Heart Earth (6 page)

The odometer's little miles slowly go, three, seven, then ten and here is town, palm-sprigged Wickenburg. My mother believes she was not born to parallel-park, so she pulls around to a side street where the Ford can be nosed in and maybe escape notice.

On the round of town chores I tag along long-lipped at her side. First to the post office, with her letters ready to Wally (
We packed up and came to Wickenburg Mon. afternoon
), to my grandmother, to Anna and Joe and others in Montana. As ever, we don't receive quite as many as she sends.

No sooner are we onto the street again than I halt her with my news.

"Can you wait," she hypothesizes as parents always strangely do in public, "or do you have to go real bad?"

Crucially bad, I assure her.

My mother does not point out that I could have taken care of this when I had the entire Arizona desert to do it in, although she looks as if she might like to. We quickmarch to the street intersection, where she scans unfamiliar downtown Wickenburg. The sign she seeks does not display a bucking horse on a rampage the way it would in Montana, but at least it declares budweiser. Into the saloon we troop. The bartender, sallow figure in sleeve garters, and my mother perched in the lastmost booth pretend each other aren't there as I trek to the
M-E-N
door.

The drugstore next. Among the sundries there, my mother's triumph is a scarce roll of film for her camera. After paying, she eyes me, gauging how far down in the dumps I am. "We better resort to ice cream cones," she determines.

Ice cream helps; when did it ever not? But my basic snit was rapidly back. I missed my father at every corner of each day, from his renegade pour of condensed milk into his breakfast coffee to turn it tan as his workshirt, until moonrise when he would burr his voice Scotcher than ever and tell me it was a braw bricht moonlicht nicht. My mother, all at once a single householder in a bareboard cabin ten miles out in the Sonoran desert, with everything there is on her mind, is doing her utmost to fill his absence, I know. But this situation of only one parent...

A carload of Phoenix people interrupts me in mid-mope by depositing themselves on the soda fountain stools with us. We learn from their jabbering to each other that they have driven sixty miles to see the snow on Yarnell Hill north of town, an excursion my blizzard-bred mother finds so comical that she sneaks a giggle to me between licks on her ice cream. Maybe we can go into the snowman business, my mother and I. If people jaunt from far Phoenix just to look upon snow, what might they pay for genuine mitten-made statuary of the stuff, snow fatsos mocking the saguaros.

Onward to groceries and the mumbo jumbo of ration stamps: Book Four reds, blue C2s, how many red points does butter take, good gosh, twenty-
four
?

Provisioned, more or less, we embark in the car again, my mother steering as if the traffic is a conspiracy concentrated against the Ford. Wickenburg is an intersection for everything—the Phoenix highway, the California highway, the highway north that we migrated down from Montana, that other earth. CABiNsCafe-CAFECabinsCAFE I watch the chant in neon as my mother conquers the hazards of Wickenburg's main street. The Hassayampa riverbed arrives beneath us, witchy leafless cottonwood trees along its banks. Our errand next is to retrieve some clean clothing from suitcases stashed at the edge-of-town boarding house where we stayed for a few nights before the desert cabin hove into our existence. How do we do it? In Wickenburg less than a week and already our belongings straddle two places.

Now we face our last destination in town, the one I hate so. My mother's expression is apprehensive, too, not to mention child-weary and chore-worn. (
A day is shot before I realize it,
she has confided to Wally of this go-it-alone treadmill.) As so often in the way she has had to live, this next chore of hers—ours—is medical.

Alongside her, up the savage steps I trudge, braw-bricht-moon-licht-nicht, the stairstep of chant does not work at all, I go from grumpy to downright cross. I was acquainted with hospitals, don't think I wasn't. In our Montana life my mother's worst asthma attacks meant pellmell dashes of the Ford into the night, my father rushing us through the black coil of Deep Creek Canyon to the hospital at Townsend, and then a day or two later, her breathing as regular as it ever became, my father and I would fetch her home from the hospital. Hospitals were where parents got substituted into altogether different beings: people who were sick.

Hallway, perpetually a hallway smelling hideously clean. Our footsteps make the hospital sound, doom doom. Now the room with the number on it, worse even than the smellhall...

My father is sitting in a chair as far as he can get from the hospital bed, fully dressed and with his stockman Stetson in his lap.

"The medical Jesus says I can go," he tells the two of us in the painted and polished way that only he can. "He claims it'll be the healthiest thing for me and him both if I clear out of here."

***

The cure for what had been ailing in my father turned out to be the roulette grace of fate. Here at Wickenburg pop up friends of ours, my parents' nearest neighbors from Montana, an older couple from the ranch next to the Faulkner Creek place. Like us, Allen and Winnie Prescott figured they'd had their fair share of blizzards in the Sixteen country, but very much unlike us, they possessed the family money and genteel level of life to have long since adopted the habit of wintering warm in Arizona. When we made the drive from Alzona Park one Sunday to call on these veteran snowbirds, the Prescotts cast one look at my skin-and-bones rather and urged him to do some doctoring with a whiz of a physician they knew there in Wickenburg, they'd help us get settled, be on hand for whatever ensued. As soon as we packed up and removed to Wickenburg, the monthlong skewer of pain through the middle of my father proved to be not at all the chronic ulcer he'd been treated for in Phoenix, but an appendix seething toward rupture. The Wickenburg doctor hospitalized him on a Tuesday night, extracted the appendix the next morning, and now on Saturday was already turning the impatient patient loose to my mother and me.
That's what I call fast work,
her pen commends in relief.

This farfetched crossing of paths with the Prescotts probably saved my father's life and definitely it rescued my mother's mood about Arizona. At Wickenburg her ink brightens:
Seems good to see somebody we know.
The Prescotts were good to us, good for us. I wish I could do better justice of recollection to Winnie, who was as approximate to me then as in memory: a ranch duchess who did not quite know how to connect with children. I remember only that she would stroll from room to room in their Battle Creek ranch house with her coffee cup in hand as if taking it for a walk. But Allen I can see as if he has been next door these past forty-eight years. Round in the shoulder and middle, squarish of jaw and nose, he resembled a droll upright turtle. Where my father went at ranch tasks in a compelled flurry, Allen entertained himself with them; he thought up a name for every cow he had and spent the time to teach each one to come running when summoned. My parents were not predisposed to like ritzy cow-naming neighbors, but Allen and for that matter Winnie were so puckish about their own highfalutin tendencies that they were hard not to be fond of. A bit later there at Wickenburg it must have been a sharp loss for my folks when the companionable Prescotts migrated back north to begin spring on their Battle Creek ranch. But they left us with all they could. It was the Prescotts who gave us the desert.

***

The cabin in the cactus-patch foothills wasn't ours and it wasn't even theirs; the place belonged to some Wickenburg acquaintance of the Prescotts who charitably let us cubbyhole ourselves there while Dad recuperated.

Not hot and cold water and so on, but more the ranch style
—
2 rooms, but we are just going to use one,
my mother described to Wally the bargain castle in the sand.
The nice part is it costs no rent.

Fie upon Phoenix, auf Wiedersehen to Alzona Park and specters of escaped Germans. Out there where we at first didn't know joshua from yucca from cholla from ocotillo, the trio of us got up each morning with nothing recognizable around except one another and the weary Ford. Neighbors now consisted of lizards and scorpions. The mountains wavering up from every horizon around Wickenburg looked ashen, dumpy. The highest lump anywhere around was, gruesomely, Vulture Peak. No pelt of sagebrush to soften this country for us, either; saguaro cacti, with their spiky mittens out, stubbled the hills. Where the familiar black-green of Montana's jack-pines would have shadowed, here the bare green blush of paloverde scarcely inflected the gulches—arroyos—and under every other bristling contortion of vegetation, prickly pears crouched like shin-hunting pygmies in ambush. Even the desert birdsounds had a jab to them, the ha
ha
of a Gambel's quail invisibly derisive in the bush, the yap of a Gila woodpecker scolding us from his cactus penthouse.

I loved every fang and dagger of it.

Any bloodline is a carving river and parents are its nearest shores. At the Faulkner Creek ranch I had learned to try out my mother's limits by running as fast as I could down the sharp shale slope of the ridge next to the ranch house. How I ever found it out without cartwheeling myself to multiple fractures is a mystery, but the avalanche angle of that slope was precisely as much plunge as I could handle as a headlong four- and five-year-old. The first time my visiting grandmother saw one of my races with the law of gravity, she refused ever to watch again. Even my father, with his survivor's-eye view from all the times life had banged him up, even he was given pause by those vertical dashes of mine, tyke roaring drunk on momentum. But my mother let me risk. Watched out her kitchen window my every wild downhiller, hugged herself to bruises while doing so, but let me. Because she knew something of what was ahead? Can it have been that clear to her, that reasoned? The way I would grow up, after, was contained in those freefall moments down that shale-bladed slope. In such plunge, if you use your ricochets right, you steal a kind of balance for yourself; you make equilibrium moment by moment because you have to. Amid the people and places I was to live with, I practiced that bouncing equilibrium and carried it on into a life of writing, free-falling through the language. My father's turn at seeing me toward gravitational independence would come. But my mother's came first and it came early, in her determination that I should fly free of the close coddling she'd had as an ill child. At the Faulkner Creek place she turned me loose in that downhill spree. Here in our second Arizona life, she daily set me free into the cactus jungle.

Where lessons were quick. One pant cuff instantaneously full of fiendish tiny needles and you know not to brush by a prickly pear again.

The saguaros seemed to welcome me into the desert democracy of light. Morning shadows of several-armed cactus in stretching dance toward Wickenburg, stubby clumps at noon, reversed elongation toward the Hieroglyphic Mountains in honor of evening. Here even I, according to the shadow possibilities of my prowling boy-body and its swoopbrimmed hat, was a hive of wizards.

And so did the Ford play into my newest seizure of imagination, its exaggerated groundcloud of shade the perfect pantomime companion for the game of Allen-Prescott-and-the-runaway-Terraplane. Allen told it on himself, how his Hudson Terraplane—an old behemoth sedan he had cut the back out of, hybridizing it into a kind of deluxe ranch runabout and carryall—hung up on a low shale bank when he was puttering out to fix fence between his ranch and Faulkner Creek. When he got behind the car with a crowbar, his mighty pry liberated the Terraplane but also flung him to his knees. By the time he could clamber back onto his feet the car was trundling away at a surprising pace. That tale of the Terraplane planing across the terra, Allen in hotfoot pursuit, was tailormade for a lone boy and a suggestible Ford, you just bet it was. In and out of the parked coupe I flung myself, its shadowline and mine the pageant of Allen's frantic chase, a pretend reel of barbwire bucking out and bowling wickedly at his/my shins, mock fence-posts clacketing against each other as they fly out of the bed of the bounding runaway, reenacted dodging of a five-pound nailbox tipping over, the Terraplane/Ford laying a silver trail of spikes.

The desert, it is said, makes people more absolute. While I kite around among the cacti, my father pegs away at the chore of recuperation, and the indigo of the desert night draws down into my mother's pen.

Everyone else is in bed but I'm not ready to go just yet, so will spend my time writing you. Pretty chilly tonight. Keeps me busy poking wood in the fire....

We are all pretty well at present. Charlie is getting along alright or seems to be, anyway. His side is sore yet, and he has to be careful, but that is to be expected....

This is a good place to rest, & that's what Charlie needs.... I always thought a desert is just nothing, but have changed my mind ... It is really beautiful here, in the desert way....

Got 2 welcome letters from you yesterday. So glad to hear from you, Wally, and know you're O.K. Was surely too bad about your buddy being lost in that storm. I don't think any of us have a good idea of what you guys have to go through.

***

Logbook of the
Ault,
March 19, 1945, off Okinawa:

0814 SIGHTED ENEMY PLANE (JUDY) MAKING SUICIDE DIVE ON FORMATION. PLANE WAS TAKEN UNDER FIRE AND SHOT DOWN BY A.A. FIRE. PLANE FELL OFF PORT BEAM OF USS
ESSEX....
OBSERVED USS
FRANKLIN
AND USS
WASP
BURNING AT A DISTANCE.

1318 SIGHTED TWO ENEMY PLANES (ZEKES) MAKING ATTACK ON FORMATION. MANEUVERED AT EMERGENCY TURNS AND SPEEDS. COMBAT AIR PATROL SHOT DOWN ONE DISTANT 5 MILES. OTHER PLANE MADE SUICIDE DIVE ON TASK GROUP AND WAS SHOT DOWN BY ANTIAIRCRAFT FIRE.

2145 ...COVERING THE WITHDRAWAL OF USS
FRANKLIN,
BADLY DAMAGED AND IN TOW TO WESTWARD.