“Greta honey?” Brian had reappeared on the dance floor. “Shall we?”
“You’re nuts,” I told handsome. “Leave my girlfriend alone and you get one dance.”
“Brenda—”
“Go, Greta. I’ll be fine.”
By degrees she turned away, until Brian drew her close and they started to sway. When I raised my right arm as if to waltz, handsome took it and led me to the edge of the dance floor. It was less crowded, not as loud. Then he lifted my arm again and took my hand, resting the sling of his right arm on my hip, and we did a little side to side. I intended to say not one word. I hoped it would be a short song.
He studied his shoes a minute, not much of a dancer. For all his zeal, we were barely moving. When he raised his face again, the downpour began.
“My name is Chris Beatty, I was between you and Frank in school but, Brenda, I always thought you were beautiful and spirited and interesting, and I’m an airman now, a pilot assigned overseas, can’t say where, but we were shot down and I dinged my arm, four surgeries, they sent me home to heal up so they can get me back to the war . . .”
He paused to breathe before charging ahead.
“. . . and I’ve not been up to much but annoying my ma and tormenting my little sis who is in tenth grade, until tonight when some buddies dragged me here—”
He glanced past me, over my shoulder as if to spot his pals and prove that he was telling the truth, but then he continued like he was running downhill and his legs got going too fast. What girl wouldn’t be flattered? It was adorable.
“. . . I saw you across the room early on, and, Brenda, I’ve spent the whole night going back and forth do you talk to a girl when you’re shipping back really soon, do you bother her, but then I remembered the one thing I have learned from this war so far—I mean besides how to fly and navigate and all—one thing that matters, because I learned it the hard way . . .”
At that his voice tightened the slightest bit, not in some masculine fakery, but as though he was about to cry. I felt it, too, in my throat, without knowing what he was going to say. He leaned forward, his body expressing some kind of amazing urgency.
“. . . which is that everyone dies, everybody, I’ve seen buddies do it right before my eyes and the only question is when, what day is your number up, and did you make good use of the time you had . . .”
Then he reached forward before I could think, and hooked one finger in my strand of little-girl pearls. He leaned me ever so slightly toward him, as if to convince me, as if to make me believe.
“. . . but if I let you walk away it might be the last time I see you, ever, so I started across the floor and then your friend stepped in before I could ask you to dance, or talk to me, or ask you please God to marry me, Brenda. Please. Please.”
He wound himself down, he gulped and caught his breath. He released my pearls. A pilot. Who had been shot down. Who knew what he wanted. Who was, now that he stood before me, quite frankly, gorgeous.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I replied. But I rose up on tiptoe to whisper close into the whirl of his ear, “Dance with me now, and we’ll see about the rest.”
22.
Charlie sat in the back of the pickup as it swayed over open terrain, trying not to vomit. Most crewmen perched on the gunwales, like dogs with their heads out the window. A bold few dangled their legs off the tailgate. But Charlie carried another new assembly, so he sat in the truck’s well to protect it, his belly feeling every pitch and yaw.
Meanwhile the summer sun roasted him, the dust dried his lips, and he felt similarly sunburned by the remove he sensed from the crew. No longer did he work with them all day amid the ponderosa. They saw Charlie only when he had something to test.
At last the truck eased to a halt. The driver set the brake, tilting his cowboy hat forward. When it came to napping, Charlie thought, the man was a professional.
Bronsky climbed out on the passenger side, and with his strange fastidious steps to protect his shoes, he minced down to the bowl while unfolding a blueprint. Charlie stood and took deep breaths.
The site boss sniffed in his direction. “Fish.”
“How are you today, sir?”
Instead of answering, he turned at the sound of his director’s boss’s boss calling for a measuring tape. One by one, Bronsky checked the measurements of the munitions circling the bowl—ten piles of TNT, every nest of yellow crystals equidistant from the center and from one another. Crewmen helped as the director called for adjustments of an inch or two in each mound of explosives, while the rest stood well back. To Charlie, they appeared as interested as if they were watching a chef prepare a meal that someone else was going to eat.
He climbed off the truck, cradling the assembly, and shuffled down the slope. The only crewman looking his way was Monroe, who he’d seen as recently as breakfast, his usual garrulous self, but who now greeted Charlie with a discreet nod.
“Fishk,” Bronsky called, eyes on the blueprint. “Do your businesses.”
“Hi, fellas,” Charlie said, ambling out into the bowl. No one replied. He placed the assembly on the ground.
The work absorbed him: unwinding the wires to a safe distance, attaching the detonator. Absently, he began to hum. “Camptown Ladies,” doo-dah, doo-dah. When everything was connected, Charlie waved to the site boss, who as usual sounded his air horn. Rather than telling the boys to move away, as before, now the blast signaled that they might return within visual range, to watch the fireworks.
Bronsky hovered as Charlie connected the assembly to a car battery. “Ready, sir.”
“All clears,” the Russian unit director cried out—the one of his many speech habits that the boys chose to mock behind his back, announcing “all clears” when they finished a meal, chugged a beer, flushed a toilet: “all clears.”
A whole lexicon of ridicule was developing on The Hill. Los Alamos was nicknamed Lost Almost. A girl with shapely hips was known as a Project Y. Every time the water ran out or the power failed, the boys would cry “Shangri-La.” The strangeness of their situation seemed to increase daily. Those who obtained driver’s licenses saw not their name beside the photo, but a number, and their address was “United States Army.”
“God forbid a policeman ever pulls me over,” Giles said. “He’ll think this is a play license.”
There was no police force on The Hill, however, only MPs with open contempt for civilians, their tempers as sullen as hungry teenagers. There was no telephone for personal use either. For radio, there was a station that broadcast on The Hill only. Men world-famous in their scientific fields strode about in dungarees and shirtsleeves, often unshaved, unless a photographer appeared for some reason. The gents would resurface in suits, their faces sleek and fingernails clean. There was one teahouse halfway down the hill, and one restaurant, but it was above the rank and finances of barracks boys. They made do with the rare weekend trip to Santa Fe, riding there and back in drab green Army buses, their wallets full on the way down but empty on the way back, with little to show for the trip but a hangover and the occasional tattoo.
When a fellow staggered back into the barracks, the boys would greet him: “Did you meet any local girls?” Nearly always, he would grin in defeat. “All clears.”