THE MUSIC, THE RUSHED-hush of cars passing, passing us on a dark road, cars speeding, making a noise as if to call out, “What’s the matter—you drunk?”
In a county full of straightaways, Arthur was too slow for where he lived. The cars passed by loudly, wrong speed. Arthur was amazed. Good citizen that he was, he did not drive over the limit while the other cars were sudden in their turns, wagging over gravel lots to get there faster. It might have been to home the cars were turning or to Friday-night fish fry when the cars bumped up behind us. The lights, swagged across the street and blinking, affected me like noise. The windshield was a rainbow, and I worried. “Can you see?” I asked. Snow was falling and the wipers streaked the glass. “Are you all right?” The way Arthur, now recovered, wore his good clothes carefully, ready to be buried, prompted me to ask, “Do you want to pull over and rest?” And we did; we parked near the school, on a dead-end street, and we slept in the car, and no one—no one in the long time we slept—passed by. I would have heard them; my ears were very sharp then. I could hear Arthur breathing in the half sleep to be had in the car, the one we both woke tired from and hungry. “But can you eat this?” I asked, breaking off squares of chocolate. “Could you have a reaction?”
“What was it about his heart, I wondered, when his hair was yet so black?
“Is it time already?”
“Do you have to leave now?” I had asked this of my mother, of Uncle Billy, of Arthur. Maybe even of my father I had asked as much, if I had known him, as once I must have known him: Father: side-part, bow tie, a voice radio-soothing when I thought of him. Now I had a car and rising water, a picture of a man driving willfully and fast. … which didn’t sound to me like him at all. If it wasn’t an accident, it could not have happened, which meant my father was alive and living somewhere.
“I have never been,” I said to my Uncle Billy; and “I have never been,” I answered that first time Uncle Billy asked if I would like to spend spring in the desert, “but I like to travel. I want to travel.” I made that known to them all, to the only living grandmother, even to such a grandmother as she, to Nonna, stroked speechless, I said what was purely true: “I want to see all of the country.”
I went to Tucson again. “While Arthur was at home with his trembling heart, I was riding horses. I was riding Patches in a stony river bed; I was swimming in the pool with Uncle Billy’s full attention.
“Aren’t you glad you kept your hair short?” Aunt Frances asked. “Would you like to go to town? Would you like to go to the cactus garden?” Every day promised some addition, more Apache tears for the tumbler, more stones for the jewelry we were making. Aunt Frances said, “I hope you know, Alice, that we love you.” Aunt Frances and Uncle Billy both said, “We love your mother, too. You believe that, don’t you?”
I didn’t. I was making rings with Apache tears. I was pulling clear glue like skin off my thumbs.
Poor thumbs, my mother’s, so evidently picked-at, sore. Her lipstick smeared on fast. One shoe, one earring, one glove, one of a pair always missing, she had said so a million years ago when I leaned under her crooked roof of arm, and she cried. Later she got mad; she threw an ashtray at Uncle Billy and rushed to hit him, and when he held her off, she ran to the glass porch doors and kicked in a pane and hobbled through the house tracking blood; but Mother wasn’t afraid of blood or of dying or that was how it had seemed to me when I saw her leaned up against the front-yard elm in just her negligee, and crying, “He left without me.”
Mother was so dramatic!
Mother was an embarrassment, a threat, a woman in a sweater dress and white bubble wig who had barged into Uncle Billy’s house with me, her daughter, a million years ago. I was along—was almost always along—on Mother’s sudden decisions to turn the car around and pay a visit. “What’s this I hear,” Mother had said that time at Uncle Billy’s when she was in the bubble wig. “What’s this you’re saying?” with no other greeting, “what’s all this I-can’t-take-care-of-my-daughter shit?” Then that time we were driving with Arthur in my Uncle Billy’s car, Mother had said it was true, Uncle Billy was right, she couldn’t take care of me—not without a man anyhow, and the men she was picking weren’t men. She was tired. She was sick of the snow. “Just look!” she said, and she pointed to fields of it washed against fences. We were driving in the Emerald Gem, passing shores of snow; and Mother, next to me, had her sad face on when she said, “You’ll like it in a warm place in the middle of winter.” Mother staring out the window at that hurtful brightness, saying, “Uncle Billy tells me the San has a beach—ha, ha. Now don’t you wish you were going there with me?” But I was going to live with Uncle Billy; and I was going to visit his springtime house, the one he had built in the Arizona desert. The desert in the spring was tonic, the early morning hours and the late, red afternoons. The rim of mountains just beyond his desert house turned all kinds of red, and I tried and tried to reach them. They were farther away than they looked, and the desert was hard to walk for its unevenness, its cactus. Jumping cholla threatened everywhere; but I walked it, walked heedlessly against the bleaching sun in the morning, or walked in the afternoon through the glaucous paloverde trees. I walked in the bed of a dry creek where the stones powdered beneath my feet, and I thought I was grinding bone. The clack, clack of loose stone. Heavy, heavy me!
On almost any day, I was on my way to the mountains grinding bone and singing my story. It was my hobo’s bindle. I carried it to anyone, to win friends and get attention from the teachers.