Full Body Burden

by Kristen Iversen

  MOST PEOPLE in my neighborhood are too busy making mortgage payments and worrying about rising gas prices to pay much attention to Rocky Flats. And they don’t want to think about how the situation might affect their property values.

  Sister Pam Solo, though, is paying attention. A third-generation Colorado native, she has deep roots in the state’s complicated history. Her father grew up in a coal mining camp in southern Colorado, site of the famous Ludlow Massacre that occurred when coal miners went on strike in 1913. Pam attended St. Mary’s Academy in Denver, and after high school, like Pat McCormick, she joined the Sisters of Loretto.

  Another young woman, Judy Danielson, a Quaker, has just returned from Vietnam, where she’s been doing humanitarian work as a physical therapist. Pam is a serious-minded woman with short dark hair and glasses; Judy, slender with light hair, shares her intensity. They learn of Martell’s findings and decide to help organize a group to go door-to-door in neighborhoods east of Rocky Flats. They knock on doors and ask residents if they can scoop up samples of dirt from their backyards to be tested for radiation. The volunteers label the samples with names and addresses and take them to the open public meetings of candidates who are running for Congress, asking to have the soil tested and residents notified of the results. “What,” they demand of each candidate, “are you going to do about Rocky Flats?”

  WINTER COMES early. In late October the pipes in our laundry room freeze and burst and water spills out into the room in arctic pools. Tonka shivers in the field, his head low and back hunched to the wind. My mother backs the station wagon out of the garage and Karma and I spread straw on the cement floor and bring him in. His chin whiskers are long tentacles of frost and the balls of ice in his hooves make him walk gingerly, as if he’s wearing stiletto heels. We cook him a hot oatmeal mash on the stove and serve it on a breakfast tray.

  We aren’t the only ones concerned about the cold weather. We share our land with a large population of field mice who take up residence in the walls, cupboards, and heat ducts. I don’t mind the glimpse of a nimble creature dashing across the kitchen floor in search of a cornflake or two, but my mother is determined to rout them out. She puts small boxes of poison in front of the heat vents. Rather than expire in the open air, the mice climb back up into the warm ducts to take their last breath. We grow accustomed to the smell.

  We celebrate Christmas in our new house with a seven-foot tree in the family room. As part of our continuing education in all things Scandinavian, my mother plays Hans Christian Andersen stories on the record player. She directs that each strand of tinsel be hung individually, one by one, on the branches. “You can’t let them touch each other!” she orders, and sure enough the tree glitters with flowing streams of silver, at least until the cats start climbing the trunk.

  My mother spends weeks deciding on presents for each of us, wrapping them in gold and red foil, tying them with fancy ribbon, and hiding them on the shelf in her closet where we track their location closely. My father mutters about taxes and bills and clients who don’t pay, but he never disapproves.

  Christmas Eve means church first. My parents reject the staunch brand of Lutheranism my mother grew up with—even cardplaying is a sin—and we sing hymns in a church that looks more like a library than a sanctuary. My mother wears a mink coat and stole my dad accepted from an indebted client: two paws and a stunted nose and tail hang down around her shoulders. On the way home we sing carols and count all the houses with Christmas lights and then have to wait for dinner to be served, lefse and sandbakkels and the threat of lutefisk—dried codfish reconstituted in lye and boiled in saltwater, which tastes like bland fish Jell-O. Fortunately she relents and instead serves a turkey from Jackson’s, the local turkey farm out by Rocky Flats, and then we can open the presents we’ve been eyeing for weeks as the Christmas tree sparkles late into the night. On Christmas morning there are stockings stuffed with rolls of Life Savers, fat chocolate Santas, bookmarks, coins, and color-changing mood rings. We spend the day in pajamas, sitting amid piles of wrapping and tinsel and tape, the record player blaring, dogs bounding around the room in chaotic ecstasy. There is something almost nightmarish in the boxes and paper and ribbon, the plethora of presents we know my father can’t afford, and yet we feel loved and spoiled and giddy in our parents’ insistence on this heady life of abundance.

  Nonetheless, by noon my father reaches his limit of family interaction and heads off in a stony silence to check on things at the office.

  THE FIRST time I ride Tonka out to Standley Lake, the wind whips my hair across my face so hard it stings. Tonka is eager to run. I ride bareback with a single leather strap looped around his ears and a rawhide hackamore dropped across his nose, the reins taut, his head tucked and neck arched like a Roman Percheron. He prances and dances—let’s run! Let’s run! He can gather himself into a ball of muscled energy and shoot across the field like a low-rolling cannonball. I’ve learned to grip his bare sides with my thighs, crouch low over his neck, and hang on. Maximum contact, minimum control.

  I’m alone. That’s the best part, to be alone with the horse and the gently rolling hills and the wind bending the tall prairie grass into long ripples of gold. I try to make Tonka walk calmly; my mother has repeated tales she’s heard from neighbors about what happens to young riders whose galloping mounts step full speed into groundhog holes. A horse’s leg can snap as easily as a slender tree branch, and there’s no remedy but a bullet to the head. Like a minefield, the long grass hides hundreds and maybe thousands of potentially lethal mounds and bumps—how many death traps are beneath those dancing hooves? But Tonka dislikes caution. He knows there will come a time on each ride when we will be past the houses, the fences, the roads, and I’ll drop the reins, bury my face in his mane, and let him rip.

  We sidestep through the metal gate and prance across the wooden bridge arching over the ditch. I try to maintain the illusion of control as long as I’m within range of the neighbors’ kitchen windows. We pass the community barn, skitter through another gate, trot past the long swamp—Tonka breaking into a light anticipatory sweat—and canter up a gentle rise to the barbed-wire fence surrounding the lake.

  There is a gate, loosely constructed of metal posts and wire. A heavy padlock hangs from the latch. A thoughtful child has neatly clipped the wires below the lock. I slide off, lead Tonka through, and swing back up. He can hardly contain himself.

  My vantage point is extraordinary. The lake stretches below us, nearly a mile in diameter. Blue water extends in rows of gentle ripples to a thin line of barely visible cottonwoods on the far side. The wind dies to a whisper and it’s quiet, almost perfectly still except for the snap of grasshoppers leaping from the weeds. To the west the mountains rise suddenly, almost violently from the sandy brown of the plains, layered silhouettes of blue and green and gray rising to a turquoise sky. My heart is filled with the beauty of it all.

  Tonka will wait no longer. I pull in his head, tuck his nose to his chest, and twist my hands in his mane. “Go!” I shout, and when the reins drop he shoots over the peak of the hill and down the other side, racing to the edge of the lake. His back is slick with sweat, and I barely keep my hold. There is mud, I can see it—should I pull him up? Will he race right into the water? The ground blurs beneath his hooves.

  I see the body first. In the split second before Tonka spots it, I ready myself for his response: the sliding stop, the snort of astonishment, and the surge of fear. He knew I had seen it first. He spins around on his back haunches and I pull him up short.

  The lower half of the cow’s body lies in the water, soggy and swollen. The upper half extends long and rigid across the ground. Her head stretches up achingly, as if she had tried to pull herself out. The eyes bulge.

  Has the cow been shot? Drowned? Was she sick? There are no other cows in sight. I look again across the lake, cool, blue, and utterly empty. The mountains feel like a dark, heavy presence, a watching shadow. It’s too far to yell for one of my sis
ters.

  I chastise myself fiercely for not having the courage to investigate. We gallop all the way home, Tonka’s hooves ringing on the bumpy ground.

  IN THE fall I start sixth grade at Juchem Elementary, a small brick school thirty minutes away that stands in the middle of an open, grassy field. My siblings and I ride a yellow school bus down windblown dirt roads that will later become four-lane highways. Randy Sullivan, the boy I’ve been observing from our kitchen window, rides the same bus. He has a ready smile and more friends than I’ll ever dream of. He makes me blush.

  My first romance with a boy—not Randy—lasts three entire class periods. He gives me a chunky chain bracelet for my wrist, but by afternoon recess we’ve broken each other’s hearts. I can’t wait to go to junior high. I think about all the friends I’ll have once I ditch my sisters and brother and the entire sixth grade, which takes the boy’s side, not mine. He plays football. I play the clarinet. The chasm between our social circles seems vast.

  In junior high I’ll be brave enough to talk to boys like Randy.

  The wind blows fiercely across the treeless fields. One drowsy afternoon we see a bald eagle settle on the steel post of our playground swing set. The teachers show us films like Our Friend the Atom. Once or twice a week we have duck-and-cover drills in case we’re bombed by the Russians. We’ll be sitting at our desks working out long, dull columns of math and without warning the bell goes off. “Duck and cover!” the teacher yells. “Stay calm!” I crawl under the flat wooden top of my little metal desk and curl up in a ball, forehead to knees, and lock my fingers over the back of my neck as instructed. We’ve all seen the classroom films of people and buildings instantly disappearing—poof!—in a nuclear blast. I wonder how locking my fingers behind my neck will save me. We huddle until the bell rings the all-clear signal.

  “They left out the fourth step,” my ex-boyfriend whispers. “Kiss your ass goodbye.”

  Unbeknownst to us, Rocky Flats is, in fact, a likely Soviet target. Rocky Flats has a sister plant, Mayak, near Chelyabinsk in the Soviet Union. Secretly built in the late 1940s, Mayak manufactures, refines, and machines plutonium for weapons, just like Rocky Flats. Our government knows a little something about them, and their government knows a little something about us. Deeply contaminated, Mayak becomes the site of one of the worst nuclear accidents in history—an explosion in 1957 released fifty to one hundred tons of high-level radioactive waste, contaminating a huge territory including populated areas in the eastern Urals.

  But there are no drills on what to do if something goes wrong right down the road at Rocky Flats.

  BY THE time the school bus turns the corner onto 82nd Avenue, I’m thinking about my cowboy boots, scuffed and worn so soft they fit my feet like gloves. My favorite pair of jeans, stained with neatsfoot oil and hoof polish and horse sweat. The way the barn smells of hay and molasses and pungent manure. When the school bus drops us at the top of the hill, I race to the house to change my clothes and go chase Tonka.

  I drop my books in the front hallway, pull on my jeans, and I’m back out the door before my mother realizes I’m home. Tonka’s waiting at the gate, head up, ears perked. He knows there’s horse candy in my pocket.

  I fasten the halter strap beneath his jaw and lead him to the grooming post. All my tools are gathered in a plastic bucket like a painter’s paint box. I tie him to the rail and set to work. Even now I can recall the pattern of hair growth on his body—the sinewy neck, the whorls at the flank and chest, the straight, wiry texture of his mane. I push my left shoulder into his side and Tonka obligingly lifts his leg. With the hoof pick I clean the underside of each hoof, including the sole and the cleft of the frog, a triangle of dark rubbery flesh.

  The face and forelock are last. With a soft cloth I wipe the film from the corners of Tonka’s big brown eyes and dab his nostrils. I comb the lick of hair falling down between his eyes. I slip off the halter and pull the hackamore over his ears. We’re ready to head for the lake.

  Sometimes I don’t make it out of the house. Each afternoon my mother rests in her room, which is tidy and quiet and covered with a permanent film of dust. She has a small drawer of pills the doctor prescribes, pills that make her fuzzy. Many of her friends in the neighborhood have the same prescription to help with nerves. She takes them every afternoon. If she hears my step at the door, she calls me and I’m trapped until supper.

  She complains bitterly about the dust. The house is filled with it. Dust settles on my mother’s dresser and its blurred mirror, on the night table, the windowsill, the lamp with the worn fabric shade. In the living room it settles on the clock and the console record player. Dust swirls and glitters in bars of sunlight striking through the windowpanes. On Saturday mornings, when we do our weekly chores, we spray the dust with lemon furniture polish and rub it in cloudy swirls, but by Sunday it’s back. Her bed, with its avocado bedspread, faces two large picture windows that look out to the mountains. I sit on the edge of the bed and watch the dust, suspended in space, floating delicately to the floor. The water tower and tiny square buildings of Rocky Flats sit like toy buildings on the flat plain.

  “I love this view,” my mother declares. “It makes me feel peaceful.”

  Hours pass and she tells me family stories and hints at dark secrets. “I shouldn’t be telling you this!” she exclaims. It’s the best first line for any story, and I’m hooked. Her own childhood was troubled; her father drank and the family struggled during the Depression. There are plenty of skeletons in the family closet. But most of her secrets revolve around my father, who seems to completely baffle her. “What’s wrong with him? What happened to him?” she asks plaintively. His anger is palpable, even when he’s not physically present. He’s never hit any of us, but we all fear his threats. She criticizes him, worries about him, and most of all fears him. Her eyes grow wide. “I can’t talk to him, you know. I don’t dare bring anything up.”

  My father says the same thing when he shouts and mutters to himself in the dark. “I can’t talk to your mother,” he announces to the room. Does he intend us to hear this? Everything is said furtively; everything is hush-hush. We don’t want the neighbors to know. We have to protect my dad’s practice. Keep things within the family, and keep things to yourself. When I feel like exploding inside, or running away, I remind myself that someone needs to hold down the fort. That someone feels like me.

  After an hour or two of examining her troubles, I’m itching to get outside, to get away. “I gotta go, Mom,” I say.

  “Kris,” she says. “Don’t leave me alone in this room.” Her long, cool fingers clasp mine. So I stay until the clock on her dresser shows six o’clock and it’s time to brown hamburger for dinner.

  I HAVE a few secrets myself. The banks of the old Church irrigation ditch behind our house are lined with wide-trunked cottonwood trees that fill the air with blizzard-like balls of fluff. Wild asparagus grows in thick, sinewy stalks along with plump blackberries and tiny pink strawberries we pop in our mouths when we can find them. Fat muskrats burrow in the banks. I find an abandoned baby muskrat the size of a hamster and for three days nurse it secretly but unsuccessfully under my bed. I look for an appropriate burial site. I find a soft spot at the base of the biggest cottonwood and start digging with a spoon I’ve swiped from the kitchen. I hear a shot, then another. A neighborhood boy is standing at the edge of our property, his brand-new BB gun leveled at my head. I stand, and I realize he’s aiming at the horses instead. A loud crack—and then Tonka, who’s been nibbling at the short fresh grass near the water, explodes. He leaps into the air, bucking and kicking, astonished with pain. The other horses startle and scatter, but not before the boy has pinged Comanche in the shoulder and sent him galloping heavily around the back of the house. “Get off our property!” I scream. “That’s my horse! Leave us alone!”

  He turns, shrugs, and slings the gun over his shoulder. He wears combat fatigues and black boots and a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He�
��s fourteen.

  That night in the kitchen, I tell my mother what happened while she’s making rice and phoning the neighbors to ask if they’ve seen my brother. “Well, Kris,” she says. “I just can’t think about this right now.”

  “But he could shoot their eyes out,” I say. “He could really hurt them. We should call somebody.” He has lots of brothers and sisters and a mother as belligerent as an army sergeant. I think he should catch hell from somebody.

  My mother sighs. The boiling water from the rice seeps over the edge of the pot and drips down onto the stove. “Boys will be boys,” she says. “The sooner you realize that, the better.”

  THE MARTELL study is the first time the public and even the state government learn at least some of the facts about the worst accidents at Rocky Flats—even though years have passed since they occurred. The AEC and Dow Chemical continue to reassure residents there is nothing to worry about. The amount of plutonium released from Rocky Flats, says Edward Putzier, Dow’s health physics manager, is no greater than “a pinch of salt or pepper.” He accuses the media of exaggerating the dangers of radiation.