An Atomic Romance Read Free Page A

taken him half an hour to find a telephone. The dream had been so real that as he swerved through the back roads, he seemed to be dreaming still. He imagined going to the police station to report what he had seen. He harbored a slight worrisome thread of paranoia. What about his footprints at the site? And did he touch the window? No. He knew nothing. She was a stranger.
    The scene had been so desolate. No one had heard the woman’s last utterances; she was like a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear. His own ears were nearly dead from the decibels at work.
    Reed was normally a confident guy, given to bursts of pleasure and celebratory blasts of energy. He wasn’t afraid of much, he knew how to protect himself, he could deal with almost anything. Being neighborly, he once rushed into a burning house to save a ninety-seven-year-old invalid. “Slow down,” his former wife, Glenda, had often said to him. “You’ll burn yourself out.” Now in his forties, he still aimed to charge through life with youthful zeal. But for the last couple of years, a deep pain welled inside him occasionally and confused him. He supposed it was simply chemical—if chemistry was ever simple. But as bitter as his moods had sometimes been, he had never entertained a suicidal thought. The dead woman couldn’t have represented Glenda. She was too much of a schemer, a master of coupon organization. And the dead woman was definitely not his mother. Although she had high cholesterol and arthritis, her life force had the strength of the Saturn V.
    And she wasn’t Julia. In no way was she Julia.
    He skirted the construction site east of the plant. It seemed forsaken without the row of blue portable toilets, which were removed the day construction was halted. The cranes posed for still lifes.
    Reed rode all day, through several counties, following no particular route. The dream wouldn’t fade out. If he had really found a dead woman, people at work would approach him, curious and agog. They would want to hear his story over and over. It would be like receiving congratulations for something extraordinary he had done. Over and over he thought of her last hours. The way she lined up the photos on the dashboard—how long did she stare at those pitiful pictures? Did she talk to them? Did she put off her act until she had said everything she wanted to say?
    He let the wind fly through his hair as he swirled around the narrow roads, the sun winking through the leaves like a strobe light. He loved the patterns of sun and shade in the woods on either side of him. Wildlife fled from his mighty engine. Reed Futrell did not know where he was going. He rode along a precipice. He was a mechanized Road Runner, rushing along, but watching himself too, knowing that if he leaned too far in one direction or the other he would pancake down a canyon. His fatalism annoyed Julia.
    “I’ve been living with that stuff so long my insides would be neon green if you opened me up,” he had told her. “If I’ve got it, I’ve got it.”
    “But if you don’t, wouldn’t it be a relief to know?”
    “Can’t you do the blood test for me?”
    “No, it’s against the rules. The paperwork would screw you up.”
    “Won’t you stick me, honey?” he said, running his hand down her back.
    “Can’t do.”
    “I’d like to stick you,” he said.
    Julia could not know his work history. He hadn’t told her. He wouldn’t.
    His mind always meandered while on the road, or lying on the tarp in the woods, or inside the patched pup tent he’d hauled around for years. But now he observed that he was surveying his whole life as though it had a pattern, passions and frailties that connected together.
    Reed had grown up reading the
Encyclopedia Americana
and listening to big bands. He always had dogs. He loved shooting targets. He loved women. He loved being married for the first fifteen years, before he and Glenda began fighting. He realized that when they married,