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

also somewhere out there being monitored in dry underground bunkers.
    Closing in on ground zero—less than half a mile—the sparse landscape turned empty. Trucks and equipment that had been left there were gone, everything flash-burned into the minute particles that fell, ashlike, here and there as a strange rain. Five hundred yards out, the assault vehicles stopped, the rear ramps lowered, the soldiers disembarked and began to move in formation up the incline where the detonation tower, now vaporized, had stood. The ground everywhere was winter white, but hot. Above them, the desert dawn had been erased by heavy black clouds, smoke, floating debris.
    Two hundred yards from center they stopped, and having fulfilled their orders and not knowing now exactly what to do, the sergeant stepped out front, smartly saluted ground zero, turned, and ordered the men to head back. With each heavy-booted step, the snowy dust and ash floated up so that from a distance the men looked as if they were moving, knee-deep, through clouds.

    Elly and Lewis Barlow, our neighbors, were card players—experts at Hearts and No Knock Rummy, tender for a game that they taught my parents called Michigan. Winter nights the four of them would be hunched over a kitchen table, moaning about what they’d been dealt. My mother never held her cards in close enough and oftentimes my father got a peek at the queen of spades or at a run or he’d push her hand toward her chest and give her a warning. “Lorraine, you’re showing us everything.”
    â€œWell, not everything,” she’d say, putting her cards down and starting to unbutton her blouse. Lewis smacked his cards face down and clapped. Elly squealed and took the time to roll a cigarette—Prince Albert in a can. My father got up from the table, stood behind my mother, and wrapped his arms around her, as if that was the only way she could be stopped. “Okay, okay,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
    Actually my parents were wrapped around each other like that almost half the time—embracing, clutching, hugging, pawing. With other men, my mother said she would have felt mauled, but with my father she felt her heart race, she felt her shoes suddenly wanting to be thrown off. They had sex like animals and she was not ashamed to say so: on a living room chair, in the root cellar, in the orchard during spring when the ribbon grass was still soft enough to make a bed. Nearby, I dozed or chewed my fist and waited.
    My mother knew that leaving wouldn’t be easy, and maybe that’s another reason we headed for the Barlows that morning: comfort and an understanding shoulder. Elly and Lewis had lived a fairly bumpy life themselves—fast times and booze in Vegas casinos—and they looked on other people’s trouble with gentle eyes.
    My mother gauged that we had gone over two miles and were more than halfway there. We had passed the S curve in the road a while back and she thought we must be close to Carpenter Wash, but time and long brown vistas mingled and distorted both. She prodded the stroller to the side of the road, found a flat rock, and we sat facing each other.
    â€œHuh, movies,” she said. “What baloney. What trash.”
    Months before at a nearby filming site where my father was caring for the horses used in breakneck cavalry scenes, my mother had met a brawny blonde named Jeff Cantrell, an in-demand lead for B movies, and she was thoroughly unimpressed. Brusque and egotistical, he spent too much time dabbing perspiration from his face and yelling for someone to bring him iced tea, and when she learned that his realname was Ira Kaufmann, she was even more disgusted. “What, is he ashamed to use his real name?” she wanted to know. All the hubbub and shouting around the set didn’t seem to foster any character in those people as far as she was concerned. Everyone was either whining or cussing or laughing with the