got it.”
“Okay, first time. But it was—it scared us.”
“I lost my temper. There was no earthly reason for him to do what he did. He’s one of the most successful men in town, in the whole state. The governor—the governor, for Christ’s sake—calls him by his first name.” She was getting worked up again. “And we’ve got that house and those cars and you in a fancy-dancy eastern prep school, and a portfolio to die for. There was just no good reason.”
“Hey, Mom? I’ve learned something at the fancy-dancy school. Trial by jury? Innocent till proven guilty?”
She sighs and fiddles with the binoculars, her lower lip curling into the pout she assumes whenever she has to say something she doesn’t want to say.
“Honey, your dad admits to doing everything the people who are suing him say he did. Well, almost everything, and the houses are right there to prove it. He’s just saying, and the hotshot Phoenix lawyers are saying, that he had a legal right to do it.”
“What do you say?”
“I don’t like getting into the legalities, I’m not a lawyer, thank God. It wasn’t necessary, that’s what I say. He knew he was pushing the edge of the envelope, knew he was taking a big risk of getting sued and maybe worse, but he went right ahead with it. So now his reputation is on the line, his future, our future could be in jeopardy, and for what? The whole thing, legal or not, was kind of sleazy. Your dad always prided himself on being a class act, so that when you saw the Web-Mar logo on a development, you knew it was top of the line and on the up and up. This—this was the kind of thing some fly-by-nighter would do. Pull over, Doug.”
She’s spotted something, and he slows down and steers to the shoulder of the road. She tells him to back up, which he does, twisting and craning his neck to see over the stacks of boxes that partly block the rear window.
“Here. Stop.”
She lowers her window, the scorching June air smacking Douglas like a hot hand. His mother freezes the binoculars on several birds, perched on a roadside wire above a dry wash, and after looking for half a minute, she hands the glasses to him.
“Time for one of Mom’s pop quizzes. Identify them.”
Leaning over, he focuses on the stocky birds, a few drab females and two males with royal blue crowns and breasts and black eye-rings like masks. He isn’t sure what they are, and it’s hard to concentrate, what with his heart still fluttering from that remark she’d made about their future being in jeopardy.
“The females look like cowbirds, but the males like indigo buntings.”
“Close doesn’t count. Can you see the male’s wings?”
“They’re facing head on.”
“Which means, honey, that you have to get out and change the angle.”
From ten yards up the road, amid the heat and unearthly desert silence, he spots the rufous wing bars. She’s unbelievable, he thinks. How did she see them, going by at sixty miles an hour?
“Blue grosbeak,” he calls, and she sticks her hand out the window, bends thumb and forefinger to form a circle, then waves him back.
They drive on in silence for several minutes, crossing the boundary into the reservation, where she is going to deliver the stuff in back: notebooks, textbooks, pencils, used electric typewriters. Most of it was donated by one of the charitable organizations she belongs to. She bought the rest out of her own pocket, following the maxim that she repeats to her children every chance she gets: Much is expected from those to whom much is given.
The land on both sides of the two-lane asphalt rolls away, meeting, toward the south, the blue, hazy wall of the Baboquivari mountains. Dwelling place of the Papago Indian gods, his mother has told him, cautioning him to refer to the Indians by the name they have for themselves, Tohono O’odham.
“No good reason for him to do it, but there is a reason,” she says, picking up where she left off. “Your dad has this need to think of himself as a tough-minded, hard-nosed guy without a sentimental bone in his body, who never lets an opportunity pass him by and never lets anything stand in the way of him getting what he wants. Why am I telling you this? Same reason I tell it to myself. So I can understand him better. He’s just got to prove that he isn’t like