Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [22]
My father chews his lip a lot during our innings at the jigsaw, but he is determined we are going to finish the damned puzzle or know-the-reason-why.
The dog suddenly wakes up, sits up blinking at us as if indignant at the excessive noise of puzzle pieces being moved. My mother puts down her pen and gives his ears a restorative scratching.
My father has been eyeing the dog as if pretty sure its next trick will be to pick our pockets. But now Dad cocks his head toward the kitchen wall. "Listen a bit, everybody."
Grutch.
The three of us and the dog listen, all right, the very knots in the wall seem to listen.
Grutch grutch.
The sound keeps stopping, then furtively grutching again. A scraping on the desert gravel, whatever this is. Working at—digging under the cabin?
By now my father knows in alarm what—who—this invasion is. And as quick as he knows, my mother and I know. Prisoners of war! More of those German submariners who tunneled out of the Papago Park camp through caliche that the U.S. Army figured was encasing them like vault steel. The SOBs were regular Teutonic badgers.
My father rises out of his chair into whispered action. "Berneta, get in the other room with Ivan and that—" The dog is already gone, scooted under the bed.
"No," my mother whispers back with utter firmness. "I'm coming with." The time in the Sixteen country when my father tangled with a bear that was marauding nightly into the sheep, he looked up after having thrust the rifle in the bear's ribs for a desperate fatal shot and found my mother standing on the cutbank just above him, holding a lantern, watching the whole show. Now again, for better or worse, she is adding her ninety-five pounds against the submariners of the desert.
"Ivan, then, go in the other room," my father directs.
"But I want to fight the Ger—"
"I-tell-ye, get-in-that-other-room!"
I compromise as far as the doorway to the other room. My father grimly scans the cabin walls, trying to conjure a gunrack and .30–06 rifle out of bare board. GRUTCH, the in-tunneling all but grinds up through the floor.
My father grabs the only weapon at hand, which is the broom, and eases to the door, my mother closer behind him than his shadow.
In the lantern light the lone attacker blinks, as startled to see my father and mother as they are by its incursion.
Then the wandering cow gives a moo and a chew, and goes back to gobbling the potato peelings my mother had dumped in the garbage box, skidding the box bottom across the desert floor with another grutch.
***
My mother and father ribbed each other for days about the cow showdown. Cabin life seemed ready to blossom along with the desert.
We have learned to like Arizona, so far as the country is concerned, my mother at last is able to tell Wally. Probably not coincidentally, her report on my father is also sunny.
Charlie is improving every day. I do so hope he can feel good now.
Meanwhile the issue of the slickhaired dog took care of itself; the next morning after breakfast, the itinerant pooch demanded to be let out and kept on going.
I still am scooting back and forth from the cabin to the cactus shadow show, fired by my latest chapter of imagination.
Ivan is busy looking for gold. Every rock he picks up he asks Charlie if it is gold.
Then the weather turned. That last of winter, late March of 1945, Wickenburg as the world's