The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (2 page)

Of course, the radiation she’d swallowed had made her sick. Weak. Anemic. Dizzy. Prone to headaches. Bleeding gums. And because she’d swallowed it, she’d killed Helen. After Helen’s death she’d had to focus her anger somewhere, and since the government of the United States as a thing to hate was too unwieldy, and all the idiots who got caught up in cold war paranoia—the morons who devised and funded and carried out the radiation experiments—were too numerous and anonymous to collectively despise, she focused her hatred on Wilson Spriggs.

She used to hate herself as well, hence the need for electroshock therapy, but these days, whenever her thoughts drifted again toward blaming herself, she steered them in another direction—toward the fact that she did not know what she was doing when she swallowed the poison. She was young, she was pregnant and vulnerable, she was ignorant, she was naive, she was a hundred million other things; but the fact remained that
she did not know
, because she was tricked. Wilson Spriggs had instructed his minion to trick her into drinking poison, and now, finally, when she and Wilson were both old and he was least suspecting it, she was going to play a deadly trick on him.

But exactly what sort of trick should she play?

For a time she daydreamed about a much younger, fifties-looking version of herself, looking like pre–alien encounter Nancy Archer in a black-and-white film, clutching a fluffy white pillow to her ample bosom, tiptoeing in a slinky dress and high heels toward an old man in his bed—Wilson had aged while she, miraculously, hadn’t—but when she tried to imagine the ensuing struggle, she turned back into a frailish old lady and it seemed too risky.

She entertained another fantasy that was just as delicious as the Nancy-with-a-pillow fantasy. She would sneak up behind him with piano wire (whatever that was) and garrote him. However, the thought of his old head rolling on the ground, blood gushing, eyes staring, was so hypnotically alluring that whenever it popped into her head she
forced it away by singing a hymn, as she was afraid that even allowing herself to imagine such things meant she was teetering on the line between avenger and sicko. Same with stabbing him. She didn’t want to enjoy herself
too
much.

She considered poisons. Poisoning him, in some ways, would be the ideal revenge, because it was so tit-for-tat. You could find anything on the Internet these days. She’d googled “how to poison someone” and got more than enough information. She was thrilled, and horrified, to discover that you could order chunks of radioactive uranium ore “for educational and scientific use” from amazon.com. There would be a nice symmetry in poisoning him with the same stuff he’d given her, but she had no idea how to go about forcing him to ingest a chunk of rock, so she crossed radiation poisoning off her list.

One of the most appealing methods of poisoning was described in a book she’d read to Helen years ago, when Helen was sick, a Nancy Drew book, the one set in Hawaii,
The Secret of the Golden Pavilion
. In that book, Nancy receives a lei from one of her enemies, a lei made with purplish black funereal orchids, and hidden among the flowers are tiny tacks “soaked in poison.” She couldn’t get this image out of her head, the image of a wizened old man with a garish lei around his withered neck, being poisoned while simultaneously looking frivolous and stupid. Of course, it would be impossible to make such a lei and force someone to wear it. What did it mean to “soak tacks in poison”?

As far as poisons went, given her in-and-out time frame and lack of round-the-clock access—in other words, she wasn’t his long-suffering wife—it seemed like putting antifreeze in something sweet would be the best option. But after more research, she had to admit that, on the whole, poisons weren’t such a hot idea, because they were all readily detectable these days, not like the good old days when someone at the coroner’s office would write “heart failure” on the death certificate and be done with it.

And now, here she was in Tallahassee, so close to her quarry, but she couldn’t decide. She and Buster walked up and down Canterbury Hills and her thoughts went round and round. What about “accidentally” running over him? Knocking him down stairs? An “accident” like that might not kill him, though, and injuring him just wouldn’t be the same. She could push him off a cliff! Were there any cliffs in Tallahassee?

Canterbury Hills was certainly hilly, and the hills were much bigger than any hills in Florida had a right to be, but there was nothing resembling a cliff, not even any large rocks. She did see a Merchant’s Lane, and a Nun’s Drive, and Cook’s Circle, Prioress Path, Knight’s Way, but no Wife of Bath anywhere. Where the hell was the Wife of Bath? Did somebody have a problem with the Wife of Bath? Bath. On TV, people were always killing people by drowning them in a bath. But how would she happen to be there when he took a bath? What about a swimming pool? She enjoyed swimming, but she was no Esther Williams, and even a man in his eighties could probably fight her off.

And so it went, until, one evening, when she and Buster arrived at the yellow house on Friar’s Way, she spotted an elderly man watering a flower bed in the side yard and felt a jolt in her brain like electroshock therapy, but instead of knocking her out, it woke her up and set her tingling. Was the old man Dr. Wilson Spriggs? The devil himself? This old man, who might be him, who surely
was
him, didn’t glance Marylou’s way. Arrogant prick. He was standing sideways, near the bottom of the sloping driveway. She could see only his profile, but it was him, all right; she recognized his insolent slouch. “The very one,” she muttered to Buster, who was too busy nosing at some dried poop to care. She’d seen this man twice before, once on the happiest day of her life and again on the worst day, and he’d been a jerk both times. Memories of those two times wouldn’t leave her. Even electroshock therapy hadn’t dulled them.

The first time she met Wilson she was three months pregnant with Helen, in 1953, when she was visiting the University Hospital OB clinic for her first checkup, and she’d just been told, by the older doctor with a crew cut who’d just examined her, that everything with the pregnancy looked fine and that she was past the danger stage when miscarriage was common. She was only twenty-three, but she’d had two previous miscarriages, and those first few months she was pregnant with Helen she could barely breathe she was so worried. (Years later she’d wondered if they’d chosen her as a subject for their experiment because of those miscarriages, because they thought that she’d probably lose this baby, too, so it wouldn’t matter what the radiation did to it. But after the hearings in Washington she read that they’d just chosen the eight hundred women at random—all poor and powerless, though; they’d made sure of that by conducting their study at a clinic with a sliding fee scale.)

But on that joyous morning, after her examination by Dr. Crew Cut, she had no idea she’d been randomly chosen for anything besides the privilege of becoming a mother. She’d gotten the all clear! She was going to have, at last, a baby! She sat up on the examining table, bare legs dangling from the mint green gown with the baby rattles pattern on it, breathing so deeply she felt light-headed, and then a nurse waltzed in and gave her a cold metal cup of pink fizzy liquid that smelled like strawberries and iron and told her to drink up quickly, that it was a vitamin cocktail to keep her baby healthy!

In her mind, many times Marylou has said, “No thank you,” or asked, “What, exactly, is in this so-called cocktail?” Or thrown the drink in the nurse’s face, screaming obscenities, or leaped on the nurse and forced
her
to drink it, or just jumped up and ran, bare assed and barefoot, out of the examining room and down the hall and out of the hospital and into the late September sunshine. Safe!

But no. No, no, and no again. What she actually did was drink the poison while the nurse, who wore a name tag reading Betty Bordner,
watched her with big blue eyes and what became, in Marylou’s memory, a greedy and sinister smile. The drink tasted so bitter that Marylou’s eyes were watering when she handed the cup back to the nurse, and just as she did a young doctor passing in the hall paused in the doorway of her examining room. He had longish hair and wore round tortoiseshell glasses and a bow tie. Foppish. Pretentious. A dandy.

“Oh, Dr. Spriggs!” gushed the nurse. “This is Mrs. Ahearn, one of our pregnant women!” At the time Marylou thought this was an odd thing to say, but so what? Medical people said all kinds of odd things, in her experience:
Have we had a movement lately? Have we had any nervous imaginings?

“We appreciate your cooperation, honey,” the doctor said to Marylou, nodding at the empty metal cup.

What the hell did that mean? Who knew?

“Back atcha, Doc,” Marylou said, acting like a smart aleck because she was twenty-three and happy. Also, although it made her sick later to admit it to herself, she was flirting with him. She knew she looked cute, sitting there bare legged in her gown, and, she supposed, she must’ve been attracted to him, God knows why.

Betty Bordner turned to Marylou, clutching the metal cup between her pointed bosoms, nearly cross-eyed with reproach. “Dr. Spriggs is in charge of the entire clinic. He’s head of our study! He hardly ever comes down here!”

“What study?” Marylou had the presence of mind to ask.

The nurse flushed and went silent, her gooey orange lips working nervously, and she fixed her eyes pleadingly on the great Spriggs.

“I’m in charge of all kinds of studies,” he said, and clearly, as his manner indicated, this was rightfully so.

The nurse set the metal cup down on the counter with a clunk. “How
are
you today, Doctor?” she said, and Marylou thought, Calm down, Nurse Bosom, you’re twenty years too old for the baby genius.

Dr. Spriggs spoke no more—their time in his presence was up. He
smiled, gave a silly wave, and disappeared; and that little scene with nurse and doctor was the only thing Marylou remembered distinctly about that day, although she knew that she and Teddy had later gone for a stroll beside the Mississippi River and then to Checkers Barbeque to celebrate.

And now, in 2006, there he was again, standing at the bottom of his pollen-covered driveway waving the garden hose, like a drooping old penis, over his azalea bushes. Still tall and lean, but no longer foppish! No visible ass. A sailor hat and thick glasses and ugly orthopedic shoes.

Marylou’s ankle ached and sweat slunk sheepishly down between her drooping breasts.

If she had a gun, she could just walk up to him and say: “This is for what you did to me and Helen and those seven hundred and ninety-nine other women and their children, you son of a bitch,” and shoot him. Would it really matter if she was tried and put in prison for the rest of her life? Or even put to death?

Well, yes, it would matter. People said that living well was the best revenge, but wasn’t it enough, really, in her case, at age seventy-seven, to say simply that
living
was the best revenge? He dies, she lives. So she’d not only have to do it but get away with it.

It hadn’t rained here in a coon’s age. Motes of dust and pollen swarmed up into her face. She and Buster stood at the top of the driveway watching the old scum overwater his bushes, hating every fiber of his being with every fiber of hers. But what to do? If only she were fifty feet tall! Fifty feet tall, twenty-three years old, dressed in superhero attire—Amazonish costume barely covering her giant bosoms—raging and focused as fifty hurricanes, she’d fly at him and fling his parts all over the flat-assed state of Florida.

Just then he cocked his head, as if he’d picked up the stirrings of a storm. He threw down his garden hose and, without looking in her
direction, turned and shambled off behind the yellow house, out of sight. Walking away from her once again.

“Mur-der-er!” she bellowed, and Buster flattened his yellow ears and rolled his eyes up at her. But she wasn’t finished. She yelled again, even louder, “Where’s your fucking bow tie now!” which was not at all what she meant to say. What she meant to say was “Eat leaden death, motherfucker!”

She waited, heart skipping merrily in her chest, but the murderer did not reappear, so eventually she and Buster started back home, unfulfilled, a familiar condition for both of them. Why couldn’t she think straight? Of all the things she could’ve yelled. His bow tie! How inadequate was that? She’d had the beast in her sights!

When she got home, she lay down on her cold pleather couch and closed her eyes and heard Teddy’s voice. “You act just like you drive, Lou. Go, stop. Go, stop. Gas, brake. Gas, brake. I’m getting motion sick.” When he’d said that to her, years ago, he’d been joking, sort of, but he was also speaking the truth. She was still that way—wishy-washy, indecisive—and she hated that about herself.

For a time after that evening, the evening of the bow tie insult, Marylou shifted into low gear, continuing to roam the streets of Canterbury Hills with Buster—Miller’s Ride, Nun’s Priest Place—waiting for either courage or inspiration to strike, enjoying in spite of herself the low humidity as well as the slight breeze that would be gone in a few weeks, not to return, unless there was a storm, until October, according to the Channel 9 weatherman. The late April air had begun to smell like October—smoky, because of nearby forest fires—prescribed burns, according to the
Tallahassee Democrat
. Hurricane season, according to countless billboards around Tallahassee, was only a month away. “According to,” “according to”—these were her friends now, these public postings.

While walking she met some of her neighbors, including a nice
minister’s wife, a chipper blond gal named Paula Coffey who always wore a white sun visor, and they talked about the pollen, which Marylou had never seen the likes of. When she’d come down to Tallahassee in March to look for a house she’d been amazed by the steady stream of brown oak leaves raining from the sky—evidently they shed their leaves in the spring and not the fall—leaves that looked like palmetto bugs swarming all over the ground. But in April the pine trees cast off little brown tubes of pollen that blew everywhere. Everything on her screened porch was coated with green slime. Trails of pollen, like ooze from giant snails, lined streets and driveways. Even though Marylou parked her rented Taurus under the carport she had to hose off the front windshield every time she wanted to drive somewhere.