Stallion Gate (26 page)

Sophie came out of the dark, taking off the blanket she wore as a shawl. Joe thought she was finally joining the circle at the fire, but she threw the blanket over the flames, smothering them as she stomped on the blanket. “Indian Service,” she said.

“You’re sure I can keep the cigarettes?” Ben asked.

“Yes, get out of here,” Joe said.

“That’s good of you,” Ben said in Tewa. “You’re a good boy.”

By now all the dogs on the east side of the pueblo were barking the alarm. Sophie and Ben led Roberto up the riverbank and around a screen of thimbleberries. Joe and Anna climbed to the jeep and pulled on their shoes. “This is much more interesting than Göttingen, you know,” she said.

“Very few cowboys in Göttingen.”

He started the jeep. Headlights out, they rolled past cottonwoods and water tanks and onto a dirty road between the pueblo and fields of barley and sorghum. Over peach trees was a glimpse of the church’s low brow. The air stirred the smell of roasted chilies. Joe drove along an irrigation ditch toward the wooden planks that bridged a cross ditch. The planks coughed as the jeep passed over.

“There!” Anna said.

Fifty yards ahead the two Service riders were on horseback. Al, the older one, waved both arms for Joe
to stop. Billy seemed to have acquired a handgun with a long, bright barrel.

Joe turned behind a windbreak of sunflowers. If he was stopped, he was AWOL and Anna would have broken security. At the same time, he could see what the riders were up to. Sophie, Ben and Roberto had taken to the ditch, and Billy and Al were waiting for them to come up. The fields were a maze of ditches, all fed by the mother ditch at the north end along the highway. If the fugitives reached the cornfields, where the rows of stalks were shoulder-high, the riders would never catch them.

Joe eased through the sorghum, the grass beating against the wheels. The riders paid no attention. The jeep rolled into the corn, mowing a row as it went. The stalks bent and broke: red corn, blue corn, black corn, beaded corn, Indian corn. At the end of the row, he stopped.

To his right, about twenty yards down the dirt road, Al was shouting, “Open her up, Billy.”

To Joe’s left, thirty yards up the road, Billy was leaning out of his saddle to turn the wheel that would raise the wooden gate of the ditch. Roberto, Sophie and Ben were neatly trapped. The flood of water would drown them or drive them back to Al.

“Get out,” Joe told Anna. “I’ll come back for you.”

“I want to go with you.”

“I don’t want you with me and I don’t have time to argue. I want you waiting here until I come back and
drive you nice and slowly to the Hill, so you don’t miss your train in the morning.”

Anna clutched the windshield. “No.”

“Okay.”

He slipped the jeep onto the road, turned and stood on the gas. Billy was still leaning from his horse and yanking the gate wheel when he heard the engine approach. Twenty feet away Joe hit his headlights. The cowboy wore a gold sateen shirt and an expression of astonishment. His horse reared up and toppled backwards out of the glare. Joe heard man and mount hit the water of the mother ditch; then the jeep was across the planks and onto the blacktop of the highway, heading north.

A hundred yards up the highway Joe spun around because he had to come back down the highway and along the mother ditch to get to the Hill. Billy was screaming he couldn’t swim. Al had ridden up to the ditch and in the wan moonlight sat patiently on his horse, aiming his gun with both hands. A speckled Colt, Joe remembered. There was no way the cowboy would really shoot, he thought, not at an Army jeep.

As he passed in front of Al, Joe changed his mind, turned off his headlights and slammed on the brakes. The gun flashed, bobbed, flashed again. He floored the accelerator. The third shot was overcorrected, rushed, behind the jeep. The last three sounded like a tin pail being futilely kicked.

For miles they drove without lights and without saying a word, as if the dark and quiet sustained the moment
of escape and delayed the saying of good-bye. They were so different, he thought, that any words divided them. It proved how strange the Hill was that they’d met at all. Let the last little triumph roll as long as possible—forever, if possible.

He had to turn the lights on when they hit the switchbacks. As the jeep climbed, Anna acted busy by cleaning bits of corn stalk from the floor. She found two zigzags of carved wood that had shaken loose from under the seat.

“What are these?” she asked, without directly meeting Joe’s eyes. This is how it ends, he thought—without real words, without even looks.

“Roberto’s crazy wands.”

“What are you supposed to do with them?”

“Call down lightning. Water your fields. Bring back the buffalo. Stop the bomb.”

“You can do that?”

Joe took the wands from her and threw them out of the jeep. They spun, glittered and then plunged into the dark of the canyon.

“Not anymore,” he said.

Orders were, no stopping en route, but as Joe went through Antonio he slowed by the Owl Bar and Cafe enough to see Army engineers and MPs stationed in the motel courtyard. He gained speed again, leading a convoy of two jeeps, two CID sedans, a carryall truck of spare parts and a covered truck bearing Jaworski and the sphere of steel and high explosive that was the implosive shell of the bomb.

“The MPs are there to evacuate the town in case of, you know …” Ray Stingo rode in the lead jeep with Joe.

“What’s it like down here?” Joe asked. Ray had been in and out of Trinity for a week.

“Typical Army fuck-ups. We got some scientists, some of the million-dollar whiz kids, laying some wires out in the bushes and a B-29 comes over shooting antelope. Fifty-caliber machine guns. Scientists are running, diving, trying to fly. You see, the rest of the Army doesn’t know about this.”

They were already out of Antonio. Ray took a long,
swiveled view of a far-off, flat horizon of buffalo grass, gray sage, yucca spears. “Fucking place for a test. You gotta shake your shoes every morning to get out the scorpions. You gotta bang a wrench on the jeep to chase the rattlers. There’s gypsum in the water to fuck up your plumbing. Every five minutes you gotta run in the bushes, and then it’s you and the shit and rattlers all over again.” There was alkali in the water, too. Ray’s black spit curl was plaster-hard. “It may be a new weapon, but it’s the same Army.”

“The odds on the fight?” Joe asked.

“Funny. The odds started out two to one for you and now it’s two to one against. The odds are so good they scare me. I was thinking, I could be real set up on the Hill. Back in Jersey I’d just piss away the money. I think I’ll stay.”

“There won’t be any Hill after the war.”

“Chief, I got one smart idea in my whole life, okay? We didn’t build this bomb for the Japs, we built it for the Reds. And we didn’t even fight them yet.”

Besides the convoy, Joe had seen no Army traffic on the road. Stallion Gate was little changed. New barbed wire, new fence posts, a checkpoint that consisted of a tarp-covered lean- to providing a miserly wedge of shade. The MPs had been issued pith helmets. Before leaving the Hill, each man in the convoy had been issued a pink pass with a “T” for Trinity, which they exchanged at the gate for round white badges.

“Foreign Legion, Chief.” Corporal Gruber was one of the MPs at the gate. His arm was still in a sling, and
his eyes were red from alkali dust. “A hundred degrees every day for two weeks. Fucking badges? Security? There must be fifty guys every night who walk off the desert for a beer. Single file between the snakes.” He wrote Joe’s name under the proper date and time on his clipboard. “Friday the thirteenth. Some day to bring down the bomb. Feeling good, Chief?”

“Good enough.”

Gruber licked dry lips. “It’s a question of confidence, right?”

“To a point.”

Gruber waved him through. “One more fight, that’s all we ask.”

The ranch access road that Joe remembered as a faint trail in the snow was newly graded and topped with
colichi
, a sand-and-clay compound that had quickly disintegrated into fine white powder. Clouds of dust trailed another convoy far ahead. Jaworski joined Joe and Ray in the lead jeep. He had a portable FM receiver, and around his neck he wore the Polaroid all-purpose red goggles issued for the test. With his dark mustache, he looked like a touring grandee.

“The orders are that we monitor the receivers at all times here, in case of an accident,” Jaworski said. “Keys are supposed to be kept in ignitions at all times, in case of evacuation. That’s why the roads are so wide. Myself, I wonder what you’re supposed to do if there is an accident and you’re not near a road and you don’t have a real field radio you can actually transmit on.”

Some static-ridden communications were erupting from
the FM. Mainly there was music—Carmen Miranda.

“Don’t ask me how,” Ray said. “The Army spent months finding a special channel just for us? It’s the same channel for the Voice of America. The Latin edition. Orders are, ignore the sambas and the bombers.”

Joe asked Jaworski, “Well, what do you do if you’re stuck out in the open and the bomb accidentally goes off?”

“The flash, the burst of gamma rays and neutrons, would kill anything within a mile and a half of the tower. If you could get a couple of miles away and find a depression, a stream—”

“A stream in the Jornada del Muerto? That sounds like planning. There couldn’t really be an accident, though, could there?”

“Yesterday, Joe, they were testing the firing circuits on a dummy bomb in the tower. Out of the blue, a lightning bolt. Imagine if the real bomb had been there. By the way, Anna asked me to tell you good-bye. She left early this morning for Chicago. She borrowed Teller’s car to drive there; otherwise I suppose you would have driven her to the station.”

“I suppose so.”

There were a couple of hundred men at Trinity, but they were so spread out over hundreds of acres that only a few could be seen at a time. Still, the closer the convoy got to Ground Zero, the more evidence of activity there was: a cable strung on a seemingly infinite line of stakes; the first blast-wave gauge, a box designed to bounce in the springs of a hoop; photographic bunkers
gray as shells on a beach, their periscope stalks aimed south at a tower seven miles off in the clear, trembling air. Six miles from the tower, the convoy reached the North-10,000-meter shelter, a timber bunker that sank into a protective slope of raw earth. Bulldozers browsed on the slope, tamping it. From North-10,000, a fresh blacktop road ran straight to the shot tower. Single cables multiplied into racks of wires. Planted in dead sage was an unmanned instrument bunker, a concrete block with portholes for cameras.

“Skyshine hole.” Jaworski pointed to the single socket aimed away from the tower. “To monitor the general neutron scatter.”

Skyshine? It sounded pretty, like a glitter of sequins shot in the air.

“Nervous?” Joe asked.

“Things have changed,” Jaworski said. “We used to detonate shells using a long string. No one had a gauge. A charge worked or it didn’t. No oscillographs or ionization chambers. What hasn’t changed is that there will only be a handful of men who actually assemble the bomb. There’ll be a hundred others screaming that this seismograph is vital or that pressure gauge must be repaired, but the only thing that counts is the weapon, right? Of course, in the war against the Kaiser we dropped nothing much larger than grenades from planes, and there was definitely no background neutron scatter.”

The tower called Ground Zero looked like an oil rig without the pipes, a spindly structure of steel beams and tie braces that rose a hundred feet to a galvanized-iron
shed perched in the sky. One tower leg had a ladder to landings every twenty feet all the way to the top. A wooden ladder reached from the bottom landing to the ground, where Foote was waiting in his sombrero and British Army shorts. His high-explosives team of a half-dozen draftees sat in undershirts, bathing shorts and handkerchiefs worn on the head pirate style. As the convoy wound around and stopped at the tower base, CID officers jumped from the two security sedans and formed a skirmish line, pointing submachine guns at cactus and rabbit brush.

Foote ambled at their backs. “ ‘They seek him here, they seek him there, those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in Heaven, is he in Hell, that demned elusive Pimpernel?’ Joe, you brought my goods?”

The truck drove directly under the wide calipers of a chain and pulley suspended down the center of the tower. When the truck’s tarp cover was struck, Joe and Ray bolted the calipers to the bomb. Cable groaned as it turned through the pulley sheave. The truck rolled out from under and the dangling bomb was lowered to a knee-high steel cradle, where it resembled a globe on a stand, a matte-gray moon four and a half feet wide, with two rims and patches where the detonator ports were taped. As soon as Ray disengaged the calipers and the pulley was lifted free, Foote’s men set a canvas tent around the bomb and the security cars drove off.

“Want to join the pool?” Foote asked Joe. “A dollar apiece.”

“For what?”

“The bang, what else? The new official anticipated yield is five thousand to ten thousand tons of TNT. Jaworski and I have both bet on ten thousand. I think it’s the first time we’ve agreed on anything. Teller bet on forty thousand tons. Edward’s always an optimist.”

“Oppy?” Joe was supposed to find him now that he was at Trinity.

“Oppy predicts three hundred tons. Three hundred tons is a dud. We’re a little worried about Oppy.”

Harvey and the plutonium core had arrived earlier that morning at a ranch house a mile south of the shot. The rancher had been bought out and pushed off, but except for Harvey’s Plymouth and the four jeeps parked with their backs to the house and their motors running, the place still looked like any ordinary spread: barn and corral, a windmill to pump water, a cistern to hold it, a one-story house within a low stone wall. Inside, the parlor walls were blue with a genteel white band below the ceiling line. The oak floor had been vacuumed and the windows sealed with plastic sheets and masking tape. All the furniture had been removed except the table, which was covered with brown butcher paper.