This was our home. Magpies, bobbing-tailed phoebes who loved nothing better than to pronounce their name “fee-bee fee-bee” over and over while raucous, cranky scrub jays cried back “pi-ñon-es,” chattery finches, vast turkey vultures that lazily floated above the land stippled by arroyos flushed with runoff water, plump robin redbreasts drilling for worms in the dewy orchard grass—in spring it seemed every bird in the world was here. Elk, deer, bear walked our vegas; brookies, rainbows, browns swam our streams and ponds. When we looked out toward the east we could see long violet vistas that as if by sorcery changed to blue to amethyst to opal to the pink of a child’s cheek within a matter of minutes. The Sangre de Cristo range, its peaks mantled by clouds or snow, defined the farthest edge of our view, beyond the sere badlands of sandstone and granite, beyond the lowland pueblos, beyond the long, serpentine red roads that led to villages where Indians conversed in the patois their ancestors had used for hundreds of years, still discussing the same problems—how to get a decent crop of corn or beans to grow out of ground dry as a liar’s tongue, how to restore the Pajarito Plateau to what it was before the mestizos came into being, before the Spanish came to subordinate the Indians, before the Anglos came to subordinate the Hispanos. Although those from San Ildefonso and others of the pueblos in the valley became our friends, in the beginning we Hill people shared little more than one thing with the Indians, and for that matter with all of us who made our home here—like them, we were at war, and we were brothers and sisters with a common purpose. We were allies, the good guys. And knowing ourselves to be on the side of righteousness, we knew we must not lose.
He, William Calder—known as Kip from as far back as I can remember—and I, who was his best friend, were so tight that if born in the same skin, we would hardly have been closer. We were brought into the world within not quite a full day of each other, eleven hours apart to be exact, in December 1944. How we came to share the name of William—though my middle name is Brice, and Brice I have always gone by—is that our grandfathers bore that name, and before them in both families there were Williams, uncles and cousins, populating the ancestral tree. The two Williams. It was thought of as an amusing coincidence and was the subject of various jokes at the time. —Well, they’re certainly a willful pair. That sort of thing. Kip—whose nickname derived from his mother calling him her little Giddy Kipper—and I were born, were named and nurtured at the simple clapboard hospital, that long low hut with its wooden floors and enameled walls, and our mothers took us home to the Sundt houses on the same block where we grew up, near each other, as the winter snows came and went and spring forced the flowers into bloom.
I remember life on the Hill, so many shards of detail. Like everyone, I remember Fuller Lodge and the purity of the air around it, so often washed by walking rains. The grandest structure in town was the lodge, where the youngsters used to room back in the twenties and thirties when Los Alamos was a summer camp for boys from wealthy families in New York and Boston and St. Louis. Its architecture of ponderosa logs and white oakum, its long porch and high windows put one in mind of both a cathedral and a cabin. I remember the happy gatherings that took place there, and the fun we had tying together the red ristras of chilies and hanging them so they could sway in the wind along the grand portal. How delicious smelling were the baskets of fresh garlic when the farmer brought them up from the valley. How much fun the Easter egg hunt every year on the lawn. I remember the mechanical Santa Claus, arm waving back and forth, seated in his plywood sleigh and the reindeer that lunged and lurched on their trestle, and how very fine it was to build big snowmen with coals for eyes and a carrot nose out on the yard below Fuller Lodge and how we made hard round snowballs and smothered them with raspberry syrup and ate them out under the morning sky too cold to flurry.
I know—and knew—my mother was quietly unhappy about living the way she lived, and in this she probably wasn’t alone. Most of the wives on the Hill were kept in the dark about precisely what it was their husbands did at the lab. This was the sine qua non, the sole pact made between the government and each of the men hired to participate in the program, the Project. To an outsider my mother’s life might have looked idyllic, and any hint of grievance toward it fussy, trivial, ludicrous, spoiled. She lived in beautiful surroundings, her life was wholesome and protected in many ways that other people’s wartime lives weren’t. She was loved by her husband and blessed with two healthy children, neither of whom had as yet learned that the birthright of adolescence is revolt. She taught in the school, all grades from elementary up to high school, and was adored by most of her pupils who studied English and tried their best to learn Latin under her guidance. The kids that didn’t revere her at least respected or feared her.
For a schoolteacher’s son—a lot in life only a step above being the pastor’s daughter—I didn’t fare badly. I was only teased a little when I couldn’t conjugate a verb or diagram a sentence, was reprimanded with the same gentle care she showed any other student when I was guilty of not paying attention. By the same token, when my work was good and showed improvement, I was rewarded with the very praise that my classmates might receive, no more and no less. Her impartiality stood me in good stead. Evenhanded toward us all, as well as a real scholar—disciplined, original, largely self-taught—she was admired by her peers, even beloved. Students of hers from years ago write my mother letters, and keep her abreast of their own children’s progress.
Still, I just knew she wasn’t with it, was never quite content. She worked hard, relished work. She was a meticulous, but not maniacal, housekeeper. She was better than a good cook. She knew that she was more fortunate than most, especially during those days when she was a young mother living with husband and children in an America where thousands of mothers and wives didn’t have that luxury, their boys and husbands off in the European theater in some muddy trench, the Pacific theater taking salvos in heavy ocean. My mother was aware of this much. There was a lot of sanity to her. She read to her children every night when they were young, raised us on Treasure Island, on Ivanhoe, on The Alhambra, on the King James Bible. She spoke to us, when we were babies, in the language of adults. She took us to pick watercress at the edges of Pajarito Springs and taught us how to tell cress from monkeyflower, which is terrible to eat. She knew things, and what she didn’t know she tried to learn. She delighted in the names of plants here, like pipsissewa and kinnikinnik. When the birds passed overhead in spring she told us that they were sandhill cranes migrating from their winter home in Bosque del Apache to their nesting grounds in Idaho. She played piano, and sang, and we all tried to sing along. She had the charming if eccentric habit of smoking a small clay pipe in public and try as he may my father was never able to talk her out of it. She was cool before cool was cool. I can remember going to the famous parties in the great room at the lodge, and we kids would gunnysack-race across the lawn and dunk for apples, pin the tail on the donkey, clasp hands and go round and around in a circle and fall down together when London Bridge was falling down, limbo the limbo (Kip was limbo champion) and scrape knees and elbows, and eat canned peaches and sugary homemade fudge, and the adults would drink and dance, and if she’d had just enough tipple, my mother could dance crazier, more reckless, more full of life than any of them. To this day her mediating sadness—a misery she has always kept to herself as if it were some precious treasure—is an enigma to me, though sometimes I do remember her feeling especially tired and having to go to bed and how the water in the glass at her bedside table smelled different from the water the rest of us drank, and how once when she was dozing I took a sip and it scorched my tongue. I spit it back into the glass, as quietly as I could, and left the room filled with the special guilt of a child who knows he has done something wrong but doesn’t have the vaguest notion what it is, or why he knows it is wrong. I must have assumed at the time the clear burning liquid was medicine. Now I may know better, but mother as enigma remains just that. In later years, when I could have risked
asking her about it I didn’t, perhaps out of embarrassment or a fear of knowing the truth. And so I’ll never have an answer because now I’ll never ask. She is still alive but not, as they say, all there. Years and declining health render certain questions pointless.
My father I seldom saw, though I have a memory of him riding me on the backs of a pair of wide wooden skis, and the bite of the snow on Sawyer’s Hill being so cold it felt hot. For some reason, there resides in my head a song sung by him, in the voice of a twanging radio cowboy, about how he was so tall that when he laid himself down to sleep he rested his head in Colorado and his feet in Montana. But my poor father wasn’t so tall as all that. We weren’t allowed to speak about the blessed Project at dinner, or any other time. —What you don’t know won’t hurt you, was how he put it, trying but failing at levity. Stealth from dawn to dusk, stealth was all and everything to these men. Their tasks were compartmentalized to insure security, so that even the exchange of information between scientists working side by side in the Techs, as labs were called, was often limited, and ideas had to be fed through the intricate cat’s cradle of what my father called speakaround. Very little in Los Alamos didn’t travel by nonlinear means. Just as electrons circle the proton and neutron heart of an atom in constant ellipses, now near, now not near, now far, now not far, on and on with every passing second, so did we, each of us, in our ways circle one another, elliptically, near and far. Relativity was, here, among physicists, more than theory. It was a given, a way of life. Silence was golden—which may be part of the reason I revolted against it, and now still equate silence with cowardice. Mum was the word, but whatever the word might have meant was so mum, you didn’t dare say,—Mum’s the word. All in all, Dad is less clear a figure to me than Mom. They are both in different ways gone now, my father dead and my mother having mislaid her memory, to use the delicate phrase of her physician, and to get her off her one dear subject of religion is all but impossible.
Still, the hows and whys of their absences are less important than the absences themselves. I regret that now, when I could finally talk with my father about his part in the making of the bomb, now that I could muster some historical curiosity unobscured by the deep and often blind anger I displayed toward him during my days of antiwar activism, he is gone. During his last years he would have welcomed the chance of a discussion with me, and the reconciliation of sorts we’d begun at the beginning of this last decade might well have been accomplished. But I guess that wasn’t to come to pass, any more than has my talk with my mother about her problems and her hopes.
I remember my Kip, too, of course. I confess to remembering nothing and no one better than Kip, my parents and sister Bonnie Jean included. Indeed, almost myself included.
When summer came to the Hill, Kip and I took our shoes off and never put them on again until we had to go back to school in September. We were young and our waking hours were given to games. All the windows in the Sundt houses where we lived were wide open, and front doors—never locked in any season—stood ajar to catch the morning breeze. Because the Sundts looked alike, in June my mother put out two potted geraniums on the porch, so I’d never get lost in the evening when I walked home. Some of the men who came by in winter to stoke up our furnaces showed up in summer to paint the two-story apartment houses a flat regulation green and the roofs dull brick brown (the Sundts were meant to resemble boulders scattered around the meadow if viewed from a high altitude by enemy reconnaissance, and were set at angles rather than in uniform rows to enhance this mirage, though I always thought these spies would have to be morons to mistake houses for rocks). As the smell of fresh paint drifted through the air it became linked for us with summer and liberty. We trailed off into the canyons, and pitched tents under the conifers. We burned pinecone pyramids, we wrapped ourselves in our soogan bedrolls and looked up into the night sky for shooting stars. We heard scary footfalls in the dark, we had stare-downs, we danced like Indians we’d watched on the reservations. In the potreros we explored cliff dwellings and whenever we came upon a rattlesnake taking its siesta we would kill it with a stick and hang it in a nearby tree. Anything that hinted of danger was what attracted our interest above all.
We treasured one game in particular, though my love for it came gradually. Peppers was what we called it.
Says Kip one day, —Hey boy, wait till you see what I got.
—Yeah, what? I ask.
He doesn’t answer, but jerks his head to the right over his shoulder, turns on his heel, and begins to walk fast down the dirt street toward the old sawmill at Central and Diamond. Pollen floats in the sunlight, grainy yellow sheen. The afternoon is windless and warm.
There are some kids down at the mill. They’re climbing up the steep pile of sawdust, playing king of the mountain. One of them has a bloody nose that looks like a bloody mouth, all red. Another, the son of an engineer, a sweaty crazy kid, is upside down on the rope swing, way out over a pile of scrap lumber studded with rusty nails. —Drop! drop! some of our friends are screaming, daring him to plummet headfirst into the dangerous rubble. Kip walks right past him and his audience, still ahead of me by a few paces. —Kip, Kip, Kip can’t be king, this other boy taunts, and his sister joins in, —Kip can’t be king, Kip can’t be king, but Kip can’t hear them, or pretends not to and keeps moving. I look over at them. They shrug and I shrug back. We are, what, nine or ten years old.
—Where we headed? I ask, once we’re out of earshot.
—You’ll see, and before long we come to a half-finished Tech building. Kip stops, looks around behind to see if anyone has followed us, and now around back slithers belly down into the crawl space, knees wide apart, shoelaces trailing behind him, both untied, looking like dirty mop strings chasing his tennies over the tan dry ground. I get down on my hands and knees and peer into the darkness but can only hear him grunting. In a minute he’s back, with a beat-up saddle blanket wrapped around something long and narrow. —Come on, he says, and we’re off again, this time down into the woods. The manner in which he’s cradling the mysterious bundle under his arm makes me a little afraid, I have to admit. Something secret, something very precious he’s got.
We walk side by side into a clearing and he says, —Sit down.
I’m getting tired of this and say, —No, just show me what you got there.
He makes me promise not to tell a soul, and I promise.
Kip unfurls the blanket. What he’s got is a shotgun.
—Where’d you find that?
—It’s a four-ten, he tells me.
—But where’d you get it?
—Isn’t it the best?
I agreed it was pretty fine, but asked again, —Where’d you get it?
—It doesn’t matter.
—You stole it?
—I didn’t steal it.
It was probably the first time Kip had ever lied to me, and I took it to be a special moment in our friendship. Something new and strange got born between us, passed in a twinkling, difficult to define just what. It was as if his lie caused everything to feel suddenly more important—the dumb wind in the high boughs of the ponderosa became smart, the hiss of the needles was significant, everything was changed, matured, honed. The wedge this deceit drove between us only served to make me love Kip more. I wanted to please him so he wouldn’t have to lie again. In a way, it was the lie that midwifed our game of peppers.
What’s next is I want to know what we’re going to do with the gun.
—We’re going to shoot it, of course, boy, he says.
—You got ammo, boy? I say.
—’Course I got ammo.
And sure enough he’s got a box of shells.
—What’re we going to shoot?
This is getting exciting, because it’s really going to happen, I say to myself. But what’s going to happen?
He doesn’t give it to me right off. He waits. He lifts the butt of the shotgun to his shoulder, draws the barrel to a nice, steady horizontal, aiming straight int
o my eye, and says, —We’re going to play peppers.
—So what’s peppers? blinking, despite myself.
I almost say, So what’s peppers, boy? but that’s harder to do with a shotgun pointed at you, even if it’s in the hands of your best friend, and unloaded, which it is.
—Peppers is one of us goes way over there . . . and he is pointing to the far edge of this canyon we are standing in, one of our favorites because none of the other kids seems to know about it, and it’s always been a place where we could come and loaf around in private. —One of us goes way over there, and then the other one shoots and the one who’s over there gets peppered.
—Forget it.
—No, look, I know how to do this, Kip says.
At his insistence, the first shot is to be taken by me at him: a display of trust. I watch him stride away across the field, long arms swinging alongside his narrow hips, his slightness belying the obstinance which at times like this can saturate his character. He is determined and casual at the same time. There is an ease, a carelessness to Kip I’ve always envied, occasionally attempted to affect. It must have seemed sophisticated from the first time I recognized it in him, but it’s something I have never achieved.
Trinity Fields Page 2
