Yellowcake

by Ann Cummins

  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.

  19

  ROSY 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.

  "Honey, please answer the phone and take messages," she says. "I don't want to lose half the day returning calls." He says he will and promises to meet and greet the mailman and the UPS guy, too—especially the UPS guy, because he's new and won't leave packages on the porch like the mail guy will, and Rosy doesn't have time to go chasing after the UPS guy.

  He gets up, bathes and shaves, and has Demerol for breakfast. He has the house to himself. Good. For a while, he's not going to worry about the doctor calling. Ryland stayed close to the phone all day Tuesday, but the doctor didn't call.

  Sometime between nine and ten, the Demerol kicks in, and he falls asleep in his chair. He wakes to the sound of pounding on the door and gets up to greet the UPS man, who has five boxes. The mailman has been and gone, leaving three more boxes on the porch.

  Ryland adds the eight to the mountain of presents in the corner of the living room. Some are wrapped in wedding paper; some are still packed in cardboard because Rosy hasn't gotten around to opening all of them.

  The Demerol has left him tired. He far prefers Xanax because it puts him to sleep but he doesn't wake up in a fog. He stands staring at the blank TV. He decides that even though he's tired, he's going to surprise Rosy and open the mail for her.

  He sits down on the floor, his back propped against the couch. The first package is from his sister Frieda. He cuts the packing tape with his pocketknife and lifts out a large square box, little pink Styrofoam peanuts clinging to it. The box, wrapped in nice silver paper with bells, is as light as air. He brushes the peanuts from the present, a dozen or so flying onto his lap and the floor, straightens the crushed silver bow, and digs through the peanuts for the card, which says MARGARET AND GEORGE in Frieda's block print. His sister's alphabet has always had corners, even on the round letters. He sees Frieda in her printing, a serious child. He always liked her. When she was a little girl, her face was constantly pinched in a worried frown. He remembers his dad teasing a smile out of her by pulling coins from her ears, doing fancy magic tricks. He remembers his dad teasing smiles from all of them at the dinner table when his mom's back was turned—a clown pulling his cheeks into hangdog jowls, rolling his eyes back, letting his tongue hang loose in an idiot drool; he'd have them in fits, while his mom, fussing at the stove, would say, "What? What?"

  Ryland puts the present at the edge of the neatly aligned pile and puts the peanuts back in the packing box. He will do this job right. He will leave no messes.

  He likes Frieda, but he's glad she and her family won't be coming to the wedding. One thing about his side of the family, he can count on them not to call, for the most part, and not to come, which is a relief. He likes looking at pictures of them. He likes hearing news of them through Rosy. He doesn't particularly want to see them—doesn't particularly want to see anybody, relative or not. Wouldn't mind seeing Sam.

  One of the presents is from Lily. This surprises Ryland. He would have thought Lily would come to the wedding and bring her present along. Rosy's family generally shows up for things.

  He slits through the packing tape, folds back the cardboard flaps on the box, and stares at something that has no wrapping. No silver paper, no crushed bows. Notebooks. Tied together with twine.
He lifts the books out of the box, stares at them for a good minute before he recognizes them as his.

  Five old green-backed logbooks from the mill and a manila envelope. He sees, in his own printed hand, his name on a white label glued to the middle of the book. Below his name, Uranium Corporation of America, and below that the year, 1964. He pulls the two ends of the twine, unleashing the bow, and opens one, thumbing quickly from the first yellowed page to the last.

  The ink has faded to a fuzzy old blue. He lets the blue dots organize themselves into words and stares at his summary of that year:

  Processed 132,803.20 tons of ore.

  He picks up a manual titled Operations:

  Milling process: a two-stage sulfuric acid leaching circuit, a countercurrent washing circuit, and a uranium and vanadium solvent-extraction circuit. Tailings from the washing circuit and yellowcake filtrates to be pumped to the tailings disposal areas and raffinate from the solvent-extraction circuit to evaporate in separate holding ponds.

  He flips to the summary for 1965:

  In addition to the principal ore mineral, carnotite, the mill processed small quantities of the upgraded slimes.

  Tailings pile 400 feet from the edge of the terrace escarpment. Escarpment, 10 feet of silty to sandy gravel with cobbles overlying Mancos Shale.

  He closes the book. Five of them. Up through 1969. But then, where are the others? If Lily has—had ...

  How did Lily get his logbooks?

  He puts the logbooks aside, picks up the manila envelope, a heavy eleven-by-fourteen thing. He rips the top and pulls out a bound copy of reports. He'd found these reports himself when the AEC and NRC started hounding him. Thought he needed to be prepared. Studies about toxicity levels at other processing plants around the country and in Europe, about levels of radiation poisoning, what was safe and what wasn't. The verdict was mixed, that's what he'd found out. One scientist would say no level was safe, the next would say the risk was minimal.

  She'll use these for her meeting. That's what this is about. Rosy also has a couple of boxes of his medical records. She's going to read from those at this meeting on Friday, which is a fundraising event; bigwigs from the bank and the lawyer's office and God knows who else will be there—Rosy's counting on it. He's heard her say so on the phone a dozen times in the last three days.

  He doesn't need to go to the meeting. He's already the starring attraction.

  He reaches back to the couch and pushes himself up. Notebooks slip from his lap to the floor. He stands wobbling, feeling the pins and needles shoot from the soles of his feet into his calves, then pulls his cart into the kitchen.

  He stares at the blinking answering machine. The number 2 lights up, disappears, lights up. Did the phone ring? He presses the ANSWER button. The first message is from Rosy, telling him he promised to answer the phone. She's checking in.

  The second is from the doctor. "Ryland, I left; a couple of messages. I hate to leave this kind of message on the answering machine, but I don't want you to worry." Something happened to the lung tissue samples. They got contaminated somewhere between the doctor's office and the laboratory, and Dr. Callahan regrets to say that Ryland will have to come in and get tested again. "Ryland, I'm sure sorry about this, and of course there'll be no charge. I wanted to get you in early this week because I'm going on vacation tomorrow, but we'll wait until I get back. No hurry."

  And that's it. Ryland laughs.

  He deletes the messages, turns, walks back into the living room, stares at the pile of presents, and remembers what he meant to do. He returns to the kitchen. There's a black address book on the table by the phone. He flips to the B's, runs his finger down a list of Behans, most of them crossed out—old numbers for Lily and a faded one in pencil for Sam. He picks up the phone and dials the number for the marina where Sam docks his boat. The man doesn't have a phone. The best Ryland can do is leave a message and hope Sam calls back.

  When Rosy comes home, she is fit to be tied. He promised to answer the phone, and she called, and he didn't answer! She starts to lay into Ryland until she sees what a nice job he did of opening the mail, breaking down the cardboard boxes, and putting all the peanuts in a garbage bag, and then she is all smiles and compliments. Ryland doesn't look at her. He looks at the TV. In its reflection, he watches her walk to the stash. He left the logbooks neatly stacked on the top of the pile. He watches her back as she takes in Lily's presents. She turns and looks at him. He glances away.

  She'll do whatever she damn well pleases. Always has. She pushes, and she pushes, and she pushes. He doesn't push. He doesn't care what she does.

  He will not touch those logbooks again. Ever. They are not his. They are hers.

  The TV. Hers. And the remote is hers. He's done with TV.

  He struggles out of his chair, pulls his oxygen tank into the bedroom, closes the door behind him, stands looking at the bed, which he didn't make. It's been made, though. Sheets tucked in, bedspread wrinkle free.

  There's a tap on the door, it opens, and she comes in. She sets an orange prescription bottle down on the dresser. "Here you go," she says. She smiles at him. Lips two-toned, just a pale nothing on the inside where the lipstick has worn away but lined red around the rims. He smiles back. She says, "Lunch?"

  "Think I'll lie down a minute."

  "Before lunch?" she says.

  "Think so."

  She leans toward him, her eyes narrow, peering at his chin and cheeks. She cannot, it seems, lift her eyes from the middle of his face to his eyes. Finally she says, "Just let me know when you get hungry."

  "Okay," he says.

  She leaves the door ajar, but as soon as he hears her in the kitchen again, he closes it, twisting the knob first so she won't hear the latch click.

  He picks up the bottle of Xanax. He walks over to the bed, pushing his tank ahead of him, and sits on the edge of the bed. He puts the bottle of Xanax next to the bottle of Demerol on the nightstand. He sees that his hand is shaking, and he wants to cut it off. He twists, pulling his legs up on the bed, lying back against the pillows. The room is full of sunshine, hot yellow light.

  He can sleep in hot yellow light, though he knows this is unnatural. He has no control over when and where he sleeps, not anymore. One ought to sleep in dark rooms. One ought to know when one is asleep and when one is awake. Sometimes she will tell him that he has been sleeping in his chair when he is certain he's been awake.

  Once he slept for twenty-four hours straight and didn't know it. This was before he married her. Just after they'd taken Palau, or thought they had. Got a furlough to Guam. He and some of the other guys were going to get some chow, and he said he'd just take a short nap. Then he got up and told them he was ready to go, and they said, "That was yesterday." All the guys grinning, saying what a good sleeper he was.

  He sits up, swings his legs off the bed, looks at the two bottles on the nightstand, one thin, the other a little fatter. He picks them up, pulls his oxygen tank to the door, opening it quietly, walks down the hall to the bathroom, closes the door, sits on the edge of the tub, twists the cap off the bottle of Demerol, and empties the bottle into the toilet. He tosses the empty into the trash can, presses down, and twists the cap on the Xanax bottle. He looks in. A full bottle, thirty pills. He can't see the bottom. He holds it over the toilet, tilts. Stops. Turns the bottle upright and listens to the pills inside shake.

  He doesn't know why he shouldn't have a little relief. He shakes a couple out, pops them in his mouth, swallows.

  20

  THE WEEK AT WORK is a disaster. In the VW, Becky's commute takes thirty-six minutes on a good day, twenty-six minutes longer than it should, and once there she starts making mistakes. She's more worried about Delmar now than mad at him. Her mother has been worrying about him, and Delia's worry is contagious. Wednesday they call the state patrol to see if a gray Nissan pickup has been in any accidents. No. The police ask her if she wants to report the truck stolen or missing. No. She figures she'll know one
way or another on Friday, because if Delmar doesn't show for his appointment, her father is on the list of people to be called.

  Her sleep is ragged. She falls heavily into dreams that she has to claw out of, waking every hour on the hour with images of her truck on fire, in a ditch, going over a cliff ... She feels constantly on the verge of tears, and on Thursday afternoon, when her manager jokingly tells her they'd be better off paying her not to come in, considering the time she's lost making mistakes and then fixing them, she does cry, to her horror, then makes a fast dash to the door. Arnold abandons his post and follows her to the parking lot.

  "We're going out tonight," he says. "Dinner and a movie. No argument."

  Arnold picks her up a little after six and takes her to Albóndi-gas. He ends up eating her enchiladas along with his carnitas, and he doesn't even complain when she doesn't hold up her end of the conversation. He orders her a beer and makes her drink it, saying, "Take your medicine," which is exactly how it tastes. It gives her a headache.

  The movie is Silence of the Lambs. They're standing in line to buy tickets when somebody behind her says, "Shhht," and blows on her neck, and she thinks instantly, Delmar, because that's what he does, just like a backward reservation Indian; she whirls around, saying, "You jerk," and finds herself face to face with Harrison.

  He smiles. "You didn't sign up for my class."

  "No. Well, I thought about it, but..."

  "You didn't either."

  "I did." She laughs. "This is Arnold."

  "Oh. The scary guy from the bank. Yá'át'éhéii." They shake hands. "Do they let you keep bullets in your gun?"

  "'Aoo'."