The Longest Night (8 page)

Mitch stopped in the driveway. “You,” he said to Jeannie's prim, upright back, “never stop nagging me about every little thing I do.”

Jeannie whirled on him. “Mitch, I don't
care
what you do. Have sex with Mamie Eisenhower. Have sex with the pope! It's all the same to me.
The only thing I care about is you keeping your job.
”

Nat's heart was pounding. Jeannie had just said “Have sex!” twice in front of her own home, on a Saturday morning.

“For God's sake, I
didn't
lose my job,” said Mitch. “I'm doing fine at my job.”

“If you sink us,” Jeannie said, “after all I've put up with—”

“This happens to all the guys from time to time. A little slap on the wrist. It's those actors from Combustion Engineering. I'll bet they have a quota, got to make sure it looks like they're on top of things—”

“You can put down the bottle at work from time to time, you know. It's not a pacifier. It's not a, a
tit
.”

“My God, Jean!” Mitch stepped back in a paroxysm of disgust. “Have you gone insane?”

Even in her anger Jeannie held herself perfectly erect, like a small pillar of marble. Her voice was low and eviscerating. “You can gamble any other way you like,” she said, “but not with
that
.”

“You don't know the first thing about my job—”

“I know a monkey could do it, and probably without getting into trouble like you.”

“That's enough.”

“Oh, how I wish I had your job,” Jeannie sneered. “I would be so much better at it than you. I wouldn't stall out while other people were promoted past me, and I wouldn't get shoved off to the side like some piece of retired machinery, but if I
did
I would try to improve myself so that I could do better instead of worse! I certainly would not let myself get caught—” She checked herself and lowered her voice so that Nat could barely make out the words. “You never
improve,
Mitch.”

Mitch's mouth was half-open in anger, his tongue showing on one side. He'd finally plunged through bewilderment into the realm of self-righteous rage. “You women, you're all the same. Jealous and bitter, always keeping tabs.”

“Keep it down,” Jeannie hissed, stepping toward him, her eyes darting nervously.

But once Mitch got started he only gathered steam. “You're a bunch of thankless harpies, skimming off men, spending our money on your fancy clothes and shoes while you're home without a thought in your head, flashing your muff to the milkman.”

There was a sharp crack as Jeannie's hand flew, leaving a bright pink starfish on Mitch's cheek.

For a moment Mitch stood, staring. Then he clasped the side of his face in his hand. “Goddamn, what in the hell, woman?”

Nat thought the slap might have been a sort of defense of womankind but Jeannie, shaking out her fingers, stepped back. “I am
not
like other women,” she said.

She pivoted on her heel and suddenly Nat was square in her line of sight. “Oh!” Jeannie said, with a jump. Mitch turned his head. His eyes widened. Nat felt like a searchlight had just swung to her.

“I didn't know anyone was there,” Jeannie cried, for a split second losing her composure.

“Nat Collier?” Mitch said.

“I'm so sorry,” Nat stammered. “We were just out on a walk, and we heard shouting, and—”

“How long have you
been
there?” He scrutinized Nat. “Did you get kicked out of your house?”

“We were on a walk. I'm so sorry. Girls, let's go.” Nat reached for her daughters' hands. The girls, who if you asked them to could not stop wiggling for thirty seconds, had managed to stand motionless, riveted, during the entire exchange.

Jeannie popped open her clutch, removed a flat gold cigarette case, and delicately plucked out a cigarette, lighting it with her purse tucked under her elbow. Eyeing Mitch and then Nat, she exhaled a cloud of disdain. She held her cigarette to the side of her face. “I see you've found a favorite dress, Nat,” she said.

It took Nat a moment to understand Jeannie's barb. Jeannie was insulting her for wearing the same dress she'd had on yesterday. How had she even noticed, in the heat of an argument with her husband? She was one of those women, Nat guessed, whose calculating mind was always at work on others of her sex, detecting their weaknesses like a mine-sniffing German shepherd.

It was terrible and awesome to have seen Jeannie Richards this way, like watching the wrath of a minor god. Nat's heart pounded. She couldn't help siding with her, just a little; Jeannie might be unstable but Mitch was a buffoon. The idea that Mitch was Paul's supervisor, that
he
was the one to make judgment calls, felt too disheartening to be true.
If we can just survive this tour and make it out of here,
Paul had said last night,
that'll be enough.

She didn't realize how fast she was striding, head down, gripping poor Liddie's wrist as the child struggled to keep up, until she reached her front walk and Sam said, “Mama, look.” Nat lifted her head and saw a pair of crows pecking at some pink, limp item in their front yard.

It took Nat several seconds of watching the birds—fighting over the glossy, rose-colored thing on the lawn as if it were a steak; the winner flying with it to a low branch and watching Nat with robotic jerks of its wedge-shaped head—to realize with a squeal that what they fought over were her missing underpants, which she must have left outside the night before and which now hung from the crow's beak, flapping gently in the breeze.

S
pecialist Franks loved the midday game shows. When their three-man crew worked days, they spent lunch hours with
Tic-Tac-Dough
. Today's episode pitted a friendly looking banker against a heavy-browed former army captain who capitalized on his clout by wearing his full uniform and ribbons on the set.

“Go army!” said Franks through a mouthful of food.

“I don't know,” said Webb. “I don't like his looks.”

“That's 'cause you don't have any respect.”

“I do!” Webb said.

Paul didn't mind the game shows in general, but he disliked the thirty-second spells of watching men think, set to ominously tinkling music. There they stood, mere inches from one another behind their podiums, all their involuntary tics and mannerisms writ large for America to see: the clenched jaw, surrendering eye roll, squirming, shifting, laughing inexplicably at one's hands, the swallowing of anxious and plentiful saliva.

“Pick the Bible,” urged Franks. “Pick Bible, or baseball.” They all watched the screen; there was no way not to, with Franks constantly urging it on, chastising it, sometimes smacking the tabletop and cursing it out. He leaned forward and bumped the table with his closed fist. “Oh for Pete's sake, not literature.”

“Author of 1925 novel in stream of consciousness,” Webb said, brow furrowed, repeating the announcer, Bill Wendell.

“What's stream of consciousness?” Paul asked, looking over the remains of his lunch. Nat had packed him a turkey sandwich, three cookies, and a fruit cup. Franks ate some kind of leftover beef concoction, cold, and the bachelor Webb munched from a large bag of pretzels.

“It sounds like a place in Idaho to me,” said Webb, washing his pretzels down with Coke. He clinked the bottle onto the table and grinned, his face so thin you could see the muscles tugging it into a smile. “Like the Lost Desert, near the Stream of Consciousness.”

Paul laughed.

“That's enough from the peanut gallery, thank you,” said Franks. “Come on, sports or entertainment.”

“Maybe imaginary geography, for Webb here,” said Paul.

“Secret category,” said Franks. “If he wins one more game, he gets a new car. He's won four now.”

“Four
cars
?” cried Webb.

“Four games,” said Franks.

“What kind of car?” asked Webb.

“A King Midget,” said Paul, and they all laughed. The King Midget was a car you built yourself from a kit, powered by any motor you could get your hands on.

Franks glanced at his watch. “Rats,” he said, stifling a burp, “we've gotta get back to work.”

“Aw, just one more round,” said Webb. Paul folded up his lunch bag and returned it to his locker, pausing to look at the picture of Nat he kept inside the door. It was from their dating days back in San Diego, taken in a booth on the boardwalk. She had been nineteen, Paul twenty. She looked beautiful and happy, with her grin that went up just a tiny bit more on one side than the other, her eyes smiling. Normally the picture filled him up with contentment, but today it pushed a small hollow into his stomach. They'd had an argument that morning, and he couldn't shake it. Things had been going great between them, and now there was a shift again.

He could still hear the tug in her voice:
I don't understand why you're being so stingy
. She had wanted to take Sam and Liddie to the Palisades Reservoir for a “beach day.” He'd seen her in this kind of mood before—she'd had about all she could take of sitting around the house with the girls and was desperate for a small adventure. For this she needed the car, which Paul normally drove to the bus stop downtown and left there during the day so he could drive it home again.

So she and the girls had given him a lift to the bus stop that morning, then taken the car for their beach adventure. He didn't love the idea of them going so far—it was two hours each way to the reservoir—or of Nat having to drive home, tired, probably on some twisty road; four hours of driving for an equal amount of simulated beach time seemed a little silly to him, not to mention a waste of gas. But—all right, Nat. Take the car.

But there was more: On the drive to the bus stop she'd also asked if she, instead of Paul, could start having the Fireflite during the day. “It doesn't make
sense
that it just sits downtown at the bus stop all day,” she'd said, picking at her skirt in the way he knew meant she was asking for something she'd thought about more than once. “You could leave the car with me and get a ride to work with a friend.”

“What friend?” he'd asked.

“I don't know, one of your coworkers.” She shrugged. “I'd
love
to have the car during the day.”

“Really?” Paul asked, genuinely surprised. “Why would you need the car all day?” It had never occurred to him that she might want such a thing.

“It would make shopping so much easier,” Nat said. “And entertaining the girls. It would make going to the pool easier…going to the…” She faltered, her face clouding as if she could feel herself losing ground with that one setback.

“There's a playground a few blocks from our house.”

“I know,” said Nat quickly, her cheeks flushed. “We go there all the time. Having the car would just give us more freedom.”

“Huh,” Paul said. “I don't like the idea of you and the girls driving all over creation.”

“I'm a good driver,” Nat protested, though they both knew this wasn't true. When she was alone she drove much too fast. She seemed to almost compulsively test fate and couldn't drive a straightaway without going twenty over the limit. She had once run over a cat, a horror that still made her cry if it were brought up. Paul let a silence hang in the air, generously, rather than contradict her.

“I don't know,” he said. “I can't risk being late to work. If I'm not here when the bus arrives, I'm out of luck. What if my ride is late? What if he had car trouble?” He didn't want to have to depend on somebody else, a coworker who could be late for any number of reasons. Webb was too frequently tardy himself, and Franks had four kids or five, Paul didn't remember; in any case, too many variables. Richards lived closest to him but Paul would never beg rides from his boss, and after the party the other night he could barely stand to be around the man.

“I don't understand why you're being so
stingy,
” Nat burst out. She sounded breathless, and Paul saw, with a flop in his chest, that her eyes were teary.

“I'm sorry.”

“But you're not,” she said simply, and turned to talk to Sam in a too-bright voice that bounced off the windows as if they were made of tin.

Paul had pulled up near his bus stop where a dozen or so guys waited, cigarette smoke rising just above their bodies. Franks was there, leaning against the side of the shoe store with his ankles crossed, turning the pages of his newspaper. Webb sat on the curb, his wrists on his knees, hands dangling loosely. He took a puff of his cigarette and squinted up as Paul's car idled, seemed to think of raising a hand in greeting, then saw Paul with his family and looked away again. “You have a pretty damn perfect family,” he had remarked later, when they were all at work. “A man could almost be jealous of you, Collier.”

“Almost,” Franks had joked.

When Paul climbed out of the car Nat was simmering with hurt feelings; he could almost see them in the air around her, as if the molecules bunched together into armor. She'd driven off without looking back, her stiff, pretty head upright in the rearview mirror. Paul felt like a jerk and also pathetically defiant: He
did
have his reasons for wanting to keep the car. It was true that he feared being late to work, and it was true that Nat drove too fast and that he liked knowing where she was during the day, instead of thinking that she and the girls were out God knew where.

But it also insulted him to consider what her request implied: that she was bored at home. He wanted to think of her as completely fulfilled. She had the house now, two daughters, a backyard like she'd wanted, an allowance every month out of his paycheck to buy clothes or cooking supplies or things she had her eye on; sure, his pay wasn't lavish, but what more could he do? He thought of his own mother, of her forest-walled life and uncaring husband and no outside stimulation whatsoever and then, in contrast, of his wife, who had all this love, all these wonderful things. Why was she asking him for even more?

But it was just the car. He tried to keep that in mind. She had not asked, say, for the car
and
an additional two-week vacation without him in the mountains. God, it was difficult to be fair to her sometimes. He wanted nothing more than her happiness, but somehow he still screwed things up. He made her angry or hurt her feelings and never gained anything from those stupid disruptions. And now here he was, standing by his locker like a chump and feeling uneasy, feeling unsettled because she was off driving around somewhere being mad at him or maybe enjoying her freedom and not thinking of him at all.

His brooding was interrupted by the aggressive crinkle of a waxed paper bag next to his ear. He jumped. “What the hell, Webb?”

Webb took on the soft-eyed expression of a dame in a movie. “Where do you go, Collier?” he whispered. “Where do you go, when you leave me?”

“Shut up,” Paul chuckled. But he felt grateful to be pulled back out of himself, to the people and task at hand.

“The reactor's burning hot, gentlemen,” Franks said through his last mouthful of food. “We're gonna have to lower the rods again.” He wiped his mouth on a napkin, wandered over to the sink to rinse out his Tupperware. From behind, in those baggy overalls, he looked a bit like a giant baby.

“Why's the thing so hot?” Webb groaned. They had already lowered the rods first thing in the morning.

“I dunno,” said Franks. “It's just hot. Guess we didn't lower enough the first time. Willie
Mays
!” he exclaimed, and Paul looked up, thinking this some kind of alternative to cursing, but the shift leader had paused in front of the television. “Good grief,” he said, “who
misses
a question like that?” and he turned the knob, shrinking the game show contestants into a tiny square of black. He picked up his clipboard. “Let's go,” he said. “This time we're lowering half an inch. I don't want to have to do it again today.”

They ascended the thin steel staircase that wound up the side of the reactor silo, their boots echoing one after the other on the narrow, slatted stairs.

The tall, narrow silo served mostly as a big container for the core, which was nestled about halfway down beneath layers of shielding and gravel. Five long metal control rods traveled from the core up to the reactor head on the top floor of the silo. The rods projected about a foot above the reactor head and were lifted or lowered manually in small increments to adjust the speed of the reaction in the core. Raising the rods allowed more neutrons into the core and created more energy; lowering the rods dampened the reaction and cooled the core. The operators were constantly calibrating, checking the speed of the reaction and fiddling with the rods; sometimes Paul felt it was the main thing he did.

Each rod weighed eighty-four pounds. Most reactors used remote-control arms to move their rods, but the CR-1—like the army in general, Paul thought—was old-school and hands-on. Their crew simply leaned over the rods, unclamped the tops, scooched a rod up a little, and clamped it again. “Who needs a remote control?” Franks had said. “We can do the same thing, just with a little more elbow grease.”

“Elbow grease and a pain in the ass,” Webb had muttered.

The five rods were named by odd numbers—the one, the three, the five, the seven, and the most powerful rod of all, the nine. The number nine rod was what set the CR-1 apart from other, similar reactors; Franks called it their “trademark.” It had been designed as a sort of emergency brake for the CR-1: If the reaction were to “run away” and become uncontrollably hot, the operators could shut down the entire machine by dropping the number nine to the bottom of the core. In a bad situation it might save the day.