The Rackham Files (29 page)

I was astonished to see how much polyfilm we'd used. We had started with a pair of fifty-foot rolls, but now only a little of the ten-mil stuff remained. Of the two-mil film perhaps half the roll was available for toilet baggies or whatever. Those two rolls of polyfilm were among the smartest purchases I ever made.

Then I tripped over a mattress in the dark tunnel and nearly fell on Spot, who marched with feline dignity to the root cellar and sat warily watching Lance. The kid was foraging in the bike kits with my big lamp.

"What're you after, Lance?"

"Getting flashlights for mom," he complained, as if I had accused him of something.

"Good. Don't use the big lamp when a little flash will do," I said as pleasantly as I could while moving away. I didn't hear his reply clearly but my palms itched because it sounded suspiciously like "fuck off" to me. Surely, I reflected, there must be some way to pulp a kid without actually harming him.

The subdued light flooding down the stairwell shed enough illumination for most of our basement operations, but I needed a flashlight to ransack my office for a coil of wire. I asked for a light.

"Coming up," Shar responded, then raised her voice in no-nonsense tones: "Lance, if I don't have a light by the count of ten, you will get
no lunch
!" I filed that one for future reference; Lance was with us, displaying two fresh flashlights, at the count of nine.

During the next few minutes we lined the tunnel with our stuff and pulled Mrs. Baird into it, pallet and all, before sealing the stairwell door and filing into the tunnel. Devon still had little to say, though he made optimistic noises each time his mother managed to sip cool coffee. I suppose she was, at most, half-conscious.

Ern's air filter was a trick he borrowed from oil filtration of an earlier era. During the next hour five of us slaved to get it ready. Ern filled empty juice cans with rolls of toilet paper, plugging off the central tube of each roll and punching holes near the bottom of each can. Then he taped the cans into circular holes in a cardboard box so that, when he connected the bellows pump to the filter box, any air that reached the bellows had to be sucked endwise through the toilet paper rolls from edge to edge. According to Ern, any dust particle that found its way through those layers of paper—between the layers, really—had to be a micron or less in size. So much for the good news.

The bad news was that the bellows had to suck like hell to get any air through a single filter element. That was why Ern used six elements, six rolls in juice cans, for the filter box. He had a second filter box half completed, not knowing how long it might be before the filters became clogged and perhaps heavily contaminated with fallout particles. If one clogged, we'd have another ready.

Before going back into the basement, we discussed the job. Shar felt that she should stay with Mrs. Baird, which left me and Ern as the two most adept at placing that filter box. We needed a fifth hand to hold the flashlight, and Lance and Cammie were the two who had taken the least dosage. Of course we chose Cammie; she could also take meter readings out there.

Kate saw the portajohn I'd been making while we talked and put the plastic trashcan between her knees when I relinquished it. "By the time you're finished with that filter out there, this little throne is going to be very popular," she said with a smile that wouldn't stay on straight.

I showed her my palm and she slapped it lightly, and then I shuffled into the basement to make the filter hookup, wondering if a new Kate Gallo would emerge from all this; and if we would all be changed.
If
we emerged.

The hookup went quickly. First we coupled the air tube we'd already linked to my furnace air intake to the new filter box which had an enclosed front plenum chamber. That way we made sure the filter elements couldn't draw air from the basement. Our next hookup was from the rear plenum chamber of the filter box to the air pipe leading to the pump and took only moments. We secured the connection with tape and went back to the tunnel.

While I sealed up the slit at the tunnel door, Ern was pumping. "Kee-
rist
but it's hard to pump," he muttered. "Cammie, get a reading on the pump exhaust, will you, hon?"

Me: "An obstruction?"

Ern: "No, I checked that. This damn thing just needs a lot of suction, or a little extra time to get through a cycle."

He was understating it. I could see the air pipe trying its best to collapse until he slowed the cycle rate. I counted sixteen cycles a minute and said, "We have two more people but we're pumping at half-speed, and it's harder work. Ungood, Ern."

Cammie knelt with the meter and flashlight, counting sotto voce, and registered pleasure. "I get less than a rem," she said.

"No more than we were taking last night during the worst," said Ern, still pumping, studying his handiwork. "You know, we really should be keeping a journal on radiation versus time."

Farther down the tunnel Spot kibitzed as Kate and Devon lugged Cammie's propped-up bike nearer to us. A good sign: the youth was fit for light duty, or thought he was.

"Here, dad, let me," said Cammie, and she settled herself at the pump. "Lordy, and me already sore from working this thing last night," she said but kept at it.

Ern mumbled, "We've got to do better than this," and motioned me to follow him to the root cellar. We could talk there without auditors except for Spot, whose coarse doggy shoulder ruff I scratched as Ern plied a flashbeam around us.

As though to himself he said, "Here it is, then: the valve Shar made at this end of the tunnel might improve airflow enough to offset the addition of two more people. Or it might not."

"I'm sorry, Ern. If I'd had more time I might have made a different decision out there."

"I doubt it. And I probably would've done just what you did. I guess I just didn't expect you to suddenly turn soft on the human race."

"It could be in short supply a week from now," I explained.

In determination that bordered on anger he grated, "Well, we aren't gonna go under here, by God! We
must
build another front plenum for that spare filter box. But we're out of cardboard."

"Why duplicate the one you built?"

"To put twice as many filter elements into the system, which ought to give us almost twice as much air."

I tried to envision it. "You mean put a second filter box out there and draw air from the basement, too?"

"No, no, goddamnit, we need air that we haven't been breathing. The only restriction is through those rolls of ass wipe. We'll just have to run crossover tubes between the front intake plenums and between the collector plenums—uh, on the suction side. Got it?"

"Yup." When Ern started cussing, he was either drunk or exceedingly worried; and he hadn't taken a nip that day. As he leaned against my thin wall paneling in the tunnel, I recalled nailing the stuff up. It was thin panel board with a watertight plastic facing. I tapped the panel behind him and said, "Well, here's our front plenum."

In two minutes we had the big panel loose and had used the back of the filter box to scribe a pattern. Though Ern's Swiss knife even had a small saw blade, we found it quicker to make repeated scribe lines with a sharp blade and then snap the panel along the lines. Soon we were trimming sides of the new part and double-taping the seams to make them airtight. Ern used the saw blade to cut a circular hole for an air pipe. We taped our new intake plenum onto the spare filter box and found ourselves ready.

I hefted the thing, which weighed no more than ten pounds, and said, "I'll tote it."

Ern's chin went down against his chest. Firmly: "No you won't, Harve. It's only a one-man job, and I—I'd rather you weren't out there."

So: open dissension. I misunderstood his motive. "I'm not
that
klutzy, Ern. And who's going to stop me?"

"Sweet reason, I hope. You and Shar absorbed some heavy stuff outside today. I didn't. Lance can handle a flashlight, and it's time he pulled some weight." Ern's stance was that of a man expecting a backhand, but he planted himself in front of me like a cornerstone waiting for a bulldozer.

Kate disturbed our tableau, moving toward us with the one-holer she and Cammie had finished. It had a taped-together seat of corrugated cardboard over an inch thick, probably in deference to my great arse, and a film-faced cardboard lid with a tape hinge. The lid wasn't airtight, but the film hung down so it could be lightly taped when we weren't using it. Ern's vanwagon had a real chemical toilet, but they had left their first-stage vehicle somewhere en route. Kate's portaprivy would have to serve.

"I'm on the verge of a—ah—breakthrough, fellas. Mind if I test the thing in privacy?"

I grinned at her, stepped aside, handed the unwieldy filter box to Ern, and sighed. "Lance, huh?"

"He's a big help when he wants to be. Don't sell him short."

"Not me, pal." Consumer-protection laws were invented to balk sales of such products as Lance.

But Lance didn't want to. "Why pick on me? Cammie can do it."

"Let him have his breakfast, hon," Shar said. "He's worked very well this morning." Her tone suggested there was nothing more to say.

Ern said something anyway, very softly.

"You wouldn't," said my sis in horror. Lance smiled and slurped pineapple juice. Shar went on. "Ernest McKay, I will not let you bully your own son. Childish bullying, that's all it is," she snorted.

Ern stripped tape from the door slit one-handed, shouldering the filter box. "Coming, Cammie?"

My niece's gaze swept across her mother and brother in silent accusation as she stood up, stretching the muscle kinks from her neck. She took the little flashlight and went into the basement with her father.

I took over at the pump, exchanging stolid glances with my sister. She held my gaze for a long moment and then said to Lance, "Why don't you pedal the bike awhile, hon?"

"Pedals are too far away."

"That hasn't stopped you in the past, lamb. And you
do
want lunch, don't you?"

"There's more than one kind of bully," he observed. But he went.

In the stillness we could identify sounds of survival: breathing; the clack of pump valves and the whoosh of air; the ratchety whir of the bike as Lance pedaled; the whine of a tiny generator. And muffled by distance, the murmur and industry of a new filter emplacement in our primitive little life-support system. Unheard but very much in my mind was the slow-fire hammer of gamma radiation riddling the flesh of Ern and Cammie.

Then we heard Kate in the root cellar, denouncing Spot as a voyeur. I smiled briefly and said to Shar, "Lance is right, you know."

"My bubba siding with Lance! Will wonders never—"

"Don't 'bubba' me; I'm not siding with him. He said there are various kinds of bullying, and he's right. He's an expert at it, Shar; he just uses you as his weapon and his shield."

"Nonsense. Look at the child, pedaling for dear life."

"Bullshit; pedaling for dear lunch, you mean."

"A much better alternative than beating a child," she sniffed.

I considered that, found it apt so long as it worked, then applied the idea to our whole situation—if we were lucky enough to have one—our future. "Maybe the whole country made a mistake by inventing so many alternatives," I mused. "Lower scores on college entrance exams; middle-class druggies in junior high; professional athletics dominated by minorities. Maybe because the average middle-class kid has too many neat alternatives, a lot of 'em never learn to pitch into a shitty job and get it over with. At worst they can just run away from home and crash at a series of halfway houses. We've let our kids replace self-discipline with alternatives. No goddamn wonder divorce rates are still climbing, sis."

Armed with years of adult-ed jargon, Shar jabbed with a favorite: "Simplistic. Cammie's no druggie and she's on the tennis varsity."

"Yep, and she also got your belt across her bottom when she snotted off. She didn't get pleasant alternatives, as I recall."

Fiercely whispered: "Cammie's not the angel everybody thinks she is. She's subtle; winds you around her finger. When I see that, it makes me want to protect Lance."

I knew Cammie could be a vamp. But she knew how to give freely, even when it interfered with what she wanted. Chuckling in spite of myself, I said, "Cammie has to work to wind us around, and if we like being wound it can't be all bad, sis." Suddenly the pump handle became very much easier to lift, and I figured Ern would be back shortly. "Anyway, think about it. From yesterday forward, for the rest of his life, Lance McKay is going to find himself goddamn short on pleasant alternatives. For his sake, I hope he's not too old to learn discipline."

After a long silence Shar mused, "As far back as I can remember, bubba, you prided yourself on finding alternatives. Nearly drove mother crazy, and got your backside tanned to saddle leather. But you've turned out to be one of those people who have
so much
self-discipline, except for feeding your face, that you tend to think of yourself as judge, jury, and . . ."

I'm sure she was about to add "executioner." Despite my best efforts, somehow my little sis had learned about the heroin wholesaler, years before. I rousted him in Ensenada and brought him back after he jumped bail. I'd been naive then, and he was such a mannerly dude, and I didn't know about short ice picks in homburgs until it glanced off a rib on its way in while I was negotiating a slow curve on the coast highway. As I saw it, Mr. Mannerly had executed himself.

"
Nolo contendere,
" I said to my sister.

"Cute," she said gently. "What I was getting at is, why aren't you one of the irresponsibles?"

I said it was a fair question and mulled it over as I pumped. Finally I replied, "Maybe because we were farm kids, though we moved to town before you had chores to do, sis. Sure, I love alternatives; they're fun! But feeding those stupid chickens and collecting eggs were things for which there simply were
no
alternatives on our farm. They wouldn't stop laying on weekends no matter what I told 'em. On a farm you try a lot of alternatives, but you shovel a lot of shit, too. Maybe there's an ideal balance. And maybe that's what I'm trying to steer you toward."