Trinity Fields (13 page)

For better or worse, I recognize, in these anniversary times—the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Manhattan Project, back in 1943—the purity of such stubbornness. It has a charming folk cast to it. It is the pure stuff of America, oxymoron that it may be, given the country's formidable lack of purity.
Give me your tired, your weak, your hungry
—yes, magnificent oxymoron given the laudably immigrant mix, the beautiful impurity of our peoples.

Kip and I were the pure stuff of America, too. Hostile toward authority to begin with, and given to lambasting everything our parents stood for, root and branch, every filament and filigree of who they were and what they were about. Migrants in the making.

In one aspect Kip and I did diverge in our thinking about Los Alamos. I became a universal detractor, whereas Kip held an ornery affection for what we called the grand, great grampas—Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer in particular, but also Hans Bethe and Emilio Segrè, Neddermeyer and Serber and Rabi, and even Niels Bohr and Stanislaw Ulam, even awful Edward Teller (we had our demiheroes, antiheroes, and our villains too)—the original makers and keepers of the flame, the first scientists who came here for, as Kip put it, “not
totally
the wrong reasons.” This fondness for many in that first generation had to do, I suppose, with a respect for naked genius, and a conviction that despite evidence to the contrary the whole community had been lulled into believing the Gadgets would never be used on civilians. It was a nice idea and had some basis in reality, however wrong it proved to be in the end.

My raving about how the bomb was evil, depraved, vicious at the deepest spiritual tier known to any of us who ever lived, how killing those hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two quick, antiseptic atomic fires was exemplary in its perfect immorality, and about how ashamed I was of us all, each one of us who lived on the Hill where the filthy machine was devised (none of this was I able to verbalize at all eloquently, although I'm sure the passion was there)—my railing and speeches did not go over well with my parents and my sister. Bonnie Jean merely thought me boring, her older brother was “going through a phase,” she told her friends, repeating some conversation she undoubtedly overheard between our parents. She was, moreover, a little afraid of me, was Bonnie Jean, and kept a distance whenever she saw me headed into one of my scenes.

There is no doubt all four of us were happier before I began to question who we were, the McCarthy family, sharing as we did that unfortunate surname that became infamous in the fifties, we who constituted such a tidy nuclear family and were possessed of all the symmetry the postwar years propounded. Father and mother, son and daughter, a perfect quincunx with the American Dream forming the dot in the middle of the square that's square as square can be. We were happier, myself included, before it became my obsession to begin connecting the dots in different ways, to begin criticizing why we were where we were.

I can remember harmony, way back when. When you have lived only fifteen years, as I had then, it's not difficult to think back over where and who you have been thus far. I remember going to church on Christmas Eve, the Communion, the wafer and the Welch's grape juice standing in for Jesus's holy blood. My mother's perfume that smelled of cinnamon, the sprigs of white fir arranged along the altar, the tapers and the choir of mothers and daughters accompanied by an upright piano whose sustain pedal was stuck. Kip a couple of pews forward, sitting between his parents, turning once in a while to make a face at me. Making a face back and getting poked in the ribs by my father, gently the first time, a little harder the second, and told, —Cut it out, the third.

Sleepiness setting in. Praying to the Lord that one of the presents under the tree back home, the one wrapped in white shiny paper, which when shaken makes no rattling sound, gives no clue as to what is inside, turns out to be the genuine desert-rat binoculars I asked for. Hymns and more hymns, and how Bonnie Jean and I would look at one another and roll our eyes in complicity. —Can we go now? Asleep in the pew, both sister and brother, then awakened. Hoping Kip hadn't seen that I couldn't stay awake. Home to bed.

I remember believing in Peter Cottontail, good Saint Nick, Wee Willie Winkie who ran from window to window throughout the town to make sure all the children were tucked in bed. I remember Old Aunt Syne who none of us ever met, though we all gathered every New Year's to sing about how she'd never be forgot, or some such business described in lyrics that to this day I don't quite understand. All the invisible playmates we invented and named and spoke to in secret languages no one could ever translate.

And there was more, much more. You have a loose tooth and you tie one end of a string to it and the other to a doorknob, and your sister slams the door, and generally the string comes loose, but once in a while it works and there is the bloody tooth dangling in the knot, and she's laughing at you when you run screeching to the sink to wash your mouth with water and salt. You put a tooth under your pillow, when you wake up there is a dime. Who can forget? The warmth of one's pajamas—mine had on them scenes with droves of cattle being lassoed by bowlegged cowboys while other cowboys stood by chuck wagons tending to broad-bellied coffeepots suspended over campfires by long sticks—flannel with feet and buttons front and back, and ginger ale and lemon sherbet and magazines when you are sick, and being tucked in tight with the sheet folded back just so under your chin. The miracle that was a paper-and-balsa kite on Saturday afternoon, bold plain yellow in the cobalt sweep of sky, rising and rising with its tail of tied strips of rag trailing, plummeting in circles when the wind weighed in too hard. A paddleboat smelling of its thick rubber band, of soap and savory mildew from the tub, and maybe the rich shore muck of old Ashley Pond. Up and down on the teeter-totter, legs extended, knees in your face, up and slow coming back down and then up again, and sometimes left dangling high in the sky if the kid you're playing with is bigger than you are and gets it in his head to keep you there, maybe laughs at you a little, maybe lets you down slowly, maybe jumps off so you drop hard on your ass with a wallop. The softball game that starts in the morning and finishes when it is too dark to see the ball anymore. Childhood. Runny noses, broken arms, leg aches, chicken pox; tincture of Merthiolate, cod-liver oil, castor oil, Vicks VapoRub.

Who could forget? It is not that these things fade away, more that they become encased, encrusted as the object—a tree, call it, for the sake of calling it something—which is your life, accretes its annual rings. When time passes and the silt settles, the trunk gets buried first. Layer buries layer. This is how it works and will always work.

—You should be ashamed of yourself, I was told, with one of the cliches that seemed devastating at the time. —Your poor father works hard to put food on the table, to put clothes on your back and a roof over your head. He's proud of his work, and your sister and I are proud of him—

At this, Bonnie Jean would reliably nod her head in agreement, and I'd think, You darned go-along, and then would think, Darn you, you love her better than I do, and I would mean my sister loved Mother better in the sense that she at least knew how to live life without hurting her, or our father either.

—and all I can say to you, young man, is if you don't like it here, you're welcome to go live somewhere else.

—But that isn't what you believe, I'd say.

—Don't get on your high horse and tell me what I believe.

—You're not proud of what he does, I know you're not!

—Shut up, Brice.

—You know we shouldn't even be eating the food he puts on our table with the blood money he makes at the lab.

—You don't have the slightest idea what your father does at the lab.

—You're wrong, you're wrong because I do.

—That's enough!

—I do, I do know what he does, and it's bad, it's wrong.

—Go to your room.

—No!

—I said
march
, young man.

These cliches could be crushing, in part because I didn't have the proficiency to fight back, and in part because within the context of my family more and more I was odd man out, and when I wasn't quick to retort, no one was there to articulate my thoughts for me. These arguments would come like prairie fire, furious and fast, and then be gone. I'd go to my room. Over and over in my head I would play out the scene I had just caused, hearing her words and mine, and thinking of all the things I could have said to make my point clearer. And then the regret would set in, and I would figure out how to apologize. I would quietly open my bedroom door and plod in blue silence down the hall to the kitchen where she was sitting with her glass and pipe, and voice cliches of my own, like —I'm sorry, Mom, it's just that sometimes I think you just don't understand, or, —I feel bad about what I said about Dad and I'm glad he's my dad and I'll never say anything like that again.

Before Kip and I left on our great expedition I would tend to capitulate more often than not in the hope of preserving some semblance of household order, knowing all the while that I could let off steam, so to speak, whenever I was with Kip. At Kip's side, where my tongue just magically loosened, I could proclaim what provisional values I was trying to work out as this personality named Brice took its form.

—Kip?

—Yeah?

—Kip, you know what they're doing in the Techs?

—Not sure, think so, though. How come?

—Never mind.

Time would wash on, the voluptuous, tardy time that children live in. We were playing marbles. Kip had fewer cat's-eyes than I did, I had more steelies than he. The ground was clean and smooth, perfect for shooters.

—Kip? I said.

There was the
click
of the marbles popping together and they sprang away at angles.

—Do a pig, he demanded, having made the shot, and I oinked. Without missing a beat, though, he answered, —Yeah?

—You understand about this Trinity junk that happened?

I shot, a tad wide.

—Yeah, so?

—Well, I mean, you know this business about the bomb drills and us having to put our heads between our knees and all?

Kip took another shot,
click
, hit another of my marbles, and said, —Make a mule.

I brayed, said, —It's bad. They're gonna blow us up, you know, and he suddenly became animated and made a very real, very effective bomb sound, silver spit at the side of his mouth, his eyes wide, his arms hugging himself as he tottered and stumbled backward and forward before falling down. I watched him. What a hambone, I thought.

—They got me, they got me, I'm a goner. I'm dying, dying.

—I'm serious, I said.

—Oh, Brice, I'm dead, farewell dear . . . friend, remember . . . me, and then lay there for a while holding his breath, waiting for me to say something, respond, get in the act with him, pretend I was a doctor come to his rescue, whatever the devil. But I didn't feel like it.

My shot now. I aimed with one eye shut and the other tight in a squint, and the marble flew off my thumb with a snap, and for once a knock,
click
, and I said, —Make a snake, and he came back to life and hissed.

Then he said, —They're gonna kill us, Brice, is what they're gonna do. Those drills where they make us stick our heads between our legs? What we oughta do is we oughta bend over a little more and kiss ourselves goodbye.

—We got to stop them.

He looked at me as if I had three heads and told me, his voice gone flat as the potsherds we used to collect down in the canyons and dry as dust, —You're just a dumb kid. You aren't gonna stop anything, boy.

I said, hopefully, —You're a dumb kid, too.

—You're right, he finished, and he would be tired of playing marbles, and we'd go off and play something else.

This was how it was when we were eight or so. We had a sense of there being something wrong, transgressive and secretive, about who we were
because
of where we came from. It was a sense that arose from how we were treated whenever we went down into Santa Fe and were first not recognized as local, but—who knows precisely how, by townie intuition, or some offhanded Hill comment that acted as a clue—gave someone to understand that we were from “up there.” An abrupt shift in the way the eyes looked at us, a change, subtle maybe but definite, in the voice, a sense of now being either hurried along, or asked to linger for a while, with the obvious interest in finding out what were we doing
up there
.

Not everyone was set against us. Many were curious is all. Something powerful, something dangerous had been accomplished on the Hill, and everyone knew that having ended the war, the nasty thingamajig that broke the Japanese and the Germans was being refined and made mightier, and that a brand-new war, now a Cold War—a very cold war—had got itself under way.

The word
proliferation
assumed new gravity. Strassmann and Hahn's discovery of fission did, too. Uranium and thorium entered lay vocabularies even as world markets for them were spawned. The letter
H
became the most frightening in the alphabet. Everything was a race, a race for space, the arms race, the war between the races. In our basements we stocked canned goods, books, blankets. Dogtags were distributed among urban dwellers to make identification of the dead easier in the aftermath of what seemed inevitable. A hundred million souls had already been slain in the first half of the century, and that had been accomplished mostly by simple means, with bayonets and bullets, by privation and blitz. Carnage was nothing new—older than language, older than fire—but just think of what we could do now. Tests continued, pristine atolls in the Pacific became proving grounds for new weapons. The isle of Elugelab was vaporized by the first thermonuclear bomb, of the name Mike, the pure reef ripped wide by tritium and deuterium—isotopes that sound like books in a Bible of the Dead—and the salt water in which life on earth first was born and all the fish and coral for miles turned into blistering noxious gas that the winds might play with for a while before giving them up in the form of cancered rain. This was the month before Kip and I turned eight. From Eniwetok they watched the fireball as it rose over the Marshall Islands, and the ocean was all lit up, tidal waves, the beautiful expanding rings dashed white across the face of the sea, and the purple-white mushroom graced the South Pacific skies. The ordnance delivered by the thirteen-member crew of the
Enola Gay
was a mere candle flame to the bonfires that were to be ignited year by year in the decade ahead. The war that had just ended looked to be dwarfed by what was to come. The next war promised to be the real thing, the biggest ever waged. And if not the best, at least the brightest.