Uh-oh. That tone in her voice, the ultimate Lucy danger signal.…
Very reluctantly Jim says, “Okay.”
“And did you visit Uncle Tom like you said you would?”
“Oh, man. No. I forgot.”
Now she really is upset. There’s something wrong there, up at the folks’. “I didn’t go this week because of the funeral,” she says, voice strained, “and you didn’t go last week when I thought you did—no one’s been down there for almost three weeks. Oh, Jim, you get down there today and then you come to dinner, you hear me?”
“Yeah! I hear you.” He doesn’t want to cross her when she’s in this temper, when her voice sounds like that. “I’m on my way. Sorry, I just forgot.”
“You don’t just forget things like that!”
“All right. I know. I’ll see you for dinner.”
“Okay.”
So he’s off to Seizure World, which in his mood is the last place in the world he wants to be, but there he is and in a black mood indeed he slams his car door and goes to the reception desk of the nursing home complex. “Here to see Tom Barnard.”
He’s sent along. In the hall outside Tom’s room a nurse stops him. “Are you here to see Tom?” Accusation in her eyes. “I’m glad someone finally came. He’s been having a hard time.”
“What’s this?” Jim says, alarmed.
Hard glance. “His respiration has gotten a lot worse. I thought he was going into a coma last week.”
“What? Why wasn’t his family told about it?”
The nurse shrugs, the gaze still hard. “They were.”
“The hell they were! I’m his family, and I wasn’t told.”
Another shrug. “The front desk makes the calls. Don’t you have an answering machine?”
“Yes, I do,” Jim says sharply, and moves by her to Tom’s door. He knocks, gets no answer, hesitates, enters.
Inside it’s stuffy, the bedsheets are rumpled. Tom is flat on his back, his breath harsh and labored, his skin gray, his freckled bald pate yellowish.
His eyes slide over in his motionless head to look at Jim. At first there’s no recognition, and this sends a stab of fear so far down into Jim that nothing else in the past miserable week bears any comparison to it. Then Tom blinks, he shifts awkwardly on his bed, says, “Jim. Hello.” His voice is a dry rasp. “Here. Help me up.”
“Oh, man, Tom, are you sure? I mean wouldn’t it be better for you if you stayed flat, maybe?” Desperate fear that Tom will overexert himself somehow, die right here in front of him.…
“Help me up. I’m not a Q yet, no matter, evidence to the contrary.” Tom tries pulling up onto his pillow himself, fails. “Help me, boy.”
Jim holds his breath, helps Tom up so that his shoulders are on the pillow and his head leaning against the wall behind the bed. “Let me get the pillow behind your head.”
“No. Bends my neck too far forward. Need all the airspace I can get.”
“Ah. Okay.”
They sit there and look at each other.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been by in a while,” Jim says. “I—well, I’ve been busy, Mom’s been busy too. I was supposed to come last week but I forgot. I’m really sorry. The nurse says you haven’t been feeling well.”
“Got a cold. Almost killed me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault. Stupid to die from a cold. So I didn’t.” Tom chuckles and it makes him cough, all of a sudden he’s hacking for breath and Jim, heart pulsing right there in his fingertips, helps him back down onto the bed and turns up his oxygen flow to maximum. Slowly, painfully, Tom regains control of his breathing. He stares up at Jim and again his eyes don’t register any recognition.
“It’s Jim, Tom.”
“How are you, Jim?”
“I’m fine, Tom, fine.”
“Little trouble breathing. I’m okay now. The nurses never come when you ring. Once I was dreaming. I flailed out at something. And knocked this oxygen out of my nose. Pain woke me up, my nose was bleeding. Suffocating in here, regular air now and I suffocate. Can you imagine that? So I rang the bell. And they never came. Managed to pick the tube up. Stuck it in my mouth ’cause my nose. Bleeding. Stayed that way ringing the bell. Nurse came at seven when the new shift started. Graveyard shift sleeping. I did that myself, working at the Mobil station. Around three all the work done, no one awake. Whole town quiet and foggy, streetlights blinking red. I’d sleep by the heater under the cash register. Or walk around picking up cigarette butts off the asphalt.”
“When was this, Tom?”
“But when I wake up it’s only this room. Do you think they put me in prison for something? I do. Public defender for too long. I’ve seen too many jails. They all look like this. People are cruel, Jim. How can they do it? How?”
Tom stops, unable to catch his breath anymore, and for a while he only breathes, sucking the air in over and over. Jim holds on to his clammy palm. It seems he has a fever. He rocks his head back and forth restlessly, and when he talks again it’s to other people, a whispered outrush of words punctuated by indrawn gasps, incoherent muttering that Jim can’t make sense of. Jim can only hold his hand, and rock in the chair with him, feeling like a black iron weight will expand out of his stomach and fill him and topple him over.
The old man looks up at him with a wild expression. “Who are you?”
Jim swallows, looks at the ceiling, back at Tom. “Your great-nephew, Jim. Jim McPherson. Lucy’s son.”
“I remember. Sorry. They say the oxygen loss kills brain cells. According to my calculations, my brain is ten times gone.” He wheezes once to indicate a laugh. “But I may be off by a magnitude.” Wheezes again. He looks out the window. “It’s hard to stay sane, alone with your thoughts.”
“Or in any other situation, these days.”
“That so? Sorry to hear you say that. Me—I try not to think too much anymore. Save what’s left. Live in, I don’t know. Memory. It’s quite a power. What can explain it?”
Jim doesn’t know what to say. Nothing explains the memory, as far as he knows. Nothing explains how a mind can cast back through the years, live there, get lost there.…
“Tell me another story, Tom. Another story about Orange County.”
Tom squeezes his eyes shut. Face a map of raw red wrinkles in gray skin.
“Ah, what haven’t I told you, boy. It’s all confused. When I first came to Orange County. The groves were still everywhere. I’ve told you that.” He breathes in and out, in and out, in and out.
“Our first Christmas here there was a Santa Ana wind. And there was a row of big eucalyptus trees behind our house. Our street stuck right into a grove, the first thrust. And the trees squeaked when the Santa Ana blew. And leaves spinning down. Smelled of eucalyptus. And—ah. Oh. It was the night we were supposed to go Christmas caroling. My mom organized it. My mom was a lot like yours, Jim McPherson. Working for people. And mine was a music teacher. So all the kids were gathered, and a few of the parents, and we went around the neighborhood. Singing. Only half the houses in the development were finished. That wax is hot when it drips on your hand. And the wind kept blowing the candles out. It was all we could do to light them. Made shells of aluminum foil. And we sang at every house. Even the house of a Jewish family. My mom had some secular Christmas carol ready, I forget what it was. Funny idea. Where she found these things! But everyone came out and thanked us, and we had cookies and punch afterwards. Because everyone there had just moved out from the Midwest, you see? This was the way it was done. This is what you did to make a place a home. A neighborhood, by God. Because they didn’t know! They thought they lived in a neighborhood still. They didn’t know everyone would move, people be in and out and in and out—they didn’t know they had just moved into a big motel. They thought they were in a neighborhood still. And so they tried. We all tried. My mother tried all her life.”
“Mine too.”
But Tom doesn’t hear, he’s off in a dark Santa
Ana wind, muttering to himself, to his childhood friends, trying to recall the name of that carol, trying to keep the candles lit.
So they hold hands and look at the wall. And the old man falls asleep.
Jim frees his hand, stands, checks to see that the oxygen line is clear and the tank over half-full. He straightens the sheets the best he can. He looks at Tom’s face and then finds he can’t look anymore. In fact he has to sit down. He holds his head, squeezes hard, waits for the fit to pass. When it does he hurries out of the place and drives home to dinner.
73
So Jim gets to his parents’ home not long after Dennis does.
Dennis is out under their little carport, working on the motor of his car. “Hi, Dad.” No answer. Jim’s feeling too low for this sort of thing, and he goes into their portion of the house without another word.
Lucy asks about Tom.
“He’s had a cold. He’s not so well.”
Hiss of breath, indrawn. Then she says, “Go out and talk to your father. He needs something to take his mind off work.”
“I just said hello and he didn’t say a thing.”
“Get out there and talk to him!” Fiercely: “He needs to talk to you!”
“All right, all right.” Jim sighs, feeling aggrieved, and goes back outside.
His father stands crouched over the motor compartment, head down under the hood, steadfastly ignoring Jim. Ignoring Jim and everything else, Jim thinks. A retreat into his own private world.
Jim approaches him. “What are you working on?”
“The car.”
“I know that,” Jim snaps.
Dennis glances up briefly at him, turns back to his task.
“Want some help?”
“No.”
Jim grits his teeth. Too much has happened; he’s lost all tolerance for this sort of treatment. “So what are you working on?” he insists, an edge in his voice.
Dennis doesn’t look up this time. “Cleaning the switcher points.”
Jim looks into the motor compartment, at Dennis’s methodically working hands. “They’re already clean.”
Dennis doesn’t reply.
“You’re wasting your time.”
Dennis looks at him balefully. “Maybe I ought to work on your car. I don’t suppose that would be wasting my time.”
“My car doesn’t need work.”
“Have you done any maintenance on it since I last looked at it?”
“No. I’ve been too busy.”
“Too busy.”
“That’s right! I’ve been busy! It isn’t just in the defense industry that people get busy, you know.”
Dennis purses his mouth. “A lot of night classes, I suppose.”
“That’s right!” Angrily Jim walks up to the side of the car, so that only the motor compartment and the hood separate him from Dennis. “I’ve been busy going to the funerals of people we know, and trying to help my friends, and working in a real estate office, and teaching a night class. Teaching, that’s right! It’s the best thing I do—I teach people what they need to know to get by in the world! It’s good work!”
Dennis’s swift, smoldering glance shows he understands very clearly the implication of Jim’s words. He looks back down at the motor, at his hands and their intensely controlled maneuvers. A minute passes as he finishes cleaning the points.
“So you don’t think I do good work, is that it?” he says slowly.
“Dad, people are starving! Half the world is starving!” Jim is almost shaking now, the words burst out of him: “We don’t need more bombs!”
Dennis picks up the point casing, places it over the points, takes up a wrench and begins to tighten one of the nuts that holds it to the sidewall.
“Is that all you think I do?” he asks quietly. “Make bombs?”
“Isn’t that what you do?”
“No, it isn’t. Mostly I make guidance systems.”
“It’s the same thing!”
“No. It isn’t.”
“Oh come on, Dad. It’s all part of the same thing. Defense! Weapons systems!”
Dennis’s jaw is bunched hard. He threads the second nut, begins to tighten it, all very methodically.
“You think we don’t need such systems?”
“No, we don’t!” Jim has lost all composure, all restraint. “We don’t have the slightest need for them!”
“Do you watch the news?”
“Of course I watch the news. We’re in several wars, there’s a body count every day. And we provide the weapons for those wars. And for a lot of others too.”
“So we need some weapons systems.”
“To make wars!” Jim cries furiously.
“We don’t start the wars by ourselves. We don’t make all the weapons, and we don’t start all the wars.”
“I’m not so sure of that—it’s great business!”
“Do you really think that’s it?” Surely that nut is tight by now. “That there are people that cynical?”
“I suppose I do, yes. There are a lot of people who only really care about money, about profits.”
Abruptly Dennis pulls the wrench off the nut.
“It’s not that simple,” he says down at the motor, almost as if to himself. “You want it to be that simple, but it isn’t. A lot of the world would love to see this country go up in smoke. They work every day to make weapons better than ours. If we stopped—”
“If we stopped they would stop! But what would happen to profits then? The economy would be in terrible trouble. And so it goes on, new weapon after new weapon, for a hundred years!”
“A hundred years without another world war.”
“All the little wars add up to a world war. And if they go nuclear it’s the end, we’ll all be killed! And you’re a part of that!”
“Wrong!” Bang the wrench hits the underside of the hood as Dennis swings it up, points it at Jim. Behind the wrench Dennis’s face is red with anger, he’s leaning over the motor compartment, staring at Jim, his face an inch from the hood; and the wrench is shaking. “You listen to what I do, boy. I help to make systems for use in precision electronic warfare. And don’t you look at me like they’re all the same! If you can’t tell the difference between electronic war and the mass nuclear destruction of the world, then you’re too stupid to talk to!” Bang he hits the underside of the hood with the wrench. There’s a hoarse edge in his voice that Jim has never heard before, and it cuts into Jim so sharply that he takes a step back.
“I can’t do a thing about nuclear war, it’s out of my hands. Hopefully one will never be fought. But conventional wars will be. And some of those wars could kick off a nuclear one. Easily! So it comes to this—if you can make conventional wars too difficult to fight, just on technical grounds alone, then by God you put an end to them! And that lessens the nuclear threat, the main way that we might fall into a nuclear war, in a really significant way!”
“But that’s what they’ve always said, Dad!” Appalled by this argument, Jim’s face twists: “Generation after generation—machine guns, tanks, planes, atomic bombs, now this—they were all supposed to make war impossible, but they don’t! They just keep the cycle going!”
“Not impossible. You can’t make war impossible, I didn’t say that. Nothing can do that. But you can make it damned impractical. We’re getting to the point where any invasion force can be electronically detected and electronically opposed, so quickly and accurately that the chances of a successful invasion are nil. Nil! So why ever try? Can’t you see? It could come to a point where no one would try!”
“Maybe they’ll just try with nuclear weapons, then! Be sure of it!”
Dennis waves the wrench dismissively, looks at it as if surprised at its presence, puts it down carefully on the top of the sidewall. “That would be crazy. It may happen, sure, but it would be crazy. Nuclear weapons are crazy, I don’t have anything to do with them. The only work I do in that regard is to try and stop them. I wish they were gone, and maybe
someday they will be, who knows. But to get rid of them we’re going to have to have some other sort of deterrent, a less dangerous one. And that’s what I work at—making the precise electronic weapons that are the only replacement for the nuclear deterrent. They’re our only way out of that.”
“There’s no way out,” Jim says, despair filling him.
“Maybe not. But I do what I can.”
He looks away from Jim, down at the concrete of the driveway.
“But I can only do what I can,” he says hoarsely. The corners of his mouth tighten bitterly. “I can’t change the way the world is, and neither can you.”
“But we can try! If everyone tried—”
“If pigs had wings, they’d fly. Be realistic.”
“I am being realistic. It’s a business, it’s using up an immense amount of resources to no purpose. It’s corrupt!”
Dennis looks down into the motor compartment, picks up the wrench, turns it over. Inspects it closely. His jaw muscles are bunching rhythmically, he looks like he’s having trouble swallowing. Something Jim has said …
“Don’t you try to tell me about corruption,” he says in a low voice. “I know more than you’ll ever imagine about that. But that’s not the system.”
“It is the system, precisely the system!”
Dennis only shakes his head, still staring at the wrench. “The system is there to be used for good or bad. And it’s not all that bad. Not by itself.”
“But it is!” Jim has the sinking feeling you get when you are losing an argument, the feeling that your opponent is using rational arguments while you are relying on the force of emotion; and as people usually do in that situation, Jim ups the emotional gain, goes right to the heart of his case: “Dad, the world is starving.”
“I know that,” Dennis says very slowly, very patiently. “The world is on the brink of a catastrophic breakdown. You think I haven’t noticed?”
He sighs, looks at the motor. “But I’ve become convinced … I think, now, that one of the strongest deterrents to that breakdown is the power of the United States. We can scare a lot of wars away. But up till now most of our scare power has been nuclear, see, and using it would end us all. So little wars keep breaking out because the people who start them know that we won’t destroy the whole world to stop them. So if … if we could make the deterrent more precise, see—a kind of unstoppable surgical strike that could focus all its destructiveness on invading armies, and only on them—then we could dismantle the nuclear threat. We wouldn’t need it because we’d have the deterrent in another form, a safer form.