It would have been nice if that Larrabee boy had stayed for a while longer.
They stand in a vast expanse of rubble, Minot’s every building having been so thoroughly blasted apart that only hints of their prior existence, here and there, poke up through the debris. James extends his right arm and index finger, pointing at the annihilation before them.
Absurdly, but not less painfully because of that, his gesture feels like an accusation.
Edna O’Hare awoke with tears in her eyes, her heart beating rapidly. Placidly shining through her window, the moon took a few moments to reassure her that this was just another one of those damn dreams.
Chapter Fifteen
Karen Haugen, high school senior, and future pediatrician, along with her friend Suzy, was taking summer courses in biology and math at Minot State University.
Late one Saturday afternoon Suzy invited Karen over to watch a movie in her room, which was itself covered with movie posters. They sat on the bed, propped against the wall with pillows.
“I found it during my research for my paper. It’s from 1964. Ancient. But it’s sexy.”
“Oh, my God. If my father finds out I watched this, my goose is like totally cooked.”
“Just tell him it’s a war movie if he asks. World War II. This English nurse’s husband is killed and she’s lonely, so she sleeps with this American navy guy. It’s called the Americanization of Emily. Anyway, he’s probably never even seen it.
“I’m not going to mention it at all. Maybe I’ll even say we didn’t watch a movie, I mean, if he asks.”
“Good for you. A little white lie in the service of some harmless racy fantasy.”
During a scene, in which a towel-draped woman stood by an officer’s bed, Suzy’s mother peeked in to ask if the girls wanted a snack. Karen grabbed the remote to darken the picture, but she only froze the half-naked woman in place on the screen. Suzy thanked her mother, but said they were fine.
“You are jumpy,” she said after her mother had left.
“You are too laid-back,” said Karen. They laughed.
“World war two was pretty awful,” said Karen. “My father’s working to prevent world war three.”
“Whoa! You’re getting awfully serious there. That old woman got under your skin, didn’t she?” asked Suzy.
“Well, didn’t she get under yours? You were a bit ruffled. I could tell.”
Instead of answering, Suzy pointed the remote at the screen and clicked. Temporarily lulled by the sweet romance, they remained silent until the end of the movie.
When it ended, Karen confessed that she’d looked up GBSD on the internet and that the old woman wasn’t the only one questioning the need to replace the old rockets.
“I’ll give you the websites,” she said.
“Give me a break, Karen. I don’t want to read about rockets, but now I can blackmail you. If you don’t do exactly as I say, I’m going to tell your father you’ve becoming a doubting Thomas—I think that’s the expression.”
Karen’s glum expression quelled Suzy’s laughter.
“I’m just kidding.”
Of course, she was just kidding, perhaps to change the topic from nuclear topped missiles to something lighter.
“That guy was kind of cute, wasn’t he,” said Suzy.
“Which guy?”
“Oh, don’t play the dumb blonde with me because if anyone isn’t dumb, it’s you. The guy with the protest lady.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You guess?” said Suzy, teasing.
“I’m not thinking about him. I’m thinking about Jack. I need to ask you something, but it’s hard.”
“Go on.”
“When you…when you first did it, did it hurt?”
“Did it? Oh, you mean it.”
“Not so loud.”
“You want to know if it hurt,” said Suzy in a stage whisper. “A little, but it was barely a pinch and there was hardly any blood. Some women don’t have any pain at all.”
“Did it…feel good?”
“It did for me.”
“You won’t tell anyone about this, will you?”
“Well, except for you father and mother, I won’t.”
“Thank goodness for friendship.”
Chapter Sixteen
Now that he was headed west, the sun was in his eyes from time to time. That yellow furnace had long since burned all the clouds from the pale blue velvet sky. It was a beach going day, though there was no beach to go to as far as Will could tell and certainly no ocean beach. And thank goodness for that. Had the ocean been nearby, the pull on him would have been so great he might have detoured completely away from his destination.
From Will’s East Los Angeles childhood home, the ocean was only a thirty-five-minute drive away and essentially the only place they went to as a family and that only in the summer. Those trips ended in his junior year when his sister died. That was probably when the bolts began slipping out of his mother’s hinges. Then his father abandoned the family.
At sixteen and unable to mourn, in large part because his mother disliked seeing her children cry, he occupied his mind with science fiction, reading one thick anthology after the other.
During his junior year in college, his mother purchased a Hummer, a high-end surveillance system, and new plumbing, wiping out his college money and ending his education. The Hummer, of course, was repossessed, the surveillance system disabled, and the replacement of old water pipes unfinished, but this was of no help to him.
He remained in Berkeley for a year, working in a supermarket and living in a rented house with five others. He lived for a year with his brother who was finishing graduate school, but they had a falling out over the proper approach to their mother and the house she still lived in.
Having no place to go and no money, he joined the marines, thinking it would be good for him in some ill-defined way. The IED blew up a year into his service.
In the hospital in Germany he fell in love with—or was it merely a routine concupiscent infatuation—a nurse, but although she laughed at his jokes and clearly liked him, she was unavailable, and probably too wise to get involved with this good looking but rootless man. Back in the states he moved in with his mother for a while, then back to Berkeley. His mother sold the house and moved to New York to live with her mother.
In college he’d been majoring in chemistry, with vague plans to go to graduate school in biochemistry and then work for a pharmaceutical company.
He’d had a girlfriend Babette, but she decided to spend a year in France and the breakup was permanent. His couple of romantic relationships after that—flings?—were short because he couldn’t commit to them. The girls weren’t right.
Aimless as a windblown leaf, he went where the breeze carried him, settling on the ground only to be lifted by another breeze and whisked away again.
On the way back to Minot he engaged in truncated dialogues with himself, sometimes aloud, sometimes silently.
“I’m going to help that old woman and then turn right around and go to New York,” said his self-confident side.
“Oh, yeah? What are you going to do? Make more signs? She can only carry one at a time,” said his doubting side, a side possibly inherited from his mother.
This parry shut him up for a few minutes, while he examined each cow in a field of cows as closely as he could without losing control of the car. There was no traffic.
Then he thought of that blonde girl in the blue dress.
Chapter Seventeen
Makenna and twenty-nine other missile launch officers hunched over their monthly proficiency test. Promotion without consistently high performance was considered impossible and failing to achieve ninety percent on a test meant a talking-too at first, a scolding at second, and a who-knows-what at third. She put these thought out of her head and read question number 23.
23. An electromechanical maintenance team has penetrated silos B-09 and B-11 to adjust malfunctioning sump pu
mps after a freak summer thunderstorm. The team last authenticated with you twenty minutes ago. You now receive a seismic alarm at B-10. What will you do?
Declare Security Situation?
Have flight security controller obtain two authentications from B-09?
Contact B-11 to obtain two authentications from the electromechanical maintenance team?
Contact missile maintenance mission control?
* * *
The seismic alarm indicated vibration at the B-l0 site, suggesting the possibility that someone may be seeking illicit access to the warhead. Typical, thought Makenna, all that stuff about the maintenance team that had nothing to do with the situation. The correct answer was D.
After answering three more question, she stretched her spine and shifted positions on her chair. Joe Calderone sat to her right. She noticed that, for the third time, he tapped the watch on his left wrist with his right index finger.
Despite continuing to read the exam questions, she was prepared to look at his watch face, should he tap it again.
When he did, a column of numbers, next to a column of letters appeared. Damn. They were the test questions and answers.
Calderone was still intermittently tapping his watch. Had anyone else noticed? But it was probably only the location of her seating that made for furtive observation. Stop this, she thought. Get back to work.
Charlie Forster had been on that security patrol out to B-02. Makenna found him and asked about the encounter.
“If you want some entertainment, she’ll give you free coffee and likely cookies and some antinuclear guff for good measure.”
“Are you going?” she asked.
“You must be joking. Fraternizing with the enemy. I’d shut her up, if I could.”
“I though the Russians were the enemy. What’s her name?”
“Edna O’Hare.”
Some of these anti-war protesters were a little cuckoo, but, as she reluctantly admitted to herself, she was bored. Imagine that. Sitting in front of that console, she could, with the mere flick of her wrist, hurl ten missiles across the world to cause ungodly death and destruction, the end of civilization, yet she was bored. Unvarying check list routines, coupled with extreme vigilance, and nothing to do stifled creativity and joie de vivre. This old woman sounded amusing.
It was easy to get her address. Edna O’Hare was well known in town. One day, during a break in the routine, Washington exchanged her military uniform for slacks and a blouse. Characteristically thinking ahead, she’d purchased flowers the day before: a bouquet of red carnations, yellow daisies, and purple monte casinos.
O’Hare’s two-story white farmhouse needed touching up but was not in visible need of repair. Four gables under the pitched red roof faced in four different directions, like sentinels.
The screen door was closed, but the heavy oak door to the house was wide open. Climbing the front porch steps, Washington realized that she was nervous. She prepared herself for a frosty reception like those past frosty receptions from certain elderly white women.
Through the screen door, holding the bouquet in her left hand, Washington watched as O’Hare approached. Washington liked her looks: erect; slender but not gaunt; dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved blouse; her red hair in a bun; a quizzical look on her face.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. O’Hare. My name is Makenna Washington. I heard that you invited airmen from the base to have coffee with you, so I thought I’d drop by. Sorry I didn’t call first. I couldn’t find your number. If this is an inconvenient time, please tell me.”
O’Hare smiled and opened the screen door.
“I really didn’t expect anyone to come.” She welcomed Washington, took the flowers, thanked her for them, led her to the kitchen, and invited her to sit at the table. After putting the flowers in a vase with water and admiring them, she asked, “Would you prefer tea or coffee?”
“Coffee, please.”
“Regular or decaf?”
“Oh, definitely regular. I don’t know how I’d survive without caffeine.”
O’Hare alternately addressed Washington or the coffee machine she was readying.
“I’m the same way. This old motor won’t start in the morning without a little jolt. Did you know that the most frequently asked question in this country is “Coffee?” I read that in a book.”
O’Hare took a place at the table to wait for the water to percolate through to the glass coffee pot below.
“A book about American customs?” asked Washington.
“Oh, no. It was called A Girl Named Cricket about a mother, father, and daughter hiding in a small Mojave Desert town because they were undocumented aliens—aliens from another planet.”
“A play on words. Was it funny?” said Washington.
“Yes, it was. But a lot of science fiction is just sort of like wild west stories except they’re in space. There’s no humor in them at all.” After a pause, she continued. “Well, now just listen to me talk. Like I was an expert or something. And I’m not. I don’t even like science fiction.”
Edna brought saucers, cups, spoons, napkins, sugar, cream, and a plate of cookies to the table, and then poured the coffee. Picking up the cream pitcher, she asked if her guest would like some.
“No thank you. I take mine black.”
Washington smiled. Edna smiled back.
They nibbled cinnamon stars and macaroons, and sipped their coffee, occasionally peaking over the rims of the cups to examine each other.
They discovered some of the things they had in common: they grew up on farms; they had chickens, never truly getting used to their slaughter, though able to wear a mask of indifference when called for; and their parents loved them—the most important commonality.
Both had gone to college, Makenna to study computer science and aviation, Edna agronomy. Each knew little about the other’s major, though Edna had a computer and used it.
Unselfconsciously, Edna talked about her husband and their long marriage. They’d never had children. She did not mention her husband’s worry about the future for children born in the atomic age.
Washington left a boyfriend behind. He’d worked summers on her parents’ farm. She cared about him but was rankled by his seeming lack of ambition. Yet they still wrote to each other.
Edna, as Makenna now thought of her, asked what she liked about him.
“Tyrone’s honest, hardworking, gentle, and cute, of course. Well, we’d better change the subject, or I’ll start missing him. By the way—and I don’t mean to be rude—but we’ve been talking for well over and hour and you haven’t said a word about the missiles. I was expecting a lecture about them, I must admit. They detained you at one of the silos, didn’t they? You were arrested. You must have very strong feelings about this. Are you sparing me for some reason?
Edna laughed.
“The truth of the matter is maybe I was. I don’t know. I was enjoying the conversation and didn’t want to spoil our visit. But, yes, I did invite your airmen out to talk about land-based missiles. In part to find out what you thought about them, if you gave them any thought at all. Frightening what we can get used to, what becomes ordinary, hum-drum, like humanity getting ready to destroy itself. So, tell me about your job on the base.”
When she heard that Makenna was a missile launch officer, Edna got up for the coffee pot, refilled their cups for the third time, sat down again, and pulled her chair a little closer to the table.
“I thought you wanted to talk about the missiles, to tell us how bad they are,” said Makenna. “Do you really want to hear about my job?”
“Hmm. I guess what I want to hear is how you feel about your job. I mean about the prospect of us blowing ourselves up, and radiating a bunch more to death, and starving the rest. And please keep in mind, I don’t feel you’re in any way guilty of…of anything.”
“Edna, may I call you Edna.”
“Yes, and I’ll call you Makenna.”
Makenna stood, put her hands on h
er hips, and extended her back.
“One thing about work; I do a lot of sitting when I’m on duty. Could we go for a walk?
They strolled along a path through a sunflower field.
“I don’t think anybody thinks about starting a nuclear war,” said Makenna. “We think about preventing one. To think too much about the apocalypse is one big bummer. It doesn’t do any good. Do you think about that much?”
“Naturally. I’ve got a Minuteman on my land not a mile from here. And they’re spread out like poison mushrooms from here to the horizon. Well, you’ve got me started, though you know all this already.
“When the alarm is given that we’re being attacked, the person or persons responsible only have a short time to decide whether or not to fire. It’s a use-them-or-lose-them situation. Since they’re sitting ducks, they’re on hair trigger alert. Launch-on-warning. And that goes for a false alarm that isn’t detected in time.”
Makenna was shaking her head.
“It’s not persons. It’s the president who makes the decision.”
“Oh, now, Makenna, are you sure?”
Makenna stopped walking, perhaps for emphasis, perhaps so she could better observe her new friend, look into her face and see her reaction.
Makenna said that it was an absolute certainty that only the president had authority to launch the rockets. She talked about the briefcase, the so-called nuclear football, that the president always had with him, with its top-secret codes of targets on credit-card-thin discs, themselves wrapped in plastic.
O’Hare listened attentively. Makenna thought Edna understood and accepted what she’d just been told. She even read into that wrinkled face an admission of error. Once more she repeated that only the president was authorized to launch the missiles. Edna nodded.
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