Todd Strasser: Fallout

“When’s she going to wake up?” Sparky asks.

“Don’t know,” Dad says.

“What if she never wakes up?”

“Let’s not think about that.”

More time passes. More silence. Dad takes the hammer and raps the pipes again — Clank! Clank! Clank! — then pauses to listen.

Still nothing.

He sighs, puts down the hammer, takes some blankets from a shelf, and offers them around. “Try to make yourselves comfortable.”

Janet is the only one who says thank you. The Shaws and McGoverns spread the blankets on the cold concrete floor. Both Mrs. Shaw and Paula tuck their knees up against their chests and hug their legs. Paula leans tightly against her dad. After making Mom comfortable on the bunk, Janet sits on the bare concrete floor and wraps her blanket around her shoulders. Soon we are four groups, huddled close to one another in the chilly, damp air.

In science we learned that some people could go a month or more without food by living on stored-up fat and then on muscle. But no one can go much more than four days without water.

It’s Sparky who asks the question we’re all thinking: “Dad, what will happen if we can’t get the water?”

I went to my room, which I shared with Sparky, whose real name was Edward, but I called him Sparky because his hair grew straight out from his head as if he was always touching something electric.

Wondering how bad the spanking would be, I sat on my bed, tugging at the hair behind my ear, too miserable to look at comics or play with my plastic army men. The paddleball racket was a given. When I was younger, Dad used to spank me, and then Sparky, with his hand, but one day he hurt his wrist and couldn’t play tennis for a few weeks, so now he spanked us with the wooden paddle, which hurt like the dickens.

The bedroom door began to open and I tensed, but it was only Sparky. He pretended to look for a toy on his shelf, but I knew he’d really come in to see how I was coping with the stress. He kept glancing at me out of the corner of his eye.

“Dad’s really gonna give it to you. You’re not supposed to steal.”

“Get lost.” I picked up MAD magazine and pretended to read it. The black and white enemies in “Spy vs. Spy” used the same round black bombs with fizzy fuses that Boris Badenov used against Rocky and Bullwinkle on TV.

“Mom says she doesn’t know what she’s gonna do with you.”

That didn’t sound right. Taking the cheesecake was the first bad thing I’d done in months. “No, she didn’t.”

“Yes, she did,” Sparky insisted.

“Liar.”

“Nuh-uh. She said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ And her eyes got red and watery.”

That sounded ominous. Was it possible that even I didn’t know how bad what I’d done was? I’d done bad stuff before, like the time Puddin’ Belly Wright and I threw dirt bombs at the back of Old Lady Lester’s freshly painted garage, or the time I dropped Sparky’s brand-new rubber football down the storm drain because he wouldn’t share his double-stick cherry ice pop.

But I’d never stolen before. Could stealing mean you’d crossed the line into juvenile delinquency and there was no going back? Could it mean I’d have to be a hood from now on and wear a leather jacket and heavy engineer boots all summer and pretend to be tough even though I knew I wasn’t very tough at all? Would I be the only kid on the block who was a hood, and none of my friends would be allowed to play with me? Just thinking about it made me want to cry.

“Go away or you’re gonna get hurt,” I warned Sparky.

He left and I felt tears of regret slide down my cheeks. Why had I listened to Ronnie?

When the door opened a few moments later, I thought it would be Sparky again, but Dad came in, wearing a dark-green suit. I sniffed loudly, hoping he’d see my red eyes and tear-streaked cheeks and know how remorseful I was and that I’d clearly learned my lesson and therefore really didn’t need to be spanked.

The good news was he didn’t have the paddle, but that could have been because he wanted to change clothes before he spanked me. Dad never did work around the house in his business clothes. He always changed into dungarees and a sweatshirt first. And that included when he punished us.

I pulled my knees up under my chin and tried to squeeze a few more tears of remorse out of my eyes. Sitting across from me on Sparky’s bed, Dad looked serious, his jaw dark with five o’clock shadow, which was something gangsters and men who were desperate or crazy often had on TV.

“You know you’re not supposed to steal,” he said.

I nodded, blinked hard, and sniffed loudly again. At the same time, I tried to estimate how many swats with the paddle I might get. The last time Dad had spanked me was after I did an experiment to see whether a little rock the size of a nickel could break a window if you threw it really hard from close up. The answer was yes, if a five-inch crack in the glass counted. That got me three swats. But that time Mom hadn’t cried or said she didn’t know what she was going to do with me. All she did was laugh and say, “Your father is going to love this.”

So it stood to reason that the punishment for stealing would be greater — maybe even six or more swats. But it also depended on Dad’s mood. If this was one of those days when he came home angry, it could be even worse.

“Why did you do it?” He sounded calm and reasonable, so I felt a little hopeful. The truth was, I didn’t know why I’d done it. Hunger had played a part. And Ronnie had said I’d be a chicken if I didn’t do it.

“I don’t know.”

“But you knew it was wrong.”

I nodded and felt a tiny bit encouraged; he didn’t seem all that angry.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” he asked.

“Ronnie said it wouldn’t matter because tomorrow the Russians might drop the bomb and we’d all be dead.”

To be honest, I didn’t think that was such a good excuse, but it was the best I could come up with. At that point, if I’d had to estimate how many swats I was going to get once Dad changed clothes, I would have guessed around five. But Dad didn’t move. He blinked, then blinked again. “Stay here,” he said, then left the room.

“Is there any water at all?” Mrs. Shaw asks. In the dim light, her eyes are glittery.

Dad shakes his head.

“And if we go up there to get some…?”

“We have to wait as long as we can before leaving the shelter,” Dad says.

“Maybe it’s not as bad as you think,” Mr. McGovern suggests.

“A bomb went off close by,” Dad says. “We saw the flash and heard the blast winds.”

“But we don’t really know,” Paula’s dad stresses.

Dad glances at Mom again. On her cheek are a few streaks of dark dried blood. “I’ll check the levels.” He takes the flashlight and gets up.

“Can I come?” Sparky asks anxiously.

“No, it could be dangerous.”

I put my arm around Sparky’s scrawny shoulders. “We’ll stay here.”

Dad gets a small box labeled FAMILY RADIATION MEASUREMENT KIT. Inside is a tubelike thing about the size of a fountain pen. He goes around the shield wall and into the narrow corridor on the other side.

Without the flashlight, it gets darker in the shelter. We watch the shadows and light in the gap where the shield wall ends and listen as Dad climbs the metal rungs up to the trapdoor.

A few moments later, he returns. “It’s four hundred ninety-seven roentgens under the door. That’s what’s getting through a quarter inch of iron plate, which means it’s even worse on the other side.”