Free Yellowcake by Ann Cummins Page B

Delmar in the customer's chair on the other side of her desk.
    "I want to apply for a loan," he says.
    She doesn't smile. It's one o'clock, an hour past her usual lunch break, and she's hungry. But she doesn't want to tell him it's time for her lunch, because Delmar will want her to buy him lunch. She says nothing.
    "Let me borrow your truck," he says.
    "No."
    "C'mon. You don't need it. You're working."
    "You don't have a driver's license."
    "I'm not going to wreck it. C'mon."
    "Why?"
    He grins at her. "So I can go cruising."
    She just looks at him.
    "I've got a job interview." He's wearing ratty blue jeans and a white T-shirt.
    "You have a job," she says. His job is helping their grandmother with the farm. That was a condition of his parole.
    "I don't," he says.
    Becky stares at him. He smiles. She had gone with her aunt Alice and her grandmother to the parole hearing last January. That was just before her father's relapse, and her grandmother was still speaking to her. She watched her aunt go into action, making a case for Delmar's release, pleading on behalf of her half-blind seventy-year-old mother, who she said needed looking after. Alice had been living with her mother, but it was rodeo season, and she wanted to be on the road. Delmar was the only one in the family not doing anything, just sitting there in prison. Alice described the farm as a desolate, prisonlike place, which it isn't—it's on good land near the river. For her part, Becky's grandmother sat as regal as a queen, her walking stick between her knees, legs covered by her green velveteen squaw skirt, and wearing her weight in turquoise, all decked out for her trip to the city. It was probably having her there, acting blinder than she really is, that made the case.
    "
Shimá saní
and
Shimá
don't mind," Delmar says. "They think I need my own money."
    "You're not going to get a job dressed like that."
    "It's a gardening job," he says. "They don't care how you dress. C'mon. I'll have it back here by five, when you get off. Really. I'll put gas in it."
    "Why can't Aunt Alice drive you?"
    "She took
Shimá saní
to the eye doctor in Durango."
    "How'd you get here?"
    "Hitched." He's wearing transparent brown shades that seem to magnify his eyes—the yellow-brown of a coyote's eyes. He's cunning, Delmar. She knows she'll give him the truck. She doesn't have a choice. She's a little afraid of him, though he hasn't given her any real reason to be since they were little. When he was very young, he had a terrible temper, would kick and scream and throw punches when things didn't go his way. Once, just after his mother had dropped him off at Becky's house and taken off for Florida, Delmar went into a rage and bit her, breaking the flesh on her arm, the bite so deep it could have been made by fangs; she still has four little white scars on her forearm, plus she has the memory of pain from the bite and from the tetanus shot she had to get. He seemed to outgrow his temper as he got older, to develop a sweetness that she has never quite trusted. In junior high he was solitary. He loved to sing. She sometimes followed him on his walks in the desert, listening to the songs he sang just under his breath, songs he heard on the radio. He didn't tell her not to follow him, he just ignored her. He once told her that being with her was like being with nobody, which was why he liked her.
    "What gardening job?" she says.
    "Landscaper. I promise I'll take good care of it and not go cruising. Pretty please?" He blinks at her.
    Becky shakes her head, but she reaches for her purse. She imagines her beautiful truck, which will be paid off in a year, a tangle of chrome and metal. She hands him the keys. "Two hours," she says. "No more. Be back by three. I get off at three." This isn't true; she gets off at four.
    Delmar grins. She stares at the dark spot in his front tooth where the enamel chipped when a baseball hit him in the mouth. He was ten. She remembers the blood