Day of the Bomb (11 page)

“So where are you headed when you get out?”

“Back home of course. But just for a visit. My mom’s
been hounding me pretty regular like about spending Thanksgiving
and Christmas back there.”

“Where are you from?”

“Upstate Michigan. Right about where Lake Huron and
Lake Michigan meet at. That’s what I love about Route 66. You hop
on it in Los Angles and it’s a straight shot all the way to
Chicago. Only four maybe five more hours once I hit Chicago and I’m
home sweet home. But when I stay for just a while it’s going to
make Mom cry or mad or both at once.”

“You sure your captain didn’t talk you into
re-upping? That guy is so good he ought to sell used cars.”

“Nah. I’ll be coming on back out here to Los Angeles
in my civvies after I spend the holidays at home. I’ve never seen a
place growing so fast. Every time I drive through it they got
another subdivision of houses going up. And the women! Mama mia.
Every good-looking gal seems to end up in Hollywood wanting to be
the next Betty Grable or Lauren Bacall. Of course most of them
won’t give me the time of day when they find out I’m not in the
movie business. But I’m thinking of becoming a hotshot agent. You
know, the guy who gets those babes signed up with a big juicy
contract at some movie studio, with a nice slice of it going to
yours truly. God gave me the gift of gab. It would be a sin for me
not to use it, right?”

“Whatever you say, chief.” Jason used an opener to
pry off the top from a soda bottle.

“You’re religious, huh? I can tell.”

“Well, I always went to church if that’s what you
mean.”

“Yeah. I knew it all along. Every other couple I
drove to Nevada to get hitched were always in the back seat
practicing for their honeymoon. You and Thelma aren’t like that at
all. Sort of nice to see folks like you two. Here’s to you.” He
lifted his second bottle in a toast and then bit the cap off.

At Needles they turned north again. By the time they
reached Laughlin, Nevada, all three needed a bathroom break. Thelma
also needed a break from the insanity that two short timers with
little time left in uniform can produce. She pulled Jason aside
outside of the restrooms. “Let’s get off here.”

“But I thought that you wanted to see Las Vegas.”

“Maybe some other time. That long drive through the
desert wore me out. That and all the crazy talk and songs you two
kept on singing. Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall? You’re
like a couple of crazy high school boys all liquored up and you
haven’t even been drinking. I’m scared of what will probably happen
if you’re anywhere near him in Las Vegas. One or both of you will
end up in jail for sure. Then we won’t get back home for the
wedding reception that our moms got all planned out for next
Saturday. They’re already plenty upset that we didn’t want to wait
to get married in Madisin.”

Jason scratched his chin, a habit he had learned from
Kong. If stopping off here made her happy, why not? His dad had
always said, “Anytime you can please a woman, go for broke.” So he
walked over to their driver to explain the change in plans. “Is
there any chapel here in town? Thelma’s not too up on going all the
way on to Las Vegas.”

“Sure is. Hop in and I’ll take you there in a
jiffy.”

The ceremony took twenty minutes, fifteen of which
were spent waiting for another couple to act as witnesses to Thelma
and Jason vowing to sail life’s seas “in sickness and health, for
richer or poorer till death do us part.” The newlyweds then
graciously served as witnesses for the ones who married after they
did.

Attached to the back of the wedding chapel was a
small house, home to Rev. and Mrs. Quantrum. A small sign at the
chapel’s front door told customers to ring the doorbell below it.
Doing so set off a loud buzzer in the house and brought one of the
two to usher the couple into the pews. So far, Rev. Quantrum had
married 14,298 couples but business had dropped off since the war
ended and the flow of those in uniform migrating through southern
California slowed from a flood to a trickle. But there was always
some couple eloping, divorcee marrying on the rebound, or other
lonely souls in a hurry to tie the knot. The Quantrums closed the
chapel for a two-week vacation annually. Otherwise it was open
seven day a week, twenty-four hours a day, rain or shine.

After counting their remaining money, Mr. and Mrs.
Dalrumple checked into a cheap motel that came furnished with a
radio, fan, and roaches. Thelma screamed at them as she smashed any
she spotted. Within five minutes her shoes’ soles were covered with
parts of their flattened corpses. After a year spent with monkeys,
birds, and rats as his only neighbors, Jason only noticed the
remnants of the insects his wife had crushed. Any that moved seemed
natural. He was likewise oblivious to her complaints about “our
sorry honeymoon.” Her new husband tried to compensate by making
love to her three times during their two-day stay in Laughlin. His
efforts coincided with Thelma’s cycle so that one of the millions
of his sperm produced during those two days penetrated one of her
approximately 70,000 eggs that she carried. But it would be a
couple of months before her missed periods and morning sickness
alerted Thelma to their honeymoon child.

Just as a good taxi driver should, Corporal Ivers
arrived promptly at the wedding chapel after his two days and
nights of gambling and carousing in Las Vegas. His downcast
features betrayed his empty wallet.

“You look lower than whale crap,” Jason said as Lance
drove south toward Route 66. Unwilling to endure any more short
timer fever, Thelma sought refuge in the back seat.

“You might say that. I went through my whole pay for
the month.”

“What did you play, the slot machines?”

“Nah. They’re all luck, just like the roulette wheel
and craps table. I stick with poker only. Now there’s a game that
takes real skill. Yes, sir. Give me three new cards, dealer, and
get ready to ante up.”

“What about blackjack?”

“Twenty-one? I tried it a couple times but kept right
on losing. With poker I come back to the base with a couple hundred
bucks sometimes.”

“Oh. Then I guess you wouldn’t be interested in the
Method.”

“Method? What’s that? What gives? You been holding
out on me or what?”

Jason spent a quarter hour outlining the Professor’s
way of winning at blackjack. Lance listened silently until Jason’s
retelling of his night of gambling before falling off the troop
ship into the Pacific. Then he slammed on the brakes and the tires’
skid marks snaked onto the road’s shoulder as the car shuddered to
a stop. He opened the door and began a war dance around the vehicle
and its passengers, who stared at each other and him. An imaginary
tomahawk cut the air as he hopped from foot to foot and yelled,
“Hee hi ho, huh, huh, huh” over and over. When Jason poked his head
out the window to say that Thelma was tired of sitting in the
101-degree heat, the fist holding the invisible tomahawk crashed
into his skull. It bounced off of the window frame but no blood
flowed.

“Ow. What did you hit me for?”

“Sorry.” Lance rubbed his hand. “I always do my war
dance with my eyes closed and didn’t see your head. Man, it sure is
hard. I sprained my hand when I clobbered you.”

“War dance?”

“Yeah. My grandma was full-blooded Huron so I’m
one-quarter Indian. My dance just declared all-out war on the
casinos. You and your Method are going to get me the victory, pale
face, because those dealers speak with forked tongues.” He turned
to Thelma. “Sorry about the hold up. You think you could drive
while Jason and me play some blackjack in the back seat?”

“Anything to get this heap moving so we at least have
some breeze.” Thelma hopped out and slid into the driver’s seat as
Jason and Lance moved to the back seat.

Jason dealt four piles of cards: his, Lance’s and two
for phantom players. As the cards dealt face up appeared he
explained how to calculate what cards remained in the deck. Six
hours and 482 hands later, Lance had the Method memorized.

Agent Bill Sampson, Army Counter-Intelligence Corps,
always reviewed past assignments as he traveled to his next one.
After starting his career as a flatfoot on the streets of Chicago,
he had moved to the fastest growing federal bureaucracy, the
Department of the Treasury, which was burdened with enforcing
Prohibition throughout the Roaring Twenties and beyond. He became a
legend of sorts, at least among moonshiners, bootleggers, and
speakeasy owners as being fair and honest. Every bribe that came
his way was rejected with, “I was going to let you off easy but
since you think so little of my integrity that you want to buy me
off, you leave me no choice but to throw the book at you.”

Word spread that “whatever you do, don’t ever try to
bribe Agent Bill Sampson.” Soon those who made, transported, and
sold illegally manufactured alcohol began to ask agents their
names. If the response was Bill, their wallets stayed in their
pockets.

When J. Edgar Hoover took the helm of the Bureau of
Investigation Sampson began to read newspaper stories of how the
new federal bureaucracy was taking down gangsters, some one at a
time such as John Dillinger, others a whole gang at once, such as
Ma Barker and her boys. He transferred and became one of Hoover’s
agents. Of the eight presidents that Hoover served, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt proved to be the most difficult.

Perhaps this stemmed from the different worlds that
the two came from. Hoover was born into a family that prided work
ethic above social status. FDR was raised as a child of privilege.
To keep the bloodline pure, he married his distant cousin Eleanor.
She did her best to ferret out the unworthy in their midst,
labeling Whittaker Chambers with the snub, “he’s not one of us”
after Chambers blew the whistle on Americans spying for the USSR,
some of whom she considered as “one of us.”

While Agent Sampson was apolitical, Hoover and
President Roosevelt were bureaucrats of Machiavellian proportions.
But Hoover thought it only necessary to spy on those he deemed as
threats to America, not those whom FDR deemed as threats to his New
Deal, so the head of what was renamed the Federal Bureau of
Investigation cared little about using his agents as the president
demanded they go after his hit list of enemies. When FDR signed an
order to send Japanese Americans to relocation camps in 1942,
Hoover protested because almost all of those imprisoned were
American citizens. Angry that such American citizens were being
interred, Agent Sampson had decided he could be of more service to
his country by ferreting out genuine spies working for the
Japanese/German/Italian Axis.

So he had transferred to the Army
Counter-Intelligence Corps. During the war he had assignments to
atomic development centers in Washington state and Tennessee. This
was the first he would visit the Los Alamos National Lab in New
Mexico. He always left his family at home with only hugs and no
explanation for his sudden trips.

“Daddy’s job makes him travel,” Mrs. Sampson told
their children.

His flight aboard a DC-3 from Washington D.C. to
Cincinnati to St. Louis to Oklahoma City to Albuquerque was long
and boring but it gave him time to practice his assumed role for
this assignment, an exercise he always did to be in character by
the time he reported to his destination. He was now Bill Pryzinski,
on his way to his new job at Los Alamos. The passenger next to him
on the plane perked up at the mention of the laboratory. “Los
Alamos? Isn’t that the place where they blew up the first atom
bomb?”

“I don’t know for sure. I’m just a maintenance man. I
just repair what needs fixing is all I do.”

“Shoot, boy. The powers that be got you headed in the
wrong direction. They should be sending you to Washington D.C. to
straighten old Harry Truman out. From what I’m hearing he wants to
keep on expanding FDR’s New Deal. I’m not sure what killed FDR.
Maybe it was his crusade to turn America into another USSR. Maybe
it was his screwing those other women besides his wife Eleanor. Who
knows? Someone needs to tell Harry he needs to keep a watch on
those damn Russians. They already took over most of Europe. We’re
next on their list. What do you think?”

Bill nodded. “Can’t argue much with all of what you
just said. But you know how it is. They tell me to jump and I say
‘how high?’ So I’m headed to New Mexico. I just hope I don’t end up
like a Mexican jumping bean.”

His seatmate extended a hand. “Name’s Tony
Rechlizo.”

“Bill Pryzinski. Glad to meet you.” He shook the
sweat-covered palm. “First time flying?”

“Nah. I’m a veteran at this. Besides, I drove tanks
all the way to Germany during the war. Blew those krauts to hell
and back again. Flying is a piece of cake. Can I buy you a
drink?”

“Thanks. Just a soda for me. Any alcohol really makes
my gout flare up. Talk about painful.”

“Gout?” He waved for a stewardess. “Bad news. My
uncle has it too. His feet turn red and puffy if he drinks.
Sometimes he can’t even walk if he drinks too much.” He smiled at
the flight attendant. “Hi. A soda for Bill here and a whiskey for
me.” He turned back to Bill. “You sound like a Republican.”

“I never bothered to register with any party. I just
vote for who looks best. I was for Al Smith back in 1928 and
1932.”

“So you’re a Catholic like Smith?”

“Nope. My folks weren’t church people except when
someone got married or died. I go to church on Christmas and Easter
when I can.”

***

Agent Sampson stayed in character as he rented a car
after landing in Albuquerque.

“Thank you, Mr. Pryzinski. Here are the keys. Your
car is out the door to your right. It’s the red Buick.”