herself lately, a car would long since have run out of gas. He didn’t say anything. That might have broken the spell.

Rachel Hines shook her head. She’d cropped her hair into a short bob, the better to have it fit under a helmet. She said, “Going off and giving secrets to the Lizards. I purely can’t fathom that, and there’s a fact. But plenty of people in Lakin got on with ’em just fine and dandy, like they were the new county commissioners or something.”

“You’re right.” Penny Summers’ face twisted into an expression both fierce and savage, one altogether unlike any Auerbach had seen on her since she’d come to Lamar. “Joe Bentley over at the general store, he sucked up to them for all he was worth, and when Edna Wheeler went in there and called them a bunch of goggle-eyed things from out of a freak show, you tell me he didn’t go trotting off to them fast as his legs could take him. And the very next day she and her husband and both their kids got thrown out of their house.”

“That’s so,” Rachel said, nodding. “It sure is. And Mel Six-killer, I guess he got sick of folks calling him half-breed all the time, on account of he’d even make up tales to take to the Lizards, and they’d believe ’em, too. He got a lot of people in trouble like that. Yeah, some people were mean to him, but you don’t go getting even by hurting ’em that kind of way.”

“And Miss Proctor, the home economics teacher at the high school,” Penny said. “What was it she always called the Lizards? ‘The wave of the future,’ that was it, like we couldn’t do anything about ’em no matter what. And then she’d go out and make sure we couldn’t do anything.”

“Yeah, she sure did,” Rachel said. “And… ”

They went on for another five or ten minutes, talking about the collaborators back in their little hometown. Auerbach sat quietly, drinking his beer, finishing his supper (he didn’t mind mutton, but he could have lived for a long time without looking another beet in the eye) and listening. He’d never seen Penny Summers so lively, and he’d never seen her finally clean her plate, either-she didn’t seem to notice she was doing it. Complaining about the old neighbors got her juices flowing as nothing else had.

The brawny waitress came by. “Get you folks some more beer, or are you gonna sit there takin’ up space?”

“I’ll have another one, thanks,” Auerbach said. To his surprise, Penny nodded before Rachel did. The waitress went away, came back with fresh mugs. “Thanks, Irma,” Auerbach told her. She glowered at him, as if doing her job well enough to deserve thanks showed she’d somehow failed at it.

“You’ve raided Lakin since you got us out, haven’t you, Captain?” Rachel asked.

“Sure we have,” Auerbach answered. “You weren’t along for that, were you? No, you weren’t-I remember. We hurt ’em, too; drove ’em clean out of town. I thought we’d be able to keep it, but when they threw too much armor at us-” He spread his hands. “What can you do?”

“That’s not what she meant,” Penny said. “I know what she meant.”

Auerbach stared at her. She surely hadn’t been this animated before. “What did she mean?” he asked, hoping to keep her talking-and, more than that, hoping to keep her involved with the world beyond the four walls within which she’d chosen to shut herself away.

It worked, too; Penny’s eyes blazed. “She meant, did you settle up scores with the quislings?” she said. Rachel Hines nodded to show her friend was right.

“No, I don’t think we did,” Auerbach said. “We didn’t know just who needed settling back then, and we were too busy with the Lizards to risk putting anybody’s nose out of joint by getting the locals mad at us for giving the wrong people a hard time.”

“We’re not going back to Lakin any time soon, are we?” Rachel asked.