“If you’ve got ’em, wear ’em,” Aaron said. As far as he knew-it wasn’t as if he’d gone looking-no one had been selling lead-lined clothes before the war started. You could sure buy them now. How much good they did was a hotly, so to speak, argued question.
“I don’t,” Jim said. “So the closer we go to downtown, the better the chance we got of fryin’ our nuts. Or am I missin’ somethin’?”
“Sounds about right,” Aaron said.
“What we oughta do, then, is go way the hell over to Pacific Coast Highway and head down it so we keep the hell away from them atoms,” Summers said.
“That’s wasting an awful lot of time and gasoline,” Aaron said dubiously.
“Gas is cheap.”
“Not since the bombs hit. It’s still over fifty cents a gallon. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Jim Summers rolled his eyes. “Anybody’d reckon you was the Hebe, not old man Weissman.” He pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and took two singles out of it. “This oughta cover the difference.”
He was right; two bucks would more than take care of the gas for the extra distance. All the same, Aaron set his chin and said, “Can you pull two or three hours out of your back pocket the same way? We can get over the hill through Sepulveda, maybe even through Laurel Canyon.”
“I know what’s eatin’ you.” Summers wasn’t smart, or anywhere close to it. He could be shrewd, though. “You want to see what the bomb wreckage looks like, from as close as you can git. I got news for you, pal-curiosity killed the cat.”
“Satisfaction brought it back,” Aaron retorted. He didn’t like being so easy to see through.
“Not if it was glowin’ in the dark to begin with.”
“Mr. Weissman said I should do the driving for this run.” Aaron didn’t tell Jim that was because the boss didn’t trust Summers not to make a hash of it.
“Says you! We’ll see about that.” Jim stumped off to have it out with the boss. Aaron could have told him that wasn’t such a hot idea, but he didn’t think Jim would have listened to him. As Aaron expected, Jim came back in short order, more crestfallen than he’d set out. Aaron had pulled punches; Herschel Weissman wasn’t the kind of man who’d see any reason to bother. After muttering to himself for a few seconds, Jim said, “Awright, smart guy. We’ll do it your way. But if your next kid has green hair and eyes on stalks, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Aaron didn’t worry about that. From what the doctors said, Ruth was lucky to have had Leon. She’d lost a girl before she managed to do it. They said she’d have to be meshiggeh to try again. Aaron didn’t love rubbers, but he didn’t want to endanger his wife. Rubbers it was, unless they did something that didn’t risk getting her pregnant.
As for the green hair and the eyes on stalks, Aaron couldn’t imagine Jim reading a science-fiction pulp with a story about mutants. That had to come straight from the comic books.
Aaron did decide to go as far west as Sepulveda before turning south. Laurel Canyon and Coldwater Canyon might still let out into bomb-damaged parts of town. Before the bomb fell, it would have been an easy trip. The Pasadena Freeway-people also called it the Arroyo Seco, the Dry Wash-had been there for a while; they were calling its southern extension the Harbor Freeway even if it hadn’t come close to the harbor yet. After it ended, Vermont or Western would have finished the route. Now they were finished. The newer Hollywood Freeway met the Pasadena downtown. That would have worked, too. No more.
The Blue Front truck chugged up to the top of Sepulveda Pass, then down the other side. As the Santa Monica Mountains shrank to foothills and then flatland, Aaron craned his neck so he could look east. So did Jim, for all his complaining.
“Oh, Lord,” he said softly. Aaron nodded. They couldn’t see well, because closer buildings that still stood kept getting in the way, but the background to those buildings that should have been there…wasn’t. It had been swept away, as if by the fist of an angry child-an angry child who happened to be several miles tall.
At Sunset, Aaron resisted temptation. He got his reward, if that was what it was, by driving past an enormous refugee encampment. National Guardsmen patrolled a barbed-wire perimeter. People dejectedly mooched about from one tent to another. The wind came out of the west, from the direction of the camp. Despite a cigarette in his mouth, Aaron made a face.
“Pew!” Jim Summers said. “Buncha stinking skunks. Don’t they ever take a bath?”
“I wonder how often they get the chance,” Aaron said.
“If they ever get it, they don’t use it,” Jim said.
At Wilshire, Aaron yielded, turning left. Jim called him some amazing things when he did. “I love you, too,” he answered, deadpan. That produced more creativity from Summers. Aaron kept heading east, toward the blast zone, anyhow.
Wilshire stayed open for some distance. Even when buildings had fallen down, the ruins were bulldozed off the street. Finally, at Crenshaw, sawhorses kept him from going any farther. A sign declared that it was A FEDERAL RECLAMATION PROJECT. Under the stenciled words, hand-painted letters added WE SHOOT LOOTERS! NO QUESTIONS ASKED FIRST! To drive home that point, more National Guardsmen and some cops prowled the area. All of them, men in blue included, carried rifles with fixed bayonets. Aaron turned right and headed south.
Bulldozer crews kept shoving rubble out of the way. Like most of the soldiers and policemen, the drivers and a lot of other workers wore masks like the ones doctors used in operating rooms. Seeing that, Aaron thoughtfully rolled up his window. It might not help, but it couldn’t hurt.
He rolled it down again when they got farther south. He could look east and see what was left of the Coliseum. It had hosted the 1932 Olympics; the Trojans and Bruins and Rams played there. Or they had. The great stone-and-concrete bowl looked more battered than pictures he’d seen of the ancient Colosseum in Rome.
“What a mess!” Jim said. “What a fuckin’ mess!”
Aaron nodded. That he could see what remained of the Coliseum said that everything in the two or three miles between him and it had been knocked flat. Farther north, City Hall, which had been by far the tallest building in an earthquake-wary town, was only a melted stump. If the earthquakes don’t get you, then the atoms will, he thought. Los Angeles would be a long time getting back on its feet, if it ever did.
The farther south he went, the easier that was to forget…for a while. Then the truck passed a lamppost with a body hanging from it. Around the dead man’s neck was a placard: THIEF. Jim Summers whistled softly. “They ain’t fuckin’ around.”
“No,” Aaron said in a voice quieter than he’d looked to use. “They aren’t.”
Damage from the downtown bomb faded as they kept on; they hadn’t come far enough to see any from the one that took out the port. Mrs. O’Brynne of Torrance was lucky. Her little suburb, full of fig and orange orchards, seemed untouched.
Aaron and Jim lugged the refrigerator inside, being careful to keep it upright while they did. They plugged it in. She signed the paperwork. A baby started to cry while she did. “My little girl,” she said.
“They do that,” Aaron agreed. “Not very old, is she? A couple-three months? I’ve got a little boy who’ll be two in May.” She handed him the clipboard. He checked. She’d put her Jane Hancock everywhere it needed to be. “Much obliged, ma’am.”
“Purty gal,” Jim said when they got back in the truck. “Reminded me a little o’ that Katharine Hepburn.”
“If you say so.” Aaron didn’t want to argue. Mrs. O’Brynne wasn’t bad, but he didn’t think she was in that league.
“A little, I said.” Summers changed the subject. “When you head back north, can you kindly stay farther away from the bomb, huh? You seen what you wanted to see.”
“Oh, all right.” You had to give to get. Aaron put the truck in gear.
17