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