John McManus - Born on a Train - 13 Stories

But it’s not much, over.

What’s that sound behind you, over.

Nothing, over.

Over and out, and Sam heard static and then silence. His father ran from the station with a brown bag to the car and climbed inside and turned the key and shouted like a cowboy in a rodeo and pointed them north on empty Highway 27. He leaned to kiss Sam’s mother, who was shaking, and Sam wondered if it was his baby brother inside her making her breathe so loud. When she was finally calm again they pulled into the parking lot of Sparky’s Spirits, and then she wasn’t calm at all. There weren’t any blinds this time to close. The lights inside the liquor store went off, and Sam’s mother began to whisper to herself. Sam couldn’t hear what she was whispering. Maybe she was talking to the baby; maybe she was counting in another language. She’d taught Sam how to count in four languages, plus backwards language. There was a language for every year of his life. Stop whispering, his father said to her when he was back in the car. He kissed her on the cheek. He rubbed dust from his hands onto his jeans and started the car and buckled his seat belt as he backed up and drove them away. That just feels so good, he said. Like jumping from a plane.

It doesn’t feel good to me, Sam’s mother said.

It would if you did.

It wouldn’t, and I have.

That’s because you’re German, said Sam’s father. He rolled his sleeve up high and patted his coat-of-arms tattoo, its yellow griffins winking at a crescent moon on the escutcheon. I feel the highway blood, he said and blew the horn and swerved into the left lane of the road.

Please don’t, Sam’s mother said.

This is how we do it back in Ireland.

You’ve never been to Ireland.

I’m practicing for when I go.

He gave Sam a handful of bills to put in the Gulf bag, and he moved into the right again, the tires crackling from a coat of rock salt spread onto the road for the coming storm, although the skies were mostly clear. Sam had been awake two hundred miles, ever since Alabama, and he let himself fall in and out of sleep. Clocks went faster when he dreamed, and it scared him for time to move so fast; he didn’t want to miss the rest of 1982. He woke up when his carnation pink crayon fell from behind his ear. What if the heat’s gone off? his mother was saying. That was today.

We’ll go somewhere else, Sam’s father said.

Eventually there won’t be any more country to go to, and we’ll be in the ocean.

I like the ocean.

I like it too, she said, and she craned her neck to look up at the stars. The sky was bleak and empty like the highway. Sam’s mother squinted her eyes. What’s wrong with the sky? she said and rolled her window down and shivered, because everything outside the car was frozen. The sky had begun to ripple with pink-and-purple light above the ground fog.

There’s a problem with the sky, she said.

What kind of problem?

Am I the only one who even sees it?

I see the sky, Sam’s father said.

The light.

Holy shit. They drifted into the other lane when he craned his neck to see the pink shimmers floating there like headless ghosts. They faced a hilly sweep of wilderness, and Sam shuddered at his father’s worry. The clouds were made of ruby-colored flesh like unpeeled plums. The night was dark in spite of so much liquid pinkness in the sky, and Sam couldn’t make out the horizon. He remembered the veil from the murder song, how it might have blustered in a midnight wind like these clouds that trembled above the knobs and granges and a distant concrete shaft of the Watts Bar nuclear reactor with its shining smoke that rose into the light and made it brighter.

Oh, my God, Sam’s mother whispered, that’s what it is.

What? Sam’s father said as Sam’s arms broke out in bumps from her fear.

Radiation.

He looked at her.

The plant, she said and pointed at the twin pillars looming to the east.

It looks okay to me.

That doesn’t matter with radiation, she said.

The road now curved in closer to the bulging gray reactors on the river’s shore. Sam caught a glimpse of water. We’d hear about it on the radio.

Not if it was a war, Sam’s mother said.

Of course we would if it was war.

It’s getting bigger.

The blight upon the sky had spread out like a photo-negative sunrise from the foothills of the Smokies to the Cumberland Plateau. The brightest stars shone through it down to earth, but the dim ones died inside it, leaving gaps in all the constellations. The Chevette didn’t have an FM radio. Sam’s father twisted the knob across the AM band from six to fourteen hundred twice and finally found a woman’s crackly voice and turned the volume high.

The children need a tangible experience, the woman said. When they bake their birthday cake for Jesus they learn that he was real, that he was one of us.

Goddamn Jesus, said Sam’s father, and turned the radio off.

Sam’s mother turned it back on, but the station had gone to static, and the woman sounded like she was speaking a harsh foreign language.

His birthday wasn’t really even Christmas. It was in the spring.

Sam had heard his father explain this once before. It had to do with Saturn, he remembered. The sky got low like it was wrapping itself around the car to choke them the way a snake would, and Sam held in his breath to practice suffocating. Ten seconds was all he could manage. His mother was breathing hard; the baby was struggling. I want to know what’s happening, she said. There’s not a car on the road. There’s not a single station on the radio.

You’re nervous because of what we did, Sam’s father said.

What we did, she repeated and shook her head. What you did.

We as in me and Sam.

You leave him out of this.

He’s my sidekick.

You’re not a hero. You don’t have a sidekick.

You’re jealous cause you don’t have one.

Does the air smell funny to you?

He’s the dispatcher, his father said. Sam clenched the walkie-talkie and hoped his baby brother would be his mother’s sidekick once he was born.

What if there’s been an accident at Oak Ridge? she said and pointed to the north, where the sky was as deep as a bruise. It would be a target for the Soviets, she said, because we make the bombs there.

Do they hate us? said Sam.

We’ve got so many children over here, his father said. They hate children.

But they have children too.

They send their little boys off to war.

Sam felt cold when his father grinned at him through the rearview.

But really Ronald Reagan hates children more than Russians do.

Ronald Reagan doesn’t hate children, Sam’s mother said.

It’s right there in his eyes, Sam’s father said, sounding more serious. How can you not see it in the bastard’s eyes?

Sam tried to picture Ronald Reagan’s eyes but saw only black holes.

He’s jealous because he’s so old, Sam’s father said. He’ll be dead soon, but all the children will live to be a hundred.

Sam thought about whether or not it might be true.

With all the new medicine, that is, his father added.

Will you live to be a hundred too, with all the medicine? Sam asked.

Maybe ninety-five, his father said. If this bomb’s not too bad.

Sam knew about radiation poisoning because of a movie they’d seen the week before. He’d lain between his parents on the queen-size motel bed and watched a mother try to raise her children in a nuclear holocaust. The youngest ones died first. The twelve-year-old helped his mother bury them in the backyard, but then he wasn’t strong enough to dig holes anymore. It was the saddest movie Sam’s mother had ever seen. Sam had almost cried too just watching her. She’d sobbed long after it was over, when Sam’s father was asleep and all the lights were out and even truckers on the highway had gone to bed so there was nothing to distract Sam from her sobbing, not even shadows on the ceiling.