The Heat of the Sun

screamed.
    Startled, the chorus fell silent. So did the soldiers.
    Trouble cried, ‘Stop these games! If you’ve come for me, come!’
    Murmurs broke out all around the amphitheatre: ‘The guy’s flipped’ and ‘Who is he? He’s crazy!’ and ‘Is this part of the play?’
    Aunt Toolie went to him, but Trouble shrugged her aside, stabbing an accusing finger into the darkness.
    ‘I know who’s sent you! I know why you’re here!’
    His shouts were for the soldiers.
    His voice cracked. ‘It wasn’t my choice! I can’t help what I am! You’ve no right to hold me and you won’t!’
    ‘Darling, please!’ Aunt Toolie cried.
    Could I intervene? I was rooted in place. Beneath the arc lights Trouble was unearthly, his pale exotic beauty transfixing, tormenting, like the vision of a god that might never come again.
    He taunted the GIs, calling them cowards, weaklings, and, though he wore his colonel’s uniform, there was more than one drunkard ready to hurl himself down the steps, fists at the ready,
to challenge him.
    A lumbering farm boy weighed in first.
    Trouble ducked as the fist swung, then he stuck out a leg, tripped the boy up, and danced around him in triumph.
    A second opponent appeared, then a third.
    Uncle Grover was frantic, waving his little hands like a conductor in the grip of an epileptic fit.
    ‘Out, out!’ he cried. ‘Out of my house!’
    His gestures took in actors and audience alike, but it was too late. Some complied, scrambling up the stone steps, but most stayed, staring in wonderment – and not a little delight –
as Trouble took on the enraged GIs. Possessed of powers beyond his slight frame, he punched one in the stomach, sending him reeling back; one flew through the air, landing heavily; one leaped on
Trouble, tore back his hair, and would have slammed his face into the rock, but Trouble flipped him over, kicked him, and slapped him about the face. Cries ricocheted around the stony tiers. Aunt
Toolie, like a mad thing, rushed back and forth, but for once the Queen of Bohemia was powerless. She tried again to intervene, just as Trouble veered from an oncoming punch.
    It connected, but not with Trouble. She dropped to the stony floor.
    ‘Tallulah!’ Uncle Grover’s cry was piteous.
    Motionless, she lay under the fizzing arc lights. Uncle Grover fought his way towards her; GIs fell back, abashed.
    Aunt Toolie moaned. ‘Grover!... Grover!’
    Trouble stood, breathing heavily. He had lost his cap, and his uniform was torn. Blood ran from a cut on his face.
    He gazed up at the tiered rows.
    ‘I didn’t mean it,’ he declared, his voice ringing, as if it were he who had struck Aunt Toolie; but no, he meant more than that. Such pain filled his voice that I believed
then, as I believe now, that he never meant any of it: never meant to be what he was, never meant to become what he became.
    Suddenly, as if shocked back into life, he pounded up the stone steps, and no one tried to stop him. Or rather, only I did, but I could hardly match his speed. By the time I reached the top, it
was too late. I rounded a corner of the house, calling his name, just as he leaped into Uncle Grover’s Cadillac, gunned it into life, and vanished into the night.
    ‘Twenty miles! Twenty fucking miles!’
    Two weeks later I sat in a long, low observation hut in the desert with Miller-Meyer-Maybee. Surrounding us were perhaps a hundred other pressmen, writers, and photographers. It was not yet
dawn. We were crowded, cold, and had been there most of the night.
    Meyer, the Robert Mitchum fellow, was increasingly restless.
    ‘Have another beer,’ said Miller, and tossed him a dripping bottle from the ice bucket.
    ‘We won’t see a thing. Not a fucking thing.’ Meyer ripped off the bottle cap with his teeth and spat it to the floor. Our position underscored our lowly status. Base camp was
ten miles closer to the blast site; for the VIPs, there were special shelters only five miles away. ‘Say, Sharpless, how long did it take us to get to this godforsaken place?’
    ‘Too long.’ Leaving Los Alamos the day before, our party had rattled in a convoy of buses for some three hundred miles across the New Mexico desert, ending up in a corner of the Air
Force’s Alamogordo Bombing Range. History, we had been assured, was about to be made. Oppenheimer had given the bomb test the code name ‘Trinity’. Later I read that he had
intended this as a reference to Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnets’: