Desert Discord

by Henry D. Terrell

  “Hah!” said Andy. “No, the trunk of my car won’t lock, so we thought we’d better bring the instruments inside. Can we put them somewhere?”

  “Here, you can put them in my bedroom,” said Ramona. She looked at Simon’s case curiously. “What kind of instrument is that?” she asked.

  “It’s an oboe,” said Simon.

  “I don’t really know anything about it,” said Ramona.

  “It’s like a bassoon, but with more range,” said Andy. “About twenty-five yards if you have a good arm.”

  “Oh shut up,” said Simon.

  “Sorry … old joke.”

  The two stashed their cases against the wall and joined the crowd in the living room.

  The party grew bigger and louder. The Rolling Stones and CCR replaced Apollo’s cool jazz on the stereo. Andy found himself in a corner of the den smoking a joint with all three Piedman sisters; Erycca’s boyfriend, Timothy Kaufman, who lived at the Piedman house; and Saskia’s friend, Angela De Ghetto, who had been in several of Ramona’s theater productions. Andy didn’t particularly care for marijuana, but it relaxed him and muted his basic social awkwardness. Apparently, it had helped Simon Frost as well, because the young musician was conversing flamboyantly in the living room with people he had just met.

  “You never told me how the first show went tonight, Andy,” said Saskia.

  “It was a little bit sloppy, like all first nights,” said Andy. “But nobody minded. That’s how it usually goes. Pops is easy to play, and it looks like Benny Goodman was the right choice. All the old people were whooping it up. There are a lot of horns and clarinets—a Big Band sound—and they loved it.”

  “I’m learning the clarinet,” said Jane. She was the largest of the sisters, taller and bigger boned than the other two.

  “That’s great,” said Andy. “Work hard at it and you’ll be able to play any of the woodwinds. You finger a saxophone almost like a clarinet.”

  “I want to play in a band,” said Jane. “Like Blood, Sweat & Tears. I love ‘Spinning Wheel.’ David Clayton-Thomas is fantastic. Do you think they should legalize marijuana? I do. I wrote an essay about it.” She gazed intently at Andy.

  “That was dumb, Janey,” said Erycca. “You shouldn’t have done that. You haven’t learned to keep your head down and your trap shut in school. Once they find out what you think, they give you shit for years.”

  “The school sent a note home to my parents about how they need to give me a good talking-to about drugs. Mom taped it on the refrigerator. She was proud of me.”

  “Well, you should never be afraid to say what you think,” said Andy. “Just always think before you say.” He wasn’t sure if that was a quote or if he had just made it up, but it sounded wise.

  “Yeah!” said Jane.

  “The saxophone is … God’s voice,” said Tim. “It’s a channel to plug your mind into the universe at large. Eric Dolphy is like Jesus Christ … or John the Baptist.”

  Andy nodded and smiled but had no idea what Tim was talking about. This guy is really stoned, he thought.

  Ramona came over and put her hand on Andy’s shoulder. “Hey, Andy, can I bother you for a few minutes? I want to show you something. Saskia, you and Angela come too.” Janey started to tag along, but Ramona told her, “Honey, would you go find Daddy and ask him to turn the music down? I’m afraid we’re going to get the neighbors mad at us.”

  Ramona led them through the house to a small room in the back, with a desk and several bookshelves stuffed with paperbacks. On the wall were photographs from years of Playhouse productions. She shut the door.

  “Sit right there,” Ramona said, pointing to a love seat. She picked up a binder that lay on the desk. Angela sat in a desk chair, Saskia sat down beside Andy on the love seat, but Ramona remained standing, flipping through pages.

  “My little sister has a crush on you,” said Saskia.

  “I can tell,” said Andy. “She’s cute. Naïve, I think.”

  “Very,” said Saskia. “She could use an older boyfriend who is patient with her and won’t treat her like dirt.”

  “I’ll take that under consideration,” said Andy.

  “A-hem!” interjected Ramona. “I just want to read you a couple of pages, Andy. Bear with me. Just open your mind, relax, and listen. You too, Angela.”

  If I get any more relaxed I’m going to keel over, thought Andy. He stole a quick look at his watch—9:45. He had to work at the gift shop tomorrow starting at noon, and play the Sunday evening show with the symphony at six p.m., but for now, Andy was a captive audience. He sat up and paid attention.

  Ramona read dramatically, as if she were on a stage instead of in a ten-by-twelve-foot office.

  “We set the scene,” she said. “The year is 1882. Boston Harbor. Before us is the gangplank of a ship. A well-dressed young man with distinctive, long, flowing hair hesitates, fearful to descend the gangplank into a world he doesn’t know. His mind is filled with ideas … radical ideas … and he doesn’t know how this new world of America will receive those ideas … or how it will receive him.”

  Andy glanced over at Saskia, hoping for a clue as to what was happening, but she just gazed up at her mother, enraptured.

  At a bit past ten thirty, Andy extracted Simon from the party. He needed to get some sleep, and Simon lived all the way across town, a few blocks from Blocker Auditorium.

  They put their instruments into the bug’s nose-trunk, and Andy shut the lid hard. If he didn’t get it all the way latched, it might pop open on the road. Andy’s brother Pug had promised to fix it when he got a chance.

  “Hey, Saskia’s mom wants to cast me in her play,” said Andy. “I don’t know. It would take a lot of time.”

  “What’s it about?” asked Simon.

  “It’s about Oscar Wilde, the playwright. She thinks I look like him, so it would actually be the starring role, if you can imagine that.”

  “Wow,” said Simon. “Maybe you should do it. You’re not getting rich sawing a fiddle.”

  “That I am not.”

  They started to get into the Volkswagen, but Simon hesitated by the passenger door.

  “Hey, man, I know it’s pretty late, but do you have to get home right away?”

  “Well, I’d like to get some sleep tonight,” said Andy. “What do you want to do?”

  “I thought maybe we could go somewhere and talk, just for a little while.”

  “About what?”

  “Just … some stuff that’s been happening. Weird stuff. I want to just … bounce it off somebody.”

  “I suppose,” said Andy. “Not too late, okay?” Simon was a good friend but could be a little bit … needy sometimes.

  “I won’t keep you up too late. I just want to talk someplace quiet.”

  “Okay.” Andy started the car, and the valves clattered. Wherever they decided to talk, it wouldn’t be in Andy’s car, which was way too noisy for quiet conversation.

  – 9 –

  Peggy Makes the Poinsettias Red

  The Zamaras were no longer allowed to shoot rabbits from their front porch. Back when they first moved to Pleasant Farms ten years ago, you could shoot all you wanted and nobody would bat an eye. After neighbors moved close by, first on one side, then another, and after the dirt road was paved, suddenly everybody started thinking they were living in the city, and everyday country things like shooting a gun on your own property would get you yelled at by a deputy, and maybe fined.

  But, unfortunately, the rabbits didn’t know they were now urban dwellers and kept up regular raids on Peggy Zamara’s garden.

  It was a bright and cloudless Sunday morning, and Peggy was tending the little poinsettia plants in the greenhouse. About once a month, the Zamaras dressed presentably and drove into town to attend St. Lucius of Cyrene Catholic Church (St. Luke’s to the faithful), but this morning there was a lot to do, and time was precious. What had started as a hobby, and then a profitable pastime, was turning into a full-fledged
business. Her goal this year was five hundred healthy, bushy poinsettia plants available to nurseries by November 15. By that time, they should be luscious and bright red, but for now they just needed to grow. Peggy moved the small pots farther apart from each other to give them more room, and discarded the odd plant here and there that was failing to thrive.

  Pauline came running in. “Mom!” she said. “Jackrabbits in the garden!”

  Peggy sighed. “Okay, baby, I’ll be there in a second. Put Bruiser inside.” Bruiser was a hound dog of dubious lineage. He was now eleven years old and spent most of his time asleep under the porch swing. Just a couple of years ago, Bruiser would have kept the rabbits away, at least in daylight. Poor old boy. Probably time to get another dog. Let Bruiser just nap away his retirement.

  Peggy retrieved Punchy’s .22-caliber pump-action rifle from behind the kitchen door and fished into a drawer for the box of shells. Jesus had told her she could keep shooting rabbits so long as she used the .22 shorts, which weren’t any louder than a firecracker and wouldn’t draw the ire of the neighbors or get the sheriff called. The only problem was that the rifle would only chamber a long-rifle shell—shorter bullets jammed in the mechanism every time—but Punchy showed her how it was possible to feed the little bullets in one at a time with a pair of tweezers, if you were steady. With time and rabbits, Peggy got to be a good shot.

  She opened the chamber and used the tweezers to carefully place the little bullet into position, then pulled the slide all the way back to cock the gun.

  “Point ’em out to me, baby,” called Peggy. Pauline was Jesus and Peggy’s youngest child, the late, unexpected one, and the only girl. At sixteen years old, she was slight, dark-skinned, and pretty, and the Zamara men doted on her, especially Andy.

  Peggy followed Pauline back out onto the porch.

  “Right … there,” said Pauline. “Right next to the water bucket. See? The other one is somewhere behind.”

  Peggy spotted the rabbit behind the tea plants in the back of the garden. The plants were not traditional tea, but a Mexican variety that Peggy used to make a natural arthritis remedy. That, along with the lettuce and greens, were a favorite target of the jacks. Peggy stepped off the porch and walked around to the right to try and see the other rabbit. She wasn’t sure she could get both, especially since it would take at least thirty seconds to repeat the tweezer-loading method. She saw the other rabbit in the collards, munching contentedly. Peggy decided to try and get the one that was farther away first, and maybe the nearby rabbit wouldn’t spook. It was a tricky shot to make. She sat down on the edge of the porch, steadied the rifle by placing both elbows on her knees, and held her breath.

  POP! The rabbit flipped once in the air and squeaked, and both rabbits bolted. It hadn’t been a perfect shot. The mortally wounded animal dashed a few feet and crawled under the tool shed. Darn. She would have to wait a couple of hours, then try to get under there to retrieve the carcass before it started to rot. Bruiser, now roused, was barking ferociously in the house.

  “I’m no good at this anymore,” Peggy muttered. She went back inside to put away the pump-action. When she returned, she saw her neighbor Mr. Spencer standing on his own porch, scowling in her direction. He was the main complainant about gunfire in the neighborhood. She smiled and waved.

  “I thought I heard a gunshot!” he called.

  “I didn’t hear anything!” she yelled back, and returned to the greenhouse. She needed to finish the tedious job of moving and culling the poinsettias. Should she water them now or wait till this afternoon? That was a long job, too, with over 550 pots, but it had to be done. If she didn’t go ahead and get it finished before lunch, the chore would only hang over her head.

  About the middle of August, the difficult part would begin. To get the poinsettias to sprout red leaves, every day in the late afternoon they had to cover the greenhouse with a huge, heavy, opaque tarp to block out sunlight. It was a tedious but essential chore, rolling the tarp up and down every day, and had to be done right, because what the plants responded to was hours of darkness, not hours of light. Simulated fourteen-hour nights triggered the plants to produce bright red carotenes instead of green chlorophyll. Even a tiny amount of light from a poorly placed tarp would disrupt the process.

  The phone rang while she was unrolling the hose. Jesus had installed a second bell under the eaves at the back of the house so she could hear it from the garden. She listened to make sure the call was for them.

  Ring ring! (pause) Ring ring!

  Yep, it was for them. There were four neighbors on the party line, each with a different ring pattern. Most of the time it wasn’t a problem, but ever since a neighbor with an eleven-year-old girl moved in, and Pauline started high school, the phone line was getting a workout. They needed to go ahead and splurge on their own private line, but her husband Jesus was such a penny-pincher, it would take some persuading.

  “Pauline, baby! Can you get that?” Peggy called. The ringing stopped. She kept uncoiling the long hose. A minute went by. The call must have been for Pauline. Peggy kept working.

  She heard Pauline calling from the porch. “Mom! It’s Daddy!”

  Peggy wiped off her hands on her apron and started walking toward the house. Jesus would be calling from his shop, which he went to every single day, even Sundays. As she got closer, she saw that Pauline was distraught, tears pouring down her face. Peggy walked faster.

  “Baby, what’s wrong?”

  “Somebody tried to kill Andy!” she screamed. “He’s hurt really bad! Daddy says he’s in the hospital and he’s almost dead!”

  Peggy ran inside and snatched up the phone. She could barely understand her husband, who was crying on the other end of the line.

  “Peg! They beat him bad! He’s in the hospital! They can’t wake him up! Oh, Peg, they hurt my boy!”

  “Which hospital? In Duro?”

  “Yeah, Duro hospital. The doctor said some men beat him last night, and he’s unconscious. I’m driving over right now!”

  Peggy hung up the phone and ran into the living room to find her purse and car keys.

  “Let’s go, baby!” she shouted. By the time Peggy reached the station wagon, Pauline was already in the front seat. Peggy started the car, threw it into reverse, and whipped the wheel as she backed out of their gravel driveway. She put the car in drive before she’d gotten all the way to the street so that when she accelerated, they crossed the edge of Mr. Spencer’s driveway, throwing little stones and fragments of seashell across his yard.

  “Hey, watch it!” he yelled, shaking his fist as the car roared out of sight. “Mexicans,” he muttered.

  As Peggy steered the car down the farm road at over seventy miles per hour, Pauline wouldn’t stop crying in the front seat.

  “Why did they hurt him, Mom?” she sobbed. “Why would anybody wanna kill Andy? Why?”

  – 10 –

  No Fear at the Cactus Flower

  Duro’s two big downtown movie theaters, the Hurst and the Ferris, both changed out their feature films on Friday nights. The Cactus Flower Cinema, always the poor stepchild, sometimes the maverick, made the weekly switch on Sunday. The theater’s majority owner, Arnold Ziegler, enjoyed flaunting local morals and defying the standards of the community by bravely presenting controversial feature films that directly challenged modern America’s image of itself and forced viewers to confront their own hypocrisies. Sometimes this resulted in indisputable dreck, such as Promises! Promises! (Banned in Cleveland! said the promo) and The Weird World of LSD (Ripped from today’s headlines!). But now there was a chance to screen a real treasure, an Academy Award winner, and get butts in the seats.

  The film was Midnight Cowboy, and it was being shown in Duro for the first time. It had actually been released the year before, but the town fathers had successfully intimidated the owners of the Hurst and the Ferris into passing it up. The film had received an Oscar for Best Picture in February, so Arnold pounced on the rare opportuni
ty to screen a major motion picture before his larger rivals got it.

  The Film Ratings Board had originally suggested an X rating, due to the film’s graphic depiction of … something … nobody was quite sure. But the rating was only a suggestion, and Arnold planned to slap a big defiant R on Midnight Cowboy, deliberately inviting official wrath. After he announced the upcoming one-week special run, somebody at the city attorney’s office called to say they wouldn’t give Arnold any trouble if he would agree to stick with the X rating. Arnold flatly refused, and the stage was set for a constitutional showdown, and the kind of publicity money couldn’t buy.

  He knew he was risking a hefty fine and the real possibility the film would be seized and his theater padlocked. The second eventuality he was prepared for, with his lawyer ready with a petition to present to a county judge as soon as the deputies moved in. He also made sure his friends at the Duro American-Post were aware that the First Amendment was under siege, and would write sympathetic stories.

  The possibility that the film might be confiscated was something else, and he couldn’t let that happen. For one thing, it belonged to the distributor and was scheduled to be shipped out early next week. If he couldn’t send the reels on their way, he’d have to pay a hefty penalty. The film was a hit, so the rental wasn’t cheap.

  So, Arnold came up with a plan: As each reel finished and was rewound, it went into its can and out the emergency exit to the trunk of a waiting car parked in the alley behind the Cactus. If nothing happened, the cans would be brought back inside for the next showing. If the sheriff’s deputies moved in to seize the film, he figured they would probably wait until the movie was over. Arnold would stall the authorities while the last reel was rewound and spirited out the door and into the waiting car. He had instructed the staff to keep him ignorant of where they were taking the film so that he could say without perjuring himself that he truly did not know where it was.

  They decided to hold a full-on drill during the first showing at the Sunday matinée, and it started without a hitch. The house was about a third full, not bad for the time slot, but Arnold hoped for a sellout that night. The assistant manager on duty, Saskia Piedman, sat in her Mustang with the engine running and the trunk open while Ronnie the projectionist rewound the last reel. Ronnie came out the back exit and placed the last film can with the others, shut the trunk lid, and slapped it twice, an unnecessary touch, but it made the whole thing more like a spy movie. Arnold clicked his stopwatch. Saskia then transported the six cans of 35mm film down the alley and around the corner, avoiding the front of the Cactus Flower, and headed for her parents’ house. When the film was safe, she was to call Arnold at the theater office and let the phone ring exactly three times and hang up. Arnold would hit the button on his stopwatch. His goal was to keep the whole process under twenty minutes.