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.”
TWELVE
Several weeks earlier a stone had kicked up and cracked the windshield of the International Harvester. Within a couple of days the crack had lengthened and grown a curve. It hadn’t taken too much inventiveness to detect the shape of Utah there on the glass. As soon as Harry was able to imagine that, his old toy soldiers came to life, marching their leaden way back and forth across the windshield through the towns he had grown up in. He was happy to have his old friends returned to him, the buglers and the flag bearers, the Johnny Rebs. But in keeping him company they also stripped him down to loneliness. He was about at the end. Then there came the mother and these two children. And now there was Jo. Harry wondered how he had ever made it these past six years, traveling alone. The crack all of a sudden was starting to bother him.
On their way back from Jimmy Splendid’s he stopped the truck at the cache point and refueled from one of the large canisters he had stored. Jo helped him lift the canister. “I guess you two can handle it?” the mother said. The gasoline gurgled in. He and Jo were frozen in awkward positions, straining to angle the canister into the gas tank. They watched the mother and Charlie trudge away.
“They’re off again,” Jo whispered.
Harry nodded.
“You don’t know what it is?”
Harry shook his head again. He took this exchange of confidences as an opportunity to lean closer. “Has she talked to you?”
“She’s hardly said more than hello to me. She hates me.”
“She likes you. That’s just the way she is.”
“How long have you known her?”
“Three days.”
Jo smiled.
“Three or four. You get a sense of her pretty quick.”
The mother and Charlie were still visible as bobbing heads over the scrub pine.
“That’ll do,” Harry said, easing the canister down. He looked around for Beth, but she was off somewhere. He started loading up the equipment. He had done pretty well at Splendid’s camp. He fantasized about selling it all, all at one stop, every single compressor, that would be something, wouldn’t it, then going back for another full load, selling all of that, and all the detection instruments and jackhammers, and give us every single shovel and pick you got, too, Harry. He could start thinking like that and it could be like some game he was addicted to. That must have been what had kept him going all this time. Just one time, selling every single thing in his truck at one place. The game seemed pretty stupid in light of all the bad things in the world. Of course he could tell himself that, but the game was still important to him and he kept on playing it. Just like selling that whole box of Good & Plenty back at Splendid’s—his heart had spun with the thrill of it. He had figured out this thing, that Navajos like licorice, and taken a chance on it and boom, just like that, a bushel of it sold! Tomorrow he was going to a new mining camp to try out his luck. Maybe Jo would go with him. Something was wrong with Charlie yet he was thinking of Jo and he was thinking of the two of them traveling in his truck together and he was thinking how beautiful she was and how he was waiting for her to tell him about her terrible, unhappy marriage. And how he kept expecting her words to come out in a Southern drawl. She had that look. And how he was still a little caught out each time she spoke and there was a clip instead of a softening. Yet he was also convinced that he was in love with the mother. He could go back and forth, shocked at how easy it was, worried that he had polygamy in the blood. Traits were passed down in families, he knew that. Believing that polygamy qualified as a trait was foolish—he knew that, too—yet he often felt foolish enough to believe anything. He resembled his mother in almost every way, physically, emotionally. She had hated in secret the whole idea of celestial marriage. Harry had always wondered what he and his father had in common, what little thing. Harry couldn’t even throw a ball the regular way; he was the only man he knew who couldn’t cock it like a guy. He always thought fate was trying to make it perfectly clear to him that he should stay away from his father’s habits.
“I’m surprised to find someone like you out here,” he finally said to Jo.
“Why’s that, Harry?” she asked, her voice still a surprise to him.
“I don’t know. You seem . . .”
“I seem?” The way she helped him along. She’d gotten a lot of this. Attention, that is. She probably got attention wherever she went.
“Oh, a party girl.”
“A party girl? I’m not a party girl.”
That was the only way he could explain it to himself about Jo and the man she had chosen to marry: