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.”
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.”
