An Atomic Romance (18 page)

32

After leaving Burl at his house and retrieving his car, Reed bought gas at the mini-mart. Tonight, Rosalyn’s blond hair was swung into a casual knot on her crown, and she wore slim jeans and a tight red T-shirt with a V-neck. He loved to hang around her because she was always cheerful. He needed that now.

“Hey, Rosalyn, did you ever know anybody who did meth?” he asked. They were chatting by the motor-oil rack.

“Why? What’s the trouble? You don’t want any of that, do you? You look beat.” She touched his brow.

“Hell, no. I just wondered about it, there’s so much of it around.” Spotting lithium batteries, he pointed to them. “A chief ingredient,” he said.

Rosalyn nodded. “I sell a lot of those.” She straightened a stack of pipe cleaners. “I know some of the truckers that come through are on meth,” she said. “It makes them a little crazy; they act like they’re ready to pick me up and carry me off.” She laughed, touching her hair confidently.

“One look at you, Rosalyn, and anybody would want to grab you and carry you off.” He liked Rosalyn, who had always been warm and maternal toward him. He said, “A couple of guys at work take it. They come in wired and go out wired. They may as well hook in directly to the power lines out there at the plant.”

She laughed, but she was worried. “I heard there might be layoffs, Reed,” said Rosalyn.

“I haven’t heard that. They won’t lay off unless they cancel the new plant.”

“It won’t affect you, will it?”

“Nah. I’ve got too much seniority.”

“I hate to see anybody get laid off.”

“Me too. Those young guys just starting out, just married—first they get laid and then they get laid off. But don’t worry. It won’t happen. When the centrifuge goes online, we’ll have plenty of jobs. We could even make bomb fuel again if we had to.”

“Well, I could do without that.” She shuddered. “There’s so much going on in the world—I’m just going to enjoy myself.”

“Sounds like a good plan.”

“I’m taking my break,” she said to the young Korean behind the counter.

Reed sat with her on the bench in front of the mini-mart, where the neon and vapor lights shone eerily on her face. She lit a cigarette. Reed hadn’t smoked in years, but Rosalyn enjoyed smoking and refused to quit. They watched a frowsy woman pump her gas, then leave her kid in the car while she went inside to pay.

“I’m getting a hysterectomy,” Rosalyn told Reed.

“Oh, no! Cancer?”

“No, just what they call fibroids. They make me so miserable I can’t sit. They could take them out, but it’s easier to yank out the whole bag than to try to cut them out individually.” She laughed loudly and went on explaining in more clinical detail than he could focus on. “The risk of having them cut out is bleeding to death, so I’ll just let them take the whole shebang.” She laughed again and drew on her cigarette. “What do I need with a uterus anyway?”

Rosalyn naturally laughed all the time, regardless of the subject. She said, “I’m going to ask if I can take my uterus home. I want to bury it in the backyard.”

“Dogs might dig it up,” Reed said, catching a lock of hair that was falling across her cheek.

“Maybe I should give it to your dog.”

“Clarence would love it.”

Rosalyn laughed until she had to catch the pain in her side.

33

The marijuana crop was coming in. Reed knew, because he saw a pair of choppers flying low in the early morning sky, black against the sunrise; they were heading toward the cropland and the forest preserves along the river. A team called the Flying Ferrets cruised with their infrared, searching for patches. When they located one, they landed and set up a stakeout. On the choppers, they carried canoes, all-terrain vehicles, assorted weapons, anything they might need for their weed war. Reed liked watching helicopters, although he always imagined that one day he would see one spiral out of the sky, its spinning beanie gone berserk. He was sleepless, not a winged ferret, but a bear in need of a cave. Ursa very major. Reed had pushed his mother from his mind. As she grew stronger, her resentment of her surroundings grew more particular. She complained of having to listen to Guy Lombardo music, of having no one to play poker with, and of having to tolerate the decrepitude and dementia of the Sunnybank inmates.

“This place is full of old people,” she said with a sigh.

He had just left work. He was exhausted. During the first half of his shift he had repaired a sprinkling system, changed a fan belt on a large ventilation fan, and aligned a motor; and after eating he had returned to the Venusian greenhouse atmosphere of the Cascade with Darrell and Kerwin to start changing a joint seal on a compressor. He had drunk three orange sodas and about a gallon of water during the night. The window of his hood had a scratch on it that bisected his view like a split screen.

His mother had already been to breakfast, but she was still wearing her nightgown and robe. Reed, although realizing that he patronized her, told his mother how lovely she looked, how good she sounded, no longer slipping on any of her words. The newest drug seemed to have cleared out her mind like a bush hog, he thought. She joked about the daily devotional program. Yesterday it was Jesus and the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. She said, “They’re praying for a miracle here. They don’t have enough good food to go around, so they pad it with generic helper.”

“I’ll order you some loaves and fishes, Mom,” Reed said, touching her hair. The soft, dark hair of her younger days was now gray and bristly, like the brush he used to clean greasy tubing at work.

“I have a song in my head and I can’t get it out,” she said. “I don’t know what song it is. I hear one line, over and over. I’m sure I know the song but I can’t catch it. Am I losing my memory?”

“No, we’re all like that,” Reed assured her. “That’s the story of my life, a song I can’t identify.”

“Well, I doubt that,” she said.

34

Plutonium was a crazy element that crawled and burrowed. It melted at room temperature. It was different colors—silvery or purple. Someone said it felt like a newborn kitten in your hand. It was elusive, a shape-shifter, a trickster. The word plutonium was evocative—a faithful dog with a big wet mouth and floppy ears, or a distant planet that was cold as leftover biscuits. Pluto, the Greek god of the underworld, wore a helmet that made him invisible. For all Reed knew, Julia was on a distant planet, or perhaps somewhere on the outer rings of Saturn.

He cruised the Internet, seeking plutonium. After wading through some cursory histories of the Manhattan Project, he got bogged down in several conspiracy-theory websites. He went off on a tangent to the Aurora Project, a hypothetical hypersonic spy plane. He bypassed several familiar lunatic claims that radiation was a healthful rejuvenator. Reed stared at the screen until the Hubble pictures of the planets appeared.

His eye on Neptune, he lifted the telephone. He had hoped Julia would be back from Chicago after the weekend, but it was already early Wednesday. He had refrained from calling for a few days. After plastering her with assurances about the wildlife refuge, how would he ever explain the deer at Fort Wolf? He rang Julia’s number. It was three a.m. Mars floated slowly forward. “It’s me again, from outer space. Call me when you get home,” he said to her machine. He thought he and Julia must be in relative motion: traveling at different speeds, each thought the other was standing still. She had called to let him know she was going to Chicago; and she had even called him sweetie. So why should she drop him again? What if she didn’t get in touch at all? What if something had happened to her?

Would it make her happy if he joined a class-action suit? If he went back to school and studied astronomy? He really should shift course. He didn’t want to think of himself as a whiny, has-been oldster, his spirit tamed and boxed, his lust dimmed, his mouth turned down in a frown. But he seemed to live in a different space from her, a variant dimension, his string furled like fishing line.

One of the books he had ordered through interlibrary loan had arrived. After exercising with Clarence and feasting on catfish and black beans, he settled down on the back porch with the book about plutonium. He intended to refresh his understanding of how science arrived at radiation protection standards. And he wanted to find out how much plutonium the body could bear. The book documented the secret government plutonium experiments in the decade following Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The topic sounded familiar, something he had shut out of his mind. Now, as he flipped through the book, the memory erupted like a malignant pustule hidden in a brain fold. In medical experiments, the essential substance of nuclear weaponry had been shot into the bloodstream of human beings who were told only that it was good for them.

“Holy Venus and Mars!” Reed said aloud.

He read on. Besides trying to figure out tolerance doses of radioactivity, researchers used plutonium and other radioactive substances as an experimental cancer treatment. Most people lived only a short time, but a few lived for years with plutonium locked inside them.

Why not put it in breakfast cereal, in case it proved healthful? Reed wondered. Why not sell it as a miracle cure for obesity? What might it do to cholesterol? He remembered that the plutonium experiments had come to light during the nineties, and the D.O.E. had apologized. Some reparations had been paid and then the subject was forgotten. Reed couldn’t remember what he was doing then. Had Glenda left? He must have been off on one of his desperate motorcycle escapes. Little was said at work, just renewed vows of safety. It was past history.

He read on, skipping parts, reading ahead, doubling back. Radioactive substances
had
been tried in breakfast cereal—boys at a correctional school had been fed radioactive iron and calcium in their oatmeal. He read about a radioactive iron experiment on pregnant women—a nutrition study that backfired. He read about huge black tumors in the mouth, grapefruit-sized growths on thighs. Some doctors thought plutonium might jazz up spermatocytes.

On the atomic level, plutonium was a little bomb in itself when it entered the body, Reed thought. It initiated something like a chain reaction among the body’s cells—a kind of mutation that could turn into cancer. Reed wondered if a chromosomal change could then eventually pervade the human race. He remembered that Julia had told him that in biological terms cancer cells were immortal. Like something obsessed, they couldn’t stop replicating.

It was growing too dark to see. He went inside, cleaned up his dishes, then continued reading in his recliner. Clarence was barking outside, but Reed paid little attention as he read on, skimming parts, flipping to the index, studying pictures of forlorn victims.

Some of these experiments led to workplace safety practices that he was accustomed to. He didn’t know whether to puke or be thankful that humans had been used like rats so that he could be a cell rat. Even though researchers figured that a microgram of plutonium might cause cancer, they injected people with many times that amount. One horror after another leaped from the page. The testes of prisoners. Plutonium mixed into vaginal jelly. Whole-body irradiation. The book said all baby boomers carry around a trace of plutonium in their bones, from fallout. One venturesome scientist accidentally created a criticality—in his hands—while demonstrating the daring test they called “tickling the dragon’s tail.” The instant blue halo dosed him with eight hundred roentgens. He lived nine days.

Roentgen, rad, rem. The Three Rs. The words started to undulate in Reed’s mind, and fearing his dreams, he fought sleep. But he slept all morning and awoke when he heard a siren pass by. His head had a case of water hammer.

“I’m dog-tired from sleeping so hard,” he told Clarence. “Do dogs ever get headaches?”

Reed dished out Clarence’s morning chow. He swallowed some pain pills and ate half a cantaloupe and some scrambled eggs with coffee. He would be off work that night, so he ran some errands, mowed the yard, patched a screen, tended to his tomatoes. The vines were shriveling, and some of the tomatoes were rotting. His headache was better, but the headache pills made him feel as if he had been in a swimming pool for ten hours. He hadn’t finished reading the book, and he had lost his place, but he got the idea. It stymied him. He didn’t know what to do with this knowledge.

He got chills remembering one of the nuclear accidents: a processing worker struck by more than twelve thousand rem of plutonium. The man burned, swelled up like sausages, went into shock, breathed like a frog. When doctors tried to get bone marrow samples, their syringes drew up what they called “slop” or “mush.” After he died, his body was systematically dismantled for studies—like an old warhead, Reed thought. The man’s body contained nineteen nanocuries. Scientists had thought the permissible body burden was twice that amount, but they learned different.

“Don’t count your nanocuries before they hatch,” Reed murmured. The words
slop
and
mush
kept tossing around in his mind like contaminated oatmeal.

The day was sweltering. It hadn’t rained in weeks. Clarence lay beneath the mimosa in the cool dirt, motionless during the afternoon. Reed’s house needed cleaning, or perhaps sandblasting, but he did not feel like mopping floors. The plutonium book sat on the table like a little bomb.

35

Late in the day, he ordered lasagna from Mr. Como’s and picked it up, a hot aluminum tray with a plastic lid nestled in a sissy little fuchsia shopping bag. After a fling around the vacant lot with Clarence, Reed jammed his camping gear into the carriers on his motorcycle. The tarp was wadded, the tent in a tangle—just like his feelings, he thought. An assortment of urges was making it necessary to fly once again to the Fort Wolf Wildlife Refuge. He told himself that he needed at least to say good-bye to the blighted place he had loved all his life. One more visit couldn’t hurt. It would be nice to believe that radiation was good for you. But that would be like having faith in Internet self-improvement elixirs. He knew that behind every magic solution was an abstruse circuitry of ulterior motives and flummery. And beneath that, in the infinite regress of Russian dolls nesting in coffins of themselves, the invisible strings of the universe oscillated dizzily. He felt a buzzy anxiety about what lay ahead.

Reed faced a sunset view of the plant. The cooling towers were billowing away, breathing with vigor and optimism, as if the energetic outlook at the beginning of the Cold War was caught in a time warp. It was still a marvel, Reed thought. The Cascade had never been shut down for a moment since it was activated in 1953. The gas had to keep moving or it would solidify and clog the pipes. But the pipes were possibly lined with exotic spices that lingered, clinging like shrink-wrap. In order for plutonium to be washed away, half of it had to be washed away, and then half of that. It was Zeno’s paradox. If the turtle traveled from A to B by halves, it would never arrive. It was turtles all the way, Reed thought, remembering, with a pang, Julia’s laugh. He knew he always got Zeno and Aesop mixed up, but he figured they were drinking buddies back in the B.C. years. Plutonium had a half-life of twenty-four thousand years. Maybe Zeno meant time, not space. Reed knew he was toying with his own mind.

Skirting the security stations, he rode past the green ponds, the glistening lagoons, the fouled ditches marked with yellow tape. There were no frogs or fish in the ponds; they had been killed to keep people from eating them. After some deformed frogs had been found a few years before, the NO FISHING signs were erected. He remembered seeing a newspaper photograph of a frog with one eye and a stunted extra leg—something like a formless pouch with toes. At the time, he simply thought deformed frogs were common. But how could he have pretended this place was anything but a malignant jungle? He trembled with sadness—this violation, a crude intrusion into a natural place that he held to be sacred.

The history of the place was swathed in fog. He would take a risk to do a good job, but if he ever suspected he was being manipulated, Reed was not an easy buddy. And he felt responsible. He had played a part in ruining this wilderness.

As he entered Fort Wolf, he stopped and removed his helmet. With the hot breeze flying through his hair, he roared through the refuge toward the levee. Suddenly, it was as though he’d never been there before. The scenery, while familiar, took on an unfamiliar air, as if every leaf held a toxic secret. The weather had been dry, and the poison ivy vines were already turning red; river birches were shedding their leaves. The ironweed was in oblivious bloom, patches of purple against a multitude of shy faces of Queen Anne’s lace folding inward as if they couldn’t bear the presence of a transuranic.

The summer growth of poison ivy and greenbrier and blackberry bushes hugged the shoulders of the road, but deeper into the refuge he located a familiar grassy clearing—one of his favorite camping spots. A shot of late sun yellowed the greenery. He could see one of the ammo bunkers in the distance. Chemicals from the manufacture of TNT had seasoned the soil, and newer, hotter elements from the plant added to the stew.

One could write a history of modern war from this corner of the earth, he thought. The TNT and the chemicals used in the shells of World War II, the nuclear fuel of the Cold War, and later the D.U. metal for bullets and tanks of the high-tech, “clean” wars—clean, except for uranium oxide spraying in all directions when the bullets hit, along with a dozen other pollutants that were the subtext of the clean wars. His close proximity to an enormous history made him quaver. Reed had lived with the Cold War, like a cold serving of nameless meat on his plate. The image of his grandfather ill in a tent near here long ago flashed through his mind. His dad in a chemical bath. Reed here, on this ground, his body hastening to join them.

As he made his camp, he was aware of a quintet of deer bedding down not far away. They had probably scattered when his bike approached, but now they had returned, out of habit. He was only a boy, with his uncles, when he killed a deer, years ago, out here at the refuge. He shot the deer in the morning, at dawn, a youngish buck with a hardly creditable rack. In his eagerness, he shot the first animal he saw, not stopping to reflect. His aim was luck. That night he glimpsed several deer feeding in the light of the full moon, their tawny coats shining silver, the highlights leaping like fish. The beauty of that moment overcame him, irrationally and strangely, and he decided that it was wrong to kill any animal that fed by the light of the moon.

Now from the levee he could see the lights and stacks of the chemical company far across the water. The land on both sides of the river was flat as truck beds; the dangerous eddies near the shore kept revelers away. He counted seabirds—squatters on the levee—parked downstream at a respectful distance from him. Staring ahead at the lights and the dark water, facing a world in motion, he thought he knew his own mind.

Surely, he thought, the scientists did not think of themselves as monsters. They were thinking of the safety of the atomic workers; they wanted to know what the body and the planet could tolerate; they wanted to find peaceful uses for their deadly discoveries; they offered the gift of nuclear medicine to the future. With enough good intentions, Reed thought, you could find yourself giving atomic cocktails to poor women or irradiating the testes of prisoners; you could inject a child’s leg bone with a purply, sticky, shape-shifting gel.

At the campsite, he pegged his tattered pup tent and hunkered down beside it. Minutes passed and he still posed—like
The Thinker,
he thought. His mind was virtually blank. His strength was sapped, and his surroundings seemed no longer nourishing or uplifting as in the past. He could feel his anxiety about Julia worming across the borders of his consciousness.

He had thought they were together again. But maybe it was only the sex. The strain between them had begun much earlier, long before the news about the rampant radioactivity. He always suspected that she didn’t want to be involved with a cell rat. The chemicals had disturbed her, and from the beginning she had been uneasy about his gun collection, which had not made her feel protected at all. Dangerous chemicals and guns weren’t the best props for courtship, he realized. They weren’t wine and flowers. What did being a romantic wooer mean? In taking her out to the slag dumps and the munitions works, he had foolishly created an impression of himself as a reckless, maniacal, redneck suicidal gun-nut. No, that wasn’t true. He was beating himself up.

He felt small for his defensiveness, for his reliance on the plant, even for his good-natured acceptance of the plant’s culture of secrecy. Julia would say that if the government was capable of injecting people with plutonium and not telling them it was plutonium, how could he trust the plant—owned and regulated by the government—to be truthful about the toxic waste? But that was too simple, he knew. The plant had been generous to its workers, he reiterated to himself now, as if he were arguing with her. But that was a lame thought, like reaching in desperation for the smallest evidence of love. Everything was more complicated, a tapestry of histories and individuals.
You can’t just wrench yourself out of your history,
he imagined telling Julia. And she shot right back at him,
Of course you can.

But when she said he was holding something back, Julia had fired her wad straight into his passivity, into the whole community’s forgiving myopia.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
she remarked once, apropos of nothing he could detect. The phrase rang a bell, as if someone important had said it. Now it caused a heavy turmoil inside him, but he resisted, daring to visit the thought in the hope that it could give him strength. He thought of the line of loyalties—the labors of his grandfather who helped imagine the plant into being, toiling right here at this river’s shore, without an inkling that he was helping to start the seeds of destruction in an atomic hothouse. And his father had sacrificed his life. Reed had to honor that. Didn’t Julia see that? It was the same as if a father had died in a war; the widow and mother and all around them would say:
he died for his country.

I t was still light when Reed heard the rumble of a small motor. It was an ATV. He and his son used to ride their four-wheelers out here. He felt a twinge of regret that he and Dalton hadn’t continued to share outdoor sports after he was grown. In the space of three seconds Reed imagined a full-blown scene, Dalton riding up and making camp with him, sharing a beer with him.

Its lights sweeping the foliage, the four-wheeler stopped at Reed’s camp.

“Howdy!” said a young guy in green cargo pants and military boots. His Aussie bush hat shaded his face. He cut the engine and lights on his ATV and stood in the fading daylight. “Fine night, huh?”

“Fine,” Reed said.

The guy, inexplicably wearing a dagger on a studded leather belt, seemed to step out of a movie. He said, “I lost my dog and I’ve been looking everywhere.”

“That’s rough,” Reed said. “I haven’t seen or heard any dogs around. What kind?”

“A little beagle. I lose him about half the time.”

“He probably can’t keep up with you on this four-wheeler.”

“Oh, I let him ride some. Them dogs is the craziest fools to get lost I’ve ever seen. That’s the third one I’ve lost out here. We were out hunting. My truck’s way on the other side of the channel.”

“Don’t you know there’s a ban on hunting here now?” Reed didn’t see a rifle or shotgun.

“Oh, they said that last year, but I figure this is a pretty big place.”

“What’s your dog’s name?”

“Little-Bit. He loves beans. When we’re out, he’ll eat a whole can of beans and wienies.”

“Well, I’ll keep an eye out for him,” Reed said. “If it was my dog I’d trail him to the ends of the earth.”

“Let me give you my phone number, in case you find him.”

The guy searched his pocket for scribbling tools. Reed found the nub of a pencil in his gearbox. The guy wrote his phone number on the back of a gasoline receipt.

“My name’s Cobb,” he said. “Cobb Kilgore.”

“Glad to know you, Cobb,” said Reed.

He did not give his own name. It annoyed him that the guy might abandon his dog. He tucked the receipt into the jumble in the gearbox. Then, seeing that Cobb Kilgore wasn’t rushing off, Reed said, “What’s with the dagger?”

“Do you ever go to the Renaissance Festival?”

“I saw something about it in the paper.”

“It’s coming up in June, over at the lake. I wear a medieval costume and play a part.” Kilgore did a little whoop of self-mockery. “My character’s named Lance, and I wear a costume—a half-sleeved tunic, with a hood, and tights, and Three-Musketeer boots. And I carry a leather pouch.” He laughed. “My sister calls it a purse, but it’s not.” He touched the weapon at his side. “I’ve got several daggers, but they only let you carry one and you have to keep it sheathed. And I’ve got a chain-mail helmet. Oh, this stuff gets involved. And you have to learn this old language. You have to talk like they did in the old days in England.”

“Prithee?” Reed said. “Gadzooks? Methinks?”

“Yeah! I’m not very good at it, but there’s a lady that helps me. She goes to the festival in this long dress with the top bare down to the nipples. In fact, there’s a whole slew of gals at this fair in low-cut gowns. They could be selling biscuits or fried pies and they’ll be in these fancy dresses with their boobs hanging out.”

“Sounds like those Civil War reenactments,” Reed said. He expected to see a flanged mace or a spiked flail in the arsenal of this warrior.

“It’s just a chance to enjoy history. We play war games. And we have a wild boar hunt with spears. It’s like going to a pay ranch where you can shoot antelopes and zebras. I did that one year and got an antelope for my den. What I like best is the Highland games. I’m Scots-Irish and it’s a chance to strut around with a little Celtic pride.”

“Didn’t the English run the Scots over to Ireland?” Reed asked. “How come you’re old England in one place and Scots-Irish in another?”

“Oh, it was so long ago. We got over it.” He laughed. “Now we’re one big happy family.”

“We’re all hooked up together in the Great Human Family Tree,” Reed said, hoping that would be the last word. But Kilgore burbled on for a while about the wars of his ancestors. They knew there would always be war, Reed thought.

The light was growing dim. It was past sunset. “Well, I better go find my dog,” Kilgore said at last.

Reed built a small fire, opened the still-warm lasagna, and ate, alone with the shrill, erratic sounds of the night. A line of a song from a distant radio was audible for a moment and then it faded. He studied a patch of sky above. He thought he could make out Jupiter, but Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto—that nefarious trio—were out at the boundary of the solar system, unnoticeable, like the little invisibles on his computer.

He called out “Little-Bit” a few times during the evening, before settling into his tent. He listened during the night for the beagle’s yelp. He heard coyotes. The sound of the yelps of a large pack of coyotes carried high. Some military planes flew overhead—heavy transports, growling loud with their load. He missed Clarence. If he had a female dog, he’d name her Millie Rem. He tried to remember Buford, the bench-legged fice, a comical excuse for a dog. A groundhog had slit Buford’s nose with its claw once, when Buford had ventured into its burrow. As Reed tried to fall asleep, he reviewed his memories of all the dogs he had buried. Buford, Happy Jack, the German shepherd Buddy, the bird dog Hans, a squirrel dog called Fabian, and the two Border collies he trained to unusual commands like “Whoop!” and “Ha-ha!” Since they didn’t have sheep, he could teach them jobs irrelevant to sheep. When they played rough, he said, “Be sweet,” which calmed them. Grace and Jack, the Border collies.