Uncle Anton's Atomic Bomb

by Ian Woollen

  The diplomat reached for a small bell on the side table and rang it. He listened for Lubya’s soft step. He swore and rang the bell again. Nothing. He heard an automobile backfire and pull away. He remembered that he had given Mikel permission to drive Lubya to the doctor in Yalta.

  Groaning, the diplomat rose from his chair. He stumbled upstairs toward his laboratory, where he often puttered till dawn. Colleagues in government procurement allowed the diplomat, at minimal cost, to stock his own laboratory with the latest in scientific equipment. Though understanding little of the tubes and wires and scopes and devices, the diplomat fancied himself an inventor. His estate was littered with failed contraptions.

  As he moved down the dark hallway, he noticed that the laboratory door was ajar. A faint light flickered within. He found Peter asleep, a candle and an abacus beside him. The fingers of the boy’s left hand, still clutching a pencil upright, rested on a sheaf of papers. The diplomat edged closer. He peered down at the papers and saw surprisingly detailed drawings of a rocket with precise equations for its ascent to the moon.

  Chapter 17

  Time Capsules

  Over the next few months, baby Anthony’s condition gradually improved. He did sleep better during stay-overs in his daredevil uncle’s room. Mary wrote Dr. Keller a thank-you note with a brief description of Anthony’s progress. She did not go back to see him.

  As he grew up, sandy-haired Anthony, a lover of marmalade, became a freckled scholar, very serious about fossils. Fred Stark escorted his grandson to highway construction sites, where rock blasts yielded treasure troves of brachiopods and trilobites.

  Rusalka and Elbert Jones bought a house in the neighborhood and also had their first child, Vincent. They all played cards and went to the wading pool in Broad Ripple Park. Rusalka took a lot of pictures.

  Ward and Mary hired an architect to draw up plans for a modernist house with a three-car garage, but unexpectedly, one steamy Saturday afternoon, Ward Sr. keeled over on the ninth hole at the country club. He died shortly after in the hospital.

  Constance asked the children to stay on at the Meridian Street manse. Construction of the new house never commenced. The Wangerts acquired a black standard poodle puppy. Anthony named him ‘Darkie,’ a decision—this still being the ’50s—Ward and Mary didn’t think to question. Toward the end of the decade, two more children appeared, Duncan and Robbie. Three actually, including Rusalka’s star-crossed daughter, Kayla.

  Anthony liked to joke that little Duncan was really named for their favorite stop on the long summer drives to Great Tusk Island, a doughnut shop in Massachusetts that later became a popular chain.

  Anthony Wangert’s earliest Great Tusk Island memory: guiding his toddler brother, Robbie, along the root-studded path to the pond. The grass sections were soft enough to crawl on. They followed the wavering line of sunlight against the shade from the apple trees. Stones warm and smooth enough to lick. Around the next bend came the ferns and the pond smells and the calls from the girl who lived on the island—Geneva —Clyde Salter’s youngest, born a couple years before Duncan. She carried a net for catching tadpoles.

  Later, after his first big-boy solo trip, with the grownups waiting at the diving rock end of the path, Robbie stuttered, “It took a long time, but when I came around the sticky tree, the world changed and I was there.”

  Robbie also loved the star blanket nights. Everyone, big and little, including Geneva and her brother, Johnny, lay together holding hands on a blanket in the yard underneath the star blanket in the sky.

  “Tiny little days,” Robbie called the stars, having just been instructed by Anthony that the difference between “day” and “night” was the same as “light” and “dark.” The panoply resembled the tangles of small, white Christmas bulbs that Mary hung over their cribs. Except for the ones that moved. The shooting stars made everyone release the same sounds: “oooh” and “aaah.”

  Duncan was a dirt-flinger. Not just any dirt. He was fixated on the mossy earth under the veranda, where firewood rotted into a fragrant pulp. Cross-hatchings of light flickered through the lattice. A dip in the ground allowed him to squirm in under the porch stairs. He rolled against giant blocks of cool stone. Many bugs in the moist earth.

  Anthony peered through the lattice to make sure he didn’t eat the bugs. Duncan giggled at the sound of footsteps overheard, especially the dog’s nails scratching. “I am a troll,” he announced to the bugs. Anthony tried unsuccessfully to make Duncan understand that trolls were bad.

  Dawn to dusk, they wore life jackets. Bulky, orange pillows, attached with fraying straps. Anthony slept in his. Some visitors to the Maine islands gravitate toward land-based activities, others toward the water and boats. Anthony immediately gravitated to boats. The yacht club dock was his favorite place. Another of his vivid early memories was the ceremonial scuttling of the commodore’s wooden ketch, the Eve. Anthony joined his parents in one of several boats that steamed out to view the last rites for the old ship. He was very confused by it all. Why was everyone happily clapping at the sound of an explosion as the Eve slowly sank? Boats weren’t supposed to sink.

  He asked his parents, “Was the Eve a time capsule put down into the ocean?” Their laughter only confused him more.

  Ward noticed his furrowed brow. He stroked the boy’s fine, wispy hair and explained, “Anthony, I can see why you might think that, what with everyone so gung-ho about time capsules, firing them off into space or burying them underground—a message in the bottle.”

  Time capsules were all the rage in the 1960s. In an otherwise fractious decade, everyone across the U.S. (and in the Soviet Union) clamored to bury time capsules. Big cities, small towns, state fairs, county fairs.

  Mary and Rusalka organized a time capsule burial for their kids in the Wangert backyard. “Choose items that will matter to the future,” Mary urged.

  The kids blinked and shrugged. They got excited about digging the hole, especially because Vincent loudly pressed his belief that he could crawl through it all the way to China. Little Kayla cut her toe with a shovel. They stuffed several Prince Albert cans with crayons, marshmallows, baseball cards, Grandpa’s sunglasses, Vincent’s drawings of outer-space monsters, bubble gum, seashells.

  What was the point? Rusalka shared Dr. Keller’s opinion that time capsules represented an unconscious desire to project ourselves into distant eons, away from an increasingly soulless present.

  Young Anthony had his own view. After the Prince Albert time capsule was buried in the backyard beside the bomb shelter, Mary launched into the standard speech, billing the time capsule as a goodwill offering of important information.

  Rusalka, pre-empting Vincent eye-rolling, cut in with, “Okay, kiddies, now why did we just do that?”

  “Because of the bomb,” Anthony answered.

  “The bomb?” Mary echoed, trying to hide her alarm with a respectful curiosity.

  Anthony took off his eyeglasses and cleaned them on his shirttail. He said, “Yes, the bomb, you know, the drills. The big bomb that is coming. The bomb that will destroy everything on earth, except for what’s in the time capsules. Then, when the creatures from outer space finally land in their flying saucers, they’ll dig up the time capsules and have something to eat.”

  “Creatures with three eyes!” Vincent yelled.

  “Creatures with six eyes!” Kayla squeaked.

  Robbie and Duncan stared up at the grownups. Rusalka shooed them off to the sandbox. Mary took Anthony into the kitchen and poured him a glass of chocolate milk, even though he’d already had his allotted portion of chocolate milk at lunch. She said, “Anthony, if the bomb came, that’s why we have the shelter.”

  Anthony shook his head. “No, it won’t work. I’ve been reading about it, Mom.”

  He led her to his room and lifted the pillow on his bed. By age nine, Anthony had mastered the art of sending away for stuff, using box-tops and Green Stamps and bottle caps. From under the pillow, he extracted a pamp
hlet titled: An American Boy’s Guide to Nuclear War. Since the start of the family bomb drills in the backyard shelter, Anthony’s scholarly interest had shifted away from fossils.

  Chapter 18

  The Dark Star

  He Who Remains Classified read this account in the Wangert file with amusement. And some trepidation. How the hell did a nine-year-old kid know all this?

  He uncorked a fresh bottle of Scotch. A bad week was getting worse. Castro—what a pain in the ass! Troubled by recent U-2 flyover data from Cuba, his staff was scrambling to mollify the White House. The director’s confident prediction, during the president’s briefing, that the Soviets had no plans for installing missiles in Cuba turned out to be flat out wrong.

  The team obviously needed a wake-up. A nine-year-old kid, for chrissakes! He Who Remains Classified was heavily involved in the public awareness campaign to convince the mainstream media that nuclear war was winnable and survivable. A few days underground until the dust settles. A few cans of spam and peanut butter. It was important that the American people not be frightened. And if little Anthony Wangert could see through it? Damn, back to the drawing board.

  Chapter 19

  Bomb Drills

  The backyard bomb shelter drills took place during Vincent and Kayla’s sleepovers. Vincent couldn’t sleep unless his mother was present, so Rusalka would stay late into the evening, enjoying Ward’s cocktails and playing cards. To inject some humor into this exercise, one of the grownups would randomly holler, “Bombs away!”

  This was the signal to gather up the kids and scurry outside with a flashlight and find their way to the crypt under the walnut trees. Robbie and Duncan and Vincent and Kayla exulted in making loud bomb noises. Anthony sat with his head between his knees, as prescribed at the school drills.

  The younger kids developed a bomb drill game. They dragged old steamer trunks down from the attic to use as coffins. They dressed up in oversize uniforms from their favorite store, the Army Navy Surplus, a bike ride away on 38th Street. Little Kayla wore a Red Cross nurse’s hat. She both tended the victims and played the role of the corpse locked inside the steamer trunk, until she burst out and the other kids ran away screaming, “RADIOACTIVE! RADIOACTIVE!”

  Anthony, often shunned by the younger children, developed his own ploy for attention. He inundated his parents and the neighbors with graphic information on the physical effects of nuclear fallout, the melting of eyeballs, the quick disintegration of internal organs and skin. His studies expanded to death toll projections from the hydrogen bomb.

  Mary finally had to put a stop to his public pronouncements. He had made Kayla and Vincent cry by accusing their mother of being the spy who stole America’s atomic bomb plans.

  Rusalka tittered politely at the accusation. “Oh, aren’t you funny boy!” Rusalka cooed to him from her Formica kitchen table. “I like to adopt you.”

  “That would be fine. I’ll be ready after school tomorrow at three,” Anthony said.

  All the neighborhood children envied Rusalka’s refrigerator full of ice-cream treats and soda pop.

  Not that Mary and Ward didn’t occasionally wonder about Rusalka’s past. The closer their friendship grew, the more questions she avoided. She confided nothing to her own husband and children. Rusalka never sat in front of windows, preferring the safety of corners, and she always wore long-sleeved blouses. Once, a button came loose and Mary glimpsed a number tattooed on Rusalka’s forearm. Midwestern politeness forbade further inquiry.

  A self-proclaimed “shutterbug,” Rusalka was never without her compact Leica. She assembled photo albums as holiday gifts.

  Much later, during the subcommittee investigation, Rusalka’s motivations were closely studied. How much did she know? Especially about He Who Remains Classified. Originally recruited from one of the Soviet Lend-Lease flights by a young James Jesus Angleton, she was planted in Indianapolis at the Norden Bombsight program, in case anyone was stupid enough to try to sell information to a Russian. A straightforward assignment, in contrast to the Wangert job. Rusalka claimed never to have known the primary target—Mary or Ward? She sensed that someone high up in the D.C. chain had an obsession with Mary Wangert. She received bonuses for including photos of Mary in her reports. At what point exactly—the subcommittee investigators endeavored to trace—did Rusalka Jones decide to identify and expose the source of her orders?

  Chapter 20

  So Successfully Disguised to Myself as a Child

  “Dunky!” Robbie called to his brother in the other crib. Actually, the cribs were now beds with elaborate guardrails attached to keep the boys from falling out. The single rail hadn’t worked. Somehow they rolled over it and landed asleep on the floor, with loud clunks that roused Ward and Mary, but not the boys. Often they were left to sleep there till morning, until their pediatrician advised that could be bad for their spines.

  “Mister moon-moon,” Duncan replied, pointing to the window and the bright orb outside in the trees.

  “Here comes a man with a big shotgun! He’s gonna getcha if you start to run!” Robbie sang, echoing their bedtime song.

  “Boom,” Duncan said, “I’m shooting the moon.”

  “Shooting the moon” was an intriguing and confusing phrase they heard their parents use while playing a card game with Rusalka and Elbert.

  They both quietly climbed out of their beds. Duncan watched Robbie empty out his boxes of toy soldiers and arrange them in the moonlight on the floor, cannons and rifles all aimed at the window. Robbie made “pow-pow” firing sounds. They stepped over to the window to see the effects of the barrage.

  “Bald like Gonga,” Duncan observed, of the moon. They knew that Gonga and Meemo were dead. They hadn’t figured out what that really meant.

  “Can the moon shoot back?” Robbie wondered aloud.

  Acting on behalf of the bald moon, Duncan turned, pulled down his pajamas, and peed on Robbie’s army of toy soldiers. Robbie laughed. He thought it was funny, although he knew Duncan was also making a statement about his bath toys.

  Duncan adored his bath toys—rubber boats and whales and alligators. He preferred them to soldiers, or any other kind of toy. It bothered him when grownups insisted that bath toys had to stay in the bathroom, because the grownups foolishly explained, “that way the bath toys will be there when you want them.” He wanted his bath toys all the time.

  “In a flood,” Duncan said, “my toys would save yours.”

  Meemo’s bathroom at the far end of the hall had not been used since she died. Flooding Meemo’s bathroom would probably be viewed as bad, but since she wasn’t around to tell them no, how bad could their flood experiment be? They tiptoed cautiously down the hall, past their parents’ bedroom, past their big brother’s bedroom, dragging their respective gear.

  Ward and Mary and Constance and Anthony awoke to a noise that Anthony thought was the sound of a nuclear attack. It was the plaster ceiling in the dining room collapsing. The cost of repairing the ceiling and the upstairs hallway floor and the guest bedroom adjacent to Meemo’s bathroom came to several thousand dollars. It was only the first of many such expenses incurred by these two boys, who Mary’s parents proclaimed to be far more badly behaved than their son, Robert, had ever been.

  Every decade seems to produce child experts and theories about children. The 1960s produced a crop. For instance: when a mother playing with her child holds up a toy truck and says, “truck,” and the next day the child holds up the toy and says, “truck,” do not blindly assume that the child has learned the word ‘truck.’ Instead, imagine the child has learned that somewhere out in the universe exists a relationship between the object in his hand and the sound coming out of his mouth, and most importantly, that one other person also knows this secret. Language, for the child, is participation in a secret.

  True enough for Robbie and Duncan. Secrets were their lifeblood. A few of theirs from this period: the president does not like to wear hats, and neither do we. Mama and Daddy canno
t see the thoughts inside us. Grandma Loretta smells. Grandpa Fred has an eye in the back of his head. A really big war happened and now everything is better, except with the Commies, and that’s why we have that hole in the backyard, just in case. The dog likes Anthony better than us. But we have to be nice to the dog, because we need her to help us dig to the center of the earth, before we shoot her up into space, like the Commies. Our real friends live on the island in Maine, except for Vincent and Kayla, but they can’t come with us because Vincent gets sick in cars. Something bad happened to the president. It could be because he wasn’t wearing a hat. Anthony pees in his bed. We are just the same as animals, even if Mama says, “No, you are human beings, not animals.”

  The local attitude toward the youngest Wangert boys was very similar to America’s view toward the ’60s: “Where the hell did this come from?” Together with Vincent and Kayla, they played awful tricks on babysitters. They lured the church group’s preschoolers into the bomb shelter for naked hide-and-seek. They broke into one of the vacant white-flight houses near the Stark residence and scrawled swear words on the walls. They could not even be trusted with sidewalk chalk. Robbie and Duncan quickly belied Ward’s belief that parenting fully biological children would be easier.

  “Do you think I should put them in separate bedrooms?” Mary asked Rusalka.

  They sat drinking coffee in Mary’s kitchen, attempting to supervise the ruckus in the basement. The kids hammered, hammered, hammered. They banged on old 2x4s from the doghouse project, and on Ward’s abandoned Soapbox Derby entry. The dog cowered under the table. When the sound turned metallic, Mary yelled down the basement stairs, “NO hammering on the furnace!”