JUNE 1945

6

In Santiago, calves were cut and branded in the hour before dawn so that the men could catch the morning bus to Los Alamos, where they worked as custodians and furnace stokers.

Joe was alone in the second corral, where steers were brought in for sale. With meat rationing, there was a market for Indian cows, and it was Joe’s job to go over the cattle with a Geiger counter. The counter consisted of a metal wand, wire and a case with twenty pounds of batteries. The case had a microammeter that was useless in the middle of a herd in the dark, but there were also the audible clicks of gamma rays from at least one cow. Joe slipped a rope over its head and led it out of the corral and around a hay rick, where a path led to a copse of cottonwoods and willows. A rare rain had fallen the day before and mud sucked on his shoes. In the middle of the copse were cans, mattress springs, shoes and bones cemented in a great mound of sodden ashes. He yanked the steer up to its knees in the pile, put his .45 where the vertebrae of the neck joined the dome of the skull and fired. At the last second, the steer, curious, looked up, and the bullet tore through the artery of its neck. Blood shot in a solid black stream over Joe’s chest and arm. He held the steer tight and fired again. The animal dropped like a weight. He poured a can of kerosene over the dead animal, lit it and staggered back from the blaze. In the yellow flames, he could see that the steer was mottled, the hide half bleached. Every canyon around Los Alamos had cows, and every canyon had sites where poisonous isotopes were vented or exploded, spewed and sown into the soil and water. Which was why the personnel on the Hill underwent nose wipes, ass wipes and radioactive urine checks, but for the ignorant animals that wandered the sites, Army policy was “Kill it, burn it, bury it,” and the perfect instrument was Joe.