Yellowcake (36 page)

When they turn onto her block, she sees that the house is dark. She always leaves the porch light on. "Drive past," she says. They scan the block, looking for Sam's truck, which is not parked in front.

"If he's in there he would've triggered the alarm," Fred says.

"I didn't turn the light off. Did you?"

"Maybe the alarm company did."

"Maybe. Let's see what we can see."

They park a few houses away and walk down the dark sidewalk, waking the neighborhood dogs, who send out an alarm. On the front porch, they stand listening, looking at the restraining order taped to the front door.

"Let's go around to the side," she whispers. "Shh!"

"You shh. This is ridiculous," he says.

She says nothing. They creep around the house, opening the side gate, unlock the glass patio door, which slides noiselessly open. Once inside, they have a minute to disarm the alarm. She can't see its blinking red light from here. Fred says he'll turn it off, and she says, "Shhh."

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.

S
AM 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 north 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.