We waited in the car by a Chevron station while Daddy went up the street to the Golden Nugget. He had a twenty-dollar bill in his pocket he’d been saving for the quarter slot machines. He’d never gambled in Las Vegas before, so it came as a surprise when he told us what he was going to do.
“You never know,” he said as he got out of the car, “I might just get lucky. Might even pay for this trip.”
“Fat chance,” Mom said. “All we’ll be is twenty dollars poorer and a whole lot hotter.” Mom was against gambling in any form, said it was the work of the devil, but for some reason Daddy had his heart set on going. He parked by the gas station so we could get a cold drink or use the bathroom if we needed to while he was gone. He said he wouldn’t be more than twenty minutes, maybe not even that long. Twenty dollars was his limit and he would stick to it.
* * * * *
It was over one hundred degrees in the sun and not much cooler in the shade where we were parked with the windows down hoping for a breeze. I was glad mom made me wear a skirt and a blouse. My usual tomboy jeans would’ve been way too hot in this heat. None of us kids were complaining about anything because we were totally drained. All we wanted to do was get back to our home on the avenues in Salt Lake, but that was a good day’s drive from Las Vegas and it was already lunchtime.
We’d been visiting Uncle Wilford and Aunt LaRue in Long Beach, something we’d been doing every summer since Dwight Eisenhower became president. Uncle Wilford was Mom’s older brother. He’d moved to California after the war and prospered there. He was now a vice-president at Wells Fargo, a handsome, blond man who always seemed to be in a good mood. It was hard to believe he and Mom were related.
I looked up the street. “Is that north?” I asked Mom, pointing in the direction Daddy had gone.
“No,” she said. “I think it’s east. Why?”
“I want to see a mushroom cloud from an atomic-bomb test. I heard on the news they set them off just north of Las Vegas.”
“Oh honey, I’m sure they do that hundreds of miles from here. They wouldn’t explode one so close to a city full of people.”
“Yes, they do, Mom. They said it’s about an hour away and you can see the mushroom cloud from right here in Las Vegas when one goes off. And you can feel it, too, like an earthquake.”
“Well, if they set one off before your dad gets back, I’m going to be furious. I don’t want to be in the same state with one of those awful things.”
As we sat there wilting in the heat, a bum came staggering toward us down the street. He seemed to be moving in slow motion. Despite the oven-like temperature and the almost-visible heat waves rising from the pavement, he was wearing a coat buttoned up in front and baggy pants that looked like they were covered in grease. Don’t bums get hot? I wondered. Don’t they sweat? The man stopped two cars in front of us and began peeing in the gutter. Mom saw him too. “Don’t look, children,” she said, but that had the opposite effect of what she intended and all of us kids watched in amazement as the man relieved himself right there in front of us.
“That is so disgusting,” Mom said. “No wonder I feel like I have to take a shower every time we come through this place.”
After the man finished his business, he continued his unsteady journey. He passed so near to us I could’ve reached out and touched him, but I don’t think he cared whether we were there or not. He just went on down the street followed by a horrible smell that made us hold our noses. We would’ve rolled the windows up but it was just too hot.
“Mom, why are there bums in the world?” my little sister Janey asked.
“Because they’re lazy and don’t want to work,” Mom answered. “And because they like to drink.”
I once asked Daddy the same question. We were driving along Second West in Salt Lake near Pioneer Park not far from the Rio Grande train station, a neighborhood that always had lots of bums.
“Because some birds fall from the nest,” was what he said to me.
At first, I didn’t understand what he meant. After thinking it over, I asked, “Are you talking about people like Uncle Glenn?” Daddy’s younger brother had been born with what the family called “diminished capacity.” He lived alone in an old part of town and his only job was stocking shelves at a small grocery store. He’d been there for years. Daddy helped him out by giving him money from time to time, especially at Christmas and family reunions. Mom said Daddy was awfully good to his brother.
“I’m talking about all the Uncle Glenns,” Daddy said, as we turned the corner.
It didn’t hurt my feelings that Daddy went off by himself to the Golden Nugget. He worked hard six days a week and didn’t have time for himself. He didn’t go fishing and didn’t play golf. And as much as he liked Uncle Wilford and Aunt La Rue, they were Mom’s family, not his. He said he was only going to be gone a few minutes and I didn’t think he was being unfair to anyone by going. Still, I was getting a little impatient.
“How long does it take to put some quarters in a slot machine, anyway?” I asked Mom.
“Too long, if you ask me,” she said. “But your dad never worries about how long he keeps us waiting for anything. He does what he wants to do.”
I didn’t think Mom was being fair at all, she’s the one who makes us late all the time, but I wasn’t going to argue with her. She already thought I took Daddy’s side in too many of their arguments.
I noticed the bum again. He was walking up the other side of the street in the direction he’d come from. And just then I saw Daddy coming back from the Golden Nugget. He was heading straight toward the bum.
As he approached the man, Daddy pulled something out of his pocket and gave it to him, probably a dollar bill or a handful of change. He was always generous with bums. Too generous, according to Mom. She didn’t think he should give them anything. “He’s just going to spend it on liquor,” she would complain.
“That’s not for me to say,” Daddy would respond.
From the way Daddy walked, I guessed he’d spent his ten dollars and didn’t have anything to show for it other than a few minutes of fun. But when he got in the car, I suddenly had the feeling that something was up. Something about him was different.
“So?” Mom said.
“So, what?”
“You know what I mean. Did you win anything?”
Daddy slowly broke into a smile and said, “As a matter of fact, Louise, I did. I won six hundred dollars.”
“Six hundred dollars!” we all said more or less in unison. Six hundred dollars was a lot of money. You could buy a used car with six hundred dollars. I’d seen the ads on TV.
“What’re you going to do with the money?” my little brother Richie asked Daddy.
“Hold on now,” he said. “Before we get into all that, who’s hungry? Why don’t we go to that restaurant we stopped at last year—the one with the great French fries and the little juke boxes at each booth—and have a late lunch? There won’t be anything for a hundred miles once we leave Las Vegas. We’ll spend the night over in St. George.”
“Can we stay at a motel with a pool?” Richie asked.
“Sure, if we can find one that has any vacancies,” Daddy said. “It’ll take a couple of hours to get over there. And don’t forget, we lose an hour when we change time zones.” Daddy was in a good mood. I was happy for him.
Both of my parents were good people, always doing things for others. Mom, for all her complaining about a lack of self-reliance in the country, was always taking dinner to someone who was sick or had a new baby or a death in the family. Daddy didn’t have time to do things like that because he worked such long hours six days a week at his store, but when someone happened to be “down on his luck” as he called it, he was always willing to help that person out with a little extra cash. We weren’t even halfway rich, he said, but we had enough that we could afford to share a little bit with others in their time of need.
It was our Mormon faith that brought out the differences between them. Mom was more devout than Daddy, there was no other way to put it. She believed everything without question, went to every meeting, read every scripture and saw signs just about everywhere that the Second Coming was close at hand. She wasn’t always like that, but she had a scary experience when Janey was born and thought she was going to die. She was sick for a long time. That’s when she began to change.
Daddy said Mom had enough food stored in our basement to feed an army, mostly large cans of wheat we would have to grind in an emergency to eat, along with many kinds of canned and packaged foods. She also had dozens of large bottles of water and all the fruits and vegetables she’d canned in the summer. It was our “two-year supply” that all good church members were supposed to have on hand in case of disaster. Daddy thought all we really needed was maybe a few weeks’ worth of food, but he willingly supported Mom. He went to church most Sundays with the family because he enjoyed being with us on his only day off and because he liked singing the hymns. Otherwise, I think he would’ve preferred to stay home and read the paper. I heard him tell Mom one time that if she wasn’t so anxious to get to the next life, she might enjoy this one a little more. He was in the doghouse for days after that.
* * * * *
After we ate, we continued across the desert on Highway 91. As we settled into the ride, our parents started arguing about the money Daddy won.
“What’re we going to tell people?” Mom asked.
“About what?”
“The money. How’re we going to explain it?”
“The way I see it,” Daddy said, “that’s nobody’s business. Why do we have to say anything?”
“Well, first of all, the kids will have it all over the neighborhood before sundown tomorrow. And then there’s the question of tithing.”
“If tithing’s what’s troubling you,” Daddy said, taking the money out of his pocket while holding onto the steering wheel with his right hand, “here: Count out sixty dollars, put it in your purse, and when we get home, we’ll have tithing covered. No problem.”
“But we can’t pay tithing on gambling money. That’s unclean money.”
Daddy sighed. “Louise,” he said, “I swear, sometimes you take all the joy out of life.” He stuck his arm out the window with the money whipping in the breeze. “Is this what you want me to do? You want me to just throw it away? I can do that, Louise, I can do it right now. Some poor soul thumbing a ride will think he’s died and gone to heaven. He won’t worry whether it’s clean or unclean at all.”
“Stop it,” Mom said. “Just stop it. Forget I said anything.”
“I didn’t win this money to cause trouble, Louise,” Daddy said. “I didn’t expect to win anything at all. It was a gift, a wonderful surprise.”
He stuffed the money in his shirt pocket and we settled in for the long drive. I thought Daddy could’ve been a little nicer to Mom, but she seemed to get mad at him even when he was.
We had all our windows down as usual and the wind that blasted in and messed our hair up—natural air conditioning Daddy called it—was the only noise we heard. Daddy had his left arm out the window as he normally did when driving and I watched as the wind swirled the dark hair on his arm. I liked looking at his arm. It was big and tan and muscular and it always made me feel safe and protected. Uncle Wilford said Daddy looked jaunty when he drove, like Franklin Roosevelt. Maybe he did, I thought, but only if Franklin Roosevelt had no hat, no glasses and no cigarette.
They had a routine, our parents did. Daddy drove and Mom watched him like a hawk to make sure he didn’t get sleepy. She never slept and I don’t know how she did it. She must’ve stayed awake through sheer will power. I think she felt it was her job to make sure we got to our destination safely, even if it meant she had to make Daddy mad to do it.
We kids had a routine, too. I always sat in the seat on the left and Richie always sat in the seat in the right. Poor Janey always got stuck in the middle. Richie always drew an imaginary line somewhere between him and Janey and he would threaten to beat her to a pulp if one hair on her head crossed over onto his side. He didn’t threaten me because he knew I wouldn’t put up with his crap anymore. I knew his threats were largely empty, anyway, and the worst Janey would get would be an attempt to put his hands around her wrist and give her a wrist burn. Richie talked tough, but I knew he was just bored from so many hours in a hot car. We all were.
Suddenly, Daddy spoke up again.
“You know, Louise, I was thinking. We could make a donation to the church. It could be used for the poor or the missionaries, maybe the building fund—whatever the need is. It’d be a gift, an offering. Would that make you feel better?”
“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” Mom said.
“Okay. I’m just saying I don’t have any problem sharing our good fortune with the Lord, no problem at all. I’m not a gambling man, Louise, you know that. Hell, I don’t even know how to gamble. That’s why I played the slots. You don’t have to know how to gamble to play a slot machine. You just pull the handle. So, I won a few dollars. It was pure dumb luck, that’s all it was. We should be happy instead of fighting.”
“Can you tell me why you went to that casino today?”
“I don’t know why I went in that damned casino. I just had an urge to stop for a few minutes and play the slots, that’s all. It was the only thing I wanted to do just for me this whole trip. I wish you wouldn’t hold it against me.”
“What I hold against you is the bad example you are to your children. You ought to be ashamed.”
And with that, Mom fell into one of her silences. I had the feeling she would stay silent until we reached St. George. She didn’t even chew Daddy out for using a cuss word in front of us kids.
I felt bad our trip was ending this way. We’d had a great time in California. We always do something special when we visit Uncle Wilford and Aunt La Rue and this year we’d gone to Disneyland, which had just opened. We had so much fun we went back a second day. I think Daddy and Uncle Wilford had as much fun as any of us. Those two were like a couple of kids themselves. They rode every ride and ate ice cream every time they found an ice-cream shop. But Mom didn’t seem herself on this trip and got angry over the littlest thing Daddy said or did. Daddy joked that it took three days for Mom to get over being mad, about as long as it took Jesus to be resurrected. I thought Mom was going to have a heart attack over that.
“Why’s Mom so grouchy?” I asked him one night before we left home.
“Oh, she’s just going through some difficulties right now,” he said, without specifying what those difficulties were. “She loves you more than anything, so just keep loving her back, okay?” I still didn’t know why Mom was so grouchy, and I was worried about her. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard her laugh.
“How much longer?” Richie whined. He was slumped down in his seat and had run out of things to do to distract himself.
“Two hours,” Daddy replied. He always said two hours no matter what. We could be around the corner from our destination and he would still say two hours. He thought it was funny. It used to annoy me when I was younger, but now I was beginning to think it was funny, too. Besides, what difference would it make? Knowing how much longer we would be in the car didn’t make us get there any faster. Sometimes knowing was worse than not knowing.
It did seem like forever, though, as we drove across Nevada and the northwest corner of Arizona, mile after mile of emptiness with nothing to look at but barren desert outside and the back of Daddy’s seat in front of me. I found myself thinking how nice it would’ve been if we’d taken the train like Lana Stevenson did with her family last year when they went to San Francisco. That way, we could’ve gotten up and walked around when we got bored instead of just sitting in the car hour after hour with hot air blowing us to pieces.
At least I was sitting on the left side of the car and would have a good view to the north if a bomb exploded. I asked Daddy how often they set one off and he said he didn’t know. “They detonated several back in the spring,” he said. “I guess they could set one off anytime, but then they might not do another test the rest of the year.” I continued staring off to the north.
It was impossible not to think about the bomb. Everyone talked about it, all the time. Our neighbors, the Holts, moved to Montana because they said the Russians were going to attack on Christmas Day and it would be safer up there. Daddy told Mom he thought the Holts were idiots, but he wished them well anyway. Mom made them brownies to eat on their journey.
From fourth grade on, we had bomb drills in my elementary school. When the bell sounded the alarm, we would leave the classroom and go out into the hallway. We would then sit under our coats until the “all clear” bell rang and we could go back into our classroom. It seemed silly to me. Other than not worrying about flying glass from the windows in our classroom that would be blown out, how could we possibly be safer out in the hallway? If the Russians dropped a bomb on us, we probably wouldn’t survive anyway. All those bomb drills did was scare us to death and cause us to have nightmares. I’d heard that the junior high school I would be going to in the fall didn’t do bomb drills. I didn’t know why, but I was looking forward to it. I was sick to death of being scared of the bomb all the time. We all were.
* * * * *
Finally, we crossed the state line. “WE ARE NOW…IN…UTAH,” Richey yelled, as we passed the sign saying “Welcome to Utah.” As happy as I was to be back in my home state, it was just as hot as it had been in Nevada, maybe even hotter. But left behind somewhere in all that emptiness we’d traveled through was any talk or argument about the money Daddy won and what we were going to do with it, which was a big relief. I was beginning to think it was true that money couldn’t buy you happiness because it had brought us nothing but unhappiness from the moment Daddy got in the car back in Las Vegas and told us about it. Six hundred dollars was a nice amount, but it wasn’t worth having my parents fight over it. I didn’t care how much money they had. I just wanted the two of them to be happy together.
Now that we were in Utah, we were on Mountain Time instead of Pacific Time and we’d lost an hour, just as Daddy had said. We were in another world, too, one Mom believed was free of sin, unclean money, and atomic bombs. Her mood improved a lot once we crossed the state line. She became almost giddy, raving about the beautiful red-rock canyons we passed, as if she had never seen them before.
There was maybe an hour of daylight left as we drove into St. George. For most people, this little community was just a stopover on the way to somewhere else. Other than the shining, white temple in the center of town, nothing stood out. The main road was one long stretch of motels, gas stations and cafes. After all the emptiness we’d driven through to get there, though, it was a beautiful oasis to me, a carpet of light green surrounded by red rock desert beneath an endless blue sky. Even though it was still light, a pale half-moon was coming up over the bluffs to the east. Tomorrow was sure to be another beautiful day, and once we left the red-rock desert behind, it would be cooler, too.
By some miracle, we found a motel with a swimming pool up front behind a pink cinder-block wall. It had one double room left. Daddy didn’t even ask Mom if she wanted to look at the room first. He took it on the spot. Janey and I would share one of the beds; Richie would sleep on a rollaway. It was just one night and the room had air conditioning. I think we were all so hot we’d have gladly slept on a cement floor as long as there was air conditioning.
“Hurry up and get your suits on, kids,” he said. “They close the pool in thirty minutes.”
The pool was surprisingly big for a motel pool and we swam and splashed until the motel manager closed it down. Afterward, Daddy asked if anyone wanted to get dressed and walk down the street to an ice-cream shop he’d seen as we drove by. Mom said he could take me if I wanted to go, but she was going to put Richie and Janey to bed. She said they were exhausted and needed to get some sleep. Richie whined for a minute, but calmed down when Daddy said he’d get him all the ice cream he wanted the next day. Janey fell asleep in Mom’s lap.
My long hair was still wet as Daddy and I walked down the street. I enjoyed having him to myself. It didn’t happen very often. It was getting dark but we could still see the fiery red glow of the sun as it went down behind the mountains to the west and that got me thinking of Atomic bombs again.
“Why do they test atomic bombs in Nevada?” I asked Daddy.
“To see how they work, I guess. So they can make them better.”
“No, I mean why there instead of somewhere else?”
“Well, probably because there’s nothing out there. Just a lot of empty desert.”
“But Las Vegas is there. They said on TV it’s only 65 miles away from the test site. How can they set them off so close to Las Vegas? Isn’t it dangerous to be there when one goes off?”
“I guess not,” Daddy said, “or they would do it somewhere else.”
“Can you see them from here when they go off?”
“I’ve heard you can see flashes of light in the western sky, but I’ve never been here to see for myself.”
“What happens to all that radioactive stuff they put out?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it just falls to the ground. Or maybe the wind blows it away.”
“Are we safe here? Mom thinks we are.”
“Well, the government says we’re safe here, so I guess she’s right. The blast site’s a long way away, over a hundred miles. Anyway, we don’t live here, so I don’t think we have anything to worry about. We’ll be gone in the morning.”
“What about the people who do live here? I read in the paper that sheep in western Utah have been dying mysteriously and they think it has something to do with the bomb blasts. If sheep are dying, couldn’t people could die, too?”
Daddy took my hand before answering. “That’s a good question, sweetheart, a really good question, but I just don’t know the answer to it.”
It was almost completely dark now, but it hadn’t cooled down much at all.
“Wouldn’t it be weird,” I said, “if we were safer back in Las Vegas than we are here?”
“Yes,” Daddy said. “That would really be something.”
“You know what?” I said as we walked along the warm sidewalk. “You remind me of Ozzie Nelson.”
“I do? Why’s that?”
“Because he’s always going out for ice cream. He never leaves the house except to go out for ice cream. He never goes to work. He never travels anywhere. All he does is go out for ice cream.”
Daddy laughed. “Sounds like a great life to me,” he said, “as long as I could get chocolate.”
As we approached the ice cream shop, I noticed a family sitting in an old Plymouth by the side of the road. It had Idaho plates. A girl my age was sitting in the back by the window staring at me. At first, I thought they might be eating ice cream, but as we passed by, I didn’t see any. They were just sitting there. They looked as hot and miserable as we must’ve looked sitting in our car back in Las Vegas. We were almost past the car when the man sitting in the driver’s seat got out and called to Daddy.
“Excuse me, sir, but do you live around here?”
Daddy had to turn around to answer him. “No, sorry. Just passing through. Can I help you with something?”
The man hesitated. “We’ve got car trouble,” he said. “I was hoping you could recommend a good place I could have it towed to in the morning to get it fixed. Maybe someplace that wouldn’t charge too much.”
“I wish I could help you,” Daddy said, “but we’re just passing through. I don’t know St. George at all. I’m afraid you’ll need to ask someone local about that.”
“Thank you,” the man said. He got back in his car and we went into the ice-cream store.
Daddy was disappointed when it was our turn to order because all they had was soft ice cream and the only flavor they had was vanilla. “I can make you a chocolate sundae by pouring chocolate syrup on it,” the dark-haired girl behind the counter offered.
“Give me a double shot of chocolate syrup and you’ve got a deal,” he said.
As we ate our ice cream, I asked Daddy what a mood disorder was.
Daddy gave me a funny look. “Where in the world did you hear that term?” he asked.
“I heard Aunt LaRue talking to Mom about it. Is that what Mom has? Is that what’s making her so cranky?”
“I don’t honestly know, sweetheart, but I think Aunt LaRue has convinced Mom she needs to see a doctor when we get home. I really hope she can get some help.”
Daddy kept staring out the window at the family in the Plymouth, even as we talked. They were still sitting there. No one had moved. When he finished his sundae and they still hadn’t moved, he said, “Wait here for me. I’ll be right back.”
“I know what you’re going to do,” I said.
“No you don’t, smarty-pants, because I don’t know myself what I’m going to do. I’m just going to talk to them.”
“Uh huh,” I said.
He went outside and talked to the man again. He talked to him for several minutes and I became distracted by the zillions of bugs collecting on the outside of the ice-cream store window. They were bigger and creepier than anything we had at home and I wondered what it was about the desert that created such monstrous creatures.
Finally, Daddy came back inside and sat down. Although his face didn’t give anything away, I knew what he’d done. “You gave him the money, didn’t you?” I asked.
He nodded at me and said, “Yes, I did. I really had to twist his arm to get him to take it, though. He was a very proud man. But he needed help. He’d lost his job. He said they didn’t have enough money to stay in a motel and get their car fixed. They were going to stay in their car all night.”
I looked outside and watched as the man in the Plymouth got out of his car and walked across the street toward one of the older motels. It looked a little run down and had individual units they called cabins when Daddy was young. It didn’t look as nice as our motel, which was more modern, but its vacancy sign was still on, so maybe they would be able to get a room. I hoped so.
As Daddy and I walked back up the street toward our motel, I asked him, “Is it okay to give someone gambling money? Mom said it’s unclean.”
Daddy took his time answering me. “How you get money is one thing, sweetheart, and I know gambling isn’t the best way to get it. Your mom’s right about that.” He took my hand in his. “What you do with it is something else. What better use could I have made of that money? I didn’t have it when I walked into that casino and I won’t have it when we get home, so I won’t really miss it one bit. None of us will. It’s almost as if that money wasn’t meant for us at all.” He squeezed my hand, and we walked along in silence for a minute or two.
“What do you think Mom will say when she finds out?” I asked.
“Well, we’ll know soon enough,” he said. “We’re almost back to the motel.”
But Mom was asleep when we went inside our room, snoring softly with her face toward the wall. The air conditioner was whirring away in the window. Before going into the bathroom to get undressed, Daddy leaned down and gave me a kiss on the forehead.
“Goodnight,” he whispered. “Thanks for going with me tonight.”
And then he bent over and gave Mom a kiss. And that’s when I knew that no matter what happened in the morning, everything would be okay. For all her complaining about Daddy, for all her grouchiness and bad moods, I think Mom knew Daddy had a generous heart. In her own weird way, I think it was the one thing about him she loved the most.
Dennis Read is a former employee of FEMA.
