The Green Glass Sea

SUNDAY MORNING, August fifth. Suze’s birthday. Mrs. Gordon was up early, making stacks of ham-and-cheese sandwiches that she wrapped in waxed paper. Dewey and Suze put their paper sacks onto the floor of the backseat of the big black Chevy and just before 11:00 they showed their passes to the guard at the East Gate and set off down the long twisting road that led from the mesa to the highway several thousand feet below. The temperature climbed as they descended.

Dewey and Suze sat in middle of the backseat, the road map spread out across their laps. 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. It was the first time she’d been down from the Hill since she and Papa arrived. 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 gotten gas coupons, and he filled up the tank in Albuquerque. They stopped for a late lunch on the banks of a trickle of river a few miles farther south, eating their sandwiches and drinking cold bottles of Orange NEHI in the shade of a piñon pine. The summer sun was bright and the air smelled like dust and resin.

Dewey and Suze bent over the map and Suze’s 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.

“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 mysteriously.

After Albuquerque, 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 dusk. 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 two blocks into town for dinner. Mrs. Gordon carried a large bundle wrapped in white paper. Carrizozo was not much more than the place where the north-south highway headed 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?”

Dewey frowned. She had spent most of the day looking 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 a hundred miles to the south. If they’d been going there, Dewey thought, it would have made more sense to stay in Alamogordo, near where—

“Exactly. And speaking of secrets . . . ” Mrs. Gordon signaled to the waitress, then opened the bundle from the seat next to her and lifted out a pink bakery box. “Anyone for birthday cake?”

“Well, let’s just see, ” said Dr. Gordon. “I think I can handle cutting a cake. I’ve done a fair amount of precision work lately. ” He sliced a generous wedge out of the cake and laid it next to the scoop of vanilla ice cream on the plate the waitress had brought. “Yep. Chocolate in and out. ” He pushed the plate across the table to Suze.

Mrs. Gordon set a smaller, cloth-wrapped bundle on the table. “Happy birthday, sweetie. ” Suze undid the string tying the neck, and the cloth fell open to reveal a small, round pot, about five inches across, tapering to a narrower opening. The surface was a deep, shiny black, like the shell of a beetle. Around the rim was a two-inch border of gray lines that outlined the black, creating a crisp geometric design.

“Maria Martinez, ” said Suze, nodding. She was some kind of famous potter. So famous that she’d made pots at the World’s Fair and had met Mrs. Roosevelt. Suze traced the band of designs with a fingertip. “It’s really nifty. ”

“I thought that since you’ve become such an artist yourself, you might appreciate it. ” Mrs. Gordon smiled. “And the other part of your present is that she’ll give you a lesson in making them, when we get back. ”

It was heavier than she thought it would be, and felt cool on her skin. It was the perfect shape for two cupped hands, smooth as glass. Dewey held it for a minute, then very gently put it down on the table. “What’s it made out of?”

“Just clay, ” said Mrs. Gordon. “That’s how powerful fire is. It can turn batter into cake, and mud into art. Amazing when you think about it. ”

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 for 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 an hour, the rising sun making a long dark shadow in front of the car. For about a mile there was nothing on either side of the car but burnt, crumbly-looking rock. An old lava flow, Dr. Gordon said. Malpais. The bad country. Then the road wound up and down hills dotted with cactus and sagebrush silvery green against the brick-red dirt. There were no houses or landmarks, nothing much to see out the window or on the map. At an unmarked dirt road, Dr. Gordon turned left.

The car raised plumes of dust so thick that Dewey could see where they were going, but no longer where they’d been. Thin wire ran between wooden fence posts, separating the red dirt of the road from the pale pink-beige of the desert sand and the bright yellow flowers of spiky yucca plants.

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

They didn’t seem to be anywhere. They had stopped in the middle of a flat, featureless desert, scattered with construction debris—pieces of wooden crates, lengths of wire and cable, flattened sheets of metal. Low mountains loomed to the east, and the far western horizon was broken by the soft shapes of another, distant range.

They started across the dirt. There were no plants, none at all, 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.

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.

She stood a few yards back from the others, her lips pressed tight together, staring down at one of the black animal shapes. “Christ, ” she said. “What have we done?” She lit a Chesterfield and stood there for almost a minute, then looked up at Dr. Gordon. He walked back to her.

“Phil? Is this safe?” She looked around, holding her arms tight across her chest, as if she were cold, although the temperature was already in the eighties.

He nodded. “Ground zero’s still pretty hot. But Oppie said the rest is okay, as long as we don’t stay out too long. Ten minutes. We’ll be fine. ”

Dewey wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Maybe sunburn. There wasn’t any shade. There wasn’t any anything. Mrs. Gordon nodded without smiling. A few minutes later Dewey saw her reach down and take Suze’s hand, holding it tight.

And then, just ahead of them, the ground sloped gently downward into a huge green sea. Dewey took a few more steps and saw that it wasn’t water. It was glass. Translucent jade-green glass, everywhere, coloring the bare, empty desert as far ahead as she could see. It wasn’t smooth, like a Pyrex bowl, or sharp like a broken bottle, but more like a giant candle had dripped and splattered green wax everywhere.

Suze turned the glass over and over in her hand. It was shiny on the top, with some little bubbles in places, like a piece of dark green peanut brittle. The bottom was pitted and rough and dirty where it had been lying in the sand. “Is it very old?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Very, very new. Three weeks today. It’s the first new mineral created on this planet in millions of years. ” He sounded very proud.

Dewey counted back in her head. Today was August sixth. Three weeks ago was when they got up early and saw the bright light. “The gadget made this?” she asked.

“Yes, it was so hot that it melted the ground. Over one hundred million degrees. Hotter than the sun itself. It fused seventy-five acres of this desert sand into glass. ”

Mrs. Gordon winced. “Well, if cooler heads prevail, ” she said, “we’ll never have to find out, will we, Philip?” She gave Dr. Gordon a look, then took a few steps away and stared out toward the mountains.

Dewey and Suze both nodded and stepped out onto the green glass sea. The strange twisted surface crunched and crackled beneath their feet as if they were walking on braided ice. They walked in from the edge until all they could see was green: splattered at their feet, merging into solid color at the edges of their vision.

“I didn’t know war stuff could make anything like this, ” Suze said. “It looks like kryptonite. Or what they’d build the Emerald City out of. ” Suze reached down and picked up a long, flat piece. “The Wicked Witch of the West’s powerful magic glass. ” She held it out at arm’s length. “It’s a nifty green, ” she said. “It changes when you turn it in the light. ” She watched the sun play on its surface for a minute, then pulled the bottom of her seersucker blouse out to make a pouch and dropped it in. “I’m going to take some home. ”

Dewey stood still, then turned slowly around, trying to take it all in. This place was more wonderful than anything she could have imagined. Sometimes, when Papa had talked about how beautiful math and science were, his voice had sounded just the way she felt now. She knelt down and put her hand flat on the green surface. “Papa helped make this, ” she whispered. She wasn’t sure who she was talking to, but it felt right to say it out loud.

After a minute she stood up and walked carefully across the jade-colored ground, looking for one perfect piece to take back with her. The glassy surface was only about half an inch thick, and many of the pieces she picked up were so brittle they crumbled and cracked apart in her hands. One odd, rounded lump had a thin glass casing on the outside that shattered under her fingers like an eggshell, revealing a lump of plain dirt inside. She finally chose a flat piece about the size of her hand spread out.

Dewey was looking closely at a big patch infused with streaks of reddish brown when Dr. Gordon whistled. “Come on back. Now, ” he called.

She caught up with Suze, who had filled her shirttails with pieces of the green glass in all sizes and shapes, and was holding the fabric in both hands.

Dewey didn’t say anything, but put her hand on Suze’s elbow. They walked back in silence, holding their fragile treasure. At the edge, Dewey stopped and turned around, trying to fold the image into her memory like a photograph. Then she stepped back onto the bare, scorched dirt.

When they got to the car, Dr. Gordon was squatting back on his heels, holding a black box with a round lens like a camera. “Good, ” he said, squinting up at them. “Now hand me each of the pieces you picked up, one by one. ”

Suze pulled a flat piece of pebbled glass out of her shirt pouch. When her father put it in front of the black box, a needle moved over a bit, and the box made a few clicking sounds. He put that piece down by his foot and reached for the next one. It was one of the round eggshell ones, and it made the needle go all the way over. The box clicked like a cicada.

When he agreed, she held the glass in front of the black box. The needle didn’t swing too far, or make too many clicks, and to her relief, he said, “That one’s fine. ”

Dr. Gordon made Suze leave behind all the eggshell pieces and two with long reddish streaks. He wrapped the rest in newspaper and put them into a shoebox, padded with some more newspaper crumpled up, then put out his hand for Dewey’s.

After a glance at Mrs. Gordon, he nodded and tied the shoebox shut with string. He put it in the trunk. Then they took off their shoes and socks and brushed all the dust off.

Her mother made a face. “All right. Because it’s your birthday, ” she said. “And only back to Carrizozo. ” She got into the backseat with Dewey.

Suze nodded. She climbed into the front seat and kissed her father on the cheek. “Thanks, Daddy. I bet this is the best birthday party I’ll ever have. ”

Dewey thought that was probably true. As they drove east, she watched the green shimmer in the desert fade away through the back window. When it had disappeared, Mrs. Gordon curled an arm around her shoulder, and she snuggled into it, closing her eyes and listening to the rhythmic rumble of the car wheels. The comforting weight of her talisman rested in her lap. One last present from Papa, a piece of the beautiful green glass sea.

Dr. Gordon nodded. “Go ahead. I don’t think you’ll get anything way out here. Maybe El Paso, if you want Mexican music. ” He turned and looked over his shoulder. “But not too loud. I think your mother and Dewey are sleeping. ”

Suze nodded. “Any music would be good. ” The radio popped and crackled with muted static. She was almost to the end of the dial when a man’s voice came through, soft but clear: “. . . onto the Japanese city of Hiroshima this morning . . . ” She turned past it to more static and shook her head. “Nothing but war news, ” she said, clicking the radio off. “We can always get that later. ”