April Smith - North of Montana

IN THE DESERT everything is clear.

It doesn’t hit until you are two hours out of Los Angeles, past the tangled hell of downtown and the protracted ugliness of San Bernardino, beyond the world’s biggest freeway interchange where the 605 meets the 10 in swooping parabolic ribbons of concrete. It starts somewhere out there when the shoulders of the road turn to white sand and there are no more sky-blue town-house colonies popping up in the distant wasteland; when the air, thinned of pollutants, becomes light and transparent and you can see amazing details like rockfalls on the slopes of snow-topped mountains miles away.

Slowing down off the freeway, suddenly quiet enough to hear your very tires chewing over feathers of sand blown across the off-ramp, as the setting sun shoots every tiny needle of every single cactus with scarlet backlight, it hits. Desert clarity. The absence of motion, pressure, traffic, and people. A mysterious monochromatic landscape speckled with life. Your body settles down. The air feels spiritual — that is, filled with spirits that a tacky little town can’t restrain. Rolling down the gamy main street of Desert Hot Springs you want to shout just to hear how your own voice would sound as a loose uninhibited coyote wail instead of the tight pissed-off squeak with which you usually address your fellow man.

Poppy’s condominium is no great shakes for what it cost, set up on a ridge looking west over an empty shopping center with a Thrifty Drug and a Vons market, a KFC and video rental store, all new construction — clean black asphalt without a tire mark and spindly palms in redwood boxes. Carrying groceries to my car (if I don’t buy my own supplies, I wind up drinking Seagram’s at night and gagging on All-Bran in the morning), I enjoy the mild breeze and calculate that by the time the town grows big enough to actually support this overblown supermarket Poppy will be dead and I can sell his condo for a nice piece of change.

I know I am fooling myself with that kind of thinking. We buried my mother when I was fourteen, my grandmother was gone before I was one year old. One more trip to Eternal Valley Memorial Park would finally cut me loose from the already thin thread of kinship like rusty shears operating in the hands of one of those gnarly sisters of fate. It wouldn’t be a clean easy cut, not at all, but a slow severing with lots of fray and lots of pain. I can see my fingers stretching up last minute to catch the end of the line so I won’t fall into space, because without my Poppy I don’t know who I would be.

In fact, when I really look at our family, it becomes as clear as the lucidity of cactus spikes revealed by the blood-red sun that three generations of females have lived our lives not as free individuals but in relation to this one man.

Grandma Elizabeth was a policeman’s wife in a small seaside town in the 1950s — what choice did she have? When she died, my mother, aside from working as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, took over the solemn duty of caring for Poppy, preparing Koenigsberger Klops, his favorite veal and pork meatballs (when he worked the night shift, she woke up at five in the morning to warm them up for him in the oven). These past ten years it has been my turn (drawing the line at Koenigsberger Klops). We talk on the phone several times a week, I drive out to see him at least once a month. First thing in the morning Poppy is in my thoughts, sometimes with a fearsome rush of anxiety that he has died during the night, although I know he is independent and strong as a horse. When I have a question, his voice tells me what to do. When I screw up, his voice punishes me. I may be a hotshot federal agent who carries a gun and a pair of handcuffs (they’re light, you can throw them in the bottom of your purse trash) but my self-worth is still measured by my grandfather’s rules. From childhood he was my standard and my mother’s standard and I have always believed as innocently and completely in the rightness of Poppy as I do the American flag.

I am here for an overnight visit to wish him a belated seventieth birthday, but questions about my supposed cousin Violeta Alvarado and my father and the lost Latino side of the family are definitely percolating in the back of my mind, so that when I approach the tan steel door loaded with groceries, a birthday cake, and a duffel bag and hear barking from within, I am not pleased.

Sure enough it’s Moby Dick, one of Poppy’s whacked-out desert pals, and his friendly pack of killer Akita dogs, which he raises in a shack out there in the wilderness, illegally crossing purebreds with German shepherds to create these hulking muscular monsters with mottled gray fur and curling tails and schizophrenic personalities, just like his. Bikers and police officers with families buy them for five hundred dollars apiece.

“Freeze! It’s the FBI!” laughs Moby Dick, opening the door. I give him a wincing smile. His enormous bouncing belly is almost covered by a black T-shirt that says Fuck Dieting.

The television is on, beer cans on the coffee table.

“It’s about the dogs.”

“No problem.” He drags them out to the balcony by their collars and slides the heavy glass doors shut, shouting, “Commissioner! Your little girl’s here!”

I put the stuff in the kitchen. Poppy keeps a neat place. The dish drainer is empty. One box of Keebler’s crackers on the counter. Inside the refrigerator everything is low salt, low cholesterol — except for Bloody Mary mix and two New York steaks. At least Moby Dick isn’t staying for dinner.

“Annie!” He is there in the doorway wearing nothing but a white towel at the waist, vain as ever, showing off his extraordinary tanned barrel chest and weight-lifters ropy arms.

Even though he is seventy, hugging him bare-chested is an experience in maleness that brings back Sunday afternoons at the YMCA on Long Beach Boulevard, the reward for sustaining a perfect freestyle for fifty yards being holding my cheek to that strong upper quadrant — the compact pectorals, cool feel of chlorine-scented skin, dark furry hair surrounding a useless nipple, fascinating turkey folds under the chin, hard shoulders beneath my small naked feet as he magically lifted me out of the water to dive over his gleaming wet head. I didn’t have a father to teach me to swim; I had Poppy.

“Happy birthday. You’re looking great.”

“Not bad for seven decades on this earth. What’re you drinking?”

“Brought my own.” I slip a bottle out of a bag.

“White wine?” He shakes his head. “That’s the L.A. crowd.” Grabbing a handful of ice, “Hope you still eat red meat.”

“I eat it and I fuck it.” Beating him to the punch.

He cracks a can of 7UP. “Easy on the language.”

“Sorry. I wouldn’t want to offend Moby Dick.”

“Is that how Feebees talk?”—derisive cop term for FBI agents—“I thought they were educated bastards.”

I laugh. Here we go. “We try to be tough. Almost as tough as you.”

• • •

Poppy sits in a chair near the balcony wearing nothing but the towel, legs crossed demurely, drinking Seven and Sevens until long after it is dark and the relentless air conditioning has given me a chill. The dogs are still out there. From time to time they nose against the glass near his feet like canine spirits conjured up by the original Agua Caliente Indians.

I admit that the other reason I drove out to the desert was to tell all the details of my perfect bust at California First Bank to Poppy in person. How I was alone. How I staked the guy out and made the right moves and cuffed him with no assistance. How my brilliant interview technique led the suspect to confess to six other robberies. How it was so good it was pure sex.