Just As I Am

by Dan Bromley

After a morning spent collecting urine and feces sample kits from the porches of nuclear workers, Larry drove to the Richland Free Will Baptist Church to get laid. The church had a simple cross on top instead of a spire, and, with the July sun near zenith behind it, the cross seemed on fire. As he passed underneath it looking for a parking place, its steep shadow traced a child’s game of hangman on the hood of the company pickup. He settled on a spot at the very edge of the dusty gravel lot, as far away as possible from the cars of the other churchgoers. He stole a glance at himself in the rearview mirror. Every hair in place, every button buttoned. Tie snug.

In his 24 years running a one-man mobile lab overseas with FirmPort Oil, this was the strangest training furlough he’d ever been on. He would have liked to get a hold of the genius who thought it was a good idea to send a petroleum sciences tech like himself to the Hanford Nuclear Site, the largest complex of nuclear facilities in the world. Even worse was that his “training” consisted of nothing but collecting bioassay samples in Richland, which, at 40 miles away, was the closest you could live to the Site. He liked being alone and having a rig at his disposal, but what could hauling human shit possibly be training him for? Not only was it humiliating, it was about as unsanitary as you could get. Since his real but unspoken job task was to destroy archeological evidence that might delay startup at FirmPort drill sites, even the regular training furloughs were useless to him. But now he felt downright nostalgic for the normal stateside run of four months pantomiming platform safety drills on rusted oil rigs in Alaska or the Gulf of Mexico. Eastern Washington had sounded attractive when they pitched it to him as “the high desert of the inland Northwest,” but this was no desert compared to his usual job locations in the Sahara or the Rub al Khali. There wasn’t even any sand. If it wasn’t for the nice clean tail he was getting here, it would have been unbearable.

He cut the engine of the pickup and waited in the air-conditioned cab. Most of the Baptists had been in church for hours—since the prayer breakfast that preceded Sunday School—but a few backsliders crunched hurriedly through the gravel to get to the morning service before opening prayer. Ashamed of being a piss courier, he’d told the Free Wills he was an inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, so he liked to wait for all the people to leave the parking lot before he surveyed the samples for radioactive contamination as required by procedure. Sneaking around was mostly overkill on his part. If he wanted to, he could have probably walked into the service with the samples and distributed them like a sacrament without anyone blinking an eye, but he didn’t want to push it. He’d started out floating a story that he had something to do with keeping Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program in check, but no such details seemed to be necessary to get these Hanford people to buy in. He knew this was a government town, but he couldn’t believe how readily they took it for granted that he was on some kind of secret mission and couldn’t talk about his work. Even Sister Deloris refrained from asking very many questions, and he was fucking her....

Dan Bromley lives in Kennewick, WA.