Читать книгу High Skies - Tracy Daugherty - Страница 9

1.

The first dust storm that spring coincided with the onset of my mother’s migraines. Early in the morning, that Friday, she grimaced while she stood at the stove scrambling eggs for our breakfast, and a little later while she packed peanut butter sandwiches and apple slices into clunky lunch pails for my sister and me to take to school. By 8:30, when my father was pulling on his suit jacket and preparing to leave for his job at the independent oil and gas outfit he worked for, she was complaining of a shimmering blue aura flitting at the edges of her eyesight, making her nauseous. The sun was too bright through the kitchen window, she said. It blinded her, though the rays were finely filtered through the leaves of the spunky little pecan tree our father had planted in the backyard just last year. She could barely stand. She propped herself upright by hanging on to the greasy corner of the stove. My father dropped his jacket onto a kitchen chair and moved to help her into the bedroom. Neither of my parents were big or tall, but my mother had never looked so bird-like, trembling, curled within the circle of my father’s slender arms. She hadn’t done her face and hair yet that morning; her cheeks were the color of the milk I’d spilled on the table earlier while fixing my cereal, and her uncombed hair resembled the checkered maze of the crossword puzzle in the newspaper, lines and angles branching off in all directions.

My father settled her into their bed, still warm and unmade from the night before. Bent over her, his arms gyrating swiftly to arrange the pillows and the sheet just so, he echoed the grace of the professional golfers he liked to watch on the weekends on our brand new Crosley television, their bodies in perfect fluid motion to get the ball down the fairway. He closed the yellow curtains on the small window above the bedside bureau. The curtains were gauzy and sheer; a little sunshine still penetrated the square room, casting a creamy wedge of light onto the green cotton quilt at the foot of the bed. My mother closed her eyes, covered her mouth, and turned her head away on the pillow. Dad told me to run to the bathroom, wet a washcloth with warm water, wring it out, and bring it to him. Gently, he placed the washcloth across my mother’s eyes.

“Joe, you gotta get the kids to school,” she mumbled. The words barely made it out of her mouth, as though something sticky kept her lips from opening fully.

“None of us are going anywhere,” Dad said. “Just stay quiet, all right?”

She moaned softly for a few minutes. Her temples were “pounding,” she slurred. Dad held her hand. When it seemed she’d fallen asleep, he whispered to my sister and me to sit with her. He’d be right back. He was going to the kitchen to phone Dr. Edwards. I was ten years old, eager each day for opportunities to prove I was a responsible young adult, but now, left to care for my mother, whom I’d never seen remotely stricken, I felt utterly inadequate for the moment. I tried to push my panic into my stomach and squelch it there at the bottom. All this did was force a cramped tension aping hunger. I wished I could tear into my lunchbox and devour everything in it right then and there. My sister was three years younger than I was. If she felt fear, she didn’t show it. She sat calmly on the side of the bed humming the Disney theme. Disney was her favorite new show on the one clear channel we got on the Crosley. As sunlight shifted through the curtains, it caught her curly red hair. Her head appeared to spark into flame. My mother groaned and twitched. The washcloth slid down her cheeks, away from her eyes. I tugged the sleeve of my sister’s brown plaid dress to move her out of the light, and readjusted the cloth on Mom’s face.

My father came back and said the doctor’s assistant had informed him we were doing everything properly. When she felt a little better, steady on her feet, we should drive her down to the office. Dr. Edwards would squeeze her in and take a look at her.

“Meantime,” Dad said, “I guess you kids have a day off from school.”

“You’ll have to write notes for us to take to Mr. Seaker,” I said. Raymond Seaker was the school’s vice principal.

“We’ll take care of it later. I’m going to sit here with Mom. Stay around the house and keep the noise down, okay?”

“Can we turn the television on?” Dee Dee asked.

“Keep the sound low.”

The big screen crackled. The black-and-white picture jumped crazily for a few seconds—wavy lines like a child’s sketch of lightning bolts—then sharpened. A local morning news show was about to sign off. Oil prices were up. High winds forecast. Just another day in late March on the dry flatlands of Midland, Texas. The year was 1957, and the Permian Basin was booming.

My favorite cartoon show, Heckle and Jeckle, came on. They were a pair of talking magpies, always wisecracking their way into trouble, Heckle with a Jimmy Durante whine and Jeckle with a “posh British accent,” according to my father. My mother couldn’t stand them—those “filthy birds are mean,” she said—but I cherished their aggression as a model for getting on in the world (“Don’t ever let nobody fool ya,” Heckle advised). I called Dee Dee “Old Thing,” after Jeckle’s name for his pal, and walked, cocky, around the house jutting out my chest, just as my feathered friends did whenever they cooked up mischief. Their heads—all beak—curved like footballs. Their eyes were stuck to their pates, where a football’s seams would be. In my bird-prancing I’d throw my head back and stare at the ceiling, an activity that often resulted in me crashing into my mother’s coffee table or a floor lamp, rousing her from the kitchen, yelling, waving a dish towel to shoo me away.

Now, warned by my father to stay quiet, I wondered if my rambunctiousness had accumulated to the point of triggering my mother’s collapse. I sat still next to my sister in front of the television, on the deep green living room carpet. I imagined the carpet’s edge as a Maginot line I mustn’t cross (Mr. Seaker loved to teach the fifth-grade boys war history). I opened my lunch box and bit ravenously into the sandwich, though I’d scarfed down cereal and eggs only half an hour earlier.

Something thocked the kitchen window. Thock. And again. Thock-thock. I stepped off the carpet (as ineffective as the real Maginot line) and ran to see the source of the noise. At that same instant I became aware of an unusual odor—not a smell as much as new weight in the air. The scent of sudden coldness. Through the kitchen window I could see the spindly pecan tree whipping about in a gale, the budding pecans like black marbles flying off its limbs, pounding the glass. I’d never seen a sky like the sky I saw. It was brown—the hue of dirty dishwater. I was used to spotting yellow haze billowing above the horizon; sandstorms were frequent in the West Texas desert. But this was different. Darker. The sunlight that had pained my mother less than an hour earlier was rapidly diminishing in brown ocean-swells shading into black hollows straight overhead.

I figured I should run to my room and turn on the humidifier, the way my mother always did whenever an afternoon sandstorm blew in. I had asthma. The humidifier looked like a big round spaghetti pot, except it was made of glass. My mother was convinced the moist steam it dispensed eased my breathing.

My father slipped into the kitchen to get a glass of water. He sang a song about a dust storm. The song’s speaker lost his home to the wind and he had to tell his neighbors goodbye, Dad said. He said it was a Woody Guthrie tune. “We used to sing it in Oklahoma, back in the Dust Bowl days.” He and my mother had been raised in Cotton County, Oklahoma just north of the Red River across the Texas line. “I thought conditions had changed since then, with people planting so many trees and green lawns, but I guess not.”

He pondered his pecan tree, worry-lines creasing his face. The tree swayed raggedly in the yard. Any minute now, its roots would rip from the ground. He shook his head.

“Is Mom better?” I asked.

“A little.” Her temples were no longer throbbing. He hoped we could take her to the doctor in an hour or so.

By noon, when we’d lifted my mother onto her feet and she’d managed to slip on a pair of slacks and a blouse, the sky, in the distance, had turned into earth: an unbroken wall of dust. It wasn’t raining on us yet, though brown particles swirled through the town’s cool air. “Are you breathing okay, hon?” my mother asked me. My chest had, in fact, tightened some, but I didn’t want to worry her. “I’m fine,” I said.

“I’m so sorry I threw your day out of whack.” Her slur was gone.

“It wasn’t your fault, Amy,” my father said to her. “Now let’s see what Dr. Edwards says.”

“I guess you’re glad to be out of school, though, home watching those filthy birds?”

Actually, I craved school, and she knew it. I was good at it. My study routines were solid and I enjoyed showing my teachers what I knew. I liked spending lunch periods reading comics with my pal Stevie Williston (“Gimp,” other students called him because he’d been born with an arthritic hip and had always walked on crutches). And we all adored Mr. Seaker. He’d pace the playground’s perimeter during recess, making himself available to us for counseling, coaching, injury inspections, jokes, and an occasional game of tetherball.

It was just as well my mother still hadn’t combed her hair: merciless gusts of wind whipped across the driveway, lashing our faces, making it difficult to open the car doors. My father held her tightly so she wouldn’t blow over. Her strength was still low.

Tumbleweeds careened between trucks and cars and buses on the streets. Traffic lights swayed like paper streamers, bouncing on soft wires above the intersections.

“Hello, Troy,” Dr. Edwards said to me, shaking my hand in his bland, sparsely furnished waiting room. He was a tall man with hairy ears. “How are your lungs? It’s getting rough out there. I hope you’re staying indoors as much as possible.”

“Yes, sir.”

He made some small talk with my dad—“I see oil’s up over three dollars a barrel now”—and then he said to me, “Okay, let’s take a look at your mom.” He turned to her. “And how are you feeling, young lady?” She’d set her mouth in an impatient half-smile, as if to say, Nice of you to finally notice me.

She followed the doctor and my father down a narrow hallway to an examining room. Dee Dee and I sat on a black leather couch by the reception desk, staring at the posters on the walls listing the symptoms of influenza and whooping cough. “Be sure to wash your hands several times a day, Old Thing,” I said to Dee Dee, reading a poster’s medical advice. She giggled.

Twenty minutes later, we were all sitting in Dr. Edwards’s office surrounded by rows of gleaming golf trophies and pictures of his smiling family (the kids, and even his wife, wore braces on their teeth, which already looked perfect to me). “We don’t exactly know what causes migraines,” he explained to us, speaking mostly to my father. “There’s good reason to think they’re related to stress. Have there been any big changes in your family lately?”

“I got promoted at work,” Dad said. “District Geologist. We bought a new Oldsmobile, a television . . . all good.”

“Congratulations. Even success tends to cause stress, you know, because it brings change, and change requires some adjustments.”

“I’d think the sudden drop in air pressure this morning had more to do with my headache than learning to live with a television,” Mom said dryly.

The doctor laughed. “Well, now, my advice, Amy, is just take it easy. Migraines are unpredictable. Sometimes they come in clusters. Aspirin can help a little, but for the most part, you just have to ride them out as you did today. I wish I had more to tell you.”

In the car on the way home, Mom wickedly mimicked the doctor: “Just take it easy, young lady!”

“Honey,” Dad said. “You’ll stir up the pain again.”

“Don’t start. I’m not a child. I can handle stress.”

“Yes, but you don’t have to push yourself.”

“If I don’t push myself, who’ll pack the kids’ lunches? And why aren’t they in school today?”

A tumbleweed slammed into our hood. It looked like a big bird cage full of thorns. In the distance, the sky was blacker than brown. The dust-swells resembled photographs I’d seen in Life magazine of mushroom clouds after an atomic blast.

At my father’s insistence, and despite my mother’s protests, she went back to bed, keeping the curtains closed. Within a minute of her head hitting the pillow, she was out for the rest of the afternoon. My father sat at the kitchen table, catching up on office paperwork. Dee Dee and I resumed our spots in front of the television. The regular programming had been interrupted for local news reports on the storm. These dispatches moved from the obvious—a correspondent babbling about “high winds” and clutching a lamppost on Main Street to keep from blowing over—to the arcane: a meteorologist describing the composition of dust particles as a combination of “aluminosilicate, SiO2 and CaCO3, with organic compounds of inorganic nitrate.” Television was still in its infancy, searching for its voice.

Far more useful were my father’s explanations. He took a break from his paperwork to watch with us. He weighed in, as an “old rockhound,” on what was happening. “All that dark matter you see in the air, it’s bare, dry soil from the ground with bits of rocks worn down by the wind over many, many years,” he told us. “When huge gusts roll over it, like today, all this loosely held stuff starts to vibrate, and then it saltates—that means it leaps into the air—and then it slams back into the earth, over and over, breaking into smaller bits. The wind picks it up and shoves it forward, using energy from a mix of hot and cold air and electrical charges.”

“Like lightning?” I asked.

“Like lightning, yes.”

“Does this happen everywhere?” Dee Dee said. “In Russia? Korea?” Names she’d heard on television.

“No. Only in places that don’t see much rain,” Dad said. “Plus, there’s been a lot of bad farming in Texas and Oklahoma. It makes poor ground, creating the conditions for this. We’re getting smarter. Things are getting better, but—” He glanced through the kitchen window at his brave little tree, whipsawing toward the zenith and the lawn.

Ultimately, this first storm didn’t cause much worry in Midland proper. Most of the damage occurred on the “wrong side of the tracks,” the eastern half of town, separated quite literally by the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks from downtown and the upper and middle class neighborhoods. One day, Mr. Seaker told a bunch of us kids on the playground that “Negro and Mexican” families lived across the tracks, “pursuing their own ways of life.” Each group had its own high school, he explained. “The Mexican school was constructed in the 1920s and the Negro facility, Carver High, opened in 1932,” he said. “They’ve been the state football champs in their league almost every year since then.”

I remembered this exchange later, when newspaper accounts of the dust storm listed Carver High students as the event’s worst victims, suffering “ocular infections” (“That means dirt got in their eyes,” Dad told me), “silicosis” (“Trouble breathing, but worse than your asthma”), and one reported case of pneumonia linked directly to swirling dust. A wheat farmer swore that six jackrabbits had suffocated on his land, and five crows had dropped from the sky gasping for air.

Our fifth-grade class was just beginning a study unit on the development of the solar system. Stevie Williston and I were particularly excited about science lessons—both our fathers were petroleum geologists, and we had inherited their curiosity about natural phenomena. One day on the playground I told Mr. Seaker we’d seen pictures of Mars in class. The Red Planet had dust storms exactly like the one we’d experienced. “Oh yes, and much worse, too,” he said. “Sometimes Mars’s storms circle its entire circumference. And the dust up there is smaller than ours, which creates more static electricity. That makes it stick to stuff.”

“If you were a spaceman, dust would stick to your suit?”

“Most definitely.”

I knew Mr. Seaker had once dreamed of being a “spaceman” (the word “astronaut” was not yet in common use). He’d been a military pilot. My dad had told me, once, that his family had long been active in West Texas aviation and that Mr. Seaker had served in the air force “with distinction.” I didn’t know what that meant but I heard school parents refer to him, affectionately, as Flyboy. I saw how eagerly they trusted him. No matter what happened, they said—fire or dust storms or a nuclear attack from Russia—Mr. Seaker would safeguard their kids better than anyone they could imagine.