Joseph Kanon - Los Alamos

“You haven’t got any now. I was just curious. Like it?”

The soldier shrugged. “Ain’t nothin’ to do. Beats combat, though, I guess. You read about them Jap dive-bombers? They’re just plain crazy, those people.”

Connolly nodded. “Year’s a long time. You must know everybody up here.”

“I just look at the passes. We don’t get invited to no parties. That’s only for the longhairs.”

“You know Karl Bruner?”

The soldier looked at him, his eyes squinting again in suspicion. “That’s the guy who got himself killed.”

There it was again-Karl’s fault. “Well, somebody killed him. Know him?”

“I knew who he was. I never talked to him or nothing. I heard they got the guy,” he said, a question.

“Yeah, they did. He use this gate much?”

“Off and on.”

“So you’d see him then.”

The soldier shrugged again. “Well, sure, if I was on duty.”

“They told me he liked to drive around.”

“Yeah, in that Buick of his.” So he noticed.

“Did he ever have anyone with him?”

The soldier looked at him, puzzled, as if he hadn’t understood the question.

“Did he?” Connolly asked, pressing.

“Sometimes. You’re asking an awful lot of questions,” he said, cautious again.

“Just one. Who used to go with him?”

The soldier looked away. “Is this some kind of investigation or something? What do you want to know for?”

Connolly stared at him.

“I mean, he’s dead. I don’t want to go making trouble for nobody. That was his business. Now it’s just hers, I guess.”

“Hers?”

“Well, sure. I figured they was just-scootin’ off, you know? None of my business.”

“You’d better make it your business. I mean it. You know who she was? What she looked like? I need to know this.”

The soldier looked flustered. “Well, hell, I thought you did know. I didn’t mean to start nothing.”

“How would I know?”

“Well, I thought she was a friend of yours too.”

Connolly stood still. When he finally spoke, his voice had the low steadiness of a threat. “Are you trying to tell me it was Mrs. Pawlowski?”

The soldier retreated a step. “Well, God Almighty, you kept askin’. Now don’t go and blame me.”

“How many times?” Connolly said, his voice still unnaturally steady.

“A few.”

“Where were they going?”

“Where?” And now his face, no longer frightened, filled with a sly grin, as if the question were irrelevant. “I guess you’ll have to ask her.”

He didn’t see her until the end of the week. He sat listlessly at his desk or lying on Karl’s bed, absorbed in his own mystery. The days were hot and dry, a steady wind scratching at everyone’s nerves. The talk was of drought and an outbreak of chicken pox in the school and the frequent caravans to Trinity. The scientists seemed never to appear, locked full-time in the labs. There were no parties. A fight broke out in one of the enlisted men’s barracks, something to do with an insult taken, but really about the new tension of the work and the constant dry wind that made everything feel as suspended as dust.

Connolly didn’t notice any of it. Something had detonated in him, like one of Kisty’s tests, and he sat shuffling through the pieces, repeating her conversations in his head, wondering what had been meant, what she wanted him to believe. Mills avoided him, sensing the black mood that was smothering him, and when Connolly noticed him at all, it was only as a figure of a more cheerful betrayal. He read through Emma’s file, and Daniel’s, as if they were new characters on the Hill, people he’d never met. Why had she married him? He’d never asked. How many others? The mood festered in him, silently, until the surprise and hurt became pure anger, and when that happened he stopped thinking about anything else.

One day he saw her walking past Ashley Pond and he wanted to run over and take her by the shoulders. Why did you lie to me? But he couldn’t bring himself to ask her, and he realized with a sick feeling in his stomach that it was because he still wanted her. The wind blew her clothes against her and there was that rider’s stride, quick and straightforward, utterly without deceit. But why lie? What had she to do with Karl, with any of it? He drew his imaginary blackboard map, but she didn’t fit anywhere. Instead, she was in another map, an X at Theater-2 and the punch bowl, lines to Santa Fe, to Chaco, to-and he saw that she was everywhere on this personal map, it was about her, everything that had happened to him. Was any of it true? Where had they gone? Maybe just a lift into town. But the soldier hadn’t thought so, with his stupid, sly grin. The MP at Trinity hadn’t thought so either. In this hot, lazy afternoon with nothing to do but brood, no one was innocent. Not even him. He’d just been the next in line.

When they did meet, he was disarmed by her smile, easy and guileless, as bright as the day. Daniel had gone down to the test site again, and they went to the ruins at Bandelier, dodging the hot sun on the shady path along Frijoles Creek, down toward the waterfall that finally emptied into the Rio Grande. She was glad to see him, talking happily about nothing, pleased to be out. She hiked briskly along the trail in the boots and shorts she had worn at Chaco, when things were different. But in fact it all seemed the same, so clear and bright that for a moment he felt the weight of the past few days was nothing but an anxious dream, one of those nights whose gloom and dread were burned off by morning. She laughed when she washed her face in the stream, splashing him. He watched her, how easily she moved through her part, and he smiled back, unwilling to let her see him watching. He wanted her to say something, a disingenuous moment, so he could begin, but she hiked back in high spirits, and he waited. They ate a picnic near the Tyuonyi kiva, again like Chaco, with the sun overhead. There were no sounds but the stirrings of lizards and the faint hot breeze that blew the cottonweed seeds like bits of snow.

“You can see why they’d come here,” she said, her voice lazy and contented. “Water. Bottomland. Storage bins.” She pointed toward the caves hollowed out in the soft lava tufa above them. “Nothing like Chaco.”

“But they left.”

“Yes,” she said, facing the sun with her eyes closed. “Strange, isn’t it?”

In the quiet they heard a muffled explosion from one of the distant test canyons, a wave of intrusion from the Hill. They looked toward the sound, alarmed, but then it was over and everything was still again. She leaned back, closing her eyes to blot it out.

“Did the Germans come here too?” he said, stalling.

“I suppose they must have,” she said, not opening her eyes. “Or maybe it was the priests. It’s always the priests, isn’t it? Some bloody archbishop leading them to the promised land. Some idea. The Navajos were frightened by it, when they came. Found all these ready-made cities and never moved in. Wouldn’t touch them.”

“Maybe they were the Germans.”

“No. At least, we don’t think so,” she said, a seminar we. “No sign of fighting at all. Anyway, they’re not like that. They’re lovely. In the creation myth, one part of the darkness makes love to another and the one on top becomes light and rises up to be the first day. It’s lovely, that,” she said, her voice soft. “Think of ours. God blundering about making this and that, busy. Everything done in a week. No wonder we blow things up.”

“What happens after they have sex, the dark and the light?”

“They make the wind, the life force. I love the Navajos for that-everything beginning in bed.”