David Ohle: The Old Reactor

Moldenke wasn’t moved. “Thank you anyway. I think I’ll maybe stay here in Point Blast, get a job net mending or working on the docks. It might be nice, close to the sea, the salty air, the sound of the waves.”

Udo laughed. “Forget that. The menders and the dock workers formed a union, years of dues and apprenticeship before you get in. Nobody stays on the Point long. It’s just a port. You come here to get things, you go back to the City. How long you here for?”

“Don’t know.”

“What offense?”

“Desecrating a grave. You?”

“I spit at the mayor’s wife twenty years ago. Same deal: indeterminate. Salmonella was born here. She’s freeborn.”

Salmonella bared her teeth. “That’s why I’ve got these blue spots.”

“Most freeborn have the spots,” Udo said. “Nobody knows why.”

Salmonella said, “Freedom’s fun. I can do anything. I don’t care about the spots or anything else. I just don’t care.”

“Give me Bunkerville or give me death,” Udo said. “That’s what I think. I hate this place. Pure freedom is not what it’s cracked up to be. See what it’s done to my daughter? She likes jellyheads. She whines when I bust one. You heard her.”

“He used to cut off the valves with a scissors, now he pinches them off with his fingers. It’s sickening.”

Moldenke gnawed on a crispy mud fish fin and considered his options. With little hope of getting on as a net mender or working on the docks, he thought it best to go on to Altobello and see how the free life would treat him.

“All right. I’ll go along. I can’t say I’ll do any shooting.”

Udo said, “It’s the most fun you can have around here. You’ll see. Now, hurry up and finish eating. The sun is up and it’s getting hot. Let’s get a move on.” He ate the last of his meal. “Don’t be dawdling, girl. Eat! You, too, Moldenke.” He called the waitress over and showed her his passcard. “We’re done. We’re leaving.”

As the three of them walked toward the motor with the sun ogling fiercely at mid-heaven, Salmonella recited a litany of complaints. “My shoes are too tight…My stomach hurts… That kerd was bad…The weather keeps changing.”

Udo grew aggravated and slapped her to the ground. “You little bag of shit! Shut up and walk! I’ve had enough of you!”

“He treats me like a six-year-old,” Salmonella sobbed. “He hurts me all the time. I really hate him.”

Moldenke was surprised by the viciousness of Udo’s slap but reminded himself that it was a parent’s prerogative as a free person in Altobello to treat a child any way he wished. That he remembered from the brochures.

Undaunted by the slapping, Salmonella continued her complaints. “I can’t walk any more. My legs are tired. I’ve got blisters.”

Udo said, “Let’s drag the little priss.” He held the water tube under one arm and took Salmonella’s hand. Moldenke grasped the other and they pulled her along. Once the motor was in sight she stood up straight and bolted for it.

“See what I mean,” Udo said, “all the freeborn kids are like that. They piss and moan all the time. You and me, we’ve got some Bunkerville in us. She don’t. That’s the difference.”

The temperature was above a hundred and ten already and Moldenke’s stomach was full of oily mud fish and churning. “Is there a commode aboard your motor? I’ve got a bowel that gets angry.”

“There is. Even got a few gallons of flush water.”

Udo went into the big motor first and opened the windows to air out the living quarters. Salmonella said she felt feverish and asked Moldenke to feel her forehead with his hand. He did.

“Am I hot? Do I have a fever?”

“Yes. You feel very warm.”

“Go take a nap!” Udo barked.

Salmonella went to her nook and flopped onto a cot.

Moldenke was tired. He lay on the divan for a while, then relieved himself on the commode. When he poured in the flush water he could hear it spattering into the dirt below the motor. There was a bucket of shredded issues of City Moon for wiping and a pitcher of clean water for rinsing the hands.

Udo spent what remained of the afternoon putting in the new tube and tinkering with the drive box and the boiler enough to get the motor purring nicely, all with just a screw driver and a box wrench. It was a “cranky” machine, he warned Moldenke, with worn shifters and bad bearings everywhere. The clutch was the devil to engage, the steering stiff, the brakes unreliable, and the boiler wearing out.

As he fumbled with the tube, trying to get the temperature adjusted exactly right, it came loose for a moment, long enough to scald him slightly on the chest. He fainted in pain but recovered quickly and had replaced the burst tube by evening. The drive to Altobello was underway.

A reporter for the City Moon stationed in Altobello was enjoying a glass of bitters in the Come On Inn when a jellyhead from the Old Reactor area came in, set her suitcase down, and claimed she had eaten nothing but grasshoppers since the Fourth of July. Her stomach was in an awful condition. She could feel their thorny legs scratching her alimentary canal. She had had a husband and seven famished children at home and had come to Altobello with their heads in a suitcase. She had done it to save them from starvation.

She asked the bartender for a glass of bitters. It was the only thing that would stupefy the hoppers and keep them dormant for a few hours. She said she had killed many of them with bitters before but that their eggs were always hatching. She believed there were at least ten thousand in her stomach and that some were moving toward one of her gel sacks.

She asked him to add a little peppermint and a few grains of sugar. That would make the concoction more potent. If peppermint wasn’t handy, then a drop of mud fish oil would do.

The bartender, who had seen these desperate, hopper-eating jellyheads before, said, “I have a better idea.” He poured two tablespoons of the essence of Jamaica ginger into a tumbler, added an equal quantity of piquant sauce, shook in a thimbleful of ground red pepper, emptied a jigger of heavy water on top, then sprinkled a few drops of tangle-foot over the mixture and handed it to the jellyhead. “Drink it quick,” he said.

Without delay, the jellyhead swallowed the decoction.

“How do you like it?” asked the bartender, laughing under his breath.

The jellyhead’s yellow eyes rolled in their wide sockets and tears ran out of them in cloudy streams. Her valves dripped gel, her mouth opened almost wide enough to swallow the barkeep and all his decanters then gradually grew smaller, her lips contracted, and the air rushed into her throat with a whistling sound. At last the barkeeper felt compassion and gave her a glass of water to cool her throat. When she was able to speak, she looked reproachfully at him and said, “See here, stranger, if that’s the kind of stuff you give me for grasshoppers, I’d like to know what in the hell you’d give me if I had a tapeworm.”

Having said that that she set the bloody suitcase beside the broken jukebox and left.

The reporter ventured to stand near the suitcase and jot down a few notes.

“What should I do?” the barkeep asked. “I thought they always left them at Saposcat’s.”

The reporter said, “With a thing like this it’s best to do nothing. I’ll write it up for the paper tomorrow. Take that suitcase and throw it off the public pier at Point Blast. Forget it happened. It’s Coward’s Day. They go crazy.”

Udo’s motor neared the Old Reactor and drove along a fenced in area that extended for miles. Inside, blue metal barrels were stacked in high pyramids. Most of them had burst at the seams and were leaking thick brown syrup. Udo said, “Jellyheads call that barrel honey. They put it on cuts and scrapes, like an ointment. They slick their hair with it. They might even eat it.”