Desert Shadows (9781615952250) (7 page)

“Before that, did she say anything that made you believe she might be afraid of someone?”

“Certainly not. We just chatted about the publishing business. At one point, she expressed a desire for me to look at some of her publications, saying that they would make a nice addition to Wyatt's Landing's collection.”

I almost laughed. “Fat chance of that, right?”

“Ah, you are quite wrong,” she said, patting one of the books on the table.

For the first time I noticed the title:
The South Was Right.
Patriot's Blood Press.

“A librarian is not a censor, Ms. Jones. We are enjoined to serve the public, and if the public wishes to read certain materials, materials that we ourselves may not care for nor even agree with, we still must make them available. Last year, for instance, I ordered several copies of
Losing America
because the demand was so great. Now it appears that I may order this, ah, historical work.”

“Wyatt's Landing must be an interesting town,” I said.

Another smile. “No more interesting than Scottsdale.”

In other circumstances, I would have followed up this intriguing comparison, but this was not the time. “During the banquet, did you see anyone touch Gloriana's salad?”

Her initial hesitation to talk vanished, she cut to the chase. “No, I did not. And I did not touch it myself, either.”

“Did you find her behavior offensive in any way?”

“If you're asking what I think you're asking, no. Gloriana made no racial remarks to me nor to any other person of color at our table. If anything, she was quite courteous. Generous, too. That trip to Oak Creek was her idea, taken at her expense.”

But I thought Gloriana's generosity seemed unusual for such a self-involved old harridan, and I said so.

“In my case, perhaps she looked upon me and the library as customers, and was eager to curry favor. But I doubt it. She was no more polite to me than to Mr. Zhang and Mr. Ramos, although she did remark at one point upon Mr. Ramos' German first name. She said it didn't match his last. He didn't take offense. Remember, we were all invited on the Oak Creek trip.”

It seemed important to Gordon for me to believe she had no motive for Gloriana's death. For now, I'd play along. “How about Owen? Did you hear any exchanges between him and Gloriana? Anything that sounded a bit heated?”

She didn't answer right away, just stretched her hands out on the table and pumped them, as if to exercise her fingers. I noticed a plain gold wedding ring, but saw only one suitcase sitting on the stand by the door. Hubby stayed home?

“The banquet hall was noisy,” she finally answered. “I'm afraid any conversation that Gloriana and Owen might have had while she was in the hallway was lost to me.”

“Gloriana went into the hall?”

“Several times. I took it for granted that she was visiting the ladies' room. Elderly bladders can be quite sensitive, I understand. And she was drinking quite a bit of tea.”

After a few more questions, I realized that she would offer little more, so I thanked her for her time and let myself out. Once in the hall, though, I reflected that Mrs. Gordon had been more guarded than necessary.

And I didn't believe a word she said.

***

I spent a couple more hours interviewing other attendees at the SOBOP convention, but without success. Eerily similar to a banger drive-by in the ghetto, nobody seen nuthin', not the California woo woo publisher, the Washington state ecology pressman, nor the Vegas how-to-beat-the-odds publisher. When I pressed them, they made me feel about as welcome as an ex-wife at a wedding.

Finally giving up, I returned to the Jeep, but now that the distraction of questioning was behind me, I realized that I was starving. Instead of driving straight back to Scottsdale, I decided to detour through the nearby town of Cave Creek, eager for a big, fat hamburger at the Horny Toad Saloon. As soon as I turned west on Carefree Highway, though, the traffic thickened. To my surprise, I was soon bumper-to-bumper with a herd of Harley Davidsons and a long, snaky line of graffiti-covered vans, many of them bearing Idaho license plates. The motorcycles made sense. Cave Creek was the gathering spot for the Scottsdale Harley-Davidson Club, which despite its macho-sounding name consisted of a couple hundred business executives. But the vans.…

Then I remembered what I should have at WestWorld.

Attracted by Arizona's rising tide of anti-immigrant feeling and Cave Creek's immigrant-friendly day labor program, the Aryan Nation and its brethren had selected the town as the site for their yearly picnic. Now the vans' graffiti made sense. The groups might have been too cowardly to display the swastika itself—they were too frightened of the Crips, Bloods, or even scarier, the Jewish Defense League—but they had found more subtle ways to trumpet their beliefs.

Four-foot-high blue letters on the rear of the white van in front of me blared,
14/88.
Every cop knew that the “14” stood for the “Fourteen Words” holy to White Supremacists everywhere:
“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.”
The “88” meant the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, as in “Heil Hitler.”

Next to me idled a black van with the numbers “311” painted in red on the sides. “11” meant the eleventh letter of the alphabet, K; the “3” stood for K times three. KKK, Ku Klux Klan.

I checked out the driver. When I saw he sported a shaved head and the de rigeur lightning bolt tats on his neck, I lost my appetite. Swinging into an illegal U-turn, I headed back to Scottsdale.

By the time I made it back to Desert Investigations, the streetlights were on. The neighboring art galleries had closed, and Jimmy was locking up for the night.

“Don't take Esther and Rebecca to Cave Creek this weekend,” I warned him. Jimmy had been dating Esther ever since we had helped her daughter Rebecca escape from a forced marriage to an elderly prophet in one of Arizona's notorious polygamy compounds.
²

He was way ahead of me. “Fat chance, with those National Alliance jerks in town.” Standing aside so that I could make it past him to the stairwell that led to my apartment, he added, “We're just going to kick back, have a little bar-b-que, and listen to some Chicken Scratch. But first, I'm going over to Wal-Mart to buy some toys for Owen's kids. Cheer them up. Speaking of Owen, did you find out anything that might help him?”

“I found out that Gloriana wasn't a very popular woman.”

He turned the deadbolt behind him. “Yeah, Owen's told me stories. She wasn't in the running for the Humanitarian of the Year Award.”

“Few people are.” I made no move to go upstairs.

“I guess. Well.…” Jimmy stood there, the tungsten light revealing a baffled expression on his face. “Is there something else? You know you're invited to join us, you always are.”

I pictured him on the Rez, surrounded by his nieces and nephews, his girlfriend and her daughter, all the people he loved. Then I pictured my own empty apartment and decided to make the conversation last longer. “By the way, were you able to get started on those names I gave you?”

“It'll take a while. Right now they look clean, but we'll see what comes up when I go deeper.” He frowned. “Lena, are you okay? Are you sure you don't want to follow me back to the Rez?”

“I'm fine, fine. Thanks anyway. I need to do some thinking, and it's easier when I'm by myself.”

He tried not to look doubtful, but couldn't quite pull it off. “See you tomorrow, then.”

“Yeah. Tomorrow.”

After I watched his truck's taillights disappear down the street, I pulled my gun out of my carry-all and began the long walk up the stairs to my apartment. The long walk I took every night. The long walk I never ceased to dread.

The monster in the closet.

My childhood nightmares still haunted me, still crept into my waking hours. They had become so much a part of my existence that I could no longer imagine a world without them. But, oh, to not fear dark spaces, to welcome the night.…

Such ease was not for me. Since living in my sixth foster home, I had never been able to enter a room alone without searching it thoroughly.

As usual, I had left the lights on, which I always do when there's a chance I will be out past sunset. Helped along by years of experience, the search went quickly. First the living room, a beige-on-beige box devoid of all personality other than the Two Gray Hills Navajo rug hanging over the sofa and the vivid George Haozous oil painting on the opposite wall. No monsters here, other than a few dust bunnies the size of alley cats lurking under the one window. Then an inspection of the hallway, the kitchen, the bathroom, and finally, the worst place of all—my bedroom.

Both hands trembling, I flipped on the lights, saw nothing. I looked under the bed. Nothing there, either.

Then I approached the long closet with its sliding double doors.

The monster in the closet.

My .38 cocked and ready, I slid back one door with my foot and parted the clothes with the gun. Nothing. I repeated the process on the other side. Another wonderful nothing. My apartment, my bedroom, my closet, all were empty of everything except the sound of my own heartbeats. I began to breathe again.

You'd think that I would hook up with someone if for no better reason than to forestall my fear of empty rooms. But as my relationship with Dusty illustrates, intimacy has never been my strong suit. Oh, I don't mean that easy physical intimacy which visits us all from time to randy time. I mean the real deal,
intimacy
, the deep emotional bond with another which is forged only after years of commitment.

I have never experienced that kind of intimacy and probably never will. Foster homes are not good training grounds for close encounters. Those of us who grew up in the wild round robin of CPS learned early on not to get attached to anyone because we understood that today's home was just that—today's and today's only. Tomorrow we might be someplace else. To us the word “home” itself was an abstraction, the description of a space where we temporarily stored our garbage bags filled with clothes. Why begin to love? Why ask for heartbreak? A child can only cry so much, and then the well—along with hope—runs dry.

Nightly apartment check finished and the remembered terrors of my nine-year-old self temporarily vanquished, I returned to the living room and laid the .38 on the coffee table. Then I leaned over my circa-1970 turntable and slipped on the John Lee Hooker vinyl masterpiece “Hooked on Blues” I'd found a few days earlier at a yard sale, but hadn't yet played. This simple joy would enrich the night. Bottleneck guitar licks on CD might be fine in the Jeep, but nothing could capture the nuances of an old bluesman like vinyl. While John Lee groaned his way through “
Every Night,”
I nuked a Michelina's macaroni and cheese dinner with jalapenos, a nod to us Southwestern gourmets. While eating, I listened calmly enough to “Boogie Chillen,” “It Serves Me Right to Suffer,” and “Drive Me Away.” Then, halfway through “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” I found myself tearing up.

What the hell?

I am not a crier and the sudden tears spooked me, especially since I didn't know what prompted them. The stress of the day? My fears for Owen? Deciding that I had heard enough music for one night, I shut the turntable off and carefully slipped the old vinyl back into its paper sleeve. But I still needed some sound, something to light my own dark spaces, so after putting the empty Michelina's carton in the trash, I turned on FOX News. While Geraldo Rivera oozed ego, I busied myself around the apartment. I scrubbed the sinks, the tub, the toilet. I slaughtered the dust bunnies, I vacuumed. Exhausted, I finally settled myself at the kitchen table and wrote checks for the rent, the light bill, the water, my monthly Crisis Nursery donation.

No time to think, no time to remember.

My resolve faded around midnight, and I finally staggered off to bed. But as soon as I fell asleep, I entered Dreamland's time tunnel and found myself four years old again, back on that terrible bus hurtling through the Arizona night, while around me, voices rose in song. Above the song—still unidentifiable to my adult ears—I heard my mother scream that yes, she'd kill me, she'd kill me, just leave her alone to do it, for God's sake.

I saw her raise the gun, heard the explosion of gunfire, found myself curling over with pain. Then the hot desert air sucked away my breath as I fell through the bus door onto the broiling pavement. Over the sound of the bus speeding off, I heard a voice call to me in Spanish, felt tender arms pick me up.…

Then mercifully, my nightmare, like my memories, was replaced by a comforting blackness.

But the respite was brief.

The dream started up again, and in the odd way of dreams, the bus morphed into to a barroom or restaurant, I couldn't tell which. I sat in someone's lap listening to John Lee Hooker singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Not on vinyl this time, in the flesh. The spotlight on John Lee's face revealed a much younger man, not the ruined husk I had seen when I attended his Phoenix concert a mere month before his death. His dream face had not yet developed the crevices of age, nor his voice the quaver of time.

This younger John Lee sang and sang, his raspy voice rising to a gospel shout, promising the eventual reunion of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, all the loved ones who had crossed over the River Jordan. He sang of arms reaching out from Heaven to hold us tight, arms that would never let us go.

Then his voice changed. My dream-self looked over to discover that, no, not the voice, but the
singer
had changed. One of his band members, a young red-haired man playing a dobro, had stepped up to the mike. This man's voice, a high, clear tenor, briefly sailed above John Lee's, then swooped low, blending with the blues master in a haunting duet. “Will the circle be unbroken by and by, Lord, by and by?”