We weren’t supposed to be out there. Hell, we weren’t supposed to be anywhere. Shunted out of polite society for reasons I still don’t fully understand, even to this day. Whatever happened, Mama and Pappy didn’t feel inclined to share it with little kid me or adult me or no version of me whatsoever. They died with that secret. Maybe that’s just as well. Don’t know anybody who would even care anymore.
It was a good little spot. A creek had spent a couple millennia or more cutting down through the little knoll. So we had a creek on one side, still full of fresh water those days, and a hard wall of packed dirt on the other. Kept us safe.
We built our home in between the two. Nothing more than a two room shack built out of lumber Pappy ‘stole ‘found’ from who-knew-where. Drove on up the hill with all of it tucked neatly in the bed of his pick-up. Took ‘em a whole week to build those two rooms. ‘fore that we was living in nothing more than a lean-to, Pappy’s old tarp from the first war stretched tight from the top of the little cut-off knoll right down to the ground. Getting to move into something with solid wood under your feet instead of just shifting sand made us feel more alive. Disconnected from the earth. It had been trying to swallow us whole.
Pappy picked up Mama and carried her through the front doorway. Well, it weren’t no doorway ‘cuz there was no door, but we cut that tarp down to size and hung it from the top and I held it to the side while he carried her in, both of them giggling like children. There was the big room and the small room, nothing more. Pappy and Mama took turns driving that truck back to civilization and bringing stuff back. Straw mattresses, one for them, one for me. A little table and a couple of chairs. Only two. Pappy always stood, or leaned against the big butcher block he’d ‘found.’
Always, always, these things were ‘found.’
“Look what I found, right next to the road into town!” Pappy would say, carrying in a bag full of clothes, or some pewter dishes, or once the heavy woodstove he put into the big room.
Found. Sure. I was a kid then, but I was ten. Old enough to know how the world works. Old enough to know ain’t nobody in their right mind just leaving something like a wood stove on the side of the road. But I didn’t say nothing, because I knew I wouldn’t get answers. Just a beating.
Looking back now, I wonder if the lie was even for me. Maybe it was for them. Maybe they was playing pretend.
We was living in the middle of the high desert. Surviving, really, at least for the first year. That first winter. Even now, most of my nightmares go back to those nights. Who knew it snowed in the desert? Who knew it snowed so much in the desert? I did not. But I surely do now. The storms that would roll through, the weight of nature pressing in on us from all sides. Heavy snow. The winds that would howl straight through all the little gaps in between the lumber of our shack. I can’t believe we weren’t crushed. I can’t believe we didn’t blow away.
That first winter we were so close to death I could see it, living with us, staring, biding its time. The rest of the world could never find us in our little creek bed, but death would follow us anywhere.
I would lie awake at night, staring at it. And it would stare back at me. Neither of us making a move. Just listening to the wind, and when the wind would fall away, the sound of Mama weeping quietly into Pappy’s chest in the other room.
Probably it was a dream. Maybe it wasn’t. I asked it one night, toward the end of the winter, I look it in it’s black swirling nothing of a face, and I asked it:
“Who are you going to take first?”
I did not expect an answer, but I got one.
Maybe I’m not here for any of you.
Death’s voice sounded an awful lot like my Pappy’s.
~
The last thing Pappy ‘found’ was that radio. The May after that terrible winter. He’d been doing regular trips with the truck, coming back with seeds, hoes, rakes, a hunting rifle and more ammunition than you’d ever expect to simply ‘find.’ Even after what we’d been through, there was still no going back. So Pappy was out to make sure we survived the next one.
Of course I don’t know what happened with the radio. Of course no one told me. Mama and Pappy talked to me little. Short sentences. Mostly orders. Demands. Sometimes I’d catch them staring at me, out the corner of my eye, and see this look on their face that said it all. This little thing they were doing, this little adventure, would have been so much better without an accidental child clinging to their coattails. If I hadn’t been there, they’d have one less mouth to feed. One less mattress to buy. One less future to worry about.
But, then again, I sometimes caught them looking at each other like that. They never fought in front of me, not that I can remember. But it was worse than fighting. It was this gradual shifting away from each other, which would never work because we were all trapped in a space that amounted to nothing more than a single car garage. It’s a bitter thing, hating someone you loved. Worse when neither can leave.
Oh, the radio. Yeah, I don’t know what happened but whatever it was, it was enough to keep Pappy or Mama going back to whatever town they was stealing from. Pappy had a black eye and a click in his jaw for weeks. He kept giving the way he’d come little glances, too, when we thought we weren’t looking.
It was this little compact thing. Well, you wouldn’t call it ‘little’ today, no sir, but compared to the one we’d had in our house, our real house, before we was driven from it, it was nearly child-sized. Rounded edges, nice wood finish, it had a little glow in the beginning behind the dial but Pappy got into it and took out the bulb so the battery would last longer. He put it on a little table that had sat empty in the corner since Mama had ‘found’ it the previous autumn, and at night, when the sun went down and the signals went further, we’d have a little piece of humanity humming away.
None of the stations came in very well. We were too far away. But there was something comforting about the static, too. Especially as the next winter came down around our heads. Outside the wind blew and that was a separate thing, a thing humans had no control over. But the static? We found the static. We made it. Even if it didn’t sound like humans, it was still a human sound.
Christmas Eve, that second winter, Pappy was turning the dial on the radio, trying to find something comin’ in with either news of the war or maybe just some carols for Mama, when he hit upon a station that seemed to climb out of the radio and deliver its music in person.
“What’s that?” Mama asked, startled.
“I don’t know.” Pappy said, staring at the radio like it would give up answers.
“It weren’t there yesterday.”
“Damn it, I know!”
If the other stations came in like a distant shout, this station came in like a roar from right under out feet. We could hear every sound, every note, every breath. Sometimes the announcer would mutter to himself as he picked something new and it was like he was muttering right behind us, right into my ear. I surely don’t have to say that after that Christmas we did not change the station. Nothing came in as well as this mystery broadcast.
And it sure was a mystery. They played all sorts of things, with no consistency. Classical music. Modern jazz. Pieces sung in languages I ain’t never even heard of. A nameless announcer would cut in between, never giving out a call sign or nothing. Just what had been played, what would be played next. Seemed to be just a man, somewhere out there in that wild darkness, playing whatever sort of records he had on hand.
Except there would be live performances! The first time our nameless announcer friend said someone would now be playing the piano for us we were awestruck. All three of us, looking at the radio, at each other, like we’d just discovered a new continent. This was not a simple man by himself. This man had a room big enough for instruments like a piano. This man had friends. This man was not simply broadcasting out into the void. There was an audience. And we were a part of it.
I think that was the trick of it. Knowing we weren’t alone, even when we were. We weren’t just three people in the middle of nowhere anymore. We were in an audience. When we had the radio on, we were listening to the same thing other people were. How many people? We would speculate. Guess. What were they doing? Where were they? Did they know the people getting on the radio and playing piano, guitar, clarinet? Did they know we were here? No, they couldn’t, of course not, there was no way…but was there?
I think that radio station, more than anything else, kept us alive. Sure, we learned to tend our little garden, and store away our food for winter, and we mudded up the cracks in the rooms to keep the wind out and all the things you need to do to stay alive in the middle of the New Mexico desert.
But we needed something else. A connection. A tether. A reminder that we are human, and out there somewhere, beyond where we could see, were more humans.
I think it kept Mama and Pappy from killing each other. They stopped drifting away. Started drifting together. Cuddled together as they listened each night. Even started looking at me with some fondness. Like maybe I wasn’t a mistake. Like maybe none of it was.
~
I know what you want to ask, it’s the same thing everyone asks. The answer is no. Most people don’t seem to know this, but their little test was done two hundred miles away, south, far away from us and their facilities. Maybe something of it came by our little camp, but it was deep in the morning and we slept through it. We did not discover what was going on until the rest of the world did.
I said we never changed the station but that was a lie. Pappy wanted news on the war, and he checked the local station every week. That’s when we heard about the bomb, like everyone else. Of course we didn’t put two and two together. How could we?
We moved out of that shack shortly after the war ended. Did one thing have to do with another? Like I said, I’ll never know. My parents were good at not talking about things. Too good. Once we moved out of that shack and back to Albuquerque it was like those years out there in the wilderness had never even happened. It was only later, much later, after both of them had died, that I ever figured out where that radio was coming from. Who that radio was supposed to be for.
Sinners, I suppose. Some of the worst the world has ever seen. I suppose, then, we fit. Whatever my folks did to get us out there. The stuff I’ve done since. Just sinners, enjoying the radio together.
I was inspired to write this when reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, and came across this little tidbit on page 569:
“A low-power radio station began broadcasting to [Los Alamos] residents on Christmas Eve, 1943, drawing on several fine collections of classical records, including [J. Robert] Oppenheimer’s; the few New Mexicans beyond the Hill who could receive the station’s signals were puzzled that announcers never introduced live performers by their last names. The “Otto” who occasionally played classical piano selections was Otto Frisch [Austrian-born nuclear physicist].”
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 
This is well put together.
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