Frank cut Oren in on the first deal. Extra shipments of uranium yellowcake—which are 80% high concentrations, very nasty stuff without the right gear—out of the mill would come on Island Line 1 to the reactor. Now, when I say EXTRA you should surely understand I mean UNACCOUNTED FOR. Did Oren know what he was doing? At first, no, but I’ll get to that.
Over the late fifties and sixties, Frank got himself embroiled in too many schemes for me to remember. The first was a dumping scam with officials in the northern region of the island. The spent uranium and waste went into steel drums and then into the ponds up there where the land wasn’t arable and generally only used for hunting. There was an overflow rail line that went further north from the reactor. Oren took those loads and then other hired hands took the drums the rest of the way in trucks. No safety equipment or shielding materials were used. Those boys are all dead now o’ course.
The officials all took palm money from Frank who got an allowance from the government for the nuclear waste disposal and forged papers through other greased hands made it look like all the waste was going on barges to the mainland to be put into the ground in approved facilities.
Ha! Approved facilities, my great derrière!
More payments came from the power company partnership—who bought the generated electricity from the reactor—and the savings in time and gas were absorbed, not by Union Rail, but by creative bookkeeping done by Frank and his staff.
We pocketed close to 850, 000 in those early years, if ya can believe that.
Later, Frank got more industrious. Union built a new line out to the west shore of the island, north of Dovetail Cove. Cover was to bring farm equipment and migrant workers to those crop areas. Because the island was Union’s most profitable per-spike operation in the world, Frank had a lot of leeway for his pet projects.
That Island Line 3 brought migrant workers from Mexico all the way from the east sea terminal along with combines and swathers and water tanks but, late at night, it also shipped raw yellowcake from the mill—uranium at high concentration levels. Unrefined but perfect for certain second-world nations who were hoping to weaponize it and get into the arms race. This is when the real money started flowing.
Yer Daddy was long dead at that point. And you’d have been in high school learning logarithms and algebra proofs.
My hands aren’t clean. I knew about what was going on. And, in a way, I even played a part. Until the spring of 1972, I kept my mouth shut. Frank promised me that he would retire once he reached a certain amount of money, an amount he felt would look after us for the rest of our lives. We couldn’t spend it until then, or it would draw suspicion.
That’s what he told me.
But I found out two things that changed me from the doting wife who kept quiet to one who left that island for good...and I did something a lot worse than just walking out with a suitcase full of cash.
Frank had been sleeping around. Don’t know if you remember Fanny Mae Banks back in the day. She would have been a few years older than you. And notorious for that kinda thing. Then there was Helen Troyer, I think she was a year younger than you—’n fact, worked right there at the Highliner for a while til she got in the family way. Those two and a slew of others were afternoon dee-light for my husband. Rumour is that her oldest was my husband’s boy. Seems Frankie-Moort wasn’t always going back to the office after lunch.
So Fanny Banks, she gets a few drinks in her and down at the Beacon Street Bar, tells Johnny Wile a few tales out of school, forgetting ol’ Johnny was cousins to Police Chief Birkhead.
Now this spilled two things out, as I said. One, I found out in short order that Frank wasn’t just a liar at work. He was a liar at home, too. The other thing was that he’d told Fanny a few stories about the late night rail runs north, east and west ends of the island. This got the police chief up and at ’em. Not only was he investigating some kind of pyramid investment scheme that summer, but also Frankie-Moort and some of the other more decorated and ’honourable’ men on the island. All of them had glow-in-the-dark hands, you might say.
So how does yer daddy play into this? How much do you remember about him? Not a hell of a lot, I imagine. But maybe more than you care too, given how he left this world.
I can fill in a few blanks.
Summer of 1956, there was a bad spill of yellowcake on the north line. Oren, your pop, he was running the cars at a low speed and Frank didn’t know what happened, just took the call. Must have been a major deal because Frank went, himself. Didn’t just send his paid guys like usual. After, he wouldn’t say a word about it. Only sat at our kitchen table for hours upon hours, drinking straight Scotch, the expensive bottles, and chewing his finger nails down to blood.
Oren must have picked up some rads that night, or maybe it was cumulative over the course of the winter months when he’d been on the take with Frank. I don’t know.
I do know that, in the beginning, Frank didn’t even let Oren in on the scam. Frank only told yer daddy that there was an approved repository on the north side of the island and he even had his other helpers meet the train in marked trucks and wearing plastic ID badges plus their radiation gear. Frank told your dad that the late night schedule was on account of townsfolk being a bit skeptical of the waste getting dumped right here on the island instead of the mainland.
Frank didn’t want a political firestorm, he told Oren, even if it was on the up-and-up. Did Oren believe such a cock-a-mamy tale of horse shit? Honestly, I think he did.
Wasn’t until Oren started talking to his buddies about picking up extra shifts on Frank’s late night runs, that Frank had to take Oren aside, as he called it, and set him straight.
Yer daddy, I remember him being torn about it when he finally clued in. Should he be involved? This was his boss, would it affect his work life? If it’s truly not on the up-and-up, what becomes of him down the road, on and on and on.
In the end, torn or not, he carried on with Frank because the money was so good. He wanted to make sure your brothers got to college on the mainland and that you would be taken care of if you didn’t find a career or a husband. I know that sounds ridiculous these days, but out there, middle of the ocean, middle of nowhere if you ask me, that was really the way daddies looked at it for their little girls. Even as late as 1960 or ’61.
But he didn’t carry on long after the night that the yellowcake spilled. Started having bad dreams. Wasn’t eating. Lots of sick days. When he was at work, Frank said, he’d just let the train roll to a stop. He’d be still and pale-faced in the conductor’s chair, the wind running fingers through his hair while he just stared at nothin’. There’d be dried puke and blood down the side of the engine, spilled from the window where he sat. He’d have blackout moments when he honestly couldn’t tell Frankie where he’d been or what he’d been doing.
He started having temper tantrums. Shouting matches with yer Mama.
A few months into the summer, I woke to some of his shouting. Oren McLeod was in our kitchen, hollering at Frank. Then crying. I came down the stairwell—in the dark, y’know—and I peeked in on them in the kitchen, lit up like a Christmas tree, two tumblers of Scotch on the table. They talked pretty low but the gist was that Oren thought your mama was going nuts. She was giving all the family savings to the Zionist church here in town. Oren was worried for you kids.
It was a lot of fast talk, the hurried kind from both of sides of the table. Like a car salesman when you’re at a lot and you really feel like you gotta have a set of wheels that day. They don’t want to lose you to common sense. So they keep talking. And but fast. Frankie didn’t want to lose Oren to his common sense either.
Oren wanted to give Frank back all the money paid out to him, everything but his Union wages, all those iridescent dollars, you might call ’em. Frank would put that money in a bank account, was the plan, then give it back to Oren in a couple of years. If anything happened to Oren—he was sure that your mama would give it all away in checks to the church�
��Frankie-Moort would pay it back, plus interest, to you and your brothers when you came of age.
Frank promised Oren. I heard him swear it. Heard him.
Oren got out his check book and wrote a series of dated checks.
Now I heard Frank swear it, but I knew he didn’t mean it. Couldn’t have—if we couldn’t put none of that dough in our accounts for the suspicion it would raise, we certainly couldn’t leave a trail of Oren McLeod’s big checks paid back to his boss. And then us plopping them in our account at First Island Savings? Come on now.
Still, Oren bought what Frankie was selling. And, boy was he relieved. I could hear it in his voice when he left.
I’m ashamed to say, I crept back up to bed that night and didn’t ever mention it to Frank. There were lots of things I never talked to Frank about.
Oren had a blowup at home the following week. That’s when he had that thing with your Mama and the deputy fired his service pistol at Oren on Scagway and that...well, that ended that.
I think he believed he’d killed her. Maybe if he knew he’d just grazed her spine and she lay there bleeding on the hardwood stairs, he wouldn’t have left, wouldn’t have been so uncontrollable out there with Deputy Doletz, trigger happy as that young man was.
’Course you never saw the money, did you, Teeny? No. Course not. Nor did your big brothers. Frank used it to play the stock market over the next few years. Not sure how he got it into the system without eyebrows, but he did. Sneaky fox, that Frank. But Oren’s money was just his pot of play money. No real worry if he lost it all on Apple Computers or Telecom bonds.
Back on the island, in his day-to-day, Frank’s private operation grew until Birkhead’s investigation began. Then I had my own brainwave—which, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t regret. Not even now.
The reactor’d been shut down years before. Leeching radioactivity. Allegedly—now, allegedly, that’s a fun word the politicians, lawyers and such all use. But, allegedly, all those rads had produced some interesting crops, some interesting illnesses and a few situations like your dad’s so, eventually, to get voted back in, someone pulled the plug on the whole damn mess. But the mine and the mill kept up for years after and Frank eased up a bit on his late night operations. He found an underground market for radioactive isotopes. That was the above-ground use for the uranium deposit which was still far from being drained. Frank just siphoned off some of the ore and sold it to bidders in a network that spanned across to countries you probably never studied in school, deary.
I learned a little about the health properties of radiation in those years too. And it came in mighty handy after Fanny Mae Banks spilled Frank’s beans at the pub.
I’d gotten my hands on some of Frank’s isotopes and started dosing his stash of expensive ground coffee. You don’t think his sweet tooth’s penchant for pineapple cheesecake was his only daily habit, do you, deary?
No, no. Frank liked to watch the evening news with a strong cup of hot black coffee. How he could ever sleep after having that at around six every night, I’ll never know. But, I guess it didn’t much matter since Frankie did lots of his dealings after one a.m., anyhow.
Each afternoon, I’d unsheathe an isotope module from its lead canister with long tongs and let it sit inside his coffee bean canister for an hour or two. Only took about twelve weeks for Frank to dose himself up enough to bite the big one. When I moved out, I left the isotope right there in his aluminum canister. They weaken far faster after exposure to air so it probably died out a few days after Frankie did. I was gone when it happened, but I remembered how your daddy had looked and I knew that, eventually Frankie would go gaunt and colourless, just as Oren had looked that night in my kitchen under the bright, bright lights.
Frankie’s hair would have fallen out and his teeth would have turned grey before they went to mush in his mouth those last seven or eight days of his life. In fact, I know that’s what happened because I saw autopsy photos when the estate was settled. Autopsy also made mention of how his internal organs all started to bleed. They wept like the wounds of Christ on the cross, you might say, just started to leak inside of him. He bled from the inside out.
He knew what I’d done—had to—but surely, he was too weak to come after me in those last couple weeks.
I’m sorry you thought you’d done him in with the tainted cake, Tina. I knew you wouldn’t go to jail for it but I also knew about the investigation. I knew Helen Troyer gave a statement about your kookie behaviour with Frankie to Chief Birkhead and the investigators from the mainland. They’d either find the isotope and come after me or they’d just think Frank had indeed been dipping into the uranium himself and making some glow-in-the-dark dough on the side—And can you believe it? None of those high priced coppers found the bloody thing. Probably got sold with the canister at a garage sale!
Birkhead’s investigation might have uncovered it all, or almost all of it, if all the old fogies involved hadn’t died off over the few years after Frankie’s death.
I sometimes wonder if the other wives got the better of their men too. Or if I was the only one and they were all just unlucky...or stupid.
Oh Tina. Teeny they all called you, right? I used to see you in the window of the Highliner back in those days, so full of promise for a future that only you could see. You’d be there behind the window, looking off at the harbour, looking at the sky and I wondered what you were thinking. I still wonder that.
So what’s this letter, then? A confessional?
Of sorts. Let me continue.
Now to the second reason for writing to you. Please be patient here. The man (or woman, I’m not sure which) who has delivered this letter to you is an employee of the law firm I have retained to control and handle my last will and testament. Hopefully, this will be years and not months after I’ve compiled these...confessions...that you are receiving in said letter hand delivered to you.
Last I heard from some who headed back to the island for a...visit...is that you were still working at the Highliner Café, still pouring coffee and bringing ice cream cones. But that was years and years gone by now. I have no real way of knowing where you ended up, if you’re even still among the living.
But if you are still there, standing in that window as I saw you back then, I wonder…I truly do…
Now I’m none to judge a person’s life choices, since I’ve made some doozies m’self. And, believe you me, I know how hard it was for a woman to get out of island life in 1970. I tried to do it, too, and couldn’t all through the sixties. But if you’re content with being there, then I salute your decision.
I suspect it’s not a decision at all, though, and I want to try something on for size with ya. Go dress shopping, if you will.
William, my beloved, and his two grown sons will get a fair portion of things, but William was a successful banker for years and years and his two kids from his previous marriage are well taken care of.
How can I put this? It has felt that since the moment I left Dovetail Cove for what I thought would be a better, fairer, greener life...it has instead been wrought with pain, hardship, ugliness and disease—despite the happy times.
My multiple sclerosis symptoms eased a tremendous amount in those first few years after I up and left. It felt like I was charmed, that this increase in mobility and freedom was a sign from God that I did the right thing.
Given what you know now, given the fact that the police came and they talked to me until I was ready to confess it all—but didn’t—you’re probably laughing darkly at what I’m saying. Did the right thing! Pffft! That’s insane, you’d say. Killing a man in cold blood, leaving him, essentially to die on his own floor like a sick animal with no understanding of what was happening to him. How on earth could God ever give any kinda sign that that was the right thing?
But in those days, I was feeling healthy. I was feeling strong. That’s when I found William, became enamoured with him. He was managing my portfolio of investments after Frank died and he made
me an even wealthier woman than Frank’s double-dealing and back room agreements had.
I was a multi-millionaire.
But things went downhill fast. Seems I’ve lived the last thirty years in a tiny bit of hell on earth, built just for Caroline Moort. Now’s the part where you can laugh, Teeny. Now you can laugh louder and harder. I deserve it. I deserve the lot of what I got.
William’s boys fell on hard times. His oldest, David, lost his arm in a ski lift accident. Needed to learn everything again, did so in time, but still his wife left about a year later. And William’s youngest, Martin (these boys, you should know, came to be like my own) fell into the wrong crowd for a time and has been battling a monkey on his back for close to fifteen years.
And William, there was financial ruin. Lost businesses, the boys’ dead mother, and testicular cancer. Yup. The big ’c’. He might be through that one, but it has been hard as a goddamn, if you know anything about that sickness.
Financially, he’s back to good standing, but that was a hard hell of a ride to do it.
My thinking, as twisted as it may sound, Teeny, my thinking is that if I get rid of all the brightly-coloured money from Frank, all that I got handed to me after his death, then maybe I will just slip away and the boys can meander back to their old ways. No one can give David back his arm...or his children their mother. And no one can give William his health or Marty his empty years but maybe it can be a fresh start for them.
And maybe it can be one for you.
The young man (or young lady, I’m not sure which) who will hand-deliver this letter to you will also be giving you a sizeable cashier’s cheque, the sum of my estate liquidated.
It is yours now.
No, to answer your next question, I don’t worry for one second that the bad mojo of my time in Washington will come back to you. No. No, no, no. It’s your money. It’s every dime your daddy gave to Frank for his brand of safe-keeping. It’s every dime my husband, Frankie bled from that island—from YOUR home.
Should be just over seven million there, Teeny. Find yourself a life. Whatever life you want. Step out of the café, if you’re still there. Step out past the big windows and head down to the water if that’s what you want. Climb on the ferry—IF that’s what you want. Put your face to the sun, darlin’. And don’t you ever look back.
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