Chapter 10

Oak Ridge, TN - Saturday, May 28th, 1983 – 6:06 AM

Richard was gasping for breath. Julie was jabbing her finger into his chest, yelling at him. Screaming at him. Spittle flew from her mouth as she screamed. It was the same stuff he had heard a million times before. They were never going to have enough money. Was he ever going to be able to provide for them? What the hell was he doing? What was he getting done? Why was he so worthless? Was he trying to make her miserable? And Richard, trying to talk, was choking on the words, unable to speak. Unable to breathe. Julie, her face red, tears running down her cheeks, opened her mouth again—opened it wide, lips peeling away from her nicotine- and coffee-stained teeth—and a phone rang. Then it rang again. Julie froze, the image of her inverting and fading to white as the ringing phone grew louder.

Richard opened his eyes. He had rolled off his mattress, and his face was on the floor. He sat up, stiff and creaky. His eyes were gummy and everything was blurry. The phone rang again, and the machine picked up.

“Hi,” Richard heard his own voice say. “This is Richard Mathers. I’m sorry I’m not available right now, please leave a message at the sound of the tone.” It beeped as Richard was actually going through the pain and difficulty of standing up, and he heard Deborah Enos speaking to him.
“Richard, come on,” she said. “Now I’m really worried. If you’re there, pick up. I want to know you’re all right. Come on. Richard? Look, I’m really sorry—”

“Y’here,” Richard mumbled picking up the receiver.

“Richard,” she responded, relief in her voice. She was really that worried? “Richard, oh, thank goodness.”

“Y’m fine,” he mumbled back. “Jus’ ist like six in the mornin’. And ist satday.” Richard yawned. “Man, I’m sore.”

“I’m sorry,” Debi replied, with a sincerity that would have sounded patronizing on almost anybody else. “I didn’t mean to wake you up so early, I was just so worried after yesterday. I barely slept last night. I was worried you’d gone out and done something or gotten drunk and tried to drive or—”

“Now, come on, I’m not like that,” Richard said, more clearly, though actually he could be entirely like that. He just hadn't had enough money to get anywhere near that drunk.

He rubbed his eyes, trying to wipe the sleep out. He glanced at his shaded windows. Damn, it looked bright out there. “It was just a job. I’ll get another one,” he said gamely enough, although he was not sure how true that was. “I hated that job, anyway,” he finished. That much, he knew was absolutely true.

“I know,” she said sympathetically. “You didn’t get along with Monk.”

“Deb, I just didn’t like that job. I didn’t get along with Monk because I did a crappy job. I did a crappy job because I hated the job I was doing. At least while Julie was with me there was a reason to keep doing something I hated. Or to try to talk myself out of hating it. After she was gone . . . what’s the point? I hated the damn thing. Not Monk’s fault, I just did.”

“So you’re okay?” Deb asked.

“Okay as I ever was,” which was to say, not okay at all, dear, but Richard thought he had burdened Deb with more than her share of his problems in the past. Dragging her down with him now wouldn’t help either of them.

“So, what are you going to do now?”

Richard shrugged at the telephone. “I don’t know, Deb. I really don’t. Maybe freelance. Maybe move out of D.C. Maybe get a job stocking groceries.”

“Uh huh,” she replied. “I hear there is a big future to being a thirty-eight year old stock clerk at a grocery store.”

“It’s something else,” Richard replied. “Something I could do.”

“What about freelancing? Got any ideas?”

“Yeah, maybe. I know people at some magazines. I think I’ve got an idea or two for articles I could write. I thought I might shop a few ideas around and see if I get any nibbles, and then take it from there. This is sort of uncharted territory for me. Alone and jobless in Washington, D.C. Hey, there’s an article.”

“You’re not alone,” Debi said, her voice warm and consoling. “I’m going to help you any way I can. I will be there for you all the way. That’s a promise. And, I know you were kidding, but there just might be an article in that.”

“Thanks,” Richard replied. That was Debi. Life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Hell, Debi was: life gives you lemons, make lemonade, open a lemonade stand, and become fabulously wealthy and famous selling Deborah Enos’s Old Fashioned Pot O’ Gold Lemonade. “Thank you, Deb. You are as good as they come.”

“Don’t suck up. Anyway, the thing is, I think I have a lead that might work out for you. I’ve got a guy at Capitol Brief who is looking for someone to write a story—a thousand bucks for 3000 words, probably. More space if you need it. No more money, though. Still, not too bad.”
“Uh huh. Go on.”

“The deal is, this guy who was in charge of some sort of hush-hush government project gets placed under investigation, then disappears. Then he turns up dead at a mall in L.A. Robbie—he’s the guy I know at Capitol Brief—thinks there’s a story there. He thinks the project is about something more than what they say it is. He thinks the guy in charge was on the run, and maybe for a good reason, or he might have been selling information to the Soviets—”

“Huh. What was the project he was working on?”

“Robbie explained it. Something to do with using lasers to find nuclear materials—like uranium and plutonium—and eventually being able to deploy them on satellites, so the military could image where nuclear materials are—”

“So the guy in charge—who was it?”

“Uh, hold on a second, he told me and I wrote it down . . .um, Dr. Donald Bernhard. He used to work at Los Alamos. Then he taught at Berkley for a while. Then he got recruited for the laser imaging project at Oak Ridge.”

“And somebody thinks he was selling information on the project to the Russians?”

“I don’t know. Robbie said they were speculating about that, but by ‘they’ he might have meant that he, personally, was speculating about it and wanted to give it more credibility by saying ‘they’.”

“You see a lot of that in this town. You said the guy worked at Los Alamos–where was he working on the laser imaging stuff?”

“Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It’s in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, right outside of Knoxville . . .”

“Oak Ridge. Huh. Hang on a second.”

“What? You’ve got something? Do you know somebody?”

“Hang on.” Richard leaned into the kitchenette and grabbed his address book and start flipping pages. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do. Actually, I know two. I know a guy who works at Oak Ridge—Tsukishiro Yukito, he’s a research scientist. Apparently gets down to D.C. a lot. Met him last year, and I don’t think I made too much of an ass out of myself. But I think I might know somebody else.”

“Well, there you go, see? It was meant to be. And pretty good money. And better than covering city council meetings all the damn time.”

“What was the guy’s name? The guy in charge of the project? Bernhard?”

“Dr. Donald Bernhard.”

“And he lived in Oak Ridge, right?”

“Uh . . . I don’t know. I didn’t ask, I assume he did—”

“I don’t know for sure, but I think I know someone who knows Bernhard. Or her kid does, anyway.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. I don’t remember exactly, but I think she told me that she wasn’t sure if it was a good idea or not, her kid hanging out with some old codger . . . I don’t recall the whole conversation but I’m pretty sure the guy’s name was Bernhard and he was a scientist or a doctor or something.”

“Mmmm,” Deb hummed. “So, who is the mystery woman?”

“Hah,” Richard laughed, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat. “Darla—uh—” He looked back at his address book.

“Darla?” Deb asked incredulously. “Like Little Rascals? Or more like a stripper stage name?”

“No, no, nothing like that. Doreen. No mystery woman. I dated her for, like, a month back in . . . damn, it was like 1973. It was a long time ago.”

Deb giggled. “You must have left quite an impression. For her to still be calling you ten years later.”

Rich smiled. He knew what Debi was up to. Look, here’s a job opportunity. Now, you’ve heard about that, let’s talk about your past conquests as a man. Let’s joke and I’ll give you my best girlish giggle, to show you how entertained and impressed I am. Get your mind off it, guy. Deb was the best.

“I don’t know about that. It couldn’t have been a good impression. She just—she seemed really desperate. I was going to be moving. She had two little kids. I wanted to get a career going. It just wasn’t going to work out.” Richard sighed. “In retrospect, I don’t know how good my decision making actually was. But, yeah, she called me out of the blue three years later—tracked me down, I guess.”

Debi laughed. “No mere mortal man could satisfy her. She had to have you back!”

Richard shrugged at the phone. “I don’t know about all that. I think she was just lonely. There wasn’t much of a chance either of us were going to pick up and move. I had moved here, she had moved to Tennessee . . . she just wanted to talk.”

“Mmmhmmm,” Debi hummed into the phone knowingly. All a put on, sure, but Richard did appreciate it. She was just as sweet as she could be. The anti-Julie. “So her kid knew this Dr. Bernhard, you said. What, were they neighbors or did she date Bernhard or what?”

“I don’t know, we didn’t talk about that much. She was telling me about all the classes she was taking. She one of those running-in-a-million-directions-but-never-getting-things-done types. I don’t see how she has room to breathe. She said it was some old guy her kid hung around, and she was worried if it was all right. Apparently her kid is something of a geek, so she thought the math and science aspect with the old guy being a research scientist might be a good thing. But she was, you know, naturally worried about old men wanting to spend time with adolescent boys. So, no, I don’t think they were dating.”

“Maybe he was babysitting,” Deb suggest helpfully.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I’ll give her a call and see if I can find out some more.”

“You do that. Also, call Robbie Deaton at Capitol Brief and tell him you’re interested in doing the story. He can probably fill in some of the details I’m missing; he just gave me a rough sketch. I just thought you’d be interested in picking up some freelance work.”

“Yeah, I am. Thanks a lot of, Deb. You are absolutely the best.”

“You bet,” Deb said. “Are you going to be okay? You want me to come over for awhile?”

“No, thank you, I’ll be all right, Nurse Nightingale,” Richard replied. “But thank you. I do appreciate it.”

“Okay, if you’re sure. I could bring some breakfast?” she half-said, half-asked.

Richard looked at himself in the mirror—he looked like he’d been kicked by a mule and pissed on by a horse—and his crappy efficiency apartment. He didn’t guess there would be too much risk of Debi swooning over him and asking him to marry her, given the circumstances. And breakfast would be good.

“Okay, okay,” he relented. “Breakfast, and then you need get out and live your life. I don’t want you just hanging around me out of sympathy. Or charity.”

“Wouldn’t ever,” she said. “I promise, I’ll just eat my bagel and go.”

“Okay. Give me a chance to shower and shave and stuff. I look like crap and I smell.”

“You usually do. I don’t mind, I’m not dressing in my church clothes or anything, but you can pretty yourself up if you like.”

“Not trying to pretty it up. I just want to scrape off a layer of grime.”

“Well, when you put it that way, maybe it would be a good idea. I’ll grab Robbie’s business card for you.”

“Thanks. See you in, like, forty-five. Is that okay?”

“Fine with me. Bagel and coffee okay?”

“That sounds great. Bye.”

“Hang in there, guy,” she finished, and the line clicked and the dial tone sounded. Rich put the receiver down.

“Today is the first day of the rest of my life,” Richard told himself, trudging toward the bathroom. “Yay.”