Trinity Fields (2 page)

—Yeah okay, he said from within, as if he were talking to somebody inside, his voice echoing off walls we couldn't see. Kip shimmied into the blackness after him, and I after Kip.

Now it was fully pitch-dark. —Come on, we could hear Martinez ten or twenty feet ahead of where we lay on our sides, breathing hard from fear. We heard him crawl on all fours forward, and we heard him pause before he jumped. When he landed he gave a grunt as if the wind were knocked out of him. Footsteps down in the nave. We scraped along, edged forward, bumping into one another, feeling our way deeper and deeper into the church. Suddenly the square opening ahead became illuminated—a faint white flickered in vague space. We crept to the end of the shaft and looked down into the void. Fernando Martinez stood below, a ghost shedding light upon ghost altar, ghost santos, ghost pews. He'd lit a candle and held it over his head. He wore a broad smile on his face. —Told you I know this place good, he said. I looked at Kip and Kip looked at me, and we dropped down feet first into the sanctuary, two drunk virgins, larcenous and saturated not just in hot, smooth swig but the innocence of angry idealism, hardly believing where we were. —Now we go to the well of earth, Martinez said.

Years later I discovered that there is a word for the act we performed on behalf of all the guilty souls back home on the Hill. Geophagy, it is.

Having hit our heads on the lintel of the doorway near the altar, we found ourselves in a claustrophobic chamber, a cell whose air was humid and ceiling low, with one small window. Here it was, the posito, a primitive circular hole carved a forearm's length wide and about as deep in the ground. We knelt. First we washed our hands with the dirt, then our faces, and finally we began to eat. From the tips of our fingers, from the bowls of our palms, we ate from the bottom of this hole handfuls of damp, crumbly loam known as the tierra bendita, choking, hacking and spitting, holding it down though it wanted to come up. Fernando Martinez sat against the wall and regarded us, amused and sodden and calm. He forbore to join our earthen feast. The candle flickered and made our shadows jump, giant and grotesque on the walls, while he finished off the whiskey and soon enough drifted into a dreamy stupor.

December 1944. Here is Los Alamos, New Mexico, an invented town, an extemporaneous city made for men at war, a secret district that couldn't be found on any map, a community that did not exist two years before Kip and I were born, between Christmas and New Year's, into a world of opposing ideas, of rage and determination, of fire and death, a community that was still in its rural infancy when we came crying into the slantlight—Kip morning, me evening—that poured through the windows of the delivery room.

Los Alamos. Sometimes in the night to frighten myself I will whisper those words into my pillow. Los Alamos.
So low, so almost, so lost all souls. Los álamos
, poplars, cottonwoods, the quaking aspen—
álamo temblón
. I'll whisper these words and I, too, will begin to tremble.

And yet it would be an easy falsehood to claim that I didn't love the place. However spartan, it was in many ways a veritable paradise back in those earliest days, as most who lived there would agree. We sometimes called it Shangri-la, though the military preferred the less expressive designation of Project Y. But by whatever name it went, Los Alamos was rather Utopian—a successful experiment in socialism, perhaps the most successful socialist community ever to be founded in this country, paradoxical as that might have seemed back in the fifties, when our principal purpose was to develop a hydrogen bomb to deter the spread of Communism, to bring socialism down so that the free-world markets might thrive and the concept of state ownership be passed into extinction.

Our parents were so young and so brilliant, and in our brand-new home there was no undertaker, no cemetery, there were no elderly people walking the streets, no widows gazing out windows. None of our citizens owned real property, nor were we subject to municipal tax. Unemployment was unknown to us. Loneliness was rare among us. Racism and casteing did not much occur to us—though it must be said there was certain social status attached to living in one of the houses of older vintage, because those were the only structures on the Hill furnished with bathtubs, but this rare honor went more often to the scientists than the military men. Still, we were a pretty integrated group. None of us was rich, none of us was poor, and because our town was unknown, drifters and grifters were never seen to walk our unpaved streets. In the war years our secret citadel was free of crime—no one had time to contemplate theft, and besides, none of us back then had anything worth stealing except ideas. Our skies were blue daubed silver and white and the purest black, and nowhere was the taint of smog that beleaguered other cities. Disease was more or less absent from our lives. That is, our doctor might set a broken arm, the result of a construction accident or a fall down a scree-strewn hiking trail, and later, as the bomb neared completion, might treat an early victim of radiation exposure, but the hospital was used above all as a place for delivering babies.

We were known as the Hill people. We lived in an embryo of hiddenness and generally kept to ourselves up there in the Jemez mountains during the last years of the war. To hold the outside world at bay, our community was cordoned off by fences that ran up and down the long lengths of the finger mesas. Men on horses rode the perimeters, studying the cliffs for unusual movements, poring over the canyons down where the Anasazi used to make their homes. No one left or entered without showing a pass to the guard at the gate. None of our movements was unmonitored. All our needs were, as much as possible, attended to within the precincts of the town itself. They preferred that we did not leave the mesa; laboratory members weren't allowed to travel more than a hundred miles away without permission, and no one—friends, relatives, it did not matter who—was allowed to visit us. Our telephone conversations were eavesdropped, letters were posted unsealed and read by censors before going out into the world. Codes took the place of English. Our names were converted to numbers on driver's licenses and our common address was a post office box down in Santa Fe. All the adults who worked on the Manhattan Project, as the entire undertaking was called, were required to sign the Espionage Act, and all were fingerprinted and photographed. Neither expense nor time was spared to assure our sequestration. In history there have been many secret societies—the Iroquois had theirs of medicine men, I think of the medieval guilds and cathedral masons, in Persia there was Mithraism and in Greece Orphism—but never was there one more secret than ours. We were asked only to make the bomb, devise it and construct it as quickly as possible. We had our hardships, the winters were tough and the summers were dusty and hot, but our lives were rich. We were shepherded by our patrons, parented by them in some ways, were given a quiet place where we could think, experiment, learn, build. In a way, we were all children—from the geniuses who walked among us down to the kids who ice-skated on Ashley Pond. We were, in the end, protected from everyone but ourselves.

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.