Full Body Burden

by Kristen Iversen

  “The neighbors probably don’t like honking on Sunday morning,” Karin says. Karin is never afraid to speak up. Sometimes she refuses to go on Sunday drives at all.

  “He’s coming,” Mom says. She glances at her watch, counts under her breath, and then lays on the horn for a good long one.

  Dad bursts from the house. “I’m coming, Marilyn. Christ.” She smiles and slides over so he can get behind the wheel. He hasn’t showered, but his shirt is clean and he smells minty, like mouthwash.

  “Hey, guys!” he says, grinning into the rearview mirror. He’s best in the morning. He puts the car in reverse and backs down the driveway.

  “You’re going too fast,” my mother says. “You’ll hit one of the dogs.”

  He ignores her. “Where are we going today, guys? Where do you want to drive? Golden Gate Canyon? Rocky Mountain National Park?”

  We don’t want to drive anywhere. It’s hard to see from the backseat, even with my mother pointing out the scenery, and the winding roads make us all carsick.

  “Let’s drive up to Rocky Mountain National Park,” Mom says. “We haven’t been there in ages.”

  “That’s a long drive,” Karin pipes up. “I have homework.”

  “This is a family day,” Mom admonishes. “Maybe we’ll see some elk. Don’t you kids want to see the elk?”

  The silence is taken as agreement. “There’s that nice little restaurant in Estes Park,” Mom says. “We can have lunch.”

  “All these kids deserve is a hot dog stand!” Dad jokes.

  “I like hot dogs,” Kurt says.

  “We’ll have a very nice lunch,” Mom says, and gives my father a dark look. “It’s the least you can do for your family.”

  It will be years before I learn to share my parents’ appreciation for mountains, and it will take a backpack and a pair of cross-country skis for me to really begin to understand what wilderness means. In those days we never got out of the car. “Look, kids!” Mom exclaims. “There’s snow on top of that peak—in July!”

  “If we’re lucky we’ll see a mountain lion,” Dad warns, though we never do. Maybe it’s the flat cornfields of Iowa that makes them so ecstatic about the Colorado mountains, but they never tire of driving and looking, the car mostly quiet except for the hum of the tires. It’s a sin to doze off. Sometimes, if Dad’s in a gregarious mood, we sing John Denver songs. We know all the words. Occasionally we see deer standing alone or in groups at the edge of the road or a hawk floating on air.

  We stop for a late lunch at a restaurant in Estes Park, and as soon as we’ve cleaned our plates, our parents dismiss us while they finish their Manhattans and have a cigarette. We stand outside and feel the cool wind on our faces. If we’re lucky we’ll get to stop at the fudge shop, a tourist trap. Already the sun is beginning to slip behind the mountain.

  “Let’s go,” Mom calls, emerging with Dad, smiling, and we take our seats. Kurt braces himself in the back of the station wagon. It will take a couple of hours to get home; the road is narrow and winding. No one sees the deer until it’s too late.

  “Damn!” Dad yells, and slams on the brakes. For a moment I glimpse the deer in the windshield and then it vanishes. The car stops, shuddering, the hood hissing, and the deer appears again, dazed, and staggers into a ditch by the side of the road.

  Karin, Dad, and I jump out of the car. The front of the car is pushed in like the nose of a bulldog and the deer lies bleeding, one eye calmly looking up. “We need a veterinarian,” I say.

  “No,” Dad says. “There’s nothing a vet can do.” His voice is tense.

  The road is dark, the car steaming, and what happens next seems unreal. My father walks into the forest and comes back with a large rock. “I’m sorry about this, kids,” he says, and in one swift motion he crushes the deer’s skull. He drops the rock to the ground and speaks in a low tone. “He was suffering,” he says. I feel the sadness in his voice, the compassion. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  But it isn’t my father who kills the deer. Years later I will learn that no one else in the family remembers the incident the way I do. The truth is that another man kills the deer, a stranger who drives up behind us in a pickup truck with big headlights. He wears a flannel shirt and heavy boots—a real mountain man, Karma says later. He looks things over, finds a rock, pulls the deer’s carcass farther off the road, and then leaves to call the cops so we will be sure to get home safe.

  I want to believe it was my father.

  The sheriff arrives and he and Dad examine the car. “It’s fine!” Dad barks. “The car is fine!” It looks bad, but it’s drivable. We climb back in to begin the slow journey home. But all is not fine. The cast on Kurt’s leg has been crushed in the jolt, and when we get home my mother takes him back to the emergency room. He returns with a fresh cast—the leg has been broken again—and he has new doctor’s orders of six more weeks of no soccer.

  “He’ll be all right,” Mom says. “He’s tough.”

  IMMUNE TO outside regulation, Rocky Flats has always policed itself. Following the 1969 Mother’s Day fire, however, the Colorado Department of Health begins sampling air, water, and soil around the plant. One afternoon in 1973, Al Hazle of the Colorado Department of Health is driving back from the Western Slope, where he’s been collecting water samples to test for tritium, a radioactive isotrope of hydrogen, in the aftermath of the Rulison Project, the 43-kiloton nuclear test project that was intended to extract natural gas from deep underground levels. Tritium, usually a by-product of a nuclear explosion, is a health hazard when inhaled, ingested through food or water, or absorbed through the skin.

  Al Hazle decides to stop by Rocky Flats to pick up some samples for another test, and on a whim decides to take additional water samples from one of the canals to use as a background test for the Rulison water.

  When he gets the results, he’s not surprised to find tritium in the water, but he is surprised to discover where it comes from. It’s not the Rulison water but the runoff from Rocky Flats that contains tritium. What the hell? Hazle thinks. How did that get in there? Unless there was a criticality or nuclear explosion at Rocky Flats, there should be no tritium anywhere near the plant.

  TINA GIVES me one more chance to redeem myself.

  Halloween is a big night. Jackson’s Turkey Farm, on Indiana Street near Rocky Flats, is a family-run business with four teenage boys. My mother knows the family; for years she’s bought our holiday turkey at Jackson’s, where she knows the meat is fresh. “Those boys, though, are wild,” she says disapprovingly. The Jackson brothers are famous for the haunted house they set up each year in one of the farm’s outbuildings.

  It’s bitter cold when Tina’s mother drops us off at the turkey farm with a promise to come back in an hour. A snowstorm is on the way. “She’ll be late,” Tina notes, but that’s fine with us. We walk up the gravel drive. The night is pitch-black except for the lights of Rocky Flats just down the road. There’s a line of kids in puffy down jackets standing at the door.

  “I wonder if this is the slaughterhouse?” Tina muses.

  “I don’t think I want to go,” I say. Tina has a pool of strength garnered from years of watching stuff like Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary’s Baby.

  “Wimp,” she says. “Come on. It’ll be fun.”

  The door opens and a shrouded figure gestures for us to come in. The shedlike space is dark. A long maze has been created by taping together large black plastic garbage bags and hanging them from the ceiling. The effect is suffocating and creepy.

  “Begin here,” the shroud moans. I can’t tell if it’s one of the Jackson boys or maybe Randy or one of his friends. “These are the parts of the witch,” the shroud intones. “Eyeballs, hair, tongue. Give me your hand.” He takes Tina’s hand and puts it in one bowl, then a second and third.

  “Peeled grapes,” Tina says. “Cold spaghetti. Peeled green chilies. Come on. We did this in Brownies in second grade.”

  I keep my hands to m
yself.

  “It gets better,” the shroud assures us. We turn a corner and a guy in a gorilla suit rocks behind the bars of a rubber cage and leaps out to grab us as we pass.

  “Bor-ing,” Tina comments.

  In the next scene, a girl lies dead on a table with a tall vampire leaning over her, fake blood dripping from his fangs. He looks up as we approach. “Are you next?” he hisses, reaching out to touch our jackets.

  “Yeah, right,” Tina says.

  The vampire looks a little crushed. “Come on, Tina,” I say. “At least play along with it.”

  We come to a long table lit with candles and another hovering, shroudlike creature. “This,” the creature says, “is the real body.”

  “Don Jackson, is that you?” Tina asks.

  The shroud ignores her. He points to the first bowl. “Here are the fingernails.”

  “Pretty skinny fingernails,” I say. “Those don’t even look human.”

  “Next, we have the innards.”

  I lean down to take a look. It doesn’t look like spaghetti. I’m not sure what it looks like.

  “Touch it,” the shroud suggests.

  “No.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” Tina puts her fingers in the bowl. “Touch, touch, touch. Okay?”

  Whatever feelings the shroud might be having, they’re masked by the costume. He continues unfazed. “Here, on this plate,” he says, “is the skin.” A pile of pale greasy casing or membrane is layered on the plate.

  “It kind of looks like skin,” I say.

  “It’s not skin,” Tina declares. “Cooked lasagna noodles, I would guess.”

  “And here,” the shroud declares with a small note of triumph, “is the heart.” He gestures toward the final bowl. A purplish, thumb-size organ lies on the white porcelain, a ventricle extending like a tiny straw.

  “Must have been a pretty small witch,” Tina says.

  “I think that’s real, Tina.”

  “Just stopped pumping a minute ago,” says the shroud.

  “That’s disgusting,” I say. I’ve never felt strongly about turkeys, but I’m about to lose my dinner. I turn away.

  “You can’t get out that way,” the shroud says. He pushes me toward a kid standing with a white sheet over his head, two holes cut for eyes. “You have to go all the way through.”

  “Fine.” I run. I push past the other kids and run. I can hear Tina scrambling behind me, screaming with laughter. Just as I reach the door, I hear my name.

  “Kris!” A masculine voice.

  I stop. A masked monster comes up behind me, grabs my shoulder, and shoves a fistful of vaseline into my hair. I fly out into the dark night, furious. “What the hell!” I’m learning to cuss like Tina.

  “It’s just a boy,” Tina says. “Don’t worry about it. He likes you.”

  I’ll never be cool. I don’t like boys. I don’t care. My flirtation with Adam broke up when I refused to let him go past first base.

  “The turkeys are radioactive anyway,” Tina laughs. “Those parts probably glow in the dark.”

  WALKING HOME from the bus stop one afternoon, I notice that Adam’s house—nearly identical to ours—is suddenly empty. The curtains are gone from the windows and there’s a Realtor’s sign in the yard. I arrive home to find my mother in the kitchen making chili. She’s humming “In the Mood.”

  “Why is Adam’s house for sale?” I ask.

  “Oh.” She turns to me. “I thought you knew.”

  “Knew what?” I haven’t spoken to Adam in weeks. He has a new girlfriend one grade up.

  “They moved to California. His father got a new job.”

  “Oh,” I say. I climb up on a kitchen stool and set my elbows on the counter. I wish I had been able to say good-bye. Adam was scary and sweet, all mixed up together.

  “You knew he was sick, didn’t you?” My mother is in her housewife attire: pedal pushers, a long shirt tied around her waist, and a scarf to hold her hair up. I like the way she looks: calm and efficient, as if she could set the whole world straight.

  “No,” I say. “I didn’t know.” I’m surprised. “What was wrong?”

  She turns to face me and her voice drops, as if someone might overhear. “He has testicular cancer. He had surgery right before they left.” She looks away. “I think he must have been embarrassed about it. His mother said he didn’t want anyone to know.”

  Later, in a whispered conversation with Karma, I learn that Adam is not alone in his experience. Karma’s had a crush, too, on Scott, a tall, blue-eyed, athletic boy at school. She’s been too shy about it to tell me or Karin. Scott, too, has testicular cancer. “Don’t tell anyone,” she says. “He would die if anyone knew.”

  A few years down the road, in 1981, a scientist by the name of Dr. Carl Johnson will publish a study on high cancer rates in three exposed areas around Rocky Flats, including our neighborhood. “The remarkably higher incidence of cancer of the testis in the three exposed areas merits special attention,” he’ll report. “One possible explanation is the demonstrated propensity of plutonium to concentrate in the gonads.”

  But no one will believe him.

  DOW CHEMICAL and the AEC don’t bother doing water samples before releasing a statement that the Rocky Flats plant has no source that could possibly account for tritium contamination. The Colorado Health Department tests the water again and confirms that radioactive tritium, released from Rocky Flats between April 1969 and September 1974, has entered Walnut Creek and flowed into Great Western Reservoir, the primary water supply for the city of Broomfield. The Environmental Protection Agency—which had just been established in 1970—confirms the sharp increase in tritium levels. Tritium emits low-level radioactivity and passes through the body over a period of days or months, but if left in the water supply it continues to be replaced in the body, which can lead to health problems. Nearby families are asked for urine samples, including a couple with a new baby. Several residents, including the new mother and baby, test high for tritium—seven times higher than what officials consider to be “normal”—but the woman’s husband, oddly, tests negative. Officials are stumped until the man admits he drinks a six-pack of Coors every night when he comes home from work and never drinks water at home.

  AEC officials are slow to acknowledge that the tritium leak has occurred, and when they finally do, months after the initial discovery, residents are told by state officials that the tritium levels are far below what might be “judged to be harmful.” Dr. Ed Martell once again disagrees. Broomfield’s water reservoir tests at 23,000 picocuries of tritium per liter of water, and the AEC itself considers normal background radiation in Colorado to be approximately 1,200 picocuries per liter.

  Even the latter number, Martell claims, is unsafe. Radiation is measured in curies, which quantify its rate of decay or disintegration. A picocurie is one-trillionth of a curie. Scientists estimate that 50 to 100 curies of tritium, or 50 to 100 trillion picocuries, eventually reach Great Western Reservoir.

  Rocky Flats maintains there is no threat to residents, and current and past discharges of radioactive material are in “very low quantities.” The Environmental Protection Agency sidesteps the controversy by concluding that the public health impact of these radiation doses is “considered to be minimal based on established criteria.”

  Laverne Abraham, a resident of Broomfield, isn’t taking any chances. Every Monday morning, two five-gallon jugs of bottled water are delivered to the Abrahams’ front porch. Laverne doesn’t want her family, including her six-year-old daughter, Jennifer, to have one sip from Broomfield’s “plutonium-lined” reservoir, never mind tritium. Plutonium is heavier than water, and residents are told that the plutonium in the reservoir is harmless as long as it remains where it is—at the bottom of the lake. Rocky Flats officials stress that plutonium in Great Western Reservoir and Standley Lake will stabilize into lake sediment and not create a hazard. Plutonium, residents are told, isn’t dangerous unless it’s inhaled into the
lungs. But Laverne is concerned that even the tiniest amount of plutonium could cause cancer, whether it’s ingested or inhaled. “They keep saying it isn’t dangerous,” she says to a reporter as she shops for groceries with her daughter. “Well, even if it was, I don’t think they’d tell us. We won’t drink the water here until we get a new reservoir.”

  But where did the tritium come from? Had there been a criticality at Rocky Flats? Rocky Flats officials explain that the tritium is not their fault; it was apparently brought on-site via scrap material shipped to the plant from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California.

  The tritium incident is a public relations nightmare. A storm of publicity eventually forces the plant to reveal that over a period of seventeen years, hundreds of tons of contaminated material were buried in seven trenches and at five other sites at the plant. The mixed waste included asphalt, soil, sewage, and radioactive materials including plutonium and uranium. Rocky Flats officials insist that the buried wastes pose “no hazard.” Tests by the Colorado Department of Health will later confirm that plutonium, americium, and strontium-90, a by-product of a nuclear explosion, exist in areas off-site. Strontium causes particular concern, as it can be readily absorbed in the body and deposits in the bones of humans and animals. The presence of strontium strengthens the suspicion that a criticality occurred, perhaps during the 1957 fire.

  Al Hazle, who’s worked with the Colorado Department of Health for years, is beginning to feel like a detective. As an aside to Broomfield’s worried city manager, he jokes that “Broomfield has its mouth over the plant’s anus.” That’s just the way it is, he says. There’s a direct connection.

  HAZARDOUS OR not, Rocky Flats is a boon to the Denver economy. In 1972, Rocky Flats employs 3,700 people working in three shifts, seven days a week. Plutonium triggers are rolling off the assembly line. Hundreds of millions of federal dollars are being pumped into local communities through salaries and commercial contracts. Real estate is booming. Jefferson County, which includes Rocky Flats, is the county with the second-highest population in Colorado and is growing fast. In 1973 the Health Department of Jefferson County needs a new director.