Stallion Gate

  "Fun and games, fun and games, Sergeant. Not to be taken seriously. A pair of drifters like that, if they weren't employed by the government they'd be in a soup line. At least they can stay on a horse, which is more than we can say for the Military Police. Sometimes I think we have the 'Dead End Kids' in uniform." Augustino's gaze shifted to the door and the car waiting outside. "She says she asked you to drive her around. She says you were a courteous chauffeur all day and all night. Dr Oppenheimer says he sent you back to check on the dancers. Everyone's covering for you, Sergeant."

  "Yes, sir."

  The captain removed his cap, setting a tone of informality. In the light of the bulb, his eyes were deep-set and hidden. His narrow cheeks had a faint blue sheen. Hair crept from his cuffs to the back of his hands.

  "You know, Sergeant, the incident between Fuchs and your medicine man sounds to me like a classic misunderstanding between races. Now you're Dr Oppenheimer's unofficial liaison with the pueblo. I can understand how you wanted to settle the problem quietly. But I hear that the Sunday after you left Fuchs, you were looking for me. Did you find me?"

  "No, sir."

  "You were told I was up on Bathtub Row. You looked for me there?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Who did you see there?"

  "No one was home, sir."

  "And after that, you didn't look for me any more?"

  "Slipped my mind, sir."

  Augustino shook his head like an overburdened confessor.

  "Sergeant, I think you've gone over the edge. You allow Fuchs to be assaulted with a gun. You couldn't have over-powered a blind man? But you do attack an officer of the Indian Service? You in an Indian dance? You? I'll tell you, Sergeant, you were already back in the hole at Leavenworth, you were buried deeper than ever until you drove up in that car."

  Joe followed the captain's eyes to the Plymouth. "Sir?"

  "Racing up and down the highways today, I went through Esperanza and I saw that couple in a motel courtyard. I know all the cars on the Hill. And I made a note of the license and the time."

  "We may have stopped there for coffee, sir."

  "I went by the motel tonight. The coupe was still there. And now it's here and I see you have been following my instructions after all."

  "It's not like that, sir."

  "I don't want the sordid details of how you do it, but I do badly want every personal and intimate detail of Dr Weiss' life, her connections with the Party and her connections with Dr Oppenheimer."

  "She won't tell me that stuff."

  "She will. I think you have a talent with women, Sergeant. By the time you're done, I bet she tells you everything."

  The lighted road seemed to shift like snow as Joe walked from the shed. He swung into the car, put it into gear and closed the door. He didn't dare look at Anna.

  Horses coughed and shuffled as the Plymouth moved forward. MPs twisted in the saddle, staring. Al and Billy stood, one on each side of the car, as it rolled past the shed.

  "You never gave me an answer," Anna said. "Which do you think I am, insane or a tramp?"

  "Do you want to see me again?" Joe asked.

  "Yes."

  "Then you must be insane."

  17

  In the ExplosiveAssemblyBuilding on Two Mile Mesa, Joe held a twenty-inch model of the Trinity bomb steady on a wrestling mat. It was a sphere of pentagonal steel plates bolted together at the edges. Foote and a private named Eberly were adding the last lenses of high explosive. The temperature inside the green sheetrock building was about 120 degrees and all three men were stripped to the waist and wore a second, fluid skin of sweat. Foote was a baronet, and one of the more eccentric scientists on the Hill. In the sun he always wore a Mexican sombrero. In the AssemblyBuilding he always wore a chain rattling with religious medals. Eberly was a graduate student who had first come to the Hill as a civilian scientist, then been drafted and sent right back at a quarter of his previous pay. He was gawky, with as much neck as head, and an Adam's apple that pumped with incessant outrage.

  The lenses were cast wedges of Baratol and Composition B, both TNT-based explosives but with different speeds of detonation. Just as glass lenses bent and focused light, so did the sooty-gray lenses of high explosive focus their shock waves from the outer circumference of the bomb towards the center, creating not an explosion, but an implosion. Of course, this was merely a model to be detonated on the mesa, so in place of a plutonium core was a croquet ball.

  Other wrestling mats were covered with other models of the bomb in different stages of assembly, non-sparking brass tools, Radio Flyer wagons, tubs of water and bottles of warm milk. The walls bore blueprint diagrams, ghostly X-ray negatives, a portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a prized picture of Hedy Lamarr in the nude and, every twenty feet, a fire extinguisher and a bucket of sand. The last two items were purely ornamental because it was understood that if there were any fire in the AssemblyBuilding, everyone in it would be at stratocirrus level.

  Foote prepared each lens – a little Kleenex into this hole, Scotch tape over that crack. After he slid each one into place, Eberly took over with a brass wrench, bolting a steel plate over the lens, pentagonal plate interlocking with plate like a puzzle being slowly solved, building up the walls of the sphere. Joe simply kept the ball from rolling.

  "I hate the Army," Eberly said.

  "The Army wants you to hate it," Joe said. "It's the Army system. It's what binds us into a fighting unit."

  "No, it's an individual thing," Eberly insisted. "You know the new security campaign? Lesbians! Why, of all the WACs here, does Security pick out my girl and ask if she's a lesbian?"

  "Joe, I do really appreciate your helping out," Foote delicately changed the subject and slid another heavy lens into place, its smaller, concave tip resting against the croquet ball. "Oppy keeps sending my boys down to Trinity. It's a hell of a place, they tell me. Jornada del Muerto, Dead Man's Journey, it used to be called by the Old Spanish. Scorpions, desert, snakes, stinging ants, hostile Indians. I keep asking how that distinguishes it from the rest of New Mexico. Saw you dance, by the way. Very impressive."

  "Anything for the tourists."

  "What does a man like you do after the war? Obviously, you're too old and too intelligent to be a boxer any more. You're the least likely sergeant I've ever seen."

  "Groves is going to be the Atomic General. Maybe I'll be the Atomic Sergeant."

  The surface of the next-to-last lens was pitted; the Baratol had cooled too fast after casting. Foote stuffed the holes with tiny wads of Kleenex.

  "I didn't even know women could be homosexuals," Eberly said.

  "To crush a solid ball of plutonium into a denser, supercritical mass is theoretically conceivable," Foote told Joe, "if the ball is crushed by a perfectly symmetrical shock wave, which is possible if every one of these lenses is detonated in the same millionth of a second."

  " 'Critical', 'symmetrical'. It's just another bomb, right? When I took Oppy and Groves down to Trinity at Christmas, they were talking about a blast equal to about 500 tons of TNT. That's big, but that's not fantastic."

  "Been upgraded. The estimate is now 5,000 tons. Another difference is that your normal, ordinary bomb will generate temperatures of a few thousand degrees. A nuclear explosion can be ten million degrees. Different animal altogether."

  Foote dusted the final lens with baby talc. As he lowered it into the last hole, he steered the descending tip with a shoehorn.

  "If she's a lesbian," Eberly said, "what does that make me?"

  The lens stuck with an inch to go. Foote laid the last plate over the lens and picked up a rawhide-covered mallet. Sweat dripped from the end of his nose. Like a diamond cutter tapping a stone, he had to hit the obstinate lens hard enough to move it, but not so hard as to shatter the goods. In fact, considering the expense of the project, the lens was at least as valuable as a diamond. And a diamond cutter didn't have to worry about sparks.

  Foote licked his lips.
r />   "Lesbians, indeed."

  He rapped the plate. The explosive lens underneath seemed to shrug and then slide into place. Eberly aligned the plate and began bolting it down.

  "I think I could use the poisonous fumes of a good cigarette," Joe said and rose limply from the mat.

  "Go ahead. We'll finish."

  No smoking was allowed inside or within fifty feet of the building, but everyone took nervous cigarette breaks over a sand bucket at the far wall where Hedy Lamarr floated on her back. Joe lit up. To one side of the bucket were the X-ray negatives. There were five of them, tacked up in sequence next to someone's scribbled note that they had been taken a millionth of a second apart by an X-ray bunker at the HangingGarden.

  On the first dark film were twelve lights like a ring of flares. Detonation. The X-rays had turned shock waves into pure light.

  On the second film, the lights had expanded and joined to form a flower shape, a daisy. The outermost edge of a burning flower.

  By the third film, the delicate trim was gone and the lights concentrated into twelve lines reaching for the center.

  In the center of the fourth film, the lights outlined a dark disc, a metal core. Some of the lights rebounded, a corona.

  On the last film, the core was crushed to half its size, the rays swirling. A collapse not into darkness but into light.

  Joe looked back at the bomb on the wrestling mat. Completed, it was a two-foot, quarter-ton sphere of steel plates. Maybe a puzzle ball. Or a dull metal spore. Nothing that the X-rays showed, which was, at its birth, a small sun.

  That evening everyone crowded into Theatre 2 to see a film that had just arrived from Washington. Robert P. Patterson, the Undersecretary of War, his desk and his flag filled the screen. He had a pug face, a nap of gray hair and big hands folded between an array of pens and telephones. The film was grainy and the sound uneven, adding to the sense of urgency.

  "The importance of this project will not pass away with the collapse of Germany." The Undersecretary leaned forward. "You know the kind of war we are up against in the Pacific. We have begun to repay the Japanese for their brutalities and their mass murders of helpless civilians and prisoners of war." Patterson shook his head with resolution. "We will not quit until they are completely crushed." He turned his hands into fists. "You have an important part to play in their defeat. There must be no let-up."

  The evening films were Back to Bataan and Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips. By then, Joe and Anna had slipped out.

  18

  In the glow of the flame the room seemed to vibrate. Anna looked around at the crucifix and saints on the adobe walls, the low ceiling vigas, the striped blanket on the cot, Joe standing piñon logs in an inverted V over the burning kindling in the corner fireplace. Through the shutters came the evening sounds of distant children, a screen door slamming, a dog being chased, "Psoot-bah!"

  "I wanted to get away from the Hill," he said. "Didn't you?" As he laid Anna down on the rough blanket, he kissed her open mouth, her neck, the small, dark tips of her breasts. He slid his hand over the pale sheen of her belly to her legs and to the essential mystery, a twist of copper over a soft, white anvil.

  "Welcome to Santiago."

  A breast as still as marble. Then a sudden heart-stir.

  "It's raining," she said.

  Joe watched flashes picking at the door jamb and around the shutters.

  "Just thunder. A strange summer. No rain, just lightning."

  "I'm afraid of you."

  What did she suspect? He wondered. "Maybe that's just your way of saying you love me."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "I love you. I love the way you taste like piñon smoke, the way you feel, and I could make love with you until this bed breaks."

  "You can't!"

  "I can try."

  More slowly, he entered her as if he were leading her, lifting her to the very heart of herself. She rode him in the narrow, yellow light of the fireplace. As beads of sweat dampened her, she glowed like a respondent flame, her hair bright as fire.

  Sleeping with his arms round Anna, Joe dreamt of Augustino. The captain was following him with a rifle as Joe climbed a steep, snow-covered hill towards Anna. Both Joe and Anna were naked, while Augustino was dressed like an Apache with a corduroy coat and a high-crowned Boss hat. The snow turned to ashes. Anna disappeared and over the crest of the hill came horses, a herd of mustangs shrouded in steam and the radiance of a phosphorus bomb.

  Thunder sounded like a far-off cracking of the earth. The fireplace had the dull, subsided glow of embers. Anna wasn't in bed. Her clothes weren't on the chair. The shutters were open to a full moon. It was after midnight and Joe didn't know where Anna could have gone unless she was visiting the outhouse, but her side of the bed was cold and he had the sense that she had been gone for some time. He put on trousers and shirt and went out.

  The pueblo was blue. Blue adobe, blue fence, blue trees. He held up his hand. Blue. Lightning played over the Jemez, but the rest of the sky was clear, the stars dim only because of the brightness of the moonlight. The ground felt like ice.

  The jeep was still by the pump. Joe ran past the Reyes' house to the outhouses. Anna wasn't there and it was on his way back that he noticed a free-standing shadow in the night, a pillar of smoke braided with embers rising from the Reyes' yard. Sitting on chairs on either side of a fire were Anna and Sophie Reyes, talking in voices too low to carry.

  Sophie was so shy as to be practically a family secret. Except for the pots her nieces sold under the portal in Santa Fe, Joe doubted that anyone outside Santiago would ever have known she existed. She had cropped gray hair streaked with black and white, and a soft, hesitant face. She wore a smudged apron outside the traditional one-shoulder dress and cotton shirt. The fire was the smothered variety, cow chips heaped on burning wood to turn the pots in the center of the fire a carbon-rich black. Joe didn't know what was more unlikely: that Sophie would be firing pots in the middle of the night or that she would speak to Anna.

  The two women watched Joe let himself in through the gate. "I couldn't sleep," Anna whispered.

  The women each held blackened sticks, as if they'd been tending the fire during their conversation. Pots already fired were stacked on charred racks to one side of the yard. Raw pots of different shapes lined the other side. Ears of corn, strings of chilies and dried chamomile hung in the striped moon-shadows of the open porch at the back of the house. By the chairs were tin pails of temper and shards, and fresh clay in twists of newspaper.

  "What are you doing?" Joe asked.

  "You can see what I'm doing." Sophie leaned back in her chair the better to regard Joe. He didn't remember his aunt's gaze as being quite so direct.

  "In the dark?"

  "It's light enough. I was lonely. It's good she came by. She talks quietly. That's nice. We don't wake anyone up."

  "It's cold."

  "Then go back to bed," Sophie said.

  Joe ignored the suggestion. Besides, it was warm around the smothered, nearly invisible fire.

  "You have a good woman," Sophie said. "She thinks up numbers."

  "She's a mathematician."

  "That's what I said. Like Thinking Woman."

  "Thinking Woman?" Anna asked.

  "Thinking Woman thought up the world," Joe said. "Her thoughts became land, water, animals, people. Whatever she thought became real."

  "Like you." Sophie tapped Anna's stick with her own. "His other women were all sluts."

  "Thanks," Joe said.

  "That came from leaving here and going to New York and the Army," Sophie told Anna. She looked up at Joe and demanded, "Why did you go into the Army?"

  "Yes, Joe," Anna asked. "Why did you?"

  This night-blooming conversation was unreal, Joe thought.

  "It's complicated."

  "You were in the Army at the beginning of the war," Anna said. "You must have enlisted."

  "See how smart she is," Sophie said.

  "
Not exactly enlisted."

  "Then you must have been in trouble," Anna said.

  "See?" Sophie said.

  "Okay. I was with some friends in New York. We decided to give a free concert to soldiers in New Jersey, at FortDix, which was for Negro soldiers. We thought we'd give them some jazz, maybe a parade."

  "This was arranged with the officers, Joe?"

  "No. Our arrival was not expected."

  "What time of day was this, Joe?"

  "About three in the morning. About this time. A lot of dumb things are done at this time."

  "You mean you were drunk, Joe."

  "See?" Sophie said.

  "There was some damage, Joe?"

  "Some of the musical instruments got pretty banged up when we hit the main gate. I vaguely remember a scuffle on the way to the parade ground and a holding action around the bandstand. Then I mostly recall seventy or eighty MPs sitting on me. Anyway, the Army was after men. They offered us a choice, jail or enlistment. We all chose enlistment. I was the only one who passed the physical."

  "That is a crazy way to enlist in the Army."

  "I didn't say it was well thought out. Anyway, enlisting cold sober in broad daylight is crazier."

  "Men are so dumb," Sophie told Anna. "My husband should be here where there are things for him to do, but he wants to go hide in the canyons, he wants to be a hero. And I'm the one who has to walk all day to take him food and cigarettes."

  "He's with Roberto?" Joe asked.

  "Where else would he be?"

  Then that was why Sophie was firing pots at night. Things made sense if you just waited long enough.

  "The Indian Service has riders from here to Utah looking for Roberto and you stroll by with his bacon and eggs?"

  "You walk past them?" Anna asked.

  "Yes. They don't pay any attention to an old woman getting clay. They're looking for Joe."

  "I'm not involved with Roberto."

  "That's not what Roberto says," Sophie told Anna. "He talks about Joe all the time."

  "You miss your husband," Anna said.

  "Yes. Tonight, the devil went by my window. He had yellow skin and silver horns and a rifle."