It was after two a.m. when I finally made it back to Bonita’s house. My nerves were as tight as barbed wire and my hands still shook from the confrontation with the bartender. What the fuck was I doing?
My dad used to keep a red metal air tank in the garage to inflate the dozens of basketballs and bicycle tires that a family of seven kids required. I’d been surprised that first time I filled it up with air at the gas station. It weighed no more full than empty. Was that what I was doing now? Trying to fill the emptiness in me with something as weightless and insubstantial as air?
I had already put the truck in Park before I noticed the slice of light coming from the partially open front door.
No one on the street. No cars or motorcycles that I hadn’t seen before. And no sound from inside.
Of course, the gun was in the kitchen instead of in my hand. I pulled out the tire iron again. It would give me enough protection until I could get inside.
Tiptoeing along the side of the house and across the patio, I ducked below the windows and avoided the patches of full moonlight that made the scrubby dry grass look frost rimed.
The light from inside was brighter now—probably the bedroom lamp or the overhead light in the hallway—but I still couldn’t see anything through the glass pane on the kitchen door.
I drew a deep breath and stopped to dial 911 on my cell phone, but clipped the phone back on my waistband before pushing the Send button. Slowly, slowly, I turned the key in the lock. A single loud click.
I opened the door and stepped in, but immediately tripped on a mop that had been left leaning against the table. Down on all fours, I scrambled to the cupboard that held the gun.
Nothing. The cabinet door was already open, the contents of the cleaning bucket strewn like piñata candies across the kitchen floor.
Tire iron in hand, I moved swiftly through the rest of the house. Bonita’s boxed belongings had been upended on the floor of the bedroom and the mattress was sliced into puffy ribbons. A bottle of ammonia had been emptied on the bed. In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet had been ripped off its hinges and someone had left a stinking pile of human shit in the middle of the floor.
The front door itself was undamaged, but the jamb had been pried away from the wall. And that ugly yellow chair had taken its last breath. It lay shattered in a dozen bulky mustard colored pieces like a jigsaw puzzle created by a madman.
The gun was gone.
Of course, I knew who had done it. Confident that I wouldn’t be home, the Braceros had made sure that I paid a price for having dodged them.
I opened the windows in the bedroom, refolded Bonita’s clothes, and put them back in the cardboard boxes, tucking the flaps securely under each other to keep the tops closed.
I lugged the mattress out to the truck and hefted it into the back, then lovingly placed the splintered remains of the yellow chair, the dining room table, and three shattered chairs on top.
I could have called the cops, told them about the gang following me, and the theft of the gun, but why give Sabin the satisfaction of knowing he was right? He’d wanted that gun three years ago. I had no doubt that he’d find some way to use it against me now, even if it didn’t involve Racine’s murder.
My anger fueled the cleanup. I carried, I cleaned, I cried—not in weakness, but in frustration. I’d made an enemy of this Latino gang, but the good guys who were supposed to be protecting me were just as likely to come after me. Damn. Swiping wildly at the word puta that had been spray-painted across the living room wall had succeeded only in smearing the red letters into a bloodred scrawl. Now it could have been translated as “whooooore.”
The bathroom took more courage. Covering my nose and mouth with my T-shirt, I shoveled the shit into a plastic garbage bag and tossed it into the front yard. Could’ve used that jug of ammonia right about now.
I added the bag of shit to the load in the bed of the truck and reversed out of the driveway. I’d be waiting at the dump at dawn when they opened.
The Braceros were telling me to get out of town. I wasn’t sure what I had done to piss them off. Interrupting their drinking festivities in Nogales? Asking about Felicia and Carlos? Dodging their motorcycle advances last night? Whatever it was, they were warning me off.
And I’d been telling myself to move on, too. There was no hope of a reconciliation with my family, I had no more business to be done here in Tucson, and Len Sabin was too interested in me for all the wrong reasons.
But now I was pissed.
I stopped on the way back from the dump for a big breakfast burrito and was waiting at the Wal-Mart outlet when it opened.
I was down to a box spring and one dining room chair at Bonita’s house. If I was going to be staying for a while, I’d need a few more creature comforts.
I prowled the aisles, gathering the bare necessities. Bonita’s furniture had been Downscale Dorm Room. My decorations would be Early Biker Chick. I got a pea-green beanbag chair, a foam pad to replace the sliced mattress, a set of two TV trays for tables, and a bathmat, so that I wouldn’t think about what had been on the tile floor. New cleaning supplies, including ammonia, two gallons of white paint, and new locks for both doors. Within an hour my shopping cart and my credit card were both loaded.
Back at the house, I turned on both the swamp box cooler and an electric fan to keep the air moving and went to work. The new coat of paint looked so good in the living room that I continued on into the bedroom, but the quart of ammonia was barely enough to make me feel that the kitchen and bathroom had been cleaned of the Braceros’ presence.
After I’d replaced the locks, rehung the bathroom door and medicine cabinet, and spread a new set of sheets across the foam pad, it began to feel like home. I flopped down on the beanbag chair, opened a beer, and grabbed the phone.
“Department of Corrections? I’d like to be added to the visitor list for one of your inmates. Paula Gammage—I think she’s using the name Paula Chatham now.” I took a long swig of Genuine Draft. “Perryville facility, that’s right.” I gave them all the information they needed to clear me for the approved list.
“Visiting hours are Saturday and Sunday, from nine to three-thirty,” the corrections officer said.
“I’d like to be on the list for Saturday, please.”
It would be nice to catch up with my ex-sister-in-law of America’s Most Wanted fame. She was the only criminal I knew, except for me. Oh sure, there were all those folks I’d been incarcerated with at the county jail while I was waiting for my trial, but I wasn’t sure which of them I could trust. In matters of crime, it’s always best to stick with family.
The next day was October first. I phoned Bonita’s landlord and arranged to pay another month’s rent on the place. I didn’t mention the new locks and new coat of paint. Any goodwill the repairs would have generated would have been offset by the damage to the furniture, anyway.
Arizona doesn’t pay much attention to seasonal change except that October signals a drop back into the eighties for the first time since Easter. I worked out with my homemade gym equipment in the backyard, seeing the bartender’s sneering face and hearing the roar of the Braceros’ motorcycles with each curl. Anger—at them for their bullying and machismo, and at myself for letting it happen—ran through me as I pumped the sand-filled containers again and again. I’d been dipped in rage for three years now, the coating getting thicker and thicker with each injustice, each disappointment, each bit of control seeping away.
Guillermo called three times, but I didn’t pick up. His last message said he’d come by after work. I didn’t want to be here. Getting involved with him and his missing brother had caused both the Braceros and Detective Sabin to come after me. I didn’t want to get any more ensnared than I already was in a situation that was blossoming craziness.
At sunset, I got in the truck, rolled the windows down, and left to find some dinner, settling for cottage cheese and two packages of sliced turkey from the grocery store. Time to get back to my build-muscle-not-fat diet. Time to reduce the cardio and increase the weight lifting. Time to get strong. Be prepared. Time to take charge again.
It was too early to go home; Guillermo might still be looking for me. I drove west through Gates Pass, the city lights a star-studded reflection in my rearview mirror. Descending to the valley floor on the other side, I spotted the plastic flowers and white cross that mark the site of a death on the roadside. Had someone fallen asleep and driven off the edge? Had he walked along the roadside, deaf to the sound of a truck approaching him from behind? Whatever happened, someone had bothered to remember him, to place a sad, plastic reminder of his existence where others could catch it in their headlights and for just a moment, wonder who had left this world, and who he had left behind.
I hadn’t seen a Day of the Dead altar at my parents’ house, but it was probably too early for my mother to have assembled it yet. It wouldn’t be lit until November, although she was undoubtedly mentally selecting the memorabilia, the sugar skulls, the candles that she’d need. The first day of November was to remember lost children and infants. The second day was for adults.
I was eight when she first let me help with an altar. She settled a gardenia in a shallow glass bowl in front of a flinty-eyed picture of her mother. A clutch of daisies became the bed for her sister’s gold hoop earring. It was the first year she marked my aunt Helen’s death.
I added the braided blue collar my old cocker spaniel had worn and a sprig from the potted fern out front he’d liked to pee on. My mother pushed them to the back of the table, keeping the apron of the altar to showcase her own pain.
Maybe she’d put a picture of Bonita on the altar this year. Not that she was dead, but being gone a worrisome distance away was just as bad. That deserved prayer and remembrance, too. I doubt that my mother had ever included any reminders of me.
On Friday I called Deke Treadwell and told him I was heading back to Phoenix for the weekend, to wrap up the loose ends of my life.
“How can we reach you if we need to?”
“You have my cell phone number.”
“I mean, where can we find you? Where will you be staying?”
That was a little too much supervision for my taste. They may have thought I was somehow involved with Markson’s and Felicia’s deaths, but so far I wasn’t charged with anything. Treadwell would have to settle for vague.
“I don’t know yet. I’ll find something cheap once I get up there.”
I was on the road by seven the next morning, in order to be at the prison when visiting hours started.
Traffic was light and I made it all the way to Chandler before I needed a refill on my coffee. Then it was a straight shot through Phoenix and another twenty miles west to reach the prison.
The Perryville complex, the largest female-inmate prison in the Arizona system, spilled over both sides of the road, but the part I was going to was the giant octagonal razor-wired section on the east. I pulled into the parking lot and followed the signs for arriving visitors.
The waiting room was packed with parents, children, and spouses, all craning to see the next inmate admitted to the visitors’ room. One ruddy-cheeked father counseled his six-year-old daughter on the finer points of prison protocol. “Remember to tell Mommy how much we miss her and how beautiful she looks.” The little girl nodded solemnly.
It took twenty minutes for Paula to come through the door and I hardly recognized her when she did. Much like my own jailhouse metamorphosis, Paula had become tauter, stronger. She was no longer the soft-spoken blonde who had swapped recipes and diet advice with me.
She was only twenty-seven now, but it looked like she’d added a decade’s worth of tough and smart in the three years since I’d seen her.
We got permission to go out to the exercise yard and took seats at an unoccupied picnic table.
“Sorry I wasn’t around for your trial,” I said. Paula had struck a plea deal about halfway through her trial, which made perfect sense given the evidence lined up against her. It would have been hard to stick to a not guilty plea when the America’s Most Wanted cameras found you in bed with the escapee, wearing the top to his orange prison scrubs as a nightie.
She smiled. “Nor I yours.”
“How’s it going in here?”
She shrugged. “There’s a good Bible study group. And I got on that team of inmate firefighters—we were working all summer on the wildland fires.”
I’d read about their efforts to help staunch the giant fires that had raged across Arizona, blackening fifteen thousand acres of land and turning what was already hot dry earth to ashes. They used a Marine cadence when they marched: “Standing tall and looking good. Ought to be in Hollywood.”
“Martin would be proud of you.” When they were married, Paula had been the perfect firefighter’s wife, but hadn’t taken an interest in the field herself. What she had taken an interest in was redeeming prison penpals from their evil ways.
“What about Dixie?” I asked. Sam “Dixie” Chatham was her current husband and the bank robber she’d risked her freedom to bust out of jail.
“We write a lot. I’ll be out in sixteen months”—she rapped her knuckles on the table—“but he’s got another six years. I’ll be waiting for him.”
I waved away a fat-bodied bee that thought we should have picnic supplies in front of us and looked around for a shadier spot to sit. Every place with more than a square inch of shade had already been claimed.
“I hope it works out.” That was a lie, but I knew how important lies could be to you on the inside. Sometimes even something that slippery was enough to get you through the day.
“Paula, I need to get a gun.”
I let it sit there, just as bold and stupid and crass a request as it was.
“Oh Jessie”—she started shaking her head—“you aren’t in some kind of trouble again, are you?” Counseling me as if I were the prisoner and she the right-thinking do-gooder stopping by on an autumn morning with reading material, advice, and a sense of superiority.
“Maybe. But it’s not of my doing. The gun’s for protection.”
“How am I supposed to help you get a gun?” she whispered, gesturing to the other inmates, the razor wire, and the guards stationed at the corners of the yard.
“You and Dixie, you know people.”
“Yeah, and they’re all in prison.”
“There’s got to be somebody on the outside. Who did Dixie deal with?”
She waited so long that I didn’t think she’d answer me, then said, “Go see Herman Prosky. He sells turquoise—onyx—in Quartzsite.”
I knew the town. It was about 100 miles west from where I was now, across some of the most desolate land God had ever squatted over. “But the big gem show is in February. Will he be around?” Anybody with a lick of sense would have left Quartzsite by April and not come back until December.
“He runs the hamburger stand in the off-season. Tell him ‘Paula remembers Ajo.’”
“What does that mean?”
“That’s where I bought the guns off him for Dixie’s breakout.” During her trial, Paula had never given up the name of the guy who sold her the guns. He owed her for that, and maybe I could be the way he paid her back.
I brushed off the seat of my pants as I stood up. “Thanks, Paula.”
“I’ll be praying for you.”