CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

There was a fire that night in the high country up near the Mogollon Rim. A part-time White Mountain Apache firefighter seeking a day’s work at $8 an hour tossed a match into dry grass in a wash near Cibecue and the fire brewed up, spat and roared. On it rambled for 11 days, joining another fire started by a lost hiker, gobbling up pine forest, incinerating homes and out-buildings, leveling mountain towns.

It was the greatest fire in Arizona history, and the story of it roared across every newspaper page and TV screen in the region. In those circumstances, small stories are cast aside like burning cinders, so a brief shoot-out in the deserts of Pinal County got little coverage. Even the capture of a drug smuggler dying from a botched kidney transplant couldn’t force that story any farther forward than page B-8 of the Local section in the Phoenix Scribe.

It was all to the good. That’s the first thing Frye said when he was sent down from Phoenix to get the details and hide them well enough to save the newspaper from embarrassment.

“Are they goin’ to charge you?” he bleated, as he paced around the waiting room in the headquarters of the Pinal County Sheriff. “If they charge you I don’t know what I can do. It will be a public record. Everybody has access to those public records, you know that.”

I took time out from mopping dried blood off my face.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s a hell of a thing about those public records. Now, if we were only in Stalinist Russia, or in the clutches of a banana republic, we wouldn’t have to worry about details like that. That’s the problem with this society. No control.”

He was nodding. Unconsciously, I hoped.

“Are they goin’ to charge you?”

I looked at the bloody towel. “No, they’re not going to charge me. They are very informal here. In fact, they let me sit in on the interrogation of Dr. Aguilara, and he’s told the whole story. I will write it up at length as soon I’m sure I won’t need a transfusion.”

Frye batted the air like a performer in a conga line.

“Oh, you can’t do that,” he said. “You’re involved. We can’t have reporters getting involved, and if they do, we have to say they aren’t. You know that.”

“Yes,” I said. “I do know that.”

Then, suddenly, Frye shut his gob and turned away. He emitted a dolorous breath, put his hands on his hips and looked at the ceiling. I’d never seen him so pensive. It’s not a mood you expect from a Texan.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It really is a good story.”

“It’s more than a story,” I said.

His blue eyes weren’t bulging now, they were quiet. His Adam’s apple was under control, he wasn’t sweating, and he looked like a human being.

“No it isn’t,” he said. “That’s not the way we are. It’s all the story. Sometimes we wish it wasn’t, but it is. We’re newsmen.”

And we were indeed, him and me, though he kept trying not to be. Who would have believed it?

“I’ll buy you a drink,” he said.

I mopped my forehead, erasing the last bit of black, bloody dust.

“Soda water,” I said.

* * * *

We held another funeral for Rhea, and buried her where everyone thought she had gone to rest before, deep in the sandy waste of Pinal County amid the white-thorn, the tarbush and the ocotillo, with the mountains rising in the distance, seeming close only because of a trick of the air. Daly and Handsome Dan made the decision. There was no one else to do it. Rhea had no relatives they knew of—not even the ones who had hurt her or left her or turned their backs on her. She had no friends except the other conspirators, and they were dead now or running or making deals, because the law was on and the money had fled. The actors had departed, the scene was struck. Only the prop people were left to care, and they did their jobs diligently. Circumstances helped. The grave was available, for the authorities had exhumed the woman who had lain in her place. That woman was buried respectably in Phoenix with a portion of Rhea’s money. The rest was ceded to the state to be used to build more schools, where presumably children would be taught a better way to live.

For Rhea’s funeral, they used the same priest as before. Daly wept again, perhaps even more freely than before, but now she had Handsome Dan’s arm around her waist, and his shoulder to lean on. He wore his uniform well, and he was a sturdy fellow—not imaginative, but I had come to place far less stock in imagination. I did not weep for Rhea myself. It didn’t seem the right thing to do. She had been so cruel, and I had been so foolish. Instead, I let the heat seep into me, the sweat rise through my hair, the sun lance into my face. That was my penance. “We owe God a death . . . ” And we owe him a penance, to be satisfied before we offer him the death. We do not settle that debt in the Great Beyond. All of us must pay here.

As the service broke up, Daly and Handsome Dan glanced at me, and we walked away from the grave. We paused near the highway to look back. Despite the heat, the sky was beginning to turn, and I could see that it would soon be autumn. The clouds were higher now, and drifting, and there was a lessening of the sounds of small creatures in the brush. Daly faced me. Her face had aged, but not in a bad way. Lines of wisdom crinkled her eyes, she lifted her chin, and her blue eyes were deep. The hot wind blew her green hair. Her mouth moved but she almost didn’t speak. The old Daly would not have. But this Daly wanted a real end. How many of us have that kind of courage?

“You’re a bad man, aren’t you, Callan?”

“It’s what I count on.”

Her blue eyes were brighter now.

“And you lied to me. About that man who came to see Rhea years ago, the one she thought was her father.”

“I had to,” I said, and when I said it, something went away from me forever. “To explain what she’d lost, why her feelings were ruined.”

Daly’s mouth blurred as she tried to keep her lips tight and failed, and the wisdom lines trembled and dissolved in grief.

“Did you do right, doing that?”

“I did,” I said. “I’m sorry for it, but I did.”

* * * *

And that was the end of it, or what you might think was the end of it. For weeks I sat up late and alone, listening to night-bird songs on my patio, ignoring the phone, playing the old ballads, watching the lights of Phoenix come and go against the dark sky. The newspaper, surprisingly, in an age of procedure and of damn-the-reporters and of sweeping under the nasty parts, accepted my malaise. The editors showed a forbearance born of uneasiness, and let me go my way.

Eventually, I pushed away the black mood and the sleeplessness and the editors let me return and work on car crashes and lottery winners and sudden turns in the weather. On the daily stories, the ones that speed by like lightning, the ones that are over when the sun goes down. The ones you don’t have to think about. What I did think about, of course, was Rhea. About how beautiful she was, how mad she was, how mad I was, about how I had felt for her.

In time, there would be other adventures, other battles, other women—one woman, in particular. I would take her to Ireland to exorcise the ghosts of my past, to visit the grave of the only true friend of my early days as a reporter, the editor Patrick O’Connell. There would be fine times and laughter and other stories. There are always the stories, aren’t there? But for good or ill, and I suppose it must be for the good, there would never be another one like Rhea.

I speak as from a great distance, I know. All this occurred only a few years ago, but to me it seems long past. Arizona is a fast place, intoxicated by its speed. The newcomers surge in ignorant of its history, everyone looks to the future, memories die before their time. Perhaps that’s inevitable, and for the best, and correct. Perhaps the soul is soothed by the hurly-burly of going forward, the mind numbed by action. But that is not my way. I remember Rhea.

It was not possible to redeem her on earth, and I don’t know if there’s a more merciful elsewhere in which she can be saved. But I do know that in August, when the storms are hissing and grumbling in from the Pacific and the winter seems such a long way off, I make my pilgrimage down to Pinal County and park just off the highway and walk over the path that Daly walked to the grave the first time I saw her. I look far out to the horizon and beyond, and I think of the sweep of the earth and of all things on the earth. On the border, the immigration agents are checking papers and the border crossers are moving through. In the desert, the illegals trudge, and many will make it. In the mission of San Xavier del Bac, the worshippers’ faces are turned up to the candlelight. In Tucson, a mother is trying to get her child to eat his breakfast. In the reservation casinos, the gamblers are trembling with anticipation, bathed in the flash and jingle of the slot machines. Hope is alive. The world is carrying on.

I stand by the grave. Daly’s handkerchief angel is no longer there, of course. But long ago she taught me how to fashion such an angel out of a clean handkerchief and a simple gold ring, and each year I do. Then, in the vicinity of the cross, I begin a search, looking over the rough ground for a bit of sanctuary. And always I find it. Amid the desolation, I encounter a rock or a rise or a dense scrap of brush—a makeshift barrier that will ease the wind. I arrange the angel and it stands in place. Errant drafts pummel it. The dust blows over it. Hawks dive and bank around it, their wings beating. But the angel continues to stand there, still and alone, as if nothing could dislodge it.

It is dislodged in time, of course. The illegals who pass that way have heard about my practice, and each year they come and pluck the ring, leaving the angel. They sell the gold and, I presume, put the money to good use. But, though they could, they never take the ring right away. They always wait at least a week. They know about me, you see, and they tell my story. They say that a man loved a woman and killed her, and now he grieves. It is an old story, they say, and one that must be respected. And every year, they give me that week to be with Rhea.