An Atomic Romance (2 page)

Rain awoke him at the brink of dawn. The dripping rain made a sound like someone pounding in a fence post. Leaving his camp undisturbed, he pulled on his slicker and zipped up his tent. Guided by his flashlight, he began slogging his way through overgrown brambles and wet vines toward the shimmering light of the plant, until he spotted a certain metal scrap heap some two hundred yards away. He didn’t go closer. He could see eerie blue flames licking the metal junk, with tongues of fire nearly a foot high. In a gentle rain like this one, mysterious blue flames often erupted, flickering delicately like a gas fire on artificial logs. The flames were lovely yet terrible, another of those elusive phenomena—like a solar storm, a starburst—that you strive to grasp but can’t. They made him think about quasars, those distant blue lights in the firmament.

The rain was slacking up. He tramped a different route back to his camp, following dirt-bike paths and small lanes, avoiding the briar patches. The ruins of the munitions factory lay ahead. He reached the clearing where in his dream he had found the dead woman. In the dream the setting was visually more of a museum than a wilderness, but his mind had placed it in this space. It was the exact spot where he had romped with Julia among the slag heaps and ruined buildings. They had played hide-and-go-seek in the bunkers, chasing each other around the towers. That was before she accused him of betrayal.

When he reached his camp, he quickly collapsed his tent, rolled up his wet tarps, and crammed his gear into the carrier. Then he kicked the motor to life.

Women were always after him to get a cell phone. If Reed had really needed to call the police about the dead woman, it would have taken him half an hour to find a telephone. The dream had been so real that as he swerved through the back roads, he seemed to be dreaming still. He imagined going to the police station to report what he had seen. He harbored a slight worrisome thread of paranoia. What about his footprints at the site? And did he touch the window? No. He knew nothing. She was a stranger.

The scene had been so desolate. No one had heard the woman’s last utterances; she was like a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear. His own ears were nearly dead from the decibels at work.

Reed was normally a confident guy, given to bursts of pleasure and celebratory blasts of energy. He wasn’t afraid of much, he knew how to protect himself, he could deal with almost anything. Being neighborly, he once rushed into a burning house to save a ninety-seven-year-old invalid. “Slow down,” his former wife, Glenda, had often said to him. “You’ll burn yourself out.” Now in his forties, he still aimed to charge through life with youthful zeal. But for the last couple of years, a deep pain welled inside him occasionally and confused him. He supposed it was simply chemical—if chemistry was ever simple. But as bitter as his moods had sometimes been, he had never entertained a suicidal thought. The dead woman couldn’t have represented Glenda. She was too much of a schemer, a master of coupon organization. And the dead woman was definitely not his mother. Although she had high cholesterol and arthritis, her life force had the strength of the Saturn V.

And she wasn’t Julia. In no way was she Julia.

He skirted the construction site east of the plant. It seemed forsaken without the row of blue portable toilets, which were removed the day construction was halted. The cranes posed for still lifes.

Reed rode all day, through several counties, following no particular route. The dream wouldn’t fade out. If he had really found a dead woman, people at work would approach him, curious and agog. They would want to hear his story over and over. It would be like receiving congratulations for something extraordinary he had done. Over and over he thought of her last hours. The way she lined up the photos on the dashboard—how long did she stare at those pitiful pictures? Did she talk to them? Did she put off her act until she had said everything she wanted to say?

He let the wind fly through his hair as he swirled around the narrow roads, the sun winking through the leaves like a strobe light. He loved the patterns of sun and shade in the woods on either side of him. Wildlife fled from his mighty engine. Reed Futrell did not know where he was going. He rode along a precipice. He was a mechanized Road Runner, rushing along, but watching himself too, knowing that if he leaned too far in one direction or the other he would pancake down a canyon. His fatalism annoyed Julia.

“I’ve been living with that stuff so long my insides would be neon green if you opened me up,” he had told her. “If I’ve got it, I’ve got it.”

“But if you don’t, wouldn’t it be a relief to know?”

“Can’t you do the blood test for me?”

“No, it’s against the rules. The paperwork would screw you up.”

“Won’t you stick me, honey?” he said, running his hand down her back.

“Can’t do.”

“I’d like to stick you,” he said.

Julia could not know his work history. He hadn’t told her. He wouldn’t.

His mind always meandered while on the road, or lying on the tarp in the woods, or inside the patched pup tent he’d hauled around for years. But now he observed that he was surveying his whole life as though it had a pattern, passions and frailties that connected together.

Reed had grown up reading the
Encyclopedia Americana
and listening to big bands. He always had dogs. He loved shooting targets. He loved women. He loved being married for the first fifteen years, before he and Glenda began fighting. He realized that when they married, they didn’t understand each other, that they were too young to understand their own natures, or their differences. Glenda had always been picky, and then she sometimes demeaned him by calling him boorish and overly macho. Their counselor began harping on passive aggression, which Reed understood to mean that Glenda blamed him for her own bad behavior. She said she had to go away so she could grow as a person; Reed said that was ironic for a person always on a diet. The divorce was simple, and she finished raising the kids, Dalton and Dana. Now his children were young adults whom he saw only once in a while. They treated him decently. They seemed normal. He was lucky.

His kids bounced along with the scary optimism of youth. Dalton, with ambitions of becoming an architect, worked at a design company in North Carolina. And Dana, who didn’t quite finish college, worked with a producer on Music Row in Nashville. She sent him CDs, sickly pop stuff that you would call gruel if it were food, Reed thought. One of the songs Dana was so proud of had a line, “Carry the gospel to them all,” which Reed persisted in hearing as “Carry the gospel to the mall.” He often kidded her about that song, even singing it on her answering machine.

In a titty bar somewhere on the edge of a river town, Reed ordered a beer. A jejune band was playing country-pop drivel, and he had to listen to half a dozen songs before the girls came on, swinging their fringed anatomies—fringe flying from their tits, fringe hanging between their legs like a collie dog’s skirt.

Reed kept himself fit. Every day he stretched and pumped and jacked up his heart rate. He considered himself sexually attractive and had no trouble getting women. He enjoyed women, made new conquests easily, flirted shamelessly. He’d tuck his finger inside a woman’s blouse and playfully tug her bra strap, or he’d reach down and play with the hem of her short skirt. He would do that even before he knew their names, and they would giggle and swoon. Reed had a certain cockiness, and the way he moved seemed to thrill women. He had simple urges—always present, it seemed, throbbing like a hurt toe and keeping him on high alert, like those power lines humming into the plant.

Sitting at a table near the door, he stayed through two beers, but he did not tip these girls. Tonight he did not feel like folding a five-dollar bill and tucking it under a G-string. He left the titty bar and whisked through the night.

As he crossed the bridge over the river, his mood shifted. He gunned his bike, knowing that just a little slip on a pebble could send him flying. He was eager to check his telephone messages.

His street was quiet and the moon was high when he arrived at his old bungalow, a relic from the 1940s with a pyramid roof and a pillared porch. He left his bike and gear in the garage and went to the backyard where Clarence was in an uproar. The dog was overjoyed to see him, nearly knocking Reed over as he entered the gate. Clarence lunged into the house with him, and Reed hugged him and let him slobber on him.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” Reed said to Clarence. “Woof woof. We’re in total agreement.”

The answering machine held nothing significant, nothing from Julia. He sat on the dog-abused sofa with Clarence and read the newspapers, to see what had happened in the world during his absence. Same old thing, he learned quickly. More commotion at the plant, troublemakers demanding more investigations. The wider world in chaos. Clarence rested his head on Reed’s lap and ate corn chips with him.

“Clarence, it says here the cops found five bags of marijuana at a yard sale.” Reed laughed. “Probably antiques.”

He was glad to be home. It was comfortable here now with Clarence. Reed read the obituaries, noting the ages. On the page of personal funeral notices, a guy named Jack, a construction worker, had died at age sixty-eight. Reed said, “Come see Jack in the box, visitation two to four p.m. Sunday.” Reed laughed. Jack could have waited all his life for such a moment and then missed it.

The telephone rang. “Go, killer,” Reed said, opening the back door and shooing Clarence out. He answered the telephone.

“Hey, Reed. This is your Prayer Warrior, calling with your ten o’clock prayer.” It was Burl, his best pal since high school. “Hey, man, are you up?”

“Up? Why wouldn’t I be up? Do you mean Big Reed or Little Reed?”

“No, man, wake up. Listen. This is urgent.”

“What?” Reed settled himself against the wall.

“A while ago I had a heavy, heavy notion, Reed, that you were in need of prayer. I need to pray for you.”

“Pray away, Burl.” Burl could be a Prayer Warrior or a pagan dancer. It was all the same. Inevitably, he was drunk.

“Are you all right, Reed? Was your little trip good?”

“Yeah. I saw the blue flames again.”

“No shit! I wish I’d seen them.”

“Next time.”

“But you shouldn’t hang out at that place.”

“I was way over by the river. That’s O.K.”

Reed told Burl in some detail his dream about the dead woman. “It was so vivid,” he said. “I’m still thinking about it.”

“Write that down, Reed. You could win the Pulitzer Prize.”

“Win what? The tulip surprise?”

Burl chortled. “You need a hearing aid, Reed. I said
Pulitzer
Prize
!”

“You don’t have to yell! I was making a joke.”

“I’m praying for you, Reed.”

“O.K.”

“That business out at the plant is like the butterfly effect,” said Burl. “One thing leading to another.”

“Sure.” What
wasn’t
involved with the fucking butterfly effect?

“Did you get that test yet?”

“Oh, Burl, go on back to Xanadu, and let me get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“O.K., but I’m praying for you.”

“That’s nice, Burl. Thank you. I’ll pray for you too.”

There was no way to pray for Burl, even if Reed were a praying type. Burl was like an asteroid that made periodic close encounters, but never quite came to earth.

Although Reed was tired, he sat down at his computer. As usual, he had a hard time getting past his screen savers, a dazzling variety of galaxies and nebulae, photographs from the Hubble telescope, gliding silently toward him, changing at twenty-second intervals. They shifted before him, unbelievable, colorful close-ups of outer space—galactic clusters, hot clumps of nebulosity, supernovas, spiral galaxies. The universe. When he stared at these pictures, his mind seemed to empty out. He changed the pictures frequently in order to retain that fresh astonishment.

Finally, he checked his e-mail. He wished Julia had e-mail, but she refused to waste her time with it. He found dozens of new answers to a personal ad he had placed on the Internet. Curious, and with a pleasing sexual stirring, he ran through the responses. His ad had been simple: “Strong, good-looking guy looking for smart, sensitive woman with sense of humor and curiosity. Sex not a requirement. Let’s just hang.” He left his zip code and moniker, “Atomic Man.”

He dumped all the messages with distant zip codes. He read the remaining one, from a zip code near his own, someone calling herself Hot Mama.

“Your ad is too vague. You don’t reveal anything about yourself. Why should I be interested? Your ad seems intended to reel in all women indiscriminately. Who would confess to being insensitive, without humor or curiosity? Sex? Screw you.”

“Goddamn,” Reed said aloud. “I can’t deal with you tonight, Hot Mama.”

He stared at the message until his screen saver came on; the shifting images of the cosmos were hypnotic, and he began to feel sleepy.

Exhausted, he fell into his stale sheets. Sleep wouldn’t come. He was too tired to sleep. He rose and dashed off a message to Hot Mama. “I’m sensitive, with a sense of humor, and I’m loaded with curiosity. I don’t stick to the everyday. I fool around with the
cosmos.
My favorite poem is ‘Kubla Khan.’ I have a scar on my wrist that resembles a rat’s ass. Why am I telling you all this?”

He sent the message, felt better, then went easily to sleep.

2

The Easter tree in the lobby at Sunnybank seemed as fresh and fecund as it had on Easter Sunday, three weeks ago. Its machine-decorated plastic eggs still seemed newly laid, Reed thought. His mother never celebrated Easter in any special way—except the time she went to a sunrise breakfast at a park on the river. He remembered her saying that since the park was on the east side of the river, the staging was all wrong for the resurrection.

Today was Mother’s Day. Reed’s mother, Margaret (“Peggy”) Melinda Reed Futrell Sisson Daly—name tags for husbands no longer valid—lived at 115 Willow Court. Willow Court was a wide, sunny corridor carpeted with pink cabbage roses. Last year Reed had talked her into moving to Sunnybank Assisted Living so that she wouldn’t be alone. He became concerned when he found a blob of stainless steel—a former saucepan—welded to a burner on her stove and found her eating from a plastic container of purple gelatin a neighbor had brought her a month before. Her refrigerator was nearly bare. In the freezer compartment, he discovered dozens of little packages—tidbits of hamburger twisted in foil. He asked her what she was doing—making chipmunk packs? He ordered her a pizza and stocked her refrigerator. After she moved to Sunnybank, her mind improved, and she resented her displacement, insisting that she should not be kept with the toothless and feeble, like a helpless old donkey in a stall. She was forgetful, but not incapacitated, she said then. She withdrew into her apartment, where she read romance novels and worked with her paint set, copying the old masters from an art book. Aides came to remind her of social activities, but she went only on occasion.

“This place is full of incompetents and nuts,” his mother said now, greeting him and his spray of supermarket flowers at the door of her apartment. “Elder abuse, too. I can document it.”

But she was grinning, happy to see him.

“Happy Mother’s Day,” he said, planting a kiss on her cheek and hugging her.

Her steely curls were springy, like the metal coils on mousetraps, and she wore a lively complex of cosmetics. Her place was sunny and spacious. Reed’s sister, Shirley, had fixed it up to resemble home, with family photographs and knickknacks. A bowl of plastic Easter eggs rested on the dining table. Reed recalled a woman he had gone out with who decorated her Easter eggs with swastikas. Where did he find such women? he wondered.

“If I had stayed home, I could be growing my own bouquets,” Reed’s mother said.

“Probably so, Mom,” said Reed. “And maybe you could get a job driving a bus, too.”

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“I didn’t mean to.” Reed still felt guilty that he had uprooted her from her home and plopped her into this glorified way station. It was supposed to be a resort, not a last resort. Maybe he would have moved her back home, but her house belonged to someone else now, a couple who had installed a volleyball court and free-range chickens. The court was enclosed with chain link, and the chickens ran in the street.

Stooping with only slight difficulty, she found a green vase under the sink for his cellophane shroud of blooms. Reed glimpsed a standing army of green florists’ vases in the cupboard.

Her bird clock signaled the hour. It was the woodpecker’s Morse code.

“My birds are screwed up,” his mother said. “It’s supposed to be the cardinal.”

“They need to be readjusted,” he said.

She ran water into the vase, and he plunked the flowers into the water. He set the vase next to the Easter-egg bowl on the small dining table. They situated themselves, Reed on the sofa and his mother in her recliner.

“The food here is getting worse,” she said. “The dietitian is overweight, and I think I see everybody gaining a little.”

“You’re not. You look good.”

“I’m not gaining weight because I won’t eat that slumgullion they concoct here. I fix myself a little something here in the room. I microwaved popcorn last night and watched
An Affair to Remember.
Did you ever see that, Reed?”

“Probably. I’ve forgotten.”

He listened to her summarize the story. He liked to watch her animated hands, which followed the enthusiastic, girlish trills of her voice. It made him feel better to know that she always made the best of a situation.

“Have you seen Julia again?” she demanded.

“No. She’s still mad at me.”

“Haven’t you apologized?”

“I guess.”

“I know you—you’ll fool around and she’ll get tired of waiting. You always did put off what needed to be done.”

“It’s not that easy.” Reed took a deep breath.

“Go after her! You’ll fool around and lose her if you don’t.”

“Any more orders?”

Abruptly, she inquired about his work. “Reed. Listen—are they going to cancel the new plant?”

“Don’t know. We’ll have to see what the D.O.E. says about how long the cleanup will take.”

“I’m so afraid we’ll lose the new plant. We need the jobs.”

“Oh, we won’t lose it unless the D.O.E. makes the whole place a Superfund site.”

“I doubt if they would take that much interest,” she said, twisting a curl between her fingers.

Seizing an opportunity, Reed said, “Talk to me about the good old days, Mom, when toxic waste was what you found in the cat litter pan.”

“Ha! Good old days! That’s the biggest fallacy in the kingdom.”

He didn’t know how much she knew about the current troubles, and he didn’t want to worry her. He didn’t see a newspaper anywhere in her crowded living room. The family pictures covered several surfaces. His eyes rested on the photograph of his father. He was handsome and clear eyed, a confident man in a tweed jacket and striped tie. Reed recalled his parents dancing to their favorite instrumental from the big-band era—Artie Shaw’s “Dancing in the Dark.” They glided across the hardwood floor of their small living room as if they had all the space in the world.

He said, “I thought you were pretty happy when you started out—when I was little and my dad was alive.”

“That’s true.” She smiled. “He loved his job. It was so important to the national defense.”

“Everybody was fighting the Communists.”

“I don’t believe we ever saw any,” she said with a laugh. “We just believed they were there, like elves.”

Reed had often heard the old-timers tell about how the bomb-fuel plant was the salvation of the community after the Depression and the War. The plant was shrouded in secrecy then.

“Maybe things seem a little different nowadays, Mom.”

“I’m afraid of what they’re finding out,” she said. “I’m afraid it’ll kill the new plant. Will it?”

“I doubt it,” Reed said to reassure her. “They’ve stopped construction while they do site assessment—that’s what they’re calling it. But I don’t think it’ll take long.”

She roused herself from her chair to reach a garment from a table.

“Look at this crazy thing,” she said, laughing. It was an apron she had made in crafts. It had at least a dozen pockets.

Reed said, “I could use one of these at work.”

“It’s just silly!” she said. “They think we’re going to lose everything. They think we’re liable to lose our heads.”

“Looks to me like you could put insulation in those pockets and go to the North Pole,” Reed said. “Or carry your camping gear. You’d be prepared for anything.”

“I’ll have to carry my head in this side pocket,” she said, laughing.

Whenever she laughed, Reed felt heartened. He laughed with her, and he stood up, swinging the apron around his shoulders like a cape.

“Look! Up in the sky! It’s a biker! It’s a maintenance engineer! Yes! It’s Atomic Man!”