The Dead Hand
by Micah Harris
Nuclear war arrived for Bob Lawson in 1972. This was the 43rd year of his life, and the war arrived for him in the form of a yellow construction hat that showed through the window of a pickup truck at the corner of his field. He plowed to the corner then, shoving his tractor’s clutch, lurched to a stop.
A stranger stood there in clean jeans, a clean shirt, and (ridiculously in this big, unclouded world) a hard hat. Bob Lawson dismounted and watched the dust from his plow drift across the stranger until it cleared and the two men stood face to face.
“You should have sat upwind,” he said by way of greeting.
“There’s nothing like dirt to convince the wife you work for a day’s pay,” the stranger said, kicking dust from his boot against one of the plow’s tires.
“What can I do for you?” Bob Lawson said.
“We’d like to drill here,” the stranger said.
“I can spare you the trouble. Folks have drilled for gas and oil around Hansford before. They never got enough to pay the drilling costs and they messed up the land pretty good.”
“I don’t want your money. I only want your confidence, and my company will guarantee you a good return for your trouble.”
“We will leave the land as good as we found it,” the stranger said. “And you’ll have some income.”
“You’d have to be luckier than the other guys.”
“We’ll be lucky.”
“The only driller that sure is one who drills with someone else’s money,” Bob Lawson said.
“I don’t want your money. I only want your confidence, and my company will guarantee you a good return for your trouble.”
“Your company is either crazy or it knows something I don’t.” Bob Lawson dipped his toe into the disked ground to see how deep the dirt had dried. He should invest in a sweep plow because it would slice the weeds from their roots without turning up his moisture to the sun. He knew this. He could smell the damp, released from the earth by his plow.
“My company is not crazy.”
“Then I’d like to hear what you know.”
“Let’s find a time to meet.”
“I think we just did.”
“Did you make a good crop this year?”
“Decent.”
“Actually, it was a great crop and a bad price.”
“You’ve seen my good stubble and you’ve seen the price of grain. Tell me something that’s not obvious.”
“You haven’t sold yet. You’re trying to decide whether to pay storage on your grain and hope for higher prices.”
“You’ve described half the farmers in this country.”
“Don’t sell.”
The stranger got back in his pickup, removed his yellow hat, and reversed his tracks through the plowed earth.
“You get two bits of information and think you’re so smart,” Bob Lawson muttered and, in principle, pushed the matter from his mind. The breeze angled the dust from his plow into the sun where it glowed then faded until his day’s work had ended.
“I’ve decided not to sell,” he told his wife that evening while brushing dust from his boots on a mat textured after grazed grass. His wife will empty this mat in the morning after she has packed his lunch, after she has washed his breakfast dishes, and before she washes his clothes.
“I’m glad you’ve made up your mind,” she said. “It’s been eating at you long enough.”
* * *
Bob Lawson waited and, in the winter of that year, sold his grain at double the price. Then, when he’d sold his wheat, he settled a new Southwest Grain Co cap on his head. He walked out past the shark’s teeth of the grain elevator’s fallout shelter sign, down the chaff-swirled steps, and mentally raised his number card to bid for a sweep plow at old Rainer Stork’s estate sale. “It’s a terrible thing at that age to fall asleep at the wheel,” he said to himself.
* * *
In the spring of the year following, Bob Lawson’s new money collided with his wife’s inveterate frugality. To resolve this problem, he set his affairs in order, which is to say, in frank terms, he prepared for death. He purchased a plot in the Hansford cemetery. Then, upon hearing that life insurance, paired with a will, would relieve his wife from making certain painful decisions after his passing, he purchased a modest policy to provide for his embalmment and for an expensive casket designed to contain toxic chemicals inserted into his arteries and his veins and preserve his remains in perpetuity where they would lay in the ground. A salesman had, it seems, convinced Bob Lawson, a Texas farmer whose forehead had even now started to show its liver spots, to purchase makeup that would be applied to his gray and bloodless cheeks when he was dead, because this is what his wife would want.
* * *
In the summer of 1973, the war returned. Bob Lawson had swept his plow inches from the stranger’s pickup, he had adjusted his path for the pickup without noticing it, and the unawareness bothered him. “I’m too young to be old,” he said and climbed out. “Do you think I can sow wheat straight into these clods?” he asked the stranger by way of greeting.
“In the event of a nuclear war, we would only ask one thing of you. It would take less than three minutes and, except for those three minutes, your life will go on just as it was.”
“I’m not a farmer,” the stranger said.
“Right. You’re an oil man.”
“I was sorry to hear about Rainer Stork,” the stranger said.
“What do you know about Rainer?”
“Falling asleep at the wheel? It’s a sad way to go.”
“Better than cancer I guess,” Bob Lawson said to be contrary. “How did you know Rainer?”
“I didn’t. But I see you’re driving his tractor and pulling his plow.”
“Yes. Well, thanks for the market advice,” Bob Lawson said as if this concluded the business they had between them.
“There’s more where that came from.”
“No one could know the market would jump like that unless he could predict the Russians would buy our grain instead of harvesting their own.”
“Then maybe we should talk.”
“You still want to drill a dry hole in my field?”
“Yes, actually.”
“If you’ve got something to say, tell it to me while I plow.”
“Sure.”
Bob Lawson sat and drove comfortably over the clods while the stranger rubbed his shoulders on the tractor’s ceiling and bumped his head soundly. “See, now, in here your hat makes sense,” Bob Lawson said after the stranger thumped his head a second time. Then he went on with gusto: “So you want to drill a dry hole in my field.”
“Yes.”
“You’re serious,” Bob Lawson muttered. He looked at the stranger’s nose, suspended above him in the cab. Then he nudged the tractor back into line and resented the two weeds that, in his distraction, he allowed to slip uncut past his plow. “Why would you do a thing like that?”
“Here, can I sit on your arm rest?” the stranger said. “This is killing my back.”
“Sure.” The stranger sat and smashed Bob Lawson’s seat to the bottom of its suspension.
“The truth is, it has nothing to do with drilling,” the stranger said.
“If it’s not drilling, then what the hell are you after me for?” Bob Lawson appeared ready to dismiss the stranger in the middle of his field.
“Can I be straight with you?”
“Why would you be anything else?”
“You wouldn’t trust me if I told it all to you up front.”
“So that’s why you lied? To earn my trust?”
“No. I earned your trust with market advice. That part was true. The other part is that I work for the U.S. Government.”
“What do you want?”
“We want you to be part of our Citizen’s Protective Brigade.”
“Last I checked, our wars were halfway around the world.”
“We’re trying to keep it that way. And the Brigade is one of the ways we’re doing it.”
“Take my advice and don’t waste your time recruiting farmers to avert a nuclear holocaust or a Communist take-over in Saigon. You already make my son cower under his school desk when it couldn’t make a nickel’s worth of difference.”
“I don’t want you or your son to cower. In the event of a nuclear war, we would only ask one thing of you. It would take less than three minutes and, except for those three minutes, your life will go on just as it was.”
“What are you asking?”
“All I need is your sworn secrecy and an easement for what will appear as an oil well on your land but that will, in fact, be a defensive installation that you’ll be responsible to activate in the event of a nuclear attack.”
Bob Lawson absorbed this information with the same expression he’d used when his son proposed they go in 50-50 on a rusty Hudson Commodore for the boy to drive. Then he said, “And nothing else will change for me?”
“Absolutely nothing. Just pretend you never met me.” The stranger paused, then added, “In return, you’ll receive a check that averages $2000 per month from what appears to be an oil company.”
* * *
“They want to drill on our land,” Bob Lawson tells his wife that evening while he mentally selects an after-dinner toothpick from the holder on their kitchen table.
“Sounds like something your parents would invest in,” she says.
“It’s better than that.”
The toothpicks are identical; he cannot choose.
“Something you would invest in?”
“Not that good.”
She looks at him. “Every dry hole they drilled on that land killed your mother a little more.”
“I know.”
He chooses a toothpick then puts it back and swirls the whole lot, inviting one to separate and self select.
“But what pushed her over the edge was the gusher they drilled on the home place.” She looks at him.
“Mom was used to hardship,” Bob Lawson says. “She couldn’t handle a good thing when it happened.”
He sets the toothpick cup down then and asks what he takes to be a smart and conclusive question. “Do I look like my mother?”
“No.”
“Then why bring this up?”
“Because she’s human and you’re human.”
“And what about you? Are you human?”
“Yes. I’m human too.”
“Then let’s be the kind of humans who can handle all kinds of luck, not just disappointment, depression, and war.”
She takes the cup from him and sets a toothpick, lone and vulnerable, on the table before him.
“I’m going to sign the papers unless you tell me not to,” he says.
“I know.”
* * *
Later in that same week, the stranger called by telephone and asked to meet again in the field. “I’m not working in that field now,” Bob Lawson said. But, after arguing, they still met there stupidly in the dirt.
“An open field is the least likely place to be picked up by Soviet intelligence,” the stranger said, hugging a bugged portfolio to his chest for better reception. A little leaked audio could, after all, strike more terror in the Soviets than the Blackbird and the Valkyrie bomber combined.
“I’ll do it,” Bob Lawson said, then signed the sober charge of secrecy.
“An installation team will certify your storm cellar as a radiation shelter, then they will place a small safe inside,” the stranger said.
“An installation team will certify your storm cellar as a radiation shelter, then they will place a small safe inside,” the stranger said. “The safe will contain a switch to activate the installation on your land. You will memorize the combination to the safe and tell no one. You will open the safe’s door once per decade on January 5 of years ending in 4—1974 for instance—to make sure the combination still works. Other than that, you will only ever open the safe if you have direct proof of a nearby nuclear attack. You must see or feel conclusive evidence of the attack with your own eyes—not by television, not by radio, not by someone else’s report. Then you will open the safe and flip the red switch inside. Aside from that, you will live your life—it is absolutely essential that you live your life—exactly as you would have lived it.
“Is this perfectly clear?” the stranger asked.
“Yes,” Bob Lawson said because, indeed, it was quite clear: witness an attack, open the safe, flip the switch. Until then, live the same life you would have lived.
But the worm burrowed in him afterwards. It had been generally understood in his conversations with the stranger that he was a particularly reliable and trustworthy man and that this was why the stranger had selected him. But the stranger owed him this explanation, and when he considered what he was owed, he became churlish with his wife and so he called upon the stranger to answer certain questions to restore him to the domestic civility for which he was respected in his community.
He called the telephone number that had been provided and was told that the stranger was exploring opportunities in another part of the country but that he would pay a visit to Hansford when he was able.
Meanwhile a hostile crew slashed Bob Lawson’s fence so the posts leaned away from the gash and the wires sagged because the workers had not properly braced the fence where they’d made their gate. This was shoddy workmanship. Then the workers drove steel-laden semi-trailers over his field, compressing the fertile ground and crushing the surface until the breezes blew dust along their tracks to where it caught in the nearby ditches. Then fall planting rains came and the workers pushed relentlessly on, towing their trucks with bulldozers, squishing the mud aside and cutting the exposed hard-pan to ribbons with their overpressured tires.
Others jack-hammered the wall of his cellar and installed a safe. Bob Lawson explained to his wife that the government was offering free certification of fallout shelters and that they would place a few medical supplies in a sealed safe where the supplies could stay fresh for decades, if needed. His wife suggested that certain neighbors would also benefit from this service. Bob Lawson agreed but said it was a pilot program and their home had been selected for early testing of the installation techniques.
As a separate item of business raised, awkwardly, during the same meeting on a fall afternoon at their kitchen table, his wife also noted that they should anticipate a pipeline to be laid through their land, connecting the new well to a nearby mainline pipe that ran to the refinery at Borger. Bob Lawson, alarmed, said they should expect the company to truck the oil for a few years before deciding about the pipe. Some months later, when Bob Lawson declared that the drilling had been a success, his wife puzzled over a lack of the characteristic oil smell. He said the well produced only gas and he informed her, helpfully, that gas has no odor. You only think it does because they add Sulphur to it so you can detect it when your appliances leak. These were bitter lies, closer to the truth than he would have ventured if the stranger had remained available and kept faith with him.
Then, in an October snow, the stranger drove up to his house, shook Bob Lawson’s hand and proposed that they drive out to the field where he said the work was complete.
“Where the hell have you been?” Bob Lawson asked.
“This will all be cleaned up,” the stranger said of the mud ribbons. He idled the pickup and watched snowflakes touch, stick, melt, and get swiped by the wipers. “I came as soon as I could. My secretary tells me you have questions?”
“I thought I owe it to myself to understand the nature of this system that I am to activate in the event of a nuclear attack,” Bob Lawson said.
“It’s designed to reduce the Russians’ temptation to launch a nuclear attack on American command and control. If they know that citizens like yourself can respond independently, there’s no reason for them to attack our Government officials.”
“That’s not particularly important from your perspective,” the stranger said. “All you need to know is that it is a responsive or ‘deterrent’ capability. It’s designed to reduce the Russians’ temptation to launch a nuclear attack on American command and control. If they know that citizens like yourself can respond independently, there’s no reason for them to attack our Government officials. It’s part of our Presidential Protection Plan.”
“But what kind of response am I activating? As in, what would transpire after I flip that switch?”
“It’s a response-in-kind. Think of it this way: If a dead person could shoot a gun, you’d never kill him, right? Because when he was dead, he would shoot you back. The Russians have a saying. It translates roughly, ‘The dead do not reply and the dead hand pulls no trigger.’ It explains why they tend to kill the people they’re scared of. Up until now they’ve mostly done it with death camps and little executions here and there but now they’ve built a system that can kill us all in a single blast. And make no mistake; they would use it if they thought it would work. But it’s people like yourself who make it plain that, if they fire the first shot, we’ll for damn sure fire the last one. Because of you they know that, even if they kill America, our dead hand can still pull the trigger. That keeps the Soviets invested in our survival.”
“You’ve still not told me what happens when I flip the switch,” Bob Lawson said.
“Well, that’s the response portion of the system,” the stranger said. “If you’re not up for it, just let us know and we’ll recruit someone else.”
“That’s not it. Just tell me what kind of response we’re talking about.”
The stranger smiled. “Good,” he said. “You had me worried there for a bit. I was afraid you wanted to pull out.” He turned off the engine so the wipers stuck in the middle of the windshield—an irrational irritant to Bob Lawson. “We’ve worked out a ‘sister cities’ plan,” he said. “We tip the Russians off that somewhere within a hundred miles of each American city there are two people who can launch a counter-attack all on their own. Even if everyone in Washington, DC is dead the U.S. will still counter-attack. I’ve given this same message to someone else within a hundred miles of Amarillo and, if you ever set both your switches to ‘on’—if, for instance, there is a nuclear attack on Amarillo or on our Pantex installation—this will activate an underground facility like that oil well in your field. This response will turn a squalid Russian city into a sea of fire and then the survivors will die of cancer at their leisure. Like I said before, we believe you are the right person—we believe you have the right character—for this.”
“You think I have the right character to give someone cancer?” Bob Lawson said.
“No one is giving anyone cancer. I said that for illustrative purposes because you asked what kind of response it is that keeps the Russians from initiating a war.”
“I’m still asking: what makes you think I have the character for this job?”
“To be honest, I shouldn’t have said character. Character isn’t worth much these days. With things this important you have to be scientific.”
“Scientific,” Bob Lawson stated.
“We have developed a scientifically proven set of reliability predictors. The trick is to find someone who will absolutely not launch unless there is an attack and who will absolutely will launch if there is one. It’s harder than you’d think to find that kind of reliability in a person.” The stranger seemed quite enamored with this system as he sat, slouching in his seat and staring forward in an avid daze while snow settled around his cockeyed wipers.
“You’ll avoid rash actions, but you’ll be outraged if someone ruins everything your family has worked so hard to build over all these years.”
“What are your predictors?” Bob Lawson asked.
A chill settled in the cab but the stranger went on undeterred.
“Well, for starters you’re a Republican,” the stranger said. “That tells us you’re not a peacenik or someone who will believe ‘America had it coming.’ We call that AHIC. AHIC is one of the leading theories for why lefties refuse to energetically deter nuclear domination.
“Besides being a Republican, you own land. You’ll avoid rash actions, but you’ll be outraged if someone ruins everything your family has worked so hard to build over all these years.
“And if I remember right you’re a Methodist?” The stranger said, suddenly looking at him. Bob Lawson nodded. “Methodism is a sensible faith. You’re principled but you’re unlikely to receive un-American instructions directly from God or to usher in the apocalypse believing that you were ‘appointed for such a day as this’—AFSADAT. AFSADAT is, interestingly, one of the leading theories for why religious people might start a nuclear war that is against their strategic interests. AHIC and AFSADAT are very rare among Methodist Republican populations.”
Bob Lawson nodded. There was an unsettling logic to it.
“You’re married and you have a son. That indicates to us that you’re attached to other humans. This works well on both sides: it makes you reluctant to disturb the peace but violently retaliatory if someone harms your family.
“You volunteered for the Air Force during the Korean War. That indicates that you’re a loyal American who understands that it takes military force to keep the peace. But you never saw combat, which is important because we’ve found a dangerous diversity of opinion among combat veterans: the tortured; the concussed; the war-is-hell pacifists; the I-watched-my-buddy-die-and-it’s-your-fault; the if-you-won’t-nuke-the-bastards-I-will . . .”
The stranger sat up in his seat and looked sideways with a smile. “You love your family and your way of life; you live and let live, but, if someone destroys it all, you’ll nuke them blind with all the righteousness of God and country. Nothing short of a nuclear attack would radicalize you; but that would do it every time. Beautiful. Exquisite. Scientific. Call it character if you like but it’s science that tells us you’re the man for this job.”
They sat in silence then. Finally Bob Lawson asked, “Will you show me the missile?”
“We generally prefer not,” the stranger said, considering how the intercepted audio would sound in Moscow, “but, if you’re that interested, we could have a look. I could use some mud spatters on this pickup anyway; the wife’s started doubting again whether I work for a living.” They drove through the ribboned field and parked near a pumpjack that labored uselessly—forever raising and lowering a barrel of concrete underground.
The stranger opened a sort of riveted hatch in the side of a storage tank and Bob Lawson saw a dim nosecone that his memory later colored in with the pastel reds and blues of Captain America. “You know, this system was originally designed by a farmer much like yourself,” the stranger said.
“I have yet to meet a farmer who would build a thing like that,” Bob Lawson said.
The stranger looked sharply at Bob Lawson then smiled. “It’s a little beyond the capability of a mechanic with an arc welder. I’ll grant you that. But the design is genius.” He began to tell Bob Lawson about how the design pulled the best bits from two of the fastest advancing technologies in modern America: heart surgery and rocket science. “It’s what we call the Tricuspid Launch System,” he said. “TLS was conceived by a farmer recovering from heart surgery and it has allowed us to miniaturize our missiles. The missile is more shot from the silo than launched, in fact.”
“Is that so.”
He considered that he, Bob Lawson, held the sober responsibility for a particular switch that would activate this technology. With no time. No communication with his fellow man.
The stranger described how the launch sequence would start: with propellant contained, not in the missile, but below the missile in the silo. Just as the acceleration fades from that initial blast, the first of tricuspid valve snaps shut behind the missile and throws a new explosive charge upward. This is repeated with another tricuspid every 10 feet until the missile clears the silo at tremendous speed, ignites its engine and continues to accelerate under its own power. “The density of the atmosphere is the only thing that keeps us from literally launching a projectile into space with this system,” he said.
The stranger chuckled to himself at the resources the Soviets would sink, based on his description, into designing a “tricuspid system” of their own.
Meanwhile Bob Lawson considered the tremendousness of it all. He envisioned the sequence of valves snapping shut, blasting explosives from the snapping flaps, and shooting a missile from the ground 10 feet from where he now sat. Could you see it, he wondered? Or would it be like watching for the bullet from a gun?
He considered that he, Bob Lawson, held the sober responsibility for a particular switch that would activate this technology. With no time. No communication with his fellow man. Just a promise that, if the body was killed, the dead hand, his hand, would convulse on the trigger. It balanced the ecosystem—a catastrophic system to ensure the safety of mankind. Bob Lawson thrilled, then he twitched like his wife used to do when she would doze in his arms. “Do the Russians have anything like this?” he asked.
The stranger slumped again. He silenced his portfolio and slid it subtly under his seat. Then he spoke with the earnest frown of a parent calculating an incongruous college bill. A bill that would, in the end, be explained through computational error—through the misalignment of certain arithmetic columns in the evening light. He assured Bob Lawson that Russia did, in fact, have a similar arrangement to launch certain missiles, which is why it was essential for the U.S. to covertly sever certain wires in their system and thereby ensure its nonfunctionality. This could perhaps be accomplished by paying the manufacturer of certain parts of the Soviet system for the parts to test well, then break predictably. Like the filament of a light bulb.
Bob Lawson was made to understand that Russia’s combination of peasant control, peasant misery, and propaganda-driven anti-Americanism was outright irresponsible and served to illustrate by contrast the care with which the American system was designed, through internal balances, to prevent war while the Russian system, were it to function, practically guaranteed war. Which is why the Russian system would be covertly disabled. Very soon, in fact.
The stranger asked rhetorically what other country in the world was so deluded as to think it must nuke the United States to remain secure? So why should Russia? “The paranoia really gets you sometimes,” he said. “And it’s unsafe.”
Bob Lawson asked whether America had other plans to prevent nuclear war. Besides counter-attacking. As a fellow American, the stranger assured him, his government had explored the possibility of a missile defense system. Big enough to protect the Capitol and to pick off an accidental launch here and there, to reduce the chance of fine people such as himself having to make the sober choice to retaliate. You’d think a system like that would be a win-win. Less chance of accidental war is good for everyone right? Wrong! The Russians spooked at it. They’re atheists, for God’s sakes, but, in their twisted minds, Russia still has a God-given right to nuke the U.S. whenever it damn well pleases and the existence of the whole human race depends on America voluntarily honoring the rights the God gave Russia when He made nukes. “That’s the kind of people we’re dealing with here,” the stranger said with a but-what-can-you-do shrug.
Bob Lawson listened and understood quite clearly the necessity of the system as it had been designed. He thanked the stranger for his explanation, observed that the snow had stopped, then noted that no man should shoot a gun blind. The stranger blinked at the non sequitur. So Bob Lawson laid the question out very plainly. He asked, “What’s my sister city?”
“It’s a Russian city. How do you mean?”
“What’s its name? What do the people in that city do? How do they live?”
“It’s a city called Chelyabinsk. It’s a dirty city the Russians claim doesn’t exist. They make tanks and nuclear weapons there.”
* * *
In the winter of 1974 Bob Lawson, opened the safe and thumbed the switch, gently to avoid an accidental “flip,” while verifying that it remained mobile and uncorroded. Then, returning to the house, he noted to his wife that the oil well was producing steadily, and to heal a distance that had grown between them, he proposed that the money be placed into an account, and while it accumulated, his wife should design an expansion to their house. “After all these years with your mother-in-law’s green furniture, you can finally pick your own,” he said.
She did design an expansion throughout the summer and into the winter evenings while he drank. “An entirely new house, in fact,” Bob Lawson murmured to himself. He drank quietly and stacked the cans in a silver pyramid that grew to the ceiling of their bedroom then flattened on top and spread sideways, turning the corner where it crept without comment onto her side of the room. He drank methodically and only slept when his senses were quite dulled.
There’s a moment of stillness when the bird has decided but not yet acted. Its head is still. It is focused and without suspicion, and this is the only clean kill you can make with a .22. You owe a bird this much.
But the parasite burrowed in him still. Bob Lawson understood this quite clearly in 1982, two years before the second opening of his safe, when a flock of loose-sphinctered grackles roosted without invitation in the grove behind his house. The elms had been planted there by Bob Lawson’s father, a man who had recently restored himself to favor in his son’s eyes by giving up the ghost and allowing his corpse to stiffen. A father who could have insured himself against his own death but, instead, told them to “just put me in a box,” a delusion which cost Bob Lawson more than a month’s oil revenue. These loose-sphinctered grackles cackled in the grove, befouling the trees, and Bob Lawson found himself indignant on his father’s behalf, despite the cock-eyed investment schemes and the dementia that had so alienated them.
Bob Lawson expressed this love scientifically, not with a shotgun as most sons would have done. He purchased a precise .22 in the city with a scope and costly, long-cartridge ammunition for speed. Then he propped his gun next to a silver can on the rail of his porch.
There he studied the tactless grackles—the rattling of their feathers, the jerk and stab of their beaks, and the shaking of their green-sheened necks in the sun. He shot a test bird, very precisely in the chest. But it flew some distance before collapsing and he came to glower over it, open-eyed in the grass. He inspected the bird, twisting back the beak until the feathers opened. He flipped open his merciful knife, drew it across the bird’s neck, then watched while its vigorous heart pumped gently into the earth.
Then, having separated the grackle into parts, he speared its heart, the size of a stillborn mouse, on the tip of his knife. By what landmark, he asked, could he place his bullet precisely through such a heart? Then, standing, he found his wife inconveniently behind him. Upon seeing her face, he forced a laugh over the obvious misunderstanding and he explained to her that this was an anatomical exploration which had, it seemed, transferred blood to his hands and then by accident to his face when he nudged his glasses up from where they’d slid during his consideration of a proper method for the killing of such birds which had chosen to live in places that did not belong to them. “They’re just birds after all,” he said shrugging to illustrate that she’d overestimated the significance of it all.
“Yes, they’re just birds,” she repeated. “You should eat your dinner.”
Over the days that followed, Bob Lawson formed very definite opinions about the proper killing of birds. Adding to his original argument for a rifle, he noted that shot, if he used it, would damage the elms, pocking and shredding their bark. His eyes misted and he swiped at the underside of his nose when he considered that with his gun he had become the protector of trees and this feeling further expanded into a tenderness even toward the grackles that he must kill so carefully. He came to respect the jerk of their beaks as a gesture of affection between mates. Behind the rattled feathers, he discovered a hygienic impulse.
There’s a moment of stillness when the bird has decided but not yet acted. Its head is still. It is focused and without suspicion, and this is the only clean kill you can make with a .22. You owe a bird this much. And Bob Lawson concluded that, for the cleanest possible kill—a dart in the bull’s true eye—a man must punch his bullet through the head so both eyes unseat and dangle, one ruptured and one whole, from the same side of a grackle’s head.
* * *
In the fall of 1989, Bob Lawson awoke and drew his breath shallow to avoid the pain. He thought dimly of seared flesh and smoking ruins. “How are you feeling?” the stranger asked.
“Fine. I’m feeling fine,” he said. “Want to see my scar,” he asked, pulling his pajama shirt up to his neck. “You know, this whole thing is a modern marvel. They put nuclear stuff in my heart, mapped it all, then went in like mechanics, snaked the pipes, repaired a valve, and bolted the whole thing back together. It’s a good thing the wife built a small house though,” he said with a smile that snagged itself over the pain. “These mechanics charge top dollar. Science comes with a price tag I guess.”
“We’re taking the safe out of your house,” the stranger said.
“We’ve wanted to make the world happy,” he says. “Or at least to make ourselves happy in it. But it’s a sad world; it has been sad for a long time and we’re not going to change that now.”
“Good,” Bob Lawson said. “That’s probably best. I just dreamed that I’d used it in fact. Then I thought you were sitting there to tell me I made a mistake. It’s probably for the best that it never came to that.”
“Yes, it’s probably for the best.” The stranger sat for a long while. Then he stood.
“I suppose you’ll take the missile too? Tear up my land on the way out then disappear after all these years?”
“That’s not a fair accusation,” the stranger said. “I promised you nothing would change, and nothing did. And you’ve been fairly compensated.”
“Is that so?”
“You take care of yourself, now,” the stranger said. “And one more thing: sell your Northrop stock. They’re about to see a drop in demand.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
Bob Lawson lies back, alone, and explains everything to the wife in his head. They laugh at the misunderstanding of it all. “We’ve wanted to make the world happy,” he says. “Or at least to make ourselves happy in it. But it’s a sad world; it has been sad for a long time and we’re not going to change that now.”
“Bob, are you awake,” his wife asks through the bedroom door. Then she opens it. “We’ve had dirt blowing off the field,” she said. “So I used your father’s old chisel plow to rough it up a little.”
“That’s the first time the land has blown since I bought that sweep plow from old Rainer Stork.”
“Or, at least, since the government put a ‘gas well’ on our land. One with a pumpjack and no pipe.”
“Yes, since that at least.”
“How are you?”
“Better now, I think.”
Micah Harris is a writer and political theorist. His first novel, Only Small Things Are Good, was praised by a former Assistant Secretary of Defense as "a must read for anyone who wants to understand life in the Pentagon." He is currently a postdoctoral associate at Duke University and lives in Carrboro, North Carolina.
