Desert Wind

by Betty Webb

  Olivia waved. They waved back. Several blew kisses.

  Then they prayed. Not being a big proponent of public prayer, I held my silence while they wove their way through the Lord’s Prayer. As soon as they reached the “Amen” part, an elderly man in the first row introduced himself as Bill Nash, a native of Silver Ridge. Holding some sort of electronic buzzer to his throat to help him talk, he rasped in a metallic monotone, “My oncologist says it’s spread to my…”

  Before he could finish his sentence, the door opened and Earl Two Horses, Monty Carson, and “Ma” and Tara from Ma’s Kitchen walked in. With them was an Indian woman I’d never seen before. From her Asian features and the darkness of her skin, I guessed she was Paiute.

  Once they took seats in the rear of the room, Nash began again. He said that as a young man, he’d been a member of the Army unit used as guinea pigs during the bomb testing. The blast, located less than two thousand feet from his unprotected unit, caused the series of cancers he’d fought for decades.

  “Me and Myra, we woulda liked kids, but the bomb sterilized me,” he buzzed. “Maybe that was the whole point of the testing, maybe the government decided there was too many Americans running around and they needed to start sterilizing us. Or murdering us, like they did so many of my buddies. Well, it takes a lot to kill ol’ Nash. Doctors been lopping off pieces of me for years, but now my larynx cancer’s spread to my brain. Barring a miracle, my oncologist gives me a couple more months. The Feds offered me a fifty-thousand-dollar payout, said that was all I was going to get, so Myra made me accept it.”

  A low murmur around the room as others tendered their sympathies.

  The next person, a former sheep rancher, spoke up. In his case, his sheep had died first, followed a year later by his younger brother, then his mother. Now it was his turn. Unlike Nash, he refused to have anything to do with the government’s offer of fifty thousand dollars.

  “With me, it’s stomach cancer,” the man growled. “My wife’s down with thyroid cancer. You folks know I’m not one for crowds, but Evie’s too sick to come out tonight, so here I am, flying the family flag. You wanna know what we told them government flunkies? We told them they could take their blood money and stick it where the sun don’t shine. Hell, that wouldn’t even pay for Evie’s pain-killers, let alone her chemo, which ain’t working anyway. Damn government scientists owe us a sight more than they’re offering, using decent Americans for lab rats! Fifty million’s more like it, and even then, it ain’t enough.”

  For the next hour, I heard more versions of the same sad stories. Those who weren’t dying spoke of loved ones who had. Some survivors, but far from all, had been offered fifty thousand dollars in compensation from the U.S. government, the maximum individual payout. Some took it, others chose to litigate. Still others described claims denied, having been told by federal attorneys that their cancers hadn’t been caused by the tests, they’d just been “unlucky.”

  A young woman who wore neither wig nor scarf on her bald head said her claim had been turned down. “Before 1951, when the bombing began, no woman in my family had died of breast cancer,” she explained, brandishing photographs of smiling women. “Since then, we’ve lost at least three women in each generation to breast cancer. My grandmother and three great-aunts; my mother and her two sisters. One of my sisters died last year, the other’s in the hospital right now getting chemo. As for me, I’ve got Stage IV breast cancer. It’s spread to my spine, but I’m a woman of faith and I can take anything God chooses to give me. But my daughter…” Her voice caught. Recovering, she said, “Lily’s only four, but she’s already…”

  When she lost it again, the young man sitting with her pulled her back down to her seat, then stood up himself. “What my wife wants to say is that we’re worried about Lily. She’s been losing weight. The doctors haven’t found anything yet, but they’re still doing tests. And as for my wife, the government said we can’t prove the cancer in her family was caused by the testing.”

  Three generations dead, another possibly dying.

  The cumulative effect of these peoples’ stories felt like being flayed alive. Just when I thought I couldn’t take any more, Earl Two Horses spoke up.

  His normally placid face was tight with anger. “You know the Paiute’s story. My people are all Downwinders. That fallout blew over our land, killing us until there’s hardly anyone left.”

  Earl held up a picture of a young man on horseback, dressed like a Mongol warrior. He made a more convincing Mongol than the Caucasian standing next to him: John Wayne, wearing heavy “Asian” makeup. “This is my grandfather. He was one of the three hundred Paiute extras on that cursed movie, The Conqueror. A few months after the movie finished filming and John Wayne and the other film people went home, the Paiute extras started getting sick. They were hunters, and besides getting dosed with radioactivity in Snow Canyon, they’d been eating the deer and the rabbit and all the other game that’d been contaminated during the tests. Most died. The skin fell away from their bones until there was hardly anything left to bury. The government didn’t care, and our deaths aren’t even listed in those articles you White folks keep quoting.”

  He made a sweeping gesture around the room, “Right now everyone’s all up in arms over what happened in Japan, with the fallout from those nuclear reactors at Fukushima. But we got, what, ten times that amount almost every month for sixty years! Nobody bothered to get up in arms over the Paiute, did they? The Feds didn’t even bother to track what happened to us. I guess they figured Indians didn’t count. Nothing new there, right? And think about this. What happened to the people in Fukushima was an accident, but our government nuked us on purpose!

  “When the attorneys finally got involved and the government started making those famous fifty-thousand-dollar payouts, the Feds made sure the Paiute didn’t get a dime. In order to get the money, those government goons demanded that our widows and children prove they were residents of the United States. Residents! We Paiutes, people who have lived on this land for thousands of years! Most of our parents and grandparents were nomads and hunters, not office workers. They didn’t have birth certificates, they didn’t have Social Security records, they didn’t have employment records, they didn’t have deeds, they didn’t have anything like that. And since they couldn’t prove who they were, they were declared ineligible!”

  The Paiute woman with him reached up and tugged at his arm, but Earl refused to sit down. “The government wasn’t through hurting the Indians, either. This is my mother. Naiomi Two Horses. Her husband—my father—died of lung cancer after handling the yellow cake at the old Moccasin Peak Uranium Mine. Now my brother is about to go to work at the Black Basin, which is owned by the same man who managed Moccasin Peak. My brother needs to feed his family, but how long will it be before he dies, too?”

  Naiomi Two Horses, aided now by the much stronger Monty, finally succeeded in hauling Earl back into his chair. Only then did I notice the photograph Monty was clutching; a young woman in a fifties-style dress. I wondered how many close family members he’d lost to the fallout.

  Now it was Elena Morehouse’s turn. Holding her photograph of Abby Boone high, she described her older sister and the hell she’d gone through after suffering through six miscarriages, then esophageal cancer.

  “We figured she got that throat cancer from eating the vegetables from her own kitchen garden or drinking the water from her well,” she said. “Whenever there was testing, the gardens were covered with radioactive ash, but the man the Atomic Energy Commission sent out to talk to folks guaranteed it was harmless, that all anybody had to do was rinse the dust off. He even swore that the water hadn’t been contaminated!” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Earl, I’m sorry for what you and your people went through, but my sister suffered, too. So did her husband. When Abby died, Gabe just plain lost his mind.”

  After several more horror stories and a vow to keep pressuring the government to make payment commensurate with thei
r suffering, the meeting broke up. A few people stayed behind to chat with friends, but the Walapai Flats contingent left after saying their farewells. Olivia exchanged some private words with her cousin, then joined me as I hurried out the door eager to breathe non-medicinal air.

  “Jesus, Olivia,” I said, as we walked toward her car. “How can you stand working on stories like this?”

  “The same way you can stand doing what you do. You put aside your feelings and do what has to be done; otherwise you’re no good to anyone.”

  Strong talk, but she’d chewed her lip until it bled.

  In front of us twin girls of around eight skipped over to a row of rosebushes bordering the parking lot. With a mischievous giggle, the bald twin snapped off a deep red bloom while the other, her hair combed into blond ringlets, frowned in disapproval. “That’s not your rosebush,” she admonished.

  “Nope, it’s God’s,” her thieving sister answered, burying her nose in the petals. “And he created roses for us to enjoy.” Her face was a map of profound joy.

  I waited until we climbed in her car before I said, “Those girls. I didn’t see them in the meeting.”

  “The children were being taken care of in the nursery by volunteers. Most of the kids believe they’re going to be fine, which is why their parents didn’t want them in the meeting.”

  “But they…” I motioned to the bald girl. “She wasn’t around when the tests were being conducted.”

  “Her great-grandparents were.”

  “Are you saying that the nuclear tests caused genetic mutations?”

  “Some people think it did, but the government’s fighting that all the way, and their lawyers are the best money can buy.”

  “Boone’s sister-in-law said that the government claimed the radioactive ash and water were safe. After what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they had to know better.”

  Olivia’s jaw clenched. “The Atomic Energy Commission certainly knew better, but they were determined to test anyway. When the cattle, sheep, and deer died and then people started getting sick, the AEC flew out some low-level flunky from Washington to calm everybody down. He held meetings in the high school auditorium here in Silver Ridge, and convinced the locals everything was fine.” She shrugged. “Why would they doubt him? He represented the U.S. government, didn’t he?”

  “Jesus.”

  She gave me a grim smile. “Jesus didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  ***

  By unspoken agreement, we said nothing more about the meeting during the drive back to Walapai Flats, but it was obvious Olivia’s headache had become worse. When I reminded her I was willing to drive, she shook her head.

  “What are you going to do, take me home, then hitchhike back from Sunset Canyon Lakes?” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  I offered to let her stay the night in my motel room so she could dose herself to sleep, but she declined that offer, too.

  “Thanks, but I can’t afford the down time. I’ve got a deadline to meet.”

  When we pulled up in front of the Covered Wagons Inn, I breathed a sigh of relief. But as I climbed out of the Explorer into the inky night, Olivia slid down the car window and called out, “Lena! Have that hunky partner of yours run a search on Ike Donohue, if he hasn’t already. Look for Donohue’s tie-in with a man named Gerald Heber.”

  “Who’s Gerald Heber?” And where had I heard that name before?

  The motel’s neon sign blinked blue on her face, making her look ghostlier than usual. “You’ll find out.”

  With that, she drove away.

  It was almost eleven, but after what I’d seen and heard at the Downwinders meeting, sleep was out of the question. Who was Heber and what was his connection to Ike Donohue? I paced around my motel room, fighting the temptation to call Jimmy regardless of the hour, to tell him what I’d seen and heard to share my outrage. I finally calmed down enough to realize that just because my night was ruined didn’t mean I should ruin his, too. Vacillating between rage and depression, I logged back onto the Internet for the second time in a day, a record for me.

  Typing Ike Donohue+Gerald Heber into Google, I found nothing. Frustrated, I sat there, cursing my limited Net skills. Trying again, I dismissed the Donohue/Heber tie-in and simply typed in Gerald Heber and was rewarded with seventy-two hits. Among them, I found a car salesman, a dentist, a dairy farmer, two real estate salesmen, and an ex-con blogging about the dire state of America’s prisons. I was making my way through various businessmen touting their wares when my eye was drawn to another blog, this one posted by a Dr. Paul D. Howell, a physics professor at Oklahoma State University. Howell, musing about the strange turns life can take, wrote that he’d planned to become a rock drummer until he won top prize in a science fair competition held at his Arlington, Virginia high school. The man who’d bankrolled the competition was named Gerald Heber.

  “I owe my career to him,” Howell blogged, “but not, thank God, my ethics.”

  Since Arlington was a suburb of Washington, D.C., I narrowed the search to GERALD HEBER+WASHINGTON, D.C. Howell’s snipe about ethics—or the lack thereof—was probably the remnants of some old grudge, but it was the best lead I’d found so far. When my search led me to a brief that ran September 2, 1965, on B-2 of the Washington Post, I struck pay dirt.

  The article, so short it wasn’t even by-lined, mentioned Gerald Heber’s retirement from the Atomic Energy Commission. This particular Heber had been lauded for “his unique service to the United States of America during troubled times.” However, the article made no mention of Ike Donohue, and a connection between the two still seemed unlikely. Heber had worked for the government, Donohue in the private sector. Further distancing the men were their ages. If the Washington Post’s Heber had retired in 1965 at the age of sixty-five, by now he was probably pushing up daisies in a cemetery somewhere.

  What they say about Internet addiction is true. Once you’re on, it’s hard to get off. Following the trail of this particular Heber, I kept scrolling though the AEC+Heber hits until I found a longer piece.

  A feature article titled Nuking Nevada, written by Alonzo Ertes and printed in the Nevada Sentinel on May 3, 1978, detailed the effects of radioactive fallout during above-ground atomic testing in the fifties and sixties.

  “Thanks to the efforts of Gerald Heber, the AEC’s public relations officer, the AEC was able to hide the dangers of the Nevada bomb testing for decades. They spoon-fed Heber misleading information, which he softened even further until the radioactive ash that was falling across the U.S. looked as pure as Christmas snow. Heber even took to the airwaves, calling scientists who warned against the tests “non-informed alarmists” at best, and “Commie sympathizers” at worst.

  Believing Heber’s reassurances, farmers in Utah brushed the radioactive ash off their tomatoes and shipped them to the stores. Arizona ranchers allowed their beef cattle to graze on radioactive land and drink radiation-polluted water. Nevada mothers gave their children milk from radioactive dairy cows. When Heber—now retired—was questioned about his role in the thousands of radiation-related deaths that followed decades of nuclear fallout in the U.S., he staunchly defended his work.

  “Ancient history,” Heber said. “That all happened at the height of the Cold War, and in every war there’s going to be collateral damage. If those hayseeds had an ounce of patriotism in their bones, they’d stop all their whining and get down on their knees to thank God and the U.S. government for saving them from the Commies.”

  I remembered the hairless women at the Downwinders meeting, the men relying on oxygen tanks to breathe, the anguished parents clinging to photographs of long-dead children. Hayseeds.

  I read on.

  Heber even defended the choice of Nevada for the testing of 928 nuclear bombs.

  “Where else was the government going to test those weapons? That area was the least populated section of the country,” he said. “No one lived out there, other than ranchers and Indians.”
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br />   Remembering where Ike Donohue had lived before retiring to Arizona, I went back to Google and typed in HEBER+DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA. Only one hit popped up, but it was a doozy.

  On February 12, 1970, the Durham Republic reported that Gerald Heber had been hired as a consultant by the Cook & Creighton Tobacco Company, based in Durham, North Carolina. His duties were to format a new public relations policy to combat the advertising limitations recently imposed by the federal government on all tobacco products.

  Public relations. Cook & Creighton Tobacco Company.

  Where Ike Donohue once worked.

  The man whose job it had been to convince the Southwest that nuclear fallout was harmless had been hired by a tobacco company to convince the world that cigarettes and chewing tobacco were harmless. Looking at the timeline, I realized that Heber had probably taught Donohue everything he knew about telling lies and about how to ignore the moral ramifications of those lies. Together, the two men were at least partially implicated in the diseases and deaths of untold numbers of smokers.

  Now I remembered where I’d heard Heber’s name before—from Nancy Donohue. She’d discovered that before her husband’s murder, he’d placed a call to his old boss. “Some were to people he knew when he was married to Claudia, like that troll Gerald Heber. I wound up talking to the granddaughter. Old Heber’d been dead for years.”

  I looked at my watch. It was midnight, but damned be the hour. I picked up my cell phone and punched in Nancy Donohue’s number. When she answered, she didn’t sound sleepy at all, just slightly drunk.