Full Body Burden Read Online Free PDF Page A

of Tonka’s neck. “Whoa,” she says as Tonka sidesteps. It’s crowded now. My plan is to stand in front and hold the reins, but suddenly I’m lifted from behind. “There you go!” Dad exclaims, and tosses me up, too high, too hard, too fast.
    I have no time to protest. I land on Tonka’s neck. He ducks his head, spooked, and I fall forward. Karin tumbles on top of me. Karma grabs Kurt and they slide off together, just before Tonka bolts.
    My mother pulls Karin up off the ground. “This one’s okay,” shesays. Karma and Kurt seem fine. I can taste dirt in my mouth. “Let me see that arm,” Mom says. I hold up my right arm and it hangs at an angle. “I think you’ve broken it,” she says.
    “It looks like the bone is sticking out.” Karin likes graphic details.
    “I’ll take her to the hospital,” Opal says. My mother hands her the keys. We drive to the emergency room, Opal humming grimly behind the wheel. When we return hours later, I have a white plaster cast and a sling. Opal reports that not a single tear was shed. “She’s pretty tough,” she says.
    “All my kids are tough,” my mother says. We sit down to a dinner of hamburger casserole, canned peas, and Jell-O salad. No words are exchanged between my father and grandmother.
    Later, as I lie in my bed with my arm in a cast—now covered with flower-power marker, thanks to my sisters and brother—I hear Opal arguing with my mother in the living room about my father, his drinking, how it’s affecting the children. What is she going to do?
    No one argues in front of the children. Nothing is said in front of the children. We know not to talk about our father’s drinking even among ourselves.
    M Y ARM heals. Months pass. Our Sunday-morning drives continue as our new house nears completion. On this Sunday—May 11, 1969—the Colorado sun is clear and bright and it’s Mother’s Day. My sisters and I wear matching dresses and saddle shoes. Kurt has on a little sweater and tie, and my dad wears a clean shirt. At the restaurant, our favorite Italian place, my mother tells us to behave ourselves as we straggle from the car and gather around the fountain on the restaurant’s patio. My dad digs into his pocket for pennies and we each make a wish before dropping one into the water. “This means that you’ll always come back,” my dad says. “Just like the fountain in Rome. It’s like a curse.”
    “It means you’ll always come back to a place that makes you happy,” my mother corrects, and after an hour’s wait—there are many families in the courtyard waiting to celebrate Mother’s Day—we are seated at a table. My mother orders a Manhattan and gives me the liquor-soakedcherry. We eat big plates of spaghetti with fresh bread and butter and spumoni for dessert, so much that we have to sleep on the way home, the four of us slumped together in the backseat, property lines forgotten, our stomachs so full they ache.
    T WO MILES away, in an underground plutonium processing building at Rocky Flats, a few scraps of plutonium spontaneously spark and ignite in a glove box.
    A glove box is where plutonium triggers are made. The production line at Rocky Flats consists of a series of linked, sealed, stainless-steel glove boxes, up to sixty-four feet in length, in which plutonium is shaped by human hands. The glove boxes are designed to be kept at a slight vacuum so that any accidental leak will draw air into the box rather than allow plutonium particles to escape. Uniform-clad workers stand in front of the glove boxes and place their arms into heavy, lead-lined gloves and peer through an acrylic window to mold and hammer the plutonium “buttons” into shape. Running above the glove-box line is the chainveyor, an enclosed conveyor system that moves plutonium from task to task along the line. Tall, transparent plastic glove boxes move the plutonium up and down, between the glove-box line and the chainveyor, like dumbwaiters. Small stepladders are