by Isla Morley
I stand up to shout at him because this has gone far enough, but the projectile has already left his hand. Suddenly, he isn’t grinning, and I am not quite standing upright anymore, and what has clipped the side of my head has come crashing to the floor.
It’s surprise more than pain that makes me cry out, but gauging from Adam’s look of alarm, I might as well have been leveled with a wrecking ball.
“What did you do that for?!”
He is sorry. I can tell by the way he avoids looking at me. He stares at the floor, his shoulders bunched up around his ears.
I right my cot and sit down.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Yes, you did, I keep from saying. I want to tell him it’s in all of us to harm someone else, even those we love. We deceive them or betray them or we throw things at them. How else are we to know they bruise or bleed? How else are we to know the relief of being forgiven?
“Come here,” I say.
It takes some convincing before he comes over. I pull him into my lap and bury my nose in his white-blond hair. After I delivered him, I lay him on my chest and searched him for a resemblance between us. Rather than finding it in the shape of his forehead or in the setting of his nose, I found it in his smell. We smelled the same, him and me. At times, it has been only his smell that has kept me from doubting my own existence.
“You’re warm.” I take off his sweater, and his hair stands straight up with static. I start laughing.
He musses my hair. “You look funny, too.”
I tickle him, and the game is afoot once again.
* * *
“Anybody home?” Dobbs calls when he opens the door.
Adam jumps up. He rushes up to greet him. If Dobbs was spiteful and mean to Adam, I might be more inclined to put aside fable for fact, but as it is, Dobbs is mostly patient. With me, he sometimes still goes on his end-of-the-world tangents, although less than he used to, but with Adam, he could almost pass for regular. If turning my boy against him might lead to anything other than disaster, I would start and end each story with a wolf dressed up in Dobbs’s clothing.
Dobbs has another treat for Adam. This one is too big for Adam to carry. Dobbs puts a vacuum cleaner on the floor, right in the middle of our stage. He hands me the duffel bag and a dead rabbit, which will later end up curing in the stairwell. The pneumatic ram with all the spigots serves as a rack for his coat.
He bends beside Adam, who is running his hands across the canister and the hose.
“What’s it do?”
“Well, it used to suck up dirt, but it doesn’t work anymore. I thought we could take it apart, see if you can put it back together again.” Dobbs is clearheaded today. This is not always the case when he comes back from a “mission.” He can be foul-tempered about how the world’s gone to pot, or landmine-quiet. Only once in a while do we see anything of the deranged person he was a couple of years ago, although we still have to listen to his theory of people being Scalpers.
Adam is most pleased with his gift. I wonder why it can never just be a toy car.
“Hey, what’s this?” Dobbs points at Adam’s getup—my best attempt at chaps and a rather lopsided fringed vest.
“It’s my costume. I’m Henry Pate.”
Dobbs, giving me a once-over, notices the black pants, the button-up shirt, a poor imitation of a bow tie. I’ve scraped my hair into a ponytail and tucked it into the back of my collar. Adam’s assured me I look like a gentleman. “And who might you be?”
“She’s the narrator, silly. We’re doing The History of Eudora.”
Slapping the heel of his hand against his forehead, Dobbs says, “Ah, yes. Your mother’s masterpiece.”
I am determined that Adam know where his people come from, that he have an ancestral home tucked at the confluence of the Kaw and Wakarusa Rivers, and that he feel part of some greater arc of history. To that end, I have my play. Each year, I add to it a little more. We are now up to the start of the Civil War. Being five and sharp as a tack, Adam gets more lines and more parts.
“Do you want to see it?” Instead of waiting for an answer, Adam steers Dobbs to a chair. “You need a ticket.” He races to the kitchen table to the stack of tickets he made from old cereal boxes. He slips Dobbs one, then stands ceremoniously with his hand out to collect it. With big solemn eyes, a broad mouth quick to smile, and stick-straight-up blond hair, he’s a good-looking little guy, nothing at all like his father. Except for the splatter of freckles on his nose, he’s nothing of me, either.
“Maybe we should do this another time, Adam.” I can read Dobbs better than a script. Dobbs doesn’t like me teaching Adam American history. He says America is a Fallen Empire. He says what matters is the future.
“Mommy, please.” He runs behind the partition, then gives me the signal to begin. I look at him, and he gives me puppy eyes.
I pick up the script, clear my throat, and begin reading, but he stops me.
“Use your narrator voice.”
In a deep voice, I take us back to the time when seven hundred acres of Shawnee land is sold to three German settlers by Chief Paschal Fish. Adam comes out from behind his partition so the one-member audience can get a load of his homemade feather headdress. “If you name the town after my daughter, Eudora,” Adam recites, “no misfortune will come to you.” His somber expression splits into a grin, so proud to have delivered the line perfectly.
In Adam’s mind, Chief Paschal Fish is right up there with God. I’ve told him that Eudora, smack-dab in the middle of Tornado Alley where great swaths of land are ripped through to the bone and entire towns tossed into the air, has been spared calamity, and in his mind, this is the chief’s doing. One of the things you cannot teach someone with extremely limited experience is coincidence. Especially not when you’re always going on about Destiny.
I narrate the part where Quantrill and his murderous ruffians raid the city of Lawrence, trying not to pay any mind to Dobbs’s chuffing. Saddled on his broom, Adam gallops around the concrete pillar as the avenging party. He chases the marauding guerrillas into the Sni Hills, in reality a place of high bluffs and deep ravines, but down here the place behind the shower curtain with paper trees pinned to it. We are about to come to the part in the Battle of Black Jack, where John Brown defeats Henry Pate in retaliation for burning down Lawrence, when Dobbs stands up. It sounds like applause, but it looks like a man smacking two old gloves together to rid them of dirt.
“But we’re not done yet.”
He rubs Adam’s head. “That’s enough for today, Sport.”
Adam is about to make another protest, but Dobbs cuts him off. “If you spent half as much time reading what I give you as you do making up these silly plays, you’d know a lot more about the world.” Adam’s smile slips. No matter how amiable Dobbs is with Adam, he has a knack for making Adam feel like he just doesn’t measure up. Reading is one of those ways. Even though I’ve explained a hundred times that not all children are quick to pick up on letters, Dobbs is worried that Adam is slow. Nothing could be further from the truth. Give the child a pile of junk, and he’ll build you the most wonderful machine. At the moment, Adam is constructing himself a companion with an alarm-clock head, limbs made from coils, and hands with spoon fingers. Tell me that’s not genius. Adam can also recite any story I’ve ever read to him almost word for word.
To get into Dobbs’s good graces again, Adam asks Dobbs to help him take apart the vacuum cleaner. While they are busy, Adam prods for information about Dobbs’s venture Above. Dobbs is quick to tell him about bad guys and vicious animals and terrible storms. He knows full well too much disaster nonsense will give Adam bad dreams, but it doesn’t stop him. If I tell Dobbs I don’t like his filling Adam’s head with stories—those kinds of stories, at any rate—he’ll only say, what makes me think my stories are better than his. Instead of putting a stop to it, I go about opening cans, making as much of a protest as I can with a spoon and a tin plate.
What A
dam believes about the outside world, the land we call Above, is something right out of a science-fiction novel. The death of masses of people is how the story starts, followed by the prolonged and agonizing death of the planet as a result of radiation. Severe climate change and barbarism sum up Dobbs’s contribution. So Adam will not feel like the last kid on earth, my contribution to the oral history has been to include survivors his own age hidden in caves and sewers throughout the land, and to reiterate that the Disaster will soon have run its course. On one point Dobbs and I are in perfect agreement—that the ending be happy. Adam, in other words, will one day run free.
“Want to take this downstairs and work on it in my office?” Dobbs asks Adam.
“Yes!” Adam’s out the door in a flash. He loves being invited into the Inner Sanctum. He’s fascinated most by the animals in the specimen jars, even though what Dobbs will want to show him are the reams of preparedness tracts. Dobbs acts more like a recruiter than a father.
* * *
When I draw the covers over Adam, he is so tired he can barely keep his eyes open. Nevertheless, he wants a story. I offer to read, but he shakes his head.
“How about The Hobbit?”
“That’s way too long, Adam.”
“Just tell the part about the treasure.”
It’s such a relief that after Dobbs’s gloom and doom Adam wants magic. “The Arkenstone is known as the Heart of the Mountain,” I begin. I tell him about its luminescence, how it has a thousand crystal surfaces sharp enough to slice off a finger. It has its own light, and everywhere it shines, things are made new and beautiful. “And it’s way down deep in the mountain where nobody can see to it.”
“Like me,” he says.
“Yes, like you.”
Doomsday is no match for such purity, such radiance.
“WHEN CAN I go Above?”
Adam is almost seven. This is not the first time he’s asked the question; it’s the first time he’s asked it with the calendar in his hand. He hands me a pen.
“It’s not something we can schedule, Adam. Mister will tell us when it’s safe.” I pretend to keep reading.
“Can’t he just open the door and let me see a little of it?”
I set the book aside. “You know what? I think you are old enough now to become a Boy Scout.” I describe what I remember from Theo’s Cub Scout days.
Adam interrupts. “You’ve told me that before. It’s where you learn how to tie knots and fix a broken leg with a stick.”
“Yes, that’s right, and a lot more than that. Do you know why?”
“So they can get badges.”
I laugh. “They do earn badges, but they learn this stuff so they can take care of themselves in the outdoors, by themselves if they have to. Be prepared, is the motto of a Boy Scout.”
He sees where this is going. “If I can take care of myself, will Mister let me go outside?”
“There are a lot of badges you’ll have to earn.”
“Can I start now?” He starts bouncing on the balls of his feet.
I get up from my chair and walk to the kitchen. “Well, shall we start with teaching you how to cook?”
“I already know how to cook. I can make toast.”
“I was thinking about something more substantial. When you live Above, you’ll need food to give you plenty of energy, for building a camp, say.”
Sometimes I wish I never went along with the end-of-the-world story so I could describe what it is really like outside at this time of year. Spring is when the trees are leafing out and the fields are turning purple with larkspur. It’s that time of year when the mercury barely rises and children go rushing outside in short sleeves. You can hear their mothers calling about how they are going to catch their deaths, mothers who have forgotten how breaking the hard ground of winter is done in the hearts of children first. I can’t tell Adam about spring without telling him about children, so I tell him instead about rivers.
There are rivers that run faster than ocean waves and some that run granddaddy-slow. “Some of them are so wide, you can’t swim across them, especially after the rains, but my favorite are the ones that have stepping-stones across them. Spending a day at the river is like being lost in time.”
“I don’t want to be lost.”
Sometimes, this is how it goes when I describe the outside world. It starts off sounding magical and ends up sounding scary.
I lift his chin. “You’ll never be lost. When we go Above, I’ll be right by your side. Now, how about we get back to cooking?”
I get out a box of kitchen gadgets I seldom use—the egg poacher, though we haven’t had an egg in months and even then, it was something a pigeon might have laid; a cheese grater; a nesting set of measuring cups. I tell him he can take anything from the shelves he wishes, and I part the blue gingham curtain to show him the pots and bowls. “Doesn’t matter what you fix. Get creative, use your imagination.”
My son takes it all in with a seriousness that crushes my heart.
“When you have cooked three meals for us, you will earn your first badge.”
He doesn’t say anything, and for a horrible moment I think this is the stupidest idea I’ve ever come up with. As if fake Boy Scout badges are going to make him stop asking to be let outside.
But he asks, “Do we still have any of those chocolate sprinkles?”
I almost choke on my relief. “Well, now, you’re the chef. You dig through that stuff and see what you find.”
I retreat to the living room and rummage around for fabric scraps to start making badges, while Adam unpacks everything in the kitchen. By the time I have finished making the first badge, an embroidered circle of T-shirt material with a pot drawn on it, Adam’s project seems to have stalled. “You done?”
“It doesn’t look right.” His face is streaked with flour and his fingers are gummed together with some sort of paste.
Beside the mixing bowl are jars and cans and packets and every conceivable mixing utensil. In the bowl is thick sticky dough the color of red dirt. It is lumpy with raisins and the last of the peanuts and other unidentifiable fragments.
“I’m not going to earn my badge, am I?” He is on the brink of tears.
“Oh, I wouldn’t give up that easily if I were you.” I scoop some of the mixture on my finger and pop it into my mouth. Way too much Cup-a-Soup, but not entirely inedible. “How about we add some sugar to it and see if these don’t turn out to be cowboy cookies.”
Anything with the word cowboy commands Adam’s attention.
Encouraged, he dumps spoonfuls of sugar into the bowl. I find a cookie cutter, and he tips out the batch onto the table, flattens it, and presses out star shapes. After we’ve browned them on the skillet, we sit down. Neither of us speaks. The mealtime has the feel of a high-stakes card game. Adam studies my face. I chew poker-faced. Too much praise too soon and he’ll know right away I’m bluffing.
He takes a bite, makes his own assessment—several quick blinks, a frown, and a hasty swallow.
When I take another bite, he shows his surprise. “You like it, Mommy?”
If it kills me, I’ll eat every last one of these cookies. “Like it? I think you’re going to put me out of a job soon.”
He grins, then comes around to give me a hug. “Maybe I can earn all my badges before my birthday.”
And just like that, I know scouting isn’t going to be any help to me at all.
* * *
“They won’t hurt him one bit.” Dobbs is suggesting a blue pill because something has set Adam off on one of his marathon crying jags. “It’ll just put him to sleep, is all.” This from the man who used to rant about drug companies.
“It’s from being cooped up in this room,” I whisper fiercely. Ever since the incident with the so-called Intruders, Dobbs limits our access to just the upper level when he leaves on his missions. Only when he’s around to supervise can Adam have the run of the place. I push the bottle of pills back across the table. “No.”
“They’re not poison, for pity’s sake. Here.” Nothing makes Dobbs happier than when he can prove me wrong, especially when it comes to Adam.
He slugs down a pill. “Watch. In a few minutes I’m going to have a really decent nap. You two want to have a party, be my guest. Raise the roof, if you want.”
Sure enough, Dobbs is snoring before I finish doing the dishes.
Adam stops crying and goes over to look at Dobbs. He doesn’t get to see such a spectacle because Dobbs does his sleeping in his study with the door locked. Adam decides to conduct a test. He lets off a piercing shriek three inches from the man’s ear.
I find this amusing until I wake up from a deep sleep. I grab Adam’s arm and tell him to hush, to let Dobbs be. I run out of the room and up the short staircase, past the first blast door to the second one. The keypad.
“What are you doing, Mommy?”
I remember the first three numbers of the code. Five, one, zero. One more. One, I try. Nothing.
“You mustn’t do that, Mommy!”
“Go get your sweater, and grab Teddy.” I pound five, one, zero, and then two. Nothing.
Adam yanks on my arm to make me stop. “No, Mommy! Don’t!”
“Adam! This is important. Let go of me.” Five, one, zero . . . three.
“You’re going to set off the bomb!”
“Be quiet.” And then I turned to him. I’ve never seen him so afraid. “What?”
Adam starts to rock back and forth on his heels. He shakes his head wildly.
I take him by the shoulders to explain. “Adam, there is no bomb down here.”
He glares at me. “Uh-huh. The Atlas bomb. It’s for Russia, but you tried to open the door, and now it’s going to go off in here!” He twists out of my reach and runs along the passage and back down the stairs.