Old Border Road

by Susan Froderberg

  I was shuffling through the rest of the find when a photo slipped out of the packet and drifted to the floor, and I wondered which it was of me he would keep. I saw it was one of the little black-and-white photos that had been clipped from those that come in fours in a strip you get from machines they have in bus stations and drugstores. Like the one back in the beach town north of Angels City, where we had pulled off the highway that afternoon, and there was a boardwalk at the seaside we walked along. The place was lively with people out for a day and men haggling over their wares, and it was motley with trinkets and hand food for sale. We bought souvenirs for ourselves and postcards to send home, and we bought peanuts to toss at the seabirds. The air smelled of fish-and-chips and finespun candy, and it smelled too of fruity booze drinks and coconutty suntan lotion and Son’s spicey aftershave. Pop songs about love played out a loudspeaker, and I couldn’t help but sing out loud myself, bold and gay as we both were that day. Palm trees laughed brisk in the wind, and gulls screamed and careened wildly about us. Light sparked off the sea as though currented with electricity, the glitter on the water sharp enough to dim the vision. The day was a day meant for the word—oh, where would there be such a word? Only to say there was a buoyancy and a radiance all about us, there was whirlpool and mollusk and flipper, and nests, corals, shells, wings, flukes, kelp—what else? There was sand and current and wind and reef, and there was tide and pulse and drift. There were clouds the shape of fishes aswim that day. We stood embraced, watching the waves, the way they were ever so slow at the gather, the way they would mount and light at the crest. There would come the start of the curl before each surge and break, before the great things came pounding down, bursting into themselves with such force you could feel the tremendous ending of every one drumming throughout your ribcage. Then again, another beginning with the start of the next swell. Everything in us swelling, as we walked along in song and clinging one to the other and always in step, like dancing, our timing was. We had all the world between the two of us, right where we were, and too out in the beyond and in the what we couldn’t even know of yet, and at the same time we had the knowing of going home to look forward to, and we were eager for it.

  We wandered into a curio shop and there I saw the photo machine and led us into the booth. We swiveled the seat down to fit our heads into the screen evenly, and Son sat and fitted me atop his lap, and we put our faces together and got our arms out of the way, and we smiled without even trying and held still, waiting to be captured in a rupture of light, wanting the moment burned into us.

  I felt a rush of that heat in me now.

  The old dog put her nose to the dropped photo and I hazed her away, bringing myself back to where I am, thinking how very close we always are to being somewhere not here. And then I felt that stall of the heart, in the instant of something gone wrong, as I peeled the photo off the floor and turned the face of it up, seeing it was not a picture of me, not even of us. It was Daughter Pearl that Son held so close.

  The old dog nudged me as I tore the picture apart, ripping eyes and lips and teeth into teeny pieces, childishly, dropping the confetti it made into the wastebasket, flicking the rest clean from my fingers. The old dog nuzzled and winced. The machine rumbled and agitated. My stomach churned out a pang of something no doctor could explain.

  THERE HAVE BEEN callings and pursuits I’ve imagined myself in, in whatever hard wind of future that lay ahead, though never did I picture myself doing the work of cowgirl or nurse. But here I am, scuffing along in slung-heeled boots, carrying a jar warm and musty smelling and heavy to the brim with Son’s urine, and wondering all the while where the time will be to keep the paint warmed up and ready for the barrels come Sunday.

  The routine is, after all, a change. Now Son and I are together every night and every day, just as it was during the month of our honeymoon. But he hasn’t left the bed, hasn’t wanted to sit up once, hasn’t used his legs, complaining they’re not working yet. Yessirree, the old man would say, chance did so rejig that boy’s ways indeed. And I would say, We have to be careful as to the details of our wishes.

  Ham says he has seen instances such as these with other falls of the kind, oncet or twicet, he says, remembering particularly. There was a bullrider friend a mine, to give a example, he says, that got caught in the getaway. He was looking good prior—got his legs fit about the bull just right in the pen, resined his glove snug, and had a good hold of the bull rope, was scooted up just so on the upper of the animal’s back, and with his knees clenched tight and toes turned out rightly and body squared over the horns, as all like to see, and he was out the chute and riding a perfect buck and waving to the queen—rollercoastering, he was, and right on until the buzzer sounded and it was time to let go the strap, and he swung a leg over the back and hit the ground on his feet. You should’ve heard the crowd and seen the cheering and that jackaroo taking all the glory in, and just then the bull, rank as all get-out, it was, came from behind and rammed his rider with such force the man was thrust into the air and throwed against the fence like a old raggedy doll. Clowns and pickup men ran the bull clear and got to the poor fellow and toted him out, Ham says. He was knocked cold. Suffered a concussion, the doc said, and a wounded spine, and a family turned horribly worried. But he had a lot of sand in him, as they say, and in a bit over a week he was up and walking again, though he did limp after and walked about with a stave, a stave he had made from a branch of a quaking aspen, the leathery bark of which was carved with the names of ever bull he’d ever ridden. An’ the story ain’t no bluff, he says.

  I suppose the ending could have been worse, I say.

  There’s another misgo I seen, Ham says. That time a clown—a bullfighter really, is what they is—was matching wits with a brahma when he got tossed up like a bouncy thing, and when he fell, the animal trampled him. That was a bad one. Wife took the ol’ boy to see the best doctor to be had on the coast. After treatment X and Y and Z, and money they ended owing up the wazoo to the bank, well still that clown was left permanently catawampus and was not walking any more barrels or getting any more laughs. After all a this his wife up and left him, which pretty much wohaw’d the man for good, Ham says, shaking his head.

  We stand staring at the same patch of ground, with a feverous sun above.

  In either of the two ordeals, nature is above all the only decision maker, Ham says.

  That could only be, I say.

  Seems to me, it matters little whether we make the two-hour drive to take Son to a hospital or if we don’t, Ham says, as the damage is or was done, or it isn’t or wasn’t.

  Worries me to think we’ll do more damage putting him through the long drive, I say.

  And in this heat to boot, you sure can’t bet on betterments.

  We don’t want to hurt him any more than he’s hurt.

  What do a bunch a fancy doctors know anyways, he says, except for fetching higher prices?

  It’s not as if medicine is even a real science.

  It’s more or less a case of wait and see, is the way to reckon it.

  I want to agree, I say. Best to keep Son still and cared for.

  Just keep him eyeballed for the time being.

  That’s what we’ll do.

  In any case, I haven’t got a roping partner, Ham says. To say the least.

  If you can head, then I can heel, I say.

  There’s nothing much to lose but an entry fee.

  The next day, Ham would go into town and pay the sum for us. But there would be no need to team-up come the event day. For there would be no rodeo Sunday at all.

  Talk about timing, is all I can say, Ham would say.

  He would be talking about the rain.

  IT BEGINS TO rain Saturday, late evening. Clouds slowly roll in and collect throughout the day, and this has people looking up hopefully and placing bets as to downfall. The clouds accumulate cumulonimbus, their underbellies fiercely dark and tumid come afternoon. By the time the hired man is doing the late-da
y feeding and watering, the overcast heap has turned ragged and scud. The horses circle fearfully in the stalls and they won’t eat, won’t drink, either one. The calves stir and groan in the holding pen. Tree clingers and perching birds harbor inside old saguaros. Hunter cats take cover under the house or in clefts of the melon shed. Cicadas and crickets are hushed for once.

  I go out to call the old dog in and feel the gather of current in the thick and mixed-up air. The ominous swells are dark and fast-gathering above, like a troop of giants set upon us, appearing loaded with weaponry rather than the bounty we had been hoping for for so long. In the end the storm might be called a blessing, but it arrives as hard as a trigger pulled, with no time between flash and sound in the first strike of lightning. The weather turns violent as some lesson put on us from the Bible. The sky pulses and booms and strobes, the rain heavy and going on steadily after. Looking out, you would think the fountains of the great deep had opened, with the water pocking up atop the hard ground, making it seem the earth were percolating. In a place turned sere and nearly blown to claypan, the rain but walters over the armor of it, with no sod to retard the flood. The deluge surges on in a rage across blind creek and arroyo, dry gulch and draw. It overflows canals, ditches, coulees, gullies, dalles. It fills wallows and potholes in, courses over broken ground and reg. It runnels gumbo, rills pumice, disturbs erg.

  It makes an eyot of the old adobe house.

  I stand with the curtain parted and with an eye out, watching the water veiling over the portal like a falls does. Through the pour I see the flowerbeds along the walkway turned spillway, with dead gophers and field mice and creeping things drifting past in the downrush. Mud and silt trickle down the slope of the hummock, melting the tumulous hold of the old adobe house. Water swells over the ribs and the welts of the burnt turf. It brims up from the furrows, pools the fields, washes out over the road. It pours across the porch, and the steps are lost to the eye in the sink. The pickup appears afloat in a pool of eddies and whirls, the watertruck stuck in a swamp of flotsam. The old lemon grove comes alive in bursts of lightning, like a scrawny army of whiskery old ghosts fallen charge on us.

  My breath dims the vision. I put a sleeve to the glass and rub my traces off. I turn away from the rain and look about, seeing the old adobe house—its rooms, its space, what it contains—seeing everything about the place as nothing it has been. Startling in its difference, and yet also more familiar than ever, as though I were standing here regarding it all for the first time, feeling the anchorage as something belonging to me. Or is it me that belongs to it?

  Nothing gives. Windows and doors warp and stick and are difficult at the open and close. Cupboards and drawers and cabinets need a hard push or a pull for a budge. Newsprint peels away heavy and wet from the countertop, leaving inkings of forecasts. I throw dripping wads of births and fatalities into the trash basket. I open the pantry and find dried beans and macaroni swelling on the shelves, cornhusks and tortillas wilting, the salt clumping, a pile of tea towels on their way to mold. The wet seeps in from everywhere. It crannies in through roof fissures and wall cracks and casing seams. It beads along the beams of the ceiling. Thresholds won’t hold it. It fills and puddles the grooves and the niches of tile and board. It fogs mirror and glass and pane, brings iron and tin to the beginnings of rusting, soddens cardboard entirely. It dampens furniture, mattresses, drapery, rugs. I walk room to room, the clothes on me dank smelling and steaming, putting buckets and pots out for roof leaks, collecting batteries, flashlights, the old man’s old buck knife, towels, rags, duct tape, and twine. The storm cuts the current off, and I burn Rose’s old oil lamps to brighten parlor and kitchen. There are holiday candles stored in the sideboard, and those ugly stubby ones kept for power outs, and these I use to light the old man and Rose’s bedroom, where Son lies restless in the bed, amutter in his sleep. He’s circled in flame, appearing ready for sacrifice, or resurrection, or something else mystical and unexplainable.

  The rain will make it dark as night for days.

  I go in and hold the light up close. I see Son look at me and not see me. Hard shadows gutter the lines in his face and mudden the sockets. He speaks in broken sentences. He speaks of a dream he’s been dreaming, a stampede, he says. Run, he says. Leave. He might yet be dreaming. He mumbles. He trembles. The house rumbles in the thundering above. A moth flutters in the lamp globe, its wings to singe in the flame. I put my hand to Son’s chest and feel the parch of the flesh of him. I listen to the water dropping into the bucket, steady as a pulse will pulse.

  I blow the flame of the wick out.

  The old dog stays close at the heel, and I use the flashlight to guide us, leaving Son in a gibber of broken sleep. I peel my clothes off and leave them in a soggy pile on the floor, lift the damp sheet, climb into the empty bed. The old dog lies down alongside on the floor on the Navajo and is soon aswim in her dreams. Her haunches jerk and her limbs twitch, and growls roll out from low in her belly. The rain pounds steadily overhead, drowning the ticking of the old clock in the parlor, muddling the whimpers and moans of husband and dog and house. I lie in the howl and scream of the wind in the night, as the waterline rises silently up the side of the adobe.

  What of the God there should be to come and retard the flood?

  IT DOWNPOURS ALL night. By morning the rain slows but goes on, the weight and mass of cooling air streaming through and settling into the valley. Layers of vapor move through phases of upset and absorb before the restore. They say the skin of the globe stretches and tightens, just as the body does, fostering a drawing-together, a kind of pressure that makes for a tightening, a narrowing, a confining, from outside to inside, in a shift of blood, and a reset of set point. There are laws explaining this kind of movement of fluid—I remember the teacher teaching us this, describing laws as to the forces of boundary and density. As I’m putting the thermometer under Son’s tongue, I wonder at the power of these truths, thinking they make me feel as safe as they make me feel afraid.

  He drinks and asks for more, and again more, but his thirst won’t be quenched. His flesh is hot and dry, and his face flushed as if burned from the sun. He’s a mumble of words you’ve never heard, his talk coming from some lost place or a bruised piece of his mind. He won’t keep the thermometer in his mouth, and I need to put it under his armpit and sit with him for the time it takes to get a measure. I hold the glass tube to the light and read the number by the marking: 105. Can’t be. Such a temperature is what only a child could bear, I can hear my mother saying. Or maybe it was Rose. Or Pearl might have been the one speaking. Who knows. I shake until the mercury slides down the stem, and I put it back into Son’s armpit. I hold his arm tight and plead with him when he tries to push me away. I shout his name out.

  The silver line rises and stops at the same number. The ceiling fan is on as always in the room, but now I add table fans and one on a stand and I get all of them going. I pull the sheets back and I think he’s shivering, but it’s too violent for shivering, or even tremoring, too uneven the movement is, more spasming is what it is, first his body going all hard and bunched up and then in a sudden opened and relaxed, and then tight again, and then let go again, all of this over and over, and the shaking now become so furious the bed is shifting about over the floor, as though with a life of its own. It takes me a few breaths and just standing there, just standing not knowing what to do, until I think to look for something to put into his mouth. Rip pages from a book on the bed table, spindle them, thrust the wad between his teeth, realize now I’m shaking myself. His raspy breathing. His heaving. Who to call? No time to call. And then it comes to me to run to the bathroom and open the medicine cabinet and take from it the bottle of rubbing alcohol. When I get back to him, the fit is just-like-that stopped. He’s talking now, talking about watering the roads down, talking not to me—what does he see?—but to the old man, he talks to the old man, Rose’s Daddy, he needs to get up, he says, and now Son lifts himself, trying to get out of bed. He can’t
get his legs to move with trying—it has to be as bad as a bad dream—and he’s thrashing his arms about and fending with his hands as I try to stay him, and he strikes out and sends the table lamp crashing to the ground. I take shirts from the drawer, use the sleeves of them to tie his wrists to the bedstead, first one and now the other one, his head rolling back and forth, gibberish and spit rolling from his tongue in his delirium. Run for a basin. Run for the cloths. Fill the basin with water. Add a whole bottle of rubbing alcohol. Put the soaked cloths dripping wet over Son—his legs, upper and lower, his stomach and groin and chest. Calm yourself, I tell him. Try, I say. Someone come and calm me. I fix the pillow under his head better. I talk to him. This is aspirin, I tell him. Open. Here. Drink. Please. I tell him I’m going to call someone. I tell him what everyone says, that everything is going to be fine. And then he begins shivering, really shivering, his teeth chattering. I take the warmed cloths off, rinsing each in the alcohol bath, putting them back again cool onto his body. I leave them on until they turn warm. Then I go through the routine again and again. After a while, the shivering stops. He sleeps.

  By the end of whatever time has passed, the number on the thermometer is down to near what it should be. I take the wet cloths off at last, cover Son over with the sheet, but leave his arms tied until I should go into the kitchen to make the telephone calls.