Water Toxic: Pastiche of Body Toxic

Here are the sounds: the smack of children's barefeet on the red dust, inebriated adult chattering in English or Diné, the sounds of twilight exuberance. There might be a radio blasting in the kitchen, and if so, it blares unattended.

Odors: four walls of stale Arizona desert. Around the back on the bottle-littered rectangle invisible to the dirt road that passes the shack an unsealed plastic drum of well water stagnates, peppered with dead and dying flies and gnats, beetles, waterbugs in the summer, thrashing and struggling for a clawhold on the slick plastic barrel sides. The yard's red crusted-over clay and dog deposits in the corners. Beer, stale frybread, diapers, too many people.

In 1979 (July) near Church Rock, New Mexico, on the Navajo Nation reservation, a hundred miles or so from my cousins' rez, a dam leading into the Rio Puerco River burst. 1,100 tons of uranium mining wastes -- radioactive sludge -- gushed through the mud-packed dam. 100 million gallons of radioactive water gushed through the dam before the crack was repaired. The expelled waste flooded into the tributary, propelled downstream all the way from New Mexico through Arizona and into Nevada. Contamination seeped into the reservation groundwater in three states. Five years later (1985), the United Nuclear Metals Co. hurriedly shut down its last mining operation on the reservation, as the business had become unprofitable; uranium particles and tainted tools were hastily buried at the site and left to bleed radiation into the earth. Despite calls for protection on the part of the Navajos who drink the water, to date no substantial effort has been put forth on the part of either the US government or UNMCo to clear up the contamination.

The Breakfast Club was released the year the mining company closed -- my mom and older relatives went to see it. The previews had featured Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald, and, especially, Molly Ringwald's tube of lipstick tucked into her pert cleavage, a symbol of the idle restlessness that plagues high schools everywhere. Everyone identified with that movie on some level. My mom spent weeks afterward bemoaning her miserable high school career. John Hughes had made a moderately amusing, mildly touching drama about the social pecking-order and how in the end we're all just as wounded as the next kid; my mom missed the point completely, obsessing over visions of Molly Ringwald's shiny red hair, peachy complexion, and firm-breasted perfection.

I ask my relatives if they remember UNMCo closing or the dam bursting and they don't. I ask them if they remember The Breakfast Club and they do.

"That red-haired what's-her-name was such a bitch," says my mom, who hates redheads.