The Longest Night (10 page)

“Well, I certainly didn't mean to make things harder. It was really just a little sugar,” and then, feeling her defiance flare up again and remembering it was probably Sam's rude gesture that had been the real problem, she stopped herself.
Let it go, Ms. Righteous Indignation
.

“So, y'all aren't from around here?” he asked.

“No, no. We're from Idaho Falls.”

He smiled at her sincere reply, as if there were any chance he actually thought she was from there. “Well, hey, me, too. Just out here for the day fishing with some buddies. How long you lived in Idaho Falls?”

“Since June.”

“Let me guess—military.”

“Exactly! My husband works at the reactor testing station.”

“One of those fancy scientists?”

“No, an operator.” Nat bent to scoop up Liddie, whose head sagged instantly to her shoulder. “It's the opposite of fancy, I think.”

He chuckled. “There were jobs less fancy before you-all got there.”

“How
was
that, the town growing so big all of a sudden? It must've been strange.”

“People have different opinions. But I think it was the best thing could have happened to Idaho Falls. You know what we had before you military folks got here? Steer and potatoes.”

Nat wondered what he meant about people having different opinions. She thought of the bearded man and the two women who'd walked out, one of them staring at Nat with her mouth half-open. They did not seem like people enamored of change. She asked Esrom, “What do you do, in Idaho Falls?”

“Ranch work, mostly, but I'm trying to switch over to more stuff in town. I've been working at my uncle's auto body shop. I do snow removal in winter. That kind of thing.”

“Mama, can we have another song?” Sam asked.

“Oh, honey, we've got to be getting home.”

Sam, recovering, smiled up at Esrom. “I like your boots.”

He knelt instantly. “You do? Can you believe they were once a snake?”

Her nose wrinkled. “What do you mean?”

“Well, they were a lot of snakes, I guess. These are their skins, all shined up and made into boots. Just like your shoes were once a cow.”

Sam looked horrified.

To Nat he said, “I think I scared her.” He turned back to Sam: “You know how you eat a roast beef sandwich, or a pot roast? That's the inside of the cow. The outside, you can make into all kinds of things—couches or shoes. That way we don't waste things.”

“Oh,” she said, tilting her Mary Janes this way and that. “What are Liddie's made of?”

Esrom squinted at Liddie's identical pair of shoes. He gave one a pinch. “Giraffe,” he said.

“Really?”
Sam said.

Nat smiled at him. The girls were captivated; their eyes darted after his every move. They were used to Paul, to gathering around him like baby birds pecking the words out of him; he adored them, but affection seemed always to take something out of him, and they all knew he'd be quiet five minutes down the road. Words and humor seemed to come to Esrom easily, as if he plucked them from the air at no personal cost.

“I'm sorry, girls, but it's time to go home,” Nat said. She leaned in toward Esrom. “We'd better get out of here before they start asking you where babies come from.” Then she laughed, a little alarmed by the saltiness of her own joke. Why did she do this, put her foot in her mouth whenever she met someone new?

The door opened and two men Esrom's age tumbled in. They raised their hand to the waitress, who was fiddling with the register now, and pulled up slightly when they saw Nat. “Hey, Ez,” the shorter one called. “Ma'am,” he added, a little questioningly, to Nat.

“Hello!” cheered Sam.

“I was just talking to your friend here,” Nat said. “I found out we both live in Idaho Falls.”

“Oh,” the young man said. “Well, did you give her our card, Ez?”

Esrom started. “No, I didn't. Here,” and he flipped his wallet from his back pocket. It was such soft, worn leather that it fell open in his hand. He passed Nat a business card: “Idaho Falls Auto Body” was written across the middle in skipped ballpoint ink. Nat had never seen a handwritten business card before, but she didn't feel it would be considerate to comment on it.

“You ever need car repairs, ma'am,” Esrom's friend said, “we're the best there is.”

“Or an all-right choice in Idaho Falls, anyway,” added Esrom. “My uncle owns the shop, actually. Russ and I just work there.”

“Well, thank you,” Nat said. “It was very nice talking to you, and learning about boots.”

Esrom squatted once more to shake Sam's hand. “See you later, friend.”

Sam grinned. “See you later.”

They headed for the door. Corrie, the waitress, was putting a nickel in the jukebox. Now that Esrom had befriended her, Nat felt generous: “I'm sorry about all that trouble,” she said.

Corrie shrugged, nodded. She leaned her elbows against the machine as Johnny Cash warbled into the room, a song Nat recognized about a pretty local girl and the man who pined for her. “Ballad of a Teenage Queen,” that was it. Nat tried to smile at her over their shared taste in music, but the waitress wouldn't look Nat's way.

Nat was not going to get anything out of the waitress, she supposed. She forced a smile anyway and herded the girls across the parking lot, into the car, arranging their tired bodies on the seats. She noticed the bearded man from the diner sitting in a car across from them, the two women in the backseat, none of them talking. What strange people. She realized she'd forgotten her purse and darted back inside, where Esrom was coming her way, holding the purse out to her.

“Silly me,” she said. “Thank you.” He smiled. Then, feeling bold and too curious to let it pass, she pointed at the car outside. “What's that man doing? Do you know him?”

Esrom followed her gaze. “Yeah, I know him.” He looked momentarily concerned. “Why? Did he say something to you?”

“No. I just thought it was odd that he's sitting there.”

Esrom's friends were watching them, so he started her toward the door. In a low voice he said, “That's Corrie's uncle. He waits for her to get off her shift and drives her home.”

“Oh,” Nat said, wondering why Corrie couldn't drive herself, feeling that there was more to this story, but not knowing him well enough to ask.

“You know,” said Esrom, “next time you go to the Palisades, I wouldn't stop in Kirby.”

“They don't like outsiders?”

“No.”

“But are you really an insider? You don't seem like them.”

He looked at her almost gratefully. “I'm a little of both, I guess,” he said. “I'm an outsider who wants to be in, and an insider who wants the heck out.” He laughed to lighten this and walked her into the parking lot. “It was nice to meet you—”

“Nat,” she said, holding out her hand.

“Nat. I'm Esrom.”

“I know. I mean, I heard.”

“Take care, now.”

“You, too,” she said, opening the car door. “Maybe we'll see you in Idaho Falls.”

“I'd like that,” he said.

He walked back into the restaurant; Corrie looked up and spoke to him, and he leaned against the counter, chatting. What did they talk about? Nat imagined they'd known each other forever, were familiar in a way she, now a military wife, would never get to be with anyone other than Paul. Whatever Corrie's story was, Esrom carried a part of it, guarded it, and this made Nat feel strangely left out—as if, having met him minutes before, she was entitled to anything more than politeness.

She sang a little as the mountains flattened toward Idaho Falls, realizing as she did so that it was the Johnny Cash song Corrie had played on the jukebox. Now that she said the words her face flushed hot.
She had everything, it seems / Not a care, this teenage queen.

W
hen his bad workday finally ended—having begun with his and Nat's argument, followed by the stuck rod that put everybody in a foul mood, then a couple more hours of barked orders from Franks while they ran late on everything—Paul clocked out with a sense of relief and stepped outside for a smoke. Late-afternoon sun glinted off the steel reactor and the chain-link fence. It was just after four; the bus would be there any minute.

Franks came out to join him. He lit a cigar; Paul raised his eyebrows.

“Neighbor had a baby,” Franks said.

“Nice,” said Paul. The cigar's smell was pungent, a cross between a spice chest and a barnyard. It sent Paul's mind on a five-second trip back to his youth, to the smell of tobacco in small rooms, mingling with all the kinds of mustiness the cabins of his childhood contained: deerskin, flannel, moss, mud, yeast, seeping dampness, body odor, stiff and drying boots, cedar, and pine. An uneasiness pinged in his chest and he thought yet again of Nat, angry with him that morning; he wanted to get home, smooth things over. She was probably driving back from the reservoir now. He hoped she was driving carefully and then recalled that she probably wouldn't appreciate the sentiment.
I'm a good driver,
she'd said. And,
I don't understand why you're being so stingy
. The way she'd bristled with hurt as she drove away, not turning her head to smile or wave—Christ, he'd apologize first if he had to; he'd do anything.

Franks interrupted his thoughts: “They're stopping the inspections, you know.”

Paul looked at him. All afternoon, Franks had seemed unwilling to talk about what had happened. Now he wanted to chat Paul up about it? Paul was almost enjoying the pain of brooding over Nat. It made him feel linked to her, if nothing else, and his mind wanted to linger there, not in this gravel parking lot with Franks.

“I wanted to talk to you earlier,” Franks said, “but I was too pissed. I needed to cool down. Besides, I didn't want the kid to hear.” Franks always called Webb “the kid,” as if he were six years old.

“Okay,” Paul said. He waited for Franks to continue.

“This past May, just before you got here, we failed two inspections in a row.”

“Two?” Paul had suspected they'd failed one, given certain signs of disrepair he'd seen around, but two was a bigger deal.

“The supervisors noticed all this boron falling off the rods when we lifted them to the top of the core for the inspections.” Franks gestured with his cigar, to the top of an imaginary control rod and down again. “So Harbaugh and Richards called the inspections off.”

“I've seen the boron peeling,” Paul said. “I thought that was strange.” Boron was used in most reactors; it absorbed uranium neutrons, slowing the speed of the reaction, but usually it was built into the core itself.

“When they were building this reactor,” Franks explained, “the engineers forgot to put the boron inside the core, so they just tack-welded it on afterwards. Thought it would work as well, but it doesn't. Yeah, the engineers, our best and brightest.” He rolled his eyes. “Lifting the rods all the way to the top for inspections made even more boron fall off. So to keep the reactor from running too hot all the time, Harbaugh and Richards decided there wouldn't be any more inspections until we get a new core.”

“They can just decide that?”

“They explained it to the engineers, I guess, and the engineers agreed.”

“Why?”

“
You
know why. Because those eggheads are ashamed of the terrible job they did on this thing in the first place.”

Paul shook his head, but he understood. If he'd done a shit-for-brains job on something, he wouldn't want other people examining it, either. But the news about the boron was startling. If boron was piling up at the bottom of the reactor, the rods could be higher than they thought—closer to the four inches they'd been warned never to go past. How could Richards not take this seriously?

“Sergeants are supposed to look after their men,” Paul said.

Franks chuckled almost bitterly, working a piece of grit forward on his tongue and pinching it off. “Our Sarge, the hero,” he said. “You think he wants to botch next year's chance to promote by screwing with this rinky-dink reactor? People will think,
He can't handle the CR-1; he can't handle much of anything
. You can get discharged over stuff like this, especially if they're maybe looking for a reason to not promote you anyway. Which, in his case, we know they are.”

“He's throwing us under the bus.”

“It's too late for him to do any different. What's he gonna say now: ‘Whoops, forgot to mention that shit's been hitting the fan over here for half a year'?”

“But Harbaugh, too? I thought he might have more integrity.”

Franks gave him a dubious look. “You've seen the man. He's dying. Would you want to fight this fight if you had half a year left to go? That poor fellow just wants to go home and water his begonias and sleep. His wife will be well set up; maybe they'll name the Admin building after him. He's not going to mess with all that.”

Paul gave a bleak laugh—there sat the Admin building, left over from WWII. He wouldn't want his initials scraped into a board there, let alone his name engraved on a plaque to claim the place. But he saw that Franks was not joking.

He began to understand why Richards had flattered him about being “quiet” and “studious.” What a fool he'd been to take it for praise. It had nothing to do with “study” and everything to do with being passive and stupid, too cowed to raise a ruckus. They knew straight off he'd keep his head down and go about his business; he remembered they'd complimented Franks, too. “Have
you
ever thought of taking this higher than Harbaugh?” Paul asked.

Franks looked slightly shocked. “I've never even talked to anyone higher than Harbaugh. Don't know if I could place them in a lineup.” He tilted his cigar toward himself and studied it for a moment before looking up. “I'd stay with the program,” he offered, his eyes sincere. “There's no need to stick your neck out. We're all in this together. We
can
fix things on our own; it's just a little more work. None of the supes wants to hear about a bunch of little dumbfuck problems we could solve ourselves.” He glanced back toward the reactor. “I'm not saying we should do this, that, or the other thing. I just wanted to keep you in the loop.”

“But what happens if things get worse?”

“We don't know that they'll get worse.”

“They won't get
better
.”

“We just have to keep the machine running till we get a new core.”

“When will that be?”

“Maybe this winter. Soon's I hear, I'll let you know. Try not to worry too much.”

Paul grunted. He understood discretion and self-reliance, and Franks had been at this longer than he had; maybe he knew when to worry and when not to.

“You know how humiliating it would be,” Franks said, as if reading Paul's mind, “if this reactor's problems were all laid out for everybody to see, all the navy brass out here, all the air force? We can't lose our honor.”

“I know.”

“If we keep exercising the rods daily, and we don't take 'em out for the inspections, they should last a long time. This core's lasted four years already; we can get another one out of it. We'll just be extra careful.”

“That's true,” Paul said. “We'll be careful.”

They had fallen into a soothing sort of call-and-response, as if the troubles plaguing the reactor were bad thoughts or demon spirits.

“Hey,” Franks said, standing quickly, “there's the bus.” Paul got to his feet also, holding his tin lunch pail, and Webb came jogging out with a bright hello. Poor, clueless kid. Screw this junky place—Paul just wanted to get home to his family. He toed his cigarette butt into the dirt and waited next to his shift mates without speaking, nearly overwhelmed by his longing to get away from the reactor, to feel the bus pull up on cozy Main Street with its barbershop and bustling pigeons, to look along the curb and spy the yellow Fireflite parked up ahead where, whether she wanted to or not, Nat would be waiting for him.