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+"Gamma says the sand massages your gums and makes them soft and then your teeth fall out and you chew them up in dreams when you're anxious like you are Claire."

Claire ignored her nephew and continued to stare down at the green lacy finger snaking through the featureless pink desert. No not featuresless Claire decided, just subtle or perhaps not even subtle--indifferent, indifferent to the churning brown water of the Rialto fiver slithering through it. Why should it pay any attention? Sure the river was starting to flood, three days rain feeding it, but ten yards on either side and it was sand again. Featureless pink sand with thorny plants. The sand didn't care for the water, didn't hold onto it, didn't even try, just let the water flow right on over it, puddle and collect, run off and feed into the river. 

And it did it so fast it routinely killed people who weren't paying attention. Walls of water rushing through, rejected by the desert and sent off to kill and maim on its way to the ocean.

Of course there were the mountains ringing the desert, keeping watch over it, making sure it behaved in some general way. Claire studied the Rincon range and tried to ignore her missing toothed nephew and his constant you look nervous and your look worried and you look miserable, why are you so sad Claire conversation.

But maybe the mountains weren't really keeping watch. Maybe they were laughing green and crumbling, discarding their unneeded water into the desert river along with boulders and tree and other baggage they could get along with out. Just dumping it down here like so much sewage.

In three days I will be married. She kept repeating it in her head to see if perhaps it would sink in and become enjoyable or scare her so profoundly she ran away and disappeared into the desert forever. But it did neither. She just thought it over and over with the same numb indifference each time.


***

The long metal tunnel out of the plane is lined with hollow florescent lights and reverberates with the muffled echo of shuffling feet headed up the incline in front of him. Airplanes are improbable. And yet it is ending again in cheap metal and sheet rock. An ordinary ending to every improbability, better suited than a continuation of improbabilities and not unlike the stale florescent absence of similarly textured hospital walls. The shuffling feet moving out of rooms like quiet last sighs of breath. He drags his hand absently across the textured wall to the memory of woven grass wallpaper on the living room walls of the house he grew up in. 

Memory is unlikely. Unlikely enough to have become necessary, to have become a marker on the passage of time, which is equally unlikely and necessary--the passage of time marked by memories of the spaces we once inhabited--improbable at best. The ramp distends and delivers Sil and his fellow passengers into the stale air of the Tucson International Airport. He continues through the gate area and onto a people mover. The florescent lights give way to a velveteen darkness lit only with soft orange glow of backlit posters of distant nebula and globular clusters. Sil glides, head tipped back, staring up at the arched glass ceilings and faint glimpse of stars above. Memory is less a recalling of events than a reconstruction. A strung together recollection of events colored by later recounting, collectively created, framed and repeated until solidified. Always with the implication that they might well have come from nowhere else. There is a roaring sound and blinking lights through the window to his left. He feels evacuated and without anything to smoke.

Around him men and women pass, most walking the hallway, but some closer, passing him along the motorized rubber floor, bags thrown over their shoulders, several soldiers headed for Davis Montham, a businessman with black leather shoulder bag more expensive than his suit, a woman near his age balancing too many bags and two children. Sil watches as she removes the child from her arms, setting him to floor and putting his hand in his sister's hands. She straightens and heaves a large quilted bag back over her shoulder and grabs the young girl's free hand and sets off again, boy in tow. This is less a disentanglement than a knotting into, a return to, a memory of some kind. They pass out of the glass domed walkway and back into florescent light, baggage claim, sliding doors and finally the warm sodium glow of the desert.

Sil settles for an Old Gold from a surly construction worker laboring under the terminus of a great, arched steel girder, which Sil is pretty sure holds up the domed skylight tunnel he has recently admired. The worker is just crushing out his cigarette when Sil asks for one. He thanks the worker and turns slowly, trying to look abscent minded, not wanting to be rude, but not wanting a conversation.  

The driver greets Sil by name. They must have sent a photo Sil reasons, though he can't really image why. Perhaps the drivers just got tired of having to hold those rediculous signs and require photos these days. Either way the man greets him by name and leads him down a line of fairly identical Towncars and Cadillacs to the one at the front of the line. He forces Sil to finish the cigarette before getting in the car so Sil turns back to watch the construction worker sand, or rather grind, something near the bottom of a steel girder. Sparks fly off at odd intervals and look a bit like luminous shards of glass from a collapsing ceiling. The sparkes have an undetectable pattern, a randomness that is notÑthey arc off and fade to nothing mimicing the smoke from the glowing tip of his cigarette. He drops the last half inch to the ground and leaves it burning.

There is pause at a liquor store for a couple packs of his own brand of cigarettes and another similar pause at the front desk, exchanges of money, silent elevator and he sets his bag in the corner of the room, turns out the overhead light and flops down on the bed, staring at the ceiling, smoking several cigarettes in succession, watching the smoke explode in beams of moonlight leaking from the edges of the curtain.

The invitation was addressed to Maine and that bothered him more than he wanted to admit. A somple mistake, but a slick looking ship, whale-sitting, something ominous lurking beneath it. It made Sil feel old and tired. He stood and went the the window pulling back the curtain the reveal the dialated nightscape below. He stared out the window wanting another cigarette. He wanted to keep smoking cigarettes until the whole city was one great smoke filled room and he was younger and everyone knew he didn't live in Maine. To smoke until the city became a blurred and spark-shooting array of stoplights, flickering neon signs, sodium streetlamps, fake adobe strip malls and black empty expances of desert devoid of people. An enormous empty smoke filled room with no one in it, and he could look back at it as the door slowly closed leaving him outside in an even bigger room with a domed sky that stretched from zero to horizon, nothing above but stars, Betelgeuse and reddish Rigel, but mainly Betelgeuse, burning dead center and nowhere near Maine.



**

Ambrose had just stepped out into the evening heat when the cloud of dust forced him to close his eyes and entirely miss the bumpy, lurching arrival of the truck. he was still standing in the shadows of the garage wiping his eyes with a greasy rag when he heard the door slam and the inevitable gravel crunch of footsteps coming his way. He was relatively sure it was not Otto and his boys so, squinting against the glare of the setting sun he stepped out of the shadows and was just able to make out a figure limping toward him when a woman's voice startled him.

"Sorry about the dust."

"That's all right ma'am."

"We need some petrol and a place to stay."

"Okay. Well I'll fill it up for you. You can stay down to street at the Vida Court. I'm sure there's some rooms."

"Are you Munson?"

"No ma'am, I'm Ambrose. I just work here. Mr. Munson went down to the V.A. hospital to have his head examined."

"Oh my..."

"Oh, no, not like that. I mean he was working on Chrysler this morning and the muffler fell off and knocked him out cold. Well, he heads down to the V.A hospital about any time he can, some nurse there..."

"I see."

She dragged what Ambrose thought of as a dainty leather boot in a half circle through the gravel. Suddenly Ambrose felt stupid for having said as much as he did. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the light he could see that she was not the sort of woman who wanted the hear about lonely mechanics and nurses. Three girls still sitting atop a pile of trundles and suitcases in the back of the truck were squirming in a fit of giggles. Ambrose turned his head away from them and busied himself with pumping gas, which regrettabley took little concentration. A strange loping sound caused him to turn away from the truck and it's blush endusing passengers and look out toward the street where a man slightly older than himself was limping across the gravel driveway. He had a curious way of walking, one side of him appeared to be badly crippled, from polio, Ambrose guessed, but the other side of him looked like it could pull down a charging steer with it's one good arm. Consequently he sort of loped to his left, dragging his right behind him.

Ambrose turned back around and found the woman studying him.

"That's my son Jim."

"Oh."

"The polio gave him that way of walking..."

"I figured." Ambrose mumbled, unsure what to say.

"The doctors told me he would never walk again and that it was best to keep him in a dark corner of the house and try to forget about him. Well, they didn't say that exactly, but that was what they meant. As you can see. He had other ideas."

"Yes, ma'am. Never liked doctors."

"Well, they also told me to come to Arizona on account of my husband. They said that the clean air would be good for his tuberculous."

She gestured to the back of the truck and Ambrose stood on his tiptoes and looked over the slated wormwood sides to noticed that the bed of the truck was outfitted with a crumpled mattress upon which a very much dead looking man was reclined. For a moment Ambrose thought he might indeed have perished on the journey, but then the eyes opened and revealed a glassy pained look that was quickly swallowed in a cacophony of hacking desolate sounds. The three girls had ceased their laughter and were staring liquid eyed in Ambrose's direction. All three seemed relatively unconcerned with the fit of coughing emitting from the reclining man.

"Perhaps tomorrow you or Mr. Munson can point us in the direction of the V.A. hospital?"

"Oh yeah it's easy, just make a left up their on Oracle and follow it..."

"We'll be back by tomorrow I'm sure."

"Oh, well, if you're not, I live at the Vida Court, so you could alway knock on my door."

The woman seemed not to have heard him and continued in a determined manner, still making half circles in the gravel with her left foot.

"We will be settling here for some time Ambrose. I believe we will need to sell this truck and probably look into some sort of more permanent lodging..."

"Oh well, you're welcome to stay at the Vida Court long as you need ma'am. My folks are the owners so I can make sure they give you an efficiency, and you can buy food at the store and there's firewood in the lot out back of my bungalow..."

"That's very kind of you Ambrose, my entire family thanks you."

Ambrose glanced up and the truck and noticed that all three girls were smiling at him and two new boys heads had appeared near the end of the truckbed, who were also smiling at him though in a less friendly manner.

She paid him in coins and the crippled man climbed back in the passengers side of the truck. The engine coughed back to life after a few sputters that Ambrose attributed to a grungy distributer cap. After a smile and wave from the woman the truck lurched out onto Prince road and Ambrose watched them for while, long enough to see brake lights in front of Vida court. He turned around and walked back into the garage and grabbed his cigarettes. He pulled down the garage doors, yanked the chain that turned on and off the lighted sign that Mr. Munson was so proud off, visible from the highway he said, though Ambrose lacked car so he couldn't say for sure. He made his usual tour of building turning off lights and locking doors. He flipped the open sign over and stepped outside locking the front door behind him. Satisified, Ambrose fished out a cigarette and lit it, pausing for a moment, watching the thunderheads over the Catalina Mountains begin evening's journey toward crimson. After a moment he shoved his hands in his pockets and began walking down the street toward the Vida Court.

**

The Rialto river was indeed rising. Claire reached behind her and unself-consciously pulled the back of her shirt down even with the hem of her pants so that the scar didn't show. but she didn't do it to hide the scar she did it because she had always done it because there had nearly always been the scar and the memory of needles and the clear antiseptic smell of epinephrine the weezing drowning pull at the bottom of her lungs the suffocating crush. This is what they mean--jitters--rocks and branches and trees pouring down out the high desert plains to the east where the rain started and tumbling cross the whole of the valley to pass here in front of this house where I am standing. 

Claire turned around and looked back at the house with its choclate slated patio and warm yellow glowing widnows stuffed with familiar faces and she wanted to vomit. 

Jittery what? and then the desert going and going. 

**


Emma had developed a peculiar fascination with chewing sand. It came to her mouth as a dry film licked off her lips with absent-minded desperateness. At first she had constantly pressed her lips up to gap between the boards and, gently as possible, spit it out. But then one spit whipped in the wind of a passing Chevy had flown back and hit Jack in the eye. After enduring Jack's response she explored other options and had happened on the fact that you can chew sand. You can not, however, gargle sand as Maggie suggested. 

So from western Oklahoma onward she had been chewing sand and now, disembarked from the truck bed she violently spat it on a cactus and resolved to never do it again. Though licking her lips inside the motel room still drew into her mouth the seemingly everpresent dusty film. 

Perhaps the whole west is just one thin dusty film. Certainly the hotel room was saturated by a fine grit that crept through the screens all day every time it could find and gust of wind to hitch a ride on. 

Jack had gone around the building and Emma could here him taking to the mechanic about the weather. What this place needs Emma thought is good long afternoon shower to put the damn dust back in it's place. To put it down. 

There was nowhere it sit inside. The boys had laid Father out on the bed and Mama was giving him a glass of water and some saltines. They were talking in low voices that Emma coould not make out. She went outside to help with the luggage and have a look around.

The Vida Court efficancy was, well Emma reasoned, it was better than sitting atop trundles in the back of the flatbed wedge between sweaty siblings and mucus and blood spewing father. And that was a about all that could be said of it. It was not, for instance, a ten room farm house with three floors and a tornado cellar. Nor was it surrounded by endless acres of imported genuine Kentucky bluegrass with a semicircle of drooping cottonwood trees growing around the pond. There was no pond. There was no second story. There was a bathtub though, and after waiting for both Maggie and Betty to finish, she was allowed the privacy of the bathroom for twenty minutes. 

It was only after she removed her stockings that she realized how thoroughly the sand had saturated her. Or perhaps she thought briefly, perhaps my thighs have tanned through these skirts, but no it was the dusty film of Oklahoma and New Mexico that had flown up under her skirt and surrendered now to the refreshing cold of the bath water.


**


In order to lay formica you need a reasonably smooth surface, too much chipping of the base material and--alchemist's horror--there is no adherance, or, alternately, the base can be filled in with some sort of patching material. But the best formica is laid atop the levelest of surfaces. Then comes the glue. Pasty, thick and sometimes non-toxic. Sometimes not. It depends on how well you want the veneer to stick.

Conner's finger was drawn back to the bubble on the counter. Was it a bump under the surface, or a bit of glue that didn't quite spread out right? Clint was munching fries and talking about "Miracle Mile" or some such nonsense. Conner wasn't paying much attention, he wasn't interested in a mile long miracle, in fact he was pretty sure the miracle mile wasn't a miracle and probably wasn't a mile either. Dr. Roberts had already described it as the only paved road to speak of, which hardly seemed a miracle if you happen to have grown up in Whittier California.

And so Conner continued to run his fingers over the strange bump in the formica counter. He was thinking about bird calls. Canyon Wrens to be exact. There had to be some method of using the parabolic mic without picking up too much of the echo as they had been this morning. Conner was pretty sure that what they lacked was some sort of dampening device, but his electronics experience was limited to ham radios and tube circuits, niether of which was any help with these new solid state electronics.

"I say we stay here at Bob's all day," Clint remarked, "too damn hot out there."

His words irritated Conner and suddenly he was pretty sure anything would be better than sitting in this booth for another second.

"You can stay," he said sliding out of the booth, "I think I'll walk back to the motel and see if I can work out something to cut the echo in the recordings"

They both shrugged, but said nothing and so Conner ducked out of Bob's Big Boy into the shimmering summer heat. Less than a block later he was regretting his decision. The soles of his shoes were noticably softer and could well have melted on the sidewalk if he stood still for too long. Back at the motel he went inside and flopped on the bed for minute, but inside there was just the heat, not chance of a breeze so he dragged a chair outside and sat on the shaded porch squinting at the moutains. 

"Whatcha doin'?"

A girl of ten or so stepped around the corner and into the shadow.

"nothing"

"Wanna come in the store and buy me some candy?"

Conner studied her for a moment and, unable the think of a response he simply stood and followed her through the cactus garden toward the store.

"He gonna buy me candy Jenny"

"Pacey, for the love of god, speak in proper english"

Jenny sat behind the counter fanning herself with a magazine, her legs propped up on a stool.

"She's really not the moron she pretends to be..."

"Oh. Well I didn't.."

"Yes you did. You're one of those college boys aren't you? Doing research? Staying in rooms 4 and 5?"

"Yes."

"Well see you think Pacey is some hick kid, right?"

She dropped her legs to the floor and stood up. She was chewing gum between sentences. She slouched forward leaning on the counter.

"You college boys are always coming round here thinking you're so damn smart and little Pacey there suckers every one of you into buying her candy. She got your friend this morning, the real skinny one..."

"Clint"

"I guess so. Anyway, if ya'll had any sense at all you'd smack her upside the head, but no, you buy her candy. Why is that exactly?"

""

[more]

** 




**

He obviously couldn't see her, at least she was pretty sure he couldn't see her. She couldn't see him very clearly either, the light was fading but there was still a dark frame in a chair on the porch. She was standing in the bathtub dripping water and watching the shadow for signs of movement.

Jack pounded on the door again. "Come on Emma, I want to clean up too..."

She ignored him and continued watching the mechanic. She was hoping he would get off the porch and chop wood or do something, but there probably wasn't much call for wood this time of year. He just sat there, tipping his chair back and forth sucking on a beer that had already gone warm.

She put on a clean dress and evacuated the bungalow as fast as she could without raising undue suspicions. The sun was already gone, but the air still had traces of the heat. She walked around the cacti and was tempted to touch the thorns of a small squat variety. She reached out her hand and ran it from the center out and down the edge, careful to keep her hand moving with the hooked direction of the needle.

"So ya'll sold your farm, bought the truck and hauled your dad out here for some fresh air huh?"

The voice startled her enough that she almost leaned on the cactus for support, but at the last second realized the stupidity of doing so, like chewing sand.

"Sorry?"

"You sold the farm, bought the truck and here you are, tb and all."

"Something like that."

"We get quite a few passing through these days..."

"Oh we're staying I believe."

"I'm Ambrose"

He extended his hand and she stepped out of the cacti and took it in her own. 

"Emma."

"Nice to meet you Emma."



***



***














































Janine moved through the crowded living room with a naively aloof glide, an innocently off-putting quality that Sil had seen in other brides-to-be on the night before their wedding. It was, he reasoned, a quality born out of the improbable superimposition of the very public upon the very private. As if a herd of unicorns has just desended upon your village and everyone must pretend that a herd of unicorns descending on your village is somehow extremely extrodinary, but expected nonetheless. Sil was unsure what to do with a heard of unicorns and so he retreated outside past the smiling relatives on the patio to the back wall of the yard where he was afforded a distance from what he considered a collective insanity.

From this vantage point he could snoop about the formica structures of the nuptials' personal life without having to actually participate. The smooth, ill-chosen color schemes that make up the palor of our daily life, that slick looking ship, whale-sitting, something else lurking below, or at least Sil liked to think there was something below, that it was not afterall real marble, but only a veneer. It is, however, possible that we are in a nautical tale after all, and that the whales have been hunted down, disgorged of oil and discarded in a heap of newspaper graveyards that we drive by thinking privately, good god, did you see that? Though this seemed unlikely to Sil, standing, as he was, in the middle of a vast desert. And so he smoked drolly and watched. Trying hard to not look aloof, though realizing that everyone thought he was being aloof.

If fact he was not being aloof. He was simply without a protective formica coating which led him to kind of shyness that came off as aloof and made him even more nervous than he already was. In situations like this smoking was kind of defense or perhaps warning since he was only one who thought he might not look nervous. Janine had already told him 'try and relax, you're making me feel calm,' which of course just made him more self conscious.

Janine seemed to flit between conversations somehow managing to not ever really have one. Sil admired her from a distance and continued to lean against the rough cement wall, glancing around occasionally to watch the sun sink down behind the Catalina Mountains. Distant clouds were beginning to turn a pinkish cast. He was unable to flit. He had never flitted in his entire life. Flitting seemed to him something only tiny grayish birds were capable of, darting between branches that wouldn't have supported the weight of Sil's clumsy hands. And yet, every time he turned away from the mountains, Janine was flitting.

He huffed the last few drags of nicoteen and resolving to, if not flit, at least mingle with his relations, he propelled himself off the cement wall and was headed toward the sliding door when dark a hand brushed his shoulder. He turned half expecting some dark skinned unicorn that the Norse myths had failed to account for, but was greeted simply by eyes he did not recognize.

"You don't know how much it means to Janine that you came to the wedding," he said. "And it means alot to me too," he added.

Sil mumbled something about it being no problem and slowly settled into the realization that this was the boyfriend he had never paid attention to. The boyfriend had darkish skin and seemed indistinct to Sil, He was quite confident that we would not recognize the face when it stepped to the alter tomorrow. He did have a distant recollection of story Janine told slowly and with a lot of emphasis on a parking garage, though he couldn't say for sure if this were that boyfried or another. Nor for that matter could he say for sure that the story involved a boyfriend but he was sure about the parking garage.

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