by Lee Smith
Another virtue right up there with order was being prepared. “Jesus will look after you, honey,” cousin Glenda often said, “but He expects you to do what you can.” Therefore the family was prepared for any possible crisis, with a first-aid kit, emergency flares, a snakebite kit, a shotgun, and—wonder of wonders—a Bomb Shelter!
Rayette didn’t appear to care too much about the Bomb Shelter one way or the other—I guess she was used to it—but I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen, the coolest place I’d ever been. You went down into the Bomb Shelter through a trap door in the garage. This was an orange metal door with three black X’s on it. It was impervious to radiation. You had to go down a dozen steep steps into the cavelike Bomb Shelter itself, which was equipped with all the necessities for nuclear war, including:
A Geiger counter with its $98.50 price tag still attached
A two-way portable radio
A pick and shovel
A chemical toilet (Rayette explained that you would put a blanket over yourself, for privacy, when you used it.)
Mattresses and blankets
A Sterno stove
A fire extinguisher
Paper products
Canned water
Canned food and drinks
It was always cold down there, and it was lit by a faint blue light that buzzed with a thrillingly extraterrestrial sound. I loved to sit in the Bomb Shelter. I also loved to survey the backyard from the kitchen window while I washed dishes, thinking, The Bomb Shelter is right out there! Nobody knows it, nobody can possibly tell, nobody knows it but us! I spent as much time in the Bomb Shelter as I could get away with, without attracting too much attention to myself, whenever we weren’t at school or doing chores or praying or going to church.
We went to church a lot. We went to church every time they cracked the door; but even at home, we’d pray at the drop of a hat. We prayed over everything: that I would make an A on my math test, that the lady up the street would see the light (what light?), that Mama would get well soon and Daddy would see the error of his ways and Jesus would forgive him, that the family’s old station wagon would make it through the winter without a new clutch, that the upcoming Tri-Hi-Y bake sale would be a big success and Leonard Pipkin would get a new leg. Cousin Glenda would throw one hand up, bow her head, and set into praying whenever she felt like it, and then we’d all have to bow our heads and pray, too. Used to the sedate and abstract Book of Common Prayer, I was as startled by the personal nature of these prayers as by their frequency.
The church itself was even more unnerving. It was very plain, a cinder-block building that looked as if it might have once been a grocery store. There was nothing about it now to suggest that it was a church except for a hand-painted sign over the front door that read “Bible Church of God, All Enter In.” I knew that “enter in” was redundant, like “Ford car,” yet I found it mysteriously compelling, an invitation to a foreign country. And I was fascinated by what went on inside: clapping, singing, crying, hugging, and shouting amen—I had never seen anything like it at St. Michael’s, that’s for sure. “Bible” was the key to everything. “If it’s not Bible, we don’t believe in it, and we don’t do it,” cousin Glenda explained.
“But the Bible was written a long time ago,” I pointed out. “Before airplanes or electricity or anything. How do you know Jesus wants you to have electricity?” I asked. “How do you know He wants you to have a phone? How do you know He doesn’t like the Everly Brothers? How do you know He doesn’t like eye makeup? There wasn’t any makeup back in the Bible days, so—”
“Jennifer, Jennifer,” cousin Glenda said, hugging me, “get a grip.”
I tried to. I had given up spying entirely, except for one quick peep into Rayette’s bedroom window to ascertain that, yes, she really did have breasts as big as softballs, obscured by the homemade shirtwaist dresses and shapeless blocky sweaters she always wore. I did not have the heart to spy on cousin Glenda and Raymond, however. The prospect of either one of them actually taking off their clothes was too awful to contemplate, much less their doing it. (What was it? I still didn’t know.) But I was sure they had done it only once, whatever it was, in order to conceive Rayette and populate the earth.
Rayette (big as a woman, dumb as a post) soon became my personal servant and bodyguard. She carried my books to school, ironed my clothes, and once even hemmed a skirt for me. Cousin Glenda shook her head at this, smiling. “That’s exactly how I was with your mama,” she said. “Just exactly. I was three years younger than Billie, and if Billie said ‘Jump!’ I said ‘How far?’ I used to follow her around everyplace, but if I got on her nerves she never let on, at least she never let on to me.”
“What was Mama like, as a little girl?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine this.
“An angel,” my tough cousin Glenda answered immediately. “Oh, Jennifer, she was an angel.”
I was no angel, but I was trying—trying not to spy, trying to get a grip, trying to be good. Now that I realized how good it was possible to be, I realized how bad I’d always been; and I got the idea that it was all my fault somehow, everything that had happened, and that if I could just be good enough, Mama and Daddy might get back together. So I was almost killing myself being as good as I could possibly be, which did not come naturally to me; but before long, sure enough, it worked.
One Sunday, Daddy reported that he had good news, that Mama was improving, and that we might all take a vacation together when she got out of the hospital. He did not mention Carroll Byrd. I was elated. I knew I had done this by being so good. I doubled my efforts, making three dozen brownies to sell at the Tri-Hi-Y bake sale to buy Leonard Pipkin that new leg.
There was a boy in the Tri-Hi-Y club who liked me, and I sort of knew it, though we had not exchanged two words. His name was Harlan Boyd. Everybody knew who he was because he was a big deal, the star football player. A jock. His neck was as thick as his head, which made his head and his neck together look like one single unit, like a fencepost topped off by his fuzzy brown flat-top. He had square jock shoulders and wore his red satin letter jacket all the time, with blue jeans. (Nobody cool wore blue jeans yet, this was before they got popular. Then, in Repass, blue jeans meant you were poor.) Harlan Boyd was in Rayette’s grade, though he was in my math class. He was big for his age, and came from a “troubled home.” He lived someplace out in the swamp with his uncle, under conditions too awful to imagine, yet he could catch a football like a dream and run like hell. These skills would be his ticket out of there, but he didn’t know it yet, had not thought that far ahead. In fact, he probably hadn’t thought much about anything yet, at age fifteen, that day at the bake sale.
The sale was held downtown in front of the courthouse, in the center of Repass, one Saturday in early December. Cousin Glenda, the Tri-Hi-Y sponsor, brought two card tables from home in the station wagon. Rayette rode over with her, and they were just getting everything set up when I arrived. Though I was trying my dead-level best to be good, I did not really like to be identified with cousin Glenda in public situations and so had turned down her offer of a ride and walked to the square by myself, bearing my platter of brownies. I hung back behind the giant live-oak tree, while cousin Glenda, wearing the world’s largest car coat, bossed everybody around.
“Susan, put that right there!” she barked. “Rayette, pull the tablecloth down! Peter, go get some change from the Rexall!” Cousin Glenda was a world-class expert on bake sales, as on everything. Rayette, too innocent to know she ought to be embarrassed, did everything her mother told her, smiling placidly. (Oh, she was the angel, not me; I could never be that good!) I stayed hidden where I was until everything had been set up to cousin Glenda’s satisfaction.
“All right now, boys and girls,” she announced in a voice like a trumpet, raising her arm, “let us join hands and pray together, and ask our Heavenly Father to bless this bake sale and all this good food and all the proceeds therefrom, and may Leonard Pipkin get his new l
eg a.s.a.p., amen.”
Looking sheepish, all the kids dropped one another’s hands like hot potatoes while cousin Glenda stomped off to her station wagon for a cigarette (Jesus did not mind for adults to smoke), and I sallied forth with my brownies.
I’m still not sure how it happened. All I know is that one minute I was holding the brownies out in front of me like a sacrificial offering, and the next minute they were flying through the air like miniature UFOs and I was pitching forward, forward, forward in horrible slow motion forever, until I slammed into the wide solid chest of Harlan Boyd, propelling him backward, overturning one of the card tables and sending pound cakes and homemade bread and fudge everywhere. It was awful. It was the most awful and embarrassing thing I had done in my life up to that point, and it ended at last with me and Harlan Boyd splayed out on the ground against the card table, my cheek smashed into the letters on his football jacket, RR for Repass Rattlers. The letters felt scratchy and wonderful against my cheek. I could hear my own heart beating in my ears, so loud I thought briefly I might be having a heart attack.
“Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer!” squealed Rayette. “Are you okay?”
Then cousin Glenda was there, too, pulling us up, brushing us off, getting everything to rights. I wanted to die, of course. I stood to the side with Rayette cooing over me, and would not even look at Harlan Boyd, who kept trying to say something to me. I had gotten pink icing on my blouse and mud on my crinoline, which hung way down below my skirt so everyone could see. Cousin Glenda drove me home to change. I told her I’d walk right back, though I had no intention of going back, ever, or of ever speaking to any of those kids again, especially not to Harlan Boyd, whose athletic letters had made a red mark like a rope burn on my cheek.
After I showered I kept touching it, looking at my face in the mirror. I put on some clean slacks and a sweater, but I couldn’t find it in me to start back over to the bake sale. Instead I wandered around the still, sunny house. It was the first time I had been there alone, and it put me in mind of home, where I had often been the only child and had had the run of the house, and had done whatever I wanted. I started feeling spacy, detached from myself, between things.
The doorbell rang.
I opened it to find Harlan, letter jacket and all, there on the stoop. Though red-faced, he spoke up bravely: “I just wanted to see how you was,” he said.
“I’m okay,” I told him. “Come on in.” I grabbed his sleeve and pulled him inside the house quickly, and shut the door. Now that I had him inside, however, I had no idea what to do with him. “My name is Jenny,” I said stupidly.
“I know that,” Harlan said. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
“No,” I said. “I’m just staying with my cousins until my parents get out of the hospital. They were in a train wreck,” I added.
“Aw, shoot,” Harlan said. “That’s awful. Are they going to be okay?”
“Nobody knows,” I said dramatically, mysteriously. “Come here, I want to show you something.”
I grabbed his hand, which felt as big as a ham, and led him down the hall and through the kitchen and into the empty garage, over to the orange XXX door. We paused before it. I was breathing hard.
“Do you know what this is?” I asked him.
“You sure are pretty,” Harlan said loudly. This announcement appeared to surprise him as much as it surprised me. He immediately turned fiery red and ducked his head and started stamping his feet in their big uncool work boots.
Hick, I thought. Swamp boy. “Come on,” I said, and pulled the door up and pushed him ahead of me, down the stairs. “This is the Bomb Shelter,” I said.
“No kidding,” Harlan said. “Well, I’ll be darned.”
I was thrilled to see the entwined rattlesnakes on the back of his jacket disappearing into the gloom. I shut the door behind myself and followed, showing him everything: the Geiger counter, the supplies, etc., though I did not go into any details about the chemical toilet.
“Let’s sit here.” I patted the pile of mattresses. “Let me get you something to drink.” I opened a can of orange juice for him and one for myself and clinked mine against his in a toast. “Cheers!” I said. I knew my sophistication was knocking him out. He just kept grinning at me, forgetting to drink his juice, while I downed mine in one sophisticated gulp and broke open a package of Fig Newtons.
“Care for a cookie?” I said, knowing that cousin Glenda would kill me. “A little refreshment?” There in the humming blue light of the Bomb Shelter, I turned into the perfect hostess, exactly as prescribed in Teen magazine. (“When he comes to your home, have refreshments ready.”)
Harlan Boyd set his juice can down carefully on the Sterno stove. “C’mere,” he said.
I didn’t think about being good or not being good. I didn’t think about anything. I dropped the Fig Newtons on the floor and scooted over there to get myself kissed by a boy for the first time ever, and I have to say it was just fine, and the whole world dropped out from under me for I don’t know how long while Harlan Boyd and I mashed our lips together, mouths closed, and then open as he stuck his tongue into mine. (Teen magazine had not mentioned tongues.) I was lying partway back on the mattress by now, with him on top of me, when suddenly I felt this hard thing like a stick between us. What was it? I struggled upward like a swimmer surfacing through thousands of feet of water. Uh-oh. What would Jesus think of that?
But it was all over, anyway, because cousin Glenda’s station wagon pulled into the garage, and then we could hear the car doors slamming and cousin Glenda and Rayette calling my name, getting closer and closer. Of course, cousin Glenda knew where I was. Cousin Glenda always knew everything.
Since there was no other way to get out of the Bomb Shelter, Harlan and I just sat there side by side, buddies at the end of the world, until the orange door opened and cousin Glenda came clomping downstairs like the wrath of God.
BY THE TIME DADDY APPEARED TO RETRIEVE ME, Christmas had come and gone and I had repented of my behavior in the Bomb Shelter and was being totally good again, or as good as possible, newly aware of my potential for backsliding. Harlan Boyd never spoke to me again. He dropped out of Tri-Hi-Y and wouldn’t even look at me in math class, where he got a D-minus for the semester.
It was over. I knew he still loved me, though, with a hopeless love, the kind of love my uncle Mason had felt for his wife, a love so strong it had caused him to go out and cut somebody. I didn’t think Harlan would do that, though I sort of wished he would. But he was too nice. Also, he had basketball practice every day after school, so he was very busy. Anyway, I would be far, far away soon, in Key West, Florida, where Mama and Daddy were going to “patch up their marriage”: a geographical cure prescribed by Mama’s doctors.
But I hated to leave Repass. This astonished Mama and Daddy, who looked puzzled as they stood waiting while I sobbed, hugging first Rayette and then cousin Glenda. Raymond stood like a tree by the door.
“Now come on, Jennifer.” Cousin Glenda finally disentangled herself from my frantic arms. “What did I tell you?”
I had to smile.
Rayette smiled.
“Get a grip,” we all said together, and I started laughing in spite of my tears.
EVEN THOUGH DADDY HAD BOUGHT US A NEW CAR FOR the occasion, a silvery-gray fishtailed Cadillac, the long drive down to Florida was grim. Mama and Daddy sat up front, and I had the wide backseat all to myself. There was a seat divider, which I could pull down to make a table if I wanted to draw or write. I had a shopping bag containing a white New Testament with my name embossed on the front in gold, a good-bye gift from my cousins; a copy of ’Twixt Twelve and Twenty by Pat Boone, a gift from my grandmother; Rayette’s Rattler yearbook from the year before; the yellow blouse I had made in 4-H; and The Search for Bridey Murphy, which I had been dying to get my hands on. Mama had just finished reading it. At the bottom of the shopping bag was my old jewelry box, all locked up, and a big new auxiliary jewelry box contain
ing the stale package of Fig Newtons and the empty orange juice can touched by Harlan Boyd. I had resurrected my notebook and brought it along, too, to record my thoughts and observations, though I had still given up both espionage and literature at least for the time being, until I could get my parents through this crisis.
I had made a new chart in the back of my notebook. It said “Good Deeds” at the top and then had the days of February numbered down the left-hand margin with a line drawn out from each date. I had done this laboriously, with a ruler, before leaving my cousins’. We would be gone for one whole month, and I planned to do a good deed every day—twenty-eight good deeds, which ought to be enough to bring even Mama and Daddy back together.
I had my work cut out for me. It would be a challenge. Mama and Daddy sat as far apart as possible from each other on the big front seat, as remote as planets. They were both smoking a lot (Mama, Newports; Daddy, Winstons), making the air in the new Cadillac dense and blue and wavy, making my eyes water all the way down through South Carolina and Georgia, until it grew warm enough in Florida for us to crack the windows.
Cousin Glenda’s reaction upon seeing Mama had been the same as mine: “Oh, Billie, you poor thing!” for Mama had simply lost her luster. She had become a thinner, paler version of herself, quieter and more hesitant. Cousin Glenda’s final instructions for us (“Now you all just forget about everything and have a good time, you hear me?”) seemed more and more impossible to follow, the farther we traveled.