Hot Waste: Men and Nuclear Fallout

By Isabel Vandervelde

This is the first person tale of an adult woman caught in a city ruled by physicists and engineers who create atomic and hydrogen bombs. She has to decide to keep secrets from the dreaded Plant Security people, whom she learns are humans after all. There is murder and plenty of mayhem as she frees herself into the world as she wishes it to be. Love, desire, art, and poetry are her new life, as well as two wonderful young men as her lovers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Oct 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490747408

Isabel Vandervelde

Author Isabel Vandervelde, in her usual guise as Malfoy Grandma, makes her own world of romance, magic, and love. An ardent historian, she also paints, draws, and designs as well as writes both fiction and nonfiction. She has nine other books of fiction and four of scholarly histories.

Book preview

Chapter 1

I wish I could start this with It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen, But George Orwell already used that, and it was really a hazy hot day in Aiken, on July 10, 1972

Aiken, South Carolina had more nuclear physicists and engineers per capita than any other town in the United States. So it should have been a Rome or a Mecca or perhaps even a Santiago Compostelo. Instead it was just a quiet little Southern town built on the sand hills of mid South Carolina. And in that boring little city, everybody who was anybody in plutonium and neutrinos knew Jack Harrington. So at his funeral, attended by hundreds, even those outside the fold, murmured about how brilliant he had been. And how handsome. And what a shame he had been murdered.

Think of it! One of the high priests of the Mysteries of Death and Destruction who split the atom and discuss the nature of the Universe in Cobol and Basic! Murdered! That’s like Murder in the Vatican!

But maybe you don’t know! You think Physics is a science. Well, you are wrong. It is definitely not a science, it is a Religion. With a capital R!

Debunking the religions of childhood has become a paying endeavor. It has always been chic to attack Jewish mothers, and it’s all the rage now to write novels and plays and movies about being a Catholic kid. Priests hang around with the Mafia. They even go to bed with beautiful women, just as if they were real men.

Now, I was a strict count-your-indulgences, say your novenas, take communion every first Friday Catholic as a kid, but I won’t bother with that. What the public really needs to know is all the dirt about the New Religion, nuclear physics! And I know plenty about it, because I married a nuclear engineer.

My Creative Writing professor says I should step back a little from my subject in order to have some perspective on events. So in my look at the new religion, I am starting with perspective. Being an artist of sorts I am accustomed to dealing with perspective—the art of fooling the viewer’s eye so that she will believe she is seeing reality.

Reality was a dead body in the sacred precincts of the office of the non-classified Heavy Water Components Test Reactor. HECTOR, they called it fondly, with that love of acronyms which has turned everything from the glories of space exploration to the murderous manipulations of terrorist organizations into political new-speak.

Reality was brilliant Jack Harrington poring over computer printouts at his desk. And no matter that he understood the intricacies of light and power and awesome radiation. When handsome Jack Harrington probed his final mysterious cavern where atoms danced, someone came up behind him and cracked him across the base of his skull with a heavy blunt instrument.

The reality was so alien to the secret and scientific progression of life at the Savannah River Plant, it should have been marked, ala Orwell, by the clocks striking thirteen. It was not. Instead life went on as it always had in Aiken.

Aiken still tried to pretend it was the same sleepy little town full of about 5,000 good old boys and their families who made most of their money off the rich Yankees who came down to get away from the New York winters. It had been a prosperous place until 1950. The biggest excitement had been sitting around on cracker barrels gossiping about the weather, local politics, and the price of cotton.

Then Uncle Sam decided that he needed a useless corner in which to tuck his latest project—the manufacturing of radioactive material from which to build his atomic and hydrogen bombs. Aiken County fitted the bill exactly. It was about as out-of-the-way as you could find anywhere short of the New Mexico desert, which was already full of secret installations and radioactivity. So the same backwoods charm and quiet which had drawn the New York socialite women and their Robber Baron husbands drew the nuclear plant. The climate was perfect—no winters full of blizzards and wind, rare tropical hurricanes which usually stalled out and died on land, and just the lonesome old Back Swamp area where Indians and their British Traders had lived long ago on which they could build anything.

Four years of construction flooded the town with day laborers. The biggest trailer park in the world occupied what had once been a leached-out corn field. There were more fights and robberies than Aiken County had seen since it was carved out of the wilderness.

And then the scientists came—physicists, engineers, chemists, mathma-ticians — educated men and their educated, upper middle class families. So Aiken society was now split three ways. There were Old Aikenites. The Winter People (often referred to as Horse People), and Those Duponters. Only the very wealthy were considered human. No one even mentioned cotton mill hands or servants or negroes. They had their social sub layers too, but the other three tiers pretended not to notice. After all they were not really members of society, but rather furniture, underpinnings, and support thereof.

However, after a couple of decades everything sort of fell into place. Supercapitalists whose grandfathers helped found Standard Oil rode their horses and played polo. Local boys whose granddaddies had fought for the Confederacy, had been lint-heads at the Graniteville Company mills now belonged to the Klan, sold furniture, developed swamps into elite housing projects, and built themselves homes which looked like bad dreams about antebellum architecture.

The over-educated men who said easily, Well, somebody has to make it, about a bomb which wiped out Hiroshima, justified their work in terms of upward mobility and lived in all-white suburban housing projects while discussing what bigots these Southerners were.

Everyone lived in layered harmony. Aiken had become a place where mumbo-jumbo passed for mysticism, obscenity for wit, self-interest for philanthropy, and social polish for culture.

In this kind of place it is hard to be objective, but I need perspective, so I will step back from the body of Jack Harrington, B.S Nuclear Engineering, U of NC., M.S. Physics, Stanford, M.S. Mathematics, Ohio State, Ph.D. Nuclear Physics, Berkeley, and I will start at a night some forty-eight hours before his death.

Harry, my husband the nuclear engineer, was working late at the plant and would not be home until at least supper time the next day. He liked to cover the two night shifts and then catch some sleep on the couch in his office. They were having a reactor start-up in section B and he was the physicist on duty. He loved start-ups. Whatever they might be. He never told me technical things. In fact he loved his job, loved it more than any other part of his life including me and the kids, and was intensely devoted to it and to the whole idea of nuclear power, nuclear fission, nuclear anything up to and including the nuclear family.

I was alone but the house was far from silent. Pine branches whispered against the roof. Our dog, Jasper, was prowling around down in the basement, still looking for Craig, who had raised him from a pup.

My three kids were all gone — Craig in the Navy to avoid the draft and ‘Nam, Danny in Canada working on a farm for the same reason, and Angela, my precious daughter, to the white sand beaches of Florida with the local drug connection. He was a gorgeous twenty-year-old flower child with golden blond hair curling down almost to his elbows, and a quarter-ton of Panama Red stashed behind removable panels in his fancy black roach wagon. And she had been gone with him since April. So here I was, alone. Except for Jasper, of course. And the fourteen gerbils Angela had deserted, now whirling and running in their mazes, and Danny’s half-Siamese female cat, Delilah, singing to an unseen lover outside in our wooded back yard.

My children had left me their pets and their pictures, so why should I feel lonely?

The night wind coming in at the window over my bed was warm and muggy, smelling of wet pine trees. I thought that was what had awakened me from a none-too-sound sleep. The fan had cut off again. I got up and went to the window to shake the fan. I clicked the switch off and on a few times, reset the wall plug and finally hit the fan a hard whack with my left hand. None of these usually reliable actions affected the fan. My God, I thought, If only Harry believed in air-conditioning.

But Harry did NOT believe in air-conditioning, at least not for HIS home, no sirree, not when HE had to pay the electric bill. Of course all the offices and reactor rooms where he worked at the Plant were air-conditioned, but not HIS house, where he spent the least amount of time possible.

I put on my bedroom slippers and padded downstairs where Jasper greeted me with a tentative wag of his flagged tail. The old golden Lab had been a good hunter once, ten years ago when Craig was eleven and Harry went through a spell of teaching our sons how to handle guns and dogs. Now Jasper was twelve years old, half deaf and nearly blind. He wanted nothing more than to lay on the furry old rug beside Craig’s bed and eat the food Craig put into his red bowl. But Craig was gone, over in Greece somewhere translating radio messages at a naval station. So Jasper did not eat much anymore, though he always let me convince him to take a few mouthfuls.

Want to go outside, Jasper? Come on, boy, I coaxed, always afraid of the dark but never willing to admit it. Jasper sighed and looked back at the door to Craig’s room, but he went out with me, as did Delilah. She ran out eagerly, disappearing into the mass of azalea bushes along the back fence. Jasper looked up at me with one big ear cocked, but when I made no comment on his foolishness, he sighed and sat down on the warm brick of the patio. I had built that patio all by myself because Harry did not like brick patios.

I sprawled on the chaise and Jasper flopped beside me, sighing again, because he preferred his rug, Craig’s rug. I willed myself to relax, sinking into the cool plastic cushions. The breeze seemed cooler and the dampness was almost refreshing. Just as I started to doze, I hear voices.

Disgusted, I got up and padded around the brick walk to the side of the house. There wasn’t much moonlight, but I could make out two people under the dogwood tree in the Harrington’s back yard. I started to say something to Midge Harrington, but then I realized it was not Midge. In fact, in the back of my mind I knew that Midge was pulling eleven to seven shift at the hospital, her favorite time as a nursing supervisor at the delivery room. And her kids were all gone for the summer. But I recognized the husky baritone of her husband, Jack. He had a sheet wrapped around his body, and he was laughing.

That alone was enough to draw my complete attention, because Jack Harrington was a senior level reactor engineer, and he rarely laughed, unless he was exceptionally drunk at a section party. What on earth was he doing, I thought, playing Halloween or something?" I moved closer and saw that the woman, whoever she was, wasn’t wearing anything at all except her hair, which was down very long on her back. No woman I knew had hair like that! I crept closer, just to hear their voices.

Jasper followed me and sat down beside me, watching me to see when we would go back inside. He could neither see nor hear the humans ten feet away. Poor old dog.

Now Jack Harrington let the sheet drop He was leaning against the dogwood trunk and the woman was kneeling at his feet just in front of him. They both laughed and then she grabbed his penis in both hands and began rubbing it. I was astonished at how long it was getting! I lost my breath and started to go away, but then I thought, what if they hear me, so I stayed. My God, I thought, she’ll hurt him!, because I never treated Harry’s organ with anything except gentle respect. But Jack seemed to like it a lot. He was laughing and moaning and then she….well she actually took it into her mouth, and she was pumping away with grunting vigor when a bright flashlight beam caught them both like bugs on a pin.

"Goddamn you, Renee, I TOLD you I’d catch you next time, you bitch," the man holding the big flashlight said in a fierce voice. I knew who it was! C.C. Baird! Section Supervisor of the whole Reactor Department! Old C-squared Baird, as all the men fondly called him! The epitome of Nuclear Engineers, the best damned supervisor on the plant, and scheduled for promotion to the Explosives Department in Wilmington at the very next round of personnel moves! The Archbishop of the Atom himself! He ran toward Jack and began beating him on the head with the flashlight. Renee Baird let out a scream, and he turned to her, grabbing her by that long, swinging hair which I had only seen done up into the tightest of prime buns before tonight. "Shut up, you whore!" Baird snarled, and he stopping hitting Jack Harrington so he could cover her mouth with his hand. You bitch, you idiot, you get your ass into that car and get your ass home. Right NOW!

Yes, CC, she squealed as he gave her hair another yank. She was gone before Baird turned aback to Harrington.

Harrington moved groggily to punch Baird, but Baird swung that heavy flashlight again, and even Jasper heard the whack as it connected with Harrington’s skull. Harrington sank down onto the ground with a new kind of groaning pain, and Baird snarled, "You filthy son-of-a-bitch! Tomorrow you ask for a transfer out of my Reactor department or I’ll see you fired." Then I heard him running away, and two cars, his and hers, took off from the front of the house. I saw Jack Harrington get up, moaning, picking up his sheet, stumbling across his concrete patio toward the open door of his recreation room. But he only got about half way, and then he fell down and I was sure he was dying of a skull fracture or something, so I ran out our back gate and around through the Harrington’s carport unto their patio where he lay. I knew my way around even in the dark. I had been there nearly as often as I had been on my own patio. Poor Jasper came puffing and groaning behind me.

As we passed the barbecue grill Jack started to get up. Jasper, not quite knowing what was going on, let out a great belling woof and jumped on this new enemy. I shrieked at Jasper. Lights began popping on in back yards and kitchens and bedrooms all around the neighborhood.

No, Jasper! No! Down! Down! Heel! I was screaming! "Damn it, dog, Down! Heel!" I screamed with increasing fervor till Jasper finally let go of Jack’s sheet and got himself behind me, all the time growling and wheezing and foaming at the mouth. He had not been either angry or excited since Craig left him, and he was enjoying himself immensely, shaking all over and letting out an occasional deep bark whenever he caught his breath.

"Damn it, Dog, you’ll give yourself a heart attack," I wailed and then Jack sat up.

"Oh, for Christ’s Sake, Ann Marie, be quiet! Can’t you please be quiet? Shut up and take that mutt home, please! Please, for God’s Sake!"

"But there’s blood all over you, and…..

Go HOME, dammit, he whispered hoarsely. "Just go home."

"But you might have…..

"Dammit, woman, he screamed desperately, GO HOME! And take that god-forsaken hound with you!"

Jasper was panting and growling, and as Jack’s voice rose in anger, he let a gigantic baritone howl. If anyone in the neighborhood had still been asleep, they woke up then. I saw the despair in Jack’s eyes and