Drowning Tucson (35 page)

He reached the police cruiser and looked at his reflection in the cop’s silver-tinted shades. The officer looked at him with a smirk on his face and asked what he was doing with that little girl over there.

Little girl? Oh, that’s just Sarah, one of my kid’s friends.

So where’s your kid?

He ran off with some of his other friends. They’re probably by the pond catching crawdads.

Officer Loudermilk removed his shades and looked deep into Octavio’s eyes. Octavio tried to will his hands to stop shaking, shoving them deep into his pockets as if he were looking for something.

You got some ID? Loudermilk asked. You got a license or something on you?

Octavio reached around to his back pocket, pulled his wallet out, and handed it to the cop. It’s in there.

Take it out.

Octavio opened the wallet, flipped the plastic picture holder over, and pulled his driver’s license out, praying that the cop hadn’t noticed his trembling fingers. Here you go, sir.

Just hang tight for a second. I’m just gonna run your name and make sure there aren’t any warrants out for you. You’re clean, right?

Yeah, I’m clean. Then he remembered his deal with the judge in Sierra Vista and wondered if that was going to show up on his record. He waited, listening nervously to the cruiser’s engine as it idled and the radio inside the car crackled and sputtered out police codes to the various crimes happening in other parts of the city, hoping that a call would come through for a real emergency so Loudermilk would have to speed off and forget the whole thing. But none came. Loudermilk called in Octavio’s name and license number and sat back, waiting on the information to check out, looking at Octavio from behind his mirrored
sunglasses to see if there was anything about the guy that would justify taking him in. But Octavio just stood beside the car with his hands in his pockets, looking off into the heart of the park and avoiding the playground.

The radio crackled at Loudermilk and he picked up the CB and held it to his ear, nodding his head and then pressing the button and saying ten-four, just making sure everything’s kosher with this guy. He handed the license back to Octavio, told him he’d checked out okay, then said you better go find your kid because there’s a lot of weirdos around this park and it’s really not safe to let him run off like that.

Octavio nodded and assured the cop he was going to find his kid immediately. He walked back to the picnic table, making sure to do it calmly because the cruiser still sat idling behind him, and he packed his lunch back into the pail, waved goodbye to the little girl with his lollipop in her mouth, and walked toward the pond, pretending to search for his nonexistent child with a sense of great urgency, even calling out Junior loud enough for the cop to hear him.

When he’d made it over a hill and out of Loudermilk’s sight, he stopped to catch his breath. It had been too close. Not that he’d done anything wrong, he’d only been innocently tying some kid’s shoes. Shit, it wasn’t like any of the parents there had noticed or freaked out. But he realized how close he had come to getting in big trouble. The cop was definitely suspicious. He’d practically looked like he thought I was raping the girl right there in public, on top of the concrete tunnel while the other parents watched in horror. He wiped the sweat from his brow, looked down at his perspiring armpits, and sat down to calm himself before he went back to work. It would only raise more questions if he showed up looking like he’d just finished jogging in his shirt and tie. Shit, he thought, I should’ve given the cop one of my business cards. Offered him a real nice deal on a used car. That would’ve been so brave there’d be no way he’d think I was up to something. But what’s past is past. Scared the shit out of me anyway, he muttered as he started up his car, so paranoid he resolved never to return to the park again.

For four weeks Octavio kept that promise. Instead of taking his lunch outside the fences of schoolyards, sitting in his car, pretending to
listen to the radio while he watched little girls playing, or unpacking his lunch at a picnic table in a park with a handful of lollipops by his side, he spent the next few weeks eating in the food court of Park Mall. It was almost as good as parks or schoolyards, though it fell a little bit short. There were plenty of children, but most of them were being rushed from one store to another by their mothers shopping for clearance items or bargain clothes while their husbands were at work. The mall was a different place in the daytime. It had the air of a library or church. Women shushing their children if they spoke too loudly. Merchants standing calmly behind their counters or stocking their shelves, visibly relaxed because all the teenagers who stole from them after school were nowhere to be seen. But despite the abundance of children, Octavio preferred the playground to the mall because the kids were truly happy there, running and playing together and laughing and not having to worry about being too loud.

Eventually Octavio forgot about the terror he’d felt the day Loudermilk questioned his presence at the park, and so he began visiting schools again, but only once or twice a week to keep from drawing any unwanted attention. He made a conscious effort to stay away from Reid Park.

The once- or twice-a-week visits soon grew into everyday visits, and once again Octavio found himself walking up to one of the many tables surrounding the playground, where he unpacked his lunch and pretended to revel in the peacefulness of the quiet afternoon, watching the girls playing from behind a pair of shades he’d recently purchased. They weren’t excessively tinted. That would draw too much attention. Instead, they had a nice brown hue to them that allowed for people to see his eyes if they came close enough, but from afar, they ensured that no one would notice what he was looking at while he sat eating his lunch and concocting ways to get girls to accept his gift of a nice lollipop.

A few weeks of this went by and then Octavio found himself talking to a child who came up to him and asked for a stick of gum. He smiled and apologized for not having gum but told her I do have a lollipop. Do you want orange, lemon, or grape? and the girl’s eyes lit up and she said I dunno, I like all three, and he laughed and said me too,
and rifled through his pile of lollipops and found a yellow one and an orange one and a purple one and handed all three to the girl, who thanked him and then turned and ran toward the playground, flaunting her treats to the other kids playing in the sandbox and on the swings and they all shouted gimme, gimme and where’d you get them? and the girl pointed back at Octavio, but he was already packing up the remainder of his lunch and walking back to the car because he was afraid of drawing too much attention.

In his spare time, he tried to come up with a way to be around children all day long and have the trust of their parents. Each night when he came home from work, he began to plant the seed of this new idea in his dinner conversations with his wife, but Claudia largely ignored the hints, worrying more about the recent changes in Lavinía’s attitude. She told Octavio about how she’d seen Lavinía’s best friends, Helena and the two Rosas, hanging around with those gangbangers outside Torchy’s. Octavio, not wanting to think about his daughter hanging around the very crowd he’d tried to protect her from, repeatedly tried to change the subject to his dream of going into business for himself, but Claudia kept cutting him off with a sharp look. You used to care so much about Lavinía. What happened? I remember when you used to rush home to be with us right after work, and you’d take her out back while you built her a treehouse and a swingset, always asking her opinion—do you want a trapdoor, or how about a swing that seats four?—and treating her like she was the only thing in the world that mattered. And now look at you. You act like you don’t care if our baby falls off the face of the earth. I’m telling you, something’s WRONG with her. I saw a hickey on one of the two Rosas the other day—the short one—and she didn’t even try to hide it.

Octavio only shook his head in disgust, not bothering to interrupt.

Say SOMETHING, Octavio. This is our girl I’m talking about. She’s only fifteen. When did you stop caring?

Octavio had stopped caring the first day his wife came home with a training bra for their daughter. That day he’d gone to the bathroom and knelt beside the toilet, resting his head on the cold plastic seat with an overwhelming feeling of nausea, unable to deal with the concrete proof
his little girl was making the first transition to womanhood. A
training
bra? What else might she be training for while her he was away at work? He could only imagine the worst. Could only picture his daughter lying in bed with some boy, or worse, losing her virginity in a public bathroom in some mall while he and his wife thought she was spending the night with Helena or one of the Rosas.

He continued to avoid the subject each night, only speaking enough to assure his wife that there was little they could do. They could only hope their daughter was out there making the right choices, because ultimately, Claudia, there is nothing we can do to stop her. She will have sex when she feels like it. She will try drugs or steal or maybe even be a saint and make wonderful grades, but right now there is little we can do. We can only hope and pray that we’ve raised her to use her head.

While his wife knew he was right, these answers were not the ones she was looking for. She wanted to hear him say everything would be all right. Tell me, she wished, our Lavinía is just as sweet and innocent as we raised her to be. Tell me our girl is growing into a smart and fair woman who will be the envy of everyone around her. She knew that probably wasn’t true. And she was mad at her husband for vocalizing her worst fears. After all, Claudia spent more time around the neighborhood than her husband. Over the years since they’d first moved in, she’d watched the neighborhood change. She could barely take naps anymore during the day because it was a constant battle trying to think over the sounds of cholos working on their car stereos, the bass shaking her windows and the cat running and jumping up in bed next to her, trying to burrow beneath her pillow to escape the awful sound of rap beating at the walls of their house. She worried that someone would break in while her husband was away and hold her down at gun or knifepoint—all those punks carry knives and guns—and rape her while the neighbors looked the other way. Nothing like that ever happened, but she constantly fretted about it. She thought about it so much that one evening, when she sat across from Octavio at dinner and listened to his rambling on about starting a small business she decided that she’d play his little game, offering to support him if he promised to move the family to a better neighborhood as soon as they had saved up enough money. You
know, for the good of the family. Maybe it’s just what Lavinía needs. Just a better environment. I mean, what would we do if she came home pregnant or something? And Octavio pretended to care, pretended he was genuinely concerned with Lavinía’s growing independence and foolish choice of friends. He convinced his wife that he was looking out for the best interests of the family. Yeah, we’ll get out of here and everything will be fine.

And so, while Octavio sat at a picnic table on his lunch break handing out candies and lightly touching the girls who ran up to him when word spread that someone had candy, he thought hard about the type of job that would allow him to be around kids constantly without seeming obvious. His own child had failed him. And he had loved her so much. He’d had many dreams about living the rest of his life with her frozen at seven, the age when he first fell deeply in love with her and her innocent voice and her childish breath and her laughter. So many nights he’d sneaked into her room and knelt beside her while she slept, kissing her face and pressing his cheek against her flesh, smelling her soft child skin and imagining what it would feel like to undress her and then himself and climb into bed next to her, feeling her cool skin against his own, wanting to touch and taste every part of her body and imagining she’d wake up and welcome him into her bed, snuggling up to him and wrapping her legs around his waist, and he felt a throbbing in his pants and realized that his thoughts were horrible and disgusting and yet he still liked them and relished them and he would leave his daughter’s room immediately and crawl into bed with his wife, who lay waiting for him, legs open, because he always came to bed in the mood to make love to her roughly, just the way she liked it. But those days were over. All he could see now was a girl growing into a woman. A girl who was only concerned with looking good for the boys in the neighborhood and at school. But those boys only wanted one thing and he tried to tell her they don’t love you. They only want to get into your pants and they’ll say anything to do just that. Once you give them that part of you, they’ll get bored and move on and they’ll break your heart. But the bigger tragedy is that you set yourself up for that by looking and acting like a whore.

The cheerful music of an ice cream truck rang out across the park
and mixed with the cries of children who ran from the playground in a pack, yelling for their mothers to come and bring money quick, it’s the ice cream man, it’s the ice cream man, tripping in the playground sand, skinning knees and bruising legs and arms, which they ignored because the music flowing from the ice cream truck’s loudspeaker rang out like a beacon, drawing the children toward it as the truck pulled to a stop, the driver turning the speaker down to hear the children hollering their orders over one another at the side window covered in stickers of Nestlé Crunch ice cream bars and Bulletpops and Lemonheads and Dreamsicles. The driver smiled and hushed the children, organizing them into two rows and taking their orders. The mothers came behind, pulling bills and change from their pockets and purses while the ice cream man tried to keep track of who had what, handing out frozen treats with one hand and collecting money with the other.

Octavio was in awe of all the children crowded around the truck—so many kids, look at all those beautiful girls—and the driver smiled and continued to take orders, nodding to the mothers, who were happy their children got a nice cold treat on such a hot summer day, and more children appeared, unable to resist the music that called from the farthest reaches of the park. It was brilliant. Perfect. He only had to watch for a few moments to realize that this was exactly the business he’d been searching for. A little tune played at the right volume, a white van with ice cream stickers—the prices written in Magic Marker—and the kids will flock to me like the sick flocked to Jesus.