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

the heat, she put a wet cloth on my head, water dripping down my neck and shoulders, my face scrunching up into a good cry, but she hushed me without any sympathy. She wanted me to be able to think, to reason, which is where the trouble lay for her.
    My mother didn’t have to reason that morning, however. A mother simply tastes trouble; she feels it in the small of her back or in her blood or somewhere along her jangly nerves. Even ten miles off and blowing toward her, trouble was about as discreet as an ocean liner full of singing drunks. My mother said she suddenly smelled something carried on the wind: lye and dust and burnt liver or kidney beans, an awful combination that made her gasp. She hadn’t eaten much that morning and her stomach turned once and then she got ahold of herself. She dropped the suitcase right there in the road as if it was something that had become crude and pointless, and with both hands on the stroller she started running, barreling into the wind, pushing us madly up a small ridge from where, she hoped, we might be able to see the Barlows’ windmill. The stroller wheels kept hitting rocks and ruts, but she powered through, sending the stroller sideways and the front end off the ground. I slid down in the seat, crumpled formless as a pillow, laughed and squealed and did my best to kick away my shoes.

    On the broad Lincoln County range that runs from Nevada head-on into western Utah, sheep were grazing. The bells they wore jingled like a soft stuttering music out in no-man’s land. These were western sheep, medium-sized and perseverant, muzzles down in sagebrush and galleta grass. Though spread out and foraging, they still moved as a loose ever-present herd.
    The cloud blew over about nine that morning. The wind came with it, blowing to the east and then suddenly shifting north, stirring up dust devils, rolling tumbleweeds across the desert into the midst of the feeding sheep. They scattered with the noise and sudden movement. As the sky overhead turned dark, sheep dashed for cover that wasn’t there. The bells on their necks clattered wildly, bringing more confusion and panic. A fine dusty mist began to fall from the cloud and, like rain, covered and penetrated: the dense layered wool of the sheep, the heavy-leafed sage. The sheep veered right and left, stumbled and doubled back on themselves, and even after the cloud had passed, the bleating continued. They hopped and skittered at a falling rock, at a shadow, at a waving branch. Finally they lowered their heads again, though the ground and plants were now covered with a film of ash which lent a strange new taste to sagebrush. Slowly they grazed their way into the next valley.
    Not far away in Elgin, Nevada, three children came out of a trailer house and played in what they imagined to be snow. They spread their arms, ran in circles, and turned their faces up into the gray-white storm. The oldest one—the only one who could write—used her finger to trace her name through the snow collecting on the hood of a junked car in the driveway. She licked her finger to clean it and then cartwheeled while the two younger ones, in wet drooping diapers, made themselves dizzy spinning.
    From there the cloud moved due east—Nevada into Utah, though there was no marked change from one place to the other. It was all just dry unrelenting terrain. Here and there, almost like accidents, a tarpapered house sprang up and next to it the rotted posts of an abandoned corral, and in those lonely places a Basque shepherd or a used-car salesman holding a Geiger counter looked up, wondered to himself, and shrugged.
    A young husband, hauling furniture in his truck from Veyo to Santa Clara, was surprised by how the cloud seemed to engulf him andeven to move with him down Highway 18. He’d driven in bad weather before, sometimes been able to outrun the big spring and summer cloudbursts if he caught them far enough on the horizon in time. Ten