Full Body Burden Read Free Page B

the plant boundary.
    The product that comes off the factory line at Rocky Flats is a well-kept secret.
    By 1969, more than 3,500 people work at the plant. No other nuclear bomb factory has ever been located so close to a large and growing population.
    W E BEGIN what we do best as a family: collecting pets. They come and go. Fluffy, a gray tabby who melts in my arms when I rock her on the backyard swing, lasts only a few weeks before a neighbor’s dog gets her. Melody is a sweet-natured calico cat who disappears almost as quickly; when my sister Karma sees a photo of a similar-looking cat in a glossy magazine, she tells me that Melody has run off to become a famous cat model. We drive a dachshund to neurosis by chasing him around the house. Fritzi is then sent to the home of an elderly couple to recover. He never returns. My mother takes us to the Arvada Pet Store and buys me a green parakeet I name Mr. Tweedybopper. Karin gets a tiny turtle, Tom, in a plastic moat, and Karma gets a pair of hamsters. When they succumb to the various hazards of our household—Mr. Tweedybopper catches a draft, Tom Turtle dehydrates, and the hamsters successfully plot an escape—we visit the pet store again.
    My father endures our ever-expanding household with little comment. He spends Saturdays—the only day we see him—mowing the backyard in Bermuda shorts, black socks, and worn penny loafers. My sisters and I dance along behind him in the clipped path, the scent of the grass thick, sweet, and heady. Saturday is also trash day. We help Dad pack up all the household trash and take it out to our incinerator, a cement-block monument in the backyard, blackened from use. We taketurns pushing trash in through the trapdoor at the front. Everything goes—cans, paper, plastic, food, coffee grounds. Dad lights a match and we watch the pieces catch and burn and the oily smoke curl up into the sky.
    W ITH THE birth of my brother, Kurt, the house reaches its limit. My father says he doesn’t have room to think, and my mother claims she’s losing her mind. Our Sunday drives take us out by Rocky Flats, through empty landscapes of planned housing developments, dirt roads drawn in chalk, and squares of land separated by wooden spikes with fluttering orange ribbons. Bulldozers push piles of earth and dig rows of deep foundations like a vast potter’s field. My parents sit up late at night at the kitchen table, looking at blueprints and adding up numbers.
    “Guess what, kids,” my mom says. “We’re moving to a new house.”
    Our house begins with a deep rectangular pit. My mother drives us out in the station wagon, a long green lizard of a car with no seat belts, so we can watch. No one back then has seat belts; if they do, they don’t use them. My father takes pride in not buckling up.
    Carpenters arrive in weatherbeaten pickups. The soil is rocky and the workers cuss. We aren’t supposed to hear, even if it is in Spanish. There is a lot of pounding. I remember the bones: two-by-fours reaching to the sky, anchored in concrete.
    Our skeletal house stands on nearly two acres at the end of a road that dips down to a small hill, where our driveway begins. Not a long driveway, but long enough to set us apart from everyone else. There is no grass or trees, only mud. We look out from the freshly poured concrete of our front porch and see lines of spindly houses: streets laid out for pavement and front yards of raw earth waiting for sod, doors and windows, mortar and bricks. All the pieces ready to be put together. Some families have already moved in with their dogs and tricycles and motorcycles and an occasional horse stabled in the backyard.
    The developer calls it Bridledale. My mother calls it heaven. Bridledale represents the golden dream of suburban life and all its postwar promises.
    The bills begin to mount and our new house is still not finished. My father spends more time at the office. Some evenings, if he’s home from work, we go to the