Flights of Angels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Just because you broke up with your boyfriend doesn’t mean you have to call up 60 Minutes and get them down here poking around in Strickler and causing a lot of trouble for everyone,” I said.

  “They shouldn’t leave that thing sitting there that near to our houses,” she said. “The companies that built it should come and take it down and take it away from here.”

  “Well, hell, let’s go take a look at it and see how it’s doing,” Euland put in. “I would have gone to see it a lot of times but you can’t climb the fence in front without messing with the Penningtons’ dogs. I don’t like those dogs. I got bit once by a dog and that’s enough for me.” He pulled me over close to him and put his hand around my waist right under my breasts. We were standing outside the visitors’ center where we made love that Christmas day. I started getting really horny and I knew he was too. I wished Kelly wasn’t there with us but she was. I guessed that meant it was just going to be that much better when we got home that night. Euland likes to be horny. He likes to go around all day thinking about screwing me that night. Not me. I like to do it the minute I think of it. I am spoiled from getting laid by him any time I wanted to since we were juniors in high school and he was All State in football and basketball and track. He was the best and I picked him out and I have kept him. Well, I know how to keep him, but that’s another story.

  Euland runs his daddy’s heating and air-conditioning business and I teach at West Fork High School and, yes, we are going to get married but not until we can buy a house. We are happy just like we are and we don’t need anybody telling us to have kids when we haven’t even paid off our student loans. It’s the nineties and were living our own lives.

  He got out of the truck and came around and opened the door for us. He has the loveliest manners of any man you could want to meet. Also, he’s got those shoulders and those long straight legs and if I start thinking about it I’ll never get this finished.

  We started off down the path beside the waterfall. It was so cold and dry we had to really watch our step. It was the coldest day we had had all of December. “What a day for a walk,” I began, but Kelly interrupted me. Part of her being stubborn is she never lets you finish what you are saying. No wonder she never keeps a boyfriend.

  “I’m walking every day if it’s over forty degrees,” she declared. “I’m not going to stay fat. Fat is death and I’m going to walk it off.”

  “What did you bring to eat?” Euland asks. She was wearing her backpack. We knew she had food in it.

  “Some graham crackers and low-fat cookies,” she answered. “Well, are you guys ready?”

  “Let’s go to the reactor,” Euland said. “You’ve got me interested now.”

  We hiked past the waterfall and down to the bottom of the trail and started back up toward the east. There wasn’t a leaf left on a tree but there were bundles of bright orange pine needles on the path and beautiful hawthorn berries here and there. Hawthorn berries are the most beautiful color of red in the world. No Christmas decoration has ever been as nice as stark winter woods with hawthorn berries under a gray sky. There was also red holly and barberries and dark green mistletoe in the high branches of the oak trees. Everything you see is sexual if you start thinking about it. Everything is seed and reproduction and sperm and egg. Thank God for birth control pills. Well, it would have been too cold to make love even if Kelly wasn’t with us so I stopped thinking about screwing Euland and concentrated on pulling my fingers back into the palms of my hands inside my gloves. I knew something was going to happen. I knew this was going to be a day that mattered and it wasn’t just because I was cold and horny that I felt that way. There’s Welsh blood in all the Nobleses. We know things we can’t prove we know.

  We hadn’t been walking half an hour when we saw a man coming down the other way. He was wearing a black leather jacket and some sort of thick light brown pants and his hair was jet black and curly. He wasn’t wearing a hat. I love a man who can stand the cold without a hat. If I see a man in a hat I think he’s old, no matter what his age.

  We stopped at a wide place in the path and let him walk down to us. He was smiling this lovely wide smile like we were just what he was hoping to find in the woods. When he got about three feet away he stopped. “Hello, there,” he said. “I was wondering if I had this place to myself. It’s so quiet you can hear a leaf drop.” He smiled the gorgeous smile again and I could see Kelly changing gears. She pulled her old AMOCO hat with the earflaps off her head and shook out her long red hair. She has the best hair you’ve ever seen in your life. Brilliant golden red and so curly it is like a bouquet of flowers. She never cuts it. It hangs down halfway to her waist. Fat or thin, Kelly can get a lot of mileage out of that hair. So then she unbuttons the top button of her jacket.

  “I walk any day it’s above forty degrees,” she said, throwing her hair down on her chest.

  “Then you shouldn’t be out today.” He laughed and pulled back his sleeve and showed us a watch with a digital dial that gave you the temperature. The watch said thirty-two. We all laughed and he took out a package of cigarettes and offered them to us and Euland and I took one and we lit them and then we all stood there smoking.

  “What are you doing out on a day like this?” Kelly answered.

  “I’m the new professor in the botany department,” he said. “I’ve only been in town a week. I’m lonely. Everybody’s married so they sent me out to see the woods. It’s very interesting. I’m from Massachusetts. This is all new to me.” He waved his hand around at the flora and fauna and I thought, I may have given up on Jesus but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in providence.

  “You want to see something interesting you should go with us,” I said. “There’s an abandoned breeder reactor a mile from here. We live near it. We’re walking over there because you can’t get in the front. You want to come along?”

  “A breeder reactor?”

  “An experimental breeder reactor that was the only one of its kind in the world. We’re going over to check it out.” I loved the expression on his face. I love it when people think Strickler is the end of the earth and then find out it’s not.

  “I’m the one who thought up going,” Kelly says. “No one pays any attention to it anymore but I’m interested in it. I just broke my engagement and I decided I’d better wake up and find out what’s happening in the world.” She had completely moved in. She isn’t all that fat and even if she was you couldn’t tell it underneath all the basic black ski clothes she was wearing.

  “I’m Ed Douglas,” he said. “I’d love to tag along.”

  So we set off back down the path with Kelly and Ed in the rear and Kelly telling him everything she’d been learning about SEFOR and Ed turning out to be a really good listener, something every Nobles finds seductive to the tenth power since we all talk too much.

  “They built it right beside Fall Creek,” Kelly is telling him. “Which runs into Lee Creek which is a category five white water river. Not to mention Fall Creek is where the people in my family teach their children to swim. All three of us learned to swim there, Chandler, Euland, and me. All our grandparents are from Strickler. And our parents too. Anyway, they built that nuclear reactor right beside our creek without asking anyone if they could do it. I think we can still sue them. I’m looking into it.”

  I didn’t look behind me. I didn’t want to turn into a pillar of salt and I didn’t want to start giggling. I just held on to Euland’s arm whenever there was a place where we could walk side by side. It was beginning to look like we might not be stuck with Kelly all weekend after all.

  It wasn’t as easy getting from the park to the pasture that leads up to SEFOR as we thought it was going to be. The path through the little woods was covered with honeysuckle vines. Euland and Ed had to get out pocketknives and cut vines every ten or twenty feet. I guess we would have given up if Ed hadn’t come along but Ed was showing off for Kelly and Euland was showing off for Ed so they kept on hacking down the vi
nes. It wasn’t that far. I could see the pasture and the top of SEFOR through the trees. All this time Kelly is having the time of her life saying all the stuff she’s been reading in the library and making copies of in her spare time. “The heat produced by the nuclear reactions was transferred to liquid sodium metal, then transferred to more sodium, then the steam came out of the pipe to float around on top of our pastures and houses and creek. Can you see why I got interested in this?”

  “Well, of course,” Ed answered. “It’s one thing to think about nuclear power in the abstract. It’s another thing to have it in your backyard.”

  “So one of these breeder reactors blew up in Detroit, Michigan. Well, they don’t call it blowing up. They call it melting down.”

  “A disaster either way.”

  “You got it.” She was letting him get a word in here and there, but not many. “Anyway,” she goes on. “After that happened in Detroit they shut this one down and gave it to the university. Our uncle sold them the concrete. He says it’s probably okay but that the metal might be starting to deteriorate.”

  “I can imagine it might.”

  “Anyway, I keep reading everything I can find but there’s not much information. The university should sue the power companies that built it to make them take it down but they won’t because SWEPCO, our local power company, was part of it and they contribute money to the university. There are other connections about that but I haven’t finished finding them all out.”

  Kelly was casting herself in the role of some investigative reporter with secrets to keep. One thing about all the television she watches, she can find lots of outlets for her dramatic side.

  We finished hacking through the vines and came to the rickety wire fence that separates the park from SEFOR. Euland climbed over it and held it while I climbed over and then Kelly and then Ed. Just as we got to the other side and were straightening up our clothes, the sun came out for the first time all day. It was so beautiful, this big patch of sunny sky in between the banks of clouds. It cast beautiful shadows all over the yellow pastures. It made the world look beautiful and interesting and gay. I moved over to Euland’s side and started thinking maybe we ought to go on and get married in the spring. We could rent a house for a year or two before we buy one. Kelly was unbuttoning her jacket another button as if she isn’t the most cold-blooded person in the world.

  “It’s just half a mile from here,” Euland said. “Let’s hike.”

  “This isn’t the only time nuclear power came to Arkansas,” Kelly was telling Ed. “I guess you know about the Titan II missiles in Damascus, don’t you?”

  “Damascus?”

  “Damascus, Arkansas. It’s a town down west of Little Rock. We had this representative named Wilbur Mills and he got so crazy from drinking and screwing whores that he let the government put eighteen Titan II missiles in the ground in Arkansas. He volunteered the state for all sixty of them but Kansas and Arizona wanted some so we only got eighteen.”

  “You are centrally located.” Ed was laughing at everything she said, like she wasn’t discussing the fate of the world. She still had her hat off. She gets terrible ear infections. I was hoping her hair would keep them warm.

  “You got that,” Euland put in. “We could guard the United States from east, west, south, and north.”

  “People aren’t educated,” Ed puts in. “If they were, they wouldn’t let politicians get away with these things.”

  We stopped for a moment in a low protected place beside a man-made dam. We huddled together and Kelly finally put on her hat, turning it around so the AMOCO sign was in the back and her curly bangs fell down across her forehead. Before us was a long sloping pasture leading up to the reactor in the distance, the Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor, a concrete silo sixty feet below the ground and fifty feet above the ground with a smokestack rising another fifty feet. There was a power line running from the silo to the road and a chain-link fence with a gate. Above that the gray-blue skies of December in the Ozarks.

  “So anyway,” Kelly is saying. “They came down and dug these holes in the ground and put in the missiles, each one containing the most explosive devices ever aimed at an enemy in the history of the world. Right there, in Damascus, they put the one that melted down, blew up, whatever you want to call it. Two people were killed.” She was losing her audience. We were freezing. Ed pulled out his watch and the temperature dial said thirty. “Let’s walk while we talk,” he suggested. “Let’s get on up there.”

  We started hiking really fast in the direction of the silo, but the conversation was started now and no one could let it alone.

  “I worked with this guy who was a soldier stationed in Little Rock when the Titans were down there,” Euland said. “It was his job to drive one of the trucks that took the warheads back and forth to Fort Chaffee to be checked and cleaned up. There were two men driving each warhead. He said one night the brakes went out on the truck, that was before cellular phones, and they had to keep pouring water on the brakes every twenty miles to make it to the base. He runs Jackson’s Air in Fayetteville now. He’s a smart guy.”

  “Your tax dollars at work,” Kelly puts in. Not that she pays anything compared to me. You ought to see what they take out of a single teacher’s salary.

  We were halfway up the pasture when we saw the dogs. I’m always worried in a pasture that I might meet a bull but it never occurs to me to worry about dogs. Everyone around here keeps their dogs tied up. If they didn’t their dogs would be dead. So when I saw the dogs in the distance I didn’t get worried at first. Euland was the one who stopped. Euland’s been bitten.

  “Are those dogs going to be okay?” Ed asked. He took hold of Kelly’s arm. I guess it was the first time they touched each other.

  “I don’t like loose dogs,” Euland answered. “I don’t trust them. Hell, I wish I had a gun.” We were within sight of the fence surrounding the reactor. There was a gate on it but it didn’t look like it was padlocked. Euland picked up a dead branch from the ground. It broke in two in his hand. “Let’s go,” he said. “Run for the fence.”

  I guess it was a quarter mile. Too far to outrun dogs but we did what we were told. The dogs kept trotting in our direction. They didn’t bark. They just kept trotting with a big yellow dog in the lead.

  “Stay in front of me,” Euland yelled. He had the ends of the stick in his hands. I’ll say one thing about boys from Strickler. They aren’t afraid of the devil when the time comes. I’ll say something for my cousin Kelly, too. She can sprint. We were on basketball teams together and you could count on her to get a basketball down the court. So Ed didn’t have to wait on any girls from Strickler. We beat him to the gate. All three of us from Strickler were probably thinking about the dog pack last summer that killed a child near Hogeye. There are wolves and foxes in this part of the country and all sorts of wild creatures.

  We got to the chain-link fence just as the dogs stopped trotting and started running. Euland threw himself against the gate and it opened. I don’t know what we would have done if the caretaker hadn’t left it open. He said later it was open because someone from the university was supposed to come by on Sunday and double-check the radiation badges in the containment vessel. Whether that was true or not, he had neglected to put the lock on and Euland pushed it and it opened. About the time we got inside these three dogs as big as mastiffs got to the fence and started throwing themselves against it.

  “Do you have that cellular phone?” I asked Kelly.

  “No, the battery was down. It’s at home on the charger.”

  The dogs kept throwing themselves at the fence and at first I was sorry I’d made Euland stop carrying a gun in the truck but then I decided he wouldn’t have had it out here anyway. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “Well, Ed, I guess you didn’t plan on this much excitement. You think we could have scared them off if we hadn’t gotten in the fence?”

  “I’m glad we didn’t have to try. I think they’re feral. Wi
ll they go away, do you think?”

  “I wouldn’t trust it.”

  “Is there a caretaker to this place? Surely someone watches it.”

  “Just Mrs. Pennington. She lives in the old visitors’ center. It’s her dog that keeps you from getting in the front gate. I’ll be damned. I don’t know how we’re going to get out. Well, I guess we can look around and find something to use for weapons. An iron rod would do.”

  “They check it every Saturday,” Kelly put in. “That was in the newspaper article. A man from the university comes out every Saturday and sees about the radiation. Do you think he’s been here yet?”

  “Maybe that’s why the gate was open.” Ed turned and looked at the building behind us. The dome-shaped containment vessel and the flat-roofed building that adjoins it. It looked like a fallen rusting spaceship stuck in the ground, not really evil, just a pile of concrete and metal and bad ideas, abandoned and forlorn. The ladder going up the side of the dome was cut off twenty feet above the ground but there was still a ladder to the flat-roofed part. Ed buttoned his jacket up around his neck and walked over to the ladder. “I’m going up,” he said. “Let’s see if we can get inside. There might be an alarm we can set off or a phone.” As soon as he was on the roof Euland started up after him. I looked at Kelly. “Let’s go,” I said. “I don’t want to be left out.”