Philip Wylie - The Smuggled Atom Bomb

A languorous ocean breeze set sail from the Bahama Islands for the coast of Florida.

It crossed the Gulf Stream and came ashore where autumn tourists sprawled on the allegedly golden but actually pale brown sands of Miami Beach. A breath of it, after crossing Miami, following a road lined with fluffy evergreens, swung finally into a stand of much larger trees: mahoganies, tamarinds, poincianas, gumbo limbos and live oaks. These it stirred audibly before it moved over a sun-brilliant lawn, entered the screened window of a dilapidated, two-story frame house and touched bright blond hair on the brow of a pretty, middle-aged woman who sat in a bed. She glanced up with the pleasant thought that the still heat of day was ended. She saw the clock. Three-twenty. She faced the screen, then, and called in a contralto that was penetrating without being harsh, “Charlee-ee!”

Her mind pictured her dark-haired, merry-eyed son, age twelve. The picture did not materialize and she remembered he was going to try to get a newspaper route after school.

She conjured up the brunette glow and giggly adolescence of her younger daughter. “Marian! Marian!”

Again there was no answer and again she remembered. Marian had said she would be delayed. Eleanor, her eldest, wasn’t due until four-thirty because she had a regular lab period that day at the university. Mrs. Yates, invalided eight years before in the accident that had taken her husband’s life, leaned back on her pillows, still smiling, and wished she hadn’t called. For she knew what would happen.

Feet strode on the crushed coral of the driveway. A foot tripped on the threshold of the back door. And a young man appeared, grinning, at the entrance of her downstairs room — a man of less than twenty-five, a tall man and thin, a stooped young man with polelike arms and legs, eyes of a faded blue, unkempt hair the hue of new rope, and a determination of mouth and chin that did not fit his over-all diffidence.

“Duff,” she said apologetically, “I didn’t mean to bring you in from the barn! What in the world were you doing, though? You’ve still got on your good gabardine slacks!”

The young man chuckled, looked down as if to check the statement, started to answer and was obliged to deal with a slight impediment of speech before saying, “Oh! Oh — sure!

Decided not to change. Not doing anything messy — labelling a lot of cans with small hardware in ’em.”

She laughed. “Of course! You said you were going to. I’m so scattered! Well — I’m sorry I disturbed you.”

“Not a bit. Nearly finished. Did you want something? Iced tea, maybe? Eleanor left things ready.”

“Later, perhaps. No, Duff. Don’t want anything. I’d forgotten the kids were going to be late. It’s their afternoon to sweep and dust and scour.”

His grin widened. “I’ll do it. Give me an excuse to put off mowing the lawn till a cooler day. Besides, I’m a talented house cleaner.”

She laughed again. Duff Bogan — Allan Diffenduffer Bogan — had been a boarder at the Yates home for more than a year. The luckiest boarder, she thought, that any invalid woman with three children ever had — though Eleanor couldn’t possibly be called a child any more. “You go back and finish.” Seeing he wouldn’t, she added, “Or at least put on an apron.”

He executed a comic salute and soon she heard a broom working upstairs. Not long after, came a bizarre din from the bathroom, and she lay on her pillows, chuckling.

He was, she thought, such a dear. A graduate student of physics at the University of Miami. He’d come over at the start of the first semester, the year before, when the Yateses had had a vacancy in the two-boarder schedule which augmented their slender finances.

Who’d brought him? One of Eleanor’s numberless admirers. She thought back. It was that fullback, she believed, the one with that absurd nickname — Avalanche, Avalanche Billings.

“We have to have,” she remembered saying to Duff, “somebody who can help around the place, take care of the yard and the station wagon — which is vintage and requires plenty of care. Somebody who can tend the trees and shrubs, won’t mind doing dishes at times, and so on. The rate is low on account of the help I need.”

Duff had regarded her amiably, even warmly, and replied, “Mrs. Yates, I was brought up in the family of an underpaid Indiana preacher. Housework, its simplification and efficient management, became one of my hobbies. I have other hobbies that might prove helpful.”

She had taken him, on trial. After a week, she had come to feel Duff was indispensable. Now, he was like a son — except, of course, where Eleanor was concerned. He was too shy, too self-effacing to be like a brother to Eleanor, which somewhat interfered with his status as “son.” Mrs. Yates sighed. Eleanor didn’t give him much encouragement. Much?

Not any. Which wasn’t surprising in a girl elected Miss Freshman in her first year, the Belle of the Junior Prom, and who now, as a senior, was Queen-elect of the Orange Bowl festivities.

Upstairs in the bathroom, Duff Bogan had gone to work with equipment of his own devising — a “gun” for spraying insecticides and a second “gun” for dusting. First he dampened all porcelain, metal and tile surfaces with a water spray. Then he dusted with a scouring powder. Thereafter, a damp cloth in each hand, he polished furiously — which caused the din Mrs. Yates had heard. In fifteen minutes the bathroom glittered.

Perspiring in the damp warmth of the day, he called down the stairway, “What about Harry’s room?”

“That, too,” she responded. “He never locks it.”

So Duff entered the quarters of the other boarder, Harry Ellings. A light dust mopping only was needed there. For Harry, who had been with the Yateses ever since the father’s death, made his own bed and kept his own premises picked up. It wasn’t, Duff thought, much of a home for a fifty-year-old bachelor like Harry. A living-sitting room in somebody else’s house — a day bed and a desk, a shelf of books, bridge lamps, old chair, a worn rug, a radio, a few photographs, a calendar hung on the knob of the closet door. That was Harry’s residence.

He had a job as a mechanic with a trucking concern; before that he’d been a letter carrier. He had quit during his early years with the Yateses because of varicose veins, and had gone to school to learn his present trade.

Church on Sundays, a Friday bridge game, his Wednesday evenings practicing casting, a lot of porch sitting and radio listening, occasional fishing trips, few visitors, little mail — that summed up all Duff knew of the other boarder.

Maybe, from Harry’s viewpoint, it was a good life, whole and satisfying. The thought depressed Duff. He finished dusting, helped himself to one of Harry’s cigarettes and stared out at the sunshine, wondering, as young men do, what he would do when his degree had been awarded and the uncertain world said wordlessly, “Okay, Bogan; beat me if you can!”

He picked up the mop and noticed then, behind the calendar that hung from the knob, a lock on the closet door, a lock newer than the hardware of the Yates house, which he constantly repaired and replaced.

If he had not observed the lock, it is possible, although unlikely, that Duff Bogan’s life might have been relatively speaking, as colorless as his estimate of Harry Ellings’. But Duff did notice the lock and wonder about it, and nothing was ever the same for him afterward.

Wondering about locks was not, in Duffs case, an idle exercise in bafflement. Early in life he had been discarded by his schoolmates as a possible pitcher, fielder, end or basketball center. Competitive sports revealed him as something of an Ichabod Crane and, since his middle name was Diffenduffer, after his mother’s father, he had been called Duffer from the age of ten. He was Duff only to the kindly Yateses. But though a duffer at games and sports, he excelled in hobbies. Among them was a know-how concerning locks.