An Atomic Romance

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “Holy Venus and Mars!” Reed said aloud.

  He read on. Besides trying to figure out tolerance doses of radioactivity, researchers used plutonium and other radioactive substances as an experimental cancer treatment. Most people lived only a short time, but a few lived for years with plutonium locked inside them.

  Why not put it in breakfast cereal, in case it proved healthful? Reed wondered. Why not sell it as a miracle cure for obesity? What might it do to cholesterol? He remembered that the plutonium experiments had come to light during the nineties, and the D.O.E. had apologized. Some reparations had been paid and then the subject was forgotten. Reed couldn’t remember what he was doing then. Had Glenda left? He must have been off on one of his desperate motorcycle escapes. Little was said at work, just renewed vows of safety. It was past history.

  He read on, skipping parts, reading ahead, doubling back. Radioactive substances had been tried in breakfast cereal—boys at a correctional school had been fed radioactive iron and calcium in their oatmeal. He read about a radioactive iron experiment on pregnant women—a nutrition study that backfired. He read about huge black tumors in the mouth, grapefruit-sized growths on thighs. Some doctors thought plutonium might jazz up spermatocytes.

  On the atomic level, plutonium was a little bomb in itself when it entered the body, Reed thought. It initiated something like a chain reaction among the body’s cells—a kind of mutation that could turn into cancer. Reed wondered if a chromosomal change could then eventually pervade the human race. He remembered that Julia had told him that in biological terms cancer cells were immortal. Like something obsessed, they couldn’t stop replicating.

  It was growing too dark to see. He went inside, cleaned up his dishes, then continued reading in his recliner. Clarence was barking outside, but Reed paid little attention as he read on, skimming parts, flipping to the index, studying pictures of forlorn victims.

  Some of these experiments led to workplace safety practices that he was accustomed to. He didn’t know whether to puke or be thankful that humans had been used like rats so that he could be a cell rat. Even though researchers figured that a microgram of plutonium might cause cancer, they injected people with many times that amount. One horror after another leaped from the page. The testes of prisoners. Plutonium mixed into vaginal jelly. Whole-body irradiation. The book said all baby boomers carry around a trace of plutonium in their bones, from fallout. One venturesome scientist accidentally created a criticality—in his hands—while demonstrating the daring test they called “tickling the dragon’s tail.” The instant blue halo dosed him with eight hundred roentgens. He lived nine days.

  Roentgen, rad, rem. The Three Rs. The words started to undulate in Reed’s mind, and fearing his dreams, he fought sleep. But he slept all morning and awoke when he heard a siren pass by. His head had a case of water hammer.

  “I’m dog-tired from sleeping so hard,” he told Clarence. “Do dogs ever get headaches?”

  Reed dished out Clarence’s morning chow. He swallowed some pain pills and ate half a cantaloupe and some scrambled eggs with coffee. He would be off work that night, so he ran some errands, mowed the yard, patched a screen, tended to his tomatoes. The vines were shriveling, and some of the tomatoes were rotting. His headache was better, but the headache pills made him feel as if he had been in a swimming pool for ten hours. He hadn’t finished reading the book, and he had lost his place, but he got the idea. It stymied him. He didn’t know what to do with this knowledge.

  He got chills remembering one of the nuclear accidents: a processing worker struck by more than twelve thousand rem of plutonium. The man burned, swelled up like sausages, went into shock, breathed like a frog. When doctors tried to get bone marrow samples, their syringes drew up what they called “slop” or “mush.” After he died, his body was systematically dismantled for studies—like an old warhead, Reed thought. The man’s body contained nineteen nanocuries. Scientists had thought the permissible body burden was twice that amount, but they learned different.

  “Don’t count your nanocuries before they hatch,” Reed murmured. The words slop and mush kept tossing around in his mind like contaminated oatmeal.

  The day was sweltering. It hadn’t rained in weeks. Clarence lay beneath the mimosa in the cool dirt, motionless during the afternoon. Reed’s house needed cleaning, or perhaps sandblasting, but he did not feel like mopping floors. The plutonium book sat on the table like a little bomb.

  35

  Late in the day, he ordered lasagna from Mr. Como’s and picked it up, a hot aluminum tray with a plastic lid nestled in a sissy little fuchsia shopping bag. After a fling around the vacant lot with Clarence, Reed jammed his camping gear into the carriers on his motorcycle. The tarp was wadded, the tent in a tangle—just like his feelings, he thought. An assortment of urges was making it necessary to fly once again to the Fort Wolf Wildlife Refuge. He told himself that he needed at least to say good-bye to the blighted place he had loved all his life. One more visit couldn’t hurt. It would be nice to believe that radiation was good for you. But that would be like having faith in Internet self-improvement elixirs. He knew that behind every magic solution was an abstruse circuitry of ulterior motives and flummery. And beneath that, in the infinite regress of Russian dolls nesting in coffins of themselves, the invisible strings of the universe oscillated dizzily. He felt a buzzy anxiety about what lay ahead.

  Reed faced a sunset view of the plant. The cooling towers were billowing away, breathing with vigor and optimism, as if the energetic outlook at the beginning of the Cold War was caught in a time warp. It was still a marvel, Reed thought. The Cascade had never been shut down for a moment since it was activated in 1953. The gas had to keep moving or it would solidify and clog the pipes. But the pipes were possibly lined with exotic spices that lingered, clinging like shrink-wrap. In order for plutonium to be washed away, half of it had to be washed away, and then half of that. It was Zeno’s paradox. If the turtle traveled from A to B by halves, it would never arrive. It was turtles all the way, Reed thought, remembering, with a pang, Julia’s laugh. He knew he always got Zeno and Aesop mixed up, but he figured they were drinking buddies back in the B.C. years. Plutonium had a half-life of twenty-four thousand years. Maybe Zeno meant time, not space. Reed knew he was toying with his own mind.

  Skirting the security stations, he rode past the green ponds, the glistening lagoons, the fouled ditches marked with yellow tape. There were no frogs or fish in the ponds; they had been killed to keep people from eating them. After some deformed frogs had been found a few years before, the NO FISHING signs were erected. He remembered seeing a newspaper photograph of a frog with one eye and a stunted extra leg—something like a formless pouch with toes. At the time, he simply thought deformed frogs were common. But how could he have pretended this place was anything but a malignant jungle? He trembled with sadness—this violation, a crude intrusion into a natural place that he held to be sacred.

  The history of the place was swathed in fog. He would take a risk to do a good job, but if he ever suspected he was being manipulated, Reed was not an easy buddy. And he felt responsible. He had played a part in ruining this wilderness.

  As he entered Fort Wolf, he stopped and removed his helmet. With the hot breeze flying through his hair, he roared through the refuge toward the levee. Suddenly, it was as though he’d never been there before. The scenery, while familiar, took on an unfamiliar air, as if every leaf held a toxic secret. The weather had been dry, and the poison ivy vines were already turning red; river birches were shedding their leaves. The ironweed was in oblivious bloom, patches of purple against a multitude of shy faces of Queen Anne’s lace folding inward as if they couldn’t bear the presence of a transuranic.

  The summer growth of poison ivy and greenbrier and blackberry bushes hugged the shoulders of the road, but deeper into the refuge he located a familiar grassy clearing—one of his favorite camping spots. A shot of late sun yellowed the greenery. He could see one of the a
mmo bunkers in the distance. Chemicals from the manufacture of TNT had seasoned the soil, and newer, hotter elements from the plant added to the stew.

  One could write a history of modern war from this corner of the earth, he thought. The TNT and the chemicals used in the shells of World War II, the nuclear fuel of the Cold War, and later the D.U. metal for bullets and tanks of the high-tech, “clean” wars—clean, except for uranium oxide spraying in all directions when the bullets hit, along with a dozen other pollutants that were the subtext of the clean wars. His close proximity to an enormous history made him quaver. Reed had lived with the Cold War, like a cold serving of nameless meat on his plate. The image of his grandfather ill in a tent near here long ago flashed through his mind. His dad in a chemical bath. Reed here, on this ground, his body hastening to join them.

  As he made his camp, he was aware of a quintet of deer bedding down not far away. They had probably scattered when his bike approached, but now they had returned, out of habit. He was only a boy, with his uncles, when he killed a deer, years ago, out here at the refuge. He shot the deer in the morning, at dawn, a youngish buck with a hardly creditable rack. In his eagerness, he shot the first animal he saw, not stopping to reflect. His aim was luck. That night he glimpsed several deer feeding in the light of the full moon, their tawny coats shining silver, the highlights leaping like fish. The beauty of that moment overcame him, irrationally and strangely, and he decided that it was wrong to kill any animal that fed by the light of the moon.

  Now from the levee he could see the lights and stacks of the chemical company far across the water. The land on both sides of the river was flat as truck beds; the dangerous eddies near the shore kept revelers away. He counted seabirds—squatters on the levee—parked downstream at a respectful distance from him. Staring ahead at the lights and the dark water, facing a world in motion, he thought he knew his own mind.

  Surely, he thought, the scientists did not think of themselves as monsters. They were thinking of the safety of the atomic workers; they wanted to know what the body and the planet could tolerate; they wanted to find peaceful uses for their deadly discoveries; they offered the gift of nuclear medicine to the future. With enough good intentions, Reed thought, you could find yourself giving atomic cocktails to poor women or irradiating the testes of prisoners; you could inject a child’s leg bone with a purply, sticky, shape-shifting gel.

  At the campsite, he pegged his tattered pup tent and hunkered down beside it. Minutes passed and he still posed—like The Thinker, he thought. His mind was virtually blank. His strength was sapped, and his surroundings seemed no longer nourishing or uplifting as in the past. He could feel his anxiety about Julia worming across the borders of his consciousness.

  He had thought they were together again. But maybe it was only the sex. The strain between them had begun much earlier, long before the news about the rampant radioactivity. He always suspected that she didn’t want to be involved with a cell rat. The chemicals had disturbed her, and from the beginning she had been uneasy about his gun collection, which had not made her feel protected at all. Dangerous chemicals and guns weren’t the best props for courtship, he realized. They weren’t wine and flowers. What did being a romantic wooer mean? In taking her out to the slag dumps and the munitions works, he had foolishly created an impression of himself as a reckless, maniacal, redneck suicidal gun-nut. No, that wasn’t true. He was beating himself up.

  He felt small for his defensiveness, for his reliance on the plant, even for his good-natured acceptance of the plant’s culture of secrecy. Julia would say that if the government was capable of injecting people with plutonium and not telling them it was plutonium, how could he trust the plant—owned and regulated by the government—to be truthful about the toxic waste? But that was too simple, he knew. The plant had been generous to its workers, he reiterated to himself now, as if he were arguing with her. But that was a lame thought, like reaching in desperation for the smallest evidence of love. Everything was more complicated, a tapestry of histories and individuals. You can’t just wrench yourself out of your history, he imagined telling Julia. And she shot right back at him, Of course you can.

  But when she said he was holding something back, Julia had fired her wad straight into his passivity, into the whole community’s forgiving myopia. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, she remarked once, apropos of nothing he could detect. The phrase rang a bell, as if someone important had said it. Now it caused a heavy turmoil inside him, but he resisted, daring to visit the thought in the hope that it could give him strength. He thought of the line of loyalties—the labors of his grandfather who helped imagine the plant into being, toiling right here at this river’s shore, without an inkling that he was helping to start the seeds of destruction in an atomic hothouse. And his father had sacrificed his life. Reed had to honor that. Didn’t Julia see that? It was the same as if a father had died in a war; the widow and mother and all around them would say: he died for his country.

  I t was still light when Reed heard the rumble of a small motor. It was an ATV. He and his son used to ride their four-wheelers out here. He felt a twinge of regret that he and Dalton hadn’t continued to share outdoor sports after he was grown. In the space of three seconds Reed imagined a full-blown scene, Dalton riding up and making camp with him, sharing a beer with him.

  Its lights sweeping the foliage, the four-wheeler stopped at Reed’s camp.

  “Howdy!” said a young guy in green cargo pants and military boots. His Aussie bush hat shaded his face. He cut the engine and lights on his ATV and stood in the fading daylight. “Fine night, huh?”

  “Fine,” Reed said.

  The guy, inexplicably wearing a dagger on a studded leather belt, seemed to step out of a movie. He said, “I lost my dog and I’ve been looking everywhere.”

  “That’s rough,” Reed said. “I haven’t seen or heard any dogs around. What kind?”

  “A little beagle. I lose him about half the time.”

  “He probably can’t keep up with you on this four-wheeler.”

  “Oh, I let him ride some. Them dogs is the craziest fools to get lost I’ve ever seen. That’s the third one I’ve lost out here. We were out hunting. My truck’s way on the other side of the channel.”

  “Don’t you know there’s a ban on hunting here now?” Reed didn’t see a rifle or shotgun.

  “Oh, they said that last year, but I figure this is a pretty big place.”

  “What’s your dog’s name?”

  “Little-Bit. He loves beans. When we’re out, he’ll eat a whole can of beans and wienies.”

  “Well, I’ll keep an eye out for him,” Reed said. “If it was my dog I’d trail him to the ends of the earth.”

  “Let me give you my phone number, in case you find him.”

  The guy searched his pocket for scribbling tools. Reed found the nub of a pencil in his gearbox. The guy wrote his phone number on the back of a gasoline receipt.

  “My name’s Cobb,” he said. “Cobb Kilgore.”

  “Glad to know you, Cobb,” said Reed.

  He did not give his own name. It annoyed him that the guy might abandon his dog. He tucked the receipt into the jumble in the gearbox. Then, seeing that Cobb Kilgore wasn’t rushing off, Reed said, “What’s with the dagger?”

  “Do you ever go to the Renaissance Festival?”

  “I saw something about it in the paper.”

  “It’s coming up in June, over at the lake. I wear a medieval costume and play a part.” Kilgore did a little whoop of self-mockery. “My character’s named Lance, and I wear a costume—a half-sleeved tunic, with a hood, and tights, and Three-Musketeer boots. And I carry a leather pouch.” He laughed. “My sister calls it a purse, but it’s not.” He touched the weapon at his side. “I’ve got several daggers, but they only let you carry one and you have to keep it sheathed. And I’ve got a chain-mail helmet. Oh, this stuff gets involved. And you have to learn this old language. You have to talk li
ke they did in the old days in England.”

  “Prithee?” Reed said. “Gadzooks? Methinks?”

  “Yeah! I’m not very good at it, but there’s a lady that helps me. She goes to the festival in this long dress with the top bare down to the nipples. In fact, there’s a whole slew of gals at this fair in low-cut gowns. They could be selling biscuits or fried pies and they’ll be in these fancy dresses with their boobs hanging out.”

  “Sounds like those Civil War reenactments,” Reed said. He expected to see a flanged mace or a spiked flail in the arsenal of this warrior.

  “It’s just a chance to enjoy history. We play war games. And we have a wild boar hunt with spears. It’s like going to a pay ranch where you can shoot antelopes and zebras. I did that one year and got an antelope for my den. What I like best is the Highland games. I’m Scots-Irish and it’s a chance to strut around with a little Celtic pride.”

  “Didn’t the English run the Scots over to Ireland?” Reed asked. “How come you’re old England in one place and Scots-Irish in another?”

  “Oh, it was so long ago. We got over it.” He laughed. “Now we’re one big happy family.”

  “We’re all hooked up together in the Great Human Family Tree,” Reed said, hoping that would be the last word. But Kilgore burbled on for a while about the wars of his ancestors. They knew there would always be war, Reed thought.

  The light was growing dim. It was past sunset. “Well, I better go find my dog,” Kilgore said at last.

  Reed built a small fire, opened the still-warm lasagna, and ate, alone with the shrill, erratic sounds of the night. A line of a song from a distant radio was audible for a moment and then it faded. He studied a patch of sky above. He thought he could make out Jupiter, but Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto—that nefarious trio—were out at the boundary of the solar system, unnoticeable, like the little invisibles on his computer.