Uncle Anton's Atomic Bomb

by Ian Woollen

  It was a novel request, and at least changed the subject from Geneva. For all his dabbling in astrology, Rob didn’t know where to begin on this. He said, “We haven’t talked much about you being adopted.”

  Kathryn smiled and trotted out one of her stock observations: “Oh, in some ways it has its advantages. For example, as a teenager, I don’t have to go through the typical independence parental revolt thing, because I’m already separate from them in a basic way. I already know they’re just people.”

  Rob nodded, “Can’t say I’m there yet. My mom and dad are still very much Mother and Father.”

  “Independence can be exaggerated, and besides, one thing I like about you Wangerts is that you’re all joined at the hip,” Kathryn said.

  “What exactly do you mean by that?”

  Again, a comment that Kathryn expected to build connection boomeranged. She said, “I’ve already done a little research. No surprise to you, probably, I’m a Virgo.”

  “Maybe I’m not the right person for this job,” Rob said. “You should probably consult a professional.”

  “Why? What? Is it something about my real mother?” Kathryn demanded.

  Rob shrugged. “No, it’s just I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

  Her adoption finesse exploded into an attack: “That’s stupid! What makes you think anything you could say about a stupid birth chart could hurt me? You’re giving yourself way too much credit.”

  Rob cracked his knuckles in frustration. Kathryn started to moan and sway and slap herself.

  Rob had heard about these trapdoor episodes from Duncan and knew the only thing to do was embrace her till she wore herself out. His long arms easily encompassed her. The next few minutes did create a sort of tenderness, at least as far as Rob was concerned. It was exactly what Kathryn had wanted to achieve, but she couldn’t feel it. Too far gone, too raw and exposed, already plotting revenge.

  Chapter 53

  The Blonde from Chicago

  A few nights later, around midnight, Rob heard a soft knock at his door. He was studying for a quiz on Moby Dick. Last semester, Rob barely passed Crowbar Gus’ course on Hemingway. The Melville class was even harder. Crowbar Gus publicly teased Rob about his spelling.

  The knock on the door probably meant that somebody was in a similar fix and wanted to borrow his Cliff’s Notes. He found a grinning female in a nightgown, holding up a guitar and whispering, “Rob, I’ve got to play you a song. Kathryn said you would love it.”

  The blonde girl from Chicago, radiantly stoned, taking the chance of her life. Rob quickly ushered her in and said, “Did anybody see you? They’re just dying to catch somebody and kick them out, to set an example.”

  She whispered, “No, don’t worry. They’re only watching for guys sneaking into the girls’ dorm.”

  She plopped down on his bed and threw back her hair and said, “Get out your instrument.”

  Rob smiled, “Is there any way we could do this another time? I’ve got a quiz in Gus’ class tomorrow.”

  Readjusting her hair from one shoulder to the other, she studied his Dylan posters. “I’ve got the one with the hair all different colors,” she said, and suddenly began to giggle. Rob signaled for her to please be quiet.

  The second knock on the door was sharper. It did not sound like someone wanting Cliff’s Notes. Rob calculated that being caught with a girl in his room was bad enough, but being caught with an illegal copy of Moby Dick Cliff’s Notes would make it worse. He gestured for the girl to take the Cliff’s Notes and hide in his closet. She dropped her guitar. It made a loud bwang.

  “Mister Wangert, please open your door.”

  It was Crowbar Gus. He tapped Rob on the forehead and said, “I thought the Wangert brothers were smarter. Do you want me to walk over to the closet?” he said sternly, “or would you like to ask her to come out?”

  Rob directed the girl to exit the closet. Fortunately, she left the Cliff’s Notes behind. Rob turned to Gus and said bravely, “You should let her go. It’s not her fault. I brought her up here. You don’t need to nab two of us.”

  Gus frowned and nodded, considering Rob’s statement. The father of the girl from Chicago was a major donor. It would be easier if she wasn’t involved.

  “Okay,” he said. She scurried away.

  Rob sat down on the bed and held his head in his hands. Gus said, “I saw the Andover game last weekend. Your goal there at the end was a thing of beauty. I’ll always remember it.”

  “You make it sound as if I’m done here,” Rob said.

  “Your claim to fame is going to be: most improved lacrosse player and first guy kicked out during coeducation,” Gus announced. “I’m glad I don’t have to be the one to tell your dad.”

  Rob stood and circled the room, ripping down his posters. He suddenly understood Kathryn wanting to hit herself.

  “Do you have anything to say for yourself,” Gus asked.

  Rob mumbled, “Remember that extra credit question at the end of last semester’s final exam?”

  Gus shrugged, “You mean the test you didn’t finish?”

  Rob said, “I ran out of time. I would have said that Hemingway’s writing looks and sounds clean and together, but really it’s like white knuckle driving. Underneath that simple, controlled style is a guy desperately trying not to spin right off the road.”

  Gus sucked his pipe and clapped Rob on the shoulder. “Very good, Wangert. Almost good enough to save your ass. But not quite. Don’t worry. Ultimately, being expelled is just an early kind of graduation.”

  “Can I just ask one question?” Rob said and didn’t wait to continue, as the pieces suddenly came together. “You’re not my hall master. Your apartment isn’t even in this dorm. How come you’re the knocking on my door at 1 a.m.?”

  Rob, with nothing to lose, wandered over to Duncan’s room at 4 a.m. He woke his brother and told him what happened. Duncan, never very sharp on waking, did not grasp the situation. He kept saying, “So just tell her to leave.”

  “Wake the fuck up, Duncan, this is serious. Dad will be furious!”

  “He might send you to church camp,” Duncan groaned.

  Between them in the past, trouble had been jointly endured. Rob saw that he would have to suffer this rap alone. “Oh, thanks, fuckwad,” Rob swore, “and thanks to your girlfriend for setting me up.”

  Bitter at the realization that Duncan could not and would not volunteer to climb the scaffold with him, Rob angrily spewed his theory that Kathryn had sent the blonde from Chicago up to his room and ratted him out to Gus so that the ensuing crisis would make it harder for him to break up with Kathryn. If only Rob had presented his theory more evenly, instead of full bore pissed, which put Duncan on the defensive and resulted in a shove and punches.

  Call it passive-aggressive or scared shitless, Rob engineered the next step such that Duncan had to make the phone call to their parents. He waited till Sunday evening, the usual phone-call time. Kathryn got on the line too. She wanted solid confirmation that Duncan had decided to break up with his brother, instead of her.

  Duncan said, “I don’t know how to tell you this. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, because I know Rob and I put you through a lot as kids. We were having a great season together on the lacrosse team. I guess that’s the end of it all. I guess that’s the end of me and Rob being me and Rob.”

  “Duncan, slow down. What are you on about?” Ward asked.

  Kathryn jumped in and explained the situation: the bust and the disciplinary committee meeting scheduled for Monday, with expulsion almost certain. Duncan interrupted, “Then yesterday, I don’t know, maybe the little jerk couldn’t face telling you himself—”

  “Or he wanted you to be more worried about him than angry,” Kathryn said.

  “What?” Mary demanded. “I’m already worried enough! What?”

  “He went AWOL,” Duncan said. “He didn’t show up for practice to say goodbye to the team like he’d promised and I didn’t see hi
m at dinner, so I went up to his room and found a note saying that he’d left for Great Tusk and that nobody should try to stop him or it would only make it worse.”

  “Why hasn’t anyone from the school called me?” Ward demanded.

  “Because I told Gus I’d do it,” Duncan said, “and you’re supposed to talk to the Big E tomorrow.”

  They all listened to each other breathe into the phone line for a full minute. Ward finally said, “Your mother and I are going to need to discuss this, so we’re going to hang up now.”

  Mary and Ward had just finished dinner when the call came. As part of their empty-nest regime, they were sharing dish duty. Ward was clownishly improvising dish-duty tai-chi. Mary had signed them up for a tai-chi class with Rusalka and Ruby. Ward was trying to be a good sport. He wanted to be known as a supportive husband among the psychotherapist-in-training crowd, and Mary told him that tai-chi would help his golf swing.

  “That’ll be the boys,” Ward said, gravitating away to the ring of the hallway phone.

  Now, sitting at their separate locations for almost a half hour, they each improvised bad-news tai-chi, pushing away imaginary gremlins. Mary at the downstairs phone, Ward in the upstairs hallway, each caught in their worried thoughts. Mary crossed and uncrossed her arms as she alternated between maternal alarm and more clinical cogitations on the meaning of Rob’s behavior. The maternal alarm, though raising her heartbeat and causing her palms to sweat, felt oddly okay because, Lord knows, they’d been through this so many times in one way or another, most recently with Rusalka and Ruby during Vincent’s brief disappearance.

  From the perspective of her family systems class in which everything is a reflection on the parents’ marriage, perhaps that was Rob’s intention. By going AWOL, was he unconsciously acting on his empty-nest parents’ behalf, trying to restore them to one of their oldest bonds? Mary decided to take this question to her Monday practicum case conference.

  Upstairs, Ward feared exactly that—more personal fodder for Mary’s classmates. He waved a hand across his domed forehead and closed his eyes tightly. His thoughts went to practical concerns for Rob. How much cash did he have available and how was he going to get to Great Tusk? The nearest bus station was miles away in Pittsfield, and the closest he could get to Great Tusk would be Bangor. On both ends he’d have to do some hitchhiking.

  Ward felt some sympathy for Rob, and also a growing anger. Ward’s anger with Rob increased as he considered his impending phone call with the Big E. Ward hated to confront the demeaning reality that for his father and grandfather such a phone call would simply be an exercise in Wangert power—the boy would be reinstated pronto. Ward had lost that clout.

  “So what do we do?” Ward yelled downstairs. “And don’t give me any of that junior counselor bullshit!”

  In consultation with the Rokeby authorities on Monday, a decision was made to allow Rob his shameful retreat from official expulsion. His transcript read, “withdrew.” Upon reaching Great Tusk, he would be flown back to Indianapolis in his parents’ custody to finish out high school.

  On Monday evening, Mary’s classmates in her family systems course discussed the event as an example of a dispersed sibling group electing an undifferentiated member to return home to care for the elders.

  Chapter 54

  The Dark Star

  He Who Remains Classified, a former Rokeby lacrosse player, heard about Rob’s expulsion from several lacrosse alumni who were furious that the Big E would kick out a star player and deny Rokeby the chance to win its first championship in forty years.

  Their angry calls came in on Tuesday morning. The disgruntled alumni appealed to their prominent teammate to contact the school’s trustees and get the kid back on the playing field. He Who Remains Classified listened to their concerns and promised to look into it. He did not mention his personal connection to the player in question.

  Previously, Rob and Duncan’s lacrosse prowess tickled the heck out of He Who Remains Classified. Their victories allowed him to feel some ongoing admiration and pride in the clan. He would have happily interceded on Rob’s behalf and later used it to score points with Mary, after she divorced Ward. But honestly, who cared about points with her now? She was deader than Dillinger to him. Rob’s expulsion from Rokeby, probably well deserved, was yet more confirmation of the family flaws.

  He Who Remains Classified wallowed in his bitterness about Mary. It produced a clarifying potency. To whatever extent his youthful feelings for her helped maintain a modicum of compassion toward humanity in general, that shit was over. His bitterness trusted no one. He became relentlessly effective at work.

  In the mid-1970s, every rookie congressman in Washington, D.C. seemed to think it was open season on the agency. Bungled missions and bad actors were exposed weekly on talk shows and in the headlines. He Who Remains Classified resolved to end the distractions. Everyone—from his office staff to congressional aides to station chiefs in Chile and Greece to informers and turncoats around the world—felt the renewed wrath of The Vulture.

  Chapter 55

  Rob’s Journey

  The clinical theories did not play out as expected. The effect of Rob’s boneheaded move on his brothers was that they became increasingly solicitous of their parents. Duncan and Anthony called home more frequently, trying to soften the blow to the family’s reputation. Anthony invited his parents to reunion week at Yale. “Don’t worry,” he said, “at the tenth and fifteenth everyone is still trying to impress. By the twenty-fifth, life has pretty much beaten the shit out of everybody, so people are just people again.”

  Anthony had been inching closer to officially ‘coming out’—with Trip’s encouragement—but Rob’s disgrace made that impossible for now. Duncan felt compelled to announce that he would be the one returning home to attend Indiana University in the fall with Kathryn, and also that he wanted to work part-time for Wangert Public Relations. He shared ideas about using computers for a client database.

  Meanwhile, no word from Rob on the island, or from Clyde, who was supposed to alert Ward to Rob’s arrival.

  Instead, a series of postcards began to appear at the Wangert residence in Indianapolis. Two words in Rob’s poor handwriting, “getting closer.” They were postmarked from little towns in Massachusetts and Vermont. Some of the towns were so little that they were not on the roadmaps in the glove compartment of Mary’s car.

  It was Kayla who finally figured out the mystery, during a commiseration gathering at Rusalka and Ruby’s house. Staring at a thin, squiggly line in an atlas, Kayla said, “Robbie is on the Appalachian Trail. He got on right at the school so the cops wouldn’t pick him up on the roads. He’s hiking it all the way to Maine.”

  It would be tempting to describe Rob’s experience on the Appalachian Trail as a visionary quest. Actually, he was in a traumatic state and didn’t notice much. He could have been hiking in a tunnel. His shock allowed him to trudge fifteen hours a day through all weather and temperatures. His down jacket and vest doubled as a sleeping bag, with the vest wrapped around his legs while he slept briefly in the shelters. Blisters be damned. He subsisted on bare rations, peanut butter, raisins, and chocolate bars, purchased in the trailside towns where he stopped to mail the postcards. He didn’t talk with anyone. In Vermont, attempting to stabilize his deteriorating mental condition, he began to sing, or rather, grunt songs from church choir. He dredged up the Frost lyrics from “Choose Something Like a Star,” not as any kind of inspiration, just something to repeat, over and over, adding footstep to footstep.

  He acquired a walking stick and found a canteen and began to notice the arriving spring birds. White Mountain vistas and streams beckoned, as did a lone, high-altitude, spiraling hawk that seemed to be urging him on. Gradually, his thoughts shifted to Great Tusk. It would be mud season. No driving around in mud season. Barely warm enough midday to sit out on the porch. That’s what he was aiming for, the green Adirondack chair on the porch. It would tell him what to do next. Som
ewhere along the trail in the White Mountains he realized that a decision had been made. Twenty miles back, fifty miles back maybe, he wasn’t consciously aware of having debated or mulled over a choice to live year round on Great Tusk. The decision was simply presented to him as irrevocable—with no specific details or plan—Geneva or no Geneva. He was going native.

  The decision brought flashes of exhilaration. Rob produced the first and only poem he ever wrote, squeezing it onto a postcard that he sent to Anthony at the next trailside town to show he did have an opinion:

  we grew up with Vietnam

  it lingered in the newspapers

  I glanced at before going out to play

  in the cool spring evening

  that did not reek of destruction

  Vietnam is like a mother’s caress

  or stickball in the street

  all gone

  except a futile itch of guilt

  we grew up stepping on broken glass

  Rob exited the Appalachian Trail in Bethel, Maine. He hesitated at the trailhead, ran his dirty fingers through his matted hair. He thought about continuing on to Mount Katahdin, but Route 2 offered him a relatively direct shot over to the coast, and with some hitchhiking luck he might make the late boat to Great Tusk.

  His luck came in the form of a bread truck making deliveries all the way to Blue Hill. It was driven by a curly bearded hippie who stopped just long enough for Rob to jump aboard. The step-van smelled of a recently smoked joint. The driver nodded and gunned the engine and pulled back onto the road, as if Rob were a scheduled pickup, as if this were already planned.

  Feeling awkward about his first human conversation in weeks, not to mention his first contact with a real-life hippie, Rob said nothing. The driver turned on some music. He nodded to a red-tailed hawk swooping low over a marsh. He honked and waved at a passing school bus. Pointing to Rob’s dusty, torn varsity sweatshirt, which read ‘Rokeby Lacrosse,’ he said, “Believe it or not, I played for Exeter.”