Trinity Fields (3 page)

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 into 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.

To get our bearings, first he has me shoot from a distance too great to reach my target. He moves forward twenty paces, while I load again—Kip has shown me how—and then look up at him.

—You're too close now, move back, I shout.

—Go ahead and shoot, he answers, his voice reedy in the thin, still air.

—Move back.

He takes some steps backward, not many, and I shoot.

Nothing; a little dust kicks up off to his left and shy of where he stands.

—What'd I tell you? You're wasting shells, he shouts out, his hands cupped around his mouth. —Shells
-ells-ells
echoes neatly down the steep canyon walls. I look up. The sun is retiring over the trees. A redtail hawk is ovaling back behind me toward the east. I reload. Kip has walked up much closer now, and all this begins to make me nervous. I'm thinking, How come we got to play this game? It isn't very fun anyway. And what happens if I kill him?

—Come on, boy! Kip is calling, and I aim dead at his dancing figure. I can't do it, begin to lower the barrel. He is hollering, —Pull that trigger, babyman, come on, pull! Up goes the barrel again, and I hold my breath, see Kip jumping up and down, eyes closed so the bird-shot doesn't blind him, and we both know that unless my aim's off this time he'll get a pelting. I squeeze the trigger, recoil, smell the metallic smoke, hear the shotgun crack. It's like it is not me doing any of this, like I am watching someone else accomplish it all.

Kip is on the ground. He's screaming—kind of a high-pitched squeal I'd never heard him make before—and he is writhing. I am running to him. I've dropped the shotgun in the dirt. I'm afraid I've started to cry from fear, and my breath is heavy, my chest heaving by the time I reach him. His screams sound like laughs. His face is strangely smiling, but he's not smiling. It's a grimace. I guess I expected blood, and yet there isn't any blood. His face is purple-pocked, and his shirt is torn. I try to put my arm around him, but he shoves me off. He doesn't say anything to me. If he were to speak, I know it would be to scold me for crying like I am. His chest and cheek the most repulsive sight, a negative constellation of buckshot bruises.

The peppers game.

Kip has won.

He sits silent as a monk, then when he finally stands, his first words are, —Where's the gun, little fella? It's your turn now.

Born in a place set apart from the cultures surrounding it, we naturally developed a deep detachment, a separateness that all of us carried forward from youth into adulthood. Growing up as we did in the afterglow of genius, in a place whose triumph it was to create the finest death machine ever conceived by human beings, we expected that our games, games like peppers, games that involved defying injury on the monkey swing, games like the one we loved where we roller-skated as fast as we could down the sidewalk that approached Central School and crashed into the wall and fell down laughing so hard our sides ached, were all games that in their childish ways attempted to match the perils we surely sensed our parents—mostly our fathers—were courting day and night in their labs.

Kip and I had been too young, of course, to have registered what was happening on the Hill before the first bomb was detonated downstate at Alamogordo, and the dream of Trinity became in one bright instant on a predawn morning, after a long night of cold rain and driving winds, an actuality.

That was July 16th, 1945, 5:29:45 Mountain War Time. Dawn in which black became white, the white of absolute death, and then white became black, blacker than the black of Otowi glaziery, as the desert gave birth to a fiery tapbell, a flowering kale of light whose unprecedented pressure of a hundred billion atmospheres caved the earth in beneath the tower even while it disintegrated everything in its immediate path, caused a blind girl a hundred miles away for a moment to see its flash, and in a matter of instants changed forever the world back home at Los Alamos, not to mention the world beyond.

Like atomic particles, emotions have half-lives. Emotional climates linger, like radioactive clouds, in rooms where human beings have lived, fought and loved, eaten and shat, worked and slept. We'd grown up, Kip and I, inside an atmosphere changed and charged. We sensed—no, we
knew
—we were different from anybody who didn't live on the Hill. Trinity only confirmed this difference. We had been delivered into the midst of a birth far more significant, profoundly more potent than our own. The principles and tenets of Nature herself were being tested. Mere unfledged babes, we were set forth in the shadow of something far greater than ourselves. And we knew it.

Who would have thought a community could become so prepossessed by the invention of a device that would supply neutrons to start a chain reaction of nuclear fission? It is no exaggeration to say that never in the history of modern man—possibly never in mankind's history, period—has a collective of individuals lived together in such isolation, defined and motivated by such clear purpose, freed of distraction, fully focused on solving a single problem. It will never happen again.