Red Sky at Morning (15 page)

"You are Arnold?" he asked me. "Of course you are. My wife, Dorothy Temple." I shook hands with him, and then with her. Her grip was far stronger. There was something about her face, and the way her tweed skirt hung around her rump, that reminded me of people who owned Morgan horses and had tack rooms.

"Are you a doctor, too, Mrs. Temple?" I asked her.

Temple answered for her. "She is not a doctor, but she accompanies me on many professional visits. You don't mind." It was more a statement than a question.

"I'm glad you could come," I said. "It's lucky there's a psychiatrist in town."

Mrs. Temple answered. "We came to New Mexico because we thought Arthur had tuberculosis." She gave him a look that could have withered a cactus. "It turned out to be psychosomatic, all in the mind." Her husband smiled wanly.

I unlocked the door, and immediately smelled something burning. I found the lights and ran into the kitchen. The Temples followed me.

"In the oven," Mrs. Temple said. "There's something burning in the oven."

"You can see why I ask her to accompany me on professional visits," Dr. Temple said. "Her mind cuts to the root of the problem at once."

I turned off the oven and opened the door. In a casserole was what had been, once, a thick ham steak, now crisp and feathery black. I recognized the odor of carbonized Coca-Cola. "Mother's in there," I said, pointing to the bedroom door. "At least, I think she's in there."

"We must go to her at once," Mrs. Temple said. Her husband turned to me and gestured, as if to say, "You see? You see what brilliance she has?"

Mother was fully dressed, again, lying on top of the covers. There were two more Pedro Domecq empties on her table, and a half-empty bottle of Harvey's Amontillado. Dr. Temple went swiftly to her bed and picked up the bottle, opened it, and sniffed the contents. "I wonder where she got it," he said. "There hasn't been any in the liquor stores for months. Just that swill from California." Mrs. Temple touched him on the shoulder and pointed to Mother. "The patient."

"Ah. Your mother is drunk. She may or may not have a psychiatric problem, but at the present time she is drunk. Anyone who has recently consumed two and one-half fifths of sherry, even very good sherry such as this, will be drunk." He shook her gently by the arm. "Mrs. Arnold. Mrs. Arnold."

My mother opened one eye and said, "Who're you?"

"She is
very
drunk," he announced. Mrs. Temple whispered something in his ear. "Yes," he said. "Right. Being drunk, or rather drinking, is merely a symptom of a deeper, underlying problem, the nature of which must be brought to light by intensive probing. Profound analysis."

"I see," I said.

"Yes, but at the present time, as I pointed out, she is merely drunk. It is useless to discuss these matters with someone who is drunk. When she is no longer drunk, I will talk to her at my office. I suggest that you begin by making her sober."

"How?"

"How? How?" Mrs. Temple whispered in his ear again. "Coffee," he said. "Black, hot coffee. Make her drink black, hot coffee and then make her walk around."

"I don't think I can
make
her do anything, Doctor," I told him. "She's my mother."

"If you don't wish to cooperate with us, we'll never be able to help. Do you know where she hides her bottles?"

"She doesn't hide them," I said. "Why should she? This is her house. The liquor's all down in the cellar. All she has to do is go down there and open some."

'Tve never heard anything so ridiculous in all my professional career," he said. "She
must
hide her bottles. It's all part of the clinical picture. These situations have a classic order about them, an order that must be preserved if therapy is to be effective."

"I'll look around the house and see if I can find some bottles stashed," I said.

"You will," he assured me. "Look in all the unlikely places, places where you are sure no one would ever hide a bottle. You will find them. These people are extremely clever and resourceful. There is no end to their ingenuity. Dorothy?"

"That's right, Arthur," she said.

"We are going now. Tomorrow, or whenever she becomes sober, call me either at my office or my home. If you call me at my home, Tsigmoont may answer. Please be courteous to him, and don't hang up on him in the middle of a song. That can be ruinous."

I went with the Temples to the front door and watched them climb into the Rolls-Royce. Dr. Temple reopened his attaché case, and immediately began to make corrections on his manuscript. Mrs. Temple drove. He obviously made the most of every minute.

It took nearly an hour to clean the burned food off the casserole. There was some canned tuna in the cupboard, and I made a sandwich for Mother, and fixed a pot of drip coffee. She ate the sandwich and drank the coffee without a word. She was getting very thin, I noticed, and her eyes were red. Her hands shook slightly as she held the sandwich.

"Mother," I said, "this is getting silly."

"I know."

"You're going to get sicker and sicker unless you start eating and stop all that sherry-drinking. I don't know how to run the house, and I don't know how to cook."

"I know. I know."

"We have to get Excilda and Amadeo back here. It's stupid to try to do everything without them."

"You're right," she said. She was crying.

"Maybe they haven't found another job yet. Maybe they'll come back if I ask them to."

"I'm so sorry," she said. "I don't know what came over me. Where's Jimbob?"

"He's still in the hospital," I said. "He caught pneumonia."

"Of course. I forgot for a minute."

"And that's something else," I said. "Maybe Jimbob ought to go back to Mobile. He isn't having a good time here."

"We can't ask him to leave when he's so sick," she said. "We couldn't ask anyone to do that."

"All right. When he's well we'll ask him to leave. If you don't want to, I will. He doesn't like me anyway, so I won't care if he gets sore. I don't think it looks right to have him living with us anyway. Not while Dad's away."

"That's a silly, provincial attitude. That's a very middle-class sort of thing to say. Jimbob is from the very best family. He's an ornament to any house, and a perfect gentleman of the old school."

"In my opinion," I said, "he's a lush and a bum and a sponge. And a snob. I didn't think gentlemen were supposed to be any of those things."

"We'll talk about it later. Who were those people in here? You shouldn't bring anyone into my bedroom without my permission."

"I thought you were sick, so I brought a doctor. The woman was his . . . nurse."

"Did he think I was sick?"

"He thought you were drunk. He said as much."

"Well, he was right. I was drunk. I still am, a little, even after all the coffee. I don't know any other way to get through these long, long days and nights. I don't know anyone at all here except some silly women who play bad bridge. I don't like this cold weather. I miss the sea. I miss the house in Mobile. I'm tired of living in this horrible mud house with tacky Indian rugs all over the floors and a garden you have to water all the time because it never rains. I'm sick of your father being away and having to make all of the decisions alone."

This last one didn't make much sense to me. The only decisions of any importance that she'd made since Dad left were to let Jimbob live with us and to fire the Montoyas. Both were rotten decisions, I felt.

"I'd be happy to help out with the decisions," I said. "Maybe the two of us together could make better ones."

"And I'm really sick of all the cute lip I've been getting from you. You haven't said a civil word to me or my guest for months. And I don't know who you're seeing. Can you imagine what it's like, sitting here alone at night and wondering what sort of sordid mess you're getting into with girls? You don't ever write to little Courtney any more. She's just pining away for you, and you don't even write her letters."

"I've made some new friends here," I said. "If I'm going to live here, I might as well make some friends. I'm two thousand miles from Mobile."

"Yes, friends, And what an assortment. There isn't one person, not one, who's had your advantages. Not one who's the sort of boy or girl you'd be proud to bring home and introduce to me. Just a bunch of tacky, dusty little Westerners who never go to the dentist."

"I don't know where you get your information," I said. "I think people like Marcia Davidson and Steenie Stenopolous go to the dentist as often as I do, and even if they didn't, I'm not sure I know what the connection is. Maybe you'd better get some sleep. Do you want me to call the doctor again tomorrow?"

"What sort of doctor is he?"

"He's a psychiatrist."

"You dreadful little snot. You've gone too far this time."

"Well," I said, getting up and taking the sandwich plate and the coffee cup, "I won't call him any more if you don't want me to. He seemed to think that your main problem was that you'd been drinking too much."

"That was perceptive of him. I wonder how big a bill he's going to send for that piece of diagnosis."

"Maybe we'd better talk this whole thing over some other time," I said. "Do you want me to try to find the Montoyas?"

"I can cook as well as I ever could," she said, "and there isn't much outside work to do in the winter anyway. We can get along very nicely without them."

"Mother, I hate to tell you this, but you're a terrible cook. You're even worse than I am, and I'm not any cook at all. Let me at least get Excilda back here. What's going to happen when Jimbob gets out of the hospital? Are you going to cook for him, too? As I remember, he's a man that likes his meals on time, even if he complains about the way they taste."

"You can try to get her back if you want to. You can get every Mexican in Sagrado to stay here if you want to, and we can all sit around and eat tortillas and rattle Spanish at each other. Won't that be fun!"

"You won't mind if I write to Dad and tell him what's going on around here, will you? He still has some say about what happens."

"There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that happens here that needs to be told to your father. He went off to the Navy because he
wanted
to. He wasn't going to be drafted or called or anything, you know. He
wanted
to go. He
wanted
to leave us. He
wanted
to leave me with you on my hands
just
when you were starting to be difficult. He knows how much I hate it here. I've hated it every summer, and he knows it."

When her motor ran down finally she closed her eyes and turned her back to me, without saying anything. I turned out her bedside light and went to the kitchen to make a sandwich for myself.

A rattly blue bus makes a daily circle of the little mountain towns in Cabezón County, from Sagrado to the valley at Yunque, and then up through the hills—San Esteban, Santa María, Villa Galicia, Ojo Amargo, Río Venado, Río Conejo, Amorcita and, at the end of the route, nearly 11,000 feet high, La Cima. No matter what the weather is like, the bus is always at full boil when it reaches the high point, and the driver has to give it an hour to cool off before he starts down again.

I skipped school the next morning and rode up to Río Conejo to find the Montoyas. Once before, when I was seven or eight, we had driven there for a Fourth of July dinner at their house, but I remembered nothing about the village except a tiny stream bordered by giant cottonwood trees, a little adobe church with a galvanized tin roof, and a baked-clay open space occupied by what seemed to be hundreds of sleeping dogs.

The bus stopped in front of Montoya's Genl. Mdse. U.S. Post Office Liquors Wines, a low, crumbled building that apparently served all the needs of Río Conejo. It was about eleven; the driver told me he'd be back through around three, and to be waiting at the same place if I wanted a ride. A young girl was behind the counter inside, and I asked her, pointing down the road, if the Montoyas lived that way. She said sure, and the other way too; everyone in Río Conejo was named either Montoya or Romero. She, herself, was a Romero. I asked specifically for Amadeo Montoya, the one with a wife named Excilda and twelve or thirteen children, and she gave me directions.

The road snaked between the hills, roughly parallel to the Río Conejo, lined with bare cottonwoods and poplars. The houses were scattered widely along the road, each with a rural mail box, each mail box painted with the name Romero or Montoya, distinguished only by first names or initials. Amadeo's was a mile uphill from the post office.

It was a fine house, solid, old and inviting. From the road it was difficult to tell how big it was. One story and pitch-roofed, it rambled and spread in several directions from the central room, which was log and mud, to the outlying bedrooms and storerooms of adobe brick, freshly mud-plastered in the fall. Several cords of wood were neatly stacked under the
portal
near the front door, and strings of dried red chile hung from the
vigas.
As I walked toward the house on a path shoveled from the snow, an immense dog, part shepherd and, to judge from his size, part horse, barked once and trotted to me for a scratch behind the ears, or a fight, whichever I wanted to offer him.

I was scratching him behind the ears when a small, round-headed boy opened the front door and looked at me gravely. I said hello, and he ducked back inside, to be followed by an older child, a girl. She disappeared, and other kids came to look at me, each one older than the last. A boy seventeen or eighteen finally asked me what I wanted. He was round-headed and heavy in the trunk, and looked like his father.

"I'd like to see Mr. or Mrs. Montoya," I said. "My name is Arnold, from Sagrado."

"Wait a minute," he said, and closed the door.

The dog and I walked back to the shelter of the
portal,
and I squatted on the flagstones and scratched him some more. He was in a thick winter coat, but glossy, as if he'd been brushed recently, and well-fed.

Excilda eventually came out onto the
portal
and asked me why the hell I didn't get inside before I froze to death, but not to let in that worthless brute of a chicken-stealing dog who, she was sure, was someday soon going to take her youngest child in its jaws and run away to a cave and eat him. I gave the dog a last scratch and he smiled and wagged his heavy tail. He didn't look like a dog that stole and ate children. He looked like a dog that might steal chocolate-covered Easter eggs.