Yellowcake

by Ann Cummins

  "Call you Zoom," he says, taking his foot off the pedal, shifting to neutral, and dropping back just before they enter Bloomfield's speed-trap zone, while the Mazda jets ahead, a decoy, should anybody be out there watching. Delmar knows this country. He's been busted here. This country he knows well.

  17

  THE SUNDAY AFTERNOON after her adventure with the horses, Becky is sitting with her mother on the front porch when Aunt Alice's white Chevy half-ton pulls into the yard. Her mother says, "It's the Pied Piper of Sin." Becky doesn't laugh.

  Alice toots the horn, sticks her hand out the window, and waves. The truck, pulling a horse trailer, circles the willow tree where Arnold's old VW is parked, an orange boil on the dirt. Becky and Arnold went to his place just as the sun was coming up, and she drove the VW back. Two red horse rumps fill the trailer's rear window, two long tails hang out.

  The wayward roans. Figures. Becky has had about three hours of very shallow sleep. She's been both dreading and anticipating a face-off with Alice about the lost roans, which, of course, are not lost. What a surprise. Things always seem to work out for Alice.

  When Becky was younger, she secretly wanted to be Alice, who is everything a woman should not be. Her other aunts used to talk ceaselessly about a woman's place, which was in the home where she should rear children and abide by the righteous counsel of her husband. Or, if unmarried like them, she should serve the Lord.

  As Becky grew up, people began to tell her that she looked like Alice, which delighted her, but when she examined herself in the mirror, she saw the resemblance but not Alice's beauty. Becky, her father, and Alice all have the same rectangular faces tapering just slightly into a squared chin, though Alice and her father have high, defined cheekbones and indented cheeks, which Becky, with her uninteresting slabs, has always envied. She thinks the hollows make her father and Alice look rugged and mysterious. Becky's nose is just a little wider than her aunt's, her lips a little thinner, and where Alice's hair is long, ropy, and very braidable—it's the color of sable but sun-threaded with copper — Becky's charcoal hair is coarse, electric, and copious, growing down her neck and in front of her ears like sideburns. Though her father and Alice both have thick brows, neither is nearly uni-browed, as she is. Arnold says he prefers Becky's Frieda Kahlo brow, her screwball face with its monstrous beauty. He thinks Alice's beauty is classic and forgettable, but he's the only one she knows who says that.

  "Yá'át'éhéii, Delia," her aunt calls, walking toward them. "Yá'át'éhéii, Becky."

  "Hello," her mother says.

  Becky says nothing. A man gets out of the passenger's side of the truck. He wears a straw cowboy hat, plaid shirt, and tight jeans. Alice climbs the porch, smiling at Becky, stretching her hand out. Becky barely touches her fingers and can't bring herself to look in Alice's face.

  She introduces the man, a wrangler from Sanostee who seems closer to Becky's age than her aunt's. Though it looks as if he's taken a few falls in the rodeo ring—his nose is flat, the bridge probably broken, and his left cheekbone is flatter than the right — he's good-looking in a scarred way. Her aunt's type. Becky has seen a dozen of his kind with Alice over the years.

  Becky's mother moves over, making room for Alice next to her on the porch swing. "They were there this morning when I got to the farm," Alice says, nodding toward the trailer. "Sorry about the trouble. They know their way home." Her voice is jolly, as if last night was a fine joke. Her eyes are hidden behind dark glasses. She stretches her arms out on the back of the swing, crosses her ankles, spreading out. She's a little fleshier than usual, bulging around her blue-jeaned thighs, and she looks soft, sort of liquid. Becky gets the feeling she's watching the guy behind her glasses, though she keeps her face turned toward Becky. What it is? It's the languid softness of a good night's sex. Irritating. Next to Alice, Becky's mother seems shrunken and bland, her hair graying fast. Alice and Delia are the same age, forty-four, but her mother is starting to look older. Her hair is badly curled, a dozen hoops all operating independently of each other, the hoops dull, the hair thinning. In spite of her effort to keep on top of her moods, depression has begun to ooze from her.

  Becky looks at the horses' rumps. The tails don't swish. They're probably asleep. They had a hard night. Alice says she hasn't heard from Delmar, but it looked as if he'd been by the farm. Some of his stuff was gone. But he didn't leave a note. "Maybe he got the job."

  "Where is it?" Becky says.

  "I don't know. He just said it was a gardening job."

  "So you want to lend me your truck?" Becky says. "Delmar took mine."

  Her aunt presses her lips together, looking at the cowboy. Annoying. Becky gets the impression Alice is trying not to laugh. The cowboy smiles.

  "Sorry, Becky. You know Delmar."

  "I'm not kidding," Becky says. "We've got no transportation here." Alice looks at the VW. "That," Becky says, "is like a tricycle."

  Alice puts her index finger over her mouth. Becky wishes she had the guts to slap her. Her aunt thinks Delmar is something. Clearly.

  "Sure," Alice says. "Just as soon as we get back."

  "Where are you going?" Becky's mother says.

  "We have to go down to El Paso. Yá'át'éhéii ánaaí," she says as she gets up. Becky's father is standing behind the screen door. Alice crosses the porch, opens the door, puts out her hand, which Woody takes and holds on to, leaning into her and coming out on the porch. She walks him to the swing. They speak to each other in Navajo. Becky glances at her mother and is glad to see a little fire in her eyes. Delia does not appreciate conversations in Navajo, which exclude her, especially in her own home. Only Alice does this.

  "What's in El Paso?" her father says after a while. He's wrapped in his orange Pendleton blanket, which he grips at the chest with fingers that are too bony. His concave cheeks no longer look mysterious and dangerous but simply skeletal.

  Alice leans up against the porch railing next to the cowboy. "We're starting some training camps. We've got one in El Paso and one in San Antonio. Good money. We should be back in a couple of weeks. I was wondering, Becky, could you look in on Shimá until Delmar gets back?"

  "And how am I going to get there!" Becky's mother's head rears back in surprise. Becky didn't intend to shout, but she can't stop. "Give me your truck and I'll look in on Grandma."

  Alice stares at her feet. The cowboy looks at her feet. Becky's father smiles at his feet. Heat floods Becky. She bites her tongue.

  The wrangler says something softly to Alice in Navajo.

  "It's okay," she says. "He says his sister will look in on Grandma."

  They sit in silence.

  Becky watches cloud shadows drift across the dirt yard and thinks maybe it will finally rain. She decides she's not going to feel the shame she's feeling. How can Alice make her feel this way, as if she is a cute child having a tantrum?

  "Don't worry," her aunt says softly. "He'll come back. You know Delmar." She takes her sunglasses off, cleaning them on her shirt. She has bags under her eyes, which make her look her age, but the expression in her eyes makes her look even older. Her teasing fit seems to have passed. She's looking at Becky with a heavy-lidded kindness, as if she understands exactly how Becky feels, as if she feels it, too, and Becky's temples begin to throb, the lack of sleep and the desire to cry swelling her sinuses.

  "If he doesn't," she says quietly, "I'm calling the police."

  Alice nods slowly. She puts her glasses back on. She links the index fingers of both hands into her jeans pockets and gazes at the section of porch floor between her and Becky.

  Becky closes her eyes. She could be Alice's twin, and she wouldn't be as beautiful. Alice's beauty comes as much from her attitude and bearing as from her features. People don't mess with her aunt. Once when Alice was driving Becky and Delmar to their grandmother's farm, they had an accident. A gray blur, dog or coyote, slunk across the highway just as they were passing the Turquoise Bar at Hogback. Alice swerved, missed the blur, but
nicked the back of some white guy's car, causing him to spin down the highway, while they plunged headlong into the ditch at the side of the road. The white guy's car nosed into the guardrail, collapsing the front and causing the airbag to inflate. Alice bumped her head on the steering wheel and cut her forehead, blood flowing into her eyes. Becky and Delmar were okay. The white guy was okay but angry, yelling at the people who came out of the bar that they better get a state trooper, he knew his rights. A Navajo cop showed up first, but the guy wouldn't let anybody move until a white state trooper came and tried to put Alice in the back of his car—the white guy screaming about the goddamned drunk Indians—but Alice did not get into the back of his car, and she did not scream at anybody, just said over and over again to the Navajo cop, as if the white one were invisible, "There was something in the road, I swerved to miss it," as the blood streamed down her face. Becky will never forget her voice and her poise, which seemed to cocoon and protect them.

  "Well," Alice says, "he has to see his parole officer on Friday. Can you wait to call the police until then?"

  Becky opens her eyes.

  "If he doesn't show up for his appointment," Alice says, "his parole officer will contact the police. He knows."

  "Is there a number where I can reach you if I need to?"

  Alice looks at the wrangler. He stares at the ground. "I'll call you. Sorry for the trouble, Becky. We'll be on the road. I'll call next weekend."

  After they've gone, Becky's mother goes in to start dinner. Her father pats the swing next to him, and she goes to sit with him.

  "Are you going to No Fat?" He means the mesa where they run. Years ago she'd asked him why they call it No Fat. "Because everybody who runs there gets skinny. Look at you," he'd said.

  "Too tired."

  "You go yesterday?"

  "Yeah."

  "How far?"

  "To the lake."

  His eyes shine. "That's good."

  "I'm thinking of registering for that fifty-mile race at Hopi."

  He nods. She ran her first race with him when she was twelve, a 10K, and they've run two marathons together. He has only one rule: finish, even if it means walking, even crawling. But she holds her own. She came in twenty-sixth in her age group at the Green Valley marathon.

  "Delmar should fix my car," her father says.

  "Delmar doesn't know how to fix cars. All he knows how to do is steal them."

  He laughs, wheezing, then coughing and sputtering. "That's true, that's true." He doubles over, gasping for breath. She holds his shoulders, gripping them hard, trying to help him hold himself together. When he can speak again, he says, "You tell him when he comes back he can have my car. You need your truck."

  "You need your car," she says softly.

  He smiles, closing his eyes, shaking his head, saying nothing.

  18

  ON MONDAY Dr. Callahan calls again. Rosy is outside watering the lawn. Ryland sees the doctor's name on the caller ID. He watches Rosy through the kitchen window while he lets the answering machine pick up and listens to the doctor say he left a message on Saturday and is calling again, that he really needs to talk to Ryland. He gives his number, gives it again, and Rosy is on her way into the house when Ryland deletes the call.

  "A million things to do," she's saying. "Bone tired. Did it all last night in my sleep."

  His heart is racing. The kitchen table is covered with chocolate truffles in red and blue wrappers, bags of cashews, rolls of breath mints. Maggie and George are coming over this afternoon to pack the stuff in colorful pouches that they'll leave for the out-of-town wedding guests in their hotel rooms. Rosy laid it all out last night and told him what it was about. He sits down at the table, taking the portable phone with him.

  "Got to give this house a thorough cleaning before the hordes descend," she says. "I can't believe it's less than a month away. Edna, bless her heart, asked if she could send her maid down to help. That woman is an angel."

  The phone rings. He jumps and answers. Rosy's eyes widen. He stares at her, watching her eyebrows knit, then hands the phone to her. He didn't recognize the voice. But after her first few words, he knows it's somebody from the uranium coalition. "Yes, I saw the announcement in the paper. You might be surprised. I think there's interest." They're having a meeting this Friday night at the Unitarian church. It's in today's paper. Rosy read the article to him and asked him to go. Nobody expects him, she said, but she wishes he would, because, she said, nobody knows as much about this stuff as he, and he said, "Good."

  "Good what?" she said.

  "Good that nobody expects me." Over his dead body would he help those people.

  He runs his fingertip over the cellophane truffle wrapper. He pulls the candy toward him, then another piece, then another, arranging them in a line. He's on double doses of Demerol. His back's killing him.

  When she hangs up, she puts the phone in its cradle on the desk. He waits until she leaves the room, then gets up and puts it on the table within his reach.

  "Honey," Rosy says, coming back into the kitchen, "you're underfoot. Why don't you go to the living room and watch a movie or something. You look like hell," she says. "Didn't you sleep?"

  "Slept good," he says.

  "Well, you look like hell," she says.

  "Thank you very much."

  She puts her hand on his shoulder. He can feel her looking at him. He gets up and pulls his cart into the living room, where clothing has taken over. His good black suit is laid out on his chair, just a cloth socket waiting to be filled. And Rosy's new suit, which she has informed him is melon, not orange, lies on the sofa, with melon shoes on the floor. Billowy, lacy stuff, flower-girl headgear, covers the other furniture. More clothing and billowy stuff is scattered through the rest of the rooms. Rosy has been doing inventory, checking for rips or stains just in case something needs to be sent to the cleaners.

  He walks over to his chair, picks up his suit pants, folds them, puts them on the footstool, sits down, picks up the remote, then puts it down again and stands back up.

  He walks into the bathroom, stares at himself in the mirror, at the tiny blue veins under his chapped skin. He walks out of the bathroom, moves into the living room, and picks up the remote. He turns the TV on, watches it for a minute, puts the remote down, turns, and walks into his bedroom. She is running water in the kitchen. In less than a month the house will be full of family and strangers here for the wedding. He walks to the bed, sits, then stands again.

  He looks at the dials and lights on his oxygen tank. He filled the tank this morning when he got up. The red light is dull, the green bright. He's used a quarter of a tank. He pivots, closes the bedroom door against the sound of the ringing telephone. Even when there isn't a wedding in the works, the phone rings several dozen times a day. She's popular, his wife. He walks to the window and stares at the cars moving up and down Cactus Drive. Across the street a young woman he doesn't know kneels in the grass digging tufted sprouts of dandelions. Digging in, pulling out, digging in.

  In the afternoon, when Maggie and George come over to assemble party favors, Ryland sits with them at the table, his stomach numb from too much Demerol, the phone on the table next to him.

  He is the main topic of discussion. Will he be able to walk Maggie down the aisle? "The question isn't," Maggie tells him, "whether or not you're giving me away." She pulls the two ends of a truffle wrapper, and the chocolate ball drops to the table. "He doesn't want to give me away," she says to George. She pops the ball in her mouth.

  "That's not what he said," George says. "He said you have a choice."

  "Eddy is not giving me away. Eddy is not my father." Chocolate squeezes around the corners of her mouth.

  "Honey," Rosy says, "it's going to be a long Mass. Your father's going to be more comfortable if he can sit in the back by the door. He can't sit through the whole Mass anymore."

  "Well, what about this," Maggie says. "What if he walks me down the aisle. Then he can go around to
the side and go to the back of the church and sit there, and then when it comes time to stand up for me, he can come back up. What about that?"

  "What does he do with his oxygen tank?" Rosy asks.

  "What do you mean? He does what he always does. He pulls it in the cart."

  "His oxygen tank embarrasses him," Rosy says. "He doesn't want everybody in the church looking at him pulling an oxygen tank."

  "Daddy," she says, "will you dance with me at the reception? Daddy taught me how to waltz," she tells George.

  "Honey, that was a long time ago," Rosy says.

  "If I get the band to play 'Goodnight, Irene,' will you dance with me? That's his favorite," she tells George. She sings, "Sometimes I live in the country, sometimes I live in the town..."