The Longest Night (3 page)

Richards leaned forward. “
I
wouldn't mind a touch more prestige around here, I'll tell you that.” His arm snaked into a desk drawer and he pulled out two tumblers and a bottle of bourbon, which he poured neat, passing one to Paul with a grin that was somehow both friendly and challenging. “What is it you like to do, Collier? Do you ski? The skiing's amazing around here.”

“I've never been skiing,” Paul admitted.

“Never have—” Richards swatted his knee, breathless with disbelief. “Why, that's something. Well, do you fly-fish?”

“I've—I've fished. I don't fly-fish.”

“What are you into? Cars? Sports?”

Paul stared at him, drawing a blank, suddenly horrified—nothing. He was into nothing. What was there to be into? He worked, he went home, he fixed things and sat with his wife while she listened to the radio. He'd never had much time or money to spare. The awareness of this seemed to come crashing down upon himself and Richards at the same time.

“What are you, Collier? Some kind of bumpkin?” Richards laughed, baring his teeth. He held up a hand. “No, no. Don't worry about it.”

“I just—”

“Never mind. You're a quiet, studious one, I could tell the moment I saw you.” He glanced away as if he'd already lost interest: Paul's poverty of leisure was not compelling.

Paul shifted in his seat and looked again at the woman in the photo on Richards's desk. Her expression seemed almost condescending to him now.

Richards sucked on his drink, bored; then a thought came to him and he leaned forward. “Well, listen,” he said, almost brightening. “We have a certain way of doing things around here—you've probably noticed.”

“All right,” Paul said, relieved by the change of topic though he wasn't quite sure what Richards was talking about.

“Deke Harbaugh—you'll meet him, he's our lead man from Combustion Engineering,” Richards said. “He's a civilian, but he understands where we're coming from better than the other pricks they've got up there. Pardon me.” Richards raised a hand again and grinned. “Anyway, Harbaugh's on our side when things come up.”

Paul absorbed this, wondering:
What comes up?

“What we try to do around here,” Richards said, “is keep things close, keep things army. I like to say that the buck stops here. We're
operators
.” He made eye contact to check that Paul was following. “If there's an…irregularity, a concern, you can bring it to me before you even write it in the log. It's a can-do attitude kind of thing. If we fix it before it hits paper, all the better. Otherwise, we're always having to go to the Combustion Engineering guys, asking permission for every last thing, like teenage babysitters.”

Paul nodded. This was not how he'd been trained; in reactor school they were taught to document any occurrence, large or small, to the point that it seemed overdone. But Richards was Paul's new boss, and Paul had found it was best to listen awhile before you talked, so he did.

“Excellent,” said Richards, as if Paul had agreed to something complex. “Just a can-do culture around here. I could tell you were exactly the right kind of guy for this.”

Paul wanted to ask what
exactly the right kind of guy for this
meant but decided to take the praise at face value. So he stood; they shook. Paul hoped Richards would decide to head home around midday, as his reputation suggested he liked to do, and offer Paul a ride to compensate for making him miss the bus. Maybe Richards would even use him as an excuse to leave early—
I made this poor Joe stay late, so I'd better get him on home now.

But if Richards had such a plan, he didn't mention it. “Collier, you go on and have a good day now,” he said. “Close that door for me, will you?” He tossed his feet onto the desk, stretched his chair back so that it creaked, and closed his eyes. Paul hesitated, clicked shut the door.

He'd encountered master sergeants like Richards before and knew his type: men who silvered into maturity, enjoying the flirtations of women and the subordination of men, who remained athletic in that lazy way where, despite the small potbelly nudging the bottom of their brass-buttoned shirts, they could still trounce you in horseshoes or twenty-one at a division barbeque and laugh heartily about it. These were not men Paul generally liked.

He wandered into the lounge and settled onto the small, hard couch, pulling his knees up; might as well make himself comfortable. He wondered if it were admirable that he'd refrained from mentioning the missed bus, or if he'd just been a patsy. Probably a little of both.

H
E MUST HAVE DOZED,
because the next thing he knew he heard a soft noise in the parking lot outside: the distinct sound of a classy car clearing its throat.

He got up and went to the window. His eyes widened when he realized it was Richards's car leaving without him. Before Paul could even get to the door, he heard the propulsion of tires against gravel.

“What the hell,” he cried. He jogged into the parking lot, waving his hands above his head. “Master Sergeant!”

There was no way Richards could hear him; the car was through the gate now, heading for the highway.

Surely Richards would stop.
Surely
he'd remember that he'd stranded Paul fifty miles from home in the desert, and turn back. Paul called out again, even gave a pathetic little jump, hoping he'd be spotted in the rearview mirror. But the car glided down the road, shiny as a pearl in the afternoon sun. Richards was headed home to relaxation and family and comfy slippers, leaving Paul outside the goddamn reactor in his uniform.

Do not chase your boss's car down the road. You are not going to act desperate.

He shuffled back toward the building. Was this some kind of power play? Was Richards drunk, did he just not give a shit, what? Nat was going to ask why Paul was eight hours late, but if he told her this sad little tale she'd pepper him with all sorts of further questions. It would be better just to keep it to himself, but the thought made him feel like a lonely fool. He kicked the doorframe and stalked back inside to wait for the bus, to let Richards's dust settle on the ground and rocks, which, if nothing else, seemed better than standing there and letting it fall on him.

B
ACK IN THE LOUNGE
he paced, agitated, humiliated almost out of proportion. Being made to stay eight extra hours for a ten-minute meeting seemed an infuriating absence of consideration, or an act of outright hostility. Richards had shown no respect in assuming Paul would stay, and even less in leaving him there, fifty miles from home with no ride.

He was too steamed up to sit still. Richards's smug questions dogged him:
What are you into? Skiing? Fly-fishing? I knew you were exactly the right kind of guy for this.
Whether it was logical or not he felt that Richards had somehow seen right through him, deduced in minutes that he was a man who could be dismissed, no repercussions.

Paul was used to being snubbed; he was from people with no money and learned early on that this made him easy to brush aside. All the tokens and symbols he used to armor himself—his uniform, operator's badge, wedding ring—meant nothing to Sergeant Richards, who blew them off in an instant and made Paul feel groveling and worthless. He didn't want to be angry now, didn't want to knock around hostile, pessimistic thoughts for the next few hours, but he had never found a way to fight that train of thought once he got on it.

He had grown up in a rural Maine cabin as quiet as a deep snow, punctuated by outbursts of inexplicable and embarrassing violence. More than once he could recall standing flat against the log wall, breathing shallowly as if he could avoid being noticed while his father, drunk, swished past in an itchy rage like some creature from the zoo. When his pa did address Paul it was mockingly, making Paul stammer and squirm, squelching his hate. His mother was not much better. She'd taken to drink as far back as Paul could remember, and one of his earliest memories was of sitting by her bed, playing with her limp fingers as she snored.

The lack of control people showed repelled him. They brought their trouble upon themselves, one person after another, and it was impossible to feel sorry for them. He wasn't surprised when his mother sought relief in bars and men; he wasn't shocked, either, when she was brought home one cold morning on a wooden sled, her eyes punched in, and left in the shed for the ground to thaw and the serviceberries to bloom.

At sixteen he stole his father's boots, hitchhiked to Portland, and enlisted in the army. When he first joined up he trusted everyone, all these people he'd dreamed about for years who were not his family, who'd decided to live upstanding and useful lives. These, finally, were his people! But he learned, to his disappointment, that they were often just as flawed as his own family had been; that even with all the military did to raise them up, they settled back into their character defects like a dog curling into a round bed.

That first spring away from home, still in boot camp, he'd received news of another nonsurprise: His father had been discovered by hunters a few miles from home, having fallen through the ice on one of his weaving walks back from town. Paul was an orphan, and he was relieved.

It turned out that his parents' deaths neither cured nor worsened things. Paul embarked on a program of self-control and betterment. In his locker he taped a Robert E. Lee quote:
“I do not trust a man to control others who cannot control himself.”
Amazingly, as the years went by, he won the job, the girl, and an amount of respect that seemed neither stingy nor extravagant: It seemed just right. But like many hard-forced things his veneer was delicate, and he found that he became easily panicked. He'd fought so hard for what he had that he could imagine countless ways it might be taken away.

Which brought him back to Sergeant Richards, this day, this room. This disastrous blowing-off, this bitter, stupid stranding. Maybe Richards was just an asshole who would've left anyone at the reactor; maybe he had simply stayed in his office, gotten mildly drunk and let Paul slip his mind easily as any other minor chore. But Paul could not stop it from driving him crazy. There was something satisfying about the way an obsession fired up every spot on his brain all at once: pain, pleasure, anger, desire, defiance. Fuck everyone who had treated him like he was nothing; fuck Richards for treating him like nothing now. He would revel in this small torment, his mind churning cycles of concession and resistance, anger and acquiescence until he wore himself out.

He knew better than to fight it. There was only one thing that could soothe him and that would be walking in his front door, calmed by the golden kitchen light like a violent, rogue archangel. Nat would smile at him, knowing exactly who he was, the man he'd made himself to be, good provider and husband, father of the two little girls who would be skipping toward him, kissing him with their little crumb-covered faces: All this goodness he'd made for himself out of nothing, scaring his old self right back from where it came.

J
eannie Richards examined the centerpiece for the dining room table and put her hands on her hips in disgust. The Shasta daisies looked big and coarse, the baby's breath too delicate in contrast. The red-and-white-checked tablecloth was garish, like a hillbilly picnic.

She plucked the vase from the table, marched it into the kitchen, and shoved it inside the bread hutch where she could deal with it later. The tablecloth she folded and returned to the linen cabinet, though she had an urge to stuff it into the garbage. She couldn't; it was an heirloom, if a tasteless one, from her husband's grandmother. Mitch had a reverence for extended family that bordered on unseemly. He had aspired to be something of a patriarch himself, eventually: wanted a dozen children, but in the end they had only one, conceived after a decade and a half of trying, when Jeannie was thirty-seven years old.

She looked at the gold watch on her fine-boned wrist. This evening she was hosting a small dinner party for a few of the operators who worked with her husband, and their spouses. As the master sergeant's wife it was her role to reach out to them, but she was losing steam. She was tired of giving pep talks, tired of playing perpetual den mother to the earnest, flustered women who drummed her for tidbits of advice. (
Do you think we should register to vote here in Idaho? When can I expect my husband to be promoted? Where do ladies shop in Idaho Falls?
)

“But you have so much to offer them, Jean,” her friend Patty had said that morning, when Jeannie confessed her waning enthusiasm for mentorship. “You've been an army wife for sixteen years. You've had so many different
experiences
.”

“Well, I don't know about that,” Jeannie had said, bothered by the thought that experience was linked with age.

“World War Two, Korea,” Patty listed them off. “The wives coming up don't have your background. You're
seasoned
.”

Jeannie had thought on this throughout the day, her admirable seasoning. Mitch
had
served in WWII, but he'd been stationed on the remote island of Nanumea and spent most of those years playing beach volleyball, helping dump busted American equipment into the ocean, and absorbing the endless gifts of coconuts, taro, and chickens from the locals. He'd been on leave in Brisbane with his buddies during the one major attack on the island, in which seven Americans and a Nanumean died.

Upon coming home he'd slid into a long, uninspiring career. Over time Jeannie learned that her dashing army husband was not exceptionally intelligent nor principled, but somehow he hung in the game, gradually getting assigned to roles of minor leadership. He assigned himself a handful of minor affairs: a townie typist in Alabama, an immunization tech in Nebraska. If
this
was what Patty meant by “experiences,” then, yes, they'd had a few. Jeannie figured she eventually learned of most of them. None resulted in children, thank God; she took solace in the fact that her fertility was not the likely culprit in their underpopulated marriage, though this, of course, was never discussed.

Jeannie's sole aspiration was for Mitch to stick it out just four more years with the army, stubborn and dumb as a barnacle, until he hit his twenty-year mark; then his pension would be generous, family healthcare insured. But his career, she feared, was approaching lethal stagnation just short of the finish. Each of his recent tours had seemed a little more sluggish, like he was being parked somewhere, a placeholder, a relic. The CR-1 rubbed it all in, this remote, ridiculous reactor, a mere prototype, at a testing station full of prestigious groundbreakers. No one checked up on Mitch, which was how he liked it, but that meant that no one cared. He had fallen off the radar.

Hence tonight's party, with Jeannie pulling out all the stops, all her tricks and charms. She'd had her hair freshly styled, the grays touched up at the salon just yesterday. Her outfit was laid out on the bed: apricot-colored organza dress, high heels, silk stockings, a bra that would catapult her little ladies upward like rocket boosters. For the guests there was a daunting cut of roast beef, gleaming silverware, a white lace tablecloth (yes, she could see now, it was much better than the red-and-white check).

She dusted off one of Mitch's wartime photos from WWII and propped it near the wet bar, beside his canteen from Korea and a mother-of-pearl box he'd brought back from Pusan. This was the Highly Selective Museum of Mitch Richards, curated and tended by Jeannie; she was sick of it. Their army life felt like an endless parade in which Mitch was a large, slow-moving float and Jeannie every other performer, running alongside, cheering, shooting off confetti, waving banners and flags, calling attention to his every move as if it were fantastic and exciting and rare. She wondered how well this worked, how well people believed it, if they saw what she intended or only bore witness to her exhausting efforts.

She smoothed the tablecloth with her palm and arranged the gravy boat, the place cards, a better selection of flowers (roses in red, pink, and white). Returning to the bread hutch she grabbed the daisies, which lolled like idiot clowns, carried them to the waste bin, and snapped their necks one by one.

T
HE GUESTS BEGAN TO
arrive at six. Her house smelled of gravy and roast beef; she'd swapped her cooking apron for her company apron, white and smooth down her hips. Baby Angela was in the nursery with the nannies—Martha, their usual, and Martha's sister Lupe, who would help watch the guests' children during the party—and Mitch had just come home from a day of golf. Jeannie could hear him washing his face in the bathroom, which he always did with no comprehension of how much water he threw onto the sink and mirror. He left the room as if he had just sprayed it down with a hose, and glibly turned off the light. Thank God he was tucked away in the master bath, where he could splash around like some oversized happy otter and none of the guests would have to witness the mess.

The doorbell rang and she gave an inner jump. She checked her hair and lipstick one last time, smoothed her apron, and went to answer it, smiling broadly before her fingers even touched the doorknob.

It was Lennart and Kath Enzinger, the bunco champions. “Come in!” Jeannie beamed, though the Richardses' Wednesday loss to the Enzingers was still fresh.

The Enzingers helloed: Lennart, as always, was squinty with cheerfulness, while Kath was as solemn as a bloodhound. German-born Len had spent time in an American internment camp at the outbreak of World War Two. No one held it against him now, since it had only been because of his nationality and because he had handled it graciously. Rather recently he'd married Kath, who was an enigma to Jeannie. Kath never used a dab of makeup and on weekends wore Len's shirts, which Jeannie knew because she had once stopped by on a Saturday to drop off a sweater Kath had forgotten at bunco. Kath wore her husband's shirts not in a sexy sort of swapping way, but tucked into her pants, as if that were just what she was wearing that day.

Lupe poked her head up the hallway but Jeannie waved her back; the childless Enzingers required no nanny.

The Frankses arrived—an unstylish but friendly couple, dressed in matching brown—and then the Kinneys, classy dark-haired Patty and her husband, who just went by Kinney, and their three children. There were Minnie and Deke Harbaugh: Deke, the supervisor from Combustion Engineering, who Mitch said had some awful disease from insulation work he'd done years ago and who spent most of his time whooping into a handkerchief; and Minnie, who enjoyed the fact that her husband, though weakened by his illness, was everyone else's boss. Next came the unattractive man, Slocum. He was followed by the startlingly young Webb, who seemed to give off a glow of awkward goodwill and who stood by the wet bar, sucking in one cheek a little. Franks called him over and got him to talking. Soon folks were mingling and men helped themselves and their wives to drinks. Mitch appeared from his extensive freshening, red-faced and shiny; he looked as if he had just been steamed. The hair at his temples was wet and he grinned at everybody. He would complain for weeks in advance of any gathering Jeannie planned, but once there he enjoyed himself tremendously.

The men gathered to talk baseball: Early Wynn's good season for the White Sox; the recent integration of the Boston Red Sox, the last professional baseball team to allow black players. Few things interested Jeannie less than baseball or integration, so she returned to the couch and love seat where the women had settled.

Brownie Franks was, unfortunately, subjecting the women to another discussion of her love for paint-by-number kits. The woman was obsessed with crafts. She had probably made the wooden necklace that hung around her neck like an infant's teething beads. However, watching Brownie attempt to draw Kath Enzinger into a discussion of paint-by-numbers could prove amusing. It was like watching her try to sell Girl Scout cookies to a telephone pole.

Patty Kinney leaned in toward Jeannie, her green eyes flashing beneath a crop of bottle-black hair. “Look at you, Jeannie! Every inch the lady. Are all the guests here?”

Jeannie scanned the room, sipping her mai tai. “The new couple is missing,” she said. “That man Collier and his wife.”

“Have you met them yet?”

“I haven't.”

“Hm,” said Patty, as if this lack of information were somehow information. She was Jeannie's closest friend in attendance; their husbands had gone through Belvoir at the same time.

The doorbell rang. “That could be them now,” Jeannie said.

Patty's lined black eyebrows shot up with interest. “Stay here, you,” Jeannie said with a laugh, and Patty made a face.

Jeannie picked her way delicately past the legs of the seated women over to the group of men who stood with their drinks.

“Mitch,” she whispered. He turned from whatever chuckly conversation he'd been having and looked at her, puzzled. “The door,” she said, taking his arm.

“Oh.” He sighed and turned with her down the hall. He had told her once that he did not understand why they had to answer their door linked arm in arm like young lovers on a twilight stroll, but she explained that it simply set a tone: for their household, for the gathering. Jeannie believed in gentility. Everything a person did set forth an impression about them, and first impressions, of course, mattered more than any other. That was why her hand towels were ironed, her soap dispensers polished, the vacuum marks freshly ridged into the carpet like paths to righteousness. She tapped her hair as she passed the hall mirror—surely it couldn't move, it was hair sprayed within an inch of its life—and opened the door.

“You must be the Colliers,” Jeannie beamed, as she sized up the couple before her. Mr. Collier had dark hair, dark eyes, and a quiet bearing. His wife was no great beauty—her face narrow and a little asymmetrical—but there was a prettiness to her, nonetheless. She wore a navy blue collared shirtdress (not quite dressy enough for an evening party) with a strand of pearls (better), and her hair was up. She was holding a large platter with a brick of meatloaf in the center, covered in cellophane wrap. Jeannie caught herself staring at it and diverted her gaze. The party was not a potluck; Mrs. Collier must have been confused. Jeannie found this both irritating (her invitation had been quite clear) and also mildly pitiable, but she would be gracious about it.

“Master Sergeant,” Paul Collier said, shaking Mitch's hand.

Mitch grinned at Collier's wife. “And
Mrs.
Collier, so glad you could join us.”

“Please, call me Nat,” she said. “These are our daughters, Samantha and Liddie.” She nudged her children forward with one hand. They were cute dark-haired girls, the little one round faced and bright eyed, the older leaner and long haired, a spitting image of Nat. “Say hello,” she urged.

“Hello,” said the older child. The younger one stood frozen.