Falling Down (18 page)

“M
om,” Spider said.

“Yes?”

“Is Nathan gone for good?”

“Spider.” I steadied myself, I'd almost hugged her, I saw her eyes open in surprise when my arms went out toward her, but she couldn't hug because my granddaughter, Sarah Katherine, had just started her first steps, and she could stand upright only as long as Spider held one tiny hand.

“I'm sorry, sweetie. I don't know if he's coming back.”

“Mom. He's hardly been here the last few months. What's happened?”

“A rough spot.”

“Oh, Mom. He didn't, God, don't tell me he beat you?”

“No no no no no. Nathan would never do that.”

“What
would
he do?”

“He wants to adopt a boy,” I said. “An orphan, nobody else in his born-to or born-from clans wants the boy. Nathan wanted me to go with him, wanted me to meet the boy, welcome him into the family.”

Spider drew Sarah Katherine up in her arms, balanced her on one hip, and put her other arm around my shoulders.

“Hug gammy,” Spider said to the baby. Sarah Kather
ine put out both hands to swat at my chin and nose until Spider pressed the three of us together.

How many years have I waited for this?

Almost all my life.

“So, Mom,” Spider said, letting me go. “We need to talk about that sweat lodge Nathan built down below. Look at my arm. Up here, near the elbow. That's a bee sting.”

A reddish circle, half an inch around and swelling vividly at the center.

“Killer bees,” she said.

“Killer bees?” I started to laugh.

“Nathan hasn't lit a fire in that sweat lodge for weeks. Pack rats are in there, but worse, I think there's a nest of killer bees.”

“What a concept,” I said.

Couldn't stop laughing. A swarm of killer bees, near my house? What a concept, that I'm not dealing with real people, it's just killer bees.

“Mom. It's no joke. There's a swarm in the sweat lodge.”

Leave it to nature, it always kicks you in the butt when you're feeling low. I couldn't stop laughing, after all I'd been through in the past forty-eight hours.

“Mom. These are Africanized bees. They're very aggressive. If they swarmed on my baby, she'd die from shock. This is serious, Mom.”

“Yes. You're right.” Tried and failed to suppress a giggle. “We'll call the exterminator. We'll kill those killer bees. We'll rip down the sweat lodge.”

“You don't have to do that.”

“Yes, I do,” I said to myself.

And like that, things seemed lighter, less serious. I staggered slightly, grasped a mesquite bush to steady myself.

“Rip it down?” Spider said. “So he's really gone?”

“It is what it is,” I said.

“So he's really gone.”

It wasn't a question, despite my facile answer.

Killer bees. Not much of a unique metaphor, but I'd already seen four bodies, the results of aggressive assaults and torture by the
maras
. If that's who did the killing, so be it. Killer bees, killers of any kind.

“Let's call an exterminator right now,” I said. “And a trash remover, to tear down the sweat lodge.”

“Mom.” Concern veins rippling blue in her temples, a long wiggly vertical vein down the center of her forehead. “Do you know what you're doing?”

“No,” I said. “But I've got to do this quick or I'll talk myself out of it. And when he comes back,
if
he comes back, he can build another one.”

 

Over the next four hours, Spider dealt with the exterminator and the man who came with his son to rip apart the sweat lodge and truck it away. I called Nathan's cell number fifteen times, it rang and rang and rang, and nobody answered.

Around eleven at night, Spider gave me some of her Mexican clothes to wear to the cockfights. Latinas dressed with panache. A lot of skin, a lot of fake long fingernails and eyelashes, too much black or purple or pink eye shadow, we settled for pink. Spider's leather pants fit me like a glove, not so bad at all, looking at myself sideways in a full-length mirror. No tummy, no tree-trunk thighs despite my long miles of swimming every day. And no panty lines, Spider emphasized this, made me take off my cotton panties and pull the leather pants tight, being careful of the zipper. A leather halter top without a bra, I couldn't fill it out to Spider's breast size, but it worked. And four-inch platform heels, amazing myself I could walk in them.

“So who's the guy that's taking you out?” Spider said.

Clothes approved, guy not yet checked out.

“Ken. Ken Charvoz. Used to be an undercover cop. Now he's coordinator of all the volunteers at Tohono Chul Park. And he's not taking me out.”

“And you know him…how?”

“Spider,” I said. “It's not a date. It's for a client. I don't want to tell you about it, I don't want you to know.”

“Hey, cool. And here he comes.”

The
blahtblaht
of a Harley, downshifting to crawl up our driveway. We went down the back stairway to the parking area, Ken revving the Harley a few times before he switched off the engine.

“It's a Fat Boy,” Spider said.

“Come on,” I said. “He's in good shape.”

“Mom,” Spider said. “That's the bike. A Harley-Davidson Fat Boy.”

Ken removed his helmet, neck-length black hair spilling out over his face and he shook his head like a dog to free the hair. “Ken,” he said.

“Spider. Cool ride.”

“Well,” he said, “Laura. Look at you.” Spider shot me a smile, climbed onto the saddle, trying the clutch pedal, leaning forward slightly to grasp the handlebars. “Mom,” she said. “This is one nasty bike, this is so cool. Just like the battle cruiser Arnold rode in
Terminator 2
.”

“One more thing to do,” I said. “Come up. See the view. I'll be out in five.”

Back in my office, I carefully fitted a miniature video camera into the leather halter, wincing at the small hole I cut with fingernail scissors in the left cup. After securing the camera with surgical tape, I fitted a five-hundred-and-twelve-megabyte memory stick into the right halter cup, linked it to the camera. In front of the mirror, I adjusted the halter, turned to three-quarters profile, decided everything would stay put as long as nobody groped me.

“This is incredible,” Ken said. An amazingly clear night sky, all of Tucson laid out below us as far as we could see. “This is your house?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I mean, you own this place?”

“Yes.”

“I'm in the wrong business,” he said. “Nonprofits don't pay this well.”

“Just a client. Nine months' work, a team of five people. He paid off his debts by deeding the house over to me.”

“You mean”—he couldn't quite grasp what I'd said—“it's all paid for?”

“Yes.”

“I could work nine years, I still wouldn't be able to afford this.”

His cell burped twice, not the insistently obnoxious ring tones you hear in malls and airports and even restaurants, just two short burps, then two again. He answered and just listened, then snapped the cell shut.

“We've got some time,” he said. “Can I just enjoy the view?”

“Come up to the roof.”

“Oh, man,” Ken said.

We emerged from the narrow stairway onto the dark roof, the only lighting from the full moon. Stars glittered over half the sky, dimmed only over the street-lit portions of Tucson, a city built to be dark for the many observatories on peaks rimming the southern basins. Once our eyes adjusted to the moonlight, I led Ken to the wooden chairs, pulling aside the broken chair used by Bob Gates two mornings ago. Ken turned his chair around, sat backward, leaning on the carved wooden backrest, a broad grin on his face as he looked everywhere.

“Oh, my,” he said. “Oh, my, my, my.”

“I come up here to watch monsoon lightning. Tried to photograph it a hundred times, but lightning is tricky to capture. I'd just rather watch.”

We sat in silence until his cell burped again. Opening it, he read a text message.

“Ten minutes, we'll leave,” he said. “So I hear you met with Gates and Kligerman today. You going to work for them?”

“A contract, yes.”

“I hope you know what you're doing.”

“I don't.”

“Be realistic here,” Ken said. “Be honest with your limited knowledge of the power politics within the Tucson Police Department. They want you at a midlevel position. You've not met the chief of police, not met the movers and shakers out of headquarters. The guys who move in political circles inside and outside TPD.”

“I like Gates,” I said. “I probably trust him a lot.”

“He's a fair man. But Kligerman is the next wave of TPD politics. You'll never,
ever
really know why decisions are made, why people are hired or motivated or fired. When I retired, I was a Detective Level One. I ran a whole squad, I made calls, I controlled crime scenes. But once something became political, I'm just the guy who follows parading elephants with a broom and a shovel. Well. That's not fair.

“Kligerman never wore a uniform. Went right from the academy into administration. They knew, back then, they knew he'd move up really fast and nobody wanted to get in his way. So he never strapped on the gear, he never rode a sector car. There's good men in admin. Gates, he's a good man. Eight years in a unit, never wanted undercover but they made him detective. He knows.”

“Knows what?” I said.

“Most of us out there in the units, uniforms and undercover…you ever see a neighborhood sweep?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“It's night, it's after midnight. Say you're driving down Grant, you've had this great meal at Kingfisher and you're headed east to your home, up here, your palace away from the streets. But along Grant you see the bubblegum lights a few blocks ahead of you. Cherry and sapphire, 'round and 'round. You get closer, you see a unit blocking off side streets. And uniforms are humping over fences, Maglites bobbing around backyards,
every uniform's got his duty piece out, they're all yelling, clearing out one backyard after another. Sometimes it's all just…somebody heard a noise, saw a shadow, punched nine-one-one.
Guy's got a gun,
somebody says to the nine-one-one operator. Out we go. Do the sweep. Jump up to clear a six-foot fence, you got
no
idea what's on the other side until you put your Maglite on the yard. Adrenaline pumps big-time, this sounds like a movie, like a TV reality show. But it's really what it is. Some guys…after clearing a dozen fences, sweeping a dozen yards, maybe they find a perp, maybe he's got a gun, maybe it's a coyote eating somebody's garbage, or somebody's little dog, it's all melodrama, you've seen in a hundred movies, a thousand TV shows. But those movies, that TV, you never
smell
what it's like those times when shit really goes down. Listen to me, I'm talking like Al Pacino. But that's what movies don't give you. Blood, how it smells, coppery, metallic. Some guy's puking his guts out, if the scene's really bad. What an old cliché, that you can smell fear. But you
can
.”

“And Kligerman?” I said.

“Never.”

“But that doesn't make him any less good at what he does.”

Ken looked at me a long time. A sad look. Shrugged. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, it does make a difference. He's done a lot for the department, but he's still an equal opportunity asshole. You ready?”

“I'm ready.”

 

“Where you guys going?” Spider said. Ken climbed onto the bike, helped me get seated behind him.

“Can't say.”

“Okay, Mom. I guess you're old enough.”

“She's nowhere too old for me,” Ken said.

“Where's my helmet?” I said.

“Honey Bunny,” Ken said. Just a term he used, like
baby
or
dear,
I didn't take it personally. “Where we're going, a helmet would be like the only dog in the mall. Tie your hair in this bandanna.” He kick-started the bike. “And away we go.”

B
eyond Tucson, heading north, I-10 stretches past Marana and what used to be mostly desert and old ranches, now heavily populated with subdevelopments, industrial parks, and fast-food strip malls. With a full moon, in the distance you see Picacho Peak looming dark against the skyline.

Ken wove the Harley in and out of thinning traffic, exiting at Tangerine and then north on a state farm road. We passed through a few small towns, not even towns so much as gatherings of trailers and houses surrounded by abandoned vehicles and all manner of junk dropped randomly on the desert floor. Some of these little places had a gas station and a store or two, occasionally a bar which might be a double-wide trailer or some ancient cinder-block building with the adobe facing pretty much worn off by the wind and the dust.

Ten miles and three cattle guards later, the paved road disintegrated into loosely graveled dirt ruts and, not far past that, a clump of a few dozen trailers. Oddly enough, the rutted road came back to a paved surface, an old two-lane road with a yellow center line so old it barely registered in the bright sunlight. Power poles jagged into the place from the southeast and ran off across the road into the desert. Power cables sagged down to most of the trailers, a few cables so old they
hung just a few feet off the ground, you could see the bare aluminum wires and you knew they were hot.

Ken pulled over at a four-way stop, but motioned me to stay on the bike as he straddled the tank and anchored both boots on the shoulder of the road. He checked his cell phone, read off three text messages.

“We're looking for a barn,” he said. “You watch the left, I'll watch the right, it's supposed to be set back a hundred yards from the road. Probably a dirt track to the barn, past a single-story, flat-roofed house.”

“Wait,” I said. “Before we get there. I don't know what to expect.”

“Expect the worst,” he said finally.

Two miles later, I grabbed his shoulder, pointed to the house. Light sparkled in the distance, some of it from vehicle headlights. Passing the house in low gear, it looked typical of neighborhood houses in South Tucson, well landscaped and maintained over the forty or fifty years since it was built. No derelict cars or stuffed furniture baby toys lying haphazardly on a sandy front yard. Not that that's typical of poorer neighborhoods, but I'd passed a lot of that random style of living while driving through South Tucson.

The house was surrounded by tall and well-tended trees of all kinds. Palo verde, hackberry, a few mesquite, the house itself partially shadowed from the road by ten-foot-high oleander bushes. Sixty yards ahead, we saw the barn. An ancient
RED MAN TOBACCO
sign painted on the front side, almost erased by decades of wind and rain. Ken stopped the bike between a Mercedes and a Beemer, let me get off, and parked.

Rusted pickups, a dozen motorcycles, two RV vans, five travel trailers, lots of brand-new SUVs of all makes, many expensive.

“I thought this was a redneck thing,” I said.

“Lots of money wagered in there, by all kinds of people. Just getting inside is expensive. The handlers usu
ally pay three to five hundred dollars for each cock they enter.”

“How do they figure odds? For gambling?”

“No odds. You'll hear people shouting out their bets, before the cocks are let loose and all through the match, sometimes people switch their money over to the cock they think is winning. Whoever is promoting this fight is the banker, all bets are with him, he's the ‘house.' I'll follow the money, you shoot video of whatever you think best.”

“Not the cocks,” I said. “I can't watch one animal killing another.”

“One thing,” he said to me. “Remember this one thing. Follow whatever I do. We're acting, you've got to be exactly who you're supposed to be. We're at a cockfight, okay? Ever seen a cockfight?”

“No.”

“You're
not
going to like it.
But you can't look away
.”

“Damn,” I said. “This is going to be hard.”

“Just remember the only rule in there. You're acting, you
love
cockfights. Okay? You geared up?”

“Once we get to the door, I'll start the camera, but it won't run continuously. I'll have to start and stop for what I think's most important. I've got enough memory and battery power for about twenty minutes of video. Just the picture, I can do a small zoom, but not much. So get us seated as close as possible. So we can video whoever is running the fights.”

“You ready to start?”

He wrapped one arm around my waist, high, started the two of us walking to the front doorway where a huge Indian collected money. When the Indian's eyes turned to us, Ken moved his hand higher to cup my breast and he turned his face to me, lips out, and I kissed him.

“We're on,” he said.

 

Two men just inside the doorway, wearing headsets. They ran flashlights up and down our faces, just a random thing but enough to terrify me, each man with one hand on his flashlight and the other holding a pistol down at his side. Not at all apologetic, one took out a metal detector and hand-wanded each of us, then looked in my bag, probably checking for cameras or recording devices.

Ken paid fifty dollars apiece to get us inside. The barn was huge, more of a warehouse, full of cars, pickups, and bikes parked all around the walls, about three vehicles deep. At the center, a rectangle of bleachers, eight rows high, surrounded a cock pit boarded off on all sides by three-foot-high sheets of plywood. The crowd roared, seated and standing on eight rows of graduated aluminum planking. I finally wedged between Ken and a biker wearing a blue denim vest and jeans so worn and faded they were almost white. Laundered, I saw. Ironed and pressed, creases on the sleeves and down each side of the front, the jeans six inches too long and folded back up like John Wayne used to wear them in his westerns. The biker smiled at me, dipped his longneck beer bottle at Ken just as two more fighting cocks were released in the ring.

“Give us all they got!” he shouted at the ring, settling the bottle at his feet before he stood and yelled, even with the other people yelling and screaming the biker's voice slicing through the intense noise.
“Give us all they got!”

People in front of me stood up just as I triggered the videocam button, but instead of standing I tried to wiggle sideways to shoot video between the people.

“Stand
up,
Laura!” Ken said. Elbow in my ribs. “This is not a tennis match. If you act polite here, you'll just stick out.”

Blood squirted straight up from one of the cocks, staining the white feather around his neck. The other
cock slashed again, so quickly I didn't even see the wound, but the bloody cock flew sideways, head mostly severed from the body, feet moving for another twenty seconds. When the fight ended, the winning cock hoisted by his handler, the loser, dead, was carried off unceremoniously. I tried to look away, but Ken jabbed me with his elbow and I shouted and applauded. At one corner of the cockpit, I saw that the fights were being recorded by a digital video camera mounted on a tripod. Diametrically across the pit, another camera. While waiting for the next bout, the two cameras made periodic sweeps of the audience and I saw the camera's zoom lenses working.

“The video game,” I said in Ken's ear. “Here's where they shoot the digital video that gets processed for the animated video games.”

I saw one videographer give directions to the other via a headset. Ken nudged me as the promoter of the fight gave directions to the next pair of cock handlers and the videographers.

“Hoyo,”
the promoter shouted to the next pair of men that swiveled themselves over the boards, both men bringing cocks to the center of the pit, allowing the two cocks to swipe beaks against each other. Two other men came into the pit, holding the steel gaffs, even from my seat in the top row I could see the gaffs were nearly four inches long, ending in a sharp steel point. Gaffs were attached to the bone spurs of each cock, and everybody except the handlers left the ring. They knelt to the sandy floor, held out the cocks toward each other, and released them with a flurry of wings and feathers, each bird kicking out, dodging, slicing, pecking once in a while but keeping their strikes moving toward the other cock until one scored a direct blow to the head, instantly killing the other cock. The victor was carried off over his handler's head, the body of the loser disappearing with his handler to behind the stands.

“Ésta es la primera lucha semifinal,”
the promoter shouted.

“The first of the semifinal fights,” Ken said to me.

“De Nogales, el campeón, luchas de Renaldo Roo. Veintiséis como ganador, él les mató todos. Y de Yuma, el desafiador, Arnold el asesino. Diecinueve matanzas.”

“Champion, twenty-six kills. Challenger, nineteen,” Ken said. “That promoter isn't speaking very good Spanish. I'm watching him, so get him on video and then record whatever you want.”

“Para ambos gamecocks. Celebre su fuerza y salude su honor,”
the promoter shouted, circling his arms to bring the two cocks and their handlers to the center of the ring. The crowd stood and cheered.

“Fuerza y honor!”
the crowd shouted. The biker beside me shouted, “Strength and honor. Strength and honor.”

“Las maquinillas de afeitar!”
the promoter shouted.

For this match, the needle-pointed spurs weren't held up. Instead, I saw what looked like knives, like razors, being strapped to the cocks. I grabbed Ken's arm, tried to stop biting my lower lip, tried to look enthusiastic at the bloody spectacle of a fight that lasted almost nine minutes, the crowd on its feet roaring for one bird or the other, calling out bets of hundreds of dollars, until both cocks collapsed, exhausted, heads moving slowly, warily, and then the challenger cock made a sideways slice and killed the champion.

 

After the last fight, the crowd dispersed quickly, the vehicles inside the barn leaving through two side gated doors. A crew began tearing down the bleachers. Ouside, I wanted to follow the main videographer, but Ken just shook his head, knelt beside his Harley as though fixing a part.

Only a few vehicles left, the promoter finally walked out and headed toward a Porsche SUV. Ken motioned for me to get on the Harley, he kick-started it, we moved slowly across the parking lot toward the Porsche, and just as we came alongside the promoter, Ken threw out
an arm and knocked him to the ground. Ken quickly stopped the Harley, killed the engine, and jumped off, motioning for me to steady the bike while he sat astride the promoter and punched him twice in the jaw.

“In the saddlebag,” Ken said. “In the right saddlebag, some duct tape.”

I threw the roll to him, Ken duct-taping the promoter's mouth shut and then flopping him on his stomach and taping his hands together. Taking the Porsche's keys, Ken toggled the alarm system off and swung the promoter into the back seat.

“Get in,” he shouted to me, and we drove away into the desert.