Stallion Gate Read Free Page A

down the whole keyboard on the ninths like Tatum, returning to catch Harvey’s dying note and stretch it into melody with the right hand while he brought the left softly up the keys like a rabbit. Harvey stopped playing and stood with the reed in his open mouth, eyes big. Joe turned the rabbit into a bebop bopping from chord to chord as softly as a lullaby until he merged the melody again and made it swell until Fuchs couldn’t help but start dancing again. When the German was in full spin, Joe dropped into “The Skaters’ Waltz,” still in A-minor. The girl was laughing, taking him up on it. Fuchs tried to stop, but she wouldn’t let him; Oppy wiped tears of laughter.
    Slowly, as if it were a force taking control, syncopationcame out of the bass and the waltz became a dreamy rag, then escaped into a comic stride that left Fuchs not knowing whether to put down his left foot or his right until Joe marshaled the notes into a resolute two-four and marched them into a proper waltz, where he left them for dead and reprised Porter as if nothing had happened, no Strauss, no bebop, and when he cut it short he nodded to Harvey, who came through with a fluty arpeggio, and Joe hit a last chord and that was that.

3
    In the beginning, Oppy thought he could build the bomb with just five other physicists. They could take over the schoolmasters’ houses and eat at the school lodge. What laboratories were needed could be squeezed in between the canyon rim and the little man-made pond that graced the front of the lodge.
    After deeper thought, Oppy doubled and redoubled the number of physicists and added some mathematicians, chemists and metallurgists. The Army brought in an engineers detachment to man the labs, run the power plant, maintain the roads and drive the trucks. Two hundred MPs were shipped in for security. WACs came for clerical work, and the labor force had to be expanded because work that had been expected from the outside world, the real world so far away from New Mexico, couldn’t be done there. Volcanic tufa was bulldozed for foundries. Cyclotrons and particle accelerators were jimmied up the canyon road. The British mission arrived. Dormitories, hospital and school were built and babies born. Soldiers, MPs and WACs wereagain doubled in number and needed more barracks, cafeterias, commissaries and theaters. The civilian machinists who cut high explosives would leave if they didn’t have their own housing. Civil servants had to be housed. By December 1944, five thousand people were crammed onto the mesa and in the dark without street-lamps because the Army was still trying to hide its most secret project.
    From the dance, Joe cut across the ball field and behind the beauty shop to an area of low, rounded Quonset huts, so-called Pacific hutments designed to be thrown up on tropical islands, not in New Mexico in the winter. This was where the construction workers who built the housing for everyone else were expected to live. He found the fight just by the noise.
    The ring was in the dayroom of the central hut. Sergeant Ray Stingo was fighting one of the workers. Like Joe, Ray was a bodyguard and driver with security clearance, and had been a fighter, a heavyweight, before the war. He sported a black spit curl over a beaten-down nose and showed a stomach still hard as a washboard, but he must have had ten years on the kid he was boxing.
    Joe edged open the door just enough to see. The hut had the deep, sour reek of stale beer and dead cigarettes. The Hill had recruited and suffered through successions of construction men, each group meaner than the one before, as healthy workers without police records were likely to be drafted. The latest bunch were Texans who labored stripped to the waist but, like acaste mark, always wore their hats. They’d put on their good Stetsons and shirts for the evening’s entertainment and stood on sofas and chairs to root their boy on. Ray’s backers were MPs, a corps of uniformed thugs who