Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [21]
"It's going to be a chilly one tonight," my father tastes from the air, and I swear I begin to notice the cool as he is saying it. The feel of existence seems different here from the huge weathers of Montana, the desert temperature instead registering itself degree by degree as if coats of my skin were constantly being added by day and subtracted by evening.
This evening we have barely turned around to start home to the cabin before the wind comes up, strong as soon as it arrives. Around us the entire desert gallops in the sudden blow, the tops of creosote bushes wobbling, the stiff paloverde and mesquite abruptly restless, dust haze mounting into the air between us and the mountains. Everything up and running except the trudging us. For the first time in my life I can walk as fast as my plunge-ahead father, slowed as he is by the incised soreness in his side.
"Wouldn't this just frost your ass," my father mutters as we hang on to our hats, although the wind doesn't seem to me that chilly.
Falling night, the swooping wind, whatever is on my father's mind, all propel us rapidly into the cabin. My mother is not alone.
"Look who I found," she says in a loving tone.
The visitor skeptically sizes up my father and me to see whether we constitute fit company for the likes of himself and my mother, and at last gives us a medium welcome by licking his own nose.
There is a little white slickhaired dog strayed in here today, an old dog, hasn't been too well fed.
"More like, who found you," my father says in his driest manner. In his stockman life, dogs had been a natural necessity. Cowdogs, sheepdogs, dogs that were merely dogs and barely even that, the Faulkner Creek ranch had boiled with dogs. So my father got along fine with dogs in their place, which was anywhere but in the house. Or as he had to put it constantly in his years with my mother, not-in-the-damn-house.
Of course I let him in and fed him, you know me.
No neutrals among us, but I was closest. From the time I was big enough to toddle I possessed a dog of my own, a perfect German shepherd pup who grew up to be a kind of furry gendarme assigned to me as I caromed around next to Faulkner Creek. Pup had lasted until the summer before we embarked to Arizona, when we were living temporarily in White Sulphur Springs. The town had a dog poisoner, some strychninic fiend, and after Pup died in crawling agony before our eyes I was never the same about dogs again. Now I edge up and put in a minority share of petting, but this desert mutt is no Pup.
My father is on that same theme, pointing out that this specimen amounts to more mooch than pooch. My mother, though, is all but pedigreeing her guest on the spot.
"There you go, yes," as she scratches his mangy ears, "you just want to be petted and petted, don't you," fully doing so.
"Berneta,"my father takes his stand. "You're not having that dog with us. We don't need a dog in Arizona."
"I know," says my mother as if she doesn't know any such thing. "But it's cold out there on that old desert tonight, isn't it, Mooch? Here, up on the chair, up, Mooch." Professional tramp that he is, the mutt obligingly scrabbles onto the seat of a straightback chair and sits with his head turned toward my mother, who immediately pays off in cookies.
"He gets put back out in the morning," my father tries another declaration. "For good."
The dog looks at my father, gives a sniff, then arranges himself on the chair for a nap. My mother laughs and gets out her letter paper while my father and I settle at the other end of the kitchen table for our other routine of his recuperation. He and I are using his enforced leisure on a jigsaw puzzle of the Grand Canyon, yielded up by the cabin. (Big one, 500 pieces, my mother records appropriately into the letter. She wisely holds back on helping us except when a piece is so obvious she just can't resist.) Naturally we saw the actual colossus of canyon on our journey from Montana and were properly astonished