Tucson, Arizona. The autumn of 1960. A Saturday afternoon in a neighborhood on the east side of the city. Six blocks from the Southern Pacific rail yard. In the kind of neighborhood that had been built in the late 1940s for the families of railroad workers and had remained through the subsequent decade.
The kind of neighborhood where the houses were small and well-maintained. And the yards were swept. And the families that lived in them knew each other by name. And by the specific knowledge that proximity over years produces. The houses were adobe and wood frame. Most of them painted in the colors that Southern Arizona favors. Which are the colors of the desert itself.
Ocher and sand. And a pale green that echoes the saguaro. The streets were quiet on Saturday afternoons in October. In the specific way that residential streets in working neighborhoods are quiet when the week’s work is done. And the particular pressures of Monday through Friday.
Have released their hold on the days. And the weekend has settled into its rhythm. The sounds were the sounds of domestic life conducted close to the outdoors. In the way that life in Southern Arizona is conducted. The specific combination of screen door sounds and yard sounds. And the occasional car. And the more frequent sound of children whose range on a Saturday afternoon extended to the full radius that parents in this neighborhood understood was safe.
Which was several blocks in any direction in the specific way that residential streets in working neighborhoods are quiet when the week’s work is done and the weekend has settled into its particular rhythm of yard work and errands and the sounds of children that serve as the ambient soundtrack of neighborhoods where families live in close enough proximity to hear each other’s lives.
On this particular Saturday on a street called Mesquite Avenue, a woman named Ruth Garza was hanging laundry in the side yard of the house she had lived in for 11 years with her husband and her three children. When she heard her youngest son say something to the boy from two houses down that stopped her hands on the clothesline and made her stand still for a moment in the October sun.
Her youngest son was named Eddie. He was 8 years old. The boy from two houses down was named Michael Torres and he was also 8 years old. And the two of them had been sitting on the concrete block wall that divided the Garza yard from the narrow side yard beyond it eating the orange slices that Ruth had brought out for them 20 minutes earlier talking in the specific rambling way that 8-year-old boys talk when they have no particular destination for the conversation and are simply following it wherever it goes. Eddie had been talking about cowboys. He had been talking about cowboys because the previous Saturday his father had taken him to see a film at the Rialto on Congress Street which was the theater that the Garza family used for the occasions when they went to films which were not every week
but were often enough that Eddie had developed a specific relationship with the Rialto itself with its particular smell of popcorn and the specific darkness of it and the way the screen filled his vision when they sat in the seats his father preferred which were eight rows from the front and slightly left of center.
And the film had had cowboys in it. And Eddie had spent the subsequent week in the specific saturated attention that eight-year-olds give to things that have captured them completely. He had talked about the film at dinner every night for a week. He had drawn pictures of the men in the film on the paper bags his mother gave him for that purpose.
He had asked his father questions about the men in the film that his father had answered as fully as he could and then directed to his mother when they exceeded what he knew. On this Saturday afternoon sitting on the concrete block wall with Michael Torres and the orange slices he had been talking about the man in the film who had seemed to him the most real.
The one whose way of moving and speaking had convinced him in the specific way that eight-year-olds are convinced which is completely and without reservation. He said that the man in the film was a real cowboy. Michael Torres said that he was not a real cowboy. He said that real cowboys did not exist anymore.
That they had existed a long time ago and did not exist now. And that the men in films who looked like cowboys were actors who dressed up to look like cowboys and were not the same thing. Eddie said that was not true. Michael Torres said that it was. Eddie said that if Michael Torres was right then he wanted to see a real cowboy because he did not believe they were all gone.
Michael Torres said that Eddie was never going to see a real cowboy because there were none left to see. Eddie thought about this for a brief moment. Then he said that he was going to ask his mother. Ruth Garza had heard all of this from the side yard with the laundry. She was 34 years old and had been a mother for 9 years and had, in those 9 years, developed the specific parental ability to hear the conversations of her children at a distance with the same accuracy that she heard them at close range. The ability that parents develop, not through any particular effort, but through the simple repeated necessity of knowing what their children are doing and saying in spaces they cannot directly observe. She had heard the entire conversation between Eddie and Michael Torres from
the moment it turned to cowboys. She stood with her hands on the clothesline for a long moment after Eddie’s last sentence. She stood with her hands on the clothesline for a long moment after Eddie’s last sentence, looking at the sheet in her hands and thinking about what a mother thinks about when her 8-year-old son has just said something that she does not know how to answer correctly.
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John Wayne was in Tucson because the film he had been making in the desert outside the city had wrapped its location shooting the previous afternoon. And he had one day before the flight back to Los Angeles that the studio had arranged. He had been in Tucson for 3 weeks. The shoot had been difficult in the specific ways that desert location shoots are difficult, which are ways that have to do with heat and dust, and the logistics of moving equipment across terrain that does not accommodate equipment easily. And John Wayne had been present for all of it with the specific steady attention that he brought to work that was hard, which was without complaint, and without the performance of endurance that some actors use to signal to the people around them that they are aware of the difficulty. He had simply worked.
He had developed over those 3 weeks the specific relationship with a place that extended location shoots produce, which is not the relationship of a tourist or a visitor, but the relationship of someone who has been in a place long enough to know which diner makes the best coffee, and which road out of town is quietest in the morning, and what the particular smell of the desert is in October when the heat has broken, and the air carries the specific dry clarity of high desert autumn.
He had been in this neighborhood on Mesquite Avenue because the hotel he was staying at was six blocks away, and he walked in the mornings and sometimes in the afternoons when the shooting was done and the evening had not yet begun. And he needed the specific interval that walking provided, which was time that belonged to no one and required nothing from him except the use of his legs.
He had been walking south on Mesquite Avenue at 3:15 in the afternoon when he passed the Garza house and heard, through the gap in the adobe wall that separated the side yard from the sidewalk, two boys talking. He was 52 years old and 6 ft 4 in tall and wearing a plain canvas jacket over a work shirt and dark trousers and a hat that was not a costume hat, but the hat he wore when he was not working.
A plain felt hat with a modest brim that he had owned for 4 years and wore because it kept the sun off his face and for no other reason. He heard the boys talking the way he heard things on his walks, which was with the peripheral attention of a man who is present to the world around him without directing his attention at any specific part of it.
He heard Michael Torres say that Eddie was never going to see a real cowboy because there were none left to see. He heard Eddie say that he was going to ask his mother. He heard it with the complete attention that the sentence required, which was not much in terms of volume or duration, but which was the complete attention because the sentence was the kind of sentence that contains, in its eight words, the entire situation of an 8-year-old boy who has been told that the thing he believes in does not exist anymore and who has decided to go to the highest authority available to him to find out if that is true. He stopped walking. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment. He looked at the gap in the adobe wall. He looked down the street in the direction he had been walking. Then he did something that he had not
planned to do when he left the hotel that afternoon. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment with the decision settling into place the way decisions settle when they are the right ones, which is without the resistance that wrong decisions produce. He walked to the front of the Garza house. He knocked on the door.
He knocked the way he knocked on doors, which was with the specific combination of enough force to be heard and not enough to alarm. The knock of a man who has spent his life in houses that were not his own, and has learned the appropriate volume for announcing himself at a stranger’s door. Ruth Garza opened the door.
She was 34 years old and was wearing an apron over a house dress and had a dish towel in her right hand and the specific expression of a woman who has come to the door expecting a neighbor or a delivery and has found something else. She looked at the man at the door. She looked at him for the 2 seconds it took for the recognition to arrive, which it did in the specific way that recognition arrives when the face in front of you is a face you have seen many times in a context that did not involve someone standing at your front door on a Saturday afternoon in October. She said his name. He said yes. He said that he was sorry to bother her and that he had been walking on the street outside and had heard her son talking over the wall and that he wondered if he might meet the boy. Ruth Garza looked at him for a moment
longer. Then she opened the door wider and called for Eddie. Eddie came from the back of the house at a run, the way 8-year-olds come when their name is called with a specific quality in the voice, the quality that says something is happening that you will want to see. He came around the corner of the hallway and stopped.
The specific stop of a child whose body has arrived somewhere before his mind has caught up with what his eyes are telling him. He looked at the man at the door. He looked at the man’s size first because the man’s size was the first thing anyone looked at. And then he looked at the man’s face, and the looking at the face took longer than the looking at the size because the face required the specific calculation that eight-year-old brains perform when they encounter something that matches a stored image in a context where the stored image was not expected. He looked at his mother. He looked back at the man at the door. John Wayne looked down at the boy. He was 6 ft 4 in tall and the boy was the height that eight-year-old boys are, which meant that Wayne was looking down at a significant angle,
the angle that large men have always had to use to speak to children. And he adjusted for it in the specific way he adjusted for it, which was to crouch down slightly so that his eyes were closer to the level of Eddie’s eyes. Not all the way down, but enough to change the geometry of the conversation from one between a very large man and a very small boy to one between two people who could see each other’s faces clearly.
He said that he had been walking on the street outside and had heard Eddie talking over the wall about cowboys and that he had thought about what he heard for a moment on the sidewalk and had decided he wanted to introduce himself. He said his name the way he said it when he was not working, which was simply and without the weight that the name had accumulated in the 30 years since he had first used it professionally, he said it as information, rather than as introduction, as the answer to the question the boy’s face was asking. Eddie said that he knew his name. He said it in the voice of an 8-year-old who has just confirmed something to himself by hearing it said out loud by the person it belonged to. Wayne said that he figured Eddie might. He said that he had heard Michael Torres say that Eddie was never going to see a real cowboy, and that he had thought about that for a
moment on the sidewalk, and that he had decided that Michael Torres was wrong. He said this in the direct, flat tone he used for things he meant. He said it the way a man says something that is the truth and does not require elaboration. Eddie looked at him for a long moment. He was 8 years old and had spent the previous week completely saturated in the idea of what a cowboy was, and he was now standing in the doorway of his mother’s house looking at the man who had seemed to him the most real of all the men he had seen on the screen at the Rialto on Congress Street the previous Saturday. And the man was crouched down slightly with his hat in his hands and his eyes at approximately the level of Eddie’s eyes. And the man had just told him that Michael Torres was wrong. Eddie nodded once.
He nodded in the specific way that 8-year-olds nod when something they have believed is confirmed by an authority they cannot argue with. The nod of a settled question. John Wayne stood up. He put his hat back on. He shook Ruth Garza’s hand. He He her for her time and her patience. He said it was a pleasure to meet her son.
He walked back down the front path to the sidewalk and turned south on Mesquite Avenue and continued the walk he had been on before he stopped. Ruth Garza stood in the doorway and watched him walk down the street until he turned the corner and was gone. Eddie stood beside her. He was quiet for a moment.
Then he said that he was going to go tell Michael Torres. He said it in the tone of a boy who has just received the definitive answer to a question that has been open for a week and is now going to close it in the most direct way available to him. Which was to deliver the answer in person to the person who had prompted the question.
Ruth Garza watched him go down the side path toward the wall and Michael Torres’s house. She stood in the doorway for a moment longer. The October afternoon continued on Mesquite Avenue in the ordinary way. The quiet and the swept yards and the sounds of the neighborhood. And the man in the canvas jacket and the plain felt hat was gone around the corner.
And the side yard had the orange peels on the concrete wall and the laundry half hung on the line. And nothing about the afternoon looked different from the outside than it had looked an hour earlier. But Eddie Garza was 8 years old on a Saturday afternoon in Tucson and he had just seen a real cowboy knock on his mother’s door.
And some things that happen on ordinary Saturday afternoons stay with a person for the rest of their life. Not because they were large things but because they arrived at exactly the right moment and confirmed exactly the right belief at exactly the age when beliefs are still being formed, and the confirmation of them matters in ways that are not large, but are permanent.
