A Girl's Guide to Missiles

by Karen Piper

  “Well . . .” I did not know how to explain. “I worked on the base when he was director and wanted to ask him—”

  She interrupted, “Oh, let me go get him. I’m sure he’d love to talk.”

  I gulped, suddenly feeling like I was driving to Mr. Porter’s house to sell Amway. What was I doing? Hays was the head of everything before Mr. Porter.

  Nevertheless, he picked up the phone.

  “Uh, I’m Karen Piper . . . and I worked on the base when you were technical director,” I stammered. “And I remember the Paisley buttons and when you were fired and was just wondering what really happened. My dad worked on the Sidewinder.”

  “Ah, China Lake,” he said, as if he were talking to an old familiar friend.

  He paused, then unexpectedly laughed. “You know, People magazine once called me and asked me that, twenty years ago, but I couldn’t tell them. But I suppose I can tell you now. I suppose it doesn’t matter.” He was seventy-four years old then.

  And so began a long story about one of the nation’s first armed drones, which had been tested at China Lake and, like the B-2 bomber, had failed its tests. “It was a black program,” he said. “Supersecret.” Assistant Secretary to the Navy Paisley was not happy with the results. As Hays explained, “When he heard that there wasn’t any way this thing was going to work, he said, ‘Well, change the data, so it looks like it will.’”

  “Did you?” I asked.

  “No, of course not,” he said. “I went to the admiral that ran the black program and told him essentially what was happening, and he said, ‘Well, whatever happens to you will not be as bad as if you blow the cover of this program. You can’t do that.’ So I essentially was left on my own.” I felt for him then, alone with this secret. He continued, “I believed it when that admiral told me that my penalty would be a lot worse. He was talking about things like firing squads. You know how those secret guys are.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I nodded, though I had never heard of firing squads on base. He was scaring me a little. Because he would not change those tests, he explained, he was forced to submit his resignation, retiring with just enough pay to support his wife and a little house in Ridgecrest, where he still mowed the lawn. A few months after he left the base, Hays would learn that Paisley was under investigation by the FBI. It seemed that even the FBI could not save Burrell Hays.

  Investigations can take a long time, while the government is crumbling around you.

  “I see,” I said, and we were both quiet. I felt as though we were talking about my father. To finally talk about secrets like this with someone who knew, who understood, felt like an explosion in my stomach. I thought of all the grunts in the field who got the bad weapons. Like me, they never had a “need to know.” I tried not to start crying.

  “You know . . . ,” I hesitantly proffered. “My dad once said they were faking the tests on the Sidewinder.”

  “Well, now you know why,” he said. “Paisley didn’t think this up all by himself. Industry controls the navy.” We paused in silence.

  Then he said, “You know, Tom Amlie, who was director before me, once said there were only three reasons for black projects. One, you’re doing something that should genuinely be secret. There’s only a couple of those. Two, you’re doing something so damn stupid you don’t want anybody to know about it. And three, you want to rip the money bag open and get out a shovel, because there is no accountability whatsoever.” I chuckled with him, though I still wanted to cry.

  Finally, I asked, “What about now? Did anything change?”

  He laughed. “Now you just give a contractor a requirement and money and then you throw him off in another room and pray that something comes out. There are no requirements for documentation. There are no requirements for follow-up. And that’s how your weapons are being built now.”

  When I hung up the phone, my eyes welled up, then spilled over, and finally turned into rivers. Burrell Hays had told me the things my father could never explain, perhaps because I was too young to understand or perhaps because they were “Secret.” I half thought I had imagined it.

  But now Hays had confirmed it was real. He had spilled the secrets, twenty-some years after the fact, right at the moment I needed to hear them.

  * * *

  —

  I still do not understand why men make war, but I know that it hurts us when we kill others, sometimes irreparably. I know that the ghosts of the dead stay with us or are silenced only by amputating a part of ourselves. I know that when wars are waged for money or resources, they can become a perpetual-motion machine. I know that sometimes weapons kill the wrong people. I also know that wars are waged long before a gun is fired or bomb dropped. There are propaganda wars and cyberwars. There are wars between individual spies and cold wars between states. There are wars between oligarchs where murders happen right outside the Kremlin gates. I know that people can lie without realizing they are, and that these lies can cause wars too. I know that war is a bad habit, a habit of saying “yes” when the other person says “no.”

  “Yes, anyway. I will. I must. I grab.”

  My Hidden Knowledge Detector has finally kicked into gear.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Leaving The Twilight Zone

  I was finally ready to visit my dad’s grave. It was time. I was poignantly aware I had been avoiding it for too long, even before my mom left Ridgecrest and my visits there were regular. I could not stand to see him dead. But now that I was ready to leave China Lake behind, I wanted to say goodbye. So I flew to Los Angeles and rented a car for one last trek into the desert alone in 2016.

  I planned to stay only the day. First, I thought I would visit my childhood home, not the Rowe Street duplex that was bulldozed, but the one across from the jackrabbit golf course on Shangri-La Street, named after an aircraft carrier from World War II. Somehow I thought, with a visitor’s pass, I could just drive in and take a picture, even though technically both were illegal. Base visitors are allowed to drive only to the armaments museum and then back out. Photos are prohibited. But my mom was not with me, so she could not stop me from sneaking out to my house and back. The military police could, but I hoped they would not notice.

  Around noon, I drove straight to the main gate to get my visitor’s badge at a double-wide trailer filled with offices. Inside, I was discouraged to find all the waiting room seats taken. “What is everyone doing here?” I asked a man standing near the entrance, waiting for a seat, arms akimbo.

  “Time to renew badges,” he said, staring glassily ahead. I saw forms for base employee badge renewal hanging in gray metal holders on the walls. The boredom, waiting, and metal gray felt familiar.

  Cutting in line, I asked a clerk behind her trailer desk if I was in the right place for tourists. “I’m only here for the day,” I explained.

  “This is the right place,” she said. “But I doubt you’ll get in today. You can take a number and come back tomorrow if you want.”

  “But I’m only here for the day,” I repeated.

  “You’re interrupting this man,” she said, waving me away. “It’s his turn now.” Her weary eyes pushed me back to the waiting room as she said, “Even if you get through the line before we close, you can’t get a badge today. We need to do a background check first. And the museum closes at four. It all takes time.”

  “I see,” I said. “It’s just that I used to live here and was hoping—”

  She interrupted, “This is a military installation, after all. What did you expect?”

  No, it’s my home, I wanted to say. I wanted to be angry. I wanted the guards to carry me out, kicking and screaming, shouting, I just want to go home! Instead, I left the center in resignation, feeling my exile more poignantly. All I wanted was a view of the tree I once climbed and the smell of grapevines that clung to our fence. I wanted to see that jackrabbit golf course and remember b
unnies. I wanted evidence of my childhood, even after all these years. I wanted to know it really happened.

  But there was nothing I could do.

  Outside, the 115-degree heat hit me like a wall I knew well. Don’t mess with me, it said. Better slow down. A heat wave was hanging over California, and the sun burned into my corneas. I had forgotten my sunglasses. Stupid, I thought. My confidence was truly sagging now. Did I belong here?

  I drove on to my father’s grave, stopping to say hello to the horses and burros on the way, huddled around a watering trough in a dirt corral. It was the same spot I had seen them in almost thirty years ago, when I would drive by on my way to work. They must have wondered how they’d ended up locked in there as remnants of a forgotten mining history.

  They looked as though they needed a nuzzle.

  I got out of the rental car, and the burros perked up their long fuzzy ears, their own friend-or-foe detectors like the navy’s. The littlest one approached first, its eyes full of wonder, and soon the whole herd was upon me, licking my hand through the gate. I wanted to adopt them all.

  By the time I got back to the car, the steering wheel was too hot to touch. My thighs sizzled when I tried to sit down. I jumped up like those burros’ ears when they’d heard me screech, “Ouch!” I pulled a top from my suitcase to sit on and carefully inched back in, placing my thumb and index finger around the bottom and shadiest part of the steering wheel. Then I drove on, barely touching the wheel until it cooled down, feeling like the stupid outsider again. In Ridgecrest, everyone has sheepskin wheel covers and seat covers precisely to avoid this problem.

  At the cemetery, the graves were covered in silk and plastic flowers that, even though sun bleached and a tad unsightly, at least stood the chance of lasting more than an hour in the heat. I looked down at my fresh flowers, dismayed, while also facing the fact that nothing looked familiar. Where was my father? I had assumed you could not lose your father’s grave, that it would jump out like an old wound at you. Instead, all I could do was walk from grave to grave, my flowers gradually wilting as my shirt filled with perspiration. “Dad?” I yelled. The graves were as abandoned as the burros.

  Were my instincts really right this time? There was no one in sight. Finally, a brass military cross on the ground caught my eye. I looked more closely, weirdly hoping not to see his name, believing that not finding it would mean he was still alive.

  “Earl Marwin Piper,” it read. “Beloved husband and father.”

  I lay down in the grass and cried, kissing the earth that was his head. This was why I had come.

  “We’re okay, Dad,” I whispered. “Don’t worry about us. We miss you, but we’re okay.” The sun crept a little down the horizon in the cool of the shade trees. I finally got up to leave, but then suddenly flopped back down again, remembering my mom. She had asked me to bring the flowers. Did she want me to tell him something?

  “The flowers are from Mom,” I said. “She loves you.”

  Then, reluctantly, I drove away, feeling my dad and all my burro children tugging at my sleeves. Maybe they wanted to go for a ride too. Their faces in the rearview mirror grew smaller and smaller even as I wondered if my last words to my dad were really true.

  “Mom, were you in love with Dad when you married him?” I had asked only the week before while we were antique hunting in Seattle, where my mom and I had just bought a condo together.

  She thought a minute, then said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been in love. What do you mean by ‘in love,’ anyway?”

  “What?” I was shocked. “You stayed with him for almost fifty years!”

  “He was good to me, and I appreciated it,” she said. “It was more like affection.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I insisted. “I know dad loved you, anyway.”

  “Did he? What makes you say that?”

  “He wrote you romantic cards and brought you flowers all the time!” It must have been clear from the tone in my voice that this was not up for dispute.

  “To me, that meant he treated me well,” she said, shaking her head in a way that said, “Young people these days . . .” She did not understand us.

  “But you were always kissing and holding hands,” I insisted while realizing the absurdity of trying to convince my mother she had been in love. What did it matter now?

  “Were we? I don’t remember.”

  “Okay, whatever,” I conceded. It was not my place to say. “It’s just that . . . that’s weird.”

  I think she realized she had disappointed me, because she started looking for examples of love. “He used to read the Song of Solomon from the Bible to me,” she said. “Is that what you want?”

  “Well, that’s romantic.” I nodded, vaguely remembering something about grapes and breasts. It was the Bible’s “erotic” book.

  “I suppose it is. It seemed very natural to be with him.”

  Then she thought of another example. “Before we married, our friends secretly followed us to the park and started pushing up and down on the car bumper with us inside. We thought it was an earthquake.”

  “What’s that have to do with anything?” I asked, exasperated.

  “Well, what do people do sitting in parked cars?”

  “I know you guys had sex, Mom.” I rolled my eyes. “That’s not what I mean. You sound like the old couple in Fiddler on the Roof, you know, where the guy asks his wife if she loves him after twenty-five years and she says, ‘For twenty-five years, I’ve washed your clothes, . . . so I suppose I do.’ Or something like that.”

  “Oh yes, your father liked that one!” She nodded and smiled. “He said we were like that. Yes, that’s it.” She did not realize it was not a compliment.

  So maybe I told my father a lie. I hope not.

  * * *

  —

  Over the next few weeks, my mom began to remember more. We were driving in the summer Seattle rain when my mom told me about the first time she met my dad, at a church party. “I remember leaning over Lydia’s back to talk to him about the binomial theorem,” she said. “I was learning it in class at the time. It seems so silly now. I talked about math for hours.” On their first date, she said, she wore a green wool two-piece suit she had made, with lining in the collar so it would be straight. “We were more careful about most things back then,” she said. She bought a green full-length slip in case her midriff showed. My dad brought her a corsage and took her to Fisherman’s Wharf in Seattle. She said it was too expensive. And so they began their fitful journey.

  “Come, my beloved,” I imagined my dad reading to my mom, “let us go out into the fields and lodge among the henna plants; let us go out early to the vineyards, and see whether the vines have budded, whether the grape blossoms have opened, and the pomegranates are in bloom. There I will give you my love.” They parked by the lake at Green Lake Park. Before long, she said, my mom started saving money for after he died because he was eleven years older than her. For her, this was the ultimate sign of love.

  From their letters, I could piece the rest together. Twelve days before the wedding, my mom wrote to my dad, “Are you sure you want to marry me? I’m still shaking and wish you were here. . . . My doubts and fears are still present and how I wish I could get rid of them.”

  He wrote back, “I still love you and want to marry you, but I will not blame you if you change your mind.” He ended the letter with, “Please marry me, Darling Mary.”

  In his last letter before the wedding, my dad wrote, “Though I may not be able to pray well yet, I believe the Lord hears me and answers my prayers. After all, he gave me you. . . . I’ve never loved you more.” According to my mom, he was afraid she would not show up at the altar. What he did not know was that after meeting her so-called “weird bunch of relatives” for the first time, my mom was afraid that he might change his mind.

  When my mother finally ap
peared with gardenias in her hair, thick cat’s-eye glasses, and a body covered in Chanel No. 5, my father must have gasped, and she must have smiled to see him standing there, waiting for her after all. In their wedding pictures, they are both beaming. They stand with the fear of abandonment still in their eyes and the wonder at each other’s presence filling their hearts.

  “I suppose we did love each other,” my mom finally admitted to me one day. “It’s just that we were always afraid that the other would leave.”

  I told you I had a Hidden Knowledge Detector.

  “Roller-coaster road!” the kids would soon shout from the back of the car on the way to China Lake. I would tickle my sister while she laughed in glee, wrapping her arms around me to make me stop. Full of song like a bird in a nest, I would begin to warble tentatively, “Thumbelina, Thumbelina, tiny little . . .” and my sister would join in automatically, as our voices grew stronger, in perfect harmony, through all the ups and downs ahead.

  * * *

  —

  “Stepping into The Twilight Zone” was how the base’s first commanding officer described arriving at China Lake. I wonder if he was surprised when he learned he would assume command over a vast desert city-ship rather than a real one, overseeing thousands of civilian scientists while tending a million acres of desert. Coming straight from the war in the Pacific, he must have found it hard to be surrounded by open desert rather than open water. It must have seemed as though his engine had cut out and he would have to float in that sea forever, waiting for someone to reach him with supplies. But we all learned how to float somehow. In the sky without a parachute. In war.

  When I left China Lake for the last time, I turned on my engine and revved it just a bit first. I relished the power of leaving in me. I was ready to turn this ship around. I was ready to head for shore. I drove away from that missile town knowing that all of us—the burros, me, and my dad—were fighters. Even the creosote bushes refused to die, throwing out rings of protection around themselves. We would ensure that history was not erased. We would do this simply by surviving, in life as in death, for better or worse. I tipped my head back, the power of desert animals in my bones, and had the last laugh.