Coast to Coast (12 page)

“Did I?”

“Yes, I didn’t feel that you blamed me.”

“Nobody blames you.”

“But when someone that you genuinely admire doesn’t blame you, then it makes it easier not to blame yourself.

“Anyway, now that I have heard it—well, you remember what you said before we left about the missing piece of the puzzle?”

“Sort of.”

“You said Granny could never enjoy the puzzle if there was one piece missing. The one piece was everything. I can sympathize with that now. Because sometimes it’s that one little piece that lets you see the whole picture.”

She threw back her head. “I feel good enough to compose a poem!”

“I was afraid of that.”

“When will I see Pete? Let me count the days.

“No,” she decided, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s way was better. I’ll start over.”

“Not on my account,” Pop said.

“How do I love Pete? Let me count the ways.

I love him to the depth and breath and height my soul can reach.

I love him with the passion of my girlhood and—”

“That’s enough!” Pop said from the backseat. “I don’t want any talk about passion.”

“I was just trying to get a rise out of you,” Birch answered calmly, “I’m tired of flying over Arizona.”

“You got a rise, all right. I want you behaving yourself. No more dates for you.”

“Oh, Pop, I’m just disappointed,” Birch said. “I wanted some wind this morning. I had a wonderful, wonderful time last night, and if we’d stayed over, I could probably have had another wonderful time. This was the,
the
first cute boy I’ve ever been able to talk to, and you drag me away.”

“I wish we’d never stopped.”

“Anyway, I told Pete we’d probably be back in about a week. I told him to—Oh, Pop, there it is!”

“What?”

“Where
The Thing
lives. Take a picture of it. Quick! Where’s your camera?”

“I’m getting it.”

Birch pressed her face against the left window. Below curled on the top of the mountain like a dragon, was a rambling red, yellow, and blue building.

“And I found out what
The Thing
is. Pop, it’s—”

“Turn your head around so you’ll be in the picture too.”

“Gladly. I’ll send him a copy.” Birch posed. She said, “I found out last night—from Pete, the wonderful, wonderful boy I went out with, that
The Thing’s
a two-headed pickled lizard.”

“That figures.”

“And look how they ruined that mountain. That is an ugly, ugly building, which they built for a two-headed lizard.”

“There’s something pretty,” Pop said. He pointed to a hawk that glided by in a graceful, sideways sweep. Its head was turned away, pointedly ignoring them.

“You won’t see a prettier sight than that. Yonder’s another one.”

“I imagined all our days would be like yesterday, Pop, relaxing at motels, me going out with cute boys … You know I like western people; they’re so laid back. Last night, Pete and I got a hamburger after the movie and there was this little girl—she was probably seven years old, and she was clomping around in high heels—they were not an old pair of her mom’s. They were hers. Her grandmother goes, ‘She’s going to break her neck in them things,’ and the mom just yawns. ‘She’s got to learn to walk in heels sometime.’ Pop, you ought to be more western.”

“It’s too late for me.”

“You could work at it. Like, the next time you hear thunder, don’t hop up and run to the airport—Oh, Pop, pass Ace up here to me. I’ve been neglecting him.”

Pop handed Ace into the front seat and Birch said, “Ace, let me tell you about my date. Pop’s tired of hearing about it, but you are a better listener. Pete came for me in his father’s station wagon about …”

They flew for a while and Pop said, “I hate to interrupt, but we’re coming into the Tucson area. I need to talk on the radio.”

Birch straightened and looked out the window. “Oh, I have wanted to see Tucson my entire life. Ace, that’s Tucson!”

Pop cleared his throat and said, “Tucson approach, Piper Cub three oh three six two.”

The radio answered, “Piper three oh three six two, Tucson. Go ahead.”

“Tucson, Cub three six two is fifteen miles south of Tucson International, VFR at thirty-five hundred feet, northbound along I-ten to Phoenix, requesting flight following through your area. Negative transponder.”

“What does that mean—negative transponder?” Birch asked.

“It means I don’t have one.”

“And VFR?”

“Birch—”

“Well, how am I ever going to learn?”

“VFR is Visual Flight Rules. It means we aren’t on an instrument flight plan like most of the bigger planes in the area.”

“Oh. Hey, I like Tucson,” Birch said as the city came into view. “It looks like the kind of city that cares how it looks from the air—nice red roofs over here, nice blue roof on that real tall building, nice—”

The radio said, “Piper three six two, are you exactly over a rodeo fairground?”

Pop dipped one wing and looked. He said, “Piper three six two, that’s affirmative.”

“Roger, three six two, we have you. Radar contact.”

“I know what that means,” Birch said, “we are now an official dot on the radar screen.”

The radio said, “Three six two, turn north and stay over I-ten. Maintain thirty-five hundred feet.”

“Three six two, roger. Turning north.”

In silence Birch watched the scenery below. West of the city giant saguaro and organ pipe cacti stood stiffly on the jagged bronze hills. On the mountain someone had painted a big white A.

Birch couldn’t help herself. She blurted out, “Those letters everybody puts on mountains do one thing—ruin a perfectly good mountain.”

“Birch!”

“My mouth is closed for the rest of the flight. But, Pop, remind me to tell you something about Tucson’s garbage.”

“Go ahead and tell me.”

“It’s blue. Tucson has blue garbage! Look at the dump!” She pointed. “See, Pop! Could we fly over there and get a closer look?”

“You know we can’t. You heard the radio tell us to stay over the interstate.”

“But why, why would Tucson have blue garbage? I’m going to wonder about that the rest of my life.” Suddenly she threw back her head. “Oh, Pop, it is just so,
so
good—the best feeling in the entire world!”

“What?”

“That all I have to wonder about is blue garbage!” She broke off. “Anyway, I see you inching over to look at those surplus warplanes.
Why
can we go look at your garbage when we can’t go over and check out mine?”

“I
LOVE CALIFORNIA! POP,
I love it.” It was 2:45 in the afternoon, and the J-3 Cub had just left the airport at Blythe, California. Their other stops had been Tucson and Phoenix.

Birch twisted around in her seat. “You know what I thought when I first saw it?” “Nope.”

“We were coming over those Arizona mountains, and they weren’t all that high, but we were low. And it was bumpy, Pop, and I was afraid on one of those bumps we’d sink down too far and hit.”

“We didn’t.”

“And then, Pop, then we went over the last barren, brown peak and suddenly, suddenly there was this beautiful green valley. It was the first green I’d seen since the Sun Bowl. And a river too! And palm trees taller than telephone poles! And canals! It took my breath away.

“You yelled, ‘California,’ and a poem popped into my mind. This particular poem had never popped into my mind before—see, poems pop into my mind when I feel the exact way the poet did. Like the other day when we left the road, what popped into my mind was ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er blah … blah … blah.

“But this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay—I’ve had it memorized for two whole years and I’ve been waiting and waiting for something wonderful to happen to me—I don’t count my date—that was wonderful but not in the same way. You want me to say the poem for you?”

“By all means.”

“And as I looked a quickening gust

Of wind blew up to me and thrust

Into my face a miracle

Of orchard-breath, and with the smell,

—I know not how such things can be!—

I breathed my soul back into me.”

There was a silence. Birch sighed. “Did you feel like that, Pop?”

“Well, I was mighty glad to see Blythe, California and the Colorado River.”

“Edna St. Vincent Millay wasn’t a lot older than me when she wrote that—Oh, are we leaving the interstate again? We aren’t going across those mountains, are we? I haven’t even opened my California map.”

She unfolded it and turned it around. “I don’t have the foggiest idea where we are.”

He leaned over her shoulder and put his thumbnail on a yellow area. “Well, there’s Blythe.”

“You know what I thought was neat, Pop. At the Blythe airport you asked the lady where we could get something to eat and she told us to taxi over to the truck stop. So we got in the plane, taxied to the truck stop, got out, ate, got back in the plane and took off.”

Pop said, “We’re right here. We’re going to leave our old standby I-ten and cut across Eagle Mountain, Joshua Tree National Monument, and the Pinto Mountains. We’ll spend the night right there at Twenty-nine Palms.”

“Now this
is
desert we’re crossing over because I see it on the map. That’s Desert Center right, down there.”

“This land’s the same as it was a hundred years ago when the old Bradshaw freight wagons crossed it … Except I don’t reckon that mine was there.”

Birch pulled herself forward with the support bars to look.

“They call that Alligator Mountain,” Pop said. “You can see why.”

“Oh, look what they’ve done to that mountain. They’ve ruined it. Look, Pop.”

“I see.”

“It’s like something out of
Star Wars.
They’re cutting away the whole, entire mountain. I hate to see things like that. And that huge pile of dirt looks like it came out of a Jello mold. It’s so ugly.”

She watched the mine intently, then turned to Pop. “I got so upset about them ruining that mountain that I forgot to be scared going over it. Are these the San Gabriel Mountains, the ones I’m worried about?”

“No, they’ll be the last ones before the Pacific.”

“Are they worse than these?”

“That’s what they say.”

“You know what else I hate? I hate to see water that looks like melted ice cream—like lime or pistachio or buttered almond because water is supposed to look like one thing—water!”

She turned indignantly to the front of the plane. Then she fell silent. She felt as if she were looking at a planet that had just died.

There, stretching ahead of the plane, lay a broad, bone-dry valley, fenced in by mountains as barren as crumpled brown wrapping paper. Birch blinked. There was not a trace that a person had ever been here—not a tire track, not a footprint, not the glint of metal. She leaned forward in grim wonder.

“Pop, it’s like somebody leaned down with a giant eraser and just went over everything.” Pop was silent.

“Pop, what if we had to land out here? Nobody would ever find us.”

“We’d have a walk, all right. But remember we have a radio. We could call for help.”

“Pop, I can’t get over this. You know, every single place we’ve flown over, even the most deserted, there was always some sign of life, like a tire track or an abandoned shack, oil wells or pipe lines. Here there is nothing. And it’s huge.”

“The valley’s only about fifteen or twenty miles across, but when you’re only making fifty-two miles an hour, it’ll take a while.”

She leaned against the window, looking at the barren ground. “I guess I should be glad that there’s some place in the United States people haven’t found yet …”

“Birch, do you see that tiny threadlike line in the hills ahead.”

She squinted at the distant, ragged black hills. “Yes.”

“I’m trying to figure out if that’s a road.”

“I think so.” She looked down. “Pop, even dune buggies haven’t found this place.”

Pop said, “Yes, that’s a road. Right beside it is a sort of mom-and-pop mine, a shoestring operation.”

Birch peered at the raw unpainted board shacks, the rusting tin roofs. “No trucks, no people. I never see any people. I guess mom and pop gave up.”

“I guess.”

“Oh, Pop, look! There’s—” She broke off. “Oh, it’s another mine. It looked like the ruins from cliff dwellers for a minute. I mean if it wasn’t for the tons and tons of spillage below it.”

She shook her head in dismay. “I always had a thing about cliff dwellers and just for a moment, before I saw the spillage, I got excited.” She trailed off.

“I guess their mothers didn’t teach them to fill up a hole when they got through digging it,” Pop said. “Mine sure did.”

“Mine, too. You know what, Pop?”

“What’s that?”

“The California of my poem—the California that breathed my soul back into me—didn’t seem to last but about fifteen minutes.”

“M
OM, HI, IT’S ME.”

“Birch! Why didn’t you call last night?”

“I did! Well, I tried about fourteen times, and the line was busy. Pop kept saying, ‘Try again, try again.’ And finally I said, ‘Why are you so eager for me to get Mom? All you ever tell her is that we used one hundred and sixty-one gallons of gas.’ He said, ‘Well, maybe I’ve got something else to say this time.’ I go, ‘What?’ He said, ‘I’m not going to sell this airplane, that’s what.’ I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.”

“I knew that was going to happen.”

“I didn’t, but it made me real happy, because it just seemed cruel to sell the plane after it flew us all the way to California!”

“He’s probably changed his mind about the retirement home as well.”

“Yes, that too.”

“Where are you, Birch?”

“I’m at a pay phone at Apple Valley Air Lodge right now, but last night we stayed at a wonderful place called Twenty-nine Palms. Mom, it was beautiful with huge old palm trees and cottonwoods. The inn had four dogs—two were Saint Bernards, and they let Ace be in the pack. Mom, Ace has made millions of friends, and guess what!”