Fallout

Huddled in the shadows with her husband and Ronnie, Mrs. Shaw quietly begins to sob.

Snip, snip, snip… Dark clumps of hair fall to the concrete floor. Janet turns to Dad. “Could I have some water, Mr. Porter?”

With a start, Dad snatches the flashlight from me and shines it up at a large red sausage-shaped metal tank hanging above us. Skinny brown pipes run into it from the ceiling. Rising quickly, he reaches up and turns some valves, then waits as if he’s expecting something. Everyone else looks up, too. Paula’s cheeks glisten with tears.

“Come on,” Dad mutters at the tank, and I feel myself tense.

Seconds pass. He stares intently. “Come on!”

I’m not sure what’s supposed to happen, but it’s obvious from the way Dad’s acting that it’s important.

“What is it?” Mr. Shaw asks.

“The water tank. I was supposed to fill it.”

“It can’t be too late, can it?” asks Mrs. Shaw while Dad shines the flashlight beam on a metal toolbox on the floor near the wall.

“I don’t hear water running.” He flips the box open, pulls out a hammer, and starts tapping the pipes. Clank! Clank! Clank!

Paula buries her face in her father’s shoulder. Dad stops and listens, then starts to hit the pipes harder. CLANK! CLANK! CLANK!

Sparky covers his ears. “Stop! It’s too loud.”

Dad listens again. In the glow of the flashlight, the sinews tighten in his neck and his temple pulses.

CLANK! CLANK! CLANK!

Despite the jarring racket, Mom lies perfectly still.

10

By the time we’d licked the last traces of cheesecake from our fingers, the afternoon was descending toward evening, the shadows growing longer and deeper. The distant train whistle meant fathers were coming home from work. The sweet pleasure of the cheesecake vanished, replaced by the sour taste of dread.

“The Yankees lost,” Freak O’ Nature said in his normal voice, not affecting any well-known television character, and looked at his watch. “I gotta go in. Are… you guys gonna say I had something to do with it?”

Ronnie and I looked at each other and shook our heads. School-yard logic might have dictated that since he’d been part of the crime at the beginning, he was a tiny bit culpable, but spreading the blame probably wouldn’t reduce whatever punishment we would face at home.

“Thanks.” With a smile of relief and gratitude, Freak O’ Nature stood up. Since we were in his backyard, Ronnie and I got up as well. As we started toward our homes, the train whistle blew again, sounding closer.

“I’m gonna get it bad,” I said, trying not to step on the unlucky cracks in the sidewalk — a last-ditch effort to keep things from becoming worse.

“We could all be dead tomorrow,” Ronnie said.

Either way, I felt doomed.

At the front door, Sparky was waiting with an expression of awe on his face. Even though he got into plenty of trouble himself, nothing thrilled and fascinated him more than when the ax was about to fall on me. Before he could say anything, I raised my hand and said, “I know.”

But he had to say it anyway. “You’re in big trouble.” He grinned with delight.

Mom came out of the kitchen wearing a blue apron and a frown on her face. Then she spoke the words that struck an even greater, or at least more immediate, fear than a Russian attack: “Go to your room until your father gets home.”

11

Dad slumps down on the bunk kitty-corner to where Janet sits, still comforting Mom. The tension is gone. Either Dad’s tired or he’s decided that more banging on pipes won’t help. Sparky goes over and settles on his leg. I sit next to him, pressing my shoulder against his arm. In Dad’s hands, the flashlight makes a bright bull’s-eye against the wall of gray concrete blocks.

“Mr. Porter?” Janet speaks softly.

Dad shines the light back on Mom. Using a bandage and some alcohol from the first-aid kit, Janet wipes her hands, then starts cutting again.

Snip, snip, snip…

“Everyone we know,” Mrs. Shaw sniffs woefully. “Everyone!”

Mr. McGovern mutters, “It’s unbelievable.”

There are places I can’t stop my thoughts from going to: What about the others who were up there? The ones who didn’t get in? Were Paula’s mom and brother among them? Freak O’ Nature and his family? The Lewandowskis and Sinclairs? Were they all blinded and burned in the heat flash? Poisoned by radiation? Blown apart by the shock wave?

Or are they still out there trying to avoid the fallout floating down out of the sky like poisonous gray snow? Dad said that if you weren’t in a shelter, the fallout would be unavoidable. Even if you managed not to get any on you or breathe it in, it would still get into the water and food. At the end of World War II, the United States dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, and hundreds of thousands of Japanese people died from the explosions and the radiation that followed. And those bombs were tiny compared to the hydrogen bombs that the United States and Russia have now.