Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet (shoe dog free ebook .txt) 📕

all the familiar people had been replaced with others who alarmed her. She saw a man with a shotgun and a man with a crossbow, and wondered where they had come from and what they planned to do with their weapons.

During the decades of bomb testing in Nevada, ranchers for hundreds of miles around watched their cows and sheep give birth to mewling creatures with the wrong number of limbs. In small Mormon towns downwind of the test site, pregnant women discovered they were carrying hearts that beat slowly in shapeless bundles of tissue; the children they did have died of leukemia far too often.

Later, the Centers for Disease Control determined that cancer hot spots from fallout existed as far away as New England. But for years, indeed for the lifetimes of many of the victims, the government had denied any link. Also the people themselves, the Mormons and others who lived in the area, had so perfectly trusted their government that they had denied the effects of the mushrooms clouds and black rain on their dead children and mutant cows. It was God’s will, some said.

A quarter of a million soldiers, known subsequently as atomic veterans, had bombs tested on them. They would be lined up to watch such explosions as Shot Hood, which at seventy-four kilotons was the biggest atmospheric test ever conducted in Nevada. Hood was puny compared to the tests in the Pacific, but it was still about six times the size of Hiroshima. Just a few years after the tests they had witnessed many of the young soldiers came down with cancer, lost legs or were found to be sterile. The government denied any connection with the nuclear tests, and hunkered down for decades to wait out its victims.

People who lived near the test site and were exposed to fallout from it—often called downwinders—almost always described the clouds that rose on the horizon after a bomb went off and then passed over their houses and towns as “pink clouds.” Some said the clouds were evil, and they hated and feared the clouds. Others were not interested in the clouds and believed the leaflets handed out by the government, which said the clouds were harmless.

After all radiation itself cannot be felt, and it cannot be seen.

But most people who saw them said the pink clouds had a transcendent beauty they were at a loss to describe. The clouds moved like great crafts over the small dark towns huddled beneath them.

She was far back enough to hear a dull roar of noise but no words, and see Oppenheimer and Szilard climb up over the cab of a truck onto the top of the silver Airstream, above the crowds. Then they were spotlit. She had to go closer. A newsman with a camera on his shoulder skirted the crowd in front of her, and motorcycle engines revved out at the far edges of the throng.

The outside of the Airstream was plastered with Szilard’s posters, and she could make out Larry and Big Glen at the front of the bus, keeping the onlookers at bay. A skinny kid with a ponytail ran past her holding one of the posters, other kids on his heels. Music was thudding from a powerful speaker system, rap she thought but all she could hear of it was the bass, and on a folding chair beside a nearby pyre Loni was strumming on what appeared to be a sitar.

Oppenheimer said something inaudible and then someone handed up a megaphone and she caught the fragment speak to you of a unity before the megaphone fell to his feet and a sector of the crowd was chanting —Mic them! Mic them!

Szilard had the megaphone next, and held it too close to his mouth. His words were staticky.

—In the course of working to prove our identity we have filed a lawsuit—

—Ann! yelled a man a few inches from her ear. It was Adalbert the food activist, hoarse from trying to be heard over the clamor. —I finally found you! I saw Tamika but she was what do you call it? Tripping? Where are the rest?

—Up there somewhere, she yelled, and gestured in front of her.

A newsman was climbing onto the bus and handing Oppenheimer up a microphone.

—Thank you! said Oppenheimer, voice clearer but still too soft.

—Oppie! Oppie! Oppie!

Ann looked around her at the chanting men in their leather jackets and torn jeans, the sunworn faces of bikers and timeworn eyes of peacelovers, and at the guy in the bandanna with the crossbow, which was dangling casually at his side. It threatened no matter what he did with it.

Then there was Dory, with her microphone raised. Ann was relieved to see her. Standing close to her she looked down at the ground between them. Dory’s toes were filthy in her dusty Birkenstocks.

—Can you believe this?

—I’m amazed he got this kind of turnout, said Dory. —Plus the fact that there’s media coverage. It’s—frankly it’s surprising.

—Partly it’s the free beer, said Ann, and then regretted it.

—What?

To avoid explaining she leaned forward and listened intently. Oppenheimer was barely audible.

—colleague Leo Szilard here is circulating around a petition to the government—

Beneath the Airstream a fight was breaking out. She could see moving heads and shoulders, shoulders squared and bumping against each other, and then Big Glen and Clint and a hulking bearded man with a flag on his back were dragging someone out of the core of the crowd to the margins, dragging him toward a van parked nearby where the paved parking lot ended. She ran over after them, some of the others behind her.

—What is it?

—David, said Clint.

—What did he do?

Big Glen followed Clint into the van and closed the door carefully in her face. She pressed her nose against the tinted glass but could see nothing within.

—Hey! We need First Aid here! said a staggering teenager in a faded vintage MegaDeth T-shirt, falling against her with a pale drunk girl at his side. Her short blond hair was singed