She is choosing her words, being careful with the truth. Still, I don’t care for her use of one word—
left
—as though my absence was somehow my own choosing. Who would choose to be hidden? To be kept underground for all these years? I have denied the question for two days,
but now it comes begging: Has Dobbs, who did my choosing for me, saved us from a terrible trial?
Adam is thinking along the same lines. “So there was some kind of disaster.”
She pulls out what looks to be a handmade booklet from her pocket and gives it to Adam. “I brought this for you to read. It is certainly a more complete account than what I could give. I suggest you read it before making any hasty decisions.”
“I’ll take that.” Adam hands me the book as four people stomp into the infirmary. Recoiling in fright, Adam jumps into bed, throws the covers over his head, and cinches the edges. The ball of twine falls to the floor and unravels as fast as Adam pulls on the string.
From under his sheets comes a static voice. “Adam, are you there? Over.” Harriet Fletcher has her walkie-talkie pressed against her mouth and is signaling the four men to be still. The room is hollow-quiet.
When the last of the twine is gathered under the sheet, Adam’s tiny whisper is amplified on Harriet’s transmitter. “Yes, I’m here.”
Smiling, Harriet pushes the button and tells Adam some very important people have come to see him. Has he ever met a scientist before? No, is Adam’s tentative answer. Well, wouldn’t he like to meet one? Adam doesn’t answer, but he does lower the sheet. He assesses the men as if they were specters, not men of science. And they certainly are peculiar-looking. Their skin seems raw and has a sheen to it. They stoop like stacks of boxes piled too high and have the same odor about them, too, like they are in need of a good airing.
“I have asked a few colleagues to join me today, Adam. They have traveled a considerable distance to be here. They are very excited to meet you.”
Adam shields his eyes with one hand, clenches the walkie-talkie with the other.
“Hello, young man.” A man steps forward and extends his hand, a gesture Adam mistakes as being required to give back his walkie-talkie.
He tucks it under his arm.
“Nobody’s going to hurt you, Adam. This is just an evaluation. Okay?”
It has taken as little as a gadget for Adam to let Harriet Fletcher treat him like something under a microscope. He looks my way. Everything’s going to be all right, isn’t it?
I muster a smile. Everything’s fine.
All the same, I keep the backpack on my shoulder and the suitcase in my hand and wait for Harriet Fletcher to finish talking about the knife wound and presenting symptoms of dehydration and anemia. She asks Adam to pull his garment down a little in the front. It’s my fault, the way he does her bidding. Haven’t I taught him that sometimes the best resistance is to give way?
“A mild case of rickets, the beginning of a rachitic rosary.” She points to Adam’s chest, which has recently sprouted soft blond chest hair, an asset of which he is extremely proud. “Deficiencies in vitamin D, calcium, and iron would suggest a limited diet and limited exposure to light, which would correspond with his pigmentation. A somewhat abnormal response to touch. It’s possible he has some kind of autistic disorder, Kanner’s syndrome perhaps, judging by the poor social and communication skills, the high sensitivity to bright lights and noises.”
Adam does not have poor communication skills. There are times he’ll talk your ear off. If he’s quiet, it means he’s working on something in his head. Lord only knows what he’s trying to work out now.
One from the crowd raises his pen. “You said he’d been confined?”
“According to the mother, since birth.” Harriet Fletcher looks over at me and lowers her voice so I cannot hear what she says next, but all heads turn to me, faces without expression.
“There seems to be some unwillingness to cooperate fully.”
Cooperate fully? I’ve given that woman fact after fact, and what I’ve received in return is an offer to separate me and Adam.
One of the scientists asks me about Adam’s upbringing. Did I keep a journal of his development? What illnesses has he had? How often does
he get sick? How long does it take for him to recover from an illness? At what age did he start puberty?
“Has he ever had intercourse?”
“Excuse me?” What kind of question is that of a kid who has been confined his entire life? And then the lightbulb goes on. They’re insinuating I’ve slept with him.
There is but the tiniest pause before Harriet Fletcher resumes her rundown. “No goiter, normal thyroid functioning, no cutaneous ulcerations or necrosis. In summary, no visible signs of exposure.”
“How old are you, son?” one of them asks.
“Seventy-eight,” Adam answers. Going by birthdays, he’s right, but they misread him and crack up. One has a laugh that sounds exactly like the squeaky door between the lower level and the silo tunnel.
“Intact sense of humor.” Harriet Fletcher smiles proudly. “At first, we put him around twelve or thirteen because of his muscle tone; however, genital development is definitely that of a postpubertal male.”
“I told you, he’s fifteen!” All this time I’ve waited for them, and this is what we end up with: stupid people. How can they look and look at my boy, at me, and not see? They scribble on their notebooks what they can’t see, and then they come back again to make sure their looking hasn’t changed into something else. If there was any doubt before, I know now with certainty that they are not, as Dobbs used to categorized a very small portion of the people he encountered, Friendlies. There is something about this place that is not entirely on the up-and-up. Their scrutiny of Adam, for one. It is Dobbs’s voice in my head, clear as a bell:
Get him out of here.
“And the bioassays?” one asks.
Harriet Fletcher can’t resist touching Adam. She gives his arm a little pat. “Labs came back clean as a whistle.”
As one, the group folds toward Adam in a bow. It’s not evaluation. It’s veneration.
Get him out of here.
“Hear what, Adam?” Harriet Fletcher asks.
I can hear it—a groaning sound, or humming, perhaps. Adam holds his walkie-talkie in front of him and pushes the button.
“Oh, that’s just the generators. Come along.”
On either side of us is a row of Quonset huts. Each is fronted with an overhang, a number, and a porch light. There isn’t a soul in sight, and yet I have the distinct feeling we are being watched.
“Are other people here?” I ask.
Harriet Fletcher makes a flicking motion with her head that could be construed either way. As she leads us past the huts, the fine mist turns to a drizzle. Instantly, the ground turns to slop. Adam stops. Instead of opening his umbrella, Adam lifts his palm and watches tiny droplets
land on it. He lifts his face to the heavens, shutters his eyes against the drops, and sticks out his tongue. He has fallen under the spell of rain.
Harriet Fletcher lifts her coat over her head and insists Adam take cover under the umbrella. She tries to hurry him, but he scuffs his feet against the ground. “I get it, Mom. I get it!” He’s remembering the time I mixed up a batch of flour and water and chocolate powder, and ordered him to unwrap his feet and stick his toes in the gooey mixture. “Mud,” I told him, insisting he make footprints all over my clean floor. He was quite unsure of me that day. Now, he stoops to get his hands dirty, and I can’t bring myself to tell him no. I open my arms. Maybe if the rain soaks in, something in me will be renewed.
Harriet Fletcher shoos us to a hut with a sign of a shower painted on its door. “The bathhouse,” she announces. Inside, the building is draped with black plastic sheets except for a window covered with burlap. Instead of the cold glare from our quarters, the lamps strung at each end of the hut give off a warm yellow haze. It’s humid inside and smells faintly of chemicals. An enormous plastic pool, the kind people put up in their backyards, takes up almost half the space. It’s filled with liquid so green it is almost neon. The other side of the Quonset hut is trussed with pipes. At evenly spaced intervals about two feet above the floor are a faucet, a hose with a showerhead, and a step stool. The black rubber floor is dappled with puddles, and the water in the giant tub is still eddying from recent use.
Harriet points to a wooden cubicle near the entrance and explains that I am to wait in it until it is my turn to bathe. Adam, she says, will go first. Adam unties the string from his waist and hands it to me. Gathering up the twine, I take a seat on the bench, but as soon as she aims to close the door, I stand up. “I’m not good with confined spaces.”
“If you don’t mind, Mrs. Hallowell, a man needs his privacy,” she insists, all but putting her hand against my chest.
Adam hardly qualifies as a man, I do not say, deciding to keep my quarrel for what counts. “It’s ‘Miss,’ ” I mumble through the slats, as she closes the door on my protest.
“It’s warm,” he says, before giving a satisfied moan.
“You take as long as you like.”
There is some splashing and then much sloshing about, as though Adam is doing laps.
Of all the things I liked to tell Adam about, water was my favorite subject. It was a watery globe, I taught him. Even when you stood on dry ground, water was running under your feet. Dig down deep enough and it would go spurting into the air. Below, water came in a big tank and with a warning from Dobbs about using too much. You could lick the floor and have a drink of water and not taste the difference. Above, water came from heaven, I told him. The cleverest thing anybody had ever done was find a way to put it into pipes so people could turn a faucet on and have it run all day if they wanted.
Heaven’s what gave me the idea to baptize him. When I emptied the water over him, I pictured him in a river, floating across county lines, emptying first into the great Pottawamie, and then into the kingdom of found souls. I knew I’d secured for him some kind of salvation with that water.
Now here he is, submerged. Free. But not quite.
After a while, I hear Adam get out of the pool. Harriet Fletcher invites him to move over to the wall with the pipes so he can shower off. When she offers to help him do what he is perfectly capable of doing himself, I can take no more. I barge out of the wooden shed. Adam is seated on the footstool, his head tipped forward, a small towel draped over his lap. Harriet Fletcher is holding the showerhead so water can cascade over his shoulders and down his back. The deaf women and their staring, the visiting doctors and their valuating, and now Harriet Fletcher tending my son as though an unearthed treasure, like she is
laying a claim to him—it no longer makes me uneasy. It makes me afraid.
“Get your hands off my son!” I shout.
We return to the Quonset hut, and still the police have not arrived. We eat lunch, and they have not arrived. We wait for three hours more, until Harriet Fletcher makes an unconvincing speech about how she can’t imagine what has held them up, but that they will surely arrive in the morning. And then when the day is drawing to a close, I say, “They aren’t coming, are they?”
Choosing not to answer my question, she bids us good night and leaves the Quonset hut. Adam comes over to my bed. Through gritted teeth, he says, “Mom! You are going to get us into a lot of trouble.”
I don’t tell him we are in a lot of trouble. Instead, I tell him to get ready. The moment the rain lets up, we’re leaving.
“We’re not going back out there.”
“Yes, we are. I’m taking you home.”
“There is no home; didn’t you hear what she said?”
“Our home is with each other.”
He looks at his walkie-talkie, as though he might just need to consult the woman on this issue.
I snatch it from him. “We do not belong here. With these people. They aim to separate us. Probably tonight, when we fall asleep.”
“These are nice people. You said so.” He grabs the walkie-talkie from me, scowling.
I try a different tack. “We’re free now, Adam. We get to do what we want.”
“What I want is to stay here.”
“We’re leaving, and that’s the end of it.”
I pack the leftover dinner in the backpack. Which is another thing that bugs me—they’ve been through our belongings. I am glad we buried Charlie; who knows what they would’ve held against us if they found
a bundle of bones. They’re a bunch of thieves, too—the bolt cutter is missing. It’s only fair, then, that I take the inhaler.
I am pacing in front of the windows, glaring at those rain clouds, willing them to part, when the door opens. The others are a heavy-handed bunch, but this one takes my hand gently and shakes it.
“Marcus Hill, at your service.” His toe catches the edge of the suitcase. “You planning on heading out?”
I don’t say anything, but he responds as if I do.
“I don’t blame you none.” And I can weep for the way he says it, full of tenderness. I try to size him up—he’s larger than the others, and darker. His head is shiny, and his lips are the size of thumbs. Only one of his black eyes looks at me; the other settles off to the side.
Adam is mesmerized. “Are you a policeman?”
He laughs and says, “No, son, that I ain’t. I’m a sitter. That means whatever you want, for the next twelve hours, you just ask me.” He speaks as though he has hot butter beans in his mouth.
I fold my arms in response. A sitter? Someone to keep us from running off, more like.
Adam, who has up to this point retreated from strangers, now volunteers his name and shows him the walkie-talkie. He is delighted when the sitter pulls out his own transmitter. The sitter tells him that unless he wants to transmit to every Tom, Dick, and Harry, he better change the channel. Thirteen is what they decide on, but this sounds very unlucky to me.
“Adam won’t be transmitting anything,” I clarify.
Not at all put off by my tone, the sitter asks again my name.
I do my deaf-nurse impression.
Adam makes his eyes go wide at me, then apologizes. “My mother’s not in a talking mood right now.”
“That’s okay. I respect that. I know some people who flap their gums all day. You want my opinion, it’s fools who talk the most.”
An awful lot of words for one breath of air, is what I think, but Adam grins. If he had a tail, it would be wagging. Three days ago,
confronting Dobbs with a knife, and here he is, as eager to please as a young boy. All that time worrying about how I would deal with his fears about the world, the disappointment that was sure to come from having been raised on fantasies, and I haven’t made any preparations for how to deal with his blind faith. How do I keep him from falling for every smile, every slick word? How a man holds himself, what he does with his hands, can tell a straighter story. If living with Dobbs should have taught Adam anything, it should be at least this much.
“I’ve got a buddy like your mama here.” The sitter takes a seat next to Adam. “He ain’t much of a talker, either. He has his reasons, as I’m sure she does. Tunnels of Cu Chi—you ever heard about those?”
Adam draws a blank.
“ ’Nam, brother. 1974. Dyno was a tunnel rat. It was his job to crawl down those holes to find Charlie.”
Adam swings around to look at me.
“Different Charlie,” I say.
“Dyno never knew if he was about to step into a booby trap, if some trapdoor of nails was going to slam down on top of him.” The sitter smashes his fist in the palm of his other hand. Adam flinches. “The guy’s one tough sonofabitch, I’ll tell you that. Nothing fazes him. Not much of a talker, but one very wily cat. Got out of ’Nam with all ten fingers and ten toes, unlike most. Started his own dealership back in the day. How d’you like that? A car salesman who don’t talk! Damned if he didn’t make himself a ton of money, too. One year he even got some fancy award for having the best dealership in the state of Ohio. People went to his place, see, they didn’t need no sales pitch. Dyno was an honest-to-god war hero, and folks found a way to show their appreciation. Some said it was a shame he ended up on the street so soon after, but the way I figure, he got those tunnels inside him.”
“My mother killed the man who kept us locked up. Are they going to put her in jail? Is that why they won’t let us leave?”
“Adam!”
The sitter holds up his hands, and goes, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”
The sitter leans past Adam to look at me. “You have a car that runs?”
“It ran out of gas,” Adam replies, shrugging off my glare.
The man’s face drops. “Scavengers have got to it by now.”
Adam snaps his fingers. “We saw them! They live in a train. I think my mom ran over one of them.”
“Okay, that’s enough, Adam!” I stride toward him and situate myself between him and the sitter.
“She didn’t mean it, though.” He knows I’d like to throttle him.
And in this way we put on a nice little show for the man with one good eye until he offers to turn out the lights so we might sleep.
Darkness feels like a respite. As long as the lights aren’t on, I don’t have to pretend. Between me and the sitter are only a few feet, but in the dark it might as well be miles. Lit up, this place gives the wrong impression, that with people around we are found. Truth is, the more there are of them, the more isolated I feel. Cut off is what the darkness shows. On our own. Silo-alone.
“We lived underground where they used to put rockets,” Adam whispers.
“You mean, like a missile silo?”
“Yup.”
“Son, you bullshitting me? Because I’ve heard some stories in my day.”
“No. It’s true.”
The sitter mumbles about children having being squirreled away in all sorts of places, but never a missile silo.
“He wasn’t protecting us.” Adam explains a truth that for him has only barely set. “He kept us locked up. That’s why my mom doesn’t like it here—she doesn’t want to be a prisoner. We’re not prisoners, right?”
The sitter is silent for a moment, as though he’s forgotten it is a
person next to him and not a story. “How long you been living in that missile silo, Adam?”
“My whole life.”
“Your whole life.” He says it real slow. “And your mama’s been down there that whole time, too?”
“She’s been there longer. Since before I was born.”
“Since before you were born.”
The sitter repeats everything Adam says—about getting the door open; about never having seen the moon or stars till a few days ago; about never having been outside. It’s as if he can believe the words only if they come from his own mouth.
Adam is out of bed, rummaging in his trousers. He asks the sitter to hold out his hand. “That’s some of the gravel I’ve collected. There are so many different kinds of earth. But rain’s my favorite thing so far; it turns this stuff to mush.”
Just when I’ve decided to hate this man, he pipes up, “There’s lots of different kinds of rain, too.” For a minute, we listen to it
thunk
down on the corrugated siding. “You afraid of getting wet?”
The sitter and Adam stand in the doorway where the rain makes a beaded curtain against the porch light. Adam sticks his hand in it, pulls it back, and then rubs his head. Watching Adam is like watching an astronaut on a new planet. You see him experiencing the world, it’s like you’re experiencing it for the first time, too.
The sitter steps into the porch-lit rain and holds out his hand. Adam takes it. I lean forward on my elbows and watch two boys dance under a cloudburst and kick up puddles.
We are back Below, having to listen to what’s wrong with the world.
“No!” I shout, sitting up. Not in my cot in the silo, but in the Quonset hut. The storyteller is a hunched shape beside my son’s bed—not Dobbs, but that sitter, Marcus.
“Can you turn on the lights, please?”
We all squint at each other when he does.