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

miles out of Veyo, though, this cloud had caught him, surrounding the truck in whirling sand. Particles hit the windshield and seeped through every crevice of the old Ford until even his clothes were covered with a fine light soot.
    When he finally turned off the side road and moved onto Highway 91, which led into Santa Clara and then on into Las Vegas, he was surprised to find a roadblock set up next to the Texaco station. He shifted down, idled forward, then stopped his truck and got out. Hours later, before the young man was allowed to go, the deputies burned his clothes, patted his shoulder to reassure him, and let him borrow a Texaco uniform to wear home. Even with her own furniture in the back of the truck, his wife didn’t know him when he drove up to their house and stepped out of the cab.

    My mother’s lungs burned from running. Her arms and shoulders felt disconnected and one of her ankles was swelling, and by then she realized the stroller wasn’t worth the trouble. She picked me up out of it, wrapped me in her arms, and she wished, for once, that there was more of her to cradle and cover me. She had run herself out, so she trotted on from there, off balance and heavy-footed, alternately watching the sky and the road and me.
    Coming in fast from the southwest, the cloud grew larger, its edges spreading like thin fingers. In the midmorning sky it appeared to be a piece of boiling twilight that had broken away from somewhere else. Instinctively my mother moved over to the far side of the road, putting a little more distance between it and us.
    I worked my arm away from my mother’s chest and touched herchin and talked to her in code—coos and broken syllables and among them she was almost positive that she heard the name John. Had the moment been different, she would have stopped, sat me in her lap, and we would have had a heart-to-heart, but as it was, we kept going.
    My mother had shaken John Wayne’s hand and that was about all. He was making arrangements for his upcoming movie,
The Conqueror
, in which he would play Genghis Khan and tempt Susan Hayward with his made-up almond eyes. It would be filmed not far from our ranch and he wanted to look things over, make some plans for his sons who would accompany him. Someone had given him a cup of coffee. My mother remembered Wayne stirring in two teaspoons of sugar and drinking the coffee so slowly that it had to be ice cold when he got to the bottom. He nodded his head shyly when they were introduced, stood up out of his chair and extended his hand, and she could see that he was a big sensitive meatblock of a man.
    Sometimes in panic and in trying to protect our life, my mother forgot things about the movies: the sweet temperate nature of John Wayne, the way Milo de Rossi had written my father a large check for his and my mother’s hospitality and it was that very check that gave us Christmas that year. My mother unwrapped her dream of a sewing machine and cried on and off all day.
    A mother’s intuition is seldom wrong and my mother’s was always right about her babies. If she was mostly right about Milo de Rossi, she was absolutely right about that cloud. We had to find shelter.
    She had taken only two steps off the road—toward a feeble overhang in the rocks—when she heard the long frantic blasts of a horn. My father, like a man driven by deep stinging forces that we couldn’t understand, had ingeniously spliced the ignition on the old Dodge flatbed and gunned his way to find us. His puzzlement and fear had grown by leaps as he found first the suitcase in the road and then the abandoned stroller.
    At the sound of the horn my mother turned and scanned the roadbehind until finally she could see the grill and the familiar green hood and the brown trail of road dust. She put her arm in the air and waved.
    When finally he was next to us, my father opened his door, the engine still running, and came around and opened the