AT PLAY IN THE PARADISE OF BOMBS Clinton St. Quarterly— Fall, 1987 His flat voice ricocheted against the rolled-up windows of the back seat where I huddled beside my sister. I hid my face in the upholstery, to erase the barbed wire and tanks and mirror-eyed soldier, and tried to wind myself into a ball as tight as the fist of fear in my stomach. By and by, our car eased forward into the Arsenal, the paradise of bombs. This was in April of 1951, in Ohio. We had driven north from Tennessee, where spring had already burst the buds of trees and cracked the flowers open. Up here on the hem of Lake Erie the earth was bleak with snow. I had been told about northern winters, but in the red clay country south of Memphis I had seen only occasional flurries, harmless as confetti, never this smothering quilt of white. My mother had been crying since Kentucky. Sight of the Arsenal’s fences and guard shacks looming out of the snow brought her misery to the boil. “It's like a concentration camp,” she whispered to my father. I had no idea what she meant. I was not quite six, born two months after the gutting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, My birth sign was the mushroom cloud. “It looks exactly like those pictures of the German camps,” she lamented. Back in Tennessee, the strangers who had bought our farm were snipping bouquets from her garden. Those strangers had inherited everything—the barn and jittery cow, the billy goat fond of cornsilks, the crops of beans BY SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS ILLUSTRATION BY LOUISE WILLIAMS MY FATHER STOPPED OUR CAR. HE LEANED OUT THE WINDOW AND HANDED THE GUARD SOME PAPERS WHICH MY MOTHER HAD BEEN NERVOUSLY CLUTCHING. “WITH THAT LICENSE PLATE, I HAD YOU PEGGED FOR VISITORS,” SAID THE GUARD. “BUT I SEE YOU’VE COME TO STAY.” WICE A MAN’S HEIGHT AND TOPPED BY STRANDS OF BARBED WIRE, A CHAIN-LINK FENCE STRETCHED FOR MILES ALONG THE HIGHWAY LEADING UP TO THE MAIN GATE OF THE ARSENAL. BESIDE THE GATE WERE TANKS, HULKING DINOSAURS OF STEEL, ONE ON EACH SIDE, THEIR LONG MUZZLES SLANTING DOWN TO CATCH TRESPASSERS IN A CROSS-FIRE. A SOLDIER EMERGED FROM THE GATEHOUSE, GUN ON HIP, SILVERED SUNGLASSES BLANKING HIS EYES.
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