After having endured weeks of physical therapy and drug tests to check if he had returned to heroin, Dan welcomed the introduction to Sandra’s friend. A dark-eyed, dark-haired Filipina whose bronze skin seemed to glow, she acted as his tour guide as she took him by bus to the history and nightlife of Manila, the mountains and rice terraces of Bagio, and the white sand beaches and crystal clear waters of Long Beach and San Miguel. By their third trip to Manila, they were in love. Now using a cane, Dan pointed it at the sign above a bar alongside one of Manila’s side streets.
“Joe’s Place. Sounds interesting. Let’s check it out.”
Inside, one wall was filled with photos, all faded. Dan blinked as he surveyed the faces of American soldiers who had fought during the Philippine War of Independence at the turn of the century.
“That’s my Grandpa Hank!” He turned to the bartender. “You have a magnifying glass?”
The wiry man smiled as he passed one to him. “I bought it because so many have asked over the years.”
“Thanks.”
Dan studied the tiny print along the bottom of the photo. “It says H. Richmond’s Going Away Party. That proves it.”
Teresa squeezed his hand. “You know what that means?”
“No.”
“Now you have to write your mother and tell her about it. And us.”
Dan smiled crookedly and nodded. His letter home rambled but Sally cherished it:
April 29, 1968
Dear Mom:
Sorry it’s been a while since I wrote. I guess I’ve been sort of busy. The last few months have been a blur ever since I almost got blown away. Things are going well with my PT. The therapist says my leg is getting stronger.
But the big news is that I saw a photograph of Grandpa Hank in a bar in Manila. It’s called Joe’s Place. What a coincidence. Now I wish he was still alive so I could talk with him about the P.I. This place is something else. Now I finally understand why Jason loved Monkey Island so much. These Pacific Islands are like paradise, especially compared to Vietnam and Madisin.
I guess the other news is I’m getting married. Her name is Teresa. Her dad runs a clothing factory and wants me to be his sales rep in the States. But I’ll be staying here in the P.I. for at least six months. It’ll take a while to get Teresa’s visa. The Army liaison officer here at Clark is really cool and is setting up my discharge papers so I can get out here.
Love,
Dan
Sally cried as she read the letter. She smiled as she wrote her reply:
May 9, 1968
Dear Dan:
I’m happy for you and look forward to meeting Teresa. Remember Jason’s friend, the private eye Lance Ivers that you met when you went to Disneyland?
About six months back he moved out here to Madisin. He bought forty acres out off of Turner Road. A couple weeks ago he asked me to marry him. Thelma said Fred would want me “to get on with my life” so I said yes. He’s a real go getter and wants to build a warehouse on his land to import the clothes from your father-in-law’s factory. Jason is drawing up the blueprints.
You discovered a skeleton in our family’s closet there at Joe’s Place in Manila. My daddy knew Joe, the owner of the bar. He met a girl there and got her pregnant the night before he shipped out but didn’t find out about his daughter until years later. Daddy’s Filipina daughter Cristina came to visit us in Kentucky after WW I when I was little. Then she moved on out to Hollywood and became a movie star. I hated the fuss Daddy made when he took us to see her movies so I sort of hated Cristina, even though she’s my half-sister.
I never brought this up with Fred or you kids because I figured if Daddy wanted you all to know about it he would’ve told you. Now that he’s gone I think you need to know. You see, Joe married Cristina’s mother Maria while she was just a few months along with Cristina so he was Cristina’s stepfather. We stopped getting telephone calls from Cristina when she moved back to the Philippines. But I think she might have inherited Joe’s Place. Since she’s my half-sister I guess she’s your half-aunt.
Please go back there and try to find her. Tell her that her half-sister is going to honeymoon in Manila. Lance says he wants to check out that clothes factory and give your future father-in-law some ideas for a men’s and women’s line that he’s cooked up. Jason wants to tag along to make a side trip to Monkey Island.
Love,
Mom
Epilogue
It took an hour of pleading and bargaining before Jason found an islander willing to ferry him to Monkey Island for $40.
“When I described Kong to our zookeeper back home he said Kong sounded like a Spider Monkey,” Jason told the impassive boat captain. “He said they can live up to forty years so there’s a good chance Kong’s still there waiting for me to take him home.”
“They say it might still be hot with radiation so you have to go ashore by yourself,” the sailor told Jason as he anchored his boat in the coral reef twenty yards from shore.
“Yeah, yeah.” Jason waded the final distance to the beach where he had washed up on twenty-three years earlier.
Typhoons had altered its landscape somewhat; radiation from the atomic bomb tests had removed all of the monkeys and most of the bird population. Survivors, the rats now ruled the island, some deformed in the womb by the radioactivity.
It took Jason five minutes to find the remnants of his camp where shreds of his lean-to still clung to the breadfruit tree. He blinked when he saw that someone had continued to carve lines into the tree trunk after his departure.
“Kong…” He ran his finger over the smaller etches, meant to draw Jason back to the island.
He cried when under the lean-to he found a tiny skeleton with his watch draped about its neck bones, the timepiece Jason had given to Kong for Christmas, 1945. After burying his friend, Jason saluted the grave.
“You knew how to live, my friend. I wonder if you would want me worrying so much about the Russians and Chinese and their damn A-bombs. When I get back home you think maybe I should take apart my bomb shelter like Thelma keeps on nagging me to do? I knew I should’ve never shown her where I hide the food.”
A gust of West wind loosened a breadfruit high above him. It landed at his feet.
He shook his head. As he waded back to the boat he wondered how best to dismantle his bomb shelter without Thelma taking credit that it had been her idea.
***
Arkhip kept saying, “I don’t believe it,” as she watched hammers, power tools, and bare hands destroy the Berlin Wall. After most of the USSR’s republics had broken free from Mother Russia she talked of Kazakhstan for the first time since she and Wilhelm had left it.
“I wonder what the test site is like after so long.”
“Go find out,” her husband Wilhelm said. “You need to bury some ghosts that still haunt you.”
So she travelled from the small town in East Germany where the two had lived after their usefulness to the Soviet atomic bomb program had ended in 1953. At least their four children could now live part of their lives in the freedom of a reunited Germany she thought as her plane landed in Akmola, the eventual capital of the newly freed republic.
The Kazakhstani official responsible for overseeing the former atomic test site was reluctant to let her go inside of it until she slipped him a 20-Mark bill. Then he smiled, nodded, and unlocked the door to her old laboratory. After her visit, he offered a side trip free of charge.
“Perhaps you would like to see the fruits of your labor.”
“What?”
In response he drove her to a drab building in the city closest to the test site. He nodded at its door. “I’ll wait.”
The smell of the facility reminded her of the East German hospitals where her children had been born. She wandered its halls, occasionally peeking through open doors at patients whose only commonality appeared to be their grotesqueness. Before she could ask a nurse about them, she felt a tug on her shoulder.
“Arkhi
p?”
She turned and stared at a woman who looked about her age. “Yes?”
“It’s me. The cleaning lady for your laboratory. Remember how I lived at the village near here downwind from your bomb tests?”
“Oh, yes.”
She took Arkhip’s hand. “Come. I want you to meet my granddaughter.” She led the way into a room with six beds, occupied by children ranging from age one to seventeen. None responded to the visitors. “Here she is. This is Arkhip. We named her after you to remind us why she is here.”
Arkhip dropped into the chair beside the bed and stared at what she thought to be a circus freak. When the large misshapen head turned toward her, the narrowly set vacant eyes blinked and a smile grew across the twisted cheeks above the missing chin. A low growl passed through the contorted lips and missing teeth.
“She’s eleven now. She came here a few days after she was born.”
Arkhip cradled her head with both hands and let her tears drop onto the one named for her. “Forgive me, Schatzi. Please forgive me.”
***
Dave Freight carried the presents from his 79th birthday party into his trailer. After setting them down on the tiny kitchen table, he pondered the conversations at the party. Its attendees were all members of the Double Dippers Club, one retired from the military, another from state government, a third from local government, a fourth from teaching. Two others were like himself, drawing pensions after long careers in federal government. All seven also received monthly Social Security checks, which made them double dippers and “proud of it.”
Two at his party were convinced that President Bush and company had planned or at least known that the terrorists would fly jetliners into the Twin Towers and Pentagon on 9/11/2001. Three other attendees thought the first two were “paranoid old farts in need of psychiatric care and medicine.” One said he was not sure. But Dave had it all figured out.
“Typical bureaucracy,” Dave had told the partygoers. “FBI agents in Arizona and Minnesota warned their superiors beforehand about the terrorists connected to the attack. But somewhere up the line their warnings died. Result? Thousands dead. It was the BIA, Bureaucracy in Action that let 9/11 happen.”
Dave sighed as he stared at the inside of the metal dwelling that at times felt more like a coffin than home. No longer as concerned about atomic and hydrogen bombs, he instead believed other kinds of weapons of mass destruction now posed the greater threat. He wondered if he would be granted the grace of a natural death. It was either that or become a victim to this new millennium’s evolving war of terror.
“I hope I go in my sleep,” he said to his cat Fat Boy, who meowed in reply.
Acknowledgments
Thank you for taking the time to read this story.
Thank you to my wife Jean for her critique of the first draft.
Thank you to Gretchen Ricker and Ed Shafik for their insightful critiques of the first 100 pages.
Thank you to Maryann Miller for her helpful input on the final draft.
Thank you to James, GoOnWrite.com, for the cover design.
Books read for background:
Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener
The Rising Sun by John Toland
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer
The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
An Illustrated History of the Horror Film by Carlos Clarens
The Western Films of John Ford by J A Place
The Great Films by Bosley Crowther
New Deal or Raw Deal by Burton W. Folsom Jr.
UFOs by Leslie Kean
Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen
The Redhunter by William F. Buckley
Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s was unsettling for me. In first grade, we practiced ducking under our wooden school desks “in case a big bomb goes off somewhere.” Dozens of movies fed our imaginations as creatures mutated by atomic radiation stalked humanity: giant crabs, spiders, locusts, moths, or dinosaurs unleashed because of nuclear fallout. There was even a man who grew to colossal heights and a woman to fifty feet tall in other movies. Aliens from distant worlds came in UFOs to warn of Earth’s destruction if we did not cease and desist from testing and stockpiling nuclear weapons.
During fifth grade, we talked on the playground about whether “those missiles in Cuba” would land where we lived. Backyard or basement bomb shelters became common. The fears seemed to peak in the 1980s until Mr. Gorbachev saw the handwriting on the wall and let the one in Berlin be torn down.
Emotions wrought by such times seemed to serve as an undercurrent as we grew up and became distracted by other realities of life. For me, trying to put such reflections down on paper seemed better suited to the world of fiction.
My hope is to convey, at least partially, the effects that The Bomb cast over billions during the last half of the Twentieth Century.
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