Thanks to anyone who's been looking at this and especially for comments--this is excerpt 3/5 for the first chapter (which is 40 pages)... for the impatient the role of Russians in the Fear of Russians chapter is clearest in excerpt 4... but anyway this excerpt is more of SQ, her dad and Alice.
Looking forward to feedback--don't hesitate to comment on the negative side or of course if you like anything!!
Cheers, and thanks again for reading,
Roughin


Fear of Russians (excerpt 3, from Paranoid Wasp)


Alice burst directly into a gushing monologue of surprise and praise of Tex. Suzie-Q was embarrassed for Alice, since she knew her Dad would find Alice silly. Alice was also drowning out the radio with her breathlessness, which always annoyed Suzie-Q’s Dad when Suzie-Q did that. But Suzie-Q knew she needed to be polite, so she nodded up and down and giggled from time to time to show complicity. Suzie-Q listened to Alice embarrass herself with clichés and a thinly-veiled crush for some time. She thought it was in bad Taste to demonstrate so clearly a crush on a youth pastor, and especially when he was a Married Man. When at last Alice began talking about liberation theology, Suzie-Q was able to become genuinely excited. “Mr. ‘Tex’ was so funny about those communist Christians, wasn’t he?” Suzie-Q felt uncomfortable laughing like that about those people, but she was torn between that and wanting to make Alice feel comfortable by complicity and laughing with her. She compromised by laughing a little and then saying almost what she thought.

“I don’t know if it’s really that funny, you know what I mean Alice? But he certainly knew something I didn’t know at all!"

“He just cut them right down to size, I thought, with all his making Every Single Argument they could possibly have and positively Proving from the Bible how wrong they were. I just thought he was so funny the whole time, making fun of them just like they deserve with those stupid ideas!”

Suzie-Q’s Dad suddenly swerved across three lanes of traffic and pulled over to the side of the Beltway. He stopped there in the emergency lane while cars whizzed past at 75 miles an hour. Alice gasped, “Oh my Gosh, you almost killed us!”

Suzie-Q’s Dad said nothing. Suzie-Q knew that meant it was really serious, since usually he didn’t permit anyone to say “Gosh” around him without a lecture about it being a blasphemy since “Gosh” was just a euphemism for “God.” Calvin Q turned the radio and the engine off. He just sat and waited for the gravity to sink in. Alice got the point and shut her mouth. They sat there in silence for some time.

“Suzie-Q,” Calvin Q finally spoke.

“Yes, Daddy.”

“The liberation theologians are wrong.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“They have confused the Kingdom of Heaven with the Kingdom of earth and 'vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord.”

“Um-huh.”

“Some hard decisions have been made to protect America from this grave error.”

Suzie-Q decided to brave a question. "You mean like the Iran-Contras?" she asked, her shoulders in the air and her brow uncleverly furrowed.

Calvin Q looked exasperated. "I'm talking about legal operations, Suzie-Q, not scandals."

“Yes, Daddy.”

“At least 500,000 communist men and women have been tortured, killed or disappeared in Latin America since World War II in anti-communist operations. 150,000 killed or disappeared in Guatemala, 30,000 disappeared and 2000 murdered in Argentina, up to 30,000 dead, 50,000 tortured and 2000 documented disappearances in Chile so far. The disappeared may be presumed tortured or killed as well.”

Calvin Q paused to allow himself to grapple with his emotions before adding with deep sadness, “…and his understanding no one can fathom.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

Calvin Q fell silent again. The Beltway cars whizzed by. Calvin Q looked in his rear-view mirror directly at Alice. She looked back at him with great surprise. He stared at her significantly for some time. Then he said, “It’s nothing to laugh about.”

“But I don’t get it,” Alice said. “Are we for them or against them?”

Calvin did not answer the question. Calvin Q continued to look at Alice directly without answering the question until both Alice and Suzie-Q felt they were somehow responsible for unleashing the wrath of God and all its consequences as carried out by the government of America. “It’s nothing to laugh about,” repeated Calvin Q.
Alice couldn’t look away. She wasn’t used to this. Alice’s eyes were locked into the deathly gaze of Suzie-Q’s father, and Alice knew she must respond to it. Alice looked and looked until she was very uncomfortable with Suzie-Q’s father's spectacles looking back at her. Suzie-Q watched Alice and thought it seemed as if Alice were searching deep in her memory for the appropriate response to a man like that. Finally, as if pulling the phrase out from the bottom of a murky pond, Alice managed to say, “Yes, sir.”

Calvin Q started the car and pulled out into traffic. He turned on the radio. Alice didn’t say another word. They drove home in silence.

When they got to Alice's, Suzie-Q got out of the car too. She said, "Bye, Daddy, see you in a little!" without waiting for him to comment. That way, he wouldn't have time to ask her when she would be home. Besides, she knew her curfew. She slammed the back door.





Suzie-Q and Alice tiptoed inside. They sat down in Alice's living room. No one else was home. They said nothing.

Finally, Alice said, "Boy, your Dad sure is strict!"

"Yeah," said Suzie-Q evasively. Suzie-Q wanted to talk about the communists but she thought Alice was too silly. The two of them sat there.

"So what should we do?" asked Alice at last. Alice was bored.

"I don't have much time, you know. I have to be home before dark, which means 30 minutes past sunset. The sun sets in 2 minutes, it takes me 7 minutes to walk home, so I gotta leave your house in 25 minutes to be home by 10:22."

Suzie-Q and Alice both thought hard about what to do, while Suzie-Q secretly wished she were reading Lady Chatterley's Lover or even the Oxford History of Great Britain instead.

“I know!” burst Alice. Then dropped to a whisper. “I’ve got something to show you,” she breathed in Suzie-Q’s ear, as if anybody else could hear. Alice’s parents had gone to a prayer vigil and wouldn’t be home till late. In a normal whisper Alice added, looking wild-eyed at Suzie-Q, “But you have to promise not to tell anyone—and I mean Anyone!”

Suzie-Q paused. She took promises very seriously. She thought about all the kinds of secrets she would not be able to keep. She thought about what if Alice showed her a dead body or a prisoner, crates full of cocaine or thousand-dollar bills. She thought about what if she found out that Alice’s Dad was a Russian spy. Finally, she decided to play it safe. “It’s not illegal, is it?” she whispered in a measured way.

Alice answered in a normal voice. “No way, are you crazy?”

Suzie-Q said nonchalantly, “Okay then, I promise.”

“Are you sure you promise?”

“I promise,” Suzie-Q said again quite casually, and she thought that Alice looked surprised. Alice spread out her mouth to make an incredulous face, but Suzie-Q knew she was just pretending.

“Okay, I’ll go get the key. Stay here!” Alice spoke in a stage whisper. Suzie-Q stayed there, and Alice went to get the key. When she got back, she led Suzie-Q down the basement stairs toward the family room.

Suzie-Q trod after Alice down the carpeted stairs. The shag carpet was dappled in orange and red. Suzie-Q and Alice tiptoed on principle, although creaks under the carpet rendered their tiptoeing inefficacious. Alice held the key before her like a talisman. At the bottom of the stairs, the carpet continued off to the left into the den Suzie-Q already knew, with its linoleum wood-colored walls and movie-size TV. To the right was a door Suzie-Q had always assumed was a closet. Now she noticed the padlock. The two girls stood close one behind the other before the locked door.

“Remember—you can’t tell anyone!”

“I told you I promised.”

“Swear it.”

“I don’t swear. Swearing is wrong. The Bible says, ‘Let your yes be yes and your no, no.’ But I promise.” Suzie-Q said this because she thought Alice would be convinced by her moral firmness. She was right. Alice was convinced. She unlocked the door.

The shag carpet stopped at the threshold of an open room about half the size of the house. There was no light in the room, though the ceiling lamp at the bottom of the stairs was bright enough to make things out by. Sloping grey cement floors met grey cinderblock walls on all sides, including the interior walls. The ceiling was of grey panelling, and was lower than the den ceiling.

Suzie-Q thought the space looked like somebody’s unused garage. Several years of dust covered most objects. On her right the wall was lined with a double row of 10-gallon water bottles. A green metal cabinet like a wardrobe, with two long doors, stood in one corner. The left half of the room was filled with crates and boxes, mostly unopened. Behind them, against the far wall to Suzie-Q’s left, was a kind of cubby-hole structure made of brown painted metal. From the door where the girls were standing, only the top row of the cubby-holes could be seen. They measured about 1.5 feet squared each, and there were six across. In the one on the far left was a flashlight. The one next to that had some pamphlets. In the top cubby-hole on the far right was a plastic sack.

Suzie-Q had a very bad feeling about the sack, and about what might be in the cubby-holes she couldn’t see. Alice was standing with the key posed still before her in her hand, concentrating hard on the effect. Suzie-Q understood that she was supposed to begin exploring on her own to understand the secret. She conquered her bad feeling with rationality and went to peer more closely.

Suzie-Q inched along the left wall toward the cubby-hole with the flashlight. When she reached the skinny alley between the boxes and the cubby-holes, she leaned only the top half of her body with her elbow and wrist angled outward to pick up the flashlight. When she had turned on the flashlight, she shone it on one of the pamphlets.

The pamphlet read, “How to build a nuclear bomb shelter.” Suzie-Q felt her heart skip a beat. With her free hand, she sifted through the others. They read respectively, “Survive the tribulation,” “Get out and get by: a survivalist guide to emergency relocation,” and finally, “Nuclear holocaust survival.” Suzie-Q began to feel hot and short of breath like if she was on a roller-coaster. She turned to look back at Alice. Alice nodded up and down to confirm.

Suzie-Q carefully put back the pamphlets as she had found them and continued her meticulous investigation. One by one she shone her flashlight on each cubby-hole, careful not to get ahead of herself. The first cubby-hole she found was filled from top to bottom with large tin cans marked in no-name lettering PEANUT BUTTER. Suzie-Q understood that these were survivalist supplies, and that they represented bad doctrine. She thought that the survivalist supplies, although exciting, were not to be taken seriously. She thus allowed herself to go more quickly over the left half of the shelves, which contained cans of TUNA, STEWED TOMATOES, GREEN BEANS, CORN, WHITE POTATOES, CARROTS, and PEACHES. The right half of the shelves looked to contain more sacks like the first one. The bottom shelf held inflatable mattresses. Each mattress cubby-hole also held a supply of blankets and pillows for sleeping. On the far end of the bottom shelf was a kerosene lamp.
Suzie-Q was still standing at the edge of the small pathway that ran between the boxes and the shelves. Now she looked back again at Alice before entering the dim space to investigate the sacks. Suzie-Q’s brows were furrowed, and she felt quite serious about the thing despite her rationality. In order to seem more nonchalant for Alice and herself, she shrugged her shoulders in an exaggerated way with her two elbows crooked and her palms upward (or almost, since in her right hand was still the flashlight) and mouthed the words, crinkling her nose as she did it, “Should I look in the bags?”

Alice nodded furiously. Suzie-Q skinnied into the alleyway with her rear end brushing up against the boxes and holding the front of herself and her arms as small and far from the shelves as she could, sliding sideways through the alley. She tried not to think about what she couldn’t see on the floor. She was just thinking about how opening the plastic bags was going to make the kind of sound that scares you when you want to be extra quiet because you are afraid that any sound you make will prevent you from hearing the thing you are afraid of when she saw that in the second to last cubby-hole was a key. Suzie-Q picked up the key and twisted around to show it to Alice, holding it high in the air. She shone the flashlight on it to make sure Alice would see it well, twisting around in an awkward way and gesticulating wildly her question with her arms and her eyes. Alice, who was again nodding furiously, pointed in an exaggerated way at the green cabinet in the other corner, making thrusting motions with her index finger in its direction high up in the air, although Suzie-Q had no problem seeing all of Alice from her vantage point. Then Alice made a motion signalling for Suzie-Q to put the key in her pocket, bringing her hand down from on high several times with the index finger and thumb pressed together and putting the two closed digits in her pocket, with her elbow wide out, and then bringing the hand up again to pinch the imaginary key out of the air and demonstrate the movement until Suzie-Q had understood Alice and had made the same exaggerated motion with the real key in order to show that she had understood, nodding all the while. Suzie-Q turned her back on Alice after the twisted demonstration concerning the key, and paused to take a breath. With her feet planted firmly in one place on the ground and almost unable to change positions, she pulled the sack off the shelf and close to her body with her left hand. The sack was heavy. The weight of something heavy had fallen to the bottom of the sack as she pulled it towards her. She opened up three fingers of her hand and managed to adjust the handles of the bag between her fingers as she had intended to, shone the flashlight in from the side and peered in at the same time.

Immediately she recognized the bug eyes and long flex-tube nose of a gas mask. Suzie-Q’s heart sank. She stood frozen remembering all the anti-war poetry she had read in her literature class about World War I, and she thought about the trenches and the bloated faces victim of the poisonous fumes. She had a sudden feeling that the very presence of the masks in the room had the potential of bringing past and distant horrors into the room. She was afraid that she might live the horrors of war in her lifetime.

All this happened very fast in her mind, as her heart sunk, not like when it skipped a beat but like sinking stone, and she had little fear left or excitement as she quickly replaced the sack where she had found it and walked back out from the little passage-way with a sort of blank expression and a less enthusiastic fake smile as she pulled the key out of her pocket to encourage a fast end to the discovery.

“What is all this stuff, Alice?” Suzie-Q asked in a normal voice.

“It’s my granddad's bomb shelter. He never finished the ventilation system since he ran out of money. At our church they say we won’t be here for the tribulation, but granddad never believed that. With him, it was always, ‘Better safe than sorry!’”

“I just don’t know what to think,” said Suzie-Q in a distracted way, trying to sound nice, but feeling less worried about niceness than usual, with a sympathetic spreading of her closed lips into her dimples after the comment but without the eyes to match. “Should we go look in the green cabinet?” she asked, in a half-hearted stage whisper.

“Shshsh!” said Alice loudly, with her finger to her lips.

They both walked to the green cabinet. Suzie-Q opened it nonchalantly with the key and felt unsurprised to find six hunting rifles hung up on the right side. On the left side was some other hunting gear, including special jackets and boots and gun cases. “This is my Dad’s hunting stuff,” whispered Alice.

“Yeah, I thought so,” said Suzie-Q, who had never seen hunting gear up close before but was genuinely unimpressed after the gas masks. She felt slightly more curious about a ripped out magazine page that was taped up to the inside of the left door. On it was advertised, WE ARE WEAPONS with a 1-800 number and an address in West Virginia highlighted in yellow. She wondered whether this was important after the gas masks, but felt her curiosity was stronger than the question of importance. She stared at the WE ARE WEAPONS poster, contemplating her dilemma, then gave in to frivolity.

“So, what’s in the boxes?” Suzie-Q asked. Alice put her mouth right up to Suzie-Q’s ear. Suzie-Q felt creepy. Suzie-Q had to concentrate hard to understand. After going over the sounds two or three times in her mind, she understood, “guns and ammunitions.” At this point, Suzie-Q thought to look at her watch.

Suzie-Q was late. It was 10:22. Suzie-Q tried to say good-bye to Alice fast, but Alice was too talkative and worked up about her grandfather's collection. Suzie-Q felt her heart begin to pound. Finally, Suzie-Q cut Alice off. "Alice, I have got to go. Daddy's gonna kill me!" Suzie-Q cupped her hand and wagged her fingers to excuse herself, ran up the stairs and let herself out.