An Atomic Romance

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  At the business office, the blond social worker gave him forms to sign. As he was signing the releases, she said, “I met a guy in Middletown with the same last name as yours, but he pronounced it Fu-trell.”

  “The Fu-trells went uptown,” Reed said with a grin. “My bunch, the Few-trulls, stayed home. I guess they thought it was futile to be a Futrell.”

  “What kind of name is it?”

  “It’s French, I think. Search me. It could be Kurdish for all I know.”

  “My mother researches family history and she knows all about names.”

  “My cousin does genealogy, and you’d think she was a monk preserving the books in a monastery in the Dark Ages,” Reed said. “It’s deadly serious stuff.”

  She laughed and smoothed her hair. “I know what you mean. My mom is hooked.”

  Why was Miss Clipboard acting like a normal person now? Reed wondered. Was she flirting with him?

  Reed’s mother, sitting by the door in the wheelchair, grunted, then said, “Let’s get out of this cow palace.”

  A couple of weeks went by, with summer coming on like a blow-torch. Reed changed his air-conditioning filters. He staked his tomatoes, which had shot out crazy arms in the recent rain. He couldn’t get through a summer without fresh tomatoes. If he had extras he liked to give them away, and if they rotted, he loved to throw them against the fence and watch their sad-sack faces disintegrate as they flew through the sieve of the chain link. He hadn’t seen Julia again, but they spoke twice on the telephone—friendly enough, but she was still reserved. He apologized for his snide remark about guns, and she dismissed it. He longed to see her, but she put him off; her studies consumed her free time now. She said she hadn’t had time to plant any tomatoes. “I’ll give you tomatoes,” he promised.

  Burl had gone with an organized group to the Smoky Mountains for a bear hunt. He went along for the ride; he didn’t shoot, but he wanted to see the Smokies. Reed reviewed his gun collection. Now and then he would remove a gun from the safe and polish it, admiring the artistry and maybe reading up on its history. Old gun stocks were beautifully crafted, especially the wooden ones with ivory inlay. Most of his weapons were World War II era and would seem undistinguished unless you knew the history. His oldest was a Civil War pistol that he had bought for ten dollars at a flea market. It had been repaired with a modern bolt, which made the gun less valuable, but still it was a great addition to his collection. His funniest was a blunderbuss. The fastest was a Winchester repeating rifle. The strangest was the pepperbox revolving pistol he had assembled from a kit. As he thumbed through his books on the history of weapons, he couldn’t help dwelling on how the Colt .45 was called the Peace-maker and the ICBM was called a Peacekeeper. He could turn Julia’s argument completely around—a line of peace from the caveman to Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace to Star Wars. His collection was appropriate and logical, he thought. Weren’t war and peace as intimately related as man and woman, yin and yang?

  A woman in a pink hat was playing raucous, full-chorded hymns on the piano at Sunnybank. On a table was a large globular glass vase of green plants, the roots dangling visibly in the water. Reed was startled to see a blue-fringed ichthyoid creature trapped in the globe of the vase, swimming helplessly in circles among the roots. The fish, flicking its tail, paused and stared at him, bug eyed. The hymn emanating from the piano was “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Reed considered that it might be something of a theme song for the aged.

  “Did you feed the cats?” his mother asked.

  “What cats?”

  “At home. I couldn’t feed them all. They’re starving.”

  Since returning to Sunnybank, she seemed to live half in dreams. She had told Reed about an orgy in the bathroom—a bearded man who leered and a nun with her skirt wadded around her waist. And she reported that camels and elephants marched past her window. Little creatures played under the bed—not mice, just gentle furry things who hid. The cats couldn’t reach them. The cats were starving. She too was starving. They never fed her anything. No snacks. No marshmallows. No cordon bleu.

  A bloated woman clutching a flyswatter was propelling herself backwards in her wheelchair.

  “Watch out, she’ll run over you,” Reed’s mother said. “She ran over my toes several times.”

  “There’s a lot of traffic here,” Reed said. He wished Julia would suddenly be there, playing the piano. He said, “Mom, you look terrific. I need a woman who looks as good as you. That hairdo is a knockout.”

  She laughed and brought her hand to her hair, as if to verify it. “You need a girlfriend,” she said. Reed thought she was testing a memory of herself as a young, flirtatious girl. She said, “Did you know Bud Futrell died?”

  “I saw that in the paper. Is he the cousin with the crazy wife?”

  “No.” She considered the question, searching her memory. She said, “He was the one with the crazy wife. Let me think.” She rolled a small hand-weight from exercise class in her lap. She said, “He had a crazy, detached wife.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She selected her words slowly. “He had a crazy, detached wife.”

  “O.K., Mom.”

  “He had a crazy wife,” she said. “She was . . . detached.”

  “Oh. Don’t worry, Mom.” He couldn’t bear to watch her searching for words.

  At five o’clock, he accompanied her—struggling along with the walker—to the dining room table, which she shared with three frail women. A retired preacher, a craggy man in a golf-green blazer, was saying grace at a nearby table. Irreverently, Reed glanced around at the bowed heads. “He goes on and on forever,” his mother commented a bit loudly.

  “And heavenly father, we thank you for giving us your only begotten son who died for our sins,” said the preacher. “Thy son Jesus took up the cross and lugged it up the hill and died. We gather together on this special day to ask thy blessing.” He paused, then added emphatically, “And forgive us for our lustful sins and passions.”

  Reed’s mother emitted a little hoot.

  Divorce! Reed thought suddenly. A detached wife.

  At the supermarket Reed located a can of oyster stew and some oyster crackers. His mother loved oysters in any form—fried, stewed, raw, or Rockefeller—and he wanted to surprise her. Maybe there was some kind of shock therapy to shake up her cognitive faculties. Oysters might do it. He searched out his staples—popcorn, fruit, dairy, dog food—and threw in a twelve-pack of toilet paper (soft, in case Julia came to visit). After paying for his groceries, he slung several plastic bags into his hands instead of wheeling the cart out. In the parking lot, he spotted Burl getting into his truck.

  “Hey, Burl, how many bears did you catch?” Reed said, tapping on the window.

  He set his groceries on the asphalt. The glass bottles clinked. Burl scrambled out of the truck. He was wearing a garish souvenir T-shirt that said NO SMOKING IN THE SMOKIES, green letters against orange flames. He gave Reed an expansive hug.

  “That’s my bear hug, Reed,” Burl cried. “You won’t believe the wild bear chase I’ve been on. It was a bear hunt and a game feast and an opera, all rolled into one.”

  “Opera?”

  “I’ll get to that. Listen. These people put on a wild-game barbecue for about five hundred people. But first they take you out in S.U.V.s, with dogs and bear rifles, and now and then they let the dogs out to look for bear. Then they come back and you ride some more over the mountain service roads. We never saw a bear—but it’s illegal to shoot one anyway.”

  “Sounds more like a hayride than a bear hunt,” said Reed.

  “It was all pretend. Denny Jones and his wife Tippy were along. She’s pregnant, and she had to have her cervix hole sewed up; they lost one baby because her cervix wasn’t strong enough to hold it. I didn’t think she ought to be out riding in an S.U.V. in the mountains.”

  “That sounds nuts,” Reed said.

  Burl, ducking into his front seat, swigged from a pint of bourbon t
hat was concealed in a paper bag.

  “That’s not all,” he said, replacing the package in his truck.

  “When we got back from the bear hunt we were at this fancy hunting lodge—deer heads on the wall? A woman was playing the piano, and another woman was in there yelling like she was being torn to pieces by coyotes, and you could hear coyotes wailing out in the woods. It was opera! She was singing opera.”

  “Opera does sound like coyotes, in parts,” Reed said, to be agreeable. Burl wasn’t staggering drunk yet, but he clearly intended to be. Quickly, Reed updated him on his mother and her delusions.

  “Doesn’t that sound like she’s on drugs, Burl? That doesn’t sound like stroke damage to me.”

  “What’s she taking?”

  “They kept her stoked up on Xanax in the hospital, but they took her off of that, and now they have her on a couple of new pills that I’m not sure about. Maybe she’s not even getting her right medicine. The aides can remind them to take their pills, but they can’t give them their pills. It’s against the law for the aides to touch the pills.”

  “What if your mom drops one and can’t stoop down to pick it up?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Those old folks are on their own there.”

  “You better look up those pills. And look up the side effects.”

  “I’ll have to. There’s no telling what she’s taking—or how much.”

  “Sometimes the side effect cancels out the effect,” Burl said.

  Reed laughed. “Does that sound like the story of my life?”

  “I heard spinach soaks up radiation.” Burl took another drink of bourbon. He screwed the top back on and twisted the paper around the neck of the bottle. “Or was it rutabagas? I can’t remember.”

  “How’s the old Prayer Warrior?” Reed asked. “Seen any major action lately?”

  “I haven’t slept in two days. I’ve got a prayer vigil going, not just for you but for everybody out there at the plant that might be in trouble. You never know what they might have done to you twenty-five years ago! And then it comes up later. It’s like syphilis! I had a great-uncle that had that a long time ago. It crept up on him; it was living there all along and then one day it hatched like a maggot in a dead dog’s eye.”

  “Is that a parable? You sound like a preacher, Burl.”

  “I’m telling you, Reed, it might get you. Not syphilis. Radiation.”

  “If I got it, I got it,” Reed said. “And you sure are making me feel good, Burl. You sure know how to make a fellow feel good.”

  “I’ve got a headache and the scours,” Burl said. “And the red-eye. And if I don’t get out of here and go fix Mrs. Patterson’s sump pump, she’ll stop speaking to me.”

  “Take care, Burl.” He paused. “By the way, the silverfish ate Eisenhower.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “There were just toenails left. I was off for three days and they had a Roman orgy.”

  “Silverfish can eat a library in a weekend, I’ve heard.”

  “I took care of that bird like it was my own baby.” Reed kicked at the pavement. “Silverfish! What kind of creature thrives in the Cascade?”

  “You do. Or you think you do. Hey, you’ve got oyster crackers!” Burl pounced on the package and felt it. “I haven’t seen any of those in a Jack Russell terrier’s age. And what ever happened to oysters? We used to get oysters at that fish joint down on the river. They came in little goldfish cartons.”

  “It’s just another one of those things,” said Reed. “Probably overdosed on technetium.”

  “Oysters don’t grow here anyway,” Burl said. “You’re joking.”

  “Well, wherever they grow, there’s probably technetium or something worse in their breeding ground—their oyster beds?”

  “Pyridoxine hydrochloride?” said Burl, reading from the ingredients list on the oyster-cracker package. “Disodium guanylate?”

  “That sounds like bat shit,” said Reed.

  16

  The next afternoon, after five hours of sleep, Reed padded barefoot outside for the morning newspaper, slung in its plastic duvet into the grass, which was wet from a light shower. At the bottom of the front page, a two-line heading stretched across a three-column story:

  BLUE FLAMES AT PLANT MAY BE

  SIGN OF NUCLEAR REACTION

  Reed emitted an involuntary low whistle. Standing in the moist grass, he skimmed the story. It was about the blue fire on the scrap heap at the edge of the wildlife refuge. A couple of scientists from Boston claimed that the flames were from an underground criticality—a nuclear chain reaction. Goose pimples on Reed’s legs began a chain reaction of their own and rippled to the back of his neck. He read on. Possibly the fire was Cerenkov radiation—charged radioactive particles from a nuclear reaction could give off a blue glow in water.

  “Cerenkov radiation, my foot,” Reed said to Clarence, who was waiting impatiently for Reed to join him in a game of knuckle-bone toss.

  One of the scientists wanted to fence off the scrap heap and take core samples. Taking a core sample of a criticality-in-progress was a novel idea, Reed thought. Enrico Fermi didn’t think of that one. The newspaper reported the blue flames as if they were as rare as the aurora borealis. But Reed himself had seen them probably a dozen times. He felt almost possessive toward the phenomenon.

  When Reed arrived for his shift that night, he learned that a federal team had been there earlier and had left without comment.

  “Blue fire when it rains?” Jim said with a laugh. “Well, now, that must be a nuclear bomb! Or else special effects from Hollywood!”

  “It’s aluminum shavings,” a balding machinist nameless to Reed volunteered. “Or maybe uranium shavings. They’ll bust out burning when they hit air.”

  “I’m sure uranium shavings are out there,” Jim said.

  “You can have hydrogen come out of a chemical reaction when water is there,” Reed offered. “Or methane. Anything like that will cause a blue glow. Beryllium will catch fire if it hits the air.” He added loudly, “Not that anybody would admit we have a beryllium problem.”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Jim, twisting his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “But if it was a chain reaction, wouldn’t it have blown the whole place up by now?”

  “I haven’t seen it glow blue in months,” a big guy known as Beau said. He had recently transferred from the tails station, where the depleted uranium was withdrawn from the Cascade.

  The blue flames appeared just after Reed dreamed of the dead woman. The dream had visually faded, but she still lingered in his mind, the way the strontium-90 in global fallout settled in children’s bones. He was grateful that he had not shared the blue flames with Julia.

  He clocked in, a buzz of voices surrounding him. He checked his work package; he would be replacing a valve on the recirculating water system that cooled the Cascade. He wouldn’t need the moon suit for that. After changing into his snot-green scrubs, he grabbed the man lift and shot upward.

  Reed towed his toolbox down the painted lane to the job site and stopped at a stairway to a catwalk. Eisenhower was a ghost, just a smear of white on the toolbox lid.

  “Farewell, Eisenhower!” Reed shouted to the cavernous space above him. “You were a good soldier—for a bird.”

  From a supply wagon, he selected a drive-impact wrench, about seventy-five feet of air hose, and a couple of chain come-alongs to pull piping. He carried them up to a section of catwalk above the cell rows, then returned for his oxyacetylene rig. It was hotter up there on the catwalk. Gazing up at the skeletal steel structure of the building, he imagined himself working lights at an arena concert, as his son, Dalton, had done one summer. While he manipulated his burning rig, his mind seemed to clear, along with the eyepieces in his goggles, as if he were peering through a retro crystal ball. The radioactive waste products from bomb-fuel processing had been left to accumulate and idle like abandoned old farm machinery. And now they were leaching into the ground and the water. Wor
kers used to climb inside the large drums and cylinders to scrub them out with deadly cleaning chemicals like trichlorethylene, TCE, that got flushed into the soil. His father had done such jobs before him—without a respirator, without a TLD, without the anti-C suit and other precautions Reed took for granted. If his father hadn’t died in a chemical accident, would he now be suffering from leukemia or liver cancer? At the plant there were plenty of cases right now, stark emblems of a hidden past, although the doctors would not draw that conclusion because they hadn’t done the proper studies. His father and his coworkers had sacrificed their personal safety for the safety of the country. It was always put that way. Reed felt a spasm of grief, a longing for his father.

  Of course the plant had hot spots, but he believed them to be contained. The plant was like a resort for wildlife. Raccoons and foxes played under the lights at night, and pigeons roosted on the steel stairways on the exterior walls of the Cascade. Just the other day, Reed saw a skunk scurrying beneath a piece of corrugated metal flashing. The old feed plant, where the UF6 had been concocted, served as a storage shed for old equipment that was too hot to de-con. He thought of his mother at Sunnybank, stored among the useless and decrepit, warehoused. The idea that his mother would die in the relatively near future still struck him as idiotic, a notion he couldn’t bear. But from time to time another emotion suffused him: he might be glad when it was all over.

  He remembered Nurse Linda saying, “Now don’t let’s have a pity party, Miss Kitty.” He reminded himself that he would ride his hog off a cliff before he would have a pity party for himself in one of those final-home joints. The thought lifted his mood. He accidentally dropped a bolt through the steel grating of the catwalk and cursed.