Tours of the Black Clock

25

IT’S 1931 AND I’M FOURTEEN. My father’s ranch is hurt by the Depression but not wiped out. Around us farms fail left and right, the ones financed by the banks. There’s unrest in the valleys, the farmers and their hands seized by the malice of hopelessness. Every evening there’s smoke in the hills, and sometimes looking from my window I think the hills are shifting across the horizon. And then I realize it’s only that they’re alive with desperate men, thousands of them. In the nights when their hands are filled with torches it’s as though the world’s on fire, but I’ll come to see such fires the rest of my life. They’re there in the streets of Vienna seven years from now, I can already see them. And the smoke I smell, and the blood in my fourteen-year-old nostrils, is from a fire to come two years from now, fire and blood by my own hands. These fires might seem different, hopeless fires and fires of my own liberation and fires of triumph in the streets of Vienna. But the hate of them is the same, and the heat’s cruel and cold.

I lean out my window and breathe myself as full of it as my lungs can take.

My father puts rifles in the arms of the stablehands and the Indians. They’ll fight if the hills come to the edge of the ranch. My father’s happy enough to kill anything that sighs within earshot. It may or may not be he’s killed things before. Given my own talents, I can guess.

The hills are hungry, and I don’t doubt they’d kill every horse in the stable. Until nothing’s left but the red of their eyes in the snow.

When the crisis ends my father goes into town to drink. Oral and Henry go along. I wake at about four in the morning to the sound of our motorcar pulling up the road, and Oral and Henry propping father under his arms and bringing him in the house down below me. He moans in the living room. Oral and Henry laugh about a girl they met in a speakeasy. I don’t get back to sleep until around dawn, when Oral comes into my room and tells me to get started in the stables.