“A lot. Half a centimeter, at least. ” He puts an arm around her shoulder, and she leans into him. He smells like cold wool and aftershave. “Thanks for taking care of her, Dorothy. I don't know what we'd do without you. ”
“We had a lovely time, ” says Mrs. McKibbin.
“You ready to go, Dews? You have your pass?”
Dewey nods into her father's arm. “I am very ready. ”
“Thought so. ” He gives her a squeeze and reaches down to get her bags.
Dewey and Papa walk out through the iron gate into the plaza. “I'm parked behind Woolworth's, ” he says. “Are you hungry? Do you want a Coke or something?”
“Not really. The lady gave me cocoa. ”
“Dorothy's aces. Her office is pretty much Grand Central when any of us are down in Santa Fe. ” They walk through a narrow passageway and out onto a side street where the green Studebaker is parked. Its wheels are caked with reddish mud, the bottoms of both doors splattered up several inches.
“Climb in. I'll put your things in the trunk. ” He stows the suitcase, then gets into the driver's side. She keeps the shopping bag.
“I'm sorry about Nana, ” he says as he pulls onto the highway heading north. “You've been really brave. I'm proud of you. ”
Dewey feels her whole body get warm as she flushes with pleasure. She looks over at him, studying his profile, not quite believing that he's actually here, sitting next to her. The tight little knot of faith that has been holding her together for the last twenty-four hours lets go, and a tear trickles down her cheek. “I missed you, ” she says.
“I know. I missed you too. ” He reaches over and squeezes her hand. “I wanted to come to St. Louis, take care of you. But I couldn't get away. There's just so much work. ” He looks over at her for a moment. “I'm so glad you're here. ”
“How long will we stay here?”
“Hard to say. A year, maybe two. I hope to god the war doesn't go on longer than that. ”
“Me too, ” says Dewey. She sits back in her seat, relaxed for the first time since she left Nana's house. She is with Papa, and they won't have to move again for a very long time. Until she's old. Until she's twelve. She watches the desert land go by the window, brown and foreign-looking, with distant mountains on either side of the road. It is a late autumn afternoon, and the fence posts cast long shadows as the sun drops in the west.
“How much farther is it?”
“Well, in about five miles we'll turn off the highway onto the Powakuh road, and it's a little more than half an hour from there. You can help me watch for the sign. ”
“Okay. ” Dewey is pleased to have something specific to do. She peers out the window intently until she sees a wooden sign that says POJOAQUE. “I see a sign, ” she says. “But it doesn't look like what you said. It says Po-joâsomething. ”
He glances out the window and chuckles. “That's it. It's pronounced Po-wah-kuh. It's Spanish. ”
Dewey thinks about La Junta and shakes her head. “Spanish people spell funny. ”
“It takes some getting used to. I bet you'll pick it up pretty fast. ” He turns left onto a dirt road that makes the car bounce like it's driving over a washboard. But only for about a mile. Then the road turns muddy, thick slippery mud that makes the car skid and slide from side to side. Papa slows the car down until they are crawling along. In front of a cluster of small mud-colored houses with strings of bright red peppers hanging by their front doors, he gets out to wipe the slurry from the windshield with an old towel.
“Is it like this the whole way?” Dewey is beginning to wonder about what kind of place they are going to, at the end of a muddy, bumpy road. It isn't looking good.
“Used to be like this all the way up. Except steeper. No fun to drive. But the army engineers have just about finished paving the really tricky part. It'll be smoother once we cross the Rio Grande. The bridge isn't too much farther. ”
It takes them twenty minutes to get there, but then the road is smoother, with brand-new black asphalt, so new there are still yellow bulldozers parked off to the side. The road begins to wind and twist, looping around on itself in tight switchbacks, so that Dewey is looking down at where they were a minute before. It climbs very uphill very quickly, and her ears feel too tight, then make a popping sound and are fine.
Dewey stares out the window with her mouth open. She has never seen anything like this, not even in pictures. One side of the road drops off into a deep canyon scattered with scrubby dark bushes. The walls on the other side of the canyon look like a layer cake that some giant has cut cleanly with a knife. Sheer vertical cliffs are striped in horizontal bands of color, layer after layer of crumbly-looking rock, red and pink and brown, with the green valley below, and the distant mountains turning lavender in the twilight.
The farther they climb, the more the land seems to fall away below them, until Dewey feels as if the rest of the world, everything she has known before, has become a distant memory.
Ten minutes later, the road levels off again and she feels the car slow down. “Okay, we're here, ” says Papa.
Dewey turns from the window, from the rocks and the sky that seems to stretch forever. In front of the car is a long chain-link fence, topped with many strands of barbed wire. A small green wooden building stands to the left, with a large sign that says: DANGER! PELIGRO! KEEP OUT!
Three uniformed men, wearing battle helmets and holding rifles, surround the car.
“Passes?” says one of them, holding out his hand.
Papa hands over a laminated card with his picture on it. The man writes his name on a clipboard. “Ma'am?” he asks.
Dewey reaches into the top of her sock and pulls out the little card. She scoots over on the seat until she is sitting right next to Papa, his body between her and the men with guns and the danger signs and the barbed wire. What if they find something wrong with her pass and take her away, away from Papa again?
Her hand shakes as she gives the card to the guard. The man looks at it carefully, looks at her, then hands it back. He waves them through the gate.
They drive around a curving dirt road flanked with pine trees. “Welcome home, Dews, ” he says as they pass an open area with a lot of partly finished buildings. He puts one arm around her shoulders and kisses the top of her head. “Welcome to Los Alamos. ”
1944
August 25
JUMPING ROPE
TERRY GORDON SAT
at the kitchen table staring at the cards in her hand. She took a puff of her cigarette, then discarded the seven of clubs. Her daughter Suze looked at it, shook her head and drew a card from the pile. A queen. She needed an eight. She made a face and tossed the queen onto the discard pile.
“Hah!” said her mother. “Gin!” She tossed her cards onto the table in groups of three and four and smiled triumphantly.
Suze laid her cards down with a sigh. So close. She'd only needed one card to go out herself. She counted up her unmatched cards. “Six, eleven, twenty, ” she said.
Her mother picked up the pencil and scribbled the total onto their score pad. “Okay, that gives me 25, 658 to yourâ” She looked at the other column of numbers. “22, 485. ” She glanced at the clock, then stubbed her Chesterfield out in the glass ashtray. “That's it for today, sweetie, ” she said. “I've got to run. Remember to tell Daddy that I'll try and meet you in the Lodge for dinner. ”
She put her coffee cup in the sink, blew a kiss from her fingertips, opened the screen door, and ran lightly down the outside staircase that led from their second-floor apartment to the road below. Her moccasins made soft thuds on each riser, and then she was gone.
As usual.
Suze looked at the ivory plastic clock on the kitchen wall. Five minutes to one. She put her fingers in her ears and waited.
A few seconds later, at exactly 12:55, a shrill siren sounded its warning blast, signaling the end of lunch hour. Suze counted to ten, then took her fingers out of her ears. It would go off again in another five minutes, and by then her mother would be through the Tech Area gate and back in her lab, doing whatever she did with her chemicals, six days a week. Daddy too, in his own lab. He hadn't come home for lunch, the third time this week. She hoped he'd remember to stop for dinner.
Suze sighed and pushed her blonde hair back behind her ears. It was getting to be an annoying length, too long to be short, and its blunt bowl cut meant that the sides were always falling in her face. Her mother had trimmed the bangs with nail scissors last week, but she needed a real haircut, and that meant a trip to Santa Fe. Or to the army barber, which was starting to feel like a reasonable solution to Suze. She could walk there by herself.
She pushed the score pad and pencil to the corner of the table. The numbers were written in pencil, pen, all different colors of ink, because the game had started more than a year ago. They used to play every night, after dinner, but lately her mother had been too busy. This was their first game in two weeks.
Both her parents had always worked. Back in Berkeley, though, where they'd been professors at the university, they'd had regular hours. Here on the Hill, she was never sure when she would see them. Especially Mom. Suze missed having her around, which was unpatriotic, because whatever the scientists were working on was going to end the war, and she knew that was more important than playing cards.
Most days.
The second siren went off, startling her. She'd forgotten.
“Do you ever miss our old life?” she asked her cat, Rutherford, who was lounging by the kitchen door. He was a big orange-striped tom who didn't seem to notice any difference between one sunny floor and another. California sun, New Mexico sun. It didn't much matter to Rutherford.
But it did to Suze. She had spent her entire life, up until last fall, in a rambling old house on Russell Street, half a mile from the UC campus, and only a block from College Avenue, with a movie theater and two drugstores. There were never any sirens, unless there was a fire, and they had had a yard with grass and trees with leaves.
Not like here. Here they lived upstairs in a tiny apartment with only four rooms. In the summer it was hot outside, and dust blew in, making the wooden floors gritty. In the winter, it was too hot inside, and soot from the coal furnace coated the walls and tabletops with a greasy black film. The walls were so thin that she could hear the family next door talking in their living room when she was trying to fall asleep.
She had her own room, but it was just barely big enough to hold her bed and desk and dresser. If she stuck her head way, way out the window, she could see mountains and pine trees and the rocky slopes of the canyon, and about a million stars at night. That part was okay. Mostly though, when she looked out the window normally, all she saw was laundry and dirt and army-green everything. Green houses, green trucks, green uniforms.
Suze liked colors. She liked crayons and paints and Oz books full of pictures of the Emerald City. But she was getting very tired of the army's kind of green.
She put her plate and milk glass in the sink, and thought about writing a letter to her grandmother. She'd gotten one last week, a late birthday card, so she ought to write back. Except she wasn't allowed to say anything interesting. She wasn't allowed to talk about the people here, or what happened last week, or even where she was. She had to leave the envelope open too, so the censors could read her letter before it left the Hill. Suze hated having some old army man read her private thoughts.
Once she had drawn a picture for Gramma Weiss, the view from her bedroom, the stick-your-head-out view, which had been very hard to draw. But the stupid old censor sent it back and said it wasn't allowed. If she couldn't talk about where she lived or anything, what was the point of writing a letter?
Through the open kitchen window, she heard voices from the road below, so she walked out onto the tiny porch they shared with the neighbors, letting the screen door bang behind her. A small knot of kids was down by the garbage cans at the bottom of the stairs. Back home, the street was at the fronts of the houses, but here it was at the backs. The army built it that way, her father said, because making deliveries would be easier. Her mother said it made the place look like a slum.
“What're you doing?” Suze called down.
“Nothin' much, ” a boy named Tom answered. He tossed a stone a few feet, raising a tiny mushroom of dust in the dirt road. They always played in the street. There weren't any lawns or yards or sidewalks, and no traffic during the day, except for an occasional army truck. And you could hear those coming from a long way away, bouncing and clattering over the rutted dirt roads that crisscrossed the site.
She thought for a moment. Doing nothing with the other kids might be more fun than doing it by herself. She pounded down the back steps, two at a time.
Suze Gordon was a stocky child with cinnamon-brown eyes, dressed in a striped shirt and cut-off khaki pants, the edges of the legs jagged and raveling. She had just turned eleven, and was as tall as most of the boys in her class, taller than some of them. She hoped she could talk the other kids into playing Red Rover. She was a good runner, and strong, and could almost always break through.
A blonde girl named Judy sat on the concrete stoop at the bottom of the stairs. She moved over to let Suze pass, but not enough to make room for her to sit. Judy was in her class at school, but she and Barbara and Betty and Joyce always hung out together, or with the other Girl Scouts. “Thick as thieves, ” her mother said.
Suze had been a Brownie in second grade, back in Berkeley. They'd gone on field trips to the zoo and made plaster casts of animal tracks up in Tilden Park and even rode horses once. So when they moved to the Hill and her mother suggested that she join the troop because it would be a good way to get to know the other girls and give her something to do after school, Suze had agreed.