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diff --git a/unseen/research/tucson/1938.jpg b/unseen/research/tucson/1938.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..239cf6d --- /dev/null +++ b/unseen/research/tucson/1938.jpg diff --git a/unseen/research/tucson/Sabino-1938.jpg b/unseen/research/tucson/Sabino-1938.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..94b2598 --- /dev/null +++ b/unseen/research/tucson/Sabino-1938.jpg diff --git a/unseen/research/tucson/Terminal.doc b/unseen/research/tucson/Terminal.doc Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..9693696 --- /dev/null +++ b/unseen/research/tucson/Terminal.doc diff --git a/unseen/research/tucson/big truck side view tucson copy.jpg b/unseen/research/tucson/big truck side view tucson copy.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..c3508e1 --- /dev/null +++ b/unseen/research/tucson/big truck side view tucson copy.jpg diff --git a/unseen/research/tucson/family history_stoughtons.txt b/unseen/research/tucson/family history_stoughtons.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..593b69a --- /dev/null +++ b/unseen/research/tucson/family history_stoughtons.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +
Scott this is the History from Aunt Helen; I believe. How accurate it is I am not sure:
Helen Kennedy was. Grandma VidaŐs cousin.
This is The Jarman-Sawyer Family tree-(Grandma VidaŐs Grandma Jarman and before that Sawyer.
Wesley Best Jarman-Your Great Great Grandpa-Grandma VidaŐs Grandfather on her motherŐs side. He was born June 17, 1862 in Macoupin county, Illinois, he father was Henry Jarman and his mother was Harriet (Adlaid) Grant.(Grandma wants to know if we are related to Ulysses S. Grant). They made their home on a farm in Litchfield, Illinois for a number of years before moving to Moline, Kansas and then on to Columbus, Kansas where they remained the rest of their lives. Twelve children were born of this marriage with two sons and six daughters living to maturity and three girls and one son dying in infancy. Wesley was a farmer his entire life, and shortly after he retired from farming and moved to Columbus, Kansas he was kicked by one of his favorite horses causing his death on December 3, 1921. He is buried in Columbus, Kansas.(Some tidbits from me:Grandma Stoughton(GrandmaŐs mom) loved her father dearly and for years she cried at Christmas for him. She was closer to her father than her mother. Her mother married two times after her father to which she was very upset about!! I saw Grandma Jarman when she was 92 years old and I was two years old in Kansas. She was very stern!
EMMA SAWYER-JARMAN-Your Great Great Grandmother-Grandma VidaŐs grandmother on her motherŐs side. She was born August 8, 1866 in Litchfield, Illinois, the eldest daughter of John Perry Sawyer. She was married to Wesley Best Jarman on Oct. 10, 1882 in St. Louis, Illinois. She was the mother of 12 of his childrn. Several years after WesleyŐs death she married a Mr. Bueller and after his death she married Mr. Best. Emma died in Columbus, Kansas July 1955 and is buried there.(my sister Debbie was born that year). Grandma & Grandpa, Nancy, me and Ron went back to Kansas to visit and that is when I saw her and Mom was pregnant with Debbie.
Children of Wesley Best Jarman-Emma Sawyer Jarman
1. Bess-Children-Grace, Pauline, Mary, Maxine, Jack and Van. Aunt Bess married Dave Juniper and died in columbus, Kansas.
2. Bertha Viola born Aug. 18, 1884 in Moline, kansas married to Frank Lee Kennedy Feb. 1st 1908 in Columbus, Kansas. Died April 29, 1974 in Long Beach, Calif. Buried there.(I met Aunt Bertha(Grandma StoughtonŐs sister)She used to visit Tucson once in a while and last time I saw her she took my cousin, Sue and I on a Long Beach harbor cruise. She was gracious, interesting and very smart! She wore a blue suit that day and was very grand looking. She was not sure where the harbor was but I found it at the age of 16 and we brought the boat back to harbor because we missed it!! It came back for us and we all had a good time. Her children are Helen Louise Kennedy born May 31, 1911 in Joplin, Missour.(She is the one that typed this info for the family). She married Richard Eugene Bly Jan. 2, 1937. Children:Diana, Carole, Barbara and James.
3. Eugene Jarman born? married to GraceHolstein Thompson died in Columbus, Kansas on? Adopted a boy named Louis. I never knew him. 4. Ethel-died at 2 months.
Page 2
5. Irene Jarman was born? died in columbus, Kansas. (As far as I know, she never married, lived with her Mom for a long time and i saw her in Tucson also and she dressed very well. She was a career woman; I think.
6. Laura Belle Jarman; born? and married CP Horner and they both died in a boating accident in Idaho on Snake River. A storm was brewing and they were warned not to go but they were all very good swimmers so they took a risk!
7. Addie-died at 2 years old. Grandma Stoughton talked to me about her and she thinks it was pneumonia. She really was happy to have a baby sister. Everyone treasured her.
8. Faye-Grandma Stoughton(my favorite)-born July 21,1898 married William Henry Stoughton born Jan. 7th 1897. Children:oldest, William H. Stoughton Jr(Bill)born 3/9/1920 died when I was about two years old(1951?)He had polio and reuhmatic fever. I think he had conjuctive heart failure. Then Grandma Vida; Emma Jean Stoughton born Sept 6, 1921-Marjorie Stoughton(Aunt Marjie) Jan 9, 1922.Betty Lou Stoughton born?James Willis Stoughton; Raymond Dale Stoughton born in May 7, 1928 and jack Lee Stoughton(Feb 27, ?)Uncle Jack.
9. Lena-died at two years old
10. Mildred Jarman was born? married Tom Jenny. I visited her many times in Columbus, Kansas on her farm and in Tucson when she visited Grandma.
11. Ralph-died at two months
12. James Howard Jarman born ? 1913 married to Aunt Nora. (I knew them really well). Neat people! Brian and Eric and I stayed with them in Ft. Scott, Kansas. We had a family reunion of the Stoughtons etc in Columbus, Kansas in 1982 or so and I took the boys and they put us up for a night. Children; Joanna and Sharon. I met Sharon also.
Jarman-Grant
Henry Jarman was born (possible in North Carolina) and maried Harriet Adlaid Grant and they lived in Macoupin county, Illinois on a farm.
Children of Henry Jarman and Harriet Grant Jarman
1. Wesley born June 17, 1862 Macoupin county, Ill. Married Emma Sawyer Oct 19, 1882 in St. Louis, Ill. 12 children 2. Lystra 3.George 4. Ira 5.Bell Jarman-Grant 6. Ida jarman-Groover 7.Jane Jarman-Sexton lived in Parsons, Kansas
Pg. 3
John Perry Sawyer-Sarah jane Sawyer-Sawyer(cousins marry, I believe) was born in Stanton, Macoupin county, Ill. Sept 3, 1842. His father was BHSawyer and his mother was Ann Scroggin. He enlisted as a private in Company 1-59th Regt illinois Vol. Infantry, August 16, 1861 and was honorable discharged Feb. 18, 1863. he married Sarah Jane Sawyer Oct 1, 1863 in Macoupin county, Ill. To this union ten children were born, six living to maturity and four dying in infancy. They moved to Moline, Kansas in 1884 where most of the children completed their education. His wife, Sarah jane, died in June 17, 1898 when a shotgun accidentally was discharged. he moved shortly after that to Stuttgart, Arkansas and on May 1, 1900 he married Mrs. Fannie Gibson. He died and is buried there on may 20, 1913.
Sarah jane Sawyer-Sawyer was born Nov. 28, 1846 in Stanton, Ill. Her father was Amos Sawyer and her mother was Delacy--Sawyer. She married John Perry Sawyer Oct. 1, 1863 and had ten of his children. Six living to maturity. her family was from the south and when the Civil War broke out several of her brothers joined the Union Army and several the Confederate Army. Her father was in sympathy with the south, so never spoke to the two older boys who joined the Union Army. they were both killed. When the Gold Rush to PikeŐs Peak was held. Her father Amos Sawyer furnished five wagons and each wagon had 5 span of mules the best he could buy. He just about went broke on this adventure. He had been a prosperous farmer and this story was told to Elsie Sawyer when she was a little girl, by a neighbor, Uncle Dick Sturgess in Moline, who used to live near her grandparents, but she couldnŐt remember where. Sarah Jane and john moved their family to Moline, Kansas in 1884. She dies June 17, 1898 when a shotgun was accidentally discharged.
Children of John Perry Sawyer and Sarah jane Sawyer-Sawyer
1. Emma Sawyer was born 8/8/1866 in Litchfield, Ill Married to Wesley Best Jarman 10/10/1882. Eight living children. Four died in infancy. Died in columbus, Kansas. 1955. 2nd marriage-Mr. Best 3rd marriage-Mr. Bueler
2. Elias born? Married? Children-Maud died in Oregon.
3. Laura was born? Married to Lou Collier died in Moline; Children:Bruce
4. Anna was born 9/26/1875 in Staunton, Ill. Died March 26, 1967 in Sedan Kansas. Married to frank Dollinger. No children.
5. Ben born? Married to Katie Kanabe. Kenneth only son.Married second time to? Died?
6. Elsie Louise born Sept 23, 1888 in Moline, Kansas
Pg. 4
BH Sawyer was born? Probably in the south. John Perry Sawyer is the only child we have any record of his marriage to Ann Scroggin.
Ann Scroggin was bron? Her mother was Mary Tatum. Ann was one of the five Scroggin children and then her mother married a Mr. Thurston after Scroggin died and she had one more child by Thurston. The Thurston cild was about the same age as John Perry Sawyer. (This informaton was in a letter written to Aunt Anna by Emma Jarman many year ago).
Now this is the couple that I think the story about their both smoking their pipes out on the porch was told. Anyway we have the cutest picture of a pioneer famr couple that is John Perry Sawyers father and mother.
Children of B.H. Sawyer and Ann Scroggin Sawyer
1. John Perry Sawyer was born in Staunton, Ill(Macoupin county) 9/3/1842. Married Sarah Jane Sawyer. Died May 20, 1913.
Amos Sawyer-was born? He married Delacy-----Sawyer on ? in?. They moved their family to Staunton, Ill on? where Delacy gave birth to ten of his children. Dying in childbirth when Sarah Jane was ten years old-about 1856. he wa married again and his second wife had ten children. He ws a properous farmer. During the Gold Rush to PikeŐs Peak he furnished five wagons with five spans of horses or mules to race to the top. He almost went broke of that venture.
Delacy---Sawyer was born?She married Amos Sawyer on ? and they moved to Staunton, Ill. where they raised a large family. She was the mother of his ten children and died in childbirth with the tenth sometime in 1856.
Children of Amos Sawyer and Delacy family
1.Sarah Jane Sawyer born Nov. 28, 1866 in Staunton, Ill. Married John Perry Sawyer Oc. 1, 1863 and had 10 children. She died June 17, 1898. Buried in Moline, Kansas.
Dear Scott,
This letter does repeat itself. This is the original one from Aunt Helen Kennedy; I believe. When there are parentheis with comments, those are mine!!
I am always glad to give away my knowledge of the family as I hear it or read it!!
I hope this is something of what you were wanting.
Love Aunt Patty
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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.
[more]
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.
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 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?"
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 adherence, or, alternately, the base can be filled in with some sort of patching material. But the best Formica is laid atop the most level 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? "
********
"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 always 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 truck bed, who were also smiling at him though in a less friendly manner.
"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."
"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 always 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 truck bed, who were also smiling at him though in a less friendly manner.
Before they left the river and walked home he would point out stars he had memorized from the chart the Munson had pinned on the wall of the garage. Exotic names wormed into her head, Betelgeuse, Orion, Regal. Later they would blend with names like Panama, Manila, Kyoto, Tokyo. Words that rose from letters seemed to float and always she would see his eyes floating like the novel Jack told her about. She tried to picture him when John Wayne would storm the beach, but it never worked and newsreels always talked of bravery and pride and Emma saw the words floating loneliness, longing, sorrow, homesick and did not bother to be brave weeping on her bed as the baby slept without having seen her father. She leaned into the crib and listened to the babyŐs heartbeat like the hummingbird wings she saw when he blinked.
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 trees and other baggage they could get along with out. Just dumping it down here like so much sewage. My thoughts always end this way she realized, always with death and debris. But then so does life doesnŐt it. She turned that over a while waiting to see if the notion would become enjoyable or scare her so profoundly she ran away and disappeared into the desert forever. But it did neither. It merely repeated 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 them. 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 last quiet sighs of breath. She drags her hand absently across the textured wall to the memory of woven grass wallpaper on the living room walls of the house she 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 Claire, Daniel and their fellow passengers into the stale air of the Tucson International Airport. They continued 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. Advertisements for a new exhibit at the observatory. Claire 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 her left. She feels evacuated and desperate for nicotine.
Around her men and women pass, most walking the hallway, but some closer, passing Claire 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 ClaireŐs age balancing too many bags and two children. Claire 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 disentanglement than a knotting into, a return to, a memory of some kind. Everything I learn is really a process of remembering. Daniel takes her hand in his and watches the woman with the children slide back down the hall. He looks down at her and smiles in a way that makes Claire uncomfortable, as when she would eat to much candy on Halloween. They pass out of the glass-domed walkway and back into florescent light, baggage claim, sliding doors and finally the cool sodium glow of the desert.
Daniel walks down to the Avis counter leaving Claire to seek out a hurried cigarette before he returns. She settles for an Old Gold from a surly construction worker laboring under the terminus of a great, arched steel girder, which Claire is pretty sure holds up the domed skylight tunnel she has recently admired. The worker is just crushing out his cigarette when Claire asks for one. She thanks the worker profusely and turns slowly, trying to look absent minded, not wanting to be rude, but not wanting a conversation.
Claire starts to walk in the direction of the Avis bus stop but 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 sparks have an undetectable pattern, a randomness that is notŃthey arc off and fade to nothing mimicking the smoke from the glowing tip of her cigarette. She drops the last half-inch to the ground and leaves it burning.
Later in the hotel room after Daniel has fallen asleep Claire sits up in bed and turns on the light. She draws her knees up under her chin and stares out the window. She wants another cigarette, but has promised him she would stop. It isnŐt good for you Claire. Lots of things arenŐt, but I enjoy them. YouŐre killing yourself and worse youŐre paying to do it. So are you, just not with cigarettes. Even later after their argument had escalated, crested and settled down in a trough of kisses and sleepy mews she could feel the topic sitting on her like a ship, but a slick looking ship, whale-sitting, something ominous lurking beneath it. It made Claire feel old and tired. And so she continued to stare out the window wanting another cigarette. She wanted to keep smoking cigarettes until the whole city was one great smoke filled room and she was younger and felt confident in her ability to live full if not long. 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 expanses of desert devoid of people. An enormous empty smoke filled room with no one in it, and she could look back at it as the door slowly closed leaving her outside in an even bigger room with a domed sky that stretched from zero to horizon, nothing above but stars, OrionŐs belt and raised arm burning dead center and nowhere near Tucson.
Even up on the mountain it was hot. At least itŐs not as stifling as New Geneai he reasoned. Whenever the dish rotated the glare was unbelievable. They said if you looked right at it it would burn the color out of your eyes like what happened to Jack with the arc welding. He was unsettling to look at even now. Though the doctors said it could get better.
Ambrose still thought hugging the road would have been the smarter move. He tried to tell the engineers but they dismissed him because he was just an installer. They seemed to think a college education made you smarter. It irritated Ambrose, but he said nothing. He was thankful for the work. Emma had just gotten home with the baby when Bell called and offered the job. The baby would need diapers and Janine was starting school next year, he reminded himself that he should be thankful, but whit the heat it was hard to be thankful for more than a simple breeze.
By the time he made the drive back from the observatory it was well past dark. He generally ate his supper at the table with Emma and went straight to bed. The crew truck would be honking outside at 6 AM.
Emma sat alone on the porch late into the night smoking the cigarettes she had given up for the babyŐs sake. She missed the blankets. The smell of the river full of debris and swollen with desert placenta. They had talked. They had talked all night and then he would walk six miles home to get up and go to work a few hours later. They met every night after Father ran off and there was no one to holler and slap when she disappeared at night. Jack had tried of course, but he didnŐt have the heart. He wanted to run off to the river too, but didnŐt have anyone to run with. Nor could he run.
But Ambrose had been different after he got back from the war. Not that he had seen action or was shell-shocked. He never talked about it. Emma wished he would. She could feel the barrier of the war rise up between them. Something had sent him to the other bank of the river. He claimed he hadnŐt seen much action and she believed him, but he would say no more. She would rather have heard intimate details of the men he had killed than hear nothing at all. She did not think she would think less of him. He hadnŐt started the war. He was just a man sent to kill. Or rather to save since he had been a medic. Whatever the case she merely longed to feel that closeness again. To stare in his eyes and play at Eskimo kisses or Butterfly kisses or just watch the lightening bugs floating in the Mesquite trees.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/unseen/research/tucson/tucson-edit.txt b/unseen/research/tucson/tucson-edit.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2c96ea7 --- /dev/null +++ b/unseen/research/tucson/tucson-edit.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +"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 notŃthey 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.
[more] diff --git a/unseen/research/tucson/tucson.txt b/unseen/research/tucson/tucson.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0e3b7e2 --- /dev/null +++ b/unseen/research/tucson/tucson.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +"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 notŃthey 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.
[more]
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/unseen/research/tucson/tucson2.txt b/unseen/research/tucson/tucson2.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cd24030 --- /dev/null +++ b/unseen/research/tucson/tucson2.txt @@ -0,0 +1,270 @@ +"Mama 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 you're anxious arencha Claire?" + +"Who told you I was anxious? Do you even know what anxious means?" + +"Momma says you're anxious cause you're tyin soon and you loose everything and your teeth fall out." + +"How old are you Darren?" + +"I'll be eight soon." + +"And your mother told you I was nervous..." + +"No she said anxious." + +"Right. Anxious, because I'm..." + +"Because soon you'll be pregnant and fat and you'll start dreaming your teeth is falling out." + +"Are falling out." + +"Are falling out." + +Claire regarded her nephew and for a moment considered telling him everything just to spite his mother, but instead she grabbed the green and purple Supersoaker from the middle of the table and abruptly ended timeout in favor of distraction. Darren shrieked and took off across the gravel yard headed for the back gate. Claire arched the stream of water up but it was too late, he disappeared through the gate and into the desert. + +It was too hot to give chase. Claire walked out into the gravel yard swinging the squirt gun from her finger and stepping carefully between barrel cacti and Cholla, the nastiest of the Sonora's spiny, rather unfriendly inhabitants. The minute she emerged from under the slatted patio cover she could feel the midday sun seering her pale skin. She glanced at her arms as if they might have already, in five minutes time, began to burn. She called out to Darren but heard nothing. Probably he had gone down the street to his friend's house. + +Darren's mother was looking out at Claire from behind the sliding glass door, she waved from behind the glass, comfortable in her air conditioned cocoon; Claire smiled and waved back stifling the urge to mouth bitch at her. Claire's aunt lived just outside of Tucson, the patio was atop a small hill overlooking the Catalina foothills and the vast expanse of desert just west of them. Finding an relatively clear, cactus free area Claire leaned her head back and shot a stream of water straight up in the air. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth with her tongue extended waiting for the water to return to earth, which it eventually did, splattering her face and causing her to cough, choke briefly and start laughing. + +Claire had heard the chewing sand story about a million times, from her aunt, her uncle, her mother, the whole damn family, the only one of them that never seemed to tell the story was the one person who had actually chewed sand. It was a story told so many times it had ceased to have any meaning, it had been reduce to words, sounds formed with mouths and lips but completely divorced from comprehension or understanding. Claire had always felt bad for the story, like it was blushing every time it heard itself start, sort of how Claire felt when her father introduced her again to his neighbor whom she had known for the better part of a decade. Claire could never decide whether her father actually thought she hadn't met the man or whether he was simply too excited to introduce her to his friend to consider that he had already done so many times. And she had long ago decided everyone telling the sand chewing story was simply too excited to stop themselves. It was the best story the family had. In some ways it was the only story they had. + +Claire walked back to the table and lit a cigarette. She took another sip of the now almost hot wine that remained in the plastic cup her Aunt had thrust in her hand earlier. it tasted a bit like peach juice, but in the heat it had the desired effect rather rapidly. She decided to see where Darren had gone and wandered back through the yard and out into the river gully running just beyond the back fence. + +At the end of the street the river bed disappeared mysteriously into a drain pipe and was not seen again above ground for twenty miles or so. Claire picked her way up the embankment and climbed a small hill where she sat down and finished her cigarette. The desert below was sketched out in watercolor hues of sand and rock that surged together over the rolling canvas until all that remained was the sensation of washed out pink with only the river and its groves of Palo Verde and Mesquite standing out from the blushing sand. Claire felt the river as an after thought, an architect's final over-the-top push on an otherwise sedate and monochromatic palette. She could hear the committee, we simply must have water, you have got to put water in there somewhere, and so the frustrated and overworked architect picked up a muddy green brush and simply drizzled it Pollack-like on the ground. The desert had countless hidden details not visible from the observatory position Claire occupied. + +Claire watched the river and wondered what its name actually meant. It seemed odd to her that she had lived next to or around the Rialto River for so many years without ever wondering what the word meant. + +She felt as if she were herself a desert only recently become aware that someone had flung a river down on her. Or with desert ambivalence she had always had a river running around her but had simply never noticed it. What then does the desert make of the river? This was the thought that had propelled her outside, away from couch bound relatives, inquisitive nephew in tow. As she studied the scene that was cascading down the slope and away from the organization of the manicured patio and yard, she decided that the desert seemed to ignore the river entirely. The river was starting to flood, somewhere far upstream three days rain had been feeding until it swelled like a Christmas ham, but ten yards on either side and it was sand again. Stagnant pink sand interspersed with prickly plants and clumps of sagebrush and Mesquite trees, ironwood her grandfather called it. 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. Farther in the distance there were the mountains ringing the desert, keeping watch over it, making sure it behaved in some general way. + + + + + + + +To some people the desert is a hot wind at the gas station, something passing through and to be passed through. Others see a sunny retreat from cold wind billowing off northern lakes. Some see it as an endless playground of sunshine, golf and hotel pools. Some are just born into it and forget to leave. Claire did not think she looked nervous or worried. She suspected that her older and more malicious nephew had put the younger up to this sort of thing. She felt she had composed herself rather well throughout the evening, dealt admirably with the blistering afternoon heat and then amicably with the barely known relative and extended family that stopped by to wish her well. It alarmed her that she could so completely separate the words coming out of her mouth from the ones forming in her mind. When will they slip over, some sort of damn break loose and everything comes tumbling out. She thought of the sea gulls leaping into the air, they hunched slightly coiling up to spring of the ground and then their wings lifted them into the wind. + + +She glanced back at the patio to see if anyone was watching her and, satisfied that they were all busy, she sent her nephew inside. She slipped over the wrought iron fence and lowered herself down to the sand. There was a trail leading down in the general direction of the river and Claire followed it walking slowly and keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes and scorpions. A breeze had begun almost as soon as the sun sunk behind the Catalina Mountains, not strong enough to bend the stiff twiggy branches of desert trees, it moved though in whispers, puffs of air brushing against her cheek. She thought of airports, hospitals, departure points, the shuffling of human feet moving in and out of rooms like last quiet sighs of breath. The noise of the river grew louder as she drew near it. She stopped and sat down on a large rock nestled half under the branches of a Mesquite Tree. After making sure no one had followed her. She took a cigarette from the crumpled pack hidden in the back pocket of her jeans. She didn't immediately light it, but held it under her nose inhaling the sweet faintly chemical smell of unlit nicotine. Daniel did not see the simple joys of smoking, he was capable only of the bad things, the death, the cancer, the disease, things Claire recognized, but did not allow to write the whole story. She had tried to tell him one afternoon on the beach. Don't you love the smell of nicotine? Don't you love that you can feel the smoke slipping between your fingers? I love that feeling; it makes me want to slide off a silk robe at the edge of a warm bathtub. Don't you love when your hands get that smell of oily blacktop after a thunderstorm? He had stared at her in disbelief. Claire was going to quit; she already knew that, she just wanted an admission that there was some beauty, some tangible good in a cigarette, that the end of the story was not just death and disease. + + ** ** ** ** ** ** + + + +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 face with a greasy rag when he heard the door slam and the inevitable gravel crunch of footsteps coming his way. 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." + + +He turned toward her and shrugged as if to say that it was expected. She had already removed the cap from the gas tank and stood dragging what Ambrose thought of as a dainty leather boot in a half circle through the gravel. 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 noticed the girl in the middle, her mouth was laughing, but her eyes were much more piercing than the two that were clearly her siblings. He eyes seemed to be reflecting the first bit of sunset so the she looked a little on fire, which added to intensity of her gaze. Ambrose felt suddenly uncomfortable. The image of her eyes stayed in front of his even after he turned his face away. He could feel her eyes burning, he felt himself somehow caught in them, he began to sweat. He tried to busy himself with pumping gas, but regrettably it took little concentration. He looked at the pump and let the glare of the setting sun momentarily blind him. A strange loping sound caused him to look away and as color slowly returned to field of vision a strange figure took shape. 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 tuberculosis." + + +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. + + +She paid him in coins and the crippled man climbed back in the passenger's side of the truck. The engine coughed back to life after a few sputters that Ambrose attributed to a grungy distributor cap. The truck crept across the gravel drive and lurched out onto Prince road. Ambrose watched them for while, long enough to see brake lights in front of Vida court. I knew it he thought. 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 the building turning off lights and locking doors. He flipped the open sign over and stepped outside locking the front door behind him. Satisfied, 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 wheezing drowning pull at the bottom of her lungs the suffocating crush. This is what they mean--jitters--rocks and branches and trees pouring down bouncing roughly off boulders and riverbanks. Dancing to some hidden rhythm of water. Flash floods do not simply flood Claire noticed as she watched the water rising. They pulse and surge and course through the desert. They have their own rhythm, their own metabolism, their own consumption and digestion. They breathe in the dry air and expel moisture, humid vapors, a mist that steams off the surrounding banks. She thought of her grandmother. The cigarette burned down between her fingertips. And 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 cannot, 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 ever-present dusty film. + + +Perhaps the whole west is just one thin dusty film. Certainly the hotel room was saturated with fine grit that crept through the screens all day every time it could find a gust of wind to hitch a ride on. + + +Jack had gone around the building and Emma could hear 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 to 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 could not make out. She went outside to help with the luggage and have a look around. + + +The Vida Court was, well Emma reasoned, it was better than sitting atop trundles in the back of the flatbed wedge between sweaty siblings and a mucus and blood spewing father. And that was about all that could be said of it. It was not, for instance, a ten-room farmhouse 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. + + +Emma began to hum bits of a song Mama used to sing when she was younger. Emma wished Mama would still sing to her even though she was nearly seventeen and didn't want to ask. It was no fun if you had to ask. Before the dust and the wheezing Mama used to sing all the time, just softly singing as she went about the house, without thinking of anyone hearing her, she would just sing whatever rose up inside her. Emma's earliest memories were of wanting to sing, but not knowing how. She could not dance either. Father would not let her dance, had given her a bad whipping when he caught her trying to sneak out to a dance. And then the TB laid him down, but by then everyone else already knew how to dance and they seemed to have left Emma behind, skidding wheels and a swirl of sand, bam they were gone. And now so was she. Perhaps people in Tucson danced. Father had complained that they were moving to Mexico and then gone on tirades about Mexicans and rape and a war Emma only dimly remembered from school. Lawlessness was the word she remembered from his hoarse shouting. Lawlessness was a word that made her legs tingle in the bath. Made the running water a throatier sound and her heart raced for a minute. Emma had never thought of lawlessness as a bad thing. Lawlessness did not seem to have a belt or switch and so she had no reason to fear it. After all Father had called the Elson twins lawless and godless and Emma got along with them just fine. + + +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 needles. + + +"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. + + +"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." + + ** ** ** ** ** ** + + + + +The newspaper said that the wet season was coming, that leaving now was a blessing, that the hurricanes would be worse this year, that the Bahamas would persist, that tourism is a curse, that citizens of the islands must bear the curse, that every place has it's curse, that eventually all the curses will combine, that everything will be cursed, that the curse is not so bad, that loneliness is a curse, that loneliness is different than alone, that still the coffee is quite good at the caf... Claire set the paper down and looked out the window at the terminal, the beads of water forming on the wings of the plane. She looked at the ring on her finger and tried to remember just when she had said yes. She knew she had not said no, but she wasn't sure she had said yes. She had been thinking about Otherness when she noticed he was on one knee which made sense now because she knew he was not traveler, the island, the plane, the waterfront hotel, all in preparation for something. She had her suspicions but she had accepted them as she accepted other premonitions, vague inklings and star crossings. Just prior to the knee dropping they walked up over a dune and were confronted with a flock of seagulls sitting on the sand. Or rather some were sitting some were standing; one was even perched on one leg. Daniel had once said he didn't enjoy traveling, the memory of which had put her in the mind of otherness. He did not like other, he liked familiar. As she had moved forward the seagulls parted, but did not fly off, they watched warily as Claire passed between them. And then he had said wait and, startled at the sound the gulls had taken off. She paused on the sand turning over in her head a notion that perhaps otherness was not possible. That there was no other and that the very existence of an other implied it was not other at all, but part of, which leftÉ what exactly? Surprise airline tickets, tropical islands, but Claire spent her time thinking about terminals and the fascinating cant of airplane wings. He wanted to lie on the beach and she had spent her time taking walks through the arid landscape across the road from the hotel. Thinking that after five hours of flying it ought to look different than Tucson, but there it was, the same granular existence of eroded rock, thrown up by the sea and broken down slowly over time to become individual grains. Was there an irreducible limit? Was Daniel back there lying on the final forms, a great soft graveyard in front of the laughing ocean, or would eventually everything turn finer, move to silt and dust inhabiting nostrils and forming a film around her lips? Claire thought about the walk back the clich juice peddler saying ya mon to obligatory tourists and then she had showered. Daniel was insistent that they go for a walk after dinner though she was not feeling romantic. Claire wanted to go home and read and fall asleep thinking about aloneness, if it should happen to exist, might she cuddle with it? Wrap it up in Butterfly kisses? Was it simply that we move through our lives alone and that aloneness convinces us that there is an other, that there is some place our aloneness can lead us, was that the delusion we were under and to think that at such a moment he decides to get down on that knee. That is something other. Daniel on his knee looking up at her with his warm smile and saccharine eyes. The crying of the gulls faded and mixed with the sounds of the surf a muddled sound. Claire looked out and watched them arcing low across the horizon, skimming the crest of the small waves. Claire started to cry because she knew that aloneness was not alone, that to find the other you first had to find yourself, that no one had ever found themselves, that the closest we get is finding ourselves in others, in public, in private, in groups, in cultures, in the rain, on the beach, in bed, in airplanes. The gulls were behind her now circling back around and coming up from behind. She sat down on the beach next to him and took his hand in hers and stroked the sand out from between his fingers watching the gulls' circle around and return to their spot atop the dunes. The settled down in waves, the larger shape crumbling out of the air into individual birds, no longer a flock in flight. They skittered as they touched down, some of them sitting, some standing, a few again on one leg, a marvelous balancing act. When the last one had landed and settled itself and all of them turned with their beaks pointed into the wind the seemed once again a single entity, a flock. Daniel was speaking but Claire could not hear what he was saying, it could be inferred from the dramatic action involved, she left herself in a silent film, muted and trapped suddenly in her head. Trapped with ceaseless circular thoughts that created a rarified atmosphere, an unpressurized cabin that sometimes made her dizzy after making love. All she could think about was saying excuse me to a passing stranger on the stairs. + + +The engines beginning to wind up for the yoyo. The plane lurched and backed away from the gate. She noticed a few stubborn seagulls standing to the side of the runway while they taxied about. They didn't seem to mind the noise or the hot scream of air out the back of the jets. Claire imagined one of them taking to air and the exact wrong moment the spray of feather and blood from the whirling turbine and then Daniel's big plan undone by a seagull. She had read of such things in the newspaper. She half smiled at the thought of death by bird. I am a turbine she thought, whirling and never moving only pushing things out behind me in the hopes that by expelling them they will somehow propel me. Pushing the Bahamas now behind me, trying to rise up, wing flaps lowered, the rush of wind passing over me. Lifting. + + +Later she would be alone in the night. She would go to the window of another hotel in Tucson and think of the last hotel, think for quite sometime about the notion of pair bonding as her cousin called it. She would turn and look at Daniel lying asleep in the bed and know that she had never said excuse me, had never passed him on the stairs. She would stand perfectly still and let tears run down her face without sobbing, without wracking her chest and she would cry no more after that. + + +She turned from the window now and looked at Daniel ensconced in the cramped airline seat. She lifted up the armrest between them, drew her body close to his. She placed his hand between hers and set them in bundle on the warm skin of her thigh. She smiled and laid her head on his shoulder to sleep. + + + ** ** ** ** ** ** + + + +"Emma!" His voice half a whisper half a shout. He looked around for another stone, but when he straightened up again she was already halfway out the window. They crept through the back yard and down through the Palo Verde snarls to the banks of the Rialto. They did not dare speak until they were quite sure they were clear of the house. Once the babble of the water became stronger he stopped and she crashed into his body. He started to say something, but she smothered his mouth with a kiss. + + +Later lying on their backs on the blanket looking up at the stars she told him. + + +"Father ran off with the nurse." She propped herself up on his chest, her thin fingers retrieved the Camel from his lips and brought it to her own. + + +Ambrose sat up with a start. "What isÉ?" + + +"Mother is taking a job at the hotel. Jack is going to ask Munson about your job." Emma nuzzled against his bare chest and sighed. She flicked the cigarette off into the bushes and pulled herself up to Ambrose's lips. + + +Between kisses he managed to say, "Munson will hire him, I'll make sure of it." + + +"Of course you will." She stopped kissing for a moment and stared at his blue eyes flickering with hummingbird lashes. "You aren't going to get Malaria are you?" + + +"Do they have malaria in Panama?" + + +"Of course. And snakes and worms and all sorts of nastiness. It's a jungle you know." + + +"I'll be fine Emma." + + +"Kiss me like it's the first time you've ever kissed me." She closed her eyes and raised her eyebrows puckishly. He tried to imagine how he would kiss a stranger, but realized he would not. There is no way to kiss a stranger. Perhaps a peckish kiss on the lips. She giggled and said no not like a stranger, like me, but for the first time. Or he reasoned you could kiss a stranger roughly like the whore in Bisbee who he was pretty sure had raped him, though he hadn't minded really. But he didn't want to kiss Emma like a whore. All the people that we kiss in life he thought, so many different types of kisses, of hugs, of contact. All the meanings that can be conveyed without words. Words could stumble and fall where the brush of lips never faltered to convey, or the words he could write as his fingers dragged down the back of her linen blouse, her breasts pressed to his chest, the full weight of her on top of him sinking into him. She could feel herself collapsing, folding into the rough hair of his chest her legs entwined with his. There is a pressing and decompressing that happens during sex, some melding alchemical process she could feel rising from him and investing her with a vaporousness that lasted longer than sex itself. + + +Ambrose lay on the blanket watching her crouched at the rivers edge skipping rock out toward the middle like a little girl. She was wrapped in a blanket that opened up as she crouched down revealing the still milky skin of her shoulders. He marveled that after two years she still did not have so much as a hint of brown about her. They had already agreed that they would marry when he returned from Panama. He did not at that moment realize that his daughter would be at the wedding, but he would not have cared if he had known. He wanted to get married now because he felt like he could not die without being married. He felt he would be missing some essential part of experience if he were to simply march off as so many of friends were ready to do. Most of them glad in fact that have the excuse, to regularly use the excuse at the dance hall parties. One more before I go darlingÉ Ambrose felt sorry for them without knowing why. He watched the girl skipping rocks by the river. She looked luminous and reminded him of the stellar calendar Munson had pinned up at the garage. Photographs taken from a telescope, the first of their kind Munson claimed. Ambrose sat and stared at it for hours when Munson wasn't around. He had memorized every description. He could even find Orion's belt. He glanced up at the sky and could dimly see it through the branches of the tree. He remembered the first day and burning eyes that he had to turn away from, but now those eyes seem more of glow than the piercing he had originally perceived. He thought of them like giant nebulas, like the stars of Orion's belt, especially the reddish one at the top. She yelled something from the edge of the river that he could not understand. He stood up still naked and walked toward her. + + ** ** ** ** ** ** + + + +Claire's grandfather's voice startled her. + + +"I heard you gave those up," he smiled. + + +"I say a lot of thingsÉ" + + +"So do I, mind if I bum one?" + + +She hesitated, "it's not going to give your heart attack or anything is it?" + + +He shrugged. "I don't know, but it's about time for me to be getting along anyway, so let me live a little before I go." + + +She gave him her cigarette and fished out another for herself. She studied his face as he smoked, wondering what how it looked, young and smooth, before eighty years spent in and out of the desert sun. With some difficulty borne of age he managed to lower himself to the ground and sat down next to her. He began talking about Gamma and the river and things that had happened years ago, but Claire could not hear him. Try as she might she could not follow the words and instead could only wonder what oldness was made of, what shape death takes as it draws nearer and nearer. Or perhaps it takes no clearer shape than what she could see from her own thirty years, perhaps it's life that has sharper shape when death approaches and I will be caught between them unsure where to run. She watched a skink darting in and out the rocks and shade at the edge of the tree. The fern frond leaves of the Mesquite dropped and seemed to want to head toward the ground, or perhaps only knew that it was futile to try and go up in this heat. Up where it is only hotter she reasoned. If life begins in pleasure and ends in pain is it therefore necessarily futile? Is it just an expansive joke, me being the product of endless strangers' pleasure, rooted in their bellies and born through their legs only to end in pain? And what? Along the way move to feel my own pleasure and bear out strangers of my own, slowly plodding toward the pain. She thought of Aldus Huxley and his anesthetized hallucinatory suicide. Was that cheating? Was the pain necessary? Was it still possible to die with grace, naturally, without the infest of disease, that later day stranger come to roost itself like so many passenger pigeons returned home? She thought of the seagulls standing on the leeward side of the dune. They did not fly until they heard the voice, until the words were in the air, that was simply too much for them, they had to leave. Is that why they slap the baby's bottom, that sound to drive off the seagulls, the pigeons, to send them packing out into the world until latter when they had gathered up their messages, the spare change of phone calls never placed and came back bearing cancer and heart attacks and the cornucopia of disease that waits for me. + + +Claire heard him now indistinct at first, she heard her grandmother's name and knew that grandfather did not mention it often; it startled her to hear it. She thought of her grandmother's pain, swept up in the rising river, the boulders, she knew from whispered family stories that the body was never found. That the desert had claimed her for its own. Gamma's birds returned home to roost bearing such messages as to forever wipe her from the face of the earth, until she existed only as dim memories repeated by her mother and her aunt and now her grandfather talking of Gamma's love for the river, how she had always wanted to be in the river and how it reminded her of a pond she swam in as a child before the dust and the sickness of her father had come back to roast and how perhaps that was her way of seeing different birds come back into the barn, she did not wantÉ She knew Claire. He is looking her straight in the eyes and repeating it. Their eyes met and held for a moment, his moist tiny universes floating in a saline ether with faint but visible stars beginning to glow behind them. + + ** ** ** ** ** ** + + + + +The ceiling fan was spinning slowly like the reel of a tape machine or a movie projector except that it was old and broken and to get it to work at all, Ambrose had reversed to drive mechanism in the motor. His once skilled mechanical hands had turned clumsy and slow. It was not until he had the motor back together that he realized his error. Now it played backwards, rewinding, pulling air up instead of blowing it down. He lay on the bed in near darkness watching a fly that had been bussing about him all day. It was now entering its death throws, or seemed to be. It reminded him of the cockroaches on the troop ship steaming past New Guinea. He watched the fly die slowly, taking a few staggering steps then resting, staggering some more. He enjoyed the fly's motion much more than the memories of the flying New Guinea cockroaches which went through a similar motion, but with less grace. The cockroaches had a frantic clinging quality to their death walk that had made them endearing at the time, stuck as he was, treated like a cockroach. But now the thought of the motion seemed to him distant and inappropriate. He enjoyed much more the seemingly sublime subtlety of the fly, less a stagger, nothing in its motion was so heroic as a stagger, more of a final stroll, stopping now to wipe it's eyes with it's little fingerlike antennae, not altogether different from what Ambrose might do if he still took walks. But he did not so he lay and watched the ceiling fan rewind. + + +The troop ship had been infested with cockroaches. At night you could hear them beating themselves against the faded dull lime colored steal of the hull. They would chew at the tough salty skin of your fingers and feet until you woke up nearly unable to walk, though some of that was due to the varieties of tropical funguses the men had acquired, all of which kept Ambrose and his medical kit fairly busy during the day. He remembered at the time he hated the fact that everyone else sat around all day, but now he recognized that he had retained his sanity because his mind was occupied. And of course there had been no ceiling fan, rewinding or otherwise, just the deathly still tropical air and crazy cockroaches battering themselves against the walls until they broke their wings and began to limp about on the floor like characters from Beckett novel. + + +The sun was gone now only a dull bluish light visible around the edges of the curtains which Ambrose kept drawn all day to cut the heat. The fly was wondering off toward the end of bed where without warning it begin to slip and once moving did not have the strength to stop itself, or perhaps just decided that anything was better than this and it slid out of sight into the black depths between the bed and wall. How beautiful he thought watching it disappear, to just slide like that, just slide right out of existence. The water that came to his eyes was not for her anymore, but for himself. For having remained behind, for having to perpetuate everything out of some duty, some servitude to forces he could not understand, could not make sense of and long ceased to care about. He heard the first splattering sounds of rain hit the windowpane, muffled splatters dulled by the heavy draperies, which he was too lazy to pull back even now that the heat had begun to abate. He remembered standing on the railing of the ship, under the cover of the upper deck walkway watching the water pour off the side in sheets, holding the papers in his hand still though he had read them a thousand times in the two days since they had called him up to the command deck and solemnly handed them to him. Some lost legs, some arms, some hands and feet, some guts, some organs, some sanity, some love. It was the last of these he could not help. There were no tools or medicines in his pack for them. His was not a dear John letter, he wished that it was, he deeply wished that it was something so simple as falling out of love, finding someone else, these things would fit the shape of war. But he got a War Department letter. A change of billet. A plane ticket home. As soon as the tub reached New Guinea the war for him was lost already. Two days outside of port he decided that indeed he did not matter either and as discreetly as possible he stepped out into the rain and climbed up the deck railing. Below the sea was pitching softly, above the first stars already showing. He had it in mind to let the ship decide, to let the bashing insanity of the cockroaches, the randomness of their lives which had taken over the world completely, decide whether he returned or not, but before he had the chance to test randomness the ship pitch violently away and he was sent flying back hitting his head against steel bulk head. He still remembered the one inane thought he mustered before passing out. I did not know you could see Orion this far south. + + +Lying in bed at night he watched the fan turn and thought it over and over again. I did not know. That was what gathered meaning over the years. Orion remained incidental. Ambrose had come to believe that knowing was not experience, nor abstraction. He was not in fact sure that he knew what knowing was at all. He still did not know. Knowing had careened around him a roulette ball bouncing on a wheel or maybe bouncing all over the table like a cue ball or maybe knowing has nothing to do with balls, maybe its more like time-lapse footage of clouds on the Discovery Channel, puffs form and dissipate and form anew and on and on. What it was he had not know at that moment was incidental, trivial and nothing compared to what he did not know now. + +Ambrose stood and wiped the seat of his pants. With some grunting and difficulty he ducked out from beneath the thorny branches of the Mesquite Tree. He looked at Claire sitting with her back toward him, leaning against the trunk of the tree, only strands of her black hair really visible and even those blending confusingly with the black bark of the tree. He wanted to say something, but wasn't sure what it was. He wanted there to be some closure, some satisfactions, but knew there was neither available. So he said nothing and turned back toward the house hobbling and crouched from age. + + +Claire watched him go and reached into her hip pocket for another cigarette. The water was beginning to spill over the banks. They would be running the ticker tape at the bottom of television. Flash flood warning in effect. Tomorrow the newspaper would say that perhaps someone had died, that the desert is a curse, that the desert is barren and a curse, that a new golf course is going to be built on the hillside, that perhaps the treat of flooding is the price we pay for sunshine, that coffee is still good atÉ Claire stood up from the rock and started to follow the train closer to the river. She knelt beside the lapping edge and listened to rumble of the deeper waters. She reached behind her and pulled her shirt down over her back. She smoothed the creases of her pants and turned to walk back to the house. + |
