Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

I completed my master’s in June 1979.

A time of miniaturization, it seemed. Our cars were shrinking; our daily affairs were printed on microchips. Across America, the streets were quiet. Richard Daley was dead and Gene McCarthy was in seclusion and I spent the last summer of that decade in the Sweetheart Mountains, deciding. Before me was the rest of my life. What I wanted above all was to join the world, which was to live and to go on living with the knowledge that nothing endures, but to endure. It was a matter of choice. I didn’t give a damn about missiles or scruples, all I wanted now was my life, the things of the world, a house and whatever hours there were and the ordinary pleasures of biology. I was hard and sane and practical. I wanted Bobbi, who was real.

And I knew where to start.

If you’re sane, I realized, you take the world as you find it.

Science dictated: The uranium had to be there, and it was.

All summer, and through the fall, I followed the trail up into the high ground, homing in, and by mid-October there was no doubt.

On New Year’s Day 1980, Sarah and the others came to visit. In a sense, I suppose, I was expecting them. Except for the years, nothing much had changed. There was some gray in Ned Rafferty’s beard, a few extra pounds at Tina Roebuck’s beltline, the usual wear and tear. It was good to see them. Ollie Winkler was a Christian now, and before dinner he led us in prayer, then we ate lamb chops and talked nostalgia. For the first time I felt at ease in their presence. Like family, I thought, and I was one of them—hard and sane and practical to the end.

Around midnight, after the others had turned in, Sarah and I sat on blankets in front of the wood stove.

“Son of a bitch,” she said. “Almost nine years. Not a word.”

She meditated for a while, then put her head in my lap.

“Kiss?” she said.

Later we held each other. Her skin felt cool and foreign. She laughed when I told her about the uranium.

“Well,” she said, “it’s a crime, isn’t it?”

I said, “No.”

Then I laid out my plans. It wasn’t crime. It wasn’t selling out. I was an adult, I said. I was able to take the world as I found it, and to use it, and to make what I could of it. When she asked about morality, I shrugged. When she asked about the flashes, I smiled and quoted Yeats: We had fed the heart on fantasies, the heart’s grown brutal from the fare .

Sarah thought about it.

“Oh, well,” she said, “at least we’re rich.”

WE HIT PAY DIRT on the twelfth day out. By the twentieth day we knew exactly what we had. I’d been confident all along, and the data were there to back me up, but that didn’t prevent celebration when Ollie ran the clicker over that pile of hot rock. On February 4, 1980, we bought the mountain. Rancher Roe reckoned we were setting up a commune, or maybe a new close-to-the-clouds religious establishment, but even so he couldn’t wait to unload. At the registry of deeds he kept saying how, if he had it to do over, he’d most surely lead the hippie life himself. I never saw a man so willing to please. When it was done, we rented an electric typewriter and group-composed the letter. I handled the technical stuff, Rafferty the prose, Sarah the legal ins and outs. Then I sat down at the IBM Electric and cranked out seven copies, one for each Sister. We mailed the letters and waited. That was the hard part: two months before the first tentative reply, another month before Gulf brought in its exploratory team, two more months before we got any sort of bidding war going, then forty days more before Texaco doubled BP and we finally signed the papers. A straight cash deal—it had to be that way. No options, no pie-cutting, no deferred payments. The check was for twenty-five million dollars. Of course, there wasn’t a banker in town who’d touch it, so we ended up in Ned’s van, the whole gang, heading for First National in Helena. Along the way we stopped. There, on the banks of a shallow creek, we conducted a ceremony. It was silly, but the ladies insisted, so we each tossed a chunk of precious ore into the water, and I uttered a few solemn words, and we left two clickers behind as a gift for the next generation.

In the van, halfway home, Sarah cuddled up against me and asked how I’d be using my cut. It wasn’t something I wanted to talk about. Buy a town somewhere, I said, or maybe a sinecure at Harvard.

“Geology?” Sarah asked. “No other dreams?”

“Well,” I said, but of course she was right. “I guess I’ll go to Bonn.”

“In reference to what, exactly? As if I didn’t know.”

“A girl,” I admitted. “A woman—I’m in love with her.”

We rode along for a while. Sarah said she’d never seen Bonn. Not even a postcard. Could she come along?

We made Helena at midnight. It was Saturday’s midnight, which meant another idle day, so we selected a motel advertising a heated pool and sauna. I suppose it was a combination of things—the van, the way Ned had let his hair go, Tina’s behind-the-times peasant costume—but, whatever, the night clerk insisted on cash up front. He was just a kid. “We’re good,” I said, and I showed him the check: “ Texaco’s good.” The clerk shrugged and claimed it was one of those computer foul-ups—extra zeros—and we ended up depositing our last hundred or so. The kid was smug about it. When he asked how many rooms we’d be wanting, I held up a finger and said, “One,” and before he could smile I moved the finger to his nose. “Day after tomorrow,” I said. “Watch out.”

“No kidding?”

“Day after tomorrow. You’re out of work.”

The kid smiled and handed me a room key.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “And don’t forget, shower before you use the pool. New house rule.”

We spent Sunday in the water. It was our last full day together, the Committee, and there was lots of talk about where everyone was headed. After all the nonsense, it boiled down to the predictable. Tina and Ollie were returning to Key West, where they would soon be very well-heeled revolutionaries. Ned Rafferty talked about buying himself a piece of property somewhere, maybe horses, maybe cattle, he couldn’t decide. He glanced at Sarah, who kept quiet. At times sadness intervened, but we fought it off—much splashing and dunking. It was a heated outdoor pool, big and comfortable, and we made the most of it, floating side by side, holding hands, turning sentimental in the way smart people do, hipping it, finally coming straight out and saying how much we loved one another and how it wasn’t the money that made it good, it was something else, the time together, all the ups and downs, and how we felt older and sadder, and how we hadn’t done much to change the world but how the world had changed us, and how the whole thing was like camp. We hated ending it. Ollie said he’d heard tell of rich lodes up in British Columbia. Ned said he’d heard the same stories. We’ll do it again, we said, but bashfully, with the sophistication of senior citizens who know better. Tina cried. Everybody hugged and kissed. “Maybe we should pray?” Ollie said. Nobody wanted to pray, but we knew what he meant.