Isn’t that the purpose? To save those smooth blond hides?
Split?
Doesn’t make sense.
Dig.
That makes sense. All day long I’ve been at it, sweat and calluses, and my back hurts, but there’s pleasure in the pain. It’s duty-doing; taking charge. Tension translates into doggedness, anxiety into action, skittishness into firm soldierly resolve.
I feel a nice tingle as I rig up the dynamite.
Ollie Winkler taught me—I learned from a pro.
Two sticks and the primer. Wire it up. Crimp the blasting caps. Take shelter behind the tool shed. Think about Ollie and his Bombs for Peace.
“Fire in the hole!” I yell.
The kitchen windows rattle. A muffled explosion, just right. Bobbi comes to the back steps and stands there with a mystical smile on her lips. In the backyard, like smoke, there’s a light dusting of powdery debris, and my wife and I stare at each other as if from opposite sides of a battlefield. Bobbi bites her thumb; I smile and wave. Then it’s over. She goes inside, I go back to digging.
The dynamite, that’s what disturbs her. She thinks I’ll miscalculate. Crazy, but she thinks I’ll blow the house down, maybe hurt someone. Dangerous, she thinks. But what about the bomb, for Christ sake? Miscalculations? If that’s the stopper—miscalculations—I’ll be happy to show her a few. Four hundred million corpses. Leukemia and starvation and no hospitals and nobody around to read her miserable little jingles.
Screw it. Dig.
A pick, a garden spade, a pulley system to haul out the rock.
When Melinda returns from school, I’m still on the job. I straighten up and smile over the rim of the hole. “Hey, there,” I say, but she doesn’t answer. She kicks a clod of dirt down on me and says “Nutto” and scampers for the house.
I don’t let it rattle me. At dusk I plug in the outdoor Christmas lights. I skip supper. I keep at it, whistling work songs.
It isn’t obsession. It’s commitment. It’s me against the realities.
Dig, the hole says, and I spit on my hands. Pry out a boulder. Lift and growl and heave. Obsession? Edgar Allan Poe was obsessed.
At ten o’clock I tell myself to ease off. I take a few more licks at it, then a few more, and at midnight I unplug the lights and store my tools and reluctantly plod into the house. No signs of life, it’s eerie.
In the living room, I find only the vague after-scent of lilac perfume—a dusty silence. I stop and listen hard and call out to them. “Bobbi!” I shout, then “Melinda!” The quiet unnerves me, it’s not right.
Melinda’s bed is empty. And when I move to Bobbi’s bedroom—my bedroom—I’m stopped by a locked door.
I knock and wait and then knock again, gently.
“All right,” I say, “I know you’re in there.”
I jiggle the knob. A solid lock, I installed it myself. So now what? I detect the sound of hushed voices, a giggle, bedsprings, bare feet padding across oak floors.
Another knock, not so gentle this time.
“Hey, there,” I call. “Open up—I’ll give you ten seconds.”
I count to ten.
“Now,” I say. “Hop to it.”
Behind the door, Melinda releases a melodious little laugh, which gives me hope, but then the silence presses in again. It occurs to me that my options are limited. Smash the door down—a shoulder, a foot, like on television. Storm in and pin them to the bed and grab those creamy white throats and make some demands. Demand respect and tolerance. Demand love.
I kiss the door and walk away.
Supper is cold chicken and carrot sticks. Afterward, I do the dishes, smoke a cigarette, prowl from room to room. A lockout, but why? I’m a pacifist, for God’s sake. The whole Vietnam mess: I kept my nose clean, all those years on the run, a man of the most impeccable nonviolence.
So why?
There are no conclusions.
Much later, at the bedroom door, I’m pleased to discover that they’ve laid out my pajamas for me. A modest offering, but still it’s something. I find a sleeping bag and spread it out on the hallway floor.
As I’m settling in, I hear a light scratching at the door, then a voice, muted and hoarse, and Melinda says, “Daddy?”
“Here,” I say.
“Can’t sleep.”
“Well, gee,” I tell her, “open up, let’s cuddle.”
“Nice try.”
“Thanks, sweetie.”
She clears her throat. “I made this promise to Mommy. She said it’s a quarantine.”
“Mommy’s a fruitcake.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I murmur. “We’ll straighten things out in the morning. Close your eyes now.”
“They are closed.”
“Tight?”
“Pretty tight.” A pause, then Melinda says, “You know something? I’m scared, I think.”
“Don’t be.”
“I am, though. I hate this.”
There’s a light trilling sound. Maybe a sob, maybe not. In the dark, although the door separates us, her face begins to compose itself before me like a developing photograph, those cool eyes, the pouty curvature of the lips.
“Daddy?”
“Still here.”
“Tell the honest truth,” she whispers. “I mean, you won’t ever try to kill me, will you?”
“Kill?”
“Like murder, I mean. Like with dynamite or an ax or something.”
I examine my hands.
“No killing,” I tell her. “Impossible. I love you.”
“Just checking.”
“Of course.”
“Mommy thinks… Oh, well. Night.”
“Night,” I say.
And for several minutes I’m frozen there at the door, just pondering. Kill? Where do kids get those ideas?
The world, the world.
I groan and lie down and zip myself into the sleeping bag. Then I get jabbed in the heart. Another poem—it’s pinned to the pajama pocket.
Horseshit of the worst kind. Bedlam—unbalanced, she means. Marooned, divorced—a direct threat, nothing else. At least it rhymes.
Lights off.
Sleep, I tell myself, but I can’t shut down the buzzings. The issue isn’t bedlam. Uranium is no figure of speech; it’s a figure of nature. You can hold it in your hand. It has an atomic weight of 238.03; it melts at 1,132.30 degrees centigrade; it’s hard and heavy and impregnable to metaphor. I should know, I made my fortune on the stuff.