local coffee klatch. My father’s reputation grows, and she’s invited to join the Denver Lawyers’ Wives Club. This is a great honor and she takes it very seriously, putting on a skirt and heels once a month to attend their afternoon teas. One day she takes me shopping for a new dress so I can accompany her to the Daughters’ Tea. We go to the mall and choose a maxiskirt—all the rage—and a matching vest and blouse. The ensemble is stifling hot. At the party I take turns with the other girls pouring steaming tea from a heavy silver pot, and we listen silently to chatter about home decorating and children’s soccer games.
Soon it’s my mother’s turn to host a tea at our house. She frets forweeks—what to serve? what to wear? how to make the house presentable?—until it finally becomes evident to her that there is no way to hide the dust and chaos of our household and the constant parade of half-hidden bottles of bourbon. She quietly drops out of the group and never mentions it again. They were all just a group of silly women, anyway.
N EIGHBORHOOD POLITICS are rough. The girls act like I don’t exist and the boys tease me for wearing cowboy boots when go-go boots are all the rage.One girl, Tina, decides to give me a break. She lives up the street and rides a quarter horse mare that can race a motorcycle and win, if the race is short enough. She has a mother who lets her have boy-girl parties and a father who’s never home.
Tina’s a girl of strong opinions. Cowboy boots—shitkickers, she calls them—are for after school only. She wears short skirts and go-go beads and streaks her hair with spray bleach she buys at the five-and-dime. All the neighbor boys think she’s a fox. Her friendship is contingent upon the relentless completion of small rites of passage like ditching biology class, kissing a boy with your tongue, and jumping the pipe.
Every kid in the neighborhood knows about the pipe. Standley Lake is fed on the west side by Woman Creek, the waterway that runs from Rocky Flats. On the east side are several small, open canals that flow from the lake, canals filled with frogs and water skippers and darting glints of minnows. A long corrugated pipe, about four feet in diameter, extends from a high bank and spouts water to a deep pool nearly thirty feet below. Shallow and muddy, the canal meanders at a snail’s pace toward the lake, but a small round pool directly beneath the pipe is deep enough to accommodate a cannonball dive. Aim is everything. Speed helps. A quick sprint to the end of the pipe followed by a forceful, froglike leap works best, although few kids have the guts for that approach. Some kids crawl inside the pipe and jump from its dark cavern. Even if you manage to hit the deep pool and avoid breaking your neck, it’s still a mighty task to battle the waist-high mud that makes clambering back to the bank like fighting quicksand.
As a heavy metal, plutonium settles in mud and sediment.
I’m a spectator for weeks. Every afternoon after school a small jury seats itself on the grassy bank. One by one, a kid gingerly inches out to the edge of the pipe, looks down, takes a deep breath, and jumps. Or not. Few do it twice. To look down into the muddy swirl and contemplate a retreat under the vigilant gaze of your schoolmates means not only assuming the role of social outcast but establishing a reputation that will follow you all the way to high school.
Randy Sullivan jumps. Tina does, too. She makes it look easy. She hardly even looks—just eases out to the end of the pipe, closes her eyes, and leaps out into the air as if she could fly. She’s dressed herself with an audience in mind: a low-cut, sea-green swimsuit and tattered jean shorts. “Shit!” she breathes, pulling herself up onto the slick bank and flipping back long strands of wet hair. Her legs are covered with mud and tangled weeds. “Your turn,” she says.
“Okay.” My legs feel like lead. I let two boys go ahead of
Soon it’s my mother’s turn to host a tea at our house. She frets forweeks—what to serve? what to wear? how to make the house presentable?—until it finally becomes evident to her that there is no way to hide the dust and chaos of our household and the constant parade of half-hidden bottles of bourbon. She quietly drops out of the group and never mentions it again. They were all just a group of silly women, anyway.
N EIGHBORHOOD POLITICS are rough. The girls act like I don’t exist and the boys tease me for wearing cowboy boots when go-go boots are all the rage.One girl, Tina, decides to give me a break. She lives up the street and rides a quarter horse mare that can race a motorcycle and win, if the race is short enough. She has a mother who lets her have boy-girl parties and a father who’s never home.
Tina’s a girl of strong opinions. Cowboy boots—shitkickers, she calls them—are for after school only. She wears short skirts and go-go beads and streaks her hair with spray bleach she buys at the five-and-dime. All the neighbor boys think she’s a fox. Her friendship is contingent upon the relentless completion of small rites of passage like ditching biology class, kissing a boy with your tongue, and jumping the pipe.
Every kid in the neighborhood knows about the pipe. Standley Lake is fed on the west side by Woman Creek, the waterway that runs from Rocky Flats. On the east side are several small, open canals that flow from the lake, canals filled with frogs and water skippers and darting glints of minnows. A long corrugated pipe, about four feet in diameter, extends from a high bank and spouts water to a deep pool nearly thirty feet below. Shallow and muddy, the canal meanders at a snail’s pace toward the lake, but a small round pool directly beneath the pipe is deep enough to accommodate a cannonball dive. Aim is everything. Speed helps. A quick sprint to the end of the pipe followed by a forceful, froglike leap works best, although few kids have the guts for that approach. Some kids crawl inside the pipe and jump from its dark cavern. Even if you manage to hit the deep pool and avoid breaking your neck, it’s still a mighty task to battle the waist-high mud that makes clambering back to the bank like fighting quicksand.
As a heavy metal, plutonium settles in mud and sediment.
I’m a spectator for weeks. Every afternoon after school a small jury seats itself on the grassy bank. One by one, a kid gingerly inches out to the edge of the pipe, looks down, takes a deep breath, and jumps. Or not. Few do it twice. To look down into the muddy swirl and contemplate a retreat under the vigilant gaze of your schoolmates means not only assuming the role of social outcast but establishing a reputation that will follow you all the way to high school.
Randy Sullivan jumps. Tina does, too. She makes it look easy. She hardly even looks—just eases out to the end of the pipe, closes her eyes, and leaps out into the air as if she could fly. She’s dressed herself with an audience in mind: a low-cut, sea-green swimsuit and tattered jean shorts. “Shit!” she breathes, pulling herself up onto the slick bank and flipping back long strands of wet hair. Her legs are covered with mud and tangled weeds. “Your turn,” she says.
“Okay.” My legs feel like lead. I let two boys go ahead of
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