Full Body Burden (20 page)

The court lets Dad come home for good, though we still rarely see him. Some nights, when he comes home very late, my mother will ask one of us to stay with her in the bedroom and be there to help block the door. She keeps a baseball bat in the front closet. “Just in case,” she says. All bark, no bite, my brother says, but we all stand ready to rescue her. Together we hide under the stairs with the baseball bat.

“Why don’t you leave him?” Karin demands. “Why don’t you stand up to him?”

“I can’t say anything to your dad,” she says. “He has a hard enough time as it is.” Besides, she says, she made a commitment. “That’s what marriage is. A commitment.”

My sisters and I whisper that we will never marry.

“And your father loves you,” she reminds us. “He just can’t show it.”

E
ACH OF
us thinks about running away at one time or another. We live in a house where the rules are inconsistent or nonexistent, and the contours of our lives constantly change. Some nights, just to get out of the house, I sleep with a blanket on the trampoline in the backyard, gazing up at the stars, wishing the time would pass more quickly and I could leave for college, for a job, for a boy, for anything.

One afternoon, after a long night of hearing our parents argue, Karma stands at the top of the stairs, listening to our mother on the phone. Suddenly she is filled with a muted sense of rage. She returns to her room, takes some clothes out of her dresser drawer, and quietly slips down the stairs. She saddles up Tonka—her new hand-me-down, now that I have Sassy—and puts the clothes in her leather saddlebag. She’s accustomed to long rides, usually by herself, and she loves to gallop over the hills and fields. She feels most comfortable when she’s out
in the landscape. It’s dusk when she and Tonka reach the box canyon at Leyden, a secluded spot near the train tracks just before the foothills where high school kids sometimes go to drink and make out. The spot is empty now except for broken beer bottles.

With her jacket bunched under her head for a pillow, she lies on the ground and looks up at the black sky riddled with stars. The night is cool but not cold, and Tonka stands peacefully over her. No one will find them here, she thinks, and she’s right. No one comes looking.

She wakes when the sun strikes her face. The ground is rocky and her knees are stiff with cold. Suddenly she realizes she’s hungry. How foolish not to bring food, or even a sleeping bag! Tonka is hungry, too, and nuzzles her pockets for horse candy. But what to do? She has no money—she’s eleven and too young for a job. She can’t stay here, but she doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

Feeling like a whipped puppy with its tail between its legs, she turns Tonka toward home. She’ll have to face the music. It won’t be pleasant.

But when she gets home, no one says anything. No one’s even noticed her absence. Or Tonka’s. They haven’t been missed.

S
OMETIMES
I wonder how my father feels about having three daughters. He complains about women drivers and dislikes female attorneys. My mother says he’s just mad at the world.

My sisters, my brother, and I all share a fierce, if silent, loyalty. But we begin to splinter away from one another. I move into the bedroom in the basement, where I paint the walls vivid purple and keep the door closed. Karma is never home; no one knows where she goes. Karin’s rarely around, and when she is, her bedroom door is closed, too. Kurt spends time at the homes of friends. We tiptoe around the house, hoping not to be called up to our mother’s bedroom during her afternoon siestas. She has a row of little orange bottles in her medicine cabinet, and she keeps a broom next to her bed to pound on the floor when she hears we’re home from school. “Kris!” she calls. “Who’s down there? Karma? Karin? Come up here!”

But she wants to keep the family together. “We have to do what we can to help your dad,” she says.

One Saturday afternoon she piles us all in the station wagon, just like old times, for a drive in the mountains. She slides in behind the wheel and starts the car and we wait. Dad doesn’t come out. Finally she goes into the house and gets him. His mouth is set in a hard line. We drive silently through the foothills to a pretty house surrounded by pine trees, the house of a psychiatrist. “This will be fun,” Mom says. “Lots of people do this sort of thing now.”

We all nod grimly.

A man in a sweater walks out to the driveway to meet us. “Welcome,” he says, and extends a hand to each of us. “This must be your wonderful family,” he says to my father. He doesn’t answer.

The man shows us to his living room. My parents each get an easy chair and the kids are instructed to sit cross-legged on the carpet. Alcoholism is a disease, we’re told. But it’s a disease of the family and not just the person.

My heart sinks. My siblings look glum. It looks like it’s our fault after all.

The psychiatrist takes out some construction paper and crayons and hands them around. “I’d like each of you to draw something for me,” he says. “Draw me a picture of your house. Of your family home.”

We clutch our papers close so no one can see what’s being drawn, except for Kurt, who never follows the rules. He lies on his stomach on the carpet and draws a square little house with a door and two windows. A puff of smoke comes from the chimney and a stone path curves up to the door. He draws a tree on each side of the house. “Good,” the psychiatrist says. “You did a nice job there.”

I can’t decide what kind of house to draw, so I draw a horse instead. Karin and Karma are reluctant to show their drawings. “How about you?” the man says, turning to our parents. My mother’s drawing is detailed and precise—she took art classes before her father talked her into going to nursing school. Her house looks like a bare-bones version of our house in Bridledale. “And you?” the man asks. My father turns up his paper for us to see.

The paper is solid black, colored in hard crayon from corner to corner.

The psychiatrist nods. When we get back to the car, Dad mutters something about a very expensive drawing lesson.

We don’t bother to stop for dinner on the drive home. “Well, that was a good first step,” my mother says cheerily as we file back into the house. We don’t go back.

I
N LATE
1974, seven companies respond to the AEC’s request for bids from private contractors. On November 21, the AEC selects Rockwell, one of the nation’s largest industrial corporations, as the new contractor at Rocky Flats. It awards Rockwell the typical cost-plus contract that will provide the company immunity from most lawsuits should problems occur.

Rockwell is well-known to activists like Judy Danielson, Pam Solo, and other volunteers from the Denver office of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker-affiliated organization working for social justice and human rights. One of their projects is to curb production of the B-1 bomber, which is built by Rockwell.

And there are still many unanswered questions about the effects of the 1969 Mother’s Day fire. No one—not Dow, Rocky Flats, the Colorado Health Department, or the Jefferson County Health Department—can or will provide clear answers. With Maury Wolfson of Environmental Action of Colorado, activists form a coalition of citizens and grassroots groups called the Rocky Flats Action Group. The group begins a public information campaign with the slogan “Local Hazard, Global Threat,” and bumper stickers bearing the slogan begin to appear on cars. Meetings are set up with incoming Governor Dick Lamm and Congressman Tim Wirth. One of the people in attendance at these early meetings is my sister Karma.

Denver has changed from a cow town to a burgeoning city of oil and gas companies and successful sports franchises. Colorado is riding an early wave of environmental enthusiasm. Citizens are finally able to stop the Rulison Project, the blasting of underground nuclear bombs to stimulate production of natural gas. But no one’s sure what, if anything, to do about Rocky Flats.

Governor Lamm and Representative Wirth respond to citizen pressure by creating the Lamm-Wirth Task Force to study Rocky Flats and make recommendations for its future. In late 1974 the task force conducts a series of public hearings to seek answers to citizens’ questions about Rocky Flats. More than fifty people testify, including experts from around the country. Farmer Lloyd Mixon of Broomfield brings along Scooter, a piglet with deformed ears and hind legs. Mixon testifies that Scooter is only one of many animals with deformities born on his ranch southeast of Rocky Flats, beginning as early as 1965.

Rocky Flats officials contend that the plant makes a “vital and substantial contribution to freedom” by manufacturing plutonium triggers, and that the plant’s $70 million operating budget is necessary to the region’s economy. They dismiss claims of health problems and sinking property values. The Colorado Health Department, often caught in the middle between Rocky Flats and the public, attributes the problems with Mixon’s animals to unsanitary conditions and inadequate nutrition, an allegation Mixon vigorously denies.

When the Lamm-Wirth Task Force publishes its report after the hearing, it concludes that there are not only serious safety issues at Rocky Flats but also the potential for a catastrophic nuclear accident. The risk is too great for a weapons plant to be located near a large population center, and the report recommends that the nuclear work done at Rocky Flats be closed or relocated.
In a press interview, task force member Patrick Kelly, a Rocky Flats worker and United Steelworkers of America official, states that Dow Chemical is “neither responsible nor responsive” to the public or to Rocky Flats workers, and that the secrecy at the company is supported by the AEC.

The report recommends the establishment of a permanent citizen monitoring committee.
It also criticizes the Price-Anderson Act, passed in 1957, and renewed in 1967 and 1977, which indemnifies the nuclear industry against nuclear accidents and exempts corporations from penalties associated with their actions, even in the case of gross corporate negligence. (In 2003, the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act was extended until 2017.) Companies like Dow and Rockwell can pollute
without penalty, and taxpayers bear the cost. “The Price-Anderson Act should be repealed and replaced with a nuclear industry liability act,” the task force states, “which requires contractors and licensees to bear the risk of doing business in the industry.”

Contradicting its own recommendation, however, the report also emphasizes that “strong consideration should be given to maintaining the economic integrity of the plant, its employees, and the surrounding communities.”

Some critics claim that the Lamm-Wirth Report is “a masterpiece of compromise.” It compromises the health of local citizens with the competing interests of a government that wants to make bombs, developers that want to sell houses, and workers who need jobs.

Dow Chemical has left Rocky Flats after two decades of accidents, plutonium releases, and safety problems, most of which are still hidden under the cloak of Cold War secrecy. Now that Rockwell has stepped in, it’s business as usual.

W
HAT LITTLE
popularity I enjoy in junior high disappears by the time we move into the new high school. I’m not a stoner or a jock or even a proper redneck. I play clarinet in pep band but I don’t hang out with the band geeks. I go to Rodeo Club meetings but I’d rather listen to Led Zeppelin than Tammy Wynette. I don’t smoke pot, I think beer tastes like soap, and I’m still painfully shy. I persuade the principal to let me take auto mechanics instead of home economics—who wants to be a housewife?—but the teacher won’t let me actually work on a car like the guys in the class.

Spirit Day arrives. Classes end early and all the students and teachers gather in the new gym for a special assembly, a pep rally in the gym just before our first basketball game of the season. I sit with the band in the bleachers, wearing my Pomona Panthers T-shirt, and we belt out a fumbled but deafening version of “Rock Around the Clock.” Our theme for Spirit Day is “Happy Days,” from the popular television show.

The assistant principal walks up to the microphone. “Panthers!” he
cries. “Are you ready for a little spirit?” The crowd roars. We’re a big school. We stamp our feet on the bleachers until the whole gym rocks.

Suddenly there’s the sound of a motorcycle in the hall, revving its engine. The gym falls silent. How can this be? Motorcycles aren’t even allowed in the parking lot.

The doors swing open and the motorcycle roars in. The rider wears a white T-shirt, black leather jacket, and black boots. His dark hair is shiny and slicked back. Before he can take the bike full-speed around the gym floor, the assistant principal waves him down. “Boys and girls!” he yells into the mike. “I give you … The Fonz!”

The crowd erupts. Girls start screaming. I’m shocked. It’s Randy Sullivan on his big brother’s motorcycle.

Randy smiles and gives a big thumbs-up. All the girls love him, and he gets a full page in the yearbook. There’s no hope for me now.

T
HE SUMMER
of my sixteenth year, my mother goes back to work, my grandfather starts to have heart trouble, and bill collectors call every night at suppertime. My father is adored by his clients. He gets them out of their divorces and lawsuits, accidents and DUIs—some of the neighborhood kids have begun to fall into the latter category—and they all love him for it. He wins a pro-bono award from the local bar association. “Your father is wonderful,” people say. “He’s so smart, and he’s fun to talk to.”

I think they’re nuts. Who are they talking about? He must be living a double life. Nothing has changed, and even our mother seems stumped. “I thought I knew him when we married,” she says. “But I often wonder what happened to him.” She sits on her stool in the kitchen and smokes one cigarette after another. She’s not convinced that all men aren’t like this anyway, to some degree or another. Unreliable, unknowable, impossible to trust. And they can’t even do their own laundry. But she likes men—she’s always been a big flirt—and she firmly believes in marriage. Everyone in the world should be married.

“Look what I have, despite everything,” she says. “A wonderful family
and four beautiful children.” This has become a mantra: a-wonderful-family-and-four-beautiful-children.