The woman settles herself back in her chair, stretches out her long legs, and looks up. “What’s your name?” She has a dimple at the corner of her mouth that gives her lips an upward tilt of friendliness.

  Emy Lou says her name and feels it crumble in her mouth, air-filled and stale.

  “Okay, Emy Lou McCracken. I’ll ask again. What do you want?”

  Emy Lou doesn’t hesitate a moment. She talks so fast her words run together. “I’m here to get you to come to the Dallas Halfway House where you can get the help you need.”

  “I told you before,” and the woman’s words are round like pearls, “I don’t need help.” Her black eyes tell Emy Lou that she knows a secret, but she isn’t sharing.

  “But you’re here,” says Emy Lou.

  “And you’re not.”

  Emy Lou understands the implication. She knows she’s blessed in every way this woman isn’t. But that’s just luck. She could be this woman. She squats down on her heels, white linen settling around her on the scarred linoleum. She’s intent on winning, and she has more power, face-to-face.

  She asks, in that dreadful Emy-Lou-voice she hates, if the woman has any family.

  “Yeah, I got me a boy.”

  “So do I,” says Emy Lou without thought. Behind the woman, pinned to the wall, loops an unrecognizable world.

  The woman doesn’t seem to have heard her. She’s turned to speak to the plump woman on her right, the one with the wide-set eyes and pink muffler. It’s as though she’s continuing an interrupted conversation.

  “After my ex stole my baby. About six years ago—he was two. It’s like I went crazy for a while. That’s when I started dealing. I felt like a part of my body—an arm or a leg—got cut off.”

  “Come off it, Cornelia,” says Mrs. Keck from her desk behind Emy Lou. “You got used to the fast life and easy money. You like the excitement of dealing.”

  The woman—Cornelia—smiles easily. “That too, of course. That too.”

  Everyone laughs except Emy Lou, who’s impatient with the interruption.

  “Don’t you want to see your son when you get out?” she says.

  “When I get out …”

  Cornelia disappears behind a flat gaze.

  “My boy’s somewhere in Louisiana—Lake Charles probably. When I get out I’ll go there and get him. Rent an apartment, be a regular mom again.”

  Emy Lou sees Cornelia with her long Byzantine neck and perfectly shaped cropped head. With the aid of a road map, she has found her way across the state of Texas and stands now in her baby-blue cap, hugging the rail of a barge, looking out at a watery horizon. She’s headed for Lake Charles. She hasn’t seen her son in six years. He will have grown, she knows that, but, still, she’ll recognize him.

  Emy Lou grips the laminated desk and leans in, “My son …”

  This brings Cornelia back. Her eyes are black fire. “Mine’s a fine boy!”

  “So is mine,” says Emy Lou, and in an instant Andy has pushed through the drawn curtains of her mind. Her son, who for twelve years has alternated between pacing and stupefied staring; her son, who two weeks ago began talking to himself, writing furiously in his notebook, refusing the food she cooked or anything from the refrigerator. Her son. From the neighborhood 7-Eleven, he brought individually wrapped packages of food, but if she or Robert walked in while he was eating, he would push away from the kitchen table and dump the Ding-Dongs, Twinkies, Hostess CupCakes, Cheetos, Fritos in the garbage. He refused to sleep in his bed or sit in his rocking chair, rolled a towel to stuff in the crack at the bottom of his door, and after walking to buy a large sack of supplies at 7-Eleven, refused, finally, to come out of his room.

  She and Robert had argued about how long he should be allowed to stay in there. “Give him a few days,” Robert said. “He’s a grown man. Maybe he needs to pleasure himself. Can’t he have any privacy? Do you have to take everything away?”

  But Emy Lou can’t leave Andy alone. Through the closed door, she shouts, Are you taking your pills? You can’t just eat junk.

  Three days. Four.

  Robert is at work when, pushing against the rolled towel, she enters the precious inner sanctum she’s been denied. A stench beyond that of stale cigarettes rushes out. Cellophane wrappers overflow the wastebasket, and piled on the desk, the bed, the rocking chair seat, empty cat food cans, their interiors encrusted, dark. Her stomach lurches and comes up; in her mouth, the taste of bile. From his sleeping bag on the floor beside the cowboy-and-lariat bed, Andy raises up on his elbows, You said I needed more protein.

  “My boy,” says Emy Lou in a low, wondering voice.

  Cornelia sits up to hear these soft-spoken words, and the jauntiness of her thrown-muffler loosens. Her almond-shaped eyes are confused, uncertain. “I don’t know exactly where he is.”

  From far away, Bev’s voice. “Emy Lou?”

  But already she is reaching out. She touches Cornelia and the blue muffler falls open. Beneath it, in the hollow of her neck, Cornelia’s heart is pumping like mad. “Don’t know when I’ll see my boy again.”

  Emy Lou doesn’t move: she is stone. After a moment she lets go—of the desk, of all striving—and, lowering herself back onto her heels, she bows her head and closes her eyes.

  A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes

  THIS METHOD REQUIRES AN OPEN-ENDED FORMATIVE STAGE WHERE ANYTHING is possible.

  Seeking a place to live and work, Robert Goddard spends a year studying statistics for the entire country before choosing Roswell, New Mexico. He picks Roswell for its mild weather, its level ground, and scarce population so that his rockets can “rise, or crash, or even explode without wear and tear on neighbors’ nerves.” At this time—1930—the average projectile is thirteen feet, average flight ten seconds. Liquid-fuel rocketry belongs in the realm of poetry, a flight of Goddard’s imagination more than actual, physical flight.

  Considered a crackpot, Goddard is shunned by other US scientists. The American military, failing to understand the martial application of rockets, repeatedly rebuff his offers of assistance, but the Germans send a spy to lurk among the sheepherders and cowboys in Roswell’s flat, unpopulated landscape.

  * * *

  Nine years after Goddard’s move, two young people, white roses still pinned to their wedding clothes, drive west across Texas toward the same destination. It’s Christmas Eve day, 1939. The groom, a new graduate of the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, prayed to be assigned to the big time—perhaps Chicago with its precarious hold on law and order. Instead he’s been posted to some tiny, nowhere town in New Mexico. Like Goddard, Special Agent Hamm Wilson lives in an imaginative realm. Germany has invaded Poland; Capone is released from Alcatraz; on every horizon, danger looms. Hamm, with his new training, wants only to do good, to save the world and mankind. He is a cliché, but the purity at the heart of his desire is real. Fresh-faced, he doesn’t drink or smoke; he believes in God. How else did he win the beautiful Isabelle?

  In the late afternoon, the newlyweds drive into the aftermath of a snowstorm. On the Llano Estacado, the “staked plains” of West Texas, there are no landmarks, no stone, nor tree, nor shrub, nor anything to go by. It is an ocean of sky. The Spanish conquistadors and the Comanche stuck yucca stems in the ground to mark their paths through it. For the Wilsons, the highway has disappeared, its only indication tips of distant fence posts on either side of the car. All around them, stretching out to the horizon, a glistening white landscape, unmarked, immaculate, pure.

  If anything is possible, the unimaginable can occur.

  By 1945 Goddard has launched thirty-one rockets from Roswell—all growing progressively larger and each flying farther—and Hamm has been picked as one of a handful of Special Agents to be informed about an ultra-secret project hidden in the remote Jemez Mountains to the north. The Manhattan Project aims to construct a new type of bomb, which the scientists refer to as “the gadget.” Time-pressure is great, activity fevered. When the gadget is ready to test, Hamm is one of three agents invited to the Trinity Site.

  On July 16, 1945, Hamm witnesses the atomic age announce itself. The bomb blasts the desert into the sky. The light is greater than any produced before on Earth, great enough to be seen from Mars. It bleaches the land a ghastly white. The sublime terror Hamm feels that morning enters his cells. For the rest of his life, he will never allow his mind to linger on what he saw at White Sands, but that image—the power in a single atom—changes him; and the knowledge that his country controls this power shapes itself around him, bestowing a mantle of personal authority beyond his years.

  The two bombs created in the laboratories at Los Alamos end the war. It’s a new day. Hamm takes a big breath and looks around. His vision of what might be possible mushrooms. He smokes his first cigarette, drinks his first whiskey. He is twenty-seven years old.

  With the world safe and the need for heroes diminished, launcher redesign becomes essential.

  When the Wilsons’ second daughter is born, Hamm decides to quit strapping on a gun to go to work and takes a job as a landman with Magnolia Oil. A few months after this decision, the Roswell Record reports the crash of a mysterious spacecraft outside of town. Hamm reads the headlines, but he’s focused on what’s below ground, not what’s arriving from the stars.

  His new office is an oak desk in the middle of a bullpen of oak desks in a building at the Magnolia Refinery. The refinery occupies the acreage across the highway from NMMI, the New Mexico Military Institute. Yellow flares burn atop its tall, foul-smelling stacks; giant storage containers of oil squat amidst the miasmic stink of sulfur. But just as surely as there is luck, Hamm has it: as a landman, he spends his days away from this refinery hell, scouting the territory of Southeastern New Mexico. He drives down dusty, unpaved back roads, stops by ramshackle homesteads. He’s always a welcome sight in his ’42 Plymouth with the windows rolled down, hair breeze-blown, bright smile. He flashes his old FBI photo ID for assurance of trustworthiness—also for glamour. He’s boyish, idealistic, and he sweet-talks a lot of landowners into signing the piece of paper he proffers. He’s selling a vision, a dream. Hamm’s imagination of what lies trapped beneath the ground where cattle or sheep graze is what seduces. So much possible wealth! The whole Earth a vast promise!

  The Wilsons buy their first home, a frame two-bedroom, one bath. The nights are cool in the Roswell desert, and when Hamm stands in his tiny new backyard and looks up at the sky vaulting high and clear above him—the mighty swath of Milky Way so close!—he knows he’s a lucky man. When he reaches up to touch the stars, he can feel the spaciousness of his body, his molecules and the vast wheeling sky, a match. For Isabelle, touchable stars do not compensate for windowsills constantly gritted with sand.

  That summer of Hamm’s new job and the mysterious crash, the Wilsons are awakened in the middle of the night by their older daughter who’s run, terrified, from across the hall to tell them Martians are whispering strange words outside her screen window! Hamm and Isabelle are “airing out,” which is something they have to do for good health that requires foregoing pajamas, but they take her into their bed. Hamm explains that Mars is unreachable, a pinprick of light in the sky. In the succeeding nights, as the Martians continue to whisper, he sends Georgina back to her room to listen and learn their language.

  A steady state requires an explosive booster for higher altitude achievement.

  Robert Goddard is the first person in the history of the world to launch a liquid-fueled rocket, but rocketry originated nine hundred years earlier when ancient Chinese alchemists created gunpowder, and the “fire-dragon issuing from water” was born. Fireworks.

  In 1950 Hamm brings a grocery sack of Roman candles to the annual Fourth of July party at the Gillespies’ house on the NMMI campus. It’s a fireworks extravaganza with long pauses where the wives shout, Is it finished? Are you through? And from the blackness of the yard that isn’t a regular yard but is unfenced, contiguous with the Institute’s parade grounds, the fathers call back, No, we’re trying—and then comes a high-pitched wail followed by a chrysanthemum burst, or a gushing fountain of fire, or a huge pinwheel with colored explosions that go out into the vastness before falling down.

  The Gillespies’ house is large, all blond brick and square crenellated turrets, and as Hamm walks the line of rockets at the perimeter of its backyard, it shines like a ship in the vast sea of night. Roman candle shafts point toward the empty parade grounds. They are dangerous, forbidden to children, and when Hamm lights their wicks, the rockets whizz up, whistling, one after another, screaming light.

  After this finale, children of various ages, in various states of hysteria, chase about in the dark. A warm body hurls itself at Hamm’s knees. He reaches down to scoop up his three-year-old baby, but Josie doesn’t want to be held. She wiggles free and dashes back into the night, toward Mexican girls lighting sparklers. Georgina squats in a slant of kitchen light, enchanted by the ashy “snake” humped out from a burning flat tablet.

  In the kitchen, Hamm fixes a rum and Coke and allows himself to admire the fineness of his fine wife as she stands arranging tomato slices on a white platter. With her dark hair pulled back from her heart-shaped face, her widow’s peak is all drama, and it pierces him. Everything about her combines to make his groin ache. Isabelle looks up, reads his mind, and smiles into his eyes. Outside, children run through the dark from one adult to another, holding up firecrackers: Light mine, light mine. Multiple sounds of laughter and screams in the cool July night.

  * * *

  Later, after the explosion, after the real screams, Hamm lifts Josie from the patch of blackened grass where tiny flames still burn and carries her in both arms against his chest. He’s trotting, and around him a phalanx of men trot with him.

  Later, Isabelle sits on the third step of the stairs in the Gillespies’ entry hall, sobbing. Georgina’s been torn from her and ordered to stay out of the way. She retreats to the bathroom beneath the staircase and peeks out from behind its door to watch women carry cold, wet cloths back and forth from the kitchen to lay across her mother’s forehead, her eyes.

  Later, in the kitchen with the sliced tomatoes swimming in their juice, the Mexican girls huddle, crying. One of them is inconsolable. It’s her fault, she says. She isn’t sure, but she thinks she handed the baby a Roman candle. The others say, It could’ve fallen over in the grass. They say, She could’ve picked it up herself.

  Later, with a hot bright light pulled down over the examining table on which his daughter lies, Hamm watches Dr. Williams pour water into Josie’s eyes. They are wide-opened, huge and black. The doctor hasn’t yet touched the bloody mass of her cheek. First, he has to wash out the gunpowder—before it’s too late and she’s blind. The men hold Josie’s plump little arms and legs while Dr. Williams pours seven slow beakers of water. After washing the wound, he says he thinks the rocket imploded—not that it was supposed to be handheld anyway. He sews together the edges of what’s left of Josie’s cheek with black thread. After each stitch, he cuts the thread so that the ends of it stick out like sharp whiskers from her little face.

  For a week, Dr. Williams comes to the house every afternoon. Every afternoon, the gauze pad, held in place by a four-piece grid of tape, is blood soaked, and beneath it, the little cheek gone, as though some creature has taken a bite. Black whisker-stitches follow the red loop of the bite on both sides. Dr. Williams tells Hamm that the rocket missed Josie’s temple by a millimeter. She could’ve been killed; she could’ve been blinded; it could’ve been much worse. Hamm should thank his lucky stars.

  After the booster, rapid acceleration prevails.

  In October 1957 the Soviet Union shocks the world by sending a satellite into space. All over America people gather to listen to the sound of this unimaginable presence. In Roswell, Hamm huddles around a shortwave radio at the FBI office, and in the silence, there’s only Sputnik’s crackle and hiss, hurtling over the globe. The men do not speak, but what they understand is this: the freedom they fought a war for is threatened.

  Hamm goes home early to find his family on the couch staring at a small screen inset in a large cabinet. TV reception is new to Roswell, and there’s no programming until late afternoon. Josie’s feet rest in Georgina’s lap, her head in her mother’s. Isabelle is rubbing special “scar cream” into the sunken cheek while they wait for the test pattern to dissolve and Liberace to rise up from the dark surface with his candelabra and white teeth, flinging his cape and playing “Malagueña.”

  Josie has had two plastic surgery operations and needs more. She and Isabelle have had to travel hundreds of miles to El Paso and spend weeks at a hospital there. Hamm’s loneliness in the quiet house during the first surgery and his understanding of the financial commitment ahead combine to push him into “going out on his own.” The change in his cells that occurred at the Trinity Site helps him take this risk. It is a leap into the unknown. He leaves the bullpen at Magnolia Refinery and rents a one-room office, touching with awe the black letters stenciled on frosted glass: “Hammond J. Wilson, Independent Oil.”

  The information he sleuthed for Magnolia, he now uses for himself. Leasing is about oil field intelligence, and Hamm sees patterns others don’t, squeezes out information others can’t. He knows when a man is keeping something back, listens when an ancient homesteader swears his well water flares in the night. Farmers and ranchers tell their neighbors about the nice young man who’s going to drill on their property, and Hamm picks up leases all over Lea and Eddy Counties. He’s advanced from gathering signed paper to actually poking holes in the Earth. He loves the hunt, the adventure of being engaged with the planet’s mysteries.

  The night the radio crackles for the first time from outer space, Hamm drinks three Scotches rather than one. Sputnik circles above, and below, the stitched loop of Josie’s scar has tightened into a noose. Isabelle doesn’t hear it in his voice and he doesn’t tell her: the upheaval, the vibrations of fear he feels in his body. All he wants is to keep his wife and children safe, but how to do this? He wasn’t able to protect Josie and now, with Sputnik, the specter of Soviet domination has raised its death’s-head. Everything, everywhere: unsafe.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21