Читать книгу Lucky Strike - Nancy Zafris - Страница 19

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 the man in charge.” His voice reminded Beth of the voice you would use to a sick baby. He said how do you do as if the words were there there now. The tone didn’t seem at all to fit what he was saying yet it did make Beth, languishing in the heat, feel a little better. Maybe the man was just tired and this was his tired voice.

“Here it is!” Harry cried out.

Jimmy Splendid signaled to a group of men, and they came over to get the fan belt. They were Navajos, dressed all in mismatched white men’s clothes.

“I’ve got two of them,” Harry said.

“We’ll take both,” Jimmy Splendid said.

Harry began talking fast and excitedly about the stuff unloaded on the ground. The rush of his words wasn’t like salesman patter, more like someone trying to beat the buzzer. The buzzer was probably someone always saying shut up to him. Beth wondered who in his life this buzzer had been. Maybe his grandfather? She liked Harry. She didn’t have to think of him as an adult at all.

Harry was rushing to say that he had several of these portable compressors by dad and would be delighted to unburden himself of them. He’d come a long way by dad to deliver just a fan belt. Jimmy Splendid interrupted him here and said, “Not just any fan belt, Harry. My fan belt.” Well, yes, Harry knew that of course, that’s what he meant. And two fan belts at that, Jimmy Splendid added, and no he didn’t need any compressor bits. “Not the bit,” Harry began. “Don’t need ‘em,” Jimmy Splendid interrupted. A blush reddened Harry’s face, and the dirt streak on his cheek brightened into war paint. Jimmy Splendid looked up from a gold cigarette lighter he had taken out to study and said, “All right, have the boys go through their tool sets with you. We’re short on stoop labor supplies.”

“You can always use a shovel,” Harry said.

“We can always use a shovel,” Jimmy Splendid agreed.

“People don’t . . .” Harry paused. “In the midst of all the . . . Shovels are important,” he finally said. He scurried off with the Navajos. Beth saw Charlie take a step toward Harry and the group of Navajos, but Harry was so nervous and excited he forgot about Charlie and about how maybe he’d like to tag along. She could guess how bad Harry would feel if he figured it out later.

Jimmy Splendid lingered behind. Under the strong sun the gold cigarette lighter blazed in his hand. He began working on it with a key-chain screw. He said something like, “Think I’ll catch my breath for a minute,” and her mother answered something like, “Might as well.” His head stayed down, aimed at the cigarette lighter, but his eyes were watching them. Beth knew that trick; everyone in her class at school knew it.

After a good spell, he lifted his head. “Well, I find myself not quite understanding this situation,” he said.

Nobody answered him. Beth might have liked to answer him, but she had no idea what he was talking about.

“How about you?” he suddenly asked Beth, and she felt her face about to burst into flames. Everything about Jimmy Splendid had a frightening authority. Even his handsomeness was authoritative. His face laid down the official rules of handsomeness and all these other faces were breaking the rules.

Jo came over and put a hand on each of her shoulders. “Young man,” Jimmy Splendid said, turning to face Charlie. He walked over and held out his hand. Charlie looked at it, and then slowly reached out to shake it. “There you go.” Charlie began to pull out of the handshake, but Jimmy Splendid wasn’t done. He held on to Charlie’s hand. “And are you taking care of these women?”

“I guess,” Charlie said. He watched his hand, waiting for Jimmy Splendid to let go. He sneaked a helpless glance at Beth.

“Quiet,” Jimmy Splendid said. “Right? Quiet and observant.”

“He doesn’t miss a thing,” her mother said.

“So you’re the man to ask,” Jimmy Splendid said. “And what’s the name of this man to ask?”

“Charlie,” her mother said.

“Charlie. And you’re Charlie’s mom.”

“Yes I am.”

“Charlie’s got good hands,” Jimmy Splendid said, finally letting go. “You know what I do, Charlie—”

“No,” Charlie said.

Jimmy Splendid chuckled. “Before I hire a man, I shake his hand and I take a study of that hand in the palm of my own, and I find out what I need to know. Charlie, whenever you want, you’ve got a job with me.”

What Beth liked about her mom was that she didn’t step in when Charlie declined to respond to this.

“I guess what I’d really like to know, Charlie: Would I have a job with you?”

Charlie didn’t answer for a few moments. “We’ll see,” he said.

Jimmy Splendid laughed heartily and flipped the cigarette lighter in his hand. He probably didn’t have much chance to enjoy himself if some exchange like this, which made absolutely no sense to Beth, was giving him so much delight. He reached in his shirt pocket and still chuckling pulled out a metal case and snapped it open for Jo who said no thank you and her mom who quickly plucked a cigarette. Her mother avoided cigarettes. Meat and cigarettes. She avoided meat because there were too many things that could go wrong, even a little thing: Suppose the cow had the flu? Vegetables didn’t get the flu or get herniated or cough up blood. Her reason for avoiding cigarettes was that they clogged up the lungs. Who runs into a house filled with smoke?

Avoiding meant avoiding, however, not refusing altogether. When hamburgers were on the grill and the line couldn’t be avoided, she picked up a paper plate with the rest of them. If someone passed her a cigarette, she lifted her chin for a light.

Jimmy Splendid acted like a simple handshake with Charlie constituted magic. He acted like he knew everything now about everybody.

Harry was back at his truck. He pulled out a grocery box marked Good & Plenty and handed it to a Navajo. Now Beth could see that although Jimmy Splendid was tall, he was no taller than Harry. In fact, Harry was taller, but Jimmy Splendid was very strong-looking and big around the chest, and of course handsome in that policeman or soldier way, not wobbly you-can-laugh-at-me handsome like Harry. People were talking about her. She could hear her mother saying something about Beth collecting information for book reports because they left school a bit prematurely this year.

“What else do you know about Charlie?” To her own surprise Beth added her own voice to the voices she was hearing.

Jimmy Splendid fixed a scrutinizing gaze on her and it was so unnerving she thought she might faint, which would be all right, everyone would just blame the heat and she’d have an excuse for her audacity. “I think that’s a good question,” Jimmy Splendid said, slowly unwrapping a lazy, contagious smile that convinced everyone else to smile at her. She thought she might burst into tears.

He took Charlie’s hand and displayed it next to his big muscular one. His point wasn’t clear. Beth was beginning to get uneasy. “Look there,” he said. “Our hands have the same symmetry. You play the piano, Charlie?”

“No,” Charlie mumbled.

“You could,” he said.

“Charlie’s good with his hands,” her mother said. Charlie pulled away and returned his hands to his pockets. The sleeves of his T-shirt flagged loosely around his thin arms. Jimmy Splendid acknowledged that Charlie was not the most sizable fellow around, but his hands were wide and the fingers graceful. Charlie allowed his hands to be pulled from his pockets and put on exhibit again as Jimmy Splendid explained what he meant. His voice was the one thing about Jimmy Splendid that didn’t scare Beth, and as he spoke about things boding well for Charlie his words wove a blanket of comfort and when he asked everyone to stay for lunch, Beth cried yes before the invitation was completed. “Don’t get too excited,” Jimmy Splendid laughed. “It’s just hot dogs and baked beans.” But Beth had been wanting a hot dog ever since seeing those shriveled-up ones in the Grand Vu Theater. The Navajos kept on their hard hats and carbide lamps while they ate. They sat on the ground and leaned back against heavy-looking canvas sacks that nonetheless looked soft enough to massage their backs. Jimmy Splendid asked Beth if she knew what was in the sacks. Flour? Beth guessed. Uranium ore, all crushed into powder. Something for one of her book reports.

Harry and a worker were checking off the supplies Harry had unloaded. Jo went over to him with a plate of food but Harry said he had to get air in the tires first and he drove over to a huddle of vehicles.

“You probably didn’t believe me when I said hot dogs for lunch,” Beth heard Jimmy Splendid say to her mother. “Sorry it couldn’t be more.”

“It’s very nice,” her mother said.

“I’ll have to make it up to you. In fact I could do that this evening.” Jimmy Splendid added that he was off to town. He said they should all ride to town with him. Her mother thanked him for the offer but said they didn’t live in town, they lived at a campsite. Jimmy Splendid’s head cocked and he waited for her to continue but she didn’t. Finally he said, “Not that polyg camp up the road from town?”

Her mother paused for a few moments. “No,” she said.

Harry had returned just as Jimmy Splendid was saying how it amazed him what kind of squalid conditions passed as a nice place to settle down to polygs, no offense Harry. It sounded like a football play, the no offense Harry. Jimmy Splendid said women shouldn’t be out there wherever they were and where the heck were they Harry? Another football play, the where the heck Harry.

Beth took out her letter in case she got brave enough to ask Jimmy Splendid to mail it for her when he went to town. The envelope was already addressed and affixed with an ATOMS FOR PEACE stamp. She just had to finish it. The Navajos had gone back to work and she picked one of their spots and leaned against a canvas sack. Guess what Grandma? I’m sitting against a sack of uranium ore. It’s radioactive. Bye. I have to go now.

Jimmy Splendid’s new idea was that Harry could break down their camp and pack it up and the rest of them could go into town. Jo’s eyes flitted back and forth, trying to figure what side she should be on. As they stood up and brushed themselves off, Jimmy Splendid mentioned that he was also the sheriff in town. Her mother laughed outright at this, and Jimmy said no really, but Beth thought he was looking like he’d rather not convince her, he’d rather go on hearing her laugh. Her mother said they had to get back, she didn’t want to miss work. “What work?” Harry asked. Her mother didn’t like that and gave Harry a look and said they’d better get going. Jimmy Splendid walked them to the truck. He tried to drop behind but her mother didn’t drop back with him so he moved up and touched her arm and when she turned around he seemed at a loss. “Well I’ve got these for everyone,” he said.

He gave one to Jo and one to Beth. Beth looked down at a thin white painter’s hat in her hands. R&R Mining was written on it. It wasn’t as nice as the turquoise cowboy hat she had begged for at one of the trading posts, but it was still nice. “Charlie, take care of these ladies,” Jimmy Splendid said, passing him a hat. Beth’s letter to her grandmother was in her hands, there for Jimmy Splendid to see, but he was not good at reading her mind and she couldn’t get up the nerve to ask him. Her mother was looking at the new hat in her hands. “I’ll see you,” Jimmy Splendid said to her mother, waving his hand casually here and there as though the slickrock seats and the chairback sacks of uranium powder were part of a Parisian café both of them were likely to be frequenting, “around.”