Settlement

Beer spoke of his father. How it had been in older days when Arizona was still dust and empty tracts and roads scraped through the ruins of Anasazi pueblos. All was construction. Resorts and ranches grew up out of the desert ahead of the city. Indians delivered water in dromedary sacks on carts muledrawn to feed fields of cotton. Prospectors raked the red cliffs and foothills for copper. The soil full of gold and dinosaur bones. Endless citrus. Mexicans. Transit land. Front yards on the frontier.

When work started on the dam on the Nevada border Beer’s father went north. There by the river men built towns of rags frozen in winter. They rode on machines and wore coats lined with coal. By day the rock and the steam and by night the freeze. Men died outright and were catalogued by height and weight, lumbered up on trucks and shipped back south. The machines picked on. Beer’s father gambled by firelight with the survivors. A gypsy read his future in a toss of pistachio shells. 

He quit the dam and returned home to find his wife pregnant. He got work painting flagpoles. Drive here, drive there, said Beer. Shimmy out over a ledge a dozen stories up, paint the flagpole, shimmy back. On long trips he slept on the soft shoulder in the trunk of his car with a boot propped under the latch. One night a highway patrolman tipped open the lid with his service revolver crossed over his flashlight. Beer’s father felt the beam shaking across his eyes. When he sat up the patrolman screamed, did a spin in the dirt and came back holding his hat.

I thought you were dead, he said. I thought I was looking at a corpse. 

Half a year later Paul Beer was born. At his first haircut the barber was drunk and cut off the top of his ear. His father had pulled the barber out of the bar to do the haircut. On slow days that was where you could find him. Young Beer held a towel to his head and felt himself bleed. Later he became a pilot and then later yet a man.