Sputnik's Children

by Terri Favro

Truth and Justice

  I didn’t go back to Postapocalyptica the next day, or the next. To avoid questions, I asked Sandy to phone Kendal and tell him I was under the weather. Which I was: I took Midol and spent two days in bed with a hot water bottle and back issues of Jasper the Friendly Ghost and Little Henry — comforting, little kid comics. Even the ongoing love triangle between Velma, Betty and Artie felt too emotionally taxing. Menstrual cramps were one of the few things the U-shot couldn’t fix, but they were working on it.

  Finally, on day three, with the cramps subsiding and my period reduced to a trickle, a brown envelope arrived in the mail for me, printed with the words: IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS ENCLOSED: OPEN IMMEDIATELY!

  It was my Free Talent Test Booklet from the Famous American Artists Correspondence School. The letter read:

  Dear Mr. D.R. BIONDI,

  Are you ready to take the first step toward an exciting career as a creative artist? CONGRATULATIONS! The enclosed FREE Talent Test will open the door to the future of your dreams. Whether you’re after a rewarding career, good pay, travel, commissions or simply a worthy creative outlet, MR. D.R. BIONDI, the teachers at the Famous American Artists Correspondence School can get you on your way! Simply follow these three steps:

  1. Complete the Talent Test Booklet. Make sure you have a sharpened HB pencil handy and an eraser.

  2. Place the completed booklet in the postage-paid envelope provided and mail it back to us. You don’t even need a stamp. We’ll pay the postage for you!

  3. Be sure to enclose your completed enrollment form so that if your test is satisfactory, we can IMMEDIATELY issue you your exclusive Famous American Art Student Enrollment Code, assign you a teacher and invoice you for your first 26 weeks of correspondence lessons at the incredibly low rate of $11.55 per lesson, plus applicable state or provincial taxes. That’s right: for just $300 (plus taxes), you could be on your way to a whole new career. If your Test shows real promise, or a UNIQUE CREATIVE SPARK, our faculty of Famous American Artists may recommend you for a bursary. If you would like to be considered, please tick the box on your form.

  The letter was signed by Norman Rockwell himself. I stared at the $300 price tag. I’d thought the course was free. But no, that was just the talent test. Maybe I could get a bursary. After all, I had been learning from the Walter Foster How to Draw books for years.

  I opened the Talent Test Booklet.

  The first page asked me to draw the head of a deer. As in How to Draw Horses, I started with a rectangle. Too late, I remembered that a deer’s head was a triangle. I drew and erased the deer again and again until the page was a mess of soft grey lead. Eventually, I wore a hole right through the page.

  I threw the test booklet away. It was becoming clear that I didn’t have the talent to be a famous artist any more than I did to be Kendal’s wife or the Shark’s lover. Three days and still no sign of Larry Kowalchuck, despite all those promises about tracking me down and conquering me.

  I waited for Mom to leave the house and dialed the extension phone next to the Virgin Mary. Kendal sounded happy and relieved to hear my voice.

  “I can meet you at Postapocalyptica after lunch,” I said.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said.

  “Me too,” I answered.

  He brought comics, but we didn’t waste time on reading. Instead, we immediately got down to a frenzied make-out session. I encouraged Kendal to go further and further until he was doing what the Shark had done to me. At first I didn’t think Kendal would know how to touch me, the under-the-table nature of the Shark’s sneak attack making it seem unusually dangerous and exciting. I thought I’d never be able to feel that amazing tingling tension again. But Kendal knew exactly what was expected of him, no doubt from his relationship with Angie Petrone. Afterwards, he grinned shyly at me, shook his head and said, “Wow.”

  “I felt something break inside. I don’t think I’m a virgin anymore, technically,” I confided — a lie of omission, not commission, as the priests liked to say. Kendal happily assumed that he was the one who had pierced that taut little membrane of purity between my legs.

  And just like that, Kendal and I were a couple again. As easy as one, two, three. We agreed to meet every day in Postapocalyptica until fall term started.

  * * *

  With the Shark’s high-interest loan, Mr. Holub’s plans for fast food greatness were turning into reality. He bought a second-hand grill, deep fryer, cash register, splintery wooden counter and pop cooler and paid the first and last month’s rent on an abandoned body shop. There was no room for tables and chairs and barely enough space for customers to wedge in and place their orders.

  Mrs. Holub ran up some traditional Ukrainian blouses on her Singer — folkloric red and white with embroidery and rickrack. One for me, one for Sandy. Mr. Holub offered Kendal a part-time job stacking supplies and emptying trash — jobs Mr. Holub couldn’t do every day because he still had his factory job. Better money than fruit picking, as long as we actually had paying customers.

  The menu, hand lettered on a card above the counter, read:

  Sputnik Burgers [as the Shark had suggested]

  Laika Fries [named after the doomed dog that rode Sputnik 2]

  Perogi in a Box [Mr. H’s original idea, inspired by Kentucky Fried Chicken in a bucket]

  Borscht in a Bowl [I had my doubts about this one]

  Cabbage rolls

  Coke [really, RC Cola]

  Opening day was busy, with everyone in the neighbourhood coming in to check us out and shake Mr. Holub’s hand. The biggest sellers were (as the Shark had predicted) not Ukrainian food, but burgers, fries and pop.

  On the second day, the crowd thinned to a few shipyard workers from the other side of the canal. On the third day, Sandy and I stood waiting for someone — anyone — to walk through the door while Kendal tried to come up with advertising ideas. “Maybe we could put something on the radio,” he suggested, but we were made to understand by Mr. Holub that one radio ad would eat up all his existing capital, including what little wages he was able to pay us.

  Around noon, the door swung open and Mrs. Donato and the twins strolled in, wearing matching tennis outfits, and ordered Perogies in a Box, to go. As I made change, Mrs. Donato eyed me.

  “You’re looking quite svelte, Miss Biondi.”

  “Thank you,” I said, dropping change in her hand and wondering if she’d tip us.

  She didn’t.

  Thinking the Donatos would be our only customers that day, we opened a NUTS magazine on the splintered counter to kill time. While we were reading “Spy Versus Spy,” the door opened and two handsome black-haired boys — one about my age, the other in his early twenties — walked in like they owned the place.

  The younger boy was slender and tall; the older was a little shorter and as musclebound as a boxer. Muscle Boy fell immediately to examining the menu, furrowing his forehead as if he didn’t understand what he was reading. The other boy broke into a wide, bright smile; although his face was peppered with pimples and a scruffy growth of beard, he was on his way to turning into a heartbreaker of the Latin-lover variety.

  “Hi, Debbie! And Kendal, how you doin’ man?” he said, and I realized the heartbreaker was Bum Bum.

  He introduced the slow-reading bodybuilder as Rocco Andolini, his buddy and unofficial cousin. The two of them, predictably, ordered Sputnik Burgers and Laika Fries.

  “So, what’s it like on the farm, BB?” asked Kendal, kindly turning Bum Bum’s awful nickname into a cool-sounding one.

  Bum Bum shrugged. “Beats the hell out of any place Catholic Children’s Aid would’ve sent me. Could be worse. Three squares a day. They make me pick fruit and go to church, but school out there ain’t so bad. Pretty easy to just slack off and read science-fiction novels under your desk. No one really gives a shit. They just want another pair of hands to help out on the farm.”

 
; Rocco slowly chewed his Sputnik Burger, keeping his big cow eyes fixed on Bum Bum. He never glanced at Sandy or me. Whenever Bum Bum made a joke, he turned to look at Rocco, making sure he was not left out of the circle. I realized then what was between them: Rocco loved Bum Bum, and vice versa. Not just loved each other, were in love with each other. They could have been the Gemini, twin gods of the zodiac, but unexpectedly Bum Bum was the leader of the two. The smarter one.

  When they left the store, waving goodbye and promising to return soon, we sadly watched them go.

  “Wow, hasn’t Bum Bum changed. He’s a hunk now,” said Sandy.

  Kendal gave her a surprised look. “I thought he and Rocco seemed like a couple of fruits.”

  Sandy and I shook our heads at him. I said, “You’re being prejudiced.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Kendal. “I didn’t say I didn’t like them. I just stated an obvious fact. They’re queers.”

  Sandy flipped her ponytail over her shoulder. “He just hasn’t met the right girl.”

  The afternoon dragged on. We closed down the deep fryer and started working our way through the cold pop, dropping money into the cash register. We were quickly drinking our way through a day’s wages.

  At the end of the day, Duff and Linda picked us up. The Cutlass coughed its way to the curb and idled while Sandy locked up. In the distance, we heard the sudden up-down wail of the town’s air-raid siren. Sandy clamped her hands over her ears and shut her eyes; she had hated that sound ever since that day she’d wet herself during duck-and-cover drill. Within seconds, we heard the all-clear signal, letting us know it had been yet another false alarm.

  “How often does that damn thing malfunction?” asked Duff through the car window.

  Kendal shrugged. “It goes off a lot in hot weather.”

  “Where is the siren, anyway?” asked Duff.

  “Roof of the high school,” said Kendal. “The caretaker knows how to shut it down.”

  Duff nodded at this piece of information. “They should probably just decommission the damn thing.”

  “But what if there were an actual attack?” I said.

  “Wouldn’t matter. Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles travel too fast. All that siren gives you is about fifteen minutes of intense underwear-shitting fear before Armageddon.”

  “Gosh, thanks for letting us know, Duff,” said Kendal. “Very comforting.”

  As we piled into the car, Linda asked, “How’s business?”

  “Seriously sucking,” said Sandy miserably. “It better pick up soon. Today our biggest customer was the three of us.”

  Duff was in overalls, his long hair pulled up under a painter’s cap. He was finding handyman jobs around town so that he could keep paying the rent until he started teaching physics and calculus at St. Dismas Collegiate. As Dad had predicted, they jumped at the chance of hiring a well-educated draft dodger, and a Catholic, to boot. Linda snuggled next to him to make room for me in the front seat. The two of them had become inseparable. I knew there was something going on between them, not only from the way Duff casually draped his arm around Linda’s shoulder, his dangling hand playing with the ends of her hair, but because I’d woken in the night more than once to find myself alone, the pillows in Linda’s empty bed rolled under the quilt just like when she got into trouble during the missile crisis. She was sneaking out regularly to go next door and slip through the unlocked back door, past the bedroom where Nonna Peppy lay sleeping and down into the basement to Duff’s bed, then back up to our room before dawn. I watched her go in and out of our bedroom window through half-closed eyes, pretending to be asleep.

  This must have been the sex thing the Shark had talked about: once you started, you couldn’t stop. He’d compared it to Florida orange juice, but its addictive quality made it more like plonk.

  That night I lay in bed, imagining Duff and Linda all over one another next door.

  I turned onto my stomach and pushed my hand between my legs but couldn’t work up enough enthusiasm. Even thinking about Kendal or the Shark didn’t help. I hadn’t seen the Shark since that day at the Falls and wondered whether he’d show up at Sputnik Burger to conquer me, as nature intended. In my imagination, I had turned him into a dashing David Niven or a rugged but articulate Sundance Kid, although he was more like an untutored Kyle Crusher. Even if the Contessina didn’t mind bad grammar, the double negatives bugged me. I wondered whether he and Kendal would fight to the death over me.

  Between the mugginess of the air in my bedroom and thinking about what was going on next door between Duff and Linda, I couldn’t sleep. I got out of my bed and stood at the window, listening to the night sounds of Shipman’s Corners. The chainsaw whine of cicadas, the unnerving scream of a cat in heat, the sound of hot rods drag racing on the long straight stretch of Fermi Road, running every red.

  I took Linda’s nail file and popped off the screen, just as I’d seen her do. The soft drop to the grass strip between our house and Nonna Peppy’s was farther than I thought; standing below, staring up at the bedroom window, I wondered how I would climb back inside. Linda must have devised a method. I would, too.

  The full moon blanketed everything in a bleached-out light the colour of French vanilla ice cream, as if I’d fallen into some type of ghost world. I walked quickly to the back door, which I knew would be unlocked; Nonna Peppy said turning a key was hard with her arthritis, and why bother locking up with a man in the house anyway? If robbers broke in, Pepé the Seventh would bark and she would scream and Duff would come running with a baseball bat she’d armed him with for this very purpose.

  Inside the house, I stood in the living room, listening to soft snores coming from Nonna Peppy’s room. Pepé the Seventh waddled out to greet me, tail wagging; I knew he wouldn’t bother wasting his energy barking at me. A few scratches under his neck and he headed back to Nonna’s room.

  If I wanted to eavesdrop on Duff and Linda, I was out of luck; the long steep stairway into the basement was notoriously shaky and creaky. They’d hear me coming a mile away.

  I took off my shoes and padded into the kitchen in bare feet. Might as well see if Nonna had something tasty in the fridge. I had been purging so religiously that I felt like it was time to binge a bit. As I stood at the fridge door, staring uncertainly at a bowl of leftover polenta and a half-eaten can of sardines, I heard someone say, “You’re going to scare everyone to death.”

  It was Linda’s voice, followed by Duff’s: “No, I’m not. I’m going to shake them until they wake up.”

  Quietly, I closed the fridge, the rubber door-seal smacking like wet lips. Their voices were coming up through the hot air register; I’d forgotten that sound travelled from the basement this way. I lowered myself to the linoleum floor. Cigarette smoke drifted into the kitchen along with their voices.

  “Let’s take Debbie with us,” said Linda.

  Yes, do that, I thought.

  Duff answered, “She’s still just a kid.”

  Oh, well, thanks. The Shark sure didn’t think I was “just a kid.”

  “I can’t just leave her.”

  “She’s got as good a chance here as anywhere else,” said Duff. “It’s not like it’s going to be safe with us, honey.”

  Honey. Give me a break.

  “Maybe we could come back for her later?” suggested Linda.

  “I can’t make promises,” answered Duff.

  Traitors. Hypocrites. Leaving me here to try to save the world, while they escaped to the future.

  “It’s dangerous for her in Shipman’s Corners,” Linda said, followed by a murmured statement I couldn’t make out. “. . . so distracted. I’m the only one keeping an eye on her.”

  Linda was keeping an eye on me?

  “I get it, I get it,” said Duff with an edge of irritation in his voice. “Let me think about it. I’ve already messed up the s
pace-time continuum enough to cause endless trouble. If I remove Debbie from the equation, it could be disastrous.”

  What? What did he mean by that? And what did Linda mean about me being in danger? So much in our family was left unsaid, I felt as if the walls would explode if they had to absorb one more secret.

  When I stood up, the floor creaked loudly. I froze.

  “What was that?” whispered Linda.

  “Just your grandma taking a leak,” said Duff.

  As I moved stealthily through the living room to the door, I noticed an object on the sideboard: the black leather wallet I’d seen Duff pull out at Cressie’s. I clicked the lowest switch on the Lady Liberty floor lamp and opened the wallet, pulling out a Massachusetts driver’s licence in the name of Benjamin H. Duffy with a photo of him in a pair of black horn-rims and a pocket protector that made him look like one of the men at Mission Control. Date of birth: January 18, 1948. There was also a plastic ID card from a place called General Dynamics in Pomona, California, with Duff wearing a shockingly conservative crewcut and necktie; it gave his name and title as Ben Duffy, Electrical Engineer, Research and Development, Military Aircraft Division. And sure enough, there was his draft card. I wondered why someone like Duff would be sent to Vietnam at all, when he could have been inventing novel ways to kill the enemy with robots and viruses and whatnot. According to Duff, history would show that Vietnam and the other Domino wars were an attempt to wipe out his entire generation and start all over again by mating old men, like Richard Nixon, with the last ten years of Miss Universe finalists, a conspiracy that sounded like the plot of the propaganda comic Kendal and I had read at Cressie’s.

  I slipped the cards back into Duff’s wallet and returned it to the sideboard. Now I knew the truth. Just as Kendal had predicted, I was beginning to think that Duff was a class-A bullshit artist, his story about being from the future, a fantasy. I’d been brainwashed to believe him. Had I really lost two years of my life in a time hop, or was I turning into a plonkhead?