Atomic City

Fathers

In the high desert, fathers don't stick around. Something about the arid heat, or the brutal winters, drives them away. Pete's dad stuck around, but it wasn't pretty. Calvin never knew his father, he jetted off before his mother had a chance to say, "I'm pregnant." My father stuck around as long as he could.

My father was a spent-fuel handler for the Idaho Nuclear Laboratory. My mother worried that the radiation would poison him, that it would melt his insides. Sometimes she would kid, tell him that she was starting to notice a strange glow around him, an aura. My father would laugh, a laugh with an edge. I imagined my father working in a nuclear plant like the one on the Simpsons. It made the worry easier.

They found my father slumped over the steering wheel of his truck at a rest stop off the highway. He was coming home, and he must have needed a little shut-eye. The coroner said his heart failed him.

I remember in science class dissecting pig hearts. How the heart lay limp on the little metal tray, splayed out with pins to hold it in place. I didn't think it looked like all that much, a lump of muscle. I didn't think about that pig heart again for years until I saw the urn with my father's ashes on my mother's bedside table.

Pioneers

As kids, Calvin and I collected soda cans. Our garages filled with bulging black garbage sacks of them. Coke Red and Pepsi Blue. Our teeth ached from sugar. We took our collection out to the pasture, stacked them on a ragged fence line or a rusted-out barrel and took turns shooting them with my grandfather's antique pellet gun. We pretended we were pioneers on the range.

Sometimes we were on the Oregon Trail. I'd contract cholera or dysentery or small pox. Calvin never got sick, said his mother told him he had a "good constitution." But sometimes he'd pretend to be shot in the chest with arrows, or a victim of stagecoach robbery. Our deaths were always slow and painful, drawn out and melodramatic.

When we'd shot our fill, we'd collect the cans and cut them into shapes with tin snips. Hung them by fishing line in a grove of Russian olives by the irrigation canal to mark our territory. The cans told other children in our neighborhood to stay away, that this was our land now.

This Is What It Means To Be Alone

It is possible for a man to go his whole life in solitude, surviving a year off thirty pounds of salt, a can of tobacco and a box of matches.

Maurizio Montalbini lived alone in a cave for 210 days.

I can go days without saying a word, and in a crowd of people I feel like drowning.

The Pool

Summer before our senior year, Calvin's mom bought one of those doughboy pools from the Walmart in Idaho Falls. Pete and Calvin were fighting again, one of their regular fights, but once we set up the pool walls and filled it with water and the proper chemicals, the blue gem brokered a truce between them, however temporary.

Calvin's mom dragged out a tired air mattress, the velvet top rubbed raw, and we took turns blowing it up. Each time someone would see stars, see the light fading in their eyes from lack of oxygen, we'd pass it off. Pete would wipe the nozzle with the hem of his swim trunks after Calvin, as if worried he'd catch whatever it was that made Calvin Calvin.

We'd had a series of violent thunderstorms, ones that would rile up the horses and get them running in circles around the pen. That summer, it was dry lightning that caused the first fire. After that, the flames licked up mountainside after mountainside. From the flats we could see a wall of smoke that lingered around the foothills.

"It's all about the pool," Pete said, with a wink...