He snorted. He stomped up the front steps. He opened the screen door. He wedged the tapered end of the jack handle between the doorjamb and the door lock, noted how much it looked like an ordinary crowbar, and was about to pry open the door, when he caught himself and removed the instrument. He turned the knob and walked in.
Country living, he thought. Not an ax murderer for miles. Why lock up?
In the living room he began his search for a telephone, figuring he’d systematically work through each room until he found it. The walls here were covered with vertically striped silver and white wallpaper, which had slightly peeled off near the ceiling in one corner and near another corner near the chestnut brown floor, which looked worn at the entrance. A long royal blue sofa, a short sofa and two matching armchairs were arranged around a coffee table.
He worried Edna would come home to find him snooping around. Though he had a good reason to be here: he was completely stranded, and she might be tied up for hours brewing up trouble or being burned at the stake.
Stop, he told himself. Stay focused.
But the framed pictures on the wall beckoned him. Here was an attractive young red-headed woman dressed as a witch beside an equally attractive young man dressed as a scarecrow, his right arm encircling her narrow waist. The picture next to it showed the two in the same pose, same costumes but in this photograph they were old.
There were pictures of two girls standing on the bed of a hay wagon. The youngest, or at least the shortest, was O’Hare. Next to these hung a tattered, old black and white photograph of a Japanese family: father, mother, son, and daughter.
On an adjacent wall hung a series of watercolors, modestly initialed E., of pastoral scenes: fields of sunflowers, cows grazing, a girl on horseback.
Having covered the living room’s perimeter, he moved into the kitchen, then into the five other rooms on the first floor. Where the hell did she have her phone? After briefly being troubled by the idea that she might not have a land line, he clomped up the stairs, to demonstrate to himself that he had not given up hope.
He checked the bedroom where the only thing of interest was a black book, lettered in red, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, lying on a bedside night table. He left it untouched and moved his search operation to the bathroom next, where he allowed himself the time to urinate.
Of the six upstairs rooms only the master bedroom and bath appeared lived in. Sheets covered the furniture in the other rooms, one of which appeared to be an office, whose desk, cluttered with piles of books, and stacks of newspaper clippings, looked as if it had been in use, when, in a moment, it had been put into suspended animation.
It was highly unlikely that a telephone hid under one of those sheets. But like a dust devil he began pulling sheets off pieces of furniture, tossing them willy nilly all over the room. Then abruptly he stopped. It had felt good doing something but now he felt like a dumb cluck. Why would anyone hide a telephone in an unused room? Half-heartedly he covered the furniture again.
Down the stairs to the first floor and then, after a search behind various closet doors, he descended to the basement. No phone.
He would walk to town. Hell, he’d march to town.
Chapter Five
Edna returned to her truck after having handed out only a few flyers. It wasn’t much in the way of physical work, but her discouragement was taking deeper root. People were simply uninterested. And making matters worse, someone had struck the driver’s side window with a heavy object instantly producing an ominous spider web of cracks.
She tried calming herself. Yes, this was frightening but she didn’t want it to paralyze her. She was not a coward. She’d let a stranger into her house in the middle of the night. But, on the other hand, she couldn’t sit by her truck with a shot gun in hand.
On the way home, she saw Will a mile and a half away, though she didn’t recognize him until he was closer. It looked as if he were marching, arms swinging rhythmically at his sides. She pulled to the side of the road and stopped. He came around to the driver’s side to speak with her. She rolled down the window, the spider-webbed glass disappearing into the door.
“You don’t have a goddamn phone in your whole goddamn house.” Then he started his march again.
For a moment she was puzzled, then thought good riddance, but felt the bite of conscience almost simultaneously. The man was obviously disturbed. It was hot, very hot, and miles to town. Traffic was practically non-existent on this stretch of country highway, though he might not have tried to hitch hike even had someone driven by. She made a U-turn, passed him and parked.
As he approached, she got out of the truck and called out to him.
“Please let me give you a ride.”
He strode by the car.
“You’re stubborn as a tree stump,” she said. “By the time you get there everything will be closed. Then what?”
He turned to face her but was silent. He took his hat off, fanned himself with it for a second, walked to the car, and got in.
“I got overheated,” he said. “I’m sorry about that but I need to get on the road and my car is dug in about as deep as it will go.”
“Have you been rummaging around my house?”
“I was looking for your goddamn telephone.”
“Now you listen here, Mr. Larrabee. If anyone’s going to do the swearing around here it’s me. Did you see my window? Someone bashed it, probably because they don’t like me. I’m not swearing. You can swear without blaspheming, you know. Leave God out of it. He has the destruction of mankind to worry about.”
“Just like you,” said Will.
For a few minutes they were silent.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Someplace that can haul my car out of its pit.”
“I can do that.”
It would be better if she did it her way, she explained, because it would be quicker and cheaper. She made a U-turn, heading back home as soon as he accepted her offer.
After a few miles she asked about his mother, because she was interested, but in part to get her mind off her own problems.
Will’s mother had called, begging him to come immediately. They were going to lock her up and electrocute her brain and his brother was all for it. Will was the only one she could trust. The only one who understood.
“Are you talking about electroconvulsive treatment for depression?”
“She’s not depressed. Sometimes her judgment is a little off, that’s all. She buys things at garage sales. Things she doesn’t need. Or she doesn’t buy them; she just takes them. Or she argues with people she should know better than to argue with. Or she makes big plans she can’t carry out, but she doesn’t need shock treatment. She’s scared to death of it.”
He removed his hat, straightening the feathers, then turned the hat around and around, using thumb and index finger on the brim.
They had wanted to put the old buzzer to his delicate skull, too, but the psychiatrist said he wasn’t manic, just angry at life.
O’Hare had questions but kept them to herself.
“So what’s with the window?” asked Will.
“Someone’s unhappy with my flyers.”
“I’m sorry. That’s a bummer. Do you know who did it?”
“No idea. Must have been kids.”
“Where’s your telephone?”
“In my purse.”
“No. Your home phone.”
“In the kitchen cabinet along with the shotgun.”
“Funny place for a phone and a shotgun.”
She examined the tires and the deep holes they had burrowed, turned away, walked to the tractor shed, removed chains and hooks from their sturdy pegs, and placed them behind the tractor’s cab. She gave him a shovel. He said nothing.
Grimly he dug ramps in front of each rear tire. She attached the tractor to the car and pulled it free.
He thanked her.
“All in a day’s work,” she said. “Wish
I were that efficient with my campaign.”
He removed some bills from his wallet.
“I’d like to give you something.”
“Are you sincere?” she asked.
“Yes. I want to pay you back for your kindness.”
She didn’t wish to get him in any trouble, but she wasn’t about to ask him to do anything illegal or dangerous.
She just needed to make an impression. Get people talking. She didn’t need the money—at the moment anyway—she needed him to help her make a sign and bring it into town.
“I want you to pay me back a different way.”
What she was proposing would be a delay in Will’s departure. Well, she had sheltered and fed him, even clothed him after a fashion by washing and drying his clothes and then pulling out his car. A few days wouldn’t make much difference, would it?
She needed a sign that was light enough to carry and a simpler, more stylish flyer with the basics about the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent—that mouthful of a name for the missile scheduled to replace the Minuteman.
“Would you mind driving in your car? I’m a bit edgy at the moment about using my truck, which apparently is easily recognized.”
Will drove them to the university bookstore in Minot to get what they needed.
The clerk, a perky young woman wearing a t-shirt with a large white M on a red background, pointed at Will’s hat.
“What kind of feathers are those?”
“Horse,” he said, straight- faced.
“That’s what I thought,” said the clerk, smiling at him.”
The felt markers and the three-by-four-foot cardboard presentation boards lay on the dining room table. While Will unpacked his suitcase upstairs, O’Hare sat at the table, ruminating. She’d already given the problem some thought but finding the right thing to say and the right way to say it, was tricky. Her first flyers were amateurish.
First of all, how many people knew what GBSD meant? Did she literally have to spell it out for them: GBSD stands for Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent? No. It would take up too much space.
* * *
The GBSD is unnecessary for deterrence.
The GBSD is a tremendous waste of your money.
The GBSD brings us a step closer to nuclear war.
Say no to the GBSD.
Tell your congressman and senators now.
If people didn’t know what the GBSD was, they could ask. Anyway, she’d have flyers with her, laying out the arguments and citing the references. She attached a wood handle to the cardboard. If this sign didn’t get people’s attention, she’d make a different one. Clean shaven, Will Larrabee, came downstairs to look at the poster.
“What’s GBSD stand for?”
“It stands for the new missile they want to put in. Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. I asked myself what kind of muddle-headed committee came up with this moniker.”
Without mirth, Will said, “How about The Bomb Bucket, or The Last Hammer or The Big Pisser or Up Yours or—
“Do you want a cup of coffee?” she said, purposefully interrupting him.
“Thanks, that would be good. My phone should be fully charged in a couple of hours. I think I’ll leave then.”
“Would you take me downtown first?”
“You didn’t like my names, did you? Bomb basket.”
O’Hare frowned. “The warheads the Minuteman missiles now carry are as powerful as three hundred forty thousand tons of TNT, about twenty-five times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. So it isn’t funny, not to me anyway. No offense. You’re very creative.”
No, there was nothing funny about it except maybe “the funny business” of getting the congress to authorize so damn much money for something so expensive and unnecessary.
“When do you want to go?”
“It’s a little late to go now. Would you be willing to spend another night here and take me in the morning?”
As soon as he agreed, she began thinking about a protest site, flip-flopping between Minot State University or Minot High School. On the one hand some of the university students were of, or close to, voting age. On the other hand high school students around the world were agitating for strong laws to fight climate change, but it was summer vacation. So it was the university.
She prepared dinner for the two of them and then insisted he watch some YouTube videos of Daniel Ellsberg giving talks about nuclear weapons.
“He is a former analyst who leaked a secret defense department report showing that the government had lied to the public about the extent of the war in Viet Nam. His action was a key to the ending of the war. And now he’s trying to prevent another—the last war. World War III.”
Two muscular men each holding a handle on a wooden crate hanging heavily between them, walk from a truck into an alley, a quarter mile from the White House. They take a freight elevator to the tenth floor and leave their cargo in a hallway.
She cannot see their faces.
A ball of brilliant white light engulfs the capital. The White House disintegrates. WW III begins.
They had breakfast silently.
“What’s wrong?” asked Will.
“Nothing.”
“You look like the food’s going bad in your mouth.”
She sipped her coffee as if to wash away a bad taste. She smiled weakly.
“Bad dream,” she said.
“What about?”
“A terrorist attack on Washington, leading to nuclear war.”
“Oh.”
At around nine Will drove her to the university. She would find a way home she reassured him. She’d lived in Minot all her life and had people who would drive her home. After they shook hands and wished each other well, Will turned to leave, then thought better of it, and simply stood to the side to observe. He would begin his road trip again, he told himself, in a minute or two.
Built in 1913, Old Main, the red-brick heart of the campus, was three stories tall in the center, flanked on either side by a two-story wing. A long set of stairs, red handrails up the center and along the sides, led to the entrance. Two columns on each side of the entrance dignified the building.
Only summer school classes were in session, so the staircase was not thronged with people, but students in ones, twos, and threes entered and exited the building. At the foot of the stairs she put down her canvas shopping bag with her provisions, opened a folding chair, sat down, and raised her sign, which she put down from time to time when her arms got tired.
It was thirty minutes before anyone came to talk with her, though most gave her at least a glance. People often made her nervous, especially if they were hostile or dismissive so her very public protests caused considerable anxiety, now heightened by the thought of her vandalized truck.
Will was about to leave, when, finally, two teenage girls, each with a small backpack, approached. The taller, her blonde ponytail swinging, wore a pale blue summer dress. The shorter, her brown hair bobbed, wore skinny jeans and a tight t-shirt printed with the words “Frailty Thy Name is Woman. B. S.”
“What’s GBSD?” asked the blonde girl.
O’Hare explained that it was a missile being developed to replace the old Minuteman and told her what the initials stood for. The girls didn’t make her too nervous.
“These sitting duck land-based missiles are easy targets. The Russians have the same kind. If one side gets a warning that it’s being attacked it must decide within minutes if the warning is true. But once the missiles are launched, they can’t be called back and it’s doomsday. Do you know what nuclear winter is?”
The blonde girl shook her head, remaining where she stood as the brown-haired girl took her elbow and gently tried pulling her away.
“After a nuclear war fire storms will raise millions of tons of soot into the stratosphere, blocking out seventy percent of the sun’s rays. With so little sunlight harvests will end and it will get very cold. Not many people will survive.”
“We’r
e not having a nuclear war. Come on, Karen, let’s go,” said her friend.
Will, initially a mute observer, now spoke up, surprising himself. That he spoke from a wish to be noticed by the girl in the blue dress only occurred to him later.
“Mrs. O’Hare knows what she’s talking about,” he said, rather more loudly than he wished. Indeed, there was an edge to his voice. O’Hare give him a questioning look.
The brunette ignored him, but the blonde girl looked him in the eye, before turning back to Edna who continued.
“There have been false alarms since the silos went in. Any one of them might have started a nuclear war. It’s all here on this flyer.”
The blonde girl shook her head vigorously,
“No,” she said. “The point is to scare the Russians so they won’t fire. We need those missiles.”
Perhaps what was becoming a heated give and take moved the brunette to release her friend’s elbow and speak up.
“Do you think North Dakota is going to give up all the business that installing those new rockets is going to bring in. No way. Our senators and congressman want those missiles and so do the people who live and work here. And so do I. They’ve protected us a long time.”
Edna forced a smile. That should be enough for right now. She didn’t want them to have a bad impression of her because that impression would taint the information she was providing. There was so much more she could say but it might come across as hostile. That, for example, it was not just North Dakota that was affected by this. Just because the GBSD was a boondoggle for North Dakota, Minot in particular, didn’t make it a good thing.
“Well, I see your point,” said Edna diplomatically. “Read the flyer and see what you think.”
“No one wants nuclear war,” continued the brunette, peeved, “but you want us to disarm. We need rockets.”
“Of course, we do. Of course. But the twenty missiles launched from a single one of our atomic submarines can destroy an entire country. Each missile has five warheads. And then there’re the airplane launched missiles and bombs. We have plenty of deterrent without those stuck underground.”
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