Day of the Bomb (31 page)

About six months back he
moved out here to Madisin. He bought forty acres out off of Turner
Road. A couple weeks ago he asked me to marry him. Thelma said Fred
would want me “to get on with my life” so I said yes. He’s a real
go getter and wants to build a warehouse on his land to import the
clothes from your father-in-law’s factory. Jason is drawing up the
blueprints.

You discovered a
skeleton in our family’s closet there at Joe’s
Place in Manila. My daddy knew Joe, the owner of
the bar. He met a girl there and got her pregnant the night before
he shipped out but didn’t find out about his daughter until years
later. Daddy’s Filipina daughter Cristina came to visit us in
Kentucky after WW I when I was little. Then she moved on out to
Hollywood and became a movie star. I hated the fuss Daddy made when
he took us to see her movies so I sort of hated Cristina, even
though she’s my half-sister.

I never brought this up with Fred or you
kids because I figured if Daddy wanted you all to know about it he
would’ve told you. Now that he’s gone I think you need to know. You
see, Joe married Cristina’s mother Maria while she was just a few
months along with Cristina so he was Cristina’s stepfather. We
stopped getting telephone calls from Cristina when she moved back
to the Philippines. But I think she might have inherited Joe’s
Place. Since she’s my half-sister I guess she’s your half-aunt.

Please go back there and
try to find her. Tell her that her half-sister is going to
honeymoon in Manila. Lance says he wants to check out that clothes
factory and give your
future
father-in-law some ideas for a men’s and women’s line that he’s
cooked up. Jason wants to tag along to make a side trip to Monkey
Island.

Love,

Mom

It took an
hou
r of pleading and bargaining
before Jason found an islander willing to ferry him to Monkey
Island for $40.

“When I described Kong to our
zookeeper back home he said Kong sounded like a Spider Monkey,”
Jason told the impassive boat captain. “He said they can live up to
forty years so there’s a good chance Kong’s still there waiting for
me to take him home.”

***

“They say it might still be hot with
radiation so you have to go ashore by yourself,” the sailor told
Jason as he anchored his boat in the coral reef twenty yards from
shore.

“Yeah, yeah.” Jason waded the final
distance to the beach where he had washed up on twenty-three years
earlier.

Typhoons had altered its landscape
somewhat; radiation from the atomic bomb tests had removed all of
the monkeys and most of the bird population. Survivors, the rats
now ruled the island, some deformed in the womb by the
radioactivity.

It took Jason five minutes
to find the remnants of his camp
where shreds of his lean-to still clung to the breadfruit
tree. He blinked when he saw that someone had continued to carve
lines into the tree trunk after his departure.

“Kong…” He ran his finger over the
smaller etches, meant to draw Jason back to the island.

He cried when under the lean-to he
found a tiny skeleton with his watch draped about its neck bones,
the timepiece Jason had given to Kong for Christmas, 1945. After
burying his friend, Jason saluted the grave.

“You knew how to live, my
friend. I
wonder if you would
want me worrying so much about the Russians and Chinese and their
damn A-bombs. When I get back home you think maybe I should take
apart my bomb shelter like Thelma keeps on nagging me to do? I knew
I should’ve never shown her where I hide the food.”

A gust of West wind loosened a
breadfruit high above him. It landed at his feet.

He shook his head. As he
waded back to the boat he wondered
how best to dismantle his bomb shelter without Thelma taking
credit that it had been her idea.

***

Arkhip kept saying, “I
don’t believe it,” as she watched hammers, power tools, and bare
hands destroy the Berlin
Wall.
After most of the USSR’s republics had broken free from Mother
Russia she talked of Kazakhstan for the first time since she and
Wilhelm had left it.

“I wonder what the test site is like after
so long.”

“Go find out,” her husband Wilhelm said.
“You need to bury some ghosts that still haunt you.”

So she travelled from the small town
in East Germany where the two had lived after their usefulness to
the Soviet atomic bomb program had ended in 1953. At least their
four children could now live part of their lives in the freedom of
a reunited Germany, she thought as her plane landed in Akmola, the
eventual capital of the newly freed republic.

***

The Kazakhstani official
responsible for overseeing the former atomic test site was
reluctant to let her
go inside of
it until she slipped him a 20-Mark bill. Then he smiled, nodded,
and unlocked the door to her old laboratory. After her visit, he
offered a side trip free of charge.

“Perhaps you would like to see the fruits
of your labor.”

“What?”

In response he drove her to a drab building
in the city closest to the test site. He nodded at its door. “I’ll
wait.”

The smell of the facility reminded her of
the East German hospitals where her children had been born. She
wandered its halls, occasionally peeking through open doors at
patients whose only commonality appeared to be their grotesqueness.
Before she could ask a nurse about them, she felt a tug on her
shoulder.

“Arkhip?”

She turned and stared at a woman who
looked about her age. “Yes?”

“It’s me. The cleaning lady for your
laboratory. Remember how I lived at the village near here downwind
from your bomb tests?”

“Oh, yes.”

She took Arkhip’s hand. “Come. I want
you to meet my granddaughter.” She led the way into a room with six
beds, occupied by children ranging from age one to seventeen. None
responded to the visitors. “Here she is. This is Arkhip. We named
her after you to remind us why she is here.”

Arkhip dropped into the chair beside
the bed and stared at what she thought to be a circus freak. When
the large misshapen head turned toward her, the narrowly set vacant
eyes blinked and a smile grew across the twisted cheeks above the
missing chin. A low growl passed through the contorted lips and
missing teeth.

“She’s eleven now. She came here a few days
after she was born.”

Arkhip cradled her head
with both hands and let her tears drop onto the one named for her.
“Forgive me,
Schatzi
. Please forgive
me.”

***

Dave Freight carried the presents
from his seventy-ninth birthday party into his trailer. After
setting them down on the tiny kitchen table, he pondered the
conversations at the party. Its attendees were all members of the
Double Dippers Club, one retired from the military, another from
state government, a third from local government, a fourth from
teaching. Two others were like himself, drawing pensions after long
careers in federal government. All seven also received monthly
Social Security checks, which made them double dippers and “proud
of it.”

Two at his party were convinced that
President Bush and company had planned or at least known that the
terrorists would fly jetliners into the Twin Towers and Pentagon on
9/11/2001. Three other attendees thought the first two were
“paranoid old farts in need of psychiatric care and medicine.” One
said he was not sure. But Dave had it all figured out.

“Typical bureaucracy,” Dave had told
the partygoers. “FBI agents in Arizona and Minnesota warned their
superiors beforehand about the terrorists connected to the attack.
But somewhere up the line their warnings died. Result? Thousands
dead. It was the BIA, Bureaucracy in Action that let 9/11
happen.”

Dave sighed
as he stared at the inside of the metal
dwelling that at times felt more like a coffin than home. No longer
as concerned about atomic and hydrogen bombs, he instead believed
other kinds of weapons of mass destruction now posed the greater
threat. He wondered if he would be granted the grace of a natural
death. It was either that or become a victim to this new
millennium’s evolving war of terror.

“I hope
I go in my sleep,” he said to his cat
Fat Boy, who meowed in reply.

Thank you to my wife Jean
for her critique
of the first
draft and cover design.

Thank you to Gretchen Ricker and Ed
Shafik for their insightful critiques of the first 100
pages.

Thank you to
keattikorn
for the cover
photo.

T
hank you to Maryann Miller for her helpful input on the
final draft.

Books read for background:

Tales of the South
Pacific
by James
Michener

The Rising Sun
by John Toland

The Rise and Fall of the
Third Reich
by William
Shirer

The Gulag
Archipelago
by Alexander
Solzhenitsyn

An Illustrated History of
the Horror Film
by Carlos
Clarens

The Western Films of John
Ford
by J A Place

The Great Films
by Bosley Crowther

New Deal or Raw
Deal
by Burton W. Folsom
Jr.

UFOs
by Leslie Kean

Area 51
by Annie Jacobsen

The
Redh
unter
by William F. Buckley

Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s was
unsettling for me. In first grade, we practiced ducking under our
wooden school desks “in case a big bomb goes off somewhere.” Dozens
of movies fed our imaginations as creatures mutated by atomic
radiation stalked humanity: giant crabs, spiders, locusts, moths,
or dinosaurs unleashed because of nuclear fallout. There was even a
man who grew to colossal heights and a woman to fifty feet tall in
other movies. Aliens from distant worlds came in UFOs to warn of
Earth’s destruction if we did not cease and desist from testing and
stockpiling nuclear weapons.

During fifth grade, we talked on the
playground about whether “those missiles in Cuba” would land where
we lived. Backyard or basement bomb shelters became common. The
fears seemed to peak in the 1980s until Mr. Gorbachev saw the
handwriting on the wall and let the one in Berlin be torn down.

Emotions wrought by such times seemed
to serve as an undercurrent as we grew up and became distracted by
other realities of life. For me, trying to put such reflections
down on paper seemed better suited to the world of
fiction.

My hope is to convey, at least
partially, the effects that The Bomb cast over billions during the
last half of the Twentieth Century.

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