Bombshell (21 page)

Nausea flowed through her, her spine curling over involuntarily as she vomited into the wild grass. This sickness was something more than having killed Kip Winters. Yet, killing him had brought her to a new threshold, a place where the secrets of death were rendered transparent, where it came as a howling gale through the living. Killing had opened up a new zodiac. On one side of the threshold, which was like a partition of weird stars in her mind, was Kip Winters; and on the other, she felt that something terrible, something final had happened to Molly. New and crystalline instincts forced herself to the position: Molly is dead. The knowledge of it glowed in her bones with a grotesque, radiant agony. Her certainty was as irrational as the certainties of Reagan's astrologer, yet because it was born of a plexus of atomics and assassinations, she did not doubt it. It was her fault. In the vertigo of this unutterable pain, the gris-gris pulsed and chattered at her throat. She had to keep moving.

Cash knew that the burning car would be visible from the Vogtle plant, which was owned by the Winters Corporation. It would summon desperate memories and trigger a security alert. A site emergency had occurred at Vogtle on the morning of March 20, 1990. A reversing fuel truck had crashed into an electrical system, disabling the power. The cooling systems lost their facility to prevent the reactor core from overheating in the bright, humid morning. The Vogtle engineers lost control of the reactor. As faulty wiring systems sparked and incorrectly sealed connections disentangled, the reactor raged, a deadly Promethean bulb on the banks of the Savannah River. As the plant personnel struggled to regain control of the electrical circuits that the crashing fuel truck had caused to flash out and short-circuit, the heat approached catastrophic limits. Cash intended the abandoned and flaming car to be a death card on a corpse. Yet, since it had, at the last moment, occurred to her to bring the dead, blond Winters boy along, it would be more than that. With his family assuming that he was missing, but alive, she calculated that she could purchase valuable time
to get to the others before they would tighten their firewalls. She had to move, before the alert brought too much heat. Down the remote road to the farm she had marked earlier, she pulled the two-tone burgundy-white pickup truck from dirt track to highway and faced north.

These are the quieter spaces of the earth, she told herself, the places that no one talks about, the places where death passes across desks in anonymous bulletins that change nothing, where bad driving can destroy a state. Eighty percent of the nuclear reactor plants in the United States lie to the east of the Mississippi River in Nuclear Regions I, II, and III. The great expanse of Nuclear Region IV, from Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, shading off through Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and west, was almost empty of reactors. Winters Corp was about to exploit Region IV, and the vast uranium deposits there, the dormant mines that could be reactivated, and new catacombs sparkling like cocaine could be drilled, glittering cataracts at Paradox Basin, Powder River Basin, along the Texas Gulf Coast, at Fort Range, the Washakie Sand Wash Basin, Wild River, Marysvale, Spokane, northwest Nebraska, northern Arizona, and the Grants Mineral Belt in New Mexico. And there were others. The Winters Corporation was developing new means of opening up Region IV, based on the economy of building new reactors close to the uranium mines that they would disinter. The nightscape of America was already crowded with ghost trains transporting solid and liquid radioactive waste in decaying caskets to dumps along the Texas–New Mexico border, through prehistoric swamps, to the poisoned limits of the cities of the poor, to contaminated fields, to the perimeters of reservation lands, to cancer sections of the map. Otherwise, they moved in trucks with crystal-meth addicts at the wheel. And uranium for processing also had to travel to reactors thousands of miles away. New reactors in new territories, the Winters Corporation bargained, need not be far away from their source of uranium. By now, Cash reflected, as she drove north along I-95 through the overcrowded nuclear spaces of
the Carolinas, moving through the complete night in one unbroken race toward Washington, D.C., the disappearance of the youngest scion of the Winters Corporation patriarchy would have caused the elder brother and the father to cancel their speaking and lobbying engagements at the Low Carbon Symposium. Behind her, the burning car would draw the police, the CIA, to Vogtle, and it would purchase her a darker shroud and a little more time.

Cash retrieved some cassettes from her pack and pushed a mix-tape into the dirt-smeared cassette player in the dashboard of the pickup truck; light rain fell against the glass and wind moaned against the green metal of the highway signs. She stopped at a gas station to refuel. Inside, she bought a Styrofoam cup of stagnant coffee and another packet of cigarettes to keep her awake and alert, paying with crushed dollar bills from her jeans pocket. Back in the truck, pulling back into the darkness of the road, she lowered the windows to the rain and blasted “Janitor” by Suburban Lawns on the stereo, a new wave conjoining of nuclear physics, doubt, and sex organs. She drove on through landscapes of cooling towers and congealing nuclear swamps, pits of cracked concrete, slums of radiation sickness and denial.

DRIVING AWAY FROM EXAMINING THE WRECKAGE OF THE BURNT-OUT
car in Savannah, Robert Dresner had regarded the manner in which the arc lights from the Vogtle nuclear plant interrupted the stars. He thought that he could feel vast waves emanating from the structures behind him, pushing him away, as though the space rejected all flesh, all life. It was as though the plant had incinerated Kip Winters even while he stared at it like a seduced tourist. The river was silent; no insects or birds stirred. It
was like a vacuum. A local farmer had fought the blazing car, and had reported that his own missing pickup truck seemed to have been stolen. He got the description. Dresner had managed to get a forensics team to the site to work through the black remnants of the corpse. He ordered them to work with all haste, yet, still, he would have to wait hours for their report. The farmer's daughter was a fuck, Dresner decided. He would rip open her gingham shirt and bang her over the kitchen table while the old man was out crying over his stupid truck.

Initial ballistics reports had informed Dresner that the gun that killed Kip Winters before he was half-incinerated was a Russian PSS pistol, developed during the 1980s and used by the KGB. It was a six-shot silent pistol with a noiseless cartridge. The shots fired that morning would have made less sound that a child's toy, a few faint clicks as blood sprayed eerily across the lawn from Kip Winters's grunting body. Dresner was exhausted.

APRIL 15, 2011. SHE DROVE INTO WASHINGTON, D.C., AT DAWN,
red sunlight on the Potomac.

Dial tone . . .

“Janelle? Janelle Gresham?”

“Cash? Holy shit, it
is
you! Nona said that you might call. Where are you?”

“I'm at a pay phone, here in D.C.” Cash shrugged down beneath the metal hood of the public telephone as a pigeon landed on it. “Can I see you? Nona couldn't find your address, where are you?”

“Constitution Avenue, the northeast. But tell me where you are, or where I can meet you, and I'll come and get you.”

Cash abandoned the truck, leaving the keys inside the glove compartment, and walked to the Capitol building with her stained khaki pack.

“Do you still take strong coffee? Make yourself at home.” Janelle glanced back over the padded shoulder of her navy blue business suit as she turned the key in the lock of her heavy white apartment door, blowing her blond hair away from her eyes. A broad pistachio rug lay over the polished floorboards; the walls were white with pale mint and dove-gray accents at the picture rail. A print of Tamara de Lempicka's
Portrait of Madame Allan Bott
was framed above the Georgian mantle; Madame Allan Bott statuesque in her pearlescent silk shift, turning her back upon an indistinct city of gray, green, and black. Cash moved about the apartment, admiring the objects she found, a pair of green glazed candlesticks and silver drinks coasters. She allowed herself to collapse upon Janelle's zebra-print couch, hugging a blue velvet throw cushion to her taut body and gazing up at the tall townhouse ceiling. Janelle was now thirty-nine years old, a Pisces, two selves bound together by an ineffable cord, a sometime riot grrrl now working tech shifts for the bureaus and offices, the marble and pale rock of Capitol Hill. Cash said: “You look so good in your suit, wow.”

Janelle picked up a remote control and the sawtooth electro pulses of Chicks on Speed's “Yes, I Do” began to pump from a set of Mackie studio monitors. “It's my Cindy Sherman drag, right? My power costume.” The heavy drum machine kicked in.

“Right. Here, clench your fists and look desperate. Complete the picture.” Propelling herself from the couch, Cash tousled Janelle's hair, explaining: “You've just been refused promotion because you won't blow Michael Douglas. Glass ceiling, bitch.”

“No, I will not.” Janelle growled and bared her teeth, holding her laughter in.

“That's right. And I prefer Jane Fonda myself. Remember Michael Douglas pounding on the glass of the control room of the Ventana nuclear plant, before the shooting starts?”

“
The China Syndrome
? Sure. Why do you think I don't have a microwave? And because of you.”

Cash was silent, self-conscious.

“So. You saw Nona?”

“In New Orleans, yeah.”

“Did she tell you that I sold out? At least, I imagine that's what she told you. She never lets me forget it. She's kind of a bitch that way. You know, because,” Janelle lifted her palms to the room, gesturing wearily at the large television, the new computer on the glass coffee table, and toward the door to the shining kitchen, finally toward her own body, wrapped in her flawless suit. Her tall heels bit the pistachio rug.

“She's suspicious of me, too,” Cash reassured her. “Says I am stuck in the past. And besides, Nona's on payroll. She's got a mortgage. What are you supposed to do?”

Janelle scoffed. “In Nona's eyes, if we're not sucking the tit of ‘the essential feminine,' then we're all victims; that sanctimonious Earth Mother wannabe. She buys into all of that duality bullshit. That's part of why I had to get away from her. She honestly digs the old tyrannies of male and female whenever they suit her and make her feel like a goddess. Fuck . . . ”

“I don't think you sold out. But you're already self-conscious because I look the same,” Cash anticipated.

Janelle admitted it.

“Why, though?” Cash was incredulous.

“Because you don't look like you have
surrendered
.”

“Because I look like shit?” She was overtaken by a pang of need. For a moment, it occurred to her that she wanted something similar to Janelle's life, except that it was too late. “Okay, but what if I am actually just sick and miserable? What if my development arrested? You know that Nona thinks that I am trapped in the past? I think she was just as pissed about what she sees as my inability to change as she is with your ability to move on. Whatever the fuck my past is. Maybe you don't look like yourself, and neither do I.”

“Come and see something.” Janelle took Cash's hand and led her to another room off the main entrance hall. “It's usually locked.” She ushered Cash inside, switching on the light.

“Oh my God . . . ”

The walls were covered with monochromatic Xeroxed punk rock posters, Excuse 17, the Frumpies, Bratmobile, band fliers, set lists, torn pages, collaged photographs, appropriated cartoons, illustrations, typed and handwritten fragments:
Jigsaw Youth, Riot Grrrl
, images of Revolution Summer, feminist-situationist graffiti,
Revolution Girl Style Now!
. . . There were a few beer bottles on the carpet, a dust-blown four-track cassette recorder, a Fender Duo Sonic with two strings missing, a cheap analog keyboard
bandaged with silver insulating tape. Cash studied the poster on the back of the door. R
ECLAIM
Y
OUR
L
IFE
: F
UGAZI
, B
IKINI
K
ILL
, S
PEAKERS FROM
W
ASHINGTON
P
EACE
C
ENTER
, D.C. S
CAR
, R
IOT
G
RRRL
E
QUAL
J
USTICE AND
M
ORE
. . . P
UNK
P
ERCUSSION
P
ROTEST AT THE
R
EAGAN
/B
USH
S
UPREME
C
OURT
. “That was before my time here, of course, but it keeps me honest.” There was the old boom box, covered in decals and stickers. Janelle followed Cash into the room. “What Nona doesn't understand is that none of us ever really left Herland.” She put her fist on her hip and slouched against the kitchen door frame. For a moment, Cash saw her as she had been: Leaning against the door frame to the kitchen, beneath boughs of mistletoe, Janelle Gresham wiped her blond hair back, wetting it with beer that she poured from a can into her palm. The beer spilled onto her black and glitter-flecked Runaways T-shirt. The angles of her hips shone above the waist of her ripped jeans.