of research; Tara Ison, ever the passionate teacher, for the instructive conversation at Noah’s Bagels; and Jim Zafris.
PREFACE
One of the things Harry liked to do was make up songs. He was a cheerful traveling salesman dressed in a seersucker suit, and he often visited us in camp. At first his singing was something we ignored, like a few raindrops, like Harry himself as he pitched his tent. Then came the downpour, the original words and music of Harry L. Lindstrom heard twice as they echoed off the canyon walls. At length it became up to us to close him down. No one could accomplish this with the effectiveness of my mother, who was fond of shooting off her pistol.
It was 1954. My brother, Charlie, was twelve and I was ten. We were camping out with my mother in the red rock of Utah, prospecting for uranium. An adventure was what we were after. We were alone and words like claim jumping painted exciting action images coated with violence. When one of the old prospectors offered my mother a pistol, she accepted. She discovered a desire to shoot off guns, and became first-class at it, a regular Annie Oakley. During the long silence that hung heavy after one of her blasts, you could hear breathing form a circle around you; you could feel the jumping of a heart that hardly belonged to you. Pretty soon without knowing it you were humming a secret tune of your own. I was always right on the verge of catching this song in full when bang would go another of her pistol shots and there they went, all the notes scattering like a flock of birds, until finally most of them returned and settled into this. It’s a bit different and some pieces are missing, but it’s enough to provide a pretty good idea.
Beth Waterman, Uranium Girl
ONE
The two children were up there on top of the rocks. Harry caught a glimpse of them but then had to turn away. The sun had decided without warning to knife a wayward beam right into his face. He almost ran off the road, if a road was what you wanted to call it.
He was driving an International Harvester truck loaded down with wares: detection instruments, portable compressors, bits, jackhammers, shovels, picks, a couple of wheelbarrows. He was constantly talking or singing to himself. Arriving at a mining camp after journeying hours alone, he never even had to clear his throat. He was always in midsentence, heading toward that motherlode noun and its precious adjectives. When he reentered a town, civilization as he liked to call it, he had to remind himself to clamp his jaw shut so he wouldn’t seem crazy. Probably too late. He had a feeling he had already built a reputation.
It was a boy and a girl up there. This much he could tell despite the sunlight bouncing off at crazy angles to blind him. Well okay, so that was it, they were using hand mirrors. He wondered if the children were doing it intentionally to bedevil him. He didn’t really care in a way. He wondered if his easily hushed temperament was there by nature or forged by his religious upbringing, and was it a good or bad thing? Maybe it had more to do with loneliness. Here were some people—children, of all things.
He was pushing through the road in first gear. Lord amighty, first gear, whoo, top speed. He put an imaginary wife in an imaginary house and there she was in the doorway wagging her finger at him—don’t you bring me any more of your speeding tickets! His foot came off the clutch and he stalled out. He couldn’t tell you the last time that had happened. The Harvester jerked to a halt. He’d been meaning to stop anyway to check on those children.
He was thinking he also had in the truck a few bargain Geiger counters. The children’s mom and dad might be interested. Another family out for the afternoon to strike it rich, although they were way too far from town to be making a picnic of it. May was already ending and the heat was perilous. These Sunday dogstakers got themselves into dangerous pickles and couldn’t get out. This was not a department store with a down escalator you could take when the prices got too high. Actual risks were involved. Learning this lesson midway marked a lesson learned too late. Well, here he was, Harry Lindstrom. Here was Harry Lindstrom, here to save the day. He realized he was singing. Better stop.
The oddest thing happened. He got out of his truck and was standing there and the tire he was staring at decided to deflate on him. Just like the heck with this or some such thing that the tire was saying to him. The leak was not slow but it wasn’t fast either. The rubber coughed out its air with enough leisure to torment him.
He kept the jack and the tire iron behind the passenger seat. The spare tire (two spare tires) was in the back of the truck, loaded up last so it could be retrieved first. He undid his belt and took off his still clean pants and folded them. He found his straw boater on the driver’s-side floor. It had fallen against the brake pedal and looked to be hanging on a rack. He patted the boater atop his head. The sun was beating down.
He twirled off the bolts with the tire iron and tossed them in the hubcap’s dish. The bolts came off readily, relaxing into their true purpose. Their true purpose obviously was to get screwed off at regular, ever shorter intervals. Their true purpose was to make Harry Lindstrom’s life miserable. He was feeling sick at how good the ruined tire was. He could sink his finger full into the curvy treads. And now here were two children watching him. He’d forgotten all about there being children. The boy was older but the girl looked stronger. All this he could tell without turning his head. He was still seeing them out of the corner of his eye.
“Did you see the nice treads this tire’s still got on it?” He addressed the children without turning around. No use getting them scared.
“I saw a big hole in it,” the boy said.
“There’s no hole in this tire. It’s just the curse, that’s what it is.”
“What’s the curse?”
“You like reading the Greek myths?” Harry asked him.
“That’s her line of work,” the boy said, pointing toward the girl.
“Okay.” Whatever he was going to say about Greek myths was gone anyway. “I’m not too happy right now,” he said. “I hate to have you exposed to a bad influence with my temper showing.”
Now he could confirm that the two children were brother and sister because they did one of those sibling glances—quick, furtive, genetically synchronized. He saw that, too, even though he hadn’t yet turned his head. That kind of glance had often passed between him and his real brother (but not the other ones). He’d have to tell the children about his x-ray, back-of-the-head vision. They might not think he was joking, though. Might get scared. Save for later.
The girl had stepped forward and was checking out the dusty windshield of his International Harvester. A long crack looped across the windshield, magically forking in half right where the driver needed to look out. The crack forked north and the crack forked south, leaving the driver’s equator undisturbed. The windshield had become the map of Utah to Harry, and sometimes his old toy soldiers from childhood went marching across the towns of his youth, shortening his ride by an hour or two as he got lost in their battles.
Harry picked up the tire iron and pointed out the windshield’s splintered trail. “That here is also the curse.” His finger traced the crack to its lucky detour and drew a circle on the unblemished glass at the driver’s line of vision. “And this here’s clean living.”
The children weren’t responding. Well, who would really. Would he respond to himself if he were acting this way? He moved to the back of the truck and pulled out one of his brand-new spares. He rummaged for an old Prospectometer. New, $149.50. He was selling it for $69. Good deal. They might be interested. He ran across
