Sighting Rock Junction, Arizona, at noon on 22 August 1961, Willy Bersinger let his miner’s boot rest easy on the jalopy’s’ accelerator and talked quietly to his partner, Samuel Fitts.
‘Yes, sir, Samuel, it’s great hitting town. After a couple of months out at the mine, a juke-box looks like a stained-glass window to me. We need the town; without it, we might wake some morning and find ourselves all jerked beef and petrified rock. And then, of course, the town needs us, too.’
‘How’s that?’ asked Samuel Fitts.
‘Well, we bring things into the town that it hasn’t got – mountains, creeks, desert night, stars, things like that…’
And it was true, thought Willy, driving along. Set a man way out in the strange lands and he fills with wellsprings of silence. Silence of sagebrush, or a mountain lion purring like a warm beehive at noon. Silence of the river shallows deep in the canyons. All this a man takes in. Opening his mouth, in town, he breathes it out.
‘Oh, how I love to climb in that old barber-shop chair,’ Willy admitted. ‘And see all those city men lined up under the naked-lady calendars staring back at me, waiting while I chew over my philosophy of rocks and mirages and the kind of Time that just sits out there in the hills waiting for Man to go away. I exhale – and that wilderness settles in a fine dust on the customers. Oh, it’s nice, me talking, soft and easy, up and down, on and on…’
In his mind he saw the customers’ eyes strike fire. Some day they would yell and rabbit for the hills, leaving families and time-clock civilization behind.
‘It’s good to feel wanted,’ said Willy. ‘You and me, Samuel, are basic necessities for those city-dwelling folks. Gangway, Rock Junction!’
And with a tremulous tin whistling they steamed across city limits into awe and wonder.
/>
They had driven perhaps a hundred feet through town when Willy kicked the brakes. A great shower of rust flakes sifted from the jalopy fenders. The car stood cowering in the road.
‘Something’s wrong,’ said Willy. He squinted his lynx eyes this way and that. He snuffed his huge nose. ‘You feel it? You smell it?’
‘Sure,’ said Samuel, uneasily, ‘but, what…?’
Willy scowled. ‘You ever see a sky-blue cigar-store?’
‘Never did.’
‘There’s one over there. Ever see a pink dog-kennel, an orange out-house, a lilac-coloured bird-bath? There, there, and over there!’
Both men had risen slowly now to stand on the creaking floorboards.
‘Samuel,’ whispered Willy. ‘Every kindling pile, porch-rail, gewgaw gingerbread, fence, fireplug, garbage truck, the whole blasted town, look at it! It was painted just an hour ago!’
‘No!’ said Samuel Fitts.
But there stood the band pavilion, the Baptist church, the firehouse, the orphanage, the railroad depot, the country jail, the cat hospital and the bungalows, cottages, greenhouses, shop-signs, mailboxes, telephone poles, and trash-bins, around and in between, and they all blazed with corn yellow, crab-apple greens, circus reds. From water-tank to tabernacle, each building looked as if God had jig-sawed it, coloured it, and set it out to dry a moment ago.
Not only that, but where weeds had always been, now cabbages, green onions, and lettuce crammed every yard, crowds of curious sunflowers clocked the noon sky, and pansies lay under unnumbered trees cool as summer puppies, their great damp eyes peering over rolled lawns mint-green as Irish travel posters. To top it all, ten boys, faces scrubbed, hair brilliantined, shirts, pants, and tennis shoes clean s chunks of snow, raced by.
(No Ratings Yet)