Full Body Burden

by Kristen Iversen

  “Okay.”

  Tonka flattens his ears back toward me as if he doesn’t like what he hears.

  “Just don’t let him know you’re nervous. Remember, you’re in control.”

  I nod.

  “Off you go.” Glen makes a clucking sound, like a chicken.

  Tonka doesn’t move.

  “Give him a little nudge with your heel, honey,” Glen says.

  Tonka doesn’t seem to know what to do.

  “Here then,” my dad offers, and reaches out and swats him hard across the rump.

  Tonka leaps straight up like a grasshopper and suddenly we’re lurching across the field. His back is as smooth and slick as a watermelon. I clap my legs against his sides and Tonka understands this as a command for a dead run. Fenceposts fly past. I lunge forward onto his neck and try to find something to grab.

  “Hang on!” my sisters yell.

  “Grab one rein and turn his head in!” Glen calls. “Make him turn and stop! Pull a rein!”

  I’ve lost the reins. I catch a blurred glimpse of my mother, who is shouting something about not running through barbed wire.

  I twist my hands into his mane. And then I see it coming. The one apple tree—the big one—where we pick green apples filled with worm-holes to take home to our mother. The trunk is old and gnarled and there are two large limbs, one on each side.

  Tonka is a veteran of tricks. Later it will occur to me that this was not his first performance. Just before we make contact, he drops his head and slides under the bough, smooth as a limbo dancer. The branch hits me straight across the chest, full force.

  I fall flat on my back. Is this death? I can’t breathe. By the time Glen’s face is peering into mine, I manage a gasp.

  “Don’t worry,” he consoles me. A wide grin spreads across his face. “Everyone gets the wind knocked out of them once or twice.”

  “You fall off, you have to get right back on,” my dad adds, jogging up.

  I lift my head and Tonka trots over, swinging his head from side to side in a kind of celebratory shake. He sniffs me over in a friendly way. Do I have more horse candy?

  “She can wait until tomorrow to climb on again,” my mother calls. “Birthday cake first.”

  I stand. The ground feels a little shaky beneath my boots. Glen hands me the reins. Tonka gives me a nudge and obediently follows me back to the house.

  For the first time I’m in love.

  A FEW weeks after Tonka arrives, my grandmother comes for a visit. Opal is tall and elegant and wears sweaters from her travels in Norway with my grandfather, a Lutheran minister who has recently passed away. Opal’s shoes and handbag match perfectly and she speaks her mind, an unusual trait in our family. She doesn’t approve of the glass of bourbon my father often has in his hand and she’s not sure how she feels about her daughter’s marriage, even after four kids. But she wants to see the new house we’re building out by Rocky Flats, even if it’s not much more than a hole in the ground.

  My parents have a new Kodak and my mother wants a photo of the four of us kids with Tonka. A photo Opal can take back with her, a photo we can use for our Christmas card. I lure Tonka to the fence with horse candy and pull the bridle over his ears. We decide not to use a saddle so we can get more kids on his back. My mother aims the camera. My dad swings Kurt up first. “You sit in back,” he says, his voice a little too loud, the edges of his words tumbling one over the next. “You’re the little guy. It’s easier on the horse’s kidneys.”

  “Okay.” Kurt grins a toothless grin.

  “Karma next,” Dad says. He swings her up and Karma’s long legs hang down Tonka’s sides. Tonka gets a little jumpy.

  Karin goes up next. She grips the mane at the base of Tonka’s neck. “Whoa,” she says as Tonka sidesteps. It’s crowded now. My plan is to stand in front and hold the reins, but suddenly I’m lifted from behind. “There you go!” Dad exclaims, and tosses me up, too high, too hard, too fast.

  I have no time to protest. I land on Tonka’s neck. He ducks his head, spooked, and I fall forward. Karin tumbles on top of me. Karma grabs Kurt and they slide off together, just before Tonka bolts.

  My mother pulls Karin up off the ground. “This one’s okay,” she says. Karma and Kurt seem fine. I can taste dirt in my mouth. “Let me see that arm,” Mom says. I hold up my right arm and it hangs at an angle. “I think you’ve broken it,” she says.

  “It looks like the bone is sticking out.” Karin likes graphic details.

  “I’ll take her to the hospital,” Opal says. My mother hands her the keys. We drive to the emergency room, Opal humming grimly behind the wheel. When we return hours later, I have a white plaster cast and a sling. Opal reports that not a single tear was shed. “She’s pretty tough,” she says.

  “All my kids are tough,” my mother says. We sit down to a dinner of hamburger casserole, canned peas, and Jell-O salad. No words are exchanged between my father and grandmother.

  Later, as I lie in my bed with my arm in a cast—now covered with flower-power marker, thanks to my sisters and brother—I hear Opal arguing with my mother in the living room about my father, his drinking, how it’s affecting the children. What is she going to do?

  No one argues in front of the children. Nothing is said in front of the children. We know not to talk about our father’s drinking even among ourselves.

  MY ARM heals. Months pass. Our Sunday-morning drives continue as our new house nears completion. On this Sunday—May 11, 1969—the Colorado sun is clear and bright and it’s Mother’s Day. My sisters and I wear matching dresses and saddle shoes. Kurt has on a little sweater and tie, and my dad wears a clean shirt. At the restaurant, our favorite Italian place, my mother tells us to behave ourselves as we straggle from the car and gather around the fountain on the restaurant’s patio. My dad digs into his pocket for pennies and we each make a wish before dropping one into the water. “This means that you’ll always come back,” my dad says. “Just like the fountain in Rome. It’s like a curse.”

  “It means you’ll always come back to a place that makes you happy,” my mother corrects, and after an hour’s wait—there are many families in the courtyard waiting to celebrate Mother’s Day—we are seated at a table. My mother orders a Manhattan and gives me the liquor-soaked cherry. We eat big plates of spaghetti with fresh bread and butter and spumoni for dessert, so much that we have to sleep on the way home, the four of us slumped together in the backseat, property lines forgotten, our stomachs so full they ache.

  TWO MILES away, in an underground plutonium processing building at Rocky Flats, a few scraps of plutonium spontaneously spark and ignite in a glove box.

  A glove box is where plutonium triggers are made. The production line at Rocky Flats consists of a series of linked, sealed, stainless-steel glove boxes, up to sixty-four feet in length, in which plutonium is shaped by human hands. The glove boxes are designed to be kept at a slight vacuum so that any accidental leak will draw air into the box rather than allow plutonium particles to escape. Uniform-clad workers stand in front of the glove boxes and place their arms into heavy, lead-lined gloves and peer through an acrylic window to mold and hammer the plutonium “buttons” into shape. Running above the glove-box line is the chainveyor, an enclosed conveyor system that moves plutonium from task to task along the line. Tall, transparent plastic glove boxes move the plutonium up and down, between the glove-box line and the chainveyor, like dumbwaiters. Small stepladders are provided for workers, particularly women, who aren’t tall enough to reach the arm portals. It’s difficult and cumbersome work, with no small amount of risk, as plutonium is highly combustible.

  There is no immediate alarm—the alarm has been disconnected to save space in the crowded production room. Production takes precedence over safety.

  The spark goes unnoticed.

  In sixteen years of operation, the plant has quietly doubled in size. More than three thousand employees work their daily shifts and then go home, where they can’t talk
about where they work or what they do. Few people have clearances to enter more than one building. No one knows exactly what happens at Rocky Flats. Workers in one area don’t know what other workers do. The press doesn’t know. It’s all under the cloak of national security.

  The half-buried 771 complex—several buildings designed to manufacture plutonium—is at the heart of the plant, surrounded by guard towers and barbed wire. A bluff hides it from the road. Hundreds of glove boxes snake across a floor area that encompasses two buildings: Building 776 and Building 771. The production floor is like a big, shiny kitchen stretching the length of two football fields.

  The word trigger is almost euphemistic. In a nuclear warhead or hydrogen bomb, there are two steps: an initial fission explosion, called the “trigger,” followed by a secondary fusion explosion. Each stage releases nuclear energy, and the two stages happen so quickly that they appear to be simultaneous. The principal isotope, or form, of plutonium in these bombs is plutonium-239. The trigger is cradled in conventional explosives, which compress the plutonium inward, creating a high enough temperature and strong enough pressure to initiate an atomic chain reaction. Roughly the size of a softball or grapefruit, this initial bomb, smaller than the Nagasaki plutonium implosion bomb, triggers thermonuclear fusion between tritium and deuterium, the two forms of heavy hydrogen, and is capable of leveling a small city by itself. But the detonation that creates this fission explosion then triggers the far more powerful fusion explosion of a hydrogen bomb—a mushroom cloud, as in the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.

  The plutonium triggers created at Rocky Flats form the explosive fissionable core essential to every nuclear weapon in the United States’ arsenal. Yet each pit is an atomic bomb in its own right, of the same type as the Trinity and Nagasaki bombs.

  Precise manufacture of the trigger is crucial, as any flaw or variation could cause a nuclear warhead to malfunction. A perfect, “diamond-stamped” trigger is the goal, again and again, whatever the risk.

  On this day there are few workers due to the holiday. Only a skeleton crew is on hand. More than 7,640 pounds of plutonium—roughly enough for one thousand thermonuclear bombs—is held in the maze of glove boxes, pipes, tanks, and containers.

  Small fires are common. When a plutonium chip sparks, the worker douses it with sand or drops it into machining oil to snuff it out. There is no automatic sprinkler system or floor drainage. Water is used on plutonium only as a last resort because water can cause plutonium to go “critical”—that is, it can create a spontaneous nuclear chain reaction that can be lethal to anyone within close proximity.

  But no one sees this spark. The spark in the glove box grows into a flame.

  Four security guards, Stan, Bill, Joe, and Al, are driving to work. They don’t mind working on Sunday, even though it’s Mother’s Day. The shift is quiet and the pay is good. Like many Rocky Flats employees, they like to carpool. They know each other well. One of the best things about working at Rocky Flats is that it feels like family. Stan likes driving; he’s behind the wheel of his new Chevy Corvair. Joe, who tops three hundred pounds, rides shotgun. Bill and Al are both tall and have folded themselves into the backseat as best they can.

  Given the constant ravages of wind, rain, and snow, the road out to Rocky Flats can be rough. Old-timers tell stories of flat tires and overheated radiators in the summer, black ice and whiteouts in the winter. Back in the fifties, when the plant was being built, the weather sometimes made it impossible to work. The wind alone could push a man off his feet, and cattle knocked down outhouses while men were still inside. That’s all changed now. The road is paved and the old guard shack is gone, replaced by a compound of more than ninety buildings, all hidden from the road by a bluff. Only the entrance gate is visible.

  May can be as cold as February, but this afternoon is tentatively calm. Cottony clouds rest their bellies flat against a blue sky. Meadowlarks sing. The dry brown of winter has given way to foothills spotted with a few pine trees, hardy grass, and fragile wildflowers. Beyond the foothills a sharp-toothed ridge runs from north to south, with the dark, flat slabs of the Boulder flatirons in the distance. The road is nearly deserted. Families are at home or church or waiting for tables at restaurants.

  Stan Skinger was twenty years old when he started working at Rocky Flats. He’d worked as a plumber during high school back in Illinois and traveled west for the wedding of a friend. His friend had a Colorado bride, but Stan fell in love with Colorado. He heard about the plant and applied for a job. He didn’t know what he was getting into, and he didn’t particularly mind. He just wanted to be in Colorado. Rock climbing, biking, skiing, he loved it all.

  Like many employees, Stan started out as a janitor. The pay was good—no, great. And he didn’t mind being a janitor. He got a kick out of the old coal miners who worked in the bowels of the plant where the plutonium work was done—the hot zone, they called it. And he liked meeting the new college kids who came in all cocky about climbing the corporate ladder. He kept an eye on the job postings, and when a position in Plant Protection opened up, he applied and became a guard. Just when his paycheck was getting really decent, he was drafted. Stan served two tours in Vietnam, the second time in Special Forces. He didn’t like to talk about what he saw there. It changed him.

  His wife and his job were waiting when he returned. But after two years in Vietnam, Stan wasn’t sure he wanted to go back to Rocky Flats. He’d have to carry a gun and he felt a little jumpy. And he wasn’t naïve. He knew what they did at Rocky Flats. It was a bomb factory. Most employees didn’t want to think too much about that. No one used the word bomb. They had special words for the plutonium disks that rolled off the production line: triggers, pits, buttons. The bomb was called nothing more serious than a “device” or “gadget.” The workers were making the parts, not pulling the trigger.

  Stan wasn’t the only one who felt uneasy. Like some of the old-timers who had been in the Navy and seen the nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific, or served in the Army and experienced some of the atomic bomb tests in Nevada, employee Jim Kelly—who started working at the plant in 1958, and eventually presided over the union—knew right from the start what they did at the plant. He knew the destructive power of the bomb. It was terrifying. He and other workers reconciled themselves with the notion that when the “device” left the plant, it couldn’t explode. That was technically true, since the nuclear bombs from Rocky Flats were sent down to Amarillo, Texas, where they were packed into a nest of conventional explosives.

  Jim admitted to himself that this argument was like somebody saying he worked in a dynamite factory, but he didn’t make explosives because the blasting caps were made somewhere else. It was a way to deny what they were doing. It bothered him, but he kept it to himself. He didn’t talk to his family about it, and like others he tried to repress the enormity of what was going on.

  Other workers had similar sentiments. Dr. Robert Rothe, a nuclear physicist who performed approximately 1,700 nuclear experiments—many of them extremely dangerous—at a laboratory at Rocky Flats, felt “somewhat divorced from the actual nuclear weapon itself. In fact, I have hardly ever even seen any of the components for a nuclear weapon.”

  As far as Stan Skinger was concerned, the world had lost its innocence when the first atomic bomb was dropped. He had been three years old when that happened. But he remembered. He remembered his parents talking about it. You couldn’t go back after something like that. It was a done deal. In a rational world, there would be no need for nuclear weapons. But human nature didn’t allow people to be rational, he felt. At least not all at the same time.

  He gave it some thought and decided to go back to Rocky Flats after all. There he met a kindred spirit, a guard named Bill Dennison, and they became fast friends.

  Bill Dennison is a big, soft-spoken man, fifteen years older than Stan. He, too, keeps his war experiences to himself, although his are from a different war. After ninth grade he dropped out of school, left home, an
d spent his teens working on ranches in Colorado and Wyoming. At seventeen he joined the Army and was sent to Korea, where he served as a machine-gunner in an infantry company until, as he later described it, a mortar shell “blew him all over the field.” He was surprised to find himself still breathing. Of the 120 men in his unit, he was one of only 36 who survived. He and his buddies were trapped for three days without water before they crawled far enough to find a stream. They drank and got sick. A few days later they reached a point upstream and realized the water was filled with rotting bodies.

  Bill’s health was never the same.

  When Bill returned to the states in 1951, he needed a job. His older brother worked at Los Alamos, the laboratory in New Mexico that developed the first nuclear bomb. Los Alamos was a tight-knit, closed community—a company town, really—surrounded by a stunning landscape. Bill liked it. His brother told him to check out Rocky Flats. The pay was good and the work steady.

  It turned out that Bill was old enough to fight for his country but too young to work for Rocky Flats. He had to wait a few months until he turned twenty-one and the government completed his background check. Finally, in August 1952, Bill became Rocky Flats employee number 972 and started work as a guard. It wasn’t long before he was offered a promotion to chemical operator—a worker on the production line in the hot zone—and the raise that went along with it. He took the job.

  Bill knew the basics of radiation: you couldn’t feel it, you couldn’t see it, you couldn’t smell it, you couldn’t taste it. You wouldn’t know if you were exposed. But with enough exposure, you got sick. Too much exposure and you died. Like most employees, though, he wasn’t too worried. There was a lot of talk about safety. Given what he’d been through already, it seemed a relatively small risk.

  But Bill didn’t last long as a chem op. He was surprised to discover that he didn’t have the nerve to work the glove-box line, holding plutonium semi-spheres the size of small half-grapefruits in his lead-lined gloves. Lingering health problems made it hard for him to stand for long hours, and it was a very tense business. Sometimes things went wrong.