A Brief History of Male Nudes in America (9 page)

“Kirk Douglas?” he asked. “Know him? Gotta hire a full-time tutor to teach him his lines. Sorta like training a dog, I guess. A little thin between the old ears. Of course, this is only what I hear. I'm just passing it along.”

My mother couldn't stand de Rossi's feral gaze when anything female moved past him. “Call me Milo, my dear,” he had told her as she bent over the oven pulling out hot rolls.

“If I had the chance, I'd call him a lot worse than that,” she told me as we sat at the side of the road. Her shoulder-length dark hair blew
forward around her face, and with one hand she quickly gathered it up and held it at the back of her neck. With the other, she moved the stroller back and forth, gently rocking me in the sunshine. I babbled my heart out to her, kicked my feet, and squirmed in the cotton netting of the seat and these things she understood as my wanting to get back on the road. She picked up the suitcase, turned the stroller around, and shoved us forward.

By then, in the far-off distance ahead, the sky was changing and at first my mother wasn't concerned—a hundred changes rolled by each day in that enormous unpredictable sky—but as the disturbance came closer, she pushed more firmly against the stroller. From the first good look, she could see that it was not the deep pouting gray of a thunderhead. It was another one of those churning purple-black clouds from the test site, but it was larger this time and lower. In it, she saw sparks of light, glimmerings, electricity, she didn't know what.

“Nothing to worry about,” she told me, though I wasn't worried. I was happy, totally entertained. The scenery slipped by, right and left, like wavy blue and brown streamers. I pointed randomly and screeched.

“Tree,” she said. “Rock.” “Fence.” “Horse.” “Mountain.” She reeled off a vocabulary that I was at least a good six months away from, but she encouraged me to try anyway. She loved the sound of me, unlike Miss Lurl, my third-grade teacher who years later put tape over my mouth. “Miss Yakety Yak” she called me, and my schoolmates picked it up, chanted it at recess, whispered it down the rows at the spelling bee.

My mother and I passed Carpenter Wash and then the wind grew stronger and came in bursts. My mother's skirt clung to the front of her legs and flared out in back, waving behind her. She stopped, dug through the suitcase, took out a lacy white bonnet, and put it on me, drawing it down low over my forehead, tying the straps firmly beneath my soft clefted chins, which she couldn't resist pinching. My mother loved all of me, but it was my head that she had high hopes
for and therefore protected—a bonnet, a scarf, a ratty straw hat used for gardening. Sometimes, in the heat, she put a wet cloth on my head, water dripping down my neck and shoulders, my face scrunching up into a good cry, but she hushed me without any sympathy. She wanted me to be able to think, to reason, which is where the trouble lay for her.

My mother didn't have to reason that morning, however. A mother simply tastes trouble; she feels it in the small of her back or in her blood or somewhere along her jangly nerves. Even ten miles off and blowing toward her, trouble was about as discreet as an ocean liner full of singing drunks. My mother said she suddenly smelled something carried on the wind: lye and dust and burnt liver or kidney beans, an awful combination that made her gasp. She hadn't eaten much that morning and her stomach turned once and then she got ahold of herself. She dropped the suitcase right there in the road as if it was something that had become crude and pointless, and with both hands on the stroller she started running, barreling into the wind, pushing us madly up a small ridge from where, she hoped, we might be able to see the Barlows' windmill. The stroller wheels kept hitting rocks and ruts, but she powered through, sending the stroller sideways and the front end off the ground. I slid down in the seat, crumpled formless as a pillow, laughed and squealed and did my best to kick away my shoes.

On the broad Lincoln County range that runs from Nevada head-on into western Utah, sheep were grazing. The bells they wore jingled like a soft stuttering music out in no-man's land. These were western sheep, medium-sized and perseverant, muzzles down in sagebrush and galleta grass. Though spread out and foraging, they still moved as a loose ever-present herd.

The cloud blew over about nine that morning. The wind came with it, blowing to the east and then suddenly shifting north, stirring up dust devils, rolling tumbleweeds across the desert into the midst of the feeding sheep. They scattered with the noise and sudden movement. As the sky overhead turned dark, sheep dashed for cover that wasn't there. The bells on their necks clattered wildly, bringing more confusion and panic. A fine dusty mist began to fall from the cloud and, like rain, covered and penetrated: the dense layered wool of the sheep, the heavy-leafed sage. The sheep veered right and left, stumbled and doubled back on themselves, and even after the cloud had passed, the bleating continued. They hopped and skittered at a falling rock, at a shadow, at a waving branch. Finally they lowered their heads again, though the ground and plants were now covered with a film of ash which lent a strange new taste to sagebrush. Slowly they grazed their way into the next valley.

Not far away in Elgin, Nevada, three children came out of a trailer house and played in what they imagined to be snow. They spread their arms, ran in circles, and turned their faces up into the gray-white storm. The oldest one—the only one who could write—used her finger to trace her name through the snow collecting on the hood of a junked car in the driveway. She licked her finger to clean it and then cartwheeled while the two younger ones, in wet drooping diapers, made themselves dizzy spinning.

From there the cloud moved due east—Nevada into Utah, though there was no marked change from one place to the other. It was all just dry unrelenting terrain. Here and there, almost like accidents, a tarpapered house sprang up and next to it the rotted posts of an abandoned corral, and in those lonely places a Basque shepherd or a used-car salesman holding a Geiger counter looked up, wondered to himself, and shrugged.

A young husband, hauling furniture in his truck from Veyo to Santa Clara, was surprised by how the cloud seemed to engulf him and
even to move with him down Highway 18. He'd driven in bad weather before, sometimes been able to outrun the big spring and summer cloudbursts if he caught them far enough on the horizon in time. Ten miles out of Veyo, though, this cloud had caught him, surrounding the truck in whirling sand. Particles hit the windshield and seeped through every crevice of the old Ford until even his clothes were covered with a fine light soot.

When he finally turned off the side road and moved onto Highway 91, which led into Santa Clara and then on into Las Vegas, he was surprised to find a roadblock set up next to the Texaco station. He shifted down, idled forward, then stopped his truck and got out. Hours later, before the young man was allowed to go, the deputies burned his clothes, patted his shoulder to reassure him, and let him borrow a Texaco uniform to wear home. Even with her own furniture in the back of the truck, his wife didn't know him when he drove up to their house and stepped out of the cab.

My mother's lungs burned from running. Her arms and shoulders felt disconnected and one of her ankles was swelling, and by then she realized the stroller wasn't worth the trouble. She picked me up out of it, wrapped me in her arms, and she wished, for once, that there was more of her to cradle and cover me. She had run herself out, so she trotted on from there, off balance and heavy-footed, alternately watching the sky and the road and me.

Coming in fast from the southwest, the cloud grew larger, its edges spreading like thin fingers. In the midmorning sky it appeared to be a piece of boiling twilight that had broken away from somewhere else. Instinctively my mother moved over to the far side of the road, putting a little more distance between it and us.

I worked my arm away from my mother's chest and touched her
chin and talked to her in code—coos and broken syllables and among them she was almost positive that she heard the name John. Had the moment been different, she would have stopped, sat me in her lap, and we would have had a heart-to-heart, but as it was, we kept going.

My mother had shaken John Wayne's hand and that was about all. He was making arrangements for his upcoming movie,
The Conqueror
, in which he would play Genghis Khan and tempt Susan Hayward with his made-up almond eyes. It would be filmed not far from our ranch and he wanted to look things over, make some plans for his sons who would accompany him. Someone had given him a cup of coffee. My mother remembered Wayne stirring in two teaspoons of sugar and drinking the coffee so slowly that it had to be ice cold when he got to the bottom. He nodded his head shyly when they were introduced, stood up out of his chair and extended his hand, and she could see that he was a big sensitive meatblock of a man.

Sometimes in panic and in trying to protect our life, my mother forgot things about the movies: the sweet temperate nature of John Wayne, the way Milo de Rossi had written my father a large check for his and my mother's hospitality and it was that very check that gave us Christmas that year. My mother unwrapped her dream of a sewing machine and cried on and off all day.

A mother's intuition is seldom wrong and my mother's was always right about her babies. If she was mostly right about Milo de Rossi, she was absolutely right about that cloud. We had to find shelter.

She had taken only two steps off the road—toward a feeble overhang in the rocks—when she heard the long frantic blasts of a horn. My father, like a man driven by deep stinging forces that we couldn't understand, had ingeniously spliced the ignition on the old Dodge flatbed and gunned his way to find us. His puzzlement and fear had grown by leaps as he found first the suitcase in the road and then the abandoned stroller.

At the sound of the horn my mother turned and scanned the road
behind until finally she could see the grill and the familiar green hood and the brown trail of road dust. She put her arm in the air and waved.

When finally he was next to us, my father opened his door, the engine still running, and came around and opened the other door for us. They didn't say a word, didn't give each other the cool slender glance of people still carrying grudges. With me held closer than ever to her chest, my mother skip-hopped onto the running board and then up onto the seat, looked straight ahead, and waited for my father to slam the door.

My father, of course, thought she was coming back for him. He couldn't stand two hours without her and he thought she felt the same, and in a while she did. But at the moment when she had jumped into the truck, she was all mother, all pounding heart, and she didn't for one second analyze our escape.

We drove back to the house while behind us, in the valley to the west, in the very spot where
The Conqueror
would be filmed the next year, the cloud unloaded sheer white dust and here and there glassy particles that would end up driving the cameramen wild, sudden glints and glarings appearing in the uncut footage. Sitting in the truck that day, we didn't know it, but my father would be there at that filming, too, maybe not a star but at least an extra. For weeks, dressed in blousy pants and wearing snow boots, he was destined to ride a skittish buckskin a hundred times across the same stretch of red sand until someone finally yelled that they had a take.

My father, glad to have his wife and daughter back that day, drove carefully and watched in his rearview mirror; my mother kept turning around. They didn't know exactly what they were seeing back there, but they were spooked, and in no time she had slid across the seat and partnered back up with him. The cloud hung low for a while and didn't seem to move. Beneath it, wind and dust and fallout created a turbulent hothouse that we could see and would hear about on the radio the next day.

Maybe to calm herself, my mother started—right there in the truck—by kissing my father's cheek, even though it was a little too smooth for her taste, a little too much like a young James Stewart's. Then things fell into place: a kiss, a hug, my mother's skirt coming up over her legs.