Chapter 155
AFTER MARY LOU LED LAURA to the wardroom, Wilson suited me up in a lead apron and steered me behind the curtain, where Bobby was gowned and lying on a gurney.
He had a kidney-shaped basin resting across his chest and an IV stuck in his arm, but what was most jarring was his skin, which was pale and clammy, and his eyes, which were extremely red.
“You look like shit,” I said to him, determined to keep the mood light.
He laughed a little. “I feel like shit, too.”
I touched his forehead with the back of my hand. He was feverish, and when he called me Ellen instead of Eileen, I remembered what Wilson had said about him being disoriented.
“What hurts?” I asked, but the question wasn’t going to get me anywhere, because Bobby was thinking only of Laura.
“Is she okay?” he asked. “This had to have freaked her out.”
“She’s fine,” I said. “Just worried about you, that’s all.”
“I don’t want her around any of this.”
“I know. But the doc is saying you’re not a risk to her. Or the baby.”
“What does he know?” said Bobby, and I peeked around the curtain to see if Wilson was in the room. The infirmary was mercifully empty.
“You shouldn’t be in here, either,” he added.
“I’m not worried about it,” I lied, and pulled up a stool.
Bobby let out a long sigh, and I got the impression that if he hadn’t been so exhausted, he might have fought me harder.
“Where’s Canady?” I asked. “And the two other guys?”
“I don’t know about Marty and Punk, but they’ve got Canady next door. In dental. He got the worst of it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” said Bobby. “Direct hit in the face.”
“Jesus Christ. What happened in there?”
Bobby glanced at the curtain, and I pulled it aside so we could both confirm the infirmary was still empty.
“Don’t tell me anything that’ll get you in trouble,” I said.
“It doesn’t fucking matter,” he said, and I was too afraid to ask him why not.
I returned to the stool and waited for him to say more.
“How much do you know about nuclear reactors?”
“Paul doesn’t tell me shit.”
“Yeah, well… there are these circuits that run coolant through the reactor.”
“Laura was telling us about them.”
He smiled at that. “She’s the one who should have gone to Nuclear Power School.
” He was probably right. “The reactor’s just a bunch of fuel rods, sitting one right next to the other in the equivalent of a metal box.
We call it the reactor core. These fuel rods produce a ton of heat, and they’d melt down if we weren’t constantly running coolant over them. ”
I nodded, to indicate I was following.
“The coolant’s cycling through two circuits. A primary circuit, which is what’s cooling down the reactor core, and a secondary circuit, which is really there to cool down the primary circuit.”
“Okay,” I said, tentatively.
“It sounds fancy, but it’s just pipes. And all these pipes, they’re connected with a bunch of valves. Some are threaded, some are flanged. But they’ve all got gaskets and O-rings. Shit that rusts and rots and has to be replaced if you want to keep these circuits sealed up nice and tight.”
“Which I assume you do?”
“It’s ninety-nine percent of what we do in Nuclear Repair. The joke is we go to all this school, and we’re glorified plumbers.”
I laughed, which he seemed to appreciate, but then he bolted upright and gagged into the basin he’d been holding.
“Should I get someone?” I asked, but he told me to wait. So I let him finish, then I rinsed the basin in the sink and handed it back to him. Only then did I realize that maybe I shouldn’t have been anywhere near his body fluids.
“Fuck, I’m dizzy,” he said as he lay back down, the basin resting against his chest once more.
“Maybe just sleep?”
“I got to tell you this. In case something happens to me.”
This startled me. I’d never heard anyone talk this way, not even Lenny when he’d left for Vietnam.
“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” I said in a hurry, but he held up a finger and told me to quit bullshitting him, so I did.