An Atomic Romance (19 page)

A tick was crawling on him, and he cast it away from him. Julia loved telling him about the rickettsia viruses, those spread by ticks. With flutters of her eyelashes against his skin, she had pretended once that she was setting ticks loose on him.

His dreams that night were surreal scenes, stretched images of birds and microwave ovens, and writhing coils of colorful toothpaste. He dreamed that Julia was playing the piano with Artie Shaw. The clarinet dissolved into a flock of starlings. He slept sporadically, with his usual screeches and groans. He listened carefully to the insect music that performed in shifts, the nighttime munchings of busy nocturnal creatures, the whirring flights of owls. But the sensations seemed tentative, threatened, too noisy at times, too quiet at other times. He dreamed of lava flows and cauldrons of boiling witches’ soup on display in a show window. The memory of the dream about the dead woman grabbed him in a brief nightmare. In the waking periods, he felt suspended, watching, waiting for the next act.

36

Reed had to zigzag through church traffic as he biked through town on his way home from the wildlife refuge. His retreat had offered no respite or renewal, not even a sound sleep. Lying awake, with the insects’ wall of sound and the thrumming of the plant in the distance, he had felt angry with himself. With the heaps of corroded metals and sea-green sludge and green water, the place was spoiled and ugly. His heart had been a slag heap, his gut a rusted-out chemical storage drum. For the first time out there in his tent, he felt truly alone. Julia seemed like a will-o’-the-wisp, the sanctuary like a setup in a gangster film.

At home, Reed listened to his telephone messages while feeding Clarence in the kitchen. A chatty monologue from his daughter, who was apparently no longer concerned about workplace safety. A reminder about an ice-cream social at Sunnybank. No bad news about his mother. Nothing from Julia. She had simply disappeared, perhaps kidnapped and murdered, her body dumped into Lake Michigan. He dialed her number and got her answering machine again. He hung up without leaving a message. Then he realized that Clarence was standing on his hind legs, paws on Reed’s chest. The sleek feel of the dog’s fur and the pleasant weight of his paws felt good.

“Clarence! I didn’t mean to ignore you, buddy.”

Clarence danced in circles, barking.

Reed said, “Next time I go camping, you’re going with me. We’ll go to some pure place where you won’t burn your tootsies on poison ground. Wherever that might be.”

He thought that if Julia never came back to him, he would light out for some other territory. He would become a hermit and surround himself with dogs. He could be happy with dogs. Dogs had always offered him moral instruction.
Happy to be anywhere.
Burl’s motto could have been a dog’s. Dogs were storage drums of happiness, he thought.

After a short run around the dismal vacant lot with Clarence, he telephoned his mother. She sounded alert and cheerful. It struck him that she did not have an old-lady voice.

“Mom!”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. I’m counting on you. You’re my best girl.”

“You’re my baby,” she said.

Reed felt a shard of guilt for isolating his mother in a remote cubicle of his mind, but it was a helpful arrangement at the moment. If she were occupying the back bedroom of his house, as he had earlier imagined, he might be checking himself into a psychiatric ward by now. He hung up the telephone and started for the den. A plastic jug on the kitchen floor was in his way. He stomped on it, smashed it with an angry explosion.

Canceling out the face of Venus with a quick click on his keyboard, he checked his e-mail—only one nonjunk message. One person other than his daughter had bothered to think of him all weekend. Click. Hot Mama!

She had written, “Showdown. I challenge you to meet me for coffee Sunday morning. No strings. I’ll be at the Dairy Queen on Grand Avenue, and I’ll be in a green 1987 Chevy. 11 a.m.”

“I’ll be there,” Reed replied impulsively. He told her he would be wearing a red T-shirt and driving a blue truck. He was not more specific about the truck, and he didn’t want to go on his easily identifiable motorcycle. He showered and slapped on some musky after-shave, just in case. The red T-shirt fit smooth and tight, and he tucked the ends into his black jeans, consulting himself in the bathroom mirror. Hell, he was Atomic Man.

The Dairy Queen was next to a carpet showroom. When he arrived, about five minutes late, he intended to circle the place and try to get a look at the woman calling herself Hot Mama. He spotted the old green Chevy. As he paused to turn into a parking spot, he saw the green door open and a giant head appear—silvery, like a cabbage. Then slowly a woman materialized, standing and leaning against the door frame as she collected herself. She was an Amazon, with the biggest head of hair he’d ever seen. Her unruly hair was like an overgrown honeysuckle vine, its tendrils floating in all directions. She hauled a large purse—the size of a cat carrier—out of the passenger seat and clutched it against her. Closing the door, she stood still and gazed around. She had on jeans and a loose floral-print top. Her hair was light, not gray, and she seemed younger than he had expected.

Reed would have floor-boarded away from the Dairy Queen at the initial sight of her giant head, but he hesitated because she had gone to the trouble to come here. Her lines about Beethoven and sitting on the porch in the rain came to mind. Actually, what had intrigued him all along was the juxtaposition of Beethoven and the personally cured country hams. Now, he thought, he was seeing hams like none on earth. He couldn’t guess what all that brawn weighed. She was striding to the entrance, military fashion.

Atomic Man parked his truck. He should have a bumper sticker: I’M A WORKING MAN—ALL MY PARTS FUNCTION. He fearlessly strode to the woman’s side, catching her before she reached the door.

“Hot Mama!” he said—as gallantly as one could utter “Hot Mama,” he thought, then wondered how that must sound if he had guessed wrong and she was someone else.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” she said, with a terse little giggle.

Her handshake was as firm as a man’s. She was almost his height, but she wasn’t as large as he thought at first, and she had a rather sweet face beneath the frightening honeysuckle bush she wore on her head.

They sat at a corner booth, Reed with coffee and Hot Mama with coffee and a pineapple sundae. He had offered to pay for hers, but she would not allow him. She sifted two sugars into her coffee and stirred noisily. She could probably lift a fifty-five-gallon drum of chemicals, he thought. She tested her coffee. Then she startled him.

“I thought I recognized you!” she said, with one muscular arm flying up as though she were about to hail a taxi. “But I never knew your name.”

“No names. Didn’t we agree?”

“Right. But didn’t you used to run around with Sammy Blew?”

“Yeah. I still see him now and then. How do you know Sammy?”

“I used to date him, ages ago. Before he got so pitiful.”

“Oh, Sammy’s not pitiful! What makes you say that? But I haven’t talked to him in a while. He might be worse than pitiful by now. He might be downright sorrowful.” Reed squirmed in the booth. He didn’t want to reveal that he knew Sammy from the plant.

Her eyes flashed fire. She said, “Well, he was snorting coke in my dinette and I told him to leave, that it was one time too many to get messed up when he’s around me. I don’t think he even noticed what I said. He just left, left a box of cigarettes there too and his lighter, and he never came back and got them. After that I wouldn’t answer his calls. I’ve got my pride. Anybody that thinks he can use me to support his habit has got another think coming. How about you, Atomic Boy, you got any bad habits?”

“I’m sure I do, but they don’t involve snorting, or anything criminal.” Reed tried to grin. Her hairdo belonged in the
Guinness Book of
World Records,
but he wasn’t sure in what category. Flyaway fractals?

“You don’t have to tell me who you are,” she said. “But I do remember you. It was years ago. You had a couple of young kids. I used to see you at Little League. My nephew played shortstop.”

“Probably.” He didn’t remember her.

“I’ve got certain rules I live by,” she said, as she dipped into her sundae. “And one of them is that I treat people the way I want to be treated. That’s the golden. And another one is that I don’t turn anything I can’t deal with into a joke—because I’ll deal with it or else. No jokes. Also, some things I don’t tolerate. One thing I can’t stand is for somebody to say they’ll do something and then not do it. Last year I hired a guy to fix my gutters, and he came out and installed scaffolding around the whole place. Then he disappeared. No show. So I finally got my nephew to come over, and he climbed up on the scaffolding, fixed the gutters, and then tore down the scaffolding and sold it for lumber at the flea market.”

“Same nephew from Little League?”

She nodded and spooned the last of her ice cream.

“Did you ever hear from the guy you hired?” he added.

“No.”

“Maybe he died. Or got called up by the National Guard.”

“Just the same, I’m not having scaffolding around my house. It looked like a damned roller coaster.” She ran her fingers through her tangle of hair. “I’m glad we decided to get together,” she said. “A little Internet intrigue! I might not have gotten any replies if I’d called myself Betty—fond of classical music, self-sufficient, loves to watch the rain.”

“I like big bands,” Reed said. “And rain. Tell me about Beethoven.”

“Deaf as a stump, but he made up melodies to die for. It was all in his head.”

“He must have had a big head to hold all that,” Reed said idly, then spilled his coffee. Her wild hairdo made him cringe. He saw rampant mutant space-worms writhing.

“You know what I want to do sometime?” she said, her eyes in dreamy half-moon phase.

“What?”

“Go to one of those symphonies in a big city. I like to watch those conductors on television, the way they swing their arms. I always imagine that’s the way generals run a war.”

She finished her sundae, which was so small Reed figured she would want another one, but she didn’t. She said, “Your turn. What big wish do you have?”

Reed was thinking about the slag heaps and the green ponds. The green-clad warrior and the lost dog.

“Hello! Earth to Atomic Man. Come in, please.”

“Oh. Where was I?”

“Your big wish.”

He started inventing something, just winging it, wondering where he was going with it. He said, “I like to ride my motorcycle. So I ride around a lot, but I want something different. I want to take a longer trip.” He had no idea where the next sentence would take him. “My dream is to take the same trip Jack Kerouac took, only I’ll do it with my dog, and I’ll write my own book about it, with snapshots I take, of my dog in different places, like at the Alamo. Maybe I’ll write it from my dog’s point of view—that’s it; I won’t be in it. It’ll just be
Dog on the Road.
” Not a bad notion, Reed thought, if Clarence would agree to it.

“Is this Jack a friend of yours?”

“No. He died years ago. He wrote a book about his trip,
On the
Road.
”

“I like to write down my thoughts,” she said. “I do a little journaling. The trick is to do it every day, regardless. I find I always have some little something to write.”

Reed was heartsick. If he made her feel good, then she’d just get disappointed. He didn’t want to be rude. So he babbled on, inventing more dreams. He described his dog as a mongrel with spots and red eyes, resembling a wolf. His reckless chatter made him feel unhappy. Her manner was flat, abrupt, almost abrasive, and her mass of hair overpowered him.

She said, “I’ve been married, and here’s how it worked out. I had to be in a hospital once for about six weeks, and when I got back home my husband had gotten rid of all my knickknacks. He didn’t throw them away. He just put them out of sight. He found them annoying, I guess, because he had to do the cleaning during that time, and they were too much trouble to dust. But he had gotten rid of all my embroidered pillows, all the little boxes and frills on my dresser. He hid my silver comb and brush that belonged to my grandmother. In the kitchen all the ceramic chickens and owls were shut up in a drawer. He had trashed the bedroom. It was like some bachelor pad, dirty sheets and clothes everywhere, and not a trace of me.”

Hot Mama seemed ready to cry, but she pulled herself together, and said, “I was well rid of him. He didn’t have a poet’s soul to begin with.”

When they left the Dairy Queen, Reed felt the impulse to help her into her car but was afraid she wouldn’t like that. Yet she seemed to linger, as if she expected an embrace. She flung her door open.

“I enjoyed the chitchat,” she said, settling into her seat. “You never know who you might meet out here in the world.”

“Glad to know you,” Reed said. “Take it easy.”

He tunneled home through a mental fog.
Glad to know you.
He remembered his father saying “Glad to know you” to a man who came to their house. Reed didn’t remember who the man was. It didn’t matter.
Glad to know you,
his father said. It was a phrase that was so genial, so old-fashioned. And not necessarily sincere.

37

At home he ate a head of lettuce over the sink, pinching out the brown parts, then opened some cheese and a box of crackers. Without a woman around, he had turned into a slob, like Hot Mama’s erstwhile husband. If Julia were here, they could have something elegant and delicious at the Cavalcade, or Mr. Como’s—some mesquite-grilled salmon and some complicated salad that had a choice of fifteen dressings and its own fork.
Fresh ground pepper?
from a pop-up guy with a phallic pepper mill. That would be nice, he thought—Julia twinkling across from him, self-assured and tender as asparagus tips.

In his mind, Hot Mama grinned at him, her teeth on fire, her Einstein hair like some radiation experiment gone awry. She was heavy like the gel form of plutonium. He tried to pound the image out of his head.

Later in the afternoon, after washing his car and puttering mindlessly around the house, Reed dropped by Burl’s with a half-formed notion of going to Chicago to find Julia. When he thumped on Burl’s screen door, Burl yelled “Entrez!”

Reed battled a caterpillar-green sheet hanging on a line across the front room. A crude mural was painted on it. Reed ducked under it into the kitchen, where Burl was microwaving a burrito.

“What’s that? It looks like David and Goliath, with Goliath taking a crap.”

“No! It’s the Apostle Paul meeting Jesus. Jesus is up on high, so he looks bigger. His halo was on crooked, and I tried to fix it and made a mess. It was for the pageant at Sally’s church. I volunteered to do it, but she took a look at it and said, ‘Burl, you are
out of
your mind.’ She wasn’t even half polite about it.” He laughed. “Hey, I like it.”

The microwave beeped. Burl put another burrito in the microwave for Reed. Burl said, “I thought I’d get a truckload of statues or something and set up at a flea market. The mural would make a good display—and an awning.”

“Well, it would, I guess, Burl. And when you get done, Goliath can use it to wipe with. He reminds me of this humongous woman I just met.” He told Burl briefly about his Dairy Queen date with Hot Mama. “She had this head of hair that looked like it could have bird nests in it—or anything. You couldn’t tell.”

“Big hair to the max?”

Reed nodded. “And she was huge. Man, every woman that comes my way is either too busy for me or too old, or too young, or uptight like that social worker at the hospital—or too weird.”

“Well, don’t feel bad that you can’t screw them all.”

Burl twisted his fingers as if he were knitting a bonnet for a baby mouse. “Didn’t you tell me there are ten or twelve dimensions in string theory? Maybe she was really little-bitty and she just popped out of another dimension.”

“I don’t know her dimensions, but man, she was a load of woman,” Reed said. “She said she used to go with Sammy Blew.”

“Sammy always liked big strong women—weight lifters.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Sammy’s got a streak of masochism.”

“This woman was
scary
! I thought I’d encountered a mutation from a radiation experiment—you know, one of those movies?”

“Aren’t you living in that movie?” Burl asked, flipping the cap from a bottle of beer. “
The Uranium Follies,
or some such.”

“That’s not the half of it.” Reed took the beer from Burl. “I’ve got atomic mutation on the brain.”

While they ate the burritos, Reed told Burl briefly about the plutonium experiments, describing one of the cases, a four-year-old boy with a bone cancer.

“A child came all the way from Australia for a special treatment, and they injected him with plutonium-239. The boy was in pain when he left home and he was screaming when he left to go back. He didn’t live long.” Reed took a slug of beer. “They were trying plutonium on all kinds of ailments. They’d give them a hundred times as much as they thought might be safe just so they could find the tolerance dose. They’d try it on people with heart attacks, ulcers, anything handy.”

Apparently Burl was speechless.

“Hello. Earth to Burl.”

“Man, oh, man. Awful stuff.”

“Maybe you can eat it, but you sure can’t breathe it.”

“How do they think up stuff like that?”

They finished the burritos and went to the living room.

“You know, Reed, there’s no telling what the government’s still up to.”

“Right.” Reed nodded.

Burl said, “If the government did it back then, why wouldn’t they do such a thing now? It might not be plutonium. It might be something else.”

He flapped his sheet mural in Reed’s face. “This calls for church,” he said.

The church pageant had slipped Reed’s mind. Burl had wanted him to go along. “When is this bacchanalia, anyway?”

“Tonight. I reckon you could go with me.”

“Hmm.”

“I promised Sally I’d clean up and go.”

“Why don’t you get Rita to go with you?”

“Oh, she’s gone to a family reunion, one of those genealogy weekends. I told her my family tree had dry rot.”

Reed helped himself to another beer from Burl’s refrigerator and stood at the window watching a group of children walking along in a crowded, tight bunch. They seemed to be little grade-schoolers, and they struggled along under backpacks, even though it was Sunday. When his kids were little, they traveled light; he recalled them jumping around, unencumbered. But now it seemed as though children were beasts of burden, hauling their essential material possessions, as if they had to be prepared for a quick escape from the nuclear cloud.
The hobgoblin of little minds,
he thought, visualizing the backpack as a hobgoblin that had hitched a ride.

Still watching out the window, Reed saw a little girl stumble and fall. Another girl tried to help her up, but two small boys skirted them, laughing. The child who had fallen kicked at the boys, like a bug thrown onto its back, her tiny foot drumming the air.

Reed turned to face Burl’s mural. He couldn’t see Jesus and the Apostle Paul in it. He scrutinized the figures, realizing he should give Burl some credit for his artistic effort. “I didn’t know you could paint,” he said.

“Neither did I.” Burl surveyed his work. “But why not? We can do a lot more than we think we can. Maybe I’ll start a website and sell sheet paintings.” He laughed.

Burl’s schemes were sometimes so extravagant that he was paralyzed by their very grandeur, Reed thought. But the enthusiasm of the plutonium experimenters obscured their vision, and they sprinted ahead, their perversity an energy source, like radium. Not Einstein. He balked at the atomic bomb; he resisted quantum mechanics.

“Where does Sally’s church stand on Einstein’s theory of relativity?” Reed asked.

Burl laughed, spurting out some droplets of beer. He had been washing dishes but then forgot and was wandering around with a wet dish mop.

“Einstein believed in God, didn’t he?” Burl said.

“Well, he looked like God anyway, with that hair.”

“Like God had been traipsing through the universe like a hobo for about a hundred million years. Like he’d lost something out there in one of those galaxies and couldn’t find it.”

They laughed.

“Maybe that’s where Jesus is,” Reed said. “Maybe he took a wrong turn. He could be in imaginary time. One of those books I read said imaginary time is at a right angle to regular time—if you can believe that.”

“That’s no way to talk about Christ the Savior!” Burl said.

“Who bailed you out of jail, me or Jesus?”

Burl fell onto the sofa laughing. This kind of banter with Burl had long been a chief source of entertainment for both. It felt good to go at it again.

“You’re full of shit, Burl.”

“You’re full of shit, Reed.” Burl shook the dish mop at Reed. “If Jesus came back here now, he’d be in over his head. Just the cleaning alone.”

“He’d need more than a dish mop,” said Reed, draining his beer.

“Come with me to the pageant,” Burl said. “It’ll be fun. It’ll cheer you up. You’ll see. There’ll be lots of singing—and eats.”

“Why the hell not,” Reed said. “If there’s food, how can I go wrong?”

Before leaving, they finished the six-pack and painted for a while on Burl’s mural. Now Goliath had a crown of flowers and David was standing in a soybean field. Burl still insisted they were Jesus and the Apostle Paul. Reed thought the painting resembled the work of two schizophrenic monkeys at a research lab engaging in self-expression on Art Day.

Burl showered and dressed in Sunday rigging—khaki pants and a clean short-sleeved plaid shirt. Reed was still in his red T-shirt and black jeans, which he considered might not be appropriate for church, but Burl assured him it was. “Sally says that some Sundays everybody wears overalls, or another Sunday they’ll come in old-fashioned costumes. Sometimes it’s Hawaiian-shirt Sunday.”

The parking lot at the church was enormous, the size of the lots at the big-box stores. Burl, in a bubbly mood, introduced Reed to half a dozen people in the throng as they made their way into the church, a big box with a spire. Burl greeted people with backslaps as if he had known them for years.

“See, these are just good folks,” said Burl, sending ebullient greetings all around. “They’ve got the spirit.”

Reed felt buoyed by the beer, but unscrewed. “Holy shit,” he said to Burl.

“There’s my ever-loving brother!” cried a woman in a red blouse, white pants, and blue shoes. It was Sally, Burl’s sister, all smiles and suntan. She had a gang of small children in tow, and they all jumped on Burl, tugging and squealing. He hugged them all and teased them. Sally acknowledged Reed and whispered “Beer on your breath” in Burl’s ear—loudly enough for Reed to hear, but the children didn’t notice.

Sally and her brood joined a group of children in front, and Burl and Reed found plush seats in the middle of the basketball-arena-sized auditorium, where American flags adorned the walls.

On the stage a painted scrim represented a blue sky with a scattering of cumulus clouds above a broad desert. At one end the desert became a seashore, with stark tropical trees scattered about and white seabirds hanging in the air above the greenish water.

“Sally didn’t want my sheet messing up the scenery,” Burl said. “It’s a pageant-in-a-box. They rent it and put it together like a piece of furniture you get from a warehouse store. It’s got the costumes, the stage sets, the play, the whole works.”

“Batteries included?”

“Right!”

A minister kicked off the evening with an exuberant prayer. Surveying the bowed congregation, Reed thought of the flock of praying mantises caught up in the filter rooms. He had liked those big bugs.

The crowd hushed under the abruptly dimmed lights, and the drama began. The pageant
—The First Missionary—
was about the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus. Damascus was represented by a large tropical plant resting on a beige blanket—a palm tree in the desert. A teenager in a burnoose was walking along a winding, gray cardboard road. He was gasping with fatigue and thirst, and when he spotted the palm tree, he staggered across the stage, then knelt and drank from a bucket of water next to the tree.

Suddenly a spotlight beamed down from the ceiling, and a voice from above said, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?”

“Who art thou, Lord?” Saul jumped in fear, shielding his eyes from the bright light.

“I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.”

Reed elbowed Burl.

“Lord, what wilt thou have me do?” said the man Saul.

The voice said, “Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do.”

From the shadows a bearded man in a white robe, trimmed with gold glitter, appeared, gesturing kindly to the thirsty man. It was Jesus. The audience gasped. The lights played on his gold glitter.

As the play progressed, Reed began to fidget, and the seat grew less comfortable. The beer buzz wore off. He was hungry and agitated. He was stranded, perhaps like a traveler on the road to Damascus. He had placed his faith in science, and he felt it had eluded him. He had pledged his allegiance to big institutions, and they had fucked him over. His best friend was living on the edge. He missed Julia.

Saul, who had become the Apostle Paul, was being persecuted. Escaping his pursuers, he was lowered out of a high window in a large basket. A live donkey was led onto the stage to whisk Saul out of Damascus.

“I know that donkey,” Burl whispered. “Pedro. Belongs to a guy I know.”

At one point Reed misheard “the Apostle Paul” as “Parsifal,” and his imagination inserted the Celtic warrior he had met in the refuge, or perhaps the Green Knight, waylaying Parsifal from behind a tree. Reed imagined the factory worker who packed the pageant into the box accidentally mixing up the parts from two or three different pageants. Reed considered how the pageant committee might accommodate the Green Knight in the drama. In church, Reed’s mind had always wandered.

In his mind were vials of liquid stuff that could blast into fire if improperly handled. He saw heavy black rubber gloves jamming plungers into flesh. He could see Jesus on the cross, the thorns dripping poison into his eyes, the nails driven in like fuel rods. What was the fatal dose? How much could hide in your body before it made itself known?

Reed wondered if he would end up filing a medical claim. He wondered if Sammy Blew had had any bad exposures at the plant. Hot Mama had said he was pitiful. What did that mean?

It was odd to be in church. He was happier cruising the ether in his jaded Reedmobile, knowing that he didn’t know shit, than he would be nestled in a silk bed of blind certainties. Religion could explain a billion angels dancing on a pinhead but reject subatomic structure as a blasphemous fantasy. The chasm inside him, the emptiness that made him cry out in the night and dream Salvador Dalí paintings, wasn’t for lack of a faith.

The play ended with a crowd onstage, representing the multitudes the Apostle Paul had converted to Christianity. When they burst out singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” the audience rose and joined in. Next was “God Bless America.”

Reed sang along. He hadn’t sung in church in a long while, and he felt nostalgic about the times his mother used to take him to church. He couldn’t read the meaning of the rapture on Burl’s face—whether Burl badly needed to belong, or whether this church reminded him somehow of going to church in Detroit when he was a kid, or even whether he was inwardly amused.