Yellowcake (7 page)

"Are you sure?" she said. She wanted to come.

"Yes." He was sure.

The doctor is speaking in a tone that makes Ryland feel as if he's a very young child. "This is the villain," he says, holding up the rubber contraption he'll use to take the tissue sample. He waves it in front of Ryland's face so that he doesn't have to lift his head from the pillow. The first test of the afternoon: Can Ryland control his damn neck muscles and keep his head on the pillow? He feels as if he is drowning, and they haven't even started yet.

"Now, are you comfortable?" Dr. Callahan says.

Rae Freitag has put his oxygen tank on a shelf that pulls out from the examination table, and now she hands him the tube. Overhead, the plastic case covering the fluorescent lights is completely clean. Admirable. Very admirable.

Rae gave him a shot to relax him, and now she is inserting an IV into his arm. Before they started, she asked him if he needed the toilet, and he did, and now he needs it again, but she is holding his arm and telling him to be still. His arm is shaking. He's afraid his bladder is going to burst. He doesn't want to wet himself. Not in front of Rae. She's a nice woman.

"What we're going to do," she is telling him, "is pass this tube through your nose. This other tube here is oxygen. So you're going to be getting plenty of air. You don't need to worry about that. Okay?

"Now Ryland, when the tube passes through your vocal cords, you may feel like you can't catch your breath. Don't worry about that. Everybody feels that, and after a minute it'll pass."

Dr. Callahan stands to his right, wearing a green mask. "If you get at all worried that you can't breathe, Ryland," he says, "you just raise your hand and I'll stop whatever I'm doing and let you catch your breath."

"What if I need to cough?" Ryland says.

"That's not going to happen. That's what this IV is all about. It administers medicine that relieves the need to cough. You're getting a good dose of steroid here, buddy." Above the green mask, behind the speckled glasses, the doctor's eyes smile. "Ryland, you're in a doctor's office. If you get into trouble, where better? Now you can help by taking slow, shallow breaths through your mouth. Can you do that?"

Ryland breathes.

"You ready?"

He feels the tube when it enters. The other tube, with oxygen, is cold, this one hot. He feels it scraping into the soft upper part of his palate.

"Try not to talk while the tube is in your lungs. Talking can make you hoarse or give you a sore throat after the procedure."

Ryland blinks. He thinks about pissing into his helmet when he was in the service. Crammed in a foxhole with a dozen other men. Nobody wanted to sit in piss. They pissed into their helmets, but he doesn't have a helmet. He can't trust his eyes not to tear.

"You may feel pressure or tugging when the specimens are taken. How you doing? Remember, raise your hand if you want me to stop."

He remembers what he forgot to ask the doctor. He wanted to ask exactly how long the tube was going to be in his lungs, and how he would know when it got there, and how long it took to get there, and how long he needed to hold his breath, because he could hold it quite a while. It was a trick he used to stay awake in the foxhole, and on the graveyard shift, and when he was a boy and needed to stay awake until everybody else in the house was asleep. He could hold it for four or five minutes in his prime, but he isn't in his prime now, so he needs to know what's expected of him. He tries to raise his hand. He is raising it. He's pretty sure he is raising it. The green mask is in the way. He can't see a thing because the doctor's damn green mask is bearing down.

 

Afterward, when Ryland is dressed again, the doctor comes back in and tells him they'll send the samples down to Albuquerque. Might take a week, maybe longer, to get the results. "If there's anything, anything at all, I'll call you. But if you don't hear from us, don't worry. In this case, no news is good news. I'll have the results sent to you. Okay?"

"Okay."

"So when's the big day?"

Ryland stares at him.

"The wedding."

"Oh. Soon. Six weeks."

"Little Maggie. I remember when she was born." Ryland smiles, nods, and swallows, his throat burning where the instrument had scraped.

S
AM STANDS JUST
inside the door of Molina's Fish and Tackle holding two large grocery bags and blinking while his eyes adjust to the dim room. He puts the bags down next to five others he's brought in. Molina's wife, Mary, is behind the cash register, and Molina, a trim man with a thin mustache and thick, wavy brown hair, is talking to a customer. He nods at Sam, Sam at him. It's a tiny room, stinky with fish, the floor gummy. Bait bags of ready-to-go live bait cover most of the counter where Molina stands. The customer, a willowy man in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, rubber thongs on his feet, a Yankees hat on his head, towers over him.

Sam walks along the edge of the room to the fly bins and sees that the cubby where Molina keeps his fancy flies is empty. Two teenage girls crowd in, looking in the cubbies. He moves on to the frozen cases, reading labels on boxes he can barely see through the frosty glass: Mullet, Squid, Pilchards, Ballyhoo, Spanish Sardines, Cigar Minnows, Chum.

"My friend Sam might disagree with you,
verdad,
Sam?" Molina calls. "What'd you bring me?" Sam walks back to the door, picks up two bags, walks over to the counter, and puts them on top of it. "People around here have been having luck with Sam's ties.
Buenas dias, señor. Donde estabas
?" Molina says, stretching his hand out.

"Moley," Sam says, shaking it.

He returns to the door, picks up two more bags. Behind him, Molina clicks his tongue.

"
Hola,
Sam," Mary says.

"Mary." Mary could be her husband's twin, they look so much alike. They're nearly the same height, though Mary is fleshier. Her hair is a longer version of her husband's, thick and wavy, and both have mild brown eyes.

"What'd you bring me,
viejo?
" Molina says again. "
Pesces largos?
" He grins. Sam scoots a bag toward him, and he opens it, pulling out one of the fake mackerels. "We can't keep these in stock," Molina says to his customer. "Not this month, not next. Try one of these, my man. Test your luck."

"Wouldn't use artificial bait," the man says.

"Artificial's starting to take off," Molina says. "Works, and it's not so smelly."

"Live bait and a Carolina rig," the man says. "Can't miss. Did you ever try that?" the man asks Sam. He pulls a snapshot out of his shirt pocket and hands it to Sam. Molina smiles, ducks his head, and occupies himself with Sam's flies. Molina spends his weekends listening to the weekend fishermen tell their stories and show pictures of their catches. "People don't understand the Carolina rig," the man says. "They don't trust it. Pure ignorance."

Sam stares at a picture of this man standing in a boat, holding what looks like a good-sized bass attached to a hook and line that must be this Carolina rig. The man in the photo stares solemnly at the camera's eye. Sam nods and hands the photo back. He watches Molina count his flies by twos.

"Carolina rig with live ballyhoo."

"I count twenty-five,
verdad,
Sam?" Molina says.

"Twenty-five," Sam says.

"Fifty bucks," Molina says.

"Working's one thing," the man says. "Working better is another."

"What else you got?" Molina says, nodding at Sam's other bag.

Sam pushes it across the counter and reaches for two more bags on the floor. Molina opens the first and looks in.

"Yes, indeed, I was up on the Potomac with a friend of mine when this picture was taken. Have you ever fished up there?"

"What I'm going to do with these?" Molina says. He pulls out a handful of the white flies Sam tied last fall, getting ready for Alice before she didn't come. Sam has named these Florida Ghosts. When the mackerel start running, a little white fly on the top of the water will bring them in. He's seen Alice land twenty in an hour. Schools of mackerel start running in November and December. "How many you got here, Sam?" He drops the handful on the counter.

"Hundred."

"Hundred? What I'm going to do with them?" He shakes his head, gathers the flies up again, and drops them back in the bag. "Can't use them, Sam. In a month or two, yes." He pushes the bag toward Sam.

Sam pushes it back, and pushes another alongside it. "Wets," he says. "Blue Dun, Black Gnat, Coral Moth, Mirth. Red-winged Moth, Silver Speeder ... What you want, Moley? You don't see it here, I'll do it special."

Molina peers into the four bags on the counter. "Been busy, eh,
tío?
Well, I wish I could. The
pesces largos
are the ones that are moving right now, Sam. I could use maybe another twenty-five. As for these others..." He pushes the bags back across the counter. "Mary, give me seventy-five dollars. We'll advance you on the next batch."

Mary rings up a sale. Sam watches her take money from the register, shuffling bills, counting them, crossing the room. "Oh, these are pretty. Aren't these pretty," she says to the customer. She picks up one of Sam's big flies and offers him the money, but Sam doesn't take the bills. She puts them on the counter.

"Tell you what, Moley," Sam says. "I'm going to make you a deal on these flies. I've got five hundred dollars' worth here. I'll give you all of them for three hundred, plus I'll make another twenty-five for the wide-mouths." He pushes the bags back across the counter.

Molina clicks his tongue and shakes his head. He pushes the bags back. "You know the story. No storage and not much ready cash. Just write me out a receipt for seventy-five dollars."

Sam folds his arms. He doesn't touch the bags. He's nodding and feels cold in the sticky room. He eyes Molina, and Molina's eyes shift down. Moley's got cash in a safe in his hurricane shelter, lots of it. Sam has seen it. Moley knows that. They got drunk together in that shelter once, and Moley showed him the safe.

"Okay, I guess I'll have the ballyhoo," the customer says, picking up a bag of bait. He puts it in front of Molina on the counter, pushing one of Sam's bags out of the way. The man steps in front of Sam, looking into the glass display case, tapping his finger on the glass. "So that's a Marlin II reel? Can I see it?"

"You know the score, Sam," Molina says. "Your flies sell good. I want to sell them for you. I got no storage space." His eyes shift away.

"Three fifty," Sam says. "You just missed out on my good deal. Still, it's a savings, Mole. Three hundred and fifty right now today. If you want to see me again."

"What do you mean by that?"

Sam nods. "Known you a good while, Jorge."

Molina closes his eyes and shakes his head. "You haven't been coming around regular, Samuelito. You bring me some in a couple of weeks, I'll be ready."

"Now that's a dual-mode, isn't it? Can I just take a look at that?" the customer says, and Sam turns around, walks out of the room, leaving the flies and the money behind.

He crosses the parking lot quickly, pulling his flask from his back pocket, taking a drink, then another. He opens the truck door and gets behind the wheel, slams the door, turns the key, puts the truck in gear, starts to back up, then stops. He stares at the open door. He says, "No sirree, no sirree," just under his breath. He turns the key off and folds his arms. After a few minutes, Mary steps out on the porch and looks at him. She's holding the cash and a bag. She starts to step down but stops when Sam shakes his head, a precise back and forth. He says, "No sirree." He takes a drink. Mary shrugs, hesitates, then turns and steps back in.

Cars and trucks come and go in the parking lot. The day is sweltering, and the air in the pickup is rank, a little like rotting meat. A mosquito plays in and out of the window, buzzing around Sam's right ear, but he pays it no attention. He opens his glove compartment, where he keeps a receipt book and pen. He takes the book and writes Jorge's name and the date at the top of a receipt, and below that $350, and below that Cash. He tears the receipt out, lays it on the dash, opens the glove compartment, puts the book and pen back in. He takes a drink.

The man in the Hawaiian shirt comes out carrying his bait bag. He glances at Sam and quickly away. Sam can see Mary through the open door, standing in the shadow where she probably thinks he can't see her. Other customers come and go.

Forty-five minutes later, Jorge comes out. He stands on the porch, glowering at Sam, shaking his head. He steps off the porch and starts toward Sam's truck. Halfway across the parking lot, he stops. He shakes his head slowly. Sam nods. Molina's cheeks fill with air, then deflate. Finally he turns and walks around the store toward the backyard, where the hurricane shelter is. Sam nods, keeping his right foot pressed hard on the brake. When Molina comes back around the corner, his hands are stuffed in his pockets. He walks to the driver's side door. Through the open window, he hands Sam a wad of bills. He says,"
Diablo.
"

Sam hands him the receipt, stuffs the bills into his pocket, and turns the truck key.

"Don't you want to count it?" Jorge says.

"I trust you," Sam says.

Molina shakes his head. "Don't do this again, Sam. Come in regular. Okay?"

Sam eyeballs him.

"
Ladrón,
" Molina says, and spits on the ground.

Sam says, "I don't know what that means, Moley, but I'm going to take it as a compliment."

T
UESDAY NIGHT,
Rosy called Lily and asked her to drive out to their storage unit to look for old files from the mill. They had rented the unit together in Durango before moving to Shiprock because the company houses were a fraction the size of their mountain homes and they couldn't stand to part with everything. Just before the Shiprock mill closed, Ryland had taken a file cabinet full of his personal files up to the storage unit. He turned everything else over to the company.

The unit is in a city of asphalt—rows and rows of padlocked cubes. Lily walks along the cement floor, Tom Jones singing, "It's not unusual to be loved by anyone," through the invisible speakers overhead. She inserts her key into the heavy-duty padlock on 1-12, unlocks it, slides the bolt, opens the door, steps inside, and switches on the light. She pulls the door shut behind her.