City for the next few hundred years, he would raise it from its grave and turn it loose, to wander where it would.
We tried very hard not to believe that he could do that.
But he could, he could.
Amazing.
• • •
There was no odor. We expected a lot of odor, but there was none. Army engineers had buried all the dead under the block-square municipal parking lot across the street from police headquarters, where the old courthouse had stood. They had then repaved the lot, and put the dwarf arboretum of parking meters back in place. The whole process had been filmed, we were told—from parking lot to mass grave, and then back to parking lot again.
My brother Felix, in that rumbling voice of his, speculated that a flying saucer might someday land on the mass grave, and conclude that the whole planet was asphalt, and that parking meters were the only living things. We were sitting in a school bus. We weren’t allowed to get out at that point.
“Maybe it will look like the Garden of Eden to some bug-eyed monsters,” Felix went on. “They will love it. They will crack open the parking meters with the butts of their zap-pistols, and they will feast on all the slugs and beer-can tops and coins.”
• • •
We caught sight of several movie crews, and they were given as the reason we weren’t to touch anything, even though it might unquestionably have been our own property. It was as though we were in a national park, full of endangered species. We weren’t even to pick a little flower to sniff. It might be the very last such flower anywhere.
When our school bus took us to Mother’s and my little shitbox out in Avondale, for example, I wandered to the Meekers’ house next door. Young Jimmy Meeker’s tricycle, with white sidewall tires, was sitting in the drive-way, waiting patiently for its master. I put my hand on the seat, meaning to roll it back and forth just a few inches, and to wonder what life in Midland City had been all about.
And such a yell I heard!
Captain Julian Pefko, who was in charge of our party, yelled at me, “Hands in your pockets!” That was one of the rules: Whenever men were outside the school bus, they were to keep their hands in their pockets. Women, if they had pockets, were to do the same. If they didn’t have pockets, they were to keep their arms folded across their bosoms. Pefko reminded me that we were under martial law as long as we were inside the fence. “One more dumb trick like that, mister,” he told me, “and you’re on your way to the stockade. How would you like twenty years on the rockpile?” he said.
“I wouldn’t, sir,” I said. “I wouldn’t like that at all.”
And there wasn’t any more trouble after that. We certainly all behaved ourselves. You can learn all kinds of habits quickly under martial law.
The reason everything had to be left exactly where it was, of course, was so that camera crews could document, without the least bit of fakery, the fundamental harmless-ness of a neutron bomb.
Skeptics would be put to flight, once and for all.
• • •
The empty city did not give me the creeps, and Hippolyte Paul actually enjoyed it. He didn’t miss the people, since he had no people to miss. Limited to the present tense, he kept exclaiming in Creole, “How rich they are! How rich they are!”
But Felix finally found my serenity something to complain about. “Jesus Christ!” he exploded as our second afternoon in the flash area was ending. “Would you show just a trace of emotion, please?”
So I told him, “This isn’t anything I haven’t seen on practically every day of my adult life. The sun is setting instead of rising—but otherwise this is what Midland City always looked like and felt like to me when I locked up Schramm’s Drugstore at dawn:
“Everybody has left town but me.”
• • •
We were allowed into Midland City in order to photograph and make lists of all the items of personal property which were certainly ours, or which might be ours, or which we thought we might inherit, once all the legal technicalities were unscrambled. As I say, we weren’t allowed to actually touch anything. The penalty for trying to smuggle anything out of the flash area, no matter how worthless, was twenty years in prison for civilians. For soldiers, the penalty was death.
As I