Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [16]
There is plenty of Phoenix I haven't seen, she will write with pointblank neutrality.
***
Our story, my mother's, my father's, mine, would seem to need no help from imagination to predict us onward from that 1944 Christmas. Americans of our time lived some version of it by the hundreds of thousands, ultimate millions, as Phoenix's population greatened beyond those of Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Milwaukee, beyond that of entire states such as Montana, as America's center of gravity avalanched south to the Sunbelt. The picture of us-to-be is virtually automatic. My father doctors his way out of the ulcer siege, my mother's asthma stays subdued and her homesickness begins to ebb, we continue on as self-draftees in the sunward march of America. Sheepkeepers no more, now we be bombermakers. Naturalized Alzonans, no more or less ill-fitted for project living and eventual suburbs than any other defense work importées. As this last war winter drew down toward all that was going to burgeon beyond, we were right there at hand, ready-made, to install ourselves into the metropolis future that was Phoenix. Except we didn't.
The Doig boys in the 1920s; Charlie, in the striped shirt, with three of his cowboy brothers.
We two, my mother and I, navigate among the cacti. The road from the cabin threads in and out of any number of identical pale braids of wheel tracks, but we have memorized strategic saguaros, arms uplifted like green traffic policemen, at the turns we need to make. Behind the steering wheel of the Ford my mother keeps watch on the cloud-puffy March sky as much as she does our cactus landmarks. She hates bad roads (and has spent what seems like her whole life on them) but at least these of the desert are more sand than mud.
The odometer's little miles slowly go, three, seven, then ten and here is town, palm-sprigged Wickenburg. My mother believes she was not born to parallel-park, so she pulls around to a side street where the Ford can be nosed in and maybe escape notice.
On the round of town chores I tag along long-lipped at her side. First to the post office, with her letters ready to Wally (We packed up and came to Wickenburg Mon. afternoon), to my grandmother, to Anna and Joe and others in Montana. As ever, we don't receive quite as many as she sends.
No sooner are we onto the street again than I halt her with my news.
"Can you wait," she hypothesizes as parents always strangely do in public, "or do you have to go real bad?"
Crucially bad, I assure her.
My mother does not point out that I could have taken care of this when I had the entire Arizona desert to do it in, although she looks as if she might like to. We quickmarch to the street intersection, where she scans unfamiliar downtown Wickenburg. The sign she seeks does not display a bucking horse on a rampage the way it would in Montana, but at least it declares budweiser. Into the saloon we troop. The bartender, sallow figure in sleeve garters, and my mother perched in the lastmost booth pretend each other aren't there as I trek to the M-E-N door.
The drugstore next. Among the sundries there, my mother's triumph is a scarce roll of film for her camera. After paying, she eyes me, gauging how far down in the dumps I am. "We better resort to ice cream cones," she determines.
Ice cream helps; when did it ever not? But my basic snit was rapidly back. I missed my father at every corner of each day, from his renegade pour of condensed milk into his breakfast coffee to turn it tan as his workshirt, until moonrise when he would burr his voice Scotcher than ever and tell me it was a braw bricht moonlicht nicht. My mother, all at once a single householder in a bareboard cabin ten miles out in the Sonoran desert, with everything there is on her mind, is doing her utmost to fill his absence, I know. But this situation of only one parent...
A carload of Phoenix people interrupts me in mid-mope by depositing themselves on the