Stallion Gate (6 page)

“Did he say who?” Oppy looked up with the eyes of an innocent.

“No,” Joe lied.

“No names at all?”

“Let’s say the person was just a security risk.”

“He’d have to be pulled off the project.”

“His reputation?”

“Ruined. No names?”

“Let’s say I wanted off the Hill. Say I wanted combat.”

“That’s an Army matter, Joe. The Hill is an Army base, after all. You’d have to go to the head of military administration.”

“That’s Augustino again.”

“The captain is a powerful man in his own little realm.”

“Which is the Hill.”

“He really didn’t give you any names?”

“I suppose he’d tell you if he had a name in mind.”

“True.” Oppy gave Joe a conspiratorial grin. “Remember, the captain is an intelligence officer. It’s his duty to be paranoid.”

With the next set of flags, Oppy and Fuchs traded off.

“It must be interesting to be an Indian.” Fuchs followed Joe’s measured steps. “To be free of civilization, to live simply as men and women with nature.”

“You mean go naked?”

“No, I mean defy all bourgeois standards of behavior. You understand what I mean by bourgeois?”

Joe watched Oppy slowly stepping off the direction. A frail figure, his coat whipping around him. As he spread his arms, turning, holding flags, he seemed, in his ungainly way, to be dancing in the snow.

They created a model of the test site to come: red flags for directions, lettered stakes to indicate relative distances to control shelters, base camp, observation posts, evacuation roads, populated areas. By the time they gathered by the transit, the model’s Ground Zero, the snow had almost stopped. Groves’ manner was brisk and expansive, an engineer breaking ground. Waving his hand, he described the test tower, miles of wire, roads and trucks he saw in his mind. Oppy had brought a bottle of cognac, and even Groves, who usually drank nothing more than the smallest glass of sherry, accepted a ceremonial sip. Alone in the car, Joe radioed the
convoy that was supposed to have met them hours before. He opened his own flask while he fished in the static. Vodka. Wartime distillers made vodka from potatoes, corn, molasses, grain, from ethene, methane and petrochemicals, from horse sweat and purified piss. Santa Fe liquor stores wouldn’t sell a bottle of anything unless you bought a bottle of vodka. Another subversive Communist connection.

“… difficulty … lost a drive wheel … soon, over.”

Joe repeated his map coordinates to the static and signed off. The general had missed his plane; he’d have to see Roosevelt another day.

Suddenly it was colder and darker. Clouds flowed by on either side, and directly above was a stream of evening stars. When Joe returned, he made a fire from cow chips he dug out of the snow. The other three, exhilarated from mapping the test site, were still sharing the cognac. It occurred to Joe that these minutes of waiting for the party from the base probably were the first moments of relaxation, of complete and powerless rest, that either Oppy or Groves had spent in years.

“You have to wonder about the Chinese alchemists who invented gunpowder,” Oppy said. “When they were on the verge of discovery, were they fortunate enough to have a night as quiet and beautiful as this? Perhaps the emperor of China had horsemen searching for them, just as jeeps are searching for us. Perhaps we’ll meet them.”

“What do you mean?” Groves asked.

“Einstein says time bends around the universe in a
curving line. On that line you can go backwards or forwards. We’ll never find this same Stallion Gate here again, but we can always find it on some cusp of time. If we could do that, we could meet those Chinese horsemen, too.”

“I’ll tell you about going back to the past,” Groves snorted, and filled his hand with caramels from his pocket. “The bitterest day of my life was when I was ordered to rescue this project. I had just been offered my first combat command the week before. A soldier wants to see combat. My father was an Army chaplain, and even he saw combat. There I was, Army born and bred, ordered to spend history’s greatest war at home overseeing a bunch of scientific prima donnas who, as far as I could tell, had sold the President a bill of goods.” He popped a caramel into his mouth and ruminated. “Well, I don’t run phony projects that don’t show results. A lot of scientists and so-called geniuses tried to sell me a bill of goods on how to make this atomic bomb. The greatest American physicist is E. O. Lawrence. I like Lawrence. He put the cyclotron on the map and he won the Nobel Prize, but he’s hardly produced a speck of uranium. Nevertheless, I will make this project a success. It’s largely a matter of plumbing, albeit complicated.” Oppy’s eyes glittered with amusement. Groves wiped his fingers in the snow. “In fact, I have never been more positive of success than I am at this very moment, at this very place.”

“This will be your monument,” Oppy said.

“Monument?” Groves sighed. “After I built the Pentagon,
I calculated that in my career I had moved enough earth and laid enough cement to build the Pyramids of Cheops two hundred times over.”

“This is a different kind of pyramid,” Oppy suggested. “It has different blocks—some steel, some gold, some of water, some so radioactive you can’t touch them or even come close to them—and the pyramid must be built according to a blueprint no one has ever seen.”

“Let me tell you the kind of monument I want,” Groves said. “I’ve seen the estimates of the casualties we’re going to suffer in the invasion of Germany and Japan. I wouldn’t mind a monument of a million American lives saved.”

Groves’ sincerity was ponderous and real and demanded silence. Embers slipped and rose.

“The Hindus say that the final vision of Brahma will be mist, smoke and sun, lightning and a moon.” Oppy paced in front of the fire, too excited to be still. “Brahma would be a good name for the bomb.”

Joe stood on the arc of the fire’s light. Outside the arc rattlesnakes were curled up, cold and asleep under the snow. There was a whole map of winter sleep: mice balled up in burrows, toads suspended in mud, poorwills tucked into the folds of the earth. Memory was out there, a map of women curled up in the dark. Japs.

Actually, life was very nice when he got to Manila. Mostly what the Army wanted him to do was box: tour the airfields giving exhibitions against the local champions, fight in the annual boxing festival at Rizal Stadium,
play piano at the officers club. When dependents were shipped out, the officers, like men freed from a domestic garden into paradise, came in with the most beautiful whores, coffee-colored Filipino girls and White Russians with paste jewels.

When the invasion came, three days before Christmas, Joe had a platoon of Philippine scouts. The first night they made contact was in a banana plantation, and in the dark among the rustling fronds he heard, “Hey Joe! Over here, Joe.” Even after he’d figured out that Japs called all Americans “Joe,” that they hadn’t come all the way across the Pacific for him personally, the voices were unnerving, like the dark come to life.

He wished he could listen to the car radio and hear some big band from Albuquerque or, if the ether gave the lucky bounce, a jazz station from Kansas City. Ellington, like a black Indian in an invisible canoe, paddling through the clouds. Paddle, Duke! Rescue me.

Groves was down to his last candy. “The big picture is, no one else has the industrial base or the technology. Never forget the inherent inefficiency of the Soviet system. It will take them twenty years to develop an atom bomb, if ever.”

There was something in the clouds, dim lights moving in and out, and the sound of distant thunder.

“A world without war,” Oppy said.

“A Pax Americana,” Groves agreed.

Lights reappeared in the stars between the clouds. A more diffused glow grew in the snow below the lights. Nearer. The general’s final caramel dribbled between
his fingers. Oppy cocked his head limply in the manner of the most ethereal saints. Fuchs stared through the flames reflected in his glasses. Joe counted until he heard thunder again.

“Bombers, about six miles off.”

“Here?” Groves asked.

“It’s a bombing range, sir. Night practice.”

“What do they bomb, exactly?” Oppy asked.

“At night,” Joe said and looked at the campfire, “illuminated targets.”

He broke for the car, dove into the front seat and cranked up the field radio. Through the Buick’s windshield, he watched the three men kicking apart the fire. Groves was surprisingly nimble, Oppy disjointed as ever. Beyond, blooms of light moved laterally on the horizon. The radio gave off a roar of static untainted by any coherent transmission.

By the time he returned, all that was left of the campfire was a circle of soot. Fuchs was on his knees, slapping the last embers. With the fire out, the party could see how the moon had escaped the clouds and filled the range with an opalescent haze.

“Can we get away?” Groves asked Joe.

“I noticed on the way in that they like to bomb the stretch of road behind us. If we blink headlights at them, they’ll try to drop a fifty-pounder on the hood. Run without headlights and we’ll turn over in a ditch. We may as well stay here.”

“What if you’re wrong?” Fuchs’ face was smudged
and his hair stood up straight. “This entire project should not be put in jeopardy because of a stupid Indian.”

“Shut up, Klaus,” Oppy said softly.

Joe said, “B-29s.”

Approaching, the bombers were bigger than anything he’d ever seen in the air. Superforts, twenty tons of steel, twice as big as Flying Fortresses, each of their four engines the size of a fighter. Chutes spilled from the bays, floated and sputtered into flares.

“Good Lord,” Oppy said, “this is beautiful.”

Why flares? Joe wondered.

The lead bomber lifted reluctantly and the next in line took its place, settling lower with closer attention to the ground. Why so low? The belly turret turned, its .50-caliber barrels swinging back and forth. He could make out the green light within the Plexiglas nose. A green bombardier pointed straight down, and as if there were a magical connection with his finger, a phosphorus bomb as bright as snow crystals lit the valley floor. From the bomb came running shapes: horses, brilliant with lather and the glare of the bomb, racing under the wing. Mustangs out of the mountains for the night grazing and the mares the ranchers had left behind. Joe couldn’t make out individual horses, only the motion of their rocking and straining, urged by the dazzle of tracers, and the way they wheeled from rays of burning phosphorus. At a distance of a mile, he thought he could hear not only their hooves but their breath, although he knew they were drowned out by the sounds of pistons and hydraulics and .50-caliber rounds. Then the mustangs
and bombers moved on together like a single storm, distance muting the sound, and nothing could be seen except a flash that resembled an occasional, faraway stroke of lightning.

What Joe remembered best was what Oppy said when they were alone in Alamogordo, after the half-track and jeeps had finally appeared and led them to the base.

“It was awful, but it was still beautiful.”

In Santiago, calves were cut and branded in the hour before dawn so that the men could catch the morning bus to Los Alamos, where they worked as custodians and furnace stokers.

Joe was alone in the second corral, where steers were brought in for sale. With meat rationing, there was a market for Indian cows, and it was Joe’s job to go over the cattle with a Geiger counter. The counter consisted of a metal wand, wire and a case with twenty pounds of batteries. The case had a microammeter that was useless in the middle of a herd in the dark, but there were also the audible clicks of gamma rays from at least one cow. Joe slipped a rope over its head and led it out of the corral and around a hay rick, where a path led to a copse of cottonwoods and willows. A rare rain had fallen the day before and mud sucked on his shoes. In the middle of the copse were cans, mattress springs, shoes and bones cemented in a great mound of sodden ashes. He yanked the steer up to its knees in the pile, put his .45 where the vertebrae of the neck joined the
dome of the skull and fired. At the last second, the steer, curious, looked up, and the bullet tore through the artery of its neck. Blood shot in a solid black stream over Joe’s chest and arm. He held the steer tight and fired again. The animal dropped like a weight. He poured a can of kerosene over the dead animal, lit it and staggered back from the blaze. In the yellow flames, he could see that the steer was mottled, the hide half bleached. Every canyon around Los Alamos had cows, and every canyon had sites where poisonous isotopes were vented or exploded, spewed and sown into the soil and water. Which was why the personnel on the Hill underwent nose wipes, ass wipes and radioactive urine checks, but for the ignorant animals that wandered the sites, Army policy was “Kill it, burn it, bury it,” and the perfect instrument was Joe.

A hide turned white? That was new. The other thing was that the steer was a cow, and through the greedy roar of the fire he could see that it was pregnant. Now he remembered why he was so upset with Augustino when they’d gone hunting. He hadn’t thought of it since then. Not shooting an animal that was carrying was an Indian stricture, a primitive taboo. Not against killing life, but against killing the
seed
of life. He started for the cow as if he could pull it out of the flames, then realized how stupid it was and staggered back. Jesus, what a butcher. The way the cow had turned its large marble eyes up to him. The sideways fountain of blood. As the pyre burned and crackled, he thought of the second heart within the cow.

One moment, he was so close to the fire that his shirt was steaming; the next, he was in the tangled dark of the willows forcing his way to the road where he’d left the jeep rather than pass by the corrals and have anyone see him. As he stumbled out of the woods, headlights ambushed him.

The lights swerved. A Buick fishtailed to a stop, its rear end in the mud of the shoulder of the road. Ray Stingo and then Oppy came running back to Joe, shouting at the same time: “You okay?” “What happened?”