When It All Comes Down to Dust (Phoenix Noir Book 3) (14 page)

But it was as different from L.A. as Tony and Becca del Rio could have hoped for, without cold weather, and that was enough for them. It was easy to find work, and, even though wages weren’t high, neither were rents.

Tony got a job in a butcher shop. Becca waited tables in Durant’s, a restaurant on Central Avenue that was frequented by the town’s politicians, businessmen and criminals, and some people who were all three. Sometimes there would be a movie star passing through town, and as Becca brought him his food she would remember how much she hated L.A.

They lived in a house near Seventh Street and Glendale. It was slightly beyond their means, but they were sure that wouldn’t be the case for very long, and they were right. Things went well for Tony at the butcher shop, and soon he was managing the place. It wasn’t long after his promotion that Becca got pregnant. They hadn’t planned for it to happen, but they were both happy about it. Becca didn’t want to quit work until she really had to, but her boss fired her as soon as the pregnancy started to show, telling her a pregnant girl waiting tables didn’t look good and didn’t fit the restaurant’s “classy” atmosphere.

She was angry, but Tony told her not to worry, they’d get by without her paycheck if they were careful. She knew he was just trying to make her feel better, so she ignored what he said and started looking for another job. He told her that nobody was going to hire her knowing that she’d have to leave soon, but she applied for a job at a burger joint, told the manager flat out that she needed a job, and the manager said “Okay” and set her to work there and then. She put each paycheck into a savings account, and when Frank was born they had a little bit of money for emergencies.

After the birth, Tony held the boy and whispered, “I’m gonna take good care of you. You eat before I do, always.”

In the years that followed, although money was often tight, there never came a time when anyone in the family couldn’t eat. Tony continued to do well at his job, and Becca stayed home with the baby. Tony had told her that whatever she wanted to do was okay with him, whether that was go to work or stay at home. She said she wanted to be a full-time mom at least until Frank was old enough for kindergarten.

Frank’s earliest memory was of how he’d hear a car pull into the driveway, and his mother would tell him, “That’s your daddy coming home from work.” They’d go outside and watch Tony get out of the car and walk towards them. He always brought some meat home from the shop, wrapped in paper and carried in a plastic bag with some ice to protect it from the heat on the drive home. Each day, when Frank saw the bag, he’d ask, “What did you get, Daddy?” and Tony would tell him it was beef stew, or steaks, or pork chops, or chicken.

That memory stayed with Frank for the rest of his life. He would always be able to see his father, tall and lean under the blue sky, coming home with the food they would eat for dinner, kissing his wife, hugging his son. As Becca cooked, her husband would hang out in the kitchen and talk with her, sitting on a chair at the dining table, drinking a cup of coffee, as Frank sat on his lap.

As Frank got a little bit older, he was astonished to see that many of his friends’ parents didn’t get along. Tony and Becca loved and liked each other. When they were upset with each other, they talked about it and talked about it until they figured something out, and when they were angry they never let their son see it.

When Frank was four, he asked his parents if they could get a dog. His mother said she didn’t mind, and his father said it would be good to have a watchdog. “But,” Tony told his son, “it’ll be your dog. You’ll have to take care of him, okay?”

“Okay,” Frank said.

Tony and Frank got in Tony’s car and drove to a pet store, but what they saw there sickened Tony and made Frank cry. The puppies were kept together in a cramped glass enclosure, and they were in obvious distress, hardly able to move in the small space, and nervous at the parade of people looking at them through the glass. Frank wanted to buy one, rescue it, but Tony said that would be giving money to the people who were being so mean to the dogs.

“If you want, we can go find a dog that nobody wants, and we can give it a home,” Tony said.

Frank nodded, still crying. He didn’t want to leave the puppies like that. He wanted his father to talk to the people who owned the store, and make them be nicer to the animals.

Tony used a pay phone to call home and get Becca to look in the phone book and find out where the city pound was. Then he and Frank went there.

Frank had never imagined so many dogs. They were confined together in rows of cages that were as long as streets. It seemed even worse than what Frank had seen at the pet store, because it was so much bigger. The warm air echoed with the sound of barking and whimpering. Tony explained that it was different than the store, because the dogs at the store were being treated that way because they were being sold to make money, and the dogs at the pound were there because they had nobody to take care of them.

“But you can pick one and he can come home with us,” Tony said.

“What happens to the other dogs if nobody wants them?” Frank said.

Tony didn’t like lying, ever, and especially not to his son, but there was no way he could have told him the truth. “Somebody always wants them,” he said. “They stay here until somebody takes them home.”

Frank believed him.

They walked for a long time, through corridors between cages. So many dogs barking, so many different kinds of dog, big ones and small ones, and Frank didn’t know which kind he wanted.

“Tell you what,” Tony said. “You should just go right up to a cage, and, whatever dog you think likes you the most, you pick him, okay?”

“Okay,” Frank said. He liked the idea of letting the dog choose him. Tony hoped it would be a young dog and not one of the old ones that were just in brief storage before being killed. He’d have liked to be able to save such a dog, give it some comfort in its final years, but he didn’t want Frank to have a pet die of old age soon after getting it.

Frank walked up close to a cage, and just about every dog it contained barked at him. There was one, though, that was barking with an urgency that didn’t seem random, that wasn’t just automatic barking at anybody who came near. It was looking at Frank like it knew him already, like it was saying
Get me out of here.
Tony wasn’t aware of it, but that was how it seemed to Frank, and the dog was okay with Tony. It was a mongrel, about six years old, average size, looked like it had some terrier in it.

The staff at the pound let Frank pet the dog, and it obviously liked him. Frank wanted to take it home right away, but the pound had a rule that all animals that were adopted had to be neutered at the expense of the new owner. Tony paid the fee, and was told to come back and pick the dog up two days later.  When Tony and Frank left, the dog was already so bonded to the boy that it howled like a wolf, thinking it was being abandoned again. Frank felt almost as bad until, on the drive home, Tony distracted him by asking what he wanted to call the dog.

“I don’t know. It’s a boy dog, huh?”

“That’s what they said.”

“I don’t know what to call him. Did you have a dog when you were little?”

“Yep.”

“What was his name?”

“Casey.”

“Why was he called that?”

“I actually don’t know. I think it was my dad that named him.”

“What happened to him?”

“My dad or the dog?”

“The dog.”

“He died. But he was real old when he died. He had a good life.”

“Did he die before your dad?”

“No, he didn’t. My dad didn’t live to be very old. But
your
dad sure will.”

“I hope the dog does too.”

“Well, you’ll take good care of him and make sure he does.”

“Can we call him Casey?”

“He’s your dog. You can call him anything you want to.”

“Can I call him Superman?”

“Nope.”

“You said I could call him anything.”

“Yeah, but if you call him that, then Superman’s enemies might think he’s the real Superman, and come after him. That wouldn’t be good.”

“I want to call him Casey, then.”

“Casey’s good. You’ve got my dad’s name, and now your dog’s gonna have my dad’s dog’s name. That’s good.”

And Casey was Frank’s dog. When Tony and Becca took Frank to the pound to pick him up, he seemed interested only in Frank, barking at him, wagging his tail, jumping on him. On the ride home, he sat on the back seat with Frank, his head on Frank’s lap, as though this were nothing new, as though they had done this every day for years.

Tony made up a dog bed in the hall, right outside the kitchen, but Casey hardly ever slept in it, other than to take naps in it during the day. At night, he slept on Frank’s bed, snuggled against Frank’s feet.

Back in those days, the law wasn’t stringent about making people clean up after their dogs, and so people didn’t. But Tony told Frank it wasn’t nice to let the dog mess in the yard or on the street outside people’s houses, so they’d get in the car and drive to the park, where Tony would pick up Casy’s shit with a plastic bag and drop it in a trashcan, or they’d drive out to the desert, and Tony would sit on the hood of his car and smoke a cigarette while Frank and Casey ran around, and Casey would piss against mesquite and crap in the shadow of saguaro.

The only problem with Casey was that he was as destructive as a puppy, and no amount of training seemed to make a difference. Left alone in the house, he would chew any furniture he could get at – couches, chairs, pillows. He got in Tony and Becca’s room one day, and tore open their mattress and sent its stuffing flying around the room. The family didn’t have money to spend on replacing furniture, and so Tony briefly considered getting rid of the dog. But, almost as soon as he thought about it, he also thought about having to tell Frank, and he knew he couldn’t do it.

Instead, a new rule was made: Casey wasn’t allowed to be left alone in the house. Since he was so hard to train, it didn’t seem like a good idea to let him roam free in the neighborhood, so when there was going to be nobody home, the last person to leave the house would put a chain on Casey and fasten the other end of it to the porch rail.

Casey hated this, but, since Becca was home most of the time, it was seldom for very long. He’d be left in the shade of the house and the orange trees, and they’d leave a bucket of water beside him. Still, he hated being chained up and left alone, and, whenever the family had been to the store or to visit friends, it always made Frank sad to hear Casey bark with excitement when they came home. Somehow, Frank could tell that Casey always thought that they weren’t going to come home, that they were abandoning him.

One Saturday morning, the family went to Encanto Park, and took Casey with them. Tony, Becca and Frank sat at a picnic table and ate hot dogs and drank soda, Casey ran around in a circle on the grass, chasing the tail he couldn’t stop wagging. As Frank watched him, he thought about all the other dogs that were in the pound, and how nobody loved them, and he was glad Casey was so happy.

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L
aura never had any pets, except for a series of goldfish. None of them lived for more than a couple days, because her parents didn’t realize that the fish couldn’t live in bowls filled only with tap water. They’d take Laura to the pet store, get a fish in a plastic bag full of water, take it home, fill a fish bowl with water at the kitchen sink, and drop the fish in it. By the next day, the fish would be floating on its side, and Laura would be crying. Her father would take her to the pet store and get another fish, and the process would be repeated. After about a month, Laura said she didn’t want any more fish.

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F
rank and Casey got older, but you couldn’t really see it on Casey.  For most of a decade, he looked and acted the same, and had the energy of a puppy.

Frank did okay in school. He was good at what he enjoyed, and not so good at what bored him. He learned to read very quickly, and never learned to count very well. He was fit and strong, but was never good at sports, because he didn’t like them.  He did well with other kids, because he liked them, and so they liked him.

He always had friends, though a lot of the time he preferred to be by himself so he could read. He learned to read faster than most of the other kids, and sometimes they would want to hang out when he wanted to read comic books. Since they couldn’t read yet, he would read the comic books aloud to them while they sat beside him and looked at the pictures.

––––––––

L
aura read comic books too. She liked
Tomb of Dracula
, and she liked
Popeye
.  She read them while being ignored by her parents, and she wished the images in the panels of the comics were real life, wished she lived in a world where everything was clean and easy, and even scary things weren’t scary because you knew they would turn out all right.

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W
hen Frank was twelve, one of his friends got taken to the Maricopa County Fair and then told everybody at school about it, and so nearly everybody in the class ended up going. Frank told his parents he wanted to go too. They checked the newspaper and saw that it was the last day of the fair, which was a problem, because one of Tony’s friends was moving out of town, and Tony had to attend his going-away party that evening. Becca told Frank she’d take him to the fair, but, since nobody would be home, they’d have to chain Casey up in the yard for a few hours.

Frank wouldn’t do it. He cried because he wanted to go to the fair, but he couldn’t stand the idea of Casey being chained up and left all alone for so long, thinking that he’d been left forever. Becca told him that it wouldn’t do Casey any harm, that they’d make it up to him when he got home, but Frank said no, and he didn’t go to the fair.

When Frank was sixteen, Tony and Becca decided to spend the summer traveling together. They had never spent any time anywhere other than the West, and they wanted a break from the heat, so they decided to explore the North, and maybe head into Canada as well. They considered taking Frank along, but they wanted the time by themselves, and they knew he was responsible enough to be left alone in the house for a few weeks. For his part, he had no interest in spending weeks in a van with his parents, and he was excited by the prospect of having the house to himself.