At the filling station Beth and Charlie pulled out cold soda pops from the vending racks. Harry told them to save the bottles to use as claim notices. Beth didn’t miss the glance Harry gave her mother when he said this. Harry was very tall and because he was so skinny he seemed floppy, and his personality seemed floppy, too. But in his glance Beth could see his strong inkling that they had staked not a single claim. It wasn’t up to her to tell him he was right or wrong.
Harry pulled out an orange soda for himself. “I’ll add it to your collection,” he said. “What have you been putting your claim notices in before this?”
“Cans of chili con carne,” her mother said. She gave Harry a glance of her own.
Harry needed to pick up his laundry. They drove over to Mel’s Cleaners. Harry piled the stack of fresh shirts on the front seat. They were folded up and wrapped like presents. Harry said it always made him feel good to pick up a bunch of shirts. Right there he went through every shirt, pulling out the cardboard that kept the shirts folded and stiff. He presented the cardboard pieces to Charlie for his ever-expanding map of the campsite and environs.
They went next to the hardware store. Harry picked up tape for Charlie’s map and then a supply of different-colored inks. Beth went over to look at paper she might need for her book reports. She wasn’t running out yet but she liked thinking about running out. Harry came over. He must have thought she was feeling left out because he bought her paper and a fountain pen and then ink cartridges in her choice of color (peacock blue). Then he went off for his own stuff.
The hardware store had an excited buzz to it, like people shoving in line to catch a glimpse of a movie star. Most of the customers were prospectors and they were holding rocks in their hands and all of them were pushing into the same aisle, where the Geiger counters were lined up on shelves like coffee percolators. What sounded like Miss Dazzle’s radio static emitted from them. The static added an angry discharge to the bumping and muttering of the prospectors as they ran their rocks over the sensors.
In the middle of the turmoil Beth kept thinking how lucky they were to have found Harry.
Beth studied the prospectors. They were too occupied to notice her stares. She had read her mother’s pamphlets. She had seen the photographs of a clean showered smiling lady and the clean showered smiling man holding their rocks up like delicious milk shakes, but all she was seeing here were men, dirty men, looking dried up and not very nice, and not a single one of them with combed hair or a shaved face.
An old prospector stood off to the side, drinking from a dainty teacup. Amber-colored cracks branched through the porcelain. Beth saw that he was using the teacup to hide his face, to hide the fact that he was scrutinizing her mother. She realized all the men under normal conditions, these kinds of men that is, would be leering at her mother since every once in a while Beth remembered how pretty she was. She pointed out the old man to Charlie, who kept watch while she went off to find Harry. Harry was using his salesman’s discount to buy the claim stakes and powder charges her mother said she needed. He followed Beth to the other side of the store and they looked around until Charlie waved them over. They found her mother with the old man. They were picking out bullets together for the gun he was giving to her. He was giving it to her for free. Harry said, “Oh no. No. Thank you but no.” The old man said it was just a .22, he had more where that came from, and he said, “This one’s not like the others”—meaning her mother not the gun, Beth got clear on that after he nodded toward the jostling, filthy men some of whom flung their rocks to the linoleum floor before stomping out.
“Yeah, get the gun, Mom,” Charlie said.
Her mother’s hair had worked loose again and the strands were hanging down. She hooked the strands behind her ear, the old man enraptured by her every gesture. As they were leaving, the old man said he wouldn’t mind a peck on the cheek but perhaps he’d clean himself up a little first. She said that would be fine, she’d look forward to the occasion. She shook his hand.
Before going back to the campsite they went to the grocery store for some fresh fruits and more emergency alkaline at sixty-four pounds per cubic foot, and then to the Grand Vu Theater. They had planned on a movie and ice cream and then, her mother said, time to get back. Set up inside the movie theater was a Magic Uranium Booth. The man in the booth hammered a penny with uranium to make it radioactive then ran it over a Geiger counter with the silken sweep of a magician. The needles started clicking. “I’ll get you each a lucky penny to put in your pocket,” Harry said, but her mother said, “Thank you, Harry, but we’re going to pass on that one.” Next to the Magic Uranium Booth was a hot-dog stand that Harry said was run by the owner’s wife. He said the hot-dog stand used to be a kissing booth but her kisses were like poison. The wieners of her hot-dog stand were displayed inside a small glass oven and they were dry and hard as the desert, as if she had poisoned them, too. Still, Beth wouldn’t have minded eating one. They didn’t get ice cream. The ice cream was ruined because the freezer couldn’t get cold enough.
Twenty minutes into Captain Horatio Hornblower the brownouts started. Harry said the single generator couldn’t keep up with all the newcomers pouring into town. The moviegoers milled outside. Beth had seen enough of the picture to figure that since the movie took place on a ship there wasn’t going to be a searching-for-water-in-the-desert scene, so she wasn’t too disappointed when her mother suggested they try another time. They got more soda pop for the claim notices, and Harry treated himself to a large paper cup of iced tea and said he didn’t care who knew it. “And I’m sure the whole world is watching,” her mother said. In the truck they ate peaches which dripped all over them and Harry hurried to beat the darkness, which arrived like a yanked curtain just as they reached the campsite. The sun flared red as it dropped. Although still above the horizon when they got home, it was setting directly behind the horseshoe. The overhanging rock eclipsed it and suddenly the sky grew dim. Harry parked in the road. It got darker with each step toward their shelter. It seemed darker, too, because of the suddenness of it. Beth almost didn’t realize there were other people there at her campsite until something big and silver loomed ahead of her. She was tempted to call it a spaceship.