The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [85]
“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,