Joe said, "Sophie, do me a favor. Next time you see Roberto, tell him I'm not involved. He wants to play cowboys and Indians, I don't. It has nothing to do with me."
In his house, Joe lit a kerosene lamp and poured two glasses of Scotch while she looked at the photographs on the wall.
"No pictures of you."
"They're of my brother Rudy. I don't think he made it off Bataan. Funny, I can picture him better at night than during the day because we used to keep animals out back. I took care of the horses. Rudy had a rabbit hutch. We used to feed them in the evening and I can still see Rudy and those white does in the hutch, that fuzzy whiteness in the dark."
"But no pictures of you?"
"I left home. When I was fifteen I went to El Paso. A circus had its winter quarters down there and I caught on hauling water and hay."
"That must have been exciting."
"Hauling hay for elephants? Mainly, I remember sneezing," he said and gave her a glass. "Well, that was more words from Sophie than I can remember. You like being Thinking Woman?"
"I like the idea that I thought you up, that you're my idea."
"Your idea?"
"My biggest. What else did you do at the circus? I feel responsible."
"There was an old sideshow fighter. Local heroes paid $5 against $50 if they could knock him down. No one ever knocked him down. He showed me the first things about boxing – that's probably why I'm basically a counter-puncher. But the best was the circus band leader. I played a pedal organ a little bit here at the church, but he taught me the piano. He used to describe himself as 'a gentleman of the Negro persuasion', and he drove the Texans crazy because he dressed better and acted finer than any of them. He was a ragtime player. And stride. Name it. He hated me fighting, but that's where the money was; that was the ticket north."
"You must have been a good fighter. I asked you about the pictures twice and you ducked the question each time. You must never have been hit."
Joe studied a photo of Rudy on a horse.
"You know, Sophie's right. Indian men do work on their dignity. They don't talk a lot. As Oppy would say, they're non-verbal. They internalize everything, and to an outsider, which may include women, they may not say a word. They'll drink themselves to death or drive off a cliff, but they do it with a sense of quiet dignity. I'm not that Indian. I've spent half my life away from here. I've got a half-breed brain now. Lost the old natural dignity."
"You have better than that, you have invulnerability."
He was astonished. "Me?"
"You seem to be the giant who has attracted all the men from here up to the Hill."
"Look, Santiago is a poor place. This is still the Depression here, it's always the Depression here. For the last twenty years the most dependable income here has been from pottery, and that's made by women. One reason the men work so hard on their dignity is that it's all they've got. Then the Army took over the Hill. The men are happy to work up there, they don't need me as an attraction. There is a price. If the lowest caste on the Hill is the soldiers, lower than them are the Indians."
"Have you ever been hit, or hurt, or touched?"
"Lower than the Indians is me, because I'm not really from either place, I just serve as a go-between. At least the men from Santiago know who they are and have some place to go home to. Who am I? I am a driver, a joker, a mascot. I am the most insignificant person on the Hill. I am a has-been fighter, a so-so musician who's going to be scrambling for jobs in nightclubs for the rest of my life. A giant? That's a joke. I feel like I'm committing a perpetual fraud, a hoax, because inside is a coward. Men are fooled, Oppy and Roberto are fooled, but I don't want you to be. I didn't mean to enlist in the Army, I wasn't a hero on Bataan, I made a deal to get out of the stockade. I'm like the Gestapo– Fuchs was right about that. This is not self-contempt, this is simple honesty. Rudy was fooled. Rudy joined the National Guard because he wanted to be like his big brother. Dolores wasn't fooled. She said Rudy would be safe at home if it wasn't for me. When I ran away I took one son from her. When Rudy left, I took the other. She wrote to me in the hospital in Australia and said as far as she was concerned, I was as dead as Rudy. Not to write and not to come home. That seemed unfair to me, but after a while I saw there was a grain of truth in what she said, because I had tried to cut everything Indian away from me, and maybe Rudy got caught and trampled in the process. See, Dolores cut right through me. So that's why there are no snapshots here of me. When Rudy comes home, that's when my picture goes up."
"You mother's dead. You said your brother's dead. How can it go up?"
"You're Thinking Woman, think of something. Anyway, I have been hit and I have been hurt. And you, you could completely destroy me."
She sat across the table from Joe. The moon in its downward transit no longer entered the house; the lamp flame was the only light.
"I didn't run away from home. My childhood was very quiet and bourgeois compared to yours. I fantasized. I thought I would be an actress like Marlene Dietrich and have wealthy lovers. Then I thought I might be a female aviator who crash-landed and had to live with someone like Tarzan while the rest of the world searched for me. When I was rescued, they would understand that I had been forced to submit. There may have been wild Indians involved."
"In any respectable fantasy."
Anna took a deep breath. "But from the age of fourteen on, my fantasies turned to fear. Not anxiety. Fear. That everyone wanted to hurt me, kill me. Not my mother or father, of course, or my family, but everyone else. The gardener, the tram conductor, the postman. The police, naturally. I stopped going to school for weeks at a time. Our doctor said I was suffering from unspecified hysteria. An alienist came from Berlin and said I was suffering from female castration complex. Perhaps so, but I thought he wanted to torture me. A crazy child! They took away my pencils, scissors, even my stockings.
"My father knew Freud. He wrote to him in Vienna. Freud wrote back to say I was suffering from a 'flight motif. More and more German Jews, he said, were suffering from 'flight motif,' but it was his opinion that Nazi brutalities were diminishing and that a young girl should consider how extremely unpleasant it was to be a refugee. I remember he added in a postscript that all he ever wanted to see in America was Niagara Falls. There is some charm in Freud contemplating the great running bath of Niagara Falls. My mother and father were reassured because they were Germans first and Jews second. So I was sent to the sanatorium where sometimes we were given water cures and sometimes sleep cures, and where I hid in my bower full of numbers and bees. At lunch we listened to Herr Goebbels on the radio loudspeaker. Everyone had to.
"Actually, the doctors were kind. One who was a communist suggested a trip to Sweden. He falsified the documents without telling my parents, but I think they knew he put me down as Aryan. How else would I be allowed to leave? It took a communist to know how to do such things. He was going with me, so it was not all out of good will. It was an odd thing. We docked in Stockholm and suddenly I was not crazy. I do wonder, Joe, why me? Why –out of all my family, good, rational people, uncles, aunts, rabbis, professors, old ladies, babies– why was I the only one to escape? The question is, did God save me or did He just forget me? So, I am ready for a new God. Thinking Woman sounds to me like a great improvement."
"Did you see any more of the doctor who got you out?"
"He seduced me. A lot of men seduced me in the beginning."
"Communists?"
"Who knows? The world is full of communists. In Germany, the only ones who stood up to the Nazis were communists."
"And Oppy?"
"What do you mean?"
"How did you run into Oppy again?"
"In New York. He needed a mathematician. He was rounding up refugees like stray cats. He used to have long brown curls, you know. He cropped his hair, like Joan of Arc, to go to war. Yes, like Joan of Arc! First he asked if I wanted to see my numbers come to life, then he invited me to the project."
"He's a s
educer."
"Yes. Do you know what my work is? I turn my equations into programs for an electronic computer. I turn each millionth of a second of an imaginary Trinity into a deck of punch cards so that we can estimate what will happen in the real Trinity. You see, everyone else is working toward Trinity. Oppy inspires everyone to work so hard."
"There wouldn't be a bomb without Oppy."
Anna refilled his glass and her own.
"There wouldn't be an Oppy without the bomb. There are other physicists here more brilliant by far."
"Come on. Harvey starts a sentence and Oppy finishes it for him."
"He's quick to finish other people's thoughts. But they're still other people's thoughts. What I meant to say, though, is that no one looks ahead to after the bomb is used. Or asks whether the bomb should be used or, at least, demonstrated to the Japanese first. Because they haven't reached the event of Trinity itself, they don't think of the consequences. On the punch cards are not only the fireball, the shock wave, the radiation, but also an imaginary city. So many structures of steel, of wood, of concrete. Houses shatter under shocks of one-tenth to one-fifth of an atmosphere. For steel buildings the duration of the shock is important. If the pulse lasts several vibration seconds, peak pressure is the important quantity. I can stop the blast at any point. I can go backwards or forwards. Nobody else sees it. It's as if they can't imagine a shadow until the sun is up. I see it every day. Every day I kill these thousands and thousands of imaginary people. The only way to do it is to be positive they are purely imaginary, simply numbers. Unfortunately, this reinforces a new fantasy of mine. There are times when I feel as if I am one of those numbers in one of the columns on one of the punch cards flying through the machine. I feel myself fading away."
"To where?"
"To Germany. Freud was right, after all. It is difficult to be a refugee once you think you are dead."
Joe pulled a crate from under the bed and took out a wadded ball of newspaper.
He unwrapped the newspaper at the table and set down by the lamp a small, gleaming black pot with a tiny top hole. "It's a seed pot. It's the last pot I have of my mother's."
"It's beautiful."
"I was supposed to sell it with the rest, but I couldn't. I wanted to have something of hers."
"It's a work of art."
"Like a little, smooth earth. Nice, huh?" He let Anna admire the pot for a second more, than blew out the lamp flame. He stepped back across the room.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm going to throw you a pot."
"I can't see."
"I can't see you, either. This could be interesting."
"I can't–"
"Catch!"
Joe tossed the pot lightly, underhand. It rolled from his fingertips into the dark. A last, faint nimbus of moonlight clung to the open window. Joe watched the pot tumble past the dim glow and disappear into the darkness on the other side. He waited for an explosion of clay. There was a sharp intake of breath from the other side, no other sound.
He stepped gently across the floor, reached into the dark and found her hands. Anna had caught the pot as it passed her ear and she still held it there tightly, off-balance. When Joe had first pulled out the crate, he hadn't know what he was going to do. An impulse was there, the start of an arc, the opportunity to risk all.
Anna was shaking.
"That was crazy."
"Maybe. But we proved you're here." He moved his hand from hers, down to her necklace and shirt and the weight and heat of her breast, where he felt the accelerated rhythm of her heart. "And alive."
The nimbus at the window became brighter and harder. For a moment Joe thought perhaps the moon had turned back, pulled by the pot's dark flight, a vying gravity. If he could raise the dead, he could raise the mountains and affect celestial bodies. The nimbus became a beam of light gently probing the dim outlines of lamp, table, chair, then a white shaft that poured through the window and filled the room. A car engine idled outside. It must have rolled in neutral on its own momentum all the way from the road behind the Reyes' yard.
"Who is it?" Anna asked.
Joe set the pot on the table. He cracked the door to look out, but the headlights were too bright and whoever was in the car wasn't getting out. "Can't see," Joe said.
He slipped his .45 from its holster and tucked the gun into his trousers, then crouched below the light and pulled Anna to the kitchen. Through the shutters over the sink he had a view of his jeep parked by the side of the house, of a corn field, the stalks standing in ranks, and of the Reyes' yard. There was no more smoke in the yard. He remembered Sophie's nightmare and deciphered it. Sophie said she'd seen a devil with yellow skin and a rifle. The silver horns were captain's bars and the devil was Augustino. Joe didn't know why the captain had come, but his own mind was decided. He eased open the casement window.
"Why not wait to find out?" Anna whispered.
"Because I think I know."
Joe went through the window head first, rolling between the jeep and the wall of the house. There were no more cars, no footsteps, but Augustino was capable of coming alone. Joe rose, his back sliding against the corner of the wall. He freed the .45 from his belt, cocked it, thumbed off the safety. As the night wind brushed over the field, rows of corn dipped and rustled. Dogs were quiet. He heard nothing in the corral, nothing on the roof. Only the deep, powerful count of his heart.
In one long step he swung round the corner of the house and through the headlights, and stuck the .45 in the face of the driver, a colored man wearing a tuxedo. The car was a Cadillac.
"Joe?" Pollack asked. His eyes opened so wide and white they seemed to ooze. "Joe, don't you shoot your bestest friend. Don't do it."
Joe let the gun drop and hang.
"What the hell are you doing here at this hour?"
"Leaving you a note." Fountain pen and paper were still frozen in Pollack's spidery black hands. "How else can I get into communication with you working on the Hill? I can't reach you there. All I can do is leave a note."
"At this hour?"
"I didn't know you'd be here. You were supposed to come by the Casa Mañana last weekend and sign those papers."
It was the night Joe had gone to the hot springs with Anna and Harvey.
"I got sidetracked, sorry. You have the papers, I'll sign them right now, right here."
"I have them," Pollack said, although he made no move to produce them now that he'd regained his composure. "Know what the buyers want to do? They want to tear down the club and build garden apartments. They have the money."
"That's what counts."
Pollack sighed.
"A sad end for the Casa Mañana."
"You'll have a new club in New York."
"But it will be one of many good clubs in New York. There was only one good club in New Mexico. It was the best, right?"
"The best. You've got the papers?"
"The only authentic jazz in New Mexico. Even if I was gone, it would be like a last laugh."
"You want me to sign or not?"
"They're from Fort Worth, the buyers. I heard them talking to each other. Calling me 'Rastus'. 'Tar baby'. Called me 'the dinge' in my own club. Joe, can you get your hands on $50,000? If you can, the Casa Mañana is yours. Club, license, lot, everything."
Joe carefully slid on the gun's safety and tucked it in his trousers.
"Half price?"
"For you."
"Serious?"
"Have I ever joked about the club?"
"There are laws about Indians drinking liquor, let alone serving it."
"There are laws about bootlegging and your father was a bootlegger. Afraid?" Pollack smiled a yellow grin. "You want it or not?"
"I want it," Joe said and knew at the same time. The future was here. The future had come coasting in as a silent Cadillac. "I want it."
"You have the $50,000 now?"
"I need a month."
"A week. Eddie Jr's coming in from It
aly and I'm going to be there at the dock."
Joe had, after pocket and black market, a little over $15,000. If he sold all the tires and nylons he could lay his hands on, he still couldn't raise another $500 in a week. And he'd be leaving for Trinity in ten days.
"Two weeks. If I don't have the money for you then, you can still sell for twice as much and blow the difference on Eddie's welcome home party."
Pollack gave his hand through the window.
"Two weeks, Joe, not one day more. We'll show the white trash what this war was all about."
Joe watched the Cadillac roll away down the road and across the dark plaza. When he turned around, Anna stood in the doorway. He didn't know how long she'd been there or how much she'd heard. Some ghost of the headlights still seemed to play on her and the house. She and the house glowed.
Joe Peña's Casa Mañana.
19
Omega Site was a hanger at the bottom of Los AlamosCanyon, a natural trench of basalt and pines deep enough and narrow enough to shield the Tech Area, a mile away, from any explosion. The hangar itself was divided by a cement barrier. One side was occupied by the miniature reactor that Fermi called his "Water Boiler". On the other side was an experiment of Harvey's called "Tickling the Dragon's Tail".
A croquet ball-sized round of plutonium coated in glittering nickel was the Dragon, the core of the bomb. It nestled snugly in a twenty-inch paraffin bowl on top of a hydraulic piston. Over it, suspended face-down by a chain, was a second, hollow bowl of paraffin. The idea was to check whether an outer sphere of high explosive "lenses" would, simply by being in place around a nearly critical core, reflect enough neutrons for the plutonium to go critical and explode prematurely and relatively ineffectually. The paraffin was mixed with sooty-gray carbon flour so that it had basically the same atomic make-up as high explosive, without the risk, in case of mishaps, of wiping out the eastern end of the canyon.
Only Harvey, Joe and Oppy were in Omega. Harvey's usual Critical Assembly team was scouting Trinity, and Fermi's team refused to be near the hangar when the Dragon's Tail was being tickled. Harvey had protested that at least two physicists had to be present for the experiment, and Oppy had answered that while General Groves had done his best to turn him, Oppy, into an administrator, he was still a physicist. Oppy had insisted that Joe stay and push the red and green buttons on the wall that raised the lower bowl holding the Dragon up to the hanging hollow bowl.