The Nuclear Age Read Free

my slippers, and ran for the basement. No real decision, I just did it.
    Basement, I thought.
    I went straight for the Ping-Pong table.
    Shivering, wide awake, I began piling scraps of lumber and bricks and old rugs onto the table, making a thick roof, shingling it with a layer of charcoal briquettes to soak up the deadly radiation. I fashioned walls out of cardboard boxes filled with newspapers and two-by-fours and whatever basement junk I could find. I built a ventilation shaft out of cardboard tubing. I stocked the shelter with rations from the kitchen pantry, laid in a supply of bottled water, set up a dispensary of Band-Aids and iodine, designed my own little fallout mask.
    When all this was finished, near dawn, I crawled under the table and lay there faceup, safe, arms folded across my chest.
    And, yes, I slept. No dreams.
    My father found me down there. Still half asleep, I heard him calling out my name in a voice so distant, so muffled and hollow, that it might’ve come from another planet.
    I didn’t answer.
    A door opened, lights clicked on. I watched my father’s slippers glide across the concrete floor.
    “William?” he said.
    I sank deeper into my shelter.
    “Hey, cowboy,” my father said. “Out.”
    His voice had a stern, echoing sound. It made me coil up.
    “Out,” he repeated.
    I could see the blue veins in his ankles. “Okay, in a minute,” I told him, “I’m sort of busy right now.”
    My father stood still for a moment, then shuffled to the far end of the table. His slippers made a whish-whish noise. “Listen here,” he said, “it’s a swell little fort, a dandy, but you can’t—”
    “It’s not a fort,” I said.
    “No?”
    And so I explained it to him. How, in times like these, we needed certain safeguards. A line of defense against the man-made elements. A fallout shelter.
    My father sneezed.
    He cleared his throat and muttered something. Then, suddenly, in one deft motion, he bent down and grabbed me by the ankles and yanked me out from under the table.
    Oddly, he was smiling.
    “William,” he murmured. “What’s
this?
”
    “What?”
    “This. Right here.”
    Leaning forward, still smiling, he jabbed a finger at my nose. At first I didn’t understand.
    “Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’s a fallout mask.”
    Actually, of course, it was just a paper bag filled with sawdust and charcoal briquettes. The bag had ventilation holes in it, and the whole contraption was attached to my face by strings and elastic bands. I grinned and started to show him how it worked, but my father raised his arm in a quick jerky movement, like a traffic cop, as if to warn me about something, then he squeezed my shoulder.
    “Upstairs,” he said. “On the double. Right now.”
    He seemed upset.
    He pulled the mask off and marched me up the stairs, coming on strong with all that fatherly stuff about how I could’ve caughtpneumonia, how he had enough to worry about without finding his kid asleep under a Ping-Pong table. All the while he kept glancing at me with those sharp blue eyes, half apprehensive and half amused, measuring.
    When we got up to the kitchen, he showed my mother the mask. “Go ahead,” he said, “guess what it is.” But he didn’t give her a chance. “A fallout mask. See there? Regulation fallout mask.”
    My mother smiled.
    “Lovely,” she said.
    Then my father told her about the Ping-Pong table. He didn’t openly mock me; he was subtle about it—a certain change of tone, raising his eyebrows when he thought I wasn’t looking. But I
was
looking. And it made me wince. “The Ping-Pong table,” he said slowly, “it’s now a fallout shelter. Get it? A fallout shelter.” He stretched the words out like rubber bands, letting them snap back hard: “Fallout shelter. Ping-Pong.”
    “It’s sweet,” my mother said, and her eyes did a funny rolling trick, then she laughed.
    “Fallout,” my father kept saying.
    Again, they didn’t mean to be cruel. But even after they’d