THIS IS REALLY about how Kelly got a new boyfriend but it is also about why you should register to vote and vote in every election even if you don’t know which one is the worst liar and scoundrel and thief. If you don’t vote, somebody else will. If you don’t have a say in what happens, you might wake up one day and find an experimental fast breeder reactor going up in your backyard and it’s too late to stop it. I live in a town where thirty years ago when the whole town was dirt broke and scratching for a living the politicians who run things came in here and let a bunch of electric power companies and the West German government build a breeder reactor and use it to test whether it would blow up. This is exactly one mile from the Fall Creek cemetery where two of my father’s uncles who were shot down in the Second World War are buried beside their parents and grandparents. I don’t hate Germans or anybody else. Some of my ancestors are Germans. I’m just saying that in 1964, when the Second World War was hardly over, they let the West German government come into Strickler, Arkansas, and build a reactor to see if the Doppler effect would cool it down if it got too hot. It contained plutonium oxide. One-thousandth of a gram of plutonium oxide will kill a human being within hours. One-millionth of a gram will cause cancer in a few years. This is not speculation. These are facts. The other thing about plutonium oxide is that it is a very active sort of powder. It moves around in a sprightly dance. It clings to things. Inside our reactor it was mixed with uranium. At one time at least half a ton of plutonium oxide was inside a building right here in Strickler, Arkansas.
The reason I’m so interested in this right now is that I ended up on the roof of the reactor for two and a half hours. And then I went inside. I was on the roof for two hours and ten minutes and inside for fifteen minutes. I keep thinking about that plutonium oxide and wondering if some of it might still have been there. I keep thinking of all the places it could have found to hide, the bark of trees, the tar on the roof, the dust on the walls, the shelves, the glove boxes in the wall.
This happened in December. My boyfriend, Euland Redfern, and my cousin Kelly Nobles and myself were sitting around one Saturday morning freezing to death because it was twenty degrees outside and Daddy still won’t turn the heat pump up above sixty-five and Momma said she thought we ought to go out to Evane’s Hardware Store and buy some insulation for the doors.
“Come on,” Euland said. “We’ve been sitting around all morning. Let’s go get something done.” Kelly got up off the couch and giggled and started putting on her hiking boots. I was already on my feet. I don’t watch TV. I hate it. I think it’s ruined everybody’s minds.
“I want to go up to Devil’s Den and hike over to the old reactor,” Kelly said. “You promised you’d go walking with me if I came over.”
“We will,” I answered. “As soon as we go to the store and get this stuff for Momma.”
We all live in Strickler, which is near West Fork, which is just south of Fayetteville. All our families have lived there for ages. I guess my daddy would have moved to West Fork to be near the schools but then G.E. came in and built the reactor and that made work for all the contractors in town. Daddy paved the roads from town to the site. He made eighty thousand dollars that year, which is what built us the new house and dug the well and put money in the savings account. His brother sold the concrete for the silo. His older brother is the principal of the West Fork High School, which got the new gym paid for by the taxes G.E. paid. Now the university has to pay them.
Nobody in West Fork or Strickler is mad about SEFOR even if it is just sitting there, and Uncle Rafe says the concrete is okay but the metal is probably starting to deteriorate. Plus the liquid sodium they used to cool it will catch fire in water and they ought to get the government to come in and take it apart and get it out of here.
“It would make a really good tornado shelter if they just kept the outside,” Momma always says. She hates to waste anything. That’s the way she was raised.
So as soon as Euland and Kelly and I got the insulation we went straight to Devil’s Den and decided to hike to the reactor and back. We are all babying Kelly because her boyfriend quit liking her. He’s going out with a girl in Fayetteville who works at the university. I never did think he was good enough for her to begin with but I see why she liked him. He is a really good-looking man, and sexy. He looks a lot like Alan Jackson, who is Kelly’s favorite singer. Sort of a cross between Alan Jackson and Don Johnson. There was no way he was going to stay with Kelly after she gained all that weight last year. I told her to go on a diet but she wouldn’t do it. She is so stubborn it’s unbelievable, just like all the Nobleses.
Now she has decided to walk six miles a day until some of the weight comes off. I’m not going to be the one to tell her it won’t do any good if she doesn’t stop sitting in front of the television set eating snacks.
Devil’s Den is our park. People come from all over northwest Arkansas to walk around it and be in nature. It has a waterfall and nature trails and is a good place to go if you’re feeling sad or just want to remember you are on the earth. Euland and I have made love all over the place there, in tents, at night and in the daytime, and once in the car outside the visitors’ center on a Christmas afternoon. It is never hard to get Euland and me to go to Devil’s Den. We have such good memories of it.
“One thing about going to Devil’s Den in the winter is you don’t have to worry about chiggers,” I said. We were in Euland’s truck with the package of insulation on the floor.
“Are you sure we can get from the trails to the reactor site?” Euland said. “I think we’d have to cross Lee Creek to do that. I’m not in the mood to spend all day tramping around somebody’s pasture.”
“You just have to cross Fall Creek, and it’s dry as a bone right now. Then we’re on university land. They don’t care if someone walks over there to look at SEFOR. It isn’t even fenced in until you get to the building.”
“Why are you so interested in SEFOR all of a sudden?” Euland asked. “It’s been there all our lives.”
“Because there was an article in the paper so I looked it up one day when I had some time on my hands.” Kelly works at the Fayetteville Public Library. She’s been there a year, the longest she has ever stayed at a job. “These guys that built it were using it to do experiments to see if it would blow up. They thought they could start it up and cool it down but they weren’t sure. For three years, when all of us were babies, they were right over there mixing uranium and plutonium together and seeing if they could cool down the nuclear reaction fast enough to keep it from exploding.” She leaned toward us and there was this look on her face I have never seen before, like maybe she had actually forgotten for a minute about her boyfriend and buying makeup at the Wal-Mart and watching television and charging things to her charge card. “They were releasing this plume of heat into the air above our pastures where our cattle feed and inside of it was God knows what. That’s what that long pipe sticking up is for. That’s where the steam came out. When they build a reactor now that pipe has to be six hundred feet above the ground. The one at SEFOR was a hundred feet. So why do you think they built this little experimental breeder reactor in the middle of nowhere in a pasture outside of Strickler, Arkansas? Because our politicians let them. Governor Faubus let them and Senator Fulbright let them, too, the senator who has everything in Fayetteville named for himself. I’ve been thinking about calling up 60 Minutes or 20/20 and telling them to come down and do an investigative report on it.”
“Just because you broke up with your boyfriend doesn’t mean you have to call up 60 Minutes and get them down here poking around in Strickler and causing a lot of trouble for everyone,” I said.
“They shouldn’t leave that thing sitting there that near to our houses,” she said. “The companies that built it should come and take it down and take it away from here.”
“Well, hell, let’s go take a look at it and see how it’s doing,” Euland put in. “I would have gone to see it a lot of times but you can’t climb the fence in front without messing with the Penningtons’ dogs. I don’t like those dogs. I got bit once by a dog and that’s enough for me.” He pulled me over close to him and put his hand around my waist right under my breasts. We were standing outside the visitors’ center where we made love that Christmas day. I started getting really horny and I knew he was too. I wished Kelly wasn’t there with us but she was. I guessed that meant it was just going to be that much better when we got home that night. Euland likes to be horny. He likes to go around all day thinking about screwing me that night. Not me. I like to do it the minute I think of it. I am spoiled from getting laid by him any time I wanted to since we were juniors in high school and he was All State in football and basketball and track. He was the best and I picked him out and I have kept him. Well, I know how to keep him, but that’s another story.
Euland runs his daddy’s heating and air-conditioning business and I teach at West Fork High School and, yes, we are going to get married but not until we can buy a house. We are happy just like we are and we don’t need anybody telling us to have kids when we haven’t even paid off our student loans. It’s the nineties and we’re living our own lives.
He got out of the truck and came around and opened the door for us. He has the loveliest manners of any man you could want to meet. Also, he’s got those shoulders and those long straight legs and if I start thinking about it I’ll never get this finished.
We started off down the path beside the waterfall. It was so cold and dry we had to really watch our step. It was the coldest day we had had all of December. “What a day for a walk,” I began, but Kelly interrupted me. Part of her being stubborn is she never lets you finish what you are saying. No wonder she never keeps a boyfriend.
“I’m walking every day if it’s over forty degrees,” she declared. “I’m not going to stay fat. Fat is death and I’m going to walk it off.”
“What did you bring to eat?” Euland asks. She was wearing her backpack. We knew she had food in it.
“Some graham crackers and low-fat cookies,” she answered. “Well, are you guys ready?”
“Let’s go to the reactor,” Euland said. “You’ve got me interested now.”
We hiked past the waterfall and down to the bottom of the trail and started back up toward the east. There wasn’t a leaf left on a tree but there were bundles of bright orange pine needles on the path and beautiful hawthorn berries here and there. Hawthorn berries are the most beautiful color of red in the world. No Christmas decoration has ever been as nice as stark winter woods with hawthorn berries under a gray sky. There was also red holly and barberries and dark green mistletoe in the high branches of the oak trees. Everything you see is sexual if you start thinking about it. Everything is seed and reproduction and sperm and egg. Thank God for birth control pills. Well, it would have been too cold to make love even if Kelly wasn’t with us so I stopped thinking about screwing Euland and concentrated on pulling my fingers back into the palms of my hands inside my gloves. I knew something was going to happen. I knew this was going to be a day that mattered and it wasn’t just because I was cold and horny that I felt that way. There’s Welsh blood in all the Nobleses. We know things we can’t prove we know.
We hadn’t been walking half an hour when we saw a man coming down the other way. He was wearing a black leather jacket and some sort of thick light brown pants and his hair was jet black and curly. He wasn’t wearing a hat. I love a man who can stand the cold without a hat. If I see a man in a hat I think he’s old, no matter what his age.
We stopped at a wide place in the path and let him walk down to us. He was smiling this lovely wide smile like we were just what he was hoping to find in the woods. When he got about three feet away he stopped. “Hello, there,” he said. “I was wondering if I had this place to myself. It’s so quiet you can hear a leaf drop.” He smiled the gorgeous smile again and I could see Kelly changing gears. She pulled her old AMOCO hat with the earflaps off her head and shook out her long red hair. She has the best hair you’ve ever seen in your life. Brilliant golden red and so curly it is like a bouquet of flowers. She never cuts it. It hangs down halfway to her waist. Fat or thin, Kelly can get a lot of mileage out of that hair. So then she unbuttons the top button of her jacket.
“I walk any day it’s above forty degrees,” she said, throwing her hair down on her chest.
“Then you shouldn’t be out today.” He laughed and pulled back his sleeve and showed us a watch with a digital dial that gave you the temperature. The watch said thirty-two. We all laughed and he took out a package of cigarettes and offered them to us and Euland and I took one and we lit them and then we all stood there smoking.
“What are you doing out on a day like this?” Kelly answered.
“I’m the new professor in the botany department,” he said. “I’ve only been in town a week. I’m lonely. Everybody’s married so they sent me out to see the woods. It’s very interesting. I’m from Massachusetts. This is all new to me.” He waved his hand around at the flora and fauna and I thought, I may have given up on Jesus but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in providence.
“You want to see something interesting you should go with us,” I said. “There’s an abandoned breeder reactor a mile from here. We live near it. We’re walking over there because you can’t get in the front. You want to come along?”
“A breeder reactor?”
“An experimental breeder reactor that was the only one of its kind in the world. We’re going over to check it out.” I loved the expression on his face. I love it when people think Strickler is the end of the earth and then find out it’s not.
“I’m the one who thought up going,” Kelly says. “No one pays any attention to it anymore but I’m interested in it. I just broke my engagement and I decided I’d better wake up and find out what’s happening in the world.” She had completely moved in. She isn’t all that fat and even if she was you couldn’t tell it underneath all the basic black ski clothes she was wearing.
“I’m Ed Douglas,” he said. “I’d love to tag along.”
So we set off back down the path with Kelly and Ed in the rear and Kelly telling him everything she’d been learning about SEFOR and Ed turning out to be a really good listener, something every Nobles finds seductive to the tenth power since we all talk too much.
“They built it right beside Fall Creek,” Kelly is telling him. “Which runs into Lee Creek which is a category five white water river. Not to mention Fall Creek is where the people in my family teach their children to swim. All three of us learned to swim there, Chandler, Euland, and me. All our grandparents are from Strickler. And our parents too. Anyway, they built that nuclear reactor right beside our creek without asking anyone if they could do it. I think we can still sue them. I’m looking into it.”
I didn’t look behind me. I didn’t want to turn into a pillar of salt and I didn’t want to start giggling. I just held on to Euland’s arm whenever there was a place where we could walk side by side. It was beginning to look like we might not be stuck with Kelly all weekend after all.
It wasn’t as easy getting from the park to the pasture that leads up to SEFOR as we thought it was going to be. The path through the little woods was covered with honeysuckle vines. Euland and Ed had to get out pocketknives and cut vines every ten or twenty feet. I guess we would have given up if Ed hadn’t come along but Ed was showing off for Kelly and Euland was showing off for Ed so they kept on hacking down the vines. It wasn’t that far. I could see the pasture and the top of SEFOR through the trees. All this time Kelly is having the time of her life saying all the stuff she’s been reading in the library and making copies of in her spare time. “The heat produced by the nuclear reactions was transferred to liquid sodium metal, then transferred to more sodium, then the steam came out of the pipe to float around on top of our pastures and houses and creek. Can you see why I got interested in this?”
“Well, of course,” Ed answered. “It’s one thing to think about nuclear power in the abstract. It’s another thing to have it in your backyard.”
“So one of these breeder reactors blew up in Detroit, Michigan. Well, they don’t call it blowing up. They call it melting down.”
“A disaster either way.”
“You got it.” She was letting him get a word in here and there, but not many. “Anyway,” she goes on. “After that happened in Detroit they shut this one down and gave it to the university. Our uncle sold them the concrete. He says it’s probably okay but that the metal might be starting to deteriorate.”
“I can imagine it might.”
“Anyway, I keep reading everything I can find but there’s not much information. The university should sue the power companies that built it to make them take it down but they won’t because SWEPCO, our local power company, was part of it and they contribute money to the university. There are other connections about that but I haven’t finished finding them all out.”
Kelly was casting herself in the role of some investigative reporter with secrets to keep. One thing about all the television she watches, she can find lots of outlets for her dramatic side.
We finished hacking through the vines and came to the rickety wire fence that separates the park from SEFOR. Euland climbed over it and held it while I climbed over and then Kelly and then Ed. Just as we got to the other side and were straightening up our clothes, the sun came out for the first time all day. It was so beautiful, this big patch of sunny sky in between the banks of clouds. It cast beautiful shadows all over the yellow pastures. It made the world look beautiful and interesting and gay. I moved over to Euland’s side and started thinking maybe we ought to go on and get married in the spring. We could rent a house for a year or two before we buy one. Kelly was unbuttoning her jacket another button as if she isn’t the most cold-blooded person in the world.
“It’s just half a mile from here,” Euland said. “Let’s hike.”
“This isn’t the only time nuclear power came to Arkansas,” Kelly was telling Ed. “I guess you know about the Titan II missiles in Damascus, don’t you?”
“Damascus?”
“Damascus, Arkansas. It’s a town down west of Little Rock. We had this representative named Wilbur Mills and he got so crazy from drinking and screwing whores that he let the government put eighteen Titan II missiles in the ground in Arkansas. He volunteered the state for all sixty of them but Kansas and Arizona wanted some so we only got eighteen.”
“You are centrally located.” Ed was laughing at everything she said, like she wasn’t discussing the fate of the world. She still had her hat off. She gets terrible ear infections. I was hoping her hair would keep them warm.
“You got that,” Euland put in. “We could guard the United States from east, west, south, and north.”
“People aren’t educated,” Ed puts in. “If they were, they wouldn’t let politicians get away with these things.”
We stopped for a moment in a low protected place beside a man-made dam. We huddled together and Kelly finally put on her hat, turning it around so the AMOCO sign was in the back and her curly bangs fell down across her forehead. Before us was a long sloping pasture leading up to the reactor in the distance, the Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor, a concrete silo sixty feet below the ground and fifty feet above the ground with a smokestack rising another fifty feet. There was a power line running from the silo to the road and a chain-link fence with a gate. Above that the gray-blue skies of December in the Ozarks.
“So anyway,” Kelly is saying. “They came down and dug these holes in the ground and put in the missiles, each one containing the most explosive devices ever aimed at an enemy in the history of the world. Right there, in Damascus, they put the one that melted down, blew up, whatever you want to call it. Two people were killed.” She was losing her audience. We were freezing. Ed pulled out his watch and the temperature dial said thirty. “Let’s walk while we talk,” he suggested. “Let’s get on up there.”
We started hiking really fast in the direction of the silo, but the conversation was started now and no one could let it alone.
“I worked with this guy who was a soldier stationed in Little Rock when the Titans were down there,” Euland said. “It was his job to drive one of the trucks that took the warheads back and forth to Fort Chaffee to be checked and cleaned up. There were two men driving each warhead. He said one night the brakes went out on the truck, that was before cellular phones, and they had to keep pouring water on the brakes every twenty miles to make it to the base. He runs Jackson’s Air in Fayetteville now. He’s a smart guy.”
“Your tax dollars at work,” Kelly puts in. Not that she pays anything compared to me. You ought to see what they take out of a single teacher’s salary.
We were halfway up the pasture when we saw the dogs. I’m always worried in a pasture that I might meet a bull but it never occurs to me to worry about dogs. Everyone around here keeps their dogs tied up. If they didn’t their dogs would be dead. So when I saw the dogs in the distance I didn’t get worried at first. Euland was the one who stopped. Euland’s been bitten.
“Are those dogs going to be okay?” Ed asked. He took hold of Kelly’s arm. I guess it was the first time they touched each other.
“I don’t like loose dogs,” Euland answered. “I don’t trust them. Hell, I wish I had a gun.” We were within sight of the fence surrounding the reactor. There was a gate on it but it didn’t look like it was padlocked. Euland picked up a dead branch from the ground. It broke in two in his hand. “Let’s go,” he said. “Run for the fence.”
I guess it was a quarter mile. Too far to outrun dogs but we did what we were told. The dogs kept trotting in our direction. They didn’t bark. They just kept trotting with a big yellow dog in the lead.
“Stay in front of me,” Euland yelled. He had the ends of the stick in his hands. I’ll say one thing about boys from Strickler. They aren’t afraid of the devil when the time comes. I’ll say something for my cousin Kelly, too. She can sprint. We were on basketball teams together and you could count on her to get a basketball down the court. So Ed didn’t have to wait on any girls from Strickler. We beat him to the gate. All three of us from Strickler were probably thinking about the dog pack last summer that killed a child near Hogeye. There are wolves and foxes in this part of the country and all sorts of wild creatures.
We got to the chain-link fence just as the dogs stopped trotting and started running. Euland threw himself against the gate and it opened. I don’t know what we would have done if the caretaker hadn’t left it open. He said later it was open because someone from the university was supposed to come by on Sunday and double-check the radiation badges in the containment vessel. Whether that was true or not, he had neglected to put the lock on and Euland pushed it and it opened. About the time we got inside these three dogs as big as mastiffs got to the fence and started throwing themselves against it.
“Do you have that cellular phone?” I asked Kelly.
“No, the battery was down. It’s at home on the charger.”
The dogs kept throwing themselves at the fence and at first I was sorry I’d made Euland stop carrying a gun in the truck but then I decided he wouldn’t have had it out here anyway. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “Well, Ed, I guess you didn’t plan on this much excitement. You think we could have scared them off if we hadn’t gotten in the fence?”
“I’m glad we didn’t have to try. I think they’re feral. Will they go away, do you think?”
“I wouldn’t trust it.”
“Is there a caretaker to this place? Surely someone watches it.”
“Just Mrs. Pennington. She lives in the old visitors’ center. It’s her dog that keeps you from getting in the front gate. I’ll be damned. I don’t know how we’re going to get out. Well, I guess we can look around and find something to use for weapons. An iron rod would do.”
“They check it every Saturday,” Kelly put in. “That was in the newspaper article. A man from the university comes out every Saturday and sees about the radiation. Do you think he’s been here yet?”
“Maybe that’s why the gate was open.” Ed turned and looked at the building behind us. The dome-shaped containment vessel and the flat-roofed building that adjoins it. It looked like a fallen rusting spaceship stuck in the ground, not really evil, just a pile of concrete and metal and bad ideas, abandoned and forlorn. The ladder going up the side of the dome was cut off twenty feet above the ground but there was still a ladder to the flat-roofed part. Ed buttoned his jacket up around his neck and walked over to the ladder. “I’m going up,” he said. “Let’s see if we can get inside. There might be an alarm we can set off or a phone.” As soon as he was on the roof Euland started up after him. I looked at Kelly. “Let’s go,” I said. “I don’t want to be left out.”
I started up. As soon as I was almost to the top she got on and started climbing too. I was getting off the ladder when I heard it start to slip. “Jump,” I screamed down at her. “It’s loose. It’s falling.” She ignored me and kept on climbing, half her body on the ladder and half on the brick wall. Two years ago when she was going with a rock climber she put in a lot of hours on that fake rock wall in Fayetteville behind the brewery and I guess it wasn’t all wasted time because she made it onto the roof. By the time she came over both Ed and Euland were holding on to her arms.
We stood in a circle. We looked at each other. It was cold as hell. It was Saturday afternoon. The ladder was on the ground. No one on earth knew where we were. Not to mention that the University of Arkansas Razorback basketball team was playing Louisville in the Bud Walton Arena and anyone in northwest Arkansas who wasn’t at the game was watching it on television.
“They’ll find our cars,” Ed said.
“There’s a forecast for snow,” Euland answered. “We better all just hope that doesn’t happen.”
“I hate dogs with all my heart.” Kelly walked to the edge of the roof to look at them. They were still hanging around the gate. “I hate the whole idea of dogs and keeping them penned up and putting collars on them and if you let them go they get wild and try to kill you.”
“Well, I wish I had my dog,” Euland said. He has a Doberman. “I’d love to turn him loose to kill those hounds.”
Ed had walked over to a black shed on the back of the roof and was inspecting the door. He took out his pocketknife and began to undo the screws on the side of the door. He didn’t curse or act like he was mad or anything. He just stood there taking the screws out of the door with the flat blade of a Swiss army knife. I guessed that if we didn’t catch pneumonia this was going to be the day Kelly finally found what she’d been looking for all her life. A ticket to a bigger world.
“I’ll be goddamned. I’ll just be goddamned,” Euland said about six times. Kelly was just standing off to one side like she didn’t have a care in the world. She had fixed the main thing wrong with her world by finding an unmarried professor out in the woods and getting herself marooned with him on top of a breeder reactor, so why should she care if we starved to death or caught pneumonia before someone missed us and came to help?
“Can you lend me a hand here?” Ed called out and Euland went to him and began to help with the screws.
“There might be an alarm we can set off.” Ed took a different blade out of his knife and began to wiggle it around along the sides of the lock. I pulled a scarf out of my pocket and asked him if he wanted to put it on his head but he said no. It must have been about twenty-five degrees by then. The patch of sun we had seen earlier had entirely disappeared. There was nothing to be seen in four directions but the roof of Euland’s mother’s house on the hill near the cemetery and the old visitors’ center looking deserted and the two-lane blacktop road no one could hear us from and snow clouds coming in from the west.
No alarm went off but the lock did begin to come loose around the door and Euland got really excited and started calling the hogs. “Sooieee, pig,” he yelled out. “Go hogs.” He was pulling on the lock while Ed cut around it.
All I could think about was my thin gloves and how it would be just my luck to get frostbite and lose a finger just when I had almost finished learning how to play Erik Satie’s Second Gymnopédie. I was learning it to play for Euland’s mother’s sixtieth birthday party.
“It’s coming,” Euland yelled. “Sooie, pig, here it goes.” There was this crashing, breaking sound and a big chunk of lock and wooden door was twisted and torn out of its place and then Ed and Euland kicked the rest down.
“A hollow-core door,” Ed said. “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Well, let’s go in. There may be a phone that works.”
“What do you think is down there?” Euland asked.
“Well, surely not the radioactive core.” Ed stood with his hands on his hips. “If it’s been decommissioned that’s gone. In any case that would surely have been underground.”
Only it wasn’t underground. Later, when Kelly was poking around the files in the university library, one of the things she found was a letter from a nuclear engineer to the Atomic Energy Commission. It was dated 1972, the year SEFOR was decommissioned. It said one of the problems with SEFOR was that they had no idea whether they would be able to cool down the nuclear reactions they were starting and they should have built it underground just in case. The nuclear engineer is named Richard E. Webb. We wanted to write him a letter but Kelly can’t find an address for him anywhere although she has used up about six hours of Fayetteville Public Library computer time in the search. When last heard of he was in West Germany working for some organization called the Greens. The part of the letter I liked most was the very end. He told them, “As officers of the federal government, who are bound to support the Constitution, the AEC and the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy should recommend that Congress submit an amendment proposition to the states so that the people can make a value judgment of whether a civilian nuclear program is both necessary and safe, as is their right.”
Also, he says twice they should only build something like SEFOR deeply underground in case something to do with safety had been overlooked.
The something that was overlooked was me sleeping a mile down the creek. The something that was overlooked was Euland’s parents’ house up on the hill and Kelly and her brothers right down the road.
“I would think this was the lab area,” Ed was saying. “I don’t know much about nuclear reactors but I’ve seen plans. There had to be a lab and they wouldn’t want it near the core. I visited Los Alamos once when I was a graduate student.”
“Let me go in first,” Euland said. “I know about equipment. I’ll be able to tell if there’s anything that might be contaminated. Let me find the lights.”
“Imagine this being out here in the middle of nowhere.” Ed buttoned the top of his leather jacket and turned to look at Kelly and me where we were huddled together watching them.
“Strickler isn’t nowhere,” Kelly told him. “It’s where we live. I learned to swim in that creek. That one right over there. The one you can see from here.”
“I’m going in,” Euland said. Ed held open the broken door and Euland disappeared into the hole. “It’s a ladder,” he called back. “There’s a ladder going down.”
“I’m right behind you,” Ed called back. “You stay here, girls. Don’t come in until we find some lights.”
We’ve found out something else since that afternoon. The half ton of plutonium oxide that was in the core doesn’t take up much room. Stacked all together it wasn’t much bigger than, say, eight six-packs in a pile. For some reason I find that comforting when I start worrying about the dust that was everywhere when Kelly and I finally went down the ladder and were inside.
“Come on down,” Ed called up. “We found a light but it’s not much. Watch your step. There’s a steel ladder with fourteen rungs. Count them.”
Kelly went down first and I followed her. The light was only one bulb in a ceiling fixture. And it wasn’t a laboratory or a nuclear core. It was an abandoned office with desks and three chairs and a stack of wire baskets pushed against a wall. A set of stairs led down to the space below.
The lower level was a laboratory with beakers and stacks of equipment and sealed containers marked GENERAL ELECTRIC. There was a steel door locked and padlocked. DECONTAMINATION CHAMBER, it said. DO NOT ENTER.
In the laboratory Ed had found two lights that worked. It was much brighter than the upstairs part. We stood in a group looking around. There were glove boxes in the corner. That gave us a chill. If there’s a glove box in a laboratory it means something was inside it that no one should touch.
We stood there for a minute not saying a word. Then Euland walked over to a table and picked up a telephone and held it to his ear. “It works,” he said. “I’ve got a signal.”
“Call the West Fork police,” I suggested. “It’s 555-8777. Jo Lynn works there on the weekends.”
Euland dialed the phone and our cousin Jo Lynn Nobles answered and then she put him through to Dakota Jackson, who used to go out with Kelly in high school. “Get out of that building,” Dakota said to Euland. “Get back up on the roof. I’ve been there when they tested those badges. Don’t stay in there any longer than you have to.”
“Dakota said get out of the building,” Euland said. “Go on. You girls go first. They’re coming as fast as they can. They’ve got to get the fire truck for the ladder.”
Kelly was already running up the stairs with Ed behind her, but I refused to run. I just walked back up the stairs and across the office and up the ladder.
It was snowing a soft light snow when we reached the roof. A darling misty snow that filled the air with mystery and a hundred shades of white. The soft yellow hills and evergreen trees were disappearing into white. Above us the sky was turning every color of pink and gray and violet. Then the black leafless trees. The dogs had disappeared. “Well, at least you got to see the prettiest part of the country,” I said to Ed. “This is our home. I guess we can’t help it if we think it’s gorgeous.”
“It’s beautiful country,” he answered. “This is the first time I’ve felt at home since I got off the plane a week ago. That’s a joke, isn’t it? Feeling at home on top of a decommissioned nuclear reactor. Not many people would understand that, I guess.”
“We understand,” Kelly said. “Why do you think we all still live out here? Why do you think I haven’t moved to town? I’m a librarian at the Fayetteville Public Library. I have to drive fourteen miles every morning to get to work.”
It gets dark at five o’clock in December in the Ozarks. It was pitch-black dark by the time we saw the four-wheel-drive vehicles coming down 265 in our direction. It was another twenty minutes before they got the jammed front gate open and drove in and put up the ladder from the fire truck and took us down one by one.
“I’m going to kill those goddamn loose dogs,” Euland kept saying to anyone who would listen. “I’m coming back tomorrow and hunt those bastards down.”
“We’ll trap them,” Dakota agreed. “It’s part of that pack that attacked that kid last month. I’m glad you flushed them. You aren’t the only one with those dogs on a list.”
Kelly and I rode as far as Devil’s Den in the deputy’s truck. The men rode in the police car and made out the reports. “I’m going to ask him to stay and have dinner with us,” Kelly said. “You think we can take him to that sushi place we went to last month? Or should we just stay home and cook something for him?”
“Let’s just go to El Chico’s like we always do,” I answered. “Don’t go changing your personality just because he’s a professor. Besides, Euland hates Japanese food. He’s had all he needs today.”
They took us to our cars at Devil’s Den and Kelly rode with Ed to show him how to get to Momma’s house and we all went in and saw Momma and Daddy and told the story and then Kelly and I put on some fresh makeup and the four of us went in Ed’s car to get some supper. We’d decided to just stay in West Fork and go to the White Tiger Haven and get a hamburger and a beer. We played the jukebox and talked about nuclear energy and the global warming meeting in Japan and told Ed all about Fayetteville and what there is to do there. We tried to teach him to call the hogs, but he wasn’t ready for that yet. They had beaten Louisville 87 to 65, by the way, after our embarrassing loss to them the year before.
Then Ed took Euland and me home and he and Kelly went off and spent the night at his apartment although I had begged her in the ladies’ room not to do it.
I had had an epiphany up on the roof of SEFOR. As soon as we were alone I told Euland I wanted to get married in April for my birthday.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if we should rush it, Chandler. Everything’s all right like it is, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s not. We’ve been going together since the dawn of time. It’s time to get married. We’re a laughingstock for not getting married. I’m sick of it.”
“I can’t believe you’d start this tonight. After all that happened to us today.”
“I’m starting it. So just get used to that.”
The next day I threw away my birth control pills. I knew he’d never leave me or let me go but I wanted some insurance.
Postscript: Euland and I got married on April 28, 1998, out in my mother’s backyard by the wisteria arbor, which is where McArthur Wilson and I used to play doctor together. He was at the wedding with his wife, Cynthia, and their two little girls. He runs a television station in Fayetteville. He’s gone pretty far in the world.
No, I wasn’t pregnant or pretending to be but I’m still off the pill. Nothing’s happened yet but we’re not worried. No one in the Nobles or Cathaway or Redfern or Tuttle families has ever had any trouble having babies if they wanted them. I kind of want it to happen and then again I don’t.
I wore Momma’s wedding dress with new lace all around the sleeves and hem. It’s been in a box for thirty-six years. It had not turned yellow thanks to Mrs. Agnew’s having sealed it up so well when she ran the cleaners down on Main Street.
What else? Nothing has happened about SEFOR. Not a single thing has been done and Kelly is still thinking about calling 20/20 but she hasn’t done it yet because she doesn’t want to make trouble for the university while she’s dating a professor. She thinks Ed’s going to marry her but Euland and I think the odds are about fifty-fifty. Of course, Kelly will get pregnant if she needs to. She is the most ruthless of my cousins, plus the most stubborn. She has lost eleven pounds. She doesn’t look like some starving model yet but she is definitely back in the game and holding cards.
Well, that’s all from Strickler for the moment. It’s October again. Time to start getting ready for the winter. Euland’s so busy this time of year I hardly see him. Everybody wants to get their heat pump checked before it snows. We like to keep things working around here.