Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [14]
"Did ye happen to hear?"
I have only one fact in me—that it's about to be Christmas—and my mother but two—that it's about to be Christmas and we are an interplanetary distance from anybody and anywhere we know—and so my father's bulletin arrives spectacularly fresh. Leave it to him, he has pried it out of one of the aluminum plant gate guards who were giving everybody a going-over at tonight's change of shifts, making the entire workgang shuffle through in single-file so their security badges could be hawkishly inspected.
"A whole hell of a bunch of German prisoners got away," is the report my father brings. The great breakout at the Papago Park prisoner-of-war camp had been engineered by U-boat men, tunnel-visioned in the most effective sense: somehow they dug through a couple of feet of hardpan a day for the past three months, and tonight twenty-five of them have moled out to freedom, under the cover of ruckus set up by their comrades. "They're watching for the buggers everywhere."
Including, now, 119B.
"What's next in the stampede," murmurs my mother, simply in commentary of German POWs added to the rest of the deluge out there. Tonight she wouldn't be surprised if the moon itself came squashing down on Phoenix.
Meanwhile I am scared, flabbergasted, and inspired. A tunnel! A foxhole is nothing compared to that; tomorrow will not be too soon for me to start my sandhog future beneath Alzona Park.
Huns at the door of Phoenix don't faze my father, at least with a caseknife jamming that door. He kids my mother about the Gluns and Zettels on her side of the family, "Just remember, Berneta, if the MPs come around here you're not related to those sauerkraut cousins of yours back in Wisconsin."
What? What? I'd done my teething on the war, could never remember when the grown-ups were not inveighing against Japs and Krauts. And now—
"Mama? Are we Germans?"
My mother shoots my father a now-look-what-you've-started look. "We're pedigreed Scotch," he assures me, but can't resist adding: "Even you and Mama—ye both caught it from me."
I am determined to get this matter of breed straight. "How did we catch it?"
My father gives the handsome jaunty grin off the Grass Mountain photographs. "It got pretty contagious there for a while."
Naturally I want to follow up on that, but my mother, business to do with cookies and wrapping paper, pokes another look at my father. "Do you figure you're about done stirring him up?"
"I guess maybe so," he acknowledges as he studies her. "Now what can I do about you?" All at once he says, so soberly it breaks on the air as a kind of plea:
"Merry damn Christmas, Berneta."
Realization lifts her upper lip in the middle, her index of surprise. She honestly hasn't known how much her mood has been showing. She is at a loss. "Charlie, I only—"
She hunches her shoulders a little, smallest shrug, but on it ride all the distances of this Christmas. Not only is my mother ten hundred miles separate from her own mother and father, they have separated from each other—my grandmother is cooking on a ranch in another part of Montana from Moss Agate and my grandfather is in parts unknown. Bounced like dice against the war's longitudes and latitudes, Wally is somewhere in the Pacific, my army uncle Paul is in Australia, here we are in aluminized Arizonan Alzona. This sunward leap of ours has been my father's doing, for my mother's sake. More and more spooked by her asthma battles in the isolation of the Faulkner Creek ranch, he flung the place away, piloted us out of Montana on war-bald tires and waning ration books,