Yellow Cake

Dark spots in the bottom of my lung, that’s how it’s to be. Could’ve been a lump in one of my breasts or a bleeding sore on my leg. Could’ve been my throat, my uterus or any other part of this worn out body. Could’ve been Lymphoma, or any other of those kind of words. Always knew I’d get a cancer, just a question of which one.

It’s like the rocks over in Utah at Goblin Valley. All the dirt underneath them is blown away except for just enough to hold them up. You know they’re gonna fall over just a question when and why haven’t they already. I saw them once, out driving around with Spoon. We ate tuna sandwiches and beer in the shade of a gully then walked around arguing about what the rocks looked like.

“This one looks like a leprechaun,” I said.

“I don’t see it.”

“Well, its there—see the eyes and the little beard.”

“Nah. It looks like a stump to me.”

The doctor in Cortez, he was a boy with blue eyes and no lips. When he showed me the X-rays I said, “You gonna tell me the truth or you gonna say it was the cigarettes that done it?”

He looked down at the white linoleum, down at his soft shoes and said, “It’s probably the uranium, but we can’t say for sure.”

“That’s what I thought.” Ever’one of my family dead from the dust, ever miner in this country pushin around an oxygen cart and you can’t be sure. Can’t draw any conclusions.

They told Dad the same thing when he was in the hospital, until I snuck in a Geiger counter and run it up and down his body in front of them. The needle jumped up at ever one of his joints. At least then they stopped saying it didn’t have anything to do with his being a uranium miner. Once he died they got pretty good at drawing conclusions.

First memory I have is of playing in the mine tailings over in La Sal, waiting for dad to come out of the shaft. The wind was blowing hard toward the Colorado line and I’d kick at the dust just to watch it blow away. Uranium dust. Probably, I already had it by then; Dad hated to give me anything and my conception was no different. Probably the very seed that made me was dusty and worn out from the radiation.

You can’t take it to the government, like Spoon and the others tried. You see em in town, the miners, ever one of them wheeling an oxygen cart. Or sitting in the courtroom with the lawyers from Salt Lake. It’s all on account of your smoking so much say the lawyers. But if they knew they was gonna die young, die of the radon gas and the poison dust they’d do a lot of smoking too.

I worked for awhile over in the refinery at Uravan, where they processed the ore. I scrubbed out the ditches and tanks of uranium and chemicals, it would make all these yellow crystals that would clog ever’thing up. It got so hot that we couldn’t wear the respirators they give us cause they’d fog up. I lasted two weeks till my lungs started to hurt. Ever’one in that town, their lungs hurt. It was the only work I could find.

Dad kept a sample of dust from ever place he worked; La Sal, Lisbon, Moab, Slickrock. Used to have a whole cabinet full of jars filled with ore. When he died, my sister flushed all that dust down the toilet in Cortez, but I kept this one jar. I figured maybe someday it’ll be worth something, maybe when there’s no more mining someone might want to buy it. Don’t matter now.

First thing I did when I found out was to come home and dig out the jar. I keep it in the back of a cupboard, behind the high school yearbooks and napkins and the flashlight that don’t work and a dozen other pieces of crap. It’s an old heavy mason jar, like the kind my mom would use to can peaches with when she was well enough to drive to Cortez and buy fruit. The letters on the side say Perfect Mason and the top is dull grey metal, the kind with the wax seal on the bottom. Mom had a soft spot for peaches and ever time I look at the blue glass of the jars I think about that.

It’s kind of pretty, the dust. The one I kept, it’s all yella cake, the pure thing. There’s orange and yella and little flecks of grey in it. I can feel the heat in it, like it’s seeping up out of the old lid and through the glass.

I left the jar out on the little table next to the pictures of all my dead family and just set and stared at it awhile. I thought it’d make me feel better, looking right at it, but I found I was looking instead at the picture of dad all dressed up in his preacher’s suit with lapels of his shirt like the fangs of a snake, and looking down over those high proud Cherokee cheek bones, like he was about to back hand me cross the face, and a little dried up smile on his face. I didn’t feel any better at all, just the opposite. I couldn’t decide whether it was the dust that got me in the lungs, or whether it was Dad who made me wrong in the first place.

Spoon come by the next day to fill up his water jugs on account of his well being contaminated with coal dust and he was carrying them out when he sees the jar on my table.

“Well, you dig yourself a doghole?” He asked.

“One of Dad’s sample jars, got it out yesterday.”

“What’s the occasion?

“I got it. In my lung. Went to the doctor in Cortez, he said it’s cancer in my lung.”

Spoon looked me in the eyes like he was gonna go soft and just stood there licking his lips. “Well,” he said several times. “Well, you don’t seem too shook up over it.”

“Always knew I’d get it. No sense trying to hide from a cancer.”

Spoon looked at the jar of yella cake in his hand. He can be real sweet when he takes a mind to it, and I could see he was trying to find the right thing to say. “Ah shit Geegee. You too. I thought maybe you might ... ah shit.” He set down the plastic jugs and put his arms around me. I could hear his lungs wheezing and smell the onion rings he had eaten for lunch in his beard. I wasn’t sad, but I cried a little anyways. Even though I can’t stand Spoon but in little spells, I guess you could say I love him.

I got beers out of the cooler and we set out in the back and polished them off. One of Dad’s old trucks, an orange International has a couch in the bed and a view down toward Slickrock and I like to sit there in the afternoons. Chessy, the little black dog, the one that hunts rabbits, stood on his hind legs looking out over the piñyon and cedar, looking for rabbits.

“Thing of it is Spoon,” I said, “I started thinking about Dad when I got home. I was thinking how he used to say he wasn’t gonna complain about his cancer because he had made good money at the mines and he had taken his own chances. I was thinking how before he got sick he’d buy a couple of chickens and we’d go down to Slickrock in the evenings and have a barbecue by the river. You remember?”

“Of course I do,” he grinned. I punched him on the shoulder; what he remembered was how Dad’d get drunk and we’d run off behind some brush and he couldn’t keep his hands off of me. Always, just about the time he’d figured how to unsnap my brassiere with his free hand, Mom would shout “Come get yer meat you kids!” and we’d run back stuffing our shirts in and picking up cedar branches for the fire. I always knew he was going to catch us and for sure he’d whip us to a bloody pulp. We we’re 16 then but you’d a thought we were seven-year-olds the way we feared that old man. Times when Spoon’s folks came along, his dad would wink at us as we ran up and get that big lopsided grin of his going.

“Well, those summer nights was all I ever got out of his so called good living. That and all these goddamn cars he left here when he died.” Dad used his settlement to buy up all the old junker cars and trucks he could get his hands on. He claimed he’d get better and fix them up but now the Gama has grown up around them and ever now and then someone stops in to see if there’s a part they can salvage.

“He’s gone, Geegee. What can you do about that mean old man?”

“Nothing I guess. Suppose I’ll see him soon enough.”

“I don’t suppose you are gonna try and get compensation?”

“Hell no. I didn’t work in the mines. Technically. Besides, far as I can see, it’s just made all you into beggars trying to get the sonsabitches to pay for what they done to you.”

He nodded. “Well, I did finally get a new trailer out of it.”

“Which you were too sick to even help ‘em set up. No. I’m just gonna ride it on out and when it’s my time, well it’s my time. I’m not gonna die in the hospital with all my family gone and those white walls ever’where.”

I looked at Spoon; I could see he was sad, but its best not to let him get too choked up. We sat there in the silence looking out… me at the green Toyota where the chickens roost, Chessy for a jack rabbit, Spoon for I don’t know what. We didn’t any of us find anything out there.

The next week I told ever’one I cared to that I had it. My sister said I needed to get right with the Lord soon as I could. Loraine Sanders at the bank in Dove Creek got all teary and said, “Just let me know if there’s anything I can do for you honey,” and gave me a hug. Smelled like Jean Na-tay.

Cancer isn’t real big news around here, but people gave me the sideways looks when I told them I intended to do nothing about it.

Dad had a big bay horse once that he bought in Monticello. It was a toss up whether he whipped me or that horse more. He’d get so mad at that horse and it’d just look at him calmly, above it all. Finally, Dad got so mad that he was out smacking it on the butt and the horse kicked dad right between the eyes. You could see the red shape of the horse shoe for months afterward.

The next day Dad went out with his great big .44 pistol and he shot that horse in the head as calmly as if he was putting a letter in the mailbox. I ran down and when I got there the only thing to do was rub his shoulder while the blood drained out of his head. He had this look in his eyes though, just as calm as you please, as if to say, “It’s over.” That horse he knew, he knew that a quick ending was better than a life of being whipped and yelled at. That horse had the right idea.

My prospects for old age haven’t been so hot anyway. My body is wore out from all the work I done—tree planting and hay loading and picking fruit and all the chemicals I took in spraying for the county weed control. The only work around here anymore is at the gas station in town and that barely pays for the gas between here and there. I never have wanted a husband, Spoon irritates me enough as it is.

We made it out of here once, trying to get to Oklahoma where I had been once before to see my grandmother. The grass was green there, and the oak trees weren’t just little bitty things. But, instead, we went down to Tempe where his brother was then and it was hotter and crowded and drier than here. Once he thought he had me around his finger, Spoon got just as mean and stupid as my dad and I left him there to come home.

The other night, I couldn’t get to sleep, thinking about the past. I had bigger plans when I was young. I mean bigger than living in a trailer in West San Miguel County all of my life and working at the gas station. I was gonna be a veterinarian, I had the grades to go try college. They sent me a paper that said I could get a scholarship, but Dad hid it from me. I didn’t even know till he told me one day out of spite when I come back after driving around with Spoon.

“You gonna get nowhere, girl running around with that fool,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“He ain’t got any future is what I mean. You got to find someone to take care of you. You’re too strong-willed for your own good. Like a bad horse. It’s a good thing you didn’t run off to college and let it get away from you.”

“They didn’t want me at the college anyway.”

He sneered. “Course they did. I just told em they couldn’t have you.”

“You did what?” He was real sick then and he shrunk down like a cripple but there was no getting past that grin of his. He enjoyed hurting his family as he got more and more pained.

“I told em ‘No thank you,’ she’s a high and mighty one as it is.”

Anyway, I couldn’t sleep and so I got up and set in the living room ever’thing was lit with the near full moon outside and the light fell across the jar of yella cake and I just set there looking at it. I was infected by that old man just as fatally as if he had been made of the yella cake himself.

It was probably two a.m., but I called over to Spoon’s place.

“It’s me,” I said.

“Geegee, what’s the matter? What time is it?”

“It’s late. How about coming over and keeping me company.”

“Ah shit Geegee, I’m sound asleep.”

“Well, your loss then.”

I hung up and he was in the driveway in twenty minutes. It ain’t very often I get to feeling frisky, and it ain’t never happened yet that Spoon don’t come when I call. He’d even remembered to brush his teeth like I always make him.

The next day he hung around lazy as a dog while I made him eggs and biscuits. He sat there eating, taking his time and leaning back in his chair with his hands over his head like he was right at home. When I had had about enough I told him so. “Spoon, don’t you have something to do?”

“Like what?”

“Like anything other than sitting around here irritating me?”

“Gosh Geegee I thought you wanted me to keep you company.”

“That was last night. Today I can take care of myself.”

He moped around like a scolded puppy picking up his clothes and filling his water jugs. He took his time like he wanted me to change my mind. “Don’t forget your tank, “ I said. He has to carry the tank whenever he might exert himself. I didn’t want to trip over the damn thing laying by the edge of the bed. I walked him out to the truck and he sat in the driver’s seat for a minute clearing his throat. “You trying to say something, Spoon, or you gonna spit a loogie?”

“Geegee, I wish you’d do something about the cancer.”

“I am. I’m doing nothing.”

“I, well, I don’t want you to die. I wouldn’t know what to do.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t. You’d have to fill your water cans up in town and there’s not many women around here that would let you into their beds.”

“You know that ain’t what I meant.”

“Yeah. I know. But look at me Spoon. I’m 48 and my body’s near worn out from the years already. I can’t find any work. I don’t want to die in a hospital.”

Spoon said nothing. He’d been in the same spot longer than myself. He run his hand over the steering wheel, thinking. “Well give me a call tomorrow, let’s go fishing or something.”

“Yeah.”

He started the truck and drove back toward town. I could hear the sound of him shifting gears for a long while, on account of the holes in his muffler.

I sat inside looking at the family picture wall and the jar of yella cake for a long while not wanting to do anything. The phone rang and I didn’t answer it. The air had warmed up somewhat, though there was snow on the ground and I left the door open and the chickens came in and pecked around on the carpet then scattered when I threw a beer can at them. In the warm spring air, when the sky is clear and the sun comes in and lights ever part of the living room, it all looks pretty plain. Dad in his preacher suit and the jar of yella cake just looked like any other objects in the house, like a broom or a kitchen table. I had promised myself I wouldn’t get worked up over the cancer, and I wasn’t, but now it seemed like there was nothing for me to do except wait for it.

Usually when I feel sorry for myself, I take Dad’s old Winchester and a pocket full of shells and head out into the canyon below the trailer to shoot jack rabbits. But now I didn’t feel like it. I couldn’t see any point to killing a rabbit and skinning it, just to feed a body that was rebelling against me anyhow.

When I was real little, I could talk to the animals. Sounds silly to say it now, but it’s true. I’d hide out in the tall sage when Dad was drunk or in a whipping mood and eventually the rabbits or sometimes an elk or an eagle would come and talk with me. There are whole other languages the animals speak, and I knew a number of them. It gave Dad the spooks to find me out at the fence line making words no human could and his face would go white. I lost the language when I turned 13 and started bleeding, when I entered the world of adults, which is the world of men. But I still can’t stand to shoot anything I don’t eat, not even the stinkin coyotes.

I got up and almost went to the corner for the gun, out of habit, but instead I grabbed the jar of yella cake and held it in the light. It didn’t look so fearsome; it looked like a peach jar mom had filled with yella dust by mistake. I stuck it in my sno-go jacket and walked out the front door, where the chickens were looking inside hoping to be let back in. I left the door open for them.

It feels dumb to walk out into the sage for no reason, without a gun. I didn’t even bother to watch for the jumping cactuses that have a way of poking through the snow and grabbing the leg of my pants. The mud was soft and wet and wanted to suck me into itself as I walked. Chessy, the little dog, found me out, sure we would be going after the rabbits and nipped at my heels impatiently.

This canyon is full of old dog holes dug from top to bottom and yella pine stumps where they hauled the trees away to the mill at Spud Patch and they never grew back. Later in the summer the bovines will be thick up this way crowding around under the overhanging walls, pawing at the wet ground, if it is still wet that is. Used to be arrowheads all over the place in here.

I walked along the sandy bottom to where the first cottonwood, with no leaves was and turned up in to a little draw. Back behind some boulders was a little dug out cave, a doghole where Dad would sometimes come and dig on the weekends. He never found much that I know of, but I would come down here and hide out on occasion. I stood at the front of it and pulled out the jar of yella cake. The sun did not reach into this part of the canyon yet and the jar was once again a dark thing full of poison dust. I shook it and the dust rattled against the glass.

I unscrewed the lid and threw it into the dog hole. “Well, Dad,” I said, “I suppose you’d think it about right that I’d do something as dumb as throw away perfectly good yella cake back into the ground.” Chessy cocked his head at the sound of my words.

I sprinkled the yella cake at the foot of the cave and it made a yellow grey pile. I kicked it with my boot and ground it back into the red soil until there was nothing left. “There.”

I stood there for a second thinking about Dad sweating away in the mines, about dad digging in this hole and for an instant I was red hot mad and I threw the jar as hard as I could at the rock wall, my shoulder yelling at me as I did so. It hit the wall and the glass was too thick to break, so it fell to the ground, empty.