Red Sky at Morning (29 page)

She rocked back slightly on her heels and looked up at it. "Mountains make me dizzy," she said. "That one looks just like a. . . ."

"Yes," I said quickly. "It does, a little."

"What does 'Teta Peak' mean? It sounds so romantic."

"It means, ah, Bosom Mountain."

"It means Titty Peak,' and you know it. Your father told me about it once. What are you trying to do? Shield me from the vulgar world?"

She wasn't a very good climber—I hadn't been, either, when I first got to Sagrado—but she was game, and we made it to Romeo's sculpture grove. The great heads excited her. "They're magical," she said. "It's something God would do."

"I think that remark would make Romeo feel very humble," I said. "He says he does it to beautify Nature; Nature disappoints him sometimes, so he fixes it up. He says it's the poor man's Mount Rushmore."

"They're so lifelike. Who are they?"

We wandered from head to head, and tried to identify them. "Romeo carves heads of people he admires, he says. No charge. Here's Leon Trotsky. He pointed him out to me one time."

"Is your friend a Communist?"

"No, I don't think so. He's got a head of Robert Taft up here too, somewhere. That's Marian Anderson. There's President Roosevelt. Garibaldi's further up. Winston Churchill, Dante, Jefferson Davis."

"Imagine!"

"Haile Selassie over there. The guy with the nose is Artur Schnabel, he said. A piano player. Joe Louis. Socrates—he had to guess at that one. Humphrey Bogart. I don't know who this one . . . oh, my God."

A fresh stone, with no streaks of dirt from the melted snow, the neck deep in the spongy ground, stood under a spruce. It was my father's head, the stone eyes staring out over the broken landscape toward the cordillera.

"That's Frank!" Amalie said. "That's Frank Arnold!"

"I know. It's a new one. He must have rolled it up here alone, just a few days ago." My eyes filled with tears; there was nothing I could do to stop them. "Isn't that a hell of a thing?"

Later, we sat together on the hillside and watched the colors change on the cordillera foothills as the sun turned the world pink and purple.

"I loved your father," she said. "I don't mean just love like a good friend. I mean I'd have hopped into bed with him if he'd just winked at me. I was crazy about him."

"Amalie, please don't talk like that."

"No, I will. I want to tell you. He knew I loved him, and he could have made me feel like a two-dollar, sateen-dress, Bourbon Street whore if he'd laughed at me, but he never did. Nothing ever happened. He just went on being nice and protective to your mother. Protective. That's what used to make me so mad. Her daddy kept her wrapped up in tissue paper like a Wedgwood egg cup until she got married, and Frank went right on caring for the heirloom. One of these days you men are going to realize that underneath the crinoline and the dotted swiss and the lacy pantaloons and the delicate talk, Southern women are tough as a bunch of gawdamn railroad spikes. Well, the tissue paper's off your mama now, and don't try to tell me she broke. She just chipped. She'll be all right. The women are tougher than the men. If you don't believe me, look at Jimbob. Where is he, by the way?"

"He went up to Wisconsin to see some people named Hackenschmidt," I said. "His welcome finally wore out. The man that works for us drove him down to Albuquerque to put him on the train. He said he looked four hundred years old."

She brushed the pine needles off her behind, and we started down the slope. "Little Courtney Ann Conway's getting married to that numbskull Gagnier boy next month," she said. "I hope you're not too broken up."

I tried to remember what Corky looked like. Small, with honey hair and blue eyes. Brown eyes?

Mr. Gunther finally ran out of things for me to sign, and let me take the morning off to graduate from high school. Steenie's low back pain had mysteriously disappeared on his eighteenth birthday, and the Draft Board took note of it officially. "I demanded a rehearing," he said. "I insisted on Habeas Corpus. It was like talking to a brick wall."

"That's great talk for an ex-Commando," Marcia told him. "I knew you were chicken, ever since you refused to get inside that dead horse, the way Josh did."

"I can always malinger," he said. "I'll bet I can malinger better than any guy in the Army. I can talk the language all right. 'Sergeant, I wonder if I could be excused from latrine duty this morning. I think I'm coming down with erysipelas.'"

"You come back with a medal, William Stenopolous, or I'll tell everybody about the time you wet your pants."

Chango enlisted. Parker was drafted. I was deferred because I was a shipyard owner, or something like that. I telephoned Bertucci, just to make sure that the yard could get by without me. "We'll struggle along," he said. "I mean, you're a good kid, and technically you're my boss, but what in the goddamn hell do you know about building boats, when you come right down to it, for Christ's sake?"

A sailor named Boudreau came to the house one afternoon in early June, almost the first Negro I'd seen since I came to Sagrado. He said he was on his way from Portsmouth to San Diego, and thought he'd stop by to pay his respects.

I dug the illuminated manuscript out of a file and showed it to him. "Did you do this?" I asked him.

"Yes, sir," he said. "I did it for Commander Arnold. We both got a big kick out of it."

"Come on in and have some coffee," I said. I had a hard time getting him to sit down with me. He kept thinking "Mobile, Alabama," and looking around for a burning cross. "Why don't you forget that," I said. "Out here, we're just a couple of Anglos."

He told me the ship had hit the mine at night, about fifty miles off the coast of Portugal. It went down by the bows in ten minutes, with sixty per cent of the ship's company. "It was fast, man. It was really fast. Nobody was expecting anything like that. There wasn't any mine field 'way out there. The Navy figures one of them broke loose and drifted. Just a piece of luck."

After a long argument, he agreed to stay for dinner, and Excilda made rabbit stew with corn and chile in it. We had a glass of brandy afterwards, and he spent the night. He was calmer in the morning, but still glanced around nervously until Amadeo and I put him on the bus. At the post office, the Navy recruiting chief said two years was the minimum, so I took the two years.

It was going to be a green summer in Sagrado. The rains had been good, not heavy but frequent, and the valley would be lush by August. The war was over, or half of it was, and there was something satisfying about moving west with the rest of the troops.

Marcia came down just before the bus pulled out She was red-eyed from studying; somehow she'd got the idea that Barnard had impossibly high academic standards, and she was spending the summer with her books. She came into the bus, ignoring the whistles from the other recruits, and kissed me good-by.

"When can you be back here? The very earliest."

"I don't know. Boot camp's about two months. I think they let you have a week off after that."

"You come back here, then. You get back here in two months, and I'll keep my eyes closed until then."

"What do you mean?"

"You're going to be the first man in uniform I see," she said, "and you better not come back with any 'hunner' per cent'" She put her mouth to my ear, and deepened her voice. "Or you'll get your ass blowed off."

The bus sped south and left the plateau for the desert. The driver told us we could open the windows and get a breeze, if we thought we were men enough. The boy next to me struggled with the catch while I pushed, and we managed to raise it a few inches.

"Thanks," I said. We shook hands. "I'm Arnold, Joshua M." We had already found out the Navy preferred the names backward.

"Romero, Eladio P."

"Are you from Sagrado?"

He turned in the seat and pointed to the receding cordillera with his chin. "Río Conejo."

We rode in silence for a while. "San Diego," he said. "That's on the ocean,
verdad?"

"Right on the ocean."

"I never seen the ocean. I never even been out of the county before. What's it look like?"

I said: "It's the color of the sky."