Tucker's Last Stand Read online

  Tucker Montana’s father was dead. He had been run over by a taxi while hailing a bus in a rainstorm to make a delivery of an electric fan he had repaired for a parishioner who operated a souvenir factory near the Alamo. Tucker was six and his father had struggled to feed wife and son, doing odd jobs at St. Eustace Church during the day. Faraday Montana, who traced his background to General Sam Houston and one of his Indian concubines, during the year the general left Tennessee en route to Texas, was proud that he could offer his services as an electrician, as a carpenter, as a plumber, as a mason, or for that matter as a janitor: there wasn’t anything, really, he could not do with his hands. Fr. Enrique would almost always find something in the large church that needed fixing, and on good weeks, when Fr. Enrique would give a particularly galvanizing sermon at all six masses, he would manage to count out enough nickels and dimes to pay Faraday fifteen, every now and again twenty dollars. Although the elderly priest and the twenty-eight-year-old jack-of-all-trades got on wonderfully well, Fr. Enrique knew that Faraday was looking about, always, for more lucrative work. Far from resenting this, Fr. Enrique kept his own eyes open and it was he who had told Faraday about the opening at the Alamo.

  Fr. Enrique had stopped by the little factory-shop on a summer day to chat with his parishioner, Al Espinoso. Sweating profusely in his Roman collar, the priest had looked wistfully at the idle electric fan behind the counter. Why wasn’t it turned on, on so hot a day? Al Espinoso said it was broken and he hadn’t found anybody who could fix it. Moreover, the only one of his workers who knew anything about electricity had left the factory the week before to join a brother in Houston.

  Fr. Enrique pounced. He would have the fan fixed by a young man of extraordinary talents as a craftsman if Al would agree to interview him for the opening. It was agreed, and the exciting news was given to Faraday that if he landed the job, he would be paid thirty dollars every week. Whereupon Faraday (Fr. Enrique would tell and retell this to young Tucker in the months and years ahead) “took that old fan, it was in pieces in about”—he snapped his fingers—“maybe four minutes, then said, the trouble is in the armature, and in about eighteen more minutes the copper was stretching right from there”—Fr. Enrique pointed to the door into the sacristy—“to the main altar. But five minutes after that, he had it all rewound. Then what really impressed me about your father happened. He said he was ready to take the fan to Señor Espinoso, and I said to him, ‘Faraday, what you mean you ready to take the fan to Señor Espinoso—you don’t even know if it works!’ And he said to me, he said, ‘Father, of course it works. I just fixed it.’ So I said, I said, ‘Now look here, Faraday Montana, you plug that fan into that socket right now and we’ll just see if you fixed it.’ Well, he did that—and the fan began to turn, and in a couple of seconds it was shooting out a fountain of air.

  “You know what your father made me feel like? He made me feel like St. Thomas! You know about Doubting Thomas, yes, Tucker?”

  When he first heard the story at age six Tucker hadn’t read about Thomas, who had doubted the resurrection of Jesus until Jesus asked him to probe His wounds, and then Thomas knew. Because Tucker didn’t know, that first time, about Doubting Thomas, and because he didn’t want to lie to Fr. Enrique or confess his ignorance, he managed to change the subject. As soon as he got home he asked his mother, who told him that when he wanted an answer to a question like that he should consult their little library, in which there were two—not one—copies of the Bible. Tucker, with his mother’s help, found the reference, and afterward it seemed as though a month didn’t go by without Fr. Enrique talking about Faraday’s tragic last afternoon on earth, and about how, just before the end, he had made a Doubting Thomas out of Fr. Enrique.

  His mother took a job as a receptionist-bookkeeper-telephone operator at a small hotel, coming back to the little apartment late at night but always with a fresh book for him from the library. She would stop there on her way to work—the library wouldn’t let children under twelve take books home. When Tucker ran out of reading matter, often on Sunday afternoons, he would leave the apartment and go to the drugstore, which was never closed, and read through one magazine after another. Mr. Eggleston let him do this, but only on the understanding that he would wash his hands at the sink in the back of the drugstore first, so as not to leave any marks on a magazine that might be sold to a customer. Tucker liked especially Life magazine, whose pictures he would stare at with hungry curiosity, and Popular Mechanics, and National Geographic. There was only one copy of the National Geographic, to which the store subscribed, and it was earmarked for a professor at St. Mary’s University, but the professor never got around to picking it up until after a week or so, giving Tucker time to come in, even during weekdays, to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.

  Tucker attended the parochial school at St. Eustace’s and during the afternoons stayed on after classes to help Fr. Enrique. By the time he was thirteen, Fr. Enrique would discreetly confide to anyone conceivably interested in the point, Tucker Montana could perform any job his father had been able to perform. “I don’t know where he picked up the knowledge,” he told Tucker’s mother one Sunday after Mass on Tucker’s eleventh birthday, “but he did.” He pointed to the cathedral-shaped wooden Victor radio. “That stopped working on Friday. I thought it needed a new tube and I told Tucker to take it to a radio shop. He said he would have a look. He took it apart. I mean, all apart. In a half hour he had it working. Wasn’t a tube, your boy said. Some kind of short circuit. He is some kind of a kid!”

  By the time Tucker was fourteen, Fr. Enrique knew that he had to do something about him. So one afternoon, after making an appointment over the phone, he went over to St. Mary’s, the Marianist men’s university at San Antonio, and was told where he could find Mr. Galen, the professor of physics. He explained the problem and Mr. Galen agreed to see the boy, and the following afternoon, at the designated hour, Tucker arrived in Mr. Galen’s study, which was also his classroom.

  Tucker was tall for his age. His hair was cropped close but not mercilessly short. A “bean shave” meant fewer quarters spent at the barber. (Tucker had begun, at age seven, restricting himself to four haircuts every year, explaining to his mother that hair grew at the rate of a half inch per month, and that if cropped close enough, once every three months was all he really needed to spend at the barber’s—exactly one dollar per year.) He had lately taken to asking Antonio if there was anything in the barber shop that needed to be fixed—one day he said, to his own and the barber’s astonishment, “malfunctioning”—and as often as not there was: a chipped mirror, dull shaving blade, whatever. Tucker would fix it, sharpen it, clean it, paint it, and Antonio would remit the price of the haircut. Antonio took to cutting Tucker’s hair less drastically than directed because Antonio didn’t want to go a full three months without seeing him. So that although Tucker, entering the physics professor’s domain, had had his hair cut the day before, he didn’t look as spare as he would have a year earlier.

  He was tall, but somehow not ungainly. His arms and legs seemed fully developed, and Mr. Galen found himself wondering whether the boy was full-grown at fourteen. At five feet six or seven inches his body seemed mature, though his face was that of a prepubescent boy. His brown eyes were oddly adult, penetrating but not obtrusive, and his ears lifted slightly when he was spoken to (though perhaps this would not have been noticeable if his hair had been a little longer). Tucker’s chin was slightly pointed, and since he did not smile, one saw only a trace of his white, regular teeth. He was beardless of course but there was the peach fuzz, lighter in color than the light-brown hair on his head. His manner was direct—polite, obliging, but not in the least intimidated or obsequious.

  Mr. Galen told him to sit down. He turned then, and pointed to the blackboard. He asked Tucker whether what was written there meant anything to him. Tucker looked up and said Yes, of course, those were the basic propositions of calculus. Mr. Galen then asked him if he knew anything a
bout the subject of physics, and Tucker said only what he had read in a textbook. Which textbook? Tucker pointed to the book by Hatteras and Guy sitting on top of one of the desks in the classroom. Mr. Galen, who used that book for his introductory physics course, asked if Tucker had experienced any difficulty with the subjects covered in that book, and Tucker looked up at him with quite evident dismay.

  “Difficulty? What do you mean, sir?”

  “What do I mean? I mean just that. Some students have a problem with spatial mechanics, some with the introduction to electricity, some with theories of motion—did you have any problem with these?”

  Tucker still found it difficult to answer. He was obviously thinking about the social consequences of the fix he found himself in. He did not wish to appear boastful. He found the solution. He said brightly, “Sometimes I have a problem with Latin. For instance: I can never absolutely remember whether pre, in, and post take the ablative or the accusative case. I just forget.”

  Mr. Galen said nothing. Then he stood up and went to the bookcase behind his desk and reached for a large volume bound in maroon-colored cloth. He pulled it out and brought it to the boy, who obediently looked at its title and pronounced the title out loud: “Theories in Advanced Physics. By”—he looked up at Mr. Galen. “Did you want me to read the names of all the authors? There must be ten, fifteen maybe.”

  “Those authors,” said Mr. Galen, “twelve men and one woman, are at the frontiers of the study of physics. Do you want to have a look at the book?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, sir. I promise to take very good care of it.”

  Mr. Galen, who stood six feet one inch tall, looked down at the fourteen-year-old boy. “Take it. And come back here next Tuesday, same time. We’ll see how you get on with it.”

  Tucker said thank you, extended his hand, and left the room, his heart pounding with excitement at the treasure carried under his arm. He remembered, on the way down the staircase, to recite a quick Hail Mary of gratitude in thanks for his good luck.

  The recruiting sergeant scanned the application.

  “This your mother’s signature?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You might as well begin your training. I am not a ‘sir.’ I am a sergeant.”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “And this is your birth certificate?”

  “Yes … Sergeant.”

  Sergeant Brisco looked at it. He then looked up at Tucker. “You were seventeen day before yesterday. On Pearl Harbor Day?”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  Sergeant Brisco looked at him. “And you entered the University of Texas as a freshman last September?”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “That means you were only sixteen when you came to Austin.”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  At this point Brisco took the heavy lead ashtray on his desk, raised it and with all his strength struck it down over Tucker’s application form. “You know something, kid,” he said, his lips parting into something between a smile and a snarl. “I don’t think you are seventeen. I don’t think that ‘1924’ on your birth certificate was written by the registrar of public records in San Antonio. And I flatly doubt that your mother signed this piece of paper.

  “Now I’ll tell you where we go from here. One possibility is we go to the police, and they call the registrar in San Antonio and verify your birth certificate. Then we call your mother and ask if she signed this certificate. Then we take you to the juvenile court and suggest thirty days in the juvenile lockup for forgery. That’s one alternative.”

  Tucker stood, almost as if at attention.

  “You want to hear the other alternative?”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” he whispered.

  “Get your baby ass out of this office before I light my next cigarette”—he reached for a pack of Luckies—“and go back to your freshman class and let us big boys fight the war.” He searched theatrically for his matches. When he looked up, Tucker was gone.

  One year later Tucker was seventeen, and he knew that if he really worked on her, he could get his mother to sign the application form listing his true date of birth, December 7, 1925. But he had been told informally by the major in charge of the V-12 program on the campus that on the recommendation of the chairman of the department of physics, no application of Tucker Montana for early enlistment in the Army would be accepted. Moreover, said the major—he had come to Tucker’s little room at the Zeta fraternity house, a most flattering gesture—he had already written, at the request of the dean, to the local draft board, flagging Montana’s name and registration number. “You’re not going to be seeing any trenches in this war, Tucker, as far as I can figure out. They’ll probably scoop you up and put you in an Army lab.” He smiled. “There you can design radios or bombsights, to help us win the war more quickly.”

  Tucker didn’t reply. He didn’t smile either. On the other hand he didn’t want to appear rude, so finally he said, “Okay, Major. We’ll see how it goes.”

  The major smiled and started out the door. Suddenly he turned around. “Listen, Montana. If you want so badly to serve your country, don’t be so fucking stupid about how you can do that best. Every now and then—not often, just every now and then—the Army does the smart thing, and the smart thing is to keep you in physics. If you don’t like that idea, go over and join the Japs or the Nazis, because you might as well be on their side as to refuse to use what you’ve got for us.” He looked Tucker directly in the face, and then shut the door quietly. Two years later, Tucker was working under very strict Army supervision at an installation called Los Alamos in New Mexico. He was helping Professor Seth Neddermeyer with the infernal problem of developing a trigger mechanism that would detonate what they referred to as an atomic bomb.

  Fifteen months later, Division C, as Professor Neddermeyer’s department was called, was confident the thing would work. There was no such thing as a fully reliable laboratory test. Tucker Montana thought briefly of Fr. Enrique recounting the story of his father, so confident he had fixed the electric fan that he didn’t think it necessary even to plug it in. Well, this was very different. Those frontiers of knowledge about which he had first heard from Mr. Galen, those frontiers had been pushed a long mile forward, if that was the right word for it. And no one doubted that he, nineteen-year-old Tucker Montana, had done some heavy rowing against that current of physical stasis that kept saying No, you can’t get there from here, nature won’t permit it. Day after day, month after month, he had worked out the implications of this and the other tiny alteration in the known sequence. And when Professor Neddermeyer had seen that last schedule of Tucker’s he had gone right to Dr. Oppenheimer who one hour later said, “We’ll build this one.”

  And then those fateful decisions, in two stages.

  He was to join the professional Los Alamos crew who would first disassemble Little Boy, as the bomb was called, for shipment to San Francisco where it would board the Indianapolis for Tinian, in the Marianas. Tucker would fly to Tinian with the other Los Alamos scientists to reassemble Little Boy and prepare it for its mission. At Tinian the technical crew would check, check, check, every hour, to record any electronic movement, impulse, vagary. No human patient, Tucker thought one night after making the routine tests with his meters and noting the results, had ever been subjected to more intense stethoscopic scrutiny. And then the time came, D–1. He was present at the briefing of the airplane crew as they were told for the first time about the special aspects of the bomb they were to drop the following day over the city of Hiroshima, Japan.

  And then, the next morning, he was called in by the deputy mission commander, General Groves’s representative, and told that he was to be the twelfth member of the large crew—for the purpose of applying, four times an hour during the five-hour-thirty-minute flight, his instruments to the nerve ends of the bomb, carefully recording every registration. “We want a log on Little Boy just like the kind we’ve kept since we left New Mexico right up to when she leave
s the bomb bay. You’re one of the six people on this island who know what to do, and the other five are old enough to be your father. So I’ve decided it will be you.”

  Tucker was glad, as he was being fitted up with a pilot’s suit, that he hadn’t been told the night before. The large crew was led to the runway for pictures. It hadn’t yet been decided in Washington when or whether to release the pictures (much would depend on reaction to the bomb). It occurred fleetingly to Tucker as the photographer adjusted a bandana around Tucker’s neck to give him a little of the fly-boy look that, not inconceivably, he might have been selected to go on this mission instead of one of the older men because of his youth, yes, but also because of his poster-boy-innocent good looks—a young Gregory Peck—not easily linked to an apocalyptic episode. And it was true: Tucker, at six feet one inch, his hair—longer than Antonio used to leave it—framing a thoughtful and animated face, permitted himself these days a more frequent smile, associated with the tension relief needed by scientists who work in close quarters almost around the clock.

  Sleep would not have been possible. He could not believe his good fortune. With his own eyes he would see it—happen. The fruit of many men of genius, but the fruit, also, of his own efforts and imagination. He had heard it said at Los Alamos that if this thing worked the Japanese would sue for surrender. Surrender! That could mean saving half a million American lives. Half a million American lives! Among them maybe—Harry Evans. Joe Savage. Helicio Espinoso. Stowie Cleaver. Johnny Galliher. They marched through his imagination one at a time, his fraternity brothers at Zeta Psi; his fellow students in the physics classes and in the history and Spanish classes. The barber’s son. Mr. Galen’s son. They had all gone off to war and, he hoped, most of them were still alive. Now, if this—thing—worked, they would stay alive, instead of dying on Japanese beaches. And he would actually see the breakthrough happen.

  Since the test explosion at Los Alamos, no communication of any sort had been permitted, even to friends or relatives, except routine messages done through the official clerk reporting nothing more than that the writer was in good health. But he felt he had to write a letter. He would leave the letter in a sealed envelope, and mail it after the embargo was declared ended, at the finish of the mission. There was the possibility they would not return, in which case at some point the adjutant would see the letter, accompanied by the note asking that it be mailed, posthumously. He wrote: