“They don’t do this in Amsterdam.”
Dahlia had moved here from Fargo to be near the air base where she “dated” some of the men. They were mostly okay but occasionally there was a nasty one, but she could take care of herself, she explained.
They talked about the weather, about a trip to Disneyworld Dahlia had made when she was a girl, about the movies Dahlia had seen and liked.
“Did you ever see Pretty Woman?” she asked. Edna had not.
Later Edna had to use the toilet, a humiliating experience though the guards were women and Dahlia looked away.
Sheriff Andresen called Colonel Frank Nichols, commander of the 91st missile wing at Minot Air Force Base, with the odd story of a seventy-eight-year-old woman trespassing on a missile site.
“We’ve got her in a cell.”
“What was she up to?” asked Nichols.
“Protesting against the missiles.”
“She throw any cow’s blood on the fence?”
“No. No blood. No signs either or anyone else.”
“Is she a member of one of those nutty disarmament groups?
“No. Frankly, I think she’s harmless.”
“You never know but let’s not give her any publicity.
“Let her go?” asked Andresen. “No charges?”
“Christ! Of course, you’ve got to charge her, just don’t keep her in jail. Let her go to court.
In the late afternoon Johansen reappeared.
“Mrs. O’Hare, please come with me.”
“Good-bye, Dahlia.”
“Yea, take care.”
On the way back to the changing room, Edna asked what was going on.
“Sheriff Andresen wants to talk with you and then you’re being released.”
In his office, on another hard chair, she waited for him to speak.
“I have half a mind to keep you overnight but… Never mind. Just stay off those missile sites. You’re still being charged with a crime. You’ll get something in the mail. I suggest you not contest the charge.”
She suppressed the urge to comment on his having half a mind, but her anxiety had turned to agitation and she couldn’t repress her urge to speak.
“Bjorn, do you know how long it would take Russian rockets to hit these silos?”
“Frankly, Edna, I have other things to think about.”
“Probably thirty minutes, if that. And that long for our rockets to hit their silos. One side will launch their rockets if they receive a warning that the other side has attacked. And they’ll do this even if the warning is a mistake. And then billions of people will die. We need to get rid of them.”
He had nothing to say.
Officer Johansen escorted her to the exit where Amy Haugen was waiting.
“I’ve been here all day. I didn’t think it would take that long. What happened?”
“They locked me up.”
“Really?”
“Yes, they dressed me in orange like a pumpkin and locked me up. Dangerous little old me.”
“Locking you up for misdemeanor trespassing seems over the top. I wonder what’s going on. Do you need a ride back to your truck?”
As Amy drove, Edna began to relax.
“Did you take any pictures?” she asked.
“I did. Of the vehicle. Listen, Edna, I’d written up the story from what you’d already told me. And when I was waiting for you I spoke with Wilburn about it. He wasn’t interested.”
“Wasn’t interested? With the pictures and everything?”
“There are no pictures of you. Just of the vehicle. And anyway, he said no one wanted to read about a crazy old woman raving against a project that would make Minot a boom town all over again. Not even the farmers are grousing. He also asked if you were a peacenik.”
“A peacenik? He knows James and I have wanted this rocket and its hydrogen bomb off our land forever and we were never called peaceniks. Most of the farmers, if they had their way, wouldn’t have those monsters on their land either.”
Amy Haugen shrugged her shoulders. A protest by a woman at a missile silo was clearly newsworthy, and Wilburn’s rejection of it was censorship after all, but perhaps it was best that it had not appeared. Amy’s husband would have called her out for helping a crackpot.
Edna experienced Amy’s stillness, not as hostile or disinterested, but merely as pensive. And she was grateful for Amy’s generosity with her time. She could have left Edna to her own devices.
“I swore to myself that I would do this… This campaign or crusade or whatever you want to call it, and I feel I’m letting James down and myself. It’s a really bad feeling but I don’t seem to have the get-up-and-go for it.”
“Well, that’s not so surprising. You’re still in mourning.”
Edna nodded but steered the conversation away from grief.
“You know, shortly after we moved here, James experienced for himself Minot’s general disinterest in the ICBMs, which I’d warned him about.”
“Yes,” said Amy, “and it’s still true. Out of sight, out of mind. They don’t cause any problems. They are simply facts of life and finding someone who wants to talk critically about them is as likely as finding someone who wants to bad mouth the air force.”
“Yes,” agreed Edna. “James accepted reality and stopped trying to engage people on the issue. He understood his unique circumstances already made him foreign to these Midwesterners and he didn’t want to seem even more foreign.”
“Most everybody liked James, though,” added Amy.
“Right, but when they announced that billions were to be spent on new missiles, he felt compelled to act.
“He was committed to bring this GBSD thing to national attention, as quixotic as that sounded. And here his unique background would enhance the newsworthiness of his efforts.
“But I disliked confrontation, still do, and was reluctant to say things that made people mad, specifically my brother-in-law Earnest Schmidt. The only real arguments James and I ever had were about this reticence and about my keeping my maiden name.
“James understood that I’d do what I could but that the burden would be on him but before he could do anything, the corona virus put an end to his plans.”
She choked up, not adding that he’d died in isolation in intensive care, and that she had been barred from an in-person visit.”
“I’m sorry, Edna.”
“You don’t see anything wrong with these missiles, do you?”
“To tell you the truth, I’ve never given them much thought. But I understand what you’re saying. I think I do.”
She felt sorry for Edna, principally because she’d lost her husband of over fifty years, had no children, and lived alone, but also because she found sad the idea of a woman sworn singlehandedly to stop a juggernaut that might easily crush her. At the same time she admired the woman’s spunk. Amy herself, hadn’t even tried arguing with Wilburn when he said no to her article.
A week later, returning from the supermarket to her pick-up truck, a shopping bag hanging from each hand, Edna was shocked to see the word “Russian” and a five-pointed star sloppily spray painted in red on the driver’s side of her truck.
The sun had warmed the sidewalk so much that the heat could be felt radiating back up from the concrete. Her black truck was hot, too, and when she gingerly touched the tip of her little finger to the red paint, a bit stuck. She rubbed it off on a tire.
She put the bags in the cab and, cursing under her breath, walked several blocks to a hardware store. A man in an apron bearing the label Strong’s Hardware, It’s Strong, asked if he could be of help.
“Yes, I need some black enamel spray paint. Glossy.”
“I have just the thing.”
Back at her truck she had the odd thought that she was fortunate to be dressed in black, now that she had to use the spray can, though she would not be as slap-dash a painter as the vandals who did this. Intently focused on the job, she covered the red paint with black.
A
s she got into the truck and sat behind the wheel, about to pull out into the light traffic, a wave of gooseflesh passed over her. She saw herself in the cross-hairs of a sniper’s riffle. The red spray paint was blood. No. No. No. She told herself. That’s as cuckoo as it gets.
Under the awning of an ice cream shop across the street, stood two beefy young men, boys really, in wine red football jerseys. Number 9’s brown hair was cut in such a way that his head looked like an artillery shell. He stood arms akimbo, shaking his head slowly. Number 15’s longish blond hair hung in his eyes. He carried a skateboard, which he moved from one hand to the other.
They were definitely staring at her and she had the eerie feeling that they were the vandals.
Her chest rose and fell rapidly now as she tried to come to a decision. It might be prudent to just leave. On the other hand maybe it wasn’t prudence but simple cowardice. She got out of the truck walked the short distance to a corner where she could cross safely, and then approached the boys, stopping a few feet from them.
“Did you young men see anyone spray paint on my truck?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, lady,” said number 9, tonelessly.
“That truck over there.” She pointed. “That’s mine. Somebody sprayed paint on it.”
She couldn’t believe she was doing this. Her heart pitter-pattered in her chest.
“We’ve got better things to do than look at your truck,” said number 15, brushing hair from his forehead. “It’s not much to look at, anyway.”
“Sorry to have troubled you,” she said.
On the drive home questions about that troubling encounter arose like bubbles from a swamp. Why were those boys so hostile? Was it possible that they themselves had done the dirty work? But if so, why? And how had she worked up the courage to face them?
She was still chewing over these questions at night. She couldn’t sleep. Though she scolded herself and whispered to herself under her breath that it really was unnecessary, she got out of bed, padded downstairs into the kitchen, and poured herself an ounce of whiskey precisely measured in a jigger. She fell asleep.
Above the huge world map at the center of the North American Aerospace Command under Cheyenne mountain a red number 4 begins to flash. Unidentified objects on the screen approach the United States. Now the red number 3 flashes. She swallows but her mouth is dry. Number 2 replaces number 3. At number 1 the computer generates a warning: 99.9% certainty of an attack on the United States. “Wait,” she thinks. “Wait.”
She waves her arms at the man in the control chair whose face she cannot see. She cups her hand to her mouth and screams, “Wait! The man turns toward her, puzzled, shrugging his shoulders. He does not wait.
She sees and hears hundreds of missiles arise, roaring from their Great Plains silos. Hundreds more missiles arise, roaring from their Russia silos. Hydrogen bombs rain upon the earth.
Hundreds of firestorms from burning cities spew soot into the stratosphere. The earth is cast in darkness.
The flock of geese that triggered the alarm perishes in the doom.
Chapter Three
The car’s rear wheels spun as if they were in the final lap of the Indy 500, but the car just sat. Goddamn it! Will Larrabee felt a cursing binge coming on, but he clenched his jaw and the feeling passed.
Stuck in a summer thunderstorm at night in the middle of North Dakota. Nice. He turned the engine off. During the day the only feature of the landscape was a horizon-to-horizon yellow, green, or brown shag rug of one crop or another. He could only identify the sunflowers. Though the moon was out, they were now gray, except when a nearby bolt of lightning, splitting into jagged roots like an otherworldly tree, cast a ghostly light on them.
He’d have to spend the night in the car, not that he would be able to sleep.
Another flash and there it was, probably a house, as if it had just popped into existence like one of those virtual particles that nuclear physicists go ga-ga over.
Should he stay in the car and take his chances with the lightning or try to make it to the house not even knowing for sure if it was a house? Well, what the hell else could it be? A bright forking root of light pierced the ground not twenty yards away, making up his mind for him. You didn’t have to be a naturalist to read nature’s signs. The next thunderclap told him to get moving. He forgot all about the suitcase in the trunk. He pulled his broad-brimmed hat tightly down over his head and stepped out of the car.
He knew he would be soaked but what surprised him was the wind’s frenzy and the rain stinging his face like hundreds of tiny whips. His feet sunk almost to his ankles in the mud as he slogged across the field to what now really did look like a house. It was completely dark.
He trudged up four wooden steps to the front porch, which wrapped around one side of the house. He knocked forcefully on the screen door. Five hits. Pause. Five hits. If there were nobody home he’d break the damn thing down. But he clenched his teeth again, telling himself he must wait. It was, after all, the middle of the night. Nevertheless knocking, waiting, knocking, waiting, took a great effort of will.
Almost simultaneously the inner door opened, the sky flashed again, and the porch light came on. An old woman in a white bathrobe stood there, a light on in the room behind her. He was in no condition to examine her with his usual thoroughness for signs of danger but saw that her hair was surprisingly red, that she was slender, and with her right hand over the grip, held a double-barreled break action shot gun cradled in the crook of her left arm.
He had the presence of mind to be aware how he must appear to her. A bedraggled young man with several days of dark scraggly beard and a scowl on his face. Hell, he could star in a slasher film.
“Sorry to wake you but I… My car is stuck in the mud. I wonder if…you might have a place for me to spend the night. I don’t want to sleep in the car.”
She stared at him as if concentrating on a particularly annoying crossword puzzle.
She’d gone to bed thinking of those two hostile boys and her vandalized car. Then had that dream and had to have a second shot of whiskey to get back to sleep.
And now this miserable but strong looking young man, a supplicant, polite, but what was he doing out here in the middle of the night? His appearance was not reassuring.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“New York. To see my mother. She’s sick.”
“Where are you coming from?”
“Seattle.”
The young man began to shiver.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll sleep in the car.”
“Wait here,” she said.
Wait here! He was going to crack a tooth if he had to keep clenching his teeth. He was glad that he hadn’t kicked in the door though. Now that would have been a bummer. He could almost feel the buckshot in his chest. His shivering increased.
She returned holding the shot gun and dangling from her left hand a large blue plastic bucket, which she lay on the floor. She unlatched the screen door and stepped back and to the side.
“Better come in. You’re shivering.”
He opened the door and stepped inside, wordless.
“Now put your shoes and socks in there.” She pointed at the bucket. When he finished she pointed to the stairs.
“Take the bucket and go up the stairs. There’s a bathroom on the right.”
So thoroughly was he soaked that the sleeves of his shirt and the legs of his pants made a sloshing sound as he ascended.
She followed behind him.
“The light switch is there.” She pointed. He entered the bathroom.
“You can take your things off. I’ll bring you something to put on.”
He stood there, rivulets of water streaming from him, and began to strip. She returned, partially opened the door and, averting her eyes, handed him pajamas, a bath robe, and slippers. He left his soggy hat under the sink, where he’d spotted a hair dryer.
“This is really nice of you. I app
reciate it. My name’s Will Larrabee, by the way”.
“Edna O’Hare. Give me your things. I’ll hang them in the mud room.”
Remarkably the slippers fit him as did the men’s silk pajamas printed with green Japanese ideograms on a black background. The white terry cloth bathrobe, however, was a little small, probably for a woman, which reminded him of Katie Owens, a girl he’d been growing sweet on until it was clear, even to a thick skull like him, that she’d never to go to bed with him, much less love him. She finally told him, after eating on his tab five times, that she wasn’t totally comfortable dating a man almost twice her age—poor arithmetic on her part. She was nineteen, he twenty-four. Besides, she was a virgin she told him. Had he been an explosive device they would have been goners. As it was, he simply muffled a curse and excused himself from the table, returning when he’d gotten himself under control.
His temper, spring-loaded, got him into fights, almost got him a dishonorably discharged, but he fought the enemy even harder than he fought the MPs. He’d been reprimanded but he got his purple heart.
Dressed and slippered, he stepped into the hallway where Edna was waiting. He left his hat, its feathers drooping, in the bathroom.
“Downstairs, Mr. Larrabee.” Again she pointed. He descended. She followed, still holding the shotgun.
His nervous system and adrenal glands had been revved up for months now, well before he’d taken off to see his mother while there was still time, as she had put it, and as he would tell anyone on the road who asked. His eye, intermittently, was keen as a fish hawk’s. A moment later, in the rush of his own thoughts, he might be oblivious to the most obvious gesture. But when he was focused, the emotions behind people’s expressions and postures were as evident to him as a fly in the soup.
Mrs. O’Hare appeared to be well past the age when most people’s hair had turned gray or silver or white, yet hers, he noted again, was almost as red as a hazard flag. And with that shot gun she did present a potential hazard, but all it really meant was that he frightened her.
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