Mark Costello - Big If

) knows what, anal cream or something, and this itchy person spends it on a coffee frappe at Monsey’s or at the day-old-bread store on Route 32. Finding a little piece of Walter in one’s wallet forced the town to see itself as a set of lives, or one collective chorus-life, consisting of piano teachers, sherry, pens and anal cream, rummy lobstermen drinking ’Gansett on bare mattresses with stains the shape of South America, stains with coastlines and dark interiors. It was bleak somehow, IN WE TRUST, not a welcome vision at the supermarket. Vi knew that her father was never fully satisfied with his altered motto. He did not believe that we trust, or could trust, or should trust, in nothing. Some months after Walter started crossing out the GOD, Vi was at Aulette’s with her mother. They were buying nitrates for the Rose of Sharon bushes and Aulette, making change at the register, gave Evelyn a bill which said, IN WE TRUST.

Aulette said, “Your husband’s got a new one, Mrs. A.”

Evelyn, embarrassed, went out of there with dignity.

People grumbled Walter’s name on every shopping trip, especially the bomber dads (who were good Americans and proud to pledge allegiance), and their children, being children, picked on Jens and Vi. Bullies taunted them at recess, spitting “Pledge allegiance!” as the punches flew. Jens took his beatings as a salesman takes rejection, philosophically (removing his glasses, pronouncing himself ready to be hit). Vi, who didn’t take a beating, never, anywhere, fought back like a girl, the dirtier the better, kicks and bites and scratches. She fought the bullies of all grades, her brother’s and her own, and though she never won these fights, she always got her money’s worth. She went for the balls and eyes and lied about it afterwards because, unlike her bookish father, Vi had no morality.

She loved her father simply and completely then. She watched him as astronomers watch stars. She saw him in the house across the marshes from the sea, slippered after dinner in the den, puffing Wild Cherry Borkum Riff, leafing through The Accident Reporter, Shop Safety Monthly , and the latest OSHA circular. He said the hour after supper was the best time in the world. He said the den was civilization.

Evelyn was in the kitchen, feeding slop to dogs. They always had a pack of dogs, never any cats. They had a dog named Dingo, a string of dogs named Dingo, and when a Dingo died, Vi and Evelyn took the station wagon to the pound behind the dump, picked out another mutt, and named him Dingo too. Jens, the budding scientist, was balled up on the couch, wiping smudges from his glasses, smudging smudges, giving up and going back to whatever he was reading, pop astronomy, titles from the Mathemagic series, a battered Best of Asimov overdue from the grown-up library, or the monthly magazine Ham Radio Today , to which Jens sent penciled letters correcting the errata of prior writers.

The phone would ring, the dogs would bark. Evelyn would answer at the kitchen sink. Walter was already moving, reaching past Jens for the extension in the den. It was duty on the phone. It was Ligourie the lawyer, Boyle the mortician, the Portsmouth fire marshal, the state police dispatcher, or the morgue. Disasters were average when Vi was growing up. Her father shaved for them. She watched him shave upstairs in the master bath, the care he took about the neck, chin pointing, kissy-lipped. He tied his tie and went out to the car and was usually home again for breakfast the next day.

Jens got all the brains in the family;this was understood and not especially disputed. He was locally considered something of a wonder, a math and physics prodigy. He was often in the Doings section of the Effing Reveille under headlines like Boy Wins Science Prize and Jr. Engineers Visit Troubled Seabrook N-Plant . He loved his radio, a ham-bands-only Hallicrafter with a slide-rule dial. He camped out in the basement, tapping Morse, jotting Morse, the walls covered with his globe-girdling collection of QSLs, postcards hammers sent to hammers verifying contact, Greetings from JH1VRQ-Tokyo, Cheers from 8P6EU-Barbados. When other boys were asking Santa for dirt bikes and toy rifles, Jens was asking Walter for a new beat-frequency mixer and a half-dipole antenna.

Vi was seven when they got the powerful antenna. Jens and Walter tried to find a place to rig it. Jens said the roof wasn’t high enough and they looked around the yard for an even higher place, baffled by the problem until Major Wade wandered through the trellis from the Coopers’ pool. Major Wade was another bomber pilot, Captain Cooper’s friend. When Cooper was in Thule, Major Wade’s Camaro was often in the Coopers’ driveway. Major Wade and Carol Cooper went swimming in the Coopers’ pool, did the frug on the lawn, and were always wearing terry cloth.

Major Wade inspected the antenna and the roof. Carol Cooper came over too, carrying a clinking pitcher.

She said to Vi, “Ever taste a whiskey sour, dear?” and dipped a finger in. She wore a zebra swimsuit. Her breasts were true bazooms.

“No,” said Vi.

“No thank you,” Walter prompted.

Vi drew it out, “No thank you, Mrs. Cooper.”

Carol Cooper said, “I wish my goddamn kids were that polite.”

Major Wade, having a pilot’s mind, saw the answer right away. He started digging through the trunk of his Camaro. He came back with a bow and a quiver full of arrows.

“Keeps me lean,” he said, slapping his gut. “Little hobby I picked up in Guam.”

“Jesus we’re hungover,” Carol Cooper said.

The bow had many knobs. Major Wade adjusted them as Walter got a fishing rod. Wade tied the line to an arrow and Walter stood back with the rod. Wade bit his lip, aiming at the highest limb of a tall copper beech in the corner of the Asplunds’ yard. Everyone was watching him, Carol Cooper holding Vi by the shoulders, Jens ten feet away, clustered faces on the driveway looking up. The major drew the bow. The fishing line snapped several times and several arrows arched into the woods. Several others landed in the Coopers’ yard, in the Coopers’ bushes, in the Coopers’ pool. The middle Cooper daughter came out and asked what was going on.

Carol Cooper said, “We’re shooting at a tree. Go back inside and watch cartoons before you get an arrow in the head.”

Major Wade drew the bow and let the arrow fly. It cleared the limb, the reel in Walter’s hand was singing, the fishing line went taut, and the arrow fell. They cut the line at the rod, tied it to a rope, tied the rope to a steel cable, and hoisted the antenna to the tree.

Jens discovered weather through his new antenna. He monitored CONELRAD, the government’s storm-warning band, created in the ’50s to spread the word of mushroom clouds. Weather was the ghost of war, Jens said, the marching fronts, the blue high-pressure domes, or maybe it was war’s original. A hurricane in Bangladesh killed half a million people, four Hiroshimas. Jens said that a hurricane was like all the nukes going off at once in terms of energy set free and he hoped to see one in the sky above the yard. When Vi was eight, Jens and Walter built a weather-watching shed, a chicken coop on stilts between the garden and the doghouse. Inside the shed was a barometer, a two-foot thermometer, and a double-bulbed device which measured dew point and humidity and was strangely named a psychrometer. On top of the shed was a mast and spinning cups. Vi could see the cups from the window where she slept. When the wind was strong, bowling down the marshes from the Gulf of Maine, the cups would spin into a halo blur.

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