Portable Childhoods Read online

  “God,” she called out. “Don’t you think that’s enough of those?” She had thought the night should remain in darkness. It was getting quite light in the firmament.

  “Just a couple more?” God said.

  “All right. But only a few. Then I need you to come in and help with the animals.”

  Nanadeus rolled out a sheet of clay while she waited for God to come in out of the void. Now that there was fire, there was much to be done. Systems and cycles and chains of being to set in place. And the oceans, which had turned out to be a little tricky.

  The waters had been gathered together, separate from the dry land, and that was fine. But they weren’t moving. They just lay there, wet and placid and still. She’d gone out and shifted them back and forth, and they did move, but then they slowed down and lay still again, and that just wouldn’t do. They had to keep moving, and she didn’t have the time to go out and shake them twice a day. Besides, they were too heavy for her to be lifting all the time. Maybe she had made the deep too deep? Where was God? If he could help make some of the simpler creatures, she’d have time to deal with the oceans.

  God lay on the earth, watching the twinkling stars, spraying random corners of the firmament with his outstretched finger, filling in the parts that seemed a little empty. Pow! Powpowpowpow! KAPOW! Ooops. He pursed his lips and drew in a breath, sucking a bit of light from that spot, then another, and another, until there were a few holes in the midst of the stars, blacker than the black of the void.

  He sat up and examined a small muddy pebble clinging to his right knee. He put it on the palm of his hand and flicked it with his first finger, as hard as he could. The pebble shot far up into the firmament. God waited for it to fall down again, but it didn’t. It wobbled a little, then just hung there. God made a PoP! sound with his lips and the pebble began to glow with a bright white light. He grinned and reached for another pebble.

  “God. I need you. Now,” called Nanadeus.

  God dropped the pebble and went in. “What’re you making? Can I help?”

  Nanadeus smiled and rumpled his hair. “Yes, you can. You can be a big help right now. Watch what I do.”

  She pulled a tray of tiny brown ovals from the oven. “You need to decorate them while they’re still soft,” she said, putting one on the counter. She reached into one of the bins that lined the counter. legs, said one. WINGS. ANTENNAE.

  She stretched the oval a little, added two hair-like feelers and six legs, daubed it with a bit of green pigment, and added two multicolored wings. She held out her palm. The little bug was perfect in every detail, except it was just clay. Its tiny eyes were blank and featureless and it lay still.

  “Pay attention,” she said. “This is important.” She picked up another soft, baked lump and added identical legs and antennae and wings, stretching it in the same way. “You have to make two of each. They can be different colors, if you want, but the very same creature. Okay, God?”

  He nodded slowly, his eyes wide and curious.

  “Good. Now watch.” She pinched a bit of bluish sparkling dust from a stone vat on the counter and sprinkled it over the dark shapes. “This is the fun part.” She leaned over the clay figures and breathed on them gently. “Butterfly,” she said.

  The butterflies’ wings quivered, then slowly beat together and out again. They flew onto the edge of the tray, to God’s shoulder, and out into the void.

  “Wow!” God clapped his hands in delight. “Can I try?”

  His grandmother scooped two clay dots from the tray. God stuck his tongue in the corner of his mouth and very carefully put five tiny legs into the warm clay. “Can I make them red?” he asked.

  “Yes,” laughed Nanadeus. “We’ll need a lot of insects, and you may decorate them in any colors you want. Do try for symmetry, though, won’t you dear?”

  God nodded solemnly and added a sixth leg and two little wings. He painted the round bugs bright red, and after a moment’s thought, added some tiny black spots. He held them out to Nanadeus.

  “Very nice,” she said. She sprinkled and blew onto them. “Ladybug,” she said, and they flew away.

  “What other kind of bugs can I make?” God asked.

  “Use your imagination,” she said. “Just don’t get carried away. Keep them small.”

  “Yay!” said God.

  “But—” she held up her finger in warning. “Remember. Only two of each kind. They will make more of themselves.”

  “Okay,” said God. He made two red ants, and two tiny green aphids, and a pair of flies with fuzzy flocked legs. Nanadeus had just breathed onto the second fly when there was a shudder, and then silence.

  “Oh, God, the seas have stopped,” she sighed. “Will you be all right by yourself? I need to start them up. Again.”

  He nodded. “I like making bugs,” he said.

  “I thought you might,” Nanadeus smiled. “Have fun, but don’t sprinkle them. We’ll name them all when I come back.” She patted him on the cheek and went out to deal with still waters.

  God made two brown ants, and a different kind of aphid. Then he looked to make certain that his grandmother was gone, and opened all the other bins.

  FANGS. PINCERS. HORNS. ARMOR. STINGERS.

  “Cool,” said God. He took one of the larger mounds and outfitted it with fierce claws and long fuzzy antennae, painting it bright, bright green. Then he made three hundred dozen dozen more, each more fearsome and garish than the last. Horns, claws, stripes, spots, bristling legs and armored carapaces blazed in every iridescent hue.

  Bugs everywhere. God wanted to make even more, but he had run out of counter space. Where could he move them to? Move…? God looked at the vat of shimmering dust. Nanadeus had said to wait for her, but…

  He took a handful of the dust and flung it over the trays of inanimate insects.

  “Well,” said Nanadeus from out in the void. “That was easier than I’d feared.” Her voice was small and distant. “The rock you put up there really did the trick. Moon. Tides. Now why didn’t I think of that ages ago….”

  She was getting closer. God could hear her sensible shoes tramping across the face of the earth.

  He looked at the shimmering trays of bugs and blew, hard, over all of them at once. God whispered, as fast as he could:

  “Scarab. Scarab, scarab, scarab. Weevil. Tiger beetle. Leaf beetle. Weevil. Weevil. Weevil. Click beetle. Harlequin, palm borer, leaf miner. Firefly. Weevil, weevil, weevil. Jewel beetle. Blister beetle. Bark beetle. Flour beetle. Stag beetle. Potato beetle. Stink beet—”

  “God? How are you coming with those insects?” Nanadeus asked from just beyond.

  God looked over his shoulder, then quickly back at the last pair of unmoving creatures on the tray. “DUNG beetle,” he said with a grin. And it was so.

  Then he leaned back and began to whistle as if he hadn’t done anything at all. Creeping things covered every surface, legs and claws and pincers scuttling and skittering. God saw them and smiled.

  They were good.

  The Green Glass Sea

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1945, Dr. Gordon was gone for the first two weeks in July. Dewey Kerrigan noticed that a lot of the usual faces were missing from the dining hall at the Los Alamos lodge, and everyone seemed tense, even more tense than usual.

  Dewey and her father had come to the Hill two years before, when she was eight. When he was sent to Washington, she came to live with the Gordons. They were both scientists, like Papa, and their daughter Suze was about the same age as Dewey. Dewey’s mom hadn’t been around since she was a baby.

  One Sunday night Mrs. Gordon had shooed the girls to bed early, then woke them before dawn for a hike with some of the other wives, many of whom also had jobs and titles other than Mrs. They carried blankets and sandwiches and thermoses of coffee out to a place on the edge of the mesa where they had a clear view of the southern horizon and sat in the still early darkness, smoking and waiting.

  Right before sunrise there was a bright lig
ht. Dewey thought it might be the sun coming up, except it came from the wrong direction. It lit up the sky for a moment, then disappeared, like the fireworks they’d had in May when the war in Europe ended. There was silence for a minute after the light faded, then Mrs. Gordon and the other women started hugging each other, smiling and talking. They hugged Dewey and Suze too, but Dewey wasn’t sure why.

  She figured it must have something to do with the gadget. Everything on the Hill had something to do with the gadget. She just wished she knew what the gadget was.

  That evening, around dinnertime, a caravan of cars full of men returned to the Hill. They looked tired and hot and dusty and were greeted with cheers. Dr. Gordon walked into the apartment about 7:30. He had deep circles under his eyes and he hadn’t shaved.

  “Well, we did it,” he said as he hugged Mrs. Gordon. He hugged Suze next, and ruffled his hand through Dewey’s curls. He didn’t say what “it” was. He just ate a ham sandwich, drank two shots of whiskey, and slept until the next afternoon.

  On the fourth of August, Dr. Gordon came into the apartment late in the afternoon. He was whistling, his hat tipped back on his head, carrying a pink box from the bakery down in Santa Fe.

  He put the box down on the table and opened a bottle of beer. “Got a birthday surprise for you,” he said to Suze.

  She stopped coloring in Dorothy’s dress with her blue crayon and looked up. “Can I open it now, Daddy?”

  “Nope. Your birthday’s not until the sixth. Besides, it isn’t something you can unwrap. It’s a trip, a little vacation. I’ve gotten special passes.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Well now, that’s the surprise.”

  “Farther than Santa Fe?”

  He smiled. “Just a bit.” He took a deep swig of beer. “Why don’t you go and pack up a few things before supper. You won’t need much. Just a change of clothes and your toothbrush. Your Mom left a paper sack for you to put them in.”

  Suze threw her coloring book onto the table with a thump and ran into the bedroom, her shoes clattering loudly on the linoleum.

  Dewey sat on the couch reading a book about Faraday. She ducked her head behind the page and didn’t say anything. She was used to people leaving. It was better to stay quiet. She pushed her glasses up on her nose and concentrated on the orderly rows of black type.

  “Aren’t you going to get your things ready?” asked Dr. Gordon. He had picked up the newspaper and was looking at it without really reading.

  Dewey was startled. “Am I coming with you?”

  He chuckled. “Of course. What did you think? The whole family’s going.”

  From the bedroom there was a loud sigh, then a snap! as Suze unfolded the paper bag.

  “Oh,” Dewey said slowly. “Family.” The Gordons weren’t her family, really. Nobody was, not since she’d gotten the Army telegram about Papa and the accident. But they were nice. Mrs. Gordon even tucked her in, some nights, if she wasn’t working late at her lab.

  “Don’t you want to go on an adventure?” Dr. Gordon asked.

  “I guess so.” Dewey wasn’t sure. She liked being on the Hill. She knew where everything was, and when dinner was served at the Lodge. There weren’t any surprises. She’d had enough surprises.

  But Dr. Gordon seemed to be waiting for an answer. Dewey carefully replaced her bookmark and closed the book. “I’ll go pack my things,” she said.

  The next morning Mrs. Gordon was up early, making stacks of ham and cheese sandwiches that she wrapped in waxed paper. She put the picnic basket and their paper sacks into the big black Ford, and just after eleven they showed their passes to the guard at the East Gate and set off down the long twisting road that led to the highway several thousand feet below. The temperature climbed as they descended.

  Dewey and Suze sat in the back seat, a foot or so of black serge between them. Suze had the road map spread out across her lap. Los Alamos wasn’t on the map, of course, but a thin blue line trickled down from the mesa through Pojoaque. When it became a fatter red line, Highway 285, in Santa Fe, Dr. Gordon turned right and they headed south.

  Dewey stared out the window. She had never been anywhere in New Mexico except the Hill, not since she and Papa had arrived two years before, and then it had been night. She’d imagined that everything looked like the mesa, just more of it. But now outside the window the land was flat and endless, bounded by craggy brown mountain canyons on one side and distant dusky blue ridges on the far horizons.

  Close up, everything that went by the window was brown. Brown dirt, brown fences, brown tumbleweeds, brown adobe houses. But all the distances were blue. Crystal blue, huge sky that covered everything for as far as she could see until the earth curved. Faraway slate blue, hazy blue mountains and mesas, ledges of blue land stretching away from the road, blurring into the sky at the edges. Blue land. She had never seen anything like that before.

  Dr. Gordon had gas coupons from the Army, and he filled up the tank when they crossed Route 66. They stopped for a late lunch on the banks of a trickle of river a few miles farther south, eating their sandwiches and drinking Orange NEHI in the shade of a piñon pine. The summer sun was bright and the air smelled like dust and resin.

  “How much farther are we going?” Suze asked, putting the bottle caps in her pocket.

  “Another three, maybe four hours. We’ll spend the night in a little town called Carrizozo,” Dr. Gordon said.

  Dewey watched as Suze bent over the map and her finger found Carrizozo. It was a very small dot, and other than being a place where two roads crossed, there didn’t seem to be anything interesting nearby.

  Suze looked puzzled. “Why are we going there?”

  “We’re not. It’s just the closest place to spend the night, unless you want to sleep in the car. I certainly don’t.” He lit his pipe, leaned back against the tree, and closed his eyes, smiling.

  It was the most relaxed Dewey had ever seen him.

  After lunch, the land stayed very flat and the mountains stayed far away. There was nothing much to see. Beyond the asphalt the land was parched brown by the heat, and there were no trees, just stubby greasewood bushes and low grass, with an occasional spiky yucca or flat cactus.

  Dewey’s eyes closed and she slept, almost, just aware enough to hear the noise of the car wheels and the wind. When the car slowed and bumped over a set of railroad tracks, she opened her eyes again. They were in Carrizozo, and it was twilight. The distant blues had turned to purples and the sky was pale and looked as if it had been smeared with bright orange sherbet. Dr. Gordon pulled off onto the gravel of the Crossroads Motor Court.

  They walked a few blocks into town for dinner. Carrizozo was not much more than the place where the north-south highway heading toward El Paso crossed the east-west road that led to Roswell. There was a bar called the White Sands, a Texaco station, and some scattered stores and houses between the railroad tracks and the one main street.

  Through the blue-checked curtains of the café Dewey could see mountains to the east. “Are we going into the mountains in the morning?”

  “Nope,” said Dr. Gordon, spearing a piece of meatloaf. “The other direction.”

  Dewey frowned. She had spent most of the day looking over Suze’s shoulder at the map. There wasn’t anything in the other direction. It was an almost perfectly blank place on the map. White Sands was a little bit west, but almost 100 miles to the south. If they’d been going there, Dewey thought, it would have made more sense to stay in Alamogordo.

  “But...,” Dewey said, and Mrs. Gordon smiled. “You’re confused, my little geographer. That’s because where we’re going isn’t on the map. Not yet, anyway.”

  That didn’t make a lot of sense either. But when Mrs. Gordon smiled at her with warm eyes, Dewey felt like everything would be okay, even if she didn’t understand.

  It was barely light when Mrs. Gordon woke them the next morning. Dr. Gordon had gotten two cups of coffee in paper cups from the café, and Cokes fo
r the girls, even though it was breakfast. The air was still and already warm, and everything was very quiet.

  They drove south, and then west for about an hour, the rising sun making a long dark shadow in front of the car. There was nothing much to see out the window or on the map. At an unmarked dirt road, Dr. Gordon turned left.

  Thin wire ran from wooden fence posts, separating the pale brown of the road from the pale beige of the desert. A few straggly yucca plants, spiky gray-green balls with stalks of yellow flowers, were the only color forever. The car raised plumes of dust so thick that Dewey could see where they were going, but no longer where they’d been.

  After half an hour, they came to a gate with an Army MP. He seemed to be guarding more empty desert. The Gordons both showed their passes and their Los Alamos badges. The guard nodded and waved the car through, then closed the gate behind them.

  Dr. Gordon pulled the car off to the side of the road a mile later and turned off the engine. It ticked slowly in the hot, still air.

  “Daddy? Where are we?” Suze asked after a minute.

  They didn’t seem to be anywhere. Except for a small range of low mountains to the west, where they’d stopped was the middle of a flat, featureless desert, scattered with construction debris—pieces of wooden crates, lengths of wire and cable, flattened sheets of metal.

  Dr. Gordon took her hand. “It’s called Trinity,” he said. “It’s where I was working last month. Let’s walk.”

  They started across the dirt. There were no plants, not even grass or yucca. Just reddish-beige, sandy dirt. Every few yards there was a charred greasewood bush. Each bush was twisted at the same odd angle, like a little black skeleton that had been pushed aside by a big wind.

  They kept walking. The skeletons disappeared and then there was nothing at all. It was the emptiest place Dewey had ever seen.

  After about five minutes, Dewey looked down and saw burned spots that looked like little animals, like a bird or a desert mouse had been stenciled black against the hard flat ground. She looked over at Mrs. Gordon. Mrs. Gordon had stopped walking.