American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [83]
Grandpa Doc felt a keen responsibility for those living under his roof—or the roof of the Ferguson, anyway. He told us a story that summed up what he was having to shoulder. One warm spring day when he was working on a Comanche, he found Nub on the waiting-room sofa, a freckle-faced girl at his side. “You two there long?” said Doc.
“Nope,” said Nub, flashing a rakish grin.
Grandpa Doc proceeded to work on the Indian, slipping out from time to time to shoot tobacco juice into the spittoon and eye the two on the couch. He could hear Great-Grandma Clapp clanking up and down the metal stairs, knocking on doors, visiting with the uranium prospectors down the hall. “How’s business, folks?” she barked. “You found some good rocks today?” But she was too deaf to hear their answers, and so she continued to career through the corridor like a bat with bad sonar, bumping against the walls.
Doc was excavating his patient’s jaw when he realized that the conversation in the waiting room had grown muffled; there were unmistakable sounds of clothes rustling, heavy breathing. Doc weighed his choices. Should he stop midsurgery and let his patient bleed? He wavered there, one foot on his chair pedal, his scalpel midair. Until the solution came a-knocking.
The sheriff was at the door. Next to him, ashen, diminutive, crowlike in her floor-length black cape, was Doc’s mother. Nub rose. Grandpa Doc stepped forward. The Comanche’s eyes rolled up in alarm.
“Ho, Doc,” the sheriff said, shifting cud to the other side of his smile. “Doggone if she ain’t done it again. I found her streaking through town like a banshee, screeching to everyone, asking if they seen her daddy.” He nodded toward Nub. “You keep your kin reined in now, hear, Doc? Two generations of your folk are working me up one side and down the other! I’m gittin’ a little raggedy.”
As little as I could relate to my dying grandmother and her wacky mother-in-law, I found myself drawn to my pretty-boy cousin. I was crazy for Nub. In a time when the world seemed to have more moving parts than an Andean earthquake, he struck me as someone I could rely on. He had a will of his own and a wry, wicked humor. I began seeking him out the way I’d sought out Antonio: On the roof of the Ferguson Building, where he went to smoke. Down in the grassy alley between the dry-goods store and the sheriff’s office where I’d find him chewing on a weed. Like Antonio, he welcomed me, grinning wide, patting whatever ledge he was perched on, signaling me to put my little rump by his side. Whereas Antonio’s lessons had been about laws of nature, rules of energy, the consequence of historias, Nub’s school was something else: Laws were for breaking. Rules were for chumps. History counted for nothing. Mornings were for shuffling the deck.
More than anything, Nub taught me how to throw my head back and take in the sky. He’d lean against a wall or stretch out on a patch of green, blowing circles of cigarette smoke at our sheltering firmament. Sometimes he’d pass me a butt end and let me try puffing my own. More often, I’d put my elbows behind my head and watch his perfect rings rise, curling high into the crisp spring air.
From time to time I’d scramble into his lap, place my hands on his shoulders, and hoist myself up so that I could look down into his eyes. They were a crystalline blue. Just as Antonio’s eyes had been the color of a rich brown loam, Nub’s eyes were alive with clear hyaline. Looking into them buoyed me up, made me feel light, dizzy, high.
I know now that to Nub I was just a silly child with amusing eccentricities. But from time to time, when I’d lie beside him as he looked into the blue serene, something would move him to pour out his heart. I’d stare into that vastness listening to his voice, the warm twang of it, and hear about his world. He would talk about his mother, my Aunt Helena, who had been institutionalized for some years now but was forever escaping from