Alternities

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  NO MOTORIZED VEHICLES

  NO FISHING

  NO DIVING

  No fun, Wallace thought. He kicked a bottle cap off the edge and watched it arc downward to splash in the chilly water, then walked back past the swing sets and picnic tables to where he had parked the car. The chains holding the swings creaked in the breeze.

  There were any number of new homes on the outskirts of town, little clusters of pastel look-alikes lining new roads with names like Prospect Place and Cul de Sac Drive. But the heart of town looked very little changed from what Wallace remembered. He drove slowly, pulling to the curb now and then to indulge his curiosity.

  Here a familiar old oak tree was missing, there a rambling, turreted turn-of-the-century “mansion” had become a lawyer’s office or funeral home. His grandmother’s old place on Chestnut had a new garage and an elaborate garden framing the porch. Bobby Prick’s house looked spookily the same, down to the toys littering the stoop and postage-stamp front yard. And when he rounded a corner to find a tangle of white paper streamers dangling from a pair of maple trees flanking a driveway. Wallace laughed until he was wet-eyed.

  Feeling braver, he headed downtown. He found mercantile Hagerstown the same two blocks of red, white, and whitewashed brick storefronts, dressed up with new streetlamps and concrete sidewalk planters. Parking the Magic, he set out to explore it on foot.

  There was a series of little jolts awaiting him. The bank building had expanded, and its parking lot had gobbled up the little appliance repair shop and postal substation which had stood next door. Dave and Dot’s, the fountain counter of which had been host to his “first date,” was now called Whitewater Gifts, and the old candy case was filled with ceramic cats and dried flowers. He looked for a copy of the weekly newspaper, but there was no dump box bearing its name.

  The woman tending the register eyed him surreptitiously, had been since he had entered. Strangers. “Do you know where I can get a Record?” he asked her.

  “There’s a music store in the Flatrock Center, over to New Castle.”

  “The Hagerstown Record—the newspaper.”

  Her brow farrowed “We get the Richmond paper around noon—”

  Further conversation was dangerous. “I must have made a mistake,” be said excusing himself.

  Continuing along the block, he looked for familiar faces. He found them sitting at the window table of Brooks Restaurant—older faces, deep-lined faces with deep-rooted names. Dell Schroeder, wearing his stained Pioneer Seeds cap, sipping a cup of coffee and sharing a story with stubble-faced John Wilson, whose yellowed teeth were clamped on the stem of a black-bowled pipe.

  Frozen there on the sidewalk. Wallace was bombarded by memories. Schroeder and his antique steam tractor had always headed the Independence Day parade. Wilson’s oldest son and Wallace’s brother had been friends.

  The glass separating Wallace from the two men saved him from blurting out a greeting. As it was, he stared long enough to draw their glances, Schroeder’s raised eyebrow, and a comment from Wilson that set them both laughing.

  Wallace forced himself to turn away. It was becoming harder to stay here, harder to maintain his balance, even though he had dodged or postponed the most threatening encounters. He could not stay much longer. It was time to finish what he had come here for. He had to face his own life.

  But every step closer to the corner was an effort, because around the corner would be the blue and white canvas awning that said WALLACE HARDWARE—FARM AND HOME, jutting out from the two-story brick building which had been a second home to Harry Wallace’s sons.

  Rayne could close his eyes and remember the stone scrollwork surrounding the “Schrock 1910” which appeared high on the face of the building, the self-memorial of the grocer who had built it. Inside, the narrow aisles, the cupped and time-stained oak floorboards, the wall-filling cabinets of drawers and doors from which his father seemed able to pull any imagined object on request—

  Walk!

  The store. Think about the store. The dirt basement, how he used to be terrified of it, standing empty and consigned to the spiders and mice who claimed it. The way his brother would threaten to lock him down there, blackmailing him to win his silence. How he finally forced himself to go down there alone, door closed and in the dark, confronting and defanging the monster, taking that weapon from his brother’s arsenal.

  Better, better—

  The maze of second-floor stock rooms, once grocer Schrock’s modest walk-up home, with claw-footed bathtub and push-button light switches still in evidence. The mystery of how his father knew what was in every box, just where to find what he needed, just when to order more. His father had kept it all in his head, as if all the bolts and bits and toaster elements and saw blades made one huge clockwork machine which he could look at and see in an instant what was missing or misfiring.

  I can’t do it. I can’t face him.

  Deep and dimly apprehended forces tugged at Wallace, alternately urging him forward and staying his steps. It was as though he were in the hands of an apprentice puppeteer, stumbling through his role in the matinee. A shiver rippled through his body, a shiver felt deep inside, the touch of a ghostly hand momentarily disrupting every natural rhythm. The fear that had seized him in the car had returned in full measure.

  How can I deal with it when he looks at me like a stranger? Or worse, looks at me and gnaws on his lower lip the way he does when he’s thinking hard, like he’s trying to figure out why I’m familiar? How can I keep from blurting out, “Dad, you’re looking good, I haven’t seen you in two years. I came the long way home—”

  It was a knot Wallace could not unravel. Was there anything closer than a father and a son? Weren’t they part of each other? How could his father not recognize him, not know somehow who he was? Like when you swear you’ve met someone that just walked into your life for the first time.

  Jesus, what if that’s what’s going on? Gates we haven’t found, infiltrators we don’t know about. Hello, haven’t we met? Yes and no, and please don’t ask for explanations. You’re dead where I come from, and I wanted to spend some more time with you—

  Walk!

  But he was frozen, a stride or two from the corner. I’ll walk by. I’ll walk by and look in, but I won’t go in, and I won’t stop. Just to know he’s there. Just to have that one constant. Just to know I might have been.

  In that moment he confronted for the first time a terrible truth that he had been hiding from himself. Just as Roger Eash might still have had a son Donald, Harry and Gina Wallace could well have had a Rayne. Second-born, first-born, older, younger, someone who took his name and his place. Life closes round until nothing is missing, all spaces filled.

  He barely was aware that his feet were carrying him the other way, back down the block toward the car. The thought of being replaced in his parents’ lives by a cipher, a stranger, was more devastating than the thought of never having existed at all. He struggled for a word to describe the feeling. Abandoned. Betrayed. We’d like to trade in our son, please—that one there looks interesting, don’t you think, darling?

  Mom… Dad…

  He sat in the car for a long minute, running up the engine like some stoplight speedster issuing a challenge. How silly, Wallace thought. How silly to feel threatened. To feel jealous. They would love any child they made. As they loved me there—back Home. How unfair to think they should have somehow saved it for me.

  A touch on the gas, a spin of the wheel, and the Magic pulled away from the curb. Before he could manufacture more reasons not to, Wallace let the car carry him to the intersection and past, turning right with deliberate purpose and making himself look.

  And there was the store, Schrock 1910, the awning bright yellow—stretched canvas over a ribbed frame, different, eye-catching. But there was something wrong with the printing, ACE HARDWARE. That’s all it said, ACE HARDWARE in black letters a foot high across the front. And on the windows the awning shielded, the same mistake.r />
  It was a moment before Wallace realized the mistake was his. He pulled the car into the first available space, blocking an alley, and ran back along the sidewalk.

  Even through the windows he could see the changes. Pegboard displays and shrink-wrapped tools. Nuts and screws in little plastic containers, dangling from metal trees. A boy in a bright yellow vest, building a pyramid of paint cans.

  Three more steps carried Rayne inside. “Didn’t this used to be Wallace Hardware?” he demanded.

  The boy looked up. “Geez, I don’t know. I’ve only worked here two months.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Huh?”

  “You live in town? Go to school here?”

  “Yeah—”

  “How long?”

  “Uh—three years. No, four.”

  You sold it. I don’t believe it. Why’d you sell, Dad? What else would you do? “You know the owner?”

  “I just work here part time.”

  “You know a man named Harry Wallace? About fifty-five?”

  “No.”

  “Sure you do,” Wallace said, voice cracking. “Plays the trumpet for the National Anthem every Memorial Day. At the veterans’ monument in the cemetery. The parade. Don’t you ever follow the parade?”

  The boy’s face was drawn up into wrinkled confusion. “Hey, what’s your problem?”

  Wallace fled, giving no answer. You wouldn’t sell it, Dad. You wouldn’t, but Mom would. Would have to, to take care of a child or two after you were gone. Goddammit, I didn’t come here to find you in a grave—

  Wurtsmith AFB, Michigan, The Home Alternity

  Isolated in a field a quarter-mile south of the end of the main runway, four oblong grassy mounds each as tall as a man rose from the earth within a fenced compound. From outside, the slope-sided mounds appeared innocuous, yet slightly mysterious, like a pristine Hopewell site sealed off from would-be tomb robbers, or a cluster of land-locked dikes.

  But the compound was far from innocuous. For nested within the mounds’ cylindrical vaults, like colossal metal pupae, were twelve Mark XII hydrogen bombs, more than two hundred million tons of explosive power contained in a few dozen tons of steel, enriched U-235 and lithium deuteride. Another twelve Mark XIIs were aloft in the bomb bays of some of the wing’s swept-wing B-55s, which roared off the main runway in groups of three at two-hour intervals around the clock.

  The 397th Squadron prided itself on its trusteeship of the most powerful weapons in the American arsenal. The cartoon emblem of the group, which appeared one day on the bulletin board and had never been removed, was a fierce-faced mosquito with furiously beating wrings carrying a gigantic bomb aloft. Underneath, the legend read: 397th SQUADRON: HOME OF THE BIG SHOTS.

  The vaults all faced inward, nominally shielded from the shock of Soviet near-hits by the mass of earth, steel, and reinforced concrete surrounding them. But most of Ordnance Storage Area C’s design was directed toward threats on a smaller scale. The double fences were topped by coils of long-barbed hangwire, and the weapons of the two-man guard detail at the gate house were loaded with live ammunition.

  Twice each hour, at varying intervals, one of the guards would make a circuit of the compound in the gap between the fences. Automatic rifle in hand, he would “walk the wire” looking for breaches or tampering. None was ever found, but the ritual went on all the same.

  For Ben Briggs and Tom Rawley, walking the wire was the most common interruption in a detail marked more by card-playing and coarse talk about women than earnest vigilance. There was little traffic at Ordnance C, little call for the weapons stored there. The Mark XII was a specialized part of the arsenal, carried by less than ten percent of the wing. Usually the aircraft coming off the line for maintenance and the aircraft coming into the rotation balanced, and the ground crews simply swapped out the weapons from one to the other.

  But once or twice a week glitches in scheduling would leave the drones with one more or one less Mark XII on the flight line than was needed. Then a low-slung blue tractor would crawl down the service road from the base, pulling a canvas-draped cylinder on its dolly, or appear with its tow hitch bare to drag a bomb away toward the loading trenches in the flight apron.

  Once a week a lieutenant would drive out from base HQ to perform a physical inventory of the arsenal. And once a month or so the base commander would toss them a full-readiness drill, which usually meant a parade of tractors coming out to retrieve bombs for planes not routinely kept full-bellied.

  Anything else was an oddity, a curiosity. So when Briggs saw the black sixteen-wheel trailer-truck rolling down the service road toward the gate house, followed by a familiar blue tractor, he threw aside the book he had been reading and jumped to his feet. Rawley was napping in his chair, but a hard push with a booted foot ended that.

  “Company,” Briggs said, reaching for his rifle.

  With groaning brakes, the truck came to a stop at the prescribed mark, and the tractor drew up behind it. A moustachioed colonel, his uniform sharp as his build was trim, hopped lightly down from the cab. Briggs left the gate house and met him at the fence.

  “Sir,” Briggs said.

  The colonel’s namestrip read Andrews. “Good morning, corporal. I’m Colonel Ken Andrews, from Nawtec. I’ve got transmittal papers for number 8925. You’ll want to call it in.” His voice was pleasant, with just a hint of good-humored world-weariness.

  Briggs perked up, interested. The National Weapons Testing Center was the umbrella name for a dozen facilities, embracing mock battlefields in Alaska, sprawling proving grounds in the empty spaces of Utah and New Mexico, missile test ranges in Nevada and Florida, and the Sea Tactics School in the Gulf.

  NWTC served all four services and drew its staff from all their ranks. What with development and qualification tests of new weapons and live readiness firings on weapons drawn at random from the active inventory, NWTC was considered a sexy assignment, with a cachet exceeded only by Edwards or Pax River.

  Briggs craved to ask what Nawtec wanted with the bomb, but etiquette prevailed “Yes, sir,” he said. “Please wait here.”

  He returned to the gate house and the curiosity of his partner. “What’s going on?”

  “They want an egg for Nawtec,” Briggs said, picking up the phone.

  “Operations desk. This is Air Corporal Briggs at Ordnance C. I have a Colonel Andrews here presenting transmittal papers for a Mark XII, serial number 8925.”

  “Give me the sequence number off the TP.”

  “Alpha three five five edgar zero zero eight.”

  “One moment. Roger, your sequence number alpha three five five edgar zero zero eight is confirmed. Let ’em have it, Ben. SOP.”

  “Whatever you say.” He returned to where Andrews stood waiting and let himself out through the smaller gate. “I’m going to need to check the back. If you’ll open the trailer, sir.”

  “Of course.” Andrews said agreeably.

  There were no surprises. The trailer was empty except for a small electric winch and the clamps and anchors which would be used to secure the bomb and trolley. “If you’ll have the driver pull the truck ahead past the gate, I’ll let the tractor in.”

  It took fifteen minutes to pass the tractor through the double gates, vault 19, and hitch up the bomb-laden dolly. Andrews stayed at Briggs’ elbow, showing no special curiosity in the Mark XII and no inclination to idle talk.

  “Bet we’ll hear that one all the way up here,” Briggs ventured at last.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I was just saying there’ll be a hell of a bang when you fry this egg.”

  “Um,” Andrews said, stepping forward to help line op the dolly with the ramps leading into the back of the truck. Shortly, the tractor rolled away and the winch strained away, inching its burden up the incline.

  “How long has it been since we tested a Twelve?”

  “Even if I knew, it would be classified,” Andrews said, standing back as the
blunt nose of the bomb edged into the shadows of the cavernous truck. “You should know that, Corporal.”

  Briggs swallowed hard. “Sorry, sir. It’s just that I’ve been on this detail seven months now. I was just curious—”

  “Sit on it,” Andrews said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  But Briggs’ curiosity persisted after Andrews and the truck were gone, rolling down the road toward the north gate and picking up an escort of two jeeps and a troop carrier. And when Rawley went out to walk the wire, curiosity put him back on the phone to the operations desk.

  “Is Jake there?”

  “This is me, Ben. Everything all right out there?”

  “Yeah. Got company?”

  “Not at the moment. What’s up?”

  “Just wondering where they were going with that Twelve—New Mexico or the Aleutians. They’d have to take it to the Aleutians, wouldn’t they? It’s too big for New Mexico.”

  “Hmm. Looks like it’s going to Westover.”

  “Huh?” Westover was a fighter and transport base near Holyoke, Massachusetts.

  “This thing got special handling. I’ve got a coded ’gram here direct from the Air Force Chief of Staff authorizing the transfer of that Twelve from Racetrack to Slingshot, with the transmittal sequence. We’re Racetrack. And I’m pretty sure Westover is Slingshot.”

  “That’s nuts. Nawtec doesn’t work out of Westover. And there aren’t any B-55s there.”

  “I’m just telling you what it says.”

  “Well, what it says is nuts,” Briggs insisted.

  “Where does Nawtec come in?”

  “That’s what Andrews said. And his papers said.”

  “This ’gram doesn’t say anything about Nawtec.”

  Briggs mused. “Maybe I’ve just been out here too long. Did the base commander know about the transfer?”

  “He must have.” There was a pause. “But the paperwork doesn’t have any place for him to check off on it.”

  “Maybe you should take it to him.”

  Jake was not happy with the suggestion. “We’re going to look like idiots of the year if it turns out we let go of an egg without proper authority.”