by Isla Morley
“Sweetheart! That’s great!” Too early for teeth to be coming out. This one I have been trying to save with much brushing, but to no avail.
“I talk funny now: Thimon thayth touch your toeth.”
“Come on, let’s go wrap it up and put it under your pillow.” I lead him out of the Vault. Dobbs doesn’t like him coming in here, not since he went through the drawers and found the seed packets. Half of Dobbs’s stock got spread out all over the floor. If that garden ever gets planted, we’re going to have cucumbers come up with petunias. I don’t like Adam to come down, either. Stairs scare the heck out of me. We’ve tried a gate, but the child always figures out how to dismantle the lock.
Adam insists I let go of his hand when we come to the stairs. He walks like a puppet with strings that aren’t always coordinated. He makes it to the upper level without my help and grins again. Another milestone.
I tuck him in and kiss him good night for a second time.
“How much money will the Tooth Fairy bring?” He slides his hand under his pillow, making sure the tooth is situated just right.
Bottle caps are what we use for coins, but for Adam they’re as valuable as Dobbs’s cache of Krugerrands. “We’ll have to see. Now, sleep, or she won’t come at all.”
“One story. Please?”
I sigh. “The turtle?” The old standby.
He nods.
I tell him the world has been taken for a ride into a cave on the back of a giant turtle. Everyone has gone into hibernation, which means to live indoors and get stronger. One day the sun will come out, and all the children will run into the garden of plenty. The end.
“Good night now.” I slip the sleeping mask over his eyes and give him a peck on the cheek.
* * *
I tell Adam stories, and the fourteen-foot ceiling rises up, heaven lowers itself a hundred feet underground, the stars are coaxed from their impossible heights to dust his head. I speak, and the walls fold back so he can roam the prairie. It doesn’t take but a few words for my son to be lying on a raft in the middle of an enormous silver ocean. Facts can’t do that. The gospel truth isn’t going to fuel his sense of wonder. Ever since he first opened his eyes, he finds everything wonderful—shoelaces, spit bubbles, toilet rolls, keyholes. At what point am I supposed to set him straight with words like prison? If I point to his father and say, “Warden,” what good will this do? Before he was born, I spent sleepless nights worrying about what I would teach him about why we were here. I considered a plague, an emperor king calling for the slaughter of infant boys, an alien invasion, another ice age, war, anything that would make our circumstances down here be about choice, not captivity. Dobbs moving below three years ago and subjecting us to long-winded survivalist sermons convinced me that his clichéd nuclear disaster scenario was as good as any. Adam is being brought up to believe he is a treasure guarded by a mother of mulish good cheer and a charitable, if testy, provider. Someday, he will know the truth, but for now my job is to elaborate on the myth, to find a way to fight gum disease and to keep the Tooth Fairy from getting flush on my boy’s teeth.
I fish out some old bottle caps and trade them for Adam’s tooth.
* * *
Dobbs is out of breath when he comes back from his latest foray above. In a state, actually. He is gesturing and jabbering and doesn’t make a lick of sense. Adam is having a nap on his pallet, so I tell Dobbs to hush. I think he’s gone to his study to calm down, but he dashes back upstairs, this time with his shotgun. He grabs my hand and leads me through the door, up eight stairs, past the first blast door, which he now keeps open so we can have access to the corridor for exercise, and to the second blast door. He tucks his long, greasy hair behind his ears and shoves his ear against the door. I am beckoned to do the same.
“You hear anything?”
There’s a yard of solid steel between us, beyond that the L-shaped corridor and a fifty-foot stairwell. What’s there to hear? “Not a thing.”
He is beside himself, so much so that he punches the combination to the keypad right in front of me. It used to be that a key opened this door, but a few years ago he rigged this and the outer door with magnetic locks. Only the inner doors to the upper and lower levels need keys now. He also installed a security camera up above, which is almost always on the blink, but he will still spend ages watching the fuzzy black-and-white picture. I wish he’d unplug the darn thing because Adam’s now taken up the habit, and I constantly have to pull him away for fear that he will ruin his eyes.
Four numbers. I make out the first three: five, one, zero. I hear the lock release. Dobbs leans against the door. It swings wide. He yanks me by the wrist. I don’t have any idea what he intends to do. “But Adam’s—”
“Come on!”
We race around corners and then up the steep flight of stairs, Dobbs taking them two at a time. You’d think a man who spent so much time underground would let himself go. Not Dobbs. He spends hours “training.” He says unless the hunter wants to become the hunted, one has to stay in shape. He tries to use the same argument to get me to “bulk up,” and says I’ll never be fit for life aboveground if I carry on at this rate. And he’s right, because the stairs have done me in.
I notice the walls are green. I’d forgotten that. I haven’t been up this far since he brought me here. He has to drag me the rest of the way. Again, I am told to stick my ear against the door. Just on the other side is Kansas. Birds, tractors, cars, crop dusters—all manner of noisy things. What I hear is concrete.
“They’re out there! They made it look like their van had broken down, but it was parked! It’s a reconnaissance unit.”
My heart starts to race. He’s been pursued? They’ve come for me? I press my ear against the door and strain so hard I think I’m going to burst a blood vessel.
“I told you they’d try this!”
I can’t hear anything. “Who’s out there, Dobbs?” I then wonder what the heck is wrong with me, and start to bang against the door. “Hello, hello, help!”
Dobbs yanks me away from the door. “Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind?” He all but throws me down the stairs. I try scrambling up them again, and he twists my arm so hard I think it’s going to break. “Those are Scalpers out there. You have any idea what they’d do if they got in here? What they’d do to you? To Adam?”
On our way back to the living room, he locks all the inner doors. He goes on and on about the End of the World. I’m surprised Adam doesn’t wake up. There’s probably a fancy term for the way Dobbs has turned out. Crazy’s my word for it, and I consider myself an expert. Moody, jumpy, afraid to go sleep. Half the time he won’t eat what I prepare because he’s afraid I’ll poison him, even though he’s confiscated anything that could be used to that effect. We don’t even have bleach down here anymore, which goes to show how far he’s slipped. Ever since Adam was born he’s been like this. If he’s not running around with his gas mask on or doing bench presses and sit-ups, he’s holed up with his seed catalogs and his preparedness tracts. Adam and I can go for ages without seeing him. Even when he does come out of his study and joins us for a meal, he’ll be off someplace else. He’ll look up with a mouthful of food, totally startled to see us sitting in front of him. He’ll start talking that gibberish again about the Last Days being in effect and how we’re about to be the last known survivors, and that’s usually when I put my foot down and tell him enough’s enough.
When Dobbs is this upset, it can take ages for him to wear himself out. There’s only one thing that will shut him up. So that Adam will not wake up to a raving lunatic, I fetch The Manifesto. I’ve typed it and retyped it so many times I could recite it front to back. I settle Dobbs in his recliner with hot cider, take my seat across from him, and start to read to him.
* * *
By now, I realize the police are not going to break down the door. If they were not figments of his imagination, the Scalpers must have been teenagers wanting to vandalize private property. Still,
Dobbs is agitated by the event. He has me come down to the lower level. Before I do, I check on Adam. He is napping again. He sleeps a lot lately. I hope he is not getting sick. Dobbs says this is another good reason why we’re still here. People are Carriers of the Plague.
Everything on the lower level is much the same, only more cluttered. Instead of going into the Vault, we go the other way around, to the Weapons Room. He unlocks the door, opens up the gun safe, and gets out the .38 revolver and a fistful of ammunition.
“It’s time you learned a thing or two about self-defense.”
We tromp down to the utility tunnel, where he has pushed an old mattress up against the blast door of the silo. With masking tape, he has made an outline of a person.
“Head shots,” he says. “You never want to think you can scare them off by injuring them.”
The gun is cold and heavy, and it makes my hand shake.
Dobbs insists this is no time for being weak. He orders me to raise the gun at the target.
“Just think about how you are trying to protect your home.”
I don’t say, “This is not my home,” because with a three-year-old boy, I have been trying so hard to make it home. If I can make it home, my son will not grow up a refugee.
I raise the gun. I steady my arm for the recoil, like he says.
And then I fire.
A deafening bang. My ears ring. I open my eyes.
“Bull’s-eye!” shouts Dobbs.
Sure enough, there’s a hole where a nose ought to be.
“Do it again!”
As commanded, I fire. Bits of yellow stuffing explode from a bullet hole. I try again. I notice that the trick is to fire between heartbeats. I shoot and shoot, and the mattress gets torn up.
Dobbs reloads. I tell him I’ve had enough, but he won’t have it. All of a sudden he is repositioning the mattress, and I am holding the gun.
The blood drains from his face when he turns to me. We both hear the bullet drop into the chamber.
Every muscle in my body contracts into a supportive position around my forefinger. It is steady with purpose. It is being goaded by a single nerve sending a single message, Fire.
Shoot the bastard.
I hear a cry behind me.
“Mommy.” The racket has woken up Adam.
I don’t turn around. I know he’s at the top of the stairs. I know that with or without my permission, he’s going to use those wobbly legs to come down. “Stay where you are, sweetheart.”
Dobbs’s expression has changed. “Head shots only, like I said.” Smug, is what it is. He doesn’t need to say it; I know. If I shoot him and he dies, Adam and I die down here with him.
I’M STILL NOT sleepy, so I decide to change the landscape again for when Adam wakes up. I rummage around in the supply closet. Tarps, egg cartons, cardboard boxes—fine for craft activities for little boys, but if I want to engage a five-year-old in make-believe, I’m going to need something a little more dramatic. Down in the tunnel is much more stuff. Even if our door wasn’t locked, I still wouldn’t go down there. I hate that place, ever since the day with the gun. Sometimes, I wish I had shot Dobbs, shot him at the very least in the kneecap, made it so that his every waking moment would be a struggle. Adam would see the damage, might understand later when I tell him about the damage inside the man. Instead, I pretend. I pretend Dobbs is keeping us from all evil, and I pretend this isn’t hell.
Behind the camping gear are the rolls of tinfoil that Dobbs is one day going to use to build solar panels. Perfect. I haul them to the kitchen. I turn the table upside down and cover the bottom with sheets of tinfoil. I wind string between the legs. An overturned kitchen chair serves as the helm. One crazy idea leads to another, and soon I have everything covered—the counters, the washstand, the sugar bowl and the coffeepot, the cutting board, which makes the most excellent shield. And still there are thirty rolls of tinfoil left.
I paper over the bookshelves and food shelves, and tape great long sheets across the floor and the walls. For the first time ever, there is no door. For the first time, there is no past on the other side of it, and no future, either. There is only the shiny now, in all its crinkliness. I shape a ship’s wheel, a parrot, and a helmet. I leave the last roll for Adam.
The room looks like a pop-up book. Stories, what would we do without them?
* * *
When the lights come on, the room is a silver wonderland. It isn’t snow on Christmas morning, it isn’t looking out the window and seeing four-foot icicles dangling like wind chimes from the eaves, but it is pretty darn close to spectacular. I can tell by the way Adam gasps that he thinks so, too. The conniption fit Dobbs is going to throw when he gets back from his mission and finds his precious commodity squandered is nothing compared to the sound of Adam’s surprise.
Adam can be such an old man, but today he acts exactly as a five-year-old on a snowy day is supposed to act. He twirls slowly. The wrinkled walls reflect his amazement. Without being told, he steps into his boat, picks up the wheel, and tacks into the wind.
I hand Adam the last of the homemade jerky and tell him that’s what pirates eat for breakfast.
When he tires of sailing, I give him the roll of tinfoil.
“Let’s have a snowball fight.” I scrunch up a few balls to show him how it’s done.
We take up opposite sides of the room, me behind my upturned cot, him in his boat. He raises his shield. Adam has never needed to be taught how to play.
Nor does he have to be shown just how quickly play turns to combat. One minute we are lobbing tinfoil balls at each other, the next they might as well be grenades. The more I cry for mercy, the more savage he becomes. This gentle boy has turned into a tyrant. When I hold my hands up in surrender, he is fueled for war. I see him casting around for something heavier to throw and yell at him to stop. He can’t hear me. It’s as though his mouth has become unstitched; his grin unravels.
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 eac
h 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.