The Cursor Winks

I rolled outside with a second steaming cup of coffee, the morning expanding, possibilities opening. After turning down the wheelchair speed control, I maneuvered between parked cars, skirted the guard rail and crunched into the sandy strip along the tracks. The rails shown with silver, their sides with rust. The wooden ties baked in creosote. The rocks sighed. I sipped my coffee.

The office building's door banged open and Roger what's his name from Sales banged out to his car. In seconds he would notice me, the wheelchair man in no man's land. This might raise Roger's eyebrows, but he wouldn't raise the alarm to Dottie. So the crippled technical writer was eccentric. So he liked the non-pixel-based zone behind the office, however declasse. Maybe a wheelchair guy had some affinity with heavy grease and thudding wheels. I half waved at Roger, but he did not seem to notice. Roger of software sales, purveyor of the virtual. He would not even see the wheelchair in our local strip of Rust Belt America. Confident of my invisibility, I lifted the coffee cup in salute. Roger waved back. Whatever.

Time and caffeine would get you in a caring mood. Pretty soon Partners in Productivity would matter, brochures would matter, I would matter to my work, my work to me. One big productive partnership. Time and caffeine and sun.

You had to admit that Union Pacific had achieved something of a moonscape out here. You had to look hard to find a single weed. No dead grass, no thistles, nothing. California's arid ground burst into weedy life at a hint of rain. It took a lot to reduce the desert to raw mineralscape. Someone had worked hard spraying or burning. No, you had to rule out burning.

In the burning season every afternoon I would hurry home from fourth grade. When his doctor's office hours concluded, my dad would drive home, don old suit pants, and wander the empty fields, tossing matches here and there into the dry grasses. We were making a firebreak, he told me. At first he carried a rake and sometimes a hoe. By fifth grade, he had bought a flamethrower, a pump-action device fueled by a backpack of kerosene. As the rough clumps of desert stubble erupted into flame, the two of us would stand and watch dry brown turn to orange, then to smoky black and white. My father stared into each blaze as though extracting a message, rocking back and forth on his feet, hands behind his back. He seemed unaware of my presence, absorbed in the flames and their grim secret. Watching him, I grew frightened and attentive.

"Your mother is the vilest bitch in hell," he would say, regarding the orange flickers. A moment later, his childhood sweetheart Virginia Himmelstein would appear to him in the fire. He should have married her, he would tell me. Not doing so was the worst mistake of his life. That, and becoming a doctor. It was important to keep him talking, to calm him, all part of my life-and-death work of saving our family. I also watched to make sure none of his fires went astray. Several blazes had gotten loose in the desert winds, and my father had become a generous contributor to the local volunteer fire department. At dinnertime, he stopped tossing matches, surveyed the charred patches and pronounced his fires out.

Calming my mother required more vigilance and imagination, and my younger brother and sister weren't much help. I knew when my mother was feeling good, because she talked and smoked with her friends. She would light a cigarette, immediately light another, then another. As she talked, her gestures expanded, her laugh grew wild, and three cigarettes burned parallel in her ashtray. She smoked only one and did not appear to notice the rest. But other people did, and when my mother was at her high-strung, erratic worst, I felt the eyes of the locals upon us. Even I could see that she no longer went to town dressed as a doctor's wife, but did her errands in frayed gardening shorts, blouse knotted, hair askew.

As her divorce and my adolescence approached, she seemed to dwell in a state of tears, anger and accusations at me. She drove too fast along the desert roads, flying into a rage at whatever child was closest. I was siding with my father against her, she said, our station wagon bouncing through rocks and dust. I thought of the 50 cents I could make washing her car. Did I believe she had a drinking problem, she asked? No, I said, Uncle Dave, her brother, had the drinking problem. I watched her neck arch, her face tighten in anger. I said, "Uncle Dave joined Alcoholics Unanimous." I had deliberately chosen the wrong word and was pleased to see her pound the steering wheel and laugh as greasewood and cactus flew by. It was important to convince her I was a child and did not dread the hours alone with her after school.

Actually, if Union Pacific timed it right, they would only have to come through once a year with some weed killer. One spray, and that would be it. This kind of sandy desert liked to pack itself down. Anything, car tires, footsteps or the rain itself could do the packing. Even an eight-year-old with his lunchpail could trod down the desert grasses before they got a chance. I did this without knowing, five days a week, making the parent-instructed beeline up the dirt road to where the houses began and the school bus stopped. On the way I had a view of high snowy mountain ranges and fields full chaparral unobstructed by a single house or neighbor.

The dirt track got an annual visit from the town's road grader. Within the space of a half hour the metal blade scooped away the encroaching mesquite, gouged earth gutters along either side, and left mounded banks of adobe and sand piled fresh. The effect was permanent. The tracks left by the grader lasted throughout the year, despite wind, rain and cars. Their pattern, a tweedy herringbone, hardened to a gloss in places, such was the weight of the tractor's tread, the pressure of its steel teeth. The pattern moved one morning as I trudged buswards. My eight-year-old mind tried to grasp the phenomenon, whipping and sinuous, that slid ahead of my feet.... Snake. Large, bulging diamond-patterned skin, soundless and reptilian, throwing S loops flawlessly. Then it was gone, and so was I, stumpy legs running for my life.

The rattlesnake was pursuing me. I felt this, rather than saw it. I did not want to see it chasing me, up on its tail and rattle, across the desert. I don't know when I opened my mouth and let out the crying that sought no one or everyone. I was almost on the town pavement now, hundreds of yards from the snake, still bawling for my life. Ahead a woman ran down a driveway, her posture bent as though to be closer to my height. Her house dress was flying all about her and her arms were as open and ready as the blade of the road grader. She was going to scoop me. Which she did, pulling me to her breast, which was not warm but hot. We had both been running, after all.

It was Mrs. Pluckett, our closest neighbor. Mrs. Pluckett, my mother said, eavesdropped on the neighborhood's shared phone line, a partyline. I'd heard my father say that Khrushchev was towing the party line, so none of this made sense. I knew only that Mrs. Pluckett was a giver of hugs. On the slightest pretext she was inclined to put an arm around you. Her hugs were as puzzling and unfamiliar as the man hawking knives at the county fair sideshow. Yet her large embrace was something you could count on, and half fear, as you entered her kitchen with one of the Pluckett sons. The boys were bent on tearing up chaparral and building forts in the desert. A worthy cause, though something about their mother made you want to stay behind in her kitchen and eat oatmeal cookies.

For now, I was sobbing and tearing beyond control. Looking up at Mrs. Pluckett, I got out something about the snake. Her arm went around my head, soft dress and pulsing bra against my cheek. GraduaIly I opened my eyes and come to consciousness, crying clearing things the way a rain storm clears the skies. Mrs. Pluckett held my hand and walked me to the bus stop. My eyes were smeared, but I did not care. I did not even care that she was holding my hand in full view of Sally, Steve and Jason, third-graders who assembled each day for the bus. We normally busied our waiting selves by exchanging insults and kicking nuts from the neighborhood deodar trees. But not today. No one said anything. I waited unapologetically, holding Mrs. Pluckett's hand with something like pride.

I had never done such a thing with my own mother, neither the embrace, nor the handclasp. This must be the prize for enduring an ordeal, a rare, not to be repeated thing, especially the embrace with Mrs. Pluckett's warm scents and soft even swellings. The school bus drew up, brakes grinding, mechanical door opening.

One thing about the school bus, whatever happened on the school bus, stayed on the school bus. Hard to say why. But once you stepped off, the distractions and intensity of gradeschool took over. People forgot about your tears, and so did you. In the end you knew a lot about weed control. Whenever the end was, which you kept expecting and kept eluding. Because there was the next thing, even here in the rail barrens, a strip denuded and denatured, land reduced to its abstraction, the right of way.

The sun was beating on the back door of the office. The steel surface would be hot. Just grab the knob. The brochure was insurmountable. I had to watch every penny these days. Whims and indulgences had to be kept within budget. No they didn't, and this was a quiet no, a calming one. It led me inside, to my desk, to the phone and to the Amtrak 800-number where, yes, there was a train every day to Seattle where my brother lived. Every day including Friday. And as for wheelchairs, there was plenty of room, even a special room for special people with special needs. Which I booked, rattling off the number of my last remaining credit card. After which, I felt something like elation. The screen cursor winked at me and I at it.

How could people be productive without partnering? How could there be productivity without partners? This was how the world worked, particularly the industrial software world were development costs ran high, as high as expectations. And to keep those costs low and those expectations high, there had to be trust. Playing to each other's strengths, industrial science and computer science. That, by definition, was what made partners partner, producers produce. The knowledge that we were all in this together.