Gus seemed to ponder that for a few moments, and his voice quiet, he said, “My dad.”
“What about him?”
“It was his fault.”
Michael was so glad he hadn’t rushed things, because this was certainly a new bit of information. Gus sighed. “My dad. A gentle guy. Never once hit me. Was a deacon at our local Congregational Church. Didn’t really belong in the military at all. But they were calling everybody up back then, teenagers, fathers, guys with glasses or some medical conditions. A cousin of his, he said to my dad Curt, ‘Curt, join the Navy. You’ll sleep at night in a bunk, you won’t be in a muddy trench, you’ll have food three times a day, no cold rations, and no marching.’ So he joined the Navy.”
Gus rotated his cane twice. “Since he was so smart and quiet, he was assigned to some military evaluation team. He and a bunch of others were sent to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to check on what the places were like after the atomic bombs had been dropped a month earlier. It was horrifying, he told me later, all these blasted buildings, the trees burnt stumps, and wounded and burnt people still stumbling around.”
“That’s war,” Mike said.
Gus shook his head. “No, dad thought differently. It may have ended the war, but it also opened the door to something much more terrifying, something that could go beyond destroying cities to destroying whole peoples, whole countries, even the damn planet itself. He said every day and night there just sickened him. He said going across the Pacific, not once did he get seasick, but he was nauseous and threw up a lot when he was in Japan.”
“That’s why he didn’t want you to join the military, do anything that had to do with defense.”
“You got it. He only talked about it as he got older, and then, in 1962, he got lung cancer. Pretty funny, since he never smoked a cigarette or a cigar in his life. His doc told me privately that he probably kicked up a lot of radioactive dust when he was going through Nagasaki and Hiroshima, kept on breathing it in. By then I was married, to a nice girl called Sylvia, had two young boys, and I was working at the shipyard, making good money. My dad died that October. I was his only son, so I went through some of his things. That’s when I found the movies.”
“What kind of movies?”
“My dad, he told me that he and the others, they were forbidden to take photos at Hiroshima and Nagasaki unless it was part of their official work. But somehow dad got a hold of an eight-millimeter movie camera, even used color film. I think he went out on his own and took these short little movies. No sound, of course, but you didn’t need sound to figure out was going on.”
Michael let him sit quiet for a few moments, wind coming off the water flapping the loose ends of Gus’s white zippered jacket. “What were the movies like?”
A heavy, drawn-out sigh, like the man next to him had just finished climbing an impossibly high peak. “I still dream about them, even though it’s been thirty years. I found a projector and one night, hung up a white bedsheet in the basement and played them. The city… you see those TV reports, about a tornado hitting some city out in the Midwest? Just piles of rubble and debris. That’s what it was like. Except the rubble had burned… there were places along the sides of bridges or cement walls, where the flash from the bomb had burned in shadows… and the last bit of the third film, it was the people. Still walking around in shock at what happened to them. One plane, one bomb… there were these two little boys… about the age of my own little fellas… looking at the camera, looking at my dad… they were barefoot… the clothes they was wearing was filthy… and each was holding a little ball of rice. And you could tell they was brothers, they looked the same… even were hurt the same…”
The old man’s voice dribbled off. Michael cleared his throat. “How were they injured?”
“The right side of their faces. Scabbed and crisscrossed with burns. Like they were walking down a street, going in the same direction, when the bomb hit and burned them. Oh, I know they were the Japs, the enemy, and lots said they deserved it for what they did at Pearl Harbor and Bataan. But when I saw it, in 1962, the war had been over a long time. All I saw was two kids, all I saw was my two boys, burned and barefoot in the wreckage of their city.”
Michael saw the emotion in the man’s face, the tears coming up in his eyes, and it came to him. “You said your father died in October, 1962. That’s when the Cuban Missile Crisis was, when we almost got into World War III with the Russians. You put the two together, didn’t you.”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Had Sylvia take the two boys up to a hunting camp of ours, over in Maine, with food and supplies. She said it wasn’t right to take ’em out of school, but I also said it wouldn’t be right to have ’em vaporized or burned in Portsmouth, because, by God, we were a goddamn target for the Russians. That and the SAC base over in Newington. And a couple of times, I went out drinking in some of the bars in Portsmouth, and got drunk and pissed off, and said that damn fool Kennedy was going to kill us all, burn us and flatten our cities, because he got kicked in the nuts at the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, and had to prove he was a real man to his bootlegger daddy.”
“Somebody heard you, then.”
Gus said, “Oh yeah. Somebody heard something, who passed it on to somebody else, and one day, a guy came by and bought me some drinks. Said he was in the government, trying to work for peace, but he and the others were fighting against the hawks that were controlling JFK. He spun a good yarn, the bastard, and said if I was truly for peace, I could help things out. And I said, how? And he said, well, the Thresher’s being overhauled. If the overhaul took longer and longer, if problems cropped up, if things were delayed, that would help him and the others. Put things over budget. He and the others could help JFK rein in the defense department, help him work for peace with the Russians.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told ’em to go to hell… but he was sly, he was wicked sly. Wouldn’t take no for an answer. Showed me his ID, said he worked for the Department of Defense. Even took me to his office, just outside of the SAC base.”
“All faked, wasn’t it?”
“ ’Course it was,” Gus said. “But I was too young, too dumb. He kept on going back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He said look, back then, the Japs were our mortal enemies. Now we’re best buds. We’re buying their radios and soon we’ll be buying their televisions. That’s what happens in wartime. Your enemies become your friends. Look at Germany and us. So who can say what we and the Russians will be like, ten or twenty years down the line? But the big difference was the bomb. The next war would be fought with the bomb, and this guy—Chandler was his supposed name—said, you know what Einstein said, about World War IV?”
Michael said, “Beats the hell out of me.”
“Einstein said, the fourth world war would be fought with sticks and stones. That’s what he said.” Another long sigh. “I watched those movies again, and I made up my mind. I told Chandler I’d help, but only to delay things. Not to hurt anybody. He gave me a tiny black box to smuggle in during my next work shift, which is what I did. A week later, the Thresher went out on a shakedown cruise, never came back…”
Gus coughed. Tears were rolling down his cheeks. “What was worse… I mean, the whole thing was bad. All those poor sailors, all those poor families. But what made it worse was knowing there were seventeen civilians on board, guys from my own shipyard, guys from companies like Raytheon. You think, hey, the military, they sign up to put their lives on the line, that’s the risk. But these civilian techs… I’m sure they thought it was a thrill, to go along on this test dive, to make sure things worked… and then they sure didn’t. Can you imagine that, you’re a civilian, having a blast on this top-secret sub, thinking about bragging to your coworkers when you got back, figuring out what you could tell your wife and kids… and then alarms. Navy crewmen running around. Shouting. The sub tilting its nose up, sinking by the stern… knowing in your bones that the water wasn’t shallow enough to hit bottom… only knowing you were going to be dead within seconds…”