Nike Zeus, the missiles in the desert are called—shades of my book of archaeology! The engineers will work for years at fenced-off sites, and when they’re done the holes with their projectiles aimed at Moscow will be covered over with earth and creosote and brush, only a little shack on the surface you’d never think contained an elevator, entrance to an underworld where two men sit in a control booth with a red telephone and a pair of key-operated red buttons.

My father’s silo is called Site 9, and sometimes we go out there on weekends, when no one’s working. My father has a security pass at the gate, so we can drive into the desert a ways from the site and have a cookout: T-bone steaks and watermelon. When my mother and I go for a picnic in the desert, as we do some days when I don’t have school, it’s different; we bring sandwiches, feed kangaroo rats, and watch cordons of ants go about the monumental labor of hauling away the potato chips we’ve laid out for them. But a cookout with my father is different. He brings along the new pistol he’s bought, “for security,” a black German Luger. He demonstrates how to put the chrome clip full of bullets in and pull it out, how to put the safety on, so the gun won’t go off when you don’t want it to. I line up cans and bottles from a sack we’ve brought along, and then he and my mother take turns at target practice. He tells her she must hold the pistol farther away from her eye; when she hits a can dead center he says, “That’s my Ruthie, my girl’s a wicked shot.” We have a little fire and stay till just after sundown, when the desert hills cool and go blue. Detritus of our visit: shattered bottles, beer and soda cans shot full of holes, little bullet casings scattered in sand. There’s a photo of the two of them by a campfire, the cooler bright in the foreground, intensely red in that odd desert evening light. Each with an arm around the other’s waist. With his free hand he holds up a beer; in hers she brandishes the pistol. I must be the cameraman.