Yellowcake

by Ann Cummins

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  Copyright © 2007 by Ann Cummins

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce

  selections from this book, write to Permissions,

  Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South,

  New York, New York 10003.

  Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cummins, Ann.

  Yellowcake / Ann Cummins.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-26926-6

  ISBN-10: 0-618-26926-6

  1. Uranium miners—Health and hygiene—New

  Mexico—Fiction. 2. Family life—Fiction. 3. Navajo

  Indians—Fiction. 4. Conflict of generations—

  Fiction. 5. New Mexico—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.U657Y45 2007

  813'.6—dc22 2006023453

  Book design by Melissa Lotfy

  Printed in the United States of America

  MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Tell me what's the matter with the mill.

  MEMPHIS MINNIE

  For my mother,

  BARBARA CUMMINS

  In memory of

  my father,

  CYRIL PATRICK CUMMINS

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the supportive and inspiring readers who saw this book through many drafts: first and last, my husband, Steve Willis. Susan Canavan, editor extraordinaire. Tilly Warnock. Nancy Johnson, Ann Packer, Sarah Stone, Ron Nyren, Lisa Michaels, Vendela Vida, Cornelia Nixon, Julie Orringer, and Angela Pneuman. For their help with the Navajo language and medical details, Ellavina Tsosie Perkins and Warren Perkins. For putting up with me, my sisters and brothers, Mary, Tom, Steve, Trish, and, in spirit, Kathy. Georgia Briggs, whose stories have been a guide for many years. The Lannan Foundation for its generous support and haven in Marfa. The wonderful Jenny Bent.

  1

  THEY COME AT ten o'clock in the morning. Ryland's wife, Rosy, is at the fabric store with their daughter, Maggie, who's getting married next month. Ryland goes ahead and opens the door against his better judgment. He always opens the door when somebody rings, though he usually regrets it. He is not afraid of muggers. Muggers, he figures, will leave sooner rather than later. He's afraid of the neighbor lady, Mrs. Barron, who always leaves later, and the Mormon missionaries, who like to fight with his wife, they always leave later. And Pretty Boy across the street, old Hal Rivers, who waters his lawn in bikini swim trunks, parades young girls in and out, day in, day out, lady's man, though he has a gut and a little bald pate—still, the girls like him, which only goes to show that it's not the looks but the pocketbook. Old Hal stopping by every now and again to chew the fat terrifies him, though Ryland makes sure the man never knows but that he's welcome.

  This man and woman, though, Ryland doesn't recognize. He lets them in because of the young Navajo woman with them. She has to tell him who she is. Becky Atcitty.

  "You know my dad," she says.

  "You're not Becky Atcitty."

  "Yes I am."

  He stands for a minute and admires the young woman little Becky has become. He tells her that when he first met her she wasn't any bigger than a thumbnail. Now they sit across from him, three of them on the couch, and Becky begins telling him how Woody is sick.

  Ryland shakes his head. He likes Woody. "Your dad was a good worker. Every time somebody didn't show up for a shift at the mill, I'd call him and say, 'Woody, got a cup of joe with your name on it,' and your dad'd always say, 'Okay, then.'" Ryland looks over Becky's head out the front window to the ash tree in the yard. The leaves are green-white, dry. Rosy has hung plywood children in plywood swings, a boy and a girl, from the tree limbs. The children aren't swinging, though, because there's no hint of a breeze.

  "He has lung cancer," the woman with Becky says. Classy. Dressed like a TV news anchor in one of those boxy suits. Hair any color but natural—one of those poofed-up, clipped, and curled deals that hugs her head.

  "Your dad's a strong man," Ryland says to Becky. "Don't you worry." Becky is sitting between the man and the woman. The man is looking all around, beaming at the pictures on the wall. His hair is pulled back in a little ponytail. Skinny guy in jeans.

  Becky says, "We just think that maybe the mill workers should get some of the same benefits the miners got."

  "We're just at the beginning of this process, Mr. Mahoney," the woman says. "The mill workers like yourself and Mr. Atcitty are entitled ... Tell him about the air ventilation in the mills, Bill. Bill's a public interest lawyer—"

  "I don't have cancer."

  The woman stops. She blinks at him. He watches her eyes slide to the portable oxygen tank at his feet.

  "Of course not," she says. "We were wondering if you kept medical histories on your workers, and if by chance you still have..."

  "You people like something? I could put on some coffee. Rosy'll be home any minute. She's going to be mad if she sees Becky Atcitty here and I didn't give her anything."

  Becky says, "They think if you've got any records on Dad it might give us some place to start."

  "Mr. Mahoney," the woman says, "as I'm sure you know, we made great strides when the compensation act passed, but it does us no good if there's no way for victims to collect. The mill workers like yourself and Mr. Atcitty are entitled ... Bill, tell him about the-"

  "He doesn't have to tell me anything," Ryland says.

  The woman blinks again. She smiles.

  The lawyer gets up and walks over to the pictures on the wall. "Is this your family, Mr. Mahoney? Handsome family."

  Ryland stares at the man staring at his family.

  The woman says, "This is simply about workers who were continually exposed to toxic—"

  "Your daddy doesn't know you're here, does he." He peers at Becky, who leans back into the couch. They had a party when she was born. He brought cigars and cider to the mill. Sam Behan, his old chum, teased him. "During working hours, Ry?" Sam said, and Ryland said, "Who's the boss?" They all raised a glass and toasted this girl's birth.

  Ryland leans forward. The girl stares at something over his shoulder. He can't read her. Navajos. Never could read them. But her dad, Woody was a good man. Didn't truck with unions. When they wanted to bring the union in, Woody said he had a family to support. This Ryland knows for a fact.

  "Don't you worry about your dad," he says. "He's a strong man." He looks at the news anchor lady. Her eyes are as bright as a child's, and her grinning teeth are blue-white. Her hands, laced in a fist on her lap, are white, too, and the skin pulls so tight it looks like her knuckles are about to bust through.

  "One of the best men I know," Ryland says to her. "Woodrow Atcitty. This girl's dad."

  But Rosy catc
hes them as they're leaving. Now the four of them sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee. Ryland sits in his chair in the living room."...little chance the Navajo miners with legitimate claims can file. The red tape is prohibitive," the lawyer's saying.

  On the TV a fancy man is breaking eggs into a dish. The man uses one hand to break the eggs—egg in the palm of the hand, little tap, then presto! On the egg-breaking hand, the cook wears a Liberace ring. One of those rings that stretches from knuckle to fist.

  The lawyer says they've only just begun to organize. He wants to have community meetings. He wants to educate and motivate.

  Moneygrubbing lawyer. Ryland would lay bets that guy's on the clock. The man isn't sitting at his kitchen table out of charity.

  Liberace says, "Whisk it up good." He's making a confection. Ryland watches him stir sugar into eggs.

  Rosy wants them to know about Ryland's handkerchiefs. "All those years that he worked in the uranium mill, his handkerchiefs were always stained yellow from mucus he blew out of his nose. I have many questions and no answers."

  "We all have questions," the lawyer says. "Maybe you'd like to join us next week. We're identifying key people in the region who might form a planning committee."

  "Sure," Rosy says. "Any day but Tuesday." She says something about a doctor's appointment Tuesday. Ryland strains to hear. He hits the mute button on the channel changer. She's saying he's got some sort of test scheduled.

  "What test?" he calls out.

  The kitchen goes silent. Ryland can feel them looking at each other. Then Rosy yells, "I told you about it. We scheduled this a month ago, Ryland." He stares at the thick confection as Liberace pours it into a bowl. Now he hears a chair skidding on the kitchen linoleum, and he watches his wife's reflection in the TV screen as she comes into the living room. "You agreed to it," she says quietly. She says that Dr. Callahan recommended this test, that they're going to take a little tissue from his lung. That's all. "It's just a precaution," she says, and he turns, giving her a look "It wasn't my idea," she hisses, her dark eyes fiery. He wonders about that. "Don't you remember?"

  He looks back at the TV. He can see her hands, tiny fists in the screen's reflection. He says, "You're my memory."

  2

  HE CAN'T QUARREL with them. They have their evidence. He's heard all about it for years, what uranium does to people. How could you quarrel? He's seen the pictures: pictures of tumors, pictures of soft-gummed miners whose teeth have fallen out. Maybe it was the uranium exposure. Maybe it was something else, like cigarettes. But nobody was complaining back then, not on payday. It isn't that he wants to pick a fight; it's that the quarrel is beside the point. He doesn't really know what the point is, just that the steady drone of moneygrubbers taking up this cause and that cause makes him sick.

  The thing is, it hasn't been a bad life. They've done okay.

  Sometimes he dreams he is there. In the heat of the crusher room, midafternoon when the shift was new. On a swing-shift afternoon in the uranium mill, sunlight bored hard through the smeared windows in the room where the crushers split yellow ore for the yellowcake they made. At a certain angle, in the heat of the day, golden dust filled the air above the conveyor belts, and entering the room was like entering an oven. You didn't want to go in. You didn't want to begin. Once there, though, the heat took you. You got the rhythm of the place. The clickety-click of the bearings in the conveyor belts, the steady pounding of the crushers grinding rock to bits, dust the texture of chalk. Mouth and nose coated. Entering the mill when the heat-seared walls and ceiling began to sweat was exhilarating, like moving hard into a fast hot wind.

  ***

  Of the eighteen men who moved down from Colorado to New Mexico with him in 1964 to operate the mill on the Navajo reservation, he supposes some have died. He doesn't know, doesn't keep track. Rosy keeps track. She reads him Christmas letters written by wives, wives who don't seem to die. It's always old Mr. So-and-So died, never Mrs., which seems a little like a conspiracy to Ryland, how the women just live on and on to write their Christmas obituary letters.

  Sam hasn't died, though. Against all odds, Sam Behan is still alive. Sam is his oldest friend; they are both sixty-five years old and have been friends for fifty-eight of those years. Sam called Ryland from Florida last week to tell him about a new kind of tin roof. It takes Ryland exactly twenty-two rings to get out of bed, put on his slippers and robe, start the portable oxygen tank rolling. He takes his time getting to the kitchen to answer because he knows Sam won't hang up. Drunk or not, when Sam wants to talk, he's a patient man. Sam had been watching TV in some Florida bar and saw a commercial about the roof. "Twice as durable, half the cost," Sam had said. Old Sam. Sitting in a bar, thinking about hard New Mexico winters and Ryland's roof. Though they talk once, sometimes twice a month, Ryland hasn't seen him in seventeen years, ever since the mill closed. Lily, Rosy's sister, divorced Sam that same year when she found out about Alice. Sam had been having an affair with a Navajo woman, Alice Atcitty, the entire time they were on the reservation. For Sam there always were women in the wings. It surprised Ryland, though, that he let one of them monkey up his marriage. Ryland and Sam had married Lily and Rosy Walsh in a joint ceremony three years after the war. They'd been best man for each other.

  It was Sam who went down to the reservation with him that first summer, before any of the workers or their families came, to get the place ready. They bached it, slept in sleeping bags on a bare floor in one of the company houses. Everything seemed pretty bleak then. None of the mill families wanted to move from Colorado to that godforsaken place. He and Sam drove down that first week into a sandstorm that didn't let up for three days. He remembers pulling hard against the wind, trying to get furniture moved into the mill office, remembers yelling himself hoarse, trying to mobilize the newly hired Navajo workers. Taking care of business despite the red eyes and grit and howling wind in the ears, then sitting with Sam late into the night, worrying.

  "You want this to work," Sam was fond of saying, "you're going to have to please the wives."

  The wives didn't want to move down from Durango. Who could blame them? They had been displeased from the moment whispers about the transfer south started circulating. Rosy had worried about it for a whole year while the company bigwigs worked out details with the tribe. She prayed the Indians wouldn't grant the lease, even though the move meant a huge promotion for Ryland. In Durango he was a shift foreman; in Shiprock he would be the mill foreman. The boss. Still, Rosy resisted right to the end. Before she ever saw the housing compound, the square block where they all lived, and then for the ten years she lived there, she called the place Camp, as if it were temporary, something you could break down and leave in the dead of night.

  They set out, he and Sam, to please the wives. He remembers sitting on the stoop of one of those empty houses, drinking whiskey, smoking cigarettes, thinking about it. Sam came up with the idea of planting grass. The housing compound—the whole village—was bald, the exact opposite of their Rocky Mountain homes, where they all had lawns and gardens and mountains outside their kitchen windows. Ryland had called Henry Ritter over in Cortez because Henry knew grass and he had grass. Henry advised Bermuda. Took good in alkaline soil. It took three days to lay five acres of Bermuda sod around the empty houses.

  That night, sitting on the stoop, two A.M., bone-tired and tipsy, Ryland felt good. He remembers it to this day, how fine it was to sit there with his friend, to smell wet grass and feel dampness in the desert air. The whole adventure felt possible that night. They had government contracts for uranium to fuel new power plants and for vanadium. Enough to keep them in work for a long while. They had the mill, the houses, and they had grass.

  "What do you think?" he asked Sam that night. "Will the wives be pleased?"

  For a long time Sam didn't say, just sat looking out. The stoop they sat on faced the highway, and beyond it the trading post, which was dark, and beyond that fields, and the river, and the mesa where the m
ill was. A barbed-wire fence between them and the highway. That night, and every night they'd been there, they'd seen a line of horses, a dozen or so, crippling along on the other side of the fence, their back legs hobbled, rumps twitching. Swaybacked and thick-bellied, not the scrawny desert horses. These were horses somebody owned, out taking their evening constitutional. At the compound cattle guard, they would stop, one at a time, and look in. Pretty things.

  Watching the horses pass, Sam said, "Just as soon as you fix one problem, here comes another. How long do you think those horses are going to stay on that side of the fence? You know what they see over here? Good grazing." Ryland laughed. "You think I'm kidding? You're going to have to secure the garbage cans. The wives," Sam said, "aren't going to want garbage all over their yards, and once those horses get in here to the grass, they're going to be spilling the garbage."

  "Sam, you're a comedian," Ryland said.

  Sam hunched into himself, his shoulders rolled, head sunk low, scowling at the world. "You know what?" he said, but then didn't say what. He shot up, pitched his cigarette, and ran across the field yelling, "Hai! Hai!" and the horses turned as a unit, bolting across the highway, away from Sam Behan's waving arms.

  3

  LILY BEHAN SITS at a picnic table in Durango's Santa Rita Park, twisting the gold posts in her ears and listening to the soft shush of the muddy Animas River behind her. Around and around the earrings go. She is waiting for Fred Steppe to bring groceries from the car. Half an hour ago, he'd knocked on her door and told her he had salami and champagne in his trunk. So today her new beau has arranged a surprise picnic, and yesterday ... Yesterday, while walking by Thorton's Jewelry, they stopped to admire the earrings in the window, and Fred went right in and bought these pearl studs.

  Lily is sixty-two. For the first time in her life, she has punctured earlobes. How long, she wonders, will it take Rosy to notice that the pearls in her ears are attached to posts, not clamps?