“Mine too.”
But Tom doesn’t hear, he’s off in a dark Santa Ana wind, muttering to himself, to his childhood friends, trying to recall the name of that carol, trying to keep the candles lit.
So they hold hands and look at the wall. And the old man falls asleep.
Jim frees his hand, stands, checks to see that the oxygen line is clear and the tank over half-full. He straightens the sheets the best he can. He looks at Tom’s face and then finds he can’t look anymore. In fact he has to sit down. He holds his head, squeezes hard, waits for the fit to pass. When it does he hurries out of the place and drives home to dinner.
73
So Jim gets to his parents’ home not long after Dennis does.
Dennis is out under their little carport, working on the motor of his car. “Hi, Dad.” No answer. Jim’s feeling too low for this sort of thing, and he goes into their portion of the house without another word.
Lucy asks about Tom.
“He’s had a cold. He’s not so well.”
Hiss of breath, indrawn. Then she says, “Go out and talk to your father. He needs something to take his mind off work.”
“I just said hello and he didn’t say a thing.”
“Get out there and talk to him!” Fiercely: “He needs to talk to you!”
“All right, all right.” Jim sighs, feeling aggrieved, and goes back outside.
His father stands crouched over the motor compartment, head down under the hood, steadfastly ignoring Jim. Ignoring Jim and everything else, Jim thinks. A retreat into his own private world.
Jim approaches him. “What are you working on?”
“The car.”
“I know that,” Jim snaps.
Dennis glances up briefly at him, turns back to his task.
“Want some help?”
“No.”
Jim grits his teeth. Too much has happened; he’s lost all tolerance for this sort of treatment. “So what are you working on?” he insists, an edge in his voice.
Dennis doesn’t look up this time. “Cleaning the switcher points.”
Jim looks into the motor compartment, at Dennis’s methodically working hands. “They’re already clean.”
Dennis doesn’t reply.
“You’re wasting your time.”
Dennis looks at him balefully. “Maybe I ought to work on your car. I don’t suppose that would be wasting my time.”
“My car doesn’t need work.”
“Have you done any maintenance on it since I last looked at it?”
“No. I’ve been too busy.”
“Too busy.”
“That’s right! I’ve been busy! It isn’t just in the defense industry that people get busy, you know.”
Dennis purses his mouth. “A lot of night classes, I suppose.”
“That’s right!” Angrily Jim walks up to the side of the car, so that only the motor compartment and the hood separate him from Dennis. “I’ve been busy going to the funerals of people we know, and trying to help my friends, and working in a real estate office, and teaching a night class. Teaching, that’s right! It’s the best thing I do—I teach people what they need to know to get by in the world! It’s good work!”
Dennis’s swift, smoldering glance shows he understands very clearly the implication of Jim’s words. He looks back down at the motor, at his hands and their intensely controlled maneuvers. A minute passes as he finishes cleaning the points.
“So you don’t think I do good work, is that it?” he says slowly.
“Dad, people are starving! Half the world is starving!” Jim is almost shaking now, the words burst out of him: “We don’t need more bombs!”
Dennis picks up the point casing, places it over the points, takes up a wrench and begins to tighten one of the nuts that holds it to the sidewall.
“Is that all you think I do?” he asks quietly. “Make bombs?”
“Isn’t that what you do?”
“No, it isn’t. Mostly I make guidance systems.”
“It’s the same thing!”
“No. It isn’t.”
“Oh come on, Dad. It’s all part of the same thing. Defense! Weapons systems!”
Dennis’s jaw is bunched hard. He threads the second nut, begins to tighten it, all very methodically.
“You think we don’t need such systems?”
“No, we don’t!” Jim has lost all composure, all restraint. “We don’t have the slightest need for them!”
“Do you watch the news?”
“Of course I watch the news. We’re in several wars, there’s a body count every day. And we provide the weapons for those wars. And for a lot of others too.”
“So we need some weapons systems.”
“To make wars!” Jim cries furiously.
“We don’t start the wars by ourselves. We don’t make all the weapons, and we don’t start all the wars.”
“I’m not so sure of that—it’s great business!”
“Do you really think that’s it?” Surely that nut is tight by now. “That there are people that cynical?”
“I suppose I do, yes. There are a lot of people who only really care about money, about profits.”
Abruptly Dennis pulls the wrench off the nut.
“It’s not that simple,” he says down at the motor, almost as if to himself. “You want it to be that simple, but it isn’t. A lot of the world would love to see this country go up in smoke. They work every day to make weapons better than ours. If we stopped—”
“If we stopped they would stop! But what would happen to profits then? The economy would be in terrible trouble. And so it goes on, new weapon after new weapon, for a hundred years!”
“A hundred years without another world war.”
“All the little wars add up to a world war. And if they go nuclear it’s the end, we’ll all be killed! And you’re a part of that!”
“Wrong!” Bang the wrench hits the underside of the hood as Dennis swings it up, points it at Jim. Behind the wrench Dennis’s face is red with anger, he’s leaning over the motor compartment, staring at Jim, his face an inch from the hood; and the wrench is shaking. “You listen to what I do, boy. I help to make systems for use in precision electronic warfare. And don’t you look at me like they’re all the same! If you can’t tell the difference between electronic war and the mass nuclear destruction of the world, then you’re too stupid to talk to!” Bang he hits the underside of the hood with the wrench. There’s a hoarse edge in his voice that Jim has never heard before, and it cuts into Jim so sharply that he takes a step back.
“I can’t do a thing about nuclear war, it’s out of my hands. Hopefully one will never be fought. But conventional wars will be. And some of those wars could kick off a nuclear one. Easily! So it comes to this—if you can make conventional wars too difficult to fight, just on technical grounds alone, then by God you put an end to them! And that lessens the nuclear threat, the main way that we might fall into a nuclear war, in a really significant way!”