Mama's Boy Page 9

  “Could I talk to you for a sec, Tracy?” Gus said.

  “Sure. Talk away,” she said.

  “I mean alone.”

  “You can say whatever you want right here. These are my friends, Gus. I’ve known them a lot longer than I’ve known you. I don’t think we have any secrets between us that they can’t hear.”

  “Speak up, Gus,” Josh said. “Hell’s bells, don’t mind me. I’m a congenital smartass. If I’ve ruffled your feathers, I apologize.”

  “It can wait,” Gus said.

  “Maybe Gus would like to join the protest,” Sandra said.

  Gus looked at Sandra to see if she was setting him up. She looked like the type who could do that. She had attractive features but for some reason that Gus could not fathom she wasn’t exactly attractive. It had to do with the unattractive thing that was going on behind her attractive features.

  “How about it, Gus?” Josh said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gus said.

  “We’re going to Richland, over in Washington,” Tracy said. “Richland is where they make the plutonium for atom bombs. Isn’t it curious that its called plutonium, after the god of the underworld? The Satan bomb. We’re going to chain ourselves to the main gate of the Hanford works. We hope to discourage the Satan bomb.”

  “Why?” Gus said.

  “Why not? If you believe in something, you do it. Otherwise you’re just taking up space.”

  “You’re not going to stop them from making plutonium,” Gus said.

  “That’s not the point,” Josh said. “The point is to make a point. We might spur others to take up the cause. Look what’s happening in England.”

  “Bertrand Russell is leading the way,” Tracy said.

  “I don’t think I’m allowed to protest plutonium,” Gus said.

  “Our hero!” Sandra said. She lit another cigarette. Gus’s cigarette was in the ashtray with an inch-long ash. He hadn’t picked it up since his first puff. Sandra looked at Gus through threads of smoke, her green eyes opaque as jade.

  “We can’t give up making our bombs while the Russians keep making theirs,” Gus said.

  “The age-old recipe for disaster,” Josh said. “Pure and simple.”

  “They’d be playing the tune that we’d have to dance to,” Gus said.

  “Good God!” Josh said. “The poetry of the apocalypse, straight from the mouth of an American defender of the skies!”

  Gus ignored Josh. “I don’t think you should do this, Tracy,” he said. “You could go to jail.”

  “I’m not afraid of spending a few days—months even—in jail. In fact, I hope they do arrest me. Can you just see the headlines? Coed Jailed Protesting Nukes. That would generate sympathy among the undecided, don’t you think?”

  Gus was sorry he’d said anything. He felt like an idiot, and worse—he felt that he was ruining his chances with Tracy.

  “If you came with us wearing your cute uniform,” Sandra said, “that would really cause a row.”

  “They’d put me in Leavenworth,” Gus said.

  “What’s Leavenworth?” Tracy said.

  “A federal prison in Kansas,” Gus said. “The government doesn’t fool around. I’d probably get ten years, maybe twenty. Hell, they might hang me for treason.”

  “Okay, count Gus out,” Josh said.

  “Ten years isn’t much when you consider that the half-life of plutonium 239 is twenty-four thousand years,” Tracy said. Gus watched her lift her coffee cup to her full lips. She seemed almost cheerful about what could happen to him.

  “I’ll call you, Tracy,” Gus said.

  “We’re leaving this weekend for Richland,” she said. “We’ll probably be back by Monday, unless they decide to imprison us.”

  “Should score big points with your dad,” Gus said.

  “Is that what you think?” she said. “You think I’m doing this to humiliate my dad?”

  “He doesn’t figure into it?” Gus said.

  “You bastard,” she said.

  “Sorry,” Gus said. “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”

  “Maybe you should go back to your radar base and hunt for phantom Russians,” she said.

  “They aren’t phantoms,” Gus said weakly.

  “The flyboy has foot-in-mouth disease,” Sandra said.

  Gus left the Athenian, trying not to slink. Out in the street, the time-and-temperature sign on the First Intermountain Bank said -11.

  He headed down Main. The city looked deserted. He was the only human being out on the streets. He looked at himself in the plate glass window of a hardware store.

  “Good work, you idiot,” he said.

  15

  A pink and white car pulled up to the curb ahead of Gus. The car, a Mercury Turnpike Cruiser, looked showroom new. The driver rolled the window down. “Want a ride, flyboy?”

  Gus got in. “Nice car, Sandra,” he said.

  “It’s my dad’s. I get to use it when he’s not. He likes to drive his old Studebaker. He won’t let me touch that. Where to, airman?”

  “No place special.”

  “Hell, we’re already there,” she said, laughing.

  It was the same laugh, but this time Gus liked it. He didn’t feel put down by it. In the Athenian, he decided, she’d been performing for her friends at his expense. Her laugh now was openly friendly and good-humored. Her features, which he’d seen as individually attractive but collectively unattractive, had relaxed into ordinary good looks. Gus marveled at the transformation. Was the change in him or in her? What triggered it?

  “Where are your friends?” he said.

  “Still in the Athenian, saving the world from itself.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “The world is going to hell and people like Tracy and Josh are going to hell with it. It’s like we’re all in this big leaky boat headed for the falls and we’re bailing with teaspoons.”

  “But you’re going to Richland with them anyway.”

  “It could be fun.”

  “So with you it’s a fun thing, not political?”

  “It’s always a fun thing. You were right on the money about Tracy and her old man. She’s going to have great fun watching him get steamed. People work out their kinks in ways that satisfy.”

  “What kinks are you working out?”

  “Boredom. Boredom is the first circle of hell.”

  “I think you’re too deep for me,” Gus said.

  “I’m not deep. I just try to stay on the qui vive.”

  “The key what?”

  “It’s French for staying alive to the situation.”

  “You go to college, Sandra?”

  “Call me Sandy,” she said.

  “Your friends call you Sandra.”

  “My friends are incorrigible snobs. I love them dearly, but they’re kind of uppity. Maybe you noticed.”

  “So do you go to college?”

  “I’m a third-semester sophomore in philosophy and French at Northern Plains. What are your plans for the future, Gus? Going to make a career of the air force?”

  “I don’t have any plans,” Gus said.

  “Stay that way. People who plan out their lives are bores. Life just happens, plan or no plan.”

  “My life was planned out for me. That’s why I joined the air force. I’m an escapee.”

  “A fugitive from boredom! But now you’re stuck for what—four years in Milk River? How ironic.”

  “A little over three now,” he said.

  “A lot could happen in three years, even right here, in boredom’s capital city.”

  “A lot has already happened.”

  She smiled at this, but didn’t ask Gus to elaborate. “Ever been to the Milk River dam?” she said. “It’s one of our famous tourist attractions.”

  They drove west on US Route 2. A few miles out of town she turned onto a narrow unpaved road. The almost-full moon turned the bare fields into flats of gray pew
ter. Sandy had the heater turned on high, but Gus could feel the outer cold pull heat from his body.

  “Supposed to get down to twenty-five below tonight,” she said. “After I finish my degree at Northern Plains, I’m going to find a job in Florida or California.”

  “Looking for paradise?” Gus said.

  “Nope,” she said. “I just want to be warm.”

  “Being warm isn’t everything,” Gus said. “I think northern Montana is pretty neat. I mean, there’s nothing like it anywhere else.”

  “Good! There shouldn’t be anything like it anywhere else! How many hells do we need? Maybe some place in Siberia comes pretty close. No one lives voluntarily in Siberia! People get sent there to be punished for crimes against the state.” She looked at Gus and grinned. “Is that what happened to you, Gus? Are you being punished for crimes against the state?”

  “I don’t have anything against the state,” Gus said.

  “You might before you leave the air force,” Sandy said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just a thought. Sometimes a thought just comes to me.”

  “Like you got a crystal ball?” Gus said.

  “You just seem like the kind of guy that attracts trouble. You don’t look for it, but it finds you anyway.”

  The road they were on suddenly sloped down to a gritty beach. Frozen sand crackled under the Mercury’s tires. The big V-8’s roar rose and fell as the rear wheels searched for traction in the cold sand.

  The lake formed by the Milk River Reservoir stretched out flat and black under a waning gibbous moon. Sandy parked a hundred feet from its edge. She reached across Gus and opened the glove compartment and pulled out a pint of Southern Comfort. She uncapped it and offered it to Gus. Gus swallowed some and gagged.

  “Too sweet,” he said. “It’s like cough syrup.”

  Sandy took the bottle from him and raised it to her lips. She tilted her head back and Gus watched her fine throat work as she swallowed. He leaned toward her but checked the impulse to kiss her throat while she was drinking. Too early for that sort of move.

  She lowered the bottle. “All set?” she said.

  “For what?”

  She laughed and started the car. She gunned the engine and slipped the gear lever into drive.

  “Whoa,” Gus said.

  “Hang on, flyboy,” she said.

  The car waffled, gained traction, then gathered momentum. It sank on its springs as it left the sloped beach and dropped onto the iced-over lake. The car slid sideways a hundred yards as the wildly revving engine suddenly had no load.

  “Jesus Sandy!” Gus yelled above the roar. “The ice could break!”

  She took her foot off the gas pedal and let the car idle in gear so that it moved more or less forward with some yawing as they skated toward the middle of the reservoir.

  “It’s been below zero for three weeks,” she said. “The ice should be thick enough by now to hold us.”

  “You don’t know for sure?” Gus said.

  “That’s why it’s fun,” she said. “If it doesn’t get your blood moving, what’s the point? You might as well stay home playing Chinese checkers in front of the fire.”

  That didn’t sound so bad to Gus.

  “Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you,” she said.

  “Is that what you learned in your philosophy class?” Gus said.

  “My grandpa used to say it. It used to seem dopey to me.”

  “But now it doesn’t?”

  “It seems clearheaded. Worthy of Sartre.”

  Gus didn’t ask who Sartre was.

  “Give the bear leeway,” he said.

  “Is that your philosophy of life?” she said.

  “I don’t have a philosophy of life.”

  “Sure you do. You just haven’t faced up to it yet.”

  “You know what?” he said.

  “What?”

  “You’re scary.”

  Ice crackled under the car. Gus felt the car lean left, as if the ice was softer on that side. The thought of drowning under the ice made him nervous. He imagined sinking to the bottom of the lake, the car slowly filling with icy water. The thought gave him the jitters but he wasn’t about to beg her to go back.

  Sandy seemed calm. Her calmness scared Gus more than the cracking ice did. She said, “Last winter a couple of high school kids drove a pickup out here and the ice opened up. The lake hadn’t been frozen long enough. They weren’t hauled out of the water with grappling hooks until spring. Their bodies were half eaten by pike.”

  “How do you know what’s long enough?” Gus said.

  “Stay cool, Gus. If you’ve lived here all your life, you get to know what’s long enough by instinct.”

  Gus could sit atop a swaying hundred-foot radio mast in a gale without a whisper of fear, but the thought of drowning under the ice, his body feasted on by pike, chilled him to the marrow.

  He picked up the pint of Southern Comfort and took a long pull. When he finished, he gave the bottle to Sandy. Her lips parted, stayed parted a moment, then accepted the bottle. Gus thought: She’s going to kill us but she’s got great lips.

  She put gradual pressure on the accelerator and the car picked up speed in a more or less straight-line direction. When she got the car up to forty miles an hour she hit the brakes and turned the wheel a full revolution and the car went into a wild spin that made her shriek with laughter.

  Centrifugal force crushed Gus against the door. The car rotated like a helicopter blade and she slid toward Gus on the slick plastic seat-covers, raising a static charge that lifted strands of her hair. Gus put his arm around her, his hand found a breast, he tried to kiss her. A blue lip-to-lip spark snapped between them. They both jumped.

  “Forget it,” she said. “That’s not what this is about.”

  “What is it about?” Gus said.

  “Thrills, flyboy.”

  When the car stopped spinning Sandy pressed down on the accelerator again to build up speed. They were headed for the dam’s spillway at thirty miles an hour.

  “I think I’ve been thrilled enough,” Gus said.

  He thought he could hear the ice separating under the tires. His right foot stomped the floorboard as if the car had an extra brake pedal.

  “There’s a hundred foot drop on the other side of the dam,” she said. “We can’t go over it because the dam’s nowhere near full, but we can make a run at it and maybe ride up the berm and get close to the top. Maybe close enough to look down the spillway.”

  “Why?” Gus said.

  “Why not?”

  “Why don’t we just shoot ourselves and get it over with.”

  “Don’t think that hasn’t occurred to me, but where’s the fun in that?”

  She let up on the gas and the car gradually slowed down. When they were a hundred feet from the damn, she hit the gas again and turned the wheel hard and they slid sideways, coming to rest against the upsloped berm. “I guess this will have to do,” she said.

  She turned on the radio and searched the dial for music. She found a station in Canada playing polkas, another one in Wyoming playing Patti Page’s “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?” She made a face and twisted the dial until she found a Denver rock and roll station. She turned up the volume, pulled a hooded fur-lined parka out of the back seat and put it on. They got out of the car and climbed up the ice-crusted berm to the top of the dam. Gus walked to the edge and looked down at the spillway, about a hundred feet of steeply sloped fill.

  “Be careful,” Sandy said.

  Gus laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “You drive two tons of steel across a frozen lake and you want me to be careful?”

  “Touché,” she said.

  Gus walked the length of the dam. At one point he did a handstand, then walked on his hands on the edge of the spillway’s hundred-foot drop.

  “You don’t have to prove anything to me, Gus,” Sand
y said.

  Gus was happy to hear her voice tighten with concern. “Stay cool, Sandy,” he said. “I’m part monkey.”

  They sat down on the berm and finished the bottle of Southern Comfort. Gus tossed the empty down the spillway. He pulled off his hood and tried to kiss her again. Sandy turned her head aside.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “I can’t believe you don’t know,” she said.

  “Know what?”

  “Men can be so damn thick.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m not going to move in on Tracy. I’m her best friend, for God’s sakes.”

  “Tracy? What’s Tracy got to do with it? She thinks I work for Satan. I’m the plutonium kid.”

  “You’ve got a sizeable blind spot, Gus. Tracy likes you a lot, in spite of your drawbacks.”

  “Not after tonight.”

  “Don’t make too much of that,” she said. “Tracy’s got a temper, but she doesn’t hold a grudge.”

  Somehow that didn’t make Gus feel better.

  “What if I said I was more attracted to you than to Tracy?” he said.

  “I’d say you were lying.”

  “Maybe you’d be wrong.”

  “Any whichway your compass needle points, is that it?”

  Buddy Holly was singing “I’m Looking For Someone to Love.”

  Sandy stood up, found her footing, then pulled Gus to his feet.

  “Let’s dance,” she said.

  Hooded in their parkas, they danced to Buddy Holly on top of the Milk River dam under the moon and stars.

  16

  Sandy took Gus to the Beanery, an ancient Chinese restaurant next to the railroad yards. Gus had a skull-cracking headache. They ate noodles in hot sauce, sweet and sour pork, and spring rolls. Sandy ate with chopsticks. Gus twirled his fork through the noodles, watching her eat. She ate as if it were her first meal in days. Like a Chinese rail-splitter, Gus thought. No self-consciousness, no delicacy, no reluctance.

  “What other suicidal pastimes do you have besides driving your father’s new car across frozen lakes?” Gus said. He touched the lump on his head, the source of his headache.

  “Sometimes I fall for losers,” she said.

  “I’m either lucky or screwed or both,” Gus said.