Yellowcake

by Ann Cummins

  "I can't," Delmar says.

  She doesn't stop what she's doing, which is bending over, holding one nostril, sniffing with the other. "Why not? Yes, you can." She stands up, wipes her nose with the back of her hand, sniffing. He can almost feel the jolt as he watches her. "Why not?" she says again.

  He tells her about the plastic cup, his Friday urine tests, and she says that's a bummer, drops to her knees, and unzips his jeans. He decides a little sex spree's better than nothing.

  This one's on fast-forward, her lips and teeth scraping up and down his cock at lightning speed in a not unpleasant full-throttle kind of way. Energetic. Very like the first time when they were oh-so-young, seventeen. He lets his hands rest on her head like a pope blessing someone. He thinks he hears a knocking—his heart? Or maybe somebody at the door. He pulls her up by her armpits, pulls her tank top off, pinches her breasts, which are mostly nipple, and she steps out of jeans and panties. He likes this. Always he likes it when her clothes come off and she starts doing her goofy dance thing, stepping on his feet and climbing up. She is a little thing, Stuck, and he helps her, lifting her by her bottom so he can slide in—little gasp; he likes that. "Not on the desk," she whispers. The two lines are still there. He walks her around, hobbling because his jeans are around his thighs, back to the wall. He backs her up against it, which he knows she doesn't like—being trapped—but she deserves it for not going with him to the fair. Her little hands are tapping him on the back, reminding him she's claustrophobic, especially when high. He presses his chest into her face hard. She deserves this for being high when he can't be. After a while she stops tapping and starts clawing, trying to breathe. She is so weak, little Stuck, she has no muscles, and he is so hard. He pulls back a little, giving her air and also feeling for the back pocket of his jeans, where he has a bunch of Trojans, and he's glad he can't see her face too clearly, the roving eyes, because it's a little creepy, like diddling a jerking and very wet corpse.

  He finds the packet. She says, "Just come in me."

  "No."

  She says, "I'm pregnant."

  He says, "Jeez. Again?" And so he comes in her.

  Afterward they don't talk. He zips up, she starts to dress. There is most certainly a knocking at the door. A pounding. He feels good, relieved, but also mad at her. She doesn't give a shit about herself. It's probably Jeremy at the door. It's probably another little Jeremy growing in her. He's glad it's dark and he doesn't have to look her in the face.

  "He's moving us out to LA," she says. "He's getting a house on the beach that's big enough for us. I'm going to be a housewife."

  Delmar wants to say, Again? but doesn't. With Jeremy it's always the same bullshit promises. "I'm going to go out the back way," he says.

  Half dressed, she comes to him, hugging him, smelling like him and like acid blow sweat. She says, "When we move to LA, will you come see me?"

  "Yeah." He kisses her on the top of the head and walks quickly toward the back door.

  "Del?"

  "Yeah?" He opens the door, sun and heat pouring in.

  "How come they're testing you for drugs if you weren't busted for drugs?"

  He looks back at her, a sad twig in the spear of sun, and he wants her again.

  "I don't know." He shrugs, then grins. "It doesn't matter. I am an excellent pisser."

  He hits the Albuquerque city limits just before sundown. Driving up Central, he sees a lot of tired drunks sitting on the low stone wall that edges the university and a lot of college girls in short shorts walking on the sidewalks. Hippies in long skirts and bra tops hug up against long-haired white boys and dreadlocked black guys, all drinking juice at the juice shop. Cowboys in hats and shades walk too carefully down the street, heel to toe, as if they have to concentrate—these are probably rodeo boys with sore bones, looking for bars.

  At the fairground entrance, a cop directs traffic, waving cars in with his baton. The good smells of roasted corn and manure float out to the street. The Ferris wheel is turning, the roller coaster flying. He turns into the parking lot, staring straight ahead and not looking at the cop, who probably isn't even a real cop but a hand hired for the occasion. He tries to feel good about coming to the fair, but he still wants the blow—he's read that it stays in the blood system for only a couple of days. Why is he thinking of that now? He probably could've done a line, no consequence. It's Friday night, he's got a week before he has to piss in the cup again, he could've gotten high, but he hasn't in nearly two years. No blow, no GHB, no Smoke, no nothing. He started going to NA meetings when he was in jail. He liked listening to all those addicts congratulating themselves for cleaning up. It's good to accomplish things.

  He parks the truck next to a Honda Accord. Out of habit, he looks in, sees at a glance that it's got a Bose stereo system. Why do people buy these cars? It's very easy to pop a Honda's window. He could strip this dash in two minutes if he were still in the business. But he's not. He's about to begin a new business, groundskeeper, and this is his last weekend of fun. He gets roasted corn and two chili dogs, heads over to see the animals, which are mostly snoozing now, the piglets zoned out, the lambs silent, the horses in their trailers.

  He wanders through the Arts and Crafts building and the Ag building. Prizes have been awarded. Blue ribbons, Best in Shows, yellows, reds, and whites, ribbons on quilts and jam jars and cacti. Four-H Troop #238 got honorable mention for their interactive educational display. They have a board full of questions with multiple-choice answers. If you press the right button, a green light glows, the wrong, red. Delmar tries it. What nutrients does a serving of beef provide? He pushes the button next to Protein. The red light comes on. Hmm. He thought it was protein. He punches the other buttons: Vitamin B—red; Zinc & Iron—red; All of the Above—green. Of course. He should read all the choices before he pushes a button. He reads the other questions. Number six is an interesting one: How many sheep are in New Mexico? Wow. Did they count them? His grandmother has forty-five, but six of them are lambs. Did they count lambs? When did they take this count? If they counted before spring, they wouldn't have known about the six new lambs, which Delmar helped deliver, a bloody mess. He reads through the choices: a. 1,000. b. 10,000. c. 100,000. d. 1,000,000. He punches d. Green light. Wow, that's a lot, he thinks. He punches the others to see if the lights work, but they all glow green. Interesting. There are apparently no wrong answers here. He guesses this must be why Troop #238 only got honorable mention. All the answers can't be right.

  He walks through the crowded, dusty grounds, past the merchandise booths, looking at the tiny tie-dyed baby shirts, the mirrored sunglasses, the canvas safari hats, past the amazing vacuum cleaner guy, and the pure mountain spring water guy, and the Sony guy. In the Sony booth, Garth Brooks blares from a new car stereo system, and the businessman behind the table looks well fed, little pot under his polo shirt, Dockers, five o'clock shadow, plenty of hair. Delmar stops to listen to him tell a wide-bottomed woman how CD players are selling faster than tape players now and she really ought to upgrade. "The compact disk is the fastest-growing consumer electronic product ever introduced in this country. The development of the CD player was a joint venture between two companies: Philips and Sony. Philips was the first to come up with the idea of optical-disk audio reproduction."

  Making his sale. In the business. The guy nods at Delmar. Delmar folds his arms. He thinks Becky ought to get one of these CD players for her truck. She ought to upgrade. She's probably mad at him. He could get her one of these easy if he were still in the business, but he's not in the business, he doesn't get to be in the business anymore. How'd this guy get into the business, anyway? This guy looks younger than Delmar.

  He moves on. The fact is, Delmar started out as a legitimate businessman salvaging car parts from the heap of junker cars at the base of Whitaker Mesa. There were a lot of good usable parts in the cars and trucks on the junk heap. Back in high school, during his warrior days, he and his buddies had races, and sometimes a car wen
t over the edge of the bluff. You couldn't drive it anymore, but not every part got banged up. So he'd ditch school and return to the battlefield in the light of day, dismembering the wrecks, selling what was usable to salvage lots, keeping the electronics to sell at flea markets. He was pretty rich in high school. While everybody else was herding sheep and pumping gas, he was bankrolling parties. But then the city of Farmington started their own salvage business and put up a fence around the junk, put guard dogs inside. They also started patrolling the mesa at night, and the warrior days came to an end. The bandit days started. They'll force you into banditry. He'd been a legitimate businessman, and when they took his business away, he had to start thieving.

  The fair isn't any fun. He wanders away from the exhibition areas and food booths, goes through a turnstile and into the carnival, where monkey music is playing. He sees a troop of little girls screaming in teacups while an old guy leans on the railing, watching them, his tongue between his teeth. Dirty old man. But Delmar likes it better in here. The Hammer is pumping, cages twirling. Woozy girls reel, draping themselves on each other, counting their tickets, wanting more—more tickets, more spinning rides. Girls in tight jeans and tight T-shirts, round breasts, eyes icky with mascara. They cut those eyes at him as they walk by, laughing behind their hands, glancing back after they pass, girls who smell like chocolate and strawberry and some like vomit. Boys follow them, teenagers, wannabe gangsters, suave, giving him the evil eye, like he already did it with those girls making eyes at him.

  He goes up to a ticket booth and buys twenty tickets, a dollar each. Maybe some rides will cheer him up. He's been thinking about that question Stuck asked. Why does he have to piss in a cup if he wasn't busted for drugs? No reason. It's the system. The system will eat you alive. He's going to have to learn to be part of the system because it's better to be a cannibal than to be cannibalized.

  His cousin's good at it. She has always been part of the system. She's got money and a truck. His friends used to call her Apple. Well, he still likes her. He should take her a present.

  There's a hunting booth with BB guns chained to the counter. Two girls lean over the counter, aiming their rifles with the help of their boyfriends, who stand behind them, fixing the girls' hands on the triggers. They keep shooting and missing and laughing, shaking their butts in their boyfriends' groins.

  "Five tickets, five shots," the barker tells Delmar. There are rows of moving chicks, ducks, rabbits, elephants, and bears. The girls shoot, the boys hoot. Delmar gives the man five tickets, picks up a rifle. He's a pretty good shot. His uncle Woody used to take him hunting, though with a bow and arrow, not a rifle. He aims, shoots, and a chick goes down. He can feel the girl next to him pause and watch. Her boyfriend, too. He shoots again, four shots in rapid succession, hitting two more. He puts the rifle down. The barker gives him a plastic whistle. Delmar holds it up for inspection, glances at the boyfriend next to him, who gives him a half smile, a shake of the head, as if to say "That's it?" But now they are comrades, just as long as Delmar keeps his eyes off the girl. Delmar knows the rules.

  "Let me try," Boyfriend says, laying down five tickets, taking the rifle. When she moves, the girl cuts her eyes at Delmar, but the boyfriend doesn't see. He slays two chicks and a rabbit, and the barker gives him a little rubber duck. He grins at Delmar and hands it to the girl.

  "What do you have to do to get one of those?" Delmar asks, nodding toward the stuffed animals arranged on a board at the side of the shooting booth.

  "Hit all five in the same row."

  "Oh, I want an elephant," the girl says.

  "Everybody likes the elephants," the barker says. He's a wheezy, red-haired guy with shaking hands, a chain smoker.

  They are cute Dumbos with long, floppy trunks and mild, dewy eyes. But the elephants are lined up on the second to the top row of the shooting range, and they duck randomly, whereas the chicks, rabbits and ducks don't duck. The elephants are a challenge.

  The guys square off, all of them trying for the ducking elephants. These guys are pretty good shots. Whistles and rubber ducks begin to accumulate in three piles. Delmar quickly runs out of tickets and starts to go for more, but one of the shooters gives him five, very generous. When they all run out, they send the girls for more, Delmar digging in his pocket for a couple of twenties. They joke about how they could buy better elephants at WalMart, but where's the challenge? And they discuss timing, which elephant disappears when, and at some point Delmar notices the girl at the end of the row do a little bob and dunk reaching over and down behind the counter while the barker is reloading, her hand coming back with a gray blur—she's quick. And so, without discussion, they go into business, he and these four strangers. The guys point, shoot without aiming in rapid-fire succession, and talk to the barker, keeping him busy, counting off intervals between disappearing elephants, hitting a surprising number, forking over tickets. Then the girls wander off, and shortly afterward, they all stop, gathering their ducks and whistles. They find the girls in line at the portable johns, laughing hard, legs crossed so they don't wet their pants, and the thief holds three handsome elephants.

  "You're good," Delmar tells her.

  "She's had practice," the boyfriend says proudly. They exchange names. Shannon, Noah, Roy, Ashley. The girls hit the johns; he and the other two guys go for candied apples, and the fair is fun again. They go on some rides together, the five of them. It's fun in the Hammer, where the cage is big enough for all of them. Delmar's thigh rides up against Ashley's, and he accidentally brushes her breast with his arm lots of times. It's a pretty big breast for a sixteen-year-old. Roy, Ashley's boyfriend, is a little dense, or maybe stoned, his eyes glazed. In the Tilt-A-Whirl, Ashley seems to be exaggerating each tilt and whirl, turning slightly toward Delmar, until he feels her erect nipple, and he starts thinking about and then can't stop thinking about what she'd look like without the T-shirt. But Noah is not so dense—or blind. When they get off the ride, Delmar sees Noah checking him out, and it's true: in the bright carnival lights the bulge in Delmar's jeans is fairly obvious. Noah says something to Roy, Roy's eyes narrow. They head to the Ferris wheel, where Delmar finds himself sitting alone and looking back at Roy and Ashley in the seat behind him. Roy has a pretty big hand. It completely covers Ashley's left breast. Ashley looks forlorn. She doesn't smile.

  Well, he has a choice. Stay and rescue Ashley and get laid or go home. At first he thinks there really isn't a choice, but then he remembers Eduardo Martinez, a twenty-one-year-old he knew in prison, doing time for the statutory rape of his seventeen-year-old girlfriend.

  Delmar decides to go home.

  He stops for gas and a Coke at a Quik Stop before he gets on the freeway, and that's when he notices he has only three dollars left and less than half a tank of gas. He puts the three dollars' worth in the tank, but the needle still quivers below the half-full mark. This could be a problem. He decides to take the shorter eastern route home, up 550 through Cuba.

  He drives with the elephant beside him, thinking about Ashley and what a bummer the straight and narrow is. He thinks of the people he knows who have followed the straight and narrow: Becky, who spends eight hours a day behind a desk and then runs her feet off instead of getting laid; Uncle Woody, who spent eight hours a day in a mill and now has cancer; Stuck, who doesn't really qualify because she isn't straight, but she's on the narrow path, was named employee of the month in July for perfect attendance, and now she manages to show up every day, take care of her two kids every night, and still stay high. He thinks he would have to blow his brains out if he ever qualified for employee of the month at Stuckey's. He's got six months on the straight and narrow to look forward to as groundskeeper and all-around handyman at Whitaker Estates.

  According to the clock on the dash, it's just past midnight. It's an uphill drive, the truck climbing steadily through Zia and San Ysidro into the Jemez Mountains toward Cuba, where he slows down because the hills have eyes—always a state patrolman hidden in t
he shadows around the Apache rez; as he climbs, the needle on the gas gauge drops fast. He rolls his window all the way down, leaning half out, feeling the sting of cool mountain air. Stars paper the sky overhead in this glittering world. He comes up fast on a slow-moving car, its sleepy taillights weaving back and forth from the shoulder to the broken white line, and he lays on the horn as he passes, waking the driver up. "I'm already gone," he says to the answering horn.

  He speeds up on the other side of Cuba, where the road flattens out and the mountains drop away, sailing around the cars he meets. Quite a few on the road for this time of night, fairgoers, he assumes, some going real slow, drunks trying to find their way home. Fewer cars are heading south. They turn down their high beams miles before they need to because distances always seem shorter in the flatlands. There's nothing but black space and headlights. He too turns his high beams down well before he needs to, then flashes them just before an oncoming car passes, helping the drivers stay awake with a flash of blindness. He pushes the truck up to eighty, eighty-five, as if by speeding he can outrace the empty tank. He's wishing he had money for gas; if he did, he could turn right and head on down to Florida, hide out on Sam's houseboat. He wonders how Sam would feel about that. He likes Sam and he thinks Sam likes him. If he had money, he might just doit.

  The air smells like gasoline. Somewhere to the west, El Paso Natural Gas is pumping black gold, but the night's too dark to see the hammers. They're there, though, like giant cockroaches digging in the earth, right where the Anasazi used to plow and plant their fields. He can feel them, the cockroaches, busy feeding, not giving a damn about him heading toward the straight and narrow. He could use some of that gas. Why is it they get to just dig and dig and he doesn't have a dime?

  Just at the top of Bloomfield Hill, the gas pump symbol on the dash flickers, a faint yellow, then black, yellow, black. He can see the tiny lights of Bloomfield and the glow of Farmington just to the west. Twenty miles to Farmington, thirty-five to Fruitland, where Becky is sleeping, and only fifteen or so miles to Whitaker Mesa, where he has his own cottage. How many miles does he get once the warning light comes on? Five? Fifty? He comes up fast on a slow-moving car, then downshifts, watching the speedometer drop to seventy, getting right up on the car, sixty-eight, shifting into neutral, coasting a bit to save gas. He's close enough to read the license plate. It's a nice car, a Mazda with a vanity plate. NM HUGH. Delmar turns his lights off. He's coasting. He's invisible. He glides behind NM Hugh in his cloaking device. Speedometer stays steady at sixty-eight. He turns his lights on, shifts back into gear. Turns his lights off. Presses the gas pedal and closes the gap between him and Baby Huey, leaving a three-car length. Are you awake up there? he wonders. Time to wake up. He watches the speedometer, which starts to climb. Seventy. He closes to a two-car length, the lights from the car ahead animal eyes, twenty-twenty, lighting his way. Oh, now he's awake. The Mazda pulls ahead. "Steady as she goes, sir." He wonders how fast a Mazda can go. Faster than this Nissan? Delmar watches his speedometer climb to seventy-five. Eighty. He closes in, breathing down the Mazda's neck, a one-car length. "Go, baby go." And the yellow gas light stops blinking, starts shining. Ninety. Fast little Mazda. Rocketing along the straight and narrow.