Yellowcake (12 page)

"On the side of the road," Vangie is saying. She's telling Becky that she almost hit one of the horses. They're grazing along the highway. "Somebody better come get them," Vangie says, "before they jump into somebody's car." Becky tells Vangie that she doesn't have any transportation. "Could you just get the horses in?" Vangie says. Becky is in the middle of saying she'll come out tomorrow and take care of them when the phone goes dead. She stands for a minute listening to the dial tone, staring at the empty phone cradle. Vangie Biggs doesn't care for her grandmother. Ariana doesn't believe in corralling or hobbling animals. For years the horses got into Vangie's corn and onto the highway and everywhere, and one day Delmar's horse, Luckyboy, went running down the highway and jumped on top of some white people's car. Amazingly, nobody was hurt. The horse landed dead center, found its ground, took a leap, and cleared the back end of the car, coming out without a scratch. None of the four people in the car were sitting in the center seats, where the roof caved in. Everybody was lucky except her grandmother, who had to pay. So Alice, Delmar, Becky, and her dad built a corral, and after that Ariana mostly kept the horses in it. Mostly.

She closes her eyes, trying to think of what to do. She decides to call Arnold.

"You want to go to my grandmother's farm and round up some horses?" she asks him. She can hear his TV in the background.

"Horses? Now? Sure. That's what I want to do. I was trying to think, what do I want to do tonight? Is Delmar going to be there?"

"If Delmar was there, we wouldn't be going."

"Well, 111 still come."

 

It's thirty-five miles from the house in Fruitland to the farm. They drive with the windows open, the cold night air rushing in, Marley on the stereo. Arnold likes opening the Saab up in the middle of the night on the mostly empty desert road, so they approach the turnoff within twenty minutes of starting out, but they slow to a crawl a mile or so before they reach her grandmother's land. The three-quarter moon tints the land bluish. They pass Vangie Biggs's house first, where a light is on, its yellow arc stretching from the window to the border of her cornfield. Becky can see the skeletons of stalks. She can't see any horses in the field. The crop should hold little appeal for the horses this time of year.

Becky switches the tape player off. She sticks her head out the window, listening to the Saab's tires crunch loose gravel near the shoulder, the chilly air making her eyes tear. Skunk is in the air. It's skunk season, but the scent is thin, the skunk probably far away by the river. She can smell manure, too, and the clean scent of cut hay. The/re driving along the edge of her grandmother's farm now. She can see the ragged fencing, in most places just strands of barbed wire strung between wooden posts, but here and there the wires are missing and the posts bend down toward the ground. Crickets are singing to the wavering, high-pitched scream of the overhead telephone wires. There are so many wires now. When the whining started, five years ago or so, after the telephone company tripled the number of wires running along the road, her grandmother paid a medicine man to come and bless the farm to keep the ghostly voices from flying overhead. Now she believes the blessings have started to work, because she no longer hears the whine. Her family doesn't tell her that what's gone is the fine-tuning in her old ears. She no longer hears that high-pitched frequency.

"Looky," Arnold whispers.

Aunt Alice's two red roans are chewing weeds at the side of the pavement. The horses look up as the car approaches, then go back to grazing. A dog has begun to bark farther down the road, and behind them, at the Biggs' house, a chorus of dogs answers. The horses chew.

"How we going to do this?" Arnold says.

"I don't know," she says. "We should've brought rope."

"Don't worry. Horses like me."

She laughs. One of the roans lifts its head, looks back in the direction of the barking dogs. The barking comes closer. The horse takes a step onto the pavement.

"Don't do it," Arnold says. He flashes his lights, which the horse ignores, so he blasts his horn. Both horses jump and bolt to the other side of the highway, opposite the farm.

"Arnold!"

"Oops. Don't worry." He pulls to the side of the road, turns off the engine, opens his door, and steps out. "There's a flashlight in the glove compartment."

"Maybe we should go to the corral and get rope," she says, but he's already heading across the road. She hurries out of the car, turning the flashlight on, hoping that the dogs are not the Biggses' mean ones. Ariana keeps three dogs for herding the sheep and one farm dog that Becky herself named Denver—all mongrels. Right now the sheep dogs are with the sheep up in the hills. Her uncles and cousins will bring the herd down to the farm in a few weeks. Those dogs are smart and can hold their own with the Biggses' dogs, but Denver is old and useless now.

The horses are trotting in the ditch between the fence and the highway, and Arnold is trotting after them. From the barking, it sounds as if the dogs are even with her, moving across her grandmother's property, but she can't see them. The lone dog up ahead continues to call. She has a bad feeling about this.

A circle of yellow light from the flashlight bobs up and down as she runs after Arnold. They need rope. This is stupid. Up ahead, the white lights of an oncoming car bear down, lights so bright she has to look away, and she almost calls out to Arnold to keep the horses off the highway, but how in the hell is he going to do that? And anyway, horses running in a ditch will probably stay in a ditch; they're not likely to climb out of it unless pushed. Unless some stupid lays on the horn. She's laughing as she runs, nervous laughter. The car whizzes by. Down here in the ditch she is a floating head, at eye level with the pavement. "Hai!" Arnold is yelling just ahead of her. "Hey!" Now he's scrambling up the side of the ditch to the fence. She shines the flashlight on his back and beyond him, where she sees the silhouette of a horse turning sideways and then leaping over the fence. "Hey!" Arnold shouts again. She runs up to him. Arnold doubles over, holding his side, wheezing. The fence here sags. One wooden post angles forty-five degrees from the ground.

"Where's the other one?"

Arnold holds his knees. She sees his head nod toward the field. She shines her light on the horse that leapt and has now turned and is standing still, watching them. He puts his head down, as if taking a bow. Just beyond him, the other horse neighs. They both turn and trot away into the desert.

Arnold twists and sits. "I gotta get in shape," he says, still breathing hard. The dogs, yipping, seem to have reached whatever they were after. They're just a little way ahead on the other side of the highway. "Well, at least those horses aren't on the road anymore."

"Shh." There's something else out there. It might just be the humming of the telephone wires, which seems to ebb and wane, like human voices in conversation. Her skin is tingling, but she's not cold now, she's hot, her pulse noisy, adding to the dogs' loud barking, so she can't hear clearly, and in spite of herself, she's thinking of the stories her father has told her of skinwalkers, Navajo witches who don animal skins and take on their powers.

"What?" Arnold says. "Those dogs? They..." He looks up at her, then scrambles to his feet, grabs the flashlight, and turns it off. They stand listening to what sounds like a human voice—a high, nasal chant warbling in and out of the night noises.

Arnold slides down into the ditch, climbs up to the road, crosses, and walks along the fence in the direction of the barking. She follows. He doesn't turn the flashlight on. She can't see the ground she's walking on. She can feel weeds tugging at her jeans and knows her socks are already pincushions for the prickly goatheads. Moonlight shines on the pavement, making it glow like glittery coal. Not a stone's throw away, she can see a floating white cloud and now can hear, unmistakably, the sound of someone chanting in Navajo. Something leaden turns in her stomach. "Shit," she says. She runs ahead, grabs the flashlight from Arnold, turns the light on, and sees the floating cloud turn into the white swatch on 'Abíní!'s back. 'Abini' is her grandmother's palomino, and the voice, her grandmother's.

She calls, "
Shinálí!
" and starts running toward the barking dogs, which explode with new vigor. "
Shinálí!
" She waves the yellow light back and forth out beyond the pony. Only three dogs, that's all she can see. Making all that noise. They're in triangular formation, the Biggses' mean shepherd with one blue eye, the dog that always finds her if she tries to run around her grandmother's farm, stands point, and the flashlight catches his teeth, blue and bared.

"Hey!" Arnold shouts behind her, and suddenly the dogs scatter, one yelping. Arnold has picked up rocks and is throwing them at the dogs.

She shines the light toward 'Abíní' and sees Ariana's other palamino, Ak'ah. Both are nervous, rearing their heads, pulling against the ropes that her little grandmother grips, standing between them, chattering and squinting fiercely into the light. The old farm dog, Denver, stands next to her, barking at Becky as if she were a stranger.

"
Shinálí,
what are you doing out here?" Becky says. Off in the darkness, the Biggses' dogs grumble. Her grandmother, just on the other side of the fence, doesn't answer or even acknowledge her. She's wearing the green bandanna that rarely leaves her head, a tiered skirt, and a sweatshirt that's at least three sizes too big—probably Delmar's. How did she manage to get ropes around the horses' necks? Becky pulls up the top strand of barbed wire, pushes the next down with her foot. "Go," she says, and Arnold steps carefully through.

"Ouch. Ow!"

She hears something rip, his shirt and probably the skin on his back, torn by a barb. She shines the light on her grandmother again. The horses pull against the old woman as she leans away from them, reaching for the ground with one hand. The horses keep yanking her back. She probably weighs ninety pounds. "Grandma, wait."

She once was tall, but she's no more than five-two now, shrinking every year. Her grandmother ignores her. But Denver now acts like he knows Becky. He walks over to her, tail wagging, licks her hand once.

Becky hands the light to Arnold and steps between the two horses, putting her hands on their quivering necks. They're both sweaty and hot, snorting. She pets them, saying, "Shh, shh." Her grandmother keeps reaching for something on the ground. When Arnold shines the light there, Becky sees her walking stick. Arnold picks it up and hands it to her. Becky tries to take the ropes, but her grandmother brusquely nudges her away, continuing her stream of talk. She jabs the ground with her stick, yanks the horses, and starts walking, the horses half following, half pulling away. "Speak English," Becky says softly, trying to take the ropes again, but her grandmother won't let her, so she falls in beside her. Arnold walks on the other side, shining the flashlight in front of them to show the sun-dried cracks in the land.

"What's she saying?" she asks Arnold.

"She's saying she doesn't need our help."

He looks over her grandmother's head at her. In the moonlight, she can see one eyebrow raised. Becky glares at him.

They trudge along, Becky and Arnold silent, her grandmother talking to the air. They're a good quarter-mile from the house, which is just a dark smudge against the navy sky. The sand is crusted and packed but softens a little as they get closer to the river. Here wild grass grows in patches. The sheep will crop it close when they come back, but now it reaches Becky's knees, and she keeps stumbling into it. It's stupid to walk through the desert at night in the summer, especially this close to the river, because on cool nights like this, when there's been no rain, rattlesnakes will make their way to the river. At the full moon she and her father used to go for a run but they always stuck to the road and never went near the river.

"Where's Luckyboy, Grandma?" Four of the horses are accounted for, Alice's two wayward roans and these two palominos, but where is Delmar's horse? Her grandmother stabs the ground.

The Biggses's dogs seem to have gone home to bed, and Denver has disappeared, too, having been relieved of guard duty. Behind them the horses crunch through the grass, breathing evenly again. They're crowding close, hurrying, as if going home were their idea. Ak'ah keeps sticking his head between her and her grandmother. She can feel his breath on her neck, a tickling warmth like the soft brush of horseflies. In summer the horseflies swarm the horses and their human riders, digging under hair and skin, stinging.

"
Deesk 'aaz,
" Arnold says.

"What?" Becky says.

"Just talking about the weather," he says.

He looks amused, his eyes shining in the moonlight. Her grandmother continues preaching to the ground.

Arnold says, "
Dichin nishli.
"

"What'd you say?"

"That I'm hungry." She sees his purple teeth.

Her grandmother chants. Arnold continues to talk, sounding very agreeable, very conversational. Her grandmother stops speaking and begins to laugh, a high wheezy cackle. She stops walking, too, causing Ak'ah to try to shoulder ahead.

Arnold says something else, and her grandmother answers in Navajo. He says, "
'Aoo',
" and her grandmother hands Arnold 'Abíní's rope.

They continue walking. And chatting. Becky stares into the leaves of the cottonwood next to the house. If she half closes her eyes, the leaves catching the moonlight look like a hundred little mirrors. They seem to flash but probably do not because there is no breeze. She is the one moving, not they. But she doesn't feel that she moves. These days, even when she runs she feels like she's standing still.

They stop in front of the house, a wood and adobe flat-roof that her grandfather built. Without a word to her but continuing her conversation with Arnold, her grandmother hands Becky Ak'ah's rope. Arnold, smiling, hands her 'Abini"s. Arnold is having a real good time. Her grandmother picks up a lantern that she had left shuttered next to the door. She has no electricity on the farm. She wants it that way. The Biggses have electricity, but her grandmother likes old-style in everything.