Yellowcake

by Ann Cummins

"You know how to shoot?"

  "Yeah. So don't try to rob us. Are you here alone?"

  "Yeah. I just got through teaching." He frowns at her.

  "Sit with us," Arnold says, stepping up to the window to buy their tickets.

  Harrison watches her, and she thinks that her face must be the color of a pomegranate. "I don't want to interrupt your date," he says.

  "It's not a date."

  "Yeah, we're just friends. Really bad friends," Arnold says. "Popcorn?" Harrison says no, and Arnold says, "Thank God."

  Later Arnold will say that she should always trust him in movies and men, because he could not have picked better: a gloriously gruesome film guaranteed to wrench her from her worries. And Harrison turns out to be a man who is serious about the theater, who will sit, uncomplaining, in the front row, who does not gross them out by eating, though Arnold could have forgiven this during the cannibal scenes, and who has the good sense not to say a word throughout the film.

  When the lights come up, Arnold says, "Mmm, mmm. Hungry?"

  "Actually, yeah," Harrison says. "I could go for a burger."

  This, too, pleases Arnold, Becky knows. He hates opinionating right after a movie. He takes movies the way he takes meals. When they're over, it's time to move on, though he will expect Becky to get every little movie reference he makes for weeks afterward and will, in fact, remember every cutaway, every rocky or seamless transition.

  "Take this one," Arnold says, nudging her. "She hardly ate any of her dinner. I ate hers and mine."

  "How come?"

  "A convicted felon stole her truck and she's depressed."

  "Don't talk about me like I'm not here," she says.

  "A convicted felon stole her truck that she gave him the keys to."

  Harrison laughs. "Really?"

  "It was my cousin."

  "You have a convicted felon cousin?"

  "Delmar Atcitty," Arnold says.

  "No way. Delmar's your cousin?"

  "You know him?"

  "We used to party together. Back in my partying days. Before I became a teacher." He nudges her. Throughout the movie, his shoulder had been pressed against hers. "And I used to buy car parts from him. So he's out of jail?"

  "He's out and on the lam," Arnold says in his Eastwood accent. "I'm out of here." Before Becky can stop him, Arnold gives a little wave and heads up the aisle.

  "There goes my ride," she says.

  "Hmm. We'll have to see about that." He jerks his head toward the exit.

  They go to Chef Bernie's. She sits across from him in a lime green booth with ripped upholstery. She is no longer miserable; she's nervous. He makes her feel a little the way Delmar makes her feel, like her parts don't quite connect, like disaster could be around any corner. Like she is fully awake, the world tumbling toward her.

  "So Delmar's your cousin," Harrison says. He leans forward, his laced fingers in the middle of the table. He wears the wedding ring. "You look like his mom."

  "That's what people say."

  "How come I never met you?"

  "I grew up in Fruitland, not Shiprock."

  "He speaks Dine. Delmar."

  "I know. Weird, huh. He's mixed-blood and I'm full."

  She leans forward, touching the wedding ring, his finger immediately hooking hers. "Why do you wear your wedding ring on this finger?" she says.

  He laughs. "I told you I'm not married."

  "Did you?"

  He wraps his fingers through hers, their palms touching, but then the food comes and they unlace, burger and fries for him, just fries for her.

  "It's my mom's. She pawned it, then I bought it." He doctors his hamburger—mustard, catsup, and onions—then seems to reconsider, scraping them off.

  "She didn't want it?"

  "Mom's MIA. Haven't seen her in years. Booze." He takes a bite.

  "Oh. Sorry."

  He shrugs.

  "Your dad?"

  "He's a weaver. Maybe you heard of him. Carl Zahnee?"

  Carlee. The beneficiary. "No."

  She squeezes catsup on her plate, dips a fry in, tries to eat. It goes down hard, sticking in her throat.

  "What do you have against learning the language?"

  "Nothing," she says. "I just wasn't raised that way. I've never even lived on the reservation. I mean I go there. My nalí's there."

  "I know her. Ariana, right?"

  "'Aoo'."

  He smiles, probably at her accent. He chews, hamburger pouching his cheek.

  "I just feel self-conscious when I try to speak it. Anyway, I'm sure I'll never live there. There's no reason for me to learn it."

  "Oh man, everybody's got to learn it. We all do. It's going away. We're going away. We're on our last days. If our generation doesn't do something about bringing the language back, and the ceremonies, who will?" He tells her he's building a house in a part of the reservation that has no water and no electricity. His grandmother's land. His father moved there after his mother left. Harrison's going to start spending his summers there. He'll have sheep, chickens, dogs, and horses. He's saving to move back permanently. He wants to start a school of his own, one that won't use public or tribal funds, cut through everybody's bureaucratic bullshit. He wishes the reservation would close its borders and become a sovereign nation, all bad news to her.

  "I better not fall for you, Harrison Zahnee," she says. "We could never get along."

  His eyes widen. "Are you falling for me?"

  "I bet a lot of girls fall for you. All your students and the wife on the farm."

  He smiles. Says nothing. She shakes her head and pushes the fries away. "You know why I really didn't sign up for your class? I don't want you grading me."

  This makes him laugh and choke. He gulps water.

  Later he gives her a B. They're sitting in his truck, C3PO barking on the porch, her mother peeking out the window, just like she used to when Becky was in high school, and Becky is reaching for the door when his hand grips her neck, pulls her over, and he kisses her, and he doesn't taste like onions. "You get a B," he says.

  "Just a B?"

  "I always give Bs to students with promise."

  "Oh, give me a break."

  "For incentive. Maybe you'll get an A tomorrow."

  "Maybe I'll grade you."

  "It's a date. I'll see you at the meeting. If I get back in time. I have to go to Albuquerque."

  "Oh, God," she says. That meeting. She promised to speak.

  "You'll do good," he says. "You got real good English." He laughs his funny airy laugh.

  21

  BECAUSE ROSY WON'T stop badgering her, Lily drives down to the meeting Friday night. Rosy told her she had rallied the forces, insisting that the whole family come and show their support. "If I cannot count on my own family to come to these things, who can I count on?" Rosy had said.

  Lily hates to drive south of the Colorado border. Unlike most of the people in Durango, she never goes down to shop in Farmington, which is much cheaper. She's always afraid she's going to run into that woman or her son, Sam's boy.

  She arrives a little after seven and stands in the doorway at the side entrance, scanning the room. She's surprised at the crowd. Though it's a large room—a slick hardwood floor and glossy white walls—the air inside is stuffy and smelly, acrid sweat mixed with the chemical sweetness of perfume and hairspray. On the other side of the room, a man is opening large windows near the ceiling, using a hook on a pole. Six ceiling fans rotate in lazy circles, stirring the hot air.

  Lily scans the Indian people—about half of those in the room, clustered in the middle and back rows, with only a few Anglos sitting among them. There are a few old men, hair bundled and bound in string, turquoise bolos strung loosely over their shirts, and old women with scarves tied under their chins, wearing, despite the heat, long-sleeved velveteen blouses and ankle-length tiered skirts. Lily watches as they greet each other, touching but not really shaking hands. Rosy told her, "You don't shake a Navajo's hand
. You hold it. If you haven't seen the person for a long time, you hold it for minutes, and if you saw the person yesterday, you hold it briefly." How did Rosy learn these things?

  The younger people wear jeans and T-shirts. Lily looks for the boy's orange hair, a beacon, but she sees no orange-haired Indians, and she doesn't recognize his mother's face among the middle-aged women. She'll know the face when she sees it again, of that she's certain. Once Sam took Lily to the Shiprock rodeo. She sat on splintery old bleachers watching Indian cowboys rope calves, twisting the animals' necks so severely it looked like the necks would break. She didn't care for it, but she liked the barrel racing. She admired a woman who seemed to glide around the barrels, dipping in and out, her long braid perfectly stationary on her back while she moved with the horse so beautifully, nearly touching, nearly tipping the barrels, a woman whose strong legs seemed to melt into the obstacles without disturbing them. She was the woman Sam had been sleeping with for five years and whose three-year-old child was probably in the stands. Sam had put Lily in the stands to watch. Perverse.

  Children are screaming, running up and down the aisles. "Aunt Lily," a shrill voice yells. She looks toward the very back of the room, where Maggie and Sue are organizing a refreshment table and waving to her. Eight-year-old Sandi, in shorts and a halter top, walks briskly toward her. "We're on KP. Grandma says so."

  "Does she?"

  Sandi pivots, walking back, a little soldier. Rosy is bustling around the front of the room, acting as if she's in charge, stopping to talk to this person and that, a pink-headed little man in khakis and cotton shirt, a round woman in a flowered summer dress fanning herself with a newspaper. Rosy wears a nice white pantsuit with a concha belt at the waist, turquoise nuggets around her neck. People used to say Lily and Rosy looked alike, but Rosy has gotten stocky over the years. She's always gone up and down in her weight. She put on pounds with the babies and had a hard time taking them off, but now her weight has crept up again, not just in her hips, where she has always gained first, but in her shoulders and face. She'd better take care. She's a short woman. If she keeps going that way, she'll be short and square. And she's let her hair go gray, wears it like a steel helmet. Fred told Lily she looks ten years younger than she is. She's been bleaching her hair for years, which Rosy thinks is deceptive. "We're not young, why pretend?" But why not?

  "Everybody please find a seat," a man says through the microphone.

  Lily goes to the refreshment table. "It's so hot," she says.

  "The air conditioner's broken," Maggie says.

  Maggie has pulled her black hair into a ponytail, the curls frizzy and wet with sweat. Maggie's got way more thick and curly hair than anybody deserves.

  "How's the wedding coming?" Lily says.

  Maggie rolls her eyes. "Why didn't we just elope?"

  "I'm a flower girl," Pooh says.

  "We all are," Sandi says. "Not just you."

  "Well, that's a lot of flowers," Lily says.

  "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," the man at the microphone says, and he says his name, Bill Lowry. He begins laying out the plan for the evening. He motions to two microphones, one at the head of the room, one in the middle saying that anybody who wants to will have a chance to speak.

  It's going to be a long night. Lily stands with her back to the wall, next to Maggie, who doesn't seem to notice that the meeting has started. She's whispering about the wedding. Lily tries to be polite and listen, though Maggie's chatter makes her nervous. It's rude talking while people are stepping up to the microphone, like talking in church or at the movies.

  "Worried about Teri," Maggie whispers. "She's awful little."

  Lily smiles and nods.

  "Didn't have anything blue, so guess what Sue gave me." Maggie is wearing a sleeveless green shell that she now pulls away from her neck, showing Lily a star sapphire on a silver chain. "God, I love it so much I can't stop wearing it."

  "Be careful you don't lose it," Lily says, then bites her tongue. Rosy calls Lily walking gloom. "Your first thought is always of disaster, Lily," she likes to say.

  Fred doesn't say that, though. He calls her "pretty lady" and doesn't seem to get tired of hearing her stories. "Tell me something I don't know, Lil," he'll say, and she'll tell him whatever comes into her head, which always seems to entertain him. Suddenly she wants to scoot out of this meeting, get in her car, drive north to Fred's house on Rainbow Road, where she had spent the night last night. She wants to snuggle against the pillow of his flesh, which had felt momentarily suffocating when he fell asleep on top of her, but that moment passed, the moments pass, and in all, the moments with Fred have been good. They spent the weekend together in his lovely country home, which he designed himself. He had found an old barn south of Durango, just a stone's throw from the Animas, and converted it into a roomy, luxurious home. A talented man, and he can cook. He made her blintzes Sunday morning for breakfast. In the evening they sat on his deck and watched a pair of eagles hunting.

  "I can't stop eating," Maggie's whispering. "I better stop. You don't want to know how much my dress cost. I've put on five pounds since then. Don't let me eat one of those," she says, nodding at a plate of Pecan Sandies on the refreshment table in front of them.

  "Okay," Lily whispers.

  An old woman has stepped up to the middle microphone. She is speaking in Navajo and not translating. This is one of the things that used to annoy Lily when she lived on the reservation. These people will talk behind your back. In the trading post, where she hardly ever shopped—she far preferred to drive into town if she needed groceries, but on those rare days and occasionally weeks when it snowed or rained, she had to shop at the trading post—it never failed, the cashiers would hold their conversations in Navajo. Lily knows one word, bilagáana, white, and that's how she always knew they were talking about her. She assumes every Indian in town knew about Sam and that woman.

  "Wanted to get dresses the bridesmaids could wear after the wedding; can't please them," Maggie whispers.

  They watch Rosy step up to the mike, and Lily finally holds up her hand. Maggie stops talking.

  Rosy introduces herself. "My husband, Ryland Mahoney, first started in the uranium business in Durango shortly after the war." Her voice seems to boomerang around the room, quieting everybody. She is so confident. In any room it's always possible to find Rosy, for her voice carries a kind of jubilance into corners, and people always gravitate to her. It isn't fair. Lily has always felt like Rosy's sidekick. Yet she finds she can't go for many days without talking to her sister. She relies on Rosy's confidence.

  "He worked his way up to foreman. Altogether Ryland was in the business for twenty-five years." She tells them that he's been sick for the last six, that she has stacks and stacks of medical records. "I want to tell you all right now, if you have a relative who's sick, start keeping a paper trail. I am sure that eventually we will win this fight, but we know that only the miners who had medical records got any compensation. We hope to change that. We know many of you have lost relatives who couldn't afford to go to doctors or who went to medicine men instead. We must find a way for everybody to be compensated. I just want you to know that a paper trail can make things a little easier.

  "This is the kind of evidence a medical record can provide. I'm going to read just a few summaries. Here's one from three years ago: 'Mr. Mahoney is a debilitated gentleman with multiple medical problems including severe COPD and emphysema who is oxygen dependent due to past history of exposure to uranium and coal dust.' Here's another: 'The lungs remain very hyperin-flated with chronic areas of linear scarring and emphysema.' Not only are his lungs damaged, but his esophagus has deteriorated, so he has difficulty swallowing solid food. We believe his kidneys have been damaged. His ankles sometimes swell so badly that the skin splits. I know many of you have relatives with multiple organ damage, too. If there is anybody in the audience who would like my help in contacting doctors, I would be more than happy. Hindsight is twenty-twe
nty."

  She goes on, flipping through the years of Ryland's illness. Looking after him has made Rosy almost as housebound as he now. She used to be able to get out and exercise. That's the reason for the weight.

  When she stops and steps away from the microphone, there is silence in the room. After a while, people begin to applaud, not by any means a wild clapping, but a metronomic slapping like marching feet.

  Now a young woman steps up. She speaks loudly, the microphone shrieking. "My name is Susan Ray. I was born for the Tódích'í'nii clan and from the Táchii'nii Clan. Shinálí, my grandmother, was born over there, on the mesa above the San Juan, just south of the old mill in Shiprock. She had two daughters and a son, but my auntie and my uncle have passed on. My auntie was forty-six years old when she passed. She had a little boy who was born with a tumor the size of a baseball at the base of his skull. They took the tumor out, but the tumors come back. He's six years old. He's had three operations. He can't move the fingers on his left hand, and he falls a lot. His balance is bad."

  "My God," Lily says. She folds her arms over her stomach. Little children chase each other in the open space between the refreshment table and the chairs.

  "I hope you can do something for the people who live around there. That land belongs to my family, but we can't live there anymore." The young woman sits down. The metronomic clapping goes on for a minute, the crowd warming to it, the noise gathering its own momentum.

  Rosy begins making her way back toward Lily and Maggie. A tall, handsome young man at the front of the room stops her. He's wearing a cowboy hat, summer cotton shirt, and jeans. He leans down, listening. The emcee begins announcing the next speaker, and Rosy continues down the side aisle, pausing to talk—Lily stops breathing—to an orange-haired Indian standing in the doorway.

  22

  BECKY IS THIRSTY. She forgot to bring water with her to this meeting. She had left work early and gone for a long run to calm her nerves, but she ran too long in the heat. She knows better. The line between relaxation and exhaustion is a fine one, and she didn't drink enough water. Her head is thick, throbbing, and her tongue seems bloated; it fills her mouth.