Yellowcake

by Ann Cummins

  Under the porch he can see a pair of sleepy eyes. That dog. That robot. That spy.

  For his grandmother, Delmar knows, Sam has his uses, and so does he. At times like this Delmar is white. None of his relatives in the yard would want to deal with the body, though they would have to if his father and he weren't here, and afterward they would have ceremonies to purify themselves. He doesn't mind dealing with his uncle, though. He'd rather be doing something than just waiting.

  At the pickup Delmar takes the foot of the pine casket, balancing the other end on the truck bed while Sam throws in the stuff they brought, sheepskin, a shovel, and a pick. Sam balances the lid on top. Delmar feels a pinching at his elbow and turns. His grandmother squints up at him, holding out a small leather pouch, which Delmar takes. There is corn pollen blessed by a medicine man in the pouch. He starts to put it in his T-shirt pocket, but then remembers about the joint, and instead ties the pouch cords around his wrist. His grandmother turns and, using her stick to keep her up, walks toward the backyard, her skirt swishing around her ankles.

  They carry the casket around the east corner of the house, past a row of saluting sunflowers, to the backyard, which is quiet and empty. A rug nailed at the top covers the hogan doorway. Delmar props his end of the casket on his knee, flips the rug up, and enters backward, looking over his shoulder, watching where he steps. It's pretty dark inside. The only light comes from the door and a small opening in the middle of the rounded roof that the stovepipe doesn't completely fill. He sees a blanket next to the stove in the center of the room, and underneath the blanket the shape of a body. Delmar steers to the other side of it, and they put the casket down. Feet and ankles stick out from under the blanket.

  The stove is cold. There's a lantern by the door, which Sam opens and lights. Then he lets the rug drop back into place, closing off the east entrance. Some flies have gotten in. Delmar hears them before he sees them, then sees three of them zigzagging above the blanket. The room smells like Vicks VapoRub. There's an open jar of it balanced on the shelf of the cast-iron stove. The place smells a little like the beginning of death, that stale perfume, sweetish in the early stages, a smell he knows from a funeral parlor. He has been to one parlor for the funeral of a fallen warrior from back in the warrior days—an old friend named Harry. He has been to two other funerals, though, Navajo ceremonies, and at one, his grandfather's, he and his father did this same service. His mother had gone to the mill and gotten his father especially for the job. Delmar thought that was weird. His father barely knew his cheíí. His mother explained that if the spirit lingered, it would not harm his father since Sam is not Diñé, and though Delmar is Diñé, his white side would protect him. As a child, Delmar didn't really believe her. He thought she was making that up. But he has tested this theory since then, and death does pass through him. There must be something to it.

  His grandmother had instructed him, telling him his cheíí must not leave the hogan through the east, where the living enter, so they made an opening in the north wall and took his grandfather to a remote spot a few miles south of the sheep camp. That was a long time ago, and he was just a boy, barely strong enough to help. He supposes they'll take his uncle to the same place. They'll have to hurry.

  The time doesn't add up. Two hours to the sheep camp, two hours back, at least two hours to find a place for his uncle. By then he will have turned into a pumpkin. He's going to have to figure this out.

  Delmar unties the pouch from his wrist and sets it next to the Vicks jar, then takes the pick and shovel out of the casket. Sam kneels down next to the casket, removes the sheepskins, begins lining the box with them. Delmar moves toward the north side of the hogan. His uncle's feet point outward, forming a V. Sam makes a funny sound while he fixes the sheepskin, humming and breathing through his nose. He hums only when he breathes out, one note. Delmar looks over his shoulder. Sam is rocking, just a little, back and forth on his knees.

  Delmar swings the pick up to his shoulder. His shadow, long and thin, stretches up the sloping wall, the shadow of his head stopping near the hogan's apex, and when he swings the pick into the adobe wall, cracking it, he swings directly into his shadow's center. He pulls the pick back, adobe crumbling at his feet.

  "Couldn't have been forty-five," Sam says. "Let's see, your mom was sixteen when I met her, and she's—how old is she now? Forty-three? Guess he could've been near forty-five. Forty-six."

  Delmar swings again, piercing the wall, sunshine pouring through the gap.

  "He was, what, three years older than she is? Poor old Woody. Hmm. Hmm."

  Delmar swings again, cracking and crumbling a section of wall from top to bottom, sand and dried mud falling on his head and shoulders.

  "Here," Sam says. "Let's put him in."

  Delmar puts the pick down. Sam is squatting at the head. Delmar squats at the feet. The bottoms of the feet are gray. The toenails look like shells curving around toes that are long and flat. Delmar grasps the ankles, which are as hard and cold as antlers. A fly lights on his hand. He tries to jiggle it off but it sticks to him.

  "One, two," Sam says, and they lift. The blanket slips because Sam is stepping on it, exposing the face. Delmar drops one ankle, the heel thudding down to the earth floor, and the flies rocket upward. He picks up the blanket and throws it over the face, which, he sees in a quick glance, looks nothing like his uncle, whose face had broken into a mess of worry lines over the last year. This face is smooth, calm, and blue. Eyes closed.

  Sam gazes at him. "Hey, kid. You're not nervous, are you?"

  "No." A fly lights on his uncle's ankle. He waves it off. He picks the ankle back up, lifts and lowers the body onto the bed of sheepskin in the casket.

  Sam is gazing at him. "Maybe we should get him something better to wear."

  Pajamas, the color of the cloudless sky at noon. "It's okay."

  "Because we could dress him in his Sunday clothes," Sam says, smiling weirdly. Delmar says nothing, and Sam laughs. "I think you're nervous, kid."

  He holds his father's eyes for a few seconds, then turns away, wiping his hands on the front of his jeans, taking up the pick again.

  "I guess that'd be too much work," Sam says. "Getting him undressed and dressed. We should've thought of that earlier before he started stiffening up."

  "Whatever you say," Delmar says and swings the pick forcefully into the wall. He has torn away enough adobe to make a small doorway, about five feet high, two feet wide. Loose sand sifts down steadily. Outside, people have begun arguing, and he can hear singing, Nizhónigo naniná.

  Delmar puts the pick down and takes up the shovel, scraping the pile of debris at his feet off to the side, out of the way. He glances behind him. Sam is doing nothing, just sitting on his heels rocking and watching him, holding his flask. In the ragged sun shaft, Sam's sunburned face looks raw.

  The dirt floor before the opening is now clear. Delmar puts the shovel aside and wipes his hands on his jeans. The feel of antlers in his palms, the desire to squeeze something, to strangle something. The singing has stopped. He can hear his grandmother's voice and Becky's, but he can't hear what they're saying.

  "Del?" Sam says.

  "Yeah?"

  "Your mom got a boyfriend?"

  Delmar stares at him. "You already asked me that."

  "What'd you say?"

  "I don't know."

  Sam nods and doesn't stop, as if his head's on a spring. "That's not what your grandma said."

  Delmar sees a flash of silver—a quick flick of the wrist as Sam sips from his flask. His father is drinking that stuff in here. That is not right. Again, the urge to strangle something, but then he remembers the joint in his pocket, and the memory makes his arms go weak.

  "You didn't think you could tell me?"

  The buzzing flies are invisible but noisy, arguing in the dim room, and outside several people are arguing in the yard. One voice Delmar doesn't recognize, but he believes it must be the preacher, a baritone with a southern acce
nt, and Becky, his grandmother, her voice high, like a scream.

  "Tell you what?"

  "Christ," Sam says. "How long has she had this boyfriend?" He drinks again.

  "I don't know."

  "Well, is it serious?"

  "We should just do this now. Okay?" Delmar picks up the corn pollen pouch and lifts the blanket enough to place it on his uncle's chest. He tucks the sheepskins around and over the body. Then he lowers the lid onto the box. There are no nails or hammer. They'll have to nail it later.

  Sam has just been kneeling there watching him, rocking; now he jumps to his feet in one movement, putting the flask away, stooping to grip the box.

  There is only the noise of the buzzing flies inside. The yard outside is quiet. Delmar squats, picking up the foot of the casket, and Sam picks up the head. They start out, Sam moving fast, almost pushing Delmar over, forcing him to sort of trot backward out the opening he's made.

  33

  BECKY WALKS THROUGH the opening in the hedge. Aunt Pip, standing on the porch, seems to have been waiting for her. She runs down the steps. Delmar is no longer under the tree.

  "Honey," Aunt Pip says, "your grandma..."

  "Where is she?"

  "In the backyard. They all are."

  Becky jogs toward the backyard, noting Sam's empty truck bed. She finds her grandmother standing between the house and the hogan, chanting, turning slowly in a circle, and sprinkling pollen in the four directions. Her father's relatives form a semicircle around her, all of them with heads bowed. She sees a flash of steel above the hogan, and now she knows where Delmar is. She can't see the part of the hogan where he's making the northern door.

  She looks at her mother, who stands with Aunt Kate, the preacher, and his wife on the back stoop. Her mother's face has collapsed into an expression Becky has never seen. She looks hopeless. She has lost. He is dying again for her.

  "Shinálí," Becky yells. She walks quickly to the center of the yard. "Shinálí, Shipá told me he wanted to be buried in the cemetery." She looks quickly at the side of the house. Harrison has followed her. She sees his eyebrows rise.

  Her grandmother stops turning. She says something in Navajo to the relatives, her voice eerily high, and the relatives nod, saying 'Aoo', and Becky shouts, sputtering, "You guys, you can't come on my mother's property and disregard her wishes. He was her husband!"

  Her grandmother looks at her, the expression in her bluing irises befuddled, as if wondering who Becky is. "Shinálí," Becky says, trying to soften her voice, "he told me he'll get too lonely without Shima." She glances at Harrison. His face is solemn, unreadable. "He wanted her to be able to visit him in the cemetery," she says.

  They stand in silence. Her grandmother's eyes drift toward the ground. She bows her head. Delmar's father is talking in the hogan, and she can hear cars passing on the road in front of the house.

  After a bit her grandmother draws the string on her pollen pouch and tucks it in her sleeve.

  34

  WHEN DELMAR EMERGES from the hogan, he is surprised to see Becky standing close by. She's very pale, lips dry and gray, hair a mess, strands floating skyward in the charged air. The white people from inside and Becky's mom all stand watching from the back stoop. Two strange white men, one in a suit, the other in work clothes, are there, too.

  Delmar's grandmother is walking toward Harrison, who stands at the corner of the house.

  "What's up?" he asks his cousin.

  "Dad told me he wanted to be in the cemetery." She licks her lips and doesn't look at him. She's lying, he can see that.

  "What do you want, Ariana?" Sam yells. But his grandmother has disappeared around the corner with Harrison.

  Delmar watches his cousin. Something about the way her shoulders bow makes him see her when she was a scared little girl following him around. He could make her flinch just by looking at her. He's not proud of that.

  He puts his end of the casket down. He reaches out to touch Becky's arm, but she pulls it out of reach, stepping back, glaring at him. "You can take Dad now," she yells. The two men start across the yard.

  Delmar sits next to the open window of the truck, his grandmother between him and his father. He's glad for the hot wind brushing the side of his face. Poor má saní. His grandmother looks all caved in, her face shriveled but very beautiful to him. She smells like the plants she dries in her herb shed, the way she always smells; when he feels crazy, as he does now a little, her smell helps remind him that he walks on the earth. The flies followed them out. As they turned onto the road, he saw one rubbing its legs on his hand. He stuck his hand out and let the wind carry the fly away.

  He feels má saní's sadness. She had two children, and now she has only one. This is outside the order of things. Your children and your grandchildren aren't supposed to die first. She told him often when he was younger and stupider that he better be careful and stop getting into trouble because he had to be around to say goodbye when she was ready to go, that it was his job as her tsóí. His uncle went before her and now will be put deep into the ground, which is okay, because his spirit will not be there. It is in the wind. Go home, Uncle, he prays. He rubs his hand where the fly's legs had played.

  They drive through Fruitland and past the turnoff to Navajo Mines, past the butcher shop, MUTTON painted in red on the dirty white sandwich board outside. Two pickups are parked in the lot near the road, tailgates down, watermelon in the beds. On up through grassy land and cornfields, corn stalks yellow and brown and tall, past four-cornered Mormon hay bales stacked in neat squares and rectangles, past nicely curried horses and mud-spattered pickups, on toward Hogback. Just this side of the mountain is the new package liquor store across the road from the old Turquoise Bar, which is not turquoise anymore. Somebody painted it white and hung a sign on the door—NO TRESPASSING. Rolls of barbed wire circle the bar, which is not a bar anymore, it's a prison. They have locked up the wraiths there. When Delmar was little, his mother pointed out the wraiths drinking rotgut in the ditch on the side of the road and warned him never to go there, which he never did, because he is not a fool. Cops watched that place like hawks.

  Sam hums just under his breath, saying, "Poor old Woody," every so often. He's smoking. Occasionally Ariana waves the smoke out of her face. When he was little, his mother was constantly waving Sam's smoke out of her face, and if he was in a good mood, he'd blow it at her, and if he was in a silent mood, he'd pitch the cigarette out the window. The silent moods always made his mother mad.

  "Do you know that song?" his father says.

  "What song?"

  "Hank Williams. I can't remember how it starts."

  He hums. Delmar doesn't know it.

  "The chorus goes, 'She sent his saddle home.' Your mom knows it." Sam, red-eyed, looks at him over his grandmother's head, and he can see that it's neither a good nor a silent mood he's in. Though he has never seen Sam lose his temper, he has seen temper run across his face a thousand times. It runs, a fast shadow, there one instant, gone the next, and it always used to make Delmar feel his littleness. He's got five inches on his father now. But still.

  "Your mom used to say I look like Hank Williams. You think I do?" Sam tilts his chin.

  Delmar shrugs. "No."

  "Well, I was younger then."

  He drags on the cigarette. "Sent his saddle home," he sings, smoke leaking out the sides of his mouth. "You're thinking of the younger Hank. Wrote 'A Family Tradition'?"

  "'Aoo'."

  "Just a shadow of his old man. Believe me. No, that's not the one your mom meant. The senior is who she meant."

  On the Indian side of Hogback, the land is beige and bristly with tumbleweeds and sage. They drive into Shiprock, past the ugly government houses, people's laundry hanging on lines, skinny red dog running in the ditch, slouching basketball hoop on a pole in cement, no net. Past Harry's house on the hill, Harry, Delmar's old cruising buddy, but Harry doesn't cruise anymore because he died on Whitaker Mesa when he was fifteen—ten
years ago. Just ten years ago he and Harry were fifteen, and he didn't know Officer Happy then, and he didn't have a job. And Harry didn't know he wouldn't make sixteen.

  "You know why Hank Williams was so good? The best."

  Past the boarded-up elementary school, where Delmar went and got spanked for stringing wire across his desk, playing the strung wire like a guitar. That wasn't right—spanking a little kid for making music.

  "I said, you know why Hank Williams was so good?"

  "Why?" His grandmother whispers to him. "She doesn't want you smoking, Sam."

  "This bother you, Ariana? I'm sorry." He tosses the cigarette out the window.

  Past the Uranium Corporation of America, those houses behind the cattle guard, the letters UCA in twisted wire on the cattle guard gate. Sam used to live in one of those boarded-up houses, Delmar doesn't know which one because he never went there, not once, and doesn't remember if he ever even knew where his father lived until he didn't live there anymore. The roofs have caved in on the houses facing the highway and look like nests for large birds. When he was little, Delmar thought Sam lived at the mill. He and his mom sometimes went up that way to the Dairy Queen and got Dilly Bars, then went to the mill parking lot. Sam would come out and talk to them. And would never let him go into the mill to see the machines, though he wanted to.

  "Because he ate the world. Not many have that courage. His kid? Money ruined him. He didn't have a chance from the beginning. Money'll ruin you. People with too much money ought to be relieved of it."

  Sam drinks from his flask, steering with his wrists so he can screw the cap back on.

  "Háni'yigaat. Adláanii."

  "'Aoo'."

  "What, Ariana?" She doesn't answer. "What'd she say?" Sam says.

  His grandmother wants Sam to go, to leave the farm. Delmar doesn't want to tell him in the truck. Not while he's driving.