Full Body Burden

by Kristen Iversen

  When my parents sign the final mortgage and insurance papers, they’re also asked to sign some kind of waiver or statement about Rocky Flats from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Nothing too specific, just some language acknowledging that they’ve been told about plutonium in the soil, at a level the government says is safe. Everyone in the neighborhood signs it. They wouldn’t be building so many houses, my parents reason, if it weren’t safe.

  Finally, our house is ready.

  Every family that moves into Bridledale is fast-tracking on the American dream. It’s a blueprint for the perfect place to raise a family: four bedrooms, a gold-and-avocado living room, indoor-outdoor carpet, a kitchen with new appliances, and a formal dining room for show. My mother gets a bay window in the living room. My father gets a wet bar in the basement. Polynesian-style wet bars are all the rage (Trader Vic’s is my parents’ favorite restaurant), along with big backyard grills and trampolines. My mother hangs a couple of coconut heads from the ceiling behind the bar. Some of the neighbors are building bomb shelters in their basements and stocking them with radios, canned goods, and fold-up cots. “Bunch of paranoids,” my dad grumbles.

  We christen our new level of affluence with a bearskin rug, a gift from another grateful but strapped-for-cash client at my dad’s law practice. There’s a hole in the side where it was shot, and fleas hide in the fur. The jaws gape in a vivid plastic pink. My mother lays it in front of the fireplace as our first piece of new furniture.

  I’m eleven. My blond hair is long and straight and so fine that my ears stick out. I wear boys’ jeans because they have no hips, and I wonder if I will ever wear a bra. My heart belongs to Tonka, but I can’t wait to have a boyfriend.

  The developer, Rex Haag, is a slender, dark-haired man whose enthusiasm for the new community is contagious. Rex and his family, who live in the neighborhood, occasionally attend the cocktail parties and cookouts hosted by residents to welcome new families. A few months after we move into the neighborhood, Rex and his wife have a new baby. They name her Kristen. It’s an unusual name for the time, and my mother is convinced they stole it. But she’s willing to forgive. “There’s nothing prettier than a Norwegian name,” she says.

  AT THE end of the summer, the AEC completes a report, classified secret at the time, confirming that forty-one Rocky Flats employees endured substantial doses of radiation during the Mother’s Day fire. Both the AEC and Dow Chemical state that no contaminants were released off-site and the public was never at risk. One plutonium conveyor line, two tons of the Plexiglas windows on the glove-box lines, and tons of plastic walls were devastated by the fire. The fire results in more than $50 million in damage, and the cleanup takes almost two years to complete. Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg, chairman of the AEC, notes that despite the fact that “the damage is the most extensive ever incurred in the weapons production complex … operations will continue.” AEC officials urgently appeal to Congress behind closed doors for $45 million to repair the facility. Production is halted temporarily, but, the Pentagon notes, the stoppage “is not expected to affect presently planned commitments to the Department of Defense.”

  Due to pressure from concerned scientists, activists, and the media, for the first time the AEC admits publicly that small amounts of plutonium have been released from the plant, but emphasizes that it presents “no risk to the health of employees in the plant or to citizens in the surrounding area.”

  Bill and Stan are assigned guard duty in the building they saved, patrolling the dark interior, looking for hot spots. Costumed workers in bright white-and-orange hazmat suits scrape out the radioactive mess. The plant begins sending trucks of drums and barrels filled with radioactive waste to a waste site in Idaho, where it’s dumped off the trucks like ordinary garbage.

  Charlie Perrisi, the guy who carried Bill out of the burning room, got a high body burden. There’s so much plutonium in his system that they say he can’t take any more. They pull him out of the fire department and make him a janitor. His salary is reduced as a result.

  No health warnings are issued to other workers at Rocky Flats. Employees at the plant are not allowed access to their personal health records, and over the years many of those records are lost or misplaced anyway.

  Bill will work at Rocky Flats for another thirty-six years. Thirty-six is his lucky number. But he has his problems. No more children, for one thing—he’s sterile after the fire. But he’s still a lucky guy. He has three children, and he and his wife decide to take in many foster children over the coming years. He survived the two fires at Rocky Flats. He survived the Korean War, one of 36 guys out of a group of 120. Sometimes he still thinks about the war and the faces of the 84 who died. It bothers him that he doesn’t know all their names.

  Stan Skinger is worried, even though Rocky Flats says he’s clean. At first he believes them, but then he changes his mind. He requests a lung scan, even though the plant doesn’t feel it’s necessary, and the results are inconclusive. Stan’s lost a little faith in things, maybe in the plant as a whole. He thinks about going into the tropical fish business—a long-standing hobby—and after another year or so he quits Rocky Flats and opens his own shop. Eventually he becomes a youth counselor. Years later, when he develops mesothelioma, his doctor will attribute it to those few moments when he lost his mask in the 1969 fire.

  With a final price tag of $70.7 million, the 1969 fire at Rocky Flats breaks all previous records for any industrial accident in the United States. Roughly $20 million worth of plutonium is consumed in the fire. A congressional investigation later that year reveals that government officials hid behind national security to cover up details of the fire, and it was only the “heroic efforts” of the firefighters [that] “limited the fire and prevented hundreds of square miles [from] radiation and exposure.” The report recommends extensive building modifications, and notes that if AEC officials had not disregarded the recommendations following the 1957 fire, there never would have been a fire in 1969. Further, fire investigators note that although they determine that the fire was ignited by oily rags tainted with plutonium, this fact did not appear in the final investigation report, as AEC officials “were afraid it was going to implicate certain individuals.”

  MY FATHER’S law practice grows, and so does our extended family. Guppies and goldfish seem harmless enough, and my mother readily agrees to that. Then come hamsters and gerbils that reproduce at breakneck speed and elude capture by scooting under the heat registers. We progress to pet finches and miniature frogs and crawdads and—for a short time—a baby piranha named Killer.

  Tonka, though, is my real passion. If I leave the tip of a carrot sticking out of the back pocket of my jeans, he steals it as smoothly as a pickpocket, and he can eat an apple whole. He licks my neck and face from the collarbone all the way up my cheek. My mother says it’s just for the taste of salt, but I know it’s love.

  Our progress with training is slow. He likes to play hard-to-get. I stand at the gate and call his name and up pops his head. On a good day he casually picks his way around the reeds and tall grasses and moves in my general direction. More often than not we have a chase. I climb through the fence, halter and rope behind my back. He waits until I get within arm’s reach, just close enough to offer an open palm with a piece of horse candy. He extends his neck, lips up the treat, and spins around, galloping off to the other side of the pasture.

  Often it’s dark by the time I catch him. Just in time for his dinner.

  He hates saddles. When I tighten the cinch, he sucks in air and swells his belly, waiting to exhale until I get my boot in the stirrup. I swing up on his back and the saddle flips under his belly. He turns to look at me on the ground, pleased with his success.

  I decide bareback is best.

  A successful mount doesn’t mean a successful ride. If Tonka doesn’t want to go anywhere, he doesn’t. He just stops. All sorts of things capture his interest: dogs, cats, butterflies, weeds. Even bushy purple-topped thistles, wh
ich he likes to pluck and eat with bared teeth to avoid pricking his lips. He’s a renegade, but he has delicate table manners. If I urge him forward with my heels—or spurs, a poor suggestion from my mother—he rears straight up, again and again, like a mechanical horse, knocking me in the face with the back of his head. His aim is pretty good, and more than once I stagger into the kitchen with blood dripping from my nose.

  Glen, who’s still working off his debt to my father, offers his advice. “Break a water balloon over the top of his head,” he says. “The horse will think it’s blood dripping down his face and he’ll never rear up again. It never fails.”

  It fails. Aiming is difficult and a water balloon, it turns out, is hard to break on a moving target. The balloon splashes on the ground. Tonka twists his head around and looks up at me as if to ask, Are you an idiot?

  A truce is declared. For the moment it seems just fine to sit on Tonka’s warm back under a tall cottonwood tree next to the irrigation ditch that runs across the back of our property. I drop the reins and Tonka drops his head and his eyes half-close in a doze. I lie back and rest my head on his haunches, soft as a pillow. We listen to the meadowlarks and horseflies and the constant drone of construction workers.

  ONE AFTERNOON my sister Karin and I notice a car parked on our street with a woman asleep on the backseat. The window is cracked. We peer in to see if she’s sleeping or dead. Her jaw is slack and her skin pasty white. The front seat is a jumble of clothes and toiletries. “She’s dead,” Karin says. A blanket that must have covered her legs has slipped to the floor of the car. “Someone killed her.” Karin is the kind of girl who will grow up to love Freddy Krueger movies.

  “She’s not dead,” I say. “There’s no blood.” By the time we get home and tell our mother, the car has disappeared.

  Our mother is reassuring. “She just needs to find a new home, that’s all,” she says. “Sometimes people get caught in circumstances.”

  I wonder if she has a husband, or a job.

  “Maybe she’s an alcoholic,” Karin volunteers.

  My mother’s look is sharp. “How do you know that word?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” Karin retorts, and the matter is dropped. I add the word alcoholic to the list of words we’ve been strictly instructed never to say, words like shit and fuck and damn. Even dang is off-limits. “Just say uff-da,” my mother instructs. “That’s what good Norwegians say.”

  We are well-behaved children. We know what not to say. Money, religion, politics, liquor: mum’s the word. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. When I finally start my period, my mother acknowledges the occasion with an incomprehensible pink booklet on my dresser about sperm and eggs.

  KURT CELEBRATES his third birthday and we all share a sticky-sweet chocolate cake. My father misses our gathering, as he often does, spending the evening at his office. When he comes home later that night, the house is quiet. I sit in the living room, reading, listening for him. We barely speak. His hours are odd and he spends little time at home, but when he’s there, his presence is heavy and I always know where he is in the house. Often he sits brooding in his recliner in the den with the lights out, a big square bottle of bourbon tucked just out of sight.

  “Hi, Kris,” he says. This night his voice is hoarse. “What’s for dinner?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. Dinner was over long ago; the question is strictly rhetorical.

  “How’s school?” he asks. His shirt is rumpled. His fingers, long and slender, are stained yellow at the tips from smoking. His mind is always on something else. My mind is busy, too, reading every cue and signal, keeping track of all the things that cannot be discussed, that must not be remembered, that have to be erased.

  But the scent of tobacco that clings to my father’s clothes and skin is familiar and, in a way, comforting.

  “Fine,” I reply. He doesn’t want details. I close my book. The Carpetbaggers. A book my mother wouldn’t allow me to read that I swiped from under her bed. For hours I’ve watched a steady glow on the horizon, the lights that burn every night, all night long, against the dark mountain range. They’re as predictable as the stars in the sky. “What is that, Dad?” I ask.

  He turns and looks out the window. “What?”

  “Those lights.”

  “Oh.” He lights a cigarette. “That,” he says brusquely but with pride, “is Rocky Flats. The defense of our country.”

  YEARS LATER, when Kristen Haag is eleven, she comes home with a bump on her knee. Like other children in the neighborhood, she rides horses across the windswept fields, swims in Standley Lake, and plays in her backyard. Bumps and scrapes are common. But this bump won’t heal. In May, doctors discover a malignancy and the leg is amputated. By Christmas the cancer has killed her.

  Rex Haag is devastated. Small items have begun to appear in the press about Rocky Flats, and a few neighbors quietly express distrust of government assurances that the plant is completely safe. Rex thinks back to the fire in 1969, just about the time he built a new sandbox in the backyard. He wonders what’s in the soil and the air. He wonders about the drainage from Rocky Flats that feeds directly into Standley Lake and local streams and ditches. He starts talking about a lawsuit.

  The neighbors whisper: It’s a terrible thing when a child dies, but looking for a scapegoat won’t ease the family’s grief.

  Besides, my parents agree, the government would tell us if there was any real danger.

  After the funeral, Kristen’s ashes are sent to be analyzed by three separate labs: a university in New York; a laboratory in Richmond, California; and a primary contractor for Rockwell International, the current operator of the plant. The California lab reports a high level of plutonium-239 in Kristen’s ashes, the type of plutonium used in nuclear bombs and routinely released by Rocky Flats. The university in New York—curiously—never performs the analysis. The contracting laboratory for Rockwell International sends back inconclusive results that indicate the presence of plutonium, but at a level within the margin of error for their particular testing procedure.

  Kristen’s parents do not file a lawsuit. It would be almost impossible to prove a direct connection between Rocky Flats and Kristen’s death, and the cost to sue the U.S. government is mind-boggling. Ultimately, Rex comes to believe that matters of life and death are in the hands of God, and that Rocky Flats has nothing to do with it.

  The rumors start with rabbits. One Rocky Flats worker and then another begins to notice long-eared bunnies, lots of them, out by the 903 Pad, an area of 260,000 square feet—larger than four football fields—where more than five thousand rusted oil barrels stand. Barrels stretch nearly as far as the eye can see and have been open to the elements for years. Since 1954, as a matter of fact. There’s just no place to put them. Each thirty- to fifty-gallon drum holds waste oil and solvents contaminated with plutonium and uranium, for a total of hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid waste laced with radioactive material. They can’t be shipped, they can’t be stored, and no on-site building can hold them all. Weeds poke through the badly corroded bottoms. Contaminants leak into the soil and the groundwater that feeds into Woman Creek and Walnut Creek, and then Standley Lake and Great Western Reservoir. Rocky Flats calls it the 903 Pad, but some workers privately call it the Launching Pad, where all sorts of things are launched into the environment.

  Word gets out among the workers. Those bunnies are hot.

  But management has known all along. A top-secret memo, with the heading CONTAMINATED RABBIT, dates back to January 1962. The rabbit, dissected for analysis, showed high concentrations of alpha radiation, particularly in the hind feet.

  THE SUMMER of 1969 seems apocalyptic. Images of death and destruction in Vietnam are shown on the evening news. The Manson murders stun the country, and Ted Kennedy drives a car off a bridge near Chappaquiddick Island. Apollo 11 lands on the moon and more than 400,000 people show up for three days of peace and music at the Woodstock Festival. In Augus
t, several thousand Colorado residents travel to Washington, D.C., to participate in the largest antiwar demonstration to date. The Cold War is in full swing, and Rocky Flats is busy building the heart of every nuclear weapon in the United States. Occasionally demonstrators begin to appear at the west gate of Rocky Flats to protest nuclear war.

  Except for my father’s sporadic railings about how Nixon can save the country—and possibly the world—my family is largely unaware of anything that’s happening outside our immediate cocoon of kin, pets, and general chaos. Vietnam is just imagery on television, and racial tensions are far, far away. The only conflict on the block is when my friend Danny gets teased for being Italian. “I’m a wop,” he says. He’s proud of it.

  As soon as we settle into our new house, we receive more tokens of appreciation from my father’s nonpaying clients. My dad says that if I’m to have a horse, every kid in the family should have one. None of them are much good for riding. Chappie is loose-limbed and harebrained, with the golden coat and white-blond mane of a movie starlet. He has a habit of walking into fences and the sides of buildings; we suspect he suffered at the hands of a previous owner. Comanche stands for hours in the same spot, dumbly waiting for dinner. Barney has the sly manner of a mutineer deceptively packaged in the body of a sleek Shetland pony. His favorite trick is to stretch out his neck, grab the bit between his teeth, and tear madly at top speed across the field. In one single brilliant moment, he stops dead in his tracks, plants his front feet, drops his head, and sends the rider flying like a cannonball over his ears. We all take our turns.

  Barney has another useful trick. He uses his teeth to slide back the metal lock on the gate, but is polite enough to leave it open for the other horses. He goes to forage and snack on the local lawns and gardens and sometimes on the golf course. “Kris!” my mother hollers up the stairs on early mornings before school. “Go round up the horses!” We’ve scarcely moved in and the neighbors hate us. Barney seems especially fond of the garden and field of a family on the east end of Standley Lake, not far from our house. The Smiths live off the land. They have horses and cows and grow their own vegetables. Mr. Smith sometimes scolds whoever is unlucky enough to rescue Barney from his garden.