I THAT DEAD BAND’S SONG

Sometime after midnight a lime green Prius drove into the middle of a deserted parking lot on the outskirts of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The engine idled a few minutes before it cut off. Three figures emerged and stood transposed in shadow against a starless sky. The ground was wet from a late evening shower—the fast kind that comes in during summer, announcing its approach with thunderclaps and beautiful flashes of lightning, letting loose with a deluge lasting only thirty minutes before moving on to different, maybe more deserving, country.

The young man fastened his flashlight to his helmet, like an aboveground miner. A piece of duct tape partially obscured the lens—placed there in hopes of keeping the light’s beam small and undetected. The preacher asked them to gather in a circle. They held hands. The preacher and student bowed their heads and closed their eyes. The young man lowered his head but kept his eyes open. The student sneezed in lieu of an amen. She had come down with a cold, and the young man worried she would hold them back or get them caught before they could make it to their destination. He knew the wet ground would slow them down. Luckily, it had only been a small shower, and it was likely the ground would be drier under the dense ceiling of pine trees up on the ridge.

They started out across a mossy field leaving the lights of the city behind, while the silhouette of Pine Ridge stood before them hulking in the dark like a sleeping giant. It wasn’t going to be a long trek, just a little more than mile, but it was uphill in pitch-dark with no trails or roads to ease their progress. The piece of tape allowed just a sliver of light through, but the young man’s hearing improved as his ears compensated for his lack of vision. He discerned the sounds of his two companions in the dark. The preacher was breathing fine, despite his age, compared to the young man’s gasping wheeze. He hadn’t expected the hike would be so difficult, and it was clear the old man was in much better shape than he was. The student, meanwhile, was easy to distinguish in the dark by her sniffles and stifled coughs. He heard rocks and twigs and leaves give way under their feet. Tree limbs and leaves brushed against his arms, like the boney fingers of blind strangers groping furtively in the dark. The young man’s backpack, the heaviest of the three, was loaded with bolt cutters, spray paint, and the obligatory human blood. They were halfway up the ridge, about an hour into their hike, when they stopped to rest.

The previous day the preacher had shown them John Hendrix’s grave—only a short distance from where they were now. The legend was well-known to people with an interest in the Y-12 National Security Complex and its development, but it was new to the young man. Apparently, Hendrix was an ascetic at the turn of the 20^th century, before there was a town called Oak Ridge, back when it was mostly forest and log cabins.

One day John Hendrix heard the voice of God telling him to go into the woods for forty days and nights, and John obeyed. He went and stayed on a ridge overlooking Bear Creek Valley in what was then called Black Oak Ridge. When he returned forty nights later, he told the townspeople: “Bear Creek Valley someday will be filled with great buildings and factories, and they will help toward winning the greatest war that ever will be…thousands of people will be running to and fro. They will be building things, and there will be great noise and confusion and the earth will shake.”

The preacher had recounted Hendrix’s story in a solemn voice, as though he were delivering one of his sermons. The student had cried, but the young man merely nodded. The story was meant to strengthen them, to make their resolve clear and focused—as if it were a sign from God that their mission was approved. But to the young man it seemed like another crackpot urban legend. Interesting from a historical standpoint, but unverifiable. The preacher believed that victory would be attained after Y-12 was shut down. But the young man didn’t buy it. If the United States and the rest of the mega powers around the world disarmed, it would merely leave the world hostage to places like North Korea. After all, hadn’t Dr. Strangelove proven that the one safeguard against nuclear war was mutually assured destruction? Without that mutuality, how long would the world stay friendly, and who would be the first to build up a new nuclear supply? Of course, he didn’t share these thoughts with anyone else. There was a time and place for doubts and questions, but in the midst of an extremist environmental group’s protest was neither the time nor the place. Especially after making the deal he had made. He couldn’t even in good conscience speak with the other members of the group without feeling a pang of guilt. But guilt was better than prison. It had to be.

Since making the deal, his thoughts often turned toward his mother and how easy it was for her to fight for the environment. To him, the snail darter controversy seemed clear. David versus Goliath. Class warfare—something he understood. Rich folks wanting to flood a valley so they could have lakefront property while not caring about the poor farmers, defenseless animals, and unique ecosystems they would displace or destroy in the process. But this, what he was doing now, what was it? Geopolitics? Terrorism? Patriotism? Religious radicalism? It wasn’t clear.

Would his mother be proud of him? He could hazard a guess. The space in his life allocated to parental approval was empty, leaving him searching for ways to fill it up. Leading him here to Pine Ridge in the pitch black, trudging up to a facility where the heart and soul of Fat Man and Little Boy had been enriched before being assembled and dropped on Japan. Where billions of dollars in federal money went each year. Where more than 24,000 people were employed either directly or indirectly. Where, just over the ridge, they’d enter and vandalize the world’s largest uranium deposit, like high schoolers rolling a neighbor’s house. If they didn’t get shot dead before they got there, of course.

Their break was over. They continued up the dark incline. Above the ridge the dark sky was smeared with light, as though El Dorado or Carcosa might be on the other side.

A half hour later they topped the ridge and peered down at their target. A patrol SUV turned onto Bear Creek Road and disappeared from view. What happened next seemed like a montage of random film cuts playing in his mind. His adrenaline pumped. It seemed like it only took a few seconds to climb down the other side of the ridge. Before he knew it, they were right in front of the first gate. The sound of his own heart banging in his ears against the silence of the forest was gradually replaced by the hum of lights and generators resembling the metallic hiss of a great electronic cicada.

He took out the bolt cutters and clamped them down on the chain-link fence where “No Trespassing” signs hung like funeral wreaths over neglected graves. The links separated and the sound reminded him of how his guitar strings always used to snap at the most inopportune times, like in the middle of a show, or when he was trying to impress a girl with a solo. His thoughts turned to the man he had called father for so many years, and how he had never been a good enough musician for him. He thought about the man’s hands starting to curl from arthritis. Someday they’d form a claw unable to grip the neck of a guitar or much of anything else. Then he thought about how ambivalent he felt toward the man, neither hate nor love, just coldness and regret at having spent so much of his life trying to impress him.

He cut the fence enough to let the group pass through, pushing the backpacks ahead of them. First the preacher, then the student, before he finally crawled inside of the compound. They had officially reached the kill zone, and it felt just fine. If everything he had been told was true, the alarm system on the first fence was faulty. Yet the feeling of being watched persisted, as they walked across white rocks to the next fence. Surely this wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be happening. There had to be cameras capturing their actions. There had to be alarms. The preacher recited some bit of scripture under his breath.

The second fence featured electromagnetic sensors, but it was cut as easily as the first fence. The Gatlin guns located somewhere out of sight remained unarmed, unused, and cold. One more fence to go before they reached their destination—a reinforced bunker storing one of the world’s largest stockpiles of enriched uranium.

He thought about all the people working at the facility and how many would lose their jobs after this incident. He thought about the taxpayer money that would go toward beefing up security, and he thought about the defense contractors and subcontractors who would place their bids to be the new security provider, happily profiting from this serious lapse in federal defense security. The preacher and the student were doing God’s work, but even God’s work left casualties. He knew some would think them heroic, while others would label them terrorists, but the young man didn’t care because he wasn’t really there.

Upon reaching and successfully breaching the third and final fence, there was still no one in sight. The facility was eerie in its silence, like walking through a town evacuated because of some unknown, unseen threat. They approached the drab grey concreted building. Their destination. They got out the spray paint and blood and began desecrating the side of the building, which was supposedly fortified to withstand an airplane crash. The blood had freaked him out at first, but it was part of the ritual. You had to be tested first to make sure your blood was clean, which in his mind violated his sense of privacy, but he had submitted and given his blood to the cause. Now with large paintbrushes, they fashioned their blood into cryptic symbols with messy results, like children learning to write on a living room wall.

He thought about his mother again. Would she have joined him? Would he have betrayed her too if she were there? He thought about his real father and grandfather—they would have appreciated a good con, wouldn’t they? It was another thirty minutes before he heard the sound of a vehicle approaching. The young man tossed the can of spray paint and raised his hands above his head. As the patrol SUV came to a stop and the door opened, he thought about Anna, and wondered if she would make it to his funeral. But first he had to die.