The Nuclear Age (39 page)

“Somewhere,” I said, as I stashed the sign as a souvenir, “the mountain is still there, it’s tucked away in silos across the Great Midwest. It isn’t gone, you just can’t see it.”

Bobbi asked if this scared me.

It didn’t, not then. But back at the motel, two or three years later, it did.

A Sunday afternoon. I was sleeping. It was August, and I was out by the pool, a calm summer Sunday, the gentlest Sunday of all time, a day of rest, and even in my sleep I could hear the lap of water and tourists splashing—business was booming, Montana was the Energy State—and there was the feel of Sundays forever, a lawn mower buzzing, a child laughing, a steady hum beneath all things. And the sun. And a breeze that wasn’t really a breeze and made no earthly sound as it swept the Sunday like a Hoover. This was sleep. This was the day of perfect union, when Christians bar-becued. A day for picnics and lazing. I basked like a lizard. I wasn’t dreaming, just drifting. The sun—that full
sun
—the sun was part of it. It was a Sunday like no other Sunday. It was a day without spite or malice, not an evil thought abroad, not a word of blasphemy, not a sickly deed; a day when, by some incredible chance, one shot in ten billion, the human race quieted as if in church. Disembodied, dusty, I felt like fragrance, I could’ve made chlorophyll.

Afterward, I told Bobbi how it happened: “Just this drone at first. Maybe a mosquito, like that. Except the sound was way up.
Way
up. Nobody else noticed. Everybody in the pool kept splashing, having a great time, they didn’t
notice
, and the drone kept getting louder and louder, like this screechy whine, like—like I
don’t know what—like from outer space. A whistle sound, sort of, but it wasn’t a whistle, it was something else. Like this, like
wheeet
. You know? Just
wheeet-wheeet
. So I sat up. I saw these weird ripples in the pool. Then this vortex, swish, a whirlpooly thing, like when water goes down the toilet, and then—maybe it was the heat or something—but then I looked up and there was this huge zipper across the sky, a big silver zipper. And it was unzipping itself. That’s what I saw. That’s how it happens. A zipper opens up.”

Bobbi was gentle. She kept close to me that night, and for many nights afterward. If I wanted, she said, we could make some changes. Would I like to travel? Go back to school, maybe? Pursue a career? I thought about it, then shook my head. All I wanted was for her to stay with me. Always.
Fidelis ad extremum
. I looked straight at her. “Fidelity,” I said. “It’s absolute. I won’t let you leave me.”

Her smile was opaque. Not much later she composed a poem called
Leaves
. Lush imagery, but I didn’t quite understand it.

A year later we sold the motel for a handsome profit. We toured Europe, and the Orient, then returned to build a house in the Sweetheart Mountains. It was a large, expensive house, with decks and fine woods, not a neighbor for miles. To be safe, though, I bought up the surrounding land and spent a summer fencing it
in. I installed a burglar alarm and dead-bolt locks on all doors. It was a lovely sort of life, Bobbi said, horses and hiking, our daughter, but even so I could sometimes feel an ominous density in the world. The stars seemed too tightly packed. The mornings were too short; the nights collided. Beirut was a madhouse. The graveyards were full. In Amarillo, they were manufacturing MIRVs, and in the Urals there were Soviet answerings in kind, a multiplication.

And me—I stewed. At night I would often wake up and squeeze Bobbi for all she was worth, which was everything. The flashes were killing me.

Density, I thought. Implosion, not explosion, would surely end the world.

It wasn’t mental illness. By and large I was happy. The world spun on one axis, we spun on our own. Bobbi worked on a translation of
Erlkönig
, I putzed around the house, Melinda grew smart and beautiful.

We were homebodies.

On November 8, 1988, Chuck Adamson was elected mayor of Helena. When the polls closed, I remember, there was a gathering at his house, which by midnight became a victory party, and we were all there, his wife and kids and cocker spaniel, and Bobbi, and my mother, and many people I didn’t know. I remember dancing with my mother—hard stuff, no waltzes—her hair bluish now, the way she snapped her fingers and rocked without modesty. I remember delivering an oration. It had to do with the governorship, how Chuck was a shoo-in if he kept his nose clean and his eyes on the shining dome. It was stirring rhetoric. We were all very drunk and very happy. Later, I found Adamson off by himself, sitting in a stairwell with a drink and a glum expression in his eyes. The dog was curled up in his lap. “Mr. Mayor,” I said, “what’s the sadness for?” and Adamson fixed a stare on me, a long one. He wasn’t acting when he said, “The usual.” I knew what he meant. Nothing more was said. I sat beside him, and we listened to the party, and after a while we went back in.

My mother died on January 10, 1993.

And that summer Bobbi disappeared. She was gone two weeks; her diaphragm went with her.

That was the worst time. I loved her, she loved me. I was almost sure of it. So why? I’d go to the medicine cabinet and open it and just stand there. It was like watching a hole. The diaphragm, I came to realize, was one of those objects whose absence reveals so much more than its presence.

In mid-June, Bobbi returned as abruptly as she left.

She put her bag down and kissed Melinda. She gave me a look that meant: Don’t ask.

But I did. I wanted specifics. Where exactly, and who, and what was said and done. I wanted to know these things, but I didn’t want to know, but I did, I wanted to know and not know, and what I most wanted to know and not know was why. Bobbi was forthcoming in her own way. She did love me, she said. But then
why?
Why couldn’t it be absolute and perfect and final and lasting? Her smile was uncontrite. When I asked about the diaphragm, she said it was only a precaution—I believed in precaution, didn’t I?—and when I asked where, she said it didn’t matter—she was here, with me, now—and when I asked who, the navigator or Scholheimer or the adjutant or Johnson or someone new, Bobbi shrugged and went off to wash her hair.

I followed her into the bathroom. I kept asking why. It was more than asking, because I opened the medicine cabinet and showed her the hole and yelled, “
Why?
”

Bobbi worked up a lather with her fingertips. The shampoo, I remember, was lime-smelling. She looked at me in the mirror. She was back, she said. Couldn’t we let it go at that? I remember sitting on the edge of the tub, smelling limes and picturing the diaphragm. It was round and rubbery and discolored to a white-brown. Two weeks, I was thinking. Why? I pictured the tube of spermicide. Bobbi in bed: blond and long-legged, those narrow hips, how she made love with her eyes open, not moving much until near the end, when she would reach behind her head with both hands and grasp the vertical grillwork on our brass bed and make a sound like a bassoon. But the diaphragm was there between
us. It was there even when it wasn’t, or especially when it wasn’t, and it was there now when I asked, “
Why?
”

She dried her hair with a red towel.

She closed the bathroom door and sat beside me on the tub. She did not smile. Because, she said quietly, she was a breathing human being. Because she was not a dream. Real, she said, and it was time to accept it.

Then she quoted Yeats.

Brutal, she said.

For several months afterward, through the summer and fall, I expected to find a last poem nailed to my heart. I couldn’t sleep. In bed, I watched her eyelids. I plotted tactics. Ropes and locks and dynamite. I felt sane and brutal.
Dig
, a voice whispered, but that came later.

There were stresses and uncertainties, an in-between time, and then one day near Christmas Sarah and Ned Rafferty drove up in a jeep. They needed a hideout.

“Just for a month or so,” Sarah said, kissing me, then Bobbi. “Till things quiet down.”

She was wearing mink. Piled high in the back of the jeep were Christmas presents, boxes of Swiss chocolate, a frozen turkey, and an armed nuclear warhead.

“So far,” Sarah said, “the Air Force doesn’t even know it’s gone. Ignorance breeds calm.”

Rafferty hugged me.

That evening Bobbi cooked the turkey and I put a record on and Sarah chatted about the terrorist life. She was not a terrorist, of course, or not exactly, but she enjoyed the wordplay. “You wouldn’t believe how tough it is,” she said. “Not all glamour and fun. I mean, shit, nobody gets terrified anymore.” She looked at Melinda. “Excuse the shit.”

After midnight, when Bobbi and Melinda and Ned had gone to bed, Sarah curled beside me on the couch.

“Home, sweet home,” she said softly. “Your daughter, an absolute honeybun. How old? Nine? Ten?”

“Ten.”

Sarah sighed. “Ten biggies. The magic number.” She put her head in my lap. “Naïve Sarah. All that time I kept thinking, Hang in there, baby—he’ll be back. Wanted to be wanted. Not a peep.” She tapped my wedding ring. “Anyway, it’s still politics as usual. Key West, the old Committee. Not quite the same, I’m afraid—mostly just dreams. Super Bowl, remember? Never made it. Cowgirls won’t have me. Look at this skin, William, like cowhide, that’s what the tropics do. I’ll be tan till I die.”

“It’s perfect skin,” I said.

“Old.”

“And perfect.”

She laughed and kissed my nose.

“So here’s the program,” she said brightly. “We kill Bobbi-cakes. Sell your daughter. Blow this house up then hightail it for Rio. Two days, we’re home free.”

“Not funny,” I said.

“Add your own wrinkles.”

“There’s Ned, too. You’re lucky.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “that I am. Magnificent guy. Loves me dearly, you know. Not a string, just loves me and loves me.”

“Well, he should.”

“He does. Love, love, love.”

I waited a moment.

“So look,” I said, “what about that warhead?”

Sarah coughed and rubbed her eyes. She’d lost some weight—too much, I thought—and without the mink she seemed skinny and poor-looking. Unhealthy, too. The blister at her lip was hard to ignore.

“The warhead,” she said, and shrugged. “Actually, I guess, we could’ve built our own—Ollie had the blueprints. Who doesn’t? But that wouldn’t make the same waves. Had to swipe it. These days, it takes real drama.”

She stared at the ceiling.

“God, William, I do miss you. But anyhow. The bomb. Ebenezer—it was his brainstorm. Proliferation, you know. Dramatize the problem. Show what could happen. One last shot, so we got
organized and pulled it off like you wouldn’t believe. Like with the guns, that easy.”

“And now?”

“Yes, now’s the problem.” Sarah pulled off my wedding ring and popped it in her mouth and swallowed. “They wanted to
use
the damned thing.”

“Use it? You mean—”

“Blackmail. A demonstration project or some such shit. Set it off in the desert, wake up the rattlesnakes. I don’t know. Headlines. Ollie was crazy about the idea—Tina, too—she wouldn’t stop quoting Chekhov. Some terrorists.
Threats
, that’s what scares people. A difference of opinion, you could say. So Ned and I, we had to reswipe the warhead. Packed it up one night and took off. And now we’re badly wanted.”

“I see.”

“By our own comrades. That old gang of ours. They want the bomb back.”

We were quiet for a time. It occurred to me that life has a way of tidying up after itself. I remembered my Ping-Pong days, but then I remembered the grief.

“Sarah,” I said, “I want that ring back.”

“In due time,” she said.

Later we put on our coats and went outside.

It was snowing hard. Sarah lay down and made angels on the lawn, then she led me to the jeep and pulled back a tarp and showed me the warhead.

“There’s your mountain,” she said.

She brushed snow from the nose cone. It was the size of a large cantaloupe, smoothly polished.

“Seventy-two pounds,” she said, “but think what it would do to Las Vegas. New model—Mark 24 or something, I forget.” She slipped her arm through mine. Her voice seemed faraway. “Graceful lines, don’t you think? Like me. Bombshell. If you want, we can run away together, you and me and Mark. Tuck us in at night, tell us bedtime stories. Great sex, I bet.”

“Enough,” I said.

“Touch it, William.”

“Not necessary. No.”

“Your big chance. Cop a quickie.
Feel
it.”

“No.”

“
Touch
.”

She took me by the hand and pressed it down. The metal was cold. No surprise, I thought. Just cold and real. I felt a slight adhesion to the fingers when I pulled away. I nodded and said, “Get rid of it.”

“Of course.”

“I mean it, Sarah.”

“Yes. You always do.” She tapped the warhead. “For now, though, we need storage space. Three weeks. A month, max. Look at it as a good deed. For me.”

“Temporary?” I said.

“Oh, sure,” said Sarah. “Just temporary. Like everything.”

We lugged the bomb into the tool shed, covered it with rugs, and locked the door.

Outside, Sarah hugged me hard.

“I love you,” she whispered, “and that’s final.”

We celebrated the holidays like a family. Rafferty and I chopped down a tree, Bobbi and Sarah made pudding and pies, there was mistletoe everywhere. On Christmas Eve we set up an electric train for Melinda. We opened gifts and sang carols and drank rum toddies. On Christmas morning, before breakfast, Sarah returned my wedding ring.

The days afterward were lazy. I remember snowshoeing and quiet reminiscence. Beneath the surface, however, there was renewed velocity: that Doppler feeling.