Stallion Gate (14 page)

“Let’s for Chrissake go.” Ray clutched the tommy gun. Hair clung to the sweat of his forehead. His face had closed down to a bleak and dangerous glare. He refused to look back at the suspended eight-armed canister riding in the rear of the ambulance.

“Wait a second, men.”

A white-haired man in a tweed jacket and carrying
a clipboard bounded out of the garage toward the ambulance.

“Santa!” Joe said.

“I’ll kill him,” Ray said.

Santa was the Hill psychiatrist. He’d always seemed to be part of the furniture at the Lodge, an amiable headshrinker on hand to offer security-cleared emotional assurance to any longhair with the blues. Joe couldn’t figure what he was doing at Fort Douglas. He expected the lieutenants to block Santa’s way because no one outside convoy personnel was allowed near the ambulance, but the officers waved him on.

“Permission to come aboard?” Santa took a letter from the clipboard and handed it through Ray’s window to Joe. The letter was a pass for Dr. Delmore Bonney to accompany the drivers of Army ambulance YO
₃
from Fort Douglas to Site Y (Los Alamos), and the order was signed by both Oppy and Groves.

“I think you’d be more comfortable in one of the cars.” Joe gave the letter back.

Santa shrugged happily. “Orders are orders. Sometimes even civilians have to suffer.”

“Sergeant Stingo isn’t feeling too good. It could be infectious,” Joe warned.

Santa raised white eyebrows. “It could be psychosomatic.”

Joe pushed Ray’s door open. Ray leaned woodenly to one side so Santa could slip through to a fold-down seat because already the lead sedan and truck, then ambulance and tail sedan, were turning around the gas
pumps for the remaining four hundred and fifty miles to New Mexico and the Hill.

“Nose wipes, boys.” Santa handed up cotton swabs. “All part of the routine.”

Joe and Ray stuck the swabs up their noses, then handed them back to Santa, who dropped them into separate envelopes.

“It isn’t routine for us to make this run,” Joe said. “It isn’t routine for you to be on it.”

“We’re bodyguards,” Ray said through his teeth. “We’re not guinea pigs. They got enough crazy truckers for this run.”

“Why do you think they chose you, Sergeant Stingo?” Santa hunched over Ray’s shoulder.

“Because they hate me.”

“If they hated you they wouldn’t have asked me to bring the nose wipes. That’s to help check any respiratory radioactivity. When we arrive, they’ll take a blood sample and perhaps burn your clothes. Would they take those precautions if they didn’t care about you?”

“True,” Ray relented.

“You just needed a ride from Salt Lake City?” Joe asked as Santa moved to his shoulder. “Why are you here?”

“I’ll tell you why they hate me,” Ray interrupted. The amphetamines had fueled his paranoia and turned the whites of his eyes pink. “For the first time in my life I’m ahead of the game. My father runs a garbage truck, my three brothers run garbage trucks and they make fifty dollars a week. I got ten thousand dollars in
poker money. I’m getting out of this fucking war with both legs and both arms. When I go back to Jersey I can buy a liquor store. I’ll get my own fighters, maybe I’ll manage. Get a boat at the shore, get married, have kids. They don’t want me to have that.”

“Why didn’t you mention your mother?” Santa moved over to Ray’s shoulder.

“What about my mother?” Ray whipped around. Because he still held the tommy gun, its barrel pointed at Santa.

“Don’t ask a man about his mother,” Joe told Santa and pushed the barrel up.

“Why do you think Sergeant Stingo is nervous?”

“Because the Army hates enlisted men, which you are not.”

“So why are you here?” Ray asked.

Santa smiled patiently. Fine skin crinkled around his pale blue eyes. His nose and cheeks had the rosy hue of a lifetime of long walks in the mellow sun of San Francisco Bay. His Harris tweed jacket smelled like a potpourri of pipe tobacco and bay rum. His hair sprung like white excelsior, thin on top, thick at the sides, wisps from the ears. Everyone on the Hill had naturally nicknamed him Santa. Except Harvey. Harvey called him Bugs Bonney.

“I’m deeply enthused about the time we’re going to be sharing,” Santa said. “I understand we’ll be driving through some spectacular scenery. In fact, in the garage I heard one of the officers refer to these shipments of”—Santa cleared his throat to indicate the plutonium
hanging in the canister behind him—“as the Razzle-Dazzle Express.”

“See any officers in here?” Ray muttered. “It’s the fucking glow-in-the-dark Asshole Express.”

The Mormon Temple swung to the north and shrank to the size of a claim stake under the immense Utah afternoon. The mountains started huge and grew. As the convoy gathered speed through the wide Jordan Valley, Ray looked as if he were entering a black tunnel.

The square and straps were designed to protect the suspended canister from shocks, but it didn’t protect the drivers from the sight of the canister. It trembled in midair when the ambulance rolled over a cattle guard; it swayed as the road turned. For all its sleekness, the canister had a pregnant quality. The slug deep inside it seemed, in Joe’s mind, alive. It was an interesting concept: metal that was alive. Not simply a mineral capable of some sort of chemical reaction, but so alive with alpha activity that the water around the slug was warmed to a hundred degrees.

“Magnificent, the sun and these Wasatch Mountains.” Santa twisted this way and that for better views. “You boys must love this run.”

“ ‘Machine Gun Joe was a rough and ready redskin,’ ” Joe sang softly, “ ‘He’ll never let plutonium touch the ground. / And he always will remember the Seventh of December, / With his be-bop-a-rebop and he’ll blow-em down.’ I’ll tell you what we’d be doing if we weren’t doing this run,” Joe said to Ray. “We’d
be somewhere in the South Pacific digging mass graves in a coral reef. We’d be burying pieces of bodies that were six months old, with one dull shovel for the two of us.”

“The South Pacific, you think?” Santa asked.

“Somewhere where no one would find us until the war was one year over,” Joe told Ray. “We’d be playing poker for seashells.”

The whites of Ray’s eyes were turning from pink to acid red.

“Why us?” he demanded.

Santa fell atypically silent. The convoy gained altitude at the Mormon hamlets of Orem, Provo and Helper, touched down the Colorado River at Moab and then rose again up the La Sal Mountains. Ray’s blood went on pooling in his eyes. He pointed out every dead rabbit carcass on the road with his tommy gun and laughed uproariously.

The amphetamines made Ray worse, but not much worse than in the first run he and Joe had made, when he had sobbed the whole way. He was a primitive Sicilian, and he thought radiation—any radiation—caused cancer. With his poker winnings he could afford to pay other enlisted men to pull his hazardous duties. He was never within a hundred yards of radioactive material except when he and Joe were ordered to run the slug.

Night fell at Cortez, Colorado, on the edge of the San Juan Mountains, where the stone climbed over itself like worn steps to the waning moon. Here the mountain building was recent and ongoing, rubbing and
fraying the road to macadam dust. Clouds tore by like steam from the engines of the earth, and winds heaved stones downhill, chasing tires and rattling on the ambulance roof. Joe followed the red lights of the repair truck ahead, although they would disappear around a wall of stone or desperately wink as the truck fought a downgrade. On one side was granite, on the other the unforgiving dark of an abyss. Sometimes the road lay on a ridge with a black void on either side, and there ice had chipped away at the road and left just enough room for the truck to inch through. The wind rose out of the depths below them, sounding as if it were pushing boulders uphill. The convoy had stopped in Moab to eat, but Ray did not eat, drink, piss or shit and would not until the trip was over. At least, Joe thought, the night would cool Ray’s sweat and the dark would hide the canister that danced at their backs.

“Let me confide in you, men, and tell you why you’re here,” Santa said, breaking the quiet. “Why you were ordered to make this run again, although it’s not part of your ordinary duties. You were chosen because you have higher clearances than the other drivers and have some inkling as to the actual nature of the project and of tonight’s cargo. As we approach a test shot, more and more men—enlisted men on the Hill and at the Trinity test site—will get some inkling of the nature of the project. There’ll be wild stories. You may hear, for example, that Dr. Teller once tried to have the project stopped because his calculations showed that one such device would set the atmosphere on fire.”

“Did he?” Joe asked.

“Yes, but later calculations showed that such a danger doesn’t exist.”

“Hardly exists?”

“Hardly. You see, then, how these stories get started. In fact”—Santa chuckled—“Dr. Teller wants a bomb a hundred times bigger, so he’s not afraid.”

“What’s he say?” Ray came out of a reverie.

“Teller’s not afraid,” Joe said.

“Afraid of what?” Ray winced as Joe dodged a pothole.

“All the same, there may be incidents of apprehension among the enlisted men as more of them come into contact with this sort of cargo.”

“You think so?” Joe asked.

“There’s the possibility,” Santa said.

“Doesn’t radiation cause tissue cancer, blood cancer, bone cancer and immediate or lingering death?” Joe asked.

“Theoretically,” Santa granted. “Plutonium’s got a clean bill of health so far.”

“It’s only been on earth five months,” Joe pointed out. “Ray and I made the first run.”

“In the fucking snow,” Ray said.

Ahead, the repair truck fishtailed from side to side over loose rocks.

“But in a few weeks,” said Santa, “there will be hundreds of GIs at Trinity, and they’ll all be wondering why they’re there and what they’re doing. They’ll be talking to MPs, who will overhear scientists talking—that’s
human nature—and there will be some anxiety, because GIs are not scientists, about being in proximity to a nuclear explosion. You see, there won’t be a radiation problem, but there may be a psychological problem. Even though they know the Army would not put soldiers in a situation that was not entirely safe. After all, here’s a bomb that’s supposed to blow up a city with just a few pounds of refined ore. I was wondering how you two feel about that.”

“The city part’s okay,” Ray said.

“Don’t ask us,” Joe said.

“But you might feel anxiety,” Santa suggested. “You two are the ones transporting that refined ore. Even though you know you’re surrounded and protected by dedicated officers, you might feel anxiety.”

“You don’t feel any anxiety?” Joe asked.

“None,” Santa assured Joe. “Not a bit.”

Joe glanced back. Behind Santa, the canister floated securely in the web of straps and steel frame.

“No dedicated officers in this fucking wagon that I notice,” Ray said.

“Then you, Sergeant Stingo, do admit to ambivalence.”

“It
was
an ambulance,” Ray said. “Now they made it into this wagon.”

“No, I mean ambivalence.”

“It was. It’s not now.”

Ray stirred. All the paranoia that had been floating free up till now was starting to come together, to find its target after two hundred miles. It hadn’t coalesced,
hadn’t quite fixed, but he twisted in his seat the better to regard Santa.

“Ambivalence, Sergeant. Wanting two things at the same time.”

“Yeah,” Ray muttered. “Two ambulances. We could bring twice as much.”

“Anyway,” Santa persevered, seeing no warning sign in the red eyes staring at him, “I asked myself, How can I treat a problem when I know nothing about it? How can we prepare for the possible mass emotional crises of the test site without seeing at least some enlisted men now in close proximity to hazardous radioactive material?”

“That’s why we’re here?” Ray asked.

“Because only you and Sergeant Peña actually know what the cargo is. The regular drivers and even the security officers only know that it’s vital to the war effort.”

“We’re here because of you?” Ray asked.

“That’s what I was just saying.”

“We’re here because of you?” Ray wanted to be sure.

“That’s what I said.”

“Because of you?” Ray’s eyes jerked back to the road when Joe hit a rabbit. His fingers twisted the handgrip of the tommy gun.

“Because of me,” Santa said with good-humored firmness to avoid any more semantic confusion.

Joe saw that Ray intended to turn and kill Santa as soon as he dared take his eyes from the road, which had now deteriorated to raw dirt. Last summer a Colorado
Highways truck had spread oil on the road as a thin binder, but a winter in the Rockies had passed, and the little oil that remained was patches of dark slick between long stretches of ice slick on a road that plunged 20 degrees down the mountainside; staying on the road would demand all of Ray’s concentration even as a passenger. Even if Joe wanted to stop and take the gun from Ray, the sedan behind would hit them and pitch them over the edge of the road into the darkness that lay like a sea around them.

Santa seemed totally unconscious of the road, the mountains, the dark, as if danger and natural phenomena lay in Joe’s area of expertise. Occasionally he had commented on the effect of moonlight on a snowy peak, or the glint of a river a thousand feet below; otherwise, he acted as if Joe had thoughtfully chosen a diverting route.

“You!”

Ray tried to snatch his eyes from up ahead in order to kill Santa, but erosion had carved the outer lane off the road and the brake lights in front of them blinked frantically, demanding his attention.

“Please take my word for it, Sergeant.” There was movement behind Joe and the tang of pipe tobacco. “Mind if I smoke, men?” A flame glowed for a moment. Joe thought that if he looked back there might be a blanket and a dog on Santa’s lap. “The three of us are like Helios, bearing the sun across the sky. A new sun, of course. Just as we call the moon when we can’t see it a new moon. There is an enormous synchronicity
building toward Trinity, a psychic tension. You men feel it, I can sense it.”