Herb Parker Feels Like Dancing, and: Deposition

Herb Parker Feels Like Dancing

Mr. Parker’s Sunbeam is shiny as an atom He pulls up, disembarks with grace and makes his dance hall entrance. Perhaps you sense his English accent and pocket square. Women shy like ponies to one corner. He corrals one and trots her around the dance floor.

Herb Parker rides a shapely 4/4. “That Old Black Magic,” “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Maybe it is, or maybe it’s blazing, unsafe to breathe tonight.

Her earrings are zircon daisies. A silver belt rings her slim waist. Herb Parker steers her toward his dark place. “Mr. Parker?” he hears somebody ask, like a tremble on a seismograph, but you can’treblame Herbert Parker for his appetites.

He palms the tender center of her back. “Mr. Parker?” again. Perhaps it’s her voice, or her husband’s, or one of the voices in his head. He’s a Dutch boy with his fingers in the dike, a valvular, crepuscular figure.

“Look out the window at that storm . . .” He takes the government’s calls and negotiates those devil’s bargains, how much of their order can he fill? You understand they say “product” and mean plutonium, they mean how many bombs can you afford to fuel?“Darling, down and down I go,

round and round I go in a spin” . . . the river, and its sediments, the air, capricious with winds, the soil column, the ground water, the vase of wildflowers on Deputy Chief Gamertsfelder’s desk! Sagebrush and Russian thistle growing in Richland yards. The mosquitoes, for pity’s sake, the farm animals, the farmers living off the land, the water birds and the duck hunters, the bottom fish and the fishermen on Richland dock. Everything he thinks to test. . . good god,

the entire food chain contaminated. He’s basically a shy man with immeasurable power. A sultan coaxing his courtesan’s smile. She only shakes a little now. Don’t you understand? Someon must step forward and play God. How much better that the man can lead? hold you tight in his very good hands, and spin.

The contamination referred to is documented in Michele Stenehjem Gerber’s book On the Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Nuclear Site, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2007).

Deposition

Richland Federal Building Auditorium February 4, 2000

I wasn’t there. I’d packed my car with houseplants years ago, confident my rawhide neighbors would change

their campers’ oil, mow and edge their lawns like always, street after street of Hanford workers

who’d moved 30 years ago from West Virginia or Pennsylvania or Tennessee

for a job—no saying what it was—for a pre-fab landscaped with white rocks, for their kids

grown up like me, for their wives, hair freshly done, comparing prices at Safeway. You know one

you know them all, I said at 25 and moved away, brushed off the dust and breathed in the liberal city.

So I wasn’t there when one by one they rose, walked stiffly up the aisle in the Federal Building auditorium.

And yet I see them clearly, the same bastards who grinned when schoolgirls strolled by, who flirted

with John Birch, and hunted grouse, and owned their stools at the cinderblock taverns downtown.

Whose sons and daughters would appear at school sometimes with bruises on their arms.

Carolyn was there to testify and even she can’t explain how anybody there met anybody else’s eyes.

It must have choked their throats like rotting meat, admitting to cancers of this and that

and hothouse-flower blood diseases, each a different suffering. How did they stand on stage and say

what nobody could say aloud? And the ones who came but couldn’t speak. It’s killing to think of even now.

Every one of them ashamed for falling ill the way the anti-nuke fanatics said we would,

who never knew shit about anything, who’ve never understood us and never will.