Fast Backward

by David Patneaude

  I feel faint. The newspapers are heavy on my shoulders. Gulping cool air, I drop to my bare knees, only half believing what I’m seeing. The fiery column continues to swell and rise, and I continue to watch. Light and shadow. Color and void. Thickening and thinning. Fear and curiosity.

  And then a base-drum roll of thunder surrounds me. A hot wind smacks me in the face and presses my carrier bag and clothes to my body and bends me back like a playing card caught in a fast shuffle. The air tastes like dirt and something foreign—a stew of burnt vegetables and smoking tires and manure.

  In an instant, the wind diminishes and debris settles to the desert floor. Quiet returns.

  Brushing grit from my knees, I wobble to my feet. The silhouettes have vanished, but I’m confident the structures haven’t. The explosion, or whatever it was, seemed close only because of its colossal size.

  The sight—rising, swelling chaos—goes on and on. A genie from a bottle. I should go home, but I’m rooted to this spot like an old cactus.

  Finally, the roiling clouds begin to dissolve and move away as purple fades to ordinary pre-dawn charcoal. I begin to feel my heartbeat, the morning cool on my skin. Suddenly I’m hungry, thirsty, exhausted.

  I get back on my bike. Guided by the dimming light of the artificial dawn, I move cautiously ahead. My legs are rubber, my eyes dazzled and swimming. I’ve just seen something I can’t explain. Will someone at the base—Uncle Pete, maybe—explain it? Or will they all be as ignorant as I am? Or simply unwilling to talk about the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen?

  TWO

  Throughout the camp, excitement charges the air. People are up, staring at the horizon past the windmill and flagpole and over the tops of the tents and huts and horse stables and ranch houses and barracks buildings and mess hall and mystery structures. I toss paper after paper toward their open doors, but they ignore them.

  They contain yesterday’s news.

  Today, there’s something bigger, something ominous, at least to me. And it must mean something extra significant to the camp residents, too, because their voices rise above the usual murmurs and whispers as they stand in small clusters, half-dressed or still in their pajamas. Someone greets someone else with “Congratulations!”

  Two engineers I recognize stand outside one of the McDonald ranch houses, which were converted to working spaces when the base camp was established. The men are fully dressed. One wears a fedora, tipped back. They’re talking with their hands.

  I usually rapid-fire three newspapers in the direction of the ranch-house door, but today I decide on something more personalized. Maybe these two guys, up early and dressed for a party, knew what was going to happen; maybe they’ll tell me.

  When I get closer, I notice their wallets are out. Have they seen me approaching? Are they going to give me a tip for persevering?

  No. The hatless one hands the other one money and gets a satisfied grin in return. The wallets go back in their pockets.

  I give each of them a newspaper and toss the other one at the door.

  “Thank you, son,” Fedora says. He has an accent and smiles. He’s got reasons. Folding ones. The other guy doesn’t look as happy.

  “Bobby,” I say.

  “Yes,” he says. “Bobby.”

  I don’t beat around the bush. “Do you fellows know what happened this morning?” I glance in the direction of the shredded clouds and faded light. I can still smell something. Broiled yucca. Scorched sand. Death.

  Their answer is a couple of blank looks.

  “You couldn’t have missed it,” I say. “Monster cloud. Colors. Noise like thunder.”

  The blank looks become puzzled stares.

  “Blinding light. My eyes still sting.”

  Fedora shakes his head.

  “You didn’t see it?”

  “Not a thunderstorm?” No-Hat says.

  “One blast, then nothing,” I say.

  Fedora lights a cigarette.

  “The whole sky was boiling.” I don’t know why I’m trying so hard. I know they saw it.

  “We must’ve been inside,” No-Hat says.

  “Thank you for the newspapers . . . Bobby,” Fedora says. “Perhaps tomorrow the Journal will have a story on your . . . storm.”

  Although night hangs on, I can read their bullshit expressions. This was no storm. But I’m not surprised at their tight lips. I’m not supposed to know anything.

  Not about this place.

  Not about what goes on here.

  “Right,” I say. “I’m sure it’ll be in the Journal.”

  I move on, rolling over the compacted desert dirt, tossing papers, snaking between buildings and groups of gawkers and talkers. I swerve close to a few of them, but like radio talk from a distant station, their spirited conversations drop in volume every time I get near.

  The enthusiasm is obvious, but I sense uneasiness, too. And the foreign taste is still in my mouth: sweet, but with the promise of something bitter, giving me a too-familiar feeling of being in a place that underneath its surface is hostile and toxic. It’s like the whole base camp is situated on top of a giant underground pool of sulfurous lava and at any moment the earth will open up and swallow us in one gulp.

  I recognize where I’ve felt this before. Albuquerque. The government building. Dad’s CO hearing.

  I squelch the memory. It’s old and unpleasant, and right here there’s more exciting stuff happening.

  Outside the mess hall, two cooks are taking a break. Officially, these two might not know as much as the engineers, but maybe they’ve heard something, and maybe they’ll be more willing to tell me what it all means.

  I stop next to them and pull the mess hall’s unrolled allotment of newspapers—six—from my bag. “Here you go, fellows,” I say, trying to hand over the thin stack.

  They barely give me a glance. I’m interrupting.

  I hold the papers out to them until I begin to feel foolish. The shorter one, who looks like he eats too much of his own cooking, finally speaks. “Just put ’em by the door, kid.”

  I tuck them under my arm. “Did you see the sky light up a while ago?” The sky did more than light up, but I want them to acknowledge that something happened.

  The taller one glances in the direction of the blast and quickly back to me, as if he’s afraid he’ll give away a secret. But he already has. He saw it. “We were on our way to work,” he says. “Helluva thing. I about shit my pants.”

  “I think you did shit your pants, Eddie,” the short guy says.

  “That’s your cooking you smell, lard-ass,” Eddie says.

  “Do you know what caused it?” I ask.

  “We don’t know anything,” Eddie says. “The eggheads don’t talk to us. But stuff sifts down.”

  I think about Uncle Pete. How much has sifted down to him?

  “Don’t let anyone tell you it was an accident, kid,” Lard-Ass says. “We’ve heard the word accident being thrown around this morning. But the longhairs are here for a reason. Most of ’em are celebrating over it.”

  “And the rest of them are paying off gambling debts,” Eddie says.

  “Gambling debts?” I say.

  He glances around nervously. “Someone bets something is going to happen, someone else bets it won’t, someone bets it’ll be big, someone else bets it’ll be small. That’s a guess, but it’s an educated one. When these guys come here to eat, they barely see us.”

  “And when they do,” Lard-Ass says, “we’re just pieces of furniture.”

  “Wow,” I say. But how reliable are a couple of Army cooks’ guesses, educated or not? What would Dad, the ex-reporter, think of these fellows’ inside scoop?

  “Shit-your-pants scary, kiddo,” Eddie says. “These assholes would be happy to blow up half the world and make bets on how many of us will survive.”

  On that comforting note I drop the newspapers at the mess hall door and continue with my route. Maybe I’ll see Uncle Pete; he’ll have some real information.
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br />   But I don’t find him, and finally I’m on my way out of the base camp, cruising past the last sentry. The bag over my shoulders is nearly weightless, but in my head and gut the questions are heavy and churning. What mysterious force is powerful enough to bring dawn to the western sky? If the engineers really cooked something up, it must have been quite some recipe.

  The sun is still hiding behind the distant hills, but light starts to expose the terrain around me. With every turn of my pedals, I can see farther. And something—edginess, maybe—makes me extra alert.

  Out of all the flatness and sameness, a dot of substance and possible movement emerges. It’s far ahead, near the shoulder, about where the road bends to the left. The dot, which slowly takes on the shape of a shrub, then something more angular, maybe a yucca, feels out of place.

  After so many back-and-forths on this barren strip of pavement, nothing should feel out of place.

  I’m spooked, but also curious, so I slow down as the dot-shrub-something becomes a human being. The person, lost maybe, gazes out of the gloom. Looking at what? Have my bike’s squeaks and rattles attracted this stranger’s attention?

  I don’t know much about girls, but when I’m a hundred feet away it becomes obvious that I’m looking at one, and she’s wearing something clingy enough that her slender girl-shape is silhouetted sharply by the daybreak glow behind her.

  Timidly I move closer. My heart thumps. Then it thumps louder.

  I know nothing about naked girls other than what I’ve managed to sneak a look at in Leo’s glove-box collection of French playing cards, but soon I realize that this girl’s shape isn’t revealing itself because of clinging clothes. With the speed and force of lightning, I realize that this girl is naked.

  Holy shit!

  I want to stop; I want to keep pedaling. I want to look away; I want to stare.

  I settle on compromise; go slow, keep my eyes on her face.

  Ten feet away I stop and get my feet on the ground before I get too distracted and tip over. Her face, I tell myself, but my eyes have their own ideas.

  “You’re not wearing any clothes,” I say.

  Brilliant.

  “English?” she says, trying to cover up. But her skinny arms and hands aren’t much good for that, even when she angles her body sideways.

  “American.”

  She shakes her head. Her hair is short and sparse. It looks unhealthy, like the hair of women and girls I’ve seen in photographs taken at liberated Nazi death camps. I order my eyes to stay above her neck. There’s some spillover.

  “No,” she says. “You speak English.”

  Of course. I speak English. She also speaks English, but with an accent, foreign but not completely so. I’ve caught snatches of something similar at the base camp, where German is usually what pops into my head. And I’ve seen war movies with fake Nazi bad guys. This girl could be one of their daughters. Or a Nazi spy, dropped in by parachute.

  But would a spy parachute in naked? The opposite of inconspicuous?

  “Yes,” I say. “I speak English.”

  “Verboten, once,” she says, confirming my suspicions. Her arms are crossed against her chest, but there’s no help for the rest of her. “But we say fuck it. The laws are archaic, and there is no one to enforce them, and we have nothing to lose.”

  Speaking of nothing to lose, she’s lost me. Verboten? Laws against speaking English? I don’t know what she’s talking about, and I’ve never heard a girl say fuck. The morning continues to brighten.

  “Where is this?” she asks.

  “You’re not wearing any clothes,” I repeat.

  “They disappeared,” she says. “Sucked away. Small loss.”

  I toss my carrier bag to her. In it is one copy of the Journal, my daily bonus from Leo. She slips the bag over her head. It covers most of her top half, but still there’s the bottom. I drop my bike and take off my shorts and hand them to her.

  While I stand there in my sweaty T-shirt and a pair of the Navy-issue boxers my cousin Carl sent me for my birthday, she steps into the shorts and zips them up. She doesn’t smile, but there’s a light in her eyes as she drops a small object in the bag. What would a naked girl carry with her?

  At last I let my eyes wander. The shorts hang on her hips. She’s more than skinny. She’s undernourished. I have no food to offer her. The Hershey’s bar is heavy in my stomach.

  “Danke,” she says. “Thank you.”

  “You’re in New Mexico,” I say, finally overcoming the static in my head to get back to her question.

  “New—” She glances around. “It looks unspoiled.”

  “What would spoil it?” I say, but a vision of the blinding flash and the otherworldly ball and the towering column rushes past my mind’s eye, and my question, echoing in my head, sounds naïve, even to a kid who knows next to nothing.

  She smiles, her teeth showing big in her gaunt face. “What year is this?” The what sounds like vhat.

  What year? “Where are you from?” I say. “How did you get here?”

  “You first, American. What year?” She takes a step closer, gazing into my eyes until I have to look away. I busy myself picking up my bike.

  “It’s 1945.” I resist saying of course or dummy or Have you been in a coma or impersonating Rip Van Winkle or something?

  “1945.”

  “July,” I say, humoring her.

  “Where are you going?” There are tears on her cheeks. I want to know why. I don’t want her to be sad. I want to know what she’s doing here.

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Home.”

  “I do not have a home. Here. There. Now. Then.”

  I feel disconnected from reality. Fire in the sky, and now this, whatever this is. I could be dreaming, but the pieces of this scene—what I’m sensing, thinking, saying—feel genuine. Unreal but real. Far beyond my day-to-day, but not far beyond someone’s. “You can come with me,” I say. “My mother has clothes you can wear. We have food.”

  Mom will know what to do.

  From behind me comes the sound of a vehicle. The girl’s eyes follow it as it approaches and whips past, not slowing at the sight of a kid straddling a bike and a half-naked girl. Its occupants are in a hurry.

  “I have seen that kind of car,” she says. “Old photographs. Middle of the last century. The Devil’s War.”

  Cars in the middle of the last century. The Devil’s War. Nothing she says makes sense, and even as the day begins to warm, I feel a chill. I tell myself it’s the lack of clothes. But is it? Although I feel unmoored, I try to make conversation. If this isn’t a dream, maybe I’m inside the pages of a comic book. “It’s 1945,” I repeat, imagining the words taking shape in a dialogue bubble. “That was a ’41 Chevy. Last century was horse and buggy.”

  She shudders. How long did she stand naked in the cool of the desert before I found her? Or is she like me, chilled by a feeling?

  “I can go home with you, American?”

  “It’s Bobby.”

  “Bobby,” she says. “Robert.” Coming from her lips, both names sound different, yet familiar. And nice.

  “Only when my parents are mad at me.”

  She doesn’t smile at my weak joke.

  “You really can come with me,” I add. “My mom and dad like taking in strays. They took me in, once.”

  I move closer and gesture at the sturdy rack behind my seat. I know it will hold this bony girl. “Get on.”

  She sits, sidesaddle at first, but she has difficulty extending her legs. She switches to cowboy style and lets them dangle. She has a different kind of smell—sweet and stale at the same time. A vanilla Coke in a locker room.

  I’ve always liked vanilla Coke. And locker rooms.

  Her hands grasp my middle as we take off. “Your parents,” she says into the wind, “they did not make you?”

  There are no sounds but ours; I have no trouble hearing her words. But they don’t register. “Make me?�
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  “Make you, Robert. Sex. Pregnancy. Childbirth.”

  “Oh,” I say over my shoulder. “No. The daughter of anonymous friends of friends from their church had me. She was unwed. She gave me up and took off with her parents for places unknown right after my mom and dad adopted me. I was just a few weeks old.”

  “Your biological father?”

  “Biological? Oh. Another mystery. Some kid. Probably a famous scientist or something now.”

  I sense a shiver. “What day is it?” she says. “What number in July?”

  For a moment, I have to think. The day already seems three days long.“The sixteenth.”

  “Did something happen this morning? Here, in this New Mexico place?”

  “You saw it?”

  “Tell me,” she says.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Tell me.”

  I tell her. The blinding flash, the mushroom cloud, the wind and thunder, the awestruck conversations at the base. Her ropy arms practically stop my breathing.

  “Why?” I say finally.

  “I have to think. Pinch myself. Wake to a familiar nightmare. Or live this one.”

  “Nightmare?”

  The bike tires roll and hiss, the fenders rattle. The day brightens.

  “I pinched myself,” she says.

  “And?”

  “The nightmare. It begins here.”

  Everything about her—words, accent, nakedness, concentration-camp body—unsettles me. What will my parents think? “How did you get here?” I ask.

  “I cannot explain it.”

  “Can you explain where you came from? Why you were naked?” The naked part won’t be ignored. “Did your family abandon you or something?”

  Like my flesh-and-blood mother and my ghost of a father?

  “I have no family. I can explain nothing.”

  Because she can explain nothing and I also feel a need to pinch myself—several times—we ride along in silence. She doesn’t loosen her grip, but I’m okay with that. It makes me feel anchored. Maybe it works that way for her, too.

  “Cocoa,” she says finally.