Читать книгу Lucky Strike - Nancy Zafris - Страница 18

In the morning she and the man, this Leonard Dawson, had a talk.

“All my claims are staked and registered,” Jean said. “I don’t need to tell you that claim jumping is a crime.” Jean said this, but all the while her mind was going through pictures of breaking down the tent, folding it up, and tying it to the Rambler’s roof. Charlie’s fifth grade teacher had helped her tie it securely to the roof, the perfect excuse for him to be there when she left. She could get Harry to help her with it for the ride back. She was imagining her mother’s face when she saw them again.

Leonard Dawson laughed.

“I don’t know what’s so funny,” Jean said.

“I’m going up high anyway,” the man said. “I seen a plane been circling that rimrock.” He tapped his forehead. Smart.

She remembered a photograph she had showed her mother and the screech of hysteria it had caused. A biplane was circling low into the canyons, its wings inches away from scraping the rock. The caption said, Rimflyers are the daredevils of the uranium business, flying their planes low into canyons and scouting ledges for uranium beds. Dangerous business, but it can pay off.

Leonard Dawson threw a pack into the bed of his pickup. “Wouldn’t be circling if there wasn’t something there.” A blackened forefinger congratulated his noggin again. His wife, Josephine Dawson—Jo, she insisted— appeared in the trailer’s doorway with a satchel of groceries. She was wearing a yellow party frock whose skirt she was pushing down like Marilyn Monroe in that famous photograph. She hopped down from the trailer with a girlishness Jean instantly noticed and considered fraudulent. Josephine smiled at her, brightly but timidly. Jean decided to ignore it.

In the distance came some blasts, not too loud, just little pops. She heard their minor key with some relief.

“What’s that?” the man asked.

It was Harry out there building a toilet, but she didn’t think she owed the man any kind of explanation.

“Is there a name for that rimrock?” the man asked.

“You’d have to ask Charlie,” Jean said.

“Who’s Charlie?”

Charlie and Beth had gone off with Harry. They had shovels and planks of wood, and the powder charges Harry had bought at the hardware store. All the while Jean pictured packing up the tent.

Leonard Dawson had climbed into his pickup and started it up. The truck lurched dramatically. He was giving it too much gas, afraid to stall out in front of her. She smirked, in case he was checking her in his rearview mirror. The pickup heaved down the escarpment and was gone.

The two women were left alone. Josephine Dawson stood, obediently lost, as if mislaid at her end of the campsite. The Marilyn Monroe imitation was over, but this new lost-little-lamb act irked Jean just as much. If Josephine Dawson expected help in the form of concrete orders that she could obey (Why don’t you help me with this tent? Why don’t we make sandwiches for the kids? Why don’t you quit smiling at me?), she was sadly mistaken.

“So what do we do now?” Josephine Dawson said. Half a joke, but half not.

Jean shrugged. She threw a couple of canteens in a backpack, put on the Mexican field hat she had bought at a trading-post filling station in Colorado (Beth had begged to stop at every single one), and set off toward the place where a new toilet should be waiting. She hoped the children had stayed at a safe distance while Harry lit his charges. She was sure Harry had good intentions but they might not go together with competence. Josephine Dawson was sitting on the trailer step, looking defeated. She rolled the ends of her hair around a brush curler. She could wield a brush curler with an Oscar-winning deflation. Jean was sure this lost soul had hoped for a friend. She couldn’t blame her for that.

She found the kids and made them drink more water even though they claimed they had just had some, but she didn’t trust Harry on that score. Beth had learned a new word, detonation, and seemed anxious to use it in every possible sentence. They were completing the toilet, laying down the planks of wood. At least it would be there for someone else.

“While we’re out here, we might as well stake a few more claims,” Harry said.

“I’ve already staked as many as I want to,” she said.

Beth said, “Yes, Mom, we should at least stake one before we leave.”

“Did you bring any empty cans of chili con carne?” Harry asked. She noted his irony and his inability to take it any further and capitalize on his exposure of her. It was the reason she liked him and the reason she would never like him more. She walked back to the camp to gather up the empty pop bottles. She roped together some stakes as well. They were there, Harry had bought them; she might as well use them. She rummaged through food in the back of the station wagon. She grabbed cans of fruit cocktail and spaghetti. The fruit cocktail would be too hot, the spaghetti too cold. Josephine Dawson sat watching on the trailer step. This time she was removing the brush curler from her hair. She was still trying to smile. Jean was about to go to Harry’s truck and retrieve the pistol when Josephine Dawson spoke: “Looks like fun.”

The girlishness irked Jean, but she also heard the tremor in Josephine Dawson’s voice. It had taken some effort to try again. Jean decided at this point it would constitute meanness not to invite her along, and meanness would put her on the same side of the fence as that husband.

“Do you want to join us?” she asked.

Jo leaped up. Didn’t shrug and say, “I suppose so.” “If you insist.” Didn’t look around as if checking on something important before she could decide. Didn’t say, “Yes, thank you,” with a tepid tea-party enthusiasm. She leaped from the stairs like a hungry doe, dispensing with language altogether. She never said a word as she scrambled to join an already departing Jean. Jean quickened her pace to keep a little ahead because she could sense this pressure, this ballooning inside Josephine Dawson, she could just feel it, almost touch it. Josephine Dawson was bursting with things to say, and Jean was afraid the first sentence would go something like “I know what you must think of my husband,” and then that would start it, the story of the marriage and either all its problems or all its justifications, or both, and it would never stop gushing out. Jean was unable to ditch her, however. Somehow the yellow frock and heeled sandals and the stakes she had flung over her shoulder didn’t prevent her from maintaining a quick step. They walked side by side, but Josephine Dawson offered not a single comment, or single word, or even a single attention-getting throat clearing, all of which Jean appreciated.

The sand gave way to hardpack flayed open by dryness and heat. The crust of the hardpack was papery and curled up. Like a sunburn peel, she thought. Even the nonliving was tortured out here. The rain the previous night had skittered off the top. Nothing had soaked in.

The children sounded close by, but they were a ways off. She could hear a conversation. They laughed at something Harry said. “Where’d you go?” she called out. Then Beth appeared on an outcropping and waved them over. Jean checked out her son, leaning back against the rock. Sometimes Charlie grew tired and wouldn’t admit it. The initial stage was hidden to others because it looked so much like an increase in thoughtfulness. Charlie caught her looking at him and glared.

Josephine Dawson spoke. “So, hello,” she said with a friendly but nervous smile. “Officially, I mean. I hope we can all be friends.” She fell hopefully silent after this.

Jean pulled at the bundle of stakes. “Do I just put one in?”

“Hi. Me, too,” Beth said, waving to Josephine Dawson.

“You’re going to stake a claim here?” Harry asked. He pulled off his boater and wiped his forehead.

“Why not?”

“It’s just dirt, Mom,” Charlie said.

Harry suggested they keep walking until they got to some slickrock, and not just sandstone, something with some colors in it. “What color do you like?” Jean asked. “I like black,” Harry said. They marched across the scrabble, heads down. They climbed over a mound of slickrock until they came to some interesting pockets and mushroom domes. Charlie suggested his own bethometer system to measure out the claim, which Jean knew from her pamphlet studies was six hundred by fifteen hundred feet. She didn’t want to disappoint him but she didn’t want Beth trudging along elevated rock with rope tied around her ankles. Instead, they followed Harry as he stepped off the measurements.

“This doesn’t seem right to me,” she said. “Are you sure this is the right way to do it?”

“Oh yeah,” Harry told her, “anyone who’s been here for a while knows what to do.”

“I don’t think Lenny knows what to do,” came a surprising voice. Josephine Dawson had been careful all this time to position herself at the tail end. So she wouldn’t be interfering, Jean guessed. She never breathed heavily, so Jean had stopped noticing her. Jean didn’t see how Harry had any sense of the distance with the steep faces and elevation changes, but who was she to pass out instructions?

“This just doesn’t seem right to me,” she said.

At each corner of the claim they pounded in a stake. After stepping off all four corners, Harry announced it was time for the soda-pop bottle. Should they do grape, orange, or RC? On a piece of paper Harry wrote out their first claim notice: June 2, 1954.“And what’s the name of this claim?”

“Something with love in it,” Josephine Dawson suggested.

“H₂O,” Charlie said.

“H₂O sounds good,” Jean said.

“Love of water,” Josephine Dawson agreed. “Perfect!”

Charlie did the honors. He wrote down H₂O, then rolled up the paper and tapped it into the neck of the pop bottle. They stuck the bottle into the sand around a scrub root and secured it further with a flat rock. Harry recorded the information in his notebook in case they wanted to register it officially at the assessor’s office. “You’ll have to do a hundred dollars’ worth of assessment work each year to keep this claim,” he warned, popping shut the notebook.

“Oh fine, Harry, fine,” Jean said.

In the middle of their claimed territory the children found a shallow cave. All of them sat inside for a while and cooled off. Jean brought out the cans of spaghetti and fruit cocktail, and Josephine Dawson told them she’d be glad to cook supper for everyone, she’d fried extra potatoes last night. They lay back groggy in the cave and perhaps each of them at different times drifted away for a few minutes or more.

There was a coziness as they all awakened. Harry stretched and left the cave for a break. The subject of the children’s father was bound to come up. Josephine Dawson asked why the children called their father Harry. “He’s not our father,” Charlie said. Jean wished this woman had saved such a conversation for later. “Their father is deceased,” she said, meaning that’s it, end of discussion.

“I’m sorry.”

A mistake to continue, but Jean found herself adding this: “It was a long time ago.”

“How did he die?”

“Suddenly. An aneurysm.”

“He was old?”

“He was young. He had a defect no one knew about until it killed him.”

“I wasn’t even born yet,” Beth said.

“I was pregnant.” She kicked herself for giving in to Josephine Daw-son’s unspoken curiosity.

“Harry’s their stepfather?” Josephine Dawson asked. “Uncle?” Her face grew not quite scandalized: intrigued.

“He’s a salesman,” Beth said.

Jean smiled. It occurred to her that Harry could have saved them all a lot of trouble by borrowing one of the Geiger counters from his truck. They could have found uranium that way. They’d spent all afternoon on this one claim that probably held as much uranium as her gravel driveway back home, now blacktopped if her mother’s postcard was true. Charlie’s fifth grade teacher had wanted to blacktop it for her, another of his offers.

She remembered the staged photograph from one of her information pamphlets: the happy family with their Lucky Strike. So now she’d been sucked in, too. 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.