by Rain, David
He stood abruptly. He paced the carpet.
‘What are you saying?’
‘Snipers on the road. Among other things.’
‘You’re Colonel Pinkerton. You’re the senator’s son. Who’d want to kill you? Tell the senator. If you don’t, I will.’
‘Poor Sharpless,’ said Trouble. ‘Ever the innocent.’
‘I hate you sometimes.’ I went to the window. With a jerk, I pulled back the curtains. I had to see the sea: I had to see the sun. The glare burned my eyes. ‘I’m your second,’ I said. ‘And all you do is play games with me.’
‘You’ve always wanted too much.’
‘I wanted nothing.’
‘You expected nothing. That’s different.’
‘Boys!’ Aunt Toolie had appeared in the doorway. ‘Do close the door if you want an intimate moment.’
How much she had heard, I had no idea.
‘But Benjy, how marvellous to see you! I declare, you haven’t changed! What’s your secret?’
At once they were embracing.
‘He keeps a painting in the attic,’ I said.
Trouble smirked. ‘Oh boy, you should see that painting! But I hear we’re off to the theatre tonight.’
‘Expect disaster. You boys lead the applause, all right? Whatever happens, applaud. Throw flowers. Oh Benjy, Benjy! Come, let me show you around Wobblewood West.’ And linking her arm in his, Aunt Toolie hauled him from the room, adding, as they vanished, ‘You’ll never guess! Grover’s invited a hundred servicemen from the base down the coast. Simple soldier boys! What they’ll make of Sophocles I dread to think. Disaster, disaster!’
‘Never mind – we’ll have a fun disaster,’ I heard Trouble say.
I lay on Trouble’s bed, hearing the throb of my blood like the tide. After some time I stirred; reluctantly, I made my way downstairs. From the drawing room came talk in a steady ebb and flow, and a woman in a golden gown whinnied like a horse, tossing back her head. I could not see Trouble. The sun, sinking sharply, speared through the wide windows. The guests, for the most part, were local business types, plump men in tuxedoes with their wives – none of them, I surmised, much interested in classical theatre.
I consumed several Scotches in quick succession. The evening took on a mellow glow, and I went to the edge of the terrace. Deeply, I breathed the sea air and swivelled back to watch as Aunt Toolie, lynx-thin, with her cigarette holder, mink stole, and trailing gown, luxuriated in the attentions of an elderly professorial type and several attractive youngish men in uniform. Our lady director and Our classical scholar, I heard the professor call her. She had pinned up her hair, exposing the long curve of her neck; her makeup was light, and though her features were awkward – the jaw too heavy, the nose too beaky – she looked beautiful. She turned, speaking enthusiastically to the youngish men, just as I became aware of Uncle Grover eyeing me with concern. I smiled, as if to say there was nothing wrong.
A spoon clinked the side of a glass, and Aunt Toolie declared it was time for the play. I made for a bathroom and pissed copiously. I doused my face with water. When I emerged, most of the guests had disappeared down the steep steps towards the amphitheatre.
Uncle Grover, in the rear, waited for me.
‘Bearing up, Woodley?’ He took my arm.
‘Oh, you know.’ Gesturing airily, I lost my footing; he steadied me and I wished he had not, but he was determined to be generous, patiently helping the drunkard, the cripple.
‘You know I’ve always been grateful to you,’ he said.
‘To me?’ I wondered what he was talking about.
‘Wasn’t it on some jape of yours that Tallulah turned up at that Jap’s penthouse that night? I’d never normally meet anybody like her. Do you think I’d have dared go to Greenwich Village? You see, if it hadn’t been for you, I’d never have married Tallulah.’
‘I’m glad,’ I said. ‘She’s quite a lady.’
In the amphitheatre, GIs filled the upper tiers. They were noisy and drunk.
‘You’re sure the soldiers were a good idea?’ I said.
‘But that’s precisely the purpose of the theatre! Culture for the masses, Tallulah says.’
In the front row, Trouble leaned forward and twisted his hands. Uneasily, I took my place beside him, while Uncle Grover went to check on Aunt Toolie. The sun, framed in the proskenion, had almost set; arc lights, attached to a generator, bathed the acting area in a lurid glow.
I asked Trouble where he had been.
‘A walk. Along the cliffs.’ His face was tight.
Aunt Toolie introduced the play with a speech that might have been a little too erudite, making much of developments in the drama between Aeschylus and Sophocles and quoting classical scholars. I hoped she could not hear the sniggering from the tiers further up. At last, to scattered applause, she took her seat with a proud Uncle Grover, while a boy with rabbity teeth strummed chords on a ukulele (a lyre being unavailable) and Real Estate Agent Antigone and Cleaning Lady Ismene emerged to declaim their lines.
Soldiers wolf-whistled; some clapped for each speech.
The play had proceeded only so far as the first chorus when I became aware of Trouble gripping my thigh. I looked down, startled. His fingers were white-knuckled, his nails digging sharply. The thought came to me of a rubber band, stretching tighter and tighter, and terror thrummed inside me. I whispered urgently, ‘Trouble! What’s wrong?’
Sweat stood out on his upper lip, and he gestured with a jerk of his head towards the upper tiers. ‘You know, don’t you?’
‘Know what?’ I turned to where he was looking. The audience, behind the arc lights, was deep in shadow.
‘The soldiers,’ he said. ‘They’ve come for me.’
‘What are you saying?’ I said, too loudly.
I had no thought for the actors, the words, the embarrassed local worthies, or the jostling, whistling soldiers; all I could see was Trouble, now twisting back towards darkness; now hunching forward, head in hands. My pulse beat at my temples like a drum. I should have led him from the amphitheatre. I should have said he was sick. I should have known that, like a rubber band stretched too far, he would snap.
During the chanting of an antistrophe, he leaped up, turned to the audience, and screamed.
Startled, the chorus fell silent. So did the soldiers.
Trouble cried, ‘Stop these games! If you’ve come for me, come!’
Murmurs broke out all around the amphitheatre: ‘The guy’s flipped’ and ‘Who is he? He’s crazy!’ and ‘Is this part of the play?’
Aunt Toolie went to him, but Trouble shrugged her aside, stabbing an accusing finger into the darkness.
‘I know who’s sent you! I know why you’re here!’
His shouts were for the soldiers.
His voice cracked. ‘It wasn’t my choice! I can’t help what I am! You’ve no right to hold me and you won’t!’
‘Darling, please!’ Aunt Toolie cried.
Could I intervene? I was rooted in place. Beneath the arc lights Trouble was unearthly, his pale exotic beauty transfixing, tormenting, like the vision of a god that might never come again.
He taunted the GIs, calling them cowards, weaklings, and, though he wore his colonel’s uniform, there was more than one drunkard ready to hurl himself down the steps, fists at the ready, to challenge him.
A lumbering farm boy weighed in first.
Trouble ducked as the fist swung, then he stuck out a leg, tripped the boy up, and danced around him in triumph.
A second opponent appeared, then a third.
Uncle Grover was frantic, waving his little hands like a conductor in the grip of an epileptic fit.
‘Out, out!’ he cried. ‘Out of my house!’
His gestures took in actors and audience alike, but it was too late. Some complied, scrambling up the stone steps, but most stayed, staring in wonderment – and not a little delight – as Trouble took on the enraged GIs. Possessed of powers beyond his slight frame,
he punched one in the stomach, sending him reeling back; one flew through the air, landing heavily; one leaped on Trouble, tore back his hair, and would have slammed his face into the rock, but Trouble flipped him over, kicked him, and slapped him about the face. Cries ricocheted around the stony tiers. Aunt Toolie, like a mad thing, rushed back and forth, but for once the Queen of Bohemia was powerless. She tried again to intervene, just as Trouble veered from an oncoming punch.
It connected, but not with Trouble. She dropped to the stony floor.
‘Tallulah!’ Uncle Grover’s cry was piteous.
Motionless, she lay under the fizzing arc lights. Uncle Grover fought his way towards her; GIs fell back, abashed.
Aunt Toolie moaned. ‘Grover!... Grover!’
Trouble stood, breathing heavily. He had lost his cap, and his uniform was torn. Blood ran from a cut on his face.
He gazed up at the tiered rows.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ he declared, his voice ringing, as if it were he who had struck Aunt Toolie; but no, he meant more than that. Such pain filled his voice that I believed then, as I believe now, that he never meant any of it: never meant to be what he was, never meant to become what he became.
Suddenly, as if shocked back into life, he pounded up the stone steps, and no one tried to stop him. Or rather, only I did, but I could hardly match his speed. By the time I reached the top, it was too late. I rounded a corner of the house, calling his name, just as he leaped into Uncle Grover’s Cadillac, gunned it into life, and vanished into the night.
‘Twenty miles! Twenty fucking miles!’
Two weeks later I sat in a long, low observation hut in the desert with Miller-Meyer-Maybee. Surrounding us were perhaps a hundred other pressmen, writers, and photographers. It was not yet dawn. We were crowded, cold, and had been there most of the night.
Meyer, the Robert Mitchum fellow, was increasingly restless.
‘Have another beer,’ said Miller, and tossed him a dripping bottle from the ice bucket.
‘We won’t see a thing. Not a fucking thing.’ Meyer ripped off the bottle cap with his teeth and spat it to the floor. Our position underscored our lowly status. Base camp was ten miles closer to the blast site; for the VIPs, there were special shelters only five miles away. ‘Say, Sharpless, how long did it take us to get to this godforsaken place?’
‘Too long.’ Leaving Los Alamos the day before, our party had rattled in a convoy of buses for some three hundred miles across the New Mexico desert, ending up in a corner of the Air Force’s Alamogordo Bombing Range. History, we had been assured, was about to be made. Oppenheimer had given the bomb test the code name ‘Trinity’. Later I read that he had intended this as a reference to Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnets’: Batter my heart, three-person’d God... Oppenheimer had a way with literary allusions. He also had a way with blasphemy.
‘Don’t worry, Meyer.’ Maybee, the Boston Brahmin, spectacles glinting in lamplight, looked up from his book. ‘If the bang’s as big as they say, we’ll see it perfectly well. Even from twenty miles.’
‘In this weather?’ said Miller. ‘The firecracker’s damp, I tell you! What time is it now, Sharpless?’
‘Nearly five.’ I huddled into my coat.
Shame consumed me. I should never have been there. Why see history? I should turn my back on it. History was Oppenheimer blowing up the world. All the day before and all that night, fellows had been taking bets on the bomb and what it would do. Some, with a bravado I did not quite believe, insisted it would never work. Some wondered how many thousand tons of TNT the blast would equal; there were numerous rival estimates. Some said the blast would ignite the earth’s atmosphere. Some said it would rain down radioactive dust, infecting us all. Psychiatrists were on hand in case any of us went mad.
Trinity had been scheduled for more than an hour ago, but deep in the night a storm had broken over the desert, pelting the roof like a rain of rocks. God, Maybee observed, was doing His best to upstage us. Lightning split the sky; thunder boomed and cracked. Only now, with daybreak, was the storm easing. Word had come that the test would go ahead.
‘Potsdam,’ announced a lean Englishman in an RAF uniform, swaying over to our little group. His moustache disturbed me; it was matchstick thin, a dark line above his upper lip. I imagined him shaving around it and wondered if his hand ever wavered. Mine would.
Miller moaned, ‘Not Potsdam again!’
The Englishman blinked. ‘It’s still true,’ he said. ‘Why do you think Truman delayed meeting the other leaders until now, two months after victory in Europe? I’ll tell you why. He wants a big stick to beat Stalin with, and he’s hoping this bomb is it.’
‘Stalin?’ said Meyer. ‘Stalin’s our ally.’
‘Shows how much you know.’ The Englishman jabbed a Camel into a long holder. ‘Enemies, that’s what you Yanks need. Do you really think you’ll shut down all this – this funfair of yours – after the war’s over? You’ll need a good excuse to keep it going.’
There was a blast of cold, and Meyer yelled for somebody to close the fucking door.
‘Major Sharpless? Major Sharpless, sir?’
A young man, a corporal with a prominent Adam’s apple, peered with curiosity through the crowd.
‘The cripple,’ said Miller, pointing in my direction.
‘I’m Sharpless.’ I rose. ‘Who wants him?’
‘Orders from Senator Pinkerton, sir,’ said the corporal, saluting me. ‘I’m to take you to him.’
Meyer goggled at me, outraged. ‘Him? The fucking cripple’s going to get a ringside seat?’
I made a rude gesture at him as I left.
‘So what’s this all about?’ I asked the corporal, following him from the hut. I had tried to see the senator for days. He had ignored me. Why summon me now, out of all these observers gathered in Alamogordo?
‘This way, sir.’ The corporal held a groundsheet over me as I struggled towards his jeep. The jeep’s cover was up, but rain seeped through, and a flap of canvas, torn half free, billowed beside me as we churned off through the mud.
I watched the windshield wipers slap back and forth. ‘It’s base camp we’re headed for?’
‘Closer. Senator Pinkerton’s in one of the VIP shelters, sir.’
Rain had ceased by the time we arrived. Our destination was a concrete bunker barely visible in a rise of scrubby hillside. Far off, in the purplish dawn, a steel tower rose like a rocket ship one hundred feet tall.
The corporal led me down concrete steps.
Inside, the bunker was bleak as a locker room, but for the desert scene, like an artist’s impression of Venus or Mars, that flickered behind an oblong of toughened glass. I half-expected Oppenheimer to be there – poised over a detonator, grimly exultant – but, of course, he was at base camp. This was only an observation point, where Senator Pinkerton, his wide back towards me as I entered, conversed heartily with a congressman I recognized from the papers. A famous general and several other top brass pored over a map or chart; the base chaplain from Los Alamos clutched a prayer book with a harried air; scientists hovered, white-coated, over meters and dials. In one corner, a radio operator with cans over his ears yelled into a bulky microphone. The walls were grey untreated concrete, stained copiously by intrusive rain. ‘Zero minus five minutes, gentlemen,’ called the radio operator, exchanging a thumbs-up with the famous general.
‘You sent for me, sir?’ I had to interrupt the senator.
‘Ah, Sharpless. One of you press fellows had to see it up close. Did you bring your black specs?’
I patted my breast pocket and listened respectfully as the fat congressman expatiated on the project as if it had been his own idea and the senator nodded, wryly perhaps, in agreement. He offered me a cigar, and I let him light it. I despised myself. I had never wanted to be in Los Alamos; I had never wanted to be in Alamogordo. Something was dying inside me and I was powerless to resist it. Impassively, I gazed into the senator’s bland, broad face. We could have been bu
sinessmen at a Rotary meeting, gathered in the bar.
‘Zero minus four minutes,’ said the radio operator.
‘A stiff shot, that’s what we need,’ said the congressman, indicating the drinks tray in the corner.
I moved to assist him, but the senator drew me back. Through the window, the steel tower flamed like a beacon in the rising sun. He draped an arm about me. ‘You thought I never cared for my son, I suppose.’
‘He isn’t in Washington, is he?’ I said. The arm was heavy across my neck, like a yoke.
I had stayed at Wobblewood West for four days after Trouble left. Aunt Toolie, unhurt, seemed pleased to have been at the centre of a drama that, undoubtedly, was a bigger hit than Antigone. With admirable panache, she applied steaks to her black eye and worried about Trouble. Uncle Grover’s red convertible had been found abandoned, some ways down the coast.
When I got back to Los Alamos, Trouble had not returned. Fearing the worst, I said to one of the senator’s staff, ‘He’s AWOL, isn’t he?’
‘AWOL?’ The fellow shook his head. ‘He’s back in DC.’
Even then, I knew this was a lie.
Now, in the bunker, the senator rubbed his eyes as if with fatigue, and I almost laughed; for the first time I saw him as an old man, pathetic and defeated. I drew back on my cigar. I felt sick.
‘You don’t know where he’s gone,’ I said.
‘Of course I know. He’s been spotted in Mexico. Lying low, the little fool! The only question is how to handle things delicately.’
‘You’re thinking of publicity.’
‘Damn right I am! But I’d gladly have him court-martialled.’
‘He’s cracked up. He needs help, not punishment.’
‘Mr Sharpless! Are you really so naive?’
I flushed and wanted to ask him what he meant, but the radio operator gave the three-minute warning, the congressman returned with the drinks, and we clinked glasses together, toasting the detonation.
‘Those Russkies won’t know what hit ’em,’ said the congressman.