Day of the Bomb (26 page)

After seven songs, Jason convinced Lance to take them
back to their motel. “Sorry to be a party pooper,” he said.

“That’s okay. You lasted a lot longer than most do.
Whenever my relatives visit they’re beat after just a day at the
beach.”

***

The sports editor at the
Madisin News welcomed the rolls of film from Thelma. In exchange
for developing them, he obtained permission to run photos of
Stanley surfing.
With schools
still closed for vacation and without his normal supply of stories
and photos from his student stringers who covered football,
basketball, track, wrestling, and baseball nine months a year, he
chose the three photos that made Stanley look like a pro. The best
one ran on the front page.

When school began the day
after Labor Day, students who had never noticed Stanley
congratulated and questioned him about
his “surfing safari.” That upset Jimbo McManey. Every school has at
least one bully. But at Madisin High Jimbo had gathered a gang of
three others to enforce his sadistic reign of terror. Beefy and
slow-witted, Jimbo would be nineteen when he graduated in
June.

“Hey, Surfer Joe!” Jimbo
slapped Stanley’s back so hard that his knees buckled
and books fell.

“Hi…hi, Jim.”

“So, you get it on with those surfer
girls?” His three sycophants guffawed and hooted as their hero
shoved Stanley’s collar bones so hard that he bounced off of a row
of metal lockers.

“Please stop it.”

“Or what?”

Sixty feet down the hallway, Dan weaved
around students and yelled at the tormentor. “Cool it, Jimbo. Leave
him alone.”

Jimbo spun around to see what fool dared to
approach. “Ooo, I’m scared. It’s big bad Dan Rhinehardt.”

Dan picked up one of Stanley’s books.
“Let’s go, Stanley.”

“How come you have to babysit him, Dan? Is
it time to change his diaper?” Jimbo elbowed one of his pals in the
ribs. “Let’s beat it out of here. These guys bore me.”

Dan led Stanley onto the back steps of
their school.

“Why is Jimbo so mean?”

“I don’t know, Stanley. Some people in this
life think their poop doesn’t stink, I guess.”

Stanley scratched his head. “Oh. I guess
that means he’s Mr. Perfect Poo-poo.”

“Mr. Perfect Poo-poo? Oh no, I can’t stand
it.” Dan laughed until his tears outnumbered his friend’s.

***

Folks at Tom’s Diner were
acting strangely, Jason thought.
They were hypnotized, with eyes focused on the 21-inch black
and white television Tom had brought from home. The grim
newscaster’s updates were interspersed with footage of American
naval vessels steaming around Cuba, showdown time as Castro had
invited the USSR to install missiles capable of delivering nuclear
warheads. Ninety miles from the U.S., Cuba’s new arsenal frightened
hundreds of millions.

“They should have taken
care of Castro by helping those guy
s out at the Bay of Pigs.” Dale Frump slammed his coffee cup
down so hard that its saucer cracked. “If Kennedy had done that we
wouldn’t be here sweating bullets now.”

“Shh, I can’t hear.” Frank Watson waved a
hand at Dale. “Turn up the volume, Tom.”

Tom obeyed. The set’s sound drowned out
every conversation. Jason sighed and carried his check to the
waitress at the cash register. Somehow she punched the amount of
the bill in, gave Jason the change, and said ‘thank you’ while
facing the television.

At least she didn’t pause
for a tip like she usually does.
As Jason walked to his truck he met Rev. Lacharetti, who was
strolling to the diner.

“Morning, Jason.”

“Morning. Maybe you can cheer up that bunch
in there. It’s all doom and gloom. Nothing but.”

“I’ll try.”

Jason had hoped to start on replacing
the roof at Louise Pinkroot’s house that morning but she had
decided that she wanted to “wait a spell. Just in case they bomb us
with those missiles. Don’t make much sense to fix my roof now if
they do. That happens and I’ll probably need a whole new
house.”

So he drove home and
entered his basement. In it he had built
for Thelma a storage room for her canned fruits and
vegetables. From the outside it appeared nondescript – half-inch
plywood walls, a hollow core door, dimensions of eight feet wide
and twelve feet long. Two of its walls were part of the concrete
blocks that made up the perimeter of the basement. Inside of it,
shelves ran along the length of one wall that were stocked with
dozens of jars of food.

Only a trained eye might
notice that the inner length was shorter than the exterior. Jason
found the hidden latch that hid the false wall at the end of the
room, opened it, and peered into the two-foot deep cavity. He
inventoried its contents: ten twenty-gallon buckets of water with
air tight lids, a battery operated radio, two flashlights, a
kerosene lamp, matches, eight dozen
batteries, fifty boxes of ammunition, a rifle, and pistol. He wrote
a note that the cans of beans, tuna, and tins of cookies needed to
be replenished. He rotated those items to the kitchen twice a year
to prevent spoilage.

He slid the false wall
back into place and sat on one of the three lawn chairs. He had
told Thelma that “I built it extra big so I can store the sleeping
bags and lawn chairs in there too.” Having passed that point in
marriage where she no longer questioned his stranger actions, she
had shrugged, even when he built walls of poured
conc
rete after erecting the outer
plywood shell. The reinforced concrete was hidden by the plywood on
the outside and paneling inside. Positioned along one wall was a
two-inch thick three-foot by seven-foot slab of metal that could be
slid in back of the hollow core door and barred shut if…

If the big one went off
a
s the Russians sent their
missiles and bombers screaming to deliver their payloads on
America. Jason thought back to the mushroom cloud he had viewed
from Monkey Island.

The Professor had detailed the
victims of atomic warfare he had seen in Japan and then explained
that to survive a nuclear blast, the formula was TDM: Time,
Distance, and Material. The radioactive fallout would decay to safe
levels in weeks or months, depending on the total of bombs
detonated. Distance was a crucial factor. The nearest Air Force
Base to Madisin was 350 miles away and a likely target. Most
important was the materials sheltering any survivors. The wood
exteriors, plaster interior, and shingles of a typical home would
block only a fraction of the radioactivity. A shelter underground
was better; one in a basement behind concrete was best, he had told
Jason. “Then the radioactivity has to go through the walls and
floor first before it gets inside your shelter and you. Plus, it’s
not as visible to those who did not prepare and will want to join
you.”

The Professor had talked
of having Jason build such a basement shelter for his family but
before Jason could begin the project, both were shipped to the war
in Korea. Afterwards, Jason instead built his. He told no one of
the storage room’s true purpose. Not even Thelma knew of the false
wall that hid the secret cache of supplies. Jason had fabricated
the backup steel door after watching how neighbors
would behave during a nuclear attack on
a
Twilight Zone
episode.

They should add people to
that TDM equation. Yeah, TDMP. You never know what people might
do.
Jason left the basement and
went to the backyard and stared at the overflowing pile of the
debris from six months of jobs. He had sorted through a quarter of
the bits of lumber, pipe, roofing material, and chunks of concrete
when an employee from the Madisin Code Enforcement parked in his
driveway.

“Howdy, Barney.” Jason wiped his
shirtsleeve across his sweaty face.

“You’re still not done yet?” Barney waved
his clipboard. “You’ve had a month since I cited you about that
junk.”

“Been real busy. I only got today off
because Mrs. Pinkroot’s holding off on her roof. She thinks the
Russians are going to blow up her house.”

Barney shielded his eyes from the sun and
scanned the sky. “You think it’s going to happen? World War III
that is?”

“I don’t know. Right now I’m more concerned
about sorting through my pile here so you don’t cite me again.”

“Just haul it all off to the dump.”

“Ha! Ever since Madisin incorporated out
this way, I’ve been paying through the nose for the privilege of
living in the city. First I had to hook up to your water and sewer
lines. That costs me a whole lot more than my well and septic
system used to. Then you made me take your garbage service. Only
way I can get my money’s worth for that is to feed what’s left over
after my jobs into my garbage cans, which are way too small.
Hauling this stuff to the dump means I have to pay twice. It’s just
not fair.”

“Sorry, Jason. Just doing my job.
Mrs. Walengrad has been checking out every neighborhood for what
she calls eyesores. She complains about your place most of
all.”

“That old witch?” Jason did his imitation
of the Wicked Witch of the West, complete with cackling laughter.
“That makes you one of her flying monkeys.”

Although the summer of 1962 had been one
for the memory books, the summer of 1965 had proved unremarkable.
The world had become a complicated and dangerous place, at least
for young American men, with LBJ sending ever more troops to
Vietnam. And if JFK could not survive an assassination then who was
safe? The question ate at Dan. Stanley brought up issues closer to
home.

“Here it is August already and we
still don’t got a job. Is your mom still pestering you
too?”

Dan pulled the long stem of grass from his
mouth and tossed it into the air. “Yeah. I keep telling her she
needs to get me on at the factory but she says I need to be
eighteen first.”

“I’m eighteen and it don’t help me out.
Nobody wants to hire a spaz.”

“Come off of it, Stanley. You got it
made and you know it. Once you finish up your last year of school
your dad will take you on. He can fix or build anything. He’ll
teach you how.”

“I just wish they didn’t make me do fourth
grade twice. It makes me feel real dumb.”

“Wish in one hand and crap in the
other and see which one fills up first.” He held up his empty
palms. “Turn up the radio. We need some music.”

Stanley fumbled with volume dial of his
transistor radio until the disc jockey’s voice carried over the
calm lake to those paddling in canoes. The radio in one of the
boats gave an illusion of stereo.

“This is Count Rockula on KHVV
blasting away at you with 15,000 mighty watts of power. I can’t get
no…well, I’ll let Brian, Mick and boys tell you all about
it.”

Keith Richards’ guitar
riff, which he claimed came to him in his sleep, introduced
Satisfaction.
The boys listened passively. It did not matter what songs
Count Rockula played, his patter was always entertaining, even when
a song was not.

He was typical of those of his
profession, bouncing from station to station looking for a larger
audience and bigger paycheck. His biggest salary had been at a
popular station in Chicago whose wattage beamed it into seventeen
surrounding states and Canada. But when he adopted Dr. Frank N
Stein as his radio name, everything unraveled. First a publisher
and then a movie studio claimed copyright infringement. So he
suggested that he could instead become Count Rockula but his
penchant for spinning records not on the station’s playlist got him
fired. Four months and twelve interviews later he landed in Madisin
still muttering, “I could’ve been a contender.” At least KHVV’s
program director did not restrict the playlist to the current Top
40 songs in the nation.

“You can play anything
that’s on this week’s Top 100.” He had explained to his new DJ.
“But only one gol
den oldie an
hour. If you give us good ratings you can stay.”

That had been a year ago. With the
British Invasion still swamping America’s airwaves and record
stores, the Count had plenty of songs to pick from. He extolled
those from across the Atlantic as the Rolling Stones’ song
ended.

“Some folks say it’s
un-American to play songs by the British bands. But I say it’s good
because it makes all the American bands crank out better songs. Are
you listening RCA, Capitol, Motown?” He rattled off eleven more
record companies in five seconds. “Here’s one by Sonny and Cher,
Number One again this week,
I
Got You Babe.
”

The duo traded verses of their love for one
another and harmonized that they had each other, puppy love
supreme.

“Here’s a song from
someone from Sony and Cher’s neck of the woods, L.A. It’s Barry
McGuire with a word of warning about an
Eve of Destruction
headed our way.” Lyrics about overpopulation, racial unrest,
nuclear annihilation, the war in Vietnam, and other issues left
Stanley filled with fear.

“I don’t like that song.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to die. That song makes me
afraid I’m going to die.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“That’s easy for you to
say. I heard my dad telling
Mom
why I was born this way. He said your dad said that a scientist
told him that when people get too close to where the atom bombs
blow up they can have messed up kids like me. My dad said it’s all
his fault for staying on Monkey Island and letting the fallout from
the bombs get inside him. That’s why I’m a retard.”