Black Sun Descending (2 page)

It took an hour, but he found the line in the final pages. He read the stanza in the last chapter of the book. “
I have seen the place called Trinity, in New Mexico, where our wise men exploded the first atomic bomb and the heat of the blast fused sand into a greenish glass—already the grass has returned . . .
”

Silas searched the room but realized he didn't have a map of that portion of New Mexico on the walls. Trinity was the code name for the detonation of the first atomic bomb, conducted in the White Sands Proving Grounds, a vast military training and testing facility in the central part of the state. On the southern edge of the proving ground was White Sands National Monument, near where Edward Abbey's novel
Fire on the Mountain
was set. Silas ran his fingers through his bristly hair and scratched a week's worth of gray whiskers.

He went to the back of the house, into the spare bedroom he had converted into a gear room, and opened a bankers box filled with maps. He found one of New Mexico and consulted it. The Trinity site was about thirty miles from Socorro, a small town on the banks of the Rio Grande, south of Albuquerque. It was about a seven-hour drive. He looked at his watch. It was two in the afternoon. He would have to wait until morning. He would use the time to assemble a portable library of Abbey's works.

HE SAT UNDER
the pergola in the backyard. The thatched roof had taken a beating during the most recent snows, and Silas would have to rebuild it. Sometime. He had reread the final chapter of
Desert Solitaire
twice that afternoon, between repacking the gear in his car for his drive and thumb-tacking a new map to the wall in the hallway outside his bedroom. For four years he had been searching the landscape around Moab. Before his wife had gone missing she had told him that she was setting off on a backpacking trip. When he had absentmindedly inquired as to where, she had said, “within a day's drive of Moab.”

Central New Mexico was technically within a day's drive of Moab, but he had never considered this to be part of his search grid. It was off Penelope's beloved Colorado Plateau.

Fire on the Mountain
rested on the picnic table at his elbow. He didn't have the heart to read it. When he had been a professor of literature, first at the University of British Columbia in his native Canada, and later at Northern Arizona in Flag, he had learned to detest Abbey's fiction. He and his wife had often argued about its merits. She thought it raw and unguarded; he considered it amateurish and infantile. He thought about his wife's journal and its long, detailed descriptions of dozens of places across the vast canyon country. Nowhere was there mention of the White Sands of New Mexico. Was her foray there something new? Had this happened after the misplacement of her prized journal?

He stood and stretched and reached for a can of Molson's. It was empty. He scooped up the books and went inside. As he heated a microwave dinner and drank another can of beer, he stood in the windows that reached floor to ceiling on the east wall of his living room and wondered what he might find in Trinity.
Heat of the blast fused sand into a greenish glass—already the grass has returned . . .

Edward Abbey had despised uranium mining; so had Penelope. She had railed against the vast mining operations that had marred the Navajo Reservation, the riverbanks of the Colorado and San Juan, and the tableland of the Arizona Strip—the northern rim of the Grand Canyon. What she hated most was the waste. All across the Southwest were the remnants of the uranium boom. She said there were rotting vehicles, oil drums, discarded mining equipment, and radioactive heaps of slag—waste rock from mining—poisoning the fragile waterways that ran like capillaries across the tablelands.

The most hated of these waste sites was just three miles from Moab. The Atlas Mill site was the largest wasteland of uranium tailings in the United States, and it was perched on the edge of the Colorado River where it emerged from Hal Canyon. Here, from 1956 through 1970, the Atlas Mill had processed yellowcake uranium, the waste products being stored in unlined pits that slowly filled with river water seeping up through the porous limestone. During those troubled years the Colorado River grew ever more radioactive downstream from the site. It took twenty years after the end of operations at the Atlas Mill for anybody to do anything to clean up the site. In 2000 the
US
government authorized its cleanup. More than a decade later the site was about one-third of the way through a massive restoration project.

Penelope had considered the Atlas Mill site an emblem for all that had gone wrong with the uranium experiment in the American desert. She had hoped to live long enough to see desert evening primrose bloom on the site once more, but would have been satisfied to see grass grow on the bottomlands of the Colorado where once toxic waste had been spewed.

Silas stood and stared out the window. The sun was down and the color had faded from Dome Mountain. Silas wasn't sure if he had the heart to drive all the way to New Mexico.

“I PROMISED I'D CALL YOU.
When I had another dream—you made me promise.” Silas sat on a green couch in a warm room draped in sun. Across from him sat Dr. Jessenia Booker, a middle-aged woman, her hair in a short, tight, graying Afro, a pair of glasses perched on the tip of her nose. She wore a plain shirt and a long skirt and had a legal pad on her lap.

“So what did you dream?”

“I . . . Penny was drowning. She spoke to me. She said something that doesn't make sense.”

“What did she say, Silas?”

“‘I have seen the place called Trinity.'”

“What is Trinity?”

“It's where the
US
government detonated the first atomic bomb. It's in New Mexico. That doesn't make sense.”

“Why?”

“Because every time I dream about Penelope, she has sent me to some place on the Colorado Plateau. My dreams are always about some place on the plateau.”

“Like Courthouse Wash.”

“Or Island in the Sky.”

“But Trinity?”

“It's in New Mexico. It's near White Sands. Abbey
did
write a book about that area. It's called
Fire on the Mountain
. It's a terrible book. I reread it this morning.”

“And what about the line? Is it from that book?”

“No, the line itself is from
Desert Solitaire
. But that's not the point.”

“What is?”

“The point is, I don't know if I can do this.”

“Do what, Silas?”

“Do
this
. This.” He looked at his hands as if the answer were contained within them. “I don't know if I can drive all the way to central New Mexico and start all over.”

A long silence followed. “You don't have to do anything, Silas.”

“But she wants me to, Jess.”

“Is that what you think this is all about? That Penelope wants you to follow her clues?”

“I have to believe . . .”

“What do you have to believe, Silas?”

“That she wants me to find her.”

“
You
want to believe that
you
can find her.”

“Maybe I'm wrong. All this time I've been thinking that Penny wants me to find her. Now, I don't know anymore. She wants me to find something or someone.”

There was another long silence.

“You think I'm crazy.”

The woman laughed. It was a kind sound, but her face grew serious immediately after. “I've had some really crazy people on that couch over the last twenty years, Silas. You don't rank among them. I do think you've got some challenges to work through.”

“Challenge is a euphemism for problem.”

“You have some
problems
, Silas, but you're not crazy.”

“Is there a name for what I have?”

“I could pull out my
DSM
and look it up. I'm sure there is. Maybe you've got a bit of post-traumatic stress going on. But I think what you are, Silas, is tired. You're tired. And I think you're feeling guilty. And that is playing havoc with your mind.”

“You think my dreams are my guilty conscious getting the better of me?”

“What do you think?”

“I think I need to find my wife. I have to go to Trinity.”

“Maybe you do. But you're not going to stop having these dreams until you face what's causing them head on. You've got to stop blaming yourself for Penelope's disappearance.”

“I don't blame myself.” Booker looked at him kindly. Silas shuffled on the couch. “What if I don't want to stop having these dreams?”

“Well, nobody says you have to stop dreaming about Penelope. But are
these
dreams what you want to be having?”

Silas closed his eyes. He could feel the skin around them tug and tighten. His face felt like sandstone.
I'm becoming this goddamned desert
, he thought.

“Silas?”

She was drowning. He watched her mouth the words again.
I have seen the place called Trinity.
The water enveloped her. The water was the color of the desert all around him: red. Not blood red, just the same old rust-colored water that he saw every day as he drove down Hal Canyon along the Colorado River. Silas opened his eyes and stood up. The coffee table in front of him jumped as his shins collided with it.

“What is it?”

“I have to go.”

The doctor smiled. “That helpful, was I?”

“I think the Trinity I'm looking for is just down the road.”

SILAS PARKED ON THE HIGHWAY
and watched the operation at the Atlas Mill. A chain-link fence with No Trespassing and Contaminated Area signs stood between him and the tailings from the now-vacant site. Four days a week a train with thirty-six cars of reprocessed uranium waste was shipped north from this location, just yards from the Colorado River, to a final disposal site near Crescent Junction. The mill site contained sixteen million tons of uranium tailings. When the wind blew hard enough radioactive dust from the site powered the desert and high cliffs that bordered the site. For more than forty years radioactive waste had been seeping into the Colorado River and washing downstream.

The cleanup project started in 2009 and, contingent on funding, was expected to last beyond 2025. The mess that took forty years to create would take almost half as long to clean up.

Silas shielded his eyes against the intense glare of the sun and watched the activity around the tailings dump for fifteen minutes before he got into the car and drove back along the Colorado River toward home.

HE RETURNED AFTER
dark and parked by the highway, on the east side, as if he were leaving his car before setting off on a walk up Courthouse Wash in Arches National Park. Instead he crossed the deserted road and walked across the scrub desert toward the mill. He had his worn pack on his back and a spade-shaped garden shovel in his left hand. A berm bordered the work site and beyond that was the chain-link fence with its impotent warnings. Looking around self-consciously, he climbed the berm, his boots kicking up a fine red dust that coated the bottom of his pants. When he reached the fence he threw his shovel over and, taking a small nylon tarp from his bag, draped it over his shoulder, climbed the fence, and laid it down over the loose strands of barbed wire at the top. Silas dropped to the far side and retrieved the tarp.

Now where? He stood next to the massive work site. The Atlas Mill waste covered more than one hundred acres and he knew he couldn't possibly search everywhere. Much of what was on site had been dumped into shallow pits and then covered with fill. He looked at his ridiculous shovel and realized the impossibility of his task.

Silas closed his eyes. In his dream, Penelope had been drowning in the Colorado. He looked toward the river, to where the most active reclamation was underway. That's where he would begin.

HE RETURNED FOR
the next two nights, climbing the fence and evading the nominal security. Each morning, just before sunup, he climbed back over the fence and retreated to his home in the Castle Valley. He decided that three nights would be the limit for his nocturnal prowling; if he hadn't found anything by sunup, he would admit defeat.