AFTER DINNER that night, Elaine distributed gifts. Each of us got a small gaily wrapped box, and she commanded us to open them in unison. In each box was a pair of earmuffs with earpieces made of fluffy artificial fur in neon colors. At the moment when I read the opening words of “My Grandfather’s Cave,” episode fifteen of Dead Air, everyone in my audience put the earmuffs on, providing a highly amusing demonstration of the way an idea (good, bad, dumb, or indifferent) can circulate through an isolated population at the speed of thought itself.
WHEN MY PHOTOGRAPH of clams in flight was published in the Babbington Reporter, it not only made Kap’n Klam the most popular place in town and brought me quite a few new buyers for the flying-saucer detectors I manufactured in my cellar, but also enabled my grandfather to persuade my grandmother to allow him to dig the cave that he’d been yearning to dig for quite some time.
Cave-digging was a widespread hobby then. People dug them in the hope of surviving fallout, the radioactive dust that an atomic or nuclear bomb would loft into the atmosphere when it detonated, extending its killing power far beyond the point and instant of impact. These caves were called fallout shelters.
We were all afraid then. The likelihood of atomic war was widely advertised, and in school we were taught to expect it. Even my kindly grandfather, whom I still called Guppa though I had reached an age when I embarrassed myself by doing it, had begun to have apocalyptic fears. He wanted to build a fallout shelter, but he knew that my grandmother, Gumma, would have considered his fallout-shelter construction work a nearer and greater threat to her trim back yard than a bomb, so he had little hope of ever persuading her to allow him to build it — until my photograph appeared in the Reporter.
On the Saturday morning following the publication of the photograph, while Guppa was putting ketchup on his scrambled eggs, he said, as casually as he could, “After breakfast, Lorna, let’s go into the back yard and pick out a spot for the shelter.”
“Herb,” said Gumma. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous!” he said. “Just look at this!” He flipped the Reporter to the front page and pointed to the picture. “It’s not just the bomb we’ve got to worry about now — it’s these cosmic clams.”
“Cosmic clams?”
“That’s what they’re calling them, cosmic clams. And it says here that there’s considerable speculation about an invasion.”
“Goodness gracious,” said Gumma.
“In light of this intergalactic threat, wouldn’t it be all right if I built a shelter?”
Gumma looked at Guppa, and a smile came over her face. “Oh, okay,” she said. “Go ahead.”
So Guppa dug a hole, and in the hole he constructed a fallout shelter, an artificial cave, to protect us from radioactive dust and cosmic clams. When the shelter was finished, Gumma and Guppa and I lived in it for an entire week, to try it out. It was well equipped — that was Guppa’s way. During our stay, he encouraged us to make suggestions about improving the shelter’s state of preparedness for enduring a siege. I remember suggesting that he could get by with fewer cans of lima beans, but I told him that otherwise I couldn’t find a thing wrong with it, not a single flaw, and that the cesspool cover was a stroke of genius. (Guppa had had the inspired idea of concealing the shelter by disguising its entry hatch as a cesspool cover. A cesspool cover was a common backyard ornament in Babbington, so I suppose the disguise would have worked, but it was never tested. Everyone we knew was aware that the shelter was there and that the cesspool cover was a phony, so Guppa never got to find out how effective a concealment it was. For a while, he thought of attracting people into the back yard so that he could determine whether the average stranger would develop suspicions about the false cover. He planned to lure them into the back yard by selling vegetables from his garden on a pick-your-own basis. When he proposed the test, Gumma said that she didn’t want people traipsing all over the yard, so that was that.)
Years passed before I saw the flaw. I was reminiscing, and in my reminiscent ramble I stumbled upon the entrance to Guppa’s shelter. While I was standing there in the past, admiring the verisimilitude of the false cover, the thought struck me that a canny refugee, running through Babbington looking for hidden fallout shelters, might have noticed that my grandparents had two cesspool covers, and that’s when I realized why Guppa had concealed the shelter. The shelter was meant to protect us from people who didn’t have shelters of their own. (I’m sorry to have to say this in front of everyone, Guppa, but it’s true.) He had hidden his cave from other people, who might need it and want to use it, because he meant to save only the people he had chosen to save, his people, and not the others, whoever they might be, whom he defined only by their otherness, the quality of not being his people. In his nightmares, it wasn’t radioactive dust or cosmic clams that threatened us but swarms of city dwellers who would survive the bomb or the invasion and sweep out over our little town, looking for shelter. When I realized this, I thought that I could see, in memory, something I hadn’t noticed at all during my stay in the shelter: Guppa with his ear to the entry hatch, listening for the rumble of their footsteps. He must have decided that in their panic they wouldn’t notice the two cesspool covers, since panic can keep a person from seeing things that are as plain as the nose on his face.
[to be continued]
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