The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (26 page)

“I’ve got my protection here,” she added, shaking the tan leather medicine bag hanging around her neck.

“Do you ever take that thing off?”

“Never. Only when I’m in the shower.”

Otis asked her what was in the bag, and she said it was a secret.

“Whatever.”

“Okay. I’ll tell you. There’s some clippings from Royce’s toenails and one of Angel’s barrettes. They’re the only two people I love in the world, right? And a little magnet with Buckwheat on it I stole from Grandma’s Attic. I love my grandma, too. There’s one of her chewed up sucker sticks.”

She kept talking, sitting there on Otis’s stool, so he tried to tune her out and focus on his task. He slipped on his face mask, then transferred the radium powder to a piece of aluminum foil and balled it up—hard to do with rubber gloves on—then did the same thing to the beryllium powder. It was hard to keep his mind on his task, because he kept picturing Rusty, not wearing her medicine bag or anything else, in the shower. He often thought about her when he was in the shower, which had lately made the whole shower business seem totally worthwhile. Why had he told her he loved her? She hadn’t said it back, but she hadn’t seemed surprised. He poked the balls of aluminum foil into the cavity of his gun and quickly wrapped the gun up with duct tape.

All the while, Rusty kept yakking. “That stuff reeks. Royce ran away.” Royce the zombie boyfriend, last seen wearing an FBI sweatshirt.

“Where did he go?” His voice was muffled by the paper mask.

Rusty shrugged. “That’s what they keep asking me. His mom, his stepdad, the cops. Have you heard from him? Did he ever talk about wanting to go anywhere? They don’t get it. We never talked about anything, right? We just smoked weed and laughed. Do you get high?”

Otis told her he didn’t and then explained that marijuana was illegal, killed brain cells, caused auto accidents, and was a gateway drug. He had tried pot once, one day behind the gym at middle school. Some cool guys offered him some. It made him feel like he was losing his mind. Why would people seek out that feeling?

“There’s other ways to get high,” Rusty pointed out. “I bet some of the stuff you got here would work.” She reached over and grabbed a vial of radium flakes.

“Put that down!”

“Just kidding. God! Hey. Did you know that your little sister’s been going to our church? Your older sister went, too. How come you don’t?”

“I’m busy.” Otis positioned his duct-taped gun on the table and set the large block of paraffin in front of it. “Scoot back. There’s a radioactive neutron stream going out of this baby.” He couldn’t see it, of course, but he imagined it until he almost saw it, a ray of sparkling, dancing particles shooting out.

Rusty scooted the stool back a few inches. “I hate going to church,” she said, “but I have to go. Mom makes me. Mrs. Archer, the serial killer, was the one who brought your sister to church and introduced her to my dad. It was like she fixed them up. Really creepy, right? Your sister’s a preppy bitch, but I feel sorry for her getting mixed up with my dad. It’s all that witchwoman’s doing. I hate her guts. One day I saw her digging up her yard on one side of her house, and then the next thing I know there’s a bunch of plastic flowers stuck in there. Who would do that? She probably buried something underneath them. Probably body parts. I bet she’s killing people, right? She tried to give me a donut once. I suspected poison so I dropped it. Why’d she move here, anyway? And why across from us? We need to figure out what she’s really up to. Maybe if we devil her enough, she’ll go away, right? Last night I snuck around her house and made scratching sounds on all her windows. Her dog barked and barked. I hid whenever she turned on the outdoor lights.”

“Stop talking now,” Otis said. He turned and picked up his Geiger counter from the shelf behind him.

Finally Rusty was quiet, watching him intently.

He switched on his machine and held it over the block of wax. The clicking started up immediately. Clickclickclickclick. .2 mrems! “It
works!” Otis said, a wave of deep satisfaction rushing through him. He was going to do it. He was! He’d show everyone!

“Wow,” Rusty said, like maybe she finally believed he knew what he was up to.

Although he hated to do it, he switched off the Geiger counter, laid it down, and began ripping the tape off his gun. “I need to get some thorium to shoot the gun at. I don’t know where to get it.”

“I’ll help you,” she said. “This is so cool. I’ll help you.”

“Why?” Otis looked into her eyes, which were pale blue.

She was the first to blink and look away. “I’ll help you,” she repeated, “if you help me. Help me smoke out Mrs. Archer. Is it a deal?”

Otis was stuffing the aluminum balls back into the medicine vials—old Lexapro bottles that had Ava’s name on them. Ava who got everything, including happy medicine. He pulled off his gloves and the paper mask. “It’s a deal,” he told Rusty, who jumped up and kissed him on the lips.

Her lips were dry and rough but softer and sweeter than anything he’d ever felt in his life, and the combination of the successful firing of his neutron gun and his first kiss made that day his best ever.

* * *

Otis approached his granddad when he was sitting in his little den upstairs, after supper, watching
Antiques Roadshow
, the sound on the TV up so loud that the windows rattled. As soon as he saw Otis, Granddad picked up the remote and snapped off the TV.

Otis sat down on the couch.

“Good evening there, son,” Granddad said, and Otis smiled. He loved it when Granddad called him
son
. “What do you know?”

“There should be a game show called that,” Otis said, then repeated in a deep showy voice, “What do you know?”

“Good to see you, son,” Granddad said. “How’s Burger King?”

“That was three jobs ago. I’m at Arby’s now.”

“Oh, right.” Wilson paused and gazed out the big square window into the front yard. “I’ve got to get out there and mulch those flower beds. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

This was something his grandfather had taken to saying every time Otis came into the den to see him. Granddad hadn’t been going out to work in the yard, like he used to. Otis was dying to ask him about obtaining thorium for his gun, but it was really bugging him that Granddad kept repeating the thing about working in the yard over and over again. He asked Granddad why he didn’t go out and work in the yard right then.

“That horrible woman will show up and harass me. I’ve told your mother I don’t want her in here reading to me anymore. Every time I go out in the yard, there she is. I know her from somewhere, I just can’t remember where.”

“You know her ’cause she shows up here all the time,” Otis said. It was scary how much his grandfather’s memory was slipping. Otis didn’t know what to do. Should he correct his grandfather, the way his mother was always doing? He felt bad for his grandfather when his mother got angry at him for something he couldn’t help. She’d say, “You’ve already asked me that one hundred times, Dad!” The same way she got angry at Otis when he forgot to put gas in his Pontiac or got fired from another job.

“Why do you keep getting fired?” she’d ask Otis. “Don’t you do what they tell you to do? Don’t you follow the rules? How hard can that be?”

How could he explain it to his mother? Yes, there were rules at his jobs, or, what they called procedures, and he tried to follow them, but other people kept screwing things up. As soon as his shift started, the other employees began yelling at him, each one telling him to do a different thing now and to hurry up, and there was so much noise and so
many hot things and loud people that it was hard to focus and he made mistakes, and pretty soon he would make too many of those mistakes. Also, he was too honest. At McDonald’s, when one of the managers, Mitchell, a skinny African American man who wore big square glasses, was reprimanding Otis for causing a big grease spill and asked him, in a nice voice, “Do you think you can give me one hundred percent effort from now on?” Otis, instead of saying yes right away, as he later realized he was expected to do, thought about it. He thought about the job and how boring and demeaning it was, especially compared to what he’d be doing when he was a famous scientist. “No,” he told Mitchell. “I can give you sixty percent.”

Mitchell shook his head and sighed, but then to Otis’s surprise, Mitchell began to giggle, helplessly, and Otis laughed, too. When he left Mitchell’s office he assumed everything was okay, but as soon as he came into work the next day he was fired by an unsmiling Mitchell.

Wilson was staring out the window at the front yard, the way Parson Brown did when she wanted to go out but wasn’t yet making a fuss about it.

“My friend Rusty says that Mrs. Archer is evil,” Otis offered, pleased to drop the phrase “my friend” into the conversation.

Wilson gave the hollow-sounding guffaw he’d taken to emitting so often that even Otis noticed it. “Well, she sure is angry about something,” Wilson said. “She thinks I’m responsible for all the unhappiness in the world. She never lets up. ‘Do you know what you did, Dr. Spriggs?’ Over and over. I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about.”

“That lady’s bonkers,” Otis said. “She murders people and buries their body parts. We’re going to do something about Mrs. Archer, Granddad. Don’t worry. We’ll stop her from bugging you. Okay?”

Wilson turned and looked at Otis as if surprised to see him sitting there. “Stop who?” he said.

“Mrs. Archer.”

“Oh, yeah.” He nodded, but it seemed like he’d already forgotten who Mrs. Archer was. Pretty soon he’d forget who Otis was! “I’ve got to get out there and mulch those beds,” Granddad said again.

“Granddad. I need some thorium for my breeder reactor. Any ideas?” Otis had, a few months ago, given up the pretense that the breeder reactor was hypothetical, after he’d figured out that his grandfather didn’t remember what they’d talked about from one conversation to the next.

“I believe,” said his grandfather, “that propane lanterns, the kind you get at camping stores, would be a good place to start. Course, you’d have to get a whole lot of them.”

Propane lanterns. Check.

“Let’s play checkers,” Otis suggested to his granddad, who agreed, seeming glad for the diversion. Granddad was always up for a rousing game of checkers.

* * *

Otis and Rusty went looking for propane lanterns in Otis’s Pontiac—the car Rusty referred to as his serial killer car. At Walmart, Sears, and Target, the propane lanterns were pretty much the same price, and all expensive—from thirty to eighty dollars. And they didn’t really need the whole lantern. At Sears they bought two, but all they wanted were the mantles that came with the lantern. Most lanterns came with two, and Otis wasn’t sure how many he’d need. At Target they discovered boxes of replacement mantles, two to a box, but they were fifteen bucks a box.

After a whispered discussion, they decided to steal them.

Rusty went a few aisles away, where the fancy granola and gourmet food was, and he could hear her pretend to collapse, knocking some jars off the shelf. When he heard that Rusty was being fussed over by a couple of old lady customers and the lurking pimple-faced store clerk,
Otis slipped six boxes of mantles into a battered canvas messenger bag adorned with a hammer and sickle, which used to belong to Royce.

In order to pay Rusty back, Otis had to agree to make some night raids on Mrs. Archer. Rusty instructed him to dress all in black and paint his face and hands with some black kiddie face paint she gave him.

At midnight one night he met Rusty in front of the old lady’s house. Then they ran around and around her house, swinging their propane lanterns and chanting “Odobee dumba lawee” over and over again. All this, including the chant, was Rusty’s idea.

“Why are we doing this?” Otis asked Rusty at one point.

“We’re driving her mad.”

Inside Mrs. Archer’s house, lights went on and Buster began barking.

“I bet she’s mad, all right.”

“Not that kind of mad.
This
kind of mad!” Rusty held the lantern up to her face and swung it in time to her chant, a hideous, leering grimace on her black-painted face, and Otis laughed so hard he nearly peed his pants. Which was okay, because it meant they had to extinguish their lanterns and call it a night.

The next step, Rusty decided, was to sneak into Mrs. Archer’s house while she was at church with Rusty’s family. Rusty was certain that Mrs. Archer had given her mother a key to her house but had no way of knowing which key it was, so she swiped her mother’s entire key chain early Sunday morning and even pretended to look for the keys with her father, acting just as puzzled as her parents about what could’ve happened to them. She told Otis all about this grand act of deception while they were fumbling at Mrs. Archer’s front door, trying key after key in her lock, the dumb dog Buster barking his fool head off.

Finally they found it and let themselves in.

It was a disappointingly bland house. Buster followed them around,
wagging his tail. They opened her cupboards and helped themselves to some Lay’s sour cream and onion potato chips and Entenmann’s powdered donuts, leaving crumbs on the counter. They leafed through her
Time
magazines and
Tallahassee Democrats
stacked up beside the coffee table.

In her bedroom they rifled through her old lady underwear and jewelry. Rusty helped herself to a pair of rhinestone clip earrings. There was a big bed with a pink bedspread and it looked soft and inviting. Otis lay down and folded his arms behind his head. The bedspread felt slippery beneath his calves. The pillow under his head was down filled and the pillow slip had pink roses on it. It smelled like old lady perfume. How kinky. He was lying on an old lady’s bed.

“Look!” Rusty said, pointing.

On the bedside table sat an old-fashioned framed photograph of a little girl in a winter coat and fur hat, her hands stuffed into a fur muff, and she was laughing. Snow was falling all around the girl, but she was laughing. What was so funny? “Is that her?” Otis said. “Mrs. Archer, you think? When she was little?”