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Show Blue Run/67 After dinner she piled us all back into her car, as she would for the rest of the week until O.W. called and said that something was up-it was time to come home. I remember watching her, how the scars were papery over cheek and down her neck, blooming over her arms and fingerless hands She smiled, seeing me see her, touched my elbow and nodded. "See there," she said. In front of us, wide open ocean, the end of the road, as far as we go. Out where the surf broke, both boys grinned, body surfed. "Ma-ma-ma." Jimmy pointed at a man in a crewcut, flying a kite with a jet silver tail. "Da-da-da-daddy," he said. Before we left, Juanita handed me this little baggy of yellow powder. "Use this when you need to. Give him the whole goddamn business." she said. I dumped it out in a bus station toilet, just outside Tucson where saguaro cactuses still looked for the world like men whose arms twisted into the sky. When I dialed the one Washer number, a voice said that the number was unlisted at the owner's request. "Here's where I had you, Joey," I said. It was almost sunset, the sky breaking tangerine orange. A thin dirt devil shimmied out over the mesa, behind it Mt. Lemon, the snow cap that had bewildered me so many years before "Out there? My daddy's out there?" You get to know people on the bus. The driver let Joey and a boy whose name won't come sing on the microphone up front. I shared a seat with a woman who'd ridden west with us on this same bus, a week earlier. We shared histories, the small and humongous things that disgusted us about men, baby pictures, what we'd be if we could be anything on earth. |