Yuma

Yuma is the place where a county-clerk’s register first tells Dan Davis that Ricky has married, and where, after time has carried them through separate lives, Dan and Ricky marry one another. The town’s importance rests less on its description than on the two visits that make it a hinge between apparent loss and fulfillment.

The First Visit: News in the Register

While searching for Ricky, Dan follows her trail from Brawley through a false lead in Calexico and back again, eventually tracing her and her companion as far as Yuma. He had expected to find a young woman traveling alone; learning that she was with a man makes him fear that she may be vulnerable to the criminals who prey on cold-sleep clients. The pursuit ends at the county clerk’s office, where Dan discovers that Ricky has married. The register shocks him so completely that he abandons his immediate plans and boards a ship for Denver, stopping only to send Chuck Freudenberg a card telling him to clear Dan’s desk and pack his belongings.

That brief entry in a public record changes the meaning of Dan’s search. Until then, Ricky’s trail has been a practical problem of finding recent records in a small town and following leads across the region. In Yuma, the search delivers information that Dan experiences as a rupture: he has found Ricky’s whereabouts, but the record tells him she has entered a marriage without him. The same place that closes the chase therefore becomes the setting for the news that sends him abruptly elsewhere.

The Return and the Wedding

Decades later, after Ricky wakes from cold sleep, Dan brings her back to Yuma. They have first gone to Brawley, where she retrieves the memory of her former home town and arranges for the books left in storage there to be shipped to Aladdin. Ricky is dazzled by the changes but wants to leave quickly; the couple then takes another cab to Yuma, making the return a deliberate continuation of their journey together.

At the courthouse, Dan signs the county clerk’s book in a careful, rounded hand, using his full name, Daniel Boone Davis. He wants there to be no doubt about which D. B. Davis designed the couple’s wedding. A few minutes later, he takes Ricky’s hand and stumbles over the marriage vow beginning, “I, Daniel, take thee, Frederica - . . till death us do part.” The courthouse witnesses are people they gather there, and Pete serves as Dan’s best man. The public record that once announced Ricky’s marriage to someone else now records Dan’s marriage to her.

A Location Reshaped by Repetition

The two Yuma scenes mirror one another through the county clerk’s register, but reverse its emotional force. On Dan’s first visit, the record makes Ricky’s marriage seem like the end of his hope; on the second, he writes his full name into the same kind of civic record as her husband. The return does not erase the years of separation or make the first discovery less consequential. Instead, the repeated setting gives the reunion a concrete form: what had been an entry Dan could only read becomes a marriage he can publicly enter.

After the wedding, Dan and Ricky leave Yuma at once for a secluded guest ranch near Tucson. Yuma is therefore not their new home or the setting for their married life. It is the courthouse threshold at which their relationship is formally changed, and the narrative’s final return to the town transforms an earlier record of loss into a record of reunion.