Stallion Gate

  "Nose wipes, boys." Santa handed up cotton swabs. "All part of the routine."

  Joe and Ray stuck the swabs up their noses, then handed them back to Santa who dropped them into separate envelopes.

  "It isn't routine for us to make this run," Joe said. "It isn't routine for you to be on it."

  "We're bodyguards," Ray said through his teeth. "We're not guinea pigs. They got enough crazy truckers for this run."

  "Why do you think they chose you, Sergeant Stingo?" Santa hunched over Ray's shoulder.

  "Because they hate me."

  "If they hated you they wouldn't have asked me to bring the nose wipes. That's to help check any respiratory radioactivity. When we arrive, they'll take a blood sample and perhaps burn your clothes. Would they take those precautions if they didn't care about you?"

  "True," Ray relented.

  "You just need a ride from Salt Lake City?" Joe asked as Santa moved to his shoulder. "Why are you here?"

  "I'll tell you why they hate me," Ray interrupted. The amphetamines fuelled his paranoia and turned the whites of his eyes pink. "For the first time in my life I'm ahead of the game. My father runs a garbage truck, my three brothers run garbage trucks, and they make $50 a week. I got $10,000 in poker money. I'm getting out of this fucking war with both legs and both arms. When I go back to Jersey I can buy a liquor store. I'll get my own fighters, maybe I'll manage. Get a boat at the shore, get married, have kids. They don't want me to have that."

  "Why didn't you mention your mother?" Santa moved back to Ray's shoulder.

  "What about my mother?" Ray whipped round. Because he still held the Tommy gun, its barrel pointed at Santa.

  "Don't ask a man about his mother," Joe told Santa and pushed the barrel up.

  "Why do you think Sergeant Stingo is nervous?"

  "Because the Army hates enlisted men, which you are not."

  "So why are you here?" Ray asked.

  Santa smiled patiently. Fine skin crinkled around his pale blue eyes. His nose and cheeks had the rosy hue of a lifetime of long walks and of the San FranciscoBay and the mellow sun. His Harris tweed jacket smelled like a potpourri of pipe tobacco and bay rum. His hair sprung in white spirals, thin on top, thick at the sides, wisps from the ears. Everyone on the Hill had naturally nicknamed him "Santa". Everyone but Harvey. Harvey called him "Bugs Bonney".

  "I'm deeply enthused about the time we're going to be sharing," Santa said. "I understand we'll be driving through some spectacular scenery. In fact, in the garage I heard one of the officers refer to these shipments of" –Santa cleared his throat to indicate the plutonium hanging in the canister behind him– "as the Razzle-Dazzle Express."

  "See any officers in here?" Ray muttered. "It's the fucking, glow-in-the-dark Asshole Express."

  The Mormon temple swung to the north and shrank to the size of a claim stake under the immense Utah afternoon. The mountains started huge and grew. As the convoy gathered speed through the wide JordanValley, Ray looked as though he were entering a black tunnel.

  The square and straps were designed to protect the suspended canister from shocks, but it didn't protect the drivers from the sight of the canister. It trembled in mid-air when the ambulance rolled over a cattle guard. It swayed as the road turned. For all its sleekness, the canister had a pregnant quality. The slug deep inside it seemed, in Joe's mind, alive. It was an interesting concept, metal that was alive. Not simply a mineral capable of some sort of chemical reaction, but so alive with alpha activity that the water around the slug was warmed to 100 degrees.

  "Magnificent, the sun and these Wasatch mountains." Santa twisted this way and that for better views. "You boys must love this run."

  "Machine-Gun Joe was a rough and ready redskin," Joe sang softly, "He'll never let plutonium touch the ground./ And he always will remember the seventh of December,/ With his be-bop-a-rebop and he'll blow 'em down. I'll tell you what we'd be doing if we weren't doing this run," Joe said to Ray, not to Santa. "We'd be somewhere in the South Pacific digging mass graves in a coral reef. We'd be burying bodies that were six months old, and pieces of bodies, with one dull shovel for the two of us."

  "The South Pacific, you think?" Santa asked.

  "Somewhere where no one would find us until the war was one year over," Joe told Ray. "We could play poker for seashells." The whites of Ray's eyes were turning from pink to acid red.

  "Why us?" he demanded.

  Santa was atypically silent. The convoy gained altitude at the Mormon hamlets of Orem, Provo and Helper, touched down the Colorado River at Moab and then rose again up La Sals. Ray's blood went on pooling in his eyes. He pointed out every dead rabbit carcass on the road with his Tommy gun and laughed uproariously.

  The amphetamines made Ray worse, but not much worse, than the first run he and Joe had made, when Ray sobbed all the way. Ray was a primitive Sicilian, afraid of nothing in the world until he came to the Hill and underwent the safety course on radiation. With his poker winnings he could afford to pay other enlisted men to pull his hazardous duties. Ray was never within a hundred yards of radioactive material, except when he and Joe were ordered to run the slug. The convoy had stopped in Moab to eat, but Ray did not eat, drink, piss or shit and he would not until the trip was over. At least, Joe thought, the night would cool Ray's sweat and the dark would hide the canister that danced at their backs.

  Darkness fell at Cortez, Colorado, on the edge of the San Juan Mountains, where the stone climbed over itself like worn steps to the waning moon. Here, the mountain building was recent and ongoing, rubbing and fraying the road to dust. Clouds swept by like steam from the engines of the earth and winds heaved stones downhill, chasing tires and rattling on the ambulance roof. Joe followed the repair truck ahead. Its red tail-lights would disappear round a wall of stone or wink desperately as it fought a downgrade. On one side of the road was granite, on the other the unforgiving dark of an abyss. Sometimes the road lay on a ridge with a black void on either side, and there ice had chipped away at the tarmac, leaving just enough room for the truck to inch through. The wind rose with them, out of the depths below, sounding like it was pushing boulders uphill.

  "Let me confide in you, men, and tell you why you're here," Santa broke the quiet, "why you were ordered to make this run again, although it's not part of your ordinary duties. You were chosen because you have higher clearances than the other drivers and you have some inkling as to the actual nature of the project and of tonight's cargo. As we approach a test shot, more and more men, enlisted men on the Hill and at the Trinity test site, will get some inkling of the nature of the project. There'll be wild stories. You may hear, for example, that Dr Teller once tried to have the project stopped because his calculations showed that one such device would set the atmosphere on fire."

  "Did he?" Joe asked.

  "Yes, but later calculations showed that such a danger doesn't exist."

  "Hardly exists?"

  "Hardly. You see, then, how these stories get started. In fact," Santa chuckled, "Dr Teller wants a bomb one hundred times bigger, so he's not afraid."

  "What'd he say?" Ray came out of a reverie.

  "Teller's not afraid," Joe said.

  "Afraid of what?" Ray winced as Joe dodged a pothole.

  "All the same, there may be apprehension among the enlisted men as more of them come into contact with this sort of cargo."

  "You think so?" Joe asked.

  "There's the possibility," Santa said.

  "Doesn't radiation cause tissue cancer, blood cancer, bone cancer and immediate or lingering death?" Joe asked.

  "Theoretically," Santa granted. "Plutonium's got a clean bill of health so far."

  "It's only been on earth five months," Joe pointed out. "Ray and I made the first run."

  "In the fucking snow," Ray said.

  Ahead, the repair truck fishtailed from side to side over loose rocks.

  "But in three weeks," Santa said, "there'll be hundreds of GIs at Trinity and they'll all be w
ondering why they're there and what they're doing, and they'll be talking to MPs who will overhear scientists talking –that's human nature– and there will be some anxiety, because GIs are not scientists, about being in proximity to a nuclear explosion. You see, there won't be a radiation problem, but there may be a psychological problem. Even though they know the Army would not put soldiers in a situation that was not entirely safe. After all, here's a bomb that's supposed to blow up a city with just a few pounds of refined ore. I was wondering how you two feel about that."

  "The city part's okay," Ray said.

  "Don't ask us," Joe said.

  "But you might feel anxiety," Santa suggested. "You two are the ones transporting that refined ore. Even though you know you're surrounded and protected by dedicated officers, you might feel anxiety."

  "You don't feel any anxiety?" Joe asked.

  "None," Santa assured Joe. "Not a bit."

  Joe glanced back. Behind Santa, the canister floated securely in the web of straps and steel frame.

  "No dedicated officers in this fucking wagon that I notice," Ray said.

  "Then you, Sergeant Stingo, do admit to ambivalence."

  "It was an ambulance," Ray said, "now they made it into this wagon."

  "No, I mean ambivalence."

  "It was. It's not now."

  Ray stirred. All the paranoia that had been floating free up till now was starting to come together, to find its target after miles, although it hadn't coalesced yet, hadn't absolutely fixed. He twisted in his seat the better to regard Santa.

  "Ambivalence, Sergeant. Wanting two things at the same time."

  "Yeah," Ray muttered. "Two ambulances. We could bring twice as much."

  "Anyway," Santa persevered, seeing no warning sign in the red eyes staring at him, "I asked myself, how can I treat a problem when I know nothing about it? How can we prepare for the possible mass emotional crises of the test site without seeing at least some enlisted men now in close proximity to hazardous radioactive material?"

  "That's why we're here?" Ray asked.

  "Because only you and Sergeant Peña actually know what the cargo is. The regular drivers and even the security officers only know that it's vital to the war effort."

  "We're here because of you?" Ray asked.

  "That's what I was just saying."

  "We're here because of you?" Ray wanted to be sure.

  "That's what I said I said."

  "You?" Ray's eyes jerked back to the road when Joe hit a rabbit. His fingers twisted the handgrip of the Tommy gun.

  "Because of me," Santa said with good-humored firmness.

  Joe could tell that Ray intended to turn and kill Santa as soon as he dared take his eyes from the road, but the tarmac now deteriorated to raw dirt. Last summer a Colorado Highways truck had spread oil on the road as a thin binder, but a winter in the Rockies had passed and the little oil that remained had become patches of dark slick between the long stretches of ice slick on a route that plunged at twenty degrees down the mountain side. Staying on the road would demand all of Ray's concentration even as a passenger. Even if Joe wanted to stop and take the gun from Ray, the sedan behind would hit them and pitch them over the edge of the road into the darkness that lay like a sea around them.

  Santa seemed totally unconscious of the road, the mountains, the dark, as if danger and natural phenomena lay in Joe's area of expertise. Occasionally he commented on the effect of moonlight on a snowy peak, or the glint of a river a thousand feet below. Otherwise he behaved as if Joe had chosen a mildly diverting route.

  "You!"

  Ray tried to snatch his eyes from the road and kill Santa, but erosion had carved away the outer lane and the brake lights ahead blinked frantically, demanding his attention.

  "Please take my word for it, Sergeant." There was movement behind Joe and the tang of pipe tobacco. "Mind if I smoke, men?" A flame glowed for a moment. Joe thought if he looked back there might be a blanket and a dog on Santa's lap. "The three of us are like Helios, bearing the sun across the sky. A new sun, of course. Just as we call the moon when we can't see it a new moon. There is an enormous synchronicity building towards Trinity, a psychic tension. You men feel it, I can sense it."

  "You want to sense something?"

  Ray started to turn the Tommy gun, but a rock slide had poured over a hairpin bend in the road and Joe had to brake and turn without locking wheels.

  "That's why I expect our problems at Trinity will be largely psychological." There was a rustle of paper. "Do you mind if I ask a few questions?"

  Joe downshifted. The ambulance slid over stones to the edge of the road. Larger rocks bounced in front and rang off the crankcase underneath.

  "Sergeant Stingo, if you heard that you were in close proximity to radioactive material, would you feel comfortable, concerned, a little anxious, very anxious?"

  "Shit," Joe said.

  The red tail-lights of the truck in front swung wildly.

  "Boulder," Joe said.

  It was the size of a doghouse and in the middle of the road. The truck cleared it on the right and slammed into the rock wall, scraping sparks off granite. Joe headed for the same space, skidding, holding the wheel steady. Ray and Tommy gun were pressed against the windshield. As the ambulance slipped past the boulder, Joe saw the truck ahead hit the wall again. Wrenches, jacks, tires spilled from under the tarpaulin, bounced in the ambulance's headlights. As the truck stopped, nose into the wall, the ambulance slid through between the truck's tailboard and the road edge. The lead car had halted in the middle of the road. Joe swung in, braked and pulled the emergency brake at the same time, coming to rest against the car bumper only a second before the tail sedan rammed into the rear of the ambulance. A tire wobbled out of the dark and past the headlights. Security officers ran up and down waving flashlights and Tommy guns. Even Ray was distracted.

  A scream that was both feminine and inhuman erupted by Joe's ear, followed by a powerful, bell-like gong as Santa flew out of his seat head first and hit the ambulance roof. He seemed still to be suspended in mid-air when Joe looked past him to the rear of the ambulance and saw the empty steel square and eight slack straps. The plutonium canister had broken loose and rolled forward, glinting and warm, to nudge Santa's loafers and Argyle socks. The plutonium couldn't explode. Joe would have been happy to explain that to Santa, to reduce his psychic tension, given the chance. Santa dropped to the ambulance floor.

  "Gee," said Ray.

  "Orders are we don't stop for anything," the lieutenant in charge said when Joe pointed out the slumped figure of the analyst. "He's already in the ambulance, we'll leave him there."

  "He's out cold, sir. He probably has concussion."

  "Look, Sergeant, we're lucky no one in the truck was killed."

  "What about this?" Joe pointed to the canister. "The strap hooks are broken."

  "God, we can't have that thing rolling around. Somebody's going to have to hold it. We're losing time. Choose up, one of you has to take it. Or wedge it with something."

  The truck, fender crumpled, was already weaving round the ambulance as the lieutenant ran off to the lead sedan. The convoy was re-assembling itself.

  "I'll wedge it." Ray's eyes were red but unwavering.

  As Joe let out the clutch Ray slipped over his seat to the rear of the ambulance. Cautiously, the vehicles moved down the mountain. Clouds scattered over the stars. There was a scuff of cloth and scrape of metal over the ambulance floor. Joe looked back and saw Ray tucking Santa into a corner. He couldn't see the canister.

  Ray was panting when he returned to his seat.

  "It was hot, Chief. Like a can of soup."

  It shouldn't have broken the hooks, Joe knew. Eight steel hooks shouldn't have snapped. It was as if the canister had leapt forward at the first opportunity. I'll tell Oppy about Augustino, he thought. If they ship me off the Hill, I've got nothing to lose except a phosphorescent glow.

  "Like a tin can of hot soup, Chief. Like it was alive.
"

  Down the rest of the mountain curves to Durango and all the way to the hills of Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, there came from the back the sound of Santa rocking heavily as the ambulance careened like a hearse.

  JULY 1945

  14

  Six clowns wore white paint with black horizontal stripes around their arms, legs, torso. Black circles around their eyes and mouths. Black and white cotton caps twisted into horns. Short black scarves around the neck, knee and wrists. Long black loincloths trailing behind. Rattles of deer hooves tied to the waist. Moccasins.

  Together, they joked and prodded the dancers into a great circle in the middle of the plaza. The men wore clean work trousers and handkerchiefs tied into headbands. The women were in dresses. Man, woman, man, woman, each holding an ear of corn in one hand and a yellow zigzag of wood, a lightning wand, in the other. Elders, singers and a drummer with a big Cochiti drum stood along the north side. Plaza and cottonwood framed the sky.

  A new touch were the patriotic blue armbands with gold Vs for victory on all the dancers. One man had also come out wearing sunglasses. A clown stole the glasses, slipped them on another clown as the drumming started; deep voices lifted and the dancers began turning counter-clockwise like a wheel.

  "We don't need Captain Augustino and his security apparatus," Oppy told Anna Weiss. "Los Alamos has a much better defense. The Hill isn't a place, it's a time warp. We are the future surrounded by a land and a people that haven't changed in a thousand years. Around us is an invisible moat of time. Anyone from the present, any mere spy, can only reach us by crossing the past. We're protected by the fourth dimension."

  They and Joe and the rest of the tourists watched from the broad shadow of the cottonwood on the south side of the plaza. Back from Washington that morning, Oppy had changed to his Western gear: jeans, boots, silver buckle, hat at an angle. Anna wore her jumpsuit and a man's fedora.

  "It's perfectly animistic," Oppy said, "an ancient Greek fertility rite, that's what so wonderful about it. The ears of corn, of course, are phallic symbols."