Nuclear War Club: Seven high school students are in detention when Nuclear War explodes.Game on, they are on their own. (2 page)

“Yes, sir. I will leave your truck, and have a friend pick me up in my truck,” David said.

“And this does NOT mean you get to go in the strip club,” Dad clarified, smiling.

The joke fell flat, there was too much tension. It seemed to David they were both putting on a brave front, but this was dead serious, and they both knew it.

“Should I just stay home from school, so I don’t miss her arrival?” David pressed, trying to extract more information.

“No, we are supposed to act routinely…” Dad stopped mid-sentence, then quickly added, “during the drill.”

David knew instantly he did not intend for that to slip out. No one has to
act
routine unless it
not
routine. Dad looked better, but he was tired, fatigued, not careful. They had alerts all the time. Maybe this was just another exercise. But this seemed different, real, deadly. Especially when he had seen Dad load up the truck with their two best emergency bug out bags, without telling him, while he lifted weights.

“She doesn’t arrive until tomorrow. If she can’t call you, we have prepositioned a bicycle and a truck,” Dad said. David thought his Dad might add something, but it was silent.

“Lori
will
get here. I know your Mom,” Dad added.

David thought he sounded like he was trying to convince himself. He suddenly understood that Dad was anxious because Mom was thousands of miles away in Alabama. This was not the way his Dad planned.

“I coordinated with your Mom where to find the bicycle and truck, so be sure that’s where you leave them. I am not going to be back in time,” Dad continued, as they reached the truck.

The sky was red, the sun would soon rise. David was startled to see that everyone in the truck was packing a 9mm hand gun, just like his Dad. The two in the back seat of the crew cab had M-4 rifles.

The driver stayed in the truck, the other crew members
stood by their doors, and crisply saluted their Colonel.

Dad returned their salute, and said, “As you were. Give me a moment,” as the crew then got back in the truck.

Dad turned, put his hands on both shoulders, and looked him in the eye.

“David, I have to look up now, you are taller than me. Seems like only yesterday Lori and I got married. The years have flown by…” Dad said, as his voice choked, and his eyes glistened.

David noticed the crew all looked away to give them some privacy. Dad tried to steady his voice, as he glanced away, swallowed, and regained his composure, then looked him in the eye.

“Son, get your Mom home.”

2.

“Here you go,” Hank Wilson said, carrying his daughter’s saddle with the worn, pink stirrups.

“Thanks, Dad,” Karen Wilson replied,, climbing the corral fence rails. Missy turned her head, and immediately trotted over.

“Missy!” Karen said, putting down her coffee cup, smiling, and rubbing her mane. Pepper, nudged her leg, demanding attention.

“Good dog, Pepper!” Karen said, rubbing his head.

He watched Karen carefully inspect the saddle, then race off at full gallop to the top of Fire Mountain. Pepper kept pace with them to the edge of the thoroughbred practice track. Then, as usual, he stopped, and waited until they came back, panting heavily.

Hank couldn’t give her much as ranch foreman, but he could give her this. Watching her ride every morning was the highlight of his day. He always seemed to struggle from paycheck to paycheck. Even years after the divorce, he had never really recovered from the expense of raising his four year old daughter by himself. And it wasn’t just the money.

Hank worried about raising Karen without a Mom. She was now a beautiful young woman, starting her senior year in high school. He had a constant, nagging, fear that she was missing out on female activities by growing up on this exclusive, but very isolated, ranch. The owner’s wife, Victoria, was the only other woman for miles.

“What am I
not
teaching Karen that all the other Moms are teaching their daughters?” he asked himself in the dead of night. He read every single book on raising daughters in the Yuba City library.

He knew she needed to be around girls her own age. So he drove Karen thirty five miles to Connection Church in Yuba City every Sunday morning to the youth group.

He didn’t really want to go to church. Sunday was his only day off, and he would rather be hunting or fishing with Gonzalez, drinking and playing pool at the Lone Star Bar, or going to a rodeo. But he figured it was his duty as single Dad, so he went every Sunday. He wondered if they would look down on him as just a ranch hand. Everyone seemed to have nice houses, happy families, and new trucks.

While he couldn’t honestly say he enjoyed Church, he did begin to dread it less, and it became comfortable. He was warmly welcomed, and he could tell they genuinely respected him for bringing Karen. People he didn’t even know began to recognize him by name as Mr. Wilson, or, more often, as Karen’s Dad, when he came to town to get supplies during the week.

He posted the Church bulletin with magnets on the refrigerator to make sure he didn’t forget to take her to all the age appropriate youth events. He watched what the better mothers at Church were doing with their daughters.

It was all he could think of to do.

Hank checked his watch as the horizon glowed deep red. He stood on the fence rails, waving his hat. He watched Karen slow down, so Pepper could keep up. Pepper was wagging his tail, excitedly awaiting her return. Karen was in the third grade when she found the old, one eyed, stray dog, on Fire Mountain. He thought Pepper would have to be put down, the wounded dog was almost dead. But he had caved in when she begged to nurse him back to health. Pepper was the first of his daughter’s many veterinarian patients.

“Fifteen minutes until the school bus gets here,” he said.

“Thanks, Dad.” Karen said as she dismounted and handed him the reins.

“How is the new school?” Hank asked.

“Fine,” she said, in the teenage past perfect tense of no elaboration.

Hank just nodded, searching her face for any
nonverbal clues. Karen had just been transferred to a new school beginning her senior year. Hank never told her that Victoria had gone to the ranch’s lawyers to arrange for the “redistricting” of the ranch to the better school, Barley Union High School. The owner called in favors, and got the bus route to her front door. Victoria had become very alarmed by the gang violence at Karen’s previous school.

He took the reins.

“School is fine Dad. Really,” Karen reassured him. Smiling, she quickly rubbed Missy again, petted Pepper, then hurried back to the mobile home to get her backpack and change clothes.

3.

The mobile home Karen Wilson lived in with her Dad was artfully, and completely, concealed from view between two very expensively constructed, air conditioned, wings of brick stables for multimillion dollar thoroughbred race horses.

“Good morning, Sis,” said Gonzalez, as he unloaded bales of organic hay for the thoroughbreds.

Most the ranch hands called her Sis. Some called her Sunrise, in Spanish, because she was naturally upbeat and cheerful, and because they saw her mainly at daybreak.

“The baby horse…had much happy birthday,” Gonzalez continued in Spanglish, as she opened the door to her mobile home.

“Great! Thank you, Mr. Gonzalez,” she replied, smiling, which translated perfectly. Gonzalez had helped the veterinarian deliver a foal for one of the workhorses, who were kept at a separate stable from the expensive thoroughbreds.

“Hurry up Cinderella, your stagecoach is coming,” she laughed, quickly choosing what to clothes to wear.

Karen had three closets, and two dressers of clothes. Dad cleared out all the closets, except for his room, for her.
About every three months Victoria brought her very expensive clothes that her friend’s daughters had “outgrown”. Karen suspected, correctly, that the clothes were bought specifically for her. The occasional concealed price tag she found was a big clue.

Hank had no idea what clothes to buy her, he had offered to have a woman from the church go with her. She declined, she always was stubbornly self-reliant. So he just gave her the keys to the truck, the debit card, and sent her to the mall.

But last year Victoria had arranged to have Karen measured and custom fitted for jeans with her tailor. These blue jeans were far more comfortable around her hips and thighs, the only clothes Karen really, truly, valued. They wore better, and were reinforced for tough ranch use. She was beginning to appreciate that they also definitely flattered her already striking appearance. And that was becoming more important to her, although she never wore makeup, and had little interest in any clothes she could not ride in.

“Cinderella is now ready for the ball,” Karen smiled, petting the doll her Dad had given her when she was five. Probably the only Cinderella doll in California with her own horse and gun, she thought. The ranch hands had found a scale size horse and gun for her Cinderella, just like Victoria had.

She put on her trail hiking shoes, and picked up her backpack. She checked herself in the full length mirrors, next to the photographs of Missy and Pepper, and the old one of her Mom and Dad helping her blow out the candles at her three year old birthday party.

Karen liked to look at her Mom’s photograph. She was beautiful, and they all looked happy together. It was their only photograph as a family. Her Mom left when Karen was four, and never returned. After her Mom left, they had moved to California when Dad got this job.

Dad never told her why her Mom never came to see her, apparently the psychologist had asked him not to until she
was older. He would just look at his hands, and say it was hard for her. She knew he tried his best to be upbeat and positive about her Mom for her sake. But she realized talking about her caused him visible pain. So Karen just quit asking.

Once, when they riding, looking for a lost calf in the Fire Mountain pasture, Dad told her, “Karen, you have to do better than me.”

“I am fifty one years old, own nothing but my old, beat up, Ford pickup, and tools, and have no wife,” Dad said.

“Even the thoroughbred horses have a better home than I do,” he continued.

But she never forgot how her Dad’s eyes sparkled and lit up.

“But Karen, I felt a strange peace and joy when I realized I love working with the horses. And I could never afford to own, or even feed, these horses. I get to be outside all day in a beautiful ranch,” he said, pausing.

“The horses don’t know, or care, who owns them,” Dad added. It was quiet for a few moments.

“The ranch owner works in an office all day and lives under extreme stress so he can pay me to enjoy and manage the horses,” Dad said.

“Who works for who?” he asked, smiling.

Karen knew she had inherited his indomitable spirit, enthusiasm, and love of horses. She enjoyed getting up early, greeting the horses, and scanning the sky for the weather. The best time of her day was after dawn and before the school bus came.

She heard Pepper bark, as usual, when the school bus came. Karen lifted the curtain and looked out the window. The school bus was now turning off the main highway and would be here soon. She was the only pickup for the school bus on the two lane, paved, private ranch road.

The sky was now a bright red that streamed out unevenly through the jagged mountains surrounding the ranch. Scattered clouds reflected the sunrise, the morning chill
lingered, the wind had yet to stir.

The grass was bright green, sprinkled with wildflowers, for acres and acres along the flat basin projecting out from the meandering creek. The land then faded to brush land, then hard rock surfaces near the mountains. Karen loved this ranch, it was breathtakingly beautiful.

Missy and the other horses suddenly raced the school bus through the grass along the fence at full gallop as Karen climbed on the bus.

“Now that’s a special goodbye ,” the bus driver said, smiling at her.

“Yes, sir,” Karen replied. She wondered why Missy had raced the bus, this had never happened before. She moved to the back of the bus to get a better look, and was relieved when she saw the horses turn right, and stop at the stables.

Missy threw her head back and raised her front legs, facing the departing school bus and the red dawn.

Dad and Gonzalez waved their hats to Karen.

4.

“Get your backpacks,” Zeke Brown said to his little brother and sister, pointing to their bedrooms.

He didn’t want them to see their Mom passed out, drunk, hunched over the kitchen table. Light from the broken neon sign of the Two Spot Bar across the street flickered through the grimy windows. The kitchen reeked of warm, stale beer and vomit. He carefully moved closer, as his eyes adjusted to the complete darkness.

“The Lakers lost again,” the television droned. Without turning on the overhead light, he could now see that beer had splattered all over his Mom and the table, leaving a dingy crust of foam.

“For erectile dysfunction….” Zeke turned the television off. He hurriedly picked up the empty Colt 45 Malt Liquor beer cans, the McDonalds red supersize fries package, a crumpled twenty dollar bill, loose change, her bus pass, half a joint, and a lotto card filled out with her six lucky ticket numbers. He smashed the aluminum beer cans, put them in the recycle bin, threw the garbage away, and dumped everything else back in her overturned purse.

“Can we come in now?” Monique asked.

There was no time to clean up the mess, so he just picked his Mom up, carried her to the couch, then covered her with a blanket. She never stirred. He shut the window curtains, turned on the lights, then hurriedly made sure she had not left the stove on, or the refrigerator cracked open.

“Just a minute,” Zeke replied.

Zeke frantically looked at the clock again. Monday mornings were always the worst. He now had sixteen minutes until the school bus came for LeShawn and Monique. They had to leave quickly as the kid’s bus stop was half a block away.

He unlocked the two deadbolts, then opened the front door. After he walked outside, he quickly turned and locked the
door. He waited for his eyes to adjust, and turned carefully to scan both sides of the street.