Yellowcake (9 page)

Delmar grins. She stares at the dark spot in his front tooth where the enamel chipped when a baseball hit him in the mouth. He was ten. She remembers the blood and how he didn't cry, but he came to her for nursing, and she had put Vaseline on it.

"Wish me luck," he says, tossing the keys in the air. Catching them.

She's worrying before three o'clock comes around and is not at all surprised when Delmar doesn't show, even by four.

At four-thirty she goes out to sit on the bench in front of the bank. If he shows at five—she believes he will, since that's the time he had in his head—she'll still be able to get a run in. It'll be light until eight. She needs a run tonight.

The afternoon was a waste. She added columns of numbers over and over again, getting different totals each time. He better not wreck her truck.

Across the river, thin clouds rest above the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project—NIIP—fields, where the tribe has piped in water and turned the barren mesa top into a green field of corn and wheat. The irrigation system has changed the climate a little. More humidity, more clouds, still no rain. Yesterday evening her father said he wanted to go up to NIIP to see the crops, so she was going to drive him there, but he wasn't halfway to the door before he changed his mind and teetered back to the couch, his thin legs just feeble walking sticks under folds of flannel pajamas.

Delmar doesn't come at five or five-thirty. Arnold had left at four, when the front doors closed, telling her to call him at home if Delmar didn't show. The air smells and tastes like exhaust. Sluggish cars and trucks roll by on the street in front of her, some of the drivers staring straight ahead, some giving her a bleary-eyed look. All look resigned to the slow roll of rush-hour traffic. She's been doing mental calculations. Her truck payments are $225 a month. She wonders if her insurance covers her cousin. What if she has to buy a new truck, pay off the one he wrecks, plus pay somebody's medical expenses? She's already budgeted so tightly there's nothing left over at the end of the month. Since her dad relapsed, she's been paying on the loan her parents had to take out to pay the hospital bill. She cosigned.

If Delmar gets hurt, she won't pay—not a dime.

The bell in the steeple of the Catholic church begins to chime. Six o'clock. She's just looking for change to call Arnold when a Dodge Dakota with tinted windows pulls up to the curb in front of her. She hears the electric buzz of the passenger window rolling down. Terry Conrad is behind the wheel.

"Hi," he says.

"Hi." She gets up and walks over to him. It's a nice truck. She smells leather.

"What are you up to?"

"Not much."

"I drove by an hour ago and you were out here."

"Yeah. My cousin has my truck."

"You need a ride?"

"It's out of your way. Fruitland," she says.

"That's right on my way." He smiles, leans across the seat, and opens the door for her.

 

He takes her on what he calls the scenic route. It's the long way, across the San Juan River, up the mesa and through the Upper Fruitland district on the reservation side of the river. Ivory bluffs line the road on the left, with farmhouses, double-wide trailers, and butane tanks scattered on the sandy land to the right. The autumn sunflowers are in bloom, clusters of them sprouting along the road.

"Where were you going?" she says.

His smile, though thin-lipped, has something sweet and boyish about it. "Just driving, really."

"Oh."

"To be honest, I spend a lot of time just driving around. I don't know many people here."

"I hear you're taking Harrison Zahnee's Navajo class this fall. You'll meet people there."

"Yeah, I'm looking forward to that. It's a hard language. I ordered tapes, but I couldn't get anything from them. I'm better in groups." He shifts, gearing down as the truck climbs the mesa. When they top it, Shiprock blazes crimson and blue directly ahead. Though the rock is twenty miles away, the day is clear, and she can see the two peaks, one a little shorter than the other, two sails that don't look at all like sails, but the rock stands alone in that swath of desert like a ship on the sea. To the right, Hogback, a ragged beige mesa that looks like a giant hunkered-down pig, bisects the land, and to the far right white smoke plumes from the stacks at Navajo Mines. From up here it's possible to see both power plants, the larger Four Corners on the left.

"You sure live in pretty country," he says.

"You mean the power plants?"

He laughs. "Dallas is flat and getting smoggier all the time. Ever been there?"

"I've never been anywhere."

"A homebody?"

"Not really. I may travel some day."

They're driving through the NIIP irrigation project now. There are no houses, just square plots of full-grown corn.

"How's your dad doing?"

She shrugs. "Not good."

"What'd he do at the mill?"

"Everything. He started as a welder, but he was a shift foreman by the time they closed."

"What does he think about all this?"

"It's complicated. He blames himself. Apparently they had protective face masks and gloves, but he never wore his because it was too hard to do the work with them on."

"Ah. He shouldn't blame himself. He was in the industry during its dark ages."

"He doesn't like to talk about it, but I've been reading through EPA papers on the Shiprock mill-site cleanup. I read where the workers raked yellowcake in open pans. Steam-heated pans."

"That's only a small part of it."

"Yeah, and when they tore the ceiling out of the processing building, they found an inch of yellow dust. It had been accumulating for years."

They drive in silence for a while, the road veering right toward the river and down into the valley, past the Nenahnezad Chapter House. The land is greener here, the sand giving way to richer dirt. Overgrown salt cedar, cottonwoods, scrub oak, and sage crowd the narrow road, occasionally brushing the side of the truck. They cross the bridge over the sluggish San Juan and drive off the reservation.

He wears a cologne that reminds her of the scent white boys used to wear at junior high dances, boys she would slow-dance with and whose cologne would come home with her, keeping her awake in her bed. Only a handful of Indians went to the public school in Fruitland. This white man seems familiar.

"Neanderthal days in the uranium business. It's not nearly so dangerous now, and I foresee a future where nuclear could be the safest fuel choice we have."

"Really?"

"Yeah. The huge risk is in ore extraction. Now nearly everybody's looking at in situ leaching—leaching the uranium from the rock without removing it. Ore extraction's the reason so many uranium miners are dead now. You pull the ore out, release toxic gases, breathe it in, and die, plus the gas stays around, embeds in the soil, the kiss of death for generations. See this is part of what we do at AGER—research progressive and safe mining techniques. Nobody'll be extracting ore in the next phase."

"Turn here. The next phase?"

"That's how I see it. I think nuclear has to be an option in the next millennium because the sad thing is, there won't be any more fossil fuel. According to our stats, this ol' earth will be out of oil in forty or so years. Solar's an option, wind's an option. But those alone won't begin to meet world energy needs."

"Man."

"Sorry to be depressing."

"Yeah."

Her parents' land appears, a green acre in the midst of yellow fields. Years ago her father planted a juniper hedge as border to the property and let it grow up high; now it nearly hides the house. "That's it," she says as they approach the turnoff. He pulls in and parks under the willow. Her truck isn't here. She'd been hoping Delmar would be waiting. The only car in the yard is her father's little Honda, which he took apart a few months ago to find out why it knocked. He hasn't felt good enough to put it back together.

C3PO struggles out from under the porch, barking. "Who's that?"

"That's C3PO."

"Old dog."

"Ancient. Somebody left a litter of puppies at the mill once, and my dad brought home two, one for my cousin, one for me. We were into
Star Wars,
so he called his C3PO. Mine was Princess Leia. She got pregnant and ran off. My cousin likes to say that his dog's a good dog because he always does exactly what a dog should do—eat, sleep, and get his sister pregnant."

Terry laughs. "Well, I'd like to meet him, this cousin of yours."

"I'd like to kill him." She steps out of the truck, shutting the door behind her, propping her arms against the door frame, and looking at him through the open window.

"Oh?"

"Long story."

"Maybe I could come by the bank some noon, take you to lunch, you could tell me." She hadn't expected this. She hesitates, and he quickly says, "No strings attached. I'm a lonely guy. Just looking for a little conversation."

She shrugs. "Okay. Maybe. Thanks for the ride. I really appreciate it."

T
HE FOX TURNS TAIL
and runs along the garden path between the acid leach and the cool clear water. Ryland cannot move. It's so hard putting one foot in front of the other. The leach is green like mucus. He can barely see the path. Two seconds is all it takes for the acid to eat through leather. One one-hundredth of a second to eat through cotton. One one-thousandth to eat through skin.

Now he is in a kitchen. A woman kneels at his feet and picks shreds of green cotton from his leg. He watches the skin corrode. Under the shredded work pants there is no bone. There's only skin turning in on itself, red, raw. The woman's hands are brown, but as she picks the skin from his leg, they begin to mottle, to lose pigmentation, and he is back on the path and it's breaking up under his feet. Acid has splashed his leg.

Now he is not so much dreaming as drifting. He is aware of the pillows at his back and an ache in his side. The grandfather clock in the living room putt-putts a warning, machine-guns a warning—
Well, you wouldn't be able to hear the clock if you didn't insist on sleeping with the door open.

And now he is awake.

The neon numbers on his bedside clock say it's 12:35; 36. He had been dreaming about a little red fox they used to see out near the leaching pond at the mill in Durango. They called it the garden path, the narrow walk between the leaching and rinsing ponds, and the night shift always looked for that little fox; it was a lucky night when somebody saw it.

He reaches for the aspirin on his bedside table. His throat aches and has for four days, ever since the doctor scraped his lungs. A scorching poker drilling up and down. There'd been nothing wrong with Rylands throat on Tuesday. He wonders if he might have picked up an infection at the doctor's office.

The pills in the bottle rattle, and that's how he knows his hand is shaking. He can't see his hand. The little night light down the hall doesn't reach this far. The light Rosy insisted on so he can see when he gets up to use the bathroom—
Gets up to use the bathroom five, six times a night. I hear him, bless his heart. This is why I'm always tired.

Rosy doesn't sleep with him anymore. Three months ago she moved down the hall to the spare bedroom. It was his suggestion. He got tired of hearing her tell everybody how tired she was. Now, though, he thinks it's her absence that wakes him. He's used to her sounds, her breathing and jostling the sheets. The only thing he can hear in the middle of the night is the brown oxygen tank percolating in the corner of their—his—room, and the puny air raking his throat. The clock. The traffic on the street.

He opens the pill bottle and takes three aspirin. Maybe they'll help him sleep. He has tried turning the light on and reading when he wakes at night, but the words are all black dots. He can't breathe if he tries to focus. Breathe or focus, one or the other. His eyes are roving little animals, working day and night. Even when he is asleep the eyes turn inward, look and look for something, which is why he has to have the door open at night. The eyes want to see what's coming when it comes.

Outside, cars are racing up and down Cactus Drive. Kids. And cops. Every now and again there'll be the whoop-whoop of the siren.

Wide-awake now, he sits up, throws the covers off, swings his feet to the floor, and turns on the light. He toes under the bed for his slippers, which are not there. Which means Rosy has put them away. She scoots them far under the bed skirt because she doesn't like to have anything visible on the floor, and she doesn't care that he has to get on his hands and knees to fish them out. He drops to his knees, lifts the curtain, reaches for his slippers, but his eyes fix on his shoes. He is wide-awake. He is wide-awake because he sleeps all day. He doesn't do a damn thing but sit in his chair and sleep. He can't sleep at night because he never gets any damn exercise. He thinks maybe he should take a walk, and adrenaline shoots through him. He reaches for the shoes quickly before he changes his mind. Go for a walk now, change your mind later, he tells himself.

 

The oxygen cart chitchats behind him. His leather soles slap the sidewalk. This is a good sound. He is marching. Pick your feet up, soldier, he orders himself, and he picks them right up, just as if he weren't old. Behind him the house is quiet. He has gotten out and to the best of his knowledge he did not wake his wife. AWOL. He looks both ways across Cactus Drive, steps off the curb, and crosses to the other side of Sunshine Street.

What truly amazes him is how good he feels. No part of him hurts, no part nowhere. How had that happened in fifteen minutes? His throat doesn't even hurt. Could be the aspirin kicking in. Could be that Rosy's right. "Your throat hurts because you're thinking about it." If he had an infection, aspirin wouldn't be strong enough. He feels good, and he feels warm. What's the temperature? This time of night it'll be 70 degrees. Today it reached 102, and he sat out on the front porch in that heat so he could get warm. His regulator's all off. But he feels warm enough now. He's got a little pinching in his calves, which are tight from lack of use.