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Moonwalk
- Ohio University Press
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8 Moonwalk The Eagle, landed, squats on its lunar base. I’m stationed at the RCA. My father, this waning July Sunday, is up a ladder. He’s scraping paint. The snarl reverberates: a sort of rhythmic growl like gravel and hawk, gravel and hawk. Meanwhile, car ads, experts. David Brinkley passes the time. And when the moment comes, I run outside and back, my father strides in behind, dusting hands on paint-flecked jeans. Tomorrow, VFR in his oilfield Cessna, he’ll fly pipeline checking for leaks. His ground support: the course of rivers, highways; spaceship water towers rising over one-story towns. The sun coming up over Texas hardpan will go to work on its bristle of pumpjacks and derricks. Like skeletal robots they’ll cast their shadows across mesquite, concrete, caliche, stubble. For now, we focus on the blue-gray light, the crackling sound. They climb out and down, one, the other, dainty, unpracticed, like two 9 dull, hamfisted men in a knickknack store. They even seem to speak with a hop-step cadence. Or is it just the distance? I watch, transfixed. The live feed howls. The window unit hums its blue-gray note. And after a while, my dad gets up, goes out, back to his gravel and hawk. ...