Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy Page B

lived with Dolores, for he had his lodging as part of the job on Quinlan’s dude ranch, and Dolores was mindful of the neighbors’ opinions. Still she had cooked for him frequently, and he had had the cosiness of her whitewashed adobe house to curl into. He had liked to look at her, even done a few sketches, although he knew that when he did one of his rare figure paintings, the people turned into landscapes. Her face was fascinatingly asymmetrical. Dolores herself was not aware of the way one side of her face was more angular and the other softer. Shadow playing over it had never stopped attracting him. Her body was neatly voluptuous, the flare out to the buttocks accentuated, her hips going out in a baroque curve that had two distinct waves to it. Her skin had hints of amber and of a faint green in its duskiness.
    Dolores had told him he was an old tomcat, un gaton, who had got used to wandering and cadging meals. Then she had put pressure on him to settle down. Why did women do that? They picked him out for his air of being well traveled, the romantic allure of the wanderer who tomorrow would be gone, and then they attempted to enlist him in domesticity.
    In ordinary times he would have been graduated from college and gone to a studio school here or abroad, come back to teach and paint, married and had children. But there had been no money and no jobs. He had begun wandering with the army of homeless men from freight train to skid row to hiring hall. By the time he had won the competition for a WPA job painting murals on post offices, he had got used to picking up and leaving a set of complications.
    He would settle eventually but only when he found the right place, the proper place, his own landscape, a woman who combined Dolores’s beauty with Bernice’s independence and brains. He was like someone who had been put on morphine out of necessity, to kill pain, and grown addicted. Moving on had become a habit, but he dreamed constantly of a companion. Someone who would know what things had been like in the town before or the previous country, who remembered Barcelona before Franco and London before the blitz and Paris before the Nazis had occupied it. A common frame of reference. Not even fear of war was that. Most people seemed to assume it would never come. The only common culture seemed to be movies and comic strips. Everybody would talk about Gasoline Alley, Li’l Abner, Dick Tracy. Maybe that was why he needed to go home, now, immediately. Bernice was his repository. All stories ended in her mind.
    Thursday morning he cleaned himself up at the train station and headed for a truck depot. He was almost immediately successful. An independent driver who was picking up a load of tires and taking them north to Cheyenne would carry him along for the work at either end. He was glad to move a step nearer. This trip was a game of chess where he was the knight who moved two steps forward and one step to the side each time. The tires turned out to be huge, for earthmoving equipment. Although the man watched him skeptically at first, Jeff did not doubt his ability to move the massive things. He was stronger than he looked, with no fat on him; and he understood balance.
    As they rode north across the wastelands where he watched antelopes the color of the ground running lightly, he was considering investigating Central America or perhaps heading down to Brazil. He imagined the sharp jagged reds of the Mediterranean rocks but set against the lurid pulsing greens of a jungle. He would research points south in the library while he was feeding up on Bernice’s good home cooking. They would climb Jumpers Mountain to steal a tree. They would take out the old boxes of ornaments, the Czech prisms and German globes with the gilt bites in their roundness, the wooden horses and painted drummers, the tinsel birds. He would visit his earlier paintings, ranged around Bernice’s room and his own. His failure in Taos had