Full Body Burden (41 page)

But Mr. K has no such motive. He wants to talk about his job.

“I don’t belong there,” he says. “I never did. But what can I do? It’s
a waiting game. Everyone’s waiting to get laid off. The salary and the benefits are too good to just quit.”

I nod.

“You can’t trust anyone, you know,” he says. “No one’s really accountable for anything. Everything is done by committee.”

I’ve heard this said before. We have sparkling water with lemon and rosemary chicken and chocolate napoleons for dessert. I’ve definitely used up my thirty minutes.

Over napoleons, Mr. K explains the pondcrete. The solar ponds. The 903 Pad. The spray irrigation. The leaking plutonium processing line. “The plant is a mess,” he says. “When the raid happened, everything just stopped and plutonium was stuck on the production line. Plutonium is stored in various stages all over the plant. It’s nothing but a big shell game.”

I recall how some of the employees have talked about the big sprinklers used for the spray irrigation. “That water is green!” someone joked. “Maybe it’s the guacamole from the cafeteria!” I’ve heard talk of all the stranded plutonium as well, but Mr. K is starting to sound a little paranoid to me.

“I never go down to the hot areas,” I say. “I can’t, anyway. I don’t have a Q clearance.”

He puts down his fork. “You don’t plan to make a career of this, do you?”

“No,” I say. “I’m just a graduate student who needs a job.”

“Good,” he says. “With luck we’ll both be out of here.”

We get back to the office just as the overhead lights start flickering. A voice comes over the PA system. “If the lights go out, do not be nervous,” it says. “I repeat. Do not be nervous. Technicians are working.”

“It’s the commies,” Mr. K says, winking.

The PA comes on again. “Thank you for your attention. Have a nice day.”

I
T
’
S BEEN
a year since I’ve seen my father. Halloween nears, and Sean and Nathan decide they want to dress up like puppies, with big ears and
brown splotches like Heathcliff. One day after school we drive to the craft store so I can buy patches of felt. I’m no seamstress, but I think I can glue brown and black patches of felt onto white sweatpants and T-shirts. With makeshift tails and ears, it might work.

As we pull into the entrance of the shopping center, a yellow cab suddenly appears and veers sharply in front of me. I hit the brakes. For a moment I’m sure we’re about to be hit—and then the cab is gone. But not before I catch a glimpse of the driver.

I coast into a parking spot and turn off the engine. My hands are shaking.

“Are you okay, Mom?” Sean asks.

“I’m fine.” I rest my head for a moment on the wheel. “I know that person.”

“Who? The person who almost hit us?”

“Yes.”

“Who was it?”

“That was your grandpa, honey.” I regret the words as soon as I say them. “He didn’t see us,” I say. “He didn’t know who we were.” I start the engine and we drive home, our errand temporarily forgotten.

D
EBRA AND
Diane decide that I am a friend.

Debra wears high heels at work—three-inch minimum—but she keeps a pair of tennis shoes under her desk. On her lunch break, if the weather is nice enough, she walks briskly around the plant for exercise, all the way down the hill, past the 300 and 700 buildings with their chain-link fences and razor wire, and up the other side, where the buildings are more open. “Join me,” she says.

It feels like an invitation to a secret club.

On sunny autumn days, it’s a breathtaking view. On one side lie the mountains; on the other, a landscape dotted with houses that stretch all the way to Denver. “The air is so clean here,” Debra says. “It comes down right off the mountains.” We catch glimpses of rabbits and groundhogs in the grass. A pair of bald eagles has been sighted near Standley Lake.

We walk past a large, flat graveled area cordoned off with what looks
like yellow police tape. A few oil barrels stand upright, and parts of the area are under a tent. It looks like they’re preparing for a wedding or a rock concert.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Oh, that,” Debra says. “That’s the 903 Pad.” She walks quickly, arms moving up and down to keep her heart rate up. The thousands of barrels are gone and parts of the area are covered with gravel and asphalt.

“Why is it roped off?”

“There’s some plutonium that leaked out there.”

I reach out and touch the yellow ribbon. I’m struck by the memory of my sister Karma and me, riding our horses around the perimeter of the plant, kicking the No Trespassing signs with the toes of our cowboy boots.

“What’s the difference between one side of the ribbon and the other?”

“Oh, we don’t have to worry about that,” Debra assured me. “They say this side is safe.”

“How does the plutonium know to stay on that side of the line?”

“It knows. Plutonium doesn’t travel.”

When I return to my desk, Anne—the secretary who greeted me on the first day, with a photo of her daughter on her desk—is ruefully watching the phone lines. “I’m holding down the fort,” she chirps. “Everyone’s still at lunch.” Anne has warmed up to me, too. I’ve also discovered she’s a little more subversive than the others. She asks whether I’ve been out walking and I say yes. It still feels odd to be wearing a skirt with white socks and tennis shoes, but there’s no place to change clothes. A little bit of sunshine at lunch makes it easier to sit in my cubicle all afternoon. It helps keep up my energy, which has been lagging lately.

A week earlier after class, I stopped in the student health center to meet with a doctor. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I said. “I don’t feel right. I’m always tired, and it’s been going on for a while.”

They take some blood tests. I’m waiting for the results.

“Did you see any of those Preble mice?” Anne asks. This is a running joke in the company. Recently the EPA started a petition to protect the tiny Preble’s meadow jumping mouse, possibly the rarest small mammal
in North America, which apparently likes to live in the Rocky Flats buffer zone.

“I guess they’re too small to see,” I joke.

Anne’s not joking. She leans forward. “Here’s the thing,” she whispers. “They’re more concerned about protecting some damned rodent than they are about protecting people.”

I
DISCOVER
a kindred spirit at Rocky Flats. Patricia is also a graduate student at the University of Denver, working as an administrative assistant. She plans to quit at Christmas. “I’m out of here,” she says. “This place is looney tunes. But it’s good money.” She’s smart and funny and, in her dark-rimmed glasses, already looks like an English professor. We meet for lunch on the patio outside the administration building and gossip about our departments.

One day she brings a friend along, a technical writer who’s here for only a few months. He’s tall and skinny and his dark-rimmed glasses match Patricia’s. We break into our brown-bag lunches and start talking about what really goes on at Rocky Flats.

“It’s not actually a bomb,” Patricia says.

“Right,” I say.

“Well, what is it then?” he asks.

“A pit,” I say.

“That’s a bomb,” he says.

“No, it’s not,” I say. I should know. I’ve been typing pages and pages about pits.

“A pit is only a critical component of a nuclear bomb,” says Patricia with authority. She’s been typing pages and pages, too. “It’s not the bomb itself.”

He laughs. “Are you girls kidding me?” He cracks open a soda.

“No,” we reply in unison.

“That’s like saying that water is only a critical component of the ocean. Or that the planets are merely critical components of the solar system.” He pauses. “There’s no bomb without the pit,” he says somberly. “The pit is it.”

Patricia shoots me a look: he takes things a little too seriously, doesn’t he?

We finish our sandwiches, toss our crumpled bags in the trash, and go back to work.

O
NE MORNING
, one of the managers stops by to say hello. “Here’s a heads-up, Kristen,” he says. “Be prepared. You might come in some morning and be told to go home because there’s no money. It’s budget time, and there might not be enough funding through procurement.”

Be prepared? I’m living paycheck to paycheck.

On November 4, a memo from the EG&G manager of Rocky Flats warns that if negotiations between the private company that provides security services for the plant and the union do not come to a mutually agreeable conclusion, “a guard force work stoppage could occur.” There’s no mutual agreement. The guards go on strike. People work on staggered schedules and double shifts. Some guards are in favor of the strike; some are against it. No one knows if they’ll get hired back.

All of us are nervous about our jobs in one way or another. I read in the company newsletter that four hundred to seven hundred people will “voluntarily or involuntarily” leave their jobs by the end of 1995.
The blow is softened somewhat for some permanent employees by severance packages and educational and training benefits, including a two-and-a-half-hour seminar addressing the phenomenon of LCS, or “layoff casualty syndrome.”

In the women’s bathroom, someone’s taped to the mirror a newspaper ad for the Denver Rescue Mission that says, “Give the Gift of Food This Christmas: Buy a Hot Meal for a Homeless Person.” Over the photo of a man with a plate of food, the words “Rocky Flats Employee Picture Here” are written in large black letters.

I look at myself in the mirror. My hair is pulled back and my face looks harsh in the white light. There are deep circles under my eyes. My mother often tells me how tired I look.

The guard strike ends, but no one seems happy about it.

There’s some good news, however. The plant is buzzing with a report
that Hazel O’Leary, the first woman and first African American to serve as secretary of energy, will visit the facility. I hope to see her; under her directorship, the Clinton administration has released millions of previously classified documents related to the Cold War—a move that’s been met with skepticism by my co-workers. Outside the plant, though, she’s a folk hero of sorts, famous for saying, “This is not your father’s DOE.” But on the day she visits, although most of the managerial and engineering staff get to hear her speech, I’m left behind to handle the phones.

“Hey, don’t sweat it,” my turkey-sandwich lunch friend says in consolation. “She says all the right things, but she’s still administration. Do you think she’ll pay a visit to the hot zone and see how things really are? No. The managers, the administration, they never go down there. They don’t go down in the bowels of the plant. They keep their hands clean.”

I’m never sure what’s truth and what’s hearsay.

November turns into December. At the end of a long day I drive home and pick up Sean and Nathan from the babysitter’s. Her name is Jennifer and she’s in high school; I pay her to watch the boys for a couple of hours after school. Today she’s frazzled. The boys are tired and fussy and a little wild; it’s been a long afternoon. She hands them over to me with no small sense of exasperation.

They fuss and wiggle and refuse to get in their car seats. I’m tired, too. I lay down the law. “Sean and Nathan! If you don’t settle down, I’m going to take you to the zoo to live with the wild animals!”

They get in their seats. But nothing will settle them down until we arrive home and have plates of spaghetti with meatballs and chocolate milk, and their eyes grow big and sleepy. Sean does his arithmetic problems and I help Nathan practice his spelling while he takes his bubble bath. He soaps his hair up into a spiky Mohawk as I sit on the floor and read him his words.

I tuck them into bed. They’re too sleepy for a story, and I’m too tired to read to them.

“Mom?” Sean asks as I turn off the light. “Did it take you this long to grow up when you were my age?”

I pause. He’s five years old.

He doesn’t wait for an answer. He has another question. “You’re not really going to send us to the zoo to live with the wild animals, are you?” He looks like he’s given this some serious thought.

“No, sweetie,” I say. I feel a catch in my throat, and I kiss his forehead. “We’re all staying right here.”

I go downstairs and take off my shoes. I make a cup of tea, stretch out on the couch, and turn on the television. I’ll give myself a few minutes before I go to bed.

Suddenly I sit bolt upright. Rocky Flats is on television.

ABC Nightline
is interviewing people I know.
The narrator, Dave Marash, talks about years of contamination at Rocky Flats, and how production was halted after the 1989 FBI raid. Since then, Rocky Flats has been in a state of limbo, wanting to resume building nuclear weapons while trying to deal with environmental regulations the plant had been able to avoid in the past. Rocky Flats has five of the nation’s top ten most dangerous buildings in the country, Marash says. Building 771 is number one. Building 776 is number two.

Marash reports that an internal memo shows that as much as 13.2 metric tons (or 14.5 U.S. tons) of plutonium may be stockpiled around the plant, including more than five thousand sealed containers of waste, many containing a buildup of hydrogen gas that can cause a container to rupture and scatter plutonium. Cans that were not supposed to be stored for more than a year have been stored for five. Mark Silverman, the DOE manager at Rocky Flats, appears onscreen. I know his voice well from the PA system at work. “We know, for example, it’s in the vents. It’s in the ductwork. We know it’s in the glove boxes, in the lathes. We know it’s in the walls and ceilings. We just can’t tell you exactly how much is at any given location in a lot of places.” Silverman adds that there was very poor record-keeping at Rocky Flats, and “we do not have as-built drawings. So a building was built, and then added onto, and we literally don’t know where every pipe is or every line is.”

Have a nice day
, I think. I grab my journal and start scribbling their words.

“This may look,” Marash says, “like an anonymous stretch of asphalt.”
My heart jumps. That’s the 903 Pad that I walk by on my lunch hour. “From here,” he continues, “contaminated groundwater leaked down the ridge towards the plain and the northern and western suburbs of Denver. Some of the barrels rusted and started leaking … and the migration of toxic waste can be traced on a map of drainage patterns in the Rocky Flats area. Walnut Creek drains down and dumps into Great Western Reservoir, and then Woman Creek comes down and feeds the Standley Lake reservoir. Samples from the bottoms of both reservoirs show deposits of plutonium. The plutonium traveled through the water and through the air.” Dr. Gale Biggs appears on screen, noting that, according to the findings of Dr. Harvey Nichols in a report to the Department of Energy, “the plutonium levels do not drop off as you go farther away from the plant.”