Yellowcake

by Ann Cummins

  They were a bad match, Sam and Lily. She never got Sam. Once she came up to Ryland at one of the company potlucks. "Have you noticed I'm not speaking to you?" she said. He said, "You're not?" and she said, "I knew I'd have to tell you or you wouldn't notice," which made him laugh, but her lips were quivering, and he saw she was angry. They took their plates over to his truck, which he'd backed up to the basketball court.

  They held the potlucks at the outdoor basketball court in Camp. Their first summer in Shiprock, Rosy had organized a "get-to-know-you." They set up card tables under one of the hoops and everybody brought food. It got to be regular, every third Sunday.

  He asked Lily why she wasn't speaking to him, and she said it was because he was mean to Sam. She wanted him out of shift work. By then Sam had been with the company a good while. She wanted to know why he was still at the bottom of the ladder.

  "He gets his raises, same as everybody else," Ryland told her, but she wasn't talking about raises, she was talking about a position with some kind of future and daytime hours.

  Sam was playing basketball with some of the little kids at the hoop opposite the card tables. Ryland can remember him hot-dogging, bouncing the ball behind and around himself. Ryland yelled, "Sam, you pick on somebody your own size," and Lily got up suddenly, spilling her plate on the sand.

  "Where you going?" he said, and she turned to him. "You want to hold him down," she whispered. "You always have."

  Right then and there he called Sam over, offered to promote him to day work in the office. He watched Sam size up the situation—Lily staring at the flies picking at her food on the ground, her face flushed. Ryland knew Sam wouldn't like Lily being in his business. Sam said just what Ryland knew he'd say, that he didn't mind shifts, that he liked mixing it up, changing the routine, versatile schedules, versatile jobs, and then he went back to the game.

  "There isn't anybody holding Sam Behan back but Sam," Ryland told her.

  She said, "I'm not afraid of you, Ryland Mahoney," her whole body trembling.

  Lily. A little bit of high drama. He's such a scary guy.

  The mail truck has just pulled up on the other side of the hedge, and the mailman's head disappears into the back of the truck. When he steps out, he's carrying three boxes. "Somebody getting married?" he calls as he walks up the path.

  "Guess so," Ryland says.

  "I can always tell. Because of the volume. Nine times out of ten, you get packages like this in the off-season, there's a wedding in the works." He plops the boxes down on the porch, then digs into his gray bag, pulls out the rest of the mail, and hands it to Ryland. "Have a good one."

  Ryland stands, black dots swirling from his eyes. The phone is ringing again. He steps inside, carrying the envelopes to the kitchen table, letting the answering machine answer.

  "Mr. Mahoney, this is Dr. Callahan. Listen, will you give me a call right away." He gives his number, and the machine beeps. Ryland stares at the blinking number 2 on the machine for a minute. He starts to press PLAY, then doesn't. Instead, he walks back to the door, unhooks himself from his oxygen, leaves the tank inside, and goes to collect the packages the mailman left. He carries them into the living room, where wedding presents have taken over an entire corner. He stoops, puts the presents on the floor, and stacks them neatly. He straightens up too quickly—the black dots rocket. He stands waiting for his vision to come back, breathing hard, thinks about Xanax, and decides.

  On a day such as this when every breath he takes is a maggoty one, he needs a little help. Half a pill a day is better than nothing. He walks into the kitchen, takes the orange prescription bottle from the cupboard, and carries it into the bathroom. In the mirror he sees that his lips are not yet blue. Sometimes he unhooks himself from the oxygen, stands in front of the mirror, and sees how long it takes for his lips to turn from red to blue. Not long. Even now, as he watches, they begin to turn a little blue around the edges. Better hurry.

  He thumbs open the childproof cap, shakes out a pill, puts it down, and takes a razor blade from the box in the medicine cabinet. He tries to rest the blade in the groove in the center of the pill. His hand shakes and the blade doesn't want to settle in, so he stabs, slicing it, and half of the pill goes skittering across the counter to the very edge, where it skids to a stop, a heartbeat away from a plunge into the toilet. He breathes deeply through his mouth.

  He pops the half pill into his mouth, then picks up the other half and pops it in too. He tucks the bottle into his sweater pocket, walks into the living room, hooks himself back up to air, then pulls his cart to the answering machine in the kitchen and stares again at the blinking number 2. The doctor said he wouldn't call if it wasn't important. It's Saturday. Why is he calling on a Saturday?

  There's a note pad and pen next to the phone. He picks up the pen. He puts the pen back down. His heart is thudding. He pushes DELETE.

  He stares at the answering machine's red o. Rosy will know. All she has to do is check the caller ID box, which has its own memory. It makes him so tired, thinking about the boxes and their memories and the doctors, and how everybody has an opinion. He presses DELETE on the caller ID box, and just like that erases history.

  15

  DELMAR DOESN'T show up Friday night. Becky calls her aunt Alice again and again but gets no answer. Her aunt keeps a trailer in Shiprock, but she's hardly ever home, and she won't get an answering machine because she's superstitious. Lightning once fried her answering machine, and instead of getting a new one, she found a new place to live. Alice won't live where lightning has struck. Bad luck.

  There's no answer all day Saturday, either. In the afternoon Becky goes for a two-hour run through Fruitland to the bridge, over the river, then up toward the lake, trying to exhaust herself. She goes to bed early because she can't stand to be awake, she is so mad at Delmar, but now she can't get to sleep. She ran too much, has too much oxygen in her, and her father sounds horrible tonight, coughing and coughing, a dry, airless cough. It's after one o'clock when she hears him get up. Her mother says something to him, and he answers^ The back door opens, and then Becky is wide-awake. He has gone out to the hogan again. She and Delmar helped her father build the hogan years ago. He said it was for them—their playhouse—but he has always used it. He prays there.

  It's cold out there at night. The silence he leaves is more disturbing than his coughing. She thinks her father believes he's about to die. He believes that the living should not stay on in a house where somebody dies, in case the spirit gets trapped inside. Most likely he sleeps in the cold so her mother won't have to tear the house down, even though Delia has assured him that she won't do that. Becky thinks he worries anyway; he loves them and doesn't want to haunt them when he goes. And these days he seems resigned to going.

  It's nearly two-thirty and she's still wide-awake when the phone rings. She rushes to answer, calling to her mother that she'll get it. She stands shivering, blinking, and trying to make sense of the voice, which is not Delmar's, on the other end. Finally her ears clear, and she hears somebody saying horses have gotten out. It's Vangie Biggs, who has the farm next to Becky's grandmother.

  "On the side of the road," Vangie is saying. She's telling Becky that she almost hit one of the horses. They're grazing along the highway. "Somebody better come get them," Vangie says, "before they jump into somebody's car." Becky tells Vangie that she doesn't have any transportation. "Could you just get the horses in?" Vangie says. Becky is in the middle of saying she'll come out tomorrow and take care of them when the phone goes dead. She stands for a minute listening to the dial tone, staring at the empty phone cradle. Vangie Biggs doesn't care for her grandmother. Ariana doesn't believe in corralling or hobbling animals. For years the horses got into Vangie's corn and onto the highway and everywhere, and one day Delmar's horse, Luckyboy, went running down the highway and jumped on top of some white people's car. Amazingly, nobody was hurt. The horse landed dead center, found its ground, took a leap, and cleared the back end of the ca
r, coming out without a scratch. None of the four people in the car were sitting in the center seats, where the roof caved in. Everybody was lucky except her grandmother, who had to pay. So Alice, Delmar, Becky, and her dad built a corral, and after that Ariana mostly kept the horses in it. Mostly.

  She closes her eyes, trying to think of what to do. She decides to call Arnold.

  "You want to go to my grandmother's farm and round up some horses?" she asks him. She can hear his TV in the background.

  "Horses? Now? Sure. That's what I want to do. I was trying to think, what do I want to do tonight? Is Delmar going to be there?"

  "If Delmar was there, we wouldn't be going."

  "Well, 111 still come."

  It's thirty-five miles from the house in Fruitland to the farm. They drive with the windows open, the cold night air rushing in, Marley on the stereo. Arnold likes opening the Saab up in the middle of the night on the mostly empty desert road, so they approach the turnoff within twenty minutes of starting out, but they slow to a crawl a mile or so before they reach her grandmother's land. The three-quarter moon tints the land bluish. They pass Vangie Biggs's house first, where a light is on, its yellow arc stretching from the window to the border of her cornfield. Becky can see the skeletons of stalks. She can't see any horses in the field. The crop should hold little appeal for the horses this time of year.

  Becky switches the tape player off. She sticks her head out the window, listening to the Saab's tires crunch loose gravel near the shoulder, the chilly air making her eyes tear. Skunk is in the air. It's skunk season, but the scent is thin, the skunk probably far away by the river. She can smell manure, too, and the clean scent of cut hay. The/re driving along the edge of her grandmother's farm now. She can see the ragged fencing, in most places just strands of barbed wire strung between wooden posts, but here and there the wires are missing and the posts bend down toward the ground. Crickets are singing to the wavering, high-pitched scream of the overhead telephone wires. There are so many wires now. When the whining started, five years ago or so, after the telephone company tripled the number of wires running along the road, her grandmother paid a medicine man to come and bless the farm to keep the ghostly voices from flying overhead. Now she believes the blessings have started to work, because she no longer hears the whine. Her family doesn't tell her that what's gone is the fine-tuning in her old ears. She no longer hears that high-pitched frequency.

  "Looky," Arnold whispers.

  Aunt Alice's two red roans are chewing weeds at the side of the pavement. The horses look up as the car approaches, then go back to grazing. A dog has begun to bark farther down the road, and behind them, at the Biggs' house, a chorus of dogs answers. The horses chew.

  "How we going to do this?" Arnold says.

  "I don't know," she says. "We should've brought rope."

  "Don't worry. Horses like me."

  She laughs. One of the roans lifts its head, looks back in the direction of the barking dogs. The barking comes closer. The horse takes a step onto the pavement.

  "Don't do it," Arnold says. He flashes his lights, which the horse ignores, so he blasts his horn. Both horses jump and bolt to the other side of the highway, opposite the farm.

  "Arnold!"

  "Oops. Don't worry." He pulls to the side of the road, turns off the engine, opens his door, and steps out. "There's a flashlight in the glove compartment."

  "Maybe we should go to the corral and get rope," she says, but he's already heading across the road. She hurries out of the car, turning the flashlight on, hoping that the dogs are not the Biggses' mean ones. Ariana keeps three dogs for herding the sheep and one farm dog that Becky herself named Denver—all mongrels. Right now the sheep dogs are with the sheep up in the hills. Her uncles and cousins will bring the herd down to the farm in a few weeks. Those dogs are smart and can hold their own with the Biggses' dogs, but Denver is old and useless now.

  The horses are trotting in the ditch between the fence and the highway, and Arnold is trotting after them. From the barking, it sounds as if the dogs are even with her, moving across her grandmother's property, but she can't see them. The lone dog up ahead continues to call. She has a bad feeling about this.

  A circle of yellow light from the flashlight bobs up and down as she runs after Arnold. They need rope. This is stupid. Up ahead, the white lights of an oncoming car bear down, lights so bright she has to look away, and she almost calls out to Arnold to keep the horses off the highway, but how in the hell is he going to do that? And anyway, horses running in a ditch will probably stay in a ditch; they're not likely to climb out of it unless pushed. Unless some stupid lays on the horn. She's laughing as she runs, nervous laughter. The car whizzes by. Down here in the ditch she is a floating head, at eye level with the pavement. "Hai!" Arnold is yelling just ahead of her. "Hey!" Now he's scrambling up the side of the ditch to the fence. She shines the flashlight on his back and beyond him, where she sees the silhouette of a horse turning sideways and then leaping over the fence. "Hey!" Arnold shouts again. She runs up to him. Arnold doubles over, holding his side, wheezing. The fence here sags. One wooden post angles forty-five degrees from the ground.

  "Where's the other one?"

  Arnold holds his knees. She sees his head nod toward the field. She shines her light on the horse that leapt and has now turned and is standing still, watching them. He puts his head down, as if taking a bow. Just beyond him, the other horse neighs. They both turn and trot away into the desert.

  Arnold twists and sits. "I gotta get in shape," he says, still breathing hard. The dogs, yipping, seem to have reached whatever they were after. They're just a little way ahead on the other side of the highway. "Well, at least those horses aren't on the road anymore."

  "Shh." There's something else out there. It might just be the humming of the telephone wires, which seems to ebb and wane, like human voices in conversation. Her skin is tingling, but she's not cold now, she's hot, her pulse noisy, adding to the dogs' loud barking, so she can't hear clearly, and in spite of herself, she's thinking of the stories her father has told her of skinwalkers, Navajo witches who don animal skins and take on their powers.

  "What?" Arnold says. "Those dogs? They..." He looks up at her, then scrambles to his feet, grabs the flashlight, and turns it off. They stand listening to what sounds like a human voice—a high, nasal chant warbling in and out of the night noises.

  Arnold slides down into the ditch, climbs up to the road, crosses, and walks along the fence in the direction of the barking. She follows. He doesn't turn the flashlight on. She can't see the ground she's walking on. She can feel weeds tugging at her jeans and knows her socks are already pincushions for the prickly goatheads. Moonlight shines on the pavement, making it glow like glittery coal. Not a stone's throw away, she can see a floating white cloud and now can hear, unmistakably, the sound of someone chanting in Navajo. Something leaden turns in her stomach. "Shit," she says. She runs ahead, grabs the flashlight from Arnold, turns the light on, and sees the floating cloud turn into the white swatch on 'Abíní!'s back. 'Abini' is her grandmother's palomino, and the voice, her grandmother's.

  She calls, "Shinálí!" and starts running toward the barking dogs, which explode with new vigor. "Shinálí!" She waves the yellow light back and forth out beyond the pony. Only three dogs, that's all she can see. Making all that noise. They're in triangular formation, the Biggses' mean shepherd with one blue eye, the dog that always finds her if she tries to run around her grandmother's farm, stands point, and the flashlight catches his teeth, blue and bared.

  "Hey!" Arnold shouts behind her, and suddenly the dogs scatter, one yelping. Arnold has picked up rocks and is throwing them at the dogs.

  She shines the light toward 'Abíní' and sees Ariana's other palamino, Ak'ah. Both are nervous, rearing their heads, pulling against the ropes that her little grandmother grips, standing between them, chattering and squinting fiercely into the light. The old farm dog, Denver, stands next to her, barking at Beck
y as if she were a stranger.

  "Shinálí, what are you doing out here?" Becky says. Off in the darkness, the Biggses' dogs grumble. Her grandmother, just on the other side of the fence, doesn't answer or even acknowledge her. She's wearing the green bandanna that rarely leaves her head, a tiered skirt, and a sweatshirt that's at least three sizes too big—probably Delmar's. How did she manage to get ropes around the horses' necks? Becky pulls up the top strand of barbed wire, pushes the next down with her foot. "Go," she says, and Arnold steps carefully through.

  "Ouch. Ow!"

  She hears something rip, his shirt and probably the skin on his back, torn by a barb. She shines the light on her grandmother again. The horses pull against the old woman as she leans away from them, reaching for the ground with one hand. The horses keep yanking her back. She probably weighs ninety pounds. "Grandma, wait."

  She once was tall, but she's no more than five-two now, shrinking every year. Her grandmother ignores her. But Denver now acts like he knows Becky. He walks over to her, tail wagging, licks her hand once.

  Becky hands the light to Arnold and steps between the two horses, putting her hands on their quivering necks. They're both sweaty and hot, snorting. She pets them, saying, "Shh, shh." Her grandmother keeps reaching for something on the ground. When Arnold shines the light there, Becky sees her walking stick. Arnold picks it up and hands it to her. Becky tries to take the ropes, but her grandmother brusquely nudges her away, continuing her stream of talk. She jabs the ground with her stick, yanks the horses, and starts walking, the horses half following, half pulling away. "Speak English," Becky says softly, trying to take the ropes again, but her grandmother won't let her, so she falls in beside her. Arnold walks on the other side, shining the flashlight in front of them to show the sun-dried cracks in the land.