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PART II OF A TRILOGY

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The Cates family knew enough to be frightened.

They did not know enough to understand how frightened they should have been, and in January of 1961 there was no reason to believe anyone intended to tell them. Walter knew that a B-52 had broken apart almost over the house where his family had been sleeping. He knew two hydrogen bombs had fallen from it, one beneath a parachute and another hard enough to bury itself in a North Carolina tobacco field. He knew military men had appeared in the darkness, helicopters had circled overhead, roads had been closed, and people who normally waved at one another from front porches were suddenly being told where they could and could not go.

That was enough for Walter.

It was not, however, the whole story.

The whole story was still being assembled by men with security clearances, clipboards and an understanding of nuclear weapons that Walter Cates had never wanted and would not have known what to do with if somebody had given it to him. The two Mark 39 Mod 2 thermonuclear bombs aboard the B-52 each weighed roughly 6,750 pounds and stretched about eleven feet from nose to tail. Each carried an explosive yield of approximately 3.8 megatons. The atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had produced roughly sixteen kilotons.

Walter would never have thought to divide one number by the other.

Had he done so, he might have stopped sleeping altogether.

Each weapon that fell near Faro possessed roughly 240 times the explosive yield of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. There had been two of them aboard the airplane, and for several minutes in the darkness of January 24, nobody on the ground knew exactly where either one was.

The weapon that struck the tobacco field without a functioning parachute buried itself with such violence that pieces of it went deep into the earth. The other bomb behaved differently. Its parachute deployed, slowing its descent and allowing it to settle among the trees with considerably less damage.

That sounded, at first, like the good news.

It wasn’t.

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Nuclear weapons were engineered with safeguards precisely because airplanes crashed, machines failed and human beings occasionally made mistakes. A Mark 39 was not supposed to become an armed thermonuclear weapon simply because gravity had taken possession of it. Under normal circumstances, the bomber crew had to perform a deliberate sequence of actions before the weapon could be released in an armed condition. Controls had to be operated. A safety wire had to be broken. Electrical power had to reach the weapon’s arming circuitry. The system was designed to distinguish between men intentionally dropping a bomb on an enemy and an airplane accidentally dropping one on North Carolina.

But an eight-engine bomber tearing itself apart in midair was capable of producing circumstances no checklist could make ordinary.

As investigators reconstructed the accident, they discovered that the parachuted weapon had proceeded through several steps associated with an intentional delivery. Safing mechanisms had been affected during the breakup. Electrical systems activated. Timing and pressure-sensing components operated. A weapon capable of releasing 3.8 megatons of explosive energy descended beneath a parachute toward farms, houses and sleeping families while one safeguard after another was being tested by events its designers desperately hoped would never occur.

One component ultimately assumed terrifying importance.

The MC-772 Arm/Safe switch had not moved to ARM.

It remained on SAFE.

That was the mechanical fact.

Everything beyond it belonged to the realm of what might have happened, and history is mercifully incapable of recording events that never occurred. No one could know precisely what the destruction would have looked like had the weapon detonated, because blast effects, thermal effects and fallout would have depended upon the nature and altitude of the explosion, weather conditions and dozens of other variables. No responsible person could say with certainty that a detonation near Goldsboro would have started World War III.

The truth required no embellishment.

A multi-megaton American hydrogen bomb had fallen onto American soil during one of the most nervous periods of the Cold War, and enough of its systems had functioned to make investigators take very seriously the question of why it had not exploded.

And while those questions were only beginning to be asked, Walter Cates was underneath his new Rambler checking the oil.

The family remained with Ruth and Earl for several more days, partly because access around Faro was still being controlled and partly because nobody wanted to admit that the family visit had effectively ended at midnight on January 24.

The coconut cake remained on Ruth’s kitchen counter beneath a glass cover. People ate it because that was what people did with coconut cake, although nobody talked about its remarkable survival across seventeen hundred miles anymore. The achievement had lost some of its luster after two hydrogen bombs completed substantially shorter journeys without benefit of a station wagon.

Aircraft still passed overhead.

Before the crash, Tommy had run outside whenever he heard one. Now he remained where he was and listened until the sound disappeared. He never announced that he was doing this, and Walter never mentioned noticing.

Nancy was less successful at concealment. A military jet passed low enough one afternoon to rattle the dishes in Ruth’s cupboard, and Nancy dropped her fork onto her plate.

Ruth started to laugh.

Then she saw the girl’s face.

“Just an airplane, honey.”

Nancy nodded.

Everybody at the table knew that had once been a perfectly adequate explanation.

Walter spent increasing amounts of time with the Rambler. He checked the tire pressure. He checked the coolant. He examined the fan belt. He pulled the dipstick, wiped it, inserted it again and checked oil that had somehow remained exactly where it had been the previous afternoon.

Earl finally came outside and found him with the hood raised.

“Something wrong?”

“No.”

Earl looked at the open hood.

Walter looked at the open hood.

“Just checking.”

Earl nodded.

He understood.

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The Rambler had not changed. The 195.6-cubic-inch inline-six still sat in its blue engine compartment breathing through one carburetor. The column-shifted three-speed still worked. The overdrive still reduced engine speed on the highway. The Weather Eye still produced heat. The AM radio remained so reluctant to receive AM radio that Walter had begun to consider its silence a factory feature.

What had changed was Walter’s relationship with the machine.

When he left Fort Stockton, the Rambler had been an achievement. He had studied brochures, compared prices and specifications, considered Ford and Chevrolet and Plymouth, then selected the sensible American Motors wagon with enough room for his family and enough economy to satisfy the part of Walter that recorded gasoline purchases in a notebook.

After Faro, none of that seemed particularly important.

The Rambler had started when he turned the key.

It had carried Martha and the children away when somebody told them to leave.

It was ready to carry them home.

Walter closed the hood.

That was enough automobile for anybody.

They left North Carolina on January 28.

Ruth packed sandwiches for the road. Martha hugged her sister beside the Rambler and cried, although she insisted the tears were because they did not know when they would see each other again.

Earl loaded the last suitcase through the rear of the wagon and closed the tailgate.

“Come back,” he told Walter.

Walter looked toward the house and then, involuntarily, toward the sky.

“I expect we will.”

He meant it.

Mostly.

The Rambler pulled away with Ruth and Earl standing in the yard. Martha turned in her seat until the house disappeared behind the trees. Tommy watched through the rear window for another few seconds before facing forward.

Then they were westbound.

The same four people occupied the same Sonata Blue and Frost White station wagon on many of the same highways they had traveled only days earlier, but the return trip seemed to belong to another family. On the way east, Walter had stopped whenever somebody saw something worth investigating. Coming home, he stopped when the Rambler needed gasoline. Nancy no longer evaluated motel rooms according to their swimming pools, since January had already rendered that system somewhat theoretical. Tommy read more and watched the sky less. Martha did not tease Walter about his mileage notebook because she noticed he had stopped using it.

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Even Walter’s beloved overdrive had lost its ceremonial importance. He shifted into third, reached highway speed and engaged it without looking toward Martha for acknowledgment.

She noticed that too.

Some marriages survived because two people knew when to talk.

Others survived because they knew when not to.

They had crossed well into Georgia when the Rambler made a noise.

It was not a dramatic noise. Nothing exploded, broke loose or came through the floor. It was simply a metallic scrape from somewhere beneath the car when Walter crossed a rough section of pavement.

Before North Carolina, he would have found it irritating.

After North Carolina, Walter had developed a reduced tolerance for machinery making noises without first explaining itself.

He eased off the accelerator.

Martha looked over.

“What?”

“Something underneath.”

“Bad?”

“I don’t know yet.”

The children became quiet at the phrase.

Walter heard himself say it.

He wished he hadn’t.

A few miles earlier the Rambler had struck something lying in the road, perhaps a piece of wood or metal that Walter had seen too late to avoid completely. He had felt it pass beneath the car but had heard nothing afterward and kept going. Now the scraping returned when the suspension moved.

He guided the wagon onto the shoulder and set the brake.

“I’ll look.”

Martha watched through the windshield while Walter crouched beside the car, then lowered himself onto one knee and attempted to see underneath. The Rambler’s ground clearance allowed him an excellent view of several dirty mechanical objects, none of which volunteered responsibility.

He was still looking when a white automobile approached from behind.

It slowed.

Tommy saw it through the rear window.

“Police.”

The word produced a reaction none of them would have noticed two weeks earlier.

Tommy sat straighter. Nancy turned around. Martha looked into the side mirror.

The white car pulled onto the shoulder behind the Rambler.

A red rotating bubble-gum light sat on its dashboard.

The sunlight flashed across it.

Tommy stopped moving.

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Walter stood.

The automobile was a 1961 Ford wearing Georgia State Patrol markings, Corinthian White from its quad headlights to its modest tail fins. GEORGIA STATE PATROL lettering ran along the body. Chrome bumpers caught the winter sunlight, and dual side mirrors flanked the car. A long whip antenna curved extravagantly above it, high enough to suggest the State of Georgia expected its troopers to maintain radio contact with counties not yet established.

The trooper climbed out.

He wore a campaign hat and approached the Rambler without hurry.

“Afternoon.”

“Afternoon,” Walter said.

“Trouble?”

“Picked up a scrape underneath. Hit something a few miles back.”

The trooper glanced at the Texas plates.

“Fort Stockton?”  He’d seen the chrome dealer badge on the back of the tailgate.

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re a fair piece from home.”

Walter looked at the Rambler, then at Martha and the children inside it.

“Working on fixing that.”

The trooper smiled.

He crouched beside the car, and the two men spent several minutes investigating the underside with the peculiar intimacy produced when two strangers find themselves lying partly on a highway shoulder beneath somebody’s station wagon.

The problem proved almost disappointingly ordinary. Something in the exhaust system had been bent just enough that it touched another piece of metal whenever the Rambler bounced.

“Doesn’t look like you’re losing anything,” the trooper said. “There’s a station a few miles up. Fellow there has a lift.”

Walter felt an absurd amount of relief.

“So I can drive it?”

“I’d take it easy. I’ll follow you.”

Walter thanked him and walked back toward the Rambler.

Tommy was staring at the patrol car.

Now that the Ford had become assistance rather than threat, curiosity was beginning to overpower fear.

The trooper noticed.

“You like cars?”

Tommy nodded.

Walter almost laughed.

Five days earlier the boy had liked airplanes.

“Come look.”

Tommy hesitated, glanced at his father, then walked toward the Ford.

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Up close, the patrol car was an entire mechanical world of its own. Its Corinthian White body rode on matching fifteen-inch steel wheels with small dog-dish hubcaps and substantial blackwall tires. Inside, the bench seats were upholstered in two-tone green vinyl. A color-coordinated three-spoke steering wheel with a chrome horn ring stood before a horizontal-sweep speedometer marked to 120 mph, with fuel and coolant gauges arranged nearby.

But none of that held Tommy for long.

Police equipment did.

A Motorola Motrac two-way radio control head had been installed inside the Ford, along with its speaker and microphone. There was radar equipment. The rotating red light sat on the dashboard, while rear-facing emergency flashers allowed the Ford to warn traffic approaching from behind.

“What’s that?” Tommy asked.

The trooper followed his finger.

“Radio.”

“Two-way?”

“Has to be. Otherwise headquarters would do all the talking.”

Tommy smiled.

The trooper lifted the microphone.

“This lets them find me wherever I am.”

“How far?”

“Far enough that I’ve never successfully hidden.”

Walter laughed.

It was the first time he had heard Tommy ask enthusiastic questions about radios, uniforms or government equipment since Faro.

The trooper opened the trunk to retrieve a flare before they prepared to leave. Walter could see the two-way radio transmitter and receiver mounted inside, along with a large Georgia State Patrol storage locker. The equipment included emergency flares, a riot helmet, baton and the assorted tools carried by a man whose working day depended largely upon other people’s working days going wrong.

Under the Ford’s hood lived its siren along with considerably more engine than Walter’s Rambler possessed. Walter caught enough of a glimpse to recognize that the State of Georgia had not ordered its pursuit cars on the theory that fuel economy would discourage criminals.

Walter looked from the white Ford to his blue Rambler.

Only a few years separated either automobile from the B-52 lying in pieces behind them in North Carolina. All three represented the astonishing faith Americans had placed in machinery. Yet the machine beside the road carried a radio to summon help, lights to warn strangers and a trunk filled with equipment for emergencies nobody could schedule.

Walter liked that kind of machinery considerably better than he had a week earlier.

The trooper followed them to the service station.

The mechanic put the Rambler on a lift, found the bent exhaust hardware, persuaded it back where it belonged and charged Walter an amount small enough to restore some of his faith in interstate commerce.

The trooper placed the flare where approaching traffic could see it.

The trooper waited until the mechanic lowered the car.

“You ought to be all right now.”

“Can’t thank you enough.”

“That’s what they give me the Ford for.”

Tommy had drifted back toward the patrol car.

“How fast will it go?”

The trooper looked at Walter.

Walter shrugged. The question had been inevitable since Tommy saw the 120-mph speedometer.

“Fast enough,” the trooper said.

Tommy considered that a satisfactory answer.

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The trooper opened the driver’s door. The Motorola microphone hung within reach. The red dashboard light waited silently beneath the windshield. The whip antenna rose above the roof and curved backward against the sky.

“Y’all be careful going back to Texas.”

Walter shook his hand.

“We will.”

The Ford pulled onto the highway, accelerated and disappeared.

Tommy watched until it was gone.

Then he climbed into the Rambler.

“That was a nice car.”

Walter started the engine.

“It was.”

“Think it really does a hundred and twenty?”

Walter looked at him in the mirror.

“Probably.”

Tommy settled into the rear seat.

Walter pulled back onto the highway.

For several miles the boy talked about the Ford.

Martha listened.

So did Walter.

Neither interrupted him.

The Rambler continued west, and slowly the journey began to resemble travel again rather than escape.

The Weather Eye kept January outside. The wide whitewalls hummed against the pavement. The blue six maintained its steady rhythm while Walter worked the column shift through towns and allowed the overdrive to do its work on open highway. Nancy began complaining about Tommy crossing the upholstery seam again, which Martha regarded as a promising sign of recovery.

The AM radio even began receiving stations with irritating regularity.

Walter had spent the trip east complaining that it could not find a broadcast. Now he twisted the knob whenever static interrupted the news.

The B-52 crash was mentioned. The presence of nuclear weapons was acknowledged. Recovery work continued.

But the radio could not tell Walter what he wanted to know.

How close?

How close had they actually been?

That answer did not yet belong to Walter. Much of it did not yet belong to the public. Investigators were still examining components, reconstructing electrical sequences and determining exactly what had happened between the moment the bomber began breaking apart and the moment a hydrogen bomb settled into North Carolina soil beneath its parachute.

Eventually Walter turned the radio off.

The little Rambler filled with engine noise.

For once he preferred it.

Near Shreveport, Tommy closed his comic book.

“Dad?”

Walter glanced into the mirror.

“Yeah?”

“Could one of those bombs really have gone off?”

Martha turned toward Walter.

There was an answer fathers were supposed to give children in 1961.

Of course not.

The Air Force knew what it was doing. The bombs had safeguards. America was protected by intelligent men, reliable machinery and procedures designed to keep terrible things from happening accidentally.

Two weeks earlier Walter probably would have given that answer.

Two weeks earlier he had never stood outside in his undershirt and watched a B-52 burn beyond the trees.

He kept his eyes on the highway.

“I don’t know.”

Tommy waited.

Walter glanced at him in the mirror.

“But it didn’t.”

Tommy considered that.

Then he nodded.

Martha reached across the blue seat and placed her hand on Walter’s arm.

There was nothing else to say.

Texas spread around them again.

The farther west they traveled, the more the landscape opened. Trees surrendered to distance. Towns moved farther apart. The horizon retreated until the sky seemed large enough to contain anything.

Walter had always loved that sky.

Now he occasionally caught himself inspecting it.

Not constantly.

Just sometimes.

The Rambler no longer looked new. Bugs covered the grille. Road grime dulled the Frost White roof. The wide whitewalls had turned gray around the edges. Cracker crumbs inhabited places American Motors had probably never intended food to reach. Nancy lost a crayon somewhere in Mississippi and rediscovered it near Abilene flattened into a shape no longer recognized by Crayola.

Walter’s mileage notebook remained in the glove compartment.

He had not written in it since North Carolina.

Eventually he would again. Eventually miles per gallon would become important enough to calculate, Nancy would hear an airplane without dropping anything, and Tommy would look upward without wondering whether it was carrying something capable of destroying the countryside beneath it.

Ordinary life was stubborn that way.

It returned without asking permission.

Late in the afternoon, Fort Stockton appeared ahead.

Nancy had been sleeping against the door. Martha touched her knee.

“Wake up.”

Nancy opened her eyes.

“Are we home?”

“Almost.”

Tommy closed his comic book and leaned forward between the seats. For the first time since North Carolina, he seemed interested in something beyond the windshield.

“There it is.”

Walter smiled.

Fort Stockton had never looked particularly grand.

It still didn’t.

That was part of its appeal.

Walter disengaged the overdrive as traffic slowed and moved the column lever down through the gears. The little six changed pitch. Houses became familiar. Streets acquired names they did not need to read.

They had left town in a brand-new station wagon, four people heading east to visit relatives and confident that the principal uncertainties ahead involved motel beds, gasoline mileage and the structural integrity of a coconut cake.

They returned in the same automobile with a somewhat different understanding of uncertainty.

Behind them in North Carolina, military crews were still working around the crash site. Parts of one thermonuclear weapon remained buried deep in the earth. Investigators were only beginning to understand what had occurred inside the other.

Walter knew none of that.

He did not know about the electrical sequence.

He did not know about the Arm/Safe switch.

He did not know that years later people would study what happened outside Goldsboro and marvel at the thin mechanical boundary between an aviation accident and something almost unimaginably worse.

Walter knew only what a man could know from standing beneath a burning sky.

An airplane had fallen.

Two hydrogen bombs had fallen with it.

His family had been there.

And now they were home.

He turned onto their street and pulled into the driveway.

The Rambler stopped exactly where the trip had begun.

Walter switched off the ignition.

The 195.6-cubic-inch six fell silent.

For several seconds nobody moved. Thousands of miles had passed beneath those four tires since the morning Walter complained that Martha had packed too much.

Nancy opened her door.

Tommy gathered his comic books.

Martha carried her purse toward the house.

Walter went around to the rear of the Rambler, rolled down the rear window and opened the tailgate.

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He began unloading the evidence of the journey: suitcases, blankets, the Thermos, his toolbox, Martha’s sewing bag, Nancy’s pillow and a grocery sack containing something nobody had wanted badly enough to investigate since Alabama.

Walter set two suitcases on the driveway.

Then he stopped.

“Martha?”

She turned from the front walk.

“What?”

“The cake plate.”

Martha stared at him.

Walter looked back into the cargo area, moving a blanket although both of them knew perfectly well that a ceramic cake plate had not spent seventeen hundred miles hiding beneath it.

“We left it at Ruth’s.”

For a moment Martha said nothing.

Two weeks earlier, losing a good cake plate might have generated a discussion lasting until supper. Walter might have suggested Ruth mail it. Martha might have explained what postage would cost. Walter might have pointed out that it was a perfectly good plate.

Instead, Martha looked at the man standing behind the dirty blue station wagon.

“We’ll get it next time.”

Walter looked east.

It was only a glance.

Martha caught it anyway.

Their eyes met across the driveway.

Walter reached into the Rambler for another suitcase.

“Your sister can keep the plate.”

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