The Summer Garden (20 page)

“Where are these mountains you told me about?”

“Shura, don’t tell me you don’t see them!” Tatiana pointed straight ahead. The ranges did loom rather large and monolith-like across the saguaros, but Alexander was in a good mood this morning and wanted to tease her.

“What, those? Those aren’t mountains. Those are rocks. I know, because I’ve seen mountains. The Tontos we passed yesterday, those were mountains. The Santa Fe, those were mountains. Also I’ve seen the Urals, I’ve seen the Holy Cross Mountains, completely covered by coniferous forest.
Those
were mountains.” His mood became less good.

“Now, now…” Tatiana said, reaching over and easing him away with her hand on his thigh. “These are Arizona’s McDowell Mountains. Sedimentary rock on top of granite rock formed from lava two billion years ago. Precambrian rocks.”

“Aren’t you a little geologist.” Alexander grinned. “A capitalist and a geologist.” She was in yellow gingham today, white bobby socks and ballet slipper shoes, her hair pulled back in a braided bun. She didn’t have a bead of perspiration on her face, looking almost serene if only Alexander didn’t look down on her lap and notice her fingers pressed so stiffly against each other, they looked as if they were breaking.

“All right, all right,” he said with a slight frown. “They’re mountains.”

They chugged along north, kicking up dirt with their dusty tires. The McDowell Mountains drew closer. The sun was high. Alexander said they were idiots,
morons
for taking a trip across the hottest part of the country during the hottest part of the year. If they were smart they would have left Coconut Grove early, driven up to Montana to spend the summer, then carried on to California for the grape-picking.

“You didn’t want to leave Florida, remember?”

“Hmm,” he assented. “Coconut Grove
was
quite nice for a while.”

They fell quiet.

It was another forty-five minutes of unpaved frontier road with not a house, a fruit stand, a gas station, a storefront, or another soul around before Tatiana told him to make a right on a narrow dirt path that sloped upward.

The path was called Jomax.

Jomax ended in a sun-drenched rocky mountain, and that’s where Alexander stopped, a mile above the valley. Tatiana, her fingers relaxed, a toothy, happy smile on her face, exclaimed, “Oh God! There is nobody here!”

“That’s right,” Alexander said, turning off the ignition. “Because everyone else is in Coconut Grove in the ocean.”

“There is
nobody
here,” she repeated, almost to herself, and hopped out of the trailer.

Anthony ran off but not before Tatiana stopped him, saying, “Remember what I told you about the cholla, Ant? Don’t go anywhere near it. The wind blows the puffs of needles right under your skin and I won’t be able to get them out.”

“What wind? Let go of me.”

“Anthony,” said Alexander, looking for his lighter, “your mother tells you something, you don’t tell her to let go. Tania, hold on to him for another two minutes until he understands that.”

Tatiana made a face at Anthony, pinched him, and quietly let him go. Alexander’s lighter was in her hands. She flicked it on for him, and he cupped her hand as he lit his cigarette. “Stop being so soft with him,” he said.

Walking away from her to explore a little, Alexander looked north and south, east and west, to the mountains, to the expanse of the entire Phoenix valley lying vast beneath his gaze, its farms all spread out in the overgrown rolling Sonoran Desert. This desert wasn’t like the Mojave he vaguely remembered from childhood. This wasn’t gray sand with gray mounds of dirt as far as the eye could see. This desert in late July was covered in burned-out, abundant foliage. Thousands of saguaro cacti filled the landscape, their brown-green spiky towering pinnacles and their arms reaching thirty, forty feet up to the sun. The mesquite trees were brown, the palo verdes sepia. The underbrush and the motley over-brush were all in hues of the taupe singed earth. All things grew not out of grass, but out of clay and sand. It looked like a desert jungle. It was not at all what Alexander had expected.

“Tania…”

“I
know
,” she said, coming up against him. “Isn’t it
unbelievable
?”

“Hmm. That wasn’t
quite
what I was thinking.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it in my whole life.” Her voice became tainted with
something
. “And wait till you see this place in the spring!”

“That implies that we would see it in the spring.”

“Everything blooms!”

“And you know this how?”

“I know this,” Tatiana said with funny solemnity, “because I saw pictures in a book in the library.”

“Oh. Pictures in a book. Do these books mention water?”

She waved her hand dismissively. “The Hohokam Indians back hundreds of years ago saw what I see and wanted to live in this valley so much that they brought water here by a series of canals that led from the Salt River. So back when the mighty British Empire was still using outhouses, the Hohokam Indians were irrigating their crops with running water.”

“How do
you
know?” he exclaimed.

“The New York Public Library. The white man here still uses the Hohokam canals.”

“So there
is
a river around here then?” He touched the dry sand with his hands

“Salt River, but
far
,” Tatiana replied. “With any luck, we’ll never have to see it.”

Alexander had never experienced this kind of stunning heat. Even in Florida, all was tempered by the water. No temperance here. “I’m starting to boil from the inside out,” he said. “Quick, show me our land before my arteries melt.”

“You’re standing on it,” said Tatiana.

“Standing on what?”

“The land.” She motioned around. “This is it. Right here, all of it, at the very top of this hill. From this road due southeast,
ninety-seven acres
of the Sonoran Desert flush into the mountain. Our property is two acres wide, and—you know—about forty-nine acres deep. We’ll have to get a surveyor. I think it may open up in a pie shape.”

“Kind of like Sachsenhausen?”

Tatiana looked as if she’d been slapped. “Why do you do that?” she said quietly. “This isn’t your prison. This is your freedom.”

Slightly abashed, he said, “You
like
this?”

“Well, I wouldn’t have bought it if I didn’t like it, Shura.” Tatiana paused. Once again strange trouble passed over her face.

“Tania,” Alexander said, “the place is going to set itself on fire.”

“Look,” she said, “we’ll go, we’ll get it appraised. If the price is right, we’ll sell it. I have no problem selling it. But…don’t you see!” she exclaimed, coming up to him. “Don’t you see the desert? Don’t you see the mountains?” She pointed. “The one right next to ours is Pinnacle Peak; it’s famous. But ours has no name. Maybe we can call it Alexander’s Mountain.” She raised her eyebrows, but he wasn’t playing at the moment, though he noted her mischief for later.

“I see the desert,” Alexander said. “There’s not a single green thing growing anywhere. Except cacti and they don’t need water. I’m not a saguaro. I need water. There is no good river and no lakes.”

“
Exactly!
” she said, all energized. “No
rivers
. No Nevas, Lugas, Kamas, Vistulas. No lakes. No Lake Ilmens, no Lake Ladogas. No fields. No clearings. No pines, no pine needles, no birches, no larks, almost no birdsong. Sometimes the swallows come in the summer. But there are no forests over the mountains. There’s no snow. You want those things, you can go into the Grand Canyon in the winter. The Ponderosa pine grows a mile above the ice cold Colorado.” Standing close, she put her intimate hands on him. “And you are a little bit like the mighty saguaro,” she murmured.

Okay, Alexander was noting the playing, he was coming back to it very shortly. “I won’t live anywhere without water, Tatiana Metanova.” He stamped out his cigarette and his arms went around her. “I don’t care what you’re trying to get away from.”

“It’s Tatiana Barrington, Alexander Barrington,” said Tatiana, slipping out of his hold. “And you don’t know
anything
about what I’m trying to get away from.”

He blinked at her. “I think even here in Arizona there might be a moon. Maybe a crimson moon, Tatia? A large, low, harvest crimson moon?”

She blinked back. “Why don’t you put on your sixty pounds of gear and pick up your weapons, soldier.” Backing away with a swirl, she walked back to the Nomad, while Alexander remained like a post in the sand. In a moment she returned with some water, which he gulped gladly, then went to look for Anthony, finding him near the prickly pears, deeply immersed in a study of rocks. Turned out it wasn’t rocks, it was a lizard, which the boy had pinned to the ground with a sharp cactus needle.

“Ant, isn’t that the cactus your mother told you to stay away from?” Alexander said, crouching by his son and giving him some water.

“No, Dad,” Anthony replied patiently. “Cholla is bad for playing with lizards.”

“Son,” said Alexander, “I don’t think that lizard is playing.”

“Dad, this place is
swarming
with reptiles!”

“Don’t say that as if it’s a good thing. You know how afraid your mother is of reptiles. Look how you’re upsetting her.”

They peeked out from the prickly pears. The upset mother was leaning back against the Nomad, eyes closed, palms down, sun on her face.

After a while, he returned to her, splashing water on her. That made her open her eyes. Alexander paused to take her in, her square-jawed flushed face, outrageous freckles, serene seaweed eyes. He appraised the rest of her up and down. She was so arousingly
tiny
. And bewildering. Shaking his head, Alexander hugged her, he kissed her. She tasted as though plums had dried on her lips.

“You are out of your mind, my freckle-faced tadpole,” he said, eventually stepping away, “to have bought this land in the first place. I honestly don’t know
what
in the world possessed you. But now the die is cast. Come on, Arizona-lover, cholla-expert, before we go see the appraiser, let’s eat. Though we’ll have to go somewhere else to put water on our bodies, won’t we?”

They brought out their flasks, their bread, their ham. Earlier that morning they had bought plums, cherries, tomatoes, cucumbers at a farm stand. They had so much to eat. He rolled out the canopy, they sat under it, where it was a hundred in the shade, and feasted.

“How much did you say you paid for the land?” he asked.

“Fifty dollars an acre.”

Alexander whistled. “This is near Scottsdale?”

“Yes, Scottsdale is only twenty miles south.”

“Hmm. Is it a one horse town?”

“Oh, not anymore, sir!” said a real estate agent in Scottsdale. “Not anymore. There’s the army base, and the GIs, like you, sir, they’re all comin’ back from the war and marrying their sweethearts. You two are newlyweds?”

No one said anything, as the
four
-year-old child sat near them lining up the real estate brochures in neat rows.

“The housing boom is something to behold,” the realtor went on quickly. “Scottsdale is an up-and-coming town, you just watch and see. We had nobody here, almost as if we weren’t part of the Union, but now that the war is over, Phoenix is exploding. Did you know,” he said proudly, “our housebuilding industry is number one in the country? We’ve got new schools, a new hospital—Phoenix Memorial—a new department store in Paradise Valley. You would like it here very much. Would you be interested in seeing some properties?”

“When are you going to pave the roads?” asked Alexander. He had changed into clean beige fatigues and a dry black T-shirt. Tattoos, scars, blue death camp numbers, no matter—he could not wear a long-sleeve shirt in Arizona. The real estate man kept trying not to glance at the long scar running up Alexander’s forearm into the blue cross. The realtor himself was wearing a wool suit in which he was sweating even in air conditioning.

“Oh, every day, sir, new roads are being paved every day. New communities are being built constantly. This is changing from farm country to a real proper town. The war has been very good for us. We’re in a real boom. Are you from the East? I thought so, by your wife’s accent. Much like your Levittown communities, except the houses are nicer here, if I may be so bold. May I show you a couple of—”

“No,” said Tatiana, stepping forward. “But we would be interested in finding out the going price of our own property here. We’re up north, off Pima Road, near Pinnacle Peak.”

The realtor’s face soured when he heard they weren’t in the market. “Where, near Rio Verde Drive?”

“Yes, a few miles south of there. On Jomax.”

“On what? They just named that road. You have a house there? There’s nothing up there.” He said it as if he didn’t believe her.

“No house, just some property.”

“Well,” he said with a shrug. “My appraiser is out to lunch.”

An hour later, the appraiser and the realtor’s faces were trying to maintain their poker expressions, but it wasn’t working. “
How
many acres did you say you have?” the appraiser said, a short man with a small head, a large body and an ill-fitting suit.

“Ninety-seven,” repeated Tatiana calmly.

“Well, that’s impossible,” said the appraiser. “I know all the land bought and sold here. I mean, the town of Scottsdale is just now thinking of incorporating—do you know how many acres?—sixty hundred and forty. Three and a half square miles. A smart man bought them last century for three and a half dollars an acre. But that was then. You’re telling me you have ninety-seven acres? A sixth of the land of our whole town? No one sells in large parcels like that. No one would sell you ninety-seven acres.”

Tatiana just stared at him. Alexander just stared at him. He was trying to figure out if this was a ploy, a game, or whether the guy was actually being rude, in which case—

“Land’s too valuable,” stated the appraiser. “Around here we sell one acre, two at most. And up there, there’s nothing but desert. It’s all owned by the Federal Government or the Indians.”