Lucky Strike. Nancy Zafris
Of course there was no uranium. Harry’s Geiger counter would have proved that. Over and over. Claim after claim. She looked at her son’s happy face. It had been at the tip of her tongue to berate Harry for not making it easy on them with a Geiger counter when all along he’d done the right thing. But it was hot out. So hot and getting hotter, even in this cave. The sun did things to one’s brain. By the time they got back to camp she was wilted and struggling not to show it. She could still do what needed to be done, but she was too tired to take Charlie far enough away that Josephine Dawson couldn’t see or hear. A boulder in the camp fitted Charlie perfectly and he walked over to it and hugged it. He was too exhausted himself to hide it. She set into her hard thumping with her palm. Directly in their line of sight, Josephine Dawson set up her stove. She caught the look on Josephine Dawson when the face peered up from cooking, the stirring spoon paused in midstir. Jean had expected pouty-mouthed mugs of sympathy, but the expression on Josephine Dawson’s face was neutral and observant.
At the grocery store in town she had bought cheap housedresses, the coolness of the flimsy material a blessing. She sponged Charlie off and he didn’t protest, and she handed him the sleeveless housedress, which he put on. Josephine Dawson dragged over lawn chairs and there was a housedress for her as well since Jean had about ten of the cheap things, clearance items mixed in a bin, and they all sat in housedresses except Harry. They ate the macaroni and cheese and fried potatoes Josephine Dawson had prepared and Jean had to admit it was one of the best meals she’d ever eaten. They heard blasts way in the distance, from Paul Morrison’s mining camp. It was like Fourth of July for the blind, and her daughter got to begin and end her day on a new word: detonation.
ELEVEN
While the grownups napped in the cave, Charlie showed Beth what he had found. Carved on the stone wall was a stick figure in a big cowboy hat. One stick arm was extra long in order to reach the reins of his horse. The horse had a friendly smile scraped back from its bit. Underneath was the deep scratch of a name: Rawhide Joe 1881. They didn’t tell the others. Beth thought of Rawhide Joe as her secret weapon. In the morning, whether Jo’s husband would be there or not, it didn’t matter. She had this avenging ghost.
But Jo’s husband didn’t come back and in the morning when Harry said he had to make a delivery and would they like to accompany him, Jo hopped in, too. Some squeezing was now involved with an extra person, but there was room for bodies behind the front seat. Beth sat on the tire jack. Every time she put her hands down she touched another paper bag full of screws or tiny springs. Her feet kept slipping on the torn covers of magazines. Harry was in a good mood with two grown women on board. He kept apologizing for wearing underwear as his shirt.
They were on the road to town, their only byway. After an hour of hard driving, Harry veered off. A narrow trail strayed across the sand between the scrub bushes. The trail got softer not harder and the truck thumped and lurched. Harry stopped the truck and cached some of his heaviest equipment at a little oasis. The few junipers and froggish cacti would have qualified as a dead spot in the lush area around their home in Dayton, but here in the desert the brief dull swatch of green seemed like a prospering forest. Jo helped Harry unload. She seemed anxious to help at all times. It didn’t matter that her dress was getting dirty. Beth found something exciting in the sight of Jo’s princess dress marred by red clay. She looked like a movie heroine shot in the stomach. Her name is Jo, she sat down and wrote in her latest letter. Last night she made us macaroni-n-cheese. This morning she fried potatoes. We went detonating yesterday with Harry. We detonated a big hole for a toilet and then put wood around it. Her husband is a stinker Grandma like you call people but as long as he’s not around we’re having fun. There’s something wrong with Harry’s truck and we’re stuck out in the desert so I’m sitting down in the shade and I have time to write.
Harry called Charlie over and said, “Looky here.” He bent down and released some air from the tires. “Makes her ride better in the sand. A little trick.” He smiled up at Charlie. They climbed back aboard Harry’s truck and plodded through the sand on the flabbier tires, and then they were on rock again and starting to climb. It took Harry another hour to go not very far, engine gunning, one jerk at a time. Her mother and Jo elected to walk it. The jolting and the drop-offs were making them ill. Beth watched them to see if they were talking to each other, but her mother’s head was down and she marched on alone.
In the distance Beth saw yellow bulldozers, drill rigs, and scurrying figures whose heads glinted in the sun. Though high up, the mining operation was sunk in a volcano-like mouth. At the edge of the camp Harry stopped the truck and stepped outside to fix himself. He washed his face and neck with a hand cloth, cleaning them but also bestowing on his cheek a streak of red dirt that hadn’t been there before. He bent over, whisked his hair forward as if beating flames from it, then combed it all back and smoothed it with his palm. He opened up one of his shirt packets from Mel’s Cleaners and buttoned it over the undershirt he had apologized for wearing. He swept his arms through the seersucker jacket that Jo was kind enough to hold out for him, found the bow tie in the pocket, and clipped it on. Jo must have seen the smudge on his cheek because of the way she smiled at him, but she didn’t say anything. Beth was glad to see her mother hand him a canteen. Harry considered it for a few moments, then took a swig.
The mining camp looked like a lost city flipped on its head. Exposed were its roots, the tangle of rock spires and pinnacles and the clumps of meaty red buttes. It seemed that all the machinery was in futile service to right it properly.
Hardly anyone in the camp looked up as the International Harvester trundled in. Shuttle cars rode tracks deep into the earth. Above the tunnel was a sign: Beware Bigfoot’s Radon Daughters Loose in This Mine. Harry was here to deliver a new belt for the ventilation fan down in the mine but he said it was a trivial thing. The ventilation fan was just government regulations about radon. In truth the Navajo lung could handle anything. The Navajos made money on their lungs, side wagers on whose breath would push the needle of the Geiger counter the farthest and register the highest radioactivity.
Jo turned to everyone with a smile. “Lenny said the Indians have a lot bigger lungs than normal people.”
“All the more reason why they shouldn’t be breathing in radioactivity,” her mother said.
“They don’t have bigger lungs,” Charlie said. “The Quechua Indians have bigger lungs.”
“Who are they, Charlie?” Jo asked.
“They live up high in the Andes.”
“The Andes Mountains?”
“That’s right,” her mother said.
“Navajos can go up high,” Jo said. “That’s why they use them on skyscrapers.”
“That’s the Mohawks. The Navajos go down low.”
“You’re just saying that,” Jo said.
“Harry, what are you up to now?” came a voice, and Harry bowed his head so he could murmur, “Owner,” undetected.
A man came climbing up to them, pushing through the sand with huge leisurely strides. He was dark and handsome and everything about him was big. He was dressed for an African safari. Harry jumped away and ran zigzagging toward the back of his truck. Harry’s leaping off like a chased animal was sudden and bizarre, and it made Beth’s mother and Jo laugh. The man smiled and ducked his head in greeting before veering toward Harry. They were on top of a hill with nothing around for shade. Beth was starting to feel like a shiny nickel in the sun, shinier and shinier and more beat up. She watched Harry tear things from his truck. She wondered what was going on with him.
The man took off his African safari hat and wiped away his sweat with a bandana. He wiped his eyes, which emerged wide open yet wearied. He scoured each of his fingers, twisting them through the bandana, and when Harry still hadn’t finished, he walked over to Beth’s mother and Jo and offered them his scrubbed-clean hand. “My name’s Jimmy Splendid,” he said. “How do you do?”
“You’re the man in charge,” her mother said.
“I’m