Yellowcake

by Ann Cummins

  "Shut up, Pooh," she says.

  "Look!" There are two red spots on either side of Pooh's knee. The child begins to whimper. She leans away from him, huddling against her sister, and she rubs her knee. Sandi stares out the window.

  "You're not hurt," he says.

  "I am!" Her face has reddened. Her eyes are glassy with tears, which spill down her cheeks when he looks at her.

  He takes his pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, taps one out, and puts it in his mouth. "No smoking!" the little one says. When he lights it, she starts coughing.

  He pulls out of the parking lot and turns toward downtown. This is an older section. The houses all look frumpy, many in need of paint jobs, shotgun houses, long and narrow, probably built in the forties or fifties, most with square metal boxes on the roofs. Swamp coolers. A funny name for an item that wouldn't work in a swamp, where the air is damp, so much softer than the desert air.

  "I can't see," Pooh whines.

  She begins unbuckling her seat belt. "You've got to wear your seat belt. It's the law," her sister says, and he swerves over to the side of the road, stopping.

  "Tell you what. How would you two like to ride in back?"

  "Can we?" the little one shrieks.

  "That's illegal," Sandi says.

  "It is? Didn't used to be." He opens his door.

  "I want to ride in back!" the little one shouts.

  "Pooh! It's illegal." Sandi doesn't move.

  He reaches over, helping Pooh out of her belt and pulling her across the seat toward him.

  "Yay!" she yells. "Take us over bumps!"

  Sandi stares at him, open-mouthed. She blinks rapidly, but when he hoists the little one into the truck bed, she scrambles out of the cab.

  He goes around to help her in. She says, "I can do it," and puts her foot up on the tire. He scoops her up anyway, holding her under her armpits, swinging her up so her legs arc high, her feet landing with a thump. She scurries away from him. Her face is scarlet.

  "Ouch. It's hot," Pooh says. She had just sat down but now lurches up, staring at the backs of her bare legs.

  Hot. Yes. He pulls his sleeping bag out from under the toolbox, unties it, and scoots it toward the tailgate, telling them to sit on it. "If you see a cop," he says, "duck."

  Back behind the wheel, he fishes his flask out and takes a swig, his first of the day. He turns onto Main.

  Some places seem familiar: bridal shop, theater, courthouse. Many of the shops seem new. Novelty shops with straw dolls in the windows. Antique stores with polished rockers and carved headboards. New bank with a neon sign, blinking the time, 12:15, then the temperature, 96 degrees.

  He glances at them in his rearview. They sit shoulder to shoulder, the little one chattering, the other staring straight ahead. When she sees his eyes in the rearview, she looks away. He smiles.

  He thinks about the bait store where he and Ryland used to get worms when they went lake fishing in the Rockies. He wonders if it's still there. And will hand-tied flies move here like they do on the coast? There used to be a sporting goods store near the train station in Durango. Will it still be there? He's run into sonofaguns who will take merchandise only on consignment. He doesn't have time for that. He needs to find somebody who'll pay cash up front. Ryland will know somebody. The boss. He always knows.

  He turns left off Main onto Schwartz, pulls up in front of the repair shop, takes a sip from his flask, recaps it, slips it into his back pocket, and goes in for the lawnmower, but it's not ready yet.

  Back outside, the truck bed is empty. He looks quickly up and down the street. He sees no sign of the girls. "Goddamnit," he whispers. He turns around and looks back in the store. It's a small shop, just the counter and a few folding chairs. No customers.

  He wasn't in the shop five minutes. Where could they have gone so fast? Sun glare on the windshield makes his eyes water. Down on Main Street, traffic is noisy, the air here putrid with car exhaust and garbage from a dumpster in the nearby alley.

  He starts walking quickly toward the truck—where to begin to look?—then sees them on the sleeping bag, which they have opened fully and spread over the truck bed. They are lying flat on their backs, hands over their chests like little corpses.

  "What are you doing?" he says.

  "We saw a cop," the little one says.

  "Oh."

  "We didn't want you to get in trouble," Sandi says. "They could put you in jail, if you want to know."

  He looks her in the eye. She glances away. "So you saved my hide."

  "Yes, we did." She meets his eyes then, her lips pressed tightly in disapproval, a hard mistress, this one, except her eyes rebel, and she half lowers her lids coyly, blinking a couple of times, a flirty imitation of some doll somewhere, probably on the tube. He laughs. This one—watch out.

  "Are you going to take us over bumps or what?" Pooh says.

  "You bet I am."

  He takes them to the river, where he finds a dirt road with plenty of potholes, and he guns it. They're sitting with their backs to the tailgate again. He watches them in the mirror. They hold onto each other, shrieking with each bump. Their heads and shoulders boing-boing above the tailgate. He zigzags, turning the wheel in abrupt jerks. They tumble left, then right, mouths open, eyes shut. This is a good ride he's giving them. They like it, he can see: little girls. His little tour guides.

  Later, back on paved roads, the two of them straight-backed, glossy-eyed, and flushed, looking punch-drunk, he decides that there will be money. There has always been money. He's not going to worry about it. Instead of driving by Taco John, he turns in.

  "Taco John!" they both holler. He tells them they can have whatever they want. But Sandi tells her sister not to order more than she can eat, that wasting food is a sin, and he smiles at what she already knows, the woman's talent for making and keeping rules.

  They ride up front for the short trip back to the house, and he tells them that maybe they shouldn't tell Grandma Rosy about riding in the back of the truck.

  Sandi rolls her eyes. "We know," she says, sassy and bored.

  "We're good at keeping secrets," Pooh says.

  "I know you are," he says.

  26

  IT'S GOING TO HAPPEN, Conrad had said. Becky cannot stop hearing him say it.

  She is running along the edge of the mesa. She can no longer see the cracks in the ground where the dirt road has dried and separated. Evening is coming on. The sky in the east is the color of mercury, and she is far from her truck. It will be dark before she gets back to it.

  Three's a crowd.

  She squeezes her eyes shut for a few seconds. She will not think about Harrison. She is sick of thinking about him. Except he was so mean. Why'd he have to be so mean? Three's a crowd.

  Her knees have turned watery. The big toe on her right foot hurts. There will be blood on her sock. When she runs this far—probably fifteen miles—the miles register in different ways. Fatigue at two, exhilaration at five, a pulse at seven, ankle and shin pain at eleven, watery knees at fifteen, and that's when she notices the pain in her toe, which means the nail has separated from the skin. The separation, she believes, occurs some time before she notices.

  She feels as if she lives in disconnected moments, somewhere between what has already happened and its afterlife. A half-life. She has been reading about uranium's half-life, what they call the Radon Daughters, a term somebody, some man probably, gave to the radiated isotopes that lodge in the ground during mining. Invisible. Toxic.

  In the valley below, a few lights have come on. The smoke from Four Corners Power Plant to her left is white against the graying sky, and the plant itself is lit up, yellow lights reflecting the stacks. The first stars have come out. Between this road she's on and the power plant, in that huge stretch of shadow, there are plants whose names she knows, healing plants. Gray grease, good for toothaches. Groundsel, good for rheumatism, arthritis, and boils. Navajo name, azee'háátdzid. Her grandmother taught her and
Delmar years ago. Snake weed. Ch'ildiilyéx siitsoh. For nervousness. For internal problems. Her grandmother had taught her many words that Becky has forgotten. Why do some words stick and others don't?

  It's going to happen.

  Her father won't tell her what to do. She told him about AGER's plans to reopen the mines. When he didn't answer, she tried to make a game of it, asking him four times, the way she did as a child. Her father used to say that if you ask a Navajo something four times, it means you really want an answer, and the person is obliged to give one. He has always given a direct answer if she asked four times. Not this time. In truth, she doesn't think he understood what she was telling him. He fades in and out.

  She sees it in his eyes. He is preparing to die.

  He did tell her, though, that he wants her to take care of her mother. He came to her room the night she tried to explain about the consulting and the money it would bring in. It was spooky. She woke in the middle of the night to him standing over her, and now she's not even sure if he was really there or if she dreamed it. He told her to take care of her mother.

  What does that mean? Does he mean she should do this consulting and pay off the medical bills?

  A siren, one of those that sound like Gestapo sirens in World War II movies, wah-wahs from the valley below, out near the new package liquor store on the highway. Red and blue lights reflect off the darkened mesa.

  Sometimes she feels bitter toward her father, and she knows that isn't fair. He has never told her what to do. If she forces him, he'll give her an opinion, but it's always his opinion, never a clear direction for her. He has told her how to do things: Go a little way one day so you can go a little farther the next; don't give up; finish the race. But he won't tell her what to do. He has always left those sorts of lessons to her mother and her aunts.

  She loves them, but she can't imagine how the house will be when it's just them. The prayer circles, the craft circles. Her aunts and mother, making crafts, selling them at bazaars. She driving her mother to church every Sunday. Driving her everywhere because her mother will never learn to drive and will never leave the house her father built, which is not in walking distance of any store.

  God, she hates this place.

  27

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON. Sam and Ryland drive up through raw sandstone where the road has sliced into the bluff, Sam behind the wheel. On either side of the road the earth's innards flank them until they reach the bluff's crest, where the land levels out.

  Yesterday afternoon Sam drove to Shiprock and found Alice's trailer. He recognized it because she had sent him pictures when she bought it and had told him where it was, up on the bluff behind the BIA school, which is not a BIA school anymore. Nothing is the same. But she wasn't home. The trailer was locked up tight. No cars, no animals. He had driven out there for nothing. Waste of gasoline.

  Now he turns onto the Upper Fruitland Road. "Place has grown," he says.

  They're passing a new ranch-style house with wood siding. Other houses are not so new: standard government issue, small, square, three- and four-room houses, some dingy yellow, others tarpapered, here a pink one with its door standing open, a goat chewing weeds in the yard. TV antennas sprout from some of the houses, and sunlight glints off satellite dishes in the dirt yards.

  "Truck drives pretty good," Ryland says.

  "Gas hound," Sam says. "You know what kind of mileage this old guzzler gets? Ten to the gallon. That's it. Probably could've bought two plane tickets for what it cost me to drive. It uses half a quart of oil every hundred miles. I went through a case just getting here." A steady shh, shh washes against the back of Sam's ears. Sand like glass spins up from the ground each time the truck veers from the paved road onto the dirt shoulder.

  "Texas, that's what gets me," Sam says. "They make the goddamn gas in Texas, so you'd think there'd be a little price break, but it was higher around Houston than anywhere. Cost me..."

  "You sure you don't need money, Sam? I can spell you."

  "Nah. I'm going to get to work here pretty soon. Head up north, sell some merchandise."

  "You know," Ryland says, "what Rosy was saying last night wasn't all wrong."

  "What's that?"

  "You paid in to Social Security for a good many years." Last night Sam sat at the kitchen table picking through supplies he'd scavenged on the banks of the San Juan. He'd found robin and duck feathers, rabbit fur. But he didn't make much progress tying. Rosy hovered, asking questions, wanting to know how many flies he made a month, how much they brought in, and also about his Social Security. He regrets telling her that he hasn't filed. She went on and on about how foolish that was, as if it was her business. After she and Ryland went to bed, he couldn't get the rhythm of work.

  They sleep separately. He wonders whose idea that was. The only advantage to marriage: you don't have to sleep alone. Rosy seems more a nurse than a wife now. A fussy nurse. It took them an hour to get started today. She had to pack Ryland a kit with medicine, and she blew up a rubber pillow for his back, and there's an extra sweater, a blanket for his legs. And she had to call Woody's wife, Delia, to make sure it was okay for them to go there. She wrote directions and the phone number, probably a good thing. Place has changed so much, he probably couldn't find the house. He's only been there once.

  "It's not like the government's giving you anything," Ryland says.

  "Don't worry about me."

  "I'm just saying, you paid in."

  "You saw to it."

  "Yes, I did."

  He turns right onto Power Plant Road, crossing the San Juan River into Fruitland, where he finds a property hedged by juniper. According to Rosy's directions, this is Woody's place. He slows and turns in at a gateless opening. They drive onto a large dirt lot with one shade tree, a tall willow. He and Alice drove over when Woody bought the place. It was an old rock hovel, a missionary's hut. Now the house is good-sized, half stone, half wood, a porch running its length. An old bluish dog stands on the porch barking. The young woman who comes out looks so much like Alice, Sam freezes. She puts her hand on the dog's head. But of course it's not Alice. Different hair. Too young.

  Ryland opens his door and begins untangling himself from the seat. Sam takes a sip.

  The girl, Woody's daughter, Becky, sits with her mother at the dining table on the other side of the room. Her mother is beading on a small loom. Sam and Ryland sit on chairs facing Woody on the couch. Woody is almost unrecognizable as the man Sam used to know. His arms and legs, once ropy with muscle, have shrunk down to the bone, and he looks like a white man—a gray man, his face the color of ash. His hair, which he has always worn short, is almost completely gray. It was black when Sam last saw him. Woody's on oxygen, too. He keeps opening his mouth to suck the air, making small, regular burping sounds.

  "Can't believe what you've done to this place, Wood," Sam says. "How much this cost you?"

  In a wobbly voice, Woody has been telling them how he has been building onto the house year by year. Now there are eight rooms and the two porches, front and back. He tells Sam it didn't cost much, just materials.

  The girl walks over to sit next to her father on the couch. The dog follows, creeping to Sam, tail wagging lethargically, eyes rheumy; the dog licks his hand. It's a strong-smelling dog, a black patch over one eye, fur somewhere between Yankee blue and Confederate gray.

  "That's Delmar's dog," the girl says.

  "It is?" He barely remembers her, Woody's daughter. She would've been eight years old when he left. Same as his son.

  "He's a good dog." Woody clicks his tongue and the dog crosses to him, lying down on his feet. He says, "What happened to you?" motioning to the bandage on Ryland's head.

  "Cat got me," Ryland says. Woody smiles.

  "Mr. Mahoney, what do they use vanadium for?" the girl says. She gazes directly at Ryland. In that way she's different from Alice. Alice wouldn't meet your eye unless you made her.

  "Why?"

  "Just curious. I've been readi
ng about it—that you guys made uranium and vanadium at the mill."

  "It's used to harden steel."

  "Back during the war," Woody says, "they used it to harden weapons."

  "That's right," Ryland says.

  "So why did they continue to make it after the war?"

  "We just processed the stuff. We didn't market it," Ryland says. Sam watches him push the tube into his nose again and again. Ry's nails are yellow and buckled. They look brittle, ragged. Woody's wheezing is getting louder.

  "They used it for making cooking pots, anything that needed hard steel," Sam says.

  "Yeah, but I read where the Atomic Energy Commission was your biggest customer. They weren't making pots."

  "So, Woody," Ryland says, "where's your sister?"

  Sam clicks his tongue, snapping his fingers, calling his son's dog over to him. The dog just looks at him. Sam watches Woody and the girl exchange glances. What does that mean? And what does Ryland think he's doing, jumping in?

  "She's on the road. Running rodeo camps in Texas, I think," the girl says.

  "When's she coming back?" Sam says.

  "We don't know," the girl says. "Another thing I read?"

  "Here we go," Ryland says quietly, looking at Sam.

  "...is that you don't have to breathe the dust in to be contaminated. It can be absorbed through the skin."

  "Everybody had gloves," Ryland says.

  Woody glances at his daughter, seeming to signal something with his eyes.

  "That nobody wore," she says. "Right? But maybe somebody should've insisted they wear them."

  Woody touches her on the shoulder and motions with his chin toward the door.

  "That pillow?" Woody says, nodding at a large beaded pillow on the floor between Ryland's chair and Sam's. The pillow is checkered with little gray, black, and ivory boxes.

  "Maybe somebody should at least say he's sorry," the girl says.

  Woody says something sharply under his breath and slaps the back of his right hand against his left palm.