Count Geiger's Blues Read online

  “I was starting to think nobody would come for this stuff,” she said. “It took me three years to find a firm like yours.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re sarta new,” the driver said.

  “No one wants used radioactives anymore. No disposal firm. No disposal site. I was getting frantic.”

  “Nothing to fret naw, ma’am. Jack and I know what we’re doin’, we do it awl th’ time.”

  “Where will you take it?”

  “Hanford ’Tomic Energy Reservation in Woshington State. They know us there. Got us a long-term cantroct wi’ them.”

  “They told me no a dozen times. So did sites in South Carolina and Idaho. I was ready to try France.”

  “Don’t mean to rap the Frenchies, but why go to furriners when you can deal wi’ Americons?”

  The driver, a middle-aged man with short reddish hair, and his partner, who might have been a trainee, put on butyl-rubber suits. The suits were more protection than they needed, but their company, Environomics Unlimited, the driver said, liked to play it safe. The administrative nurse, Teri-Jo Roving, led the EU disposal men in their balloon suits into the clinic, where they took a service elevator to the basement.

  Here, the only sound was the sluicing of wastes—human, not radioactive—through an organ-pipe assembly of bracketed overhead tubes. Nurse Roving took the men into a storage area posted with stenciled cloverleaf warnings and unlocked the door to its central vault. Soon, using a furniture mover’s hand truck, the men began emptying the room of the cylinders containing the discarded radium needles. In less than an hour, they had transferred every cylinder from the vault to the rear of their silver truck.

  “Sign here,” the unsuited driver said, handing Nurse Roving a daunting stack of forms. She signed in all the specified places and tore off a batch of copies for the clinic’s records. “’At’s awl there is to it. Bye-bye, unwontered hot stuff.” The driver looked at Nurse Roving. “I need our payment, ma’am—first hoff of ’er, anyways.”

  “Of course. Sorry.” She handed the driver a cashier’s check for $2,500. The clinic would authorize another payment of a like amount as soon as it had official acknowledgment that the shipment had reached its destination. A paper trail would document the rad waste’s movement from Salonika to the Pacific Northwest.

  “Thonks,” the driver said in his idiosyncratic Oconee accent. “Bet you’re gonna sleep good t’night, ma’am?”

  “I will,” Nurse Roving said. “I certainly will.”

  *

  Down-shifting on an upgrade northeast of the city, the driver noisily sucked his teeth. Jack, who was reading the funny papers from yesterday’s Salonika Urbanite, didn’t notice. The driver smiled. Mr. F.’s people had thought of everything, including a way to fake the mandated check-offs from Memphis, Wichita, Denver, Boise, and the other major sites en route to the dump site. It was all a matter of contacts. . . .

  “Hey, Will,” Jack said an hour or so later, having polished off the last of his comic strips. “Where are we?”

  Will didn’t answer. They were in the Phosphor Fog Mountains, a dozen or so miles from Placer Creek, and he was looking for a turn that would carry them past a rotted-out mill on a branch of Placer Creek. He found the turn and gunned the van along the muddy ruts of the sweetgum-bordered road. It was late autumn and rainy. Moist foliage scraped the van, and, despite the rain, a section of sky ahead of them pulsed yellow, as if urine tinctured or faintly beer polluted.

  “Will—my God, Will, what’s that?”

  “Plont VonMeter. Con-Tri’s a-building it.”

  “Jesus, Will, what’re we doin’ up here?”

  “This is where we’re gonna dump them little lead barrels Nurse Roving jes’ signed arf on.”

  “Dump ’em? Up here? What for?”

  “Old Mr. F.’s people don’t want us wasting our time truckin’ crass-country when we can do what needs doing claser to home. And if any of the hot stuff from them radium needles shows up in the atmosphere, well, Plont VonMeter’ll cotch the flak for it. Hot stuff’s hot stuff, right?”

  Will drove the van into a tight clearing overlooking the upper reaches of the millrace, then backed it around so that they could shove the radium-waste drums out the rear without any lifting or toting. To Will’s disgust, Jack refused to touch a single cylinder until he’d bundled himself in his butyl-rubber suit, by which time Will had already wrestled three cylinders to the edge of the cargo bay and launched them like radioactive depth charges into a pewter-colored rock pool far below the wooded cliff. The cylinders were almost gone from sight before they actually hit the creek, but Will could hear them breaking the icy water and sliding irretrievably into it. When Jack lumbered up to help, Will shooed him away.

  “Too late. Besides, this is more fun than a scroffy wort like you deserves to have.”

  He unloaded the rest of the cylinders himself, even carrying a few to different parts of the cliff so they wouldn’t land atop one another and build an upjutting reef in the pool. The effort wore him out, but it was a kick too. There was something to be said for playing bombadier. It was almost as much fun as an evening at the Grand Ole Opry.

  *

  The rock pool in the creek was deep. The cylinders plummeted down through its waters, in unseen tumbling slow motion, until they could drop no farther. One, after bouncing a few times on the creek’s nearer shore, didn’t reach the water. It lodged among a colony of pigwort and ferns, a bomb with an internal timing mechanism. . . .

  1

  A Superior Man

  Xavier Thaxton viewed himself as a superior man. But because he earned his living as a journalist, he sometimes had doubts about the degree of his superiority, recalling Oscar Wilde’s remark, “The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.”

  Even more damaging to Xavier’s confidence was the fact that he wasn’t a bona fide reporter or an editorial writer, but, well, a reviewer, a critic. Which left him open to jibes that he wasn’t a real newspaperman. One colleague liked to bushwhack him with a James Russell Lowell couplet: “Nature fits all her children with something to do; / He who would write and can’t write, can surely review.”

  Even so, Xavier persevered in the notion that he was a superior specimen of humanity. For one thing, he wasn’t only a reviewer. He was the Fine Arts editor at the Salonika Urbanite. He directed the newspaper’s coverage of any event of sufficient aesthetic merit—ballet, opera, art show, symphony concert, foreign films, even the opening of a gourmet restaurant—to escape the net of Popular Culture editor Lee Stamz. (Stamz and his staff covered the lowbrow end of the entertainment world: rock concerts, Hollywood movies, TV programs, nightclub acts, and so on.)

  Besides, Xavier had a sense of mission. If he could reach even one percent of the Salonika Urbanite’s weekend circulation of two million (most of whom dismissed any article about Beethoven or Buñuel as “boring”), he and his staff would be influencing—for the better—about twenty thousand people, unveiling for them a panorama of Beauty and Truth heretofore eclipsed by the ubiquitous contemporary smog of bad books, stupid movies, atrocious music, and second-rate visual art.

  I am a railing alongside the torrent, thought Xavier, echoing an epigram of Nietzsche’s. Whoever is able to grasp me may grasp me! Your crutch, however, I am not.

  For Xavier regarded himself as a disciple of Friedrich Nietzsche, as Nietzsche revealed himself in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and Ecce Homo. However, he didn’t regard himself as the fabled end product of Nietzsche’s yearnings, the Superman. Instead, he was a modern hero bridging the chasm between today’s bipedal beast-men and tomorrow’s transcendent Übermensch. As Fine Arts editor, he daily exposed the unwashed masses of Salonika to humanity’s highest artistic achievements.

  I’m championing what I believe in, Xavier sometimes told himself: I’m acting on my convictions.

  *

  “Why keep trying to raise the rabble’s t
aste?” Walter Grantham, the Urbanite’s Metro/State editor, once asked Xavier.

  “Because it needs raising.”

  “But wouldn’t Nietzsche say, ‘Abandon the poisonous flies’ ?”

  “Probably,” Xavier conceded. “‘It is not thy lot to be a fly-flap,’ he writes in Zarathustra.”

  “But you hang on here, anyway.”

  “I’m an idealist, Walt. I always think there’s something I can do. Even for the, pardon me, ‘rabble.’ ”

  “Nietzsche’d puke.”

  “Maybe. He’d say I should love the nonflies enough to quit this job and write the kind of philosophical-poetic criticism that they could draw sustenance from.”

  “So here on the Urbanite, Xavier, you are a sort of fly-flap, aren’t you? Swatting at the buzzing multitudes.”

  “I guess. But I’m not trying to swat them dead, I’m trying to swat them awake.”

  Three weeks later, Walt Grantham and the three members of Xavier’s Fine Arts staff—Donel Lassiter (music), Pippa Wiedmeyer (art), and Cliff Todd (drama)—gave him a flyswatter for his birthday.

  Everyone laughed, including Xavier.

  Then Pippa gave him a second gift. Unwrapped, it turned out to be a copy of the latest issue of Superman. Xavier guffawed again. As soon as everyone had left, though, Xavier trash-canned the comic book.

  Emphatically.

  2

  Aye, and Salonika

  Salonika is a city of five million people in the southeastern United States. Its name comes from that of the ancient Macedonian port city best known today for a pair of New Testament epistles—First and Second Thessalonians—written by Saint Paul in A.D. 51 to its struggling Christians. These letters contain seminal teachings on the second coming of Christ.

  Present-day American Salonika isn’t much concerned with this matter. Its people are too busy. As the capital of the state of Oconee, Salonika is the economic, political, and entertainment hub of the New South. Even though it lies three hundred miles inland from the Atlantic, it functions, like its Macedonian namesake, as a port, for it straddles the Chattahoochee River, which divides Salonika into two distinct halves and flows virtually unimpeded from the Phosphor Fog Mountains on the Tennessee-Oconee border south to the Gulf of Mexico.

  When the Salonika Urbanite hired Xavier Thaxton away from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he moved from Georgia, his home state, to Oconee, the Sun Belt’s heart, soul, and nerve center, as a bachelor in his early thirties.

  He had heard of Salonika all his life, but he had never visited it, not even as a reporter on the Atlanta papers. The moment he first laid eyes on its flamboyant buildings, lofty “skybridges,” landscaped parks, and shamefully nasty river piers, he was startled to discover that he felt vaguely unreal—like a character set in motion to carry out a series of dot-to-dot plot machinations. In a few months, this feeling passed. Xavier began to learn the city. Salonika had theaters, bookstores, art galleries, concert halls, libraries, the world-renowned Upshaw Museum, and a choice of fine restaurants that made even Atlanta’s admirable array of eateries seem provincial.

  EleRail rapid transit and several fleets of dependable private cabs made it easy to go wherever he wanted to without owning a car. Owning one struck him as a real mental and financial drain. Free of that burden, he delighted in Salonika’s user-friendliness and began to explore it.

  He found that, in addition to bookstores and concert halls, the city had pornography outlets and all-nude bistros, rock clubs and X-rated theaters, baseball-card collection centers and tacky import emporia, comic-book shops and junk-food franchises, floating flea markets and brothels. It had poke-weed dens, speaksleazies, crack houses, dilapidated hangouts for the homeless, and so many whores, addicts, sots, grifters, hoods, and hoboes that Salonika rivaled Sodom, Gomorrah, Babylon, and Alabama’s once-fabled Phenix City all rolled into one.

  Most of this “sin” was concentrated in an enclave of tenements northwest of the Chattahoochee popularly known as Satan’s Cellar, but pockets of depravity existed all over, some even in lovely Le Grande Park, the “urban wilderness”—twelve acres of neat grass, Japanese bridges, dogwoods, azaleas, topiary hedges, Cherokee-marble gazebos, and artificial waterfalls—visible from Xavier’s twenty-second-story high-rise apartment. On almost any evening, he could look down and watch sinister human shadows sprint from grotto to glade in the park, preying on one another.

  Satan’s Cellar lay across the river, but the city’s criminals could deliver it to you almost anywhere. Early on, Xavier often despaired over the prospects of turning the city’s population from stinging flies into travelers on the bridge to the Übermensch. It was folly, thinking that writing about a Satyajit Ray film or a Bartók string quartet could uplift the masses. In fact, hoping for his writing to amuse, much less improve, a single person was also folly.

  Quixotic nincompoopishness.

  “What a fool I am!” Xavier said to himself (he thought) a week after his promotion to Fine Arts editor.

  “Buck up,” Donel Lassiter, his music reviewer, said, startling him. “A buddy and I are going out tonight. Come with us.”

  “Where?”

  “A surprise. Come on, sir, even though you’re my boss man, it’ll be our treat.”

  Pippa Wiedmeyer, the art reporter, sidled up behind them. “You could eat Mexican,” she said. She lifted her arms like a flamenco dancer, swayed her hips, and began to croon a jingle that Xavier had heard twice—two times too many—on his favorite classical music station:

  “If you want a taco,

  Don’t drive to Waco.

  Go straight to Ricardo’s downtown.

  “For a big, hot burrito,

  It’s definitely neat-o

  To visit rakish Ricardo’s downtown.

  “Taste the Holy of Holies,

  Our refried frijoles—

  At roguish Ricardo’s downtown.

  “For an elite enchilada,

  Don’t be persona non grata.

  Come to Ricar—”

  “Pippa,” Xavier cried, “why’re you repeating that garbage?”

  Abashed looks fell on both Pippa’s and Donel’s faces. If anyone in the dayroom had committed a faux pas, Xavier realized, it was he, their tight-assed editor.

  “Just loosening things up, sir,” Pippa said, not without dignity. “It appeared you could use it.”

  “That was mimicry,” Donel added, “not slavish imitation.”

  “Okay, okay,” Xavier said. “Sorry.”

  “Proof your work’s getting to you,” Donel said. “Bryan and I’ll pick you up at seven, Mr. Thaxton. Be ready.”

  Maybe he did need some intraurban R and R. He was losing his grip, going off half-cocked. He couldn’t maintain a decent working relationship with his staff if he let the seeming hopelessness of transforming Salonikan society sabotage the attitudes of those who were supposed to help effect that transformation.

  *

  Xavier sat behind Donel and his friend Bryan in the latter’s fire-engine-red Porsche. After crossing the Chattahoochee Bridge into Satan’s Cellar, they drove straight to a girlie joint called Salome’s, where the girls strutted down a runway in nothing but heels and feather boas and the jukebox boomed raunchy 1950s-style rhythm and blues. It struck Xavier as an out-of-character choice for both his companions, and before forking over the cover charge, he balked. Not, he stressed, because he had moral objections, but because these were bottom-drawer amusements, unworthy of their time and attention. He couldn’t help remembering a quote from Thus Spake Zarathustra: “Thy silent pride is always counter to their taste; they rejoice if once thou be humble enough to be frivolous.”

  “Listen, Mr. Thaxton—” Donel began.

  “Xavier. Outside the office, call me Xavier.”

  But Donel couldn’t. “The whole point of our night out is to do something different from what we have to do at work.”

  “Not this.”

  “What, then?” said Bryan. “What?”

>   Donel suggested crossing back into Salonika proper to see the Cherokees play the St. Louis Cardinals in the city’s brand-new multibillion-dollar domed stadium, the Hemisphere. The Cherokees were one of three major professional sports franchises in the city, and all Xavier knew about them was that they played baseball badly enough to finish last in the National League eastern division every year. The city’s other pro teams were the Spirits (basketball) and the Grays (football), equally inept franchises.

  The collective failure of these three teams ate at the souls of thousands of Salonikans (who could talk of little else during their respective seasons), but didn’t bug Xavier at all. He didn’t like baseball. He saw basketball as so much higgledy-piggledy galloping about. He hated football. Competitive sports—excepting handball, swimming, and chess—afflicted him with a profound existential nausea.

  “Awwl RIIIGHT!” Bryan said. “The Great American Pastime! Good clean country fun!”

  “Suthren fun!” Donel said.

  “Suthren fun!” Bryan concurred. (Never mind that the New York Yankees had a record that put the Cherokees’ on-field accomplishments to shame.)

  “Okay,” Xavier reluctantly agreed. He hated to go, but he didn’t want to be a party pooper again. Besides, some intellectuals found baseball stimulating. The odd geometries of the ball parks, the situational complexity spurring each managerial move, gave them an almost erotic kick. All Xavier could see was grown men rubbing their plastic codpieces and dribbling tobacco juice.

  The air-conditioned Hemisphere was cold. The beer that Donel bought him was as warm as samples lined up for drug testing in the general manager’s office. Fans behind them were smoking cigars or making crude remarks about the ball girls. No one scored a run, despite several walks and a host of errors, until the bottom of the sixth. Xavier couldn’t remember when he’d been so bored.