This is the Way the World Ends (4 page)

‘The standard US military five-point-five-six-millimeter round. Effective range – four hundred and fifty yards.’

‘Right you are. Now Lance here is toting all the parts for a Remington 870 twelve-gauge shotgun. Most useful of all’ – John caressed Nickie’s pack – ‘is the Heckler and Koch HK 91 heavy assault rifle with collapsible stock. That’s the piece you’ll get with Holly’s suit. Effective range – one thousand yards.’

George had to admit that thermonuclear exchange worries crossed his mind occasionally, and that he did not know where to seek reassurance. It would be wonderful to lose this anxiety, which erupted at odd moments. Assuming they could squeeze another hundred dollars a month from Justine’s paycheck, there was every reason to put this thing under the Christmas tree.

‘If I give you the first installment today, can I take it home?’

An elaborate smile appeared on John’s face. ‘Sure, you can take it home. Hell, next you’ll order a suit for your pretty wife, then one for yourself, and then you’ll both sleep a lot better. Any more kids in the works?’

‘We’ve been talking about it. Yeah.’

‘Go for it.’

George took out his checkbook. John fondled the contract.

‘It’s like the fable of the grasshopper and the ant,’ said the suit salesman. ‘Mr Grasshopper wastes the whole summer singing and playing and having a ripsnorting time – sort of like that lushy boss of yours – while Mr Ant works his abdomen off saving up food. So when winter comes, Mr Grasshopper, he wants a piece of Mr Ant’s larder. Naturally Mr Ant tells Mr Grasshopper to piss off. Now, if you ask me, old Aesop was really writing about atomic wars. He got one thing wrong, though. Know what he should have called it?’

‘What?’

‘
The Fable of the Grasshopper and the Cockroach
.’

And so it was that George Paxton became the happy owner of a Self-Contained Post-Attack Survival suit.

CHAPTER TWO

In Which Our Hero’s Daughter Is Shielded from the True Facts Concerning Seagulls

As it turned out, George could not have picked a worse day for buying a scopas suit. That very morning, his wife was fired for breaking a tarantula.

Justine had never liked her situation at Raining Cats and Dogs, a franchised pet store located in the Wildgrove Mall. The job entailed most of the disadvantages of working for an orphanage and few of the rewards. It seemed to her that a given kitten or puppy never ended up with an appropriate owner; indeed, Justine mistrusted the motives of
anyone
who would patronize Raining Cats and Dogs when there were so many psychologically heal-thier, albeit less convenient, places from which to obtain a pet: a farm, a kennel, an alley. And, of course, there were those animals who did not find homes at all, every week growing older and conspicuously less adorable, their lives circumscribed by the glass-walled cages (which the chain’s owners called habitats), until the day came when Harry Sweetser would ship them back to head-quarters, where God knew what fate awaited. These unadoptable pets were a continual temptation to Justine, but George would have no more animals in a house where the nonhuman population already stood at six.

The fat boy wanted the tarantula, really wanted it, and his mother seemed far less repulsed by the idea than most mothers would have been. Justine sensed that here, for once, were customers with proper credentials. Normally she took a dim view of those parts of the inventory that had too few or too many legs – the pythons, indigo snakes, scorpions, crabs, and spiders – not because they frightened her (they did not), but because they were gimmicks, bought by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. To look at this boy, however, a loser by all odds – homely, awkward, and shy – was to realize how much he needed the tarantula, and how much the tarantula needed him.

And so Justine undertook a mission that she saw as, among other things, a test of her acting talent. More than anything else, George’s wife wanted to act. She was no dreamer, though; no visions of Hollywood danced in her head. Her sober and plausible ambition was to be the clown who gave out balloons at children’s parties, the radio voice that told you where to purchase a new sofa, or the pretty lady at the local cable television station who explained why you should patronize the Wildgrove Hardware Store or Sandy’s Sandwich Shop (or, for that matter, Raining Cats and Dogs).

‘What’s
your
name?’ she asked the boy, making
your
light up.

‘Andy.’

‘Well, Andy, this spider will make you the envy of your friends. You have my guarantee.’

‘I’ve heard that they can kill you,’ said his mother, winking humorfully. Without this particular mother, Justine decided, Andy would never survive.

‘Treat a tarantula badly and, oh yes, it’ll bite. Rather like a dog.’ Justine unwrapped a stick of spearmint gum and with a histrionic gesture placed it in her mouth. ‘The venom is unpleasant but never lethal. In fact, far from being savage beasts, tarantulas are quite delicate.’

‘Aren’t they kind of boring?’ asked the mother.

‘Not when they’re injecting you with venom, no,’ said Justine, and the mother laughed.

‘Can you play with it?’ Andy wanted to know.

‘Sure you can play with it.’ Justine removed the tarantula from its cage and set its fuzzy body on her shoulder. ‘See?’ As the animal strutted down her arm, Andy’s face gave off equal amounts of light and heat.

‘Wow!’ he concluded.

When a tarantula is dropped, the result is always the same. It blows up. Justine was never sure why the spider panicked and jumped from her forearm, although the disaster occurred simultaneously with, and might very well have been caused by, Harry Sweetser’s sudden, boisterous arrival. ‘Arrgh!’ he screamed as the forty-dollar spider exploded.

‘Jesus, I’m sorry, Harry.’ Pity and remorse swept through Justine. ‘Poor bugger.’

‘Women should never try to handle these things.’ Harry was a balding little fussbudget with a double paunch. ‘You’re too squeamish.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Justine, ‘it only fell because you came over.’

‘New rule,’ said Harry. ‘Anyone who can’t touch the arachnids without panicking has to leave them alone.’

‘Why don’t you go snort a toad, Harry?’ she snapped. She thought about the remark, felt astonishingly good, and flashed her teeth theatrically.

Harry ordered her to clean up the tarantula’s remains. ‘And then I want to see you in my office,’ he announced, giving each word an ominous spin.

The mother looked at the mess on the floor and said, ‘I guess we’re not all that interested in tarantulas today.’ She steered her bewildered son out of the store.

Entering Harry’s office, Justine noted with mild surprise that he was not at his desk. He stood in the middle of the rug, thumbs hooked in his belt. ‘So anyway, I think maybe Raining Cats and Dogs isn’t the place for you, right?’ he said. ‘I’ll mention one thing, though – you were always a pleasure to look at in the morning.’ Advancing, he groped toward her face. ‘You have an inspirational way of feeding the fish.’ He stroked her cheek. ‘In fact, Justine, everything about you is inspirational.’

She backed off. If I ever stoop to this, she thought, it will be in the name of landing a major role in a cable TV commercial. Harry’s countermove consisted of crossing to the door, closing it, and maneuvering her into a corner.

‘With a little encouragement I could be persuaded to give you your job back.’ He placed a practiced, unequivocal hand on her left buttock. ‘Why don’t we swing by the Lizard Lounge this afternoon for a drink?’

‘You know, Harry’ – she slipped out from under his palm and started for the door – ‘there’s something special about you that you may not be aware of.’

‘What?’

‘You’re an absolutely astounding scuzz-bucket.’

Harry then informed Justine that she was fired.

And so when George came home that evening proudly displaying the scopas suit, Justine’s reaction approximated that of the mother in
Jack and the Beanstalk
learning that Jack had bartered away the family cow for some magic seeds.

‘Six thousand five hundred and ninety-five dollars?’ she gasped. ‘For
what?
’

‘For civil defense against thermonuclear attack. For Holly’s future. We pay three hundred and forty-five dollars and seventy-one cents a month – that’s including the tax – and after two years it’s ours. It’s from Japan.’

Justine listened morosely as George jabbered about individual radiation dosimeters, primus stoves, Lexan screens, and Winco Synthefill. He placed the suit on the sofa and took off his work shirt, showering the floor with granite flakes and aluminum-oxide bits, the detritus of his trade; their cottage was highly tactile: granite, aluminum-oxide, sand, pet hair, pieces of mail too important to throw away yet too trivial to file, clothes that quit their hangers on their own initiative, all subsumed in the endless onrush of Holly’s toys. The Irish setter loped over and sniffed the suit. Lucius the cat jumped on it, curled into himself, and took a nap.

Justine’s horror of the scopas suit was nonverbal and intuitive, the horror of a mother hen seeing a hawk shadow glide across the barnyard. She could find no flaw in the garment’s design, no error in its execution, no fallacy in its purpose. And yet she knew that Holly must never own one.

‘I think Santa Claus should bring it,’ said George, eagerly caressing his purchase, which rested on the sofa like a boy king lying in state. ‘She’ll be more likely to wear it if she believes it came from him.’

‘George, I lost my job.’

‘You what?’

‘Harry Sweetser fired me. I blew up a tarantula.’

‘Nuts.’

‘I’m glad. Not about the tarantula – but I really couldn’t have faced another day at that place.’ She inserted a stick of spearmint gum between her lips like a cigarette, puffed on it. ‘Noah Webster College has a drama department, I hear.’

‘I thought we were talking about having another kid. This your way of changing your mind?’

‘I’ll take evening courses. By day I’ll be a mother, by night you’ll be a father. Life works out.’

‘Our plumbing is rotten, our car has cancer, we can’t afford life insurance, we’re trying to have a baby, and
you
want to join the circus!’

‘Not the circus, the drama department!’ The gum entered her mouth like a log entering a sawmill.

‘You have no sense of reality!’

‘You have no sense of anything else!’ Justine’s anger had thrown her hair across her face, and now she pushed it aside; curtains parted on large brown eyes, high cheeks, abundant lips, a sensual over-bite – to wit, a face that one might easily imagine on the talent side of a cable television camera, a face that was, by all but the most banal criteria, beautiful. ‘With training I can bring in twice what I was making at Cats and Dogs.’

‘Let’s be honest, Justine. Money isn’t something you and I will ever understand. If it grew on trees, we’d be raising chickens.’

‘You’re worried about money?’ She chomped violently on her spearmint stick. ‘Then stop going around spending seven thousand dollars like it belonged to somebody else.’

A fight followed. There was some screaming. Fists were pounded. Resentments emerged like bits of an ancient civilization tossed up by an earthquake. The fight encompassed George’s tendency to assume that the pets were solely Justine’s responsibility, and it included Justine’s tendency to treat her parents shabbily, always forgetting their birthdays. It touched on whether they could really cope with another child, money worries or not, and eventually it even embraced thermonuclear war and strategic doctrine. George believed that the bombs were normally dropped from airplanes. Justine was certain that they would arrive via guided missiles. Whenever the fight began to lull, George demonstrated some additional virtue of the suit.

‘What the hell good are
those
going to do anybody?’ Justine demanded after George showed her the vacuum-packed seeds. ‘Do you know how long it will take for those to grow?’

‘They’re resistant to ultraviolet light.’

‘Yeah? What does that mean?’

‘It’s like the grasshopper and the ant.’

‘It’s like
what?
’

‘A bad move that was, Justine, getting fired. Truly dumb. This suit will give us peace of mind. You’ll just have to ask Harry for your job back.’

‘There’s one thing I forgot to tell you, darling,’ said Justine with a tilted smile. ‘Today Harry grabbed my ass.’

The moment John Frostig saw George standing in the doorway with the little scopas suit under his arm, he knew that he had lost the sale. Taking the contract and the $345.71 check from his briefcase, he rolled them into a tube and thrust it toward George’s belly as if knifing him. He spoke in grim whispers.

‘I’m going to explicate a few things now, buddy-buddy,’ He curled his arm in a yoke around George’s neck and led him into the house. ‘Right now we’re friends, my dear grasshopper, but when the warheads reach their targets, I’m going to be looking out for me and mine and nobody else. That’s the way with us ants.’

Scopas suits cluttered John’s living room, sprawling on the floor, resting on the couches, relaxing on the chairs. One suit was watching a football game on television. Another played the piano. The house looked like a meeting place for an extraterres-trial chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

‘In short,’ John continued softly, ‘anybody who hears that us ants have a few extra suits stored up . . . anybody who drops by our larders looking to borrow one of those suits . . . such a person – even if he’s an old buddy – such a person is asking to get his brains dredged out with a Remington 870.’

Alice Frostig glanced up from her sewing machine – she was repairing a scopas suit glove – and moved her bulbous and balding head with an amen sort of nod. Among other pitiable things, she was the female equivalent of a cuckold. More than once George had seen John approach a vulnerable housewife in the Lizard Lounge and convince her to accept his hospitality at the Wildgrove Motel.

‘Justine lost her job,’ said George. ‘She’s going to take acting lessons. We can’t afford the suit any more.’