An Atomic Romance (16 page)

27

Weston Thornhill lived a few miles beyond the city limits, near a large apple orchard. When Reed was growing up, Thornhill and his wife used to drop by the house, sometimes bringing fruit from the orchard. Reed hadn’t seen his father’s friend in years.

Thornhill was bent over in his garden—stooping at the feet of hollyhocks and sunflowers. He straightened, holding on to his hoe as an anchor, when Reed turned in the driveway. He stared questioningly as Reed emerged from his truck. A clump of weeds fell from his hand.

“Reed Futrell, it’s about time you showed up here,” Wes Thornhill said in a thunderously welcoming voice. “Where in the world have you been all these years?” He pointed his hoe at Reed.

“Your garden’s looking good, Mr. Thornhill. Your tomatoes are ripe and your beans could be Jack’s beanstalks.”

Thornhill examined Reed. “You look more like Robert Futrell than he did himself!” he said as if he had just retrieved a quiz answer long stored in memory.

“I’m Robert Futrell’s, all right,” Reed said, pleased.

“Your daddy was a good one. Everybody liked him.”

They sat down on two stumps under a canopy of oak trees behind the modest white dwelling. The tatterdemalion back porch overflowed with junk, and a makeshift awning sheltered more. Thornhill wiped his face with a wadded handkerchief he plucked from his shirt pocket. Reed noticed some small white splotches on the man’s cheeks. For a while, they caught up on general news. Thornhill had not heard about Reed’s mother’s stroke, but in the way of older people he seemed to take news of illness and decline in stride.

“I’d offer you a beer if I had one,” Thornhill said. He was still clutching his hoe. “But I can’t drink fizzy drinks anymore.”

“That’s O.K., Mr. Thornhill.”

“How many hot spots do you have to step on to get through the parking lot nowadays? Are they getting that mess cleaned up?”

“We don’t throw anything away,” Reed said with a grin. “It’s like people in Alaska. They just pile up their broken old snowmobiles and pretend it’s sculptures.” He was facing a rusty riding mower piled with plastic crates beneath the tilted awning.

“That plant’s a poison pit,” the older man declared. “We breathed a lot of black dust.”

“My uncle Ed always said that didn’t bother him.”

“They said you could eat the stuff! But they also thought the work was dangerous enough to keep it top secret. Does that make sense?” He steadied himself with his hoe handle. “Back at the start, people didn’t know any better. Do you drink tap water?”

“Well, I’ve been known to,” said Reed, thinking he was being offered a drink of water; there was a hose lying on the ground.

“It’ll kill you,” Thornhill said. “It’s full of TCE—that’s as bad as anything. We used to crawl inside those big cylinders and wash them out with TCE. Tons of it drained into the groundwater.”

“I know,” said Reed. “They were sloppy in the way they handled it.”

“That stuff’s built up in the groundwater and killed the fish and all.”

Reed poked at the bark on the stump, which was pressing his testicles. “Now we wash out the pipes with Formula 409 and Kool-Aid.” He laughed.

“That TCE will kill you,” Thornhill repeated.

“Mr. Thornhill, tell me, when you were there did you know about the transuranics?”

He paused to think. “It’s funny. We were sworn to secrecy, but what the hell did we know? They said if word had leaked out, the Russians could have used the information. We weren’t smart enough to figure it out for ourselves, but the Russians would know. We were afraid to say anything, in case it might be something the Russians could use. Hell, do you think if I heard somebody telling a secret in Russian that I’d know what to do with it?” His laughter was bitter.

“But did you know you were working with reactor tails?” Reed asked.

“Oh, yeah. We did that. The shipments came in on the railroad cars, and we processed it. But we didn’t know how hot it really was. It was spent fuel rods, all ground up into black oxide.” He laughed. “We called the stuff ‘rat tails.’ ”

“And what about warheads?”

He nodded. “I remember those too. I remember when the bombs came in. They rolled them out on a huge cart, on tandem wheels.” He grinned. “The tandem wheels were nifty. I’d make toolboxes out of them. All the electric circuitry in the bombs was gold plated. The bomb had a parachute inside made out of mesh, and I made a hammock out of one.”

Reed laughed with him. “I would have done the same thing.” He stretched out his right calf, pulling his toes toward him. His muscles were tight as fence wire. “Mr. Thornhill, you don’t really mean bombs, complete and ready to roll, do you?”

“No. They’d been broken apart before they were shipped.”

“They were old bombs that had been dismantled.”

“Right. The shipments would come in the dead of night, and we’d unload them off of a conveyer belt and put them in a storage shed. It was all hush-hush. Then later on we’d strip down the gold and the nickel and the aluminum and some other stuff. We’d toss it all in the smelter.”

“That must be where the nickel scrap came from that was going to be made into barbecue grills,” Reed said.

“We didn’t know about anything radioactive in there; we weren’t told everything, just what they said we needed to know. But that’s where the beryllium came from, you know. The nose cones. Nobody said anything about plutonium though. The trigger had been taken out—”

“The plutonium pit?”

“Yeah. A hole was there. I don’t know what they did with all the triggers.”

“The hole where they were must have had traces of plutonium,” Reed said. “That must be where the plutonium contamination came from.”

“That’s what I figure,” said Thornhill, nodding.

“They’re cranking up some old plants, like the one out in New Mexico, to fix up the worn-out triggers.”

“Oh, yeah. I know all about that. I figure it’s just an excuse for making more bombs.”

Thornhill repositioned himself on his stump seat. The hoe he had been holding fell to the ground, and he turned its blade downward. In his mind, Reed conjured up the stricken expression on Julia’s face if she heard this conversation.

Hesitantly, he said, “The thing is—management has been good to us. But somebody along the line should have told us the truth.”

“Hell, they were good to us then,” said Thornhill. “I don’t think they knew. Back then nobody really understood radiation.”

Except moviemakers, Reed thought.
Them. Godzilla.
The Japanese knew.

Thornhill said, “I knew back when your daddy died that it wasn’t good to work with that stuff. I stayed because I didn’t have much choice. I had three little ones and a wife who wanted too much. But I’d come home green and they’d all laugh. We had to get the kids not to tell that I was green at the supper table—but how could you expect a kid not to blab that? Of all things in the world, that’s what they’d want to tell. We told them if the Communists found out, they’d come and take away all their playthings. Oh, it was ridiculous.” He laughed. “I had the kids scared to say boo.”

At Reed’s urging, Thornhill began to reminisce about the days when the plant was built and the atomic cloud was a popular symbol, appearing on everything from license plates to souvenir trinkets.

“Oh, it was like Christmas and the circus all at once,” he said. “People were coming in from everywhere to build the plant. Apartment buildings were shooting up. People whipped out shacks in their backyards and rented them to workers. They rented out leantos and even chicken coops. It was a few years after the war and people here were still hurting pretty bad. When the plant opened, the President came and rode in a parade downtown. It was crowded with people from miles around.”

“My mother used to tell about all that,” said Reed. “She said it was like Hollywood had come and taken over the place.”

“You have to remember we hadn’t seen anything like it,” he said, his eyes gleaming. “We’d never seen tall apartment houses, and we’d never seen so much money and so many promises. And the President!” Thornhill stopped and shook his head. Flexing his age-spotted hands, he said, “I had skin cancer—in three places. But I reckon I’ll be all right.”

“I’m sorry to hear about that, Mr. Thornhill.”

“My wife died from breast cancer. My grandbaby was born still-dead. Had no idea. But you know, I carry on! Look at them hollyhocks. Did you ever see such a sight? I reckon I’ll keep on going, even if it’s for nothing more than a fucking hollyhock.”

“Those are good-looking hollyhocks,” Reed said. The spikes of bright faces reminded him of a chorus line.

“My wife loved them, so I carry on with them.”

“I’m sorry about your wife,” Reed said. “I remember her.”

Reed again inquired about his father. “Tell me what working there was like for him, Mr. Thornhill.”

“We worked with liquid fluorine,” Thornhill said. “We knew that was dangerous. You could cut diamonds with it—if you had some diamonds.”

“I’ve been burned by hydrofluoric acid,” said Reed, showing the puckered little hole on his wrist. “Boy, fluorine smokes.”

“Well, then, you can imagine how bad your daddy’s accident was.” Thornhill paused to scrape something from his shoe. “I wasn’t there when it happened, but I know when the fluorine leaked he was working in a real tight place, and he couldn’t get out fast enough. Those fumes took him down. I believe he caught his foot on something.”

“Stubbed his toe in the dark,” Reed said. “Damn.”

Thornhill nodded. “You couldn’t see in that feed plant for the dust—except once in a while when a ball of fire rolled across the ceiling.” His face brightened. “The hydrogen collected up there and a spark would set it off. It would just roll right out the door and we’d go back to work. It might singe your hair a little.”

Reed stretched his leg slowly, choosing words. “My mother always told me my dad was a hero of the Cold War,” he said. “She said he died in the service of his country.”

Thornhill grunted. “And my boy died in Vietnam. He died in the service of his country. But nobody ever said he was a hero—except his mama and me.”

A little breeze was making the hollyhocks tremble. Reed felt the hairs on his arms move in unison with them.

28

At the end of the week, Reed picked up the exposure records he had requested. The manila envelope lay on the passenger seat of his car unopened while he stopped for gas, lingering to chat with a couple of contractors Burl sometimes worked for. Rosalyn wasn’t there. Then he drove to a market for dog food and eggs. He came home, stowed the food, romped around the vacant lot with Clarence, drank a ginger ale.

Testing was routine. Once a month he gave a urine sample, and at least twice a year during the eighties he lay on a table in the dark trailer of a mobile health-physics testing lab while a body counter, in the manner of space aliens examining abductees, trundled slowly over his flesh.

He had seen these reports back then, but he had filed them away, and they had disappeared during his divorce. Now, at his kitchen table, he calmly considered the numbers under his bioassay analysis and his in vivo monitoring. His numbers were usually less than twenty-five percent of the radiation protection standards. He was “within range.” But in 1982, 1986, and 1987 the numbers had shot up. In later years, with the safety uprating, he hadn’t worried. He figured the numbers would average out.

He remembered this one—1982. His urinalysis revealed twice the “safe” level of uranium. But the next year he was normal.

He flipped to 1986, the year of the worst incident. Yellow dust and sirens. The body-counter numbers for uranium and technetium were approximately what he recalled—within limits. But 0.15 nanocuries of neptunium had slipped into his body. Then he saw the word
plutonium.

An air sample taken on-site contained an unusually high concentration
of plutonium-239 and an equal concentration of neptunium-237.

This was new. He had not been told about plutonium on his tests before. Or had he misremembered?

The paper in hand, Reed stood up, as if he were levitating above his body like a patient who would later claim to have died briefly. He read on.

Mr. Futrell was protected from airborne radionuclides by the full-face
respirator with canister. His in vivo results are acceptable.

Maybe he had stashed all this in the back of his mind, knowing his safety suit had protected him. Now he realized that the body counter couldn’t register plutonium, but if neptunium was in his body, then an equal amount of plutonium was there too, like a shadowy twin. The 0.15 nanocuries of neptunium from this incident was matched by the same amount of plutonium. He thought of fund-raisers on the radio seeking matching contributions. Airborne radionuclides, like radio waves.

But a flyspeck of plutonium packed a bigger wallop than a flyspeck of neptunium, he realized. The numbers wouldn’t match at all.

He set the papers on the table. Under the ceiling fan, the top sheet fluttered almost imperceptibly. The numbers might not foreshadow anything at all. Nobody really knew. His trusty moon suit had shielded his lungs—maybe—from a large airburst of transuranics. No problem. He took a deep breath.

It really wasn’t much, he thought. It was far short of the permissible body burden for rad workers. But Julia had insisted that there was no safe level.

Sure,
he thought of saying to Julia.
I smoked plutonium a time or
two. But I didn’t inhale.

In an oblique way, he had been informed long ago that plutonium was present, and he had chosen not to ask questions. His own life was a reflection of his father’s. In incremental bits he had trespassed upon his father’s fate. He felt closer to his father, seeing the parallel. They were both willing participants.

Reed sorted the planets, edited and cropped them, made a new arrangement of the nine—two gorgeous goddesses and seven action-hero gods. He thought about what it would be like to see Neptune from the surface of its largest moon, Triton: how Neptune would be a huge blue breast rising from the horizon, filling half the sky. He made a special pop-up feature on Uranus and the transuranics, Neptune and Pluto, stranded out on the edge of the solar system. He had internalized them. Gazing at them made him feel as if he had vaulted out of earthly gravity into warped space-time. He had a modicum of power. He sped the planets through their orbits. He really was Atomic Man.

When Reed returned the overdue books to the public library, he ordered from interlibrary loan a book on plutonium and one about Rocky Flats, the nuclear-bomb plant that produced most of America’s arsenal and was then condemned, with a shit-load of plutonium in its backyard.

At the library, he decided to look up his father’s obituary; he didn’t remember ever seeing it. An attractive librarian in high heels helped him find the microfilm from 1962 and set up the reel on the reading machine. He chatted with her for a while, noticing the curve of her breasts when she bent to insert the microfilm.

“Do you have anything about the history of the atomic plant?” he asked her.

“I bet we do. I’ll check.”

Whipping through the pages of microfilm, Reed quickly located his father’s obituary. Robert Futrell, age thirty-six, worked at Main Atomic, as it was known then, and he left a wife, Margaret (“Peggy”), and son, Reed, six, and daughter, Shirley, two. Reed had forgotten that his father was a member of the National Rifle Association, and that he attended the Baptist church on Grand Avenue. It was a brief story. It said his father died shortly after an accident at work.

Turning the knob back, Reed searched for a story about the accident. The swift, jerky motion of the microfilm was unsettling. He found nothing. But he treasured the small facts he had found in the obituary. He remembered his father walking through the front door, hanging his hat on a peg, walking down the polished hardwood floor of the hallway, then making a sharp L-turn and sitting down to play the piano. Would he have gone directly to the piano? Didn’t he want to play with Reed, his little son, age six, first? Did he embrace Reed’s mom? Hoist baby Shirley to his shoulders? Reed tried to remember what his father played on the piano. Something fast and loud. And his mother danced. That was how his parents said hello to each other at the end of the day—in a burst of joy. She skipped down the hardwood hall, scooped Reed up in her arms, and presented him to the piano-playing pop, like a prize at the end of the number. And then they had supper.

His memories of his father, and the bits and pieces people had told him, had long ago combined into an image, the way George Washington or Abraham Lincoln is summed up by a single visual image. His father was simply his father: guy who worked at plant, played piano, died in accident. Reed had long ago ceased to ask questions about the pleasant face in photos. When Reed turned thirty-six, he was acutely aware that his father had died at that age. At that time, Reed rolled over the memories and images in his mind quite frequently, but he and Glenda were raising kids then, and he didn’t pursue his questions. Now Reed wished he knew the textures of his father’s working life—the feel of black oxide and greensalt, the heat and noise in a darker, more reckless time.

The librarian was at his side, with a folder. “I found this in Special Collections. I thought it might interest you.”

“Thanks.”

“I wasn’t supposed to take it out of the room. So be careful you don’t tear anything, and if you take notes, use a pencil.”

“Thanks. I’ll be careful.”

The folder contained a newspaper feature about the plant, printed as a special section of the paper in 1955. The principal features of the gaseous-diffusion process of enriching uranium were unexpectedly detailed, with photographs of the compressors, the cylinders, the pipes, the drums, the skilled-maintenance department, the railroad cars.

The story covered several pages, with splashy photographs of the building interiors. He stared at a bank of fluorine generators in the old feed plant, where his father had been burned. He could see the copper buss work connecting them above. The fluorine cells—like coffins on legs—were set on spring shock absorbers attached to a metal frame. He saw how his father could have tripped over the network of framing on the floor. Although the picture was bright, Reed knew the area was dim, like the lighting in a movie theater. Atomic energy dawdled in the dark ages. Gaseous diffusion was to a centrifuge what a hot-air balloon was to the Wright flyer. The technology was crude; the machinery sported sharp corners and ungainly protrusions. It would be precarious moving around the old feed plant, which kept up a steady tremor while the fluorine cells jiggled on their shock absorbers. Even though it had advanced somewhat since his father’s time, the enrichment process struck Reed as absurd. Making atomic fuel was a witches’ brew; it was like Dr. Frankenstein rigging up his crazy-quilt monster with baling wire and eyeballs from an organ depository and screwed-in limbs and mismatched feet.

The newspaper section was presented as a civic promotion, a celebration of the city’s good fortune. The lead article said, “We’re not revealing any secrets. Some procedures and materials remain highly classified.”

“The KGB wouldn’t give a shit how many welding rods I use,” Reed said aloud, startling readers at the other microfilm machines.