Joseph Kanon - Los Alamos

“No tricks?”

“No tricks. You’d be doing me a favor. And your friends. Nobody wants to turn the place upside down.”

The soldier stuck out his hand and took Connolly’s. “Christ, I don’t believe I’m doing this. What does this make me, an undercover cop?”

Connolly smiled. “Well, you’ve got the handshake down.”

“Nobody knows about this, promise?”

Connolly nodded. “By the way, what’s your name? So I don’t have to look it up.”

“Batchelor.” He grinned. “Yeah, I know. Some joke. Maybe it was in the stars. Okay, I’ll let you know if I come up with anything. But don’t get your hopes up. I’m right about this.”

“Just out of curiosity, do you always know?”

“Well, sometimes you hope. It would be nice to be wrong about you, for instance.”

Connolly was shocked, then laughed, caught off-guard. “Am I supposed to be flattered?”

“No, I think that about lots of people,” he said, waving his hand in a mock salute as he left.

Connolly watched him for a minute, then turned toward the dormitory. He felt cheered by the meeting, as if a road sign had been replaced, finally sending him on his way instead of around in circles. But now there was the deflation of having to begin over. Los Alamos began with a secret and now it seemed it lived on them, one layer wrapped around another. He wished for a minute to be back at the movie, where everything was before you, a shining self-contained surface that stopped at the edge of the screen, hiding nothing.

The car was still covered in early morning dew, a film of rime catching the pale light, but she came out in hiking shorts, her long legs shivering in the cold. She threw her knapsack in the back as she motioned him to the passenger seat.

“Are you trying to be provocative?” he said.

“Come on,” she said quietly. “It’s bloody freezing. I want to get the heater going.”

“Next time you could wear nothing at all.”

“You’d like that, would you?” she said, pulling the car away and heading west. “You’d be surprised how fast it heats up here. It’ll be boiling in a few hours. Any trouble getting away?”

“Not when you write your own passes.”

She grinned at him and he saw that she was excited, as if they were children ducking out of school and the day an adventure.

“Where are you going? The gate’s that way.” He pointed behind them.

“West gate. We’ll take the back road-it’s faster.”

“Oh.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said, thinking about the investigation. “I just forgot there was another gate. I’ve never been there.”

“You haven’t missed much.”

In fact it was much smaller than the east entrance, with a single sleepy MP at the barrier, stifling a yawn as he checked the passes and waved them through.

“There’s tea in the Thermos. Hope you don’t mind, but I hate drinking coffee all day.”

“As long as it’s hot.”

They turned right onto Route 4 and climbed higher into the mountains, the mist burning away from dense green forests of pine and aspen. The heater blasted at their feet, a cocoon of warmth, and tiny streams of condensation streaked off the hood of the car.

“You brought coupons?” she asked.

“Isn’t that what I’m here for?”

“It’ll do for a start.”

“How far is this place, anyway, or are we just going to a hotel?”

“Miles and miles. It’ll take the morning, so just sit back and relax. Oh, but wait till you see it. It’s marvelous-nothing like it anywhere.”

He watched her drive, remembering the trip back from Tesuque, when he first thought it would be possible. They kept climbing, the sun rising with them, so that when they finally reached the high ridge the land was flooded with light. Aside from one rusty pickup truck with goats in the back, headed toward Santa Fe, theirs was the only car on the road. Connolly rolled down the window, breathing in a rush of fresh air, and looked out across an immense valley of grass. A handful of cattle were grazing, clotting the rippling fields like miniatures in a diorama, the grass arranged in folds of green velvet. A series of peaks surrounded the bowl. It was a world away from the Rio Grande Valley, with its low, twisted conifers and dry riverbeds.

“That’s the Valle Grande,” she said, nodding to the right. “Except it isn’t. It’s really a caldera-you know, the top of a volcano. It stretches for miles back there, beyond those hills. It just kept bubbling and falling in until you had this great lake of lava. And now this. It’s wonderful riding. Oppie likes to come here-you can really let the horses out. Down the other side you’re always running into arroyos, but up here, well—”

She trailed off, letting him watch the view.

“You spend much time with Oppenheimer?”

“A little. Not lately. Last year it was easier, things weren’t quite so tense.”

“Like him?”

She considered. “Yes. Oh, it can be a bit much, all that man-of-destiny business, but I suppose he is, really.”

“He’s difficult to read.”

“Everyone’s difficult.”

“Are you?”

She laughed. “Ask anybody.”

They were in the high mountains now, the trees close, with patches of alpine wildflowers dotting the clearings by the road. She was driving fast, putting distance between them and the Hill as if they were racing horses across the caldera. The car throbbed a little as they climbed, then galloped across the open stretches.

“Do you still have to go away?” she said.

“No. They made a mistake. I’m back to square one.”

She took her eyes off the road for a second to look over at him. “Is that such a bad place to be?”

“Not at the moment,” he said, smiling. “Trouble is, you can’t stay there.”

“No,” she said. “But maybe for a little while.”

She put her hand on his thigh, nothing more than a comforting pat, but it jumped at the touch, an involuntary spasm. The reaction made her laugh. “My,” she said, withdrawing her hand.

Connolly felt teased, embarrassed to be so sensitive to her. “You can put it back if you like.”

“Mmm. Maybe later,” she said. “You’ll need your strength for the hike. Where’d you get the boots, by the way?”

“Borrowed.” He was going to tell her about Bruner’s closet, the disconcerting moment when the boots fit, as if he had learned something new about him, but Karl had been left behind at Los Alamos. There wasn’t room for anyone else in the car.

“How do you manage this?” he said. “Being away. With your neighbors, I mean.”

“Eileen? Oh, she doesn’t think anything of it. I’m always going off. It’s my project, you see. That’s the great thing about the Hill-everyone’s trained not to ask. So they don’t.”

“What does she think you’re doing?”

“What I am doing-studying Indians. Whatever that means. Actually, I don’t think she cares, really. She just swans around in blissful ignorance.”

“Listening at walls.”

She giggled. “Well, that’s something different, isn’t it?”

“What about your husband?”

“I left him a note,” she said quickly, not wanting to talk about it. “In case he’s back early.” Then, as if shifting into second, “God, it’s good to get away, isn’t it? Look at this morning.”

So he let it go, glancing out the window at the shafts of light through the trees, thinking about Los Alamos. Everything was secure, so nothing was noticed. Then Los Alamos faded away too, left behind in a rush of miles and the bright, sharp air. They were heading west, where the day, even the landscape, was new.

They drove for a long time without talking, as comfortable with the silence as an old couple, and then he sensed the gradual beginning of the descent. The dips seemed longer now, the road twisting to skirt the uneven hills. The speed they’d kept on the high ridge began to seem faster, hurtling them toward curves so that Emma was forced to brake to check the pull of gravity down the other slope. They raced up the sides of hills, unable to see over the top, pausing carefully before the downward plunge. The views were closed in, a series of hollows and bends. It reminded him of mountain roads in the East, up and down waves of hills.