Full Body Burden (13 page)

B
Y THE
time the school bus turns the corner onto 82nd Avenue, I’m thinking about my cowboy boots, scuffed and worn so soft they fit my feet like gloves. My favorite pair of jeans, stained with neatsfoot oil and hoof polish and horse sweat. The way the barn smells of hay and molasses and pungent manure. When the school bus drops us at the top of the hill, I race to the house to change my clothes and go chase Tonka.

I drop my books in the front hallway, pull on my jeans, and I’m back out the door before my mother realizes I’m home. Tonka’s waiting at the gate, head up, ears perked. He knows there’s horse candy in my pocket.

I fasten the halter strap beneath his jaw and lead him to the grooming post. All my tools are gathered in a plastic bucket like a painter’s paint box. I tie him to the rail and set to work. Even now I can recall the pattern of hair growth on his body—the sinewy neck, the whorls at the flank and chest, the straight, wiry texture of his mane. I push my left shoulder into his side and Tonka obligingly lifts his leg. With the hoof pick I clean the underside of each hoof, including the sole and the cleft of the frog, a triangle of dark rubbery flesh.

The face and forelock are last. With a soft cloth I wipe the film from the corners of Tonka’s big brown eyes and dab his nostrils. I comb the lick of hair falling down between his eyes. I slip off the halter and pull the hackamore over his ears. We’re ready to head for the lake.

Sometimes I don’t make it out of the house. Each afternoon my mother rests in her room, which is tidy and quiet and covered with a permanent film of dust. She has a small drawer of pills the doctor prescribes, pills that make her fuzzy. Many of her friends in the neighborhood have the same prescription to help with nerves. She takes them every afternoon. If she hears my step at the door, she calls me and I’m trapped until supper.

She complains bitterly about the dust. The house is filled with it. Dust settles on my mother’s dresser and its blurred mirror, on the night table, the windowsill, the lamp with the worn fabric shade. In the living room it settles on the clock and the console record player. Dust swirls
and glitters in bars of sunlight striking through the windowpanes. On Saturday mornings, when we do our weekly chores, we spray the dust with lemon furniture polish and rub it in cloudy swirls, but by Sunday it’s back. Her bed, with its avocado bedspread, faces two large picture windows that look out to the mountains. I sit on the edge of the bed and watch the dust, suspended in space, floating delicately to the floor. The water tower and tiny square buildings of Rocky Flats sit like toy buildings on the flat plain.

“I love this view,” my mother declares. “It makes me feel peaceful.”

Hours pass and she tells me family stories and hints at dark secrets. “I shouldn’t be telling you this!” she exclaims. It’s the best first line for any story, and I’m hooked. Her own childhood was troubled; her father drank and the family struggled during the Depression. There are plenty of skeletons in the family closet. But most of her secrets revolve around my father, who seems to completely baffle her. “What’s wrong with him? What happened to him?” she asks plaintively. His anger is palpable, even when he’s not physically present. He’s never hit any of us, but we all fear his threats. She criticizes him, worries about him, and most of all fears him. Her eyes grow wide. “I can’t talk to him, you know. I don’t dare bring anything up.”

My father says the same thing when he shouts and mutters to himself in the dark. “I can’t talk to your mother,” he announces to the room. Does he intend us to hear this? Everything is said furtively; everything is hush-hush. We don’t want the neighbors to know. We have to protect my dad’s practice. Keep things within the family, and keep things to yourself. When I feel like exploding inside, or running away, I remind myself that someone needs to hold down the fort. That someone feels like me.

After an hour or two of examining her troubles, I’m itching to get outside, to get away. “I gotta go, Mom,” I say.

“Kris,” she says. “Don’t leave me alone in this room.” Her long, cool fingers clasp mine. So I stay until the clock on her dresser shows six o’clock and it’s time to brown hamburger for dinner.

I
HAVE
a few secrets myself. The banks of the old Church irrigation ditch behind our house are lined with wide-trunked cottonwood trees that fill the air with blizzard-like balls of fluff. Wild asparagus grows in thick, sinewy stalks along with plump blackberries and tiny pink strawberries we pop in our mouths when we can find them. Fat muskrats burrow in the banks. I find an abandoned baby muskrat the size of a hamster and for three days nurse it secretly but unsuccessfully under my bed. I look for an appropriate burial site. I find a soft spot at the base of the biggest cottonwood and start digging with a spoon I’ve swiped from the kitchen. I hear a shot, then another. A neighborhood boy is standing at the edge of our property, his brand-new BB gun leveled at my head. I stand, and I realize he’s aiming at the horses instead. A loud crack—and then Tonka, who’s been nibbling at the short fresh grass near the water, explodes. He leaps into the air, bucking and kicking, astonished with pain. The other horses startle and scatter, but not before the boy has pinged Comanche in the shoulder and sent him galloping heavily around the back of the house. “Get off our property!” I scream. “That’s my horse! Leave us alone!”

He turns, shrugs, and slings the gun over his shoulder. He wears combat fatigues and black boots and a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He’s fourteen.

That night in the kitchen, I tell my mother what happened while she’s making rice and phoning the neighbors to ask if they’ve seen my brother. “Well, Kris,” she says. “I just can’t think about this right now.”

“But he could shoot their eyes out,” I say. “He could really hurt them. We should call somebody.” He has lots of brothers and sisters and a mother as belligerent as an army sergeant. I think he should catch hell from somebody.

My mother sighs. The boiling water from the rice seeps over the edge of the pot and drips down onto the stove. “Boys will be boys,” she says. “The sooner you realize that, the better.”

T
HE
M
ARTELL
study is the first time the public and even the state government learn at least some of the facts about the worst accidents at
Rocky Flats—even though years have passed since they occurred. The AEC and Dow Chemical continue to reassure residents there is nothing to worry about.
The amount of plutonium released from Rocky Flats, says Edward Putzier, Dow’s health physics manager, is no greater than “a pinch of salt or pepper.” He accuses the media of exaggerating the dangers of radiation.

But there is no consensus about what constitutes a “safe” level of plutonium, and even a pinch, according to the AEC itself, can be lethal.
Glenn Seaborg, the physicist who isolated and gave plutonium its name in 1941 during the Manhattan Project, said that plutonium “is unique among all of the chemical elements. And it is fiendishly toxic, even in small amounts.” Internalized plutonium can be the most deadly. Plutonium emits alpha radiation, which cannot penetrate skin. (Gamma radiation or X-rays can be harmful by hitting the body from the outside.) Alpha emitters have to be inside the body to be dangerous. If plutonium is inhaled or ingested, or if it enters the body through an open wound, tiny particles can lodge in the lungs or migrate to other organs, particularly the liver or the surface or marrow of bone, where they bombard surrounding tissue with radiation. It may take twenty to thirty years for health effects such as cancer, immune deficiencies, or genetic defects to become manifest.

A full gram of plutonium, which is denser than lead, is scarcely bigger than a grain of rice. One microgram—a millionth of a gram—of plutonium, invisible to the human eye, can produce a fatal cancer, according to standards set by the AEC as early as 1945. Plutonium has a 24,000-year half-life, the period of time during which the number of radioactive nuclei decreases by a factor of one-half. This means that every 24,000 years, half of a given amount of plutonium will shed energy, gradually turning into a nonradioactive material. Measured in human lifetimes, 24,000 years is almost unfathomable. And yet, after 24,000 years, half of the material will still be radioactive, and after 24,000 more years, half of that amount will continue to be dangerously radioactive. Even after ten half-lives—that is, 240,000 years—the radioactivity will still not be wholly gone. The physicist Fritjof Capra says plutonium should be contained and isolated for half a million years.

Many scientists believe there is no safe level of exposure to plutonium.

Martell and his colleagues are surprised by the AEC’s admission of off-site plutonium migration, but stunned by the news of where it came from.
Dow Chemical and the AEC have known about the leaking drums for at least a decade, but they have kept the information from the public.

Over time Rocky Flats removes most of the barrels and covers a portion of the area with asphalt. Some of the barrels are sent to a waste site in Idaho and some are buried on-site (eventually contributing to groundwater contamination). But even after their removal, wind continues to scatter plutonium for miles.
Five particularly powerful windstorms in late 1968 and early 1969 suspend a large portion of plutonium as dust and carry it toward Denver. On January 7, 1969, winds reach 125 miles per hour.

There’s no reason for concern, officials emphasize.
Major General Giller declares that “The AEC is quite convinced that the plant in its present location and operating conditions poses no health and safety hazard either to its own workers or the local population.”

But AEC guidelines for worker or citizen exposure to low-level radiation are under dispute. Dr. John Gofman, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, worked on the Manhattan Project and was an expert on chromosomal abnormalities and cancer. In 1963 he established the Biomedical Research Division for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and began conducting research on the influence of radiation on human chromosomes. Concerned about the lack of data on the health effects of low-level radiation, with other scientists he reviewed health studies of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as other epidemiological studies.

In 1969, Gofman and his colleague, Dr. Arthur R. Tamplin, suggest that federal safety guidelines for low-level exposures to radiation be reduced by 90 percent. The AEC immediately disputes the findings.

J
UNIOR HIGH
proves challenging. In gym I’m issued a blue polyester uniform too tight in the crotch—already I’m long-waisted and taller
than most of the boys—and I loathe taking showers with the other girls, who scream and giggle and pinch. They make fun of the gym teacher, a serious-looking woman with muscular arms and legs. Each week we take a test on the climbing rope that hangs from the gym ceiling and each week I make it halfway up, hang just long enough to cringe under the gaze of my schoolmates, and slide back down in defeat. I come home with red welts on my thighs from dodge ball, and a healthy fear of the balance beam, a long wooden rail four inches wide that all the girls have to walk up and back on, our feet dusted in baby powder. The only place I feel graceful is on the back of a horse.

Tina, however—who decided not to abandon me after all—is determined to make me into a real girl. On the day of the first school sock hop, she insists we walk to school rather than ride the bus so we can talk strategy. She wants to give me some advice on dancing with boys. She herself has her eye on a basketball player.

Walking to school is complicated. It involves passing the historic Bunce house, crossing an increasingly busy street, wading through an irrigation ditch (originating, unbeknownst to us, at Rocky Flats) and crossing the railroad tracks. Tina shows up at my door in a blue miniskirt and white fishnet stockings.

“Hurry up,” she declares. The morning is cool and her breath hangs in front of her face. “We have to go before everyone starts showing up at the bus stop.”

“Hold on.” I’m still tugging at the elastic waist of my pantyhose. The crotch is stuck midway down my thighs like a tourniquet.

“Your mother let you buy those?”

“Yeah.” The plastic egg-shaped container sits on my dresser. “Finally.”

“You have to stretch them up from the bottom,” Tina advises. “Don’t you know? Like this.” She squats down and inches the nylon up past my ankles to my knees. “Now pull.”

“They’re too tight.”

“Just suck everything in. And don’t use your nails. Use your fingertips, like this.” Tina touches her own stockings delicately, then stands
back to watch as I struggle. “That’s good enough,” she sighs, and slings her purse over her shoulder, leather fringe dangling.

We walk side-by-side through the silent neighborhood, Tina’s long brown hair swinging with her stride. The houses look empty. Most of the fathers have already left for work. I wonder what the women do all day, each in her own little fairytale tower. How much cooking and cleaning can a person do before she goes crazy?