House Rules

Marge took off her sunglasses. "Something's over there. By the flowers. It's glittering."
"It's probably a frigging gum wrapper."
She headed over. "Then we should definitely pick it up. How could someone even think of littering in a place like this?"
"Marge..." Larry followed her over, bumping into her when she came to a sudden stop. "What the --?"
"Look!" Marge pointed. Behind the flowers a piece of metal was sticking out of the sand.
"Lemme see." Larry squinted and crept closer. "Looks like some kind of box." He peered at it, then felt around it with his shoe. They heard a metallic thump. Larry's eyebrows shot up. He bent over the box.
"Wait!" Marge cut in. "Don't touch it." She hugged her arms and looked around. "You have no idea what's in there."
Larry looked up. "For Christ's sake, Marge, it's just a box." He squatted down beside it.
"Hold on. Stop. Isn't--isn't this where they dump all the radiation stuff?"
"Huh?"
"You know, spent fuel rods, the waste from reactors? Like they talk about on TV? They transport it into the desert and dump it in places where nobody lives."
"Marge, that's in Wyoming. And you're talking about huge containers. The size of railroad cars. Not little boxes."
"Still..." She pleaded. "You never know."
Larry shot her one of his looks, the kind where the lower part of his jaw pulsed, the way it did when he disagreed with her. An uneasy feeling fluttered her stomach. "You were right, Larry. This isn't fun. Let's go back to the car. We'll get a nice, cold drink at the hotel."
Instead, he knelt down and started scooping up chunks of dry, hard-packed sand.
"Honey, didn't you hear what I said?"
But he kept scrabbling through the sand. Then he stopped digging and sat back on his haunches. Jiggling it to pry it loose, he lifted up a gray tackle box about a foot square and five inches deep. Its surface, at least the part not covered with sand, was dingy and battered.
Marge was just about ready to go back to the hotel without him. Let him get poisoned by some weird biological toxin. "Larry, you just leave that thing right there."
His response was to shake the box from side to side. A swishing noise could be heard.
"Larry." Marge started to feel anxious. "It doesn't belong to you."
He looked around, a strange light in his eyes. The sun was casting long shadows across the desert, suffusing everything with a rosy, warm light. No one else was in sight. "It does now." Cradling the box under his arm, he started back toward the car. "Let's go. And for the love of God, don't say a word to anyone."