My companion and I attend a press conference in a casino ballroom, along with about a thousand other mostly white people. Carl Sagan introduces his glamorous colleagues: Martin Sheen, arrested the previous week for announcing on television that he intended to commit civil disobedience; Kris Kristofferson; Robert Blake. The remarks drag on, and my interest wanes. I imagine the encyclopedia salesmen who’ve been exhorted to accomplishment in this room. A venerable tradition. At four a.m. die-hard poker players glance warily at sleepy peaceniks in the hotel coffee shop. As I pay the check, the hard-as-nails cashier shoots a look at my Stop Testing button. I brace for her hostility. “Goin’ out to protest, huh?” she says. “Wish I could go with you. Look at Martin Sheen, God bless ‘ im. I didn’t know you could get arrested for thinking about doing something. This is America, ain’t it?” Just before dawn, forty, buses and a hundred cars assemble in a parking lot. Organizers distribute sack lunches and tiny American flags. Several Shoshone In d ia n s g a th e r peop le a round a makeshift desk. Before Cold War and hot sinful weekends came to Nevada, the Shoshones made a living from this land. Today they’re issuing legal-looking documents which grant permission to enter that parcel of their land now occupied by the Nevada Test Site. My companion asks, “ Who got you folks involved in this?” The Shoshone at the table gives him a long look: “We’ve been here since the beginning, man.” W'hen I was about twelve, construction at Los Alamos slowed. My father lost his job. In Albuquerque, however, Sandia National Laboratory was engineering whole new arsenals of nuclear weapons. My father left earlier and came home later, but he got steady work and excellent pay. Sixty miles later, our anti-nuke caravan arrives in Mercury, home of the test site. Stumbling through the rabbitbrush, I join an amiable crowd of 2,000 at the site entrance, a day-glo orange cattleguard. Behind the cattleguard deputy sheriffs, grim-faced Department of Energy representatives, and battered Gl schoolbuses stand in wait. A helicopter clatters overhead. Periodically, a camouflage-suited warrior on a bright red dirt bike zooms along just inside the barbedwire fence, an M-16 rifle bouncing on his back. /I bout the time Krushchev was put- / 1ting rockets in Cuba and I was learn- / r in g to dislike algebra, construction projects at Sandia Labs dried up. The contractors moved on to the dusty confines of Nevada. The vagaries of the nuclear weapons business were about to toy with my family yet again, this time with a vengeance. The crowd queues up, waiting to be arrested. I learn that the tall, dignified woman behind me is a GS-15 Department of Energy bureaucrat. In Vegas for a regional meeting, she felt conscience-bound to show up for the protest. My companion talks to a woman from New York City who arrived on the morning plane, hailed a taxi at McCarran Airport, and now, $100 later, is standing here in line. There are reasons why people who show up to protest nuclear weapons are predictably so white and middle-class- spendable cash, available time. Truck drivers peer down at us as they wait to maneuver their behemoths through the crowd—concrete mixers, tankers, grocery trucks: “ defense” spending on parade. What would they say if we talked over a beer? That they make a good living off the nukes and I should mind my own business? That it sucks and they’d work elsewhere if they could? Or that they don’t give a damn either way? The trucks pass through. The line moves forward. The Juggernaut rolls on. I contemplate the overtime the sheriff’s men are knocking down. Then I wonder why we aren’t being busted by the army or the Department of Energy’s special nuke police. My friend says the DOE has contracted with the county to charge protestors in Nye County Magistrate Court rather than the Federal District Court in Las Vegas. Not only does Nye County pocket some change, but the DOE knows T HE SUN SHINES BRIGHTLY ON THE GARISH VENUES FOR SILLY SIN. W HAT BETTER PLACE TO TEST NUCLEAR WEAPONS THAN LAS VEGAS? HERE'S A BET FOR YOU, SUCKER: WILL WE OR WON'T WE DESTROY THE WORLD? that media types find reasons not to trek into the wilderness to cover demonstrators’ trials. A / I ^a t ^e r f'v e d a n d worked in Mer- / \ / l c u r y f° r four years, leaving us I V I alone in New Mexico. The men worked long hours for great money, lived in cheap bachelor quarters and spent their free time speeding between Mercury and the infamous Nye County “chicken ranches. ” My father, in his late fifties, rode the bus. I don’t think he spent too much time in the whorehouses. As I learn more about marriages, mortgages and jobs that don’t pan out, I see he may have needed to be out here in this monastic desert. Our letters spoke only of this and that; a young man’s trivia and an old man’s evasions. Anyway, Mercury is where he was, helping punch big, useless holes in the ground. DEAR MS. LONELIHEARTS J #1 y wife Helen is hard to understand. Now I have to I W # I figure out what to do before she leaves me. I need % g I your advice. B > I W h a t s happened in the past few months is very 1 I unnerving. First Helen complains that I’m just ■ wr ■ laying around the house on weekends, and that I should get myself a hobby. ‘Okay, okay,’ I agreed. Since I was already a tool-and-die man, I thought I’d set up a little shop in the garage. You know, putter around and maybe build some lawn furniture. But then we had this big argument over our arms-limitation talks with the Russians, and how we didn’t have enough leverage. Well, I was amazed to see Helen take the defeatist ’what- can-you-do’ attitude so soon after nagging me about laying in the hammock while our grass grew half-an-inch higher than Harvey’s next door! Pointing out the flaw in her logic, I started calling around to various aerospace contractors and specialty hardware stores. Believe me, it was just a gag to watch Helen wig out. Then this guy over at Rockwell takes me serious and tries selling me sixty surplus sheets of titanium! Before long I’m dipping into our Christmas Club account so I can buy an old Redstone booster engine that’s been collecting rust in a warehouse in Huntsville. I'm soon assembling a fuselage in our back yard, and winning an argument with Helen for a change! Only trouble is, she stopped talking to me. Especially when she found out I’d taken a second mortgage on the house. Helen did like the publicity for a while, though. The first time I gave my missile a four-second test burn for the benefit of the SWAT team who’d surrounded us, she actually stood up for me. She argued plausibly how I was I CALLED THE WHITE HOUSE THAT MORNING ON THE SUSPICION THAT MY NERVE GAS WAS LEAKING AND WAS INFORMED THE PRESIDENT WAS VISITING FLOYD CRAMER, A PLUMBER IN BATON ROUGE, WHO'D SUCCESSFULLY ASSEMBLED A MAKESHIFT CRUISE MlSSILE OUT OF GALVANIZED PIPE. saving the taxpayers millions by helping us achieve our balance of power as a private citizen. She praised my fiscal accountability too, letting them know that I don’t pay seventy-eight dollars for a screwdriver like the Pentagon boys do. I interrupted her to admit that although my contribution wasn’t much, if every neighborhood handyman built an ICBM beside his bird bath, the world would be much safer as a result. Luckily, we managed to calm them down by serving fried chicken. By the time I started mimicking von Braun, some of them had even lowered their M-16s. During the question and answer period of my lecture, I confessed that my missile didn’t even house a warhead—just a cannister of spent nuclear fuel rods I’d picked up along the roadside. Not only were they calmed by this point; they promised to take up a collection to see if they could help me buy a decent, second-hand MIRV. I think Helen was most proud when the President visited to congratulate me for invoking the spirit of ’private enterprise.’ Not only did she smile for the photographers, she took great pleasure in showing them my launch facility, an Apple HE linked to a shortwave radio in my greenhouse. What’s more, I overheard her discussing how my efforts would eventually pay off at the bargaining table once the Russian spy satellites confirmed what was going on. The President rewarded me with a cannister of nerve gas, circa 1951, to protect my arsenal, the only By Jonathan Lowe We finally reach the cattleguard. A deputy entreats us not to commit th is “ c r im e ,” but we march across the grating into nuke-land. It’s not much different from the rest of the world, except most people here are wearing brown shirts. Other deputies handcuff us with thin plastic strips, careful not to pull them too tight. They are so solicitous it’s disappointing. No truncheons, no dogs, no imprecations. What do I expect? Confronted by bloodthirsty goons, would I march willingly into the clubs of imperialism’s flunkies, like an extra in Gandhi? If I did, would it deflect the Juggernaut? This civility is the most insidious feature of the nuclear weapons culture. The whole process is clean, remote, matter- of-fact. Thanks to nukes, we’re a military stipulation being that I had to get a Doberman to protect it. My neighbor Harvey was so jealous, he swiped my Congressional Medal of Honor right off the barbecue grill. It was Helen’s involvement in the Garden Club that eventually poisoned her against me. While the Secretary of State was playing up to her it was al! right, but when everyone jeeped back to Air Force One she had to deal with the ladies of the community, who hadn’t slept for days and insisted that our street was being targeted for a first strike. Unfortunately my missile would probably prove ineffective in a retaliatory strike, and not only because I’d estimated it would take me three hours to launch it. My problems were compounded when Chuckles—-my three- month-old Doberman—suffered a mysterious malady which left him paralyzed from the muzzle down. I called the White House that morning on the suspicion that my nerve gas was leaking and was informed the President was visiting Floyd Cramer, a plumber in Baton Rouge, who’d successfully assembled a makeshift Cruise Missile out of galvanized pipe. I dialed J.B.’s Scuba World and ordered a wet suit and air tank. By nightfall I’d buried the leaky cannister in a landfill outside of town. A shopping mall is not planned for there until 1989. Breathing easier, I replaced the missing cannister with a tank of laughing gas so no one would suspect. Ever since this incident, Helen has been sleeping in the guest room. Women have always been a mystery to me, and she’s no exception, Ms. Lonelihearts. She won’t accept the macho explanation, or that I’m doing this all for her. I’ve even tried to make her proud of me—my launch time is down to twenty-two minutes; my missile range is up to . . .Cuba. Nothing seems to work. Do you have any suggestions for me? Yours sincerely, At Wit’s End Dear End, I have no suggestions for you, but for our readers I suggest calling for my latest book, How to Turn Your Swimming Pool into a Bomb Shelter. The number is 800-555-4321. Operators are on duty. Have your VISA ready. . . this may be your last call. Writer Jonathan Lowe lives in Greenville, South Carolina, This is his first story in CSQ.
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