The Rackham Files (32 page)

I was next on the list with an estimated forty rems because I'd been in the attic and outside, too. Shar and Ern came next with thirty-five; Kate had taken five less. And below Cammie's twenty-five came Lance with twenty or so. Maybe Lance was young enough at eleven to be one of the "very young" who, like the aged, were supposed to be more vulnerable. I tried not to begrudge him the advantage. In any case it was an arguable set of estimates—in Ern's jargon, strictly paper empiricism.

My sis didn't mention lethal doses in front of Devon Baird. Instead she dwelt on the positive side. "In class we studied the
Lucky Dragon
incident," she said, spooning a portion of tuna and green peas that was not—couldn't possibly be!—half as bad as it sounds. "The entire crew of this Japanese fishing boat was accidentally dosed in 1954; they even ate contaminated food. They took gamma doses of around a hundred and seventy-five rems, and
all of them survived it!
I think one man died months later from some medication, but the rest made it. And they took much higher doses than we're taking here."

Devon, listlessly: "What if they keep dropping bombs near us every day?"

Ern said, "I can't believe there's much more to shoot at around here."

"I hope not," Devon replied, and dubiously addressed his tuna salad.

Presently we finished our meal, and though Spot made overtures to the leftovers, I steered him firmly to his farina mix. A tally of our food told us we'd have enough for two meals a day through ten days without resorting to horsemeat. By then we might be eating farina mix ourselves. At least we wouldn't have to cook it.

Shar urged Kate to be dealer, referee, and sergeant-at-arms for a card game among the younger members, and as soon as Devon got engrossed in the game, my sis motioned me nearer to Ern, who was seated at the air pump. "Let's talk about what we'll have to do next month," she said loudly enough to be overheard, and then much more softly, "Mrs. Baird seems to have a new problem."

The woman was semiconscious now but never spoke and could barely swallow. Shar had noticed the gradual, steady appearance of clear blisters on the woman's skin. Though some blisters were forming on her torso, they predominated in a sprinkle of raised glossy patches on her lower legs, arms, neck, and face. To Devon's query, Shar had only smiled and said we'd have to wait and see. To Ern and me, she said, "I'm afraid it means severe radiation burns, probably direct skin contact with particles only a few hours from the fireball. The blisters are on all sides of her body, so there's no way we can make her comfortable unless—but I guess the waterbed is out of the question."

"In more ways than one," I admitted. "I hate to bring it up, but while stealing some water from it to flush the toilet, I realized that that water will not be drinkable."

They both gaped at me in the gloom. "But we've only got maybe twenty gallons left in the tunnel, Harve," said Ern. "And about the same in your bathroom. What's wrong with waterbed stuff?"

"The chemicals I put in to prevent algae," I said and sighed. "It's not just bleach, guys. Bleach slowly deteriorates a vinyl mattress, so I used a pint of a commercial chemical. It's poison. I'm sorry."

We fell silent for a time. The kids didn't notice because they were talking louder, making noise for noise's sake. I understood why when I heard the Baird kid's spasms from the root cellar. He was losing his dinner into our jury-rigged john. I'd spent years rooting out soured curds of the milk of human kindness from my system because of the work I'd chosen; yet the quiet courage of this slender kid forced a tightening in my throat. I knew why I hadn't befriended him more: I didn't want to mourn if we lost him. That didn't say much for
my
courage.

"That poor boy," Shar murmured, "has diarrhea too. I wish we had some plug-you-uptate."

That was our childhood phrase for diarrhea medicine. I said, "Mom used to have a natural remedy. You remember what it was?"

"Well, she started with an enema of salt and baking soda, but that was to replace lost salt and to clean out the microbes. This isn't the same thing. If anything the Bairds probably don't have
enough
intestinal flora. Anyway, mom also gave us pectin and salty bouillon."

"Why the hell didn't you say so," asked Ern. "We've got a half-dozen bouillon cubes in each bike kit."

I put in, "If it's pectin you need, I doodled around with quince preserves from all those quinces falling off my bushes. There's so much pectin in a quince, you can jell other fruit preserves just by adding diced quince."

"I'd forgotten you make a hobby of food. God knows
how
I could forget, you great lump of bubba."

"Beat your wife, Ern," I begged.

"Just washed her and can't do a thing with her," he said.

As soon as Devon returned to the card game, Ern took a flashlight and went to find the bouillon cubes. Our carefully nurtured good spirits took a dip when he returned with only one tiny foil-wrapped bouillon cube. "I know I put 'em in," he complained, tossing the single cube to Shar.

Lance saw the gleam of foil. "Dibs," he shouted. "I saw it first, mother!" My nephew's tone suggested that he could be severe on infractions of fair play.

Shar regarded him silently for a moment, knowing as we all did that Lance had retrieved flashlights from the bike kits. Mildly: "Lance, you must've eaten at least fifty already."

In extracting confessions my sis had only to exaggerate the offense to have Lance set her straight. "Fifty? Naw, there was only a few."

"How many do you have left?"

"All of 'em. Right here," he said and patted his belly. In the ensuing quiet his grin began to slide into limbo.

"Aw, he's all right, Miz McKay," Devon said in the boy's support.

The point was that Devon himself was
not
, and bouillon could have helped him. Inwardly we writhed with an irony that we must not share with Devon. "Thank you, Devon, but I'll decide that. Lance, come here a minute," said Shar.

Mumbled: "Don't wanta."

"Two meals tomorrow, Lance."

He came bearing the word "Bully."

Shar indicated that he should sit between his parents. Then, in tones of muted mildness, my sis composed music for my ears; a menacing sonata, a brilliant
bel canto
that struck my nephew dumb.

Did Lance recall his father's threat? Shar was ready, even eager now, to endorse it. Lance would touch no food or drink without asking first. He would perform every job we asked without audible or visible complaint. He would use nothing, take nothing, play with nothing unless he got permission first. It was not up to Lance to decide when an infraction might be harmless.

Of course he had an alternative, said Shar with a calm glance toward me. Lance could elect to do as he pleased. He would then be thrashed on his bare butt by parents
and
his uncle (here I saw the whites of his eyes) and would be bound and gagged if need be for as long as necessary.

"By now, dear, you may have thought of claiming you need to go to the bathroom while tied up. Of course you can. In your pants. Since you have no other clothes and you can't wash the ones you have, you may want to think twice before you do that. But it's up to you, sonny boy," Shar gradually crescendoed.

"Finally, I'm sure you don't really believe what I'm saying. You'll just
have
to try some little thing to see where the real limits are, just to test us as you always do. Believe me, dear, I can hardly wait. I want you to try some little bitty thing I can interpret as a little bitty test, so I can blister your big bitty bottom after your father and Harve are through warming it up for me.

"I can't tell you how many times I've considered this, Lance. I've wanted to do it, but I didn't want to stunt your development. Now it's time we all stunted the direction it has taken. What you consider a harmless prank might kill someone. Because you didn't know and didn't care. Those bouillon cubes, for example, were very very important. It's not important that you know why. What
is
important is that you're going to forget and pop off, sneak a bit of food or tinker with something without asking. And when you do, dear, I am going to make up for ten years of coddling your backside. Ern? Harve? Do you have anything to add?"

We thought she had it covered rather well and said so. A long silence followed. Lance opened his mouth a few times but always closed it again. For the first time in my memory, he was not physically leaning in his mother's direction. At last Shar said, "Would you like to go now?"

"Yes'm." It was almost inaudible.

"I recommend it." A chastened Lance scuttled back to the card game. I wondered if Shar had exaggerated her willingness to whale her darling. No doubt Lance wondered, too, but not enough to check it out right then.

Ern asked, "You cold, Shar?"

"My shakes have nothing to do with the temperature," she said. "The more I said to Lance, the more I realized how true it was. I feel ashamed of myself but I want to go over there right now and—and—"

"And whack on him some," I finished for her. "You're okay, sis, but you're right about letting us tan his hide first. If you took first licks you might hurt him."

"We have casualties already." She laughed a bit shakily. "I wish we could go upstairs and get those quince preserves."

"They're in little jars in the root cellar," I said and went in search of the stuff, which didn't need special sealing when I used only honey as sweetener. For some reason honey seemed to dissuade mold; so much so that the fermenting of mead, a honey wine, was an expensive process. I couldn't even get the damned stuff to ferment with added yeast, and I knew a lot of old-timer tricks.

Returning with two jars of preserves under wax, I thought of using a candle as a food warmer. If we lit a candle in the root cellar, it would be downstream of us. Its heated air and carbon dioxide would tend to drift out through the valve Shar had made. Ern thought it worth a try, using an empty bean can with vents punched around its top and bottom as a chimney. For fondue warmers I had a dozen squat votive candles, which quickly became broad puddles of fluid wax unless you had a close-fitting container to keep the puddle from spreading. Ern made one from several thicknesses of foil.

Mrs. Baird's bedpan needed emptying, and Lance performed the chore with the expression of one who has an unexpected mouthful of green persimmon. Ern went to the root cellar with him and tried our little food warmer, which Shar wanted to use for hot water to make a quince-preserve gruel. If the Baird woman could swallow such warm sweet stuff she might—well, it might help. I'm sure my sis was thinking about the tremendous strain I had added to our survival efforts by bringing in a woman who was perhaps better dead than suffering. And who almost certainly would die regardless of anything medical science could have done.

The evening brought its full share of good and bad news. It was good that by nine o'clock the tunnel reading was down to one rem, since that meant the sizzling ferocity of radiation outside had dropped to "merely" two hundred rems an hour—half its level only a few hours previous. It was also nice that Shar remembered my hot-water heater in its insulated niche near the furnace, so much out of sight that I'd forgotten its fifty-gallon supply of clean water just waiting to be drained from its bottom faucet. Seventy gallons of drinking water might last us two weeks, and we could use the waterbed stuff for washing.

If we absolutely had to, we could boil the mattress water and hope the chemical would lose its potency. Ern guessed that a lot of people would be drinking from waterbeds, and with a dilution of one pint of chemical to two hundred gallons of water, the user only swallowed a few drops of mild poison in each gallon of water. Better than dying of thirst; far worse than drinking from your hot-water heater.

I couldn't decide whether it was good or bad news that, if the eleven o'clock news from Santa Rosa could be believed, our government had removed restrictions against the purchase of weapons by expatriate Cubans in Florida. There was no longer any doubt that Cuba had been a launch site for cruise missiles against Miami, Tampa, Eglin, and other targets. Want an Uzi with full auto fire? Bazooka? A few incendiary bombs? See your friendly dealer in the nearest bayou or yacht club, so long as you can say "
Fidel come mierda sin sal
" three times quickly. Castro's radar scopes were already measled with blips that consisted of every known vintage aircraft and surface craft, mostly crewed by disgruntled Cubans who had scores to settle and machismo to spare.

Later we might regret this response. For the moment Soviet Cuba had too much coastline to worry about to mount any further actions against the US. If many of those itchy-fingered expatriates went ashore and stayed there, Fidel's ass was grass. Put it down as good and bad news. Maybe "crazy news" was a better term.

On the bad-news side, the radio announced that grocery sales were suspended nationwide for the next few days, with certain exceptions. Perishable produce and milk could be sold in limited quantities while the government assessed stocks of food, and if you didn't have enough food to last two or three days, you were going to get pretty hungry. This rationing plan was a long-standing preparation by the feds, a decision that few of us had ever heard about. I gathered from the broadcast that the government had funded many studies on nuclear survival but hadn't published them widely, perhaps because so few of us cared to request them through our congressional reps or the Department of Commerce.

The radio claimed that an Oak Ridge study,
Expedient Shelter Construction,
was good news since surviving newspapers were printing millions of copies to be distributed across the land by every available means, including air drops of stapled copies. Was it such good news? I wished I thought so. The document hadn't reached the public in time. What did we care if five hundred copies gathered dust in emergency-technology libraries for a decade?

One news item was almost certainly
not
a government news release because it suggested that disaster-related documents could be bought in hard copy or microfiche from an address they repeated several times: