T. Boyle - Greasy Lake and Other Stories

Bayard was acutely conscious of his paunch, the whiteness of his skin, the hair that trailed down his neck in soft, frivolous coils. He felt like a green recruit under the burning gaze of the drill instructor, like an awkward dancer trying out for the wrong role. He coughed into his fist. “The long haul.”

Arkson seemed pleased. “Good,” he said, a faint smile playing across his lips. “I thought at first you might be one of these halfway types that wants a bomb shelter under the patio or something.” He gave Bayard a knowing glace. “They might last a month or two after the blast,” he said, “but what then? And what if it’s not war we’re facing but worldwide economic collapse? Are they going to eat their radiation detectors?”

This was a joke. Bayard laughed nervously. Arkson cut him off with a contemptuous snort and a wave of his hand that consigned all the timid, slipshod, halfway Harrys of the world to an early grave. “No,” he said, “I can see you’re the real thing, a one-hundred-percenter, no finger in the dike for you.” He paused. “You’re a serious person, Bayard, am I right?”

Bayard nodded.

“And you’ve got a family you want to protect?”

Bayard nodded again.

“Okay”—Arkson was on his feet, a packet of brochures in his hand—“we’re going to want to talk hidden location, with the space, seeds, fertilizer, and tools to grow food and the means to hunt it, and we’re going to talk a five-year renewable stockpile of survival rations, medical supplies, and specie — and of course weaponry.

“Weaponry?”

Arkson had looked at him as if he’d just put a bag over his head. “Tell me,” he said, folding his arms so that the biceps swelled beneath his balled fists, “when the bust comes and you’re sitting on the only food supply in the county, you don’t really think your neighbors are going to breeze over for tea and polite chitchat, do you?”

Though Bayard had never handled a gun in his life, he knew the answer: there was a sickness on the earth and he’d have to harden himself to deal with it.

Suddenly Arkson was pointing at the ceiling, as if appealing to a higher authority to back him up. “You know what I’ve got up there on the roof?” he said, looming over Bayard like an inquisitor. Bayard hadn’t the faintest idea.

“A Brantly B2B.”

Bayard gave him a blank look.

“A chopper. Whirlybird. You know: upski-downski. And guess who flies it?” Arkson spread the brochures out on the desk in front of him, tapping a forefinger against the glossy photograph of a helicopter floating in a clear blue sky beneath the rubric ESCAPE CRAFT. “That’s right, friend: me. I fly it. Leave nothing to chance, that’s my motto.” Bayard thumbed through the brochure, saw minijets, hovercraft, Cessnas, seaplanes, and ultralights.

“I can be out of town in ten minutes. Half an hour later I’m in my compound — two hundred fenced acres, three security men, goats, cows, chickens, pigs, corn as high as your chin, wheat, barley, rye, artesian wells, underground gas and water tanks — and an arsenal that could blow away the PLO. Listen,” he said, and his eyes were like a stalking cat’s, “when the shit hits the fan they’ll be eating each other out there.”

Bayard had been impressed. He was also terrified, sick with the knowledge of his own impotence and vulnerability. The blade was poised. It could fall today, tonight, tomorrow. They had to get out. “Fran,” he called as he hurried through the front door, arms laden with glossy brochures, dire broadsides, and assorted survival tomes from Arkson Publications, Ltd. “Fran!”

Fran had always been highstrung — neurotic, actually — and the sort of pure, unrefined paranoia that had suddenly infested Bayard was second nature to her. Still, she would take some persuading — he was talking about uprooting their entire life, after all — and it was up to Bayard to focus that paranoia and bring it to bear on the issue at hand. She came out of the sunroom in a tentlike swimsuit, a large, solid, plain-faced woman in her late thirties, trailing children. She gave him a questioning look while the girls, chanting “Daddy, Daddy,” foamed round his legs. “We’ve got to talk,” was all he could say.

Later, after the children had been put to bed, he began his campaign. “We’re sitting on a powder keg,” he said as she bent over the dishwasher, stacking plates. She looked up, blinking behind the big rectangular frames of her glasses like a frogman coming up for air. “Pardon?”

“L. A., the whole West Coast. It’s the first place the Russians’ll hit — if the quake doesn’t drop us into the ocean first. Or the banks go under. You’ve read about the S&Ls, right?”

She looked alarmed. But, then, she alarmed easily. Chronically overprotected as a child, cloistered in a parochial school run along the lines of a medieval nunnery, and then consigned to a Catholic girls’ college that made it look liberal, she believed with all her heart in the venality of man and the perfidy and rottenness of the world. On the rare occasions when she left the house she clutched her purse like a fullback going through a gap in the line, saw all pedestrians — even white-haired grandmothers — as potential muggers, and dodged Asians, Latinos, Pakistanis, and Iranians as if they were the hordes of Genghis Khan. “What in God’s name are you talking about?” she said.

“I”m talking about Montana.”

“Montana?”

At this point Bayard had simply fetched his trove of doom literature and spread it across the kitchen table. “Read,” he said, knowing full well the books and pamphlets could speak far more eloquently than he. In the morning he’d found her hunched over the table still, the ashtray full beside her, a copy of Doom Newsletter in her hand, Panic in the Streets and How to Kill , volumes I–IV, face down beside a steaming coffee mug. “But what about the girls?” she said. “What about school, ballet lessons, tennis, swimming?”

Melissa was nine, Marcia seven. The move to the hinterlands would be disruptive for them, maybe traumatic — Bayard didn’t deny it — but then, so would nuclear holocaust. “Ballet lessons?” he echoed. “What good do you think ballet lessons are going to be when maniacs are breaking down the door?” And then, more gently: “Look, Fran, it’s going to be hard for all of us, but I just don’t see how we can stay here now that our eyes have been opened — it’s like sitting on the edge of a volcano or something.”

She was weakening, he could feel it. When he got home from the office she was sunk into the sofa, her eyes darting across the page before her like frightened animals. Arkson had called. Four times. “Mrs. Wemp, Fran,” he’d shouted over the wire as if the barbarians were at the gate, “you’ve got to listen to me. I have a place for you. Nobody’ll find you. You’ll live forever. Sell that deathtrap and get out now before it’s too late!” Toward the end of the week she went through an entire day without changing out of her nightgown. Bayard pressed his advantage. He sent the girls to the babysitter and took the day off from work to ply her with pamphlets, rhetoric and incontrovertible truths, and statistics on everything from the rising crime rate to nuclear kill ratios. As dusk fell that evening, the last choked rays of sunlight irradiating the smog till it looked like mustard gas coming in over the trenches, she capitulated. In a voice weak with terror and exhaustion, she called him into the bedroom, where she lay still as a corpse. “All right,” she croaked. “Let’s get out.”

After Fran, the surgeon was easy. For fifteen minutes Bayard had quietly persisted while the doctor demurred. Finally, throwing his trump card, the surgeon leaned forward and said: “You’re aware your insurance won’t cover this, Mr. Wemp?”