An Atomic Romance Read Free

low on gas and begins to sputter. The engine dies. The light goes out. And the blast of the gun splinters the night calm. In a while, rain begins to fall softly.
    Reed tries to awaken, but he feels paralyzed. He struggles fitfully, and then eases deeper into dream as his muscles release and he floats toward the car. He glimpses the ice-blue metal, burning like candles, between the water towers. He approaches cautiously, noticing that it is a luxury sedan, a nice city car, not the kind of vehicle a camper or hiker would be driving. Slopping his way through puddles, he reaches the car.
    He stares through the broken window at the shattered face. She has fallen toward the wheel, but he can see half her face is ripped away, leaving a reddish-brown spaghetti sauce. She must have hit her temple at a slant. He does not need to open the door. He can see the revolver on the floorboard, a .38 special, its handle decorated with floral decals.
    On the dashboard, fastened with tape, are pictures of children. Two boys and two girls. All of them little, smiling, in Halloween costumes, the least one in a bunny outfit, with long, erect ears.
    Moaning, Reed reels away. He streaks through the woods—crazed, stupid with disgust and horror. He calls out. He runs and runs, but he feels he is traveling at the speed of a shrimp trawler, which he imagines as a slow boat to Ethiopia. But then the shrimp trawler zooms across the Gulf of Mexico, where he awakens, in a sea of sweat.
    His mind had given him a private screening of a horror film. Who was the woman? Why would she come out here to kill herself? He could not fathom a woman killing herself when she had four small children to care for. He turned and stretched in his musty, oversized sleeping bag. Was it so simple to go mad and kill yourself? He didn’t believe it. What if she wanted to spare her children from something? An illness. Maybe the woman believed herself inadequate to the task of raising them. He wondered if her husband would ask the same questions he was asking. Over and over he heard the shot muffled by the rain, saw the faceless woman, someone he would never be able to recognize. The Halloween costumes raced ahead of him as he relaxed again into sleep.
    Rain awoke him at the brink of dawn. The dripping rain made a sound like someone pounding in a fence post. Leaving his camp undisturbed, he pulled on his slicker and zipped up his tent. Guided by his flashlight, he began slogging his way through overgrown brambles and wet vines toward the shimmering light of the plant, until he spotted a certain metal scrap heap some two hundred yards away. He didn’t go closer. He could see eerie blue flames licking the metal junk, with tongues of fire nearly a foot high. In a gentle rain like this one, mysterious blue flames often erupted, flickering delicately like a gas fire on artificial logs. The flames were lovely yet terrible, another of those elusive phenomena—like a solar storm, a starburst—that you strive to grasp but can’t. They made him think about quasars, those distant blue lights in the firmament.
    The rain was slacking up. He tramped a different route back to his camp, following dirt-bike paths and small lanes, avoiding the briar patches. The ruins of the munitions factory lay ahead. He reached the clearing where in his dream he had found the dead woman. In the dream the setting was visually more of a museum than a wilderness, but his mind had placed it in this space. It was the exact spot where he had romped with Julia among the slag heaps and ruined buildings. They had played hide-and-go-seek in the bunkers, chasing each other around the towers. That was before she accused him of betrayal.
    When he reached his camp, he quickly collapsed his tent, rolled up his wet tarps, and crammed his gear into the carrier. Then he kicked the motor to life.
    Women were always after him to get a cell phone. If Reed had really needed to call the police about the dead woman, it would have