An Atomic Romance (13 page)

“You’re standing outside your life?”

“Yes. And sometimes I’m not even asleep. Or the dream keeps haunting me when I’m awake, like it was something real that happened. Now what kind of sense is that?”

“Well . . .” She shifted against the pillow, as though she were going to summon an encyclopedic knowledge. She stared across the room at the dresser mirror.

He put two fingers on her mouth. “No, don’t explain it.”

He suddenly feared that she knew him very well. She cared enough to have figured him out. He was afraid to hear what she knew.

“Maybe it’s a substitute for television,” she said, joking. Giggling, she ripped the sheet off the bed, exposing their naked bodies. “Let’s do it again,” she said, her eyes dancing.

21

On the way to the jail the next morning, Reed was slowed by school buses. Children scooted across Constitution Avenue as if they were pushed by wind. As he waited, in a little fog of happiness, he thought about the evening with Julia. They had avoided talking about his job. For once, she didn’t criticize or scold. She seemed to make a deliberate effort to make him feel warm and protected. They had rolled in his bed for more than an hour, and she had acted as if she had all the time in the world and as if her only goal was to give him pleasure. But then she left before midnight, saying she had to go to the university early the next morning to do lab experiments. Sex with her was urgent and timeless, and simultaneously it seemed like a great joke. Their kisses and caresses were punctuated by little jokes and giggles. But there was still something about her he couldn’t reach. It was as if, unlike most of his women, she didn’t need a commitment from a man. She could take care of her own needs. She seemed so levelheaded that she couldn’t be hurt or disoriented. Yet that couldn’t be true. He realized how careful they were with each other. He tried hard to avoid saying foolish or inappropriate things. She politely tiptoed around sensitive subjects. They didn’t seem to trust each other fully. There was something he didn’t know about her. Or was he the problem? Was she standing back from him, afraid he might have a core of heavy metal where his heart was? Still, she had come to him, and he was on fire, with or without a major transuranic in his system. She had remarked upon the clean sheets.

The jail was a nondescript aluminum-sided annex tacked onto an elegant nineteenth-century brick courthouse. When the annex was built a few years before, people complained that the jail spoiled the beauty of the courthouse. But, Reed asked himself, why should a jail be tastefully designed? Did Frank Lloyd Wright ever design a jail?

Reed waited for paperwork. Burl had no family he could call upon, except his sister, Sally, who was pious and relentlessly suburban. His brother—a CPA with pretensions—lived in Detroit, and his grandmother, who depended on him to mow her grass and fetch her groceries and prescriptions, couldn’t do anything for him.

Burl appeared, glaring at Reed. “You sure took your time getting here,” he said.

“Isn’t your motto ‘Happy to be anywhere’? I thought I’d let you catch up on your sleep.”

“They stripped my license this time, Reed. Six months.”

“No kidding.”

“They impounded my truck and now I have to get somebody to pick it up.”

“Oh, shit,” Reed groaned. He headed out of the Customer Parking area behind the jail. Burl was a good customer, he thought.

Burl said, “I’ll have to drive anyway, though. I have to do another job for Mrs. Patterson, and I have to get Grandma her groceries. And I’ve got a job starting next week where they’re building that new pizza place—another goddamn eyesore the world needs like it needs another strip mine.”

“You need a chauffeur.”

“I need some ham and eggs,” Burl said.

“Didn’t they feed you?”

“Leather-and-onions. And wallpaper-paste gravy. That was last night. This morning it was coffee they had left over from their Christmas party. And they had square rubber eggs. Jail cuisine leaves something to be desired.”

Burl drummed his fingers on the dash. He was jittery. He needed coffee. He bounced in his seat. He jerked to inaudible music. Reed drove to Dinah’s Cafe, where they nodded at the regulars and settled into a wooden booth. The waitress who took their orders eyed Burl’s dirty T-shirt and naturally distressed denim. He tipped his greasy cap to her, a thin high-school girl with braces. She was clumsy with the coffeepot, sloshing the liquid over the rim of his mug.

“The way I look at it is this,” said Burl after she left. “We’re going to need more than colonic irrigation to deal with this plutonium thing. We’re going to have to call in the big guns. It’s going to take more than a prayer breakfast, buddy. You’re going to need Jesus to descend from his throne with a Geiger counter and something like a heavenly minesweeper.”

“I’m sure he’ll know what to do, Burl,” Reed said.

“I don’t know transuranics from Transylvania. But Reed, you know as well as I do that a lot of guys out there are getting cancer. There it is, the bottom line.”

Reed was genuinely touched. Apparently Burl had been thinking all night on the problem. Even though Reed had never gone into detail with Burl about his particular exposures, Burl had always claimed that Reed had routinely absorbed too much radiation on the job.

Reed gazed out the window at the parking lot for a moment.

“Did I tell you I’m seeing Julia?”

Burl’s jaw dropped—a proverbial jaw-drop, Reed thought. “No shit,” Burl said quietly. “Hey.”

The food came, and Burl assailed his sausage and pancakes. “She going to take you back?”

“She’s after my body.” Reed grinned.

“
That
body?”

“Thanks, buddy.” With deliberation, Reed peppered his eggs. Then he said, “She’s flipped out over the plutonium.”

“Wasn’t all the stuff coming out of the plant the reason she left you before?”

“I guess. But now it hit her harder. She says it’s more real somehow.” He stirred his coffee and sipped it. “The jailhouse coffee couldn’t have been worse than this,” he said.

“Believe what I say, Reed,” said Burl. “I may not know much, but I know coffee. So is it more real?”

“Depends on what that means. What’s real? What if we learn that transuranics were bubbling through the Cascade all these years and we didn’t know it—wasn’t it as real then as it would be now? If we knew it was real, somehow that seems unreal to me.”

“You’re jawing in circles.”

“It’s Schrödinger’s cat all over again! We can’t get away from that darn tomcat. It’s both there and not there. Like you in your jail cell.” Reed lifted his coffee mug. “Julia’s wondering how you’re coming along reconciling Christianity and relativity.”

“Oh, I’m working on it. Tell her I’m working on it.”

Reed dropped Burl at his house, one of those hastily built little frame dwellings that popped up in the fifties during the plant construction boom. Burl had bought it at auction and with his carpentry skills he had repaired its sagging structure, so that now it was sturdy if not attractive.

“Call me when you need a ride,” Reed said.

“I’ll get Rita to drive me around.”

Rita was a woman Burl went out with from time to time. She could outdrink him, and Burl said she had an “incredible butt.”

“Wasn’t she mad at you?”

“Yeah, but she’s been in a good mood lately. I bet she’ll go with me out to the fairgrounds tonight. It’s Christian night, and they’re having Christian rappers and rockers. Want to go?”

“What
isn’t
the church into these days?” Reed said. “Wrestling matches? Do they have a gift shop? Do they have ATMs at church?”

“Have your fun,” said Burl. “But one fine day you’ll stand in the heavenly dock.”

“That might be any day now, at the rate I’m going.”

Reed greeted Clarence and filled his water bucket. Clarence had dug a new dirt bowl under the umbrella of the mimosa. The fenced yard was virtually bare, owing to Clarence’s warlike depredations. Feeling a small surge of freedom, Reed romped with him around the oak tree in the center of the dog’s domain. Reed was released, momentarily. Free. To be a skunk, if he wanted to. To rat out, monkey around, stomp on bugs.

“Hey, Clarence. Catch.” He tossed a worn-out leather glove. “Kill it, boy!” Clarence grabbed the glove and shook it deftly. Reed growled to get Clarence going, and Clarence, the glove falling from his mouth, began cutting didoes in the backyard, huge figure eights around the oak trees. He was unstoppable, a master dog, a killer dog, the only being Reed felt he could truly rely on. Clarence loved him without question, and Clarence would kill for him if he had to. Reed envied him. He’d like to be Julia’s killer dog.

He was catching his breath between disasters. He didn’t want to visit his mother at Sunnybank or take her out driving or try to get her into a restaurant with her walker, as Julia had suggested. The energy fueling his fear for his mother had flipped him onto another level—flat and gray and stoic. He wanted to think she was all right for now. After the doctor made further adjustments to her medicine, she hadn’t mentioned Mort again. Reed would wait to be surprised by the next episode threatening her life. Meanwhile, he needed a respite from her, which he intended to fill with Julia. That was natural enough, he thought—unbuckle himself from the umbilical, go for Julia hard and fast, wrap himself with her, their limbs intertwining and flailing and knotting into a throbbing ball.

“Clarence! Bring me the glove! Get it!”

Clarence bounded and dove, brought the glove like a retriever, then gazed at Reed with the collie-love look, that show-dog quality that could be a ruse and a pose. Or it could be genuine love, Reed thought.

J ulia actually telephoned him on Sunday, suggesting that they take his mother to lunch. After months of being unreachable, Julia was right there now. Reed was driving. His mother was fastened into the front seat, and Julia was in the back with his mother’s folded-up walker.

“I would have driven you in my new car, Mrs. Daly,” Julia said, leaning forward. “But it’s one of those little cars. It might hold a dozen clowns at the circus, but it’s so low to the ground I was afraid it would be uncomfortable for you.”

“Aren’t you glad we’re not in my truck?” Reed said. Their destination was only a few blocks away.

“I haven’t been out riding around in a year,” his mother said.

“Hasn’t Reed taken you anywhere?” Julia said. “He should take you out on the river gambling boat.”

Reed’s mother laughed. “I may have lost my marbles, but I don’t want to lose my money too.”

“You’re doing great, Mrs. Daly,” Julia said. “For someone who has had a stroke, you’re doing incredibly well.”

“Reed would do well to settle down.”

“I
am
settled down, Mom.”

“Reed never knows what he wants,” his mother said.

“Oh, I
do.
She’s sitting in the back seat.” He glanced in the rearview mirror but didn’t catch Julia’s eye.

Captain Mack’s swarmed with the Sunday after-church crowd. It took about ten minutes to get his mother inside. While waiting for a table to be cleared, she clutched Julia’s arm and leaned against the walker. Julia wore black pants and a blue silk shirt. His mother had on a bright floral blouse with a ruffled throat. Together they seemed chummy and elegant, Reed thought.

When their table was ready, Julia helped her sit down, and Reed folded the walker and placed it against the wall behind him.

“I want liver-and-onions,” his mother said, before the menus were dispensed.

Reed nudged Julia. “It’s lip-smacking good,” he said.

“Liver has more cholesterol than eggs,” she said, making a face.

“Julia’s afraid of cholesterol. She was traumatized in childhood by a giant egg,” Reed explained to his mother.

“He’s teasing,” Julia said, touching his mother’s arm. “It was a Halloween costume my sister wore.”

Reed’s mother made an effort to read the menu, but she was awkward with her reading glasses. Reed read the printed insert of specials to her. Julia wanted sparkling water, which Captain Mack’s didn’t have. So she asked for plain water. Reed’s mother ordered the liver-and-onions, with mashed potatoes and broccoli, and Reed ordered a strip steak and French fries. Julia chose baked flounder. Waiting for the food, Reed sat back in his chair and regarded the two women, who were laughing together, the way women did in that easy intimacy they fell into within two minutes of meeting. Their laughter made him feel good, even though it excluded him. His mom was definitely better, he thought. The doctor had calibrated her medicine, and she seemed much less dopey. Reed knew she wished she could be playing poker.

He turned to Julia. “I bet you didn’t know that my mom was on the stage when she was younger.”

“Oh, wow,” said Julia, holding her water glass paused halfway to her mouth.

“How would you know that?” his mother asked him.

“She was in the Atomic Players back in the fifties,” Reed said to Julia. “She was in
The Glass Menagerie.
”

“I’m impressed,” Julia said. “I’d love to have seen you on the stage, Mrs. Daly. A leading lady.”

“Reed needs a woman around,” his mother said.

“Julia’s too busy for me,” Reed said. “She’s always studying.”

“I’m studying for exams and I work at the lab all week,” Julia said.

“Julia studies salamanders,” Reed said to his mother.

“Is that on the menu?”

When Reed and Julia burst out laughing, Reed’s mother laughed too, insisting that she was just joking. “I’m not that addled,” she said.

For several minutes, Julia trotted through an enthusiastic description of the genome project, which didn’t register with Reed’s mother. Reed had to admit that genetics didn’t inspire him—it was too much like genealogy—but he loved to watch Julia bubbling her information. The food arrived then.

During the meal, Reed’s mom said to Julia, “You eat like a wood-pecker.”

Julia choked on her food. A dot of flounder flew from her lips.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Julia said. “I wasn’t laughing at you.”

“You’ve been listening to your bird clock, Mom,” Reed said. “But you may be right about Julia. You should see the holes in my siding.”

Now his mother laughed. She tried to do the Woody Wood-pecker call, and her face turned red. Julia cracked up.

“Bring us all some pie,” Reed said to the waiter.