Old Border Road

by Susan Froderberg

  There is a spell of relief, and then it is over.

  Oh, what could it be that is so much the matter?

  Just nothing.

  Just everything is.

  NOW THE MANMADE lakes were made—Havasu and Powell and Mead, Rose’s Daddy said. And the dams were built—Glen Canyon and Hoover, Parker and Laguna, Imperial and Morelos and Davis. Yet modern man can be naive, not only about nature, but about politics too and the inherent greed that is bred among his fellow human beings, he said. He can be naive as to his history.

  You kids know your Homer, don’t you?

  Son and I shifted in our seats in the drift of afternoon and sweet tobacco smoke.

  What happened next was of nature, a disaster of weather, a torrent of hot as anyone had heard tell of or seen. And what happened was of property matters, water rights, greed and pride, what money could and could not buy. And the life and the death of one’s brethren—yet that was considered lastly.

  Rose’s Daddy sucked the flame down into the pipebowl.

  Yessirree-bob, it was hot, he said, drawing on the pipe. It was a dry spell that had only been known by the Indians here. For the newcomers, as I said, it was a spate of heat as they had never felt it before nor seen. People lost count of the number of days they had been without rain. People who had no habit of praying began to do it. Others cursed God aloud. Some went to visit the Cocopah or the Quechan or the Mohave to consult with their medicine men. Lo, but what suffering did befall them all. People became heatstraked and sunblistered and out-and-out exhausted. They cramped and they fainted and they sweat. They stopped sweating and started vomiting. They got delirious. And the afflicted breathed shallow and quiet. And their skin turned clammy and gray. In worst cases, hearts fluttered and brains shook and kidneys quit, eyeballs dilated, clumps of hair fell out of scalps, tongues cleaved to the roofs of mouths. In all cases, everybody was scared.

  Have I scared you kids yet? he said.

  Son brought the waterjar to his lips and took a good long draw from it.

  These old-timers lived in infernal heat, Rose’s Daddy said. Or so they tried to live, within what had become a suffocating epidemic. They singed their fingers on metal implements and took to eating with their fingers. Flesh was seared, cloth scorched atop backs, outlooks shriveled. Many wore masks to protect their lungs from the dust and yet many choked to death. And those of the suffering who went down to the river to immerse themselves found the water above blood heat and unbearable to the touch. Like a hot hot-spring it was, and with the sun boiling down above them. And what water there was, was too muddy to drink. And the water was thick and red as what it was named to be.

  All suffered, man and beast alike, Rose’s Daddy said.

  Yes, indeedy. You want me to go on?

  He looked at us and did.

  The fierce heat did so bake acres upon acres of grassland and pastureland down to nothing but soot. The sun’s rays devoured the stubble, even consumed the chaff. It was said that fowl stopped scratching and laying and they simply toppled in heaps. Horses collapsed to the ground in kickups of dust. Cattle were blinded. Livestock were fed a mix of pricklypear cactus and molasses for lack of proper feed. Still, they died. All the animals died. Their scaly carcasses were dried to bleached piles of bones in the sun. Not even prey birds showed up to pick the dead clean, for they could not have flown in such waves of dust and gusts of heat. What birds there were fell like withered fruit from the trees. Dried-up lizards skittered like old leaves in the wind. Rodents and bats petrified between rock slabs and dried pipes. Fish were simmered belly-up in the river. Hot cracks appeared in the earth and life was lost into the depths of them. Dust clouds concealed the sun for days on end. Lo, people were stunned within a haze of dirt, in weltering tons of it. They met with darkness in the daylight in the midst of black blizzards. They groped in the noonday as in the nighttime. And within the blackness of the days, humankind was terrified.

  I’M ON MY way back to my father’s place, is where I am, but the road is rough and full of potholes. I’m routed through a part of town I can’t recollect, a place of concrete and steel, a place of no more open spaces, no kite hills or boat docks or flower parks to mark where I might be, no lakeshore drive or waterfront walk, no terrace of benches. There’s only the pandemonium of tearing what was up down. There’s only the chaos of making way for the new to rise. I park in an alleyway and walk to make it easier to find my way through the detours and the boarded-off and one-way streets. All around is nothing but broken ground and brownfield, a lot of abandoned lots. The school is gone, the playground, the garden store, the dollar store, the movie house, the tent shop, the bakery, the millinery, the library—all of it gone as if to vapor and floated away. I look at people I don’t know on the street, their faces blank and with not a glance or a nod in their passing. Seabirds flap their wings at my head and careen and shriek about for what’s guttered in the street. I cringe and cover my ears as a wailing hospital vehicle hurtles by in a flash of red lights. I look into the windows to see who might be inside when a burst of light erupts from I don’t know where. I look out at the water, dark and churning on the bay, at the nimbus veil that hovers above. A boat of some kind lets out a mournful bellow, and I feel the hollow echo of it rolling beneath the shell of my rib bones. Then I awake to the deep harsh sound of myself, more a pitiful groaning than the loud cry I’m trying to cry out.

  THE OLD MAN’S stories are good but not always the whole truth, Son says.

  I filter through a pile of new mail, just arrived and already collecting dust on the sideboard. Bills, bills, bills, I say, mimicking my mother talking.

  The old man tends to leave pieces out in his telling, he says.

  What pieces of what? I say.

  Like why he’s let some of our fields go fallow.

  What for in this heat?

  Money’s to be made selling water to those on the coast.

  Won’t the place blow away on us?

  Dry years make you even more money.

  Is that how you think?

  Don’t matter what I think, when the old man won’t listen.

  He listens to somebody, I say. Everybody listens to somebody.

  Sure, he says. He listens to Pearl Hart.

  Pearl Hart. Why have I heard that name before?

  Because she made sure to make one for herself, he says.

  She must have money or something.

  She does all right.

  Rose’s Daddy comes in and sees you in his chair, he will raise some Cain, I say.

  Yes, indeed, Pearl Hart’s done all right all her life, Son says. He swivels about in the old man’s chair. She’s got plenty of acreage, he says, both of the wet and the dry kind. Always had it. She’s come from an early family of desert homesteaders that proved up their land. They got in on water rights from the get-go, he says. She’s got her a little empire here. She’s talking of running for county water commissioner. You bet, he says. She’s got all a that and a face and body to go with it, he says.

  She could be your mother, I say.

  Don’t I wish, he says.

  Here, I say. Your posse dues are due.

  I leave Son aswivel in Rose’s Daddy’s chair and go into the kitchen to show Rose the postcard. Pictured on it is a watery landscape with white breakers rolling into sea cliffs that lie along a wrackline of seaweed. There are several people dressed in foul-weather gear and huddled over the body of what appears to be some beached sea mammal. Drawn onto the picture is a penned message that reads, we are here, with two stick figures arrowed in red that stand hand in hand in the sand on the card, one of the stick figures with curlicues of hair around the round of the head.

  That one would be my mother, I guess.

  Lordy, where is she run off to now? Rose says.

  She and this new husband she’s got are working their way up along the coast. She says they’re planning on driving as far north as Alaska.

  Alaska? Rose says.

  Who know
s? I say.

  It’s cold in Alaska, she says.

  I know.

  And I know too, Rose says.

  She looks at me and I see she sees everything.

  My face does things I don’t want it to.

  I know my son, she says. Always going out and running around and staying out late. I know his ways. Verily, verily, verily. He just doesn’t think about it, is all, she says. Listen, Dear Girl, what men think and do—and all of them think it and do it—well, it doesn’t need to mean a thing. What means something is the way a man and a wife are living a life together otherwise.

  I put a hand to my chin to make the quivering stop.

  Now don’t go being a crybaby, Rose says. She fishes the tea bags out of the tea jar and gives each a squeeze. After a time, she says, you learn to not care so much. You’ll see, she says. It’ll all be all right. Believe me. Don’t waste any precious day given to you worrying yourself about matters that don’t really matter. You’ll just end up at the end of your life shaking your head at the meaninglessness of what you fretted over. At the futility of your worry.

  She splits the bags open and throws the sodden tea leaves out the window. Then she opens the freezer door and puts ice in a glass and pours tea over the ice.

  You want lemon? she says.

  I nod, feeling better and feeling worse, relieved and saddened by Rose’s words. I wonder if growing up feels like growing old.

  IT IS HIS leaving that clings to me like the dust on me, his leaving that follows me into my sleep, the words and the images distorted, and always worse at night. His leaving moves into my waking. It settles into memory of what couldn’t have been, but will be because I have heard it and seen it.

  I grab him by the beltloops and say anything I can to make him stay, and with my eyes I say all there is that can’t be said. He takes my grip apart and turns away, my pleas thrown aside and set adrift to settle about the room as the dust does. He says a man can’t be roped down or harnessed up or led around, says that a guy has got to get out with the guys, says that he can’t be stuck home with a wife all the time, says all those too-often-said kinds of things to me. Then he swings the door wide and goes out, not looking back to keep from having to see what he might see. I follow him out to the porch and get a handful of his shirt, beseeching him not to leave, to please take me along, and he shrugs me off and I grab him again and he throws me aside, harder this time. The old man’s old dog runs over and starts nipping at Son in the confusion. I sink to the porch step and hug my knees to my chest and drop my head, hearing Son’s boots scuff in the gravel, hearing the whine of the hinge, a slam of metal to metal, the opening roar of the engine. I lift my head and see him drive away, watching until the body of earth he leaves floating behind him disappears and is gone.

  The old man’s old dog settles beside me and licks the wet salty drops off my fingers. Right, I say, out with the guys. I look into her milky old eyes and she looks at me. What guys? I say. I never met any of those guys, I say. She pants. I let out a breath. We sit out on the porch step, sit a long time as the night comes on, in the click and the shrill of katydids and crickets, the old dog chewing on her ticks, my legs getting all chigger bit. The ashy sky darkens. Behind the thick scrim of dust there’s a ballet of planets and stars that can’t be seen, hidden bands of constellations, zodiacs, and galaxies, cosmic debris, swarms and belts and arcs, all of everything forever hovering. I wonder at the celestial skin above, thinking of it as what might lie between people, the what can’t be seen but is known—the pulls and stays and gives, the drives, the barriers, the distances. There’s comfort in the order of the universe, I remind myself of this, knowing there are constants in the chaos, knowing there’s a given in the eternal, knowing there are reasons to believe.

  The old dog nudges me to get up from our stoop and move.

  Where is it you want to go? I say. The old dog cocks her ears back. Maybe we’ll stay and wait it out? The way the Indians did, I say. The old dog winces. Things will always change, I say. The old dog gets up and shakes and I get up and follow in the wake of her dust. She wanders out back to the melon shed, where she will use the cool of the concrete floor as a bed ground as is her way. But here, I say, up, I say, and I open the door of the watertruck. Good dog, I say, and I give her a boost in and she settles on the benchseat in front of the steering wheel. I roll the windows down. Then I settle my head on her haunches, finding this bed a better one than our own half-empty bed to be in for the night.

  ALL TOO SOON another night arrives with Son gone to town, and in the morning he’s not home and next to me in the bed. Instead it’s the old man’s old voice that rises from the depths of my slumber and brings me back to here where I am, back from a home that wasn’t or isn’t anymore—the same old and told-again dream that has made its way into me. Awake now to the talk outside, I roll out of bed and go to the window and look out into the haze of the day, blinking away the fragments of what has welled up in my head during sleep.

  The sheriff is out on the porch, standing and waving a hat as he’s talking to the old man. I pick the clothes up off the floor from the night before, giving them a shake before climbing back into them.

  Settle yourself, Rose’s Daddy says when he sees me come out the door. Everything is all right, he says. I study Rose’s Daddy’s face for the truth. I look over to the sheriff, not able to read his face for much of anything, but seeing it as pockmarked as the moon would be.

  They had to keep him for the night, is all, the sheriff says.

  Run in and curry a comb through your hair, Rose’s Daddy says. And put your inside-out shirt right side on so we can get an ándale, he says.

  He’s standing by the door of the watertruck when I come back out of the house. Slide over, he says. You are yet faster than I am, he says. I want to rocket off in a blast of dust but it’s not in the nature of the vehicle. I drop the water load out of it to lessen our weight, and it leaves the road steaming behind us, as if some tremendous beast had stopped to mark the trail. I get our speed up and pass every tractor and truck and car that’s out in front of us, working the gears and transmission as they might never have been pushed to work, and we lunge on ahead. I drive without a stop through every stop sign we come to in town. We chug and we grind and we rattle and we buck, and like this we get to the place in no time, in a no time that stretches on forever. We get to what’s not much of a hospital really, what they call here the Centro Médico, but really it’s more a hold for keeping a few tired and bent-over old people tied into wheeled chairs and railed beds. We find Son in an empty waiting room, waiting for us with a bandaged head, smoking under a sign that says not to. A man in loose, pastel-colored clothes—a doctor’s assistant or a special nurse or a specific someone of some kind—calls Son Lucky and takes Son’s cigarette away. He gives Son a piece of paper and tells him to come back in a couple of weeks for the stitches out.

  They say he did more damage to the trunk of the old madrone tree, and what a pity to put to waste good shade like that, the man says, talking now to Rose’s Daddy and me. We’d’ve had to race Lucky here out of town if he’d’ve been hurt worse.

  The sheriff tells Rose’s Daddy he should have taken Son’s driver’s license away from him for driving as drunk as he was. But the sheriff says he didn’t because he knew Rose’s Daddy needed Son out on the place to work. First thing you’ll want to have that kid do is pull his pickup truck out of the bar ditch, the sheriff says. I’m relying on you to keep an eye on him, he says. And then some.

  We shall bosal him by the nose and lead him straight on home, Rose’s Daddy says.

  By the way, the sheriff says, turning to face me as we leave. How’s your mother? he says.

  I LEAVE SON in the bed, leave him breathing as if he were laboring in his sleep, muttering as if he were struggling to find his way out of the tangle of a bad dream. I grope my way forward in the dark, arms held out, reaching for the hand of a helpful unseen being if there be one. Floorboards creak beneath m
y feet. The cool dark parlor is cooler and darker yet and filled with the tocking of the old clock. The stars that fill the sky above are still blanketed in nightdust, and no one is out of bed but me, even Rose, who says she can’t sleep till morning anymore. I’m up in the small numbers of the day to beat Son to the ready for the morning water run. I’m up to get a pot of coffee on and flask it up for the ride, and I will tie some buttered biscuits in a tea towel for later, to take the burn away from our stomachs that the brew leaves inside. I will fix myself up too, hoping Son might take notice of my just-washed hair before the dusty air sucks the sheen from the sunburnt strands of it. Hoping he might take notice of my skin smelling of primrose soap and soft yet from the water and not yet dripping and sticky with sweat as it will get too soon into the day. Hoping the shirt he loved to see me in in our beginning will catch his eye again, before the weave goes from crisp to wilted as the day sets in. Wanting him to see me as the girl I am, as the woman I am, the woman that rides beside him, wanting and strong and never-dying I am, just as during our honeymoon time. To have those days again, days that had the feeling of running away in them, with our movement weightless, our course brought to us seamless and easy, melodious, effortless, unthinking. What we had. Those nights and those days. That time. I want it back. I want him to want it back.

  I want to say, Why not make our time the way we want it?

  What is it that keeps us from that?

  Son cuts the headlights, with the sun breaching the horizon and the moon floating pale over the earth on the other side of the sky. Dawn birds scatter and lift in the field like a toss of dark seeds. The watertruck fags along, the old dog trailing all the while behind. We jounce about and buck and sway over the ridges and ruts and holes of the road. The cabfront smells of metal dashboard and leather seating, old pipe smoke and coffee spills. Dials waggle in their casings. The wing windows are flared for a draft. The squared puppet jaw of the ashtray juts full open waiting for an offering. I take comfort in the watertruck’s carry as we move over the curves and dips and straights of the road. Maybe it’s the hard and gray interior, the order and scatter of instruments, the simplicity and complications of the mechanisms, the laws of gravity and motion and speed, all of what will unfold in intention—maybe it’s all of this that is pleasing.