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18

The South Platte River looked big and important on maps of
Denver. It approached the city from the north-northeast. Its valley
and flood plain were several miles wide and served as a corridor for
a bundle of major transportation routes: state highways, an
interstate, natural gas pipelines, major railways, and high-tension
power lines. The first time Eleanor had seen it was shortly after she
and Harmon had arrived in Denver and they were driving around looking for places to live. Harmon drove and Eleanor navigated,
and she got them lost. She got them lost because she was trying to use the mighty South Platte as a landmark, and instead they kept crossing back and forth over a paltry creek or drainage ditch out in
the middle of nowhere. Not until she actually saw the name of the thing on a sign by a bridge could she believe that this dried-up rill was all there was to it.

They had crossed the Platte again a couple of years ago on their
way to the Commerce Vista Motel and Mobile Home Haven. In
retrospect, Eleanor knew that Harmon had craftily plotted their
trajectory so that they could reach the place without having to pass
through any part of Commerce City proper. They'd come in from
the northwest, from the middle-class suburbs where they had raised
their family, past brand-new strip malls sitting totally empty with
weathered FOR LEASE banners stretched across their fronts, across
open grassland that was too close to the flood plain or too far from
the highway to develop. At the edge of Commerce City they had
passed quickly through a brief unpleasant flurry of franchise
development and then come upon the Commerce Vista. Somehow
Eleanor had failed to notice the WEEKLY RATES sign on the
motel's marquee, and she hadn't even bothered to look across the
highway, off to the eastern edge of the mobile home park. She
hadn't looked that way because it was nothing but empty grassland stretching vastly under a white sky, and Eleanor didn't like to look
east across that territory because it told her exactly how far she was
from home. But if she had looked she would have seen that it was surrounded by tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, with
signs every few yards reading U.S. ARMY CORPS OF
ENGINEERS - NO TRESPASSING. Tangles of plumbing stuck
mysteriously out of the ground from place to place, and every few
hundred yards was a white wooden box with a peaked roof, like an
oversized birdhouse, containing instruments to monitor the air.

Prairie grass was the only thing that would grow in the yellow rock flour that passed for soil at the Commerce Vista. But the
vegetation was all gone and so now it was just a hardpan mixed
with broken glass so that it sparkled when the sun hit it right. There
were no particular roads or streets, only the tracks left by the last
vehicle. The only thing that kept it all from blowing away was the
tamping action of car and truck tires, and the little waist-high fences
that partitioned the land into tiny lots and gave each trailer a yard
to call its own.

On their first visit to the place, Eleanor had noticed that the
neighbor's gate had a little decoration on it. One of Doreen's kids
had put it up. It was a jack-o-lantern: a circle of orange con
struction paper with three black triangles in it, one for each eye and
one at the bottom that was apparently supposed to be the mouth.
It hadn't struck her as odd that they had Halloween decorations up
in June. Not until they'd moved in did Doreen explain that the
symbol was, in fact, a copy of the radiation symbols that their kids saw across the highway at the arsenal.

She remembered all of these things one night as she reclined in the front seat of her old Datsun, trying to get some sleep. Eleanor tried not to think of the old Datsun as a car. She tried to think of it
as a highly compact mobile home. She called it the Annex.

She could still remember walking down the street in D.C. with
her mother when she was a kid and encountering dirty men who
slept in parked cars. She could remember how frightened she was of those men and of the way they lived. She didn't want to be like
that.

It was not really such a big deal, when you thought about it logically. She was living in a mobile-home park, for god's sake.
What was a mobile home but a big boxy car without an engine?
Her old beat-up Datsun, parked on four flat tires in front of the
mobile home, was like a little annex, a mother-in-law apartment.

The seats did not exactly recline all the way, but they reclined
quite a bit. The only hard part was trying to find a comfortable
place to lay her head, because it tended to roll back and forth on
the hard surface of the headrest as she relaxed. After a couple of
hard nights she finally worked out an arrangement of pillows that
held her head in place comfortably. That and a sleeping bag and she
was all set. She knew that she might be sleeping this way for a
while, so she safety-pinned clean sheets into the inside of the
sleeping bag and took them out every week and laundered them.

The car's battery was run down but it still had enough juice to run the radio, so it could be said that the Annex had a home
entertainment system. Sometimes Eleanor would sit there and
listen to a little music, or to news of the presidential candidates.
Looking out the windshield, she could see into her neighbor
Doreen's trailer and see the candidates running around on Doreen's
TV set on top of the fridge. When she watched TV in this way,
from a great distance, through layers of dirty glass, unable to hear the sound, it had a weird, pixilated look to it. There were so many
politicians going so many places, doing so many cute things to get
the attention of the cameras. It was like a nursery school, she
thought, full of lonely kids who were always punching each other,
running with sharp objects, and sticking pencils up their noses -
anything to draw attention to themselves. The TV producers, like
overburdened nursery-school teachers, cut frantically from one
three-second shot to another, trying to keep track of them, and all
their little activities. Each cut made the image on Doreen's TV set
jump, startling Eleanor a bit and making her eyes jerk involuntarily
toward the screen.

So that was why kids couldn't stop watching television.

The candidates did not seem to have much of an attention span.
As the weeks went on, most of them ran into trouble of one kind
or another - a poor showing in a state primary, a scandal, or money
woes - and dropped out. It always seemed momentous at the time
of the actual announcement, and when Eleanor saw a candidate
standing somberly in front of some blue curtains, she would turn on
the Annex's radio and listen for news of his withdrawal. But a few
days later she would realize that she could hardly even remember
the candidate's name or what he stood for. And it got to the point that whenever one of the candidates made his little withdrawal speech, she would say, "Good riddance," and snap off the radio.

Eleanor Richmond was sleeping in her car because there was no
room left in the mobile home. It only had two bedrooms. Until
recently, she and Harmon had slept in one and their children
Clarice and Harmon Jr., had slept in the other.

Now everything was discombobulated. Harmon had killed
himself. Harmon, Jr., had taken to staying out late. Clarice had
remained stable and reliable, a good girl, for a few weeks following
the suicide, and then one night she had not come home at all.

And then Eleanor's mother had moved back in with them.
Eleanor spent about half of one night trying to sleep in the same bed
with her mother before going out into the living room, where she
found Harmon, Jr., sacked out on the couch. From there she had
gone straight to the car.

Eleanor loved her mother, but her mother had died a long time
ago. Only the body lived on. The Alzheimer's had started when she w
as in the first retirement community. The nice one. The
expensive one. By the time they were forced to move her into the
not-so-nice one, she had deteriorated to the point where she had
no idea what was going on, which was a blessing for all concerned.

Now she was home with Eleanor. She was back in diapers. Mother didn't mind, but Eleanor certainly did - and the children
couldn't handle it at all. Eleanor hadn't seen much of her children
since Mother had moved in.

With other kids, that would have been worrisome. But Eleanor's
kids weren't like that. She had raised them the way Mother had
raised her. They had their heads on straight. Even when Clarice stayed out all night, Eleanor felt confident that she was using her head and not doing any of that stupid underclass behaviour.

Harmon Jr., was a case in point. He had been horrified that first
morning when he found his mother sleeping in a car. He had tried
to insist that he be the one to sleep outside. Eleanor had put her
foot down. She was still a parent; Harmon, Jr., was still her child.
It was the parent's duty to look out for her children. No son of hers
was going to sleep outside, not while she could help it. Harmon,
Jr., eventually backed down. But the next day he came home with some sheets of silvery plastic stuff that he had brought at an auto
parts store. He went out to the Datsun and stuck this material up
on the insides of all the windows, turning them into one-way
mirrors. From inside the car, it just tinted the windows a little bit. But from, the outside, no one could see in.

Eleanor really liked it. She liked to come out here and snuggle
into her sleeping bag, lock the doors, and He for a while, gazing out
the windows. Usually when you went to bed, you were blind. If
you heard a mysterious noise outside the window or in the house,
you felt scared and helpless. You had to get out of bed and turn on all the lights to find out what was happening. Here in her silvered
bubble she could see everything, but no one could see her. If she heard a noise, all she had to do was open her eyes, and she could
see that it was a cat scratching in the dirt, or Doreen coming back
from her evening shift at the 7-Eleven. And if it was anything more
than that, she had Harmon's old officer's .45 sitting in the glove
compartment right in front of her, practically in her lap. Eleanor
had spent a few years in the Army herself and she knew how to use
it. She knew exactly how to use it.

When money got short and times got hard, you stopped
worrying about all the superficial nonsense of modern life and you got down to basics. The basic thing that a parent did was to protect
her family. That is why Eleanor Richmond felt more comfortable,
and slept much more soundly, in her silverized glass bubble with a
loaded gun six inches away. Whatever else was going wrong, she
knew that if anyone tried to get into her house and hurt her family,
she would kill them. She had that one base covered. Everything
else was details.

Her eyes came open in the middle of the night and she knew that
something was wrong without even turning her head.

The Commerce Vista ran right up to the edge of the highway,
and it didn't have any of this exit-ramp nonsense. One minute
you were going sixty miles an hour and the next minute you were
skidding across yellow dust and broken glass, trying to kill speed.
Whenever someone performed this maneuver, Eleanor heard it
and opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was always the
white aluminium front of the mobile home. If the car then turned on to her particular lane, its headlights would sweep across the
surface.

It had just happened a few seconds ago. And now she heard footsteps crunching in the gravel, right outside of the car.

She lifted her head slowly and quietly. A man was walking in
front of her car. A beefy, bearded white man, young-looking but
with the bulk of middle age, dressed in jeans and a dark
windbreaker, wearing a baseball cap. He moved confidently, as if he belonged in her front yard, as if he belonged on her front
step.

Which he definitely did not.

Eleanor had practiced this; she had been ready for it since the first
night in the Annex. As the man was mounting the steps to their
front door, his back turned to her, she rolled out the front door of
the car, dropping to her knees, pulling the gun out of the glove
compartment, and took cover behind the corner of the mobile
home, sighting down the side of the house, drawing a bead on the
center of the man's windbreaker. From here he looked exactly like a silhouette target at the firing range.