after his arrival. After she harnessed herself into the second seat, he briefed her on the controls and the instrument cluster. Arranged in a classic T, free of most electronic frills, it possessed the simplicity of a true workhorse aircraft, the kind he was used to. Looking at the array of clean analog gauges was like looking at the dashboard of a well-kept 1956 Chevy pickup: it stirred a feeling of cozy familiarity marbled with nostalgia.
“I love this old airplane,” he said. “A Hawker seven-four-eight is kinda like me, it’s a child of the sixties.”
Mary laughed. “I don’t see you as a child of the sixties. Can’t imagine you in bell-bottoms and a tie-dyed shirt, smoking a bong and groovin’ on the Beatles.”
“I did smoke, and unlike the asshole currently occupying the Oval Office, I did inhale, but I was a Rolling Stones man. I had sympathy for the Devil.”
“Oh yeah, I’ll bet you did,” she said, with a teasing flip of her honey-colored hair. He knew then that he was in for more trouble than he’d imagined.
Douglas
“He thinks they’re patsies. The slang isn’t au courant”—she comically exaggerates the French to show that she isn’t being pretentious, she hates pretense—“but you get what I mean.”
She sits in the passenger seat of her abused Cherokee, binoculars not much bigger than opera glasses strung from her tanned neck by a vinyl cord tucked into the cleavage of the bosom she tries to conceal by wearing a shirt that would fit his father. She does this because she doesn’t want people to take her for some babe with big tits instead of the serious woman she believes herself to be. The serious woman she is. Lucille Braithwaite has a sense of humor and a natural enthusiasm, but both are restrained by the lessons of her Mormon girlhood, which she’s never forgotten. Life is no gag, and we are here to merit the Celestial Kingdom.
“Yeah, I get it,” Douglas says, feeling grown up because he’s driving. Indeed, chauffeuring his mother makes him feel more adult than soloing in the Beechcraft in flight school.
“What’s more, he thinks his family has a history of being patsies. Not exactly the kind who get roped in by pyramid schemes, but dopes who let their principles get in the way of their self-interest.”
The inflection in her voice makes it clear that she, on the other hand, approves of such people.
“Like for example.”
“Like for example, some great-grandfather or great-great-uncle—I forget which—had a friend who was starting a chewing gum business in Chicago. He needed investors, you know, seed money, and asked the great-whatever to kick in and get in on the ground floor. He was a real old-timey Boston Yankee. Thought chewing gum was a disgusting habit, so he turned his friend down, who happened to be named P. K. Wrigley.”
“Like in Wrigley’s Spearmint?” Douglas asks, impressed.
“Like that. Disapproving of gum chewing isn’t what I’d call a moral principle, but maybe it was to a Boston blueblood.”
As she speaks, she looks out the side window, scanning phone wires, mesquite and palo verde trees, and the tall, prickly candles of saguaro. The back of her head faces Douglas, so that all he sees out the corner of his eye is the long, thick, naturally blond hair that very much contributes to the babe look she works so hard to hide with her baggy shirts and minimal makeup and sensible shoes. Too hard sometimes, so that the attempts to camouflage her physical attractions, by their very obviousness, call attention to them. That’s all right with Douglas; he’s proud that his mother doesn’t look her age and fits no one’s image of a mother.
“I think your dad thinks there’s a funny gene in his family, the patsy gene,” she goes on. “That’s why he came out West when he wasn’t much older than you are now.”
“On account of this gene?” asks Douglas, baffled.
“Because of, honey. ‘On account of’ sounds like some hick cowboy.”
“Okay, Mom.”
“He needed to get away from his family, I mean all of them, that whole clan, that tribe. He wanted to start with a clean slate. A nineteen-year-old ought to have a clean slate to begin with, but he felt that his family and all that history of theirs had scribbled on his slate and that, willy-nilly, he’d become whatever they wanted him to become. So it was ‘Go West, young man’ for him. What’s the West for? What’s it always been for? It’s where you go to invent yourself,