Bombs Away

You could blame it all on Pappy, I suppose. He served in World War II with Patton's Third Army on its dash across France and all the way to Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. Along the way, they hit the southern flank of the German advance in the Battle of the Bulge and liberated a concentration camp or two. Not a bad piece of work.

Pappy came out of that war proud and optimistic, feelings that soured in the face of post-war Soviet aggression. Thus, when the Cuban missile crisis came, things were going just about the way that he assumed--to Hell--so Pappy, Grammy, and his two sons, the younger of which was my father, temporarily moved up to the family cabin in the Maryland hills between Frederick and Hagerstown for a couple of weeks. There, they met up with a handful of cousins and several great-aunts and great-uncles, to dig a bomb shelter. My father was too young to do much of the heavy work, but he pitched in. The womenfolk handled stockpiling the food and supplies, including mattresses and cots. This would be the family redoubt, assuming sufficient time to travel in the event of an emergency.

None of these men were college boys. They all worked in the building trades so, between them, they rousted the equipment and supplies and quickly built a reinforced concrete bunker designed to hold 15 people for four weeks, if you really squeezed in. Years later, as the result of an overheard moment of candor, I learned that the plan had originally been for a shelter that would hold Pappy's immediate four-person family for three months, figuring for radioactive fallout, but then you really cannot politely ask family to dig a bomb shelter that you are not going to let them use, so Pappy changed the plan on the fly.

The base of the shelter was twenty feet below ground with eight feet of clearance from floor to ceiling. When you factored in the one-foot-thick reinforced-concrete ceiling and the one-foot-thick reinforced-concrete floor, there were ten feet of dirt covering it to get back up to the level of the surrounding ground. Then, to provide extra protection, they layered on five more feet of earth over the main bunker site, figuring that it would settle over time, even when compacted. The entryway, however, stood a bit away from the mound that had been added to the surface of the bunker. There, a heavy, steel hatch covered a circular shaft with a ladder up to the top. The hatch was recessed into the ground so that earth and grass camouflaged the door a bit. To enter, you had to pull the hatch up. If you were inside, trying to get out, you had to push it up. Pappy was particularly proud that closing the hatch made an airtight seal so that no fallout or biological or chemical agents could get inside.

Maybe this sounds like a bit of overkill, but the cabin was not too far from Fort Detrick, where the Army did, and does, biological weapons research, and Camp David, the presidential retreat. Pappy rightly figured that the area was going to take a pounding, if the balloon went up, so why not add some protection? Still, the concentration of fire would be lower there than down in the immediate Washington, DC suburbs where they lived, so it was a reasonable solution in those troubled times.

Fortunately, the bunker was never needed. Dad, who had inherited the cabin, did take my mother, sister, and me up there after 9/11 when we were kids, just so we would know where it was and how it worked, in case we needed it.

Doing so, we realized that, due to some sloppy design choices Pappy and the family building crew made, it was not possible to stay down there for any extended length of time. About a day was the limit with four people. More was theoretically possible, if you had the hatch open. Otherwise, the oxygen ran out. We knew because, when we stayed there for one night the weekend after 9/11, my mother was complaining of a headache the next morning. The rest of us were dopey. Dad figured out it was too much carbon dioxide.

The air circulation system that Pappy and company had planned simply did not work. It was badly designed and even more badly built. Pappy wound up plugging the hole that was supposed to have a filtered air intake tube, but he never liked admitting mistakes, so he never seemed to have told anyone, including my father. I figured it out later when I was looking it over, trying to figure out what to do with it and lit a charcoal fire to see if the smoke left at all. Not a good idea. Damned near asphyxiated myself.

The upshot of that weekend was that Dad decided it was a refuge of last resort. Otherwise, it was a curiosity that was good for storage and maybe as a short-term tornado shelter, if needed. We left some canned goods down there along with a little gas camping stove and a half dozen gallon jugs of water, just in case. But my mother remained spooked from nearly dying down there, as she said, and usually told us it was off-limits when we were at the cabin for the rest of our childhoods. Of course, that did not stop me from doing my smoke test later but, if I remember correctly, I had been drinking a bit, so my judgment was off.

My uncle, by the way, did not get cheated when Pappy died, and Dad got the cabin instead of him. My uncle got Pappy's boat instead. To my way of thinking, that was the better payoff because, as far as I know, bikini-clad college girls do not usually want to fuck middle-aged men in their mountain bunkers, but my uncle's experience shows that they are willing to give it a go when the middle-aged man is giving pretty girls free booze on a boat moored in the Loxahatchee River near all the bars in Jupiter, Florida.

On the other hand, women in their late twenties are apparently fine with wanting to fuck a mid-thirties guy in a mountain bunker. At least one was. Unfortunately, she was my wife. More unfortunately, I was not the mid-thirties guy she was fucking. That was her boss.

Aside from my wife and I, and her boss, no one who knew about the bunker was alive anymore, or in a position to talk about it, as far as I knew. Pappy and Grammy had died about twenty years ago. The distant cousins and great-aunts and great-uncles who had helped build the thing were gone, too. We fell out of touch with those branches of the family tree and had not seen them in years. Dad died of a massive heart attack about five years ago. Mom had a stroke and was in a home, and my sister had overdosed when she was in college some years ago. And I was sure no one ever got any permission from the county to do any building, back in the day, so there should be no records of the bunker anywhere. In addition, the people who built it were not, as a rule, writers. They were not diarists. They were close-lipped folk.

Come to think of it, I don't think Mom had even bothered to deal with probate for the cabin when Dad died. It was the only thing my parents had not owned jointly, and they never really used it much by the time Dad passed. Sorting it out now would probably mess up the benefits Mom was getting from Uncle Sam for her long-term care.

I pondered these facts as I quietly shoveled dirt on top of the bunker hatch about a foot deep and then, when the dirt totally covered the hatch, gently began piling fifty-pound bags of fast-set concrete mix neatly over the dirt. My wife had wanted me to build a nice patio outside the cabin. We were the only people that used it these days. I had made an order for concrete a few months ago. I had the bags delivered weeks earlier, but placed in an out of sight area, along with the bags of topsoil and grass seed. It was all documented.

Not that my wife would have noticed. She and her boss had a routine, which I had discovered by accident a few weeks earlier. I am a general contractor, like the men in the family before me. I also do landscaping. Sometimes, we build stuff in sketchy areas where I do not want to drive my nice truck so, late on Wednesday morning, I bought a beater car for cash from a guy who was a friend of a friend of a friend. I made the purchase not too far from my wife's real estate agency office, so I thought I would surprise her, show her my new wheels, and take her for lunch.

There was a surprise, alright. Mine, not hers. As I drove into her parking lot, I saw her getting into her SUV with her boss. I also saw his hand on her ass. Being curious, I followed in my new beater car, which she had never seen before. It did not take too long to figure out where she was headed. I turned off my phone at that point. I knew then that, whatever happened, the "it" that happened was not going to require photographs.

When the lovers remained stopped at a green traffic light because they were too busy sucking on each other's tongues to notice that it changed from red, I did not honk. Instead, I drove around them, keeping my head in a position that they could not see my face. I arrived at the cabin ten minutes before them. The beater had good acceleration.

The next surprise was where they went. I would have guessed the cabin itself. It was rustic but clean. But no. They went for the bunker. I was watching behind some nearby trees.

I should have guessed.

I had showed it to my wife some time before. We had even baptized it sexually. The darned thing fascinated her. I was jaded. And I already knew that it did not really work right. She was always asking about it though. Every time we went to the cabin, she wanted to do the horizontal tango in the bunker. Shades of Eva Braun, I remember thinking, but I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut. I figured, if the average teenage guy is willing to do it in the back seat of a car, then a bomb shelter bunk bed is not all that bad an alternative. Besides, it took hours of that kind of activity before the air went bad. She did not need to know any of that, so I never mentioned it.

I don't think she told anyone though, except for her boss. Friends knew about the cabin, but no one ever asked about the bunker, so she probably had not revealed its existence. That was a risk I was willing to take.

I am my own boss, and no one ever knows where I am, so it was easy to watch her and figure out her routine. After looking at her phone, I saw that she always kept the midday timeslot on Wednesdays open on her calendar. She and numb-nuts would drive North thirty minutes to the cabin from her office in Frederick in her SUV around lunch times on Wednesdays and come back before 2:30 p.m. They would get to the bunker, hide the car in a clearing behind the cabin, walk back with a picnic, pull the hatch up, and go down the hole, pulling the hatch closed behind them.

They both left their phones in the office, apparently to avoid raising suspicion on Find-My-Phone apps, but each had a burner phone that they took with them and left in the car while they were in the bunker. Not that the phones made much difference. Signal reception was horrible around the cabin anyway. I always left my phone back at the house on Wednesdays.

My wife always took clean sheets to the bunker, which still had the original mattresses. When they came back out, she removed the soiled linens.

I watched them do this five times. She never seemed to notice that I stopped trying to have sex with her and was spending more time at work.

I could have just made things easy and divorced her. We had been married for only five years. We had no kids. We had been talking about them but had agreed to wait a while. Divorcing for adultery, I might be able to get out of paying alimony. But I admit that I did not want her to have any part of my business. And there was the principle of the thing.

If she wanted to have excitement in the bunker, then I was willing to give it to her.

After their last rendezvous, I had gone down into the bunker myself and made some changes. I took out all the canned food. I also removed all the water jugs that were there, replacing them with a gallon jug full of my urine. It surprised me how long it took to fill that thing. The supplies were kept off to the side in the storage space, so you would never notice the changes unless you went looking for them. I wiped everything down with Clorox wipes and used rubber gloves. I left my phone at home again.

Today, they were on time as usual. They went down with their picnic and, one minute after they had shut the hatch, I was carefully covering it with dirt and then with the bags of concrete mix. It made a nice pyramid. The way it was laid out, you would never know there was anything underneath. The pyramid had to weigh about 900 pounds. Add to that the weight of the steel hatch, and there was no way that hatch was going to open unless I wanted it open.

I dragged a concrete mixing tub out of hiding and loaded it with tools so that everything looked like a dutiful husband was going to build a patio, just like his loyal, loving wife wanted.

It would probably take the lovers a bit of time to figure out that they were staying for longer than anticipated. I used my spare set of keys to pop the hatch on my wife's SUV, laid my bike down in the back, and made the half-hour drive to Hagerstown. I parked in an area experiencing some social distress. The locals, a number of whom were waiting for the nearby methadone clinic to re-open after lunch, looked at me with interest, dressed in my cycling shorts and jersey, as I pulled the bike out of the cargo section of the car to enjoy a ride on a nice early spring day. I could almost hear the gears clinking in their heads about how this guy's car was going to be unattended for a while. As I got on my bike to pedal away, I made sure to drop the car keys on the street, but pretended not to notice. My wife's purse was visible on the front seat anyway. I rode off thinking that if that car and its contents were there undisturbed half an hour later, it would be shocking.

I then made the sixteen-mile bike ride back to the cabin. When I got there, the bike fit right into the trunk of my beater car. I hung around for a bit to see what would happen. It was now dusk. The pyramid of concrete bags was undisturbed. I thought I heard some clanging, like metal was striking metal, but it was very faint. It certainly was not a guilt-inducing telltale-heart kind of banging. Maybe it was the wind. When it got dark, I drove my beater car back home.

Once there, after showering, I made sure to send a text message to my wife's phone, asking where she was and when she was coming home. I also called her office number and left a voice mail asking the same thing. Later in the evening, I called some of her friends to make a record that I had done so. One was a work friend, who eventually confessed that my wife had left with her boss around lunch time and never returned. Then, I called the boss's home landline and spoke to his wife, who turned out to be the true owner of the real estate agency. Together, we worked ourselves into a frenzy of near certainty that they had run off together and could go fuck themselves.

With that, I went to bed.

The next morning, I called a divorce attorney and asked for advice on how to divorce a woman who had run off with her boss, just to have a witness that I had done so. No one from the real estate office ever called the police. My wife's boss's wife informed everyone the next day that the two cheaters had run off together and good riddance. She also told the employees that she was sure that they knew about the affair and that, if they wanted to keep their jobs, they all needed to work twice as hard from then on.

It was about three months later that the police finally started poking around, probably prompted by my in-laws. I refused to talk to them and had them deal with my lawyer instead. By then, spring had turned to summer, and I had removed the concrete bags and used the mix to build the patio. I had also added topsoil, grass seed, and sod all around the hatch so that the whole area was covered with a rich mat of thick, tall grass that looked like it had been there forever.

By the time the police came up with some sort of reason to get a warrant several weeks after they started looking, too much time had passed. They ripped up the patio, of course, because their theory was that, if it was new, it was obviously hiding corpses. I had to eat the cost of that. My lawyer told me the odds of getting compensation were low. Funny thing. They did find some bones there, but they turned out to be a couple of dead dogs. My guess is that Pappy buried his hunting dogs there. I vaguely remembered some story about him and how much he loved his hounds. That discovery disappointed the cops, after getting them all excited for about five minutes before they found enough of the bones to know they were not human.

They had tracking dogs, including cadaver dogs, but got no hits. If they had ground-penetrating radar, I was probably screwed, but that did not seem to be in the county budget. They eventually lost interest. I think my looking pathetic and cuckolded helped. What's a little pride, after all?

Now, a couple of years after the fact, after adding more and more dirt and grass to the area around the hatch opening every year, you would be hard-pressed to imagine anything was under the dirt.

I suppose that there is always the risk that someone could find them, but I thought they would have trouble proving I did anything, if they ever did find anything.

"What the heck were they doing inside there, Officer Friendly?" I would say. "I'm as shocked as anyone that they got trapped there. As you can see, there is no lock on the hatch. I can't understand why they could not just open it and leave. What a tragic accident. I don't even own the place. I never even knew that thing was there. That's from the Cold War, right? Gosh, that's way before I was born. I thought she took off. My wife must have stumbled onto this love bunker somehow when I was not here and decided to keep it as her secret adultery nest. I have no idea how all that dirt and grass got there covering the hatch, Officer. But nature is a powerful force. We underestimate it at our peril. Beats me why she took a jug of urine to her sex cave. I hear you telling me that DNA analysis says that the urine is mine, but that sounds like you're bluffing me, to be honest. Maybe she harvested it from me while I was sleeping. So I can't think of any reason why she took a jug of someone's urine with her down there along with her baguette and soft cheese picnic. And dead lover. From what you are telling me, she seems to have had a whole sexual life that I never knew about, so maybe this was some kind of weird fetish. Maybe she saw it on the Internet. There's all kinds of sick stuff there these days."

What was anyone going to say?

I have moved on, gotten a divorce based on abandonment, and been dating. I wondered if I would experience any regret over time but, happily, I have not. I don't go to the cabin much myself anymore. It has served its purpose. Besides, that part of the state has lots of deer ticks, and Lyme disease is no joke.

I don't even think of my ex much. But I do wonder, and will probably go to my grave wondering, whether she and numb-nuts died first from the lack of oxygen or whether they were so desperately thirsty after they finished their picnic that they drank what was in the jug. God help me, but considering that possibility always makes me chuckle.