A Girl's Guide to Missiles

by Karen Piper

  She was eleven years old.

  “My butt is all red and swollen, but he said he won’t tell my parents, so at least that’s good. They would kill me if they knew.”

  After that, I stopped stealing books, which meant I had only the Bible. I knew they could not take that away from me. I started reading it from beginning to end, which is how I discovered Michal, David’s first wife. The pastor never talked about her. As far as I could tell, Michal stopped sleeping with David after he came prancing into town half-naked with the Ark of the Covenant, whatever that was. It read “Michal the daughter of Saul looked out at the window, and saw king David leaping and dancing before the LORD; and she despised him in her heart.”

  When she came out to meet him, she told him why: “How did the king of Israel get honor today, by uncovering himself in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself!” Naked dancing with handmaids? No one talked about that in church. I got the feeling she was jealous. This was where, in a good Gothic novel, he would apologize and say he would dance only for her from now on. That he had lost his mind.

  Instead, his reply really bugged me: “Before the LORD, who chose me above thy father, and above all his house . . . will I make merry. And I will be yet more vile than thus, and will be base in mine own sight; and with the handmaids whom thou hast spoken of, with them will I get me honor.”

  To me, it sounded as if he were saying, “Screw you. Women like me. I’m better than you.” David was no hero for me after that. I was done with David, even if he killed Goliath.

  But as I read on, I began to see that Michal’s brother Jonathan factored into things a lot. When David had to leave Jonathan to go to war, they “kissed and wept” for a long time. Then it said David loved him “more than any woman.” It occurred to me that maybe that was the real reason Michal stopped sleeping with David or, as the Bible put it, “had no child unto the day of her death.”

  Maybe Bathsheba was just another cover. He could not say what he really wanted. I forgave David a little after that. He could not have the person he loved.

  At the same time, he still bugged me a little. He sure got all the attention, not his wife, who had to just disappear and not have children for the rest of her life. So I decided to stop reading the Bible and write a novel about Michal instead—for the next eight years. I wanted people to know who she was. In my novel, Michal never wanted to marry David. She knew what was going on with her brother Jonathan, which made her resent the way David carried on with women even more. She only wanted honesty, and to be free; but there was no way out for Michal, so then she goes crazy and dies.

  Luckily, because I was Baptist, I was allowed to have my own interpretation of the Bible. That was why Luther had banged his “95 Theses” onto the door, after all. He thought we should read the Bible for ourselves and stop listening to the pope, who thought he was better than everyone.

  Still, I wished my novel had a happier ending.

  In my cubicle, it at first felt claustrophobic to stare at the wall all day long, but after a while it seemed natural. Parents were not allowed to visit ICS and we were not allowed to visit them. I began to think of my cubicle as a spaceship floating among the stars, which was comforting. Before long, I did not want to leave my cubicle at all. I was glad they let me eat my lunch at my cubicle, staring at my star chart. And though my sister was right across the room, even she started to fade in my mind. She was in her spaceship and I was in mine, floating in our separate directions into the universe.

  Outside, a war was ending and a presidency crumbling into failure. ACE had been founded, in its own weird way, to keep all that from happening. According to the Texas pastor who started the schools, parents who refused to spank their children were “part of the same socialist, communist-inspired operation trying to break down the discipline and the order in America.” He was quoting his mentor, preacher Jack Hyles. Those parents were the North Vietnamese, those nonspankers. That was why we had to be there. For the war. As Jack Hyles preached, “Don’t spank the child. Don’t have capital punishment. And the same thing leads eventually to its inevitable end, and that is, ‘We’re against war.’”

  At ICS, we were winning the war, one SWAT at a time.

  Chapter Eleven

  Snake Genocide

  On weekends, we would load into the Plymouth Duster, red with a white stripe because Christine and I wanted it that way, and flee town. So did half of Ridgecrest. We ran away from the world of weapons and Richard Nixon. We were two to three hours, depending on traffic, from the amusement parks and shopping malls of Los Angeles, but only minutes from endless desert adventures. Our choices ranged from stargazing and arrowhead hunting to collecting wildflowers and exploring canyons.

  On weekdays, I had only the back gate for comfort, my little door to Narnia. Outside it was a miniature desert, really nothing more than a street block that had remained undeveloped, but still with tumbleweeds and lizards and creosote bushes. That pink-peeling wooden gate sat behind a wall of tumbleweeds, blown there by the wind, for several months after we moved in. It looked as though it had not been opened in decades. Then my dad finally cleared them away and forced the gate open.

  “Patches!” I yelled to our neurotic dog. We inched forward at first, sunstruck, afraid that somehow we were not allowed outside. Patches sniffed and sniffed for danger, then suddenly darted past me like a rocket, pulling me along behind the leash. It was spring, so the desert had spurted out all its stars, daisies, and buttercups, whose seeds can lie dormant for seven years or more until the rain and sun are exactly right. I sang, “Daisies, daisies, daisies! Big ones, small ones, white and yellow,” while patting their soft heads. I had missed them.

  Patches was frantically sniffing the ground, lifting her head to snort at the wind, while I squatted to look beneath the bushes. First, I found my friends the black ants, with their nice symmetrical holes, unlike the sloppy ones the red ants built. Once, my mom had to put me in a bath with baking soda, then gently squeeze all the red ant stingers out since they would swarm your leg and sting you. But you could dig and dig forever in a black ant hole and not get stung, or get to the bottom, though there were little egghead silverfish living down there that looked like blind white teardrops.

  Besides the ants, there were all the ancient beetles: the green shiny dinosaur-looking ones, the black ones with red trim, and the yellow-striped ones. Bugs seemed more resilient than the navy to me. They could suck water from cactus or sleep underground for decades until the next rain came. I read about all of them, begging my mom and dad to buy me books. If I was lucky, I could sometimes find a tarantula and then would lay my hand on the ground in front of it and wait for it to walk on me. Tarantula feet feel like heaven, soft dancing furry heaven. Light as a misty rain. Gopher snakes are fine to pick up, too, and their skin feels slick and cool. Lizards hid beneath the creosotes, jackrabbits ate the twigs, and kangaroo rats dug holes at the base. Most people do not realize that a creosote bush is a whole animal town. If you pull one out and shake it hard like a rug, you won’t be able to count all the things that fall out.

  But weekends provided even vaster experiences. Sometimes the base had “star parties,” when China Lakers would drive out into the desert with big base telescopes, while my dad brought his little telescope from home. There, we would all share telescopes while trying to find new planets, comets, or stars. The kids would lie on blankets, looking at the stars, while the parents told desert stories and looked for a piece of the sky to name. For a navigator like my dad, it was like being in the war again. He felt useful. As for me, I could fall forever into the stars with aliens and be happy.

  Usually, Christine and I would want to look for rocks on weekends for Pebble Pups and Rock Hounds, the base rock clubs. In Pebble Pups, I learned where to find crystals, turquoise, mica, and geodes. A good geode, which you sliced in half in the lab at the Quonset hut, c
ould win you the annual gem and mineral show, where the top prize was your own GemMaster. I was determined to win so I could slice and grind my rocks at home. I would scour the Rocketeer for hotels that advertised “arrowheads nearby” or “good rocks” and then declare, “Found one!” And off we went on weekend races for rocks. We had to hurry because everyone else wanted that GemMaster too.

  Once, after leaving town at the crack of dawn, we started to notice that we were driving over a lot of snakes. It was not uncommon to see a few dead rattlers on the road, but this time there were too many. My sister and I started to count. “Twenty!” I yelled out. “Forty, fifty, sixty . . .” They were going by almost faster than we could count.

  “How many now?” my dad asked.

  “One hundred!”

  We kept going, up to two hundred, before my mom noticed something. “Earl, slow down,” she shouted, “I think they’re still alive!”

  Indeed, I noticed a few were flapping around on the ground.

  “Earl, stop!” my mom screamed then. “I think we’re killing them!”

  My dad slowed down, surveying the scene, but did not stop. “But we can’t stop,” he said. “What if the kids jump out? Those are rattlesnakes!”

  So we kept going on our own little snake genocide. As the sun rose over the horizon, the snakes became livelier and gradually all skittled off the pavement. I remembered what Mr. Roberts had taught us at school, that snakes are cold-blooded and like to lie on the pavement at night since it is warmer than the sand. If the pavement gets too cold, they cannot move until it warms up again. Mr. Roberts kept giant aquariums full of rattlesnakes that we got to see up close in his summer class at the public school. He taught us how to build a rattlesnake catcher out of a stick and a string. He even dissected a snake in front of us. It was frozen, so he had to thaw it out first. By making a string loop at the end of the stick, you can catch a rattlesnake by the head without it ever getting close enough to bite.

  My parents started laughing, relieved, when the roads were clear of snakes. But then we all grew quiet, shocked by what we had seen, what we had done.

  Finally, we saw the hotel sign: “Rockhounder Rendezvous.”

  “Yay! We made it!” I shouted as the car slowed down.

  As soon as we stopped, I bolted from the car and off into the desert, and my mom yelled after me, “Stay close to the car!” But my sister was already chasing behind me, giggling, with Patches behind her.

  Crossing a hilltop, I started to see obsidian right away. I picked up the pieces, examining them and putting the ones in my bag that were arrowheads. Little did I know that I was carting off the hard-earned tools of the Kawaiisu—from one of the largest aboriginal stone workshops in California. I was transferring these gems from their workshop to mine: Pebble Pups. My sister yelled from far behind, “Save something for me!” But I was not about to let the good things go. A good arrowhead was worth points. The more arrowheads, the better.

  “Karen, come back,” my mom shouted again. I decided I would have to wait, but I knew it would be good to go farther, with my parents following behind and Patches leaping and wagging her bright, white, joyful tail.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Soul of the Photoplotter

  Back at home, my mom went back to her Gerber photoplotter, named after its designer, Joseph Gerber, who has nothing to do with baby food. Nevertheless, it was my mom’s new baby. My mom said the Gerber had to be kept in the dark and cleaned often. It also emitted a moaning howl that was loud enough to require headphones and could blind my mom with its xenon lamp unless she wore her dark safety goggles. It turned out that the Gerber’s sensitivities made people sensitive too.

  Her boss, Mr. Bukowski, designed missile circuitry and was a world-renowned expert on “spirals,” which I imagined was a Slinky so hard to design that it required a PhD. Their office, which was miles from anywhere, was a magnet for desert creatures seeking shade or water. Once, she said, a rattlesnake was found under a desk at work. Even so, it seemed to me, she was far more worried about the Gerber than that snake.

  Her problems all started when she tried to change the filter in the Gerber. Technically, she was supposed to call the Gerber people for that, but she was a Depression-era kid and believed in fixing things herself. She tried to explain the problem with the Gerber people in a memo to Mr. Bukowski: “Their willingness to declare our lamps unusable may be motivated by their desire to sell a modification to the Gerber.” She thought a new filter would fix everything instead, that it would be a simple change.

  But a co-worker of hers, Harris in Operations, disagreed. He was a middle-aged man with a loud voice and saggy face who thought those Equal Rights Amendment “Freedom Train” feminists were going too far. He supported Phyllis Schlafly, who said women should stay at home. So when he happened to catch my mom changing the filter, disobeying protocol, he knew he had found an easy target. He stormed in, towering over her, and shouted, “That’s an Operations job. Our filter changer handles that.”

  My mom was taken aback by his bulk and apparent confusion. There was no “filter changer,” as far as she knew. She had assumed he would tell her to call Gerber. Nevertheless, she was driven back by his size and the way he leaned in over her. “Get out of here!” he yelled.

  “Is there a filter changer?” she wrote to Mr. Bukowski from the safety of her office. He had not heard of one either. They decided to wait and see what would happen next.

  After a few days with work at a standstill and no filter changer in sight, my mom wrote to her division head—above even Mr. Bukowski—to explain that she was not allowed to change the filter and thus was unable to work. A simple filter change, she explained, would force the machine to recalibrate and fix the problem. Until then, any plots she printed would be bad. The spirals would not have their perfect arc. The missiles would not fly.

  For Harris, that memo to Mr. Bukowski’s boss may as well have been an official declaration of war. When he got wind of it, he began his own memo-writing campaign. First, he sent one to my mom, even though her office was only down the hallway from his, stating that all further requests for plotting had to go through him. He accused my mom of secretly “tampering” with the Gerber and attached a “request form” for her to mail to him when she wanted to use the plotter again.

  “More copies are available in my office,” he wrote.

  The number of memos written, encoded, and passed between people who were working in the same hall might seem surprising to those who are not in Defense. There, everything has to be documented, double-entry-style, and preferably in acronyms. Otherwise, it does not exist.

  Meanwhile at home, my mom started lying on the couch and not wanting to get up, while my dad kept having to travel for wind tunnel tests. Though he never said where he went, he always came back with gifts. There was the black Eskimo doll, made from Alaskan sealskin, that you could wear like a purse. There was a porcupine made of rabbit fur. There was a handmade Native American doll and a pretty blue dream catcher that read “New Mexico Dreams.” He left me little bread crumbs, clues about where he was, which I cherished like pieces of him. My dad often complained, “I don’t understand why China Lake can’t build a proper wind tunnel,” which at least helped me know he was not leaving because of me.

  “What’s a wind tunnel?” I asked.

  “It’s where we make the wind blow really hard so we can watch something fly inside.”

  “Like a kite?” My dad liked to build kites, then take us out into the desert to fly them, which was his way of teaching us aerodynamics.

  “No, but someone once put a duck in at Mike lab to watch it fly,” he said. I wondered then if that duck liked being put in a wind tunnel or if the men who put him there were just being mean. I did not think I would like to be put in there. That duck would have to just fly and fly and fly while all the men laughed at him.

  “Why do you have to t
ravel,” I asked, “if you have a tunnel big enough for a duck at home?”

  “It’s not big enough,” he said. If he had a big one, he could stay.

  Today, I picture my mom’s days unfolding at work like a twisted ballet, with the Gerber in the middle of the stage. Dancers come and go, sometimes blocking access to the machine, sometimes hiding behind it. Mom and Harris are locked in a ballet battle until one of them dies in the end, falling in a curtain of red ballet blood. Had the Gerber been a shrine and whoever approached it a prophet, the problem would have been that Harris did not believe in female prophets. He thought my mom was a false prophet. He thought his machine was good the way it was and did not need anything but him.

  In contrast, for my mom the Gerber was a finicky child who had to be coaxed and preened so it would perform well. She knew that if the needs of the Gerber were ignored, it would create bad plots, little temper tantrums that would lead to bad missiles. Bad missiles made my dad leave town to fix them. And if a missile left a navy carrier chute with a bad circuit, there would be just one big plunk and then a long journey to the bottom of the ocean with all that money trailing behind. My mom believed the troops depended upon her and did not want a plunk. She did not want to waste that money. To her, sabotaging the Gerber meant sabotaging U.S. Defense. My mom must have thought she was facing an eternal enemy of the United States: treason. And all because Harris was withholding access to the plotter.

  Finally, according to my mom’s notes, which told me the story of this drama, a new photoplotter operator appeared, Martha, who was petite with feathered red hair, diamond stud earrings, and bright red nails. She was a “downtime” person, which meant her “JO” (Job Order) had run out, leaving her without an assignment or funding from a particular missile program. In China Lake, to be on downtime was humiliating. It meant you were wasting “overhead,” or taxpayer money. You would be shunned as if you were contagious. Downtime people had nothing to do because they were not popular or smart enough to be picked for work on a particular missile. For instance, my dad put “AIM-9L” on his work stubs for years because he was being paid with money allotted for the Sidewinder. He was a Sidewinder person, whereas a downtime person is nothing. It meant you did not stay in one place for long but were more like a “temp” worker, sent to fill in holes everywhere, and the hole at my mom’s office was suddenly, mysteriously, for a “filter changer.”