Free A Brief History of Male Nudes in America by Dianne Nelson, Dianne Nelson Oberhansly

fake high-pitched laughter that she identified as Hollywood.
    Milo de Rossi hadn’t shown her anything different. My father had escorted him around our ranch for several days, pointing out box canyons and high rocky fortresses, and by the second day de Rossi was convinced that this was the place for his movie,
Apache Sunset
. He already had Audie Murphy lined up, he said. He hoped for Anthony Quinn or Lee Marvin as the sad-eyed Apache leader who would glimpse the future and see the pain for which his people were bound. De Rossi was still new enough in the business to be regarded with hope, but his lack of financial foresight and his thudding story lines would finally catch up with him, and in the years ahead he was destined for junk.
    Smoking fat Havana Cristo’s, he took pleasure in confiding in everyone at dinner each night: William Holden had a drinking problem; sometimes had to be thrown in a shower before he could complete his scenes.
    My mother shook her head as she served the venison or roast she had carefully prepared. Everyone ate as if they’d been deprived for months.
    â€œKirk Douglas?” he asked. “Know him? Gotta hire a full-time tutor to teach him his lines. Sorta like training a dog, I guess. A little thin between the old ears. Of course, this is only what I hear. I’m just passing it along.”
    My mother couldn’t stand de Rossi’s feral gaze when anything female moved past him. “Call me Milo, my dear,” he had told her as she bent over the oven pulling out hot rolls.
    â€œIf I had the chance, I’d call him a lot worse than that,” she told me as we sat at the side of the road. Her shoulder-length dark hair blewforward around her face, and with one hand she quickly gathered it up and held it at the back of her neck. With the other, she moved the stroller back and forth, gently rocking me in the sunshine. I babbled my heart out to her, kicked my feet, and squirmed in the cotton netting of the seat and these things she understood as my wanting to get back on the road. She picked up the suitcase, turned the stroller around, and shoved us forward.
    By then, in the far-off distance ahead, the sky was changing and at first my mother wasn’t concerned—a hundred changes rolled by each day in that enormous unpredictable sky—but as the disturbance came closer, she pushed more firmly against the stroller. From the first good look, she could see that it was not the deep pouting gray of a thunderhead. It was another one of those churning purple-black clouds from the test site, but it was larger this time and lower. In it, she saw sparks of light, glimmerings, electricity, she didn’t know what.
    â€œNothing to worry about,” she told me, though I wasn’t worried. I was happy, totally entertained. The scenery slipped by, right and left, like wavy blue and brown streamers. I pointed randomly and screeched.
    â€œTree,” she said. “Rock.” “Fence.” “Horse.” “Mountain.” She reeled off a vocabulary that I was at least a good six months away from, but she encouraged me to try anyway. She loved the sound of me, unlike Miss Lurl, my third-grade teacher who years later put tape over my mouth. “Miss Yakety Yak” she called me, and my schoolmates picked it up, chanted it at recess, whispered it down the rows at the spelling bee.
    My mother and I passed Carpenter Wash and then the wind grew stronger and came in bursts. My mother’s skirt clung to the front of her legs and flared out in back, waving behind her. She stopped, dug through the suitcase, took out a lacy white bonnet, and put it on me, drawing it down low over my forehead, tying the straps firmly beneath my soft clefted chins, which she couldn’t resist pinching. My mother loved all of me, but it was my head that she had high hopesfor and therefore protected—a bonnet, a scarf, a ratty straw hat used for gardening. Sometimes, in