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

pointed to a pile of trashcans beside a service entrance. A family of raccoons moved among them, two adults and five young.

—They’re beautiful! said Ann, as they purred and hissed and tore at garbage with their sharp teeth, their black eyes wide and vigilant, having known her presence before she knew theirs.

—Scavengers, said Ben.

Above them a bat flitted and swooped near a lamp post, and Ben followed it with his eyes as it vanished in the dark again.

—Do you think you know what’s happening anymore? she asked him.

—I have no idea what’s happening.

—How about when we get to D.C. and they do the demonstration? Is it over then?

—It’s already over, said Ben.

In the morning Szilard took the other scientists aside to discuss the request from the Christians. Ann and Ben were not privy to the conversation but afterward Oppenheimer came and sat at the picnic table and told them what his contribution had been.

—There’s no harm, he said, —in including them. To let them have a voice is not to submit to their direction.

—I think you’ll find, said Ben, —that is a naïve conclusion.

Oppenheimer exhaled smoke and cocked an eyebrow at him, mulling it over.

A few minutes later Larry and Big Glen came back from a second meeting in the orange pavilion.

—It’s going to be Bradley, said Glen.

In the bus office, combing through newspapers for stories about them and watching his wife sort mail as Tamika and Dory filed faxes in the scientists’ inboxes, Ben said softly: —This is going to change everything.

—I know, she said.

When he looked up from his stack of papers he saw Dory had the camcorder on her shoulder and was filming them, documenting their role. That was what she said when people asked her why she was taping them changing their clothes or applying deodorant. “Documenting your role,” she always said.

He knew the answer already but a mean impulse drove him to ask: —That wasn’t you, was it Dory? Washing Oppenheimer’s feet in the shower room up at the cabin on the mountain?

—What?

As his phone rang and he slipped his hand in his pocket to get it she snapped at the bait. —There was a woman washing his feet?

—The first request was banners, said Big Glen gruffly.

Ann and Ben pitched their tent beside the trees that flanked the rest room building and he came to talk to them there, where they sat in folding chairs eating sandwiches.

—Banners? asked Ben.

—It used to be against Szilard’s rules so now they want to decorate their vehicles with these, uh, testimonies to Christ.

She tossed away the last crust of bread and walked through the crowds camped out nearby. There were arts and crafts projects in progress, followers kneeling on the ground on long rolls of newsprint, painting signs.

Back West the women traveling in the church buses had worn skirts and low-heeled pumps every day. Their hair had been freshly permed in tight curls around their heads and they had smelled of cheap shampoo, girlish perfume and cloying deodorant. Now their hair hung lank, tied back in rubber bands, and instead of skirts and blouses they wore T-shirts, once-white sneakers and dappled acid-wash jeans with elastic waistbands that might have been briefly in style sometime in the early 1980s. They could not bathe often enough on the road and so they cleaned themselves with baby wipes, their faces and armpits. She had seen the evidence walking past their campsites, toiletries laid out on folding tables: razors for the men, plastic tubs marked baby powder scent and basins full of gray soapy water.

One or two of them recognized her and waved as she passed, leaning over them to look at their signs and banners. She read ALL HAIL THE NAZARENE as well as quotations from Scripture: THE GOOD SHEPHERD LAYS DOWN HIS LIFE FOR THE SHEEP. THE END OF ALL THINGS IS AT HAND; KEEP SANE AND SOBER FOR YOUR PRAYERS. CHILDREN, YOUR SINS ARE FORGIVEN. LEAD ME TO MOUNT ZION!!!

When the caravan moved on Ann and Ben decided to drive their own car. They sat on the hood in the clear chill of the morning, drinking hot drinks as the rest of the cars pulled out.

It took hours and Ann counted the banners and signs until she got bored. BE NOT AMAZED; HE HAS AGAIN RISEN. OPEN THE GATES, SAVIOR, WE ARE READY. HAIL THE REDEEMER. GOD’S LOVE GOES ON FOREVER BUT THE HUMAN RACE WILL END. There were Jamaican flags, Jews for Jesus, doves of peace and eagles clutching machine guns. There was a family in a station wagon, whose children made faces out the windows as they passed.

She was stunned by the numbers.

—Szilard must be livid, said Ben.

When all the cars, vans, motorcycles, and buses had passed Ann walked around the parking lot. Garbage was piled everywhere and there were puddles of liquid on the concrete, yellow, blue, coffee-colored, rainbows of gasoline. Crossing the lot to use the bathroom she noticed a window pane in the building was broken, cracks spidering out from a bullet-sized hole. She followed trampled cups and food debris down the corridor to the women’s bathroom, where a toilet was spilling water onto the floor and water was also running in a sink filled with wet cornflakes. She turned off the tap and looked at broken soap dispensers that had left pink pools on the counter, used tampons bursting from a metal box on the wall and one long bulb flickering over open stall doors that revealed mounds of sodden toilet paper wadded and trailing on the footprinted floor.

On her way out she passed a raccoon slinking along the wall of the corridor, leaving bloody tracks behind. Outside the door a smashed whiskey bottle lay on the concrete and she wondered if it had stepped on a piece of broken glass.

In terms of the sheer number of nuclear warheads, Cold War proliferation peaked for the U.S. in 1966, when the country had thirty-two thousand warheads active.

By 1967, when China detonated its first high-yield nuclear