Under the Rose. Flavia Alaya

was a friend who had joined them for the journey, Joe Detta, a tailor from New York, paesano, exhilarated like Mario by the romance of moving on. Joe was about my father’s age, smart, lean, hardhanded. He was a kind of immigrant Tom Joad, no wife, no kids, just a caring anarchist heart and a pure, clean passion for the road. I know he struck out for parts even farther west soon after we arrived in Tucson. Throughout our marvelous journey, even if we called him Uncle Joe for respect, we privately invoked him as “JoeDetta,” in one single, magical word. He stars in some of my vividest recollections of our first days in the Arizona desert, pointing the way like a shaman to the secrets of our astonishing new moonscape.

      Above all else, that journey taught us the authority of the continent. We might pretend that we had conquered every mile as we went, but the truth was that we had also humbly yielded it up again behind us. It took our little caravan about two weeks to cross the country, counted out in Route 66 telegraph poles and Burma Shave signs with messages we kids memorized frame by frame and sang out in competitive ecstasy from the back of the car before we even got close enough to read them. Every night we seemed to drop into the very same E-Z Rest Motor Court with the railroad tracks alongside, the same fifty-five-car freight train passing at four every morning. There was the occasional wayside farmhouse that obligingly took guests, where breakfast was a full-course meal around an immense table, already surrounded by men in dungarees with the size and appetites of giants, who would gently help us load our plates from enormous bowls of potatoes and grits and chuckle about how four little kids could really eat.

      Food was in every sense enormous that trip—a pure revelation of strangeness from day to day, like space itself, which seemed to have taken on a fourth dimension. I couldn’t have known the metaphysics I was in the presence of; I knew only that there was something about earth and sky both perpetual and friendless. I can remember waking up in the truck after nightfall, on a black stretch of barren Texas prairie somewhere east of El Paso, to see Dad and JoeDetta wrestling some huge thing in a ditch alongside the road, my brothers standing by, their faces lit with wonder in the circle of pink and orange light thrown by a crude fire, and my mother, behind them, lit with a fainter glow, watching with shaded eyes, unmoving. Ann still slept beside me.

      The boys toiled up the embankment to tell me with a hush of excitement that it was a steer the men had just pulled, torn and bleeding, off the roadside barbed wire, a fence that had for hundreds of miles marked the impassable boundary between ranch and road. A butcher’s child, I could not yet hate this work by which my father lived, but I was at once captivated and bewildered by the almost wordless rhythm of the hard teamwork of butchering, which I had never yet been permitted to see. Survival seemed suddenly to be more amazing, extreme, and violent than I had ever imagined. For a few days after, we bypassed the Bar-B-Q stands and ate our well-carved sirloins over open campfires like the privileged children we were, digesting the ambiguities of meat and meaning together.

      JoeDetta had a way of making freedom and love seem like nothing more than your plain two hands. He waited to move on until we’d found a little rented bungalow off the main road south of Tucson, hanging on maybe a month or so until we were settled, repairing the truck’s broken axle and hunting wild quail and bringing a brace back for supper, all with that innocent, unthankable air of doing what needed doing. He taught us about the stars, when the sky that had hung so bright and hot and close all day seemed to curve indifferently away from us at night like a great black dome pricked with light holes.

      The older three of us had started school (albeit reluctantly, sorry to leave the day school of JoeDetta) at a little two-room schoolhouse out beyond the desert flats, and were coming back from our first day when he met us at the porch, little wide-eyed Ann beside him. I was full of my first-day story. I had just set my dusty foot on the porch step, ready to announce that the teacher had said I counted so well I could move one row over to the second grade, when Joe said he’d killed a rattlesnake, and did we want to see it?

      We’d been warned about rattlers; it was their desert, really. But none of us had actually seen or heard one, and we followed him eagerly, fearlessly, as we always did, and the instant he said, “There,” we froze. Out of the brush came the chattering sound we’d been told of, and my first thought was that the creature Joe had killed had miraculously come back—the desert, to me, already full of miracles enough for such a thing—but no, there lay the dead snake, flat in the footpath. What we’d heard was another, a second one, and then we saw it, magnificently coiled and arched and hissing noisily two or three yards away, poised to strike if anyone dared to touch the poor dead thing lying stiff and papery in the dust. “She’s his mate,” Joe whispered simply, laying a firm hand on my arm, and we backed away, leaving the dead snake untouched.

      I did not ask how he knew, or how he knew she was a she. JoeDetta knew such things, and the tone of sorrow and tenderness in his voice became a key, unlocking the snakey universe and all its tragedies forever.

      Tucson, in those days, still at least a decade away from the Sun Belt, was nothing more than a cow town with a college. It had had its moment of Depression-era fame, when the Feds had caught Dillinger there in a famous bank-robbing shootout. That was before he’d become Public Enemy Number One, while he still had a grip on the popular mind as an outlaw hero. For us—as for him, I suppose—it was still the romantic Wild West, its few dusty intersections lying open to the unguarded chances of fate and adventure. But the romance had its menace. Around us stretched a bleak sand sea, harsh and hostile, the tall saguaro cactus marching away in files like an occupying army to a vanishing point in the flanks of the Catalina Mountains. And everything—and everyone—on this earth, under this new and inexorable sun, seemed blond or blonding: the houses built of adobe sand cakes, the tin-roofed cement squats hunkered down beside the runoff ditches along the roads, the roads themselves, the tanned hills holding up the sky like mounds of cornflakes, even the crouching little cacti looking bleached and crisp, disguising their pulpy innards. Only we were not blond, and the Chicanos, and the Indians who sought shaded street corners from which to sell their wares, the bracelets I loved that tumbled in rippling rivers of blue and silver across their blankets.

      Was I feeling what my father felt? Ten years before this westward trek, the already reinvented Mario Salvatore had invented himself again as an American. Proud, even smug in the faintly accented but flawless grammar of his American English, he had become a citizen with the zeal of a newly baptized convert entering the Church. Everything—his studied knowledge of American politics, his dedication to Republican self-reliance, even his devotion to baseball—had seemed preparation for a future symbolized by the Golden West, had made the troubles of the Old World seem ancient and inconsequential.

      And then Mussolini dragged Italy into the war on the Axis side and Mario felt the shame he couldn’t escape. Even his shoulder hurt again, where the shrapnel still lodged from the Alto Adige campaign. Digging in, he declared himself an American, and went to a nearby defense plant looking for work. And now, after fifteen years proving he wasn’t gangster, anarchist, mafioso, wop, he was suddenly belligerent, enemy alien—new names to cut him with like a steer in the barbed wire. So much for the America of the beckoning future. He took up his pen. In righteous anger, in his fine hand and perfect grammar, he wrote his complaint to President Roosevelt. Then he went on, uncertainly tossing about for work. Maria seemed to feel even more displaced. Her naturally shadowed eyes had become deep pools of longing from which he knew tears fell at night in the dark. Should he go back? What was there for him now if he did? In his life-odyssey, you always went forward. Back meant failure. It was closed for him, closed as water.

      The two of them schemed about another business they might begin independently, what they had perhaps hoped to do from the start. For a time he found work in town with a prosperous grocer who seemed to understand his plight. Afternoons, my mother would sometimes pile us into the truck and take us to visit him. We would prowl the store while she shopped, slipping comic books stealthily from the racks and sneaking off to read them because it was something he hated to see us do.

      The day waned, the palm trees cast long shadows across the tiled front plaza. I waited eagerly for his workday to be done, sitting on a low little wall and watching him, the prince of my Oedipal romance, pushing the day’s dust across the pink herringbone bricks with a long-handled broom.

      I think it must have been then,