An Atomic Romance

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Burl’s truck was a throwaway vehicle, like the cars in Clawber’s Dead Car Museum, which they were passing now just outside of town. Clawber still had every vehicle he had ever owned—and many others—displayed in his yard. There were about twenty old hulks, their lives spent, their engines dead, their fenders rusted, their tires piled into an old-tire graveyard beside his house. Each beloved old car was deposited at its final roosting place like a spectacular new model in a show window.

  Burl was eating peanuts and talking. “Man, Clawber’s place sure is neat! He’s keeping it mowed pretty good, and he weed-eats around the cars. He ought to make a place for dancing, and a band-stand.” Burl raced along on that topic for a mile, then switched abruptly to methods of brewing coffee, followed by nanotechnology, Merrill Lynch, and the French Revolution. His jumpiness was accelerated today, making Reed feel uneasy.

  They were driving out into the country to see Burl’s cousin Beloit, a childhood pal from Michigan. He was a man who didn’t mingle and who returned to Lansing for months at a time. He had been arrested a few times for petty thefts, and last year he had been charged with cooking methamphetamine, but the charge was later dropped.

  Reed said, “Burl, I swear you’re going to end up in the penitentiary if you keep fooling with Beloit.”

  “Oh, he learned his lesson.”

  Apparently Burl’s cousin had siphoned several gallons of anhydrous ammonia from a farmer’s tank in a remote cornfield. It was corn-planting time, and the farmer had rolled the tank out to his freshly plowed field, intending to apply the fertilizer to the soil. In the dead of night, Beloit had attached a hose and siphoned off about three gallons of it. Suddenly a searchlight turned on and Beloit skedaddled.

  Reed said, “Anhydrous ammonia will soak right through you. It’ll burn the hide off of you.”

  “Can’t be worse than plutonium now, can it?”

  “Touché. You need to get your cousin to go to church with you and straighten him out,” said Reed. “Which one is your sister dragging you to now?”

  “Pilgrims’ Rest. It’s a new church, with a big new brick building and a rec hall.” Burl laughed. “The preacher gets his sermons off the Internet.”

  “Those new religions scare the pudding out of me,” Reed said.

  “They’re going to have a pageant,” Burl said. “They wanted me to play one of Christ’s disciples.” He laughed. “But I told Sally I didn’t think I could give that role my all.”

  Reed said, “On second thought, Burl, if you join some cult that’s going to blow up something or meet flying saucers or commit mass suicide, then I’ll feel obliged to step in and become a cult-buster.”

  “I’m not that stupid,” said Burl, wadding his peanut package into his shirt pocket.

  “I didn’t mean that.” Reed glanced at Burl’s face, still faintly pockmarked from teen acne.

  “But if I get drunk and join up with some TV evangelist, I’m counting on you to come and bail me out.”

  “What else am I good for?” Reed asked. “Just call on me. I’ll be there.”

  “You know I’m not a fool. I’m not taken in by these things,” Burl said, swigging whiskey from the bottle in his paper bag. “But if your sister’s out dancing with the holy spirit, you can’t just make fun of her dancing. Sally’s so purely ordinary that she broadens my mind in some strange way. And I’m always learning something useful when I’m around her, something that makes me feel holy.”

  “That would do it.”

  In a way, Reed thought, Burl was the holiest person he knew. Burl seemed to know that the world’s complications were far greater than his understanding, and he had his life worked out in some obscure, irrational linkages of myths, dreams, adages, angels, prayer rituals, rosary beads, Guatemalan worry dolls, hexes—a moral juggling act balanced against the indifference of everyday facts. Reed often thought that Burl, in his diffuse enthusiasms, made more sense than the average person who lived by the simple tenets of commerce and acquisition and clockwork regularity. Reed had read that 15 percent of Americans comprehended the scientific process, and 60 percent believed in psychics. Burl could interweave psychics and physics and still sleep soundly.

  Burl was taking a shopping bag of supplies to his cousin. Reed couldn’t see what was in the bag because Burl kept the top folded over. When it popped open, he held it closed with his foot.

  As Reed turned onto a blacktopped country road, Burl asked about Julia. Reed, jolted by the question, found himself swerving to avoid a Rhode Island Red rooster that was scooting across the road.

  “Julia’s still in Chicago,” Reed said, his heart quickening. “I haven’t heard a word. Her sister was in some kind of trouble.”

  “Hold it,” Burl interrupted. “Was that a rooster? What’s a rooster doing out after dark?”

  “I don’t know. I was wondering that myself. Furthermore, why was he crossing the road? Anyway,” Reed said, hitting the high beams, “I wanted to take her up there to Chicago myself. She’s treating me like Schrödinger’s cat. She puts me in a box and just leaves me there. She doesn’t know if I’m alive or dead.”

  “Did you hear about Dan Forgy’s cat?”

  “No. That cat he’s so crazy about?”

  Dan Forgy, an old friend, ran Forgy’s Hardware. Burl told about

  Dan’s hyperthyroid cat, Boone, who had been isolated in a cage at a veterinary hospital for ten days after being injected with radioactive iodide.

  “The cat had no toys, no music, no voices, not even a tuffet to sit on!” Burl said.

  “They nuked his thyroid,” said Reed.

  After the cat came home, Dan had to isolate Boone, in his yellow collar that said RADIOACTIVE, for ten more days, Burl explained.

  “Boone was so glad to see Dan he just danced with joy. Dan wasn’t supposed to touch him—no snuggling, they said! And this cat was just wild to get ahold of him, climb up in his lap, and purr in his ear. He leaped up on Dan’s shoulder, and Dan was afraid his thyroid would be zapped.”

  “They probably didn’t give the cat more than a few millicuries of radioiodide,” said Reed. “The cat didn’t need to be in a deprivation chamber at home. They’re just covering their ass.” Reed slowed down, for he was driving down an unfamiliar road that seemed to have no shoulders. “How’s Dan’s pussy now?”

  “Calm as a footstool. That cat was always scared and jumpy, but I guess he had time to think things over when he was in solitary. That’s what it’s like in the pokey. Yep, you get a lot of quality mental time when you’re doing time.”

  “They didn’t have to keep that cat shut up that long,” Reed said. “That’s cruel. If those rules applied at an atomic plant, we’d all be in an isolation booth half the time.”

  Reed listened in a trance as he drove, as Burl continued speculating and humming alternately. Burl was going on now about mind over matter, wondering if it applied to cats.

  Their destination, a house on the outskirts of a village across the county line, was a crumbling premodern relic, with weathered gray siding and a patchwork roof. The porch, covered with a shredding outdoor carpet, sagged. The house had a visible concrete cistern, fed by a downspout from the roof gutter.

  “Drive around back,” Burl said.

  As he got out of the truck, Burl disclosed the contents of the bag of supplies he had brought for his elusive cousin—oranges and bananas, garbage bags, cans of vegetables and soup, and a large bargain box of chocolate Easter bunnies. Reed didn’t offer any judgment; the discount-eclectic assortment seemed innocent enough. He waited in the truck while Burl entered the back door with the bag of goods. Reed had read newspaper reports of cops finding meth labs in bathtubs or in motel rooms, or even in vans rushing down the highway. If Beloit was cooking meth, it was easy enough to accumulate the ingredients from various drugstores—plastic tubing, lithium batteries, ether, ephedrine pills. If this place got raided, it would be by a Haz-Mat crew in moon suits, Reed thought. He felt like the secretary of defense t
ouring bombed-out neighborhoods. The landscape of his life was reduced to assorted toxic-waste dumps.

  Chemicals had always been Reed’s friends, because he treated them with respect. But they had turned on him. He held the truck door ajar for air, forcing himself to concentrate on the moment at hand. Here he was, sitting behind a ramshackle house where a man might have messed with liquid fire. Reed wondered what he was supposed to do. He didn’t believe Burl was involved with meth. But Burl embraced life to such an extent that he was pulled in many directions and too often made excuses for others’ failings.

  Burl emerged from the dark house and slipped into the truck. In the dim interior light, he appeared older. He had a small cut on his finger, from a metal snag on the screen door. He opened his wallet to locate a bandage strip he carried amongst his condoms. In the layers of bills, Reed saw fifties. The worn, off-brand condom packages appeared almost antique.

  Reed saw himself moving from one fantasy island to another. His workplace was science fiction; this seedy house was like an old juke joint without the music; Reed’s own house, neglected and cluttered, was like a rundown hotel; the hospital where his mother had been was like the government of a small dictatorship; and Sunnybank was a madcap Utopia, like first grade without a future.

  32

  After leaving Burl at his house and retrieving his car, Reed bought gas at the mini-mart. Tonight, Rosalyn’s blond hair was swung into a casual knot on her crown, and she wore slim jeans and a tight red T-shirt with a V-neck. He loved to hang around her because she was always cheerful. He needed that now.

  “Hey, Rosalyn, did you ever know anybody who did meth?” he asked. They were chatting by the motor-oil rack.

  “Why? What’s the trouble? You don’t want any of that, do you? You look beat.” She touched his brow.

  “Hell, no. I just wondered about it, there’s so much of it around.” Spotting lithium batteries, he pointed to them. “A chief ingredient,” he said.

  Rosalyn nodded. “I sell a lot of those.” She straightened a stack of pipe cleaners. “I know some of the truckers that come through are on meth,” she said. “It makes them a little crazy; they act like they’re ready to pick me up and carry me off.” She laughed, touching her hair confidently.

  “One look at you, Rosalyn, and anybody would want to grab you and carry you off.” He liked Rosalyn, who had always been warm and maternal toward him. He said, “A couple of guys at work take it. They come in wired and go out wired. They may as well hook in directly to the power lines out there at the plant.”

  She laughed, but she was worried. “I heard there might be layoffs, Reed,” said Rosalyn.

  “I haven’t heard that. They won’t lay off unless they cancel the new plant.”

  “It won’t affect you, will it?”

  “Nah. I’ve got too much seniority.”

  “I hate to see anybody get laid off.”

  “Me too. Those young guys just starting out, just married—first they get laid and then they get laid off. But don’t worry. It won’t happen. When the centrifuge goes online, we’ll have plenty of jobs. We could even make bomb fuel again if we had to.”

  “Well, I could do without that.” She shuddered. “There’s so much going on in the world—I’m just going to enjoy myself.”

  “Sounds like a good plan.”

  “I’m taking my break,” she said to the young Korean behind the counter.

  Reed sat with her on the bench in front of the mini-mart, where the neon and vapor lights shone eerily on her face. She lit a cigarette. Reed hadn’t smoked in years, but Rosalyn enjoyed smoking and refused to quit. They watched a frowsy woman pump her gas, then leave her kid in the car while she went inside to pay.

  “I’m getting a hysterectomy,” Rosalyn told Reed.

  “Oh, no! Cancer?”

  “No, just what they call fibroids. They make me so miserable I can’t sit. They could take them out, but it’s easier to yank out the whole bag than to try to cut them out individually.” She laughed loudly and went on explaining in more clinical detail than he could focus on. “The risk of having them cut out is bleeding to death, so I’ll just let them take the whole shebang.” She laughed again and drew on her cigarette. “What do I need with a uterus anyway?”

  Rosalyn naturally laughed all the time, regardless of the subject. She said, “I’m going to ask if I can take my uterus home. I want to bury it in the backyard.”

  “Dogs might dig it up,” Reed said, catching a lock of hair that was falling across her cheek.

  “Maybe I should give it to your dog.”

  “Clarence would love it.”

  Rosalyn laughed until she had to catch the pain in her side.

  33

  The marijuana crop was coming in. Reed knew, because he saw a pair of choppers flying low in the early morning sky, black against the sunrise; they were heading toward the cropland and the forest preserves along the river. A team called the Flying Ferrets cruised with their infrared, searching for patches. When they located one, they landed and set up a stakeout. On the choppers, they carried canoes, all-terrain vehicles, assorted weapons, anything they might need for their weed war. Reed liked watching helicopters, although he always imagined that one day he would see one spiral out of the sky, its spinning beanie gone berserk. He was sleepless, not a winged ferret, but a bear in need of a cave. Ursa very major. Reed had pushed his mother from his mind. As she grew stronger, her resentment of her surroundings grew more particular. She complained of having to listen to Guy Lombardo music, of having no one to play poker with, and of having to tolerate the decrepitude and dementia of the Sunnybank inmates.

  “This place is full of old people,” she said with a sigh.

  He had just left work. He was exhausted. During the first half of his shift he had repaired a sprinkling system, changed a fan belt on a large ventilation fan, and aligned a motor; and after eating he had returned to the Venusian greenhouse atmosphere of the Cascade with Darrell and Kerwin to start changing a joint seal on a compressor. He had drunk three orange sodas and about a gallon of water during the night. The window of his hood had a scratch on it that bisected his view like a split screen.

  His mother had already been to breakfast, but she was still wearing her nightgown and robe. Reed, although realizing that he patronized her, told his mother how lovely she looked, how good she sounded, no longer slipping on any of her words. The newest drug seemed to have cleared out her mind like a bush hog, he thought. She joked about the daily devotional program. Yesterday it was Jesus and the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. She said, “They’re praying for a miracle here. They don’t have enough good food to go around, so they pad it with generic helper.”

  “I’ll order you some loaves and fishes, Mom,” Reed said, touching her hair. The soft, dark hair of her younger days was now gray and bristly, like the brush he used to clean greasy tubing at work.

  “I have a song in my head and I can’t get it out,” she said. “I don’t know what song it is. I hear one line, over and over. I’m sure I know the song but I can’t catch it. Am I losing my memory?”

  “No, we’re all like that,” Reed assured her. “That’s the story of my life, a song I can’t identify.”

  “Well, I doubt that,” she said.

  34

  Plutonium was a crazy element that crawled and burrowed. It melted at room temperature. It was different colors—silvery or purple. Someone said it felt like a newborn kitten in your hand. It was elusive, a shape-shifter, a trickster. The word plutonium was evocative—a faithful dog with a big wet mouth and floppy ears, or a distant planet that was cold as leftover biscuits. Pluto, the Greek god of the underworld, wore a helmet that made him invisible. For all Reed knew, Julia was on a distant planet, or perhaps somewhere on the outer rings of Saturn.

  He cruised the Internet, seeking plutonium. After wading through some cursory histories of the Manhattan Project, he got bogged down in several conspiracy-theory websites. He went off on a ta
ngent to the Aurora Project, a hypothetical hypersonic spy plane. He bypassed several familiar lunatic claims that radiation was a healthful rejuvenator. Reed stared at the screen until the Hubble pictures of the planets appeared.

  His eye on Neptune, he lifted the telephone. He had hoped Julia would be back from Chicago after the weekend, but it was already early Wednesday. He had refrained from calling for a few days. After plastering her with assurances about the wildlife refuge, how would he ever explain the deer at Fort Wolf? He rang Julia’s number. It was three a.m. Mars floated slowly forward. “It’s me again, from outer space. Call me when you get home,” he said to her machine. He thought he and Julia must be in relative motion: traveling at different speeds, each thought the other was standing still. She had called to let him know she was going to Chicago; and she had even called him sweetie. So why should she drop him again? What if she didn’t get in touch at all? What if something had happened to her?

  Would it make her happy if he joined a class-action suit? If he went back to school and studied astronomy? He really should shift course. He didn’t want to think of himself as a whiny, has-been oldster, his spirit tamed and boxed, his lust dimmed, his mouth turned down in a frown. But he seemed to live in a different space from her, a variant dimension, his string furled like fishing line.

  One of the books he had ordered through interlibrary loan had arrived. After exercising with Clarence and feasting on catfish and black beans, he settled down on the back porch with the book about plutonium. He intended to refresh his understanding of how science arrived at radiation protection standards. And he wanted to find out how much plutonium the body could bear. The book documented the secret government plutonium experiments in the decade following Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The topic sounded familiar, something he had shut out of his mind. Now, as he flipped through the book, the memory erupted like a malignant pustule hidden in a brain fold. In medical experiments, the essential substance of nuclear weaponry had been shot into the bloodstream of human beings who were told only that it was good for them.