Long Voyage Back Read Online Free PDF

business, and sooner or later the gov'ment is gonna want its money's worth.'
    His son looked at him with youthful seriousness. 'What you gonna do, Pop, when that happens?' he asked.
    011y tossed his empty tongs into the forward cabin with a sense of relief and then stared out across the water. 'I'm gonna run, son,' he said with a sigh. 'That's why I'm gonna take up jogging. I would've taken it up years ago but I ain't learned how to do it on the water yet. Christ knows the Chesapeake's got enough mud in it to support a man three times my weight but somehow I just can't get the hang of it.'
    He wouldn't run, though. He would almost welcome it if it came, especially if the war would just take him and let Chris live to enjoy asses for another forty years as he had done. He'd always hated seeing old geezers sitting around in front of the general store, useless and unneeded. Although he was probaly now a geezer, he wasn't gonna be a sitter.
    No, he wouldn't run - unless he figured there was a live lady up the road aways, or a solid bit of honest work he could do. Then maybe he'd stick around. Take up jogging. Lethargically Jeanne gathered and packed clothing and sleeping bags for the cruise aboard Vagabond. She had no heart for the trip, no heart, really, for anything these days. She was packing only for herself, Lisa and Skip, since Bob had telephoned at three that afternoon to tell her that the Defense Department had asked everyone above the level of clerk to work over the weekend. He couldn't sail with them in the Chesapeake. He would be coming home only to eat and get a change of clothes.
    As she moved around first Skippy's bedroom and then her own, Jeanne was close to tears. It was anger and frustration at the insane way the Americans and Russians were stumbling towards war; frustration at her own incapacity to do anything; anger at Bob's failure even to see what was happening; anger that she was married to him. Normally lithe, catlike, and intense, now she moved dully, her long dark hair hanging limply down her back instead of bouncing as it usually did. She felt she had married the wrong man and was living only half a life. As she closed her suitcase carefully she imagined Bob's superior ironic smile at such a cliché about her life. He would assure her that of course she had married the wrong man, everybody did, but that was no reason to be miserable. Lisa came into her bedroom to ask if she could go visit her girlfriend Nancy before dinner and Jeanne had to focus in on her daughter. Framed in the doorway, Lisa held her tall, budding fifteen-year-old body with that strange stiff dignity she'd adopted over the last two years to show she was no longer a child. It irritated Jeanne, reminding her of the worst of the Forester family stuffiness. Compared to Lisa, round, energetic, happy-faced Skippy still seemed, at five spontaneous and free.
    `Have you finished your packing?' she asked.
    Ì did it last night,' Lisa replied. 'But don't forget to pack the lotions and towels you promised.'
    Ì will, I will. But look, honey. I need your help here. We'll be eating as soon as your father gets home, and I'd like you to go downstairs and begin heating the leftover stew. I'
    ll be down soon.'
    Òh, Mother,' Lisa replied. 'Can't you do that?' `Go,' said Jeanne. And she went, with a promptness that never ceased to amaze Jeanne - was that Bob's doing? A moment later she was alone again with her two suitcases and sleeping bag. Living with Bob wasn't working any more and she knew why: the war thing had grown too big and was too important to both of them. The whole world was divided into two groups, those desperately trying to avoid a war and those desperately preparing to see that their side won it. She and Bob were on opposite sides and the tension between them was becoming too much.
    The tension often tempted her just to give up. The cause she worked for seemed so hopeless. For close to three years she'd been active in a Washington-based