"You!"
Ray tried to snatch his eyes from the road and kill Santa, but erosion had carved away the outer lane and the brake lights ahead 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 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 synchroniesty building towards Trinity, a psychic tension. You men feel it, I can sense it."
"You want to sense something?"
Ray started to turn the Tommy gun, but a rock slide had poured over a hairpin bend in the road and Joe had to brake and turn without locking wheels.
"That's why I expect our problems at Trinity will be largely psychological." There was a rustle of paper. "Do you mind if I ask a few questions?"
Joe downshifted. The ambulance slid over stones to the edge of the road. Larger rocks bounced in front and rang off the crankcase underneath.
"Sergeant Stingo, if you heard that you were in close proximity to radioactive material, would you feel comfortable, concerned, a little anxious, very anxious?"
"Shit," Joe said.
The red tail-lights of the truck in front swung wildly.
"Boulder," Joe said.
It was the size of a doghouse and in the middle of the road. The truck cleared it on the right and slammed into the rock wall, scraping sparks off granite. Joe headed for the same space, skidding, holding the wheel steady. Ray and Tommy gun were pressed against the windshield. As the ambulance slipped past the boulder, Joe saw the truck ahead hit the wall again. Wrenches, jacks, tyres spilled from under the tarpaulin, bounced in the ambulance's headlights. As the truck stopped, nose into the wall, the ambulance slid through between the truck's tailboard and the road edge. The lead car had halted in the middle of the road. Joe swung in, braked and pulled the emergency brake at the same time, coming to rest against the car bumper only a second before the tail sedan rammed into the rear of the ambulance. A tyre wobbled out of the dark and past the headlights. Security officers ran up and down waving flashlights and Tommy guns. Even Ray was distracted.
A scream that was both feminine and unhuman erupted by Joe's ear, followed by a powerful, bell-like gong as Santa flew out of his seat head first and hit the ambulance roof. He seemed still to be suspended in mid-air when Joe looked past him to the rear of the ambulance and saw the empty steel square and eight slack straps. The plutonium canister had broken loose and rolled forward, glinting and warm, to nudge Santa's loafers and Argyle socks. The plutonium couldn't explode. Joe would have been happy to explain that to Santa, to reduce his psychic tension, given the chance. Santa dropped to the ambulance floor.
"Gee," said Ray.
"Orders are we don't stop for anything," the lieutenant in charge said when Joe pointed out the slumped figure of the analyst. "He's already in the ambulance, we'll leave him there."
"He's out cold, sir. He probably has concussion."
"Look, Sergeant, we're lucky no one in the truck was killed."
"What about this?" Joe pointed to the canister. "The strap hooks are broken."
"God, we can't have that thing rolling around. Somebody's going to have to hold it. We're losing time. Choose up, one of you has to take it. Or wedge it with something."
The truck, fender crumpled, was already weaving round the ambulance as the lieutenant ran off to the lead sedan. The convoy was re-assembling itself.
"I'll wedge it." Ray's eyes were red but unwavering.
As Joe let out the clutch Ray slipped over his seat to the rear of the ambulance. Cautiously, the vehicles moved down the mountain. Clouds scattered over the stars. There was a scuff of cloth and scrape of metal over the ambulance floor. Joe looked back and saw Ray tucking Santa into a corner. He couldn't see the canister.
Ray was panting when he returned to his seat.
"It was hot, Chief. Like a can of soup."
It shouldn't have broken the hooks, Joe knew. Eight steel hooks shouldn't have snapped. It was as if the canister had leapt forward at the first opportunity. I'll tell Oppy about Augustino, he thought. If they ship me off the Hill, I've got nothing to lose except a phosphorescent glow.
"Like a tin can of hot soup, Chief. Like it was alive."
Down the rest of the mountain curves to Durango and all the way to the hills of Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, there came from the back the sound of Santa rocking heavily as the ambulance careened like a hearse.
July
14
Six clowns wore white paint with black horizontal stripes around their arms, legs, torso. Black circles around their eyes and mouths. Black and white cotton caps twisted into horns. Short black scarves around the neck, knee and wrists. Long black loincloths trailing behind. Rattles of deer hooves tied to the waist. Moccasins.
Together, they joked and prodded the dancers into a great circle in the middle of the plaza. The men wore clean work trousers and handkerchiefs tied into headbands. The women were in dresses. Man, woman, man, woman, each holding an ear of corn in one hand and a yellow zigzag of wood, a lightning wand, in the other. Elders, singers and a drummer with a big Cochiti drum stood along the north side. Plaza and cottonwood framed the sky.
A new touch were the patriotic blue armbands with gold Vs for victory on all the dancers. One man had also come out wearing sunglasses. A clown stole the glasses, slipped them on another clown as the drumming started; deep voices lifted and the dancers began turning counter-clockwise like a wheel.
"We don't need Captain Augustino and his security apparatus," Oppy told Anna Weiss. "Los Alamos has a much better defence. The Hill isn't a place, it's a time warp. We are the future surrounded by a land and a people that haven't changed in a thousand years. Around us is an invisible moat of time. Anyone from the present, any mere spy, can only reach us by crossing the past. We're protected by the fourth dimension."
They and Joe and the rest of the tourists watched from the broad shadow of the cottonwood on the south side of the plaza. Back from Washington that morning, Oppy had changed to his Western gear: jeans, boots, silver buckle, hat at an angle. Anna wore her jumpsuit and a man's fedora.
"It's perfectly animistic," Oppy said, "an ancient Greek fertility rite, that's what so wonderful about it. The ears of corn, of course, are phallic symbols."
The word from Washington was that Truman's military advisers claimed Trinity was a waste of time, that the bomb was a scientific boondoggle, a hoax, a dud. Oppy put on a brave front.
"You're not going to dance?" Anna asked Joe. So far, she was no more than civil to him, as if they'd hardly met.
"No."
"Joe's different," Oppy said. "He's a progressive Indian. A bebop Indian." Oppy turned to Joe and lowered his voice. "By the way, when we get to Trinity, Groves wants you to patrol for Apaches. That incident in the snow seems to have lodged in his brain. He thinks it takes an Indian to stop an Indian."
It wasn't a major ceremony, not a saint's day or a basket dance, just a dance for late planting, open to the public but unannounced. Maids had told people on the Hill that "something would be happening". Among the hundred OP so spectators, Joe saw Fermi and Teller. Foote sported British Army shorts and a sombrero.
The dancers moved with a step. Half-hop. Turn. There were few young men; most of them were in the service. Grandparents and girls moved happily to the sonorous beat, gently stirring up dust. Hop. Shuffle. The monotony used to drive Joe crazy. A placid merry-go-round of tame Indians and corn. Shuffle. Turn.
"Who are the painted ones?" Anna asked Joe. "Clowns."
"What do they represent to you?"
"Ancient Greeks." The clowns were performing feeble antics inside the dancers' circle. Joe remembered when they were fierce mimics who imitated Navajos, tourists, Catholic priests, when clons were at least the heat in the pueblo milk.
Cottonwood leaves rustled; on the hottest day, a cottonwood could sound like rain. Ladies from Santa Fe, veteran watchers, opened folding chairs. Oppy murmured something that made Anna laugh, and Joe excused himself to take a walk.
Behind a low stone wall and a small graveyard at the west end of the plaza sat the mission of Santiago. The walls were adobe seven feet thick at the base; the church looked like a monolith thirty feet high. A fort, actually, from the days when the Apaches used to raid the Rio Grande Valley. On the roof was a graceful iron cross and a bell, both cast in Spain. The door was always shut during dances.
The graveyard had marked and unmarked mounds, and a scattering of new white crosses for soldiers. Their backs to the plaza, two cowboys sat on tombstones and smoked. They were wiry men in sweat-stained hats. The older was about sixty, with calloused hands and a chickentrack neck. The younger had long blonde hair and wore a vanity shirt like the kind Roy Rogers sang in. The satin had turned to a muddy iridescence and strips of curlicue piping had fallen off.
"Sergeant Joe Pena," Joe said and stuck out his hand. "I never saw cowboys at an Indian dance before."
"I'm Al." The old man gave Joe the briefest possible shake. "This is Billy."
Billy cocked his head, as if that reduced Joe in size. His nose twisted when he smiled.
"Fuck off."
"You can see better over in the plaza," Joe said.
"We've seen Indians before," Billy said. The shirt was shabby, but painfully romantic. No one would wear it unless he'd considered the possibility of an Indian maiden eyeing him in it. Joe wanted to give him every chance.
"Indian Service?" he asked.
"Who says?" Al looked up, pushed back his hat, revealing stringy hairs stuck to damp, untanned forehead.
"You're Service riders," Joe said.
Billy dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. "No one said that."
"It's not hard," Joe said. "Cowboys. Here. But not for the dance and you don't care for Indians. And you smell like sheep shit. That's right, you've been out shooting those Navajo sheep. With that?" He looked at the gun on Al's belt, a rust-speckled Colt -45. "Doing your bit to win the war?"
"Because they let you in the Army -" Billy began. "But this isn't the Navajo reservation," Joe said. "No Navajos here. You're lost."
"Pena." Al stored the name away aloud. "You work on that magic mountain the Army's got."
"I'll show you the road out," Joe offered. Billy stood up. "You don't -"
"By the way, that shirt," Joe said and shook his head. "That shirt looks like shit and spaghetti on a plate."
"I told him," Al said. He slid off the tombstone, stretched and started for the graveyard gate. "Catch you later, Sergeant."
Though Billy looked bewildered and reluctant to leave, he followed the older man. Halfway to the gate he turned to say,
"We got those Navajos, every one."
The tombstone Al had been using for a seat was a weathered slab of marble that said "Miguel Pena, 1895-1935". Dolores had bought the whitest stone in Santa Fe and it shone while she was alive. Billy had been sitting on a smaller, rose marble marker that said "Dolores Reyes Pena, 1899-1944". She bought it along with Mike's in anticipation; there was nothing more exotic to Dolores than a rose. Only lately had Joe started to realize how young his parents were. He picked up the butt Billy had thrown down, field-stripped it and blew the tobacco away.
There was a certain definition, an edge to the dance when Joe returned. One black and white clown had a camera and was taking a picture of Foote. Then aimed it like a gun. The clown in sunglasses pretended to be blind and stumbled with a stick along the front line of the tourists, pinching a skirt here, feeling a blouse there. In the dancers' line, women giggled. Slide. Half-toe. Turn.
A third clown slipped out of the circle. One pillow was tied to the back of his loincloth and another was strapped to his belly. A fur moustache was stuck to his lip, gold stars to his shoulders, and on his head he wore an Army officer's cap with a paper star. Ponderously he walked clockwise to the dancers, so that they passed in review for him. When he added a twitch to the pillow on his ass, the impersonation of General Groves was complete. The other clowns bowed and salaamed. Anna Weiss laughed, but Oppy looked pained.
A Buick four-door drew up in front of the mission. Fuchs was at the wheel and Augustino was with him. Cars weren't allowed that close. When a tribal policeman went to the car and waved it on, a rear window rolled down and Joe saw the Indian Service rider called Al. The car stayed.
The clown in sunglasses produced a small firecracker. Another clown took it, another clown blessed it and a fourth clown put it on the ground and pretended to light it while the clown-Groves raised binoculars to his circled eyes to watch. All the other clowns except the one in sunglasses put their fingers to their ears.
Nothing.
A second match was tried. A third. A fourth.
A dud.
One after another, clowns inspected the firecracker and passed it on until it was with the clown-Groves, who studied it through his binoculars and gave it to the clown in sunglasses, who turned and presented the firecracker to Oppy. The crowd closed in to see. The dancers had never stopped and the singers hadn't ceased their chant, but their eyes were on Oppy, too. Joe had never seen Oppy blush before. The clown in the sunglasses got on his knees and begged.
"Go ahead, Oppy!" Foote shouted. "Be a sport!"
In the car, Augustino pointed to the clown in glasses.
Anna handed Oppy a cigarette lighter. The other clowns fell to their knees to plead. Oppy rescued a smile and lit the fuse and threw the firecracker into the air, where it exploded with a puff and a bang. Whether the firecracker happened to come at the end of the morning dance or was the signal for it to stop, the circle of dancers abruptly broke and dispersed for lunch. The clowns went off in single file, holding on to the long black tails of each other's loincloths, through an alley on the north side of the plaza which was out of bounds to tourists.
Fuchs' Buick was gone.
"You should be proud," Jaworski said and shook Oppy's hand. "They're dancing for our victory and success."
"Wasn't there some element of menace?" Teller suggested.
"Nonsense," Foote said. "Oppy, you played your part beautifully, even modestly."
Oppy returned Anna's lighter.
"Anna, I have to leave."
"I'll stay. They're more alive than you said."
Augustine had joined the group. "They certainly are alive. Can we talk, Dr Oppenheimer? You and me and Sergeant Pena?"
The parking lot was an oat field beaten into a cloud of dust. More cars were arriving than leaving. Augustino's jeep was next to the gray Army sedan Joe had brought Oppy in. Joe still couldn't find Fuchs' Buick.
Augustino asked, "The ones in the black and white greasepaint, Sergeant, are they idiots or traitors?"
"The clowns?"
"Whatever," Augustino said, "that was a serious breach of security. They singled out Dr Oppenheimer here in public view and identified him with explosives. Any outsider with a background in physics had to notice him and Teller. The imitation of the general was in the worst possible taste. What is the religious purpose behind that?"
"You'd have to ask them, sir."
"I'd love to. Who are they?"
"I don't know, sir."
"A tribal secret?"
"I guess so, sir."
"There's a great deal you're not telling me these days, Sergeant. They dance again?"
"This afternoon, sir."
"Same clowns, same people?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then I think it would be wise for you to drive the Director back to the Hill now, before there's another incident. You do agree, Dr Oppenheimer?"
Oppy stared back at the plaza.
"I thought we had good relations with these people. I thought we were friends."
"What other incident, sir?" Joe asked Augustino.
"Follow me," the captain said after a pause.
All traffic leaving the lot for the highway had to pass over a narrow cattle guard. Joe stopped for incoming cars while Augustino's jeep went ahead. As always when they were alone, Oppy sat up in front with Joe. He tapped on the dashboard impatiently, as if a herd of morons were holding him back. Word of the dance had spread. From Santa Fe open buses dropped off tourists, who hurried on foot across the guard. A short figure with a camera and binoculars round his neck Joe recognized from the bar of La Fonda, the New Yorker named Harry Gold.
Joe dug into his pocket and gave Oppy what looked like a wire-mesh button.
"That's a microphone Augustino put in your house while you were gone. It's time you knew what's going on around you."
Oppy held the microphone up to the light of the windshield as if he were examining some mildly interesting artefact.
"It was hidden," Joe said. "It wasn't put there for your protection. He's watching you, he's after you."
"I know."
Oppy's voice had fallen to a whisper. He turned the tiny microphone over and over.
"Tell General Groves," Joe said. "Tell the general that his head of Intelligence thinks you're a Red spy."
"The general knows." Oppy looked at Joe with a clear gaze of resignation and contempt. It was an inner look, a meditation. He put his hand out of the open window and dropped the microphone on to the dirt outside. "You can't help me, Joe."
"You're in charge of the most important lab in the war and you're scared of a captain? They can't do anything without you. You're the goddamn bomb."
"It's… a temporary situation."
The cattle guard was clearing. Augustino's jeep waited far up the road.
Joe got out. "Then I'll help Augustino."
Oppy slid behind the wheel and asked, "Help him?"
"He wants to know who those clowns are. It takes an Indian to stop an Indian, right?"
"Joe -" Oppy started to protest. He began again. "Joe, twenty more days. After Trinity, no one can touch us."
Joe made a wide circuit of Santiago on his way back. Fuchs' car was gone, probably halfway to the Hill by now. The Indian Service riders, Billy and Al, were drinking beers in the back of a tribal police car in an alley. All around the plaza Indians ate fried bread on their roofs. Under the plaza cottonwood in an island of shade, tourists ate sandwiches. Waxed paper floated over the ground on waves of heat.
15
Around the shaft of sunlight that came down the ladder to the kiva roof, three clowns repaired their black and white stripes from Mason jars of body paint. Two clowns without caps rested on the wall benches. The last stood in the shadow of the corner to drink a Coke and piss into a pail. All turned to the side door as Joe came in.
He hadn't been in a kiva for almost twenty years. Outside, the kiva of the clowns was a plain adobe house. Inside, though, the walls were painted with shapes that seemed to hover in the dark. Snakes. Swallows. Stepped mountains and red and white clouds. The zigzag lightning slats of a dismantled altar stood between Spanish chests of prayer sticks and dance wands. The floor was beaten earth, and had the traditional hole that led to the centre of the earth. The clowns themselves seemed dislocated, white blocks, bars of black. Even so, Joe saw that one of the clowns without a cap, a clown with loose gray hair, a heavy belly and spindly legs was Ben Reyes.
"Psoot-bah!" Ben said; it was an order for a dog to scram. "Get out!"
"There are two Indian Service cowboys out there," Joe told the other clown without a cap. "I think they came to arrest you."
"You pointed him out," Ben said.
"Fuchs pointed you out," Joe told the other clown.
The clown's long brown hair fell to his shoulders, but he still wore sunglasses from the morning dance, despite the dark of the kiva. He tilted his head and smiled at Joe as if sharing a joke.
"You gave the firecracker to Oppenheimer and you didn't try to take it back," Joe said. "When you were pretending to be blind out there, you still bumped into too many people."
"Not bad for a real blind man, though," Roberto said.
"Not bad."
"They'd really dare do it?"
"You pulled a shotgun on the wrong Kraut. He's our Kraut and there's a war on. I don't know how he knew you would dance, but he knew and the captain in charge of security on the Hill knew and they pointed you out to a pair of Indian Service riders. Don't worry, Fuchs and the captain fingered you and ran. The cowboys watched the dance for five seconds and they saw you from a distance. Bring in someone else to dance. You'll have all afternoon to get back to Taos."
"Coke?" Roberto asked. "You thirsty?"
"No, thanks."
"Hot out there, isn't it?"
"If you're going to get someone, you better do it now."
Roberto removed the dark glasses and laid them on the bench. His eyes looked not only shrunken but painted out.
"Well, it's not as simple as that, Joe. No one is allowed in while clowns are here. I don't think anyone but you would break the rules."
"If six clowns don't come out of here, the riders will come in for you."
"You dance," Roberto said.
"Him?" Ben asked.
"There's no one else," Roberto said.
"It would be a joke," Ben said.
"You show him what to do," Roberto said.
The three clowns by the ladder squatted and talked among themselves. It would be a great disgrace to include someone as ignorant as Joe Pena in a ceremony. On the other hand, it would be a great disgrace to have an elder from another pueblo arrested in Santiago.
"No," Joe spoke up. "For once, Ben is right. I only came to warn you."
Roberto acted genuinely puzzled. "What good is a warning if you won't help?" he asked. "That's a fake warning."
"From a fake Indian," Ben said.
"Fair warning." Joe held up his hand and made it a wave as he moved to the door. "From here on, I don't even know you."
"He went away an Indian and came back a black man," Ben said. "He went into the Army and became a white man. Maybe there's no one there at all any more. Now, his brother was an Indian."
"Ben," Joe said and shook his head.
"Best thing that happened to his mother was she died before today," Ben said.
Joe returned from the door. "Ben, Ben, Ben. Don't say another word."
"I need your help," Roberto said.
The paint was greasy and thick, and he felt as if his whole body were a mask. His hair was tucked up into the striped cap, which was tied by a black thong under his chin. The other clowns painted black outlines around his eyes and mouth, and knotted black scarves around his neck, wrists and ankles. I can't believe this, Joe thought, this is happening to someone else; he felt like he was standing apart and watching himself be prepared, as if he were lending just his body. The tail of the long black loincloth trailed on the floor. No moccasins were found big enough, so he was going barefoot, and Roberto suggested that Joe stay within the circle of dancers as much as he could. Everyone gathered at the ladder and shared a last cigarette. Roberto wore his white Taos blanket, ready for a separate exit. One of the other clowns had the dark glasses now. Ben tucked a bullwhip under his arm. The sun had moved west, making the light from the roof dimmer, the angle sharper, and Joe had the sensation that the kiva was sealing over him. Finally, the clowns climbed the ladder one by one, Joe last. They burst off the roof and down an alley, dogs and boys running at their side. Although Joe tried to hang back, sheer length of stride brought him to the front. There was a tunnel of shade, then the brilliant, droning heat of the plaza and a bigger crowd than before. All the northern roofs were crowded. The tourists had spread across the whole southern side of the plaza. Only the watching priests and elders were the same, as if they hadn't moved since morning. Joe expected at any moment someone would shout, "That's not a real clown, that's Joe Pena!" He chased an old lady and a girl into the dancing line.
The plaza seemed to wheel round him. His paint seemed already washed with sweat. He saw Foote. Jaworski and Harvey had come. The drumming started. At the east end of the plaza, among the very last tourists, he saw the Service rider named Al. At the west end was Billy.
Just long enough for Roberto to get away from the kiva, Joe told himself. As the circle of dancers began to turn, he slipped through it and used it as a screen. The steps weren't that hard to pick up, a slow 4-4 beat. Hop, slide, half-turn. Without warning, the singers and drummer went to a fast 3-4, then back to the slow 4—4. Joe stumbled, but it was taken, as a joke, because, after all, he was a clown.
The whole idea was that everyone did precisely the same step in the same way without embellishment or conspicuous-ness. The circle was a cosmic gear moving in clouds, calling in game, drawing up corn. Any individuality was a loose screw.
"Cloud flowers lie over the mountains, cloud flowers are blooming now over the mountains. First the lightning flashes in the north, then the thunder rumbles, then the rain falls, because flowers are blooming," the singers sang.
Though there wasn't a cloud in the sky, the dancers bounced happily, hop, turn, a cob in one hand, a lightning wand in the other. Their worn, clean coveralls and crisp, faded dresses made them look like dolls of sober industry. The women and girls didn't raise their knees as high as the men or stamp their heels as hard. But they recognized Joe. He saw their glances stealing towards him and caught their whispers when he as much as turned.
"In the fields you can see melon flowers," the singers sang. "In the fields you can see cornflowers. In the fields the water bird sings and overhead the black clouds grow." A hundred dancers softly made the ground tremble.
One more revolution of the circle and he'd quit, Joe told himself. The circle moved so slowly, though. The entire population of Santiago seemed to be present, dancing or on the roofs, surrounding him and waiting for him to do something. So many of the women looked like Dolores. Not just Dolores the famous old potter, but Dolores as a young woman, Dolores as a girl. Half-toe. Turn.
Two of the clowns took folding chairs away from the ladies from Santa Fe and sat, pretending to gossip, put on lipstick, adjust girdles. A third patrolled the edges of the plaza, keeping back the spreading line of tourists. He threatened a spectator who had come halfway to the circle from the east end. It was the younger cowboy trying to get a better look at Joe, and he ignored the tubby, old clown waving him back. When the clown uncoiled a whip and cracked it at Billy's feet, Billy knocked him down.
The entire circle slowed, watching the confrontation. Joe saw the tribal policemen hanging back; they didn't want a hassle with the Indian Service. Without being aware of it, Joe was through the dancers. He seemed to cover the distance to Ben in a few steps. Billy pointed a warning finger.
Joe stepped over Ben, took Billy by the front of his shirt and, with one hand, lifted him high off the ground. The cowboy kicked and swung his fists while Joe carried him to where most of the crowd watched under the cottonwood. Joe intended to set him down gently, but, released, Billy somehow flew over the first two rows of spectators to the base of the tree.
As the crowd retreated, Foote's sombrero rolled forward. Chairs folded with claps. One man laughed. Al worked his way to Billy, laughing the whole time as if his friend had participated in a great joke. Clowns joined in as if Joe were fooling. Foote and the entourage from the Hill, Harry Gold and the tourists from Santa Fe started laughing anxiously, because they wanted to believe it was a set-up performance and the huge clown was nothing to be afraid of. Anna Weiss didn't smile. She hadn't stepped back. She watched Joe as if a giant had stepped out of the blue sky.
The drummer never missed a beat.
The circle went on turning.
Afterward, men who were clowns washed in the river a couple of miles outside Santiago. Since he wasn't really a clown, Joe washed alone where cottonwood logs and sand had stopped up a pool. Thimbleberries with white, papery buds grew thickly down to either shore. Black paint slowly yielded to oatmeal soap and a yucca brush.
The sun was dazzling on the surface of the Rio. It took Joe a while to realize he was not alone, to see Anna Weiss watching from the smooth flank of a log that rose out of the sand.
16
In Unit 20 at the Cordoba Motel, daylight made a hot, white edge round the window blinds.
She twisted, spread herself, and as she settled into him he put his hands on her hips and helped her down. Widening, her eyes never left his. Despite the drawn blinds, she glowed, as if inner-lit. Yet her eyes were luminously dark, her hair was dark, the tips of her white breasts were dark. Deep inside her, he still rose. As if he had stepped off a high building a long time ago and only now was hitting ground. Falling and rising at the same time.
"I've never made love with a giant before."
He turned her on her back and drove deeper. Perspiration shone between her breasts. As she wrapped her legs round him, the bed groaned. Anna pulled him in with her hands until he was lifting her high with each stroke.
Her shoes and fedora were by the door where she'd dropped them as soon as she came in. Her jumpsuit was sprawled, empty, across the middle of the floor. His uniform lay over a chair.
Outside, the afternoon dimmed. Inside a pearly greyness crept along the walls. The room was decorated with photographs of the Alhambra. The pictures trembled as he held her against a wall so that only her toes, barely, touched the floor. The whole wall trembled, like a vertical sheet.
She was weightless and strong. She seemed to ride him, to be on all sides of him, to swallow him and be swallowed at the same time.
When they moved away the wall bore the damp imprint of her back and his hands.
Her body had both a blue paleness and a sheen of life. His belly looked black against hers.
As he lifted her, the bed, the entire room seemed to rise. The more and deeper he had her, the further he went the next time, until he felt himself dissolving.
The radio in the room, the Capehart console, looked like an old trombone player napping in a chair.
The walls could be paper pages now, ready to burn, tear or fold back and drop him into space.
"You're crazy to do this," he said.
"Oh, yes, I've been certified."
"Certified?"
"Officially," she said and smiled.
It was the dual moment of knowledge. The learning of legs, hands, skin, sweat, when the body is the whole terrain and obsessive scope of attention. Every word echoes on and on and becomes the colour of action. Breath synchronizes and the sheets twist.
They sat cross-legged on the bed, the ashtray and haze of smoke between them. Although the heat of the day had faded, their sweat shone.
"I was in love," she said and lit a cigarette for him and put it between his lips. "I loved a French boy. He was very poetic. I loved a German boy. He was very depressed. It was fun to be in love. What I liked was the element of irrationality. This isn't love at all; this is pure irrationality."
He inhaled, filled his lungs and let the smoke escape so his breath filled the room. Of one thing he was certain. "You've never been in love before," he said.
Her gray eyes watched as if from a cat's distance. Until they closed and she arched. With her hair back, her forehead seemed higher, the lofty brow of genius, so the black hair was the giveaway, swaying, a flag whipping the dark above him. Until he pulled her head down and opened her mouth with his, and she gathered his hair in her fingers and would not let the kiss go. She asked, "You've been in love?"
"It was a flight to the moon, a night in June. Icy fingers up and down my spine, that same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine."
She rested the tip of her finger between his eyes.
"Tonight is the last night in June."
"I knew one of them was right."
In total dark, he took her from behind, the deepest, final fit, the groove of her back against his chest. So deep it seemed he flowed into her for ever. So still, they both shook to the pounding of her heart.
The car was a Plymouth two-door she had borrowed from Teller at the dance. Joe had found jazz on the radio. Stars lit the road. Wind whipped Anna's hair around her face.
"I loved King Kong," she said. "I would have traded places with that girl. King Kong was very popular in Germany. And, you can play the piano."
"Great."
"And a boxer. I asked all about you."
"Was a boxer."
"You were good?"
"Not bad. I got interested in other things."
"Music?"
"I love the piano. I love the weight, the shape. Something about a concert grand, playing a high E in an empty house."
"And women? Is it the same, the high E in an empty house?"
"Well, a little. How did you get involved in neutrons?"
She thought for a moment, but Joe could already hear her voice. Most important for him was that a woman should have her own voice, and he'd never heard anyone like Anna.
"I could always see numbers. It's like having your own world, or a world you only share with a few others. Prime numbers.
Positive numbers and negative numbers in patterns like physics. I did a paper on reaction multiplication when I was sixteen to amuse myself. I was in a sanatorium."
"Why?"
"Hysteria. Anaemia. Pregnancy. It depended on which doctor you talked to. I was lucky to be in the sanatorium at all because they weren't supposed to take Jews, but my father, although he had lost his professorship at the university, was so respected I was allowed in. The sanatorium had once been a monastery with gardens and orchards, even lemon trees, that ran in terraces to the river, the Elbe. In one garden was a bower of honeysuckle that stirred with bees. I retreated there. I tried to think of things so small and insignificant that they would be almost pure mathematics, that they would have nothing to do with the larger, real world. I watched the bees move from flower to flower. This was just after the Meitner-Frisch article on fission, you remember that?"
"I think I was fighting in Chicago that day. I must have missed it."
"Bees and neutrons are, a little, the same. The paper was only a few pages and it couldn't be published because I was a Jew." For a moment Anna looked into the canyon, and to the mountains beyond, to distant lightning collecting at a peak. "You didn't tell anyone, did you, about Harvey? You didn't report your friend Roberto either, did you?"
"That doesn't mean I agree with Roberto."
"Or with Harvey and me."
"Two more weeks to Trinity and then it will all be over. Maybe it will fail." He could feel her disappointment. "I hate arguments. I'm a coward. True arguments are full of words and each person is sure he's the only one who knows what the words mean. Each word is a basket of eels so far as I'm concerned. Everybody gets to grab just one eel and that's his interpretation and he'll fight to the death for it. Roberto's from Taos, which he thinks gives him the right to say 'up' is 'down'. Harvey's from Texas, which makes it strange he and I agree on a goddamn thing. As for you and me?"
"Yes?"
"Which is why I love music. You hit a C and that's a C and that's all it is. Like speaking clearly for the first time. Like being intelligent. Like understanding. A Mozart or an Art Tatum sits at the piano and picks out the undeniable truth."
"You're going to hear about me," Anna said slowly. "That I'm insane and a tramp. I don't care what people say, but I want you to know that only one is true."
"Which one?"
"Which one is important to you?"
Joe hesitated, and during that long moment they neared the first checkpoint. Joe kept the MPs supplied with cigarettes and ration coupons; he'd expected to be waved through as usual. Tonight, the checkpoint was a Western scene, the sort of painting daubed for tourists: the amber light of a shed reaching out to men on horseback, the riders slouched and weary, horses steaming in the night air. But also jeeps with their headlights on, blocking the road on each side of the checkpoint shed. He stopped fifty feet before the shed and left the Plymouth's lights on.
"Stay here," he told Anna as he got out. "If anyone asks, we were driving around, you don't know where."
The horses were lathered bright in the headlights. Among the riders was Sergeant Shapiro. Corporal Gruber had one arm in a sling.
Shapiro laughed.
"Fell off his horse, Chief. Broke his fucking arm."
As Joe pushed into the shed, Captain Augustino looked up from the map he was sharing with Billy and Al. The captain was sleek in an Eisenhower jacket. The two cowboys were crusty from a day's riding. Al's little eyes and mouth were drawn tight and there was a white stubble on his jaw line. Billy's hair hung lank, dirty and yellow.
"Speak of the devil." Augustino looked delighted, as if some deserved amusement had come his way at the end of a weary day. "Come in, come in, Sergeant Pena. You know our friends
Al and Billy from the Indian Service. Billy's the one you tossed like a sack of manure at the dance."
The shed was small for four men and a pot-bellied stove. The light was a hanging bulb. On the walls were a clock, map, telephone, a yellowed silhouette guide to German planes, clipboards with old orders of the day, licence lists, sign-in and sign-out sheets. Joe suspected that the only names signed out and not back in were his and Anna's.
Augustino paused to let the general discomfort grow. "You missed the excitement, Sergeant."
"Yes, sir?"
"Absolutely, Sergeant. Why, we had a regular posse out, a dragnet looking for an Indian friend of yours. You know, your friend who assaulted one of our guests with a shotgun. The same friend whose place you took at the dance. Weren't you supposed to be driving the Director?"
"He wanted to know the identities of the dancers, sir. So I joined the dance."
"Just like that. Did you determine any identities?"
"No, sir. They didn't take off their paint around me." Al snorted. "You didn't know the dancer whose place you took was about to be arrested?"
"How would I know that?"
"Excellent question, Sergeant," Augustino said. "That's just so excellent it's what we've been asking all day. These gentlemen suspect some kind of informer, but it's my belief that they're dumb and you're smart. Who's right, do you think?"
"I wouldn't know that either, sir."
"Well, I have an intimate and high regard for you, Sergeant, I do." He smoothed the map with his hands. "Now, we have spent a vigorous day on every highway in northern New Mexico and riding up every dirt road and arroyo around Santiago pueblo. We did find some rattlesnakes. I think it was Corporal Gruber who had a nasty spill. Your friend, however, seems to have vanished."
"He must be pretty fast, sir."
"And blind at that, Sergeant. Both shocking and remarkable. And how was your day, Sergeant? Was it a full one?"
"Yes, sir, I was still trying to carry out the Director's request. Unfortunately, I was not successful."
"Wherever he was, that's where we'll find his blind friend," Billy told Augustino, "and we won't have to scramble into every pisshole Indian ruin again."
"Were you alone, Sergeant?" Augustino looked out at the Plymouth. "Alone on this quest?" The captain took the sign-out sheet off its hook, "Don't answer. Don't do anything until I'm back."
Then Augustino was out of the door and striding eagerly to the Plymouth's headlights. Joe could make out Anna's silhouette inside the car.
"Tossed me like a sack of shit, huh?" Billy asked. , "It was the captain's expression," Joe murmured and watched Augustino lean through the Plymouth's window.
"Now, Billy acted like a genuine asshole today, interfering in a ceremonial, and I'd like to apologize." Al had a wheezy, singsong voice. "In exchange, I want you to tell me who tipped you we were going to pick up your blind pal. Someone did, because you didn't figure that out on your own. Please, I've been kicking Indian ass for twenty years, I know Indians. Turn round, please, when I'm talking to you."
In Al's hand was his rust-spotted, short-barrelled Colt, an old-fashioned model called "The Shopkeeper's Friend". Al was a small man - cowboys tended to get worn down like fence posts - but the gun made him a little larger, as if he were levitating. Billy leaned back.
"This is Indian country," Al said. "The Indian Service is the only thing that keeps it running in any civilized manner. Abuse the Indian Service and you undermine the system that keeps you people alive."
Joe looked out of the window. From his gestures, Augustino was asking Anna to step out of the car.
"At the very heart of the system is respect. Billy and I spend weeks surrounded by Indians, enforcing the laws. Laws about sheep, about booze, about proper schooling. All that keeps us safe from all the drunken bucks is respect. Hell, otherwise they'd have to send the cavalry in with us every time, wouldn't they? Look at me."
Al's eyes were screwed up with the earnestness of communication. His hat had moved back, showing hair stuck flat as feathers on the white and shining upper half of his forehead.
"That's why what you did today to Billy was so dangerous, because it undermined our professional respect. Even if it was nothing but Pueblos who saw. Thank God it was Pueblos, not Navajos or Apaches. So, Billy apologizes."
"I apologize," Billy said quickly, as one word. "Now," Al said, "you tell us who tipped you and you tell us where your blind friend is."
Through the window, Joe saw Augustino stepping back as if Anna were getting out of the car.
"Son of a bitch, you look at me!" Al raised the gun to Joe's waist. "Listen, you're just one more buck to me, one more bar-room hero. You come back with your stories as if this was the only war in history. You bucks came back from the First War the same way and I trimmed you down fast. You don't want to talk, then watch while I blow your balls off. Because you're a fucking Indian and I'm the Indian Service and you're not acting right."
Al's hand was steady, broad, calloused at the web from handling rope. He moved the ploughshare hammer back.
"No," Joe said. "No, this is a United States Army post. I'm a staff sergeant carrying out the orders of the Director of an Army project. You're a shitkicker and a sheepfucker and you won't do anything."
Al paused, snorted, lowered the Colt and eased the hammer forward. The door opened behind Joe and Augustino returned, alone.
"You were right," Al told Augustino, "it's going to take a while after this war to get things back to normal."
Augustino looked at the gun.
"Out," he told Al.
"I was just -"
"Out, both of you."
While the cowboys slipped past Joe and through the door, Augustino sat on the map. He took a cigarette from a case, lit up, sighed.
"Fun and games, fun and games, Sergeant. Not to be taken seriously. A pair of drifters like that, if they weren't employed by the government they'd be in a soup line. At least they can stay on a horse, which is more than we can say for the Military Police. Sometimes I think we have the 'Dead End Kids' in uniform." Augustine's gaze shifted to the door and the car waiting outside. "She says she asked you to drive her around. She says you were a courteous chauffeur all day and all night. Dr Oppenheimer says he sent you back to check on the dancers. Everyone's covering for you, Sergeant."
"Yes, sir."
The captain removed his cap, setting a tone of informality. In the light of the bulb, his eyes were deep-set 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 the 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 any more?"
"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 have over-powered a blind man? But you do attack an officer of the Indian Service? You in an Indian dance? You! I'll tell you, Sergeant, you were already back in the hole at Leavenworth, you were buried deeper than ever 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 and I saw that couple in a motel courtyard. I know all the cars on the Hill. And I made a note of the licence and the time."
"We may have stopped there for coffee, sir."
"I went by the motel tonight. The coupe was still there. And 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 badly want every personal and intimate detail of Dr Weiss' life, her connections with the Party and her connections with 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 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 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."
17
In the Explosive Assembly Building on Two Mile Mesa, Joe held a twenty-inch model of the Trinity bomb steady on a wrestling mat. It was a sphere of pentagonal steel plates bolted together at the edges. Foote and a private named Eberly were adding the last lenses of high explosive. The temperature inside the green Sheetrock building was about 120 degrees and all three men were stripped to the waist and wore a second, fluid skin of sweat. Foote was a baronet, and one of the more eccentric scientists on the Hill. In the sun he always wore a Mexican sombrero. In the Assembly Building he always wore a chain rattling with religious medals. Eberly was a graduate student who had first come to the Hill as a civilian scientist, then been drafted and sent right back at a quarter of his previous pay. He was gawky, with as much neck as head, and an Adam's apple that 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 did the sooty-gray lenses of high explosive focus their shock waves from the outer circumference of the bomb towards the centre, creating not an explosion, but an implosion. Of course, this was merely a model to be detonated on the mesa, so in place of a plutonium core was a croquet ball.
Other wrestling mats were covered with other models of the bomb in different stages of assembly, non-sparking brass tools, Radio Flyer 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 Latnarr in the nude and, every twenty feet, a fire extinguisher and a bucket of sand. The last two items were purely ornamental because it was understood that if there were any fire in the Assembly Building, everyone in it would be at stratocirrus level.
Foote prepared each lens, a little Kleenex into this hole, Scotch tape over that crack. After he slid each one into place, Eberly took over with a brass wrench, bolting a steel plate over the lens, pentagonal plate interlocking with 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 binds us 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 really appreciate your helping out," Foote delicately changed the subject and slid another heavy lens into place, its smaller, concave tip resting against the croquet ball. "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 Old Spanish. Scorpions, desert, snakes, stinging ants, hostile Indians. I keep asking how 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 any more. 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."
The surface of the next-to-last lens was pitted; the Baratol had cooled too fast after casting. Foote stuffed the holes with tiny wads of Kleenex.
"I didn't even know women could be homosexuals," Eberly said.
"To crush a solid ball of plutonium into a denser, supercritical mass is theoretically conceivable," Foote told Joe, "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 500 tons of TNT. That's big, but that's not fantastic."
"Been upgraded. The estimate is now 5,000 tons. Another difference is that your normal, ordinary bomb will generate temperatures of a few thousand degrees. A nuclear explosion can be ten million degrees. Different animal altogether."
Foote dusted the final lens with baby talc. As he lowered it into the last hole, he steered the descending tip with a shoehorn.
"If she's 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 end 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 poisonous 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 where Hedy Lamarr floated on her back. Joe lit up. To one side of the bucket were the X-ray negatives. There were five of them, tacked up in sequence next to someone's scribbled note that they had been taken a millionth of a second apart by an X-ray bunker at the Hanging Garden.
On the first dark film were twelve lights like a ring of flares. 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 daisy. The outermost edge of a burning flower.
By the third film, the delicate trim was gone and the lights concentrated into twelve lines reaching for the centre.
In the centre of the fourth film, the lights outlined a dark disc, a metal core. Some of the lights rebounded, 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 sphere of steel plates. Maybe a puzzle ball. Or a dull metal spore. Nothing that the X-rays showed, which was, at its birth, a small sun.
That evening everyone crowded into Theatre 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 telephones. 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 let-up."
The evening films were Back to Bataan and Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips. By then, Joe and Anna had slipped out.
18
In the glow of the flame the room seemed to vibrate. Anna looked around at the crucifix and saints on the adobe walls, the low ceiling vigas, the striped blanket on the cot, Joe standing pinon 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, "Psoot-bah!"
"I wanted to get away from the Hill," he said. "Didn't you?" As he laid Anna 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 copper over a soft, white anvil. i
"Welcome to Santiago."
A breast as still as marble. Then a sudden heart-stir.
"It's raining," she said.
Joe watched flashes picking at the door jamb and around the shutters.
"Just thunder. A strange summer. No rain, just lightning."
"I'm afraid of you."
What did she suspect? he wondered.
"Maybe that's just your way of saying you love me."
"Why do you say that?"
"I love you. I love the way you taste like pinon smoke, the way you feel, and I could make love with you until this bed breaks."
"You can't!"
"I can try."
More slowly, he entered her as if he were leading her, lifting her to the very heart of herself. She rode him in the narrow, yellow light of the fireplace. As beads of sweat dampened her, she glowed like a respondent flame, her hair bright as fire.
Sleeping with his arms round Anna, Joe dreamt of Augustino. The captain was following him with a rifle as Joe climbed a steep, snow-covered hill towards Anna. Both Joe and Anna were naked, while Augustino was dressed like an Apache with a corduroy coat and a high-crowned Boss hat. The snow turned to ashes. Anna disappeared and over the crest of the hill came horses, a herd of mustangs shrouded 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. Anna wasn't in bed. Her clothes weren't on the chair. The shutters were open to a full moon. It was after midnight and Joe didn't know where Anna 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 trousers 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. Joe ran past the Reyes' house to the outhouses. Anna wasn't there and it was on his way back that he noticed a free-standing shadow in the night, a pillar of smoke braided with embers rising from the Reyes' yard. Sitting on chairs on either side of a fire were Anna and Sophie Reyes, talking in voices too low to carry.
Sophie was so shy as to be 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 gray hair streaked with black and white, and a soft, hesitant face. She wore a smudged apron outside the traditional one-shoulder dress and cotton shirt. The fire was the smothered variety, cowpats heaped on burning wood to turn the pots in the centre of the fire a carbon-rich black. Joe didn't know what 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 Joe let himself in through the gate.
"I couldn't sleep," Anna whispered.
The women each held blackened sticks, as if they'd been tending the fire 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 chillies and dried camomile hung in the striped moon-shadows of the open porch 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 Joe. 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.
Joe 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, water, animals, people. Whatever she thought became real."
"Like you." Sophie tapped Anna's stick with her own. "His other women were all sluts."
"Thanks," Joe said.
"That came from leaving here and going to New York and the Army," Sophie told Anna. She looked up at Joe and demanded, "Why did you go into the Army?"
"Yes, Joe," Anna asked. "Why did you?"
This night-blooming conversation was unreal, Joe thought.
"It's complicated."
"You were in the Army at the beginning of the war," Anna said. "You must have enlisted."
"See how smart she is," Sophie said.
"Not exactly enlisted."
"Then you must have been in trouble," Anna said.
"See?" Sophie said.
"Okay. I was with some friends in New York. We decided to give a free concert to soldiers in New Jersey, at Fort Dix, which was for Negro soldiers. We thought we'd give them some jazz, maybe a parade."
"This was arranged with the officers, Joe?"
"No. Our arrival was not expected."
"What time of day was this, Joe?"
"About three in the morning. About this time. A lot of dumb things are done at this time."
"You mean you were drunk, Joe."
"See?" Sophie said.
"There was some damage, Joe?"
"Some of the musical instruments got pretty banged up when we hit the main gate. I vaguely remember a scuffle on the way to the parade ground and a holding action around the bandstand. Then I mostly recall seventy or eighty MPs sitting on me. Anyway, the Army was after men. They offered us a choice, jail or enlistment. We all chose enlistment. I was the only one who passed the physical."
"That is a crazy way to enlist in the Army."
"I didn't say it was well thought out. Anyway, enlisting cold sober in broad daylight is crazier."
"Men are so dumb," Sophie told Anna. "My husband should be here where there are things for him to do, but he wants to go hide in the canyons, he wants to be a hero. And I'm the one who has to walk all day to take him food and cigarettes."
"He's with Roberto?" Joe asked.
"Where else would he be?"
Then that was why Sophie was firing pots at night. Things made sense if you just waited long enough.
"The Indian Service has riders from here to Utah looking for Roberto and you stroll by with his bacon and eggs?"
"You walk past them?" Anna asked.
"Yes. They don't pay any attention to an old woman getting clay. They're looking for Joe."
"I'm not involved with Roberto."
"That's not what Roberto says," Sophie told Anna. "He talks about Joe all the time."
"You miss your husband," Anna said.
"Yes. Tonight, the devil went by my window. He had yellow skin and silver horns and a rifle."
Joe said, "Sophie, do me a favour. Next time you see Roberto, tell him I'm not involved. He wants to play cowboys and Indians, I don't. It has nothing to do with me."
In his house, Joe lit a kerosene lamp and poured two glasses of Scotch while she looked at the photographs on the wall.
"No pictures of you."
"They're of my brother Rudy. I don't think he made it off Bataan. Funny, I can picture him better at night than during the day because we used to keep animals out back. I took care of the horses. Rudy had a rabbit hutch. We used to feed them in the evening and I can still see Rudy and those white does in the hutch, that fuzzy whiteness in the dark."
"But no pictures of you?"
"I left home. When I was fifteen I went to El Paso. A circus had its winter quarters down there and I caught on hauling water and hay."
"That must have been exciting."
"Hauling hay for elephants? Mainly, I remember sneezing," he said and gave her a glass. "Well, that was more words from Sophie than I can remember. You like being Thinking Woman?"
"I like the idea that I thought you up, that you're my idea."
"Your idea?"
"My biggest. What else did you do at the circus? I feel responsible."
"There was an old sideshow fighter. Local heroes paid $5 against $50 if they could knock him down. No one ever knocked him down. He showed me the first things about boxing, that's probably why I'm basically a counterpuncher. But the best was the circus band leader. I played a pedal organ a little bit here at the church, but he taught me the piano. He used to describe himself as 'a gentleman of the Negro persuasion', and he drove the Texans crazy because he dressed better and acted finer than any of them. He was a ragtime player. And stride. Name it. He hated me fighting, but that's where the money was; that was the ticket north."
"You must have been a good fighter. I asked you about the pictures twice and you ducked the question each time. You must never have been hit."
Joe studied a photo of Rudy on a horse.
"You know, Sophie's right. Indian men do work on their dignity. They don't talk a lot. As Oppy would say, they're non-verbal. They internalize everything, and to an outsider, which may include women, they may not say a word. They'll drink themselves to death or drive off a cliff, but they do it with a sense of quiet dignity. I'm not that Indian. I've spent half my life away from here. I've got a half-breed brain now. Lost the old natural dignity."
"You have better than that, you have invulnerability."
He was astonished. "Me?"
"You seem to be the giant who has attracted all the men from here up to the Hill."
"Look, Santiago is a poor place. This is still the Depression here, it's always the Depression here. For the last twenty years the most dependable income here has been from pottery, and that's made by women. One reason the men work so hard on their dignity is that it's all they've got. Then the Army took over the Hill. The men are happy to work up there, they don't need me as an attraction. There is a price. If the lowest caste on the Hill is the soldiers, lower than them are the Indians."
"Have you ever been hit, or hurt, or touched?"
"Lower than the Indians is me, because I'm not really from either place, I just serve as a go-between. At least the men from Santiago know who they are and have some place to go home to. Who am I? I am a driver, a joker, a mascot. I am the most insignificant person on the Hill. I am a has-been fighter, a so-so musician who's going to be scrambling for jobs in nightclubs for the rest of my life. A giant? That's a joke. I feel like I'm committing a perpetual fraud, a hoax, because inside is a coward. Men are fooled, Oppy and Roberto are fooled, but I don't want you to be. I didn't mean to enlist in the Army, I wasn't a hero on Bataan, I made a deal to get out of the stockade. I'm like the Gestapo, Fuchs was right about that. This is not self-contempt, this is simple honesty. Rudy was fooled. Rudy joined the National Guard because he wanted to be like his big brother. Dolores wasn't fooled. She said Rudy would be safe at home if it wasn't for me. When I ran away I took one son from her. When Rudy left, I took the other. She wrote to me in the hospital in Australia and said as far as she was concerned, I was as dead as Rudy. Not to write and not to come home. That seemed unfair to me, but after a while I saw there was a grain of truth in what she said, because I had tried to cut everything Indian away from me, and maybe Rudy got caught and trampled in the process. See, Dolores cut right through me. So that's why there are no snapshots here of me. When Rudy comes home, that's when my picture goes up."
"You mother's dead. You said your brother's dead. How can it go up?"
"You're Thinking Woman, think of something. Anyway, I have been hit and I have been hurt. And you, you could completely destroy me."
She sat across the table from Joe. The moon in its downward transit no longer entered the house; the lamp flame was the only light.
"I didn't run away from home. My childhood was very quiet and bourgeois compared to yours. I fantasized. I thought I would be an actress like Marlene Dietrich and have wealthy lovers. Then I thought I might be a female aviator who crash-landed and had to live with someone like Tarzan while the rest of the world searched for me. When I was rescued, they would understand that I had been forced to submit. There may have been wild Indians involved."
"In any respectable fantasy."
Anna took a deep breath.
"But from the age of fourteen on, my fantasies turned to fear. Not anxiety. Fear. That everyone wanted to hurt me, kill me. Not my mother or father, of course, or my family, but everyone else. The gardener, the tram conductor, the postman. The police, naturally. I stopped going to school for weeks at a time. Our doctor said I was suffering from unspecified hysteria. An alienist came from Berlin and said I was suffering from female castration complex. Perhaps so, but I thought he wanted to torture me. A crazy child! They took away my pencils, scissors, even my stockings. My father knew Freud. He wrote to him in Vienna. Freud wrote back to say I was suffering from a 'flight motif. More and more German Jews, he said, were suffering from 'flight motif, but it was his opinion that Nazi brutalities were diminishing and that a young girl should consider how extremely unpleasant it was to be a refugee. I remember he added in a postscript that all he ever wanted to see in America was Niagara Falls. There is some charm in Freud contemplating the great running bath of Niagara Falls. My mother and father were reassured because they were Germans first and Jews second. So I was sent to the sanatorium where sometimes we were given water cures and sometimes sleep cures, and where I hid in my bower full of numbers and bees. At lunch we listened to Herr Goebbels on the radio loudspeaker. Everyone had to. Actually, the doctors were kind. One who was a communist suggested a trip to Sweden. He falsified the documents without telling my parents, but I think they knew he put me down as Aryan. How else would I be allowed to leave? It took a communist to know how to do such things. He was going with me, so it was not all out of good will. It was an odd thing. We docked in Stockholm and suddenly I was not crazy. I do wonder, Joe, why me? Why, out of all my family, good, rational people, uncles, aunts, rabbis, professors, old ladies, babies, why was I the only one to escape? The question is, did God save me or did He just forget me? So, I am ready for a new God. Thinking Woman sounds to me like a great improvement."
"Did you see any more of the doctor who got you out?"
"He seduced me. A lot of men seduced me in the beginning."
"Communists?"
"Who knows? The world is full of communists. In Germany, the only ones who stood up to the Nazis were communists."
"And Oppy?"
"What do you mean?"
"How did you run into Oppy again?"
"In New York. He needed a mathematician. He was rounding up refugees like stray cats. He used to have long brown curls, you know. He cropped his hair, like Joan of Arc, to go to war. Yes, like Joan of Arc! First he asked if I wanted to see my numbers come to life, then he invited me to the project."
"He's a seducer."
"Yes. Do you know what my work is? I turn my equations into programs for an electronic computer. I turn each millionth of a second of an imaginary Trinity into a deck of punchcards so that we can estimate what will happen in the real Trinity. You see, everyone else is working to Trinity. Oppy inspires everyone to work so hard."
"There wouldn't be a bomb without Oppy."
Anna refilled his glass and her own.
"There wouldn't be an Oppy without the bomb. There are other physicists here more brilliant by far."
"Come on. Harvey starts a sentence and Oppy finishes it for him."
"He's quick to finish other people's thoughts. But they're still other people's thoughts. What I meant to say, though, is that no one looks ahead to after the bomb is used. Or asks whether the bomb should be used or, at least, demonstrated to the Japanese first. Because they haven't reached the event of Trinity itself, they don't think of the consequences. On the punchcards are not only the fireball, the shock wave, the radiation, but also an imaginary city. So many structures of steel, of wood, of concrete. Houses shatter under shocks of one-tenth to one-fifth of an atmosphere. For steel buildings the duration of the shock is important. If the pulse lasts several vibration seconds, peak pressure is the important quantity. I can stop the blast at any point. I can go backwards or forwards. Nobody else sees it. It's as if they can't imagine a shadow until the sun is up. I see it every day. Every day I kill these thousands and thousands of imaginary people. The only way to do it is to be positive they are purely imaginary, simply numbers. Unfortunately, this reinforces a new fantasy of mine. There are times when I feel as if I am one of those numbers in one of the columns on one of the punchcards flying through the machine. I feel myself fading away."
"To where?"
"To Germany. Freud was right, after all. It is difficult to be a refugee once you think you are dead."
Joe pulled a crate from under the bed and took out a wadded ball of newspaper.
He unwrapped the newspaper at the table and set down by the lamp a small, gleaming black pot with a tiny top hole. "It's a seed pot. It's the last pot I have of my mother's."
"It's beautiful."
"I was supposed to sell it with the rest, but I couldn't. I wanted to have something of hers."
"It's a work of art."
"Like a little, smooth earth. Nice, huh?" He let Anna admire the pot for a second more, than blew out the lamp flame. He stepped back across the room.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm going to throw you a pot."
"I can't see."
"I can't see you, either. This could be interesting."
"I can't -"
"Catch!"
Joe tossed the pot lightly, underhand. It rolled from his fingertips into the dark. A last, faint nimbus of moonlight clung to the open window. Joe watched the pot tumble past the dim glow and disappear into the darkness on the other side. He waited for an explosion of clay. There was a sharp intake of breath from the other side, no other sound.
He stepped gently across the floor, reached into the dark and found her hands. Anna had caught the pot as it passed her ear and she still held it there tightly, off-balance. When Joe had first pulled out the crate, he hadn't know what he was going to do. An impulse was there, the start of an arc, the opportunity to risk all.
Anna was shaking.
"That was crazy."
"Maybe. But we proved you're here." He moved his hand from hers, down to her necklace and shirt and the weight and heat of her breast, where he felt the accelerated rhythm of her heart. "And alive."
The nimbus at the window became brighter and harder. For a moment Joe thought perhaps the moon had turned back, pulled by the pot's dark flight, a vying gravity. If he could raise the dead, he could raise the mountains and affect celestial bodies. The nimbus became a beam of light gently probing the dim outlines of lamp, table, chair, then a white shaft that poured through the window and filled the room. A car engine idled outside. It must have rolled in neutral on its own momentum all the way from the road behind the Reyes' yard.
"Who is it?" Anna asked.
Joe set the pot on the table. He cracked the door to look out, but the headlights were too bright and whoever was in the car wasn't getting out. "Can't see," Joe said.
He slipped his .45 from its holster and tucked the gun into his trousers, then crouched below the light and pulled Anna to the kitchen. Through the shutters over the sink he had a view of his jeep parked by the side of the house, of a corn field, the stalks standing in ranks, and of the Reyes' yard. There was no more smoke in the yard. He remembered Sophie's nightmare and deciphered it. Sophie said she'd seen a devil with yellow skin and a rifle. The silver horns were captain's bars and the devil was Augustino. Joe didn't know why the captain had come, but his own mind was decided. He eased open the casement window.
"Why not wait to find out?" Anna whispered.
"Because I think I know."
Joe went through the window head first, rolling between the jeep and the wall of the house. There were no more cars, no footsteps, but Augustino was capable of coming alone. Joe rose, his back sliding against the corner of the wall. He freed the .45 from his belt, cocked it, thumbed off the safety. As the night wind brushed over the field, rows of corn dipped and rustled. Dogs were quiet. He heard nothing in the corral, nothing on the roof. Only the deep, powerful count of his heart.
In one long step he swung round the corner of the house and through the headlights, and stuck the .45 in the face of the driver, a coloured man wearing a tuxedo. The car was a Cadillac.
"Joe?" Pollack asked. His eyes opened so wide and white they seemed to ooze. "Joe, don't you shoot your bestest friend. Don't do it."
Joe let the gun drop and hang.
"What the hell are you doing here at this hour?"
"Leaving you a note." Fountain pen and paper were still frozen in Pollack's spidery black hands. "How else can I get into communication with you working on the Hill? I can't reach you there. All I can do is leave a note."
"At this hour?"
"I didn't know you'd be here. You were supposed to come by the Casa Mariana last weekend and sign those papers."
It was the night Joe had gone to the hot springs with Anna and Harvey.
"I got sidetracked, sorry. You have the papers, I'll sign them right now, right here."
"I have them," Pollack said, although he made no move to produce them now that he'd regained his composure. "Know what the buyers want to do? They want to tear down the club and build garden apartments. They have the money."
"That's what counts."
Pollack sighed.
"A sad end for the Casa Mariana."
"You'll have a new club in New York."
"But it will be one of many good clubs in New York. There was only one good club in New Mexico. It was the best, right?"
"The best. You've got the papers?"
"The only authentic jazz in New Mexico. Even if I was gone, it would be like a last laugh."
"You want me to sign or not?"
"They're from Fort Worth, the buyers. I heard them talking to each other. Calling me 'Rastus'. 'Tar baby'. Called me 'the dinge' in my own club. Joe, can you get your hands on $50,000? If you can, the Casa Mariana is yours. Club, licence, lot, everything."
Joe carefully slid on the gun's safety and tucked it in his trousers.
"Half price?"
"For you."
"Serious?"
"Have I ever joked about the club?"
"There are laws about Indians drinking liquor, let alone serving it."
"There are laws about bootlegging and your father was a bootlegger. Afraid?" Pollack smiled a yellow grin. "You want it or not?"
"I want it," Joe said and knew at the same time. The future was here. The future had come coasting in as a silent Cadillac. "I want it."
"You have the $50,000 now?"
"I need a month."
"A week. Eddie Jr's coming in from Italy and I'm going to be there at the dock."
Joe had, after pocket and black market, a little over $15,000. If he sold all the tyres and nylons he could lay his hands on, he still couldn't raise another $500 in a week. And he'd be leaving for Trinity in ten days.
"Two weeks. If I don't have the money for you then, you can still sell for twice as much and blow the difference on Eddie's welcome home party."
Pollack gave his hand through the window.
"Two weeks, Joe, not one day more. We'll show the white trash what this war was all about."
Joe watched the Cadillac roll away down the road and across the dark plaza. When he turned around, Anna stood in the doorway. He didn't know how long she'd been there or how much she'd heard. Some ghost of the headlights still seemed to play on her and the house. She and the house glowed. Joe Pena's Casa Mariana.
19
Omega was at the bottom of Los Alamos Canyon, a natural trench of basalt and pines deep enough and narrow enough to shield the Tech Area, a mile away, from any explosion. The hangar itself was divided by a cement barrier. One side was occupied by the miniature reactor that Fermi called his "Water Boiler". On the other side was an experiment of Harvey's called "Tickling the Dragon's Tail".
A croquet ball sized round of plutonium coated in glittering nickel was the Dragon, the core of the bomb. It nestled snugly in a twenty-inch paraffin bowl on top of a hydraulic piston. Over it, suspended face-down by a chain, was a second, hollow bowl of paraffin. The idea was to check whether an outer sphere of high explosive "lenses" would, simply by being in place around a nearly critical core, reflect enough neutrons for the plutonium to go critical and explode prematurely and relatively ineffectually. The paraffin was mixed with sooty-gray carbon flour so that it had basically the same atomic make-up as high explosive, without the risk, in case of mishaps, of wiping out the eastern end of the canyon.
Only Harvey, Joe and Oppy were in Omega. Harvey's usual Critical Assembly team was scouting Trinity, and Fermi's team refused to be near the hangar when the Dragon's Tail was being tickled. Harvey had protested that at least two physicists had to be present for the experiment, and Oppy had answered that while General Groves had done his best to turn him, Oppy, into an administrator, he was still a physicist. Oppy had insisted that Joe stay and push the red and green buttons on the wall that raised the lower bowl holding the Dragon up to the hanging hollow bowl.
Drawn up to the Dragon on steel tables were a Geiger counter, a radiation graph that drew a red line on rolling paper, and a neutron sealer that measured radiation with a bank of six red lights. If the Dragon got too hot and Joe didn't react in time, the three counters were wired to drop the hydraulic piston, bottom bowl and core to the floor.
Wearing a long white lab coat, Harvey plotted the curve of criticality with a slide rule and clipboard.
"Raise it ten inches," he said.
Joe pushed the green button as Oppy continued the argument that had gone on all morning.
"You say, Harvey, that the Japanese are all but defeated. By any rational measure, they should be, I agree. You think it would be feasible to set off the bomb in a publicly announced demonstration. An island in Tokyo Bay would be ideal. Somewhere they could bring their best scientists and generals. If we do drop the bomb on them, you want it to be employed against a remote, purely military target, a base as far as possible from civilians. You don't see why women and children should die simply because we want to make a point. You add that there are American POWs in a number of the Japanese cities we may have contemplated attacking. You believe that if we are the first nation to use such a weapon we will be historically tainted. That we will sacrifice the good will of the entire world. Much worse, you fear an armaments race, a building of horrible weapon after horrible weapon, such as mankind has never known and cannot survive. That our actually using such a weapon in war will poison any chance of international agreement on the future control of such apocalyptic devices. Last, we bear the direct and special responsibility of these weapons because we are the men and women who created them. Who should say how and if these weapons are used if not us?"
Those indeed were Harvey's points better than Harvey himself had put them. Abashed, he kept his eyes to the clipboard.
"Eight inches more."
"We all have the same nightmares," Oppy said as he walked, hands in his jacket pockets, toes out, around Harvey, the tables, the Dragon. "These are the years of nightmares and they are not ended yet. If you walked away before Trinity, I would not blame you. I'd envy you." Oppy lifted his gaunt face, evidence of his fatigue. "We'd all envy you."
Joe did figures in his head. By calling in loans and cashing his last gas coupons and travel vouchers, he could bring his bankroll to $20,000. How could he more than double it in two weeks? How much scotch and commissary sugar could a man sell?
Maybe high explosives were the answer. Hilario had mentioned contractors down in Albuquerque. With a couple of mules, he could clean out the magazine bunkers on Two Mile Mesa.
"To go up into the mountains for a year," Oppy said. "Not see a headline or hear a radio. Not come down until the entire, awful thing is over."
Harvey glanced at Joe for psychic support. "Five inches."
Assuming he got the money together, there was the problem of musicians. He could only afford a couple of men from New York or Kansas City. He'd have to use some Mexicans. Horn players. There was a trolley that ran from Juarez to El Paso, and he could slip them over the border that way.
As the two bowls came within a foot of each other the Geiger counter started to concentrate on what was happening, taking a definite interest. The sealer measured fast neutrons by multiplication. One light for two neutrons, two lights for four. Up to six lights for sixty-four escaping particles, then starting over again. The red lights blinked like eyes rousing from a nap.
"It won't be over soon." Oppy's voice took a sharper tone. "The Japanese didn't give up on Iwo Jima or Okinawa. They will fight ten times harder on their own islands. It won't be just kamikaze planes. Army intelligence says they're building kamikaze boats and teaching people to strap dynamite to their chests. The estimate I've seen for the invasion is one million casualties. Japanese and American, soldiers and civilians."
"Four inches," Harvey said.
There was a bar and kitchen to stock. Utilities, water, linen. It might be tricky, getting around the liquor laws on Indians. He might not be allowed to pour a bottle even if he owned the place.
The Dragon shone like ice.
"A demonstration on an island sounds like a good idea," Oppy said. "With a bunker for the Emperor and his generals. But what if a single enormous blast didn't convince the Japanese that it was caused by a single weapon? We can barely convince our generals, let alone theirs. And what if the bomb was a dud?"
"Eighty percent critical." Harvey watched the red line on the graph paper, and then for the first time answered Oppy. "The uranium bomb works."
"We have two bombs. The uranium bomb we think will work, and the plutonium bomb we hope will work. We don't have enough refined uranium to make another. The plutonium bomb must be tested at Trinity. We can get more plutonium, though it won't matter if Trinity doesn't work. The point is, we have none to expend on good intentions and mere fireworks." Oppy spoke through a veil of weariness. "God knows, I wish we did. But the invasion will be carried out before bad weather sets in over the Japanese islands. It won't be postponed while we build more bombs or while we negotiate when and where the Emperor should sit for a better view of a peaceful demonstration. Should he come to Trinity? Trinity is in twelve days. Stop time for me, Harvey. Give me more bombs and a cushion for the divine Emperor to sit on and watch."
"Three more inches, Joe. Then at least a base, Oppy, not a city."
"A waste. A waste of the bomb and a waste of the soldiers. The Japanese would censor every report and all that would be left would be a wisp of smoke and rumours. You know the blast effects, Harvey. There wouldn't even be that much to see in a camp—not like a city, not like buildings."
"Not like civilians?"
"A target that will end the war, Harvey."
"Civilians and American POWs?"
"They'll put POWs in every city. And how many more POWs and dead and wounded will there be after the invasion? How many cities will we conventionally bomb off the map? How many American graves?"
"I didn't become a physicist to learn how to vapourize Japanese." Harvey's voice rose.
"None of us did." Oppy's voice became nearly tender. "But you tell a mother of a young soldier who died on the beach of Japan—and there will be many thousands of them—that you had a bomb that could have ended the war and that you chose not to use it. Tell his wife. Tell his children."
The Geiger counter ticked like a speeded-up clock. The sealer lights multiplied rapidly now that the two bowls were only eight inches apart. In the shadow between, the ball still glittered, like a note between two cymbals. A chain reaction of one kilogram of plutonium released as much energy as thirty-four million pounds of TNT, Joe had heard. Some percussion.
"The issue is not the weapon, Harvey, but the war. Ending the war and saving us from the hideous slaughter to come."
The trade-off for that kind of power was an alpha radiation that could destroy first the bone marrow, then the kidney. Everyone knew that the doctors on the Hill refused any responsibility for the Dragon.
"Eighty-eight percent critical at three inches." Harvey scanned the rolling graph. "The issue is the future after the war. Two inches, Joe."
After the war the Army would close its bases in New Mexico, Joe thought. The soldiers would be coming home from Europe and the Pacific, though, and they'd flock to the Casa Mariana. "Teller had the same fears. I'll tell you what I told him: that if the issue is the world's postwar future—and I agree it is— the only way to demonstrate the implausibility of any more war is to use this bomb, to make all mankind a witness. This, finally, will be the war to end all wars. Edward Teller will be with us at Trinity. In fact, I had hoped that you would do the countdown for the test."
"Eighty-nine," Harvey read.
The Geiger counter sounded like a bow drawn across a bass string. The lights of the sealer flickered, drawing nervous red dashes.
"One more inch, Joe," Harvey said.
"After the war there will have to be international control of all nuclear devices, and international cooperation for the peacetime uses of the atom. A sober, frightened world will do that, Harvey. But we will have to take the moral lead. We will share information with our allies."
"With Russia?" Joe asked.
"Yes, with Russia. Of course," Oppy said.
"Ninety percent. Half an inch, very slowly."
The Geiger counter echoed an accelerating, snapping wave of electrons.
"The future is then," Oppy said. "The war is now. The Japanese would use the bomb if they had it. They wouldn't hesitate. They started this war. Our cause is just. It is written in the Bhagavad Gita that 'There is a war that opens the gates of heaven. Happy are the warriors whose fate it is to fight such a war. Not to fight for righteousness is to abandon duty and honour.' We scientists are soldiers, no more. We are on this mesa by an accident of history, because our nation has been attacked. We have no special competence in political or social or military affairs. We are not the people elected or trained to make those decisions. We are not an elite divinely chosen, simply because we are physicists, to govern mankind."
"Stop."
Closed to within an inch, the Dragon's two bowls nearly made a single gray moon, almost hiding an inner, brighter moon. There was a faint rise in the Geiger's pitch, a touch more hysteria in the red lights.
"Still ninety percent," Harvey said happily. It was just what he had predicted.
"Yes?" Oppy asked.
"I don't know."
"Ask Joe. This is why I wanted Joe along, because he is the only man you know who has actually fought. Speaking for the men who will be on the boats that will hit Japan in a few months' time, Joe, what would you say to Harvey?"
You sly son of a bitch, Joe thought. He took his hand from the button and found his thumb had cramped. He'd listened to the ticking of atomic particles, but what had rilled the hangar were words, a web of them spreading and connecting from roof to floor. And all preamble to ensnare Harvey so that Joe could strike the final blow.
"Tell me, Joe," Harvey said.
"Speaking for the boys in the boats," Joe said, "I'd say you were a phoney, I'd say you were lower than a Jap. I'd say you were actually a traitor."
Harvey swallowed. The Geiger amplified electrons at the anode, ions at the cathode. Neutrons danced to the beat of lights.
"On the other hand…" Joe moved closer to the Dragon. "Speaking as a friend, I don't think you should care what anyone says." He leaned across the Dragon's near-moon and nearly buried core. "If you really think the bomb is that bad, then -"
Ticking soared into whine. Stylus flew from graph paper. The six sealer lights were solid red, flashing so fast that no intervals could be seen. The hydraulic piston dropped, carrying the bottom bowl with it, shaking the concrete pad of the floor. The silvery core lurched up to the lip of the bowl's hollow, made an indolent circuit, then dropped heavily back into place. The whine plummeted. Red lights flashed again with a slow, regular pulse.
"What the hell was that?" Joe looked at the stylus, still vibrating free. A red line led off the paper. "The Dragon went off all by itself."
"Don't move!" Harvey began sketching on his clipboard.
Joe was close enough to Harvey to see him draw an outline of the room, the position of each man around the Dragon, equations, a curve of criticality. There was a foul greasiness to the air, a smell of melted paraffin.
Joe still wanted to finish what he was going to say, but the moment had gone. Imploded. Oppy knew it; the blue gaze said it. That was the colour of Oppy's eyes, Joe thought: ion-blue.
"You set me up."
"I asked you to tell the truth and you did," Oppy answered.
"I'm not done."
"Yes, you are."
Harvey stared up from his scribbling. "You did it!" he told Joe.
"Me?"
"The core was already near the margin of criticality. The human body is composed mostly of water - hydrogen dioxide - which reflects the neutrons. Oppy and I didn't matter. You're bigger. When you leaned over the Dragon, you triggered the counters."
"You're a more unpredictable factor than I'd thought," Oppy said.
"It doesn't matter," Harvey said, "we got the data."
"Well, are we radioactive now?" Joe asked.
"We're fine," Harvey said. "Nothing really happened."
"Nothing really happened," Oppy agreed.
They looked at Joe with twin scientific detachment, a sudden, palpable line between them and him. He stared back, for the first time his mind fully engaged. It was obvious that Oppy had won. What was interesting was Harvey's surrender, his relief about it.
"You know," Harvey said and turned to Oppy, "it occurs to me that the bomb would probably be flown to Japan. What if the plane crashed? Maybe I should run the Dragon in salt water."
Even his Southwestern tonalities seemed to change subtly, to ape unconsciously Oppy's Eastern croak. His stance shifted, his enthusiasm grew.
The effort of winning Harvey back had taken a toll on Oppy. Each crisis appeared to take an ounce of flesh, and now he looked cadaverous and more determined than ever. He nodded proudly, encouraging the flow of ideas that was purely Harvey, until Harvey asked, "You really wanted me to count down
Trinity?"
"I wanted an American physicist to do it," Oppy answered, "and my first thought was you. An American voice."
"Listen." Joe broke the mood.
Oppy snapped, "What?"
"Just listen."
Omega was hidden in tall pines, amid the calls of jays and canyon wrens, the wind tugging at treetops. It took a moment to hear the siren.
"Fire," Harvey said.
They counted the blasts together. Oppy wore an ironic smile, as if disaster were only to be expected.
"Tech Area," said Joe.
In the middle of the Hill, squeezed between the Main Drive and the mesa's southern rim, the Tech Area held twenty-six nondescript buildings. Each structure was labelled with a placard from "A" to "Z", but this was the only sense of order to them. Half were white Army clapboard, half green Army sheetrock. They were at all angles to one another and shared a military style that decreed that every side look like the back.
A transformer was burning. In some ways the fire was well located: at the back of the Tech Area, away from the gas stocks, cyclotron and particle accelerator, near the fire station and close to hydrants. But it had taken time to cut power to the transformer, and by the time Joe and Oppy arrived, power poles, cables, switching equipment and the high wooden fence around the transformer were all throwing flames and creosote-black smoke into the afternoon. Because of the fence, firemen couldn't get their hoses as close to the transformer as they wanted.
Watching the firemen and the fire was the whole population of the Tech Area: physicists from the cyclotron shack, soldiers from the boiler house, doctors from the medical labs, office clerks and, in front, the Indians who swept every building. A truckload of construction workers rolled up to join the spectators.
Oppy stared at the fire. "No, no, no," he insisted.
His prayer was answered. The Texans leapt from the flatbed of the truck. As soon as they were off, the driver honked and moved toward the fire. The truck was an old Reo with a girder for a bumper, and as fire fighters ran from its path, the truck accelerated until it rammed through the burning fence and into the concrete barrier around the transformer. The truck backed up, lurched forward again and crashed into the burning gate of the fence. The driver rammed the fire a final time, taking out the other fence posts and shovelling more rubble into the transformer and around the base of the power poles. He backed into the clear, kicked open the cab door and hopped down like a rider who had just busted a cow in record time. He was big, in a blue work shirt and jeans, the only construction man in a shirt. He was young, with a fair crew cut and the fluid, arrogant grace of an athlete. A hero. He thrust his left fist into the air. A southpaw.
While technicians swarmed around Oppy, as if the truck had been a manifestation of his will, Joe stood aside and was joined by Felix Tafoya. On the Hill, with his khaki work clothes and push broom, Felix was invisible; in Santiago, he was the calf cutter and brander, an honoured figure. His nose had been kicked askew by a hoof years before.
"That tejano," he told Joe, "that's Hilario's fighter."
"Seen Hilario lately?"
"I'm cutting tomorrow. Hilario's bringing someone who wants to see a real old-fashioned cutting."
The fire chief led Oppy and Joe around the remains of the transformer. He was a civilian named Daley. Smoke had turned to a film of ash on his face, rubberized coat and boots. He coughed up phlegm dark as tar. Both high-voltage poles were charred and iridescent. Burned cables and wire floated on mud. Joe imagined that Daley was conducting the tour out of professional habit, as if they were stepping through the smoking bricks of a tenement.
"This is really what I wanted to show you and the sergeant." Daley picked out of the mud a carved zigzag, half blistered gold, half blackened wood.
"The dancers had those at the pueblo," Oppy said.
"It's a lightning wand. It's supposed to bring lightning," Joe explained. "Did it?"
"People saw the bolt hit," Daley said.
Oppy looked impatiently in the direction of his office. When he glanced back, he was smiling. "Joe, arson by Indian wand is your department. You handle this. I can walk from here."
"Before you do," Joe said quickly, "I heard some calves are being cut in Santiago tomorrow. I ought to be there in case any of them are hot."
"Cows and wands are definitely your crucial responsibility. Just make sure you're at the La Fonda by eleven. We have visitors coming."
Oppy stepped out of the mire, slapped soot off his hat and headed in the direction of the administration building.
"Arson is what Captain Augustino says," Daley told Joe. "He's got a dozen of these sticks from different fires. Brush fires. He'd be here now, but he's down at Trinity."
"This is not an incendiary device," Joe said and took the wand. "It's a stick. Someone threw it in the fire. You have a lot of Indians up here."
"They really think they can bring lightning?"
"They think they make the world go round."
Joe noticed that the paint that remained on the wooden head had a micaceous glitter, a fancy Taos touch.
"If you say so." Daley spat, grinned and wiped his chin. "Hell, you should know."
20
Three hours of riding brought Joe to the far side of Santiago Canyon. There the foothills between the canyon and the mountains rose in swells of yellow rabbit brush. He had taken Oppy's horse, the tall bay called Crisis. The stallion hadn't been taken out for a month and it ate up the distance with an eager lope.
While Joe dismounted to water Crisis at a tank, he saw the Indian Service riders crossing the rise ahead of him. Al and Billy halted to stand in their stirrups and examine the tank through binoculars, then moved on. Joe waited another minute in the shadow of the tank until a second pair of Service officers riding drag followed. When they were out of sight, he swung up on Crisis and started again towards the Jemez.
Though he rode in warm, glassy sunlight, a rare rain fell in the Jemez, covering the peaks with a gray as faint as waves in a stone. As the trail ascended, it reached ponderosas, cedars, cattle bones, and a new profusion of wild flowers, shooting stars, scarlet gilia. On the last ride of the canyon before it folded into the mountain was a small, battleship mesa. Joe had to kick the horse up a steep path of loose stones to the top.
The mesa was not a mile long and less than a hundred yards across at its widest point. Cedar and juniper huddled over dwarf sage. The cedar was twisted and vigorous, meaning half dead and half alive. The same with the cholla Joe saw, half green stem and half empty lattice. A trick of survival in the high desert was to bloom and die at the same time. Cedar made good firewood. A dead cedar branch could last for years if it didn't touch the ground. He tied Crisis to a live bough and went the rest of the way on foot.
In the middle of the mesa were ruins, a worn grid of stone walls about knee-high. The stones were volcanic ash. Adobe had long since washed away, along with any sense of what was storeroom, what was quarters. All a puzzle now, Joe thought. White nuggets in the stones were timber cinders a million years old. He picked one out and it turned to talcum between his fingers.
The only excavation on the mesa had been performed by animals. Between the walls were gopher mounds of soft earth, richly mixed with shards of pottery that were black, white, reddish brown, and bits of obsidian strewn like jewellery.
Joe sat down for a smoke next to a kiva completely filled in by a gooseberry bush, its boughs as dark as a cherry tree's. The sun dropped over the far side of the Jemez, turning clouds red, rung by rung.
"Hello, Joe." Roberto and Ben Reyes stepped out of the cedars. The men were in blankets and braids.
"Brought you some cigarettes."
"How did you know we were here?" Ben asked.
"The clay. Sophie was seeing you and she was getting her clay. This is the place."
"I knew you would come," Roberto said.
"I came because they're finding your wands on the Hill."
"What kind of cigarettes?" Ben asked.
"At fires on the Hill. Luckies." Joe handed the packet to Ben, who tapped one out suspiciously.
"How'd you know they were mine?" Roberto squatted by Joe.
"Mica in the paint. Typical Taos horseshit."
"Yes." Roberto grinned. Roberto had such a long nose and his hair was so brown, he had to have some French trader or horny Mormon in his background, Joe thought.
"I like Chesterfields." Ben put two in his pocket, one in his mouth and gave the packet back.
"You're welcome. You're a real frightening pair of desperadoes." Joe gave Ben the lighter. "You're supposed to be hiding, not getting into more trouble. Fires are serious business to those people."
"He thinks we're causing the lightning?" Ben lit his cigarette.
"Who?" Joe took the lighter back.
"The doctor?"
"Oppenheimer? He sees that he's supposed to think that."
"That's smart enough." Roberto held up two fingers for a smoke.
"I don't know whether to laugh or cry." Joe lit cigarettes for Roberto and himself. "You said you were going to escape, not take on the US Army. I'm warning you. Right now, you're hiding from the Indian Service. That's one thing. The Army will send a Captain Augustino. Augustino will find you. And Augustino will find out who's been helping you on the Hill, planting a wand every time they see a fire."
"You think that's the way we do it? First the lightning, then the wand?" Roberto asked.
"That would be my first guess."
"They sent you?" Ben asked.
"Nobody sent me. I'm supposed to be on the post right now."
"But they notice the lightning," Roberto asked.
"Yeah."
"Then we're doing a good job." Roberto let out a long, plumed exhale. "Good cigarette."
As the valley went dark, a full moon rose from the Sangres. They made camp on the eastern tip of the mesa, where ancient raincatches rose in worn steps. Ben built a fire in a crack of the rock, using stones to prop cedar twigs and bark. Joe started the bark with his lighter. The fire caught quickly and had the advantage for fugitives of being impossible to see from a distance, but they had to keep feeding it because they were burning no more than tinder. Ben made a stew of chilli and jerky in a can. Looking over the Rio Grande, they could make out lamplights in Santiago and Esperanza, even the village of Truchas high in the Sangres, and the bright, pollenish haze of
Santa Fe at the tail of the Sangres range. Los Alamos they couldn't see at all. They cupped the glow of their cigarettes and waited for the stew to boil.
"I'll get you a pair of Greyhound tickets to Tucson. You don't like Tucson? How about Los Angeles? The two of you haven't lived until you've seen the Pacific Ocean. What have you got against the Hill, anyway?"
"What they're doing there," Ben said. "You don't know what they're doing there. It's a secret. It's the biggest damn secret of the war."
"I had a dream they were making a gourd filled with ashes," Roberto said.
"A gourd of ashes?"
"I had the dream in Taos. Two Hopi men had the same dream, two elders. A woman in Acoma had the dream."
"Four dreams." Joe nodded, as if the conversation were sane. Ben went on stirring the can, listening. Roberto tilted his head up. "Each time, they take the gourd to the top of a long ladder and break it open. The poison ashes that fall cover the earth."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"Then let me set your mind at ease. I've seen what they're making. It's not a gourd of ashes. Let me get you those bus tickets."
"There's more."
"I was afraid of that."
"In my dream there was a giant."
"How about train tickets?"
"As soon as I met you, I knew the giant was you."
"Roberto." Joe controlled himself. "Roberto, you're a nice guy, bright, and I'm sure you're sincere. But you're playing medicine man in the middle of a war. Out in the real world, soldiers are dying, cities are burning, women are raped. What they're trying to do on the Hill is end the war. If you and Ben insist on being buckskin loonies, okay, just don't include me.
"Hot!" Ben shoved a tin plate of stew at Joe.
"But the ashes will poison the clouds and the water and the ground and everything that lives on it. All the dreams are the same about that," Roberto said.
"Sounds like scientific proof." There were no forks. Joe picked up steaming, gray-green strips of beef with his fingers.
"They will erect a great ladder in the sky. Then, in my dream, a giant climbs the ladder."
"Not bad," Joe told Ben. "Starving helps. Just in your dreams?" he added to Roberto.
"It's not that I dream better, it's that I can concentrate on dreams. Being blind helps. To me there's not the same difference between day and night, awake and asleep. One leads to the other."
"Dreams and reality?"
"Two sides of the same thing. Don't you agree?"
"I would have said the major difference in the world right now is not being awake or being asleep, but being alive or being dead. And one doesn't lead to the other like a hand to a glove. More like a stump to a glove." Joe put down his plate. "So, don't dream about a giant on a ladder. Dream about Japan. Dream yourself a hundred thousand dead men bobbing in the water. Dream red beaches, banzai charges, kamikazes, paper cities and B-29s. Put a meter on your dream. One million dead, two million, three. See, I don't mind you dreaming; I just mind easy dreams."
Well, I'm a bad guest, Joe thought. A pall had fallen over the dinner party. Ben looked like he was choking. Either he was choking or he was angry.
"I have to catch a cutting in Santiago." Joe rose to his feet. "That was your last warning. Good luck."
Roberto lifted his sunken eyes.
"All the same, you were in my dream," he said.
Joe rode back on a moonlit ridge between canyons. Around him was a seascape of ridges, a foam-brightness on the rocks and junipers. There was so much beauty at night that no one saw. He still heard himself speaking, and Oppy's words coming out— invasion casualties, kamikazes. It was the way he felt, but the words sounded like a formula. To give Roberto credit, he really didn't talk about the war at all. He just cared about his precious pueblos and the rest of the world could go to hell. In return, Oppy appreciated Indians, as people from a time warp. Sophie was right, Joe thought, he didn't seem to have his own words. Music, maybe, but not the kind of words and formulas that announced and explained actions. As if there were no words for where he was, which was in between. In a no-world, on a high ridge, in the sweet light of the moon.
He came down off the ridge near an irrigation ditch where alfalfa fields, flowered blue, rolled in the night breeze. After putting Crisis in the pasture, he carried saddle and tack to the Hill stable. There was still time to sign out a jeep and get down to Santiago to catch Felix cutting. He'd take a Geiger counter and check some cows as an excuse for the trip.
In the tackroom, the saddlebags opened and spilled. Horses coughed in the stalls. He used his lighter. On the floor were boxes of horseshoe nails, bent snaffles, broken reins and two yellow zigzags. Lightning wands. Roberto must have put them in the saddlebags.
His first instinct was to burn them, but he was in a hurry. He stuffed them in his shirt and slipped out of the stable door. Between the stable and the Hill, a nine-hole golf course had been hacked out of the scrub. The greens were sand and a rake was provided at each hole. Joe intended to dump the wands, but he was out in the moonlight in the clear and if there were any MPs awake, the flash of the sticks would catch their eye. He still had the wands when he reached the motor pool. Keys were kept in the ignitions. In the back of a jeep he put a Geiger counter. Under the seat he stowed the wands where he could reach them easily and throw them away on the road to Santiago.
21
Men sat on the top rail of the corral and shouted encouragement to boys in batwing chaps who chased calves in the dark. The cutting and branding was done at this hour because the work bus to the Hill left at dawn.
Two fires were going, one outside the corral for coffee, one inside for Felix Tafoya. The men at the coffee fire juggled mugs and shakers of salt to take Joe's hand softly and say good morning. Inside, running after a calf, the boys gave Joe a quick glance. He noticed that the largest boy wore a homemade chevron sewn to his sleeve and tucked his bandanna in like an Army tie. Everyone in Santiago had a son or a nephew in the service and Joe knew he was not only a hero to them, he was the possibility of coming home alive from the Army.
The calves were Herefords with cotton-white flashes on their heads. The boys lassoed, tackled and dragged them one by one to the fire. Wearing a leather apron over the coveralls that were his Hill uniform, Felix knelt by the coals, chose a knife with a double-wrapped rawhide handle and honed the blade on his apron. Arms and hooves converged. The heat and glow of the fire seemed to invest Felix with a magisterial glow. "Coont-da, hitos!" While the boys held the calf still, Felix squeezed the testes to the bottom of the sac, sliced and flung them into the coals, then doused the wound with kerosene. The glowing orange dogleg of a running iron dug into the calf's flank, and the smell of burning hair joined the standing odours of coffee and cow manure.
In his white suit and hat, Hilario Reyes came down the fence as nimbly as a lizard.
"The Chief himself. See my boy yesterday? I hear he put out a fire and saved the whole hill."
"He looked good."
"You mean great. What are you doing here?"
"The Army sends me to look over the cows. What's the lieutenant-governor of the state of New Mexico doing here?"
"I have great respect for the old-fashioned ways and traditions of the people here. You know, I've never missed a dance in Santiago. Most of all, I love the taste of balls."
Hilario gave a grin of open, energetic venality before going to talk to the men gathered around the coffee fire. To check out the statement about the Army and the cows, Joe assumed. Hilario liked being the fisherman, not the fish.
Joe leaned against the rail and watched the boy with the rope try a peal, a fancy throw designed to catch a calf's hind feet. He caught the calf by the head instead and almost flew out of his shoes and laces as the calf kept running, until two more boys tackled it.
Felix came to the fence to offer Joe a stick that skewered what looked like two burned chestnuts.
"Joe, if you're talking to Hilario, you need all the guevos you can get."
Someone on the top rail threw a shaker of salt. Joe snatched it out of the dark.
"Coont-da!"
"Hilario's friend didn't stick around long," Felix said. "He went to look at the old cows in the pen."
Joe peeled back the blackened skin and liberally salted the pearly insides. It was an odd ceremony, the cutting of the calves and the redistribution of their bullhood around the corral. A secret male ceremony all the more effective for the early morning hour, something basic and shameful and powerful. The roasted balls had the texture of oysters and the flavour of nuts.
"Heroes will soon be a drug on the market." Hilario returned. He wasn't so much a lizard, Joe thought, as an incorrigibly evil elf. Even the white outfit had the bright aura of a bad fairy. "You won't be able to swing a cane for heroes.
All with their scars and ribbons and stories. See, I'm already gearing for the veteran's vote. I'm going to be the vet's friend. First, I'm going to be your friend."
Felix laughed and went back to the branding fire, where the boys were wrestling with another calf.
"How are you going to do that?" Joe asked.
"Teach you how to measure your grip on reality. Profit is the only fair measure of reality. Market value, Chief. The value of a has-been is not high, but I'm going to help you cash it in. I'm speaking of $2,000 in your hand right now."
The ground around the branding fire was pulverized and dry. Boys and calf struggled in explosions of dust.
$2,000? That wouldn't buy Bar Top and tablecloths for the Casa Mariana.
"Why?"
"There's not a loyal native New Mexican who wouldn't put his last dollar on you in the ring. Formerly eighth-ranked heavyweight in the world. A big night at the gym in Santa Fe, crowds of friends and well-wishers, lots of priests, they always tone up a fight. I can't think of a better way to celebrate the imminent end of the war than Chief Joe Pena's farewell appearance."
"I'm retired."
"This is the Texas boy I'm talking about."
"I look forward to improved relations between Texas and New Mexico."
"Then let me ask you a question." Hilario raised his voice so everyone in the corral could hear. "Out of sheer curiosity. Could you beat him if you did fight him? Out of curiosity."
Joe shrugged. Along the rail the men leaned forward, salt shakers and cigarettes in hand. Holding a knife, Felix looked up. Even the calf seemed to lie still.
"Because I think he'd kill you," Hilario said. "Southpaw, ten years younger, ten years faster. You look soft and tired. You should be scared of the boy, it's no fun getting beat up in public."
"How does all this make you my friend?"
"I wouldn't want you to get hurt without being properly paid."
"You mean, without you getting properly paid."
"That, too."
Joe shook out a cigarette and lit it. How washed up did he look? he wondered. He wished he'd paid more attention when the kid beat Ray. He remembered the figure walking away from the truck at D Building, rolling the wide shoulders, fist high. Joe wished he'd seen the face again. The face always said a lot more.
"Give me a straight answer," Hilario said. "See, that is what I mean by testing reality. Could you win?"
"Really?"
"That's what we're talking about."
Joe still hesitated.
Hilario said, "$5,000, Joe. Side bets are up to you."
"$10,000, winner take all."
"You're crazy. We are talking about reality."
"Uncle, the reality is that war is over and the soldiers are going home. You're an ant in the desert watching a picnic pack up. Does the kid think he can beat me?"
"He knows he can."
"Then winner take all is fine with him."
"Then the rest of the rules are mine. No priests. No gloves, no ring, no referee. Strictly a sporting event for interested parties. Anyway, you know how to use a ring, you'd just tie a raster man up in the ropes. A referee just gets in the way. I can keep time for rounds."
"How many rounds?"
"As long as it goes."
"In a week," Joe said.
"Impossible."
"We fight in a week. You said before you could put the fight together in two days.
"I need Texas money, from El Paso, from Lubbock. That's a long way to come."
"I'll make it easy for them. We'll meet in the middle, south of Socorro at the Owl Cafe. The night of the 15th. Behind the cafe. Yes or no?"
At the last moment, Joe thought Hilario would back out.
"You came here to deal, you big son of a bitch. You came looking for me."
"Looking towards peacetime, Hilario, same as you."
"Okay." Hilario nodded to Joe and added a public nod for the other men at the corral. "Okay, you place your bets, Joe. I think you'll be surprised at the good odds you'll be able to get on the famous Chief Joe Pena."
Feet trussed, the calf tried to swim on the ground. Felix squeezed the sac, clearing the way for the sizzling edge of the knife. It was okay. Hilario would put it together. It wasn't a matter of face, it was a matter of action, of money willing to ride on the only two fighters in the state. The calf's eyes grew.
Joe walked into the cottonwoods to relieve himself. He was going to have to start taking better care of his kidneys. One more fight. And get some sleep. A blue morning star lay over the river. Jupiter? Venus? What if there were no moon? Men walked around bound by the gravity of the earth, but also lifted by the floating mass of the moon. What if there were no moon, no lift, only the heavy and monotonous chain of the earth? No better light at night than stars that said "We are cold and far away". What if he lost?
For his alibi's sake, he got the Geiger counter from the jeep and found the pen on the far side. Even in the semi-dark Joe saw the cows were Felix's oldest mavericks from the highest, dryest canyons. The man at the pen was just as unlikely, a short figure in a suit. His back was to Joe because he was patting the steers through the fence, wisely, because the animals were wild enough to stomp him if he went into the pen. Not patting, Joe thought. Combing, and dropping the combed, loose hairs into an envelope.
The man looked around, surprised. "Chief! Oh! Chief!" He had a swarthy, heart-shaped face, a full lower lip and black hair that was so wavy it was almost marcelled. When he turned, the comb and envelope had vanished. With his double-breasted suit he wore cowboy boots. He took a wobbly step forward and gave Joe a pudgy hand to shake. "I didn't hear you coming. We met at the La Fonda, in the bar. Harry Gold."
"From New York."
"I came with Happy."
"With Hilario. What's going on?"
A giggle escaped Harry Gold.
"I lost my new hat."
Joe peered into the pen. There were five cows, black and brown, a mix of Angus and Hereford, a group of scarred and wary veterans. The meanest-looking cow was standing on a crushed stetson.
"You wanted to buy a steer?"
"I was thinking of having a barbecue."
"Felix is cutting calves right now. Take one of them."
"Good idea," Gold agreed.
"He'll slaughter it and dress it for you. Better than a butcher."
"These cows looked a little old."
Not just old. As the light improved, Joe saw that two or three of the animals were mottled around the stomach and flank. Usually a cow greyed at the muzzle first. As he opened the gate, the nearest steer lowered a set of mossy horns a yard wide at the tips and retreated. Joe pushed his way into the middle of the cows and peeled back some of the milky hair. The skin underneath was black. Like the cow he'd killed before.
"Your hat." Joe came out of the pen with a twisted brim of felt.
"Thanks," Gold said and backed up into a cowpat. He looked down. "New boots, too."
"Soak them and leave them on," Joe suggested,
"I'll try it. Adios."
"Absolutely."
The whole time, Joe had been holding the Geiger counter. Someone who didn't know what it was would have asked, Joe thought.
Harry Gold knew.
22
By the time Joe got to Santa Fe, Indian women were spreading their blankets on the portal, the porch of the old Governor's Palace on the north side of the plaza. FBI agents in plain-clothes and snapbrim hats were taking their places on benches under the plaza cottonwoods.
The agents followed scientists from the Hill whenever they came to shop, waiting in the plaza because the Army bus from the Hill let the shoppers off just half a block away on Palace Avenue and all the shops were around the plaza. At the end of the shopping everyone always headed to La Fonda for cocktails.
Joe relieved Ray Stingo, who was so excited to hear the fight was on he didn't want to leave for the airport to meet the VIPs arriving for the Trinity test. Only small planes could land at Santa Fe and the ride over the mountains was so rough it was commonly called the "Vomit Comet". Oppy was at the La Fonda with some psychiatrists who had arrived on the morning train at Lamy.
Instead of shooting and burning the cows, Joe had chased them up Santiago Creek and hoped they'd find their way back up the canyon. Sweaty, dirty and tired, he strolled to the shadow of the obelisk in the centre of the plaza, where he could watch La Fonda. He took out a cigarette. Put it back in the packet. No more smoking. He'd thought he hated boxing. Even exhausted, though, he felt his body lift at the prospect of a fight, as if he'd deprived it of worthy adversaries. The first few tourists were up, making their way to the portal. No soldiers yet. Joe saw Hilario drop Harry Gold in front of La Fonda.
Hilario drove on and Gold went into the hotel. In the plaza, the "creeps" concentrated on their newspapers; the morning headline was that Truman had arrived in Berlin.
A spy? After all this time, a real spy? It took more evidence than a few hairs from a hot cow.
A man with an aureole of silver hair approached the obelisk. It took Joe a moment to recognize Santa because the Hill psychiatrist was covered with white blisters and his hands were in cotton gloves.
"Hives," he explained to Joe. "Purely psychosomatic, nothing contagious. Ever since we took that ride through the mountains with the you-know-what."
"Yes." Joe whispered, "I'm supposed to be with Oppy right now briefing our teams. We have some excellent men. Jungians, alienists, some strict Freudians. General Groves has written some press releases and we're going over them for psychological impact. Of course, if the bomb is a dud, there won't be any release. If the bomb makes a big bang, then we'll report that an ammunition dump exploded without loss of life. If we blow up the desert and everyone in it, then we have to come up with a different story. The main thing is to avoid panic. And send our teams, most of which will be stationed well away from the blast, to those cities that will be most affected by runaway fallout. I feel I can confide in you."
"Yes?"
"In that instance, a press release would choose an alternative, assimilable emergency. 'Epidemic', 'tainted water', 'chemical warfare'. I say we ought to say 'chemical warfare' right at the start because people are never going to believe 'epidemic'. The Freudians want 'tainted water', naturally."
Gold walked out of La Fonda in shoes instead of boots, wearing a fedora in place of his late stetson, smoking a cigar and holding a newspaper folded under one arm. He crossed the street to the smaller pseudo-adobe building on the opposite corner, the ticket office of the Santa Fe Railroad.
"You're wondering," Santa said, "if all this is going on inside, why am I out here?"
"Yes?" Joe mumbled, distracted.
"They're picking volunteers for the team for Trinity. Do you think I'm cowardly?"
"What do you think?" Santa laughed in a whisper. "I knew you'd say that."
Gold emerged from the ticket office, stood at the corner, looked at his wristwatch and looked at the public clock, a giant pocketwatch on a column outside a jewellery store on the south side of the plaza. He started back across the street to La Fonda, changed his mind and continued to the south side, past the curio shop, the jeweller's, a haberdasher's and into Woolworth's, and sat at the counter.
"But it's good to have someone to talk to," Santa said. "Excuse me." When Joe saw a waitress bring Gold a coffee, he left the obelisk for the ticket office. The clerk was a grandmotherly Spanish woman who told Joe he had just missed the friend he described, but she could sell him a ticket on the same train going to Kansas City and New York on the 17th. Joe said he didn't know if he could go then, but not to tell his friend if he returned to the office because Joe wanted it to be a surprise. As Joe went back to the plaza, he saw Santa vanishing in the opposite direction, moving stiffly like a man in a body cast. In Woolworth's, Gold was still nursing his cup. Although he had a newspaper, the New Mexican judging by the eagle on the masthead, Gold didn't bother reading it. He sat looking at plaster sundaes, his lower lip pendulous with thought. He tapped the crystal of his watch, dropped change on the counter and came out.
The plaza was coming to life, tourists not so much wandering in as suddenly appearing as skirts on the portal, as kids with pistols running around the bandstand. The bank on the east side of the plaza opened its doors. Mail trucks rolled from the post office, a block away and across from the cathedral. There were no traffic lights; cars and trucks ran counter-clockwise round the plaza and sorted themselves out at the corners. Gold stood on the kerb, poised to dash through the traffic directly across the plaza and towards the obelisk and Joe. A milk truck went by. A carload of Navajos. Now Gold was walking up the streets, under the pocketwatch, past the Indian drums in the curio shop windows and, again, to the ticket office on the far corner. Then he appeared to make a decision to take his time. He strolled past the office, past Thunderbird Curios and the bank's Ionic columns to a Territorial style building that housed Guarantee Shoes, crossed Palace Avenue and made a detour down a sidestreet to Maytag's. Joe didn't know why he was following Gold. Curiosity? A sense that everything about Gold was wrong? He seemed carried by the wake of the fat little man. Maytag's sold washing machines on one side of the store and music on the other. Gold scrutinized the Hit Parade list taped to the inside of the window. At last, he came back up the street to the plaza and Santa Fe's central attraction, the Indians on the portal.
The portal was a shaded arcade. Women from the pueblos of the Rio Grande valley sat against the cool adobe wall. In front of each was a blanket or rug displaying red San Juan pots, black pots from Santiago, or Santa Clara's double-necked wedding pots, turquoise jewellery from Santa Domingo, or Navajo beaten-silver concho belts. A few women wore the single-shoulder dress; most wore cotton dresses, aprons and sweaters. They yawned or read movie magazines or gossiped, paying cursory attention to the Anglos who stooped or knelt to fondle or disparage the wares exhibited. This being a holiday event, the would-be buyers dressed like dudes and browsed with intensity. Gold joined a trio of sergeants who were studying a blanket of earrings, bracelets and hairpins. The crown of Gold's fedora came to the shoulders of the soldiers. One sergeant admired a hairpin with a peacock tail of silver and jet. Joe slipped between the cars parked diagonally along the kerb of the portal. The adobe overhang was supported by massive posts of ponderosa pine worn smooth by generations of tourists, and Joe could look at an angle through the colonnade without being seen himself. Some of the women selling pots he recognized. Almost in front of him was a sleek and chubby girl with black bangs, a teenage cousin of his named Polly, for Paulina. She'd put down a copy of Modern Screen to show one of Sophie Reyes' smooth, obsidian-dark pots to a kneeling man in a panama. Gold moved closer, his eyes jumping from blanket to blanket. He stopped to pick up and examine a silver cigar holder. He seemed genuinely to want it, and he replaced it on the blanket with regret. He joined two nuns in the examination of silver crucifixes, falling into the spirit of friendly reverence. Gold seemed to suffer from boosterism, enthusiastically entering into whatever mood he encountered. Good-naturedly he let himself be talked into trying a clip on his tie. The clip looked like a silver bomber. His tie had hand-painted palm trees. He gave the clip back and bent over the next blanket, Polly's.
"For fruit?" Gold lifted a bowl with an embossed serpent around the rim.
Polly shrugged, but the man in the panama said, "Would you put fruit on a Rubens? That's a bowl by Sophie Reyes."
"She's famous?" Gold was impressed.
"To collectors."
"You collect these?" Gold turned the bowl round.
"I collect Dolores. She's dead and her pieces are very hard to find."
"Like art?"
"It is art." The man in the panama looked up as he took the bowl from Gold and Joe saw that the collector was Captain Augustino in civvies. "The pots are an expression of the native concept of the earth, and man's emergence from the earth, each pot both earth and womb. A beautiful, powerful concept."
"The decoration -"
"There is no decoration," Augustino cut Gold off. "There is representation. The snake is the never-ending cycle of the world. It's a representation of lightning. Lightning brings rain. Rain brings corn. You see the contradictions of violence and fruitfulness married in this symbol. The bowl is a vision of primitive harmony. Although not quite as fine as a Dolores."
"That's the one you collect?"
"I can show the collection to you, if you'd like."
"Thanks, but I'm in Santa Fe for only a day…"
Harry Gold worked his way past the last blankets and out of the portal to the corner, where he checked his wristwatch again. An open tour bus was at the corner and the guide was saying something unintelligible through a megaphone. Cameras leaned out of the bus. If Gold took the tour, there was no way Joe could stay near without being seen. At the same time, Joe was wondering about Augustino. The captain was supposed to be 200 miles south at Trinity.
The tour bus pulled away without Gold. Gold was walking fast, trousers flapping around short legs. Joe looked back. Augustino had disappeared from the portal. Joe had to trot across the plaza flagstones to see Gold head toward Woolworth's, where he'd started out, then make a right past Rexall Drugs, left on Don Gaspar Street, which wasn't much larger than an alley, and hurry past the bars and the pawn shops. Joe stayed a block behind, but Gold seemed unconscious of the possibility that he might be followed. Two blocks from the plaza, along the avenue called the Alameda, the Santa Fe river resembled either a dried-up open sewer or a creek. Rocks, brambles and rusted cans filled the bed, although cottonwoods grew luxuriantly on the near bank, tapping the dampness below. A concrete span called the Castillo Bridge led to an opposite bank of poplars and, beyond, the white dome and cupola of the state capitol building in the distance. In the middle of the bridge's walkway, Klaus Fuchs smoked a cigarette and contemplated a scooter abandoned or carried away by some past flood. The tyres were gone, perhaps gathered in one of the war's rubber drives. Fuchs rested his foot on the middle of the three iron pipes that served as guardrails. A folded newspaper was tucked under an arm. Joe stopped in the shadows of the cottonwoods to watch.
As Gold walked on to the bridge, he began feeling his jacket pockets, trouser pockets, shirt. A cigarette dangled from his mouth. He reached Fuchs. Fuchs fumbled through his own pockets, found a match and lit Gold's cigarette. He didn't wait for a thank you before leaving, a grim kewpie doll marching off the bridge and up the Alameda. Gold assumed the same stance Fuchs had had on the bridge, foot on the rail, gazing at the scooter on the dry rocks underneath the span. Up the Alameda, Fuchs got into his Buick. He hadn't come in the bus. He'd avoided the plaza completely. No more than two words could have been said on the bndge, Joe thought. Gold pondered the river, the branches overhead, and through the screen of poplars the faraway cupola on the state dome. He smiled at two girls on bikes. The tour bus rolled by, heads swivelling, leaving a trail of muffled facts and dates. Gold snapped a look over his shoulder in Joe's direction, but out of fleeting caution and not because he'd seen Joe move. Gold relaxed and finished his cigarette, stifled a gaping yawn that closed into a smile of relief, flipped the butt and left the bridge.
Gold walked down the Alameda, turned on Guadalupe and again on San Francisco, making a loop back towards the plaza. The Lensic Theatre had stucco walls and Moorish trim. Gold stopped to read a playbill for Here Come the Co-eds with Abbott and Costello. He saw his reflection and rubbed the blueness of his cheek. Passing a moment later, Joe saw his own reflection, a sergeant in a rumpled uniform, hair lank, face ominous. The plaza was busier now. Tourists spilled out of Woolworth's to stop Indians and ask them to pose. Like a man breasting waves, Cleto, the necklace vendor from Santa Domingo, stood in the middle of the pavement, arms of turquoise necklaces outstretched. Cleto's gray braid had come undone, the belly of his shirt was spotted with chilli, and still he maintained an expression of majestic contempt. Gold sidestepped the crowd around Cleto and then had to wait for Army trucks to pass. Across the street, at La Fonda's loading station, porters in mariachi vests shuffled suitcases. Joe slipped by Cleto. Once in the hotel, Gold would be out of reach. Something had happened on the bridge, though Joe didn't know what. Gold stepped up on the kerb, newspaper held tightly under his arm. It was the Albuquerque Journal. Gold had had the New Mexican when he went to the bridge. In his mind, Joe watched again as Gold, cigarette stuck to his lips, feeling his pockets for a match, walked to the centre of the bridge and joined Klaus Fuchs, who handed his folded newspaper to Gold the better to, without a word, find a match in his jacket, brusquely light a stranger's cigarette, take back his newspaper and leave Gold to a solitary view of the Santa Fe river. Not his newspaper, though. Gold's paper.
At the loading station, Joe grabbed Gold, who gave an involuntary hop of surprise. "I was hoping I'd see you again," Joe said. The blood rushed so quickly from Gold's face, Joe thought the man was going to swoon. "You were?"
More cars were parking, more suitcases were being unloaded. Joe encircled Gold with an arm and started to lead him out of the way.
"I was thinking how you lost your stetson. A friend of mine has a shop around the corner. Come on, we'll pick you a new hat."
"I don't want to trouble you."
"No trouble."
Gold struggled discreetly. Keeping a grip on him as porters pushed past was like squeezing a beachball. "I have a call to make."
"Right round the corner. Just take a second."
"Joe! Over here!"
It was Anna's voice. She stood on the far kerb, wearing the turquoise necklace he had given her. In her hair was the silver hairpin he'd seen on the portal and in her hands was the black pot that Augustino had been admiring. With her Hawaiian shirt, she achieved a Pueblo-Hebrew-Polynesian beauty. She also had a Maytag's bag. It was the weekend, why wouldn't Anna be in town shopping? She crossed the street behind a tour bus as it pulled in front of the hotel. The FBI agent behind her waited to cross; she wouldn't be hard to follow.
"Why should there be traffic signals?" Anna showed the contented smile people wear when they suddenly take possession of a new town, when they've decided they will stay a while and, against all odds, are comfortable. She paid no attention to Gold or to the porters or to the people hopping down from the bus. "How boring it would be with traffic signals."
"Go to the bar," Joe told her. "I'll be right there."
"See what else." She carefully put the bowl into the bag and took out a record. Billie Holiday. Lover Man. "What shall I do first, make a pot or sing the blues?"
Gold freed one hand and gave it to Anna.
"Harry Gold."
Joe was trying to steer Anna towards La Fonda when Oppy came out of the hotel and took in the trio on the curb with a strained grin. His eyes looked out from wells of exhaustion.
"Where the hell have you been, Joe? I've been waiting for half an hour."
"Harry Gold," Gold said and offered Oppy his hand.
"Am I interrupting your private business and affairs?" Oppy asked. He disregarded Anna and ignored Gold's hand. "Santa told me you were out here. You went for a walk, a drink, a little spree?"
"Can you wait a minute?" Joe asked.
Cleto inserted himself in front of Gold and presented an arm draped with necklaces.
"Two dollars."
Tourists from the bus gathered around Cleto and pushed Gold aside.
"I have to make an appointment with a sergeant?" Oppy asked. "With my own driver? And where were you last night? I went by your room and you weren't there."
"I went out for a second."
"I came by twice," Oppy said. "I looked all over and couldn't find you. In the Army isn't that called AWOL?"
"Ask me where he was," Anna said and Oppy flushed as if she'd slapped him across the face.
The tour bus pulled away. Cleto moved on.
"Please ask me," Anna insisted.
Oppy lowered his head like a man on a cross.
"No?" she said. "Well, if you do think of any questions, I' will be at the bar having a very early, not-so-perfect martini. I will be returning to the Hill later with Klaus. I know how you want to be sure where everyone is at all times."
Oppy didn't raise his head until she was gone, and then he blinked as if he were trying to will away a scene.
"Joe, where were you?"
Gold was already gone. Joe saw him trotting up the street past a camera shop and as the tour bus rolled by, Gold skipped off the kerb and jumped on to the running board, his newspaper clutched under his arm.
"I met a spy," Joe said.
Together, Joe and Oppy walked a block to the old Spanish courtyards on Palace Avenue. This was the Hill bus stop and Joe's jeep was parked outside, but Oppy opened a wrought-iron door to the smallest courtyard, a narrow passageway of carved beams and squash blossoms around a browning lawn. The screen door at the inner end of the courtyard was the Hill's anonymous parcel drop and reception centre in Santa Fe.
"You mean Gold," Oppy said in a low voice although there was no one else in the courtyard. "Augustino told me about him. Augustino is handling it. I don't see how you're involved."
"Gold was in Santiago this morning."
"Augustino is handling everything. What you can do is stay out of Captain Augustino's way. Let's hope you haven't scared Gold off. You know, Joe, we are fast approaching the climax of this enormous endeavour. I don't have the time or the patience to deal with you and your different adventures any more, not when the effort of thousands of people and the lives of many, many thousands of soldiers are in the balance. You are the smallest possible factor in Trinity. Please don't fuck it up. Stay out of my way, stay out of Captain Augustino's way and, if you want to do Anna Weiss a great favour, stay out of her way, too."
23
How high the MOON? the horns asked. Tables sat on circular tiers around the dance floor and bandstand, each table set with red cloths and candles, some with sweating pails of champagne. HOW high the moon? trombones wondered. Waiters in red jackets balanced steaks on trays. Wrought-iron sconces lit the curved adobe-like wall. Out on the hardwood, a generation of young officers danced with women in full skirts and puffed shoulders, blondes coiffed like Ginger Rogers, brunettes like Lamour. The club comfortably held two hundred diners and dancers, and another forty at the bar. How HIGH the moon? The lead sax stood to pursue the matter with a stutter of riffs. When the clarinet argued in falsetto, Joe thought of Harvey. The bass man thumped at the musical question, passed it to the drummer, who tapped it in the top cymbal, let it slip out on to the snare drum and when it bounced from there, socked it into the bass drum. How high THE moon? In front of a red plush curtain the band wore white Eton jackets, the music stands were white with glittering clefs and the piano as white as a tooth, although the pianist was in khaki. Joe caught the tune in his right hand way up the keyboard, as if everything had been delicate introduction. He went at the tune like Basic, like a chick pecking at a diamond, until he turned the hand to boogie woogie, paused for a horn reprise, and at the horn's last brassy gasp came down the keys in slowly assembling minor chords.
"Remember how I enlisted, the parade at midnight?" Joe had asked Anna. The interesting thing was not that he was willing to bribe Shapiro and leave the Hill and drive to Albuquerque five days before Trinity, but that Anna was willing to go with him. For the occasion, she wore her hairpin and a long green velvet Navajo skirt. Pollack had given her a gardenia for her hair and she sat with the owner of the Casa Mariana at his table near the rear by the bar. In his tux, Pollack looked more like an African ambassador than a nightclub owner. He poured champagne for her and drank seltzer himself.
"One more time!" the sax section shouted. And this time, Joe played "Moon" with little quotes from "Blues in the Night", "Swingin' the Blues", "Blowin' the Blues Away", sliding across the luminous melody. He could feel everyone moving with him, as if a lid had been taken off the club to unveil a starry, cerulean night, because these people were ready for the impossible. Better than a moon in June was a moon in July. They'd been at war for five years and now the war was over, the war was almost over. "Blue Skies Smilin' at Me", Joe injected, and the entire club seemed to rise. If blue skies were going to explode on them, they were ready, so he made the melody… bluebirds singin' a song even as he brought the "Moon" down a chromatic descent, a chord at a time. The tunes merged and split again, accelerating until keyboard and crowd swung between flight and plunge. Joe cued the horns, who stood and hit the Charlie Parker riffs that settled the argument by demanding How High the Moon? How High the Moon? as if it were the sun.
"Is this the Casa Manana?" Pollack asked Joe when he joined the table. "Is this not a wonderful club?"
"No, thanks," Joe said and waved off a drink. "You said you were partners with Joe's father." Anna played with her new hairpin, which she had taken out for the gardenia. "With Mike Pena," Pollack said. "Doing what?"
Pollack glanced at Joe. "Distribution, mainly."
"A dangerous business," Joe said. "Mike was distributing a load of booze up from Mexico one night when a tyre blew or he hit a cow or someone drove alongside and shot him in the head. The truck crashed and the gas and alcohol blew like a Molotov cocktail."
"It wasn't clear whether a bullet was found," Pollack said.
"The investigation was led by a Judge Hilario Reyes," Joe explained. "It was very inconclusive."
"I sent Joe down to El Paso before he could get himself into trouble," Pollack told Anna. "I had a brother working in the circus. I thought Joe was going to feed the elephants, but he caught on to music real fast. Of course, he used to play the organ in the pueblo even before that. He was a choirboy and everything."
"Did Mike like your music?" Anna asked.
"No." Joe had to laugh. "He hated it."
He took her on to the floor and they danced to "Flamingo", the Ellington version.
"Are there clubs like this in Chicago?" she asked.
"Great clubs up there."
"Would you go to Chicago to play?"
"No. When I get out of the Army, I'm not going to take orders from anyone. I'm going to have my own club. For the first time in my life I know what I want."
"What is that?"
"This." He took in the seraphic row of white music stands against the red velvet, the warm languor of the women in their long hair and short dresses, the waiters gliding under trays of iced drinks, and the music curling within the circular Hollywood-adobe walls, eddying and overlapping into echoes that asked for a sharp piano riff, the stab of a minor chord.
"It must be wonderful to know what you want," she said.
"One fight will pay for it."
"Then the Casa Manana will make you rich?"
"It's the music, not the money. Sooner or later, a great club loses money the way a beautiful balloon loses air. You mind my fighting?"
"It sounds like a bad movie. We had such movies in Germany. The man who fights one last time to pay for an operation for his sister so her sight can be miraculously saved. Natrually, he loses his.."
"I'm going to win. And I won't go blind or break my hands."
"If this is what you truly want -"
"It is."
"Then I don't think anyone in the world could stop you."
It was midnight when they came out of the club into the parking lot, half a block of cars surrounded by a low adobe barrier.
This part of Albuquerque's Central Avenue was called "Old Town", as if the Old West were lined with curio stoves and pawn shops with steel shutters. At night, except for the Casa Mariana, the street was deserted. Black, except for the tents of light around streetlamps. As Anna got into the jeep, she touched her hair.
"My new pin. I left it on the table."
Joe returned for the pin and when he came out of the club again he took a shortcut through the kitchen and out the back. There were fewer cars there, the jalopies of waiters and kitchen help. Among them, he heard voices and laughs and then something hitting the ground.
Between a pair of Fords, a tiny beam of light played from a horizontal face to a shirt, to a double-breasted jacket and a hand in the jacket pocket. As Joe approached, the beam slid back up to the face, which was round as a plate, subcutaneous blue on the upper lip and chin, eyes closed and mouth slack. Spread on the man's chest were licence, business cards, postcards, money. Kneeling over him was Captain Augustino, still in civvies.
"Harry Gold." Augustino read the cards under the light. "Harry Gold of the Philadelphia Sugar Company. Harry Gold, licensed driver of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Street map of Santa Fe, $1,250 in cash. Harry Gold on vacation."
An empty champagne bottle rolled away from the captain's knee and came to rest against a tyre. Joe assumed Augustino had used the bottle against the back of Gold's head.
"You know about him," Joe said.
"Heinrich Golodnitsky, to be exact, Sergeant." Augustino flicked the light back to the plump face and crumpled hat. "Heinrich Golodnitsky of Russian-Jewish lineage. Golodnitsky, who came at the age of three to an America of sugar-sweet opportunity, not only to find gold on the streets but to be Gold. Golodnitsky, Gold. Heinrich, Harry." Augustino pointed the beam at Joe and some of the light escaped to touch his own lean, passionate face. "See, you always thought I was crazy, Sergeant. Yet, here he is. It's like catching a real devil. A small devil, but a devil all the same. We were at the bar. You played well. Dr Weiss looked lovely."
"I thought you were at Trinity, sir."
Augustino opened the back door of the nearer Ford. "I thought you were on the Hill. Help me get him into the car." The band could be heard faintly in the lot. He could make out the beat, but not the tune. Two-four time. A whisper of horns.
He gathered Harry Gold in his arms and laid him on the back seat of the car. "What are you going to tell Gold when he wakes up?"
"The concussion will eliminate any short-term memory. I'll tell him he got drunk, fell down and hit his head. He was drunk."
"He won't believe it. He'll go right to the Russians."
"Of course he won't believe me. But, apart from treason, Harry Gold is a two-bit chemist, a nothing, a zero. The luckiest day of his life was when he became a spy. You think he wants to lose his only interesting quality? Also, even if he realizes I knocked him out, he'll know he's already caught and on the cross. Hope springs eternal even in the breast of pathological scum. He's not going to tell the Russians anything. Tonight never happened."
"Like us, sir. I never saw you, you never saw me."
"Would I stand in the way of romance, Sergeant? When we're on the same team at last?"
On the way back to the Hill they stopped to swim in the Rio where it cut a deep curve in the sandbanks above Santiago. Berry petals passed on the dark surface of the water. There were five days left until Trinity. Minutes seemed to hurry by, as it rushing to a deeper, quicker channel of time.
"A choirboy? I can't believe it," she said.
"We'll go to Harlem an' we'll go struttiri," he sang to her, "an' there'll be nothln' too good for you."
She was cool and weightless to the touch and she slipped away from his hand. Something was wrong, although he didn't know what.
"Sometimes I wonder what my father's dreams for me must have been," she said. "A lecturer's chair at the Mathematical Institute. Learned arguments with other professors as we watched Gottingen slip into the dusk."
"Sounds like a travelogue."
"The memory of a refugee is a travelogue. Anyway, a proper husband, also a professor, two children and a villa on the Wilhelrn-Weber-Strasse with windowboxes of clematis. I don't believe my father ever dreamed of the Rio Grande or you. I will miss it."
"Miss it? What do you mean?"
"I will miss this place."
"You're leaving?"
"Everyone will be leaving soon after Trinity. I'm leaving before. I've only told Oppy and you."
"That doesn't mean you have to leave New Mexico."
"Yes, it does."
"What about us?"
"Us? This is your home, and now you have your music here, too. It's not my home, and I don't have my work here."
Though he was floating, he had the sensation he was about to fall through the water.
"You came tonight to say goodbye?"
"Yes."
"No. You asked me to come to Chicago. That's what you were getting at when we were dancing."
"Joe, we've only known each other a month - really, two weeks. This is not the end of a long affair. We were just getting to know each other. I've never seen you happier than you were tonight."
"I thought you were happy, too."
"Not like you. It must be wonderful to be so in love with music."
"You're leaving to make some sort of ethical statement about Trinity, right? You feel forced to go?"
"You could say that."
"Then come back."
"And do what? Sell cigarettes in a nightclub?"
"You wouldn't have to do anything."
"But I do do something. I'm a mathematician, and I work at a certain level. Besides the Hill, there is no such place here for me to work. Could I work with you? You wouldn't know what I was saying. This is not insulting. I'm not asking you to leave your music, to live in Chicago and erase blackboards for me."
"Then the hell with the club. I'll go with you, once I'm out of the Army."
"Now that I know that the club is what you want most in life? Oh no."
"I love you. There'll always be another Casa Mariana."
"I don't think so. I think this is your chance. For you to give it up and follow me, that would be a small version of Joe Pena. You know, the first time I saw you at the Christmas dance, Klaus Fuchs pointed to you and said, 'There is the Chief, stupid and dangerous and larger than life.' You aren't stupid, but you are the other two and I don't want you to change. I don't want you any smaller than Chief Joe Pena."
"It's beginning to sound as if I've been some sort of conquest for you. Entertainment. Part of your tour of Indian country."
"That's not true."
"It's simple. I love you and I'm willing to go. If you loved me, you'd stay."
She reached out for him. "I do love you. We can make love right now." He wanted to. The water was getting colder and colder. She hovered in it like a flame.
"Then stay." He could only stand her silence so long before he turned. "Then go. Let's get you out of here. Let's get you packed and gone."
She followed him out of the water, so he was the first to see two figures squatting on the sand. "Hello, Joe."
24
In the quarter-moon, Roberto and Ben Reyes showed the fatigue of a chase. Their hair was loose, their necks limp. Sophie Reyes hung back behind a log. Joe picked up Anna's skirt for her. "One's blind. The other's so old it doesn't matter."
"They need your help," Sophie said. "Do they?" Joe asked. He stepped into his trousers. "Well, the lady's in a big hurry. So, excuse us, but we're going."
"It was the Indian Service. They came at sunset," Roberto said. "It was lucky they came from the east. Ben saw them."
"A buckle shone," Ben said. Joe snatched his shirt from the ground. "Really? And you desperadoes slipped away? How many were there?"
"Just two," Ben said. "Those Service riders."
"No one riding drag? You sure are lucky. Two cowboys came straight into the sun. You flush and nobody follows. You came back here to your house?"
"Your house," Roberto said. "We thought they might be watching Ben's."
"Naturally. You could have kept on going." Anna buttoned her shirt. "Joe," she said, "he's blind."
"Blind and crazy."
"Have you climbed the ladder in my dream yet?" Roberto asked Joe. "See what I mean?" Joe asked Anna.
"The Service came by with a Federal warrant," Sophie said. "They were talking about sabotage and the FBI. They said they were watching the bus terminals, so Ben and Roberto should give themselves up."
"You saw the warrant?" Joe asked. "I can read," Sophie said stiffly. "They need your help, Joe," Anna said. "To what? I already gave them two chances to escape, but they wanted to play cowboys and Indians, only now it's getting a little rough. I told them there was a war on, they didn't believe me. What do you care? A minute ago you couldn't get out of here fast enough. Come on, I'll take you back. You're shivering."
"I gathered some sticks there," Sophie said. "We could be warm if you have a match."
"You have to help them, Joe," Anna said. "I don't have to do a damn thing. I'm not responsible for them. Don't tell me what to do. I made a fool of myself for you, but that's over, right? Over, and you're going. I don't want to hear any more about ethical choices from you. All I want is you in the jeep, you on the train and gone."
"Joe," Sophie said. "Please."
In a depression in the sand was driftwood that looked like antlers. He knelt and lit the shavings underneath with his lighter; yellow flames branched from stick to stick. In the glow, Ben's face was dusty and scraped from a fall. Roberto's hands were wrapped in bloody bandages. Joe looked up. Was the entire universe Indian, or were there scattered craters of sanity? Roberto's eyes turned to the heat. "That spy on the cliff. Whatever happened to him?"
"He means Fuchs," Joe told Anna. "So far, Roberto, he seems to be getting away, which is more than I can say for you. A Federal warrant? That means another country, at least until this thing blows over."
"Smokes?" Ben asked. Joe gave him his Luckies. "Keep the pack."
"I prefer Chesterfields," Ben said, but pocketed the cigarettes. "What do you mean, 'another country'?"
"Mexico's the nearest one. You can be another Pancho Villa, Uncle."
"I don't like Mexico. They do something funny to their beans."
"Yeah, they mash them into shit and pour flies over them. That's why they have such good beer. Uncle, are you listening? Mexico's your only chance. The war'll be over soon, people will calm down and then you can come back here."
"You'll take them?" Anna asked.
"Well, this really has nothing to do with you, does it?" Joe said. "You'll be in Chicago or somewhere. We will be a fond memory. You'll look at your pot or your silver pin and you'll always think of us. And, Lord knows, you'll always be grateful for your short but fascinating sojourn in Santiago."
"Stop it, Joe," she said.
"The Indian mysteries revealed, the firing of the clay."
"Please stop."
"The exotic nights with an authentic chief."
"I'm sorry."
"Joe, will you take them?" Sophie asked. "Yeah. Okay, okay. It's not that hard. It means going to El Paso and taking the trolley into Juarez. We'll put some sunglasses on Roberto and a scrape on Ben. Easy. But I won't be able to take them through until Sunday night."
"That's the night of the test," Anna said carefully. "That's the night you're fighting."
"Test of what?" Roberto asked. "The weapon," Joe said. "The gourd of ashes?"
"That's the one."
"And the ladder? You're going to climb it to the gourd?"
"I'm not climbing anything. I'm not even going to be there for the blast. The general wants me to drive around and make sure no wild Apaches wander on to the test range. That's why I can get away and fight. After the fight, we'll go down to the border. The trick is for you to hide out until then. and for you to get to the fight with a car."
"A scrape?" Ben muttered. He already had the manner of an emperor going into exile. "Where are you going to fight?"
"Below Socorro is a little town called Antonio. There's just one cross-street. Make a left and go half a mile to the Owl Cafe. At the back of the cafe is a motel. The fight will start in the motel courtyard at 8 pm. By nine it should be over and the cars cleared out. That's when you show up."
"What if you can't go?" Anna asked. "What if there's a problem?"
Joe talked to Ben and Roberto.
"Park in the courtyard and put out your lights. Wait five minutes, no more. There'll be MPs all over the place. If I can't join you in five minutes, that means there's a real problem. There won't be, don't worry, but in case there is, tell the driver to just go back to the highway and turn south to El Paso and then put you on the trolley car. When you find a place in Juarez, call the Casa Mariana in Albuquerque and leave a message where you're staying. If there's a change in plan before then, I'll tell Felix Tafoya, who seems to be just as good being a clown or tossing lightning wands as he is pushing a broom."
"Good." Roberto grinned. "You figured that out."
"Yeah. And Ben, your former brother Hilario told me the other day he'd never missed a dance in Santiago. I didn't see him at the dance when they came for Roberto, but let's assume Hilario was absent-mindedly telling the truth about his perfect attendance. He fingered Roberto and left. He'll be at the fight, so keep your head down."
Sophie came out of the dark, taking off the blanket she wore as a shawl. Joe thought she was finally joining the circle at the fire, but she threw the blanket over the flames, smothering them as she stomped on the blanket. "Indian Service," Joe told Anna. "You're sure I can keep the cigarettes?" Ben asked. "Yes. Get out of here," Joe said.
"That's good of you," Ben said in Tewa. "You're a good boy."
All the dogs on the east side of the pueblo were, by now, barking the alarm. Sophie and Ben led Roberto up the river-bank and around a screen of thimbleberries. Joe and Anna climbed to the jeep and pulled on their shoes.
"This is, you know, much more interesting than a walk round Gottingen," she said.
"Very few cowboys in Gottingen," Joe said.
He started the jeep. Headlights out, they rolled past cottonwoods and watertanks and on to a dirty road between the pueblo and fields of barley and sorghum. Over peach trees was a glimpse of the church's low brow. The air stirred the smell of roasted chillies. Joe drove along an irrigation ditch towards the wooden planks that bridged a cross-ditch. The planks coughed as the jeep passed over.
"There!" Anna said.
Fifty yards ahead, the two Service riders were on horseback. Al, the older one, waved both arms for Joe to stop. Billy seemed to have acquired a handgun with a long, bright barrel.
Joe turned behind a windbreak of sunflowers. If he was stopped, he was AWOL. Anna was breaking security. At the same time, he could see what the riders were up to. Sophie, Ben and Roberto had taken to the ditch and Billy and Al were waiting for them to come up. The fields were a maze of ditches, all fed by the mother ditch at the north end, along the highway. If the fugitives reached the corn fields, where the rows of stalks were shoulder-high, the riders would never catch them.
Joe eased through the sorghum, the grass beating against the wheels. The riders paid no attention. The jeep rolled into the corn, mowing a row as it went. The stalks bent, broke. Red corn, blue corn, black corn, beaded corn, Indian corn. At the end of the row, he stopped.
To his right, about twenty yards down the dirt road, Al was shouting, "Open her up, Billy."
To Joe's left, thirty yards up the road, Billy was leaning out of his saddle to turn the wheel that would raise the wooden gate of the ditch. Roberto, Sophie and Ben were neatly trapped. The flood of water would drown them or drive them back to Al.
"Get out," Joe told Anna. "I'll come back for you."
"I want to go with you," she said.
"I don't want you with me and I don't have time to argue. I want you waiting here until I come back and drive you nice and slowly to the Hill, so you don't miss your train in the morning."
Anna clutched the back of the seat.
"No."
"Okay," Joe said.
He slipped the jeep on to the road, turned and stood on the accelerator. Billy was still leaning from his horse and yanking the gate wheel when he heard the engine approach. Twenty feet from Billy, Joe hit his headlights. The cowboy wore a gold sateen shirt and an expression of astonishment. His horse reared and toppled backwards out of the glare. Joe heard man and mount hit the water of the mother ditch, then the jeep was across the planks of the ditch and on to the highway, heading north.
A hundred yards up the highway, Joe spun around because he had to come back down the highway and along the mother ditch to get to the Hill. Billy was screaming he couldn't swim. Al had ridden up to the ditch and in the wan moonlight sat patiently on his horse, aiming his gun with both hands. A speckled Colt, Joe remembered. There was no way the cowboy would really shoot, he thought. Not an Army jeep.
As he passed in front of Al, Joe changed his mind, turned off his headlights, slammed on the brakes. The gun flashed, bobbed, flashed again. He floored the accelerator. The third shot was over-corrected, rushed, behind the jeep. The shots after that sounded like a tin pail being futilely kicked.
For miles, Joe and Anna drove without lights and without saying a word, as if the dark and quiet sustained the moment of escape and delayed the saying of goodbye. He and she were so different, he thought, that any words divided them. It proved how strange the Hill was that they'd met at all. Let the last little triumph roll as long as possible, for ever if possible.
He had to turn the lights on when they hit the switchbacks. As the jeep climbed, Anna acted busy by cleaning bits of corn stalk from the floor. She found two items that had shaken loose from under the seat, two zigzags of carved wood.
"What are these?" she asked, without directly meeting Joe's eyes. This is how it ends, he thought. Without real words, without even looks.
"Roberto's crazy wands."
"What are you supposed to do with them?"
"Call down lightning. Water your fields. Bring back the buffalo. Stop the bomb."
"You can do that?"
Joe took the wands from her and threw them sideways from the jeep. They spun, glittered and then plunged into the dark of the canyon.
"Not any more," he said.
25
FRIDAY
Orders were no stopping en route, but as Joe went through Antonio, he slowed by the Owl Bar and Cafe enough to see Army engineers and MPs stationed in the motel courtyard. He gained speed again, leading a convoy of two jeeps, two CID sedans, a carry-all truck of spare parts and a covered truck bearing Jaworski and the sphere of steel and high explosive that was the implosive shell of the bomb.
"The MPs are there to evacuate the town in case of, you know…" Ray Stingo rode in the lead jeep with Joe.
"What's it like down here?" Joe asked. Ray had been in and out of Trinity for a week.
"Typical Army fuck-ups. We got some scientists, some of the million-dollar whiz kids, laying some wires out in the bushes and a B-29 comes over shooting some antelope. Fifty-calibre machine-guns. Scientists are running, diving, trying to fly. You see, the rest of the Army doesn't know about this." They were already out of Antonio. Ray took a long, swivelled view of a far-off, flat horizon of buffalo grass, gray sage, yucca spears. "Fucking place for a test. You gotta shake your shoes every morning to get out the scorpions. You gotta bang a wrench on the jeep to chase the rattlers. There's gypsum in the water to fuck up your plumbing. Every five minutes you gotta run into the bushes and then it's you and the shit and rattler all over again." There was alkali in the water, too. Ray's black spit curl was plaster-hard. "It may be a new weapon, but it's the same Army."
"The odds?" Joe asked.
"Two to one. Odds on the fight are so good they scare me. I was thinking, I could be real set up on the Hill. I'd just piss away the money back in Jersey. I think I'll stay."
"There won't be any Hill after the war."
"Chief, I got one smart idea my whole life, okay? We didn't build this bomb for the Japs, we built it for the Reds. And we didn't even fight them yet."
Besides the convoy, Joe had seen no other Army traffic on the road. Stallion Gate was little changed. New barbed wire, new fence posts. A checkpoint that consisted of a tarpaulin-covered lean-to that provided a miserly wedge of shade. The MPs had been issued with pith helmets. Before leaving the Hill, each man in the convoy had been given a pink pass with a T for Trinity, which they exchanged at the gate for round white badges.
"Foreign Legion, Chief." Corporal Gruber was one of the MPs at the gate. His arm was still in a sling. His eyes were red from alkali dust. "A hundred degrees every day for two weeks. Fucking badges? Security? There must be fifty guys every night who walk off the desert for a beer. Single file between the snakes." He wrote Joe's name under the proper date and time on his clipboard. "Friday the 13th. Some day to bring down the bomb. Feeling good, Chief?"
"Good enough." Gruber licked dry lips. "It's a question of confidence, right?"
"To a point."
Gruber waved him through. "One more fight, that's all we ask."
The ranch access road that Joe remembered as a faint trail in the snow was newly graded and topped with colichi, a sand-and-clay compound that had quickly disintegrated into fine white powder. Clouds of dust followed another convoy far ahead. Jaworski joined Joe and Ray in the lead jeep. He had a portable FM receiver and around his neck he wore the Polaroid all-purpose red goggles issued for the test. With his dark moustaches, he looked like a touring grandee,
"We're supposed to monitor the receivers at all times here,in case of an accident," Jaworski said. "Keys are supposed to be kept in ignitions at all times, in case of evacuation. That's why the roads are so wide. Myself, I wonder what you're supposed to do if there is an accident and you're not near a road and you don't have a real field radio you can actually transmit on."
Some static-ridden communications were erupting from the FM. Mainly, there was music. Carmen Miranda.
"Don't ask me how," Ray said. "The Army spent months finding a special channel just for us? It's the same channel as the Voice of America. The Latin edition. Orders are, ignore the sambas and the bombers."
"Well, what do you do if you're stuck out in the open and the bomb, accidentally, goes off?"
"The flash, the burst of gamma rays and neutrons would kill anything within a mile and a half of the tower. If you could get a couple of miles away and find a depression, a stream -"
"A stream in the Jornada del Muerto? That sounds like planning. There couldn't really be an accident, though, could there?"
"Yesterday, Joe, they were testing the firing circuits on a dummy bomb in the tower. Out of the blue, a lightning bolt. Imagine if the real bomb had been there. By the way, Anna Weiss asked me to tell you goodbye. She left early this morning for Chicago. She borrowed Teller's car to drive there, otherwise I suppose you would have driven her to the train station."
"I suppose so."
There were a couple of hundred men at Trinity, but they were so spread out over hundreds of acres that only a few could be seen at a time. Still, the closer the convoy got to Ground Zero, the more evidence of activity there was. A cable strung on a seemingly infinite line of stakes. The first blast-wave gauge, a box designed to bounce in the springs of a hoop. Photographic bunkers gray as shells on a beach, periscope stalks aimed south at a tower seven miles off in the clear, trembling air. Ground Zero. Six miles from the tower, the convoy reached the North 10,000-metre shelter, a timber bunker that sank into a protective slope of raw earth. Bulldozers browsed on the slope, tamping it. From North-10,000, a fresh tarmac road ran straight to the shot tower. Single cables multiplied into racks of wires. Planted in dead sage was an unmanned instrument bunker, a concrete block with portholes for cameras.
"Skyshine hole." Jaworski pointed to the single socket aimed away from the tower. "To monitor the general neutron scatter." Skyshine? It sounded pretty, like the glitter of sequins shot in the air.
"Nervous?" Joe asked.
"Things have changed," Jaworski said. "We used to detonate shells using a long string. No one had a gauge. A charge worked or it didn't. No oscillographs or ionization chambers. What hasn't changed is that there will only be a handful of men who actually assemble the bomb. There'll be a hundred others screaming that this seismograph is vital or that pressure gauge must be repaired, but the only thing that counts is the weapon, right? Of course, in the war against the Kaiser we dropped nothing much greater than grenades from planes, and there was no background neutron scatter."
The tower at Ground Zero looked like an oil rig without the pipes, a spindly structure of steel beams and tie braces that rose 100 feet to a platform and galvanized-iron shed perched in the sky. One tower leg had steel steps with landings every twenty feet. A wooden ladder reached from the bottom landing to the ground. Foote was waiting on the ground in his sombrero and British Army shorts. His high explosives team of half a dozen draftees sat in undershirts, bathing shorts and handkerchiefs worn on the head pirate-style. As the convoy wound around and stopped at the tower base, CID officers jumped from the two security sedans and formed a skirmish line, pointing submachine-guns at cactus and rabbitbrush. Foote ambled at their backs. "They seek him here, they seek him there, those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in Heaven, is he in Hell, that demmed elusive Pimpernel? Joe, you brought my goods?"
The truck drove directly under the wide callipers of a chain and pulley that was suspended down the centre of the tower. When the truck's tarpaulin was removed, Joe and Ray bolted the callipers to the bomb. Steel cable groaned as it turned through the pulley sheave. The truck rolled out from under and the dangling bomb was lowered to a knee-high steel cradle, where it resembled a globe on a stand, a matt-gray moon four and a half feet wide, with two rims and patches where the detonator ports were taped. As soon as Ray disengaged the callipers and the pulley was lifted free, Foote's men set a canvas tent over the bomb and the security cars drove off.
"Want to join the pool?" Foote asked Joe. "A dollar apiece."
"For what?"
"The bang, what else. The new official anticipated yield is 5,000 to 10,000 tons of TNT. Jaworski and I have both bet on 10,000. I think it's the first time we agreed on anything. Teller bet on 40,000 tons. He's always an optimist."
"Oppy?" Joe was supposed to find him, now he was at Trinity.
"Oppy predicts 300 tons. Three hundred tons is a dud. We're a little worried about Oppy."
Harvey and the plutonium core had arrived earlier that morning at a ranch house a mile south of the shot.
The rancher had been bought off and pushed out, but, except for Harvey's Plymouth and the four jeeps parked with their backs to the house and their motors running, the place still looked from the outside like any ordinary spread: barn and corral, a windmill to pump water and a cistern to hold it, a one-storey house within a low stone wall. Inside, the parlour walls were blue with a genteel white band below the ceiling line. The oak floor had been vacuumed and the windows sealed with plastic sheets and masking tape. All the furniture had been removed except the table, which was covered with brown paper. Working at Trinity, Harvey had already joined the two silver-plated plutonium hemispheres into one 11 lb sphere the size of a grapefruit. Dressed in a white surgical coat, rubber gloves on his hands, he was now filling holes on the sphere's shining surface with tiny wads of Kleenex, the fill-all of Trinity. Geiger counters conversed on the floor. Six silent men in lab coats monitored the counters, gave Harvey one tool and then another. The only person without a task was Oppy. A man six feet tall began to look strange when his weight got down to seven stone. Oppy's head seemed gaunt and swollen at the same time, too large for the neck that stuck out of the lab coat. His hands wrung a cold briar. Somebody had hammered a nail in the wall for him to hang his porkpie hat from, the same as in his office on the Hill. The hat was there, but Oppy seemed oddly out of place and miserable, not triumphant at all.
"Remember the Dragon," Harvey said although he hadn't looked up from the core when Joe came in.
Joe stayed back by the wall, which was a foot thick, making the room relatively cool, maybe ninety degrees. The plastic-covered window faced the idling cars, poised for flight in case of a mishap, in case of a slip of Harvey's hands. Joe's mission orders now that he was at Trinity were to stay with Oppy at all times and make sure the project Director survived any accident. Harvey gave the core a final polish with an emery cloth. "I gave away my clarinet."
"Too bad. You had great potential," Joe said. Harvey's Critical Assembly team followed his every move with the intensity of chicks watching their mother turn an egg. One of them put on the table long brass tweezers and a small, shockproof case studded with plugs. He unlocked the case and raised the lid. On a bed of foam rubber lay a pearl, a one-inch ball of platinum-coated polonium. This was the core within the core, an "initiator" which would emit a burst of neutrons in the first millionth of a second of detonation. "I think I'll stick to what I'm good at," Harvey said. He re-opened the larger core, propping the top hemisphere with his finger. With his free hand he picked up the brass tweezers and used it to lift the tiny ball. He had to place the "initiator" in its nest in the centre of the core, and the insertion had to be done in slow motion while the building radiation was monitored. Harvey blinked through his sweat, but his hands didn't falter. His finger prodded open the core a little more, a little more as the ball and tweezer advanced. The ticking of the Geiger counters rose like the pulse of excited hearts. Oppy looked like he was going to sway and drop.
"Those icy atoms up and down my spine," Harvey sang softly. "The blue of ions when your eyes meet mine. A strange new tingle that I feel inside, and then that radiation starts its ride."
Oppy's pipe hit the floor and spun across the boards. Harvey froze, fingers in the maw of the two hemispheres. "Joe, will you please take Oppy for a walk?"
Outside in the hot, dry air, Joe found his shirt had soaked through with sweat. Oppy sat on the low stone wall, hat on his knee.
"I suspect that before his flight, Icarus was throwing up. I wish we could just go into the mountains again, Joe, go riding again like we used to. I've ridden that horse of mine just once this year. I know they don't need me in there, but it's my test, Joe." He looked up at Joe. While the rest of Oppy had been worn down to bones and clothes, the blue eyes had the intensity of a man enduring pain. "I asked Groves for another week or just another four days. When this is over, we'll go riding."
"Sure."
Harvey called Joe inside. The core was closed and complete and sat in a lead-lined wooden box.
"He's been like this since he got here. Maybe he should go back to the Hill."
"It's his test," Joe said.
They carried the box on a litter out to Harvey's car and put it on the back seat. Joe took Oppy in the jeep and slowly led the way to the tower. The breeze of late afternoon was picking up. Dust devils whipped around the tower base.
Inside the tent, Foote and Jaworski had removed the polar cap at the top of the bomb and taken out a brass plug so that the plutonium core could be inserted. Harvey opened his box and attached the core to a vacuum cup. He tested the seal, then hooked the chain of a manual hoist on to the cup's eye. He pulled off his lab coat and kicked it away. Tested the seal again. Harvey looked like a plump and innocent boy, the sweat coursing off his belly, his fine blonde hair standing as if magnetized. Foote cranked the core up from its box. From a corner of the tent, Oppy and Joe watched Jaworski steady the core with a pencil as Foote swung it over the waiting bomb. Wind beat on the tent.
"One proper dust devil and a few grains of sand and we can put our symmetrical implosion into a pisspot," Foote said.
He lowered the core. One moment it hovered over the bomb like a moon above a larger body, the next it was descending by its chain into the bomb's interior. And stuck.
Jaworski waved his hand up. His moustaches had started to sag. Foote cranked up the core and lowered it into the bomb again. It stuck.
Foote cranked the core halfway out of the bomb, slipped the hoist's ratchet and painstakingly let out the chain again. The core made its slow downward passage, nudging lenses of high explosive as it descended.
And stuck. By a millimetre or so, the plutonium core was simply too big, or the hollow inside the bomb was too small.
"I don't believe this," Oppy said and stared first at the bomb and then at Foote. "It isn't possible. You measured wrong?"
The tent walls shook. Measured wrong? Wouldn't fit? Like a pair of tight jeans? Joe pictured anyone telling that to General Groves, and he could see every man was imagining the same scene.
Harvey laughed.
"It's the desert heat. The plutonium's hot, expanded. Grade school physics. Leave the core where it is, it'll cool."
It took five minutes, but the temperature of the plutonium and high explosive equalized and the core slipped meekly into place. Jaworski unsealed the vacuum cup, and as Foote raised the chain Harvey inserted a three-foot-long manganese wire down to the resting core to check its neutron count. Connected to a Geiger counter, the wire detected a cascade of ions, a noise like a hive. "I'm done." Harvey withdrew the needle. He paused at the hole as if he couldn't trust the moment, then slipped quickly out of the tent flap.
At once, Foote and Jaworski began replacing high explosive. Lenses that appeared loose they made snug with Scotch tape. As the work went on into the evening, lamps were brought in. Thunder could be heard walking across the valley.
"Italy has just declared war on Japan." Harvey returned to the tent.
"Hell, this war is almost over," Joe said.
26
SATURDAY
Joe ran in the early morning; he did roadwork whenever he had the chance now. Punching the air, ducking, slipping punches right, left. Cool sweat ran down his chest.
As he ran, he played music in his head. He worked on a "Fugue for Night". He thought it could be bebop, but it became a double waltz for minor chords, constantly changing, rising and falling because there were so many kinds of night. Mountain night. Desert night. Even the deep, fungal night of the Philippines had variations. Then there was the interior void without moon or heart that was life without Anna. Sometimes the physical reaction came before the thought itself. A burning in the throat, a hollowness in the chest, and then memory. If she was driving to Chicago, she was still on the road. It was as if his body were actively betraying him. Sometimes his eyes told him they actually saw her in the dark, as if hope could gather shadows and take on human form. Then the shadows would fade and he was alone again on the flat void, and he knew how much he preferred even illusions.
Sometimes, with sweat and concentration, he didn't think of her at all.
He brought down the moon on flatted fifths.
The sweat poured.
At eight in the morning, Foote struck the tent at the base of the tower and Joe hooked a pulley cable to the rim of the bomb. It had to rise 100 feet to the trap door in the shed on the tower platform, a long way to lift 5,000 Ibs of steel and explosive and 11 lbs of plutonium. The sky was a paralyzing blue, blue as a burst of water; not a ragtail hawk up yet, only the dots of weather balloons basking in the sun.
When Foote waved up to the platform, the two-cycle engine of the pulley motor started overhead. As the cable went taut and the sphere and its cradle cleared the ground enough to stir, Foote's team began throwing GI mattresses down from the back of a truck. The bomb rose cautiously an inch at a time, while Joe and Foote slipped mattresses under the ascending sphere. "This is the greatest scientific programme in the history of mankind?" Joe asked.
"Absolutely," Foote said.
"If the cable snaps, you're going to catch a 2V2-ton bomb with mattresses?"
"I concede we may have reached a certain point of intellectual exhaustion." Foote blithely watched the bomb rise. "Reminds me of the late Queen Victoria being lifted on board a ship. A feeling somewhere between the religious and the ridiculous."
Much of the exhaustion was located next to the tower, in the jeep where Oppy was talking to Jaworski. Oppy's eyes were red from the alkali dust.
The bomb rose smoothly as a plumb, stabilizing side ropes stretched to skates that jerked up the rails within two opposite tower legs. Joe and Foote could stack mattresses up to ten feet, but no higher. The bomb, rocking gently in the air, rose to twenty feet, to fifty feet. After all the security back at the Hill, it occurred to Joe that he was looking at the easiest potshot of the war; if a saboteur wanted a chance, this was it.
"Where is Captain Augustino?" Joe asked as Oppy approached the pile of mattresses.
"The people back on the Hill tested a dummy of the detonators last night," Oppy told Foote, ignoring Joe. "There was no symmetrical shock. I am informed as of five minutes ago that we have a dud."
"It'll work." Foote tipped the brim of his sombrero the better to keep his eyes on the bomb.
"Two billion dollars." Oppy laughed. The laugh became a cough that sounded like his lungs were ripping. While he bent over, he lit a cigarette. "No, Joe, to answer a question of immaculate irrelevance, I haven't seen Captain Augustino. Please get it through your skull that I don't care about Captain Augustino. Captain Augustino does not concern me."
"I suppose he concerns Joe." Foote craned his neck. "From rumours I've heard, I supposed he'd like to nail Joe's cock to the ground and shoot him through the head."
"The captain is after bigger game than that," Joe said.
The bomb shook. A skate rattled down a track, its rope whipping the air until the skate dug itself into the dirt at the tower base. Forty feet overhead, the bomb slowly yawed from side to side, still attached to the other skate and twisting with a new inertia.
"Fucking Mother of God," someone said.
"Dear me," said Foote.
The bones in Oppy's face seemed to sag.
"The cable's stuck!" the man on the platform shouted. "Coming off the wheel. I'll have to free the other skate."
It was Private Eberly. A soldier in shorts. Crew cut. Gawky as a crane, but he came down the tower's steel rungs like a hero, taking each flight of steps Navy-style. The second landing put him on a level with the skewed bomb, but one tower leg away. He'd have to walk across a narrow, open horizontal brace of the scaffolding fifty feet above the ground. Diagonal braces would support him most of the way, but in the middle where the braces rose out of reach, Eberly would have to be a tightrope walker. Why not? After the most powerful weapon in the world left the hands of geniuses like Oppy and Harvey and Foote, why shouldn't its fate hang on the nerve of an ordinary soldier? Let him be the man of the day.
Jaworski ran from the jeep.
"Don't try it!"
"Try it," Oppy whispered.
Eberly clung to the rising brace as long as he could, then spread his arms for balance. The steel was about four inches across, and Eberly moved on anxious, splayed feet. Don't stop, Joe thought. The soldier tilted, regained his equilibrium and stood motionless in the centre of the horizontal brace. Don't look down, Joe thought. Eyes level, Eberly started again towards the far tower leg. He misstepped. He pulled his foot back on to the steel. His arms waggled like duck wings. He looked down and dived.
Eberly turned in the air and landed on his back in the middle of the mattresses. He slid off the stack to the ground and to his knees, winded but unhurt.
"Joe?" Oppy said.
Joe was already propping the ladder against the tower. He climbed to the steel steps of the tower leg and climbed those to the second landing, where Eberly had been standing a minute before.
Because Joe was taller, he could hang on to the diagonal strut longer. The breeze was stronger at forty feet than he'd expected. The steel ball slowly rolled and although Joe knew he was being watched from below he felt oddly alone with the bomb, as if it had been waiting only for him. He spread his arms wide, catching the wind, and walked with a quick, steady pace across the beam to the descending diagonal brace and to the tower leg.
The skate was jammed. Joe called down for a hammer and caught it as it spun up. He hit the skate and freed it, and the bomb gently swung to the centre of the tower. Joe tucked the hammer into his belt and walked, arms out, back across the beam.
Joe was vaguely aware of someone saying "Bravo" down on the ground. He continued up the tower steps, rising to the second and third landings and on to the platform at the top. Most of the platform was taken up by the eight-by-twelve shed of corrugated sheet iron. Outside was the engine and hoist. Joe started the engine. As the pulley wheel turned, the cable slipped back into its groove. Joe could see the bomb inching up the scaffolding again. He kept his heel on the engine switch, ready to stop it in case the skate jammed a second time.
West, he had a distant view of volcanic cones. South was more interesting. A blast smudge showed on the desert floor where a practice blast, a mere 100 tons of TNT spiced with isotopes, had been set off on V-E Day. Fire-breaks had been ploughed around the blast, giving it the look of a bullseye. Farther on was the ranch house where Harvey had assembled the core the day before. There were random scars of tyre tracks and a tarmac road that ended in the middle distance at South-10,000, the control bunker six miles away that would fire the bomb. Joe could just make out the slap-up buildings and the windmill of the Base Camp ten miles away. Behind the camp was a dry sea of brush and dust that lapped against the Oscura Mountains. The name meant "dark". And, low and broken, the Oscura seemed to lie in the shadow of larger, invisible mountains. It was a region of illusion. On the other side of the Oscura were snowy dunes called White Sands. Joe noticed that tarmac roads also ran west and north from the tower, new roads virtually without traffic, in place purely for disaster.
"The fact is, I'm scared of heights." Eberly climbed back on to the platform.
"Heights are about the last thing you need to be afraid of around here," Joe said.
As the bomb eased up through the platform, Eberly removed the trap door from the shed roof. When the bomb was halted at the pinnacle of the hoist, Joe and Eberly gently swung the hoist 180 degrees, so that the sphere hung over the open roof. Then Eberly lowered the bomb and Joe bolted the cradle to its new home on the shed's floor of solid oak planks.
Oppy, Jaworski and Foote arrived up the steps while Eberly and Joe swung the hoist again to bring up the heavy detonator gear. The Explosive Assembly team carried up electrical leads and coaxial cable. Harvey climbed to the shed to open the bomb's polar cap and re-check the neutron count with the manganese wire.
"Forty-two hours," Foote muttered to Joe.
"You'll make it."
"Oh, I know the bomb will, I mean him."
Oppy leaned against the shed wall, eyes intent on the bomb. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and showed wrists like straws. His entire body seemed to maintain a faint existence only to carry the painfully brooding skull.
Joe ran at night and on the road met what he first thought was Einstein, but was Santa, stumbling along, his white hair drooping, mouth gnawing distractedly on his moustache, wearing a jacket and long scarf.
"How are the hives?" Joe asked.
"Much better. Really under control. Up to my chin. A walking bandage of skin salve."
"I thought you weren't going to volunteer for Trinity."
"I wasn't in the La Fonda," he told Joe, "so someone else volunteered me, naturally. They gave me a hut down at the Base Camp. Already getting some interesting cases, GIs who hear the scientists talking and, as a result, focus their anxieties on the end of the world."
"That's what you predicted."
"Thank you. So, in fact, it's worked out. It's really an opportunity to be here. If you think about our psychological history really being built on anxieties. Of a sexual nature or a religious nature or a combination of the two. Then we may be on the ground floor of the primary anxiety of the rest of history."
Joe ran on to Shapiro's station at the North-10,000 bunker.
On his return leg, Joe met no one. The valley floor lay empty in the semi-dark cast by a half-moon. Beyond the mountains on either side were storms, lightning muffled in clouds so far off they were silent. In his mind, he saw Anna step again out of the Rio, water and light flowing from her. In memory, the river was black and filled with coral, shell and turquoise.
27
SUNDAY
After non-denominational services at the Base Camp picnic tables, with the bomb in place at the top of the tower and only awaiting the arrival of General Groves, some men spent the hours before Trinity hunting antelope or searching the area for arrowheads or silver mines. Oppy searched for Fermi and Joe drove.
"We left dummy rigs of the detonators and the firing rig back on the Hill." Oppy spoke more to himself than to Joe. "Yesterday morning, the detonator dummy failed. Yesterday afternoon, the firing unit dummy failed. Truman is in Berlin expecting news of our great success and I already know that we will fail. If Fermi thinks we'll fail, I'll call it off."
"Fermi is checking blast measurements. He could be anywhere on the test range," Joe said.
"Then we'll cover the test range. Everyone here seems to think they're at summer camp. It would be good to speak to one serious person."
At the lean-to that constituted the North-10,000 MP station, Sergeant Shapiro said he hadn't seen Fermi.
"We did have some intruders last night, though. Could be locals."
"Local rabbits, local deer, local cactus in the moonlight?" Oppy asked.
"Could be." Shapiro backed off.
Oppy pointed into the brush and Joe swung the jeep off the road, manoeuvring to drive a course generally on the tower's six-mile periphery, where many of the last-minute adjustments to instruments were taking place, although it occurred to Joe that searching for Fermi might be Oppy's excuse to get away from the tower and the Base Camp. Maybe they weren't looking for anyone, maybe they were hiding. The bomb wasn't the only thing on the point of collapse.