Ray was panting when he returned to his seat. “It was hot, Chief. Like a can of soup.”

It shouldn’t have broken the hooks, Joe knew. Eight steel hooks shouldn’t have snapped. It was as if the canister had leaped forward at the first opportunity. I’ll tell Oppy about Augustino, he thought. If they ship me off the Hill, I’ve got nothing to lose except a phosphorescent glow.

“Like a tin can of hot soup, Chief. Like it was alive.”

Down the rest of the mountain curves to Durango and all the way to the hills of Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, there came from the back the sound of Santa rocking heavily as if the ambulance were a careening hearse.

JULY 1945

14

Six clowns wore white paint with black horizontal stripes around their arms, legs and torso. There were black circles around their eyes and mouth. Black-and-white cotton caps twisted into horns. Short black scarves around the neck, knee and wrists. Long black breechclouts trailing behind. Rattles of deer hooves tied to the waist. Moccasins.

Together, they joked and prodded the dancers into a great circle in the middle of the plaza. The men wore regular work pants and handkerchiefs tied into headbands. The women were in dresses. Man, woman, man, woman, each holding an ear of corn in one hand and a yellow zigzag of wood, a lightning wand, in the other. Elders, singers and a drummer with a big Cochiti drum stood along the north side. Plaza and cottonwood framed the sky.

A new touch was the patriotic blue armbands with gold “V”s for Victory on all the dancers. One man had also come out wearing sunglasses. A clown stole the glasses, slipping them on another clown as the drumming started. Deep voices lifted and the dancers began turning counterclockwise like a wheel.

“We don’t need Captain Augustino and his security apparatus,” Oppy told Anna. “Los Alamos has a much better defense. The Hill isn’t a place; it’s a time warp. We are the future surrounded by a land and a people that haven’t changed in a thousand years. Around us is an invisible moat of time. Anyone from the present, any mere spy, can only reach us by crossing the past. We’re protected by the fourth dimension.”

They and Joe and the rest of the tourists watched from the broad shadow of the cottonwood on the south side of the plaza. Back from Washington that morning, Oppy had changed to his Western gear: jeans, boots, silver buckle, hat at an angle. Anna wore her bizarre jumpsuit and a rakish fedora.

“It’s perfectly animistic,” Oppy said, “like an ancient Greek fertility rite. That’s what’s so wonderful about it. The ears of corn, of course, are phallic symbols.”