Literary Orphans

A Story Out of Time
by Jane Hammons

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His colleague, Enrico Fermi, calculated a one in one hundred chance of incinerating the state of New Mexico. His brother, Frank, designed escape routes out of the desert. White thunderheads gathered over the mountains near El Paso. Darker ones rolled in from the west. A thick cloud stretched across the face of the sun, obliterating Oppenheimer’s shadow. When it moved on, Oppie saw his shadow, taut, stretched thin as a wire. He half expected it to snap. Disintegrate. No escape route offered itself. He had to have faith that things would go as planned. The Bhagavad-Gita told him man was a creature whose substance is his faith. What his faith is, he is. Oppie recited the sonnet by John Donne that had become his prayer over the past week.

            Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you

            As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

            That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me; and bend

            Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new . . .

Three-personed God. Trinity. The name of his project in the Jornada del Muerto. The anxiety that Oppenheimer shared with the men back at the camp had grown so intense over the past three days that conversation had turned from implosion, detonators, and test-towers to God, peace, and rebirth. The excitement of discovery, the anticipation of new scientific worlds, was tainted with fear and the dread of failure. As he walked back to camp, Oppenheimer’s beloved three-personed God of the blessed Trinity forced him to contemplate Cerberus, the three-headed dog who paced before the gates of Hell.

 

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Waiting for night to fall, Oppenheimer paced back and forth across the wooden floor of the makeshift Trinity housing. Around midnight he settled into a creaky folding chair. Sleep rattled through him. He awoke at 1:00 a.m. agonizing about the possible postponement. The prolonged suspense of the last three days had become unbearable. He put on a jacket and his pork pie hat, got into his jeep and drove to the site. The rain let up. The 100-foot tower pierced the atmosphere. Earlier in the afternoon, the bomb had been hoisted to the top of the tower in its specially built housing where it now waited to be tested.

Coyote pranced on his hind legs, wagging his long pink tongue at Oppenheimer, anxious to make mischief. He did cartwheels behind Oppie who stood beside the jeep staring into the sky. Shaking his brushy tail, Coyote did what he was supposed to do and howled at the hidden moon, beckoning it to come out and chase the rain away.

Ignorant of Coyote’s antics, Oppenheimer drove back to his hut and waited, for the weather to change. 4:00 a.m. Rain stopped falling. Winds calmed. Humidity stabilized at 80 percent.  Clouds broke. Scattered. The time was right.

Oppenheimer huddled together with Groves, Greisen, Bainbridge, Rabi,  Kistiakowsky, Allison, and all the others who had a vote. One dissenter could call it off.  The decision was made. 5:30 a.m.  Go.

General Groves dropped Oppenheimer at the nearest observation point, 10,000 yards south of the tower where he had stood contemplating his scientific future only hours before. Oppie clutched a post to steady himself.

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At different observation points physicists, military men, government observers, and other members of the crew lay face down on the desert floor waiting for Joe McKibben to throw the switch.

In his mind, Oppenheimer took control and pulled the switch back three times before the moment when McKibben threw the real one that set off the automatic timer.

“Now,” Sam Allison cried over the radio.

A brilliant yellow flash lit the desert. The new dawn broke. A furious ball of red and orange whipped itself into a swirling, fiery column, several hundred feet thick. A violet ring hovered, spitting bits of blue and purple back into the atmosphere.Then the halo vanished, leaving only a sinister gray cloud splashed with pieces of the yellow morning sun that sputtered to reassert itself.

“I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.” The man nearest Oppenheimer stepped away.

A thunderous rumble cracked through the mountains and dunes like applause.  Mesquite, agave and cholla quieted their rustling leaves. Snakes and lizards averted their cool reptilian gaze. Roadrunners and cactus wrens froze, poised for escape. Jackrabbits and desert rats sniffed for scent of the enemy.

A mist of vapor rose. Where the steel tower had cradled the bomb, a crater yawned. Through the fused green sand, crystalline worms emerged: first creatures of the new earth.

 

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This was the day. She knew it was the day. Broken light shattered the sky, cracked the earth. The sweet murmuring voices of others banished to the dunes in the white desert shrieked like wind whipping through a canyon. The tender arms that had tried to protect her withered. The dune that held her crumbled. She fell out into the desert.

She shook the sand out of her long white hair. Her hair had always been as white as these sands. Her Mother’s people feared her because of it and she was cast out. Around the campfire where Salamander danced in the burning logs, men told this story.

            One day when the sun burned the mountainside, when the air rose in glistening waves to escape the scorched surface of the earth, her Mother took a walk in the stream, cooling her feet, splashing water over her legs. On this day, Salamander slipped down from the moist crevices between the smooth flat rocks and crawled into the woman’s wet darkness. Her Mother welcomed the cool creature as it slithered up her leg and wriggled inside her, making her shimmer as it melted forming the child that came out of her, too white, whiter than the larvae of grub worms, not red like the people of earth.

Salamander Child became her name, and when her womanblood came, the people who feared her feared she would make more of herself. When this time came for other girls, they got a blessing. They mixed the blood with the earth, the earth with the blood. But for Salamander Child there had been no blessing, only the ceremony of sending away.

That is how she came to the desert that blistered her skin and turned her body into pain. The others invited her beneath the desert where cool caverns dripped with water. Her skin, always smooth and crystalline, now it puckered and wrinkled, stretched too tight across her hands where thick purple veins pulsed like bloody ropes. The shadow that stretched before her in the fractured light was bent like hooks used for fishing. When she tried to straighten it, her back ached, her bones as fragile as icicles.

The sky above her billowed filled with smoke. She didn’t remember it that way. Still it stung her as ants once had when she’d sat on the large anthill in the canyon where Her Mother collected the red earth she used to make her pots. Her Mother was famous for her seed pots, chipped with flecks of mica. Eyes of Her Mother. That’s what people asked for when they came to buy the pots. Fragments of memory fell about her.

She shoved her stinging hands into the deep pockets of her skirt. The black onyx Salamander, a gift from Her Mother, slithered between her fingers, up and down her arms, cooling her as she began to walk.

 

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Back at the campsite, Oppenheimer met with the men who were to write the first reports on the conditions of the desert immediately after the explosion. “Ready?” he asked Jack Warren, a Berkeley man like himself, and Alvin Doak, a local geologist on loan from the army base in Alamogordo. Oppenheimer was not impressed by Alvin’s intelligence, nor did he like the fact that he was military, but unlike anyone else who was part of the project, Alvin had grown up in the area. He had a valuable perspective.

“Yes, sir.” Jack was anxious to begin making his contribution to Oppenheimer’s project. Rumors about what was happening in Los Alamos had been circulating for months in Berkeley, and Jack was proud to be part of the famous team.

Alvin spat tobacco juice on the ground near Oppenheimer’s feet. He didn’t trust Oppenheimer, nor did he appreciate the fact that his home had been turned into a test site. He had joined the Army to go to war, but his background had landed him at the Trinity base camp. What could he see that they couldn’t? If they needed him to tell them that explosion of the bomb had turned the sand around the test tower into green crystals and that it probably would do the same to any people it was dropped on, then he figured his degree from New Mexico State was worth as much as theirs from Harvard, Berkeley, Leipzig and Göttingen.  He gave Oppenheimer a half-assed salute.

The military gesture annoyed Oppenheimer, as did the fact that Alvin had spat tobacco juice upon the ground. Oppie turned to go back to his hut where he could smoke his pipe while waiting for the first reports.

“Finicky bastard,” said Alvin, as he and Jack headed out into the desert.

“He’s a genius.” Jack didn’t like Alvin any more than Oppenheimer did. “He may have just solved the whole world’s problems.”

“Or created them,” Alvin said.

 

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The men drove away from camp without speaking. Jack was prepared to see strange things in the desert, but not an old woman dressed in a brilliant turquoise blouse and dark red skirt. “What the hell!” He slammed on the brakes and pulled the pickup to the side of the road.

As the two men got out of the truck, the old woman shrank from them. Their energy radiated, reaching for her the way a frog’s sticky tongue trapped insects.

“You speak English? Understand me?” Jack asked.

Salamander Child did understand the words that came out of the man’s mouth. She believed that if she wanted to make similar noises, she could.

“Water?” she asked.

Alvin reached for the canvas bag strapped to the side of the pickup and handed it to her. “How long have you been out here? Are you all right?”

The woman drank from the bag then poured water over her head and shoulders, rubbing her white skin hard as if she were trying to scrape something off it.

Alvin peered more closely at the old woman. Her clothes looked like Indian dress. But her skin was whiter than the skin of any white person he had ever seen. “Do you think the blast did that to her?”

“Jesus, man, didn’t you ever take biology?” Jack laughed. “She’s albino. See how pink her eyes are? It occurs in all races and in animals, too.”

“I thought you people moved folks out of here before you blew the place up?”

“Oppie has had more important things on his mind. We’re trying to end a war here, goddamn it. Save people. Whole countries.”

“Yeah, and the people you kill and the land you destroy along the way be damned. Come on, ma’am,” Alvin said, taking Salamander Child gently by the elbow.

“You get in the truck out of this sun.”

Salamander Child hesitated then climbed into the back of the truck.

“No, ma’am,” said Alvin, patting the seat next to the window. “Here.”

“Let her ride wherever she wants,” said Jack. He didn’t want to admit it but the old woman spooked him, too. “I think we better take her back and let Oppie have a look.”

Alvin got in the truck. As soon as this project was done, he was going back to his father’s ranch near Tularosa to raise cattle. “Yeah, maybe he can put her in that building where you Berkeley people kept that Ishi fella. Study her some. Experiment on her.”

Jack glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the old woman trying to keep her balance as she huddled into a corner of the truck, her face buried in the folds of her skirt. Anxious as he was to be rid of her, he slowed down.

Oppenheimer was surprised to see the truck returning so soon. “Forget something?” He loped toward the truck waving his large brown hat in his hand. He stopped cold when he saw the old woman in the back of the jeep. The thunderbolt flashes of yellow and red that streaked across her turquoise blouse reminded him of the flashes he had seen in the sky. Wisps of her white hair spun out like a web trying to ensnare him. “Who is that?”

His shrill voice frightened Jack and Alvin who had seen Oppenheimer in the most challenging phase of his life, but had never even seen him express fear.

Oppie looked into the old woman’s eyes. They sparkled like those of a child. He looked closer and saw her age, age without wisdom or experience, and he knew that she was his creation. “Take her away.”

“Shouldn’t we keep her here?” asked Jack. “We haven’t written our report.”

“She’s not to be part of your report.”

As Jack took his foot off the brake and prepared to leave, the old woman motioned Oppenheimer to the side of the truck. She reached into the deep pocket of her red skirt and grabbed Salamander with one hand. The other, she extended to Oppenheimer, who reluctantly took it, thinking she wanted to shake his hand. But the old woman turned his palm up and set Salamander loose in his hand. Salamander skittered  about for a few seconds before exploding into a million particles of black dust.

 

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During the two months that had passed since Fat Man and Little Boy were dropped on Japan, Oppenheimer had struggled to find words that would portray the future as he saw it. In his resignation speech at tomorrow’s ceremony, he was expected to address the triumphant end to the war.

As a scientist he could speak to his hypothesis. Thesis. Experiment. Result. It was the little nameless bomb dropped from Trinity’s tower that was his success. It had proved true what he thought to be true. But it was Fat Man and Little Boy that people wanted to hear about.

He watched his son play on the floor at his feet. He seldom thought about his children, but tonight they distracted him from the speech he was trying to write. Born in Pasadena, a place untouched by war, the boy, he thought, would be safe. Normal. It was the baby who shared her birthplace with their two maniacal siblings, Fat Man and Little Boy, who he worried about. December 7, 1944, three years to the day that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, this little jewel was born on the Hill down the hall from men who suffered radiation burns, stomach pains, vomit-scarred esophagi and other conditions that no one knew how to treat.  Unlike any generation of children before them, his would grow up in a world that nurtured itself on the milk of its own extinction.

The boy looked up from the building blocks he had been carefully arranging into the tall A-shaped tower he had seen models of in his father’s office. He liked to make things, too. If he could get his hands on a knife, he could whittle animals out of wood. And he liked the wooden building blocks that came in different shapes. His father’s tower had drawn him away from home. They were all moving away now. But in summers they could come back to Agua Caliente. He’d learned to hook a line a few months ago. And he could hike and ride. His father liked those things, too. He would teach his sister when she got older. The boy walked over to the playpen where his mother kept the baby who grabbed one of the wooden bars and gripped it tightly, pulling herself up until she could grip the top of the playpen where she wobbled on unsteady legs.

Oppenheimer watched the boy hover over his sister and called out his son’s name.

Startled by the unfamiliar sound of his father’s voice, the boy grabbed his sister and held her in the protective embrace of his arms. She bumped her nose on the crib and began to cry.

Oppie looked to his wife, but she was passed out in her chair, a magazine open on her lap, a sticky near-empty tumbler of whiskey on the coffee table. Unsure what to do he lifted the baby out of her pen and smiled at the boy, who thought his father looked like the skull candies sold at stores in October, treats for El Dia de los Muertos, a celebration that would begin in a couple of weeks. The boy returned to his blocks and continued building the tower until he heard his mother ask, “Finished your speech?”

He got up and whispered into his sister’s ear, “Shheesheshursheech.” And the baby laughed. He was glad his mother nodded back off. He hated picking up the things she knocked over when she stumbled off to bed.

Oppenheimer put his children to bed for the last time in the house they had inhabited for the two years they lived on the Hill. He stepped around boxes of clothes, papers, toys, the things they would take with them when they left tomorrow.

“Tell me a story,” his son begged, voice heavy with sleep. “Horses and coyotes. Red dirt and blue skies.”

From her crib, the baby did the best she could to echo her brother’s demand.

Oppie didn’t know many stories suitable for bedtime. He listened to the wind blow through the canyons. On it came a story of the people from the red earth.

            One day the Dark Upper cast out the sun and spat it upon the earth. Spider Woman gathered the children together so they would not be burned. She called to Her Mother for help. And Her Mother took them all down into the canyon to the red earth where she fired and shaped them, giving them Her Eyes of mica so that they might see when they reached the Dark Upper.

            Coyote wanted to play, too, so he gave Spider Woman a seed pot. First, he told her—and he was laughing for Coyote likes to play jokes—she must find Salamander who had been burned in the white desert in the Long Ago Fire.  Spider Woman twitched and twiddled, spinning a web, stalling for time. She hoped to catch Coyote in a lie and stop his foolish nonsense. She had no desire to make a trip to the white desert. But Coyote danced over and under her sparkling threads. He would not be taken in. The earth grew hotter and hotter. Coyote danced faster and faster, howling his story out into the Dark Upper. Then, he told her—and he cackled, for he could see that Spider Woman thought he was a liar—she must find the girl child who could deliver the seed pot filled with Salamander’s ashes to the Sky God.

            Spider Woman was angry that Coyote had been chosen to give her this task. She thought him an unworthy fool. But she began her journey, spinning her way from tree to tree and from bush to bush until she reached the white sand.  Then she took the seed pot from her back and began to gather Salamander’s ashes, grumbling as she went. This chore might take a very long time. But if she could put them all into the seed pot and find the girl child who could deliver them to the Sky God then the Dark Upper would gather the sun back in, and the earth would not be burned. Spider Woman had never heard of the Sky God and feared he was nothing but a joke Coyote had decided to play on her. Nonetheless, she scurried on, leaving tiny tracks in the sand.

“Quite a speech,” said Kitty from the doorway.

Startled, Oppenheimer lost the thread of the story.

“Finish,” the boy cried, “before Spider Woman runs out of time.”

Oppenheimer fought for the words, but it was a different story that came to him. The time will come when mankind will curse the name of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. “I have to finish my speech,” he said and hurried from the room.

The boy turned his back to his mother as she sat on the edge of his bed.

Kitty made no attempt to fill the silence with cheerful words of reassurance, light melodies offering peaceful slumber, prayers promising safe passage through the night. For the rest of their lives these flesh and blood Oppenheimer children would compete for attention with the obscene furies spat from the sky.

She got up to close the window and picked up the seed pot that sat alone on the boy’s bookshelf. She had once owned many just like it. Her Mother’s Eyes, the man at the store called them. When the war ended, she had sent them all out as gifts, tokens of beauty from this wretched place, as if they could somehow prevent people from knowing what her husband had made here. She placed the small seed pot back on the bookshelf. She did not know where it had come from. She had packed everything in the room earlier in the day. But she knew that it was not hers to keep, just as surely as her husband knew that the story he had been telling was not his to finish.

 

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The University of California marching band blasted Berkeley’s fight song out into the mountainside. The brilliant autumn sun flashed off the brass instruments, temporarily blinding Oppenheimer as he took his seat, feeling ridiculous, as though he were preparing for kickoff. Once the band finished, Oppenheimer bowed his head and listened to the army chaplain’s invocation for God to bless all universities and especially the University of California. The words sounded foolish to Oppenheimer. What words could persuade God, any god, to bless the current state of the world?

Oppenheimer rose to give his speech. Whatever sporting event the band had evoked in the minds of those present disappeared when they looked into his haunted face. “If atomic bombs are to be added to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the name of Los Alamos and Hiroshima,” he began.

In the audience, the boy fidgeted. The people around him looked away from his father. No one could stand the sight of the gaunt man who cursed them all when he said the names aloud. Together.

Los Alamos.

Hiroshima.

In those words were other words.

            One day the sun burned the mountainside. The air rose in shimmering waves. Her Mother took a walk in the stream.

“The peoples of this world must unite, or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand.”

The baby whimpered. The boy watched Coyote hop across the platform, dancing a jig. Coyote’s ankles were decorated with colorful bands and bells that made a silly noise of his father’s speech. When the boy laughed, his mother rested her hand on his leg, a signal for him to shush.

“Other men have spoken them, in other times, in other wars, or other weapons. They have not prevailed. There are some, misled by a false sense of human history, who hold that they will not prevail today.”

Coyote danced faster and faster, jingling his bells. The boy clapped his hands in time to Coyote’s music.

“It is not for us to believe that.”

Kitty squeezed the boy’s leg so hard it both hurt and kind of tickled. He pulled away from her, laughing out loud as Coyote brushed his fuzzy tail across Kitty’s face and licked her ankles before he scooted under her chair.

            “By our words we are committed, committed to a world united, before this common peril, in law and in humanity.”

The audience waited politely for the rest of the speech, but it was over. With little enthusiasm, a few clapped. Angry, those who had waited for Oppie to crow in victory, made not a sound. Coyote howled at them, mocking their silence.

The boy and the baby girl got busy collecting the words. Their father’s words, Coyote’s words, words whispered from the falling leaves, words muttered by those around them, words the blue jays screeched from the trees above. They’d pack them up and take them everywhere they went. They’d put the words together—out of order, out of time—and finish the story their father had failed to tell.

 

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Jane Hammons teaches writing at UC Berkeley. Her writing appears in several anthologies including Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer (W. W. Norton); The Maternal is Political (Seal Press); and California Prose Directory: New Writing from the Golden State (Outpost 19). A collection of short stories was recently short listed for The Scott Prize by Salt Publishing. She has published in a variety of magazines and journals, such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Columbia Journalism Review, San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Southwestern American Literature and Word Riot.

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–Art by Winoka Begay

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