Yellowcake (11 page)

He crosses Cactus, walks tear-blinded up the path to his porch. The smell from his feet makes him want to vomit. He tries to scrape his shoes on the stoop, but the stink doesn't want to come off, so he takes hold of the railing, toes the shoes off, still tied, and leaves them tucked under the porch.

R
OSY IS SHAKING HIM,
saying Maggie's here and they're going for a walk by the river. He blinks at the clock. 9:00. He listens to them leave. Sleep is pulling him back, but he resists it. The house is empty now. It's always best if he can do his waking up, his noisy lung clearing, when he is alone, nobody listening.

By the time they get back, he is washed, dressed, and sitting at the kitchen table sipping a can of Ensure. Rosy cooks breakfast. She brings over a plate of bacon, the grease saturating a paper towel on the plate, and sets it in the middle of the table. "How many eggs?" she says.

Maggie says she wants two, sunny side up. "Don't break the yolks."

"Yes, ma'am," Rosy says. She picks up a piece of bacon and puts it on Ryland's plate. "At least try one," she says.

Maggie tells them there are thirty-six padded folding chairs at the Knights of Columbus Hall, where the wedding reception will be. And sixty-five nonpadded chairs.

"That," Rosy says, "is a problem. Where are we going to get more chairs? The guest list," Rosy tells Ryland, "is completely out of control."

He thinks of Xanax. It's only ten o'clock. He promised himself not to have one today. Must ration. He's down to three, and they can't renew the prescription until next Wednesday. But it feels like it's going to be a long day. His back is out, and his throat feels like it's been lacerated. He told Rosy he slept wrong, and that's why he's walking crooked. She found him some Demerol. He took that the last time his back went out, something like four months ago, and apparently Rosy, thinking ahead, went ahead and got a refill even after the pain went away. For a rainy day, she said.

Raining in his throat today. He feels as if his body is sectioned out in acres. The acre on top is all right. No headache. There's a storm in the acre of his throat. Throat, lungs, lips, chin. They're all connected, and below that some sort of flood might be stirring the regurgitated bird food. His lower back is quicksand, the regular everyday pain of his kidneys jiggling back and forth sharpened by last night's calisthenics, and below the kidneys he's cotton. Cotton fields. A damned cotton-pecker is what he is. No trouble in the light-as-air acre below his kidneys and above his knees.

Ryland pushes his chair back, takes hold of the handle on his tank, and pushes himself up.

"Honey?" Rosy says.

"Just getting the newspaper," he says. He feels her eyes on his back as he wheels the cart toward the front door. Before he gets there, Rosy starts in about the senior citizens. How can they make sure the older people get the padded chairs?

"Children will scoot into those chairs," she says. A lot of her friends will be at the reception, and they need the padded chairs. She wonders if the padded ones could be designated "senior only," and how can she do that? Ribbons on the backs?

He opens the front door, then the screen. He stands on the porch, feeling the heat through his slippers. Heat shimmers above the pavement on the other side of the hedge, and his eyes are telescopes. No peripheral vision, doctor. It's a good thing he's not going to take his driver's test today. He can't see anything but what's in front of him.

He unhooks the tube from his nose, pulls the loop over his head, and leaves his cart on the porch. Dry grass crackles under his slippered feet. He stoops to pick up the paper in the middle of the lawn and stares at the headline. The Scorpions won, 48-10. There's a picture of a big farm boy with charcoal smiles under his eyes. Big, thick-faced, bacon-fed farm boy with a winning smile, who smashed his way to victory in a preseason scrimmage on the local football field last night.

He walks back to the porch. Without his glasses, all he can see of the front page is the football player, the headline, and the score. He sits down on the porch swing anyway, hooks himself back up to his oxygen, begins flipping through the paper, reading the pictures, just like Teri.

He presses back into the swing, rocking himself a little. The plywood children stare solemnly at each other. They never smile, those two.

"Honey," Rosy says. She's standing at the door, looking through the screen. She tells him that she and Maggie have to run down to the reception hall real quick and will be back soon. He nods and looks down at the paper.

"Did you get enough to eat?"

"Yup."

"Just in case, I'm leaving the bacon. If you don't eat it today, you'll get it tonight in salad."

"Is that a threat?"

"Yes, it is." She stands staring at him through the screen so he'll know she means it, then she disappears. But in a few seconds she's back. "Lily might call. Please answer the phone if it rings. Will you?"

"Yup."

"Ask her where she'll be later this morning, and I'll call her. Or when I should call her, ask her that. I really need to talk with her." And then she's gone. He listens to the slamming of car doors.

Lily. Lily doesn't like to hear his voice on the phone any more than he likes to hear hers.

Heat from the sun seeps into his neck, an agreeable burn. He swings gently, letting his slipper soles scratch the porch. Down the block, the little cemetery dog is in a huff. Lady Finger's been barking all morning. Irritating.

If he took a Xanax, this day might be tolerable. He could, of course, take a half. Six halves, six days. But half doesn't do the trick. It was Rosy's idea that he take only a half—a child's dose. A whole will put him to sleep. He can still count on that.

Neck is turning to jelly in the sun. He is a useless fish. If he's going to die—well, it might not be so bad. If he were dead he wouldn't have to answer the phone, which is ringing. The ringing, and then Lily's voice on the answering machine sneaks past the open door and through the screen: Lily's sweeter-than-sugar, wouldn't-hurt-a-fly, do-I-have-the-right-number-sorry-for-the-bother voice wants to know if Rosy is screening her calls.

"She'll call you back," Ryland says. There. He did just as he was told.

Lily doesn't like him because she thinks Ryland could have saved her marriage. She had come to him in a rage the night she found out about Alice Atcitty, demanding to know when Ryland knew, accusing him of knowing for years and keeping it secret from her. Which is pretty much the case. With Sam there were always other women. Ryland figured they were Sam's business, not his, and anyway, he'd known Sam for years before Lily was in the picture. Why would he break Sam's confidence?

They were a bad match, Sam and Lily. She never got Sam. Once she came up to Ryland at one of the company potlucks. "Have you noticed I'm not speaking to you?" she said. He said, "You're not?" and she said, "I knew I'd have to tell you or you wouldn't notice," which made him laugh, but her lips were quivering, and he saw she was angry. They took their plates over to his truck, which he'd backed up to the basketball court.

They held the potlucks at the outdoor basketball court in Camp. Their first summer in Shiprock, Rosy had organized a "get-to-know-you." They set up card tables under one of the hoops and everybody brought food. It got to be regular, every third Sunday.

He asked Lily why she wasn't speaking to him, and she said it was because he was mean to Sam. She wanted him out of shift work. By then Sam had been with the company a good while. She wanted to know why he was still at the bottom of the ladder.

"He gets his raises, same as everybody else," Ryland told her, but she wasn't talking about raises, she was talking about a position with some kind of future and daytime hours.

Sam was playing basketball with some of the little kids at the hoop opposite the card tables. Ryland can remember him hot-dogging, bouncing the ball behind and around himself. Ryland yelled, "Sam, you pick on somebody your own size," and Lily got up suddenly, spilling her plate on the sand.

"Where you going?" he said, and she turned to him. "You want to hold him down," she whispered. "You always have."

Right then and there he called Sam over, offered to promote him to day work in the office. He watched Sam size up the situation—Lily staring at the flies picking at her food on the ground, her face flushed. Ryland knew Sam wouldn't like Lily being in his business. Sam said just what Ryland knew he'd say, that he didn't mind shifts, that he liked mixing it up, changing the routine, versatile schedules, versatile jobs, and then he went back to the game.

"There isn't anybody holding Sam Behan back but Sam," Ryland told her.

She said, "I'm not afraid of you, Ryland Mahoney," her whole body trembling.

Lily. A little bit of high drama. He's such a scary guy.

The mail truck has just pulled up on the other side of the hedge, and the mailman's head disappears into the back of the truck. When he steps out, he's carrying three boxes. "Somebody getting married?" he calls as he walks up the path.

"Guess so," Ryland says.

"I can always tell. Because of the volume. Nine times out of ten, you get packages like this in the off-season, there's a wedding in the works." He plops the boxes down on the porch, then digs into his gray bag, pulls out the rest of the mail, and hands it to Ryland. "Have a good one."

Ryland stands, black dots swirling from his eyes. The phone is ringing again. He steps inside, carrying the envelopes to the kitchen table, letting the answering machine answer.

"Mr. Mahoney, this is Dr. Callahan. Listen, will you give me a call right away." He gives his number, and the machine beeps. Ryland stares at the blinking number 2 on the machine for a minute. He starts to press
PLAY,
then doesn't. Instead, he walks back to the door, unhooks himself from his oxygen, leaves the tank inside, and goes to collect the packages the mailman left. He carries them into the living room, where wedding presents have taken over an entire corner. He stoops, puts the presents on the floor, and stacks them neatly. He straightens up too quickly—the black dots rocket. He stands waiting for his vision to come back, breathing hard, thinks about Xanax, and decides.

On a day such as this when every breath he takes is a maggoty one, he needs a little help. Half a pill a day is better than nothing. He walks into the kitchen, takes the orange prescription bottle from the cupboard, and carries it into the bathroom. In the mirror he sees that his lips are not yet blue. Sometimes he unhooks himself from the oxygen, stands in front of the mirror, and sees how long it takes for his lips to turn from red to blue. Not long. Even now, as he watches, they begin to turn a little blue around the edges. Better hurry.

He thumbs open the childproof cap, shakes out a pill, puts it down, and takes a razor blade from the box in the medicine cabinet. He tries to rest the blade in the groove in the center of the pill. His hand shakes and the blade doesn't want to settle in, so he stabs, slicing it, and half of the pill goes skittering across the counter to the very edge, where it skids to a stop, a heartbeat away from a plunge into the toilet. He breathes deeply through his mouth.

He pops the half pill into his mouth, then picks up the other half and pops it in too. He tucks the bottle into his sweater pocket, walks into the living room, hooks himself back up to air, then pulls his cart to the answering machine in the kitchen and stares again at the blinking number 2. The doctor said he wouldn't call if it wasn't important. It's Saturday. Why is he calling on a Saturday?

There's a note pad and pen next to the phone. He picks up the pen. He puts the pen back down. His heart is thudding. He pushes
DELETE.

He stares at the answering machine's red o. Rosy will know. All she has to do is check the caller ID box, which has its own memory. It makes him so tired, thinking about the boxes and their memories and the doctors, and how everybody has an opinion. He presses
DELETE
on the caller ID box, and just like that erases history.

D
ELMAR DOESN'T
show up Friday night. Becky calls her aunt Alice again and again but gets no answer. Her aunt keeps a trailer in Shiprock, but she's hardly ever home, and she won't get an answering machine because she's superstitious. Lightning once fried her answering machine, and instead of getting a new one, she found a new place to live. Alice won't live where lightning has struck. Bad luck.

There's no answer all day Saturday, either. In the afternoon Becky goes for a two-hour run through Fruitland to the bridge, over the river, then up toward the lake, trying to exhaust herself. She goes to bed early because she can't stand to be awake, she is so mad at Delmar, but now she can't get to sleep. She ran too much, has too much oxygen in her, and her father sounds horrible tonight, coughing and coughing, a dry, airless cough. It's after one o'clock when she hears him get up. Her mother says something to him, and he answers^ The back door opens, and then Becky is wide-awake. He has gone out to the hogan again. She and Delmar helped her father build the hogan years ago. He said it was for them—their playhouse—but he has always used it. He prays there.

It's cold out there at night. The silence he leaves is more disturbing than his coughing. She thinks her father believes he's about to die. He believes that the living should not stay on in a house where somebody dies, in case the spirit gets trapped inside. Most likely he sleeps in the cold so her mother won't have to tear the house down, even though Delia has assured him that she won't do that. Becky thinks he worries anyway; he loves them and doesn't want to haunt them when he goes. And these days he seems resigned to going.

It's nearly two-thirty and she's still wide-awake when the phone rings. She rushes to answer, calling to her mother that she'll get it. She stands shivering, blinking, and trying to make sense of the voice, which is not Delmar's, on the other end. Finally her ears clear, and she hears somebody saying horses have gotten out. It's Vangie Biggs, who has the farm next to Becky's grandmother.