After supper, Father, my little brother Howie, and I march over to Uncle Larry’s for our haircuts. Uncle Larry bought a pair of electric clippers about a year ago and has been giving us all haircuts ever since. Well, not exactly giving—he charges us each a dollar.
Uncle Larry and his family live just down the highway on the other side. The orchards behind his two-story farmhouse run all the way to the Puerto Rican migrant-labor camp that houses the workers who come in the summer to pick crops on the farms here about.
I am the first in the chair on the concrete slab behind the back kitchen door. Uncle Larry starts in on me. He is unusually talkative this night. “Just about finished my bomb shelter, Henry.”
“I can see,” I say, but I really can’t tell this hole in the backyard is going to be a bomb shelter. It is about eight feet deep and ten feet across. Uncle Larry wants me to share his vision of an elaborate shelter able to sustain lives for up to three months.
“We had an air-raid drill in school today,” I proclaim. I know he will be interested in that.
“That’s good for when the Russians drop the big one on us,” says Uncle Larry.
“Drop and cover against an interior wall—that’s what Mrs. Warner made us do,” I say, trying to sound like the official government brochure we read. “Oh, yeah. All the major cities have a ring of Nike bases around them. So the chances of the Reds’ missiles ever getting through is pretty slight.”
“Well now there’s the rub, Henry. The commies are wily, and they can count. They know that they only need to get a few missiles through our defenses to take out Washington, New York, maybe Los Angeles and Chicago, just for starters. They’ll throw hundreds at us, maybe thousands, figuring we can’t knock them all down. And that’s why I have this bomb shelter.”
Uncle Larry must have noticed the surprised look on my face each time he calls this hole his bomb shelter. “Well, I know there’s some finishing work to be done,” he says.
Just then a dark car out on the highway slows down. “See that car, Henry?” Uncle Larry says in a hushed tone.
“Yup, they’re curious about your open-air barber shop. You might have some new customers, Uncle Larry,” I kid him.
“Curious like hell,” says Uncle Larry. His voice becomes gravelly and his demeanor turns dark. “Those two are CIA looking for me. Or maybe FBI.”
I can’t see two people in the car. I can’t see anybody because Uncle Larry’s house sits too far down a lane to tell how many people are in the car. It drives off.
“Oh yea, CIA, I think.” Uncle Larry goes on. “They’re still pissed about Korea. It wasn’t my fault. They know that.”
Later at home I ask Father. “What did Uncle Larry do in Korea during the war there?”
Father says. “He never went to Korea. He was in the Coast Guard right here in New Jersey. What did he tell you?”
“When I was getting my haircut, a dark car drove by slowly. He said CIA agents were inside looking for him. It had to do with something he did in Korea.”
“Oh boy, he’s talking that way again. The last time he got this way he started digging his bomb shelter. Just don’t pay any attention. He’s confused.”
Later in the summer I heard Father tell Mama that Larry would have shock treatments in the hospital where he has been sent. It sounds like the electric chair. I hope it doesn’t kill him.
a river of silence
grows wider every night—
cold sliver of moon
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