The Nuclear Age

  The window is wide open. The gauzy white curtains billow inward, and through them I watch my wife and daughter. It’s a touching scene. Bobbi stands at the center of the room, in profile, her lips drawn in concentration as she ties the bedsheets together. She wears green cords and sneakers and a yellow cotton sweater. Poignant, I think. The bedsheets make me smile; it would be funny if it were not so poignant. A gorgeous woman—the breasts beneath that cotton sweater, the places I would touch, the things I would say. But now she tests the knot, frowning, and I can’t let it go on. Behind her, wearing a raincoat, Melinda sits on a blue suitcase, waiting, her eyes excited with thoughts of escape.

  I feel sadness in my backbone.

  If I could, I would climb through the window and take them to me and crush them with love.

  If I could, I would.

  Softly, though, I close the shutters. If there were any other way. But I pull the hammer from my belt and drive in the nails.

  “Hey!” Melinda shouts.

  It’s a two-minute job. If I could, I would do otherwise, but I can’t. I seal up the window with two-by-fours. Guilt will come later. For now it’s just heartache.

  “We’ll starve!” Melinda screams, but of course they won’t, I’ll figure something out in the morning.

  The rain seems hot and dry.

  There are no shapes, the night has no configuration.

  The hole says, Beautiful!

  Inside, I take a bath, then shave, then busy myself with little household chores. I’m optimistic. I’ll reason with them. I’ll explain that it’s love and nothing else. I’ll be logical. Bowl them over with my own sanity. I’ll show them photographs of an armed nuclear warhead—that’s what I’ll do—I’ll do mathematics—I’ll slip the equations beneath the door.

  Yes, I’ll do it, and they’ll understand.

  But now I find comfort in vacuuming the living-room rug. I’m domestic. I have duties. I dust furniture, defrost the refrigerator, scrub the kitchen floor. Ajax, I think, the foaming cleanser … I sing it. The house seems empty around me. In the basement I toss in a load of laundry and sit on the steps and sing, Clean clear through, and deodorized too, that’s a Fab wash, a Fab wash, for you! I watch the clothes spin. My voice is strong. In Key West we’d sit out on the back patio and one of us would start singing, maybe Tina, and then Ned and Ollie … Are they dead? What happened? They knew the risks, they indulged in idealism. There was evil at large. Vietnam: the word itself has become a cliché, an eye-glazer, but back then we recognized evil. We were not the lunatic fringe. We were the true-blue center. It was not a revolution, it was a restoration. And now it’s over. What happened? Who remembers the convoluted arguments that kept us awake until five in the morning? Was it a civil war? Was Ho Chi Minh a tyrant, and if so, was his tyranny preferable to that of Diem and Ky and Thieu? What about containment and dominoes and self-determination? Whose interests were at stake? Did interests matter? All those complexities and ambiguities, issues of history, issues of law and principle—they’ve vanished. A stack of tired old platitudes: The war could’ve been won, the war was ill conceived, the war was an aberration, the war was hell. Vietnam, it wasn’t evil, it was madness, and we are all innocent by reason of temporary insanity. And now it’s dropout time … Be young, be fair, be debonair …

  We pat ourselves on the back. We marched a few miles, we voted for McGovern, and now it’s over, we earned our rest. Someday, perhaps, we’ll all get together for a bang-up reunion, thousands of us, veterans with thinning hair and proud little potbellies, and we’ll sit around swapping war stories in the lobby of the Chicago Hilton, the SDS bunch dressed to kill in their pea coats and Shriner’s hats, Wallace in his wheelchair, McCarthy in his pinstripes, Westmoreland in fatigues, Kennedy in his coffin, Sarah in her letter sweater. We’ll get teary-eyed. We’ll talk about passion. And I’ll be there, too, with my hard hat and spade. I’ll lead the songfest. I’ll warm them up with some of the old standards, and we’ll all get soppy with sentiment. We’ll remind ourselves of our hour of great honor. We’ll sing, Give peace a chance, then we’ll drink and chase girls and compare investment portfolios. We’ll parade through Lincoln Park singing, Mr. Clean will clean your whole house, and everything that’s in it …

  The world has been sanitized. Passion is a metaphor. All we can do is dig.

  I put the laundry in to dry.

  Upstairs, I smoke a cigarette, stand at the bedroom door. It’s not a pleasant thing.

  If I could, I think. If there were no Minutemen. If we could somehow reverse the laws of thermodynamics.

  Around midnight I lie on the sofa. Can’t sleep, though. I get up and clean the oven. Scour the sinks, apply Drano, carry out the garbage, make coffee, plan the breakfast menu.

  It’s nearly dawn when Melinda begins banging on the bedroom door.

  “Daddy!” she cries, and I’m there in an instant. I tell her to calm down, but she won’t, she keeps yelling and thumping the door. “Have to pee!” she says. “Real bad—I can’t hold it!”

  It’s a dilemma. I ask her to hang on until I’ve had time to work out the arrangements.

  “Wait?” she said. “How long?”

  “Not long. You’re a big girl now, go back to bed.”

  “Wet the bed. One more minute and—”

  “Use a bottle, then.”

  “What bottle?”

  “Look around,” I say. “Check Mommy’s dresser.”

  “Gross!”

  She hits the door. I can picture the droop in her eyelids, the tightening along her jaw.

  “Bottle,” she says, “that’s stupid. I’m a girl! God, I can’t even believe this.” Then she moans. “Daddy, listen, don’t you think maybe something’s wrong? It’s not too nice, is it? First you lock us in here, like we’re prisoners or something, and then you don’t even let me go to the bathroom. How would you feel? What if I did all that stuff to you?”

  “Bad,” I tell her. “I’d probably feel terrible.”

  “So there.”

  Leaning against the door, rocking, I listen to a silence that seems to stretch out forever.

  “Daddy?” Melinda says.

  “I’m here.”

  “You know what else?”

  “What else?”

  “I’m scared, I guess. And real sad, too. If you were me, you’d get so sad you couldn’t even stand it.”

  “I know, honey.”

  “Like right now. I’m sad.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me out,” she says.

  It’s a rocky moment, the most painful of my life. I hesitate. But then I tell her it can’t be done, not yet. “The hot-water bottle,” I say quietly. “Wake up your mother, she’ll handle it.”

  “Please, can’t you—”

  “I’m sorry, angel.”

  She’s right, I can’t stand it. When she says she hates me, I nod and back away. I turn off the hallway light and move to the kitchen and drink coffee and try to patch myself together.

  It’s a splendid sunrise. No more rain. The mountains go violet, then bright pink.

  Just after six o’clock a taxi pulls up the long driveway.

  Willpower, I think, and I write out a handsome check. “Tip?” the driver says. He’s just a kid, granny glasses and a sandy beard, but he clearly knows what it’s all about. He takes a twenty without blinking. “Could’ve called,” he says. “Six o’clock, man, no fucking courtesy.”

  And that’s it.

  Inside, I roll out my sleeping bag before the bedroom door. I strip to my underwear and curl up like a watchdog.

  What more can I do?

  Melinda hammers on the door.

  “Daddy,” she shouts, “you’re crazy!”

  FUSION

  8

  The Ends of the Earth

  “IF IT WERE UP TO me—” my father said, but he had the courage not to finish. Instead he said, “What can I do?”

  “The money, that’s all.”

  “Cash? Play i
t cozy?”

  “Probably so.”

  “And you’ve got a place to—you know—a place to go?”

  “It’s being set up,” I told him. “I’ll know tonight.”

  “That’s good, then. Fine. So what about the basics? Toothbrush, clothes. A new wardrobe, what the hell.”

  “Not necessary.”

  He smiled and touched his jaw. “On the house. Any damned thing you want, just say it.”

  “A wig,” I said.

  “Right. What else?”

  “I’m kidding. No wig. Nothing, just the cash.”

  “A coat, though. You’ll need a coat. Definitely. And new shoes—some decent leather.”

  “It’s not a funeral,” I said.

  “No?”

  “It’s not.”

  My father jiggled his car keys. “Shoes,” he said, “let’s not argue. Shoes, then a coat, then we’ll see about a haircut.”

  At the shoe store on Main Street, my father sat beside me, draped an arm across the back of my chair, and told the clerk he wanted the best. Leather soles and rubber heels, no plastic. The clerk said, “Yes, sir,” and hustled off to a back room. My father lit a cigarette. For a few minutes he sat watching the smoke, legs crossed, and then he shook his head and said, “Christ.”

  “If you want,” I told him, “I’ll call it off.”

  “I don’t want.”

  “If you do, though.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s a crime, that’s all I mean. Just a sick rotten crime. No other possibilities, right?”

  “Except to call it off.”

  He nodded. “Except that. And there’s Doc Crenshaw.”

  “Yes, but I can’t—”

  “Who knows?” he said. “A heart murmur maybe. I read somewhere—I think it was in Time—I read how heart murmurs can do the trick, or else asthma, a hundred different things. You never know.”

  “I won’t beg.”

  “Of course not. But we can hope, can’t we? Heart murmur, we can damn well hope.”

  “Or cancer,” I said.

  My father laughed and clapped me on the leg.

  “That’s the spirit,” he said. “Cancer.”

  He bought me shoes and a wool overcoat and shirts and jeans and a big green Samsonite suitcase. In the barbershop, he smoked cigarettes and flipped through magazines, keeping his hands busy. “Lop it off,” he told the barber. He made a slicing motion across his neck. “Amputate. Major surgery. The kid’s growing corn up there.” The barber chuckled and my dad went back to his magazine while I watched myself in the mirror. September 1968, and there was a thinning out in progress, a narrowing of alternatives. The scissors felt cool against my ear. The smells were good, I thought, all those lotions and powders. I closed my eyes for a few moments and when I looked up my father was studying me in the mirror. He turned away fast. “What we need,” he told the barber, “is one of those heavy-duty lawn mowers. Scissors won’t hack it.”

  After dinner that night, when the dishes were done, I modeled my new clothes. An off-to-camp atmosphere, jokes and smiles, a nervous twitter when my mother said, “Well, it’s not the end of the world, is it?”

  We avoided specifics. There was great courage in what was not said. We listened to records, made small talk about neighbors and old times, and then later, on the spur of the moment, my father challenged me to a game of Ping-Pong. “Two out of three, no mercy,” he said, and he winked, and I said, “You asked for it,” and we moved down to the basement and set up the net and played hard for almost an hour.

  At eight o’clock I asked for the car keys.

  “Right,” he said. “Absolutely.”

  There was a clumsy moment when he handed the keys over. He followed me outside and stood on the steps as I backed the Buick down the driveway, then he waved and held up two fingers.

  A good man, I thought. A veteran of foreign wars and a good man.

  Twenty minutes to kill, so I drove up Main Street to the railroad tracks at the east edge of town, then circled around and came back again, slowly, elbow out the window. The air was warm and calm. A big red moon presided over the mountains, a Friday night, and the shoppers were out. There was commerce and goodwill. I drove past the Ben Franklin store, the Thompson Hotel with its old hitching post, my father’s real estate office, the courthouse and the library and Doc Crenshaw’s little three-room clinic. The streets were safe. It could’ve been anywhere, small-town America.

  Nobody knew.

  I turned on the radio. Rhythms, I thought, Surfin’ Safari, and I tapped the steering wheel and watched the mountains above town, the safe streets and storefronts. I was afraid, of course, but it was mostly homesickness. I thought about the things I’d be losing. Little things, like backyard barbecues, but big things, too, family and history, all of it. For me, at least, it would not be an act of high morality. My father understood that. “It’s a mess,” he’d said, “it’s all upside down, a real hornet’s nest. If it were up to me … It’s not, though. What can I tell you? That damned war. What the hell are we fighting for? That’s the bitch of it, I guess, but I don’t know. I wish I knew.”

  Certain blood for uncertain reasons.

  It was a phrase I’d picked up in college, one of Sarah’s favorite lines, and now, as I turned past the A&W, I said it aloud. I whistled Surfin’ Safari.

  I did not want to die, and my father understood that.

  It wasn’t cowardice, exactly, and he understood that, too, and it wasn’t courage.

  It wasn’t politics.

  Not even the war itself, not the coffins or justice or a citizen’s obligation to his state. It was gravity. Something physical, that force that keeps pressing toward the end.

  Certain blood, uncertain reasons, but finally you have to choose.

  At eight-thirty I stopped at a pay phone outside the State Bank building. Sarah was all business. “On or off?” she said.

  “On,” I said, “I’m pretty sure.”

  “Pretty?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  There was a pause before she said, “Class dismissed. Call me back if—”

  “On,” I said.

  “Louder, man. Bad connection.”

  “It’s go, almost positive. A couple of things to take care of first.”

  “Medically, you mean?”

  “My dad thinks it’s worth a shot.”

  Sarah seemed pensive. In the background, barely audible, I could hear a tinkling sound, ice cubes or wind chimes.

  “Flat feet,” she said, and sighed. “Or cold feet. What you should do, maybe, is buy yourself some cute pedal pushers. Have Congress with a butcher knife—works every time.”

  “That isn’t quite fair.”

  “Maybe not,” she said. “Stick an ice pick up your weewee. Tell them you’re two months pregnant.”

  There was a moment of problematic silence. I watched a tractor turn left off Main, a big John Deere painted green with yellow trim. I was hurting. When the tractor was gone, I told her how sick I felt. Turned around, I said. Lost, too, and trapped, and I needed something more than smart-ass bullshit.

  Sarah chuckled.

  “You’re not pregnant?” she said.

  “I’m not pregnant.”

  “Pity.”

  “Sick,” I said. “Lost.”

  There was that wind-chime sound again.

  “All right, then, you’re lost,” she said, and her voice seemed to back off a bit. “That’s understandable. Problem is, we need a commitment, something firm. These things get complicated. Heat’s on, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to—I hate to press—but you’ll have to … I am sorry.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, on. Tomorrow night.”

  “That translates to Saturday?”

  “Saturday.”

  “Firm?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I guess so.”

  Sarah cleared her throat. “That’s what I admire. All that boldness and
fire.” She waited a moment, then told me to take notes. “Number one, you’ll have to bus it to Chicago. Number two—write this down—TWA, flight 233, Chicago to Boston, nine o’clock Monday morning. Nine sharp. Miss that flight, the whole deal’s off.”

  “Tickets?” I said.

  “At the check-in counter. Your name’s Johnson, L. B.”

  “That’s comic.”

  “We thought so. Anyhow, nine o’clock Monday. You’ve made financial arrangements?”

  “My parents.”

  “They know?”

  “Not the details.”

  “But they know?”

  “A little. I couldn’t just walk away.”

  Sarah snorted. “I thought it was clear. Mouth shut, I said. Didn’t I say that?”

  “I was careful. No names.”

  “Careful, shit,” she said. There was a brittle sound on the line, a clicking, as if someone were transmitting in code. Voices, too. I heard a whisper, or thought I heard it, then a soft buzzing. After a moment Sarah said, “So where was I? Number three. We’ll have a watchdog waiting in Boston—TWA, main lobby. Find a comfy chair and sit tight. Simple enough?”

  “Like cloak-and-dagger.”

  “You think so?” Her tone was perfectly neutral. “Because, listen, we can call it a bust right now. You think that?”

  “Trans World,” I said. “Sit tight.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And?”

  “Bring a book or something. The watchdog, he’ll find you.”

  “Who?”

  “No can say. A familiar face.” She made an indistinct sound, almost motherly, but her voice remained firm. “It’s not easy, we both know that. But flat feet don’t cut it. Sooner or later you have to walk.”

  Breakfast was a ceremony. There was great decorum in the scrambling of eggs, cups on saucers, pourings and stirrings and fussings over fresh-squeezed orange juice.

  “Socks,” my mother said.

  “Plenty,” I told her, “no more socks,” but she smiled and shook her head and added socks to the shopping list. “Towels,” she said, “you could use towels.”