An Atomic Romance (9 page)

“It’s odd, isn’t it?” He scooted his glass across the tablecloth, making ripples.

“Aren’t people afraid to work out there?”

“Maybe they are. I don’t know. I’m not afraid.”

“But how can you be so sure it’s so safe if all those scrap piles are lying around?”

“In the old days they weren’t so careful, but we have strict safety standards now. They didn’t know any better.”

“That sounds like an excuse.”

“Come on, honey. We’ve been through all this before.” His hand touched hers across the table. “It’s not going to get us. There’s a big cleanup underway.”

“The whole thing is a disaster.”

The waiter brought the bill and Reed laid his hand on it, pulling it toward him. When the waiter left, Reed said, “Back then everybody was in a hurry to beat the Russians. Nobody had time to recycle the garbage. They just piled it up or tossed it over the fence. It wasn’t important then. It really wasn’t a priority.”

“I know. Better dead than Red.”

Her sarcasm was unfair, he thought. He busied himself with the check, hoping to drop the subject. She suddenly sneezed. Finding a tissue in her bag, she blew her nose, quietly and softly. She dabbed her eyes with her napkin and sniffled. Her face was flushed, and she seemed to be shedding a few tears, but he wasn’t sure. He was surprised that her concern had grown. Reaching across the table, he tried to calm her.

As a child, Julia had assigned gender to numbers, and she thought that a six was a she and a seven was a he. When, some time later, she heard the phrase
at sixes and sevens,
she thought it meant having sex. She had told this to Reed once.

“I’m at sixes and sevens,” Reed said to her now, with a glimmer of a grin. “Speaking of Twinkies.”

She smiled and sipped some water. Her face was still red.

“I’ve missed you,” he said.

She looked away.

“Are you still mad at me?” he asked.

“Let’s call it exasperation.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you. You know that.”

“You didn’t hurt me.”

“I’m sorry about that day at Fort Wolf.”

“I was mad at you for taking me out there,” she said. “It seemed like reckless disregard.”

“We had a good time, didn’t we?”

“Of course. But it was spoiled after all the news came out. And you knew about the chemicals out at that place.”

“Didn’t you trust me?”

“Actually I did.”

“And now?”

She paused. “Maybe I was unfair, and you’ve been through a lot now, with your mom.” She drank some water and rolled her stiff napkin into a ball. It sprang open and she bunched it up again.

“I wish you’d come over to my house,” he said, his feelers going out, testing her mood. “But I guess you don’t want to be in the presence of any of my guns, in case I might go insane and go after you with one of them.”

He meant to be teasing, but she replied sharply, “I think I know you better than that. All I ever said about your cache of artillery was that you can draw a straight, uninterrupted line through history from a caveman with a rock to a megalomaniac with an atomic bomb.”

“Me and my big mouth. I said the wrong thing again.”

“My mouth is as big as yours sometimes.”

It was still raining lightly, and they dashed from the door of the restaurant to his car. He hadn’t realized how he had frightened her. He didn’t know how to apologize, or make it up to her, but when she said “reckless disregard,” perhaps she meant a character flaw that he couldn’t tame. He often misspoke, although he thought he was just being naturally expressive.

He approached the stoplight on Constitution Avenue. To the left was his house, and hers was in the opposite direction.

“Left or right?”

“I need to get up early tomorrow, so you’d better take me home.”

She was going to spend the day with her daughter Lisa, who was a freshman at the university. It was Parents’ Day. They were going to meet teachers at a luncheon, and go to a science fair, a track meet, and a production of
Fiddler on the Roof.

Julia’s house was across town on a leafy street of old houses. The street seemed deserted except for the gathering of cars at the far end of the block—someone having a party. Under the streetlights, the rain glistened on the asphalt. Reed turned into the driveway and drove to the rear of the somewhat rundown old Victorian house, where she lived in a garden apartment. Julia owned the house and rented out apartments. Her Beetle squatted in a carport, like a large frog.

“You say you worry about me?” he said as he walked her to her door. “Well, I worry about you too—living alone in that apartment.”

“The tenants watch out for me.” She touched his shoulder, her keys in her hand. She ran her fingers through his hair. “I think about you, Reed.” The key chain wiggled against his scalp. “I’ve missed you.”

She slipped away from him before he could grasp her. He watched her go inside the house. The streetlights did not reach the depths of the bushy yard outside her glass-paned door. He waited until he saw her lights come on.

He was annoyed with himself for his remark about the guns he kept at home. His mind was so twisted, he thought. He slammed his horn in frustration. A battle-scarred tiger cat sped lickety-split across the street, avoiding puddles.

Although Reed no longer hunted, he still loved shooting. The sublime satisfaction of nailing something you aimed at was the same as that little hit of serotonin some people felt when they penciled in a word in a crossword puzzle or when their team scored a point. He usually went out to Fort Wolf about once a week to camp or just to shoot at targets, but while his mother remained in the hospital, he had stopped going. Now, after seeing Julia, he wondered if their minds would ever meet on the subject of weapons.

“What do you mean, you’re antiviolent?” he’d asked her once, last fall, as they were driving downstate to a Triple A minor-league ballgame. “Turn the other cheek?”

“I don’t like killing.”

“There’s always been war,” he said. “Sometimes you have to fight back, plain and simple.”

“There are other ways.”

“I bet you wouldn’t step on a bug.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“I bet you’d let powder-post beetles eat up your house.”

“I wouldn’t kill a bug unnecessarily,” she said. “Why should I?”

“So you agree that some killing is necessary.”

“That’s not the way I’d put it.”

“But what if a hornet was dive-bombing a child? Would you swat it?”

“Well, of course, but . . .”

“Some creatures you can kill and some you can’t, depending on the circumstances?”

“You’re going in circles.”

“Which would you give priority to—a staghorn beetle or a sow bug?”

“I don’t know! Stop it!”

Reed didn’t hunt deer. Spotlights and high-powered rifles with scopes were not fair to the deer. He didn’t want to kill a deer. It would be like shooting a ballet dancer. But he could kill a rat or a groundhog. He would kill chickens to eat if it were convenient and he weren’t allergic to feathers. He was lucky, he told Julia, that he could work off his violent urges in ways that did not get him into trouble. He didn’t want to oversimplify, but wasn’t that the nature of competitive sports?

“Baseball,” she replied simply. “Nonviolent.”

“You’re still aiming and hitting,” he said. “It’s fundamental.”

She put her head in her hands in a gesture of submission. “I won’t fight you,” she said.

At the baseball game that day, a hometown hitter was struck by a pitch—an obvious beanball. The benches cleared and a fight erupted. Reed noticed Julia’s alarmed face fixed on the player, who was doubled in pain on the ground.

He felt bad now, remembering the way he had bullied her. But she hadn’t understood that he could actually kill someone in order to protect her, just as his dog would do the same for him. He had trained his dog when to attack, when to go for the throat. “My God,” Burl had said to him. “You name a killer attack dog Clarence? I can’t imagine anybody named Clarence being a bloodthirsty killer.” Burl himself didn’t hunt, or practice self-defense, or own a dog. He just flopped through life with little regard for the outcome.

“I was going to name him Copernicus,” Reed said. “But he didn’t like it.”

15

Reed felt like hopping on his bike and heading for the Florida Everglades, but his mother was waiting at the hospital for him to take her back to Sunnybank. An aide had gathered her toiletries and clothing into large transparent plastic bags with locking handles. Some of her lacy underwear was visible. The aide carried the bags, and Reed pushed the wheelchair. The aide told him to back the chair into the elevator, so that his mother faced forward. His mother sat quietly, as if she were being ushered to her doom.

At the business office, the blond social worker gave him forms to sign. As he was signing the releases, she said, “I met a guy in Middletown with the same last name as yours, but he pronounced it
Fu-trell.
”

“The
Fu-trells
went uptown,” Reed said with a grin. “My bunch, the
Few-trulls
, stayed home. I guess they thought it was futile to be a Futrell.”

“What kind of name is it?”

“It’s French, I think. Search me. It could be Kurdish for all I know.”

“My mother researches family history and she knows all about names.”

“My cousin does genealogy, and you’d think she was a monk preserving the books in a monastery in the Dark Ages,” Reed said. “It’s deadly serious stuff.”

She laughed and smoothed her hair. “I know what you mean. My mom is hooked.”

Why was Miss Clipboard acting like a normal person now? Reed wondered. Was she flirting with him?

Reed’s mother, sitting by the door in the wheelchair, grunted, then said, “Let’s get out of this cow palace.”

A couple of weeks went by, with summer coming on like a blow-torch. Reed changed his air-conditioning filters. He staked his tomatoes, which had shot out crazy arms in the recent rain. He couldn’t get through a summer without fresh tomatoes. If he had extras he liked to give them away, and if they rotted, he loved to throw them against the fence and watch their sad-sack faces disintegrate as they flew through the sieve of the chain link. He hadn’t seen Julia again, but they spoke twice on the telephone—friendly enough, but she was still reserved. He apologized for his snide remark about guns, and she dismissed it. He longed to see her, but she put him off; her studies consumed her free time now. She said she hadn’t had time to plant any tomatoes. “I’ll give you tomatoes,” he promised.

Burl had gone with an organized group to the Smoky Mountains for a bear hunt. He went along for the ride; he didn’t shoot, but he wanted to see the Smokies. Reed reviewed his gun collection. Now and then he would remove a gun from the safe and polish it, admiring the artistry and maybe reading up on its history. Old gun stocks were beautifully crafted, especially the wooden ones with ivory inlay. Most of his weapons were World War II era and would seem undistinguished unless you knew the history. His oldest was a Civil War pistol that he had bought for ten dollars at a flea market. It had been repaired with a modern bolt, which made the gun less valuable, but still it was a great addition to his collection. His funniest was a blunderbuss. The fastest was a Winchester repeating rifle. The strangest was the pepperbox revolving pistol he had assembled from a kit. As he thumbed through his books on the history of weapons, he couldn’t help dwelling on how the Colt .45 was called the Peace-maker and the ICBM was called a Peacekeeper. He could turn Julia’s argument completely around—a line of peace from the caveman to Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace to Star Wars. His collection was appropriate and logical, he thought. Weren’t war and peace as intimately related as man and woman, yin and yang?

A woman in a pink hat was playing raucous, full-chorded hymns on the piano at Sunnybank. On a table was a large globular glass vase of green plants, the roots dangling visibly in the water. Reed was startled to see a blue-fringed ichthyoid creature trapped in the globe of the vase, swimming helplessly in circles among the roots. The fish, flicking its tail, paused and stared at him, bug eyed. The hymn emanating from the piano was “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Reed considered that it might be something of a theme song for the aged.

“Did you feed the cats?” his mother asked.

“What cats?”

“At home. I couldn’t feed them all. They’re starving.”

Since returning to Sunnybank, she seemed to live half in dreams. She had told Reed about an orgy in the bathroom—a bearded man who leered and a nun with her skirt wadded around her waist. And she reported that camels and elephants marched past her window. Little creatures played under the bed—not mice, just gentle furry things who hid. The cats couldn’t reach them. The cats were starving. She too was starving. They never fed her anything. No snacks. No marshmallows. No cordon bleu.

A bloated woman clutching a flyswatter was propelling herself backwards in her wheelchair.

“Watch out, she’ll run over you,” Reed’s mother said. “She ran over my toes several times.”

“There’s a lot of traffic here,” Reed said. He wished Julia would suddenly be there, playing the piano. He said, “Mom, you look terrific. I need a woman who looks as good as you. That hairdo is a knockout.”

She laughed and brought her hand to her hair, as if to verify it. “You need a girlfriend,” she said. Reed thought she was testing a memory of herself as a young, flirtatious girl. She said, “Did you know Bud Futrell died?”

“I saw that in the paper. Is he the cousin with the crazy wife?”

“No.” She considered the question, searching her memory. She said, “He was the one with the crazy wife. Let me think.” She rolled a small hand-weight from exercise class in her lap. She said, “He had a crazy, detached wife.”

“What do you mean?”

She selected her words slowly. “He had a crazy, detached wife.”

“O.K., Mom.”

“He had a crazy wife,” she said. “She was . . . detached.”

“Oh. Don’t worry, Mom.” He couldn’t bear to watch her searching for words.

At five o’clock, he accompanied her—struggling along with the walker—to the dining room table, which she shared with three frail women. A retired preacher, a craggy man in a golf-green blazer, was saying grace at a nearby table. Irreverently, Reed glanced around at the bowed heads. “He goes on and on forever,” his mother commented a bit loudly.

“And heavenly father, we thank you for giving us your only begotten son who died for our sins,” said the preacher. “Thy son Jesus took up the cross and lugged it up the hill and died. We gather together on this special day to ask thy blessing.” He paused, then added emphatically, “And forgive us for our lustful sins and passions.”

Reed’s mother emitted a little hoot.

Divorce!
Reed thought suddenly. A detached wife.

At the supermarket Reed located a can of oyster stew and some oyster crackers. His mother loved oysters in any form—fried, stewed, raw, or Rockefeller—and he wanted to surprise her. Maybe there was some kind of shock therapy to shake up her cognitive faculties. Oysters might do it. He searched out his staples—popcorn, fruit, dairy, dog food—and threw in a twelve-pack of toilet paper (soft, in case Julia came to visit). After paying for his groceries, he slung several plastic bags into his hands instead of wheeling the cart out. In the parking lot, he spotted Burl getting into his truck.

“Hey, Burl, how many bears did you catch?” Reed said, tapping on the window.

He set his groceries on the asphalt. The glass bottles clinked. Burl scrambled out of the truck. He was wearing a garish souvenir T-shirt that said NO SMOKING IN THE SMOKIES, green letters against orange flames. He gave Reed an expansive hug.

“That’s my bear hug, Reed,” Burl cried. “You won’t believe the wild bear chase I’ve been on. It was a bear hunt and a game feast and an opera, all rolled into one.”

“Opera?”

“I’ll get to that. Listen. These people put on a wild-game barbecue for about five hundred people. But first they take you out in S.U.V.s, with dogs and bear rifles, and now and then they let the dogs out to look for bear. Then they come back and you ride some more over the mountain service roads. We never saw a bear—but it’s illegal to shoot one anyway.”

“Sounds more like a hayride than a bear hunt,” said Reed.

“It was all pretend. Denny Jones and his wife Tippy were along. She’s pregnant, and she had to have her cervix hole sewed up; they lost one baby because her cervix wasn’t strong enough to hold it. I didn’t think she ought to be out riding in an S.U.V. in the mountains.”

“That sounds nuts,” Reed said.

Burl, ducking into his front seat, swigged from a pint of bourbon that was concealed in a paper bag.

“That’s not all,” he said, replacing the package in his truck.

“When we got back from the bear hunt we were at this fancy hunting lodge—deer heads on the wall? A woman was playing the piano, and another woman was in there yelling like she was being torn to pieces by coyotes, and you could hear coyotes wailing out in the woods. It was opera! She was singing opera.”

“Opera does sound like coyotes, in parts,” Reed said, to be agreeable. Burl wasn’t staggering drunk yet, but he clearly intended to be. Quickly, Reed updated him on his mother and her delusions.

“Doesn’t that sound like she’s on drugs, Burl? That doesn’t sound like stroke damage to me.”

“What’s she taking?”

“They kept her stoked up on Xanax in the hospital, but they took her off of that, and now they have her on a couple of new pills that I’m not sure about. Maybe she’s not even getting her right medicine. The aides can remind them to take their pills, but they can’t give them their pills. It’s against the law for the aides to touch the pills.”

“What if your mom drops one and can’t stoop down to pick it up?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Those old folks are on their own there.”

“You better look up those pills. And look up the side effects.”

“I’ll have to. There’s no telling what she’s taking—or how much.”

“Sometimes the side effect cancels out the effect,” Burl said.

Reed laughed. “Does that sound like the story of my life?”

“I heard spinach soaks up radiation.” Burl took another drink of bourbon. He screwed the top back on and twisted the paper around the neck of the bottle. “Or was it rutabagas? I can’t remember.”

“How’s the old Prayer Warrior?” Reed asked. “Seen any major action lately?”

“I haven’t slept in two days. I’ve got a prayer vigil going, not just for you but for everybody out there at the plant that might be in trouble. You never know what they might have done to you twenty-five years ago! And then it comes up later. It’s like syphilis! I had a great-uncle that had that a long time ago. It crept up on him; it was living there all along and then one day it hatched like a maggot in a dead dog’s eye.”

“Is that a parable? You sound like a preacher, Burl.”

“I’m telling you, Reed, it might get you. Not syphilis. Radiation.”

“If I got it, I got it,” Reed said. “And you sure are making me feel good, Burl. You sure know how to make a fellow feel good.”

“
I’ve
got a headache and the scours,” Burl said. “And the red-eye. And if I don’t get out of here and go fix Mrs. Patterson’s sump pump, she’ll stop speaking to me.”

“Take care, Burl.” He paused. “By the way, the silverfish ate Eisenhower.”

“Oh, no!”

“There were just toenails left. I was off for three days and they had a Roman orgy.”

“Silverfish can eat a library in a weekend, I’ve heard.”

“I took care of that bird like it was my own baby.” Reed kicked at the pavement. “Silverfish! What kind of creature thrives in the Cascade?”

“You do. Or you think you do. Hey, you’ve got oyster crackers!” Burl pounced on the package and felt it. “I haven’t seen any of those in a Jack Russell terrier’s age. And what ever happened to oysters? We used to get oysters at that fish joint down on the river. They came in little goldfish cartons.”

“It’s just another one of those things,” said Reed. “Probably overdosed on technetium.”

“Oysters don’t grow here anyway,” Burl said. “You’re joking.”

“Well, wherever they grow, there’s probably technetium or something worse in their breeding ground—their oyster beds?”

“Pyridoxine hydrochloride?” said Burl, reading from the ingredients list on the oyster-cracker package. “Disodium guanylate?”

“That sounds like bat shit,” said Reed.