Bad Country: A Novel (8 page)

There were also on the hallway walls candid and studio photos of brown-skinned people in cowboy and Indian outfits, ill-fitting suits and prom gowns and oversized basketball uniforms, though very few of people in graduation robes and mortarboards. Rodeo knew what Samuel looked like from newspaper images and there were no photos of Samuel on Katherine Rocha’s Walk of Family Fame, not of him as a kid or teenager at least. All the babies on the wall looked pretty much the same except for Farrah, who had been framed theatrically from her earliest days. There were several candid shots of the little beauty queen with what must have been her parents jointly holding her at different stages of her growth. Standing beside the parents of Farrah and Samuel in one large photo was the tribal cop Rodeo had encountered earlier that day at the Circle K. Officer Monjano held the baby Farrah, who was garishly overdressed in all pink. Farrah’s mother was strikingly attractive except for her fat. The father, Alonzo, looked slightly like Monjano but was older and sloppy in his khakis with his shirttails out and his eyes puffy and red. There were also four other photographs of Farrah in later years, in her contest makeup and outfits, that always included the Reservation cop named Monjano prominently in the frames, often holding the little beauty queen in his big arms.

Since his client was still soundly asleep in the living room, Rodeo moved into Katherine Rocha’s bedroom for a quick tour.

The smell in the old woman’s room was of talcum powder and piss, patent medicines and packaged bandages, muscle rubs, and the odor of the seepage that accompanies the decomposition of vitality into decrepitude. On the bedside table were a number of pill bottles including the blood thinner warfarin along with lisinopril and metoprolol for hypertension and lithium for depression. There was another framed glossy photo of the favored dead child, Farrah, on Katherine Rocha’s dresser and several old photos featuring Katherine Rocha herself, in her late teens and early adulthood. In one of these Katherine Rocha wore a traditional Mexican dress and posed in front of Teatro Del Carmen. Her pose was as dramatic and alluring as a professional actress’s. In another photo from the same era, Katherine Rocha lounged in front of El Minuto Café with some slick pachucos. An earlier photo showed Katherine Rocha as a smiling girl with curves in a cowgirl outfit standing in front of Western WearHouse with a Tucson Rodeo Parade prize banner draped over her chest. In these old photographs Katherine Rocha’s long, round chin always tilted to the left and her thick, sculpted eyebrows arched above deep-set eyes that were luminous even in these old photographic reproductions.

Also on Katherine Rocha’s dresser was a computer-enhanced reproduction of an old snapshot, the grain exploded large as if the eight-by-ten had been derived from a much smaller original snapshot. In this picture a small cowboy on a paint pony faced Black Mountain. Rodeo recognized the location of the snapshot as the practice rodeo arena near the San Xavier Mission, just yards from the house in which he had spent most of his youth. And though the rider’s back was to the camera, from the way the cowboy sat his cutting horse Rodeo knew this was a photograph of his own father, a picture of Buck Garnet in his prime. Rodeo stood very still for a moment and then moved on.

Samuel’s room was obviously the lair of an adolescent. Stale smoke residue coated the whole room, the odor refreshed by a hubcap brimful of cigarette butts, mostly Kools. There was no computer in the room and no cable connections for one. On a bedside table were a cheap cassette/CD/radio boom box and a small pile of CDs, mostly classic rock, the CDs so old the jewel cases were opaque. Rodeo opened them all and found nothing but liner notes.

Posters covered the walls—Ray Msyterio, Nine Inch Nails, Insane Clown Posse, a shirtless Brad Pitt. Scarface aimed his machine gun at Dirty Harry, who responded with his trademark .357 magnum in the corner near the head of the single bed. Dirty and soiled sheets and T-shirts were twisted and spread over an uncovered, stained mattress. The floor was littered with men’s magazines, Mountain Dew and Red Bull cans, energy bar wrappers and Fritos bags. The drawers of the bureau disgorged dirty underwear, baggy jeans, graphic T-shirts that promoted Old School headbanger bands like Metallica, Whitesnake and Poison.

The back of Samuel’s bedroom door was covered in concert ticket stubs from a wide variety of acts, mostly from the Rialto Theater, representing artists ascending to stardom or receding from it—Aimee Mann, The New Pornographers, Peter York, Queensr
ÿ
che, Bela Fleck, Sergio Mendoza, 2 Live Crew, Monkey Arte, Acoustic Alchemy, Tech N9ne, Lucinda Williams, Animal Collective, The Robert Cray Band, David Sedaris, Slammin’ Poetry, Tucson Poetry Festival, Dark Star Orchestra, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Raúl Malo, Ken Nordine, Missy Higgins, Japonize Monkey, Morrissey, John Legend, New Found Legend, Styxnaseua, Old Timey Times, The Way Back Machine, Madansky Folk Ensemble, Franz Ferdinand, Three Red Neck Tenors, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Nicky Cruz, Badfish, Craig Ferguson, Ice Cube, Lamb of God, Indigenous, Authority Zero, Los Lobos, Wilco, Atmosphere, The Fucking Kennies, The Breeders, The Whistlers, The Wrongs, The Hives, The Faint, The Fainters, The Zombies, The Dead, A Live and Calexico.

In Samuel’s closet was one set of neatly pressed pleated khakis and one long-sleeved, button-down baby blue dress shirt scarcely worn and many hooded sweatshirts that promoted colleges or professional sports teams—Pima Community College, La Universidad de Arizona, Phoenix Cardinals, Arizona Diamondbacks, Colorado Rockies, Chicago White Sox, The Tucson Javelinas, Gila Monsters, Mavericks, Sidewinders, Scorch, Heat and IceCats and one sweatshirt that had airbrushed on the chest R
OSESMOKE
.

Under the bed was nothing but a roach clip on a leather thong tied to a fragment of a hawk’s feather. Between the mattress and box springs were two abused pornographic magazines, one gay and one straight. And a small spiral notebook filled with poems, a whole bookful of poems. Rodeo flipped through all the poems and read several of the shorter ones.

Rose Haiku

     Pink hair is the prettiest,

                Unlike the man-stink,

     Because it’s not natural.

     I’m supposed to be guilt-free

                After a guilt sweat.

     I love your pink hair the best.

     The tattoos that reach around

                Your wrists are etchings

     Not even God could dream up.

     I miss my little sister.

                You know how to make

     Her come back to life with words.

Walking to the Palace

     It’s always night

     When I’m walking

     To the Palace to collect

     The Bitchwitch is only her empty winnings

     And heavy breath from

     Christian Brothers.

     Part cross, part hammer, all death

     Knell, life

     Sentence.

     Whatever

     Birds of prey dream

     Of devouring in the brush,

     Split and bloody,

     Holds no candle

     To what I’ll do

     To the BitchWitch is only her bones.

     Once I burn her flesh

     Clean off, I might let her

     Breathe my smoke

     A few hours more

     Before I kiss her goodnight

     With a straight razor

     And cup of bleach.

     Then, I’ll grind her bones

     And snort them. To complete

     The exorcism,

     Performed with the last of her

     Christian Brothers, her only family left,

     I’ll make fire leap

     From my mouth so my face

     May be burned clean

     Of any resemblance

     Of her, even in the dark.

I am Smoke

     I am smoke

            and you’re a cloud

                  and we float

     through each other

            and trade colors

                  become each other

     and now you’re good

            and now I’m bad again

                  and gray is roseate

     and black is white

            and wet is dry

                  and earth is sky

     where the MIA

            are all at home

Folded into this book of chirographic poetry was a copy of Farrah Katherine Rocha’s obituary. The six-year-old child’s obituary was longer than many of those marking the deaths of octogenarians, most of the copy detailing the girl’s many wins, places and finishes in Little Miss beauty pageants. No mention was made of her only sibling, her brother Samuel, as a survivor of hers.

Rodeo closed the small notebook and stuck it in his shirt pocket, turned his attention to the teenager’s books. Though the rest of the room seemed well-tossed by the police, the books seemed undisturbed but by gravity. The shelves were made of splintered pallet wood and were not even held in the dry wall by expansion screw sets but only with nails scarcely sufficient to hold the pressure of the paperbacks resting on them. Many nail heads were bent and pounded into the walls in obvious frustration. The thin metal brackets were sagging from the wall under the weight of words.

Each shelf had a theme. Science fiction, fantasy, true crime, government conspiracies, alien visitation, zombies, vampires and werewolves, satanic cults, Vietnam, guns, serial killers, Harry Potter, Stephen King and Poetry. There were six books on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, so Rodeo studied these with some care. All had the pages containing the well-known diagrams of the Book Depository on Dealey Plaza dog-eared. A number of these diagrams of the ballistics report also had notes scribbled on them, distances from shooter to target and ballistics information. In a margin of one was drawn a Smiley Face and written beside it “not a hard shot!” In another book, on the most famous photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald, CE-133A, a halo was penciled in above Oswald’s head, and near Oswald’s mail-order rifle was penciled “Carcano 6.5 millimeters, ask RR about getting one for our ‘job.’”

There were also two books detailing the lives, the pursuit and eventual capture of the Washington, D.C. “Beltway” serial sniper killers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo.

Rodeo quickly flipped through the rest of the books and then replaced them one by one. He found only a single scrap of paper, in a book of Alexander Long poetry, a homemade business card that had R
OSE
R
ITE.COM
embossed on the front and handwritten on the back a local telephone number and
the Kettle
. No wallet, keys or personal items but several framed photos were on the battered chest of drawers. One photo was of little Farrah, not in one of her competitive Little Miss costumes, but simply smiling in a candid shot looking like a plain little Mexican-American girl with natural brown pigtails and brown eyes. There was a blurry shot of an Anglo girl with pink hair as she was leaving a chain restaurant. Samuel had also taped to the bureau mirror several of his own cropped school pictures. Though the photos represented several different school years, Samuel consistently had acne spots on his face and long greasy hair, a downy fuzz on his upper lip, and was a very ordinary-looking mixed-race kid except for his eyes, which were as luminous as his grandmother’s had been.

Also taped to the mirror was a photo of a group of Goth kids standing in line outside the Rialto Theater including the girl with pink hair again. Another snapshot had been taken in front of El Charro Café of a similar bunch of tattooed and pierced kids but in cheap prom gear. They stood beside a 1980’s-era Buick sedan with a spoiler bolted unevenly on the trunk lid and “Stretch Limo” soaped on the side panels of the LeSabre.

Beside this photo was one Samuel had apparently taken of himself, as his skinny arm was partly in the picture as he held the camera in front of his face. Rodeo placed the location of this image as the nearby sweat lodge, which was within a mile or so of Katherine Rocha’s house. The men’s lodge was partly visible as a dome of rags with a low, shadowed entrance. Smoke rose behind the young man, partly obscuring Black Mountain in the near distance. A dark figure also drifted in the background behind Samuel’s head, a thin, dark-skinned man in shorts.

There was also one blurry photo of a thin man in camo gear standing with a large and well-scoped rifle on his hip in the middle of a large field of grass. Rodeo removed the photo from the mirror. “White Mountain” was scribbled in ink on the back of this snapshot. A related snapshot also on the mirror was of a group of six dark-skinned grown men with one teenager easily identified as Samuel Rocha. All of the men in this photo were armed with rifles and held cigars and beers and all were smiling except for the central figure, who scowled at the camera as he aimed his large caliber, scoped hunting rifle at the head of a mature elk bull with a trophy-sized rack. Samuel Rocha stood beside this central shooter and looked up at the older man, the same man as in the solo hunter photo. Rodeo recognized one of the grown men in the group hunting shot as someone he knew very well.

The PI tucked all these photos and the R
OSE
R
ITE.COM
calling card into his wallet and returned to the living room where Katherine Rocha snored laboriously, a fisted hand clutched to her chest. Rodeo stood over his new client for a several minutes, staring at her faded beauty. Her thick eyebrows were now gray and unruly, her once long, round chin was disappeared in jowls. Her skin, once perfectly brown, was now sallow, her face marred by frown lines.

Rodeo returned to the kitchen and extracted his client’s cash stash from the kitchen drawer, counted out another two hundred and fifty dollars and stuffed it in his pocket, replaced the Food City bag. He wrote a receipt reflecting this full amount for a day’s pay and expenses as Paid In Full, put it on the table, left a R
ODEO
G
RACE
G
ARNET,
P
RIVATE
I
NVESTIGATOR
business card atop it then left the house.