“Sometimes I forget, Daddy.” He didn’t say anything, but I could see his cheeks lifting slightly. I knew he was smiling, just a little. He was very lean, and the first signs of his illness were just beginning to show. His muscles moved with no secrecy beneath his skin.
“When you were little you asked me to paint a picture of God for you,” he said. “I suppose if I stopped this painting right about now…” He added another brush of darkness to the canvas. “I guess I’d just about have him.”
On impulse I hugged him from behind. I shocked myself—usually I didn’t dare touch him while he was working—but he didn’t pull away, and I didn’t feel him stiffen at all. He just kept adding more of that endless night sky to the painting.
The summer was passing uneventfully. The days were beyond hot, and although he kept several ancient fans around, he refused to have anything to do with air conditioning. I didn’t paint anything, even though he had set aside studio space for me in an annex to his own work room. I could feel his intense disapproval, but he never said anything. I couldn’t imagine working in such heat, worse than anything I’ve ever experienced, but he was at it eight hours a day, seven days a week. After dusk he would fix us both some dinner—he never permitted me to cook—and afterwards he would sit in a rotting old chair on the edge of the desert twenty or so yards from the house, just watching the night sky that existed, I think, both outside and inside his head. He wasn’t exactly unfriendly about it—he often invited me to join him, but I always declined. This was his, and besides, there was only one chair out there.
We never saw anyone except for a couple of old cowboys who came by now and then to do repairs to the house or the fences, and the boy from the local grocery in his battered green pickup. Each time I’d open the door to let the boy in with the supplies I’d be amazed at how wet he was, and how he seemed just a bit smaller than the last time, as if his brown skin were shrinking around him like the sheath over a fried sausage link. I stayed inside on days like that—the newspapers the grocery boy brought each time (just for me, of course), talked about windshields on parked cars exploding from the heat. I wrote lots of letters during that summer to old friends and boyfriends, but I didn’t mail any of them. The letters were all alike, and like my father’s paintings: all about the heat and the sky, and the dark that came without street lamps to lighten it.
But sometimes I’d start writing about the dark and the sky, and something from the newspaper would slip into the letter, almost without my noticing it. I suppose that shouldn’t have been too surprising, since all there was to write about was the dark, the heat, and the sky, and whatever I read in the newspaper.
A lot of terrible things happened that summer, according to the papers (I had no reason to doubt them, but I’d never felt so isolated from other people’s news as I did then so it was a little like reading about these events in a novel). Four girls, ten to eighteen, had been raped, strangled, and left out in the desert where the animals found them before their families did. A father had locked himself in the house with his three kids and then set fire to the place, while the mother sat wailing and screaming helplessly outside. A shoplifter had been chased from a downtown store where three cowboys caught him, beat him, then threw him out in front of a moving truck. The usual run of traffic accidents, bad enough in and of themselves, but then there was that especially hot Wednesday afternoon that a long distance truck driver “went strange” and plowed down the highway hitting everything and everyone he could. The final death toll on that one was twenty-eight, with a dozen more permanently disabled.
My father came up behind me while I was reading the story. I looked up at him and he said, “You want to know why.”
I nodded.
He gazed out our back window at miles of desert with saguaro that seemed somehow too upright, and closer to the house than I remembered them. “It’s just the sky,” he said. “And the dark nights, those distant mountains, the heat. That’s always been, I think, at the heart of it.”
Tommy showed up at the ranch around the second week of August. “Hey, Babe. It’s your sugar daddy!”
Sadly enough, the heart does go pitter patter at times like these. I remember seeing him there in a white dress shirt and tight jeans, leaning on the door jamb with one arm, his legs crossed to show off some rich leather cowboy boots. If I were younger I’d think that pitter patter meant true love. But I’ve come to realize that, at least for me, it was just the anxiety spawned by the attraction to someone bad for you. Of course my first thought was where did this New Jersey boy get those boots? Either he conned a woman at some bar to buy them for him, payment for services rendered, or he’d just stolen them outright. My second thought was how much he looked like James Dean standing there, and of course there was nothing accidental about that. He loved the movies as much as I did, and he knew how to duplicate a pose. I’d seen him do it in front of a hundred different mirrors.
“How’d you find me?”
“What? No ‘Hi, how are you, it’s great to see you, I’m glad you took the time to come all this way?’ That’s hurtful.”
“We broke up, remember?”
“I know. It wasn’t my idea, exactly, but I was there. Doesn’t mean we can’t still be friends. You know I’ll always be there for you, babe. You’re just that important.” He stepped forward, his arms out.
“Tommy, no.”
“Just a hug, girl. I swear, that’s all.” So I let him hug me. I didn’t hug him back; not knowing what else to do, I patted his shoulder. “That’s nice,” he crooned. Cheesy, but I can’t swear it didn’t work.
I know I shouldn’t have allowed the familiarity, the pretense that we’d ever been or would ever be anything approaching friends. I have no legitimate defense, but he was always one of those guys it was hard to give a final “no” to. It didn’t matter what he did, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. It’s crazy, when I think about it now, and hard to explain. It’s just that when I was with him, especially after a long absence, it was hard to believe he wasn’t exactly who he pretended to be, who I wanted him to be.
He let go of me and walked inside before I could bring myself to say anything. I was surprised to see him, after all, but I know I shouldn’t have been. I made myself ask again, “How did you find me, Tommy?”
“You know, this place is great,” he said, looking around, picking up things and putting them back down, touching the pictures on the walls. “Is this one of your old man’s?” he asked, running his finger down the naked image of a woman in one of my dad’s favorite oils, a present from an old friend who died when I was just a girl. It was a beautiful piece of art, and seeing Tommy’s finger on the exposed paint sent me into a panic. But before I could say anything he removed his finger, examined it as if for rubbed-off color, and said, “No, of course not. It’s too normal, right? But I can see why he likes it out here. It’s small, but it’s neat, and nobody to bother you, right? Nobody dropping by? You should have explained this place better, Babe. I always thought it was pretty lame, him living all alone out here like he was. But now I can see, I can appreciate why he’d like it so much. Hell, I’d like it here, too.”
“Tommy, how did you find me?”
He looked at me, wiped the smile off with the back of his hand like it was something dirty. “Now don’t be that way, Mary. I wanted to see you. I wanted to visit you. I care about you, Mary. Why don’t you understand that?”