Count Geiger's Blues Read Free

his idiosyncratic Oconee accent. “Bet you’re gonna sleep good t’night, ma’am?”
    “I will,” Nurse Roving said. “I certainly will.”
    *
    Down-shifting on an upgrade northeast of the city, the driver noisily sucked his teeth. Jack, who was reading the funny papers from yesterday’s Salonika Urbanite , didn’t notice. The driver smiled. Mr. F.’s people had thought of everything, including a way to fake the mandated check-offs from Memphis, Wichita, Denver, Boise, and the other major sites en route to the dump site. It was all a matter of contacts. . . .
    “Hey, Will,” Jack said an hour or so later, having polished off the last of his comic strips. “Where are we?”
    Will didn’t answer. They were in the Phosphor Fog Mountains, a dozen or so miles from Placer Creek, and he was looking for a turn that would carry them past a rotted-out mill on a branch of Placer Creek. He found the turn and gunned the van along the muddy ruts of the sweetgum-bordered road. It was late autumn and rainy. Moist foliage scraped the van, and, despite the rain, a section of sky ahead of them pulsed yellow, as if urine tinctured or faintly beer polluted.
    “Will—my God, Will, what’s that?”
    “Plont VonMeter. Con-Tri’s a-building it.”
    “Jesus, Will, what’re we doin’ up here?”
    “This is where we’re gonna dump them little lead barrels Nurse Roving jes’ signed arf on.”
    “Dump ’em? Up here? What for?”
    “Old Mr. F.’s people don’t want us wasting our time truckin’ crass-country when we can do what needs doing claser to home. And if any of the hot stuff from them radium needles shows up in the atmosphere, well, Plont VonMeter’ll cotch the flak for it. Hot stuff’s hot stuff, right?”
    Will drove the van into a tight clearing overlooking the upper reaches of the millrace, then backed it around so that they could shove the radium-waste drums out the rear without any lifting or toting. To Will’s disgust, Jack refused to touch a single cylinder until he’d bundled himself in his butyl-rubber suit, by which time Will had already wrestled three cylinders to the edge of the cargo bay and launched them like radioactive depth charges into a pewter-colored rock pool far below the wooded cliff. The cylinders were almost gone from sight before they actually hit the creek, but Will could hear them breaking the icy water and sliding irretrievably into it. When Jack lumbered up to help, Will shooed him away.
    “Too late. Besides, this is more fun than a scroffy wort like you deserves to have.”
    He unloaded the rest of the cylinders himself, even carrying a few to different parts of the cliff so they wouldn’t land atop one another and build an upjutting reef in the pool. The effort wore him out, but it was a kick too. There was something to be said for playing bombadier. It was almost as much fun as an evening at the Grand Ole Opry.
    *
    The rock pool in the creek was deep. The cylinders plummeted down through its waters, in unseen tumbling slow motion, until they could drop no farther. One, after bouncing a few times on the creek’s nearer shore, didn’t reach the water. It lodged among a colony of pigwort and ferns, a bomb with an internal timing mechanism. . . .

1
A Superior Man
    Xavier Thaxton viewed himself as a superior man . But because he earned his living as a journalist, he sometimes had doubts about the degree of his superiority, recalling Oscar Wilde’s remark, “The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.”
    Even more damaging to Xavier’s confidence was the fact that he wasn’t a bona fide reporter or an editorial writer, but, well, a reviewer, a critic. Which left him open to jibes that he wasn’t a real newspaperman. One colleague liked to bushwhack him with a James Russell Lowell couplet: “Nature fits all her children with something to do; / He who would write and can’t write, can surely review.”
    Even so,