Flights of Angels
Page 28
I started up. As soon as I was almost to the top she got on and started climbing too. I was getting off the ladder when I heard it start to slip. “Jump,” I screamed down at her. “It’s loose. It’s falling.” She ignored me and kept on climbing, half her body on the ladder and half on the brick wall. Two years ago when she was going with a rock climber she put in a lot of hours on that fake rock wall in Fayetteville behind the brewery and I guess it wasn’t all wasted time because she made it onto the roof. By the time she came over both Ed and Euland were holding on to her arms.
We stood in a circle. We looked at each other. It was cold as hell. It was Saturday afternoon. The ladder was on the ground. No one on earth knew where we were. Not to mention that the University of Arkansas Razorbacks basketball team was playing Louisville in the Bud Walton Arena and anyone in northwest Arkansas who wasn’t at the game was watching it on television.
“They’ll find our cars,” Ed said.
“There’s a forecast for snow,” Euland answered. “We better all just hope that doesn’t happen.”
“I hate dogs with all my heart.” Kelly walked to the edge of the roof to look at them. They were still hanging around the gate. “I hate the whole idea of dogs and keeping them penned up and putting collars on them and if you let them go they get wild and try to kill you.”
“Well, I wish I had my dog,” Euland said. He has a Doberman. “I’d love to turn him loose to kill those hounds.”
Ed had walked over to a black shed on the back of the roof and was inspecting the door. He took out his pocketknife and began to undo the screws on the side of the door. He didn’t curse or act like he was mad or anything. He just stood there taking the screws out of the door with the flat blade of a Swiss army knife. I guessed that if we didn’t catch pneumonia this was going to be the day Kelly finally found what she’d been looking for all her life. A ticket to a bigger world.
“I’ll be goddamned. I’ll just be goddamned,” Euland said about six times. Kelly was just standing off to one side like she didn’t have a care in the world. She had fixed the main thing wrong with her world by finding an unmarried professor out in the woods and getting herself marooned with him on top of a breeder reactor, so why should she care if we starved to death or caught pneumonia before someone missed us and came to help?
“Can you lend me a hand here?” Ed called out and Euland went to him and began to help with the screws.
“There might be an alarm we can set off.” Ed took a different blade out of his knife and began to wiggle it around along the sides of the lock. I pulled a scarf out of my pocket and asked him if he wanted to put it on his head but he said no. It must have been about twenty-five degrees by then. The patch of sun we had seen earlier had entirely disappeared. There was nothing to be seen in four directions but the roof of Euland’s mother’s house on the hill near the cemetery and the old visitors’ center looking deserted and the two-lane blacktop road no one could hear us from and snow clouds coming in from the west.
No alarm went off but the lock did begin to come loose around the door and Euland got really excited and started calling the hogs. “Sooieee, pig,” he yelled out. “Go hogs.” He was pulling on the lock while Ed cut around it.
All I could think about was my thin gloves and how it would be just my luck to get frostbite and lose a finger just when I had almost finished learning how to play Erik Satie’s Second Gymnopédie. I was learning it to play for Euland’s mother’s sixtieth birthday party.
“It’s coming,” Euland yelled. “Sooie, pig, here it goes.” There was this crashing, breaking sound and a big chunk of lock and wooden door was twisted and torn out of its place and then Ed and Euland kicked the rest down.
“A hollow-core door,” Ed said. “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Well, let’s go in. There may be a phone that works.”
“What do you think is down there?” Euland asked.
“Well, surely not the radioactive core.” Ed stood with his hands on his hips. “If it’s been decommissioned that’s gone. In any case that would surely have been underground.”
Only it wasn’t underground. Later, when Kelly was poking around the files in the university library, one of the things she found was a letter from a nuclear engineer to the Atomic Energy Commission. It was dated 1972, the year SEFOR was decommissioned. It said one of the problems with SEFOR was that they had no idea whether they would be able to cool down the nuclear reactions they were starting and they should have built it underground just in case. The nuclear engineer is named Richard E. Webb. We wanted to write him a letter but Kelly can’t find an address for him anywhere although she has used up about six hours of Fayetteville Public Library computer time in the search. When last heard of he was in West Germany working for some organization called the Greens. The part of the letter I liked most was the very end. He told them, “As officers of the federal government, who are bound to support the Constitution, the AEC and the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy should recommend that Congress submit an amendment proposition to the states so that the people can make a value judgment of whether a civilian nuclear program is both necessary and safe, as is their right.”
Also, he says twice they should only build something like SEFOR deeply underground in case something to do with safety had been overlooked.
The something that was overlooked was me sleeping a mile down the creek. The something that was overlooked was Euland’s parents’ house up on the hill and Kelly and her brothers right down the road.
“I would think this was the lab area,” Ed was saying. “I don’t know much about nuclear reactors but I’ve seen plans. There had to be a lab and they wouldn’t want it near the core. I visited Los Alamos once when I was a graduate student.”
“Let me go in first,” Euland said. “I know about equipment. I’ll be able to tell if there’s anything that might be contaminated. Let me find the lights.”
“Imagine this being out here in the middle of nowhere.” Ed buttoned the top of his leather jacket and turned to look at Kelly and me where we were huddled together watching them.
“Strickler isn’t nowhere,” Kelly told him. “It’s where we live. I learned to swim in that creek. That one right over there. The one you can see from here.”
“I’m going in,” Euland said. Ed held open the broken door and Euland disappeared into the hole. “It’s a ladder,” he called back. “There’s a ladder going down.”
“I’m right behind you,” Ed called back. “You stay here, girls. Don’t come in until we find some lights.”
We’ve found out something else since that afternoon. The half ton of plutonium oxide that was in the core doesn’t take up much room. Stacked all together it wasn’t much bigger than, say, eight six-packs in a pile. For some reason I find that comforting when I start worrying about the dust that was everywhere when Kelly and I finally went down the ladder and were inside.
“Come on down,” Ed called up. “We found a light but it’s not much. Watch your step. There’s a steel ladder with fourteen rungs. Count them.”
Kelly went down first and I followed her. The light was only one bulb in a ceiling fixture. And it wasn’t a laboratory or a nuclear core. It was an abandoned office with desks and three chairs and a stack of wire baskets pushed against a wall. A set of stairs led down to the space below.
The lower level was a laboratory with beakers and stacks of equipment and sealed containers marked GENERAL ELECTRIC. There was a steel door locked and padlocked. DECONTAMINATION CHAMBER, it said. DO NOT ENTER.
In the laboratory Ed had found two lights that worked. It was much brighter than the upstairs part. We stood in a group looking around. There were glove boxes in the corner. That gave us a chill. If there’s a glove box in a laboratory it means something was inside it that no one should touch.
We stood there for a minute not saying a word. Then Euland walked over to a table and picked up a telephone and held it to his ear. “It works,” he said. “I’ve g
ot a signal.”
“Call the West Fork police,” I suggested. “It’s 555-8777. Jo Lynn works there on the weekends.”
Euland dialed the phone and our cousin Jo Lynn Nobles answered and then she put him through to Dakota Jackson, who used to go out with Kelly in high school. “Get out of that building,” Dakota said to Euland. “Get back up on the roof. I’ve been there when they tested those badges. Don’t stay in there any longer than you have to.”
“Dakota said get out of the building,” Euland said. “Go on. You girls go first. They’re coming as fast as they can. They’ve got to get the fire truck for the ladder.”
Kelly was already running up the stairs with Ed behind her, but I refused to run. I just walked back up the stairs and across the office and up the ladder.
It was snowing a soft light snow when we reached the roof. A darling misty snow that filled the air with mystery and a hundred shades of white. The soft yellow hills and evergreen trees were disappearing into white. Above us the sky was turning every color of pink and gray and violet. Then the black leafless trees. The dogs had disappeared. “Well, at least you got to see the prettiest part of the country,” I said to Ed. “This is our home. I guess we can’t help it if we think it’s gorgeous.”
“It’s beautiful country,” he answered. “This is the first time I’ve felt at home since I got off the plane a week ago. That’s a joke, isn’t it? Feeling at home on top of a decommissioned nuclear reactor. Not many people would understand that, I guess.”
“We understand,” Kelly said. “Why do you think we all still live out here? Why do you think I haven’t moved to town? I’m a librarian at the Fayetteville Public Library. I have to drive fourteen miles every morning to get to work.”
It gets dark at five o’clock in December in the Ozarks. It was pitch-black dark by the time we saw the four-wheel-drive vehicles coming down 265 in our direction. It was another twenty minutes before they got the jammed front gate open and drove in and put up the ladder from the fire truck and took us down one by one.
“I’m going to kill those goddamn loose dogs,” Euland kept saying to anyone who would listen. “I’m coming back tomorrow and hunt those bastards down.”
“We’ll trap them,” Dakota agreed. “It’s part of that pack that attacked that kid last month. I’m glad you flushed them. You aren’t the only one with those dogs on a list.”
Kelly and I rode as far as Devil’s Den in the deputy’s truck. The men rode in the police car and made out the reports. “I’m going to ask him to stay and have dinner with us,” Kelly said. “You think we can take him to that sushi place we went to last month? Or should we just stay home and cook something for him?”
“Let’s just go to El Chico’s like we always do,” I answered. “Don’t go changing your personality just because he’s a professor. Besides, Euland hates Japanese food. He’s had all he needs today.”
They took us to our cars at Devil’s Den and Kelly rode with Ed to show him how to get to Momma’s house and we all went in and saw Momma and Daddy and told the story and then Kelly and I put on some fresh makeup and the four of us went in Ed’s car to get some supper. We’d decided to just stay in West Fork and go to the White Tiger Haven and get a hamburger and a beer. We played the jukebox and talked about nuclear energy and the global warming meeting in Japan and told Ed all about Fayetteville and what there is to do there. We tried to teach him to call the hogs, but he wasn’t ready for that yet. They had beaten Louisville 87 to 65, by the way, after our embarrassing loss to them the year before.
Then Ed took Euland and me home and he and Kelly went off and spent the night at his apartment although I had begged her in the ladies’ room not to do it.
I had had an epiphany up on the roof of SEFOR. As soon as we were alone I told Euland I wanted to get married in April for my birthday.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if we should rush it, Chandler. Everything’s all right like it is, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s not. We’ve been going together since the dawn of time. It’s time to get married. We’re a laughingstock for not getting married. I’m sick of it.”
“I can’t believe you’d start this tonight. After all that happened to us today.”
“I’m starting it. So just get used to that.”
The next day I threw away my birth control pills. I knew he’d never leave me or let me go but I wanted some insurance.
Postscript: Euland and I got married on April 28, 1998, out in my mother’s backyard by the wisteria arbor, which is where McArthur Wilson and I used to play doctor together. He was at the wedding with his wife, Cynthia, and their two little girls. He runs a television station in Fayetteville. He’s gone pretty far in the world.
No, I wasn’t pregnant or pretending to be but I’m still off the pill. Nothing’s happened yet but we’re not worried. No one in the Nobles or Cathaway or Redfern or Tuttle families has ever had any trouble having babies if they wanted them. I kind of want it to happen and then again I don’t.
I wore Momma’s wedding dress with new lace all around the sleeves and hem. It’s been in a box for thirty-six years. It had not turned yellow thanks to Mrs. Agnew’s having sealed it up so well when she ran the cleaners down on Main Street.
What else? Nothing has happened about SEFOR. Not a single thing has been done and Kelly is still thinking about calling 20/20 but she hasn’t done it yet because she doesn’t want to make trouble for the university while she’s dating a professor. She thinks Ed’s going to marry her but Euland and I think the odds are about fifty-fifty. Of course, Kelly will get pregnant if she needs to. She is the most ruthless of my cousins, plus the most stubborn. She has lost eleven pounds. She doesn’t look like some starving model yet but she is definitely back in the game and holding cards.
Well, that’s all from Strickler for the moment. It’s October again. Time to start getting ready for the winter. Euland’s so busy this time of year I hardly see him. Everybody wants to get their heat pump checked before it snows. We like to keep things working around here.
“Wasn’t that the ending?”
“You call that an ending? With practically everyone still on their feet? My goodness, gracious no. Over your dead body. There’s a design at work in all art. Surely you know that. The ends must play themselves out to an aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion.”
“What’s that in this case?”
“It never varies. We aim for the point where everyone who is marked for death, dies.”
“Marked?”
“Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go, when things have got about as bad as they can reasonably get.”
“Who decides?”
“Decides? It is written. We are tragedians. You see, we follow directions. There is no choice involved. The bad end unhappily. The good end unluckily. That is what tragedy means. Next.”
TOM STOPPARD
Also by Ellen Gilchrist
The Age of Miracles
The Anabasis
The Anna Papers
The Annunciation
The Cabal and Other Stories
The Courts of Love
Drunk With Love
Falling Through Space
Flights of Angels
I Cannot Get You Close Enough
In the Land of Dreamy Dreams
Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle
Net of Jewels
Rhoda: A Life in Stories
Sarah Conley
Starcarbon
Victory Over Japan
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