Yellowcake (21 page)

"We're all adults," he says. "I think Lily and Sam will behave themselves."

Sam raises his eyebrows. "You think?"

"You better, Samuel Behan. I'll have no trouble from you at Maggie's wedding."

"Rosy, you're just the same," Sam says. "Isn't she?"

"She's a whole lot worse," Ryland says.

"And he's a mule," Rosy says. "I wish you'd talk to him, Sam. We've been organizing, trying to do something for the mill workers. Woody Atcitty. You remember him?"

"Yeah. Sure."

"He's sick. Lung cancer."

Sam glances at Ryland. "I'm sorry to hear that."

"And he's not the only one. That was dangerous business we were all in. It
was,
Ryland. Don't look at me like that. You would think this one ..."—the back of Ryland's neck starts to burn—"...would want to do something for the old workers and their families, but," and now she looks at Sam, not him, her voice rising, "right now, we're just gathering material."

Sam meets his eyes and holds his gaze for a few seconds. He says, "I think I'll stay out of this one, Rosy."

"Oh, Samuel, they're just troubleshooting meetings to—"

"She makes trouble," Ryland says. "I try not to shoot her."

Sam grins. Rosy pivots, walking to the sink.

"You're staying with us, right, old man?" Ryland says.

Rosy's head jerks around, her eyes hard and bright. Ryland can see worry skitter through her. She doesn't know what to do with Sam. She doesn't know how to be with him since he broke Lily's heart. She thought Ryland should let the friendship go when the marriage busted up. She was mad at him when he wouldn't, but over the years, she's gotten used to their phone calls, used to Sam—as long as he stays three thousand miles away.

"If it's no trouble," Sam says.

Rosy smiles, but the worry line between her brows deepens. "No trouble at all," she says—with Rosy manners usually win—but then she says, "That dog!" venom in her voice.

"TGIF," Ryland says, winking at Sam, who is gazing at Rosy, his right eyebrow cocked in amused surprise. "We got us a little dog down by the cemetery who goes wild every Friday at this time."

"It's criminal the way those people let that dog go on and on," Rosy says.

"We suspect they're out getting drunk, celebrating the end of the week."

"Criminy," Sam says.

"Oh, you two," Rosy says, twisting her foot as if grinding out a cigarette.

 

In the evening, after supper, Sam pulls some of his hand-tied flies from a wrinkled grocery bag and dumps them on the kitchen table while Rosy noisily loads the dishwasher, clanging the dishes together. She's all worked up. Ryland knows she doesn't welcome a houseguest in the middle of the wedding preparations, especially not this one. He knows she's been turning it over and over in her head.

But after she finishes with the dishes, she goes into the sewing room, and Ryland can hear her fussing, pulling the sofa bed out, rummaging in the dresser drawers for clean sheets. Sam's flies are intricate, colorful bugs. Ryland plays with a pretty green item that looks like a dragonfly, flicking it back and forth on the table.

"The good thing about single-hook flies," Sam says, "is that I can find everything I need except the hooks right outside my door. I go scavenging along the beach and down at the nature preserve on the island."

"So you make a good living?"

"I do okay. Keep my overhead low. People are moving to artificial bait, especially for the big fish. These I call the Florida Ghost," he says. He pulls some white fluff from his bag. "Couple of months the mackerel will start running along the coast, and these'll bring them in. How're the trout this year?"

"Hell if I know. Lyle Terrano—you remember Lyle? In accounting?"

"Yeah."

"He brought us down some nice browns and a rainbow that he caught up near Creed this past spring, so I guess fishing's probably good in the headwaters, but the rivers have been low this summer."

"For trout flies, for the river trout, I like a blue-jay hackle and some gamecock. Gold pheasant for the tails. Actually, Ry, I thought I might tie a few flies special for the trout fishermen while I'm here, see if I can make a buck. Gas cost more than I ex
pected coming up. You think Rosy'll mind if I set up here in the kitchen?"

"No problem," Ryland says. "You need money?"

"Nah." Sam pours from his flask into his coffee cup. They listen to Rosy moving furniture in the sewing room. "What's up with her?" Sam says. "What she was saying about Woody and all."

"Same old rigmarole. Trying to stir things up, like always. She isn't happy unless she's got some kind of a cause. Funny thing how this stuff never goes away. They want to rewrite history in regards to the uranium business. One minute they're telling you the stuff'11 save the country, the next they're saying it'll kill us, and today's good news will be tomorrow's bad news, and then it'll all turn around again. What gets me are these people making a living off lawsuits." He tells Sam about the lawyer running the show. "Not that I'm saying we did everything right. I'm not even saying the business wasn't dangerous. It was. But look at you, buddy. You were up to your neck in the stuff, and you're doing fine, aren't you?"

"I guess."

"They, these lawyers, keep it stirred up. As far as I'm concerned, half the people creating a stir want compensation for getting old. We're not young. Things go wrong."

"Yeah, but Woody..."

"I know, I know. It isn't cut and dried."

"You seen Alice?"

Ryland pushes the plastic tube into his nose. "No. Why? She finally come to her senses and quit you?"

Rosy comes in with a folded towel and washcloth. "You're all set, Sam. I'll put these on your bed, and I cleared a towel rack for you." She picks up the portable phone and goes out to the porch swing, where she'll probably call Maggie to talk about Sam, the new kink in the wedding plans.

Sam flicks a Florida Ghost across to Ryland. "You know, why don't we go see Woody? Where is he? He was building a house in Fruitland when I left. Did he ever finish it?"

"So she finally quit you." Ryland grins. Sam shrugs. "Yeah. Let's go to Fruitland. See if we can find Woody." He shoots the fly back to Sam. "I know that's the Atcitty you'll be looking for."

 

It only happened once that Ryland rode shotgun while Sam chased a girl, and Alice Atcitty was that girl. They met her at the trading post the day after they drove down from Colorado. He got up to shave that morning and found Rosy hadn't remembered to pack razor blades. Sam's blades wouldn't fit his shaver, so they stopped at the trading post, and the girl at the cash register gave him little dainty blades for a Lady Schick.

"What am I supposed to do with these?" he asked her.

"That's all we've got." She wouldn't look at him. He thought she was lying. She'd dug the blades out from some box under the counter.

He stood there staring at her, and she stared at his chin. She was wearing a plaid cowboy shirt with pearl buttons, he remembers that, her hair one long tight braid. He remembers how her hair pulled her high forehead up into her scalp, the hair braided so tightly it looked like it hurt. He didn't know what to think. He wanted to go back behind the counter and look in the box. There was a line behind him at the counter, and Sam was at his elbow. He didn't want the blades, but he took out his wallet to pay and told her again what he wanted. She told him again that was all they had, but he could buy the shaver, too, if the blades didn't fit his, and she pulled up a dainty little Lady Schick shaver. The line behind him was three deep.

He almost walked out, but he had to shave. So he paid her, his ears and neck burning, seeing all at once that this was how it would be and regretting everything, the new mill that would bring revenue to the reservation and bringing his family here. Wanted to tell her he'd been all over the Pacific, met all kinds of people who were glad he was there and at least smiled when they cheated him. But he didn't say that. He said, "Thank you." She handed him the blades and shaver in a bag.

Sam, beside him, laughing.

They saw her again that weekend. They'd been listening to music wrangling down from the mesa just north of the housing compound, drums and a throbbing bass. They had a little to drink, whiskey before and after dinner, and Sam suggested they go find the music. It came from the Civic Center up on the mesa above Camp. They drove up there and threaded through a parking lot crowded with pickups, went into a dim square building that smelled like clay and sawdust and booze. All around him he heard the soft shushing of a language he didn't understand, and he felt like he was overseas and not in America at all. It was an agreeable feeling. A holiday, like they were on furlough. They stood on the edge of the dance floor, watching Indians dancing to country music, some fancy, fast dancing, different from the formal two-step he'd learned as a boy at Grange Hall dances, where stiff-legged couples would shuffle around the edges of the floor, each following the next like horses yoked to an invisible maypole. The center of the floor was always empty. But these people danced differently, kicking a leg out, dragging one behind, twirling into the center, then out.

She was there. She was not friendly. He saw her see them, and he noted her cool indifference. She was not a woman—a woman? She was a child. Sixteen, and Sam was thirty-eight, and so was he. She was not a girl to smile, not for men. She danced well, with lots of men, with girls and women. With the females she laughed, and they flung themselves wildly around. He couldn't stop watching her. She had that about her.

He remembers sitting in the truck after the dance. They'd been waiting to break into the stream of traffic when a young woman knocked on the truck window: "Hey, give us a ride." She was thin and small, hair tightly curled, her face a mask of makeup, eyes raccooned with smudged eye shadow. Behind her Alice. And leaning up against the bed of the truck, three other girls.

"Our car broke down," Raccoon said. The girls leaning against the truck were laughing.

They were flirting. All of them. He hadn't seen any harm. The wives would come soon enough.

"These girls need a ride," he told Sam.

"Tell 'em to hop in," Sam had said.

Three of them piled into the bed of the truck, and two sat up front, Raccoon and Alice. Alice next to him, the two girls nudging each other, laughing, talking in Navajo. He with his leg pressed tightly against hers, she staring straight ahead.

The next thing he knew, the sun was coming up and he and Sam were sitting dead center in the middle of nowhere, watching it rise. Later he wondered if the girls had had a strategy, if they'd huddled up and planned how they'd lure the white men into the desert and lose them.

"No, turn here. No,
here.
You missed it." The curly-headed one giving the directions, the ones in back hollering each time Sam hit a rut on one of those dirt roads.

Sam aimed for the ruts, and he met Sam's eyes over the girls' heads, grinning like a teenager. Both of them like teenagers.

She sat silent and prim, her leg in blue jeans solid against him. His hand on her knee. The urge to let it climb up her thigh.

Which he hadn't done. But Sam had, and not very long after that night. Ryland started seeing her in the parking lot at the mill, usually when Sam was coming off the graveyard shift and Ryland was just showing up for work. Ryland figured she spent more than a few of those shifts at the mill, against regulations. Those early mornings Sam would be slouched against the driver's door talking to her when Ryland drove up, and he'd nod to them, and she'd catch his eye, holding it for a few seconds, and he couldn't tell if it was mockery in her expression—it seemed a mixture of mockery and something else. Loneliness. He felt a little sorry for her—for any woman that would get hooked up with Sam. She stayed in the picture longer than any of the others. It surprised Ryland when Sam told him she wintered with him in Florida and had for all those years. Sam was usually a love-them-and-leave-them type—all but Lily, and he probably wouldn't have left her if she hadn't made so much noise when she found out about Alice. She'd gone door to door in Camp, demanding to know who knew what and when. Rosy went with her. Rosy had been so mad at him when it turned out she was the only wife in Camp who didn't know about Alice.

I
N ROSY'S LITTLE
sewing room that night, Sam feels brittle. He has felt odd since leaving the Gulf behind, a stone crab clawing his way inland against better instincts. He has lived so long by water it is strange not to hear the lick of it.

The room he's in is a small box. On the other side of the house, every so often, Ryland's wretched coughing rakes down the hall. The cough starts as a rattle and wheedles down to airlessness. It sets Sam's teeth on edge.

He sits on the sofa bed, legs stretched out, his bag of flies and tackle box next to him. He means to work tonight. Every day and every night since hitting the road, he has felt the pull of work, his hands itching for movement. He has been sleeping in truck stops, not sleeping much, a couple hours here and there, never stopping long. He has been looking forward to getting here so he can settle into it again.

The sheets Rosy put on the bed smell nauseatingly sweet—bottled scent. The curtains on the window are ruffled, tied in bows. The sewing machine table is a mess of wedding clothes.

There's a small TV perched on top of an old wooden dresser. He's been using the channel changer, flicking through the channels, lots and lots of channels. The only time Sam ever sees TV is when he's sitting in a bar.

He needs to work. He needs money. He had no idea how expensive it would be to drive that old gas-guzzler across the country. He has a hundred bucks left. He can't get back to Florida on that, plus he needs clothes. He hasn't bought new clothes in—he can't remember when. He'd been thinking about this on the road, about somehow getting new clothes before he sees Alice. On the boat it wasn't important. He likes his clothing worn and feeling like a second skin. But he's not on the boat now.