A Fiction Series
Chapter 11: The Street
By Cliff Potts
The radio clicked off, and for a moment nobody moved.
The sound of it lingered anyway, like it had gotten into the walls.
Mike stood there with his hand still on the knob, listening to nothing.
Power in the northern suburbs. Water in Niles. Relocation centers. Reserve call-ups. Draft-age men to report. Schools closing. The war stopped, but not over, not really. Everything the voice had said sounded organized. Too organized.
Helen stood at the sink with both hands on the counter.
“Well,” she said quietly, “there it is.”
Mike picked up the counter again and looked at the dial. The needle still sat high in the green, close enough to yellow to make him uneasy. Not enough to drive him back underground. Enough to keep him honest.
“We don’t stay out long,” he said.
Helen nodded.
“That’s what you said yesterday.”
“Yeah.”
“And today?”
He looked toward the front room.
“Same answer.”
The house had changed overnight, though not in any way he could point to.
Maybe it was just that once they had been upstairs, the shelter no longer felt like the whole world. Now it felt like one room in a house that had become uncertain territory.
Helen moved through the kitchen first, wiping counters, rinsing cups, setting things in order. The water still ran clear. The lights still worked. Not strong. Not bright. But on.
Tommy stood in the hallway holding a dust rag like it was a tool of national importance.
“What do I do?”
“Anything I tell you,” Helen said.
He nodded seriously.
Carol sat at the table with the bear in her lap, brushing dust off one paw with her thumb. She had not put it down once since finding it.
Margaret sat in the chair nearest the radio, hands folded, listening to the quiet house the same way Mike listened to the broadcasts.
At the top of the hour, the radio came back.
Not CONELRAD now.
WGN.
Clear enough to hear every word, though there was still a thin roughness behind the voice, a little static at the edge, a reminder that all of this was being held together with nerve and wire.
“This is WGN Radio, Chicago… broadcasting on seven-twenty AM.”
Mike closed his eyes for just a second.
There it was.
Home frequency.
Not the emergency channels.
Not the wartime rotation.
WGN back where it belonged.
The announcer went on, slower than normal, reading from paper.
“We have a confirmed civil defense bulletin for the northern Illinois area.”
Helen stopped wiping the counter.
Mike turned the volume up slightly.
“Electrical service remains active in the northern suburbs. The Waukegan generating station continues operation. Interruptions are possible, but service is holding.”
Mike nodded once.
That made sense.
“Water service in Niles Township remains operational. Local pumping stations are functioning.”
Helen looked at him.
“You hear that?”
“Yeah.”
Deep wells, Mike thought. Not the lake. Not Chicago mains. Their own water, pulled up from the ground as long as the pumps had current.
The voice continued.
“The Salvation Army and the American Red Cross are establishing relocation centers in northern and northwest suburban schools and public buildings. Residents of the city without adequate shelter or fresh water are advised to move north when able.”
Nobody in the kitchen said anything.
Mike was already thinking ahead.
North meant traffic. North meant people. North meant pressure moving up from the city like weather.
Then the announcer said the part that changed the room.
“All military reservists are directed to report to local assembly points.”
Tommy looked up.
“All males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five are directed to report for registration and assignment.”
Helen turned and looked at Mike, even though Mike was too old for that part to belong to him.
“The primary processing site for this area is Niles Township High School, seven-seven-zero-one Lincoln Avenue, Skokie.”
The announcer paused, shuffled paper.
“Classes are suspended for the months of October and November pending site cleaning and the reallocation of facilities for defense purposes.”
Then, softer:
“We will continue to repeat this information.”
Mike leaned back.
There it was.
The world asking something from people again.
He turned the set down a notch, not off, just enough so they did not have to listen to the dead air between bulletins.
“They’re starting over,” Helen said.
“No,” Margaret said quietly.
They all looked at her.
She had not moved.
She rarely moved fast these days.
“They’re not starting over,” she said. “They’re continuing.”
Mike watched her.
Margaret looked toward the front window, toward the street outside.
“That’s the mistake people make. They think something like this ends and something new begins.” She shook her head once. “It doesn’t. It just changes shape.”
No one answered right away.
Then she went on.
“I heard this kind of talk before. Men reporting in. Schools being taken over. People being moved around. It sounds organized on the radio because if it didn’t, everybody would panic.”
Helen lowered herself into the chair across from her mother.
“Your father went out on a ship in ’43,” Margaret said. “They said then it might not take long. They said a lot of things.”
Mike had heard that story in pieces before. Never like this. Never in a room where the future felt like a weight on everybody’s chest.
“They don’t tell you how long it’s going to be,” Margaret said, “because they don’t know.”
The room stayed still.
“This isn’t the end of anything,” she said. “It’s the beginning of something that takes time. And time is the part people forget.”
Tommy looked from one adult to the other.
Carol hugged the bear tighter.
“You don’t get through something like this by waiting for it to pass,” Margaret said. “You get through it by deciding how you’re going to live while it’s here.”
She looked toward the door.
“And you don’t do it alone.”
That landed.
More than the radio had.
“You already know those people out there,” she said. “Maybe not well. But you know them. That is more than most people are going to have.”
She folded her hands again.
“So we use that.”
Mike opened the front door.
Not all the way.
Just enough to look out.
The street looked paused.
Glass in the gutter. Boards across a few windows. Lawns going uneven. Cars still sitting where people had left them fourteen days ago. It was not ruin. It was interruption.
Across the street, a front door opened.
Joe stepped out first, then Jeff from two houses down, then Janet from the corner place. Other doors followed after that, one at a time, cautious, the way men and women step into weather they do not trust.
Mike knew all of them.
Not deeply.
Joe worked at the plant. Jeff had a Buick and cut his grass too short. Janet always waved but never stopped to talk long. They had all been neighbors in the old suburban way, familiar enough to recognize, distant enough to leave alone.
Not anymore.
Joe called first.
“You made it?”
“Yeah,” Mike said.
Joe nodded once. That was enough.
Jeff held up a little transistor radio.
“You hear WGN?”
“Yeah.”
“Sounds like they got their feet back under them.”
“For now,” Mike said.
No one argued.
They drifted closer, but not all the way into a circle. The old habit of distance was still there, just weaker now.
“Water’s still running,” Janet said.
“It would,” Mike answered.
They all looked at him.
He shrugged once.
“Wells. Deep ones. As long as the pumps have power, Niles has water.”
Joe took that in slowly.
“So we’re better off than the city.”
“Yeah,” Mike said.
Nobody liked that either.
Jeff glanced south, though none of them could see Chicago from there.
“They’ll start coming up this way.”
“Some of them,” Mike said.
“Salvation Army and Red Cross are setting up shelters,” Janet said. “That’ll pull a lot.”
“Not enough,” Margaret said.
They all turned toward her again.
She had come out quietly and was standing beside Helen on the porch, one hand resting on the rail.
“Not enough for everybody,” she said. “And not everybody is going to want to leave what’s left of their house.”
No one argued with that either.
Joe asked the next question because someone had to.
“We staying here?”
Mike looked at the houses, then at the people standing in front of them.
“I don’t know yet.”
That was honest. It was also not enough anymore.
Jeff looked down the block.
“We should figure out what we’ve got.”
That was enough of a beginning.
“We’ve got canned food,” Janet said. “Not a mountain of it, but some.”
“I’ve got tools,” Joe said.
“My truck still runs,” Jeff said.
Helen spoke from the porch.
“We’ve got the shelter.”
Every head turned to look at Mike’s house.
That changed things.
Mike knew it the second he heard her say it.
Not because it made him important.
Because it made the house useful.
“If something changes,” Helen said, “if the levels go up again, or somebody needs a protected place, we’ve got it.”
Margaret nodded once.
“That’s right.”
Joe looked at Mike.
“You all right with that?”
Mike took a breath.
Then nodded.
“Yeah.”
Across the street, one house stayed shut.
No movement. No open door. No voice.
Janet saw Mike looking.
“They didn’t answer yesterday either,” she said quietly.
Nobody said the rest.
They did not need to.
WGN came back on inside the house, the bulletin starting over again, the voice steady and tired and determined to keep the thing going as long as someone could read.
The sound carried out through the screen door.
It made the street feel less empty.
Not safe.
Just connected.
Joe looked around at the rest of them.
“We should meet again tonight,” he said. “After the next long bulletin.”
“That works,” Jeff said.
Janet nodded.
No one asked for Robert’s Rules. No one suggested a committee. They were beyond that already.
Mike looked around at them, these people he had lived beside for years without really knowing.
He knew their names. He knew their cars. He knew who mowed on Saturday and who let the dandelions win. He knew who had children and who did not. He knew the thin shape of their lives the way men in suburbs know each other without ever admitting it.
Now the shape was not enough.
Now they had to become real.
Margaret looked down the street once more.
“You’re going to be stuck with these people for a long time,” she said.
Nobody laughed.
She was not joking.
“There’s a war still brewing,” she went on. “Armistice or not. It will get worse before it gets better.”
Mike believed her.
Everybody else did too.
And because they did, no one went back inside right away.
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