Stallion Gate (18 page)

“Yes, sir.”

The captain removed his cap, setting a tone of informality. In the light of the bulb, his eyes were deepset and hidden. His narrow cheeks had a faint blue sheen. Hair crept from his cuffs to the back of his hands.

“You know, Sergeant, the incident between Fuchs and your medicine man sounds to me like a classic misunderstanding between races. Now you’re Dr. Oppenheimer’s unofficial liaison with the pueblo. I can understand how you wanted to settle the problem quietly. But I hear that on Sunday, after you left Fuchs, you were looking for me. Did you find me?”

“No, sir.”

“You were told I was up on Bathtub Row. You looked for me there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who did you see there?”

“No one was home, sir.”

“And after that you didn’t look for me anymore?”

“Slipped my mind, sir.”

Augustino shook his head like an overburdened confessor.

“Sergeant, I think you’ve gone over the edge. You allow Fuchs to be assaulted with a gun. You couldn’t overpower a blind man, but you do attack an officer of the Indian Service? You in an Indian dance?
You!
I’ll tell you, Sergeant, tonight you were already back in the hole at Leavenworth and deeper than ever. You were buried until you drove up in that car.”

Joe followed the captain’s eyes to the Plymouth. “Sir?”

“Racing up and down the highways today, I went through Esperanza. I saw that coupe in a motel courtyard. I know all the cars on the Hill, and I made a note of the license and the time.”

“We may have stopped there for coffee, sir.”

“I went by the motel tonight. The coupe was still there. Now it’s here and I see you have been following my instructions after all.”

“It’s not like that, sir.”

“I don’t want the sordid details of how you do it, but I do want every personal detail of Dr. Weiss’ life, her connections to the Party and her connections to Dr. Oppenheimer.”

“She won’t tell me that stuff.”

“She will. I think you have a talent with women, Sergeant. By the time you’re done, I’ll bet she tells you everything.”

The lighted road seemed to shift like snow as Joe walked from the shed. He swung into the car, put it
into gear and closed the door. He didn’t dare look at Anna.

Horses coughed and shuffled from the beams as the Plymouth moved forward. MPs twisted in the saddle, staring. Al and Billy stood, one on each side of the car, as it rolled past the shed.

“You never gave me an answer,” Anna said. “Which do you think I am, insane or a tramp?”

“Do you want to see me again?” Joe asked.

“Yes.”

“Then you must be insane.”

In the Explosive Assembly Building on Two Mile Mesa, Joe held a 20-inch model of the Trinity bomb steady on a wrestling mat. It was a sphere of steel plates bolted together at the edges. It looked like a large steel spore—or a steel seed pot with a jagged rim, because Foote and a private named Eberly were still adding the last lenses of high explosive. The temperature inside the green sheetrock building was 120 degrees; all three men were stripped to the waist and wore a second, fluid skin of sweat. Foote was a baronet, the lowest of British titles and affected the greatest number of eccentricities found on the Hill. In the sun, he wore a Mexican sombrero; in the assembly building, he wore a chain rattling with religious medals. Eberly was a graduate student who had first come to the Hill as an easygoing civilian scientist, then been drafted and sent right back to the Hill at a quarter of his previous pay. He was gawky and crew-cut, with as much neck as head. Now his Adam’s apple pumped with incessant outrage.

The lenses were cast wedges of Baratol and Composition B,
both TNT-based explosives but with different speeds of detonation. Just as glass lenses bent and focused light, so the sooty-gray lenses of high explosive focused their shock waves from the outer circumference of the bomb toward the center, creating an implosion. Of course, this was merely a model to be detonated on the mesa, so there was a Spalding baseball in place of a plutonium core.

Other wrestling mats were covered with other models of the bomb in different stages of assembly, nonsparking bronze tools, red wagons, tubs of water and bottles of warm milk. The walls bore blueprint diagrams, ghostly X-ray negatives, a portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a prized picture of Hedy Lamarr in the nude and, every twenty feet, a fire extinguisher and bucket of sand. The latter items were the most purely ornamental because it was understood that if ever there was an accident in the assembly building, it would be at stratocirrus level before anyone could shout “Fire!”

Foote prepared each lens—a little Kleenex into this hole, Scotch tape over that crack. After he slid it into place, Eberly wielded a bronze wrench, bolting a steel plate over the lens, pentagonal plate interlocking with pentagonal plate like a puzzle being slowly solved, building up the walls of the sphere. Joe simply kept the ball from rolling.

“I hate the Army,” Eberly said.

“The Army wants you to hate it,” Joe said. “It’s the Army system. It’s what bonds us all together into a fighting unit.”

“No, it’s an individual thing,” Eberly insisted. “You know the new security campaign? Lesbians! Why, of all the WACs here, does security pick out my girl and ask if she’s a lesbian?”

“Joe, I do appreciate your helping out.” Foote delicately changed the subject and slid another heavy lens into place, its smaller, concave tip resting against the baseball. “Oppy keeps sending my boys down to Trinity. It’s a hell of a place, they tell me.
Jornada del Muerto
. Dead Man’s Journey, it used to be called by the Spanish. Scorpions, deserts, snakes, stinging ants, hostile Indians. I keep asking how all that distinguishes it from the rest of New Mexico. Saw you dance, by the way. Very impressive.”

“Anything for the tourists.”

“What does a man like you do after the war? Obviously, you’re too old and too intelligent to be a boxer anymore. You’re the least likely sergeant I’ve ever seen.”

“Groves is going to be the atomic general. Maybe I’ll be the atomic sergeant.”

“She could be the atomic lesbian,” Eberly said.

“Going to get it done in time?” Joe asked.

“The uranium device is so much easier,” Foote said. “Here you have to crush a solid ball of plutonium into a denser, super-critical mass, which is theoretically conceivable if the ball is crushed by a perfectly symmetrical shock wave. Which is possible if every one of these lenses is detonated in the same millionth of a second.”

“ ‘Critical,’ ‘symmetrical.’ It’s just another bomb, right? When I took Oppy and Groves down to Trinity
at Christmas, they were talking about a blast equal to about five hundred tons of TNT. That’s big, but it’s not fantastic.”

“Been upgraded. The estimate is now five thousand tons. Another difference is that your ordinary bomb will generate temperatures of a few thousand degrees. A nuclear explosion can be ten million degrees. Different animal altogether.”

Eberly dusted the final lens with baby talc. As he lowered it into the last hole, Foote steered the descending tip with a boot horn.

“If she is a lesbian,” Eberly said, “what does that make me?”

The lens stuck with an inch to go. Foote laid the last plate over the lens and picked up a rawhide-covered mallet. Sweat dripped from the tip of his nose. Like a diamond cutter tapping a stone, he had to hit the obstinate lens hard enough to move it, but not so hard as to shatter the goods. In fact, considering the expense of the project, the lens was at least as valuable as a diamond. And a diamond cutter didn’t have to worry about sparks.

Foote licked his lips. “Lesbians, indeed.”

He rapped the plate. The explosive lens underneath seemed to shrug and then slide into place. Eberly aligned the plate and began bolting it down.

“I think I could use the fumes of a good cigarette,” Joe said, and rose limply from the mat.

“Go ahead. We’ll finish.”

No smoking was allowed inside or within fifty feet of
the building, but everyone took nervous cigarette breaks over a sand bucket at the far wall. Joe lit up. On the wall over the bucket was Hedy Lamarr floating on her back. A few feet away were five X-ray negatives tacked up in sequence next to someone’s scribbled note that they had been taken a millionth of a second apart through an X-ray bunker at the Hanging Garden.

On the first dark film were twelve lights like a ring of flares. It was detonation. The X-rays had turned shock waves into pure light.

On the second film the lights had expanded and joined to form a flower shape, a burning daisy.

By the third film the lights were twelve lines reaching for the center.

In the center of the fourth film the lights outlined a dark disk, a metal core. Some of the lights rebounded into a corona.

On the last film the core was crushed to half its size, the rays swirling. A collapse not into darkness but into light.

Joe looked back at the bomb on the wrestling mat. Completed, it was a two-foot quarter-ton puzzle ball of steel plates. Nothing that the X-rays showed, which was a small sun.

That evening, everyone crowded into Theater 2 to see a film that had just arrived from Washington. Robert P. Patterson, the undersecretary of War, his desk and his flag filled the screen. He had a pug face, a nap of gray hair and big hands folded between an array of
pens and phones. The film was grainy and the sound uneven, adding to the sense of urgency.

“The importance of this project will not pass away with the collapse of Germany.” The undersecretary leaned forward. “You know the kind of war we are up against in the Pacific. We have begun to repay the Japanese for their brutalities and their mass murders of helpless civilians and prisoners of war.” Patterson shook his head with resolution. “We will not quit until they are completely crushed.” He turned his hands into fists. “You have an important part to play in their defeat. There must be no letup.”

The evening films were
Back to Bataan
and
Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips
. By then Joe and Anna had slipped out.

In the light of the flame the room vibrated. Anna looked around at the crucifix and saints on the adobe walls, the low ceiling beams, the striped blanket on the cot, Joe standing piñon logs in an inverted V over the burning kindling in the corner fireplace. Through the shutters came the evening sounds of distant children, a screen door slamming, a dog being chased.

As he laid her down on the rough blanket he kissed her open mouth, her neck, the small, dark tips of her breasts. He slid his hand over the pale sheen of her belly to her legs and to the essential mystery, a twist of black over a soft white anvil.

“Welcome to Santiago.”

Sleeping with his arms around her, he dreamed of Augustino. The captain was following him with a rifle as Joe climbed a steep snow-covered hill toward Anna. Both Joe and Anna were naked, while Augustino was dressed like an Apache with a corduroy coat and a high-crowned hat. The snow turned to ashes. Anna disappeared,
and over the crest of the hill came horses, a herd of mustangs immersed in steam and the radiance of a phosphorus bomb.

Thunder sounded like a far-off cracking of the earth. The fireplace had the dull, subsided glow of embers. She wasn’t in bed, and her clothes weren’t on the chair. The shutters were open to a full moon. It was after midnight, and he didn’t know where she could have gone unless she was visiting the outhouse, but her side of the bed was cold and he had the sense that she had been gone for some time. He put on pants and shirt and went out.

The pueblo was blue. Blue adobe, blue fence, blue trees. He held up his hand: blue. Lightning played over the Jemez, but the rest of the sky was clear, the stars dim only because of the brightness of the moonlight. The ground felt like ice.

The jeep was still by the pump. He ran past the Reyeses’ house to the outhouses, but she wasn’t there. On his way back he noticed a freestanding shadow in the night, a pillar of smoke braided with embers rising from the Reyeses’ yard. Sitting on chairs on either side of a fire were Anna and Sophie Reyes, talking in voices too low to carry.

Sophie was Ben’s wife and Dolores’ almost mute sister, so shy that she was practically a family secret. Except for the pots her nieces sold under the
portal
in Santa Fe, Joe doubted that anyone outside Santiago would ever have known she existed. She had cropped
hair streaked black and white, a soft, hesitant face, and wore a smudged apron outside the traditional one-shoulder dress and cotton shirt. The fire was the smothered variety, cow chips heaped on burning wood to turn the pots in the center of the fire a carbon-rich black. He didn’t know which was more unlikely: that Sophie would be firing pots in the middle of the night or that she would speak to Anna.

The two women watched him let himself in through the gate. “I couldn’t sleep,” Anna whispered.

They each held blackened sticks, as if they’d been tending the fire in a desultory fashion during their conversation. Pots already fired were stacked on charred racks to one side of the yard. Raw pots of different shapes lined the other side. Ears of corn, strings of chilies and dried camomile hung in the striped moon-shadows of a ramada at the back of the house. By the chairs were tin pails of temper and shards and fresh clay in twists of newspaper.

“What are you doing?” Joe asked.

“You can see what I’m doing.” Sophie leaned back in her chair the better to regard him. He didn’t remember his aunt’s gaze as being quite so direct.

“In the dark?”

“It’s light enough. I was lonely. It’s good she came by. She talks quietly. That’s nice. We don’t wake anyone up.”

“It’s cold.”

“Then go back to bed,” Sophie said.

He ignored the suggestion. Besides, it was warm around the smothered, nearly invisible fire.

“You have a good woman,” Sophie said. “She thinks up numbers.”

“She’s a mathematician.”

“That’s what I said. Like Thinking Woman.”

“Thinking Woman?” Anna asked.

“Thinking Woman thought up the world,” Joe said. “Her thoughts became land, animals, people. Whatever she thought became real.”