The car hits a bump and the kids wake up. The four weary travelers pull into a long semicircular driveway and the car stops in front of four stuccoed pillars. Behind the pillars is an illuminated chandelier shining its light upon a dark, wooden door with inlaid stained glass windows so large that it seems to have been made for a giant. The white sedan’s engine shuts off and all four doors lackadaisically pop open. The driver, his wife, and his two young children have returned home. They exit the vehicle and stretch their legs, now stiff from a long car ride. The air is warm and still and beyond the sounds of the driver removing suitcases from the trunk, the sounds of the Arizona desert paint vivid scenes in the darkness.
The engine ticks with heat from the long trip. Crickets chirp loud and long and an unseen rabbit scurries into a nearby bush making just enough of a fuss to startle a dove that had been nesting in the tree. The dove coos angrily and perches itself on top of the clay tile roof two stories above the desert floor. In the distance, coyotes yip and howl at some fresh kill. The prey is probably no bigger than a rabbit or a pack rat, but the sounds reverberate to the very hearts of the entire family and without a single spoken word they all pause from unloading the car and try to gauge the distance from the pack of hungry snapping teeth to themselves.
“They got something huh,” the driver mumbles to his son.
“Yeah. Sounds like five or six of ‘em,” the boy says and picks up a big black duffel bag. He slams the door closes with his hip and waddles toward the door with the heavy piece of luggage. The family closes the car doors one at a time and they shuffle to the door behind the boy who stares at the lock until his father approaches with the keys. The lock clicks and the door swings open. The children trudge up the stairs and drop their bags in dark rooms. The bedroom ceiling fans of three separate rooms spin to life and the bulbs cast long beams of light into the dark hallway. The family undresses, turns out the warm incandescent lights and slip into bed. The house is dark and only the sound of a faint television set can be heard in the hallway accompanied by pale blue light that creeps out from under the master bedroom door.
Hours later, sunlight invades the house and the children are woken by their mother.
“Come on! You need to get to school! The bus will be here soon,” the mother gives the same message to both closed doors from the opposite end of the hall. Her shoes clack loudly on the hard wood floor as she walks. She knocks loudly on both doors and inside the quiet rooms the children stir from their beds. The girl is twelve years old and most of the room’s décor is functional. The closet is small but filled with clothing that lines the walls. A shoe rack has been fixed to the door and the remaining space is barely enough to constitute a child’s hiding place; a role which it took on at least once every time the siblings played “hide and go seek.” After her shower, she goes to the tight, fabric encased filing cabinet of a closet, removes a preselected matching outfit, gets dressed, and goes downstairs to pack her bag. Her brother is still upstairs.
“John, your son fell asleep in the shower again,” the mother bellows up the stairs.
Pounding on the door, John shouts through the crack.
“You’re gonna miss the bus… and stop wasting water! Martha, I told him.”
John returns to the master bedroom which is filled with cigarette smoke and the incessant chatter of the finance channel. Talking heads gossip about the price of blue chips and triple Q’s. The boy snaps to life and stumbles out of the shower which sits in the corner of his own bedroom. He slips in a puddle of water and crashes to the floor. The thud is heard straight to the kitchen on the floor below.
Martha, who spends most of her morning shouting at various family members hardly even glances upward before asking, “Are you ok!?”
The shower has leaked ever since the boy and his father installed it the year before and early morning slips have become commonplace. No noise comes from the bedroom.
“Larry! Are you ok?” his mother shouts again.
“I’m okay,” the boy dazedly shouts from a cracked bedroom door.
“Good, then hurry up,” she scolds and returns to the business of the morning: breakfast, phone calls, get the kids ready for school, feed the dog, get to the office on time. The smell of scrambled eggs and ham has filled the house and does far more to hurry the fourteen year old boy than the shrill call of his mother. Larry’s room is filled with posters purchased from trendy novelty stores at the mall. Every inch of paint has been covered by brightly colored paper with bold print that reads, “Rage Against the Machine,” or “Fight Club,” or “Have a Nice Day,” complete with a yellow smiley face suffering from an apparent point blank gunshot wound between the eyes. Covering the wall opposite the messy queen size bed are more posters; these posters are all filled with scantily clad women in revealing poses. One poster reads, “Double scoop: $1” and underneath stands a woman covered in melting ice cream as she struggles to maintain control of the cone in her hand. Others show women sprawled on the hoods of sports cars from far off European countries. The television shows a blue super hero with green hair as he does battle to save the environment. Larry is easily distracted by the cartoon and joins the rest of his family downstairs with just enough time for a glass of juice that tastes bitter against the minty flavor of his toothpaste.
The huge door swings open and the children step into the warm fall air. Today is the first day of school and the younger child is excited at the prospect of starting a new year with her friends.
Martha shouts for the final time of the morning as the kids walk across the street to the bus stop, “Jezzette: have fun, make lots of friends. Larry: be good and take care of your sister!”
Across the street, the siblings stand alone. They wave as their father pulls his white service truck out from the far side of the house. Gripped in his teeth is a lit cigarette butt and his eye squints to keep the smoke out behind prescription glasses that he only uses to drive despite repeated requests from his doctor. He flashes his children a look that is half smile and half growl and waves as though he were Miss America being driven on the back of a red convertible in a parade. John makes the turn off of 59th Place and speeds up considerably on Dynamite Road. As he passes, the sound of talk radio fills the air followed quickly by the scent of coffee and burning tobacco.
The children stand wordlessly and minutes later their mother can be seen locking the front door and getting into the white Cadillac in which they had ridden mere hours earlier. She pulls slowly to the corner and pauses to wave enthusiastically at her children who wave back somewhat apathetically. She turns in the opposite direction as her husband and the kids are alone. The children stand in a patch of desert by an old telephone pole and stare at their own home. The trees are manicured and the front yard has been filled with decorative red lava rock pebbles. The paint is white and fresh and in the backyard is a pool house complete with its own bathroom, changing room, shower, and media center. The water is cool and blue and the sod around the pool house is wet and green. Behind the backyard, in the final third of the property, sits an old barn which had previously been used to keep horses. Since then, the barn had been divided in two; one half has been converted to a shop room filled with exotic tools to fix a multitude of machines, the other half sat empty except for several rolls of roofing and a few buckets of tar to be one day laid on the flat roof of the pool house.
A long yellow bus with a jarringly loud engine comes to a stop in front of the telephone pole and the siblings, still tired from a long night and a busy morning, take their time to find separate, empty seats on the loud vehicle filled with loud children. The house is prominently located on the street and most of the kids on the bus know this home; they call it “The White House.” To the family that lived within its walls, however, the house became known as “The Ranch;” a throwback to a time when livestock lived in the barn and horses were a viable means of transportation. The house is located prominently on a busy street in the small desert community and with a population just over 2,500 people most everyone recognized it. Many people use the house to tell when they were halfway between Tatum and Scottsdale Roads. The bus pulls away and Larry takes a final look to see his Rottweiler, Heidi jumping frantically in the backyard as if to give the children a full body wave goodbye.
Ten years have passed. Martha and Jezzette sit at the dining room table as Larry walks down the stairs. The smell of fresh bacon and eggs sit in the air but Jezzette has already cleaned the pan that was used during the cooking process. They casually converse over their breakfast as Larry pours himself a glass of orange juice.
“Hey honey, you want some breakfast?” Martha asked the man in the kitchen.
“No thanks, I’m running late,” Larry told his mother.
“What are you doing today,” Martha asked.
“I’ve gotta go to the ranch. I think there are some papers I need from before the Army.”
“Oh! In that case, take your father some half and half. We’re divorced and I’m still doing his shopping somehow,” Martha replied.
Jezzette spoke suddenly with a mouth full of ketchup and egg, “Be careful if you go over there, that place went to shit after you left.”
The car hits a bump and Larry knows he’s home. The white sedan’s engine shuts off and the door lackadaisically pops open. Larry takes a moment to survey the building in which he spent his formative years. The paint is peeling showing the tan color underneath that hasn’t been seen since there were cattle in the barn. The red lava rock is mostly gone and tree that once sat in the front yard has been blown over in some recent storm. The semicircular driveway has weeds that have sprouted from the cracks around each brick in the path creating a field of grass in which you could still play basketball.
The lock clicks and the door swings open. Crickets chirp loud and long and an unseen rabbit scurries out the doggy door making just enough of a fuss to startle Larry. He walks through the living room which is now filled with parts for every appliance from a garage door opener to a can opener. Larry walks along paths that have been cleared away just enough to allow passage to the other rooms on the ground floor. He makes his way to the kitchen and puts the small jug of half and half in the refrigerator. In the sink are over a dozen coffee mugs, some with coffee so old that it has formed a hard brown crust in the bottoms of each of the glasses.
Larry walks back through the maze of parts and old furniture and starts his trudge up the dark stairs. The house is dark except for the sunlight that creeps out from the cracks under the bedroom doors and only the sound of a television set can be heard from the master bedroom. Larry turns the knob and walks into the only room which appears to be inhabited. The bed is messy and piles of clothing are scattered around the room as though someone had been sorting them, though Larry can find no discernable order. The ashtray is teeming with butts and another half dozen coffee mugs are scattered throughout the room. The television is tuned to an infomercial with the volume uncomfortably high. Larry finds a note under the obnoxious man selling exercise equipment. It reads:
“Boy- put my half and half in the fridge and leave the TV on so people think someone’s home.”
Larry exits the master bedroom, closes the door behind himself, and starts down the hall. The hardwood flooring is beginning to splinter and it has become so warped that the only sound Larry’s steps made was an eerie creaking. Larry pokes his head in the door where his sister used to sleep. The room is filled with clothing and shoes in big piles and against the wall is a stack of boxes marked, “Goodwill.”
Larry returns to his old room to find that the walls are bare and white. The tiny thumb tack holes which used to litter the walls have been filled with some thick paint that was used to cover the matte blue walls that were once so ugly they needed to be covered by rock bands, movie posters, and lewd women. The room is empty except for a black filing cabinet. Larry opens the top drawer, removes the only remaining file from a cabinet which once held the birth certificates, medical records, speeding tickets, and bank statements for the entire family.
The huge door swings open and Larry steps into the hot summer air. He lights a cigarette and walks to the bus stop at which he stood every morning for almost five years of his life. Larry turns around to face the Ranch. A neighbor driving a white pickup truck nods his head as he turns onto Dynamite Road and Larry waves back somewhat apathetically. The trees that have survived are over grown. The pool house has dirty windows which make it hard to tell that the pool had been drained some time ago and the sod is dry and brown. Heidi had long ago died of a cancerous tumor which slowly took her ability to walk. The barn had been divided in two; one half has been converted to a shop room which now sat empty, most of the tools having been sold during the divorce to pay bills, the other half was filled with old broken air conditioners, water heaters, stoves, washing machines, several rolls of roofing, and a couple buckets of tar which were never used to fix the roof of the pool house.
The house is prominently located on the street and most of the kids Larry went to school with know this home; they call it “The White House.” To Larry and the rest of his family, however, the house became known as “The Ranch;” since now it was filled with the wildlife that used to surround it. The house is located prominently on a busy street in a growing desert community and with a population of almost 4,000 people Larry feels embarrassed that people know it’s his house. Larry takes a final look at the house to see his old window. Larry holds up his hand and waves softly to give his childhood a silent wave goodbye.
