Читать книгу Lucky Strike - Nancy Zafris - Страница 12

Jean and the children accepted his invitation to drive to the town. Harry dropped the stack of reading material from the passenger seat onto the floor. Jean propped her feet on the magazines and old newspapers; when she looked down her heels had cut into a Life magazine. She picked up a piece of the cover photo: a pair of intense eyes, darkened almost into a Zorro mask. She fit the ripped edges to another piece and Greta Garbo stared up at her.

Harry and his International Harvester reminded Jean of something she had read concerning the ease of finding uranium:

“I’d been driving along the same road to and from work for years. One day I stopped to change a flat tire and became one of the richest men in the state,” said a former plumber’s helper and one of the state’s newest uraniumaires.

When Harry showed up with his flat tire, it was exactly like one of these testimonials in her many instructional booklets (except for the getting-rich uranium part). She was loaded with these booklets—in addition to the articles from National Geographic and Look and Arizona Quarterly. She had photographs as well, tons of those. To her own mother in Springfield, Ohio, she showed only the photographs that depicted hazards and close calls, adopting a flabbergasted air at her mother’s panic.

Most of the photographs arrived from the government, however, and the government pretended that searching for uranium was an enjoyable social outing that involved pulling a Geiger counter from a picnic basket. Enticing. Why don’t you join us?

For example, a smiling man and a smiling lady out on a uranium date. For example, a family of five out for a day of picnicking and uranium hunting. The government pamphlet explained that it was this simple. The uranium sat up grayish yellow in the carnotite rock. You could spot it with field glasses or opt for the simplicity and ease of a Geiger counter. After you found the uranium, the Atomic Energy Commission would help you bulldoze roads so you could mine it out. The AEC would do all it could to help with expenses. Some people like Vernon Pick became millionaires overnight.

Jean didn’t believe any of it, or at least not all of it. Her own plan was vague but specific and aimed mostly at Charlie and his scientific nature. Charlie, whom she couldn’t stop thinking about. Charlie her son, Beth her daughter, she was the mother who was everything to them, who put them before all else, who wanted to grab them and keep life at bay. Nevertheless, a part of her left over from childhood urged her to be the errant daughter, to shock, displease, and unleash in her own mother hysterical permission-denied fiats that could no longer be enforced. Another part of her haughtily dismissed the maternal interference she kept inviting. The one thing she didn’t want was a truce. As long as she could go on fighting with her mother like the old days, the pre-Charlie days, the world was normal.

She was quiet as she sat in Harry’s truck. She had arrived once again at the image of her own mother weeping and still begging no at the Greyhound bus station. No, don’t go—her mother so proud all the time, so careful of her appearance, so careful to step lightly like a dancer— reduced to this. Everyone at the bus station looking at this weeping, youthful grandmother. And now as the errant daughter, was she happy as she drove away in the Rambler station wagon? Was she happy now with the tent she had bought from a lady whose husband had died in Yellowstone Park, with the pickax she had been given, with the hammer, with the knapsacks, with the Tupperware, with the pamphlets and the shovel and the cans of chili con carne, with the golf club for beating off danger, with the clothespins and antique washboard, with the flimsy notion that she was ready for this?

She stroked Beth’s perspiring forehead as Beth slept deeply, mouth open, flopped against her. Harry and Charlie were busy talking to one another. Secretly she was glad Harry had talked her into this ride.

After two hours the boulder trail they were driving on settled into a bumpy dirt road trenched by heavy machinery and rainstorms. Harry downshifted once, then turned to Charlie and said, “Go ahead, take her down another gear.” The mother saw how Charlie’s face was carefully expressionless to hide his pleasure and again she wanted to grab him, to hold him tight against the world.

“We’re getting close to town,” Harry said. “Looky there.”

Ahead in the road, parked in a draw, was a broken-down jalopy with an old man sitting at the wheel. The Jeep didn’t look like it had ever run. The old man looked like petrified wood.

“Is he alive?” Charlie asked.

“’Course he’s alive. That’s Ace King. He’s what happens to all you fortune hunters.”

A sign propped on the jalopy read, Ace King, the Uranium Prince. Genuine Uranium Claims, $25 and Up.

Harry gave a toot as they passed.

“He is dead,” Charlie said. Harry let out a big laugh.

“Preparation is nine-tenths of prospecting,” Harry said. “Before you even think of doing it, you’ve got to get maps, study them, read geological reports, talk to the field office people. You need to check out the aerial photos, too, and see if you can get ahold of some anomaly maps.”

In the middle of Harry’s remarks Jean realized he was speaking to her.

“What preparations have you done? Out there in Ohio, I mean. How’d you get yourself ready?”

She didn’t answer. One of the pamphlets she had read said, Pick up a rock. If it ticks, you’re rich.

“Then maybe do a reconnaissance on horseback or mule,” Harry said. “Before you start in earnest. You’re not answering me.”

“What is your question?”

“I have a feeling you didn’t do any preparations.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“Do you have a detection instrument of choice?”

“I think you already know the answer to that, Harry.”

“Then you’ll need a promoter,” Harry said. “Unless you’re thinking being Mrs. Ace King is the way to go. In that case I could help you make a sign nice as his. We could get a cardboard box and some markers.”

“Why do I need a cardboard box?” she asked.

“A promoter promotes, gets the rumors spreading and the frenzy going. Drives the prices up. I’ve never seen it go different.”

“Is that how Vernon Pick did it?”

“You know about Vernon Pick, huh?” When she didn’t answer, Harry said, “Everyone thinks they’re going to come out here and be Vernon Pick. Everyone thinks it. Happens to nobody. I’ve never seen it go different.”

She said nothing. She had been planning to leave when the bottles of water ran out, wondering if the busted springs of the station wagon would get her back as far as the town where she could make repairs before heading home. Nice of course of that Paul Morrison fellow offering to set up a water buffalo, but she didn’t really need it. She was just waiting for the look in her children’s eyes that said they’d had enough. Even kids at a swimming pool eventually got that look, and then it was time to go home.