by Tim O'Brien
“Culture’s that way,” my dad would say, pointing east, “and if you want it, civilization’s somewhere over that last ridgeline, more or less,” then he’d hook a thumb westward, as if hitchhiking. Isolated. Fifty-eight miles from Yellowstone, eighty miles from Helena, twenty miles from the nearest major highway.
We were not high on the Russian hit list. But how could you be sure? Fort Derry, it sounded like a target.
And, besides, mistakes happen.
Even as a kid, maybe because I was a kid, I understood that there was nothing make-believe about doomsday. No hocus-pocus. No midnight fantasy. I knew better. It was real, like physics, like the laws of combustion and gravity. I could truly see it: a sleek nose cone, the wiring and dials and tangled circuitry. Real firepower, real danger. I was normal, yes, stable and levelheaded, but I was also willing to face the truth.
Anyway, I didn’t have much choice. The nightmares had been squeezing my sleep for months, and finally, on a night in early May, a very quiet night, I woke up dizzy. My eyeballs ached. Things were so utterly silent I feared I’d gone deaf. Absolute silence. I sat up and wiped my face and waited for the world to rebalance itself. I’d been dreaming of war—whole continents on fire, oceans boiling, cities in ash—and now, with that dreadful silence, it seemed that the universe had died in its sleep.
I was a child. There were few options.
I scrambled out of bed, put on my slippers, and ran for the basement. No real decision, I just did it.
Basement, I thought.
I went straight for the Ping-Pong table.
Shivering, wide awake, I began piling scraps of lumber and bricks and old rugs onto the table, making a thick roof, shingling it with a layer of charcoal briquettes to soak up the deadly radiation. I fashioned walls out of cardboard boxes filled with newspapers and two-by-fours and whatever basement junk I could find. I built a ventilation shaft out of cardboard tubing. I stocked the shelter with rations from the kitchen pantry, laid in a supply of bottled water, set up a dispensary of Band-Aids and iodine, designed my own little fallout mask.
When all this was finished, near dawn, I crawled under the table and lay there faceup, safe, arms folded across my chest.
And, yes, I slept. No dreams.
My father found me down there. Still half asleep, I heard him calling out my name in a voice so distant, so muffled and hollow, that it might’ve come from another planet.
I didn’t answer.
A door opened, lights clicked on. I watched my father’s slippers glide across the concrete floor.
“William?” he said.
I sank deeper into my shelter.
“Hey, cowboy,” my father said. “Out.”
His voice had a stern, echoing sound. It made me coil up.
“Out,” he repeated.
I could see the blue veins in his ankles. “Okay, in a minute,” I told him, “I’m sort of busy right now.”
My father stood still for a moment, then shuffled to the far end of the table. His slippers made a whish-whish noise. “Listen here,” he said, “it’s a swell little fort, a dandy, but you can’t—”
“It’s not a fort,” I said.
“No?”
And so I explained it to him. How, in times like these, we needed certain safeguards. A line of defense against the man-made elements. A fallout shelter.
My father sneezed.
He cleared his throat and muttered something. Then, suddenly, in one deft motion, he bent down and grabbed me by the ankles and yanked me out from under the table.
Oddly, he was smiling.
“William,” he murmured. “What’s this?”
“What?”
“This. Right here.”
Leaning forward, still smiling, he jabbed a finger at my nose. At first I didn’t understand.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’s a fallout mask.”
Actually, of course, it was just a paper bag filled with sawdust and charcoal briquettes. The bag had ventilation holes in it, and the whole contraption was attached to my face by strings and elastic bands. I grinned and started to show him how it worked, but my father raised his arm in a quick jerky movement, like a traffic cop, as if to warn me about something, then he squeezed my shoulder.
“Upstairs,” he said. “On the double. Right now.”
He seemed upset.
He pulled the mask off and marched me up the stairs, coming on strong with all that fatherly stuff about how I could’ve caught pneumonia, how he had enough to worry about without finding his kid asleep under a Ping-Pong table. All the while he kept glancing at me with those sharp blue eyes, half apprehensive and half amused, measuring.
When we got up to the kitchen, he showed my mother the mask. “Go ahead,” he said, “guess what it is.” But he didn’t give her a chance. “A fallout mask. See there? Regulation fallout mask.”
My mother smiled.
“Lovely,” she said.
Then my father told her about the Ping-Pong table. He didn’t openly mock me; he was subtle about it—a certain change of tone, raising his eyebrows when he thought I wasn’t looking. But I was looking. And it made me wince. “The Ping-Pong table,” he said slowly, “it’s now a fallout shelter. Get it? A fallout shelter.” He stretched the words out like rubber bands, letting them snap back hard: “Fallout shelter. Ping-Pong.”
“It’s sweet,” my mother said, and her eyes did a funny rolling trick, then she laughed.
“Fallout,” my father kept saying.
Again, they didn’t mean to be cruel. But even after they’d scooted me in for a hot bath, I could hear them hooting it up, making jokes, finally tiptoeing down to the basement for a peek at my handiwork. I didn’t see the humor in it. Over breakfast, I tried to explain that radiation could actually kill you. Pure poison, I told them. Or it could turn you into a mutant or a dwarf or something. “I mean, cripes,” I said, “don’t you guys even think about it, don’t you worry?” I was confused. I couldn’t understand those sly smiles. Didn’t they read the newspapers? Hadn’t they seen pictures of people who’d been exposed to radioactivity—hair burned off, bleeding tongues, teeth falling out, skin curled up like charred paper? Where was the joke in all that?
Somehow, though, I started feeling defensive, almost guilty, so finally I shut up and finished my pancakes and hustled off to school. God, I thought, am I crazy?
But that didn’t end it.
All day long I kept thinking about the shelter, figuring ways to improve on it, drawing diagrams, calculating, imagining how I’d transform that plywood table into a real bastion against total war. In art class, I drew up elaborate renovation blueprints; in study hall, I devised a makeshift system for the decontamination of water supplies; during noon recess, while the rest of the kids screwed around, I began compiling a detailed list of items essential to human survival.
No question, it was nuke fever. But I wasn’t wacko. In fact, I felt fully sane—tingling, in control.
In a way, I suppose, I was pushed on by the memory of that snug, dreamless sleep in my shelter. Cozy and walled in and secure. Like the feeling you get in a tree house, or in a snow fort, or huddled around a fire at night. I’ll even admit that my motives may have been anchored in some ancestral craving for refuge, the lion’s instinct for the den, the impulse that first drove our species into caves. Safety, it’s normal. The mole in his hole. The turtle in his shell. Look at history: the Alamo, castles on the Rhine, moated villages, turrets, frontier stockades, storm cellars, foxholes, barbed wire, an attic in Amsterdam, a cave along the Dead Sea. Besides, you can’t ignore the realities. You can’t use faggy-ass psychology to explain away the bomb.
I didn’t need a shrink. I needed sanctuary.
And that’s when the Pencil Theory hit me. I was sitting at my desk during the final hour of classes that day, daydreaming, doodling, and then bang, the answer was there like a gift from God. For a second I sat there frozen. I held the solution in my hand—a plain yellow pencil.
&
nbsp; “Pencils,” I said.
I must’ve said it in a loud voice, too loud, because the teacher suddenly jerked her head and gave me a long stare. I just smiled.
The rest was simple.
When the final bell rang, I trotted down to the school supply room, opened up my book bag, stuffed it full of No. 2 soft-lead pencils, zipped the bag shut, and hightailed it for home. Nothing to it. I didn’t like the idea of thievery, but this wasn’t a time for splitting moral hairs. It was a matter of live or die.
That evening, while my mom and dad were watching I’ve Got a Secret, I slipped down into the basement and quietly went to work reinforcing my shelter.
The theory was simple: Pencils contain lead; lead acts as an effective barrier against radiation. It made perfect sense. Logical, scientific, practical.
Quickly, I stripped the table of everything I’d piled on it the night before, and then, very carefully, I began spreading out the pencils in neat rows, taking pains not to leave any cracks or spaces. Wizard, I thought. I replaced the lumber and bricks and rugs, added a double layer of charcoal briquettes, and then crowned it off with an old mattress. All told, my shelter’s new roof was maybe three feet thick. More important, though, it now included that final defensive shield of solid lead.
When I got upstairs, my father didn’t say much. He just frowned and shook his head and told me to hit the sack.
“Sleep tight, tiger,” he said—something like that. Then he closed his eyes.
Later my mother came by to tuck me in. I could tell she was worried. She kept clucking, smoothing down the blankets, touching me.
Finally she sat on the bed and hooked her fingers into mine and asked if things were okay, if I’d been having any problems.
I played it cool. “Problems?” I said.
“You know—” She smiled tentatively. “School problems, friend problems. You seem different.”
“Really?”
“Really,” she said. “What is it?”
What could I do? I couldn’t just blab it all out, tell her I’d been having visions of the world blowing up. Mothers don’t like to hear that sort of thing; they start blaming themselves. Besides, the whole business embarrassed me in a funny kind of way.
I shrugged and rubbed my eyes and told her everything was fine, no problems at all.
My mother patted my stomach.
“You’re sure?” she said.
For a long time, nearly a minute, she gazed at me in that scary way mothers have of psyching you out, getting you to spill out your deepest emotions just by staring you down. It made me squirm. It was as if she were digging around inside my head, actually touching things, tapping the walls for trapdoors and secret passageways.
“I’m okay,” I said, and smiled. “Perfect.”
But she kept staring at me. I forced myself to look up to meet her eyes, but the next thing I knew she was pressing her hand against my forehead, checking me for a fever.
“You know,” she said softly, “your father and I, we love you a great deal. Bunches and bunches.”
“Yeah,” I said, “thanks a million.”
“You understand that?”
“Sure I do.”
“Seriously. We love you.”
“I said thanks.”
“And so if things are bothering you, anything at all, you shouldn’t be afraid to talk it out. That’s what moms and dads are for.”
She went on like that for several minutes, gently prodding, coaxing me to talk. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. Just to reassure her, to make her feel better, I manufactured a story about how I’d been getting weird flashes in my sleep, like lightning—bright zinging flashes—and I must’ve laid it on pretty thick, because my mother’s face suddenly seemed to freeze.
“Flashes?” she said. “What kind of flashes?”
I shrugged. “The usual. Just flashes, the regular ones.”
Her lower lip puffed out at me.
“Red flashes, white flashes?”
“All colors,” I said. “Pink, mostly. And blue and green, you name it. It’s sort of beautiful, really, like a rainbow, I guess, or like shooting stars with great big tails, and then they start mixing together, they mix up into one gigantic flash, a huge one, and then everything sort of blows apart. It’s fun to watch.”
“William,” she whispered.
“But it’s okay now,” I told her. “I haven’t had a flash in a long time. Two weeks, I bet.”
My mother scanned my eyes. “William,” she started. Then she stopped, touched her lip, then started again. “William, darling, I think it’s time for a checkup.”
“Checkup?”
“I think so, yes.”
“The doctor, you mean?”
She nodded gravely. “Just to be safe.”
Clucking her tongue, speaking in the softly modulated tones of a school nurse, my mother explained that there were all kinds of diseases around, polio and mumps and so on, and then she kissed me, a long kiss, and told me I wouldn’t be going to school in the morning. “Right now,” she said, “I want you to get some sleep. In bed. No creeping down to the basement, promise me? No Ping-Pong.”
“God.”
“William?”
I pulled the pillow over my face. “Ridiculous,” I groaned, but I promised.
Next morning, first thing, Doc Crenshaw showed up with that black bag of his. I felt like an idiot. In the first place, I was perfectly healthy, not even a headache, and in the second place I hated Crenshaw with a passion you feel only once or twice in your entire life. He was a butcher. I don’t want to exaggerate, and I won’t, but there was something unmistakably foul about the man, almost evil. His breath: It was a mixture of formaldehyde and stale chewing tobacco and foot rot. And he looked as bad as he smelled. The simple truth—warts and wrinkles and liver spots and mushy yellow skin. Like a mummy. A walking stiff. And a personality to match. I despised the guy, and to be honest, Doc Crenshaw wasn’t all that fond of me either. It went back a long way. A few years earlier, when I was seven or eight, I had this embarrassing bicycle accident, a bad spill, and the damned bike came down on top of me and I ended up with a mangled pecker. A huge gash, and it hurt like crazy. My mother almost had a seizure when she saw it—I guess she thought I’d be sterilized or something—so very quickly, almost in a panic, she stuffed a towel into my pants and drove me down to Crenshaw’s office. The man had zero finesse. He laid me out on a table and cut off my underwear and started to sew me up, no anesthetic, no nothing, and naturally I squealed and squirmed around, and Crenshaw slapped my leg and told me to lie still, a sour-snappy voice, and then he jammed the needle in, and that’s when I yelled and sat up and kicked the son of a bitch. I don’t remember it, but my mother swears it happened, and apparently Crenshaw got fairly upset, because he put in these huge stitches, like railroad ties, and I’ve still got the scar on my pecker to prove it. Great big tread marks, as if I’d been sewn up by a blind man.
So there wasn’t a whole lot of love lost between me and Doc Crenshaw. The man had messed around with my pecker, and besides, he didn’t have what you’d call a gentle bedside manner.
“Well, well,” he always said.
When he came into my room that morning, I beat him to it: “Well, well,” I said.
He didn’t smile.
All business. He unzipped his bag and pulled out some rusty-looking gadgets and began poking away at me. No reassurances, no preliminaries, no friendly little nod.
“Flashes,” he grunted. “Never heard of such crap.”
I took a breath and tried to hold it. Given our history, I figured tact was the best policy, and so, quietly, I tried to explain that the flashes were just minuscule things, barely worth mentioning, and that my mother and father tended to worry too much.
“Actually,” I said, “if you want the truth, they might not be flashes at all.”
“No?”
“Well, sure, what I mean is, I mean, it always happens late at night, you know, real
late, so maybe I’m just dreaming or something. Just dreams. Or else—”
“Crap,” he snapped.
A doctor, for God’s sake.
I couldn’t help it. Instantly, before I could stop myself, I was blabbering away about the flashes, elaborating, adding little flourishes here and there—how it always started with a high-pitched sizzling sound, like hot grease, like bacon on a skillet, and how my ears would start buzzing, and how I’d sometimes see an enormous silver-colored cloud spreading out for miles and miles. Weird rainbows, I told him. And a spectacular purple glow in the sky. Looking back on it, I’m not quite sure why I rambled on like that. To get sympathy, maybe. To give the story some credibility, to make him believe me. Or maybe, in some roundabout way, I was trying to clue him in on the real problem—real bombs, real danger. In any case, it went right over the old man’s head.
“Well, well,” he finally said.
Then he stared right at me.
I knew what was coming.
He started out by telling me that the flash stuff was total garbage, that I should be ashamed of myself for throwing a scare into my parents.
“Next time you hanker for a vacation,” he said, “just go play yourself some honest hooky. No more flash crap. Understood?”
“I wasn’t—”
“Understood?”
I nodded.
But he was dead wrong. I hadn’t tried to scare my mom and dad. Exactly the opposite: I wanted to make them feel better, give them something to focus on. They couldn’t understand the real issue—nuclear war and sirens and red alerts—and so I had to concoct the flashes as a kind of handle on things, something they could latch on to.
It was compassion.
But you couldn’t tell Crenshaw that. You couldn’t tell him anything.
When he was finished preaching at me, he packed up his equipment, went to the door, stopped, turned around, and looked at me for a few seconds.
Finally he smiled.
“By the way, young man,” he said. “How’s your penis?”
Then he cackled and limped away.
Murder, that’s all I could think. For a while I sat there slugging my pillow, but it didn’t help much, so I got out of bed and crept over to the doorway and listened in while he told my parents what a faker I was. I couldn’t hear much, just laughter, but then my father said something about the Ping-Pong table, and a few minutes later they trooped down to the basement.
