Todd Strasser: Fallout

“Uh-huh.” I agree, mostly because I don’t want him to get mad.

“We’ll just have to wait until she wakes up,” he says, holding the gauze pad in place and pulling a long strip of white tape, which he starts to wrap around her head.

“Mr. Porter?” Janet says.

“Yes?” Dad looks up.

“That’s not the way.”

Their eyes meet for a moment, and then Dad nods and lets her take over.

Janet takes a small pair of scissors from the first-aid kit and begins to cut the hair away from Mom’s wound.

No one speaks. The s nip, snip, snip of the scissors is the only sound in this little cement box of a room. Maybe there’s too much to think about. Paula and her dad must be thinking about Mrs. McGovern and Teddy. Is Ronnie thinking about his collie, Leader? What about the rest of our friends and neighbors, teachers, cousins, and grandparents? Did some of them find shelter in basements and tunnels and the other places with those black-and-yellow Civil Defense Fallout Shelter signs?

Maybe some, but not everybody. Not the ones who were on the other side of the trapdoor.

Huddled in the shadows with her husband and Ronnie, Mrs. Shaw quietly begins to sob.

Snip, snip, snip … Dark clumps of hair fall to the concrete floor. Janet turns to Dad. “Could I have some water, Mr. Porter?”

With a start, Dad snatches the flashlight from me and shines it up at a large red sausage-shaped metal tank hanging above us. Skinny brown pipes run into it from the ceiling. Rising quickly, he reaches up and turns some valves, then waits as if he’s expecting something. Everyone else looks up, too. Paula’s cheeks glisten with tears.

“Come on,” Dad mutters at the tank, and I feel myself tense.

Seconds pass. He stares intently. “Come on!”

I’m not sure what’s supposed to happen, but it’s obvious from the way Dad’s acting that it’s important.

“What is it?” Mr. Shaw asks.

“The water tank. I was supposed to fill it.”

“It can’t be too late, can it?” asks Mrs. Shaw while Dad shines the flashlight beam on a metal toolbox on the floor near the wall.

“I don’t hear water running.” He flips the box open, pulls out a hammer, and starts tapping the pipes. Clank! Clank! Clank!

Paula buries her face in her father’s shoulder. Dad stops and listens, then starts to hit the pipes harder. CLANK! CLANK! CLANK!

Sparky covers his ears. “Stop! It’s too loud.”

Dad listens again. In the glow of the flashlight, the sinews tighten in his neck and his temple pulses.

CLANK! CLANK! CLANK!

Despite the jarring racket, Mom lies perfectly still.

By the time we’d licked the last traces of cheesecake from our fingers, the afternoon was descending toward evening, the shadows growing longer and deeper. The distant train whistle meant fathers were coming home from work. The sweet pleasure of the cheesecake vanished, replaced by the sour taste of dread.

“The Yankees lost,” Freak O’ Nature said in his normal voice, not affecting any well-known television character, and looked at his watch. “I gotta go in. Are… you guys gonna say I had something to do with it?”

Ronnie and I looked at each other and shook our heads. School-yard logic might have dictated that since he’d been part of the crime at the beginning, he was a tiny bit culpable, but spreading the blame probably wouldn’t reduce whatever punishment we would face at home.

“Thanks.” With a smile of relief and gratitude, Freak O’ Nature stood up. Since we were in his backyard, Ronnie and I got up as well. As we started toward our homes, the train whistle blew again, sounding closer.

“I’m gonna get it bad,” I said, trying not to step on the unlucky cracks in the sidewalk — a last-ditch effort to keep things from becoming worse.

“We could all be dead tomorrow,” Ronnie said.

Either way, I felt doomed.

At the front door, Sparky was waiting with an expression of awe on his face. Even though he got into plenty of trouble himself, nothing thrilled and fascinated him more than when the ax was about to fall on me. Before he could say anything, I raised my hand and said, “I know.”

But he had to say it anyway. “You’re in big trouble.” He grinned with delight.

Mom came out of the kitchen wearing a blue apron and a frown on her face. Then she spoke the words that struck an even greater, or at least more immediate, fear than a Russian attack: “Go to your room until your father gets home.”

Dad slumps down on the bunk kitty-corner to where Janet sits, still comforting Mom. The tension is gone. Either Dad’s tired or he’s decided that more banging on pipes won’t help. Sparky goes over and settles on his leg. I sit next to him, pressing my shoulder against his arm. In Dad’s hands, the flashlight makes a bright bull’s-eye against the wall of gray concrete blocks.

“Mr. Porter?” Janet speaks softly.

Dad shines the light back on Mom. Using a bandage and some alcohol from the first-aid kit, Janet wipes her hands, then starts cutting again.

Snip, snip, snip …

“Everyone we know,” Mrs. Shaw sniffs woefully. “Everyone!”

Mr. McGovern mutters, “It’s unbelievable.”

There are places I can’t stop my thoughts from going to: What about the others who were up there? The ones who didn’t get in? Were Paula’s mom and brother among them? Freak O’ Nature and his family? The Lewandowskis and Sinclairs? Were they all blinded and burned in the heat flash? Poisoned by radiation? Blown apart by the shock wave?

Or are they still out there trying to avoid the fallout floating down out of the sky like poisonous gray snow? Dad said that if you weren’t in a shelter, the fallout would be unavoidable. Even if you managed not to get any on you or breathe it in, it would still get into the water and food. At the end of World War II, the United States dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, and hundreds of thousands of Japanese people died from the explosions and the radiation that followed. And those bombs were tiny compared to the hydrogen bombs that the United States and Russia have now.

Thinking of my friends brings a deep, sick, sad sensation. Freak O’ Nature, Linda, Puddin’ Belly Wright, and Why Can’t You Be Like Johnny? could be lying on the ground above us right now, writhing in pain. Shouldn’t we go up and look for them? But I know what Dad would say. We’d only be exposing ourselves to the radiation. Then we’d die, too.

Still, how would it feel if it was someone else’s bomb shelter and our family were the ones who were locked out? I picture myself crawling through the rubble to the trapdoor, knocking and begging to be let in.

My lungs expand with an involuntary gasp. So far no one’s knocked, but what if someone does ?

Ronnie presses his face against his dad’s arm while Mr. Shaw wipes his own eyes with his fingers. Sparky sniffs. Dad stares at the floor. Now I can’t stop the tears from coming. In the past when there’d been tears in my eyes, I’d always gone to Mom for comfort. I never wanted Dad to see me cry because that was what girls and little kids did. But what does that matter now?

Janet wraps Mom’s head in gauze to keep everything in place. It’s so quiet. The loudest sound is Mom’s breathing. Dad hardly takes his eyes off her. Every few moments, he reaches over to feel her forehead, pull her robe a little tighter, brush a few hairs away from her face.