Desert Wind (34 page)

“When the attorneys finally got involved and the government started making those famous fifty-thousand-dollar payouts, the Feds made sure the Paiute didn’t get a dime. In order to get the money, those government goons demanded that our widows and children prove they were residents of the United States. Residents! We Paiutes, people who have lived on this land for thousands of years! Most of our parents and grandparents were nomads and hunters, not office workers. They didn’t have birth certificates, they didn’t have Social Security records, they didn’t have employment records, they didn’t have deeds, they didn’t have anything like that. And since they couldn’t prove who they were, they were declared ineligible!”

The Paiute woman with him reached up and tugged at his arm, but Earl refused to sit down. “The government wasn’t through hurting the Indians, either. This is my mother. Naiomi Two Horses. Her husband—my father—died of lung cancer after handling the yellow cake at the old Moccasin Peak Uranium Mine. Now my brother is about to go to work at the Black Basin, which is owned by the same man who managed Moccasin Peak. My brother needs to feed his family, but how long will it be before he dies, too?”

Naiomi Two Horses, aided now by the much stronger Monty, finally succeeded in hauling Earl back into his chair. Only then did I notice the photograph Monty was clutching; a young woman in a fifties-style dress. I wondered how many close family members he’d lost to the fallout.

Now it was Elena Morehouse’s turn. Holding her photograph of Abby Boone high, she described her older sister and the hell she’d gone through after suffering through six miscarriages, then esophageal cancer.

“We figured she got that throat cancer from eating the vegetables from her own kitchen garden or drinking the water from her well,” she said. “Whenever there was testing, the gardens were covered with radioactive ash, but the man the Atomic Energy Commission sent out to talk to folks guaranteed it was harmless, that all anybody had to do was rinse the dust off. He even swore that the water hadn’t been contaminated!” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Earl, I’m sorry for what you and your people went through, but my sister suffered, too. So did her husband. When Abby died, Gabe just plain lost his mind.”

After several more horror stories and a vow to keep pressuring the government to make payment commensurate with their suffering, the meeting broke up. A few people stayed behind to chat with friends, but the Walapai Flats contingent left after saying their farewells. Olivia exchanged some private words with her cousin, then joined me as I hurried out the door eager to breathe non-medicinal air.

“Jesus, Olivia,” I said, as we walked toward her car. “How can you stand working on stories like this?”

“The same way you can stand doing what you do. You put aside your feelings and do what has to be done; otherwise you’re no good to anyone.”

Strong talk, but she’d chewed her lip until it bled.

In front of us twin girls of around eight skipped over to a row of rosebushes bordering the parking lot. With a mischievous giggle, the bald twin snapped off a deep red bloom while the other, her hair combed into blond ringlets, frowned in disapproval. “That’s not your rosebush,” she admonished.

“Nope, it’s God’s,” her thieving sister answered, burying her nose in the petals. “And he created roses for us to enjoy.” Her face was a map of profound joy.

I waited until we climbed in her car before I said, “Those girls. I didn’t see them in the meeting.”

“The children were being taken care of in the nursery by volunteers. Most of the kids believe they’re going to be fine, which is why their parents didn’t want them in the meeting.”

“But they…” I motioned to the bald girl. “She wasn’t around when the tests were being conducted.”

“Her great-grandparents were.”

“Are you saying that the nuclear tests caused genetic mutations?”

“Some people think it did, but the government’s fighting that all the way, and their lawyers are the best money can buy.”

“Boone’s sister-in-law said that the government claimed the radioactive ash and water were safe. After what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they had to know better.”

Olivia’s jaw clenched. “The Atomic Energy Commission certainly knew better, but they were determined to test anyway. When the cattle, sheep, and deer died and then people started getting sick, the AEC flew out some low-level flunky from Washington to calm everybody down. He held meetings in the high school auditorium here in Silver Ridge, and convinced the locals everything was fine.” She shrugged. “Why would they doubt him? He represented the U.S. government, didn’t he?”

“Jesus.”

She gave me a grim smile. “Jesus didn’t have anything to do with it.”

***

By unspoken agreement, we said nothing more about the meeting during the drive back to Walapai Flats, but it was obvious Olivia’s headache had become worse. When I reminded her I was willing to drive, she shook her head.

“What are you going to do, take me home, then hitchhike back from Sunset Canyon Lakes?” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

I offered to let her stay the night in my motel room so she could dose herself to sleep, but she declined that offer, too.

“Thanks, but I can’t afford the down time. I’ve got a deadline to meet.”

When we pulled up in front of the Covered Wagons Inn, I breathed a sigh of relief. But as I climbed out of the Explorer into the inky night, Olivia slid down the car window and called out, “Lena! Have that hunky partner of yours run a search on Ike Donohue, if he hasn’t already. Look for Donohue’s tie-in with a man named Gerald Heber.”

“Who’s Gerald Heber?” And where had I heard that name before?

The motel’s neon sign blinked blue on her face, making her look ghostlier than usual. “You’ll find out.”

With that, she drove away.

It was almost eleven, but after what I’d seen and heard at the Downwinders meeting, sleep was out of the question. Who was Heber and what was his connection to Ike Donohue? I paced around my motel room, fighting the temptation to call Jimmy regardless of the hour, to tell him what I’d seen and heard to share my outrage. I finally calmed down enough to realize that just because my night was ruined didn’t mean I should ruin his, too. Vacillating between rage and depression, I logged back onto the Internet for the second time in a day, a record for me.

Typing Ike Donohue+Gerald Heber into Google, I found nothing. Frustrated, I sat there, cursing my limited Net skills. Trying again, I dismissed the Donohue/Heber tie-in and simply typed in Gerald Heber and was rewarded with seventy-two hits. Among them, I found a car salesman, a dentist, a dairy farmer, two real estate salesmen, and an ex-con blogging about the dire state of America’s prisons. I was making my way through various businessmen touting their wares when my eye was drawn to another blog, this one posted by a Dr. Paul D. Howell, a physics professor at Oklahoma State University. Howell, musing about the strange turns life can take, wrote that he’d planned to become a rock drummer until he won top prize in a science fair competition held at his Arlington, Virginia high school. The man who’d bankrolled the competition was named Gerald Heber.

“I owe my career to him,” Howell blogged, “but not, thank God, my ethics.”

Since Arlington was a suburb of Washington, D.C., I narrowed the search to GERALD HEBER+WASHINGTON, D.C. Howell’s snipe about ethics—or the lack thereof—was probably the remnants of some old grudge, but it was the best lead I’d found so far. When my search led me to a brief that ran September 2, 1965, on B-2 of the
Washington Post
, I struck pay dirt.

The article, so short it wasn’t even by-lined, mentioned Gerald Heber’s retirement from the Atomic Energy Commission. This particular Heber had been lauded for “his unique service to the United States of America during troubled times.” However, the article made no mention of Ike Donohue, and a connection between the two still seemed unlikely. Heber had worked for the government, Donohue in the private sector. Further distancing the men were their ages. If the
Washington Post
’s Heber had retired in 1965 at the age of sixty-five, by now he was probably pushing up daisies in a cemetery somewhere.

What they say about Internet addiction is true. Once you’re on, it’s hard to get off. Following the trail of this particular Heber, I kept scrolling though the AEC+Heber hits until I found a longer piece.

A feature article titled
Nuking Nevada,
written by Alonzo Ertes and printed in the
Nevada Sentinel
on May 3, 1978, detailed the effects of radioactive fallout during above-ground atomic testing in the fifties and sixties.

“Thanks to the efforts of Gerald Heber, the AEC’s public relations officer, the AEC was able to hide the dangers of the Nevada bomb testing for decades. They spoon-fed Heber misleading information, which he softened even further until the radioactive ash that was falling across the U.S. looked as pure as Christmas snow. Heber even took to the airwaves, calling scientists who warned against the tests “non-informed alarmists” at best, and “Commie sympathizers” at worst.

Believing Heber’s reassurances, farmers in Utah brushed the radioactive ash off their tomatoes and shipped them to the stores. Arizona ranchers allowed their beef cattle to graze on radioactive land and drink radiation-polluted water. Nevada mothers gave their children milk from radioactive dairy cows. When Heber—now retired—was questioned about his role in the thousands of radiation-related deaths that followed decades of nuclear fallout in the U.S., he staunchly defended his work.

“Ancient history,” Heber said. “That all happened at the height of the Cold War, and in every war there’s going to be collateral damage. If those hayseeds had an ounce of patriotism in their bones, they’d stop all their whining and get down on their knees to thank God and the U.S. government for saving them from the Commies.”

I remembered the hairless women at the Downwinders meeting, the men relying on oxygen tanks to breathe, the anguished parents clinging to photographs of long-dead children. Hayseeds.

I read on.

Heber even defended the choice of Nevada for the testing of 928 nuclear bombs.

“Where else was the government going to test those weapons? That area was the least populated section of the country,” he said. “No one lived out there, other than ranchers and Indians.”

Remembering where Ike Donohue had lived before retiring to Arizona, I went back to Google and typed in HEBER+DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA. Only one hit popped up, but it was a doozy.

On February 12, 1970, the
Durham Republic
reported that Gerald Heber had been hired as a consultant by the Cook & Creighton Tobacco Company, based in Durham, North Carolina. His duties were to format a new public relations policy to combat the advertising limitations recently imposed by the federal government on all tobacco products.

Public relations. Cook & Creighton Tobacco Company.

Where Ike Donohue once worked.

The man whose job it had been to convince the Southwest that nuclear fallout was harmless had been hired by a tobacco company to convince the world that cigarettes and chewing tobacco were harmless. Looking at the timeline, I realized that Heber had probably taught Donohue everything he knew about telling lies and about how to ignore the moral ramifications of those lies. Together, the two men were at least partially implicated in the diseases and deaths of untold numbers of smokers.

Now I remembered where I’d heard Heber’s name before—from Nancy Donohue. She’d discovered that before her husband’s murder, he’d placed a call to his old boss. “Some were to people he knew when he was married to Claudia, like that troll Gerald Heber. I wound up talking to the granddaughter. Old Heber’d been dead for years.”

I looked at my watch. It was midnight, but damned be the hour. I picked up my cell phone and punched in Nancy Donohue’s number. When she answered, she didn’t sound sleepy at all, just slightly drunk.

“Oh, it’s you, Jones. What the hell do you want?”

Following her example, I skipped the social pleasantries. “Did your husband ever work with a man named Gerald Heber?”

A catarrhal bark, probably a laugh. “Talk about a blast from the past! Why do you want to know about old Gerald?”

“I take it, then, your husband did work with him.”

“Of course he did. Gerald was Ike’s boss. When Gerald left C&C, Ike was promoted to head of the public relations department. But I repeat, why do you want to know about that old bastard and what business is it of yours, anyway?” In the background, I heard ice cubes rattling against glass.

“Mrs. Donohue, aren’t you in the least curious about who shot your husband? Or why?”

A slurp, then a satisfied smacking of lips. “What difference does it make? As you so succinctly pointed out the last time we talked, Ike was dying anyway.”

She slammed the phone down.

So there it was. The Atomic Energy Commission had hired Gerald Heber to lie for them. It had been his job—and the sonofabitch did it exceedingly well—to convince people that nuclear fallout posed a no larger safety risk than dewdrops on apples.