MOTHER'S DAY 1969: Quiston's Report
I think she's out of the woods I think she's made it to where she ought to have a name.
Dad thinks.
I think a good name is Feline, Sherree says, ree-ally...
Sherree and Caleb and me we're in the orchard feeding her warm water out of one of Sherree's Tiny Tears bottles. We're outside because Dad wants to get some footage. He's moving the tripod all over, worrying about shadows. I think she looks perfect, hopping around in the soft yellow mustard and sunshine. I been thinking about the softness of things, and time going by, and how it will be good to have pictures of her growing up with us all, all the cows and the dogs and ducks and geese and pigeons and peacocks and cats and horses and chickens and bees, with Rumiocho the Parrot and Basil the Raven and Jenny the Donkey, and all these people.
The camera is going. Dad shoots me and Caleb feeding her and Sherree making a garland and putting it around her neck: Princess Fe-line. Then Dobbs shows up in the dumptruck full of his kids and the mint compost mix that Mom ordered.
We all ride out to Mom's garden smelling like a million old Life Savers, and Dad shoots us shoveling and sweeping it out. Then us standing with our shovels and brooms on our shoulders. He shoots the chickens all already lined up at the fence like for class pictures, and Stewart making a big show out of beating up on Frank Dobbs's dog, Kilroy. Then he wants to finish the roll shooting the horses out in the far field.
Quiston, he says, you lock all these damn dogs in the paintroom. So they won't go bothering the fawn.
When the dogs are all shut in the paintroom we climb in the back of the dumptruck that's never dumped since Dobbs fixed it, and ride out to the pasture. Me and Caleb and all the Dobbs kids, and Sherree with her nose wrinkled at the smell. When we go by the orchard she's still nested right where we left her, in the tall mustard behind the flat-tired tractor. Her head is up like a princess all right, showing off her necklace of daisies and bachelor buttons.
The horses are excited to have all these people come visit. Dad shoots them prancing around on their green carpet, fat and feisty. He shoots until he finishes the roll and puts the camera in its suitcase, then gets out the grain bucket. He shakes it so they can hear there's something in it and then heads for the side gate. He wants to get them off the main pasture so it will make hay. They don't want to go. The colt Wild Snort and Johnny bump and nip at each other. Horsing around like kids in the locker room Dad says. Wild Snort's a young Appaloosa stud dropped off by Deadheads passing through last fall, and he's mine if I demonstrate I can take proper care of him.
His mother the white-eyed mare hangs back, watching. She's watching her kid sow his wild oats Dobbs says. Then she goes through the gate where Dad is shaking the bucket. Wild Snort follows in after, then Jenny the Donkey. Johnny the Gelding is last, being ornery and nearsighted. We have to chase him and chase him until we finally drive him close enough he sees the other horses getting the grain poured out of the bucket; then he goes through in a gallop.
Dad says Johnny is like a proud old silver-haired Texas Ranger, always got his man never took a bribe, but he's older now... has to finally go for the bucket.
Jenny the Donkey goes sidling up to the poured-out grain, rump first. And Jenny's like a Juarez hooker Dobbs says... she has to do what she has to do, too.
Sherree walks back to the house. Caleb and Dobbs's kids are all off in the clover, chasing gardener snakes. I ride back in the cab between Dad and Dobbs. At the corral fence there's Joon the Goon in her nightgown, standing right alongside Abdul the Bull. Both of them are frowning out across the pasture, to make sure nothing's being mistreated. Such barbarism, Hubert, Dad says, like he's being Joon talking to her boyfriend Hub standing alongside, not the bull. Cruel, carnivorous barbarism! Makes me shudder.
Dobbs answers, I know what you mean, Joonbug - being the bull being Hub - but it's the only free accommodations available, here in carnivore country.
Dad laughs. People on food trips are funny to him. We drive through and I get out and shut the gate behind us. Joon is stepped up on the bottom rail so she can frown at Johnny prancing around where Wild Snort is jumped up on Jenny the Donkey from behind. Jenny's huffing and twisting this way and that. You guys, Dad says. I don't know who he's being.
We fix the pipe and turn on the pump and drive back in through the orchard past the beehives. Yesterday's new swarm is still there in the blossoms, drooping from a branch, like a big cluster of peach grapes, buzzing and working in the low light. The sun is slid nearly down the naked chin of old Nebo. Dad stands out on the runner board of the dumptruck and hollers for everybody to come in from the field: Star Trek in town at Uncle Buddy's in less than an hour!
From the garden where she's been raking, Mom hollers, An hour? More like less than half an hour!
Dobbs goes to put some bales in the back to sit on and roust up Mickey. Sherree goes to get tomorrow's homework to take to Grandma and Grandpa's. Caleb and Louise and May go to let out the dogs. I run on ahead of Dad back out to the orchard, to bring her in for the night.
Something is wrong. She is just where we left her, but her head is tilted wrong. Her garland has fallen off and there's a look in her tilted face. It isn't drowsiness and neither is it loss of moisture like from her diarrhea two days ago. I run to lift her and the head flops: Dad! He comes running.
Shit! The goddamn dogs got her.
I locked the dogs in the paintroom.
Maybe it was the neighbor's dog. Shit!
She feels - ah Dad, her back feels broke! Do you think she got run over when we came in from the pasture?
I don't think so, Dad says. I saw her when we drove through the orchard. She was fine then.
It was the sun! Mom warned us. It was too much sun!
Naw... you think? She wasn't out in the sun that long, it didn't seem... really.
It really didn't. Dad took her and carried her out of the orchard around the barn to the concrete grain storage, not because it was where Hub was living with Joon but because it was the coolest room on the place. The room looked cramped and little, with ten times the clutter that all of us used to make when we lived in it and we were six! Dad cleared a spot and found a half-blowed-up air mattress and laid her on it. I saw everybody coming so I climbed up on the cement shelf that used to be my bed. Everybody crowded in and fussed over her. Her breath was getting raspy and she was starting to twitch. I saw twitches begin, first at her spotted tail, then pretty soon they were running up her spine, then over her shoulders and around to her chest. Mom came and gave her some more of the clorzum milk she'd froze from when Floozie's calf died, and I tried to pray. But all the time I could see the life twitching against the little ribcage like it wanted out.
Hub came in from work and yelled a cussword. She was really his. He found her up where they were logging, no mother in sight. Orphaned by a sonofabitch poacher, was what he figured, poor thing. When he saw her in a wad on the rubber mattress, he yelled and threw his plaid lunchbox against the concrete wall and dropped to his knees. He started rubbing his huge rough hands up and down his pantlegs and cussing in a whisper. It was all raspy. He reached out to touch her. She arched backward into his hand when he stroked her neck, then flopped limp. He cussed and cussed and cussed.
She got worse. Her breaths came harder. Even up on my old shelf I could hear the stuff gurgling in her. Mom said she was afraid that she was drowning. Fluid in her lungs. Pneumonia.
Dad and Hub took turns holding her up with her head down, so they could get on their knees to try and suck that stuff out. Jelly stuff, silver gray, out of her nostrils. The blackbright shine was going away in her eyes, and the twitch against her ribs was getting calmer. Once, bowing backwards, she gave out a call, thin and high. It reminded me of the sound of Grandpa's little wooden varmint caller that he blows in the dark when he wants to lure in a fox or a cougar or a bobcat. Or says he does.
Hub kept sucking and puffing. She was getting bloated. Dad let him do it
for a long time before he said, Give it in, Hub. She's dead. When Hub stopped and Dad put her down, the air coming out made a sound, but not an animal sound. It was a kind of silly honk, like Caleb's Harpo horn he got a long time later.
Sherree and Joon filled an apple box with rose petals and clover blossoms. Mom found a piece of silk from China. Out at the pump the cows and horses all stood around and watched. We put a round stone on top, a fine big stone Mom found on a river called Row. Before we were born, she said. Dad played his flute and Dobbs blowed his mouthharp and Joon tinkled on that old Fisher-Price xylophone Great-grandma Whittier gave me that still works. Hub blew once on a blade of grass - it made that same thin sound - and the funeral was over.
So we missed Star Trek at Buddy's and Sunday supper and Grandma and Grandpa's and everything. Dad cut our hair instead. Everybody went to bed early. Then, this morning, still foggy before the schoolbus comes, there's a loud bunch of barking from the pond. Mom says, Never you kids mind finish your breakfast and get things ready. She'll go see what it's all about. She goes out the sliding kitchen window and heads down through the mist. Hub gets up and watches, sipping his coffee, then the barking stops and he comes back to the table. Joon puts his lunchbucket on the table next to his plate and Hub grunts. I think for a minute he's going to go to cussing again. But then here comes Mom back, Stewart and Lance jumping all over her! She's carrying our five-gallon minnow-catching bucket held high from the dogs, and she's red with excitement.
I thought it was a frog a bullfrog that the darned old heron had crippled but couldn't carry off, she says. Except when I got closer I saw it was hairy. It was swimming like anything out where Stewart was barking, round and round and around in the pondweeds. I told Stewart, No! Leave it alone! Hush! And as soon as he hushes, I swear, here it comes right up the bank at us! I scooped it in the bucket before I knew what it was...
It's a big old bull gopher, mean-looking as the devil. His front teeth are terrible, like two rusty chisel blades. He's up on his hind feet in the can, chittering and snapping at our faces over the brim. Hub takes the bucket and grins down into it, pretty terrible-toothed himself. Him and the animal chitter back and forth a minute, then he opens his lunchbox and dumps the gopher right in, right with his plaid thermos bottle and his apple and his celery and his Saran-wrapped sandwiches, and snaps it shut.
I'll turn him loose up at the logging show, Hub says, turning his yellow grin toward Joon the Goon.
Be careful, Joon says, grinning herself, that you don't get mixed up and turn loose your cheese sandwich and eat the gopher. Yeah, Sherree says, ree-ally - like she can - and goes out to wait for the bus. Caleb says Yeah, ree-ally. Mom says Here comes the bus Quiston get your assignment sheet Caleb where's your shoes! Hub says he will be careful, thanks for breakfast, see y'all this evening...
I don't know what I'll say, first period oral assignment - Tell What You Did For Your Mother On Mother's Day.
TRANNY MAN OVER THE BORDER
IN THE PLAZA
- hibiscus blooms fall with heavy plops, lie sprawled on the sunny cobblestones and cement benches like fat Mexican generals, scarlet-and-green parade uniforms, gawdy and limp, too hot and tired to rise back to the rank of their branches. Later, perhaps. Now, siesta...
"Not good!" yells the gray crewcut American from Portland with his fifty-year face running sweat and his new Dodge Polaro sitting behind a tow truck outside the Larga Distancia Oficina. "Not three thrown in less than five thousand miles!"
Yelling from Puerto Sancto, Mexico, to Tucson, Arizona, where he'd bought his last transmission after buying his second in Oroville, California, where he'd paid without much complaint because it is possible to strip the gears with the hard business miles he'd put on it, but a tranny again in Tucson? And now, less than a week later? The third blown?
"Not good at all! So listen up; I'm gonna jerk the thing out and ship it back first train your direction. I expect the same promptness from you garage boys, right? I expect a new transmission down here in time for us to make the festival in Guadalajara one week from tomorrow! There's no excuse for this kinda workmanship I can tell you that!"
What he didn't tell the garage boys in Tucson was that he was pulling a twenty-four-foot mobile home.
"I been a Dodge man ten years. We don't want a ten-year relationship to blow up from one fluke, right?"
He hung up and turned to me. Next in line, I had been his nearest audience.
"That'll get some greasemonkeys' asses smoking in Tucson, won't it, Red?" He leaned close, as if we had known each other for years. "They aren't a bad bunch. Fact is, I hope I can find me a mechanic down here with a fraction the know-how as those Arizona boys."
Reaffirmation of Yankee superiority left him so flushed with feeling for his countrymen that he chose to overlook the stubbled look of me.
"What's your name, Red? You remind me of my oldest boy a little, behind that brush."
"Deboree," I told him, taking his hand. "Devlin Deboree."
"What brings you to primitive Puerto Sancto, Dev? Let me guess. You're a nature photographer. I saw you out there after those fallen posies."
"Way wrong," I told him. "It isn't even my camera. My father sent his along. He came to Sancto last year with my brother and me, and nobody took picture one."
"So Dad sent you to bring back the missed memories. He musta been a lot more impressed than I been."
"Wrong again. He sent me to bring back jumping beans."
"Jumping beans?"
"Mexican jumping beans. When we were down here last year he met a mechanic who also grew jumping beans. He bought a hundred bucks' worth of this year's harvest."
"Jumping beans?"
"Five gallons. Dad's going to give one bean away with each quart of his new ice cream, to publicize the flavor. Not Jumping Bean - Pina Colada. We run a creamery."
" 'Debris,' huh?" He gave me a wink to let me know he was kidding. "Like in 'rubbish'?"
I told him it was more like in Polish. He laughed.
"Well, you remind me of my kid, whatever. Why don't you join me in the Hotel Sol bar after your call? We'll see if I remind you of your old man.
He winked again and left, roguishly tipping his fishing cap to the rest of the tourists waiting to contact home.
I found him under a palapa umbrella by the pool. His look of confidence was already a little faded, and he was wondering if maybe he shouldn't've also had a good U.S. mechanic come with the transmission - pay the man's way now, fight it out with the Dodge people later. I observed some of these Mexican mechanics were pretty good. He agreed they had to be pretty good, to keep these hand-me-downs running, but what did they know about a modern automatic transmission? He pulled down his sunglasses and drew me again into that abrupt intimacy.
"You can take the best carburetor man in the whole country, say, and turn him loose in an area he isn't qualified in, and you're going to have troubles. Believe me, numerous troubles..."
This truth and his drink made him feel better. The grin returned and the ungreased whine of panic was almost oiled out of his voice by his second Seagram's and Seven-Up. By the bottom of his third he was ready to slip 'er into whiskeydrive and lecture me as to all the troubles a man can encounter along the rocky road of life, brought about mainly by unqualified incompetents in areas where they didn't belong. Numerous troubles! To steer him away from a tirade I interrupted with what I thought was a perfectly peaceful question: How many did he have with him? One eye narrowed strangely and slid over my backpack and beard. With a voice geared all the way back into suspicion he informed me that his wife was along and what about it.
I gaped, amazed. He thinks that I meant how many troubles meaning his wife or whoever meaning I'm trying to cast some snide insinuation about his family! Far out, I thought, and to calm him I said I wished my wife and kids were along. Still suspicious, he asked how many kids, and how old. I told him. He asked where they were and I said in school -
"But if I have to wait much l
onger for these jumping beans I'm going to have them all fly down. Sometimes you have to skip a little school to further your education, right?"
"Right!" This brought him close again. "Don't I wish my woman'd known that when my kids were kids! 'After they get their educations' was her motto. Right, Mother, sure..."
I thought he was going to get melancholy again, but he squared his shoulders instead and clinked his glass against mine. "Decent of you and your brother to take a trip with your old dad, Red." He was glad I had turned out not to be some hippy rucksack smartass after all, but a decent American boy, considerate of his father. He twisted in his chair and called grandly for the waiter to bring us another round uno mas all around, muy goddamn pronto.
"If you aren't a little hardboiled," he confided, shifting back to wink at me, "they overcharge."
He grinned and the wink reopened, but for one tipsy second that eye didn't match up with its mate. "Overcharge!" he prompted, commanding the orb back into place.
By the time the drinks arrived the twitch was corrected and his look confident and roguish again. For a moment, though, a crack had been opened. I had seen all the way inside to the look behind the looks and, oh gosh, folks, that look was dreadful afraid. Of what? It's difficult to say, exactly. But it wasn't of me. Nor do I think he was really afraid of the numerous troubles on the rocky road ahead, not even of getting stranded gearless in this primitive anarchy of a nation.
What I think, folks, looking at the developed pictures and remembering back to that momentary glimpse into his private abyss, is that this guy was afraid of the Apocalypse.
HIS WIFE
The Tranny Man's wife is younger than her husband, not much, a freshman in high school when he was a football-hero senior, at his best.
She's never been at her best, although it isn't something she thinks about. She's a thoughtful person who doesn't think about things.
She is walking barefoot along the stony edge of the ocean with her black pumps dangling from a heel strap at the end of each arm.
She isn't thinking that she had too many rum-and-Cokes. She isn't thinking about her podiatrist or her feet, spreading pudgy over the sand.