She leaned against him. “Shura, this all might look burned and brown now, but in the spring,” she said in a breathy voice, “the Sonoran Desert is reborn! With pale blue delphinium, white thistle, flame poppy, red ocotillo, blue and yellow palo verdes, and scarlet bugle. We can even plant some lilac sand verbena. You know how much you like lilac,” she cooed. “And prickly pears and pincushion cacti grow here …”
Alexander squeezed her little hand and raised his eyebrows. This was a much better conversation. “Babe,” he said, lowering his voice, and glancing around to make sure Ant wasn’t nearby, “in my lewd soldier’s world pincushion means only one thing, and you can be sure it’s not cacti.”
Tatiana tutted in mock shock, pulled to get away, but Alexander grabbed her, pulled her down onto her back on the blanket, bent over her, and said huskily, “Tell me, is there pussy willow in the desert, too?” watching her flush red, and forgetting all about flame poppy and scarlet bugle.
He let her shove him, scramble up, and run from him. He chased her, he chased Anthony.
He is making a silent movie with her, and she is moving in broken frames, animated and choppy, to the sound of the jerking crank. Her arms do a little flapper dance from side to side; her teeth are gleaming, she is tousle-haired and sunny, she runs after Anthony, her taut hips curve and swivel, she runs back to Alexander, her bouncy breasts bob and sway; she stands in front of him, holding her hands out to him, come, come, but he is holding the shaking camera, he can’t come. Her exquisite mouth puckers, her mouth in black and white—it’s a bow, a blow, a kiss, a gift that keeps on giving—and suddenly, a broken reel. Shura! Shura! Can you hear me? she squeals, and he puts the camera down and chases her, and somewhere in the Siberian juniper he catches her. She bats her eyes that squint upward catlike when she laughs, she parts her mouth and pleads falsely and merrily for release. Someday perhaps they will look back at the movies of this time, movies that will have captured the illusion, the fleeting joy that is their youth. Just as Soviet cameras once captured the snapshots of another her, another him, on the stone steps of wedding churches or near their long lost brothers.
Covered in sweat and sand, Alexander and the boy took off their shirts and fell down on the nylon tent covering while Tatiana dipped a towel into a bucket of water and cooled their chests and faces. Once he had only a soaked towel on his face as he dreamed of her. Now he had a soaked towel and her. He reached out, like a bear—and pawed her. She is here.
“I want the Biscayne Bay now …” croaked Alexander. “The Gulf of Mexico now.”
He got darkness now, and a sleeping son. The stars were all out, even Jupiter. She came out to him after putting Anthony to bed inside the camper, and he was sitting in a plastic folding chair, smoking. Another chair stood by his side.
She started to cry.
“Oh, no,” he said, covering his face.
Patting his shoulder, her voice low, she said with a sniffle, “Thank you.” And then climbed into his lap and held his head to her.
“You understand nothing,” he said, rubbing his cropped hair into her neck. “The lap was always so much better.”
Alexander had pitched a tent for them and built a small careful fire surrounded by stones right in front of it. “You know how I lit the kindling?” he said. “I held it to a rock for five seconds.”
“All righty, now,” she said. “Enough of that.”
They sat facing west, wrapped around each other, looking out onto the dark valley.
“When you weren’t with me,” said Tatiana, “and when I thought you were never going to be with me again, I bought this land on top of the hill. For you. Because of the things you taught me. Just like you always taught me. To be on high ground.”
“That rule is only for floods and war, Tatia. What are the chances of either here?” He stared into the blackness.
“Husband …” she whispered, “you see nothing down there now, but can you imagine in a few years’ time, all the twinkling lights from streets, from houses, from shops, from other souls in the valley? Like New York is lit up, this valley will be lit up, and we could sit here like this and watch it below us.”
“You said a second ago we were selling the land tomorrow!”
“Yes.” Tatiana was warm, open, until a part of her shut off, became tense like her fingers. Her wistful desire to see the desert bloom in the sometime spring was strong, but the trouble in her clenched hands was strong also. “Just a dream, Shura, you know? Just a silly dream.” She sighed. “Of course we’ll sell it.”
“No, we’re not selling it,” Alexander said, turning her to face him. “And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
She pointed to the tent. “We’re sleeping there?” Her palms went around his neck. “I can’t. My bravery is fake, as you know. I’m scared of scorpions.”
“Nah, don’t worry,” said Alexander, his hands tight around her ribs, his lips pressing into her pulsing throat, his eyes closing. “Scorpions don’t like loud noises.”
“Well, that’s good,” Tatiana murmured, tilting her head upward. “Because they won’t be hearing any.”
She was so wrong about that … christening their ninety-seven acres, and Pinnacle Peak and Paradise Valley, and the moon and the stars and Jupiter in the sky with their tumultuous coupling and her ecstatic moans.
The next morning as they raised camp and packed up to go north to the Grand Canyon, Alexander looked at Tatiana, she looked at him, they turned around and stared at Anthony.
“Did the boy not wake last night?”
“The boy did not wake last night.”
The boy was sitting at the table doing a U.S. puzzle. “What?” he said. “You wanted the boy to wake last night?”
Alexander turned to the road. “Well, isn’t that interesting,” he mused, reaching for his pack of Marlboros. “Something calm to make us sane.”
Missing Time
At Desert View, they stood over the ageless rim of the Grand Canyon and stared west into the blue haze horizon and far down to the snake of the Red River. They drove a few miles west and stopped at Lipan Point and then at Grandview Point. At Moran Point they sat and gawked and walked in silence, even the normally chatty Anthony. They walked along the rim on a wooded path under the Ponderosa pines to Yavapai Point, where they found a secluded spot to sit and watch the sunset. Anthony came too close to the edge, and both Alexander and Tatiana jumped and yelled, and he burst into tears. Alexander held him in a vise, finally relenting and releasing him only after literally drawing a line in the sand and telling the boy not to step an inch over it if he didn’t want a military punishment. Anthony spent the sunset building up that line into a barricade with pebbles and twigs.
The sun in the indigo sky set over the Canyon, painting crimson blue the greening forests of cottonwoods and juniper and spruce. Alexander stopped blinking, for while the sun was setting, the hues of the Canyon had changed, and he could not catch his breath in the silence while the cinnabar heat fell like rust iron mist over two billion years of ancient temples of layered clays and fossiled silt, and from its cream Coconino to its black Vishnu schist, all the ridges and Redwalls and cliffs and ravines, and the Bright Angel shales and the sandstones and limestones from Tonto to Tapeat, all the pink and wine, and lilac and lime, and the Great Unconformity: the billion years of missing time—all was steeped in vermilion.
“God is putting on some light show,” he finally said, taking a breath.
“He’s trying to impress you with Arizona, Shura,” murmured Tatiana.
“Why do the rocks look like that?” asked Anthony. His barricade was nearly a foot