Fallout

  “Mr. Porter? Mr. Porter!” Janet is sitting up, staring at Mom, who is still lying on her back on the bunk. My first thought is that the worst has happened, but then I see that her eyes are open.

  “Don’t look.” Dad gets up quickly.

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “Because —” He stops. When Mom hears his voice, her eyes move toward him.

  “Gwen?” Dad sounds hopeful and excited.

  Her eyes stay on him, but she doesn’t move.

  The others wake and look. Dad kneels beside Mom. “Gwen?”

  No answer.

  “What is it?” Mrs. Shaw whispers.

  “She’s awake.” Dad tenderly strokes Mom’s cheek. “Can you hear me, sweetheart?”

  But Mom’s expression remains blank.

  The others slowly climb out of the bunks and gather around. Mom’s eyes move as she looks at them, but there’s no sign of recognition.

  “Gwen?” Dad says again.

  Her eyes go back to him.

  “Gwen, nod if you can hear me.”

  Mom still doesn’t react.

  Dad holds a finger up in front of her face and moves it slowly left. Her eyes follow it, but when Dad moves his finger back, her gaze remains directed at the wall.

  “Gwen? Honey?” he says again, anxiously.

  Her eyes slowly come back to him. But her face is blank. Dad picks up her hand and squeezes it. It looks limp in his. “Sweetheart?” His voice is full of uncertainty.

  She doesn’t respond. Dad puts her hand down, then turns away and hides his face.

  When school began that fall, we had a new teacher and new desks. The teacher was skinny, with hollowed cheeks and a dark shadow over his jaw. He wore a gray suit that looked too big, a thin black tie, and a white shirt. Except for gym, it was the first time we’d ever had a man teacher.

  “Welcome to sixth grade,” he said. “My name is Mr. Kasman, and we have something in common. This is a new grade for you and a new school for me. If you look inside your desk, you will find a strip of oaktag. Please write your first name in large neat letters and place it on your desk where I can see it.”

  Our new desks didn’t have hinged tops like the old ones. To get things from inside, we had to bend down and squint into them or feel around blindly with our hands. We’d all begun to work on our name cards when the classroom’s public-address speaker crackled on: “Hello, students, and welcome back to Willis Road for another exciting year of learning.” It was Principal Sharp. “A lot has changed over the summer. We have some new teachers, a new soundproof ceiling, and, as you’ve probably already noticed, new desks with scratch-proof desktops. After what happened last year, I’m sure you know why we got them. I hope you all have a great first day.”

  The PA went silent. “What happened last year?” Mr. Kasman asked.

  Paula raised her hand.

  “Yes, uh . . . ” Mr. Kasman squinted at her name card. “Paula?”

  “The boys carved things into the desks. Then they couldn’t write on them because their pens went through the paper.”

  Mr. Kasman ran his fingers over the shiny hard surface of a desk in the front row. Then he said, “Please finish your name cards.”

  I went back to work, but a scratching sound started behind me. With his left arm resting on his desk, Puddin’ Belly Wright appeared to be hunched forward, gazing toward the front of the room. But behind his left arm, his right hand was clenched around a bent paper clip, busy scratching at the surface of his new scratch-proof desk.

  Puddin’ Belly was a big, strong, chubby kid who lived a block away from us and often came around to play fungo baseball and touch football. His real name was Stuart Wright, but his belly bounced and jiggled when he ran, and somehow he’d acquired that nickname. Puddin’ Belly would do almost anything if dared, or if even just asked. One morning a few days later, while Mr. Kasman wrote on the blackboard, Ronnie slid him a note. Puddin’ Belly read it and raised his hand. “Hey, Mr. Kasman, how come you became a teacher?”

  “I’m not a horse,” Mr. Kasman said, without pausing from what he was writing.

  “Huh?”

  “You said ‘hey,’ and he said he’s not a horse,” Paula explained.

  “Huh?” Puddin’ Belly said again.

  “Forget it.” Mr. Kasman turned from the board. “I became a teacher because I think it’s an important job.”

  “All of the teachers in this school are ladies,” said Puddin’ Belly. “Except for Mr. Brown, the gym teacher.”

  “Are you implying that the only teaching job a man should have is gym?” asked Mr. Kasman.

  Puddin’ Belly wasn’t implying anything. He was simply repeating what Ronnie had told him to say. Now that the subject had been broached without Mr. Kasman getting mad, Ronnie must have felt safe to add his two cents. “I think what Stuart means is that men usually don’t become teachers.”

  “My father teaches economics at Hofstra,” said Paula.

  “That’s college,” said Ronnie.

  “Mr. Kasman?” the PA squawked. It was one of the secretaries. “Can you come down to the office for a moment?”

  “Take out your grammar workbooks, and work on pages fourteen and fifteen,” Mr. Kasman said, and left.

  Ronnie went to the back of the room to sharpen his pencil. The grinding filled our ears. When it stopped, he didn’t return to his desk. Instead, he looked up at the new sound-absorbing white cork squares in the ceiling. Holding the pencil at the point, he flicked his wrist. The pencil flew up and stuck, hanging from the ceiling like a thin yellow stalactite.

  Ronnie went to the front of the room, took a new pencil from the box on Mr. Kasman’s desk, and sharpened it. This time the whole room watched. A moment later, there were two yellow stalactites in the ceiling.

  Puddin’ Belly flipped his pencil at the ceiling. It bounced off and fell to the floor. Freak O’ Nature flipped his pencil. Same result. Eric Flom tried it. Still the same result.

  “Stand guard, Scott,” Ronnie ordered.

  Standing guard was tricky because you had to be in the doorway and watch without being seen by the teacher you were on the lookout for. I’d perfected a method of keeping the door ajar with my foot while sticking just enough of my face out so I could see with one eye. It was nothing any other kid couldn’t do, but since I’d been the first to think of it, it had become my role.

  By now there was a line of boys at the pencil sharpener and nonstop grinding. Kids asked Ronnie to demonstrate his technique. Soon more pencils were stuck in the ceiling.

  Down the hall, Mr. Kasman came around the corner. I backed out of the doorway. “He’s coming!”

  Everyone hurried to their desks and got to work in their grammar workbooks.

  Mr. Kasman came in and sat down and wrote something in his notebook. Then he noticed the empty pencil box.

  Then he looked at us.

  Then he looked up.

  The grown-ups sit at the table and talk. The kids sit on the bunks like spectators.

  “Maybe she just needs time to recover,” Mrs. Shaw says.

  “Anyone ever seen anything like this?” Dad asks.

  “That depends on what you mean by this,” Mr. McGovern answers. I think he’s talking about his son, Paula’s brother, Teddy.

  “Mr. Porter?” Janet says from the bunk where she’s sitting next to Mom. “She needs to be turned or she’ll get bedsores.”

  “Now?” Dad asks.

  “The sooner the better, sir.”

  One of Mr. McGovern’s eyebrows dips. “And you know this because?”

  “I was studying to be a nurse, sir.”

  “You? Where?” Mr. McGovern sounds a little mean.

  “Long Island College Hospital of Nursing, sir.”

  “Never heard of it,” Mr. McGovern says dismissively.

  For a moment, everyone goes still. I wish I could ask Mr. McGovern why he said that. Then the moment passes, and Dad helps Janet turn Mom onto her side.

&nbs
p; That’s when we all smell it.

  As if the mildew and pee odors aren’t bad enough, now there’s this. I feel embarrassed for Mom and try not to watch while Dad and Janet remove her soiled clothes and the sheet she was lying on. It all goes into the big refuse can. Dad relents about using water for something other than drinking. For a sponge and towels, Janet tears off the bottom part of her robe. After the rags are used, they also go into the can.

  When they’re finished, Mom is lying on her side with her bare bottom and legs exposed. Dad takes the sheet from the upper bunk and tears it in half. He and Janet tuck it around Mom, who is as still and quiet as before.

  My stomach growls, but I know we need to ration the food, so I keep quiet. Ronnie, me, and Sparky, who’s now wearing a little loincloth Janet made for him, have played about a thousand games of checkers. Dad comes over and suggests we switch to Parcheesi. He makes the slightest gesture with his head toward Paula, so I say, “Want to play, Paula?”

  With his back to her so she can’t see, Dad smiles and nods.

  We four kids play Parcheesi, but all I think about is food. Since it’s impossible to tell whether it’s day or night, people climb into the bunks when they’re tired, but now it’s more like we take long naps rather than sleep for one extended period. Mr. McGovern snores. Sparky grinds his teeth. Mrs. Shaw talks in her sleep. Once she said, “Ronnie, stop that right now!” and another time it was, “I hate this.”

  But no one sleeps for long; hunger keeps waking us.

  “Is it time to eat, Herr Kapitän?” Mr. McGovern asks.

  Sparky looks up curiously. “What’s that mean, Dad?”

  “He’s making a joke,” Dad says.

  “Well?” Mr. McGovern doesn’t sound like he’s making a joke.

  Dad points at the remaining cans on the shelf. “I only stored enough food for four. Now we’re ten. At this rate, we’ll use it all up by the end of the first week.”

  “And you’re the one who decides when we eat?” asks Mr. McGovern.

  “It’s my family’s food,” Dad points out.

  “Maybe it was . . . before what happened,” Mr. McGovern says. “But now that we’re all in this together, shouldn’t it belong to all of us?”

  Dad and Mr. McGovern face each other.

  “You know,” Dad grumbles, “none of us would be alive right now if it wasn’t for me. Did it ever occur to you to utter two very simple words like ‘thank you’?”

  Paula’s dad glares. “Thank you, Richard. However, don’t forget that if you’d had your way, the rest of us would be dead.”

  Dad narrows his eyes. “Yes, I tried to keep people out, but only to protect my family. It was horrible and something that’s going to haunt me for a long time. But how was I supposed to know how many people were up there? What was I supposed to do? Let everyone in? How’d you like it if there were twenty people in here right now? Or thirty? You might as well be up there.”

  “I think I’d rather die than know I was responsible for the deaths of others,” Mrs. Shaw says.

  I’ve never seen Dad argue or fight with our neighbors before. Except for the disagreements my parents sometimes had, I’m not sure I ever saw grown-ups get cross with one another before.

  Now Dad turns to Mr. Shaw. “You want to tell her or should I?”

  Mr. Shaw gazes up at the ceiling and lets out a long breath. “Steph, after I got you and Ronnie down here, I . . . ” He trails off and lowers his head.

  “He helped me keep the others out,” Dad finishes for him. “I couldn’t have done it without him.”

  Once he’d gone around the room with a yardstick and knocked the pencils out of the ceiling, Mr. Kasman made all the boys stay in for lunch detention.

  “What was the point of that?” he asked us.

  No one answered.

  “Ronnie?” By now Mr. Kasman had figured out who the likely ringleader was.

  “It was interesting,” Ronnie said.

  “How?”

  “Just to see if you could do it.”

  “It appears that most of you figured out you could do it.”

  “But then we had to figure out if we could keep doing it.” Ronnie grinned.

  “Was it worth missing recess?”

  No one answered.

  “Scott?”

  I answered honestly. “Well, uh, just this once, yeah.”

  A couple of guys chuckled. Even Mr. Kasman smirked as if, deep down inside, he understood. Maybe it was good that we had a man teacher, because I had a feeling a woman teacher would never understand. “Okay, but this is the last time, right?”

  “Does that mean we can go outside?” asked Ronnie.

  “No, it means you’ll stay here today, and if it ever happens again, you’ll get a week of lunch detentions.”

  “So we just have to sit here?” asked Freak O’ Nature. We’d never had lunch detention before.

  “We can talk,” said Mr. Kasman. That was strange. Most teachers didn’t want to talk to us. They just wanted us to do our work and be quiet. Maybe Mr. Kasman was too new to know that yet.

  Ronnie whispered something to Puddin’ Belly, who raised his hand. “Are you a beatnik, Mr. Kasman?”

  “What’s a beatnik?” Mr. Kasman asked.

  “They live in Greenwich Village and listen to jazz,” said Eric Flom.

  Dickie Keller raised his hand. “They play bongos and read poetry.”

  “And snap their fingers and say ‘Cool, man, cool,’” said Freak O’ Nature.

  “How many of your parents listen to jazz?” Mr. Kasman asked.

  A few hands went up around the room.

  “Are they beatniks?” our teacher asked.

  The kids who’d raised their hands shook their heads.

  “Who knows what the word stereotype means?”

  Silence. If Paula had been there, she probably would have known, but it was only us guys.

  Mr. Kasman opened the dictionary. “To stereotype means ‘to characterize someone, usually in a negative or unfair way. To make a generalization about them.’ So saying that all beatniks listen to jazz and read poetry would be a generalization, but not necessarily in a negative way. But saying that all Russians are evil would be stereotyping them in a pejorative way.” Gazing out at a small sea of blank faces he added, “Pejorative means negative or unfair.”

  “But the Russians are evil,” said Ronnie.

  “Dirty Commies,” Freak O’ Nature said in a low tough-guy voice.

  “Why are they dirty?” Mr. Kasman asked.

  “They don’t believe in God,” said Eric Flom. “And the Russian people are starving because the Communists spend all their money on missiles and bombs.”

  “They take away your freedom,” said Dickie Keller. “You can’t vote and there’s no freedom of speech and you’ll get sent to Siberia if you say something the leaders don’t like.”

  “Why?” asked our teacher.

  Everyone went quiet.

  “Well, come on,” Mr. Kasman said. “Why would they do all those things?”

  Dickie raised his arm halfway. “Because . . . they’re evil?”

  “What if they just have different beliefs?” our teacher asked. “Communism is based on the ideas of a philosopher named Karl Marx, who believed that if all people were equal and were treated equally, they would live in a state of Utopia.”

  Mr. Kasman must have sensed our confusion because he said, “It’s not a state like Rhode Island. It’s a state of mind. Marx believed that if no one has more than anyone else and no one is better than anyone else, then everyone will be equally happy.”

  I raised my hand. “You mean, if no one has anything, then they don’t have more than anyone else?”

  “In a way.”

  “What’s so great about that?” asked Ronnie.

  “Marx thought it was great. I’m not sure I do.”

  I raised my hand again. “If everyone’s equal, who settles arguments?”

  A smile grew on Mr. Kasman
’s lips. “That . . . is a very good question, Scott. There would still be a ruler and a government, and the government would make those decisions.”

  “But then everyone wouldn’t really be equal,” I said.

  “Right!” Mr. Kasman seemed pleased I’d figured that out.

  I’d been right in class before, but I’m not sure a teacher had ever said so with as much praise. It felt good, and for the first time, I began to understand why Paula raised her hand so much.

  Too bad Mom wasn’t there to see it.

  If no one moves or speaks, the loudest sound is the grumbling of our stomachs. That, along with being trapped down here, makes everyone moody and irritable.

  “At least give us more to drink,” Mr. Shaw says to Dad. “I’d rather have Tang in my stomach than nothing at all.”

  “What if we run out of water?” Dad replies.

  “I told you that won’t happen,” says Mr. McGovern.

  “And I told you that we can’t know for sure,” Dad shoots back sharply.

  It seems like Paula’s dad doubts almost everything my dad says. Just like he doubted Janet was going to college to learn to be a nurse. Is it because Mr. McGovern teaches college himself? The tension between Dad and the other adults is always just below the surface. When it comes out, Ronnie and I share perplexed looks. Everything is so strange. Our parents getting angry at one another. Mom lying mutely on the bunk. The sadness of Paula being here without her mom and brother.

  And wondering all the while what has become of the world on the other side of the trapdoor.

  “This was a mistake,” Mr. Shaw mutters. “It’s over. All we’re doing is postponing the inevitable.”

  “Don’t talk that way,” Dad says.

  “Don’t tell me how to talk,” Mr. Shaw snaps back.

  “Steven, the children.” Mrs. Shaw puts a hand on her husband’s knee. I wonder if Mr. Shaw will snap at her, too, but he doesn’t. What would they be saying if we kids weren’t here?