by Joni Tevis
—Las Vegas Review-Journal, May 6, 1955
It could be any cornfield, any stretch of snow. What’s left isn’t recognizable as a plane, and the dark shapes on the ground don’t look like bodies, although they must be. The coroner’s broad back is dark against the white as he leans over to take their measure. The thin snow crusting the ground makes everything look even colder. There’s a shape a few yards distant that looks like someone trying to crawl away. You know it’s a lie. They didn’t have a prayer.
Time to clean up. Down in Las Vegas, employees at car dealerships sweep up window glass that had been shattered by the blast, sixty-five miles away. Someone dumps the pieces in a barrel and starts charging for them: atomic souvenirs. They sell out by day’s end. In Doom Town, cars lie flipped onto their tops or burned where they stand. Telephone poles are snapped in half, their lines a snarled mass.
I watch a clip from “Test Film #33.” A camera pans down a line of mannequins staked to poles in the open desert. Their clothes wave in the breeze. “Do you remember this young lady?” the narrator asks. “This tattoo mark was left beneath the dark pattern.” As she speaks, the hand of an unseen worker lifts the skirt a modest few inches, smoothing the slip to show how the heat seared a design onto the fabric beneath. “And this young man? This is how the blast charred and faded the outer layer of his new dark suit.” The same worker’s hand, a wedding band gleaming on one broad finger, pushes the cloth back to reveal the lapel shadow seared on the mannequin’s chest. Then he smoothes the lapel back in place. For a brief moment, he presses his ungloved palm to the mannequin’s shoulder, as if to say, There you go. You did your best. Such a slight gesture, here and gone—he probably didn’t give it any thought. But it moves me, his moment of pity for even this mute copy of a man.
He never said hardly a word but “thank you.”
—Daniel Dougherty, of Buddy Holly’s banter during the Winter Dance Party at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa; February 2, 1959
Corn or soybeans, the field gets replanted every year. A beaten path runs along the fence, and at the site, there’s a memorial, metal records and a cutout guitar with BUDDY HOLLY RITCHIE VALENS BIG BOPPER 2-3-59 etched on the aluminum. People leave things: flowers, quarters, a red model Corvette, guitar picks, pairs of glasses, ticket stubs from the State Fair, a CD with WE LOVE YOU and RIP written on it, a WAYLON tour button, a small American flag. In winter, snow covers the offerings, and the metal records look like pie pans left out to scare the crows.
He died young and far from home, and snow drifted around his body all that long dark night. Damn cold in February, but at least it was over quick. At least you can say what caused it and nobody will argue with you. The reporter who wrote about the “honorable pastime of atom-bomb watching” wrote another article that scoffed at the threat of fallout, writing that “some of the scare talk is simply a matter of individuals’ basking in the limelight of public attention for the first time.” The woman who crouched in the trenches thirty-five hundred yards from ground zero—“the closest any Caucasian women have ever been to an atomic blast”—told of “the normal feminine excitement” in the air, but insisted that “I didn’t feel that my life was in any danger.” The leukemia clusters in downwind towns would emerge over the next three to ten years, but the government would fight the link between testing and disease for far longer. “Hysterical,” the reporter called a letter writer who claimed cause and effect.
I can’t stop thinking about the bare-handed worker showing the mannequin to the camera. About the newspaperman in the tank they nicknamed Baby, and about the soldier driving the tank, who was twenty years old, and from Bellefontaine, Ohio, the town where I was born. About the workers serving lunch at the test site the day after the shot. “I particularly remember some roast beef,” says the narrator in “Test Film #33.” “It was done to perfection and roasted in cans which could have been salvaged from demolished buildings.” The camera lingers over a woman spooning stew into her mouth, the cafeteria tray before her holding an opened can, an apple, and a carton of milk. What she took inside her that day, carried home to bed with her that night.
Today, there is no second-best for family’s civil defense. The urgent need to prepare now against the threat of atomic warfare. Or will you, like a mannequin, just sit and wait?
—“Declassified US Nuclear Test Film #33”
(Apple-2/“Cue”), 1955
When you see the explosion, even from a distance, you might be stunned into repeating inanities: Pretty pretty pretty pretty. (You see it visually but it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful, just gorgeous.) The song gets caught in your head and you run through it again and again without realizing it; the song enters your life like a new reality. One quart of water per day. Food in bare rations. In the film about fallout shelters, the narrator advises you calmly to make your way to the shelter, unpack, and “take your bearings.” Someone chose actors; someone directed them. But you don’t think about that when you watch the film. Instead, you unconsciously select one person on screen to identify with, the woman with the child in her arms, taking neat steps downstairs and finding a place in the damp room, setting up the smaller cot beside her own and spreading a plaid blanket smooth.
There’s no other product that gives me as much fear and respect for the power of mass culture as the Hula-Hoop. It has a life of its own.
—Dan Roddick, director of marketing at Wham-O, 1988
The Hula-Hoop demands a lot of space. It has no place in a fallout shelter, the domain of compact games that pass time until the radioactive isotopes decay enough for a family to return to normal life. (Two weeks, says the narrator in the film.) Checkers, dominoes, or pickup sticks would all make better choices, or marbles or cards, or View-Master, “The World at Your Fingertips.” The hard-shell box is packed with reels in paper envelopes: The Grand Canyon, Beautiful Rock City Gardens, Petrified Forest, The Islands of Hawaii, Disneyland. Little Sister savors the quiet satisfaction of pulling the Yosemite reel from the Yosemite envelope. Summer vacation without the headaches, Father might say, the box of reels shelved between the powdered milk and the canned beef. Just about better than fresh.
And View-Master’s images are sharper than life, more saturated with color, Spider Rock’s crisp shadow a deep black on the desert valley, the polished spume of Old Faithful standing tall above a crowd of tourists leaning in to get a better look. Little Sister presses the viewer to her face and clicks through the shots, and when she gets up from the floor, Mother looks at her strangely; the viewer has left a mark. Time to go outside, she says. Get some fresh air.
Click, click, goes the hoop against the button of her jumper. Click, swish, go the button and the breeze. She can keep it going. The plane crash in Iowa behind her, the fallout shelter before her, but here she is, now, feet planted firmly on the ground, eyes on the horizon. Click swish, click swish, and when the hoop worries downward she kicks it back to the right place with a little jab of her hip. The drumbeat of “Peggy Sue” goes faster than her heart ever has, tacka tacka tacka tacka, like gumballs dumped onto a corrugated roof. The singer had been twenty-two, exactly twice her age. Impossibly old.
The Hula-Hoop fad begins in ’58 and peaks by ’59. I want my Hula-Hooping girl to be the same girl who pressed the View-Master to her face, the same girl who listened to records in the living room, but that’s impossible. The girl with the View-Master waits in a dark room underground; the girl with the record player lies buried inside the ruined house. But as long as the machine in the mannequin factory pours plaster into a mold, as long as a conveyor belt sends the shape through the oven to cure, as long as a worker’s there to stretch a sleeve over the arm and pull the torso upright and snap it to a pair of legs, I can have my girl, standing in a silent room full of dozens of her kind. You’d never mistake her for the real thing. Leave her in the house; make her your substitute. Send her through hell and see how she holds up.
Someday this country’s gonna be a fine, good place to be.
Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.
—The Searchers, 1956
One night in Vegas, I stood under the neon in Fremont Street and watched as a crowd of strangers linked arms, swayed, and sang along with the chorus This’ll be the day that I die, smiling like it was a lullaby. Then I read about the phenomenon of nostalgia for the A-bomb as a symbol of a “simpler time.” For me, these iconic images of the late 1950s—Buddy Holly’s grinning face, the exploding Cape Cod house, and the mushroom cloud—all signify the same thing, death. And they all demand that we grapple with them.
Despite all the documentation of Apple-2 and tests like it, there is something fundamentally unknowable about an atomic explosion. Physicists can explain how it happens and why. Historians can place it into the larger context of time and place. Eyewitnesses can tell the story of how it felt to watch it rise from the desert, unfold into the sky, and veer off toward the mountains. But for me, the atom bomb represents the breakdown of certainty. Here is a weapon that enacts hell in three ways: fire brighter than the sun, wind stronger than a cyclone, and fine particles that imbue the air with death. Only myth can explain it. This is the salamander that lives in the fire and eats of the fire. This is the basilisk that binds you, once you look. And this is the hammer that fractures time: the house is gone in the space of a moment, but the radioactivity of the fallout, what the house becomes, will be deadly for millennia, longer than our languages will last.
Let’s be honest. To really imagine what happened, you have to put yourself in her place. So make me the girl with the View-Master. Me with the Hula-Hoop, staring at the horizon, watching for something terrible. Me on the living-room floor, listening to the song with its bridge like baby-doll music. And on the television, light fills the screen, and thunder pours from the speakers. (Should the girls be watching this? Mother says. To which Father replies, You can’t shelter them forever.) Man, woman, and child, millions of them, exposed to these tests, whether or not they drove out into the desert to watch. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “the National Cancer Institute estimates that around 160 million people—virtually everyone living in the U.S. at that time (mid-1950s)—received some iodine dose from fallout.” All water exposed to the upper air since 1945 contains radioactive signatures. The A-bomb is in us all, its isotopes in all our blood: the tests, all 1,021 of them, live on through us.
Well, I’m either going to go to the top—or else I’m going to fall. But I think you’re going to see me in the big time.
—Buddy Holly, to concert promoter Carroll Anderson, before the show at the Surf Ballroom, February 2, 1959
How we paw over these old relics, a picture of his overnight bag stuffed with Ban, a half-used roll of adhesive tape, a Stanley hairbrush exactly like mine, all these ordinary things freighted with disaster. Twelve years after the crash, a man wrote a song about it. Thirty years after Apple-2, moviemakers repurposed its footage for The Day After’s depiction of atomic devastation. To simulate fallout, they used cornflakes, painted white. The man who flipped Ritchie Valens for a seat on the plane bought a bar and named it Tommy’s Heads Up Saloon. In the gift shop at the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, you can buy a Buddy Holly Spinning Snowflake Ornament.
“This is the way we get our word out,” said the atomic veteran. “This is the way we get the word out. It’s the only way.” At the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, you can turn a thumb reel and watch a school bus burning, smoking, tipping, and being swept away, or you can turn the reel the other way, and put it all back together. In the gift shop, you can buy a T-shirt of Miss A-Bomb wearing her rictus of a grin. Or sterling silver earrings, one of Fat Man and the other of Little Boy.
Well, that’s my life to the present date, and even though it may seem awful and full of calamities, I’d sure be in a bad shape without it.
FINIS
FINALE
In other words,
THE END.
—From “My Autobiography,” written by Buddy Holly for his sophomore English class, 1953
The year The Searchers was released, John Wayne filmed another movie, The Conqueror, in St. George, Utah, downwind of the Nevada Test Site. Before the filming, shot Harry, later called Dirty Harry, was exploded. The movie’s action, set in Mongolia, required several scenes with blowing sand, and maybe nobody thought much of it when they brushed the dust from their hair and eyes, shook it from their shirtsleeves, wiped it from their feet. They had work to do. Years later, when John Wayne died of cancer, he blamed his smoking habit, and maybe he was right. But ninety other actors and crew from The Conqueror were also diagnosed with cancer, over 40 percent of those who worked on the movie, along with uncounted extras, most of them local people.
In the last scene of The Searchers, Ethan Edwards returns the kidnapped girl, now a woman, to her neighbors, the closest thing to kin she has left. The movie’s theme song rises—Ride away, ride away—and Ethan turns his back on the camera. As he walks slowly out of frame, the white rectangle of sun in the door grows brighter and brighter, until finally the door closes. By the time The Searchers was playing in movie theaters from Lubbock to Clear Lake, John Wayne was in Utah, fighting through swirls of dust to finish that day’s scene. He just wanted to get a good take. Buddy just wanted to wash his clothes and take a shower.
Hardly worth dying over, but then what is? One of Apple-2’s objectives was to determine blast effects on different types of clothing. Today, historians list Apple-2 as one of the dirtiest atomic tests; its fallout made its way into children’s bodies in disproportionate numbers. No matter how many times you click through these images, they don’t change.
When asked what “American Pie” meant, McLean replied, “It means I don’t ever have to work again.”
—Alan Howard, The Don McLean Story: Killing Us Softly With His Songs
Does Buddy go on the road to sell records, or does he sell records to go on the road? Does he savor these giddy minutes of getting ready in a strange place, cement-floored dressing rooms with chipped green paint, hand-me-down dressers, and mirrors fastened to the wall with daisy-shaped rivets? He carries with him what he needs: guitar strings, fuses, handkerchiefs, nail file, pencil stub. Safety pins. Nobody ever has one. He could make a fortune if he started a new safety-pin factory; the world desperately needs more. And outside, the scurf of people talking, waiting for the show. Waiting for him.
Waiting for him, Maria Elena, back in their little apartment, lighting the pilot on the stove and talking to her mother in a warm haze of gas fumes and soup. Blue feathers of flame under the pot, telephone on the wall, push button to light the kitchen: all of these cost money. The honeymoon in Acapulco. The property in Bobalet Heights; he’s signed his real name on the deed, Charles “Buddy” Holley, with an e. The stage manager says it’s time, high time. He finds his mark, waits for the curtain, and when the stagehand hauls it up he can’t hear the creaking of the rope for the screams, and he’s playing the first chords of “Peggy Sue” without even realizing it, diving deep into a pool. Feeling the crowd stomping through the soles of his feet, shaking with the bass like he’s hooked to it, and between songs he has to take off his glasses and wipe the sweat from his eyes. Hey, he says, we sure are glad to be here. The crowd’s a blur but he can see the mike, its woven mesh familiar as his own fingerprint. Whew! That’s better. Slides the glasses on. Looks back. “Oh Boy,” do you think? When you’re with me, the world can see. That you were meant for me.
Every day
It’s a-getting closer
Going faster
Than a roller coaster.
—Buddy Holly, “Everyday,” 1957
Southern Paiute and Western Shoshone lived, once, on the land that became the Nevada Test Site. But by now, clicking through this third reel, “The Test Site Today,” it’s hard to believe anyone ever lived under this acid sun at noon. Here’s one of the few Doom Town houses still standing, its siding burned brown, windows empty. Here’s a ba
nk vault, slung the length of two football fields. Here’s a shot tower, never used, abandoned after the moratorium in ’92. Tumbleweeds rest on the broken tarmac against the guardhouse. It all looks so ordinary, the orange plastic webbing seen in countless construction zones, the ground bristling with rusty rebar. If you stare at these things, even from this remove, you carry something of them with you. Brilliant blue sky; the dust the photographer breathed, close now as the tongue in your mouth. Turn the knob of your own front door and observe how it smokes in the heat’s first blast. Stand at the kitchen sink and watch the window bow inward and break, the eyelet curtain tumbling out and tearing free. Wake suddenly from your last dream to the fireball’s flash and realize the shock wave is coming, will be here in a single second’s tick.
Click. The guitar case snaps shut. Click. He opens a stiff new pair of glasses. Click. Dog tags rattle in the soldier’s hand. Click. A photographer documents the crash scene. Click. The arm of the record player drops a 45 on the turntable. Click. A soldier stacks cans in the pantry, bottom to rim. What’s still there, in that dark, silent room? A stray jug of water; an empty coffee cup. In a crack in the floor, a safety pin.
All I got here is a bunch of dead man’s clothes to wear.
—The Searchers, 1956
That’ll be the day. When Ethan Edwards says it, it’s cynical; he’s seen it all, and none of it’s good. But in Buddy’s voice, the words change. Baby, I got your heart, he’s saying; you ain’t gonna leave me. It’d kill me if you did, you know that. He’s brave, but vulnerable, too, and maybe that’s his gift, turning bitterness into hope, an alchemy possible only because he’s so young, clean-cut, the favorite son. Will you say goodbye; will I cease to be? Not a chance.
Close your eyes. They’re in the studio in Clovis, in rooms close in summer and drafty in winter; a studio that was formerly a grocery store, smelling of paint and mice. He sits in a corner, threading a fresh string onto the guitar and tightening it, adjusting, tightening again. Meanwhile, Jerry’s working on the drum part. Norman Petty, the producer, says, “That cha-cha isn’t going to work,” and he’s right. He charges not by the hour, but by the song, and they like that; gives you time to get it right. They try different things until they hit on the idea of paradiddles, tacka tacka tacka tacka, a rhythm that rolls like breakers, and when they try a take they have to wait because a passing truck makes the windows rattle. Outside, it’s a hundred dark miles back to Lubbock, and nobody’s in the mood to quit. Grab dinner, come back, and work some more, and later they’ll stretch out on the narrow beds in back and sleep.
