Accident

By Aharon Levy

*

For fifty-seven years the river had done what it was supposed to and nobody had given it a thought. But now its level was down to where it was all some people talked about, revealing the slimy stones and rusted shopping carts it had always hidden like dirty but uninteresting secrets.

At the enrichment complex they were studying contingency plans in which they’d never believed. Inside pipes, through separators and condensers, uranium hexafluoride gas whizzed as it had since Eisenhower, while seventy and ninety miles to the northeast the turbines were running out of water to churn into power. Without hydro the gas would cease being gas. Then the complex would become something else, someone else’s problem.

People acted surprised about all this, even though upriver it hadn’t rained more than a piss for twenty-seven months, even though for longer than that the idiots on the right in Congress had been trying to teach the idiots on the left something-or-other, blocking funding for the grid interconnect which would have made all this worry moot. People mostly pretended it would be fine, but nobody knew. Tom Kerry didn’t know, and wasn’t pretending.

Also, they’d found his son Norris, who hadn’t, after all, gone to tend bar in Key West but had made it only twenty-six miles to Blandville. Every time Tom thought of the town’s absurd name he shook his head. Who’d thought it was a good idea?

Police had found Norris’s car and inside it five and a half pounds of meth, an albino ball python, and a very high girl who wasn’t quite sixteen. They’d found Norris himself a quarter mile away, crouched behind a pyramid of highway salt left over from the nothing winter.

And now Ed Rawle, who’d drawn up Tom and Malene’s wills, leaned back, soft fingers over soft belly, and said, “I’m just not sure Norris is the victim here.”

Tom didn’t respond. Ed was a talker, a lawyer, so he went on, “It’s just that he didn’t have any in his system. They tested. So.” Ed had known about Norris before Tom had. It was unclear to Tom whether Norris had used his one call—was this real, anyway, or a myth?—on Rawle; he surely hadn’t used it on his parents. “And it was his snake, too, registered to him and everything. An animal like that costs thousands. It seemed to them he might have been in charge. Norris was always smart. So.”

“He’s been talking Key West.”

“Well, Key West’s expensive.”

“Interesting, where not being high makes you guilty.” There was no point arguing, Tom understood, but here he was. “You know, I’ve had the same job thirty-four years.”

“I know that,” Ed said, sounding like he hadn’t but wasn’t surprised.

“Those pipes have to run nonstop, twenty-four-seven. No downtime. You think, same job, so long, what’s wrong with him? But Westinghouse or whoever wouldn’t have been exciting after this.”

“Okay.”

“We make the stuff that makes the bombs, that’s all we do, and we’ve never dropped one. Every day I’m grateful my job’s useless.”

In his mind it had been a refutation, but in his mouth it was just words. Ed kept silent a few respectful seconds. “I wish I could help more but this isn’t what I do. I’ll give you the name of an excellent criminal lawyer. Excellent. Tell him I sent you.” He licked his lips, quickly. “Just so he’ll make time for you, that’s all.”

“You know what engineers spend all day thinking about? Failure. What can go wrong, how to prevent it. Then we have to explain that to whoever’s in charge. Engineers are never in charge. We don’t have the personality.”

“I think, maybe, none of my business, just an observation, maybe you should be thinking about your boy now.”

“Norris? He’s fine. He has nothing to do with any snake.” How good he’d imagined it would feel to say just what he thought. But it was still just talk.

In the parking structure Tom whispered, “Fuck,” as he’d started to after the drought’s first year. The swearing was for the river; the whispering for Malene, who some ridiculous part of him believed might still hear. That thing about the uranium wasn’t quite true. They’d been reprocessing only since the 90s, old Soviet-or-Russian-or-whatever warheads into new American ones. But the idea appealed, hard and diligent work in the service of something useless.

“Goddamn.” The road was slick, a misty rain falling. Paducah itself had gotten some rain, but rain there was useless; the river just passed through.

Norris was sweet, sly, but not that sly. And he was a good boy; he’d come home when they told him to. This was before he failed out, so there was nothing on his record to stop him from returning. The worst he was guilty of was being young.

Malene hadn’t seen the point of coming. She’d prayed on it, and Tom couldn’t say that was less useful than anything else.

“Shit.”

He didn’t like how she’d become happy and placid, didn’t like Pastor Gaines at Gentle Army—what kind of name was that for a church, for anything?—who accepted a slice of cake not dutifully but with actual hunger. Gaines had three pretty daughters, just like a dirty joke, and for a while this had been enough to bring Norris to church. Tom understood his son.

Eight days he’d been missing, or anyway hadn’t answered their calls. He’d become a kingpin in eight days?

The squirrel was in the street, darting as if all its problems would be solved on the other side. Tom swerved and the animal swerved with him as if they’d planned it. Tom heard a crunch.

The thing to do was keep moving, but he hated those road-smears, primitive and grotesque. Because his mind had its own paths he thought of the dials on his console, ancient and sturdy, like eight hundred meat thermometers.

Norris had always done his own thing, aggravatingly, but as a parent you had to be proud, didn’t you, of your kid finding his own way?

Tom left his hazard-lit car and walked ten steps, twenty, thirty, but apart from bottle-caps and cigarettes, there was nothing. No blood, no fur. More traffic appeared, honking at him like the damn fool he was, bending to examine nothing.

He was grinning like a fool too. People were too quick to see meaning in things, and Tom was suspicious of all that. Things happened, more things happened, and anything beyond that was speculation. But look at the sky, no longer misting but pouring, clouds headed upriver where they might actually do some good. Look at the road, clean grumpy asphalt already exhaling its rainbows. His soaked shoes took him further from his car, though as far as he was considered he’d already been proven wrong: the squirrel had gotten away. A miracle, a sign. What else could it be?

*

*

Aharon Levy has been published here and there and has been to this or that residency. He lives in Brooklyn, NY and recently completed his first novel.