Steel Read online

  Cars, thousands of them. Les thought of the field he’d seen once after WWII. It had been filled with bombers, wing to wing as far as the eye could see. This was just like it, only these were cars and the war wasn’t over, it was just beginning.

  “Isn’t it dangerous to leave all the cars here?” Ruth asked. “Won’t it make a target?”

  “Kid, no matter where the bomb falls it’s going to smear everything,” Bill said.

  “Besides,” said Les, “the way the entrances are built I don’t think it matters much where the bomb lands.”

  They all got out and stood for a moment as if they weren’t sure exactly what to do. Then Bill said, “Well, let’s go,” and patted the hood of his car. “So long, clunk—RIP.”

  “In pieces?” Les said.

  There were long lines at each of the twenty desks before the entrance. People filed slowly by and gave their names and addresses and were assigned to various bunker rows. They didn’t talk much, they just held their suitcases and moved along with little steps towards the entrance to The Tunnels.

  Ruth held Les’s arm with clenched fingers and he felt a tautness growing around the edges of his stomach, as if the muscles there were slowly calcifying. Each short, undramatic step took them closer to the entrance, further from the sky and the sun and the stars and the moon. And suddenly Les felt very sick and afraid. He wanted to grab Ruth’s hand and drive back to their apartment and stay there till it ended. Fred was right—he couldn’t help feeling it. Fred was right to know that a man couldn’t leave the only home he’d ever had and burrow into the earth like a mole and still be himself. Something would happen down there, something would change. The artificial air, the even banks of bulbed sunshine, the electric moon and the fluorescent stars invented at the behest of some psychological study that foretold aberration if they were taken away completely. Did they suppose these things would be enough? Could they possibly believe that a man might crawl beneath the ground in one great living grave for twenty years and keep his soul?

  He felt his body tighten involuntarily and he wanted to scream out at all the stupidity in the world that made men scourge themselves to their own destruction. His breath caught and he glanced at Ruth and he saw that she was looking at him.

  “Are you all right?”

  He drew in a shaking breath. “Yes,” he said. “All right.”

  He tried to numb his mind but without success. He kept looking at all the people around him, wondering if they felt, as he did, this fierce anger at what was happening, at what, basically, they had allowed to happen. Did they think too of the night before, of the stars and the crisp air and sounds of earth? He shook his head. It was torture to think about them.

  He looked over at Bill as the five of them shuffled slowly down the long concrete ramp to the elevators. Bill was holding Jeannie’s hand in his, looking down at her without any expression on his face. Then Les saw him turn and nudge Mary with the suitcase he held in his other hand. Mary looked at him and Bill winked.

  “Where are we going, Papa?” Jeannie asked, and her voice echoed shrilly off the white tile walls.

  Bill’s throat moved. “I told you,” he replied. “We’re going to live under the ground a while.”

  “How long?” Jeannie asked.

  “Don’t talk anymore, baby,” Bill said. “I don’t know.”

  There was no sound in the elevator. There were a hundred people in it and it was as still as a tomb as it went down. And down. And down.

  THE DOLL THAT DOES EVERYTHING

  The poet screamed, “Devil spawn! Scrabbling lizard! Maniacal kangaroo!”

  His scraggy frame went leaping through the doorway, then locked into paralysis. “Fiend!” he gagged.

  The object of this mottled-faced abuse squatted oblivious in a snowbank of confettied manuscript. Manuscript delivered of sweaty gestation, typewritten in quivering agony.

  “Foaming moonstruck octopus! Shovel-handed ape!” The blood-laced eyes of Ruthlen Beauson bagged gibbously behind their horn-rimmed lenses. At hipless sides, his fingers shook like leprous stringbeans in a gale. Ulcers within ulcers throbbed.

  “Hun!” he raged anew, “Goth! Apache! Demented nihilist!”

  Saliva dribbling from his teething maw, little Gardner Beauson bestowed a one-toothed grin upon his palsied sire. Shredded poetry filtered through his stubby fists as the semi-spheroid of his bottom hovered dampishly above each lacerated amphibrach with iambic variation.

  Ruthlen Beauson groaned a soul-wracked groan. “Confusion,” he lamented in a trembling voice. “Untrammeled farrago.”

  Then, suddenly, his eyes embossed into metallic orbs, his fingers petrified into a strangler’s pose. “I’ll do him in,” he gibbered faintly, “I’ll snap his hyoid with a brace of thumbs.”

  Upon this juncture, Athene Beauson, smock bespattered, hands adrip with soppy clay, swept into the room like a wraith of vengeance resurrected from the mud.

  “What now?” she asked, acidulous through gritted teeth.

  “Look! Look!” Ruthlen Beauson’s forefinger jabbed fitfully as he pointed toward their sniggering child. “He’s destroyed my Songs of Sconce!” His 20-90 eyes went bulgy mad. “I’ll carve him,” he foreboded in a roupy whisper, “I’ll carve the shriveled viper!”

  “Oh … look out,” Athene commanded, pulling back her butcher-bent spouse and dragging up her son by his drool-soaked undershirt.

  Suspended over heaps of riven muse, he eyed his mother with a saucy aspect.

  “Whelp!” she snapped, then let him have one, soundly, on his bulbous rump.

  Gardner Beauson screeched in inflammatory protest, was shown the door and exited, his little brain already cocked for further action. A residue of clay upon his diaper, he waddled, saucer-eyed, into the plenitude of breakables which was the living room as Athene turned to see her husband on his knees, aghast, in the rubble of a decade’s labor.

  “I shall destroy myself,” the poet mumbled, sagging shouldered. “I’ll inject my veins with lethal juices.”

  “Get up, get up,” said Athene crisply, face a sour mask.

  Ruthlen floundered to his feet. “I’ll kill him, yes, I’ll kill the wizened beast,” he said in hollow-hearted shock.

  “That’s no solution,” said his wife. “Even though…”

  Her eyes grew soft a moment as she dreamed of nudging Gardner into a vat of alligators. Her full lips quivered on the brink of tremulous smiling.

  Then her green eyes flinted. “That’s no solution,” she repeated, “and it’s time we solved this goddamn thing.”

  Ruthlen stared with dumb-struck eyes upon the ruins of his composition. “I’ll kill him,” he divulged to the scattered fragments, “I’ll—”

  “Ruthlen, listen to me,” said his wife, clay-soaked fingers clenching into fists.

  His spiritless gaze lifted for a moment.

  “Gardner needs a playmate,” she declared. “I read it in a book. He needs a playmate.”

  “I’ll kill him,” mumbled Ruthlen.

  “Will you listen!”

  “Kill him.”

  “I tell you Gardner has to have a playmate! I don’t care whether we can afford it or not, he needs a playmate!”

  “Kill,” the poet hissed. “Kill.”

  “I don’t care if we haven’t got a cent! You want time for poetry and I want time for sculpting!”

  “My Songs of Sconce.”

  “Ruthlen Beauson!” Athene screamed, a moment’s time before the deafening shatter of a vase.

  “Good God, what now!” Athene exclaimed.

  They found him dangling from the mantelpiece, caterwauling for succor and immediate change of diaper …

  THE DOLL THAT DOES EVERYTHING!

  Athene stood before the plate glass window, lips pursed in deep deliberation. In her mind, a vivid balance seesawed—grave necessity on the one side, sterile income on the other. Implastic contemplation ridged her brow. They had no money, that was patent. Nursery school was o
ut, a governess impossible. And yet, there had to be an answer; there had to be.

  Athene braced herself and strode into the shop.

  The man looked up, a kindly smile dimpling his apple cheeks, welcoming his customer.

  “That doll,” Athenes inquired. “Does it really do the things your placard says it does?”

  “That doll,” the salesman beamed, “is quite without comparison, the nonpareil of toycraft. It walks, it talks, it eats and drinks, dispenses body wastes, snores while it sleeps, dances a jig, rides a seesaw and sings the choruses of seven childhood favorites.” He caught his breath. “To name a few,” he said, “it sings ‘Molly Andrews’—”

  “What is the cost of—”

  “It swims the crawl for fifty feet, it reads a book, plays thirteen simple etudes on the pianoforte, mows the lawn, changes its own diapers, climbs a tree and burps.”

  “What is the price of—”

  “And it grows,” the salesman said.

  “It…”

  “Grows,” the man reiterated, slit-eyed. “Within its plastic body are all the cells and protoplasms necessary for a cycle of maturation lasting up to twenty years.”

  Athene gaped.

  “At one-thousand-oh-seven-fifty, an obvious bargain,” the man concluded. “Shall I have it wrapped or would you rather walk it home?”

  A swarm of eager hornets, each a thought, buzzed inside the head of Athene Beauson. It was the perfect playmate for little Gardner. One-thousand-seven-fifty though! Ruthlen’s scream would shatter windows when he saw the tag.

  “You can’t go wrong,” the salesman said.

  He needs a playmate!

  “Time payments can easily be arranged.” The salesman guessed her plight and fired his coup de grâce.

  All thoughts disappeared like chips swept off a gambling table. Athene’s eyes caught fire; a sudden smile pulled up her lip ends.

  “A boy doll,” she requested eagerly. “One year old.”

  The salesman hurried to his shelves …

  * * *

  No windows broke but Athene’s ears rang for half an hour after.

  “Are you mad?” her husband’s scream had plunged its strident blades into her brain. “One-thousand-seven-fifty!”

  “We can pay on time.”

  “With what?” he shrieked. “Rejection slips and clay!”

  “Would you rather,” Athene lashed out, “have your son alone all day? Wandering through the house—tearing—cracking—ripping—crushing?”

  Ruthlen winced at every word as if they were spiked shillelagh blows crushing in his head. His eyes fell shut behind the quarter-inch lenses. He shuddered fitfully.

  “Enough,” he muttered, pale hand raised, surrendering. “Enough, enough.”

  “Let’s bring the doll to Gardner,” Athene said excitedly.

  They hurried to the little bedroom of their son and found him tearing down the curtains. A hissing, taut-cheeked Ruthlen jerked him off the window sill and knuckle-rapped him on the skull. Gardner blinked once his beady eyes.

  “Put him down,” Athene said quickly. “Let him see.”

  Gardner stared with one-toothed mouth ajar at the little doll that stood so silently before him. The doll was just about his size, dark-haired, blue-eyed, flesh-colored, diapered, exactly like a real boy.

  He blinked furiously.

  “Activate the mechanism,” Ruthlen whispered and Athene, leaning over, pushed the tiny button.

  Gardner toppled back in drooling consternation as the little boy doll grinned at him. “Bah-bi-bah-bah!” Gardner cried hysterically.

  “Bah-bi-bah-bah,” echoed the doll.

  Gardner scuttled back, wild-eyed, and, from a wary crouch, observed the little boy doll waddling toward him. Restrained from further retreat by the wall, he cringed with tense astonishment until the doll clicked to a halt before him.

  “Bah-bi-bah-bah.” The boy doll grinned again, then burped a single time and started in to jig on the linoleum.

  Gardner’s pudgy lips spread out, abruptly, in an idiotic grin. He gurgled happily. His parents’ eyes went shut as one, beatific smiles creasing their grateful faces, all thoughts of financial caviling vanished.

  “Oh,” Athene whispered wonderingly.

  “I can’t believe it’s true,” her husband said, guttural with awe …

  For weeks, they were inseparable, Gardner and his motor-driven friend. They squatted down together, exchanging moon-eyed glances, chuckling over intimate jollities and, in general, relishing to the full their drooly tête à têtes. Whatever Gardner did, the doll did too.

  As for Ruthlen and Athene, they rejoiced in this advent of near-forgotten peace. Nerve-knotting screams no longer hammered malleus on incus and the sound of breaking things was not upon the air. Ruthlen poesied and Athene sculpted, all in a bliss of sabbath privacy.

  “You see?” she said across the dinner table of an evening. “It was all he needed; a companion,” and Ruthlen bowed his head in solemn tribute to his wife’s perspicacity.

  “True, ’tis true,” he whispered happily.

  A week, a month. Then gradually, the metamorphosis.

  Ruthlen, bogged in sticky pentameter, looked up one morning, eyes marbleized. “Hark,” he murmured.

  The sound of dismemberment of plaything.

  Ruthlen hastened to the nursery to find his only begotten ripping cotton entrails from a heretofore respected doll.

  The gloom-eyed poet stood outside the room, his heartbeat dwindling to the sickening thud of old while, in the nursery, Gardner disemboweled and the doll sat on the floor, observing.

  “No,” the poet murmured, sensing it was yes. He crept away, somehow managing to convince himself it was an accident.

  However, early the following afternoon at lunch, the fingers of both Ruthlen and his wife pressed in so sharply on their sandwiches that slices of tomato popped across the air and into the coffee.

  “What,” said Athene horribly, “is that?”

  Gardner and his doll were found ensconced in the rubble of what had been, in happier times, a potted plant.

  The doll was watching with a glassy interest as Gardner heaved up palmfuls of the blackish earth which rained in dirty crumbs upon the rug.

  “No,” the poet said, ulcers revivified and, “No,” the echo fell from Athene’s paling lips.

  Their son was spanked and put to bed, the doll was barricaded in the closet. A wounded caterwauling in their ears, the wife and husband twitched through wordless lunch while acids bred viler acids in their spasmed stomachs.

  One remark alone was spoken as they faltered to their separate works and Athene said it.

  “It was an accident.”

  But, in the following week, they had to leave their work exactly eighty-seven times.

  Once it was Gardner thrashing in pulled-down draperies in the living room. Another time it was Gardner playing piano with a hammer in response to the doll’s performance of a Bach gavotte. Still another time and time after time it was a rash of knocked-down objects ranging from jam jars to chairs. In all, thirty breakables broke, the cat disappeared and the floor showed through the carpet where Gardner had been active with scissors.

  At the end of two days, the Beausons poesied and sculpted with eyes embossed and white lips rigid over grinding teeth. At the end of four, their bodies underwent a petrifying process, their brains began to ossify. By the week’s end, after many a flirt and flutter of their viscera, they sat or stood in palsied silence, waiting for new outrages and dreaming of violent infanticide.

  The end arrived.

  One evening, suppering on a pitcherful of stomach-easing seltzers, Athene and her husband sat like rigor-mortised scarecrows in their chairs, their eyes four balls of blood-threaded stupor.

  “What are we to do?” a spirit-broken Ruthlen muttered.

  Athene’s head moved side to side in negating jerks. “I thought the doll—” she started, then allowed her voice to drift away.

  “T
he doll has done no good,” lamented Ruthlen. “We’re right back where we started. And deeper still by one-thousand-seven-fifty, since you say the doll cannot be exchanged.”

  “It can’t,” said Athene. “It’s—”

  She was caught in mid-word by the noise.

  It was a moist and slapping sound like someone heaving mud against a wall. Mud or—

  “No.” Athene raised her soul-bruised eyes. “Oh, no.”

  The sudden spastic flopping of her sandals on the floor syncopated with the blood-wild pounding of her heart. Her husband followed on his broomstick legs, lips a trembling circle of misgiving.

  “My figure!” Athene screamed, standing a stricken marble in the studio doorway, staring ashen-faced upon the ghastly sight.

  Gardner and the doll were playing Hit the Roses on the Wallpaper, using for ammunition great doughy blobs of clay ripped from Athene’s uncompleted statue.

  Athene and Ruthlen stood in horror-struck dumbness staring at the doll who, in the metal doming of its skull had fashioned new synaptic joinings and, to the jigging and the climbing and the burping, added flinging of clay.

  And, suddenly it was clear—the falling plant, the broken vases and jars on high shelves—Gardner needed help for things like that!

  Ruthlen Beauson seered a grisly future; i.e., the grisly past times two; all the Guignol torments of living with Gardner but multiplied by the presence of the doll.

  “Get that metal monster from this house,” Ruthlen mumbled to his wife through concrete lips.

  “But there’s no exchange!” she cried hysterically.

  “Then it’s me for the can opener!” the poet rasped, backing away on rocklike legs.

  “It’s not the doll’s fault!” Athene shouted. “What good will tearing up the doll do? It’s Gardner. It’s that horrid thing we made together!”

  The poet’s eyes clicked sharply in their sockets as he looked from doll to son and back again and knew the hideous truth of her remark. It was their son. The doll just imitated, the doll would do whatever it was—

  —made to do.

  Which was, precisely, to the second, when the idea came and, with it, peace unto the Beauson household.