by Amy Brashear
I could feel Terrence’s eyes on me. I stopped mouthing the words and froze.
He knocked his shoulder into me, smiled, and we both as a duet finished the rap. “Say what?”
The song ended and Terrence went searching for a new one. He had dozens of tapes with only a couple of songs recorded on them. The outside was written with the title of whatever he’d crudely recorded off the radio.
While he was distracted, I tried to think how to approach the subject. Maybe Mom and Dennis were right. Maybe I did need to give Terrence a chance. He was not going anywhere unless the bomb dropped.
“So,” I started.
“So what?” he asked, knocking over a stack of tapes.
“I was thinking about the movie—”
“How awesome it’s going to be? Yeah, you’re going to be hanging out with Astrid Ogilvie, Freddy White, Peony Roth, and Owen Douglas. Pretty damn cool.”
“Pretty damn cool,” I repeated.
“I just hope Dana won’t ruin it for you.”
“I’m not going to take Dana,” I said.
“Really? Well, that’s good.”
“Yeah?”
“But you know she won’t be happy,” he said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Just so you know.”
I nodded. “But I don’t think I can take it. I have a line, and she’ll probably weasel her way into saying it.”
“You know that’s right.”
“So I was thinking,” I said, twisting my scrunchie around my wrist. “Do you want to be my guest?”
“What? Are you serious?” he asked, nearly dropping his bowl to the floor.
“Yeah, I’m serious,” I said.
“Really? Do you know what you’re asking?”
“I do.”
He got this big smile on his face and said, “Yes,” with so many exclamation points.
I’d made his day, year, life.
He put in a new tape, turned the volume to the max, and rapped (badly) to “Friends”27 as we finished our hot fudge ice cream.
* * *
20 Prince and the Revolution, Warner Bros, 1984.
21 It’s a mail-order music club.
22 Hip-hop group from Queens, New York, consisting of Joseph Simmons, Darryl McDaniels, and Jason Mizell.
23 Hip-hop group from New Jersey consisting of Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright, Henry “Big Bank Hank” Jackson, and Guy “Master Gee” O’Brien. They are known for their 1979 hit “Rapper’s Delight,” which is one of my favorites.
24 Hip-hop artist from Harlem, New York.
25 Hip-hop group consisting of DJ Grandmaster Flash and five rappers, Melle Mel, the Kidd Creole, Keith Cowboy, Mr. Ness/Scorpio, and Rahiem.
26 A song by Run-DMC. It was released in 1983 as a cassette single under Profile records. It was originally recorded by Kurtis Blow in 1980 for his self-titled debut album.
27 Whodini, Escape, Jive Records, 1984.
Chapter Six
I was one hundred percent sure that Terrence was going to tell everyone at school how he was going to be my guest for the contest, and I would have to deal with the fallout from that concerning Dana. The Doomsday Clock28 was ticking. Mom was right—I probably shouldn’t have smiled at her when it was my turn to pass out the milk cartons in kindergarten.
Dennis had already left to open the hardware store when I made my first walk through the house. Terrence was trying to finish his homework while downing a bowl of cereal, and Mom was putting on her makeup over the toaster, waiting for what I assumed was a strawberry Pop-Tart.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Mom said. “I’m glad you’re up. I didn’t want you to sleep all day.”
“I would,” Terrence said.
“This is supposed to be punishment, not a vacation.”
“Mom, don’t worry. I have tons to do,” I said.
“Tons?”
“I do have a plan.”
“A plan to stay in your pj’s all day?”
“How’d you know?” I asked, reaching inside the freezer for the box of frozen waffles.
“Laura—”
“Mom—”
“Maybe you should go to the hotel with me.”
“Um. No. Those people make me want to bang my head into a wall.”
“Those people?”
“The guests.”
She shrugged. “Yeah, but you don’t. You have to have self-control.”
“Self-control?”
She nodded. “That’s why you don’t reach across the desk and slap them silly.”
Shortly after Mom and Terrence left, I had a second breakfast in front of the TV with Hope and Bo.
“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives”29: Mom had started to record the show. It was legal now. The Supreme Court ruled that we were not going to jail if we recorded a TV show with our VCR.
My day of fun started off right. I had a list of things I wanted to do, and I crossed each thing off once I’d accomplished said item.
Read the paper—check
Take quiz about nuclear war from the paper—check
I was planning to drop the quiz off at one of the many locations it suggested once I went out for the day. My day. Laura’s Day Off.
But then an advertisement for an antinuclear meeting at Arkansas Tech that morning caught my eye. The advertisement was halfway down the page—a good three-by-five box.
ATTENTION:
LIVE OR DIE—It’s Not Up to Us:
But It Should Be
Arkansas Tech
Witherspoon Auditorium
Friday. 9:00 a.m.
A discussion on
nuclear annihilation.
Be there or be vaporized.
Paid by the members of Don’t Nuke Me,
Arkansas Tech University 1984–1985.
My idea of a fun, relaxing morning changed. The phone rang. It was Mom making sure that I hadn’t gone back to bed. I promised her I was indeed up. I was stuffing my backpack with some essentials, two comics, and a spiral notebook. I promised Max I would make some progress. We were writing our own comic book. I did the writing and he did the drawing.
“So what’s your plan?” Mom asked.
“I think I’m going to go see Granny.” I left out the part about going to Tech.
Mom sighed heavily over the phone. Granny and my mom didn’t get along at all. Granny sided with Dad when the marriage went down the drain. And Granny’s my mom’s mom. That was what made it so surprising. Granny didn’t go to the wedding. Didn’t offer congratulations. Even though my mom was her daughter, she was no longer welcome in Granny’s home. I was. But we didn’t talk about Mom. I obeyed her wishes. I went to her house every Sunday to watch Murder, She Wrote,30 where we assumed Jessica Fletcher, aka J.B. Fletcher, was a serial killer who lived in Cabot Cove, Maine—population dwindling by the episode.
Granny didn’t have much. In fact, she moved into our old home (the home where Mom, Dad, and I spent many happy years) when she gave her life savings to Reverend Floyd Lowry at The Gospel Hour. Thousands of dollars went into the pocket of the televangelist. A year ago, he went on his TV show and asked the congregation sitting at home to bless him. He asked the people for $4.5 million. He pleaded for them to send anything and everything they had. Reverend Lowry believed that God wanted him to raise the money to “erect a church that would bring the nonbelievers to the feet of Jesus.” It was controversial. It was a scam disguised as a fund-raising drive. Reverend Lowry was adamant that if the church did not reach its goal, then God “would call him home.” As in, if he didn’t raise the money by a certain time, Reverend Lowry would die. Who knew God had the same tactics as the mob? His tears were used to swindle people out of money. H
e hid behind his faith and took everything that my Granny had. I begged her to not give him a single dime, to see if he would die. But she felt she had to. He was testing her faith just like God was testing Reverend Lowry. Reverend Lowry met his deadline and ended up raising $6.2 million.
My dad felt sorry for her. My mom was embarrassed for her. Great-Aunt LouLou, my papaw’s sister, always said, “A minister can praise you with one hand and reach for your pocketbook with the other.” And she always would add with so much bitter disgust, “If my dear brother had gone to the doctor for care instead of the mailbox to send a check to Brother Lowry, he’d be alive today,” and after she said that, she would spit each time.
When Dad moved to the base, Granny moved in. Dad started footing the bill. He got the house in the divorce settlement. And though Mom wouldn’t admit it, she was thankful that she didn’t have to deal with Granny.
“Be nice,” I told Mom over the phone.
“I am,” she said.
“Mom—”
“Yes, ma’am, check-in is at three p.m. I’m sorry, no exceptions,” my mom said, not meaning me. “Okay, Laura, I’ve got to go. Someone stopped up their toilet. I’ve got to go unclog it.”
“Gross,” I said, imagining the smell.
“Laura, be careful. Look both ways when crossing the street with your bike. And go with the flow of traffic. Love you.”
“Do you want me to tell Granny hey for you?” I asked.
“I guess,” she said, then hung up the phone.
I grabbed my backpack and headed for the garage, hopped on my bike, and headed south across the railroad track, down the road from Ellis Grocery, and across the way from the Raines’ chicken houses.
“My baby girl,” Granny said, dragging out the words baby girl in her southern twang. “Come here. Give your dear granny a hug.”
I obliged. I even told her that Mom said hey, which she believed. “I’ve been praying that your mama would talk to me, and Jesus did fulfill his promises.”
“Yeah—”
“Now, come on inside, and I’ll make you a grilled cheese.”
“Granny, I’m not really hungry. I just came to borrow Dad’s motorbike.”
“Oh, baby girl, I don’t want you to get hurt on that busted old thing.”
“I won’t. I’ll be careful. I promise.”
She nodded. “Your mom knows, right?”
“Sure,” I said, lying through my teeth.
“Baby girl, I can tell you’re lying.”
“And how much did you send Reverend Lowry this week?” I asked, smiling.
“I see what you did there. I see what you did there. Where are you going with that old thing?” she asked.
“I’m on my way to Tech,” I said.
“Baby girl, I hate to break it to you, but that’s in the opposite direction.”
“I know. I just need something with an engine.”
“Does your mom know?”
“Sure,” I lied again.
“What’s so important that you’d risk your mother’s wrath?”
I sat on the front porch and said, “The end of the world.”
“The Rapture,” she said. “Making sure you’re right with the Lord, you are, aren’t you?”
“Granny, it’s not that—it’s the real end of the world. Don’t you know there’s probably going to be a nuclear war?”
“God won’t let man be wiped out by a nuclear holocaust,” she said, patting my knee.
“Granny—”
“No, baby girl, God protected us once. He’ll do it again,” she said.
That was how she told me a story about how my grandfather was a volunteer Civil Defense31 watcher. He watched the sky for Soviet planes. Then she told me about my mom. Stuff I did not know. How my mom was a wreck at school, afraid the missiles would blow up the whole world while she was in math class. She even had an assignment that she had to turn in: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” She turned it in blank.
“When the sirens blared for a false alarm one day, your momma got to building shelves, two-by-four pine shelves with her daddy. She stocked canned goods in the garage. And she got the neighbors to give us three seats in their fallout shelter. One day—I don’t remember which one; it’s been a long time—while I was waiting for your momma to get home from school, there was a loud boom and then a mushroom cloud in the sky. But it was nothing. I never told your momma about that. She would have been in the bunker for years, and you probably wouldn’t have been born.”
“Why don’t I know this?” I asked. My mom and I were a lot alike.
“Why talk about something that will never happen?” she said.
“Granny, it’s a matter of when it will happen.”
“Who says? The news? Poppycock.”
“Granny, I’ve got to go,” I said, standing up.
“Baby girl, I wish I could tell you that it will be all right,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Us grown-ups have got this covered. Have faith.”
I twisted my scrunchie on my wrist.
“I blame this movie. Everyone is on edge—even your dad is worried.”
“Dad? My dad?”
“He called the other day.”
He called her? We hadn’t spoken in over a month.
“He was checking up on me. I called him when I saw a lot of military men in their fatigues carrying shortwave radios and Geiger counters,” she said.
“Granny, now you have me worried. Are you sure you saw what you saw? Maybe it was on TV?”
“Baby girl, don’t worry. We’re fine,” she said, leaning over to rub both her knees.
“Are you okay, Granny?”
“It’s my fibromyalgia,” she said. “It acts up every now and then.”
I helped her inside the house. She sat on her recliner and pulled the lever to put her feet up. “Don’t worry about the things you can’t do anything about,” she said. “Like Reverend Lowry says, we won’t suffer a nuclear war, because God would simply not allow it.”
I rolled my eyes. She gave that man her life savings in the hopes that he wouldn’t die. I would not trust in the words he said about what God would or would not allow.
“I’ve got to go. I don’t want to be late,” I said.
“Okay, okay. Be careful, baby girl. Granny loves you.”
“I love you too,” I told her.
I found the motorbike in the back of the garage, along with a pair of goggles, and one good kick got it started. The dirt flew up as I took it across the countryside. Each hill felt like a roller coaster and made my stomach flip. Faster and faster I went. I even ran a stop sign. Going fast really cleared the head.
It was out of my way, but I wanted to see Dad.
private property
no trespassing
warning/restricted area
it is unlawful to enter this area without permission of the installation commander
-------------- ------------------------ ------------------------
while on this installation all personnel and the property under their control are subject to search
use of deadly force authorized
I had done this hundreds of times. I’d ride Dad’s old motorbike to a few miles north of Damascus to the Titan II Launch Complex 374-7. One of eighteen around the state. Fifty-four around the country. A six-thousand-mile range and a thirty to thirty-five-minute flight time. It was invincible. It had been activated in 1963 and deactivated in 1980. Now I ride to the ones close by, which included Blackwell, Hattieville, and Plummerville.
I was hoping to catch Dad out there on the site. A wave, anything. Sometimes I would. I’d disobey the warning sign and walk up to the eight-foot-tall chain-link fence that protected just two acres across, where a couple of antennas stuck out of a concrete silo lid, the
only marker of Armageddon, and stand and talk to Dad. We’d talk until someone would walk by and yell that I didn’t belong, and I’d run. This wasn’t a safe place. Nowhere was a safe place.
I wanted to be asleep when the big one happened. I would die. We all would die. Griffin Flat was only minutes away from any silo. We were close enough to a major military installation. We’d be killed almost instantly if the Soviets attacked. No amount of preparation was going to protect me from a nuclear blast that close. I wouldn’t have to worry about how to survive anarchy or whatnot. I wouldn’t be there to see it. It sounded defeatist, but it was the truth. I thought about it all the time. I looked up at the sky, at every contrail, thinking that this was it—this could be an incoming warhead.
I turned the motorbike around so fast that it blew dirt and dust up into my face. It covered the tears falling down my cheeks. I wanted my dad, but he needed to be here in case of a red warning attack.
Thirty miles in the opposite direction, I parked the motorbike with the other motorbikes and followed the signs pointing toward the Witherspoon Auditorium.
“Is this the meeting for—” I started, but a boy with black-rimmed glasses and curly hair that went down to his shoulders finished my sentence.
“Don’t Nuke Me? Yes, if you’re here for that, then you’re in the right place.”
“I guess I am,” I said.
He tilted his head and sized me up before he blew past me when he saw someone more important walk in.
I found an empty seat by the window and listened to people’s conversations. Two boys discussed the limitations on an actual deterrent to having a nuclear war. And two girls discussed the qualifications for the group leader while also discussing the degree of hotness of the boy next to the signup sheet.
No one questioned why a high school student was here. (Though I didn’t relay that information.) I was one more body for the cause. And there were a lot of bodies here for the cause. By the time the meeting got started, it was standing room only. Some people were even two to a seat.