Yellowcake

by Ann Cummins

  The patio leads into an open dining area and the kitchen. Immediately, she notices an odor. A fetid odor, a rank odor, an odor she does not associate with her house. He is dead, she thinks. She switches on the wall light.

  From here she can see the refrigerator and can just make out Fred's business card, exactly where she left it.

  "What's that smell?" she whispers to Fred, now standing in the doorway.

  "Garbage?"

  She crosses the room, turning on lights as she goes, down the hall to the master bedroom, where the bed is made and the adjoining bathroom clean. In the laundry room, she opens the door into the garage, which is empty.

  "I found what's rotten," Fred calls, his loud voice sending a jolt through her. She hurries into the kitchen. He hands her a paper bag of oranges, a half-inch of fuzzy green mold covering them. "He's not here, Lily. It doesn't look like he's been here."

  "What about the porch light?" They go into the front hall and find the switch in the on position. The light has burned out.

  She holds her stomach. It aches.

  "You're all nerves, Lil." He slips his arm around her. "What do you have to drink? Or when he broke in and forgot to take my card, did he drink all the liquor?"

  She tries to laugh. "Let's see." The bar is fully stocked. She pours some Scotch.

  They sit at the kitchen breakfast bar, she with her feet in Fred's lap. "You know what I just did, Fred? I did what I always used to do. I didn't think I was, but now ... I thought I was staying ahead of the game. You know. Being proactive rather than reactive. Thinking about it though—proactive, reactive. I could never anticipate him while we were together. What makes me think I can now? Once..." She swirls her Scotch, the ice clinking. "I've never told anybody this. I knew there was something wrong with the marriage. I thought I could fix it. I decided to surprise him. You know. So one evening I take my clothes off..."

  "All?"

  "All."

  "All right, then."

  She laughs. She closes her eyes. "God, that house. Those houses down there in the desert, they were always full of sand, so grimy." She opens her eyes. "So I'm standing in this godawful filthy house, not a stitch on. It was in the summer, the house still full of daylight, even though it was dinner time. He was late. I stood just waiting. Seemed like forever. Finally, I hear his truck pull into the drive, and every instinct in me is telling me to cover up, but I don't, and then he's on the porch, opening the screen, stepping in. And then he's gone.

  "I don't even know if he completely saw me, because he turned around so quickly it was almost as if he wasn't there at all. He got back in his truck and went away."

  "He was an asshole."

  "Yes, he was, but I left myself wide open again and again, and tonight he's not even here, and I let myself get worked up. My God, I got you out of bed—"

  "Oh, stop it, Lily." He stands, slipping out from under her feet. He takes his glass to the sink and rinses it. For a long time.

  Finally he turns the water off, walks into the living room, turns the light off in there, then goes back into the kitchen. "Let's go to bed," he says.

  "Here?"

  "Yes. Here."

  "Not here, Fred."

  "Lily. I'm tired."

  He turns off the kitchen light, the laundry room light, and the dining room light, leaving her in the dark. He goes into the master bedroom. She listens to water in the master bathroom. When she hears the toilet flush, she gets up quickly and follows him.

  In bed, the light out, he lies on his side, turned away from her.

  She lies very still, flat on her back. Blinds scissor the moonlight, drawing blue bars on the ceiling. "Fred?"

  He doesn't answer. He's not asleep. She knows the difference between his sleeping and his waking breath. Hot air hisses through the furnace grate in the wall above her head. Her house is so much less homey than his, with its wood-burning stoves—the house he designed himself. She is going to lose that, she is suddenly certain, a house she has grown fond of..."Freddy," she says, "tell me something I don't know."

  He doesn't answer. She can't hear his breath at all.

  Outside the dogs have set up another alarm; there's the crashing of metal cans. The bears are uprooting the garbage again.

  38

  SAM WALKS ALONG the banks of the Animas carrying a crumpled paper bag. In the bag are bits of fur from mule deer and raccoon, from rabbit and fox. Blue jay feathers, crow feathers, wild rooster hackle. Coyote hair. He has been scavenging for hours. Soon he'll lose daylight, so he heads back toward the truck, picking his way around thickets of tamarisk, which Alice is allergic to. She told him about the tamarisk. "Everywhere you go, all along the San Juan, the Rio Grande, the Animas, tamarisk has taken over. It's choking everything else out." It makes her sneeze.

  Selectively, he can believe what she says, what she said, used to say.

  He hears voices up around a bend in the river. He heard them, saw them yesterday at this time, too. Yesterday and every day. This time of day along the Animas people begin moving in, hobos setting up camp under cover of the overgrown bushes, hiding from park rangers or cops or whoever they are, the green-uniformed patrollers he occasionally sees. In the air marijuana smoke mixes with sweet sedge.

  Tamarisk. It's not a bush he's seen where he scavenges in Florida. There, along the water's edge, guava trees grow wild, dwarfish and gnarled nearer the sea, trees that will seem to sleep through the hot months, but when it cools, the fruit matures and drops, rotting on the ground, and then the whiteflies come, and the thicket by the marina will buzz. The flies are there now, Sam knows, their larvae mulching on the leaves' moist underparts, but the little flies will hatch and rise. Come winter the thicket will be full of them humming around his ears. He's never seen anything like the hordes of whiteflies in Florida, they're nothing like the pygmy blue flies here in the high country or the tough old horseflies that swarmed the horses on Ariana's farm.

  He should not have pushed Delmar. Delmar is not to blame for that bad moment. But Sam wonders if what the boy said was true. Did Ariana really want him to leave, or was the boy speaking from anger? Certainly, what he said about Alice is true. Of course there have been men. Why shouldn't there be, beautiful woman like that.

  Maybe she taught the boy her bad habits, what a liar she is, but ... He has a system now. For Alice. He needs to remember to reverse whatever she says, that whatever she says, the opposite is true. Selectively speaking. Not about the tamarisk, but about him and her. She liked to say they were kindred spirits. Was what she liked to say.

  Two scantily clad teenagers sit on boulders jutting out of the river. They wave sleepily at him. Olive-skinned, a boy and a girl with sandy dreadlocks.

  "Blessed be," the girl says.

  "What?"

  "Blessed be," she says.

  "Blessed be what?"

  "You, man," the boy says.

  "Whatever," the girl says.

  After he passes them, he calls back, "What's the date?"

  They wave.

  The days and nights have begun to blend together again, like they do on the boat when it's just him, him and the flies. He thinks it's Tuesday. Might be Wednesday. Maggie was married last Saturday. Might have been a week ago Saturday. He's waiting for the right time to pass before he goes back through and tells Ryland goodbye and then heads east. His poor old friend is bad off and will surely only get worse.

  As he approaches his truck, he remembers the bugs on the headlights and mucking up his windshield. He needs to wash the truck. He tosses the bag of supplies onto the seat. The floor is littered with packaging from his new clothes and with money.

  He heads up Main looking for a car wash. He hears the Silverton train. Must be around five. Over the bridge, past the old Malte Shoppe, the old bowling alley, he sees a car wash near where Lucky's Drive-In used to be, where he'd take Alice for milkshakes.

  Not Alice. Lily.

  A million years ago. He passes the car wash and goes on, heading nort
h on the Million Dollar Highway. To keep himself awake while he drives, he keeps his hand in the bag of supplies, pressing his thumb against hook points. The old flies he brought from Florida mix with the new stuff. The new ones feel gritty, the old oily and scummy; the feathers have lost their buoyancy.

  Throw them out, Alice would say. They won't float. The fish will know they're fake.

  A wasteful woman. He can take them apart, reuse the hooks.

  Through Trimble, Hermosa, along Goulding Creek. Into the high country. He could drive this route in his sleep. He was on this road when it was new and he just a tot, with his father and mother in an old Model T, which they had for about a year until his father traded it for land, Ute land the government opened up for homesteading. His father tried farming when Sam was very young, until the '29 crash, when he lost the farm, and they all hit the road, his father looking for whatever work he could find, mostly in the mines but the mines were used up. Only the Idarado at Red Mountain limped along, opening and closing, then opening again. They'd been at Red Mountain just two weeks when his father fell through the floor of that old shaft.

  They stayed on, he and his mother, living in the boxcar, and he fished the Uncompahgre with Ryland that summer, where browns and rainbows should be fat right now. He wonders if that old boxcar is still there.

  He moves into the switchbacks, turning the wheel left and right and left and right, the truck weaving in toward the mountain, out toward the gorge.

  He lets the road do the work. Has a good driving record. The best. No reason to worry when the kids are in the truck. Gin softens the road.

  It's a long haul back to Florida. November's coming up. He wants to get back no later than mid-November, when the mackerel will be running south, and will she come to meet them? He better hold on to these old flies. His Florida Ghosts. Mackerel don't discriminate when they run, they'll bite at anything.

  This road's better than it used to be. More passing lanes. But the mountain is just as sheer, little waterfalls slicking up the rock face, rivulets watering the road, and the gorge is just as deep. He slides over into the southbound lane, looking down to glimpse white water, sliding back to the blare of a horn.

  Lily always thought he drove too fast. "Don't drive fast," she would say. "It may be your last."

  Why did he get tired of Lily? Did he get tired of her? He should go back to Lily. With Alice, it's only going to get worse. He'll keep getting older. She'll keep not coming. Why should she come? What's in it for her, young woman like that.

  The aspens have already turned. He missed it. He and Lily used to come up to watch the season change. You get a week, sometimes less. In the gully at the base of the cliffs, the fallen leaves look like gold coins.

  She never cared when he talked about Lily. Why didn't she care? That's unnatural.

  She used to say they were just alike, he and she.

  Was what she used to say. What she said—he should've told Del—was that she didn't want other kids because she only wanted one: he the wanted, Delmar.

  She may have been young, but she was always old.

  Was? Is?

  Only going to get worse.

  He pokes his thumb into the hook he's holding.

  Might as well just head east. Hasn't been much of a hurricane season from what he's heard. Go back. See how his old tub has weathered. Some things he should do before he goes, though. Should apply for Social Security. Should have it sent to the kid. They'll make it up, he and the kid. The kid's young. Should go back to Lily's place and get his birth certificate.

  Go check out the Uncompahgre before everything freezes, then head south, then east.

  The long mountain twilight is almost gone, stars coming out. It'll be dark by the time he hits Red Mountain—there is no moon. He thinks of his mother, the time they spent, just the two of them after his father died, in the boxcar down below the Idarado mine. They heated it with coffee-can candles, seemed like hundreds of them, glowing like votive candles, and his mother would get up in the middle of the night to relight them so they wouldn't freeze to death.

  He could sleep there tonight if the boxcar's still there. Will probably have to kick the rats out. Field mice. Used to find their way into the supplies. Always had to watch out for that, come winter when rodents foraged. Little tracks everywhere on the snow.

  He's weaving in and out of the hairpin turns. Comes up on a sheer wall of rock that falls away like magic into the road.

  And there were other tracks, too, men's track. In the summers he listened to them on the other side of the curtain that separated her space from his. He never saw them enter, never saw them leave. Three or four a night. In winter their footprints muddied the snow, three or four a night, then three or four the next night, the snow melting midday, forming ice by night, freezing, thawing, and refreezing. The footprints of a herd. There was only one winter, though. Mining was finicky then, like everything. You couldn't count on it, and they moved to Montrose, where she worked in a diner. Still, the men came.

  He doesn't blame her. Single woman. Raising a kid. His mother did what she had to do. Just like Alice. She didn't want him around the kid. She had her reasons. She did what she had to do, and he does what he has to do, and what he's got to do now? He pinches the hook. Got to get to work.

  Got to get a permit. Ryland told him to be sure and get a permit if he's going to fish, because fines are sky high for what used to be free and was their goddamned legacy, fishing the Uncompahgre, the Animas, the Dolores ... Fished pretty near every damn river in Colorado before they were eighteen. This is the land of plenty. Used to be, they'd just put a string in the water and the fish would bite. Now you got to bait them, tailor-made bait for fish full of mercury or lead or what have you.

  He needs to work. There will be elk hair. Crow feathers. Marmot. Screaming marmot. A lonely, eerie sound. Winter nights at Red Mountain he'd hear the marmot scream. Worst sound he ever heard. He pinches a hook. It pierces his thumb.

  At Bear Creek Falls, above Ouray, he pulls over and gets out. He walks to the bridge overlooking the falls. Far below, white water froths, the racket of it as noisy as the mill when it got cooking. A frigid mist rises and feels good on his skin. He reads a sign that says it's a 250-foot drop. Not so far. For a fish. A long haul upstream, but what a ride down.

  Due west, a shimmering halo, the sun's afterthought, caps the mountain. Nice. If she were here, she'd think so, too. But she's not. The problem with that woman—he sees this now—is that she spoiled solitude for him. Should've stayed with Lily. Being with Lily was like being alone, which was good. But then Alice came along. Made him feel human for a couple of months out of the year at least.

  Never asked anything of her. Not really. Which now, it turns out, was too much, and that's a paradox, how too little can be too much. Just over the mountain due west there's a town called Paradox, right in the heart of uranium country. Ry and he used to poke around there.

  Poor old Ry. "It's only going to get worse, pal."

  "Pardon me?" A young man is standing nearby. Sam didn't notice him in the dark, but now he sees there are lots of people clustered around the overlook.

  "Nothing," Sam says.

  "Have a good night, then."

  The road is crowded. A pickup pulls off behind his truck, the cab light coming on. Two men look at a map. A rifle hangs from a rack on the back window. It's October, elk season. Laughter wafts from the bushes below. It sets his teeth on edge. Tourists in this wild place.

  He gets back in his truck and continues north, but now that he has felt the spray of water, he yearns for it. He starts looking for a place to pull off and camp. He passes the organized campgrounds, looking for someplace away from people. He finds a dirt road that threads through dense pine toward the river, then disintegrates. His headlights shine on a circle of stone, an abandoned campsite. He drives beyond it, into and over bushes—raspberry? huckleberry? A fruity smell. The bushes screech against his truck, clawing the underbelly. The truck finally ref
uses to go any farther.

  He gets out on the passenger's side, which opens to a little clearing. He can hear cars passing on the road behind him, but he can't see headlights, so they can't see him, and this is good. The louder noise is in front of him, the clamoring river. He's been thinking of going for a swim. Used to be, when he was a younger man, he never passed a river without going in. At home he swims around the island, but ocean water is different, warm, the tidal pull both deeper and gentler.

  He follows an animal trail down to the water's edge. Even in the dark, he can see rocks puncturing the foamy pools, dozens of rough hatchets in the water—a dry year, a very dry year, yes, he's surely seen this river higher. But the gorge is narrow, the water deep enough.

  He begins to take his clothes off, the expensive boots, the stiff jeans, the dirty t-shirt, all of it stinking of days on the road. He balls the clothes up, tucking them under a bush and, naked, takes a step into water that burns, it is that cold. Jolts through him, sending electric shocks into his skull. But he numbs quickly and ignores the jagged stones piercing his feet. He wades toward the river's center. Water doesn't feel wet when it's this cold. It feels solid, painful, brutal, and it wakes him up, it creaturizes him.

  If he were a younger man and had the energy he used to have, he'd swim upstream and let the current bring him back. He doesn't have that kind of energy anymore.

  Anyway it's time to head south. Where he has friends. And a wife. Ha!

  He stands in the middle of the river. It's no little effort staying upright here. The water spars with the middle of his back. For balance, he stretches his arms out to the sides, letting them float.

  What amazing little creatures they are, the river fish that battle this strong current, tough little buggers, rainbows, browns.

  He brings his hands down to his sides and, as he's done a million times before, he lets the river take him, torpedoing headfirst into white water, sluicing in and out of rock-lined channels, tucking himself in, hands gripping his thighs, legs straight, toes pointed, the back end of him a streamlined tail staying the course, following the current. Eyes open in the watery dark, mouth closed. It could never get any better than this.