Jacqueline Druga - Fallout

In fact, Harris had no viable reason to get angry and want to throw him out. Yet, he felt that way quite a bit. He cherished the hours when Toby slept and dreaded when he woke up.

It was almost that time.

Harris tapped his fingers on the counter desk fast and furiously as Toby slept on a couch five feet away.

Marissa placed her hand over his to stop him. “You need to approach this differently.”

“How?” asked Harris. “Tell me how?”

“You are looking at him from your position here at the firm. Security, tough guy. That’s going to be fantastic when we leave here, but we’re here and you aren’t security. In fact, you don’t project anything else.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have to have a life outside this job.”

“No, not really. I go home, eat, sleep, play some video games.”

“You don’t claim dependents, so I take it you don’t have children or a spouse.”

Harris just stared at her.

“Let’s see…”

“Where is this going?” he asked.

“I am trying to get you out of the security guy mind-set because I think that is the key to not getting annoyed with Toby.”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

“You have to make it possible,” Marissa told him. “We’re in this together.”

“No.” Harris shook his head. “We are not.”

“Harris, you opened the door and let us in.”

“Yes. Into this room.” He stood and paced. “Not into my life, not into my world. When I open this door and it’s safe according to the survival manual, I’m out of here and you can deal with him.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Why would we separate?”

Harris shook his head. “Why would we stay together. Safety in numbers? Because Hollywood movies tell us to fraction off into groups? No. It’s survival of the fittest. Look around, who do you think is the fittest? When push comes to shove, I won’t have weakness pull me down.” He opened the door to the kitchenette, walked inside, and closed the door.

A name he once painfully associated with childhood bullies became a very profitable trademark. Most people in the area or who bought his product thought ‘Fat Joe’ of Fat Joe’s tomatoes, corn, and other vegetables was a fictitious name.

It wasn’t.

Joseph Garbino had been Fat Joe for as long as he could remember. In fact, he was ‘Fat Joe’ long after he stopped being husky. He wasn’t thin, by any means, but he was a far cry from being fat. His work was far too physical. He was a farmer and that was the only way of life he ever knew. He grew vegetables. Although he had chickens, a few horses, and a pig, they weren’t for business, they were more so for his own personal needs.

He inherited the farm from his father when he was twenty-eight. By the time he was thirty, he created his own mixture of fertilizer and his tomatoes ended up being the ripest, sweetest tomatoes in the valley. When he canned them, they were a precious commodity and in high demand at flea markets and local restaurants.

Before the Fat Joe vegetable business became really lucrative, a high school friend of his drove a hundred miles to his farm one day just for his freshly canned tomatoes.

“You ought to take these tomatoes and go national,” he said to Joe. “’Cause these Fat Joe tomatoes are the best around.”

He had never thought about going beyond local, so when he did, just on the off chance he was successful, he named them Fat Joe’s so those who picked on him in school would get a whiff of his success.

Within a few years, everyone knew him. Well, almost everyone. His distribution was still small, but mighty.

He worked so much he didn’t have time for a social life. Let alone to get married. His fun was limited to cold beers on the porch with his friend and neighbor, Saul. He was also single, but due to divorce. And together, they’d hit the once-a-month bingo at the volunteer fire department.

He’d joke that he’d find that special one when he turned thirty. That didn’t happen and he so moved it to forty. Then when he turned fifty and that special one never came, he said, “The hell with it.” He had a nephew that he adored. He was a father figure to him when his brother, the boy’s father, had died.

For the most part, Fat Joe worked. From sun up to sun down, no exceptions. Not even when the war broke out. He was motivated even more so, because people were going to be needing food.

There was no Fat Joe’s factory. He had built a large barn on his property that served as a canning division.

When the bombs fell, his ten workers never showed up for work. Wouldn’t make a difference, there was no power, no phones to call.

Joe worried about radiation and fallout from the bombs, so he rode over on horseback to Saul’s, who owned the farm next to him.

When the Japanese Fukushima nuclear reactor melted, and the news came that radiation would arrive in California, Saul invested in the gadgets to test the air and ground. He learned them and educated himself on radiation.

Saul was younger than Joe by ten years. It wasn’t that Joe was old, he wasn’t, but he never bothered to learn technology the way Saul did. Following the Japanese incident, Saul checked Joe’s land and gave it a clean bill.

“If mine’s fine, yours is fine,” Saul had said.

“Can you just check?” Joe asked.

“We’re talking two nukes,” Saul said. “You have to look at the wind. We’re smack in between, we aren’t getting anything. Plus we’re protected by the mountains.”

“I don’t know about that stuff,” Joe said. “I have tomatoes I can pick early, I don’t want them contaminated.”

“They won’t be. If they were, they’d be no good and you’d have to skim at least the top ten inches of your soil to grow anything.”

“Can you check?”

“Fine. Fine. Let me grab Spot and I’ll be right over,” Saul said, referencing his horse.

Joe was grateful, and Saul did come over, run some tests and everything was good.

Still feeling uneasy, Joe worked to pull what he could, just in case.

The bombs fell on a Friday night California time, and Joe, along with everyone else, was plunged into darkness. On Sunday he went to church, prayed for those poor souls in the affected area, then picked tomatoes and beans the rest of the day. By Tuesday, it was as if nothing ever happened.

He was getting into his new routine, wake up to the rooster, wash his face, light a Sterno stove and put on the percolator to make some coffee. While that brewed he went out, checked the water and feed for the animals, came back in, poured a cup of coffee then went to the coop to get some eggs.

By the time he finished that, the lights were on. Every light in his house.

Joe rushed back in and the television was on, complete with cable.

The news was playing and he was glad about that. He and many others had been in the dark about the happenings in the world.

Mind full of questions and coffee in hand, he sat down to take in the news.

However, nothing, absolutely nothing was mentioned on the news about the bombs or the war.

He lifted the remote and switched the channel, there was some cartoon, another switch, a cooking show, another click of the remote and there was one of those morning shows. The cutesy hosts were laughing, sitting on a sofa while sipping from their coffee mugs.

Joe would have believed he dreamt the bombs or was hallucinating, had it not been for the fact that even with cable, those four programs were all that were on.

“What the hell?”

Joe kept pressing the ‘up’ channel button on the remote. News, cartoon, cooking, talk show… news, cartoon, cooking, talk show…