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PART III OF A TRILOGY

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Within a week of returning to Fort Stockton, Walter Cates began to suspect that surviving a hydrogen bomb might have been the easy part.

The telephone rang shortly after supper on a Tuesday evening. Walter was sitting at the kitchen table with his mileage notebook open, attempting to reconstruct the figures he had neglected somewhere between North Carolina and Texas. Before the trip, he had recorded every gallon of gasoline with the devotion of a Treasury auditor. After Faro, several pages were blank. There were receipts in his wallet from places he barely remembered, including one in Georgia where a state trooper had taught Tommy that policemen could use radios for purposes other than ordering families out of their homes.

Martha answered the telephone.

Walter knew something was wrong when she said, “Yes, ma’am,” three times in less than a minute.

The caller was Tommy’s teacher.

She wanted to speak with both of them.

Not eventually.

Tomorrow.

Tommy, who was supposed to be doing arithmetic at the other end of the table, lowered his pencil.

“What did you do?” Walter asked.

“Nothing.”

Walter had been a father for twelve years and understood that nothing was an extraordinarily versatile activity.

The next afternoon, Walter and Martha sat in two small chairs beside Tommy’s teacher’s desk while she explained that their son had become disruptive. She emphasized that Tommy was not misbehaving in the conventional sense. He wasn’t fighting. He wasn’t talking back. He wasn’t putting thumbtacks on chairs, carving obscenities into desks, or engaging in any of the wholesome misconduct educators had been successfully managing since the invention of compulsory attendance.

He was frightening the other children.

“Yesterday,” she said carefully, “Tommy told the class that hydrogen bombs can fall out of airplanes.”

Walter looked at Martha.

Martha looked at Walter.

“They can,” Walter said.

The teacher smiled the way adults smile when another adult has misunderstood the purpose of the meeting.

“Mr. Cates, I understand that Tommy has a very active imagination.”

“He didn’t imagine it.”

That slowed things down.

Walter and Martha explained North Carolina. They explained Ruth and Earl’s house near Faro. They explained the B-52 coming apart beyond the trees shortly after midnight. They explained the helicopter, the evacuation, the wreckage scattered across farmland and woods, and what they had eventually been told about the aircraft’s cargo.

The teacher listened.

Her expression changed from concern to alarm and then, gradually, to a kind of professional sympathy that Walter did not particularly enjoy.

She had seen The Twilight Zone. Everybody had. Rod Serling had spent more than a year proving that perfectly ordinary American communities could contain aliens, monsters, time travelers and neighbors who would murder one another if the electricity went off long enough. Tommy apparently had absorbed more of it than was healthy.

“Does he watch much television?”

“Not anymore,” Martha said.

The teacher folded her hands.

She explained that Tommy had told several children that a bomb hundreds of times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima had landed near his aunt’s house. One girl had gone home crying. Another boy had asked his father whether airplanes flying over Fort Stockton carried hydrogen bombs. The father had telephoned the school.

“Tommy also told them one bomb landed in a tree.”

“It did,” Martha said.

“And another buried itself in a field.”

“Yes.”

“And the Air Force made you evacuate.”

“Yes.”

The teacher stared at them.

For the first time, Walter understood the problem.

The truth sounded ridiculous.

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He and Martha had been there, had smelled the fuel and smoke, had watched military men move through the countryside, had heard the rumors become facts one impossible piece at a time. But remove the blackened trees and the helicopters and the cold North Carolina morning, and the story sounded exactly like something a twelve-year-old boy would invent after too much television and three comic books.

The teacher suggested counseling. She used the phrase alternative educational arrangements. She reluctantly mentioned that continued disruption might eventually raise the possibility of suspension or even expulsion.

Walter leaned forward.

“My boy is telling the truth.”

“I understand that you believe that.”

That sentence followed him home.

It was one thing not to be believed.

It was another thing to be told politely that somebody understood you believed yourself.

For the first time since North Carolina, Walter wished somebody would simply call him a liar.

Martha made her own mistake the following evening.

The Wednesday Evening Prayer & Sewing Circle at Second Baptist had been meeting for eleven years. Its official purpose was prayer, fellowship and charitable needlework. Its unofficial purpose was maintaining a comprehensive intelligence service covering most of Pecos County.

Martha trusted them.

That was how it started.

The women were working on a quilt intended for a missionary family when the prayer requests began. There was a bad knee, a nephew having marital trouble, somebody’s gallbladder, somebody else’s son who had purchased a motorcycle despite having been raised correctly, and a cousin in Odessa who had stopped attending church for reasons nobody entirely understood but several women were prepared to speculate about.

When Martha’s turn came, she kept her hands folded over the fabric in her lap.

“I’d like us to pray for the country.”

Needles paused.

That was a large prayer request.

Martha explained that something had happened while they were visiting Ruth in North Carolina. She said she had promised not to spread rumors, and she wasn’t sure how much had been publicly acknowledged, but she needed to tell somebody.

Then she told them.

She told them about the B-52.

She told them about waking to the sky on fire.

She told them about the helicopter ordering them out.

She told them about Walter throwing everyone into the Rambler while she was still wearing nightclothes beneath her coat.

Finally, she told them what had been aboard the airplane.

There were two hydrogen bombs.

One came down by parachute.

The other went into the ground.

The room became very quiet.

Mrs. Hollis stopped sewing entirely.

Mrs. DeWitt looked at Mrs. Parker.

Mrs. Parker looked at Mrs. Hollis.

Nobody challenged Martha.

Nobody laughed.

Nobody accused her of lying.

They did something much kinder.

They decided she was drinking.

Not immediately, of course. Baptists required a brief committee process before diagnosing alcoholism.

After Martha went home, concern blossomed.

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There had been signs, once they thought about it. Martha had seemed tired since returning from North Carolina. She had missed one Sunday evening service. She had become strangely quiet when somebody mentioned airplanes. Now she was telling stories about hydrogen bombs hanging from trees.

Poor Walter.

Poor children.

Poor Martha.

By Thursday afternoon, three women had discreetly asked five other women whether anybody knew somebody who knew somebody experienced in helping women with “that sort of problem.” By Friday, approximately half of Fort Stockton knew that Martha Cates had developed a drinking problem, although nobody knew what she drank.

This deficiency was corrected by Saturday.

Gin.

Nobody could identify the original source of the gin.

Gin simply won.

The missionary quilt became collateral damage. The women agreed that under the circumstances the Prayer & Sewing Circle should suspend meetings until Martha could receive the help she obviously needed. Since the quilt was nowhere near finished, they converted the completed portion into a table runner for the altar.

Thus a nonexistent drinking problem reduced a queen-sized quilt to six feet of ecclesiastical upholstery.

Martha learned about her alcoholism when a woman at the grocery store squeezed her hand and said, “We’re all praying for you.”

“Thank you,” Martha said.

“We mean it.”

Martha went home and told Walter.

He listened quietly.

“Gin?”

“Gin.”

“You don’t even like gin.”

“I know.”

“What do you drink?”

“Coffee.”

Walter considered this.

“Maybe that’s how it starts.”

Martha threw a dish towel at him.

It was the first time either of them had laughed hard since North Carolina.

It didn’t last.

The black Dodge appeared Monday morning.

Walter saw it through the front window at work, nosing slowly into the parking lot. At first he noticed it because practically everybody noticed a 1961 Dodge Dart.

The automobile was black.

Not dark blue. Not charcoal. Black.

It had the unsettling face Dodge had given the Dart for 1961, a broad expanse of chrome and grillework framed by quad headlights and bodywork that appeared to have been designed during an argument. Simulated louvers decorated the hood. Bright moldings swept along the sides. The roof seemed almost delicate compared with the sheet metal beneath it, while the rear quarters rose into fins that made the car look as though it remained undecided about whether it was arriving or departing.

Black fourteen-inch steel wheels wore small Dodge hubcaps and bias-ply tires.

On the rear quarter panel was a chrome Dart badge.

Under the hood was a 361-cubic-inch D-500 V8 rated at 305 horsepower, although Walter did not yet know that.

He would shortly hear enough of it to make an educated guess.

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Two men got out.

Neither wore a uniform. Both wore dark suits.

Walter watched them enter.

One asked for him by name.

“Mr. Cates?”

“Yes.”

The taller man opened a leather case, displayed something containing a photograph and a badge, then closed it so quickly Walter could not have identified the agency if there had been a multiple-choice examination afterward.

“We’re with a government agency.”

Walter waited.

“Which one?”

The shorter man said, “Government.”

Walter looked at his employer.

His employer looked suddenly fascinated by paperwork.

They asked Walter about North Carolina.

They knew where Ruth lived.

They knew the date.

They knew about the evacuation.

They knew Walter had driven his family away from the area in a 1961 Rambler Classic Super Cross Country.

Walter felt the room become colder.

“What do you want?”

“Your automobile.”

“No.”

The taller man stepped closer.

Walter remembered the teacher saying I understand that you believe that.

He remembered women praying for Martha’s gin problem.

He decided he was tired of being polite.

“You boys want my car, you tell me who you are.”

The taller man took Walter by the arm.

Walter pulled away.

The shorter one grabbed him from behind.

What followed was not much of a fight. Walter got one good shove in, somebody knocked over a chair, and his shoulder struck a filing cabinet hard enough to leave him wondering whether the government had jurisdiction over bruises.

They took him outside.

The Rambler sat where he had parked it that morning, Sonata Blue beneath the West Texas sun, Frost White roof dusty from the trip. It was no longer quite new, but Walter had washed the worst of the road grime from it after they returned. The wide whitewalls were clean again. The roof rack gleamed.

One man held Walter while the other demanded the keys.

“What are you looking for?”

“Material removed from the recovery area.”

“I didn’t remove anything.”

“Microfilm.”

Walter stared at him.

“Microfilm?”

The man held out his hand.

Walter began laughing.

He couldn’t help it.

He had driven seventeen hundred miles to North Carolina with a coconut cake, two children, his wife and enough luggage to invade Virginia. He had driven home with everything except the cake plate. Somewhere in that inventory, according to the United States government, or somebody claiming to represent it, he had apparently acquired microfilm.

The man stopped asking.

They took the keys.

What happened next hurt Walter more than being shoved into the filing cabinet.

They attacked the Rambler.

The front seat came out first. Then the rear.

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They cut upholstery seams and tore padding apart. Door panels were pulled loose. The headliner was ripped down. Wiring came from beneath the dashboard in handfuls. The cargo area was emptied and dismantled. Interior trim landed on the pavement.

One man opened the spare-tire compartment.

Nothing.

They searched behind the Weather Eye controls.

Nothing.

They pulled the AM radio.

Nothing.

The same radio that had barely managed to receive anything useful during the trip now lay on the pavement accused of espionage.

Walter shouted until somebody shoved him against the black Dodge.

For an instant he found himself staring through its open driver’s door.

The interior was monochromatic cloth and vinyl. A two-spoke steering wheel framed one of the strangest speedometers Walter had ever seen, a translucent horizontal 120-mph scale designed so daylight could illuminate it from behind. Beneath it sat barrel-type gauges for temperature, fuel and amperage. A Dixco tachometer had been clamped to the steering column, an auxiliary oil-pressure gauge hung beneath the dash, and a Hurst floor shifter rose where the original column lever had once done its work.

Whoever owned this car liked machinery.

That somehow made Walter hate him more.

The search moved outside.

They slashed the tires.

All four.

Walter stopped shouting.

There was nothing left to say.

At last the men stood amid pieces of the automobile and looked at one another.

No microfilm.

No documents.

No secret photographs.

No mysterious object from North Carolina.

Nothing.

The taller man adjusted his jacket.

“You haven’t discussed what you saw with anyone?”

Walter looked at the Rambler.

“My son discussed it with his class.”

The man frowned.

“My wife discussed it with the Baptist women.”

The frown deepened.

“Apparently she’s an alcoholic now.”

The shorter man looked at the taller one.

Neither asked what that meant.

They walked back to the Dodge.

The D-500 fired with a deep mechanical bark. The 361 settled into the uneven authority of a large V8 breathing through dual exhausts. Walter watched the black car back out, its bizarre tail fins and chrome flashing in the sun before it accelerated toward the street.

The Dodge disappeared.

Nobody had gotten a license number.

Walter stood beside what remained of the Rambler.

A B-52 had fallen out of the sky near it.

Two hydrogen bombs had landed within miles of it.

A helicopter had chased it out of North Carolina in the middle of the night.

Georgia had bent its exhaust.

Seventeen hundred miles of winter highway had thrown everything available at it.

The federal government, or two men with a convincing badge collection, had finally managed what none of those things had.

They had nearly destroyed it while it was parked.

Fort Stockton did not turn against the Cates family all at once.

That would have required a meeting.

Instead, it happened politely.

Tommy stopped being invited to friends’ houses. Parents had heard he was telling disturbing stories. One mother explained that her son had nightmares after Tommy described the bomb in the trees.

Nancy came home asking why somebody had told her that her mother was sick.

Martha began receiving casseroles.

The casseroles were particularly alarming.

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People who had never brought Martha food in their lives appeared at the door holding Pyrex dishes and wearing expressions usually reserved for funerals. Nobody mentioned gin. Everybody asked whether there was “anything we can do.”

At church, conversations softened when Martha approached.

At Walter’s work, people wanted to know about the men.

Walter didn’t know.

That answer satisfied nobody.

Were they FBI?

He didn’t know.

Military intelligence?

He didn’t know.

CIA?

Walter pointed out that CIA agents probably didn’t announce themselves by dismantling station wagons in plumbing-supply parking lots.

This merely made the story better.

Within days, Fort Stockton possessed several versions of events, all more interesting than the truth. Walter had stolen classified documents. Martha had become an alcoholic because she knew too much. Tommy had seen something the government denied existed. The Cates family was under surveillance.

Someone reported seeing a black sedan near their house.

It was a Buick.

That didn’t help.

Walter had the Rambler repaired.

New tires came first. The seats were stitched where possible and reupholstered where they weren’t. A new headliner replaced the shredded original. The door panels never fit quite as well afterward. An electrician repaired the wiring beneath the dash. The AM radio returned to service and immediately resumed receiving almost nothing, proving either that it had survived the ordeal or that the government had improved it.

Walter drove it home.

He parked in the driveway and sat behind the wheel for several minutes.

Martha came outside.

“You all right?”

Walter looked at their house.

Then he looked at the Rambler.

“No.”

That was the beginning of the decision.

They didn’t flee Fort Stockton. They didn’t sneak away.

They simply stopped trying to persuade people.

Tommy stopped talking about North Carolina.

Martha stopped explaining that she didn’t drink gin.

Walter stopped wondering who the men in the Dodge had been.

A month later, his brother called from Irving.

There was work around Dallas.

There were houses.

There were schools where nobody knew Tommy.

Nobody in Irving knew anything about Martha.

Walter listened.

Then he said, “How soon?”

Packing the Rambler for Irving was easier than packing it for North Carolina.

They owned the same amount of luggage.

They simply had less enthusiasm.

There was no coconut cake.

Nobody argued over whether the toolbox belonged beneath the suitcases. Walter loaded it where it fit. Tommy and Nancy established their rear-seat boundary without international negotiations. Martha took one final walk through the house.

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A neighbor watched from across the street.

Another waved.

Several people had told them they hated to see them go.

Walter believed them.

That was the peculiar part.

Fort Stockton hadn’t expelled the Cates family. Nobody had ordered them out. Nobody had burned anything in their yard or painted words on the house.

The town had merely made remaining there harder than leaving.

Walter started the Rambler.

The repaired 195.6 six settled into its familiar idle.

He put the column shifter into first.

They drove away.

Nobody mentioned overdrive.

Irving was different.

That was enough.

Dallas was spreading outward in every direction, laying streets across fields and houses across streets and promising that tomorrow would require considerably more concrete than today. Irving sat inside that growth with the optimistic disorder of a place becoming something faster than anybody had time to decide what.

Walter’s brother lived in a neighborhood where young trees had been planted along curbs and most houses still looked surprised to be there.

A house was available nearby.

The Cateses took it.

The Rambler went into the driveway.

For the first time since January, nobody stared at it.

Nobody asked about North Carolina.

Nobody asked Walter about government agents.

Nobody asked Martha whether she needed help.

Nobody warned their children about Tommy.

They were simply the new family.

Across the street lived a recently divorced woman about Walter and Martha’s age. She was attractive, friendly and possessed the useful Dallas-area talent of knowing somebody who knew somebody.

Her name was Ruth Payne.

Ruth welcomed them before the boxes were unpacked.

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She and Martha became friends easily. Ruth was funny, practical and interested in the Cates family without being interested in what had happened to them. When Martha eventually mentioned that they’d had a difficult few months, Ruth did something nobody in Fort Stockton had managed.

She didn’t ask for details.

Walter liked her immediately.

A week later, Ruth learned he was looking for work.

“I might know somebody,” she said.

Walter smiled.

After North Carolina, Fort Stockton, the school, the Baptists, the black Dodge and the destruction of his Rambler, he had developed a healthy suspicion of people who knew somebody.

“What kind of work?”

“Supervisor.”

“Where?”

“Dallas.”

That narrowed it down to several thousand possibilities.

“Doing what?”

“Warehouse work, mostly. Shipping. Receiving. Books.”

Walter had spent years in plumbing supply. Inventory was inventory. A warehouse full of books seemed unlikely to contain anything capable of exploding.

The interview went well.

The money was better than Walter expected.

The hours were reasonable.

The building itself was large, old and solid, the sort of place Walter instinctively trusted. Floors, walls, freight elevators, stacks of merchandise. Things with purposes he could understand.

Schoolbooks came in.

Schoolbooks went out.

Nobody carried a badge.

Nobody mentioned hydrogen bombs.

Walter accepted the supervisor’s job.

That evening, the Cateses sat in their new living room while Tommy did homework on the floor and Nancy watched television. Martha unpacked the last kitchen box.

Outside, the Rambler rested beneath a Texas sky.

Its new tires were clean. The repaired upholstery was holding. The replacement headliner remained where a headliner belonged. The Weather Eye worked. The overdrive worked. Even the AM radio had found a Dallas station and, for once, seemed determined to keep it.

Martha came into the room.

“You think we’re going to be all right here?”

Walter considered the question.

He had once believed the most dangerous thing awaiting his family on a seventeen-hundred-mile automobile trip was a flat tire.

Then he had watched a B-52 fall out of the sky.

He had learned that hydrogen bombs could land in trees.

He had learned that telling the truth did not necessarily make anybody believe you.

He had learned that Baptists could turn a quilt into a table runner faster than they could admit a woman wasn’t drunk.

He had learned that two men could destroy a perfectly good Rambler in search of something that had never been inside it.

And he had learned that sometimes home was simply the place you left when everybody became too concerned about you.

Walter looked around the new house.

“I think so.”

Across the street, Ruth Payne’s porch light came on.

Walter had a new job.

Martha had a new friend.

Tommy had a new school.

The Cates family had finally escaped history.

Or so it seemed.

The new job was at a place called the Texas School Book Depository.

A couple years later, Walter would return the favor and hire a friend of Ruth’s who’d recently come back to the states and needed work.  He was a former Marine and seemed like a nice guy.

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