Drowning Tucson (33 page)

Carmella pushed her husband’s arms away and turned back toward the table, smoothing her hair, then her blouse, then her wrinkled skirt. She took a deep breath and said let me see her. The coroner raised his hand to object. His assistant, having seen this look on Carmella’s face on a hundred parents, reached instinctively for the plastic sheet to re-cover the body. Mrs. Santiago, it’s best that—

She stormed toward the coroner and grabbed his collar and yelled IF YOU DON’T SHOW ME MY BABY’S BODY I’LL CHEW THROUGH YOUR ARMS—YOUR GODDAM NECK IF I HAVE TO—BECAUSE I WANT TO SEE HER AND I
WILL
SEE HER.

There were only two reasons Alejandro didn’t try to stop his wife. The first was that he knew she would never forgive him if he tried to deny her wish to uncover the body. The second was that he needed to see, too, so he could know whether she had simply wandered off and gotten lost and died a naïve child’s death in the middle of the desert or if she had been taken from them and misused, which is what his gut knew had happened.

The coroner said no and wouldn’t release the sheet. He dropped his clipboard and grabbed the gray plastic with both hands and begged Carmella to listen, to please use some reason. Listen. You DO NOT want to see this body. If it’s your daughter’s face, that’s enough. We’ll mail you a report concerning the cause of death when we complete the full autopsy, then we’ll release the body to you as soon as possible for you to grieve over.

Carmella only replied in a seething whisper, if you do not remove this sheet so I can see my daughter, my husband and I will kill you here and now. She turned to Alejandro for his support. He didn’t deny his wife’s threat, which was all the support the coroner needed to see.

He let go of the sheet and stepped back from the table. She’s yours. Then he knelt to retrieve his fallen clipboard. He continued to kneel as the Santiagos uncovered their daughter’s body, bracing himself for the rage that was sure to burst from the two parents of this unfortunate child.

But the rage never came.

The morgue fell silent.

The coroner held his breath.

Samantha’s mother and father looked at their daughter in shock. It wasn’t disbelief. They both knew it was Samantha on the table. She had the same knobby knees. The same muscles and well-fed legs of a child who had spent most of her free time outdoors, playing soccer in the street, riding her bike up and down the park trails. But it was the delicate fingers grabbing at nothing, reaching out for her mommy in her final moments of life, that wracked Carmella with sadness.

Neither Alejandro nor Carmella realized it, but when they saw the gaping and waxy hole where their daughter’s poochy belly used to be, they both emitted a slight howl—like a distant pack of coyotes—that grew steadily louder until the room where they stood began to expand slowly, the floor dipping slightly beneath the weight of the Santiagos’s anguish and rage and confusion.

The other tables in the morgue began to slide toward the center of the room as the howls of Alejandro and Carmella became so unbearable that the coroner had to throw up his hands to cover his ears and the couples still in the waiting area grabbed their belongings and ran to the parking lot, well aware that the proper parents had been found and terrified to see the reckless grief that would result from the mother and father whose child had been found, bound and murdered, in the middle of the heartless desert.

Samantha’s parents wailed together. They howled as they scanned their daughter’s empty body. Her torso looked as if it had been gouged and scraped out by an enormous ice cream scoop. Her eyes held a sadness so intense and so forlorn that even the coroner, unable to avert his gaze from them, began to weep, adding to the flood of tears.

Unlike her husband and the coroner, who both seemed unable to move, the way they stood there with their eyes locked on Samantha’s body, Carmella collapsed beside her daughter, the bottom of her skirt floating in the river of tears flowing past her legs, and rested her head on her daughter’s, feeling for the last time the cheeks she had wiped clean on so many occasions with a dab of spit on her thumb, the two loose teeth her daughter had been looking forward to losing so she could put
them beneath her pillow with a note for the tooth fairy. She felt the little eyebrows that she had been planning to one day teach Samantha to pluck and the hair she’d never get to style for yearbook pictures.

All of her daughter’s features Carmella committed to memory by touch while her heart split. But it wasn’t until she felt Samantha’s fingers grasping her own in death that Carmella, with her forehead resting on the cold surgical metal of the examination table, stopped weeping and looked up at her husband. She asked only one question.

What are you going to do?

And she didn’t speak another word to her husband until, a week and one day later when she sat crosslegged on the living room floor in front of the TV, hugging Samantha’s favorite Care Bear to her chest, and whispered to the screen, please don’t pull the trigger, Alejandro.

Then he did.

Octavio Flores became a father at the age of eighteen. He and his then-girlfriend, Claudia Sanchez, decided to name their daughter Lavinía after Octavio’s great aunt, who’d died the year the couple had met. Octavio, a ladies man with the charm of a poet and a voice that made women warm below the waist, had no intention of marrying the pregnant girl because he had three other, more promising prospects at the time, as well as an established pattern of bedding at least two strange women each month and keeping in contact with them by leaving behind small notes that he slipped into their purses or under their pillows after long afternoons of sex.

He could afford to date many women because he smuggled marijuana across the border every Tuesday night, passing through Nogales, Mexico, and into Arizona, then driving the back roads into Sierra Vista, where he broke up the shipment in the storage shed behind his parents’ house, bundled it into pounds, and distributed it among a few of his closest friends, who sold it in smaller towns like Bisbee, Benson, and the south side of Tucson.

His dreams of remaining a bachelor changed one day when he was captured by the border patrol just east of Sahuarita with two hundred pounds of marijuana in his trunk. Had the officer not been a rookie,
Octavio could’ve easily bribed the man into taking a portion and letting him go. Instead Octavio found himself, a week from turning eighteen, in a holding cell at the Cochise County Jail, awaiting arraignment on charges of possession with intent to distribute and the smuggling of illegal narcotics over international borders. But the arraignment never happened.

His pregnant girlfriend, Claudia, after hearing of Octavio’s arrest, broke down in front of her father and begged for his intervention, knowing he had many connections with the highest officials in Sierra Vista and Cochise County. After hearing his daughter’s confession of pregnancy out of wedlock and the situation her boyfriend had gotten himself into, Esteban Sanchez placed a few phone calls to ensure the charges against Octavio never became official. And so Octavio, two days later, was surprised to find himself face-to-face with the Cochise County superior court judge, trying to understand why he was talking privately with the man in his chamber instead of being formally brought up on charges in the middle of a courtroom. The judge gave him an ultimatum, telling Octavio, who was shaking imperceptibly, that he had two options. He could face several serious felony charges for international drug trafficking that would cost him a minimum of twenty years in prison, or he could marry the daughter of Esteban Sanchez, a retired army colonel who commanded the respect of some of the most important people in southeast Arizona and had the best interests of both his daughter and his unborn grandchild in mind.

The choice was simple. And so, in the summer of 1972, Octavio and Claudia were married in a quiet ceremony at St. Martin’s Catholic Church.

In an effort to avoid the rule of Claudia’s father, Octavio convinced his wife that his employment options in Sierra Vista were severely limited. She agreed and, less than two months after their marriage, they moved their fledgling family to Tucson, where Octavio immediately secured a job as a used car salesman at a small lot on the corner of Speedway and Kolb.

Although he’d planned to get a fresh start in Tucson, Octavio continued his philandering during his lunch breaks or on the way home from work, resentful of the debt owed to Claudia’s father and hopeful
his new wife would eventually tire of his infidelity and return to Sierra Vista to live under her father’s roof. Much to his dismay, Claudia seemed to grow fonder of Octavio the longer their false relationship wore on. The later he returned home from work, the more extravagant Claudia’s meals and their presentations became.

He even tried to offend his unwanted wife by coming home with the stench of sex in his clothes and purposefully refusing to wash up because he wanted his wife to smell and taste the proof of his disloyalty and leave him in a fit of rage.

Each night on his way home, he visualized what he longed to occur. He would come home and take his seat at the perfectly set dining room table, silverware glinting in the light of a dozen candles, trying to determine which fork to use for what and which plate matched which food and what the shit he could possibly need two spoons for. He ate and ignored Claudia’s questions about his day at work and how many cars he’d sold down at Betancourt’s Used Car Sales, telling her not to worry, sales were going just fine. Then he finished his meal, wiped his mouth, and told Claudia to put the baby in her crib and meet him in bed. She left the candles burning, bundled up their daughter in a nice wool blanket, and carried her to the nursery. When she came into the bedroom Octavio was already beneath the covers, the bedside light extinguished, scratching his balls and sniffing his fingers and wincing at the smell of stale sex, certain his wife would gag as soon as she lifted the sheet to lie beside him, or at least when he forced her head down between his legs and made her suck him off.

But it never worked out that way. Instead of vomiting or complaining about the smell of another woman, Claudia, who had mixed and sampled so many herbs and spices as she prepared their elaborate dinners that her palate had become distorted, mistook the smell and taste of other women, when it mixed with the bouquet of her culinary experiments, for the unabashed arousal of her husband, so she devoured him all the more.

Octavio was frustrated, but he began to accept Claudia for what she was—a fine mother, a wonderful cook, and an untamed lover—and he slowly resigned himself to the unwritten pact he’d made with her father.
He decided to make the best of his unfortunate circumstances, so he began cheating on his wife less and less and actually stayed at work late selling cars instead of bedding old lovers or hunting down a new piece of tail at the bars on Speedway.

Eventually he realized he’d molded his wife into a lover any man would be more than pleased to have, so he quit talking to other women altogether and devoted himself to becoming a good husband and father. He focused more closely on his sales technique, using a mixture of sarcasm—often poking fun at the stereotype of the used car salesman—and an air of nonchalance that made buyers feel as if they were trying to sell themselves to him as good customers. Once Octavio refined his technique, his sales doubled in the next six months, then tripled, allowing him not only to provide for his family but also to put away healthy sums of money so he and his wife could eventually buy a house and maybe one day he could go into business for himself.

On his daughter Lavinía’s seventh birthday, Octavio bought her a brand-new bike and locked it to the front porch railing of the house, whose mortgage he’d secured two days earlier—a fact he hid from his wife until he returned home from work with a birthday card for Lavinía, telling her and her mother to get in the car, we’re going for a drive. He drove north toward central Tucson, eventually turning east on 25th Street and stopping in front of their new home.

When he pulled the car into the driveway and pointed out Lavinía’s gift chained to the porch, his daughter let out a squeal of delight and raced from the car to examine her new bike with its beautiful flower-print wicker basket attached to the handlebars, its pink frame and pristine white tires, begging her father to please unlock it, please, so I can ride it down the street and try it out. Octavio’s chest swelled with pride at having pleased his daughter so well, and he could barely contain his joy while trying to insert the key into the padlock to release Lavinía’s present.

After he removed the bike and helped Lavinía climb onto the seat, he gave her a gentle push to start her down the driveway, then stood watching, with his arm around Claudia’s waist, smiling as his little girl rolled into the street, a little wobbly at first but quickly righting herself
and laughing as she pedaled to the opposite sidewalk and rode down to the corner of the block.

He and his wife watched Lavinía ride her bike up and down the sidewalk for a couple minutes, then he turned to Claudia and said there’s one more surprise. This house. She looked at her husband in disbelief and asked how much is the rent? There is no rent. It’s ours. Our first home to call our own. You can put a garden in the backyard if you want and, come back here—leading her to the back of the house. I was thinking I’d put a swingset for Lavinía and her new friends back there in the corner, next to the mulberry tree. Claudia squealed and threw her arms around his neck, overjoyed with Octavio’s thoughtfulness and the way he’d come around from a drug dealer to a man, a real man, who not only succeeded at his career, but also had become an enviable husband and father. She laughed until she was on the verge of tears, telling Octavio I love you, I love you, until her throat was sore. Octavio waved off the words, explaining that he was only doing what he was supposed to do—providing for his wonderful wife and their gorgeous princess Lavinía.