Desert Wind (33 page)
Dial tone.
I went back to my laptop, typing in BOMB+NEVADA TEST SITE. In the next half-hour I learned that between 1951 and 1992, the U.S. government detonated more than nine hundred nuclear bombs at Yucca Flat and Frenchman Flat, two of the main locations on the Nevada Test Site. The John Wayne marathon host had understated their power: some of those nukes were nearly
five times
the size of those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of Second World War.
The radioactive fallout spread all over the U.S.—as far away as New York’s Central Park—but Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado received the largest doses. The result was an enormous cancer cluster centered in the American Southwest. Those radiation-caused cancers included male and female breast cancer, leukemia, multiple myeloma, and lymphoma. Thyroid cancer was a big killer, but so were cancers of the pharynx, small intestine, ovaries, pancreas, salivary glands, lungs, esophagus, stomach, brain, bladder, kidney, bile ducts, liver, colon, and gall bladder. The exact numbers of deaths resulting from the bomb tests was not known, but was estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. In 1977, the National Cancer Institute released a report estimating that fallout-related deaths from thyroid cancer alone totaled as many as seventy-five thousand.
I gasped. My high school history textbook hadn’t mentioned deaths.
As I continued to read, I learned that on July 5, 1957, the Army drove more than 3,200 young American soldiers into the blast zone and exploded an atom bomb right over their heads. At seventy-four kilotons, the nuke represented the largest atmospheric test ever conducted within the continental United States. The government wanted to find out what effects eleven million Curies of iodine-131 would have on them. They found out, all right. Many of the men—some as young as nineteen—developed cancer. The bomb sterilized others on the spot.
When Olivia called me back a few minutes later, I’d calmed down enough to at least speak. “Let me tell you what I’ve discovered.” Hating the tremor in my voice, I ranted about immorality of using uninformed Americans as radiation test subjects until my throat was raw. “When Saddam Hussein gassed and killed five thousand Kurds, our government called him a murderer. But the U.S. government killed at least a hundred thousand more of our own people!”
Olivia didn’t sound all that steady, herself. “Sucks, doesn’t it? Look, how would you like to get away from Walapai Flats for a couple of hours. I’m leaving for Silver Ridge in a few minutes to get some final information for a story I’m writing. It’d be nice to have you along for company.”
“The Black Basin Mine story?”
“Not exactly, but in a way, there is a distant connection.”
As emotionally exhausted as I felt, the idea of taking a drive to Silver Ridge didn’t appeal to me. “I appreciate the offer, but before I got waylaid with all this radiation stuff, I was going to make some phone calls on behalf of Gabriel Boone. In fact, I’d better get started right now, because…”
“Lena, you’ll learn more about Gabe by going to Silver Ridge with me than by hanging around your motel room.”
Her use of the man’s nickname made it like they’d already become fast friends. While Boone had been cordial to me, he’d been less than forthcoming, certainly not hail-fellow-well-met. That alone made me change my mind.
“Pick you up in ten minutes,” she said.
I started to give her the name of my motel and the room number, but she stopped me in mid-sentence. “You’re not the only one who knows how to check people out, Lena. Covered Wagons, room 217, right?”
“Can’t hide anything from a reporter, can I?”
“Not for long.”
***
Olivia seemed edgy during the drive to Silver Ridge, and I wondered if she had another migraine coming on. If so, I hoped she’d have enough sense to pull over and let me drive her back to Walapai Flats. But when I brought it up, she waved my concern away.
“I’ll be fine. Thanks for the offer, though. If this damned headache continues, I might take you up on it after the meeting.”
We traveled in silence the rest of the way, and by the time we arrived in Silver Ridge, the last vestiges of the usual spectacular sunset had been swallowed up by indigo.
I’d always liked the small mining town. Settled by Mormon pioneers in the mid-eighteen sixties, many of their original homes still stood, lending it a Victorian flavor that has been erased from Southwestern towns which concentrated on expansion instead of quality of life. As we twisted and turned along the broad, shaded streets, I appreciated the curlicued porches, the carefully-tended rose gardens, the perfectly maintained picket fences. It was like entering another, more charming, century. Given the town’s bucolic charm, I couldn’t help but wonder why Olivia had traded it for the more frenetic demands of Boston and New York. Maybe she liked the adrenalin rush the cities offered.
“Here we are,” she announced, pulling into a Methodist church parking lot. Newer than most of the surrounding buildings, the church had made an attempt to blend with them by using a facade of weathered red brick and sparkling white trim.
“You brought me all the way up here to save my soul?” I said, as we exited her Explorer.
“I’m not sure the local Methodists are into that ‘saving’ stuff, but they’ve provided the room free of charge.”
As we reached the side door, a church van pulled up, disgorging several passengers. One of them, a middle-aged woman sporting a jaunty red turban on her head, saw Olivia and waved.
Olivia waved back. “That’s my cousin Edith.” she explained. “Other members of the Eames clan may be inside. At least, the ones who are left.”
“Left?”
“Look and listen.” She started picking at her lip again.
We followed the van passengers down a dimly-lit hallway and into a carpeted parlor. Like most church parlors, the room was furnished with a mishmash of furniture. Flowered sofas, velveteen sofas, leather sofas—all different colors. Even though the room had no windows, lamps displaying the styles of at least four decades lent the room a cheery glow. Completing this picture of ecumenical benevolence, a painting of Jesus smiled down from a peach-toned wall as a white dove hovered over his head. Beneath it, Olivia’s cousin climbed to the lectern. The flowered dress she wore would have better fit a woman three sizes larger, a pattern repeated over and over in the room, where other men and women with little or no hair were dressed in loose clothing that suggested sudden weight loss.
They were dying.
As my nose adjusted to the sharp medicinal odors that warred for supremacy in the large parlor, I studied the crowd more carefully. While some stood on Death’s doorstep, others appeared to be in radiant health. They all sat silently, holding yellowing photographs that displayed gaunt people, many of them children, attached to IVs. I recognized the elderly woman sitting in a damaged wheelchair near the door. At the demonstration, she’d been holding a sign that said ‘Hasn’t Walapai County Suffered Enough?’ Tonight she held no picket sign, just a photograph that was the double of the one on Gabe Boone’s bedside table.
“Is she related to Boone?” I whispered to Olivia.
“By marriage,” she whispered back. “She’s Elena Morehouse, Abby Boone’s kid sister. “That’s Abby in the photograph. Remember, I told you you’d learn more about Gabe here than anywhere else. These people are called Downwinders, Lena, because they all lived downwind of the Nevada Test Site. They…” She was interrupted by a rapping from the podium.
“This support meeting of the Tri-State Downwinders will now come to order,” Olivia’s cousin said. “We’ll start by going around the room, giving our names, our diagnosis or the diagnosis of our loved ones, and where our appeal against the federal government now stands. But before we do that, let me issue a warning.” Her thin face bloomed into a smile. “Keep it clean, folks. The press is with us today. My cousin Olivia, a big-shot journalist, has traveled all the way from New York to hear our stories. Olivia, wave hello to these nice folks.”
Olivia waved. They waved back. Several blew kisses.
Then they prayed. Not being a big proponent of public prayer, I held my silence while they wove their way through the Lord’s Prayer. As soon as they reached the “Amen” part, an elderly man in the first row introduced himself as Bill Nash, a native of Silver Ridge. Holding some sort of electronic buzzer to his throat to help him talk, he rasped in a metallic monotone, “My oncologist says it’s spread to my…”
Before he could finish his sentence, the door opened and Earl Two Horses, Monty Carson, and “Ma” and Tara from Ma’s Kitchen walked in. With them was an Indian woman I’d never seen before. From her Asian features and the darkness of her skin, I guessed she was Paiute.
Once they took seats in the rear of the room, Nash began again. He said that as a young man, he’d been a member of the Army unit used as guinea pigs during the bomb testing. The blast, located less than two thousand feet from his unprotected unit, caused the series of cancers he’d fought for decades.
“Me and Myra, we woulda liked kids, but the bomb sterilized me,” he buzzed. “Maybe that was the whole point of the testing, maybe the government decided there was too many Americans running around and they needed to start sterilizing us. Or murdering us, like they did so many of my buddies. Well, it takes a lot to kill ol’ Nash. Doctors been lopping off pieces of me for years, but now my larynx cancer’s spread to my brain. Barring a miracle, my oncologist gives me a couple more months. The Feds offered me a fifty-thousand-dollar payout, said that was all I was going to get, so Myra made me accept it.”
A low murmur around the room as others tendered their sympathies.
The next person, a former sheep rancher, spoke up. In his case, his sheep had died first, followed a year later by his younger brother, then his mother. Now it was his turn. Unlike Nash, he refused to have anything to do with the government’s offer of fifty thousand dollars.
“With me, it’s stomach cancer,” the man growled. “My wife’s down with thyroid cancer. You folks know I’m not one for crowds, but Evie’s too sick to come out tonight, so here I am, flying the family flag. You wanna know what we told them government flunkies? We told them they could take their blood money and stick it where the sun don’t shine. Hell, that wouldn’t even pay for Evie’s pain-killers, let alone her chemo, which ain’t working anyway. Damn government scientists owe us a sight more than they’re offering, using decent Americans for lab rats! Fifty million’s more like it, and even then, it ain’t enough.”
For the next hour, I heard more versions of the same sad stories. Those who weren’t dying spoke of loved ones who had. Some survivors, but far from all, had been offered fifty thousand dollars in compensation from the U.S. government, the maximum individual payout. Some took it, others chose to litigate. Still others described claims denied, having been told by federal attorneys that their cancers hadn’t been caused by the tests, they’d just been “unlucky.”
A young woman who wore neither wig nor scarf on her bald head said her claim had been turned down. “Before 1951, when the bombing began, no woman in my family had died of breast cancer,” she explained, brandishing photographs of smiling women. “Since then, we’ve lost at least three women in each generation to breast cancer. My grandmother and three great-aunts; my mother and her two sisters. One of my sisters died last year, the other’s in the hospital right now getting chemo. As for me, I’ve got Stage IV breast cancer. It’s spread to my spine, but I’m a woman of faith and I can take anything God chooses to give me. But my daughter…” Her voice caught. Recovering, she said, “Lily’s only four, but she’s already…”
When she lost it again, the young man sitting with her pulled her back down to her seat, then stood up himself. “What my wife wants to say is that we’re worried about Lily. She’s been losing weight. The doctors haven’t found anything yet, but they’re still doing tests. And as for my wife, the government said we can’t prove the cancer in her family was caused by the testing.”
Three generations dead, another possibly dying.
The cumulative effect of these peoples’ stories felt like being flayed alive. Just when I thought I couldn’t take any more, Earl Two Horses spoke up.
His normally placid face was tight with anger. “You know the Paiute’s story. My people are all Downwinders. That fallout blew over our land, killing us until there’s hardly anyone left.”
Earl held up a picture of a young man on horseback, dressed like a Mongol warrior. He made a more convincing Mongol than the Caucasian standing next to him: John Wayne, wearing heavy “Asian” makeup. “This is my grandfather. He was one of the three hundred Paiute extras on that cursed movie,
The Conqueror
. A few months after the movie finished filming and John Wayne and the other film people went home, the Paiute extras started getting sick. They were hunters, and besides getting dosed with radioactivity in Snow Canyon, they’d been eating the deer and the rabbit and all the other game that’d been contaminated during the tests. Most died. The skin fell away from their bones until there was hardly anything left to bury. The government didn’t care, and our deaths aren’t even listed in those articles you White folks keep quoting.”
He made a sweeping gesture around the room, “Right now everyone’s all up in arms over what happened in Japan, with the fallout from those nuclear reactors at Fukushima. But we got, what, ten times that amount almost every month for sixty years! Nobody bothered to get up in arms over the Paiute, did they? The Feds didn’t even bother to track what happened to us. I guess they figured Indians didn’t count. Nothing new there, right? And think about this. What happened to the people in Fukushima was an accident, but our government nuked us on purpose!