Julia honked, and he dashed dripping to her car, a chartreuse Beetle. She gave him an enigmatic smile—part allure, part reserve. Her hair was tousled, a bit frizzed from the rain. She wore a gray sweatshirt jacket and jeans. On the passenger seat, her bag squatted open-mouthed, displaying tissues, a slim wallet, some papers, and a bandanna. She shoved the bag into her lap, making room for him.
“What do you think about colonic irrigation?” he asked as she shifted into first. The downpour was beginning in earnest. “Burl says death gets started in the colon.”
Julia let out such a loud whoop of laughter that he felt a bit embarrassed.
“One of Burl’s pearls,” he said. “He knows a guy who did it and is trying to get Burl to try it, and so he’s preaching to me that I need to have my entrails flushed.”
She laughed again, thrilling him.
He said, “Maybe they could get out all that uranium and technetium and who knows what else I’ve got in me.”
She didn’t laugh. She was concentrating on a turn out of the parking lot.
“I’m joking,” he said. He felt shy and awkward with her, not sure what to say.
Reed had always loved rain. He found it nourishing, as if it made the mind grow the way it made plants grow. The air in the car was humid, the windows misted. Julia switched on her defroster, which made a rush of pleasant sound. At a traffic light in the heavy rain, with the red light swaying and casting blurry reflections on the windshield, he realized that she was playing a tape of Tchaikovsky. She knew he liked Tchaikovsky.
“Like my new car?”
“Cute as a bug,” he said. “But it’s not your color.”
“She’s used, two years old, and I got her for thirteen thousand plus trade-in. Of course they stole the trade-in.”
“That’s probably as good as you can expect.”
“She’s got thirty-five thousand miles on her.”
“Her? What’s her name?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“You sure picked a color,” he said, but she seemed a bit offended. He hadn’t meant to be critical. It was just his way.
The light changed and she splashed through the intersection.
“I went to see your mom three or four times, but you weren’t there.”
“You did? She never told me. Damn, I’m sorry I missed you.”
Reed brought her up to date on his mother’s condition, while Julia drove cautiously through the downpour. In her new car and some clothing he didn’t recognize, she seemed overhauled, except for her familiar worn leather clogs with the loose straps across the instep.
They were floating down a main thoroughfare in a driving rain. Her wipers were flying, and the traffic was heavy.
“I had wanted to go for a ride to show you my car,” she said. “But this rain is ridiculous.” Her manner was nervously apologetic, as if she had brought the rain.
“It’s O.K.,” he said, touching her arm lightly. “I’d go on a hayride in a hurricane with you.”
“I’m going to stop here at the drugstore parking lot till it lets up,” she said, gliding into the entrance.
She parked in an empty row and shut off the engine. The rain slammed the windshield. Reaching for her book satchel behind Reed’s seat, she began telling him about the summer class she was taking in molecular biology. She plopped a book in his lap and spoke with animated enthusiasm, her breath steaming up the windows, as Reed flipped through her textbook, which had the heft of a crate of beer.
“It’s so amazing what they’re finding out these days,” she said. “I’ve got this terrific teacher who’s encouraging me to go to grad school. He’s doing research on salamanders.”
“I haven’t seen a salamander in years,” Reed said.
“He’s studying the DNA of a pair of sister species to investigate the evolutionary divergence. And listen to this, Reed, some salamanders have this poison that oozes out of their skins—you know how some tropical frogs have?”
“Until they’re kissed by a beautiful woman? I’m probably oozing toxic waste.”
She laughed but didn’t take the hint. “This stuff attacks rapidly dividing cells selectively—voilà! maybe a cancer treatment can come out of it! It’s so exciting! Who knows what might be out there just waiting to be discovered.”
Later that afternoon, as he sat with his mother in the hospital, Reed kept replaying in his mind the brief ride with Julia, always with the thick downpour and the blurred red stoplight swinging above the street in the rush of rain. In the parking lot as they waited for the rain to abate, and steam clouded the windows, he had joked, “I’m as snug as a rug in a Bug.”
He was overwhelmed by his feeling for her. Their awkwardness seemed to disappear now as he recalled the strange little ride. All argument and tension seemed irrelevant. He would agree with anything she said, he thought now, even though he knew he had a way of sabotaging himself, saying the wrong thing, not thinking things through. It was true that she intimidated him in certain ways, but that seemed to be the quality he couldn’t resist. He was glad she hadn’t quizzed him on superstring theory, because he couldn’t remember the slightest thing about p-branes.
After some hesitation, she had agreed to go out for dinner with him that evening, but he was not sure why. He thought she had been disappointed in him, once she got him inside her new car that afternoon.
At a seafood place downtown, he listened to her rhapsodic rap about the biology courses she had taken the spring semester. Her hands flying, she described swarms of starlings—an example of population biology. He stared at her, observing the delicate way she broke king-crab legs and let the naked, red-dappled flesh slither onto her tongue. She had a slim face, high cheekbones, narrow forehead, arched eyebrows, a little freckle on the tip of her petite nose, a complexion the soft, smooth texture of a mushroom.
She said, “My plan is to get a master’s in molecular biology so I can go into research. That’s the most exciting field for diseases.”
“Are you going to study salamanders?” Reed asked.
She laughed. “I don’t know, but the university is a hot spot for salamanderology right now.”
He said, “The idea is if I get cancer, then I can take poison oil from a salamander’s back and treat it?”
“Something like that. Or maybe you’ll grow a new leg.” She laughed. “But I’m serious.”
“I know you’re serious. But this sounds like something witches might cook in a stew.”
“Witches use eye of newt.”
“I knew it sounded familiar.”
“Dessert?” asked the waiter when he came to clear away their crab carcasses.
“No, thanks.” She was applying her lip gloss, in that way she had of slicking it on without a mirror.
“Why did the menu say ‘Cell phones cause seafood spoilage’?” Reed asked the waiter. “What does that mean?”
“Didn’t you know that?” the man asked, his eyebrows following the tray of dishes that he lifted high with one hand.
Julia laughed, as though Reed had missed the joke.
“You must have a new cell phone,” he said. “How did you leave that message for me at the mall?”
“It’s just for emergencies. I never turn it on.”
“And you never answer your messages.”
“I know. But I always check them.” She sipped her water. “Do you remember that movie Silkwood?”
“No. I saw it a long time ago. Forgot it by now.”
“It’s about a whistle blower at a nuclear-fuel plant.”
It had occurred to Reed that if his life were a movie, he would be a whistle blower, rallying the workers, stirring up trouble. That was the nature of movies, and the situation demanded a whistle-blower hero. So it wouldn’t be a movie about his life. It would be a movie about an image of his life.
“What’s going on here is not a movie,” he said to Julia.
“No, it’s not,” she agreed. Her face brightened slightly. “Did you eve
r notice how in movies the hero will often eat a Twinkie before going into battle—saving someone in a skyscraper fire, or rescuing a hostage or something?”
“A Twinkie?”
“The Twinkie, judging by its size and shape, is a source of strength and energy.” She was teasing him.
He played along. “The Twinkie people probably pay the movies a fortune to play up their cream-filled goobers.”
“Could be. But a hero usually has to eat something magic before a battle.”
“I’ll have to try that.”
“Just don’t eat any technetium,” she said, lowering her eyes as if she had uttered a forbidden word.
“I never touch rutabagas,” he said. “I have my standards.”
“Oh, Reed,” she said with sudden intensity. “I’m just sick about all that. How can they do that to their workers?” She splayed both hands on the table, her slender fingers forming angles.
Her outburst unnerved him. “You know it’s not the people running it now. It’s stuff from the past.” He was tired of the phrase legacy waste. With his water glass, he made spiral galaxies on the tablecloth.
“How did technetium get into the gardens? Where did it come from?”
“It’s odd, isn’t it?” He scooted his glass across the tablecloth, making ripples.
“Aren’t people afraid to work out there?”
“Maybe they are. I don’t know. I’m not afraid.”
“But how can you be so sure it’s so safe if all those scrap piles are lying around?”
“In the old days they weren’t so careful, but we have strict safety standards now. They didn’t know any better.”
“That sounds like an excuse.”
“Come on, honey. We’ve been through all this before.” His hand touched hers across the table. “It’s not going to get us. There’s a big cleanup underway.”
“The whole thing is a disaster.”
The waiter brought the bill and Reed laid his hand on it, pulling it toward him. When the waiter left, Reed said, “Back then everybody was in a hurry to beat the Russians. Nobody had time to recycle the garbage. They just piled it up or tossed it over the fence. It wasn’t important then. It really wasn’t a priority.”
“I know. Better dead than Red.”
Her sarcasm was unfair, he thought. He busied himself with the check, hoping to drop the subject. She suddenly sneezed. Finding a tissue in her bag, she blew her nose, quietly and softly. She dabbed her eyes with her napkin and sniffled. Her face was flushed, and she seemed to be shedding a few tears, but he wasn’t sure. He was surprised that her concern had grown. Reaching across the table, he tried to calm her.
As a child, Julia had assigned gender to numbers, and she thought that a six was a she and a seven was a he. When, some time later, she heard the phrase at sixes and sevens, she thought it meant having sex. She had told this to Reed once.
“I’m at sixes and sevens,” Reed said to her now, with a glimmer of a grin. “Speaking of Twinkies.”
She smiled and sipped some water. Her face was still red.
“I’ve missed you,” he said.
She looked away.
“Are you still mad at me?” he asked.
“Let’s call it exasperation.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you. You know that.”
“You didn’t hurt me.”
“I’m sorry about that day at Fort Wolf.”
“I was mad at you for taking me out there,” she said. “It seemed like reckless disregard.”
“We had a good time, didn’t we?”
“Of course. But it was spoiled after all the news came out. And you knew about the chemicals out at that place.”
“Didn’t you trust me?”
“Actually I did.”
“And now?”
She paused. “Maybe I was unfair, and you’ve been through a lot now, with your mom.” She drank some water and rolled her stiff napkin into a ball. It sprang open and she bunched it up again.
“I wish you’d come over to my house,” he said, his feelers going out, testing her mood. “But I guess you don’t want to be in the presence of any of my guns, in case I might go insane and go after you with one of them.”
He meant to be teasing, but she replied sharply, “I think I know you better than that. All I ever said about your cache of artillery was that you can draw a straight, uninterrupted line through history from a caveman with a rock to a megalomaniac with an atomic bomb.”
“Me and my big mouth. I said the wrong thing again.”
“My mouth is as big as yours sometimes.”
It was still raining lightly, and they dashed from the door of the restaurant to his car. He hadn’t realized how he had frightened her. He didn’t know how to apologize, or make it up to her, but when she said “reckless disregard,” perhaps she meant a character flaw that he couldn’t tame. He often misspoke, although he thought he was just being naturally expressive.
He approached the stoplight on Constitution Avenue. To the left was his house, and hers was in the opposite direction.
“Left or right?”
“I need to get up early tomorrow, so you’d better take me home.”
She was going to spend the day with her daughter Lisa, who was a freshman at the university. It was Parents’ Day. They were going to meet teachers at a luncheon, and go to a science fair, a track meet, and a production of Fiddler on the Roof.
Julia’s house was across town on a leafy street of old houses. The street seemed deserted except for the gathering of cars at the far end of the block—someone having a party. Under the streetlights, the rain glistened on the asphalt. Reed turned into the driveway and drove to the rear of the somewhat rundown old Victorian house, where she lived in a garden apartment. Julia owned the house and rented out apartments. Her Beetle squatted in a carport, like a large frog.
“You say you worry about me?” he said as he walked her to her door. “Well, I worry about you too—living alone in that apartment.”
“The tenants watch out for me.” She touched his shoulder, her keys in her hand. She ran her fingers through his hair. “I think about you, Reed.” The key chain wiggled against his scalp. “I’ve missed you.”
She slipped away from him before he could grasp her. He watched her go inside the house. The streetlights did not reach the depths of the bushy yard outside her glass-paned door. He waited until he saw her lights come on.
He was annoyed with himself for his remark about the guns he kept at home. His mind was so twisted, he thought. He slammed his horn in frustration. A battle-scarred tiger cat sped lickety-split across the street, avoiding puddles.
Although Reed no longer hunted, he still loved shooting. The sublime satisfaction of nailing something you aimed at was the same as that little hit of serotonin some people felt when they penciled in a word in a crossword puzzle or when their team scored a point. He usually went out to Fort Wolf about once a week to camp or just to shoot at targets, but while his mother remained in the hospital, he had stopped going. Now, after seeing Julia, he wondered if their minds would ever meet on the subject of weapons.
“What do you mean, you’re antiviolent?” he’d asked her once, last fall, as they were driving downstate to a Triple A minor-league ballgame. “Turn the other cheek?”
“I don’t like killing.”
“There’s always been war,” he said. “Sometimes you have to fight back, plain and simple.”
“There are other ways.”
“I bet you wouldn’t step on a bug.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“I bet you’d let powder-post beetles eat up your house.”
“I wouldn’t kill a bug unnecessarily,” she said. “Why should I?”
“So you agree that some killing is necessary.”
“That’s not the way I’d put it.”
“But what if a hornet was dive-bombing a child? Would you swat it?”
“Well, of course, but . . .”
; “Some creatures you can kill and some you can’t, depending on the circumstances?”
“You’re going in circles.”
“Which would you give priority to—a staghorn beetle or a sow bug?”
“I don’t know! Stop it!”
Reed didn’t hunt deer. Spotlights and high-powered rifles with scopes were not fair to the deer. He didn’t want to kill a deer. It would be like shooting a ballet dancer. But he could kill a rat or a groundhog. He would kill chickens to eat if it were convenient and he weren’t allergic to feathers. He was lucky, he told Julia, that he could work off his violent urges in ways that did not get him into trouble. He didn’t want to oversimplify, but wasn’t that the nature of competitive sports?
“Baseball,” she replied simply. “Nonviolent.”
“You’re still aiming and hitting,” he said. “It’s fundamental.”
She put her head in her hands in a gesture of submission. “I won’t fight you,” she said.
At the baseball game that day, a hometown hitter was struck by a pitch—an obvious beanball. The benches cleared and a fight erupted. Reed noticed Julia’s alarmed face fixed on the player, who was doubled in pain on the ground.
He felt bad now, remembering the way he had bullied her. But she hadn’t understood that he could actually kill someone in order to protect her, just as his dog would do the same for him. He had trained his dog when to attack, when to go for the throat. “My God,” Burl had said to him. “You name a killer attack dog Clarence? I can’t imagine anybody named Clarence being a bloodthirsty killer.” Burl himself didn’t hunt, or practice self-defense, or own a dog. He just flopped through life with little regard for the outcome.
“I was going to name him Copernicus,” Reed said. “But he didn’t like it.”
15
Reed felt like hopping on his bike and heading for the Florida Everglades, but his mother was waiting at the hospital for him to take her back to Sunnybank. An aide had gathered her toiletries and clothing into large transparent plastic bags with locking handles. Some of her lacy underwear was visible. The aide carried the bags, and Reed pushed the wheelchair. The aide told him to back the chair into the elevator, so that his mother faced forward. His mother sat quietly, as if she were being ushered to her doom.
An Atomic Romance Page 9
