Yellowcake (16 page)

Alice nods slowly. She puts her glasses back on. She links the index fingers of both hands into her jeans pockets and gazes at the section of porch floor between her and Becky.

Becky closes her eyes. She could be Alice's twin, and she wouldn't be as beautiful. Alice's beauty comes as much from her attitude and bearing as from her features. People don't mess with her aunt. Once when Alice was driving Becky and Delmar to their grandmother's farm, they had an accident. A gray blur, dog or coyote, slunk across the highway just as they were passing the Turquoise Bar at Hogback. Alice swerved, missed the blur, but nicked the back of some white guy's car, causing him to spin down the highway, while they plunged headlong into the ditch at the side of the road. The white guy's car nosed into the guardrail, collapsing the front and causing the airbag to inflate. Alice bumped her head on the steering wheel and cut her forehead, blood flowing into her eyes. Becky and Delmar were okay. The white guy was okay but angry, yelling at the people who came out of the bar that they better get a state trooper, he knew his rights. A Navajo cop showed up first, but the guy wouldn't let anybody move until a white state trooper came and tried to put Alice in the back of his car—the white guy screaming about the goddamned drunk Indians—but Alice did not get into the back of his car, and she did not scream at anybody, just said over and over again to the Navajo cop, as if the white one were invisible, "There was something in the road, I swerved to miss it," as the blood streamed down her face. Becky will never forget her voice and her poise, which seemed to cocoon and protect them.

"Well," Alice says, "he has to see his parole officer on Friday. Can you wait to call the police until then?"

Becky opens her eyes.

"If he doesn't show up for his appointment," Alice says, "his parole officer will contact the police. He knows."

"Is there a number where I can reach you if I need to?"

Alice looks at the wrangler. He stares at the ground. "I'll call you. Sorry for the trouble, Becky. We'll be on the road. I'll call next weekend."

After they've gone, Becky's mother goes in to start dinner. Her father pats the swing next to him, and she goes to sit with him.

"Are you going to No Fat?" He means the mesa where they run. Years ago she'd asked him why they call it No Fat. "Because everybody who runs there gets skinny. Look at you," he'd said.

"Too tired."

"You go yesterday?"

"Yeah."

"How far?"

"To the lake."

His eyes shine. "That's good."

"I'm thinking of registering for that fifty-mile race at Hopi."

He nods. She ran her first race with him when she was twelve, a 10K, and they've run two marathons together. He has only one rule: finish, even if it means walking, even crawling. But she holds her own. She came in twenty-sixth in her age group at the Green Valley marathon.

"Delmar should fix my car," her father says.

"Delmar doesn't know how to fix cars. All he knows how to do is steal them."

He laughs, wheezing, then coughing and sputtering. "That's true, that's true." He doubles over, gasping for breath. She holds his shoulders, gripping them hard, trying to help him hold himself together. When he can speak again, he says, "You tell him when he comes back he can have my car. You need your truck."

"You need your car," she says softly.

He smiles, closing his eyes, shaking his head, saying nothing.

O
N MONDAY
Dr. Callahan calls again. Rosy is outside watering the lawn. Ryland sees the doctor's name on the caller ID. He watches Rosy through the kitchen window while he lets the answering machine pick up and listens to the doctor say he left a message on Saturday and is calling again, that he really needs to talk to Ryland. He gives his number, gives it again, and Rosy is on her way into the house when Ryland deletes the call.

"A million things to do," she's saying. "Bone tired. Did it all last night in my sleep."

His heart is racing. The kitchen table is covered with chocolate truffles in red and blue wrappers, bags of cashews, rolls of breath mints. Maggie and George are coming over this afternoon to pack the stuff in colorful pouches that they'll leave for the out-of-town wedding guests in their hotel rooms. Rosy laid it all out last night and told him what it was about. He sits down at the table, taking the portable phone with him.

"Got to give this house a thorough cleaning before the hordes descend," she says. "I can't believe it's less than a month away. Edna, bless her heart, asked if she could send her maid down to help. That woman is an angel."

The phone rings. He jumps and answers. Rosy's eyes widen. He stares at her, watching her eyebrows knit, then hands the phone to her. He didn't recognize the voice. But after her first few words, he knows it's somebody from the uranium coalition. "Yes, I saw the announcement in the paper. You might be surprised. I think there's interest." They're having a meeting this Friday night at the Unitarian church. It's in today's paper. Rosy read the article to him and asked him to go. Nobody expects him, she said, but she wishes he would, because, she said, nobody knows as much about this stuff as he, and he said, "Good."

"Good what?" she said.

"Good that nobody expects me." Over his dead body would he help those people.

He runs his fingertip over the cellophane truffle wrapper. He pulls the candy toward him, then another piece, then another, arranging them in a line. He's on double doses of Demerol. His back's killing him.

When she hangs up, she puts the phone in its cradle on the desk. He waits until she leaves the room, then gets up and puts it on the table within his reach.

"Honey," Rosy says, coming back into the kitchen, "you're underfoot. Why don't you go to the living room and watch a movie or something. You look like hell," she says. "Didn't you sleep?"

"Slept good," he says.

"Well, you look like hell," she says.

"Thank you very much."

She puts her hand on his shoulder. He can feel her looking at him. He gets up and pulls his cart into the living room, where clothing has taken over. His good black suit is laid out on his chair, just a cloth socket waiting to be filled. And Rosy's new suit, which she has informed him is melon, not orange, lies on the sofa, with melon shoes on the floor. Billowy, lacy stuff, flower-girl headgear, covers the other furniture. More clothing and billowy stuff is scattered through the rest of the rooms. Rosy has been doing inventory, checking for rips or stains just in case something needs to be sent to the cleaners.

He walks over to his chair, picks up his suit pants, folds them, puts them on the footstool, sits down, picks up the remote, then puts it down again and stands back up.

He walks into the bathroom, stares at himself in the mirror, at the tiny blue veins under his chapped skin. He walks out of the bathroom, moves into the living room, and picks up the remote. He turns the TV on, watches it for a minute, puts the remote down, turns, and walks into his bedroom. She is running water in the kitchen. In less than a month the house will be full of family and strangers here for the wedding. He walks to the bed, sits, then stands again.

He looks at the dials and lights on his oxygen tank. He filled the tank this morning when he got up. The red light is dull, the green bright. He's used a quarter of a tank. He pivots, closes the bedroom door against the sound of the ringing telephone. Even when there isn't a wedding in the works, the phone rings several dozen times a day. She's popular, his wife. He walks to the window and stares at the cars moving up and down Cactus Drive. Across the street a young woman he doesn't know kneels in the grass digging tufted sprouts of dandelions. Digging in, pulling out, digging in.

 

In the afternoon, when Maggie and George come over to assemble party favors, Ryland sits with them at the table, his stomach numb from too much Demerol, the phone on the table next to him.

He is the main topic of discussion. Will he be able to walk Maggie down the aisle? "The question isn't," Maggie tells him, "whether or not you're giving me away." She pulls the two ends of a truffle wrapper, and the chocolate ball drops to the table. "He doesn't want to give me away," she says to George. She pops the ball in her mouth.

"That's not what he said," George says. "He said you have a choice."

"Eddy is not giving me away. Eddy is not my father." Chocolate squeezes around the corners of her mouth.

"Honey," Rosy says, "it's going to be a long Mass. Your father's going to be more comfortable if he can sit in the back by the door. He can't sit through the whole Mass anymore."

"Well, what about this," Maggie says. "What if he walks me down the aisle. Then he can go around to the side and go to the back of the church and sit there, and then when it comes time to stand up for me, he can come back up. What about that?"

"What does he do with his oxygen tank?" Rosy asks.

"What do you mean? He does what he always does. He pulls it in the cart."

"His oxygen tank embarrasses him," Rosy says. "He doesn't want everybody in the church looking at him pulling an oxygen tank."

"Daddy," she says, "will you dance with me at the reception? Daddy taught me how to waltz," she tells George.

"Honey, that was a long time ago," Rosy says.

"If I get the band to play 'Goodnight, Irene,' will you dance with me? That's his favorite," she tells George. She sings, "Sometimes I live in the country, sometimes I live in the town..."

The phone rings. Ryland picks it up. "Sometimes I take a great notion," Maggie sings. It's Lily on the phone. He breathes. "To jump in the river and drown..."

"That's a wedding song?" George says.

He hands the receiver to Rosy. Lily's voice squeaks through the receiver as it crosses the table.

He gets up, pulls his oxygen cart into the living room, stares at his footstool reflected in the TV screen.

He walks into the bedroom, closing the door behind him, and lies on the bed. He needs to calm down. He wonders if he's still efficient—if his mind is.
The man who considers himself unfit for combat flying or who is considered unfit by the flight surgeon or the unit commander is obviously inefficient.
He once had to make a tough decision concerning his copilot, Larry English. English had set up his pup tent, flap open, and was sitting half in and half out of the tent cleaning his rifle. It began to rain. Larry kept cleaning. The gun got wet. Larry got wet, his front half. His back stayed dry. For a long time, hours. It happened in a split second. Between unloading and opening the chamber, an efficient man lost his mind.

So. He needs to strategize. What does he know? He knows the test was positive. They don't call if it's negative. He doesn't mind knowing. He's glad to know. He just doesn't know why anybody else has to know. He doesn't want the family to have a conversation about it. What to do with Daddy.

His mother died in summer, and his father did, too. He always thought he would die in summer, but summer is coming to an end. His mother had been in the ground a year by the time he got back from the war.

His father died of lung cancer.

Today is Monday. Wednesday they'll refill his Xanax prescription. That was Rosy's idea. She went looking for the bottle, and Ryland told her he'd finished it. She's thinking about him. His nerves. He's grateful for this. He is. He listens to her muffled voice. Though he can't understand the words, he can tell from her voice that she's discussing all the ins and outs of the wedding. She loves planning and replanning, then doing and discussing it for days once something is over.

She is a good woman, Rosy. Sometimes it's hard to remember that. Hard to see the woman he married in the chatty old gal. No, that's not true. She's always been chatty. And tough. That's what he fell in love with. He remembers their first date. She called him, actually. He was just back from Guam. "Wouldn't you and a buddy of yours like to take the Walsh girls fishing?"

They took Sam's old Chevy, which handled the dirt road up to Electra Lake pretty good. They got a bag of worms at the tackle and bait, had it on the floor between the girls in the back, and Rosy said, he remembers this clearly: "The first time I ever saw a worm, I ate it."

"She lies," Lily had said.

"Just because you didn't see me doesn't mean I didn't."

"Nobody saw her," Lily told them.

"Just because nobody saw me doesn't mean I didn't."

Rosy kicked her shoes off. She had long, talented toes that she spread and wiggled for his benefit, he remembers that. She had personality. He knew prettier girls, but none who kept his eye like she did.

He said, "Let's see you eat one, then."

She just looked at the scenery and smiled.

So he said, "Who we going to believe? You or the fence post?"

"Believe the fence post, I don't care." She turned her nose up.

"You know, Sam," he said, "the lady in the back seat's got an upturned nose. Not like a pig, though. A little like a bulldog but not like a pig."

Rosy put her finger to the tip and pushed that nose between her eyes.

Later, in the boat, they broke open a watermelon the girls had brought and poured whiskey into it. They speared the melon with Ryland's army knife and fed some to the fish. He and Sam went swimming in their skivs, and the girls stripped down to their undies, which was a pretty sight, that pile of women's clothing there in the bottom of the boat.

He closes his eyes. He doesn't know how he's going to keep Rosy from finding out about the test. He really hopes he can. It would completely spoil her excitement about the wedding, and she's handling a lot already. He should show his gratitude. Something she'd never expect—his gratitude. He'll get Maggie in on the act. He'll give his wife a present or something. When everybody's giving presents, he should give one to Rosy. He doesn't know what. He'll let Maggie decide. He'll write the check.

R
OSY IS IN HIS ROOM
opening the curtains when he wakes up on Wednesday. It's eight o'clock and she's dressed to go out. She tells him that she needs to pick up Maggie's thank-you notes from the printer, and she needs to see about the nuts because nuts aren't covered in the caterer's arrangements and everybody agrees little dishes of nuts are just the thing for the tables at the reception. Maggie's afraid there won't be enough food.