BURIED by Ryan Cannon
Our fathers worked at Hanford, the nuclear site where plutonium was manufactured for the bomb that leveled Nagasaki. Our fathers had no part in this except their own fathers, who were the men in the planes, the men with their hands on the helm of the world. We remember them, still thin, with winter beards, our fathers – janitors of the nuclear age, their doctorates framed on the study walls.
They buried nuclear waste in the desert. They pumped water from the Columbia River through the nuclear reactors to keep them cool. When, one by one, the reactors were decommissioned, our fathers entombed them in concrete, sealed the reactor domes, welded the steel doors shut. Our fathers bought appliances they couldn’t afford and irrigated their lawns with river water, trying to blot out the killdeer cries and the dead brown hills with something green. They cursed the wind and planted trees, as many trees as they could – maple and ash and poplar – and drank too much, watching them grow.
Apple farmers’ daughters became their wives, and they raised their children, us, in the eastern Washington sagebrush. Their fishing holes were downriver of Priest Rapids Dam, the last stretch of the Columbia running natural, all seventeen miles hooking around the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, before being harnessed and tamed by McNary and John Day and the rest of those dams standing in a line like my and Thomas’ friends at the unemployment desk, looking for something to take with no possible way of ever giving it back.
* * *
During the Cold War, Amy Sutherland’s mother passed on. Bone cancer, rare enough her oncologist could never fully hide his zeal from Amy’s family. The same year, her father dug a bomb shelter in the backyard, lined the walls with sacks of lentils and drums of wheat, a poker table, a hand-cranked radio, and a snub-nose .38. He reinforced the walls and ceiling with sixteen-pound sheet lead, a quarter-inch thick, bonded to plywood, bedded in the concrete. The lead would stop whatever penetrated the soil and concrete – radiation from a nuclear event at Hanford, fallout from a Russian bomb.
Sutherland boasted his shelter could protect us from Chernobyl. He predicted that, when the Commie warheads rained down, we’d all come running. Amy believes her father secretly hoped for such an event. Reset the counter. Baptize us in radiation and see what we looked like washed clean. Sutherland would tell you that at one time the Columbia River was the most radioactive river in the United States. He filed over a dozen lawsuits against Secretary of Energy Donald Hodel on his wife’s behalf. She was a swimmer, Sutherland said. She loved the water. I wish I could say which river is the most radioactive now – we should warn them – but probably only Jesus and the Department of Energy knows.
Sutherland is dead now, and his daughter Amy is my wife.
* * *
Thomas and I lay pipe all day in the sun and the damned wind. After, we fish tallboys of Rainier from a cooler and watch his heeler thump the planking of Thomas’ porch with his tail. I’d tell you about the wind here if I could, if it could be explained. All the fury and patience of something without limit, without head or tail. Tumbleweeds blow over Badger Road, cars swerving to miss them. They collect in droves, swarming a fence, wedged into a carport, mashed up along a windbreak of trees like driftwood at high water. Tumbleweeds the size of a man – I’ve seen them – some even bigger, entangled in bunches of five or six, big as Thomas’ Chevy, bouncing over the plain at thirty miles an hour. The wind billows through the day, through the night, bending the trees.
Thomas works the trench with a shovel and a three-foot level. He’s inside a steel box that sits inside the trench, shoring up the walls and protecting him from cave-in. He’s down there ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty feet, and the soil here is loose. It can’t be trusted. We remember Pete Stinson, the men digging so fast to unearth him one of the Cazier brothers put a shovel nose through Pete’s wrist. Things can happen fast like that. They do all the time.
The dust is so fine it sifts like flour, shin-deep in places, filling our boots. I’m topside with an angle grinder, beveling pipe and feeding it into the trench. Curled sprigs of green PVC tangle in the hair of my forearms. In the shadow of the box, Thomas levels the trench, fits and glues the pipe, and then digs a bell hole for each flared end. I climb the trench box and hook chains to the excavator bucket. The excavator lifts the box, and it sways from side to side, blotting the sun. The wind picks up in the afternoon and dirties the horizon.
When it’s really bad, when we can’t even keep our hard hats on, dirt in the pockets of our eyes, grit in our teeth, and we’re leaning like trees, bracing for the next big blow, we belly down in the trench, the deepest point, seeking shelter. We press our faces to the earth and feel the cool against our cheeks. Down far enough, you can put your ear to the soil and close your eyes and listen to the heartbeat deep in the womb of the world. It’s a trick, though I won’t tell Thomas. It’s your own heartbeat you hear, in the silence, your own blood bleating into the earth.
Thomas was once married, shortly after high school, but is no longer. Penelope is two years older. Though accepted to both the University of Washington and Washington State University, she spent the years between her graduation and his working as an optometric assistant at the local Wal-Mart. They have two children, Custer and Kimberly, who rarely visit, wandering Thomas’ rambler in a gloom, poking at the strange artifacts they find in their father’s house: a surfboard, though Thomas has never seen the ocean; an unfinished stained glass window; crude backcountry dumbbells made from rebar and buckets of concrete; a trunk of women’s clothing, certainly not their mother’s; a rare Drillings triple-barrel shotgun that Thomas shows off to Custer, saying, “Don’t touch.”
Penelope has met someone. He is a chiropractor and also a Mormon. There is no end to the chiropractors here, the dentists, the orthodontists, their mansions backing up to the river in Pasco, their lawns terraced down the grade to the water and perfectly landscaped. Small oases from the coyote willow and water birch. The vineyards are nearby, irrigation runoff rumbling down the slope in concrete flumes. Penelope could have any one of them. They’d all leave their wives and riverside palaces if she asked. Thomas was like that too, at first, willing to give up anything.
The chiropractor has never been married. Ours is a small town. We learn she is going to his church. We learn she and the kids are sitting on pews with green hymnals in their laps, following along on the page as the congregation sings.
* * *
Thomas doesn’t say much for weeks. The heeler rides the bench seat, jouncing over the dirt berms of the job site, head out the window. While we heave twenty-foot lengths of water pipe into the loader bucket, scarring freshly graded fields with trenches, the heeler sleeps in the shadow of the truck. We feed him leftovers from El Aguila – pork burrito or chile relleno – in an upturned hard hat that has been branded in Sharpie, “Dog.” Some days Thomas pours Coke into a Frisbee, and the heeler chases gophers all afternoon, digging after them through the fine dirt, snapping his jaws into their burrows, until he’s panting and powdered, resting, belly down to the cool earth, like us.
Thomas empties an IRA account to great penalty, spends every cent and then some on an ultralight airplane homebuilding kit. Single prop, tail dragger, white with red trim. You can order these things online now, anybody can. Wooden crates arrive on a flatbed, and we knock a wall out of his garage to fit them all. Now he’s out there every night, constructing an airplane from this mess of sheet metal and hardware. The heeler makes quiet attempts at sabotage. Paw prints in the fuselage. A careful arrangement of castle nuts and cotter pins scattered. The heeler and his innocent wagging tail.
Thomas doesn’t know how to fly. Thomas and I, we work the earth. Our hands have thickened, gone brutish, for the aqueducts, the drainage, the sewer systems winding under our roads. We bear water into the desert, taking it from the river into places it’s no business being: a neighborhood development of empty lots, a vacant business park. Fire hydrants and storm drains along roads that don’t yet lead anywhere.
* * *
They told us the Russians were Communists, and the Communists would have us dead. Hanford was a target. Pasco, Kennewick, and Richland, too – the Tri-Cities – sprawled around the confluence of the Snake, the Yakima, and the Columbia rivers. Amy remembers the Cold War drills – she’ll tell you – huddled under the school desk with her arms over her head. I remember them too.
She wakes sometimes just before the sprinklers come on, and her mind is underground. Her eyes catch the predawn. Sweat beads the down of her upper lip, and she’s on about the end of everything. The containment units are cracking, and nuclear waste is seeping into the water table. The reactor cooling valves are old and corroded; if they fail the core will overheat, melt down, a radionuclide steam jetting into the atmosphere – caesium-137, strontium-90, iodine-131 – and we’re downwind, downriver. She fists the sheets and tells me something has gone wrong. We’re doomed. Any little thing can go wrong, anytime.
Amy’s father was fishing a late run of steelhead where the Columbia River banks the Hanford Reservation, the dome of a reactor visible on the horizon to the west, the grooved face of the Rattlesnake Hills beyond. Despite blaming the contaminated river for his wife’s death, Sutherland never could keep off it. Drifting with the current, he snags his plug-cut lure into a rock bed. Rather than cut the line, he turns the boat against the river, going back for the lure – a five-dollar hunk of plastic and two treble hooks. When something fouls the propeller, Sutherland, lifejacket buckled like a good sailor, leans over the stern of the boat to take a look.
Nobody’s ever told me what was wound up in the prop, not even Amy. Could have been discarded ski rope or anchor line or milfoil weed, but I happen to know Sutherland fished with braided twenty-pound test, thinking he might one day hook into a sturgeon and wanting the chance to land it. I know what braided twenty-pound test can do to a seventeen-pitch prop, coiling up around the spindle, tightening, tightening and strangling as the propeller tries to spin.
Sutherland pulls the engine housing toward him, swinging the propeller to the surface of the water. One hand on the outboard, balanced on the transom. Maybe the boat clips a rock. Maybe his foot slips on the wet fiberglass. Sutherland loses his balance, tips head over stern, butting his forehead into the outdrive and losing himself, fully, to the river. The boat floats downriver, all the way to Leslie Grove Park, with Sutherland four hundred yards behind, face down in the drink. I imagine his blood chumming the water. I imagine salmon smolts flitting about his head in a halo of flashing silver.
Thomas and I went to high school with Amy, and she was hard up after, chucking everything of her father’s onto the lawn. People gathered, thinking garage sale until they saw Amy, half-crazed with grief, scattering Sutherland’s sockets across the driveway. She seemed so intent on unburdening herself, no one could refuse to lighten her load.
Thomas took the heeler pup, thinking he did her a favor in it. Myself, I walked away with a set of O’Brien water skis I don’t think Mr. Sutherland will soon miss.
* * *
Amy won’t pet the heeler now or let him lick her hands. Two weeks before the accident, Sutherland picked the heeler pup from a litter of six at a Benton County apple orchard. Amy was graduating soon, the next year, and leaving for college. An impractical gesture, Amy tells me now, over and over, gifting a dog to a girl going off to college. Impulsive. Sutherland tied a bow around the heeler’s neck, left him in the kitchen for Amy to find after school. She sat on the linoleum, and the dog threw himself against her sneakers, chewed the hem of her jeans.
If the heeler remembers, he makes no indication. Amy remembers, and she makes plenty. For her sake, or so Thomas says, he never named the heeler. He pretends that a thing unnamed can do less harm. When Amy’s around he withholds from the dog, as though the circumstances that led to their pairing were beyond his control, as though he didn’t pick the heeler pup from a pile of Sutherland’s books that had been flung across the lawn – Ayn Rand and Isaac Asimov – and let him lick his face clean.
* * *
Bill McGovern’s taxidermy shop doesn’t get much business. The real game, having more sense than the rest of us, is farther in any direction: southeast to the Blue Mountains, west to the Cascades, north to Moses Lake and farther, Canada. During the salmon run, he’ll mount a couple of trophy kings. Ancient white sturgeon, spined and monstrous. Pheasants and mallards. A bobcat now and then. Bill’s surly to clients. He’ll tell those sportsmen, right to their ruddy faces, to come back when they’ve something bigger, something worth his time. His sign, a painted piece of clapboard, went down in a windstorm last spring, and Bill has yet to replace it. Even when he’s working, you can smell whiskey through the vapors of Aqua-Cure. Bill once mounted a coyote poised with its foot stuck in a bottle of Jim Beam like the bottle was a snare. The coyote’s teeth were fixed around its own ankle, bright red paint on the jaws and pelt, as though the coyote would gnaw its own leg off to get free. Bill keeps it under a furniture blanket at the back of the shop behind the stacks of embalming chemicals: Curatan and Balmex and Stop Rot. Bill told me once, squeaking his thumb over one of the bared, red-speckled teeth, “I am the coyote.” The mount won a blue ribbon, first place, at the Benton-Franklin County Fair.
Lately, Thomas and Bill McGovern talk about mounting the heeler when it passes. The dog is getting on in years, it’s true. They moon over and prophesy their grief, liquor throwing shadows of it on the walls, making it larger, more terrible. In a whisper Thomas laments the heeler’s death, as though the dog has cancer, stage four. They are two ends of one stick, he says. How wonderful the heeler will look with his coat glossed up in resin and his eyes made of glass.
Bill drinks whiskey, murmurs, “Fucking-A, man. Fucking-A.”
* * *
In November, the chiropractor proposes to Penelope. She is baptized in a tiled font in the Union Chapel. The chiropractor performs the baptism. He is younger than her, has chiseled, arrogant features and, because he’s balding, keeps his scalp shaved clean. They wear one-piece, white baptismal suits, zipped up the back. Members of the ward attend. The bishop takes a picture on his phone, Penelope and the chiropractor posing in white, straining to hold their smiles. The baptismal suit bulges unflatteringly at her middle, shapeless from shoulder to waist, and she is uncomfortable. All these people she barely knows.
Sliding accordion doors unveil the small font. The water is warm, and the tiles echo every splash as she wades in. The chiropractor holds her wrist and the small of her back. He bends her backward before she is ready. The suit is heavy and coarse on her shoulders when he brings her, sputtering, out of the water.
Thomas wants that same night to swim the Columbia. We go to the pump house and stand on the concrete lip in our underwear, the wind whipping, disturbing the river. The water black and so frigid when you come up gasping it’s like you’ve had all the goddamn miserable years cold-burned right out of you. I don’t know much about baptism and the Holy Ghost and forty days fasting in the desert, but I can see, bursting from that slow-rolling cold with every bit of me feeling more alive than I have in a decade, how she can believe in submersion.
* * *
Amy was bereft, a lost soul. Her father gone, his possessions gone. The ache in her chest raw, open, and it hurt her, physically, to breathe. She lost weight. She withered, and her spine showed through her skin like a dead thing, and her eyes sunk. Her mouth twisted into something jaded and wry, lips made for spitting, thin lips made for cursing God.
Sutherland’s parents came to stay, but Amy got drunk and kicked them out of her father’s house. She lurked around the graveyard, a ghoul, something unearthed and without rest. That last year of high school, Amy was a senior, and we were in awe of her.
In the fall, Amy left for Pullman. Bill McGovern was a junior then at Washington State University. He found Amy, her eyes concealed in great thunderclouds of eye shadow, adorned in skinny black dresses and tattoos of bleeding roses, barbed wire. Bill drove a kick-start Kawasaki, wore a World War II infantry helmet, and I can picture the two of them roaring around Pullman in clouds of exhaust and cigarette smoke, racing Amy from her grief. It makes me crazy, imagining that. My Amy covers her tattoos with plain cardigans and calls her grandparents every week. She does Pilates at five a.m. and lectures me for driving home two beers in after hockey league.
This is what I know about Bill McGovern: he’s only interested in the moment of anguish, both as a lover and a taxidermist, directly prior to death; anything earlier or later is no good. His senior year a Pullman transit struck Bill and his Kawasaki on a blind left. The infantry helmet saved Bill’s life, that and a titanium alloplast a surgeon buried over his left eye. There was a settlement, and Bill dropped out of school. He rescued his uncle’s taxidermy shop from bankruptcy and returned to Kennewick, learning the trade before dementia could muddle his uncle’s wits. Now Bill runs the shop alone, as the business slips, like a barrow wheel to a familiar path, back into the red.
When Bill left Pullman, Amy stayed, and that was the end of it. She’ll tell you, after the proper number of rum-and-ginger-ales, that Bill didn’t really make it. The plate in his head is hiding the dead part of his brain – the soul of Bill. The new Bill is just a zombie, and somebody ought to put him out of his misery.
* * *
Lately, Amy and I are just going through the motions. She hates the desert and the sad tribal-owned casinos and the piss smell of sagebrush in the desert after it rains. More than anything she hates the wind. She wants to live in Portland or Seattle or San Francisco. She’s embarrassed of saying she lives here, Kennewick, tired of hearing where her old friends are now: Spokane, Boise, Salt Lake City. Her ten-year high school reunion is less than two years away.
During an especially bad patch, we saw a marriage counselor who advised us to set definite goals and celebrate benchmarks. Though we’ve since abandoned couple’s therapy, Amy has taken to carrying a stopwatch, the kind track coaches use, on a long Cougars lanyard. She times our conversations and marks their length on a dry erase board stuck to the face of the refrigerator, adding them up at the end of the week to see if our marriage is getting better or worse. The stats don’t lie, our marriage counselor liked to say. I catch Amy sometimes trying to extend a daily formality, stopwatch clenched, working for those extra minutes.
“Chicken casserole for dinner tonight OK?”
“Cool.”
“I was thinking of using egg noodles.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know though, I’ve heard egg noodles have more cholesterol.”
“Either’s fine.”
“But on the flip side, egg noodles do have more B vitamins. That’s good, isn’t it? B vitamins? We need those?”
“Going. See you tonight.”
“Wait!”
Hand on the door, I turn to find her red-faced and strange, thumb on the stopwatch button, crimson lanyard looped around her neck. Her hair is in sleep spirals, eyes desperate, like she’s just woken from a troubling dream.
“I’m just not sure where we landed on this whole egg noodle thing.”
I feel tethered to the land, the river, to Thomas, to our shared legacy of brilliance, decimation, and waste. I don’t want to make Amy happy; I want to wring something from her. I want to discover the Amy I never knew – the grieving, tattooed girl in black, smoking because she could give a fuck, fucking to forget. I want to forget all the ways I’ve failed her so far.
Amy blames the river for her father’s death, as much as her father blamed it for her mother’s, and she blames me for making her stay. She tells me summer road excavation and winter unemployment isn’t a living, isn’t a life. Laying pipe is all I know, I tell her, but it’s a lie. I have a bachelor of physics from Western Washington University in Bellingham. I knew, from the start, that it would do no good to come home. Thomas thought I was slumming, at first, on Badger Mountain construction sites, but as the years passed he stopped saying so. I took the GRE, planned on a PhD, at least a master’s. It feels sometimes so far behind me now it’s like another life.
Sometimes I dream about being him, my father, racing faster and faster on the commute each day, following the river through Richland, through the gates into Hanford, the sun lifting behind the reactor domes. A Hanford ID badge around my neck, khaki slacks and short-sleeve dress shirts. In the drab office space of the 300 Area, the calluses on my hands slowly softening, my palms going smooth. Sometimes I dream my father’s thoughts. Sometimes I forget myself, and the enormity of them, my forebears – men who meant something, men with the hubris to annihilate the world and the naïveté to believe it could be restored – is waiting to eclipse me. Amy smooths the sheets. She blows cool air on my forehead to dry the sweat until, finally, I can sleep again.
* * *
Bill McGovern and I go with Thomas to the vet. We sit in the waiting room, the heeler on the red-and-white checkered floor between Thomas’ feet. A man with a caged guinea pig watches his boy balance on the white squares, hopping from square to square, careful not to touch red. I know what the boy is doing. I know the red squares are hot lava.
Bill nudges me and points across the waiting room at a rottweiler and its owner. The rottweiler can’t get comfortable and keeps spinning, clockwise, counterclockwise, on the linoleum. The rottweiler’s owner is a woman in knee-high boots and spiked dog collar bracelets. She doesn’t like Bill pointing and so bumps her dog-collared wrists together, the studs clinking, and lifts her chin. The rottweiler stops spinning and looks at us. Bill makes a stabbing, scissoring motion through the air that could mean anything to her and the rottweiler but which, to Thomas and me, is clearly batshit Bill pantomiming a dorsal incision to remove the dog’s cape.
“Your dog has a beautiful coat,” Bill says.
“C’mon, Bill,” I say.
“Is it serious?” Bill asks her. The woman doesn’t answer, doesn’t look away.
When the vet calls us in, the woman follows us with her eyes, her face the color of sour milk. Bill stops to talk to her, and that’s the last I see of Bill for weeks.
The heeler squirms as Thomas and I hold him on the examination table. He cranes his head back so that he can see Thomas and then stops struggling, eyes refracting the hard warmth of the halogen examination light. His eyes are like amber agates. Thomas’ breath catches. He takes his hands from the dog’s coat and walks away. I can feel the heeler’s heartbeat under my hands.
The vet grunts and nods and ahems to himself throughout. He pulls off his rubber gloves, rinsing his hands in a basin. “Now, what makes you think your dog is sick?”
Thomas says, “He’s getting older. I don’t want him to suffer. You understand?”
The vet adjusts his glasses and looks to me for help. I have nothing for him, so he turns to Thomas and says, “You’re not looking so young yourself. Maybe we should put you down too?”
* * *
Amy’s father hated the dams and the Democrats and the Hanford Reservation: too much government meddling in the course of his river and the course of his life. He was a vintner and his father before him. They had watched, father and son, the insanity of war and science creep into the desert and take hold. The farmers along the river, the towns of Richland, White Bluffs, and Hanford, were given thirty days to evacuate, their land requisitioned by the United States government. Richland’s town site was co-opted, and the Hanford Engineer Works Village appeared, practically overnight. Trainloads of men arrived into Pasco daily, bussing to join the camp of laborers at Hanford. They lived in tents at first, burning cans of shoe polish for heat, while the barracks were constructed. They stayed as long as they could stand the dust storms – called termination winds for the line of laborers collecting their final pay the morning after, fleeing west for Portland or Seattle or San Francisco, and a landscape more hospitable.
To keep the workforce happy, gambling and prostitution were allowed. There were few women, their barracks fenced and patrolled. Sutherland remembered, as a boy, the Mexican girls, migrant workers’ daughters, headed toward the construction camp in the bed of an Army truck. There was no talk of radioactivity – the term banned – no mention of the perils involved in the enterprise unfolding along the riverbank.
Sutherland’s father suspected their phone was tapped, their mail opened. It was said government spies had infiltrated the harvesting crews. The other vintners grumbled amongst themselves about the downfall of their agricultural community, overrun by a secretive government, corrupted by tens of thousands of laborers – single, young men mostly – and their vices. Exotic metals – graphite by the ton, aluminum, zirconium, nickel and boron – arrived by train. Complexes of strange buildings sprouted along the riverbank where the wild horses came to drink, where the salmon spawned, something secret taking shape in the desert.
The bomb was called Fat Man, its plutonium core birthed in the B Reactor. The men who came to build the nuclear site didn’t know what they were constructing – blueprints, often handwritten, handed daily to the foremen – only that it was to aid the war effort. Rumor spread through Richland Village and the construction camp, speculation that the project was for the production of simple munitions, the manufacture of clothespins or Pepsi-Cola. Some joked it was for fourth-term Roosevelt campaign buttons. They had no way of knowing their work would ultimately ball like the fist of God inside a ten-thousand-pound bomb, drop from a plane eight thousand miles away, and end the war.
We understand that we’re connected now, our home where the bomb was made and theirs where it fell. And though we’ve never been there, or even farther than Idaho, we think about that place often.
I found my own father, once, up late in his study. He hung his head over a highball of scotch, his broad, plaid tie loosened from around his neck. The desktop was fanned with old magazines, pictures of Nagasaki and Hiroshima on their pages, and my father was poring over these, his face close enough to those images that his breath fogged the gloss. I believe he was committing each to memory, hoping that in immersion lay understanding. But there’s no talking about those pictures, no describing them. There is no understanding.
My father looked up, and his cheeks were flushed, his eyes too large and amazed. He pretended he wasn’t drunk, collecting the magazines and locking them away in a desk drawer. He couldn’t explain his anger or even name it. Our fathers were stunned by what their own fathers had done. They grow larger, these men, every day, and even more unknowable.
* * *
After his wife’s death, Sutherland took a crash course in nuclear physics. He filled the house with textbooks, bought a Geiger counter and boxes of dosimeters that measured radiation exposure in millisieverts. These he scattered about the house, fastening one to the vanity in Amy’s room. He studied pictures of the plutonium bomb core: a perfect sphere of dull, unassuming metal, the size of a softball. He learned how the river water, pumped through the reactor cooling tanks – millions of gallons each day – reentered the river, flush with radionuclides. The amount of time a nuclear particle remains radioactive is called its decay rate, and Sutherland memorized them all. He tabulated estimates and calculated his wife’s exposure. Plutonium, he’d tell you, is of the actinide family. Inside the body it preferentially goes to the bone.
When the tsunami in Japan triggered a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Plant, Amy couldn’t take her eyes off the television. She DVRed every national news program and scrubbed through them for footage of the disaster: hydrogen gas explosions, men in protective gear wading into the wreckage, evacuees in surgical masks clamoring for more iodine tablets. The exposed fuel rods. Zirconium cladding catching fire in the fuel ponds. Radioactive gasses and volatile fission products venting into the atmosphere. Catastrophe on a global scale. “Look,” she said, pointing at the steam pluming over the reactors. “Dad was right.”
Flotsam from the tsunami has started washing up along the Pacific Coast this year. A concrete dock from the port of Misawa, sixty feet long, beached south of Portland. A Harley-Davidson motorcycle with Japanese plates on the Canadian coast. Empty fishing vessels – ghost ships – and oyster farm floats. There’s no danger. The ocean has washed them, by this time, of radioactivity. Amy wants desperately to go out to Lincoln City or Newport and comb the beach. I tell her we’ll go – I keep telling her that – but we haven’t yet.
Some radiation – alpha, beta – is short range, stopped easily by something thin as a piece of paper, a layer of clothing, a layer of skin. Other types – gamma, neutron – can pass through the walls of your house, your flesh. You won’t even feel it. They couldn’t explain then, after the bombs, the people dying of seemingly minor injuries: sick and vomiting and then dead. Downwinders miscarrying en masse, stillborn deformities, a plague of leukemia and tumors. Plan on nausea and fever. Plan on seizures, ataxia, the hot lump of burning sickness like a gallstone that will not pass; then sepsis, then Sutherland greeting you in the great beyond in his buckled life jacket, asking what the hell you were doing marrying his only daughter and failing at every turn to make her happy.
* * *
Thomas tells me, “She has to wait a year.”
“Wait a year for what?”
“To marry him. He wants to marry in the Mormon temple. She has to wait a year before she can go inside.”
“But she’s a Mormon now.”
“They have to make sure you mean it.” Thomas bends sheet aluminum over the frame of a wing, drilling and deburring rivet holes.
Thomas talks about all the places he’s going to fly, all the places he’s never been: Mount Rushmore, Miami Beach, Las Vegas, Mexico. I don’t believe him, though. These are dream places, television locations, dots on a map, too far away to be real. Thomas says, “They’ve dirt under their asphalt just like us, right?” He talks about loading the heeler and his hockey duffel into the plane and touching down in New Orleans, New Jersey, Washington D.C. Places so far away he might never make it back.
I believe, though I haven’t said as much, that Thomas is planning something big for Penelope’s wedding. The timing is right – the year Penelope must wait, the hundreds of man-hours we have spent, hundreds more to come, constructing the ultralight. I picture him buzzing the reception, grim-faced and mad, scattering the guests, drowning out the band. I picture him crashing into the Mormon temple, Penelope in her wedding dress with the children shielding their eyes from the sun as he flames out into the white granite.
Our fathers were friends, Thomas’ and mine. I find myself in his garage most days after work, drinking his beer and building his airplane. We talk about them all the time, obliquely, in summary. We get drunk and call them great men, our fathers, if only because they’re gone. It’s getting harder and harder to face Amy and her stopwatch, trying to quantify the thing evaporating between us.
We drive down Badger Canyon for more beer, and Thomas goes all the way to Albertsons on Gage Boulevard, though WinCo Foods is closer. Behind Albertsons, at the base of a hill called Badger Mountain, is the Mormon temple: pristine and glimmering, its single spire topped with a bronze figure blowing a trumpet. Thomas forgets himself beside the truck, staring off at the temple. He thumbs his lower lip and then traces its edges in the air with his finger. I leave him there, going into the store for another case of Rainier.
When Penelope’s wedding invitation arrives in late winter, Thomas tacks it to the garage wall beside a 2005 swimsuit calendar forever opened to October and a woman kneeling in surf, her naked back to the camera, looking over her shoulder. The color has faded, mostly, from her skin. The engagement picture is the chastest I’ve ever seen: the chiropractor and Penelope on opposite ends of a teeter-totter. It is fall in the photograph, a wide shot, and the grass is covered in sycamore leaves the size of roofing shingles. Penelope’s arms are thrown up in the air, and her hair is loose as though she’s in free fall.
We run propane heaters all night and tarp the openings to keep the cold out. The whiskey helps. We build ribs and spars for the wings, shear and hammer the aluminum shell, rivet and tack, putting the plane together section by section. The garage fills with the smell of epoxy, the singe of hot metal. We collect leftover parts into a five-gallon bucket, but Thomas doesn’t seem worried. He’s been practicing on a flight simulator.
“It’s not the same thing,” I tell him.
“Colton Harris-Moore, heard of him? Barefoot Bandit? Kid stole five planes. He was what – nineteen? Trailer park broke, and he steals five. How’d he learn? Riddle me that – how did he learn?”
“He crash-landed. He got lucky.”
“Five times he got lucky? Flew to the Bahamas, and you think he got lucky? I’ve never met a piece of machinery I couldn’t operate. If that kid . . . “ Thomas trips over a landing gear and sprawls, hardware skittering across the concrete. He laughs, trying to salvage the spilled Rainier in his hand, which he’s somehow held onto, and the heeler laps beer from Thomas’ arm, licking Thomas’ elbow, licking Thomas’ hand, until Thomas is laughing so hard he’s actually crying.
* * *
In spring the winds come. The tarps won’t hold against them. To keep the dust out, we rig a windbreak: sheets of plywood against two-by-fours staked into the ground. The wind bows the plywood, rattles the stakes. Dust filters through the cracks and makes patterns, fanning the floor. We sit in the gravel of Thomas’ driveway and watch the poplars twist. There’s nothing else you can do about it, the wind.
I’d tell you about Thomas and Penelope if I could, these things that happen so slowly there’s no way to know. The same way the wind carves the land, grooving the hill faces until they look like the skin folds of giants, fallen, who may one day rise again. They were in love, the fierce and untempered kind, and they had children, and the children were beautiful, and then everything went bad.
I remember them best, though, the other way. Drunk on hard cider in the morning grass, the dew bathing their bare feet as the sun lifts over the river. Riding Thomas’ 50cc out into the fields and opening the throttle all the way, feeling the foxtail whip against their shins. Thomas laughing, laughing like there could be no end to this, ever. But these things are slippery at best. The last run of salmon, and my palms are coated in scales on the riverbank. Knuckle deep in viscera, entrails and roe and fish shit, tossing handfuls to the waiting seagulls. The handle of the filet knife slick and dangerous against my palm, and the seagulls growing more brash, cawing to one another, fighting over the guts as they hit the slow water, blood on their beaks and even in the plumage.
* * *
The Tri-City Americans make the playoffs. Amy puts the stopwatch in a drawer and bakes pigs in blankets. I mix rum and ginger ale. Thomas wanders the living room looking at photos of Amy and me on the walls, Amy’s collection of James Patterson novels, the bric-a-brac on an end table. He dips his fingers into a bowl of potpourri and smells them after. It’s not the first time I’ve seen him do this.
Thomas tells us he’s not sleeping, that the heeler is keeping him up. He’s convinced there’s something wrong with the dog, and the vet won’t see them again. Memories plague Thomas’ dreams. Fishing trips to the Tucannon River, the heeler trying to snap up trout from the stream. The heeler rolling in snow after a fine November dusting. The heeler barking at a bull snake under the black alder tree. I know it’s Penelope missing from these dreams, banished somewhere to the crawlspace of his mind.
The Americans win by two. We’ve all had too much rum. Amy holds Thomas’ head against her shoulder and strokes his hair, says that it will all be fine. Everything in the world will be just fine. I know for a fact she doesn’t believe it, though.
* * *
Amy and I make love for the first time in a month. She’s frantic and her eyes are spread wide, wet and vulnerable, hunting me down at every opportunity. I know what she’s doing. I know she believes this will be our last time.
But things are better after, for a while, until we see Bill McGovern and the dog collar woman chugging around town on Bill’s vintage Honda. He wears no helmet at all now, his Maverick cigarette spilling ash into the wind. The woman hugs his waist, her ear pressed between Bill’s shoulder blades, ragged black hair barely stirred by the rush of air.
Amy says, “Who is that?”
“Well now that’s Bill McGovern,” I say, “and his new friend.”
We’re in the parking lot between Shari’s Diner and the Pottery Barn. Amy has the keys to the truck, ready to open the door, but she puts them away and plumbs her purse for the stopwatch. I lean against the truck bed and wait, watch her color rise.
She holds out the stopwatch as though it’s a microphone and this is an interview. Amy says, “Why are you friends with Bill?”
“I don’t even really like Bill. Besides, I knew him first, before you were friends.”
“Bill and I are not friends.”
“Were. Past tense. Gives me precedence.”
“You were never fucking Bill, so shove your precedence right up your dick.” She slaps the side of the pickup. “Why do you make me stay here? You know I don’t want to be here, Jake. Everywhere I turn dead people are poking their heads out of the goddamn sagebrush.”
“Dramatic.”
“I love you, but you’re killing me.”
It feels good to fight out in the open, as though the things we’re shouting matter enough to be shouted in the presence of any-goddamn-one. The old men caning away from Shari’s, pretending their hearing aids are turned low. The family of four walking out of Pottery Barn, taking the long way around. The poor woman parked behind the truck, fumbling for her keys. Amy tells her, “Why don’t you take a picture? It’ll last longer.” I can tell Amy’s rattled because that’s an old one. From middle school, at least.
By the time we’ve yelled ourselves hoarse, the sun has gone down, and the stopwatch has clocked an hour and a half we can proudly record on the dry erase board. It will appear, at least to the refrigerator, that we’ve hit an uptick.
Amy pockets the stopwatch, but our limbs are shaky, our minds racing, recycling all of it, ready to rehash the entire thing. I wonder if she, like Bill McGovern, wants to be put out of her misery. I wonder where that wild, feeling part of her is hiding. If a plate of cartilage or scar tissue has built up in her heart, and the real Amy, the lost soul of Amy, the broken-hearted girl trying to haul her father’s office chair onto the lawn in Roxy shorts and a sports bra, her entire frame hiccupping with aftershocks of grief, is gone.
* * *
The temple is brilliant white, granite, mica glittering in the stone. Though invited to the wedding, as non-Mormons we aren’t allowed inside. There is a chapel next door where we wait for the reception to begin. Tables dot the lawn, white tablecloths flapping in the wind. Two photographers in tuxedoes try to keep the dust from their lenses with cans of compressed air. Penelope’s relatives huddle in a semi-circle of metal folding chairs, grumbling loudly about being excluded from the ceremony.
Thomas’ children are inside. They are, with Penelope and the chiropractor, being sealed together as a family, for time and all eternity, as the Mormons say. This is the same thing, I suppose, as kicking Thomas out.
Bill McGovern and I keep an eye on the airspace above Badger Mountain. We figure if he comes he’ll come from the south: an insectile drone against the wind, the shadow of a plane on the ridge. Amy keeps an eye on Bill and the dog collar woman, whose name we learn is Dawson. Visible beneath the shifting back of Dawson’s skinny black dress, a tattoo of tiny italic script bridges the gap between her shoulder blades. Bill has already told me what it says, though I can’t help squinting: If you can read this you are too close. Bill slips her a flask from his jacket. Over and over again, Dawson catches Amy staring.
After some time, Penelope and the chiropractor emerge, wed, from the temple. We all applaud and whistle, even Dawson. She looks radiant, Penelope does, like this is her first time, but I can see her glassing the crowd, looking for Thomas. Children throw fistfuls of rice, first at the couple and then at each other. A swing band plays. Bill kisses Penelope too long on the mouth in congratulations. Amy embraces her and comes away openly sobbing. The chiropractor grips my hand hard, his scalp gleaming in the slant sun and I don’t mean to squeeze back, necessarily, but there he is shaking out his fingers, saying, “Dang, that’s some grip.”
Amy, long after she’s finished congratulating Penelope, has trouble regaining her composure and staggers to a gazebo where children are playing Duck, Duck, Goose. Bill follows. I watch him pass her the flask and suspect it’s not her first nip, the way she’s loose and swaying, one hand on the gazebo railing. Dawson picks her way across the lawn in high boots made for nothing useful, touches her shoulder to mine. The children race around the gazebo, goose chasing fox.
“Your wife’s having a rough day.” Dawson slings her arm around my shoulder for balance, and I can smell her sweat mixed up with the burn of alcohol and Bill’s cigarettes. “You should go over there.”
“Yeah.” But I only glance up at Badger Mountain, hoping the ultralight will crest the hill and liven everything up a bit.
Amy says something to Bill, and he gestures at Dawson and me. When he tries to walk away, Amy clings to his arm. Bill goes anyway, but Amy doesn’t let go, so he pulls her down the gazebo steps. She tries to hold the back of his shirt for balance but is tipsy, or her dress is too tight. Her heels snag in the sod, and Amy goes down in the grass. Bill stops, a few steps away now, and Amy’s halfway up on one arm, her skirt hiked high and her legs tangled like a fawn. He starts to move back toward her, Bill does, but then doesn’t. He tries to light a cigarette as though everyone isn’t watching, but the flame from his lighter won’t keep.
I scoop Amy up from the grass and over my shoulder. Leaving her shoes beside the gazebo steps, I carry her through the parking lot, and she hammers my shoulder blades with her fists like a child.
* * *
The sun is setting, the air made amber by particulate kicked up along the horizon, and we can see out west, miles and miles toward Benton City. The alfalfa fields’ hazy red tint, evening sprinklers striking slow into the dusk. The winds calm. The dust settles. Amy puts her head against the window. For a long time, she says nothing.
She has her father’s eyes, blue and small and bright, always on the cusp of being amazed, or disappointed, by something, arcing through highs and lows like the tractor tire swing Sutherland constructed from timber and chain for his only daughter. It’s still there, by the pasture fence, collecting rainwater inside the tire, surface rust on the chain. I think of him, his wife newly dead and buried, shoveling down fifteen feet into his own backyard with a pick and shovel, the earth full of basalt and sagebrush root. Sweat slicking the dust on his forehead into mud, his hands rasping on the bleached wood of the pick handle. Digging into the earth for a safe place.
He owned a five-bedroom split-level on four acres, a deep canyon wash behind the lot. The house is Amy’s now. There were supposed to be more children – all those empty rooms – but you know how life can be. Amy is unwilling to discuss selling or renting, and the property has fallen into disuse. The lawn is dead, overrun with the green shoots of young tumbleweeds. The roof has lost shingles to the wind. Prairie dust limns the windowpanes. Small dunes line the front porch, HOA notices rolled up and shoved into the space between doorknob and frame.
I wonder if she’s punishing him, Sutherland, for being a fool, for falling into the river and failing to come up for air. I know she goes out there sometimes, to her father’s house. In the backyard, beside the garden where her mother grew snap peas and raspberries, she peels away dead strips of sod to uncover the trap door. It’s heavy, steel and oak, and it takes all she has to heave it open. She goes down into the dark and shuts the door behind her. Banks of deep-cycle batteries power the lights, trickle-charged by solar panels on the roof of the house. The air is cool, smells of concrete. Amy pumps drinking water from a fifty-five gallon drum, eats an MRE. She hand-cranks the radio and tunes to AM stations. She cleans and loads her father’s snub-nose .38. These are the things she didn’t give away, safe here under the soil. This is all she has left of her father.
For me, there are uranium reactor cores buried in the desert. My father tried to make this desert habitable again, digging down deep and planting the abominations his own father had left behind. My father welded the reactor doors closed from the outside, trapping the cores, like animals, like some dark curse too ferocious to be free. I think of the dangerous things, the necessary things we’ve buried. They burn now through half-life after half-life in the dark and the silence, quarantined to their own destructive fever. A slow, eternal cooling. Heat ticking against the graphite box, the shell of carbon steel and concrete, like a heart put down but still beating.
Amy stares up at Badger Mountain as we pass to the east, where the top of the hill has been graded for home construction, new roads ridging the slope. Thomas and I worked those roads. We laid the pipe that made them possible, deep in the throat of the earth.
She says, “How did we get here, Jake?”
I start to respond, but she remembers. “Wait.” She opens her purse. The stopwatch beeps, and she covers the dial so she won’t watch the racing milliseconds. “OK,” she says.
I tell her, “Stop. Just stop.”
Amy takes her head from the window, and I can see the intricately crosshatched map work of her skin imprinted on the glass. She covers her forehead and then covers her mouth and hand-cranks the window down, the rubber weather strip erasing the pattern of her skin from the glass. She spins the stopwatch by the lanyard like a sling, and the stopwatch flies over the gravel shoulder into the sagebrush, the seconds still racing on the dial. I wonder how long it will go, how much silence one thing can measure.
Amy lets the cool evening air on her face, and it twists her hair. It feels, in some way, as though we’ve been freed. As though we are addicts who have just destroyed the vessel of their rehabilitation. I follow the sun down Badger Canyon toward Thomas’ house, watching the gnats swarm above the irrigation canals. The air through the window is warm and then cool in patches. Amy puts her bare feet on the dash.
The heeler is at the edge of Thomas’ property, hackled and barking like I’ve never seen. Where the lawn ends, Thomas is in the ultralight on a farm road. The propeller spins. The two-cylinder motor revs, high and clean and loud. Amy and I get out of the truck. The heeler barks at us, then barks at Thomas, then barks at us. Thomas sees us coming across the grass and lowers his flight goggles. He waves, and a moment later the little plane begins to jounce and rattle down the two-track.
I say, “Good goddamn.”
Amy waves her hands in arcs as big as she can make them. Her face goes red, her eyes big, and she’s yelling with everything she’s got. I think, at first, from the violence of her reaction, she’s trying to warn Thomas, calling for him to take off the throttle and stop this craziness, but I’m wrong. She’s howling for him to go, go, go.
The plane picks up speed, bouncing through the ruts. Amy sprints after as it lifts off, her bare feet pressing the soft earth, sagebrush to her knees, and the heeler trails her, both of them sprinting down the farm road. I stand in a patch of crabgrass on Thomas’ lawn and watch her go, ambered by the setting sun, haloed by the plume of dust behind the ultralight. Cheatgrass seeds collect in the lace hem of her dress. Amy lifts her arms, striking the air with her fists, as though she’ll keep the plane aloft that way.
Ryan Cannon’s stories have appeared in Salt Hill Journal and Whitefish Review.