The Boys of My Youth (9 page)

“Look, sweetie,” Eric says, turned toward me in the driver’s seat.

On the very tip of his tongue is his Firerancher. Thin as tissue paper, it looks like the moon in the daytime sky. Suddenly
love is looming over the car, as big and invisible as the ghost mountains of the Comobabi range. I smile at him and turn up
the radio with my toes.

He snaps peevishly at his haunch, bending stiffly backward to chew the peppery trail of a flea. The walls of the den are pungent
with the smell of safety and his own fur. He gives up and flops back over, closes his eyes in the dimness and begins panting.
No good, he’s awake now, it’s time to step back out into the day. In the sunlight he blinks and stretches, fore and aft, like
a collie. He shakes so hard he almost knocks himself off his feet. The sky is as blue as blue and the coyote is in a good
mood.

He lifts his muzzle and takes in a long snort of air, pulling with it the invisible happenings in the vicinity. There’s something
big and dead looming just over the rise. The coyote yawns and his tail swings down between his back legs in its traveling
position. He puts his nose to the ground and begins his afternoon expedition. Somewhere, right on the edge of what his nose
is capable of, a rabbity perfume is lingering. He breaks into a lope just for the fun of it but drops back down to a trot
after a hundred yards or so. The sun is pressing burning fingers into his spine. The blacktop dips into view, and as the coyote
moves toward it he prepares himself for the highway’s big medicine. The sandy dirt beneath his paws gives way just a bit as
each foot lands and springs off, the small stones and irregularities in his path add juice to his travels but rarely pain.
Under his paws it is
sand… sand… rock… sand… stick… sand… stick
and then the highway’s medicine:
hard
…
scalding… scalding… scalding
and then
gravel… sand… rock… sand… sand… rock… sand
again.

As he passes once more safely through the hard pond of highway fire the coyote is startled by something in the air, something
dangerous bearing down on him. Alert and agile, he jumps to the side, cringing and whining, but it is too late. An empty bread
wrapper hits him smack in the side of the head.

The landscape has changed from the invisible Comobabi Mountains of love to the barren flats of boredom and annoyance. The
sun is a yellow baseball hanging over right field, the driver’s side is in the shade and the passenger’s side is sizzling.
I decide it’s my turn to drive.

Eric glances over. “Uh, doubt it,” he says.

I’ve just noticed how his hairline has taken a daring swoop down his forehead and back up again, just like his father’s. I
mention this to him while inspecting my fingernails.

He smiles and addresses me by my mother’s name. “I mean, honey,” he corrects himself, “the kid’s got the wheel and the kid’s
keeping it.” He’s leaning back in his seat, steering with one finger, brow arched. We are very bored.

The kid is a shithook, I remark.

A shithook with the
wheel
, though, he clarifies. He points out that I’m sweating a lot, more than he’s ever seen me do. “Pretty hot over there, eh?”

I begin calling him Lovey, and suggest that we change drivers without stopping. He gives in reluctantly, only because he knows
eventually he’ll lose. If I don’t get to drive pretty soon I will open my car door while we’re moving and he can’t stand that.
He’s afraid I’ll get sucked out by accident and it’ll be his fault for being a control freak.

You have to be going really fast for this trick, over seventy
miles an hour. Both of us recline our seats all the way down, I do the gas pedal with my left foot and hold the steering wheel
steady with my left hand while Eric climbs into the back seat. I move over the gear shift and slide into his seat while he
climbs over my reclined seat back into the passenger side. It’s not exactly that smooth, of course, there is a lot of swerving
and hollering that goes along with it. We settle in and bring our seat backs into position and open a can of malt liquor.

“Yee-haw,” I say, now that I’m in the driver’s seat. Eric tries to rig up a shade for his window using a white T-shirt. He
can’t get it to stay draped over while he rolls up the glass. I enjoy watching him do this a few times and then look sympathetic
when he gives up. “Pretty hot over there, isn’t it?” I ask him.

“Not really,” he answers.

Twenty miles later we enter the Valley of the Ajo and head for the monument, right above the border of Mexico. The road is
endless, with wavering lines of heat rising up and a mirage that looks like a silver pool always about half a mile ahead of
the car. Suddenly Eric points and I press on the brake. Along the edge of the blacktop on the opposite side of the highway
is a coyote, pushing a bread wrapper along with his nose. He ignores us completely, stops and puts one paw on the plastic
wrapper, takes it in his teeth, and begins pulling it apart. He shakes his head like a dog. I pull off into the gravel and
try to sit quietly, like I’m not a human. He’s staring at me now, still nosing into the bag, gold eyes looking up from the
dirty plastic.

The car is a boiling caldron. The coyote stands scruffy and skittish, like a wild dingo dog I met once, who bit everything
in sight, wagging his tail like a maniac. Eric slides the camera to me and puts a hand on my arm. He whispers in my ear. I
nod. I love dogs better than anything else on earth, next to cigarettes and a couple of people.

I find him in the lens, framed in a square. As I click the shutter he jumps sideways and takes off, running a few yards and
then skidding to a halt, looking back over his shoulder. He’s not afraid of us, he’s just horsing around. In the rearview
mirror he canters over the rocks, low to the ground, tail tucked. In the slide, projected on my living room wall, he will
be a gray, moving blur, a running pelt. The gracious arms of an organ pipe cactus direct him up the hill, over the rise, out
of the frame, and into memory.

The saguaros send out long lavender fingers into the afternoon. Grains of sand cool and then warm again as the slow sweep
of the shadows moves past. Something looped and coiled unravels gradually, in no hurry, to follow the pool of purple, the
spot where the shadow meets its source. It feeds a tongue out, testing the temperature of the air, and begins to wind back
into the debris of the cactus again, until there is only a barely visible presence on the ground, a tangled rope with scales
and eyes.

Nearly fifty feet in the air a scar, made with a pocketknife and dirty fingers, is visible on the skin of the cactus. A flicker
lands on the green pinnacle and peers around, pokes the needle of its beak into the flesh, and peers again. A ridge ten miles
west stands fluted and browning, like the crust of a pie, a hawk slides down a current of air and floats above it. The flicker
thrusts again and shrugs the moisture down its throat.

The cactus receives the bird, tiny claws like pins, with the same indifference as it had the man with the pocketknife on the
shuddering horse. Weak and boiling, he dug and dug into the spiny hide with his pocketknife. The horse died within the reach
of the saguaro’s shadow, descending into a dull bag that collapsed on itself, bones moving out across the desert floor in
the mouths of jackals.

The man either made it or didn’t. The words he spoke and the voice he spoke them in linger high above the ground nearly two
hundred years later, buffeted by the hot wind, nourished by desperation and the terrible solitude. The flicker turns his head
into the wind, finds the moisture again, drinks, and lifts off. The currents of air move around the top of the cactus, over
the thorny scar.

Now, as then, the saguaro stands beneath the sun as the desert clock sweeps over the ground in circles, and begins the slow,
tedious task of sealing its wound.

This is the campground: acres and acres of barren plots, bent and scraggy trees, stand-up grills, picnic tables, no people.
One big vehicle is parked about a hundred yards away, on the other side of the bathrooms, tethered to an electrical hookup.
The people won’t come outside until the sun leaves, but a small apricot poodle ventures out a few times and barks at itself
wildly. The door opens to let it back in, sending out a big waft of refrigerated air for the bugs and birds to enjoy.

Our tent is all set up, with a minimum of arguing. We stretch out inside it to see how long we can stand to lie there. First
it gets very stuffy, then the air leaves completely. We climb out and sit in the front seat of the car, listening to the radio
and eating potato chips, waiting for the sun to back off. I’m reading a book about vampires that is so graphic in various
parts that I have to breathe through my mouth and stop eating chips. Eric is thumbing through an astronomy magazine. Every
once in a while I’ll tell him a detail from the vampire book and he’ll show me his magazine, explain something about one of
the pictures, a black background with white dots. We read and thumb until the landscape is a hazy 3-D postcard and the sky
is a turquoise tent. Our legs decide to walk.

The Official Map and Guide stresses not once but twice that rattlesnakes are protected here. It has a curt, no-nonsense tone
that indicates we’d better act right. Small quail run across the path, back and forth, stopping and starting, murmuring and
pecking. In the distance one cactus stands apart, reaching at least two feet taller than any of the others, a surly foreman,
the dad of the landscape. I want to go see it, see how tall it is compared to me.

Eric has a forked stick that he’s using for a divining rod. “It’ll come in handy for snakes,” he tells me, “
and
show us where there’s water.” The stick suddenly lifts in the air and starts shaking, he manages to hold on and push it back
down. “I accidentally pointed it towards the bathrooms,” he says.

The camper people are out with their little dog. The guy has a garden hose that he’s spraying the path with because he doesn’t
want dust from cars to get on his Astroturf rug. I feel like talking to him but he just nods without smiling and we have to
keep walking. He points the hose politely in another direction until we’re past, and the poodle barks and barks.

I tell Eric I wish I had a little dog like that one.

“Of course you do,” he answers, “that’s the one thing you’re short on.” Three dogs mingle and mill somewhere in the vast universe,
in Iowa, wondering why we’re not there petting them. I muse on this for a while. A big dog, a medium-size dog, and a charming
lapdog with a mean streak.

“They don’t even know we’re gone,” I tell Eric, “they think we went in the other room and just haven’t come back yet.” The
minds of dogs interest me, the way they never bother to anticipate problems.

By the time we get to the tall cactus the light has softened to a benign burn, a warm pat on the head. We both look great
all of a sudden, stained brown with pink auras. Eric sets down his stick and moves back to get the whole cactus in the frame,
with
me standing at the base for comparison. At the very top of the saguaro a crista has formed over some kind of damage. The scar
blooms out, hard and dark green, like the tiny head on a giant. I step over the debris at the base and arrange myself with
arms out, bent at the elbow. The cactus is very old and very tall; up close it is hard and weathered and looks important;
a cactus emeritus.

I stand in the soft, end-of-day shadow and have my picture taken. It feels like being on Mars here, the light is strange,
these green men stand all over the terrain.

Ninety-three million miles due west, the sun continues to shoot off its bottle rockets. The desert has edged away now, out
of range. At the foot of the saguaro, a snake, without moving anything but the thread of tongue, gently touches shoe leather,
considers it, and decides no.

The nervous birds are gone from the ground now, it is night. The coyote runs in a mile-wide circle, at a lope, thirty miles
an hour. There is nothing else moving. The moon bounces in the sky, over his right shoulder, now behind. A rock rises, a cholla
extends soft elbows in his path, a dry husk stares up from the ground. There is nothing. The moon is a wide, mottled face,
the countenance of an enraged idiot. The coyote runs and runs, not gasping, until there is something.

Three mule deer spring and run in various directions, bounding, flinging their hooves in the air. He picks one and chases
halfheartedly for a distance, hearing his own feet, feeling the moon. They reassemble farther out, staring at him through
the dimness, long ears moving back and forth like wings, each face small and wary. The one he chased turns first and takes
up its occupation again: finding forage and trying not to die. He holds the moment until he can stay still no longer
and begins running again, away from the sky. The ground is silver, the rocks are gleaming. There is nothing.

We play euchre and hearts, drink beer, rearrange the lantern thirty times. Finally we put it under the picnic table and it
i-luminates our legs and shorts, blows the whistle on a large furred spider.

“It’s got knees,” I marvel. Actually, it has sort of a face, too, attached to a slender neck. I decide to sit on top of the
table for a while.

“Let me get my spider stick,” Eric says. He holds the tines of the divining rod and gently points the way for the spider.
It scuttles a few feet and then pauses, goes back into a trance. “Get along, buddy,” he urges, giving it a prod. It does several
push-ups, puts a leg in the air, and then moves of its own volition out from under the table and into the darkness.

We play a few more hands of hearts, until I realize that we both want me to win and I still can’t manage it. The whole desert
is disappointed. We fold our hands and practice being bored for a while. Our dogs are sleeping at home, two of them nose to
nose and snoring, one off by herself, flat on her side, dreaming of me. The stars are no match for the wash of the moon, the
night air is navy blue and coolish against our skin.