The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (14 page)

“It’s a source of nuclear power,” Otis said, and then he explained it to her using a metaphor he’d read somewhere: a breeder reactor is a power source that never needs new fuel once successfully up and running. Imagine you have a car and begin a long drive. When you start, you have half a tank of gas. When you return home, instead of being nearly empty, your gas tank is full. A breeder reactor is like this magic car. A breeder reactor not only generates electricity but also produces new fuel. There was no way he could possibly assemble the thirty pounds of uranium needed to make a true breeder reactor, he explained to Rusty, but he figured he could make a smaller one, a model, the size of a shoebox, that would perform like the real one.

“But why?” Rusty asked him, and she seemed genuinely interested, but he’d been fooled before. “Why do
you
want to make one?”

Otis told her how his granddad, after he’d moved in with them, gave him a book called
Atoms to Electricity
that was about nuclear power. In the book was a detailed diagram of a breeder reactor. Once he saw that drawing, almost a blueprint, he was hooked. Otis had never doubted that he had the persistence and focus and intelligence to make a reactor. Asperger’s was good for something. And the fact that nobody had successfully made a
safe
one yet spurred him on. “Teams
of scientists had been experimenting with breeder reactors under top-secret circumstances in well-equipped labs,” he told Rusty, “but the government—well, Jimmy Carter—outlawed them in 1977 because one of the by-products is plutonium, which is used in nuclear bombs. So no one is officially making them anymore. But I’m going to show everyone that I can make one at home, using everyday stuff I put together on my own. I’ve already made the neutron gun. Radium is the most effective fuel for the gun. The best source of radium is old clocks, clocks made in the twenties and thirties. Last week I found three in an antique mall out on I-10. I got five total, but that’s not nearly enough.”

Rusty was playing with something hanging from a cord around her neck, a multicolored drawstring bag like the medicine bags worn by Native Americans. “In other words,” she said, “you’re going to blow us all to kingdom come.”

“No,” Otis began, but Jabba interrupted him, calling from the next room in her piercing voice.

“Rustifer! What you doing in there?”

“Going wee wee on the furniture, Granny!”

“Come help me sort these clothes!” Jabba yelled.

“Hold on a minute,” Rusty yelled back. She unfolded herself from the old yellow chair—it did look like she’d gone wee wee on it—and stood up, a graceful fairy creature from the dark side, and beckoned to Otis. “There’s a big ugly clock over here somewhere,” she said, leading the way to the back of the room, winding between tables and chairs. In a dim corner, on a little kid’s dresser shellacked with frolicking lambs, there sat a couple of sparkling pink ceramic lamps with no shades and—a clock.

Otis switched his Geiger counter on and held it up to the face of the clock like a match to a flame. The needle on the dial shot up and the little red light started blinking like crazy. “Shazam,” he said.

“Indeed,” Rusty said. “That’s one hot clock.”

“How much is it?” he asked Rusty.

Rusty bent over and fished around for a tag. “Seventy-five bucks. A steal, right?”

Otis stared at the clock, a big fat plastic thing with a black face and green hands. The hands had been painted with radium, but there wasn’t enough radium on the hands to make the Geiger counter go nuts like this. What was the source? There must be more inside the clock. He felt his heart tripping along as fast as the light on his Geiger counter was blinking. “I only have thirty bucks,” he told Rusty.

“We offer layaway,” she said.

“I need it now.”

“Well, she won’t go down that much.” Rusty shook her head. Then she said in a low growly voice, “Just take it. I’ll show you where the back door is.”

“Steal it?” Otis had never stolen anything in his life.

“Beatrice!” Jabba’s voice sounded far off. “Royce just pulled up! You aren’t leaving until you help me sort these clothes!”

Rusty bent toward Otis, her medicine bag brushing his arm, and breathed her cigarette breath on him. “You’ll be doing us a favor, right, getting this nasty thing out of here. And you need it to save mankind, right?” Rusty picked up the clock and thrust it into Otis’s arms, grinning at him.

Suddenly Otis had a mental picture of Rusty from third grade, long before she went goth, standing at the front of their classroom, grinning in just this way, wearing an Atlanta Braves shirt, her hair in two ponytails sprouting out above her ears, holding up a baseball she’d caught at their spring training camp in Lake Buena Vista. Otis had been so jealous.

“He who hesitates is lost,” the older, scary Rusty hissed at him.

There was no question that this clock should be his. It had a nice weight in his arms, the same weight as his mini poodle, Parson Brown,
his boon companion. “You won’t tell anyone, right?” he asked Rusty. “About anything. What I’m making. You know.”

Rusty scrunched her eyebrows, thin black lines that looked like they’d been plucked and darkened. “Never!”

It was too dark back here for Otis to read Rusty’s expression, but he knew he wouldn’t have been able to read it even in the bright sunlight. “Do you still have that baseball? From spring training?” Otis asked her, but Rusty was already shoving him toward the back door.

* * *

It was the next afternoon, Sunday afternoon, before Otis could get free of the rest of them—free of chores and homework and anything else his mother could find for him to do—and escape to his shed. Once inside he locked the door, propped open the windows, switched on the fan, and sat down on his stool with his stolen clock in front of him on the table. He would have to work as fast as he could, now that he’d broken the law and could be arrested at any minute. If she missed the clock, Jabba could find out who he was and where he lived easily enough. It was exciting, being a lawbreaker, handling stolen property. He might have to break a few more laws before it was all over, but he was sure that he’d be pardoned once it came to light what he’d accomplished.

Otis loved his shed. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter, always stank of burned something and was full of insects; but it was his very own uncomfortable, stinky, buggy place. And even though it was full of dangerous, unstable chemicals, it was the only place he felt truly safe and at home. His mother said that people with Asperger’s often did not get irony, but in this case, the irony was not lost, even on him.

Back when he’d first decided to embark on his quest to make a model breeder reactor, he’d spruced up the shed in preparation, giving it a coat of white paint inside and out, hanging a poster of the periodic
table on the wall, arranging an old green carpet he’d found in somebody’s trash on the floor. He’d taken the old dehumidifier from the basement and plugged it and a desk lamp and fan in with extension cords. Along the wall were two sets of metal shelves lined with jars and vials of ingredients he’d collected or created to make his breeder reactor. Books his grandfather had given him were propped on one shelf:
Atoms to Electricity
and
Nuclear Power, Friend or Foe?
alongside a framed black-and-white photograph of his much younger grandfather, in a white lab coat, at the University of Iowa. Another shelf held Otis’s logbook and a notebook and drawings he’d made, plans. He loved that word.
Plans
. It made him want to rub his hands together and cackle.

And he loved all his tools and equipment, no matter how humble others might find them to be. From a nail in the corner hung a paper mask and rubber gloves and a cracked lead-lined suit, one he’d pilfered a while back from the chemistry lab at school—he wouldn’t really call that stealing, since they’d been about to throw it away. On the table, beside the stolen clock, sat a blowtorch and a frying pan and a Bunsen burner. Also on the table lay his most prized possession—his neutron gun. He’d fashioned it from a block of lead with a hollowed-out center in which he would place a chunk of fuel.

Stored in the corner were boxes of defective smoke detectors he’d bought at a discount from First Alert, so that he could remove the americium chips and weld them, with a blowtorch, into a big ball. Originally he’d planned to use americium as fuel, because it was easier to find. Granddad had been the one to suggest smoke detectors as a source for americium. He always answered Otis’s questions and gave him practical suggestions to what he thought were hypothetical questions about how to obtain ingredients for a breeder reactor, without having any idea that Otis was actually following his advice. Of course, the fact that the old man had dementia helped along these lines, but it seemed that dementia was also making his grandfather act flakey.

What was the deal with his grandfather getting locked in his shed? Had the old woman really pushed him in, or had something else happened? Had Granddad and the old woman been snooping around together? How had they found the key where he’d hidden it in the crook of a tulip tree? Otis never allowed anyone into his shed. Had his grandfather forgotten that the shed was off limits? This was another reason that he needed to hurry and finish his reactor. Before too long his grandfather would be completely gone, either mentally or physically or both. Otis wanted to surprise him with the completed reactor—surprise and impress him and make him proud. He wanted to be just like his grandfather when he grew up, only smarter and richer and more famous.

Atomic energy was Otis’s passion, had been ever since Granddad had sent him some old nuclear energy textbooks that spoke in glowing terms about the future of nuclear science, about massive power and thrilling discoveries. His grandfather was the only other person Otis knew who shared this passion. Everyone else was afraid of it and refused to recognize its possibilities. So the two of them had exchanged letters about the textbooks—the old man refused to try e-mail—and spoke on the phone at least once a week.

But after Grandma died, when he was still living in Iowa, Granddad started losing his memory. He’d be driving to the grocery store and get lost. He forgot to take his medications and missed doctor appointments, wore dirty clothes to church, and didn’t pay his bills. People from Iowa City called his mother all the time to report on his worrisome behavior. Mom cried about it, and Dad tried to comfort her, and eventually the two of them drove up to Iowa and moved him down to Florida. They gave him the guest bedroom down in the walk-out basement, where Otis had his room. Now that he lived right in the same house, his grandfather was even more available to discuss nuclear energy and answer Otis’s questions about how to get materials for his reactor.

And he was making great progress. He’d already spent an afternoon last week taking apart the three clocks he’d found at the antique mall on I-10 and scraping the radioactive paint off the dials, but afterward he had less than a quarter of a pill vial full of flakes to show for his work. He would have to find many more radioactive clocks, but this big stolen one from Grandma’s Attic was a good start.

With a screwdriver he pried the face off his stolen clock. There, inside, glued to the back of the clock, was a tube of liquid and a little folded piece of paper. The paper read, in faded black ink, “Here is some more radium paint to touch up your clock! Enjoy!” This was too good to be true. This was better than finding a hundred old clocks. Enjoy!

He picked up his Geiger counter and switched it on, holding it up to the vial of paint. The flashing light went wild. He switched it off and sat back down, and feeling that the occasion called for a celebration, began cackling and rubbing his hands.

Then he heard something else, someone else, close by, laughing, a throaty chuckle, imitating him. Nobody was at either window. He jumped up, unlocked the padlock on the inside of the door, and threw it open. There, at the top the driveway, with her back to him, walking briskly away, was the old lady who’d been hanging out at his house, the one who’d found the key to his shed and locked Granddad inside.

“Hey,” he yelled at her. “Old lady! What do you want?”

She turned around and waved but kept walking.

He stood there in the doorway, gazing out at the lush backyard without seeing anything, holding his breath. She must’ve been spying on him. Surely she wouldn’t be able to figure out what he was doing, a ditzy old lady like her who belonged in Grandma’s Attic. But maybe she wasn’t ditzy at all. Maybe that was an act. Maybe she was some sort of government agent, reporting on his activities. Who would suspect an old lady of being a spy? The government wouldn’t want a kid like him accomplishing what none of their scientists were able to do.

Otis stepped back and slammed his shed door closed. Another reason to hurry and complete his project. For some reason, he thought of Rusty, imagined telling her about this development. He wanted to tell her. He would tell her. Beatrice. Rustifer.

But first, there was the radioactive paint to open.