A Place We Knew Well Read online

  Instead of Gargantua, Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, and the little house that caught fire, there were full-sized displays of walk-through fallout shelters: from the prefab Peace O’ Mind steel-and-concrete vault (with patented fluted design to resist shock waves) to a fire-resistant California redwood Safety Shed (A shelter for the family and workshop for Dad in one!) to the small, dark Bee Safe Quonset hut (with fireproof exterior surface of Gunite!). Most of them were no bigger than one of his station’s bathrooms. Avery peered in but refused to enter. Truth be told, he hated dark, enclosed spaces and avoided them whenever he could.

  He walked about, following Charlotte in and out of the tents in search of Sarah’s “Grandma’s Pantry” display. He listened to the barkers hawking the lifesaving advantages of their wares. He nodded, in acknowledgment but not necessarily agreement, at the government man’s explanation that, although an underground basement was most easily adapted to family shelter use, Florida’s high water table, its universal lack of basements, presented challenges that were “easily overcome so long as you followed government standards to achieve ninety-nine percent reduction in gamma ray exposure.”

  Avery heard the hype. He examined the shoddy workmanship of what one local contractor called his “guaranteed watertight, airtight, radiation-tight Florida Igloo in aqua blue.” (The guy’s primary business was building swimming pools.) He shook his head at the men walking around like clowns in transparent plastic bags advertised as “Civilian Fallout Suits, only $19.99.”

  Unfortunately for the hucksters, Avery was no rube on the subject. On V-J Day, he’d been a part of the massive American “Show of Strength” flyover above Tokyo Bay and the defeated emperor’s Surrender Ceremonies on the deck of the USS Missouri. Heading back to base on Tinian Island, the crew had lobbied their pilot, amiable Cap’n Tex Ritter, to swing west for a bird’s-eye view of what was left of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Avery, facing east in the tail turret, was the last to see the green islands dotting the blue Hiroshima Bay then, opening like a miles-wide mouth of hell, the decimated delta city recognizable only by its distinctive river channels, four fingers and a thumb, flowing into the bay. Worse yet was the sulfurous stench of fiery death that filled their plane at five thousand feet and lingered for days as a black taste on Avery’s tongue. Circling back, Cap’n Tex said quietly over the intercom, “Seen enough, boys?” and headed home without further comment. In the tail, Avery got the last, long look at the devastation. How was it possible? he wondered, sickened that a single bomb dropped by a solo plane could do so much damage.

  Photos published later in The New Yorker for the rest of America to see fell far short of conveying the actual horror that still haunted his dreams. John Hersey’s chilling account of the bombing came closer, but did little or nothing to stop further nuclear testing by the Americans at Enewetak and Bikini, the British in Australia, the French in the Sahara, and the Soviets in Kazakhstan.

  Avery knew, quite rightly, that no man-made structure could survive a direct hit from today’s more powerful hydrogen bombs. And even if the hit was indirect, the chances that he and Sarah and Charlotte would be in the same place at that time were slim. For that reason, he agreed with Ike, who’d said, “If I were in a very fine shelter and [my wife and children] were not there, I would just walk out. I would not want to face that kind of world.”

  A barker strode by calling “Any Catholics in the crowd?” and thrust a yellow flyer into Avery’s hand. It was a mimeographed copy of a magazine article by a Father L. C. McHugh proclaiming, Nowhere in traditional Catholic morality does one read that Christ, in counseling nonresistance to evil, rescinded the right of self-defense which is granted by nature and recognized in the legal systems of all nations. To love one’s neighbor as thyself, the priest wrote, is, undoubtedly, an heroic Christian virtue, but it is not a Christian duty. Indeed, this Father McHugh implied, it would be misguided charity not to shoot a neighbor trying to invade one’s jam-packed shelter!

  Avery had had enough. He crumpled the flyer, tossed it into the waste barrel of a vendor hawking Double Decker Moon Pies, and called to his daughter’s back. “Charlotte…Charlotte!”

  She turned, eyes bright. “I think I see her…in there.” She pointed to the entrance of a nearby red-and-white striped tent. Beside it, one large poster proclaimed, MEET THE ATOMIC HONEYMOONERS! with a picture of the smiling Mininsons and diagonal red letters: CANCELED DUE TO HURRICANE. A second poster asked, GRANDMA’S PANTRY WAS READY: IS YOUR “PANTRY” READY IN THE EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY? and announced, CIVIL DEFENSE FOR HOMEMAKERS, PRESENTATIONS ON THE HOUR, EVERY HOUR.

  Inside the tent, rows of empty folding chairs faced a stage whose metal shelves were filled with the supplies from their shelter. Near the wooden podium, Sarah stood talking earnestly to an imposing woman in a fire-engine-red suit, white pearls, and a royal-blue pillbox hat. The infamous Edith, Avery guessed.

  “Hey, Mom!” Charlotte called.

  The two women turned. As he and Charlotte came down the center aisle, Edith cast a withering glance in Avery’s direction.

  “Edith, this is my daughter, Charlotte…,” Sarah was saying.

  “And your husband, Judas Iscariot, I take it. With friends like you, Mr. Avery, who needs enemies?” Abruptly, the older woman stomped off the stage and out the side exit.

  “What the Sam Hill?” Avery asked, dumbfounded.

  Sarah took a labored breath. “Oh, Wes, didn’t you see the paper?”

  “What paper?”

  “This morning’s Sentinel?” She walked to the podium, picked up and handed down the day’s Society Section. It was his custom to separate the morning paper into his and hers portions: News, Financial, and Sports for him; Society, usually sheathed in weekend sales circulars, for her. So, of course, he hadn’t seen the section’s cover photo of Sarah, taken inside their shelter.

  “Nice picture,” he said.

  “Read the last paragraph, Wes.”

  He scanned the column, under the byline of reporter Joseph A. Riley, to its end:

  When asked to comment on local Civil Defense efforts, Mrs. Avery’s husband, an incendiary expert who participated in the bombing of Japan, shrugged. “The only real defense against nuclear warfare is to make certain it never starts,” Avery said.

  “You shrugged?” Sarah asked in a tired voice.

  “Let me see.” Charlotte was peering at the paper.

  “That’s not at all what I—”

  “ ‘Incendiary expert,’ Dad?”

  Behind them, three women strolled into the tent chatting and took their seats midway up the aisle.

  Still on stage, Sarah smiled and called, “Welcome! We’ll be starting in”—she checked her watch—“another six minutes.”

  She bent down to tell Avery and Charlotte, “Lunch is out, I guess. I’m stuck with back-to-back presentations for the rest of the afternoon.” When her eyes slid from Charlotte to Avery, she gave him a searching, lifted-eyebrow look, clearly asking, You talk to her yet?

  His quick head shake told her, No, not yet.

  Walking out with Charlotte, he was seething at the reporter’s failure to credit Omar Bradley with his own quote, and at that battle-ax Edith for accusing him of some sort of betrayal.

  Betrayal! Wasn’t the real betrayal the whole idea behind this event? That the local Civil Defense plan—eleven designated buildings, mostly downtown, at a considerable distance from the suburbs where everybody lived—could save more than a handful of city bureaucrats? That the President’s campaign suggesting people build their own private shelter was anything more than political eyewash, part of the Democrats’ run-up to midterm elections?

  Avery looked around, bewildered by the size of the crowd and the number of families trailing small children. Why were they here? Was it plain old curiosity or did they actually intend to buy this crap? He’d seen the options available, the obvious hucksters, the bloated price tags attached to the ridiculous shelters. Shelter! The very word was a jo
ke. Do-it-yourself tomb was more like it.

  “Can we eat?” Charlotte asked, tugging on his sleeve. “I’m starving!”

  He stood in line for a couple of hot dogs while she found an open bench just inside the exit. They sat and ate their dogs in silence, basking in a patch of sunlight breaking through the clouds. Then Charlotte jumped up, intent on buying an “atomic mint chocolate” ice cream cone at a nearby stand.

  “Want one?” she asked, joining the line.

  “No, thanks.”

  Ignorance is bliss, right? he thought, surveying the crowd. But what about Sarah? She wasn’t ignorant, not by a long shot. So what in the world was she doing here? Seventeen years and there were still parts of his wife that mystified him. Her moods, for instance. One day, she could be the queen of optimism and organization, blithely moving from household task to community project to school committee meeting. All poise and polish. The next, she could be laid low, composure fractured by the less than perfect, the unpredictable, or some other thing that was completely outside her control.

  Charlotte had reached the counter and was giving him a thumbs-up. Avery thumbed her back, wondering what it was Sarah expected him to say to Charlotte. Was last night’s upset, all her talk about “options” this morning, really about Emilio? Or was it that Charlotte had made up her mind without consulting her mother? Or anyone else, for that matter? And what was wrong with that? Truth was, he loved Charlotte’s decisiveness, her desire to go her own way, to dream her own dreams. It showed character, didn’t it? And reflected well on her parents: Without those same qualities, Sarah might never have left Tuscaloosa. And I’d still be a dirt farmer, fighting bad weather and boll weevils!

  Charlotte plopped back down beside him. “Yummm,” she said, licking her cone.

  “It’s turning your tongue green,” he teased her.

  “Maybe I’m radioactive!” she shot back, crossing her eyes and flicking her tongue like a lizard.

  They walked out through the still-incoming crowd. In the parking lot, Charlotte tapped the truck’s front fender and said, “Wake up, Otto! Time to make like an atom and split.”

  Firing the ignition, Avery said, “I thought it was, ‘Make like a tree and leave’?”

  “Well, yeah, if you’re twelve.”

  “Oh, got it. So let’s, uhm…make like an engine and run? Make like a gasket and blow? Or how ’bout, make like a pedal and put it to the metal?”

  “Save it for the station, Dad.”

  Wheeling left on East Colonial Drive, Avery announced, “Scenic route!” A few miles later, he turned right on Route 436, through T. G. Lee Dairy’s cow-spotted pastures to Bearhead Road, the northern perimeter of McCoy Air Force Base.

  —

  THE BARRICADE SURPRISED HIM.

  A makeshift collection of sawhorses, guard shack, military jeeps, and uniformed air police blocked the normally public road 250 yards ahead of the main gate. Avery pulled the truck off onto the grassy shoulder, behind a gaggle of others who had done the same thing. Up ahead, a hundred yards from the barricade, a cluster of men, civilians, were gathered around a white Dodge pickup. He decided to walk up and ask what was going on.

  “Want to come?” he asked Charlotte.

  “Sure!” she said, already half out the door.

  The circle of onlookers stood listening to a large man in denim overalls and mud-caked farm boots. His milk-colored truck sported the red T. G. Lee Dairy logo and held an assortment of field tools in the back. He wore a red T. G. Lee cap and the dark tan of a man who spent the bulk of his time outdoors. He’d pulled a stalk of sweetgrass from a nearby patch and held it between his lips. The trio of lime-green leaves at its tip quaked as he talked.

  When Avery and Charlotte approached, the dairyman eyed Avery’s starched white shirt, his Sunday suit pants, and shiny wingtips, and called, “Afternoon, Reverend. How was church?”

  Avery held up innocent hands. “I’m a mechanic, not a minister. Just out for a drive on my day off.”

  “Come to see your hard-earned tax dollars at work?”

  The dairyman reached into his truck’s open window, pulled out a pair of black binoculars.

  “Take a good look. Everyone else has.”

  The solemn faces surrounding him nodded. A few men toed the dirt like cattle wary of a shifting wind.

  Avery put the binocs to his eyes, peering south beyond the huge ordnance depot, a beehive of busy front loaders, toward the row of hangars and plane docks off the flight line, far right.

  What he saw shocked him. The US Air Force organized its aircraft into wings of three squadrons with twenty-four planes apiece. Before him, like a giant flock of silver seabirds blown off course, were at least two wings of F-105 Thunderchief fighters, another two wings of F-84 Thunderjets, and a third of F-100 Super Sabres—five wings, 72 birds each, equaled 360 fighters all told! Next to the fighters sat a dozen or so shiny silver Connies (Super Constellations) with their distinctive triple tails. Some were outfitted with radar hoods for reconnaissance; others, obviously paratroop carriers.

  Avery lowered the binocs to make sure they weren’t playing some kind of trick on him. But the packed view was the same with plain sight, only smaller and less detailed. He raised them back up, looked again at the magnified fighters, each armed to the gills with cluster, free-fall, and Sidewinder bombs, and felt his gut clench in genuine alarm.

  In the uncomfortable group silence—Avery was stunned for a moment beyond words—he remembered Charlotte. Determined not to overreact, he took her arm and said, as casually as he could manage, “We were sort of hoping to see a U-2.”

  The dairyman’s eyes flared with surprise as if to ask, How’d you know about them? After a moment, he said softly, “One came in ’bout fifteen minutes ago.” He chucked the largest of his several chins. “Walk up another fifty, sixty yards and look left.”

  Avery led Charlotte in that direction, his senses assaulted by the sharp reek of jet fuel and the sucking roar of jet engines.

  “Awful lot of planes out there,” she said, betraying the same mixture of curiosity and dread that was gripping him. “Pretty scary, don’t you think, Dad?”

  Avery threw a protective arm around her. Hoping to distract her from the effect of all that firepower, he said, “Let me tell you about the U-2, Kitten.”

  He told her what little he knew about America’s super-secret spy plane: How it supposedly flew twice as high as most other aircraft, up to seventy thousand feet, “where blue sky meets black space.” How it had a single pilot, a single jet engine, and flew unarmed over enemy territory with a bellyful of special long-range cameras. How, for years, it was thought untouchable by enemy radar or ground fire until 1960, when a Soviet missile shot down U-2 pilot Frank Powers over Russia.

  When they’d reached the point roughly midway between the dairyman and the guard shack, Avery stopped. He pointed out the hangar in the distance, now visible beyond the ordnance depot. The sight of the U-2s out front—five all-black plus another three in silver with the single air force star—took his breath away. Was this a joint CIA and air force operation? Was that possible?

  The binocs provided further details. Milkman Jimmy Simms had compared the U-2’s shape to a big, black buzzard. But to Avery, the aircraft’s long, lean fuselage and significantly wider wings looked more like a cluster of fantastic dragonflies. The flurried actions of the ground crew drew his attention to one U-2 in particular.

  “Hey, Dad?”

  “Just a sec, hon.”

  A group was gathered at the all-black nose dock, canopy up, helping the pilot, moving stiffly in a silver pressure suit, out of the cockpit. Another bunch was busy mid-plane under the wide-open camera bay. And a third was loading a Metro Van with two heavy steel boxes. The film, Avery reasoned. Judging from the care with which the men handled the boxes, the sense of urgency in their movements, the boxes had to contain the spy plane’s film!

  “Dad…”

  Spellbound, Avery watched the Metro Van
wheel toward a silver T-39 transport already on the flight line, hoses dropped, twin engines at fractional power, ready to go. In mere seconds they had the boxes and an armed escort officer aboard, and the T-39 was taxiing for takeoff. Somewhere, Avery thought, there were men in high command waiting for whatever secrets that film might…

  “Sorry, sir.” A brusque baritone demanded his attention.

  Avery lowered the binoculars and felt a shiver at the nearness of the muscle-bound air police confronting them. He’d been so intent watching the runway that he’d ignored Charlotte’s warnings and completely missed the staff sergeant’s approach.

  “Sir, observation of base ops is strictly limited to approved personnel. Please return to your vehicle immediately.” The man’s gaze was direct, his tone no-nonsense.

  “Of course, Sergeant,” Avery said, and watched the E-5’s eyes glide toward Charlotte in an appreciative once-over.

  “Let’s go, Kitten.” He took her arm, stepped back onto the asphalt, and headed toward the dairyman and his uneasy herd of onlookers.

  “So what do you think, Dad?”

  “About what?”

  Charlotte gave him her don’t baby me look. “All this…” She opened her palm toward the jam-packed runway.

  Avery exhaled guilt. It was a mistake to bring her here; he should have insisted she wait in the truck. “Hard to say, honey.”

  “But…”

  They’d reached the dairyman, who, after accepting the binocs and Avery’s thanks, observed, “Looks like Gen-rill-leesimo Castro’s ’bout to get his clock cleaned, don’t ya think?”

  Avery shrugged.

  Charlotte waited until they were out of earshot to ask, “He’s right, Dad, isn’t he? About Castro?”

  “Maybe, maybe not, honey. The U-2s mean they’re investigating something. But with their range, it could just as easily be the Panama Canal or somewhere in South America.”