“And if you didn’t stop, the malfunction got you.” Now Kazaklis sounded wistful. “Pretty smart little college girl, aren’t you?”
Moreau felt tears forming again. “Not that smart,” she said. “My father explained it to me. It took him a lifetime to understand the narcotic.” She sniffled and tried to hide it. Kazaklis reached out and squeezed her elbow in support. “He must have been quite a guy,” Kazaklis soothed. “You loved him very much, didn’t you?”
Moreau spun toward him, shuddering, the past tense jarring her sensibilities. Kazaklis understood instantly. “I’m sorry, Moreau,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean it that way. There’s a good chance he made it.”
“Not a good chance,” she said flatly, pulling herself back together. “A chance. If he was home, he made it through the bombing. Now the fallout’s coming.” She paused, but the tears were gone and the strength back. “He lectured a lot at the Academy. If he was there…” She thought of Christmas again. “I think he was ready.” She looked at Kazaklis. She knew so little about him. “Your family?” she asked.
Kazakhs glanced at his watch, seeing it was eight a.m. along the Coos. “My pa,” he said. “Mean old bastard. Tough as the Oregon woods. The old fart will fight it all the way.” The words were harsh but the voice soft and full of wonderment. Moreau had never heard Kazakhs speak quite that way.
“You also love him deeply,” she said.
A perplexed expression spread across his face. “Love him?” he asked vacantly. “My God, I guess I never thought I did. The old bastard.” He turned away and gazed thoughtfully into the eternity of the ocean. “I don’t suppose the fallout’s made it to Coos Bay yet.” He paused. “Another day. Two maybe.”
“What will he do?” Moreau asked softly.
Kazakhs turned back toward her with an ear-to-ear grin, no rascality in it at all, only pure pleasure. “If anybody will make it, Pa will make it,” he said with certainty. “The old coot wouldn’t mind goin’ in a flood or a forest fire. Anything natural. But he’ll fight this shit like he’d fight the devil himself. Shoot a deer, find a cave, send out for all the whores in Coos Bay, and start himself a new master race.”
Moreau could not prevent herself from laughing, Kazakhs having presented the image of his father with such bizarre exuberance. “A master race?” she sputtered through her laughter.
“Sure!” Kazakhs exuded, and he was laughing harder than Moreau now. “Just look at me!”
The two of them broke down into hysterical laughter, venting all the guilt of Elsies and Klickitats and duties and fathers left behind; venting all the fears and sorrows, the griefs and uncertainties, too. In the back of the cabin, Halupalai heard the strange sounds over the roar of the engine. He turned to see them convulsed in mutual laughter. He nodded appreciatively. He liked that. It was a good sign. Going home was, too, and they were getting close now.
Long after the two injured men had been hoisted across the teenagers’ muscular backs, and long after the perilous trek toward Olney had begun, Sedgwick emerged from his mind’s blackness. He had no idea how much time had transpired. The scene made no more sense to him than the crazy half-dreams of the ghostly trip across the countryside. He awoke to see the large black woman present herself regally to a man in a hooded white suit. She announced, quite authoritatively, “We has brought you the President of the United States.”
A hollow and tinny voice responded from inside the white hood. “Sure thing, lady,” it said, “and the Pope’s knocking at the back door.”
Kazaklis and Moreau had stopped laughing and were checking vectors. Halupalai’s islands lay forty-five minutes away.
Moreau’s mind had trouble focusing on the work. It raced with a dozen questions about the dead world they were about to pass over, still more about the unknown world that lay beyond. “I wish I had gotten to know you better,” she said suddenly. Kazaklis looked up from his plotting, surprised. “We don’t even know each other,” she continued. “None of us. Do you think we can survive, locked together in some New Yorker cartoon of a desert island?”
Kazaklis turned away. His voice went very quiet. “We can’t do any worse than the four billion people locked together on that big island beneath us. I like our odds better.”
She shook her head slowly. It was not a very optimistic reading. “Percentage baseball, huh?” she asked forlornly.
“To hell with percentage baseball,” Kazaklis said without emotion. “At some point, Moreau, you have to get out of Yankee Stadium and back to the sandlots.”
“Yes,” Moreau said. She gazed for a moment into the fluttering yellow gauges of the flight panel and the life she had chosen. “The roar of the madding crowd gets hard on the ears,” she said wistfully. “After a while that’s all you hear and you can’t understand the person next to you.” Kazaklis turned back toward her. “I still wish I had taken the time to know you better,” she said. He looked at her a moment longer. Then he said, “Check the vectors, will you?”
Moreau methodically returned to work, cross-checking their course. After a moment she looked up and asked, “We’re really going to make the overflight?”
“Yes,” he replied tersely. But it was clear he was worried too. “Moreau, take a look out there.” He gestured disconsolately at the spectacularly clean and serene panorama that immersed them. “The world doesn’t look that way anymore. We have to see the world once.”
She nodded in understanding. But she still asked, “And Halupalai, too?”
Kazakhs drew bleakly inside himself, not answering. Halupalai’s islands had controlled this entire ocean. They had been the repository for more of the gray instruments of control than any other place in the country whose flag Polar Bear One flew. They had contained submarine pens and air bases for rapid dispersal of the weapons throughout their realm. They had contained the headquarters of CINCPAC and the Pacific fleet, satellite-tracking stations and elaborate communications bases to tie the control together. In Halupalai’s paradise, grass-skirt hula dancers had fluttered talking hands at hidden megatons. No war would be fought without taking out Hawaii.
“Maybe Tyler was right,” he said. “This is all a bad dream. A great hoax. A test we failed.” He touched his symbolic glove and paused. “It’s the height of the tourist season, Moreau. The gonzos will be cruising the curls off Waikiki and the flower shirts will be guzzling maitais at the Ilikei.” His voice trailed off.
“I understand, Kazakhs,” she said.
“I had a buddy once…” Kazakhs grew distant. “Did grunt duty in Vietnam. Halfway through, they pulled him out of the mud and the crud and the blood, stuffed him aboard Pan American, and twelve hours later they dropped him in paradise. Six days of rest and recreation on Waikiki. He chased poon and watched the fat flower shirts swillin’ martinis like there was no mud and crud and body bags anywhere. For the flower shirts, there wasn’t. Then the Army collared him and took him back. Jesus.” Kazakhs grunted. “Hell to heaven. Heaven to hell. All he did was duck after that. Said Hawaii was the reason we lost the war. Half the Army was waitin’ for R and R and duckin’. The other half was rememberin’ and duckin’.” He grunted again and stopped.
Moreau kept her gaze trained on him.
“How the hell do I know, Moreau?” he asked, finally answering the question about Halupalai’s needs. “I just know we can’t run forever from something we haven’t seen.”
She stretched her arm out toward him again. “I’ll go back and talk to him before we make the approach,” he said. Then he went silent again, staring out the lefthand window at a sun ballooning upward into a perfect sky.