Critical Reaction (19 page)

They stopped in front of a sliding door to await the train to Concourse C. “Nuclear chemistry?” Ryan repeated.

“Yes,” the Vietnamese man responded, before glancing nervously at his watch again.

“Really. Nuclear chemistry.”

“Yes.”

The train came rolling in fast, then settled to a stop. A moment
later, the doors opened and Ryan followed the diminutive man into the car. The train lurched forward, then settled into a steady pace.

“I’m Ryan Hart,” he said, extending a hand.

The man smiled. “Dr. Minh Trân.”

“Do you have a card, Dr. Trân?”

The man looked surprised. “Yes.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled one out, handing it to Ryan.

“Do you do any legal consulting work, Doctor?”

“On occasion,” the doctor said. The train was slowing now. “Concourse C,” a female voice called over the intercom.

“But I’ve been terribly busy lately,” the doctor finished.

They exited the car together. Ryan glanced around—until the doctor pointed to the arrow directing them to an escalator heading to gates C1 through 5. They were nearing gate 5 when the doctor reached into his hip pocket, pulling out a cell phone. He stared at the screen for a moment, then put it to his ear.

They parted there in the concourse. The plane to Sherman was small, but he didn’t see where the doctor was seated—nor did he see him exit the plane. But Ryan was still thinking about the man as he retrieved his car in the lot and started the short drive to the Annex.

CHAPTER 19

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“Pat, are you ever going to pass the potatoes?”

Poppy stirred, looking up at his wife’s anxious eyes and the looks of everyone else around the dining room table. “Sorry, Suzy,” he said, handing the heaped dish across to her.

Michael, to his right, was throwing his father worried glances. His son’s wife, Yvonne, at the far end of the table, was working on her food, trying to ignore the awkwardness, while Megan, their youngest, seated next to Suzy, wasn’t even trying to hide her concern.

Only five-year-old Michael Jr. paid no attention as he piled his own serving of potatoes into a shape like a mountain.

Poppy hated what he was doing to everybody. His worry and fretting had everyone tied in knots. “Hey,” he started in with a forced grin, “that new guy I’m working with told me a story the other day. . . .” He only half understood the joke about Twitter, but it worked for now. Michael and Yvonne smiled and went back to their own food. Suzy nodded. Only Megan refused to be mollified.

Thirty years and more out at Hanford, and Poppy’d never seen them as worried about their dad as now. Megan was working in accounting at one of the Hanford subcontractors; Michael was three years into his own career as a Hanford guard
while taking night classes and talking about law school. They all understood Hanford and the risks associated with it. But they had no clue why their dad was moping and muttering like a homeless man, because he wasn’t telling anybody what was bothering him, leaving them to guess and assume the worst. He couldn’t keep this up.

The remainder of the meal, Poppy worked to stay engaged. It wasn’t easy, and he wasn’t completely successful. Later, as they finished stacking the dishes beside the kitchen sink full of steaming water, Megan came up behind him and gave him a hug. He grabbed her hands and squeezed.

“Say, Suzy,” he said to his wife at the refrigerator. “It’s still early enough. I think I’d like to go over and see dad at the home.”

“Want company?” Megan asked, releasing him.

“Oh, you know, that’s great,” Poppy answered a little too quickly, “but maybe just this once I could use a few minutes alone with your grandpa.”

He ached at the look of surprise in Megan’s eyes. “That’s fine, Dad,” she answered.

He’d never turned down one of his kids wanting to visit their grandfather before, and it bothered him to do it now. “Next time,” Poppy said with a smile.

“Go ahead,” Suzy said to Poppy, eyeing him like a stranger in her kitchen. “They’ll close soon.”

Poppy was barely aware of the drive until he pulled into the Sherman Retirement Home parking lot. Endowed by Hanford contractors back in the seventies, it was cheap, well run, and the best alternative this side of Yakima or Spokane. So many Hanford veterans eventually settled into this place that the aging residents had nicknamed it the “fourth shift.”

Poppy asked at the nurses’ desk if they could bring Rodney Martin down to the lawn. Then he made his way through the community hall and past the double glass doors to the outside patio.

The evening was warm. That was good. So long as it was comfortable outside, his father preferred getting together here, where the sun glinted off the Columbia River at the end of a lawn mowed as close as a putting green. “Beats staring at the pill bottles in my room,” his father would grunt.

It was a joke, not a complaint. Poppy marveled that a man once so powerful had kept his sense of humor, reduced at eighty-nine to a wheelchair rigged for oxygen. Still setting examples, he thought.

He found a porch chair facing the Columbia to watch the shifting shades of gray on its surface, trying to lose himself in the dusky comfort of its steady flow. Whatever it took to release the worry pains in his stomach and the blanket of exhaustion in his head.

What should he do about his statement about LB5?

All the years he’d worked there, and his father before him. His grandparents had witnessed the day in 1943 when engineers, bulldozers, and construction workers had gathered like ants along the banks of the river to start building the city of structures that would become the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Poppy recalled, at age twelve, the day Rodney got permission from his bosses to drive his son onto the grounds to the ruins of the town of Hanford. It had been a sleepy place, his father said, a small farming community, before the residents were cleared out almost overnight to make way for the plutonium factory. They’d left behind as their lives’ monuments only the empty shells of houses, stores, and a single school.

His father and he strode down the rutted road of Hanford’s silent main street together, its abandoned buildings charred and darkened from years of DOE-sanctioned fire practice by outside communities. Stopping before the burned-out hulk of a house, Rodney stretched out his hand to touch blackened paint on the remains of its clapboard walls.

“This is the house where I was raised,” Rodney explained
quietly, speaking as much to the home’s remains as to Poppy at his side. “I left to fight in a war where I saw bombed-out villages from Normandy to the Ruhr. I was so grateful America was spared. Then I got back to Hanford and my own hometown was emptied forever. My parents hadn’t even been allowed to tell your uncle and me before we got back. ‘Security,’ they said.”

Everything his family had given to Hanford. Now this was what Hanford was giving back.

“Patrick?”

The voice was weak and breathy. Poppy planted a smile on his face before turning to the wheelchair and giving his father a hug.

“Hey, Dad.”

“We’re closing for visitors in forty-five minutes,” the nurse behind the wheelchair said before leaving. Poppy thanked her, then pulled his chair closer to his dad.

Rodney’s gaze was strong, but his eyes were at war with crooked fingers on spotted hands laced with dark veins. Thin gray strands of hair were combed across his head, and the skin of his face and neck was stretched and mottled. Poppy saw past it, picturing the man who’d once amazed co-workers by lifting 150-pound barrels fully overhead.

For ten minutes, a cooling breeze rolled up the slope from the river as he answered his father’s questions about grandchildren and great grandchildren. It was a blessing that his father still remembered them all. Their talk turned briefly to Sherman: the winning streak for the local minor league baseball team, the new ballpark on the east side of town.

The conversation waned.

“So aren’t you going to tell me what’s troubling you, son?” his father broke into his thoughts.

“It’s nothing,” Poppy said. He’d come planning to ask for advice. But now, sitting in the reflection of an orange sunset
floating over the Columbia, he saw only a frail man who’d earned his rest. “I think I should go.”

His father shook his head slowly. “Don’t lie to your old man. You’ve got no talent for it. You never did. Besides, you’re wasting my time—and it’s the thing I’ve got the least of.”

Poppy smiled. He knew if he left now his dad would worry. “I’ve just been having some problems on the reservation. Getting some pressure from management I’ve never had before.”

“I already know you were in that explosion last fall,” his father said, his voice fading into a wheeze. After a moment, he went on. “Suzy told me right after and made me promise not to tell you I knew. Pretty silly, don’t you think? Us both keeping the same secret from one another?”

Poppy smiled. “Yeah, Dad. But who’s gonna argue with Suzy.”

“She also tells me you’ve still got some health issues, son,” his father said, after a long breath. “That right?”

“Some coughs. Headaches,” Poppy answered, then added, “but I’m getting better.”

His dad shook his head. “I told you, Patrick, you’ve always been a terrible liar. No sense trying to acquire the habit now. What’s management trying to do to you?”

Poppy opened up, beginning with the explosion and ending with the confrontation with the HR rep and the demand that he change his statement. His father nodded as he spoke, gazing past Poppy’s shoulder toward the river.

“I’ve never heard anyone complain about something like this on the res,” Poppy finished.

His dad nodded. “Yeah, well, you might not hear about it even if it happened,” he said. “You know there’s not much tolerance for complaining. From workers or management. But for what it’s worth, I’ve never heard anything like it either.”

Poppy nodded, thinking about the incident at the ball field
with Kieran Mullaney and the dead crows that followed. He’d come this far. Poppy told the rest of the story.

He thought he’d be shocked. Instead, Rodney just shook his head. “Didn’t think they did that kind of thing anymore.”

“What kind of thing, Dad?”

His father adjusted himself in his seat a little. “Back in my day, the dead crows were a warning.”

“It’s happened before?” Poppy asked, stunned.

His father nodded. “Yes.”

In all of his Hanford stories, his father had never mentioned this before. “Well, I guess it’s a warning now, too,” Poppy said. “They’re trying to intimidate—”

“No,” his father objected, shaking his head. “Not intimidate. Past that. Warn. In the sixties, some of the guys got into the anti-war movement. Then some went beyond and got anti-nuclear. The stupidest ones got real loud about it. Finally, somebody in the union told them to tone it down. When that didn’t work, a core group sent the protestors the black crows. Head down in the earth meant they were silenced. It was supposed to be the final warning. Before the workers dealt with their own. You can figure what that meant—working in a plutonium factory.”

The evening breeze was growing cooler as night approached, and Poppy contemplated what that meant for Kieran Mullaney. “So what happened in the end,” he asked.

His father shook his head. “Most got quiet. A few quit. There was a rumor about one guy who didn’t listen and found out they were serious. I heard he got dosed—but people get dosed out there without anybody doing it to them. I never knew if it was really connected to the crows.”

His father looked bone weary now. Poppy was uncertain again whether he should have had this conversation tonight.

The last sunlight had faded from the western sky, and stars had not yet filled the void. Thinking about his father’s words,
Poppy traced the trajectory of a shooting star that blazed across the sky before disappearing just above the horizon.

The nurse arrived. “It’s time to go, Mr. Hart.”

Both Poppy and his father answered with an okay, making Rodney smile weakly a final time.

“Look, son,” his father said to Poppy before she could take him away. “When you reach my age, you sit here waiting for the Lord to take you, and you look back on your life. It’s all you’ve still got—and you count yourself lucky if you can do
that
. Well, you’ve had a good run at Hanford. It’s supported your family, and you’ve stayed safe until now. They’ve treated you right and you’ve been the good soldier. But don’t let this new company—this Covington Nuclear—change the view you’ll have from my chair someday. Don’t let ’em make you do something you’ll sit here and regret.”

As she wheeled him away, Poppy could already see his father’s head resting on his chest.

CHAPTER 20

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Emily sipped her coffee, looking across the table at Taylor Christensen, holding his second bottle of Summit Ale. The bulky man nestled the bottle under his moustache and took another long drink.

Taylor had suggested meeting here at the Lightning Ale House after his shift. She didn’t mind. It was just that she’d expected a breakfast meeting, not a talk over beers at nine in the morning.

Taylor’s eyes were red—though, in fairness, he was coming off an overnight shift. More surprising was that he wasn’t anything like Emily had expected. Both too young and too nervous, he didn’t seem like the stolid, steady Hanford veteran who’d been Kieran’s supervisor for nearly two years.