Yellowcake (29 page)

Sam shakes his head, smiling. The boy walks over to the pickup and gets in on the passenger's side, as Alice's mother moves over.

"I want Lily's money."

"Or?"

"Or I'll have you arrested."

Sam laughs. He starts walking toward the truck.

"Sam. I mean it."

"Have me arrested."

"Don't think I won't," Ryland says through clenched teeth.

Sam stops, turns, and they look at each other. "You do what you've got to do, Ryland."

His head aches. It's the lack of oxygen. He needs to get to it. Sam turns back toward the truck.

"Sam."

"What."

"We don't want you at the wedding."

Sam stops again but doesn't turn around. His head bows toward the ground. "You know why I'm up here, Ry? Woody died. I came to get my boy. I don't think I'd be making the wedding anyway. I figure we'll be burying Woody that day."

 

Edna's large living room seems to undulate. Furniture blooms from its center—bold, thin-skinned chairs and chaises without arms or edges but with rolling lips top and bottom. The couches and chairs are organized around a low black table that seems to Ryland to be miles from the walls, which are decorated with metal wall hangings. Everywhere, pillows seem to crawl with color, bright tropical flowers, tropical birds. The floor is red clay.

"Mister, you look good," Edna says.

"No I don't," he says.

"You look good to me," she says, leading him to a chair, handing him champagne. She looks pieced together, hair a patchy metallic red, little mangled coils with bits of bald shining through, two rouge dots on cheeks that have lost their roundness, streaking into creased folds of skin. "I have always told your wife she married a good-looking man."

The vise squeezing his chest hasn't loosened. It's distracting. He finds he has to concentrate to understand what people are saying.

Rosy sits in the middle of a purple chaise opposite him. Her clothes seem to have shrunk. The fabric of her green pantsuit stretches over her middle, and the shoulders pull up toward her chin.

A young Mexican woman wearing a black and white server's outfit comes through a door that must lead to the kitchen. She begins to tour the room with cocktail napkins and a platter full of little pigs in blankets and tiny pies with what looks like spinach in them. When Ryland gets a whiff, his stomach turns.

Father Liam's voice booms, telling everybody how happy he is to be here. "Doesn't Maggie look good? Here's to the bride."

The grandkids scream, running up and down the halls. Five halls branch off the main room, three to the west side of the house, two to the east. In some other room—the kitchen?—somebody is saying Sam's name. Ryland leans back in his chair, looking at a thin metal structure mounted on the western wall. Something that looks like a boxy man faces a smaller version of himself; the miniature doesn't have the edges of a face or body, just the hint of them.

"So you sold Edna this house," Father Liam is saying to Sue.

"Got two more pending," she says.

"Sue, your daughters are taking over Mrs. Friedan's house," Eddy says.

"They're your daughters tonight, Ed."

People—first the Mexican girl, then Maggie—keep sticking the pigs in blankets in front of Ryland. Rosy's face looks like it's made of ice and if she stops smiling her lips will melt.

"I miss having children around," Edna is saying. "Now I remember, was it Maggie? Twirling the baton. Do you remember, Rosy, the little girls and their batons in Camp, running from house to house, putting on shows for us? We had a nice life, didn't we? A nice little neighborhood."

"You ought to see it now, Edna. The houses are falling down. We've got pictures."

"Don't show me any pictures. I don't want to see any pictures of falling-down houses. It was a lucky life for me. Me, I was lucky in bingo and lucky in love."

"Edna, how can you say that? How many husbands have you buried?"

"Five. Each one the love of my life. Here's to you, Miss Maggie and Mr. George. May you find your luck."

"And long life."

Ryland holds the handle of his oxygen tank to push himself up, watches the black dots shoot from the center of his eyes out into the room, where they dive into color that is blurry now. He steers around the furniture. George's mother's voice floats up to him, "And I fell right through the ice," the priest booming, "A miracle." "We have lots of baby pictures," Eddy is saying, "Mags crying in every one." From the back of the house, a child's piercing laughing scream—"You kids! Stop it." Ryland winds around people he doesn't know, George's people, and he nods at their chins when they try to speak to him.

The room has no corners, Ryland notices. All of the corners are rounded, and the walls have many alcoves. He puts one foot in front of the other, moving to an alcove with a display of knives, where he stands swaying, touching the alcove's edge, the adobe cool and soothing. Old relics. Knives and swords. Fancy knives, some with jeweled handles. They put him in mind of another time, another world. He saw a man knifed in the throat when he was in the military. Early on in their campaign against the Japanese. He was one foxhole over, and in the dead of night, somebody crawled through the dark and slipped a knife from point to hilt through a man's throat. Left the thing there. It was Ryland who pulled the knife out. He can remember the feel of the handle, solid and smooth like a good kitchen knife.

Behind him, he hears the whispered names: Woody, Sam. They think he can't hear. They're exchanging news.

Edna is next to him now, saying, "Ryland, would you like to wash up? Let me show you." She takes his arm and leads him away. He can hear the scraping of his shoes as he walks. Pick your feet up, soldier. In a barely audible voice, Rosy is telling George's people who Woody was.

They go down a narrow hall. To their right is a wall, to their left glass, and on the other side of the glass a tiled patio opens to the sky. Holes have been cut into the tile, where various types of cactus have been planted. In the center a huge prickly pear has dropped its fruit, and the fruit, he sees, has pruned up and rotted. The plant shouldn't grow at this altitude. Should it? The patio must have a humidifier and temperature control.

"Too bad about Woody," Edna says.

"One of the best men I know. Knew."

She opens a door, and he goes into a bathroom.

The back side of the door is mirror. The skin under his eyes is thick and puffy, the whites pinkish, his cheeks blue.

He reaches into his shirt pocket for the pill he put there.

But there is no pill. He wanted to put one there, but he couldn't because he doesn't know where they are.

He steps away from the mirror, turning his back on it.

This room is full of reflections. The entire wall above and below the counter with two sinks is mirror. The floor is the same red clay as the rest of the house. There are levels to this room, three steps leading up to a tiled platform and a tub as big as a small wading pool. The wall behind the tub: mirror.

The commode is tucked into a little nook, away from the rest of the room and surrounded by thick, sweet-smelling green plants.

The nook walls are sea green, no mirrors. The tucked-in place looks out onto an enclosed cactus garden, a miniature of the larger, more public one.

A pleasant and private place for a commode, pretty view.

Ryland crosses to it and sits on the closed lid, looking into the garden, where a gray lizard is quickly disappearing as darkness deepens. Do lizards see color? Is he himself disappearing here in the middle of the sweet-smelling plants?

"Grandpa," one of the kids yells. "Time to eat. Grandpa, Grandpa, Grandpa."

He doesn't want to eat. But he has to eat. But he doesn't want to get up. But he has to. His kidneys have been tugging for half an hour. The lizard has slunk away, gone off to look for a warm place to spend the night.

He stands, lifting the toilet lid and seat, unzipping, propping himself up by anchoring one hand against the wall, listening to the pitiful sound of his water kerplunking, and without warning, he is coughing, convulsing with it, dropping his cock, which continues to fire wild and spray the sea green wall with piss. He spews spit all around, covers his mouth with the back of his arm. "Grandpa!" one of the kids yells, and knocks on the door. He stands gasping, trying to blink the haze out of his eyes.

 

He sits in a straight-backed chair against a wall in a room tight with people. A long table nearly fills the room, his family and George's crowding around it—the table a shiny Christmas red. A thick-lipped, eyeless salmon has been laid out on a bed of greens. Goopy swarms of red and black fish eggs nestle in the greens. Edna, loading her plate, says, "You sure you want to go through with this?" and George says, "Kill us now." Rosy says, "There'll be no killing on my watch."

There are cheeses on the table, and fruit, and some potato-looking thing, and a turkey, its inside stuffed with something orange.

Maggie stands in front of him. She's saying something he can't quite understand and handing him a box wrapped in silver. "Hey, everybody," she says. She picks up her champagne glass and clinks it with a fork. "Daddy has something he wants to say." They all wait. He looks at the box, then at Maggie, her eyes bright and eager. She says, "Mom, Daddy got you a wedding present."

"Isn't that nice," the priest says.

Ryland stares at the silver box. He hands it back to Maggie, who hands it to Rosy, who at first doesn't look like she wants to take it. "Honey," she says. "How nice. Whatever it is, you spent too much."

They all watch her open it, and they ooh and pass it around. Maggie holds it under Ryland's nose. She's joking about how it's a surprise to him, too, but his checkbook has a bigger surprise in store. He stares at a clear blue stone in a silver setting on a silver chain, a tiny four-point star shining like the star of Bethlehem in the middle of the stone. Rosy comes over and kisses him on the cheek.

"It's a smaller version of the one Sue gave me, Mom."

A child stands next to him, her hand on his knee, looking into the box. For the life of him, he can't remember her name. He knows he loves this child, but just now her name has flown from his head.

I
T WAS STILL LIGHT
Thursday evening when Becky came in from her run, and her mother asked her to go check on her father, who was in the hogan. She stopped to change out of her running shoes. She believes that was the minute he died, because he was still quite warm.

She found him lying next to the wood stove in the middle of the round room, stretched out on his back, eyes closed, hands fisted at his sides, feet pointing west. She was not afraid to touch him. She had been anticipating this moment for so long. Among the mix of emotions that swept through her, she felt relief that the struggle was over. She knelt next to him, uncurling his still warm fingers one by one, the only part of his body that betrayed any struggle at the end. She was not sorry that he had faced death alone because she knew that was what he had wanted, but she was sorry for herself and, oddly, mad at him, not at
him
but at the clenched hands, a gesture that left her out so completely. For a while she held his hand, just as he had held hers when she was a little girl. She tried to pray but had no words, only relief and, behind it, the urge to blow something up. She felt the heat of him leaving. Before he was completely cold, she straightened his arms by his sides and covered him head to ankles with his Pendleton blanket, which was not long enough to cover all of him. Then she went into the house and told her mother.

The struggle, though, is not over. Becky's mother began making calls right away, first to the undertaker and doctor, then to Aunt Pip and Katie, and then she handed the phone wordlessly to Becky, who called her father's relatives. But it was her grandmother who arrived first. It was odd. Ariana had the farthest to come, and she has no phone. It was as if she'd been hovering just around the corner. Delmar's father brought her and Delmar, too.

They wouldn't come inside, so Becky went out to them, and that's when she saw the casket in the back of the truck. A simple pine box.

"Mom has a coffin," she told them.

Ariana didn't speak. Delmar did the talking. He said that their grandmother wanted her father buried at their sheep camp on the hidden mesa, where his ancestors were. Becky told them her mother had a plot at Desert View Cemetery in town. Her grandmother wanted him laid to rest in the Navajo Way, lodged in a shallow grave, from which the spirit can easily get out and find its way west. Her grandmother believes that's what her father wanted.

Becky went back in and told her mother. When Aunt Pip and Katie arrived, they decided to call the undertaker back and tell him to wait until morning while they resolved the problem. Nobody wants a fight.

But the problem has not been resolved. Instead, they've settled into stalemate. Becky's mother tried to explain to Ariana that she wants her husband close, in the cemetery, where she can visit him. The hidden mesa is fifty miles from here, twenty of them a steep, rutted wagon trail. And if they take him there, the men will cart the body off and not tell anybody where it is. But Becky's grandmother sat stonily through the explanation, acting as if she didn't understand English.

All night her father's relatives drove in. This morning they sit parked in the yard, waiting in their cars; some of her clan cousins lounge around the stone fireplace at the edge of the yard. Her grandmother and Delmar moved to the porch, and Delmar's father stayed in his truck.

All night her grandmother talked to herself in Navajo, telling and retelling the story about their ancestors, and Becky sat on the swing listening. Delmar translated. Becky has heard the story her whole life, of the lucky band of boys who became known as the lost boys, except they weren't lost, they were hiding in the hills when Kit Carson enslaved the Navajo and forced them to walk to Fort Sumner. The band, her great-grandfather and great-uncles, lived quietly, hunting in the hills around Mesa Verde while so many of her people starved or froze to death on the Long Walk. Her grandmother says that the Dine spirit runs strong in their family; when relatives pass, their spirits can best find their way west from the hidden camp.