Phoenix Noir (17 page)

He was wearing the T-shirt he took from his son’s closet.
Path
was written across his chest in big white letters and he had no idea what it meant. His once thin torso had taken a turn south and now stationed itself around his thickened waist. Surprised that he jiggled when he laughed, he took up running in the mornings at the old Indian School grounds. One morning he tripped on the gravel and came down hard. “Damnit!” Tom had rubbed his ankle, hoping it wouldn’t swell. Boarding school still kickin’ my ass, he thought.

Used to be he could walk into a conference, a bookstore, a nightclub, and the women would turn their heads at the tall, dark, handsome Indian man who could’ve been on the cover of the romance novels they scooped up in the grocery line, his hair draped over the pulsing pink bosom of the woman in his toned arms. When he was younger he let it hang loose like a wild pony testing the spring wind. Long hair drew the looks and the women. Someone once asked if he was the actor, Wind in His Hair in
Dances with Wolves
. It became a line he used to pick up women. “Did you see
Dances with Wolves?
That was me,” he lied to a co-ed who paid for his drinks at the college bar after a poetry reading at MCC. Time was when he could turn the charm on like a light, when women dropped into his lap and all he had to do was scoop them up.

Did he ever love any of them? He wanted to tell one that she was the love of his life, his candle in the wind, his San Francisco peak.

Eliza was a Jew and a former hippie and New Yorker. She was a nurse and rotated among programs and facilities in Phoenix. Tom was working at the Phoenix Indian Center at the time coordinating GED programs for the urbs. Eliza arrived one afternoon to give flu shots to the elderly Indians. Tom helped set up chairs and brought her a cup of coffee during her break, which she accepted though she normally avoided caffeine. She stirred the coffee and impulsively told him she hated that Indians were forced to live on reservations like concentration camps.

“Now their land is being taken from them again and they must live in the cities. Doesn’t it just make you angry?” she asked.

“Hell, we’re survivors,” Tom proclaimed dismissively.

After only four months, Tom decided to give marriage another go around. Their courtship had been a rather staid affair in comparison to the women he’d fucked in the backseats of their BMWs, Audis, and even a red VW bug, their bodies damp and sticking to the leather. Over a spaghetti and meatball dinner Eliza had once asked, “If you had one wish, what would it be?”

He slurped up strands of pasta that resembled roots growing from his mouth.

“May I?” she asked, and picked up his spoon and twirled the pasta onto it and offered it to him.

After a long pause he answered, “If I had one wish, I’d want you to be my wife.” Tom knew what to say when women felt most vulnerable.

Since she was already carrying his seed in the darkness of her womb and was soon to finish up her Physician’s Assistant training, they decided to make it legal. A child was born, a boy destined to be raised by his mother. Marital bliss faded quickly for Tom and eventually his wandering eye led him back to other women.

One morning a suit arrived at work carrying a yellow envelope. The man caught Tom by surprise, and before he knew it he’d signed the delivery of his divorce papers.

His first wife hadn’t been as dramatic. They’d met at the Indian Center before she got a better-paying job at a credit union. On their third date they’d gone to see George Strait sing his love songs in the US Airways Center. They sat way up in the cheap seats and held hands. Afterwards they walked to her apartment and made love for hours on the sofa sleeper she had bought at a garage sale. Carmen was an urb like him but often drove home to the rez on the weekends to be with her family. She’d return Sunday afternoons bringing freshly killed lamb and tortillas in the cooler. Tom made a few trips with her, but his childhood experience of being on the rez gave him excuses to stay in the city. When Carmen told Tom she was pregnant, he joked that he would name the child George, whether it was a girl or boy.

Tom settled into his life as husband and expectant father until he met up with some of his old drinking buddies. They would arrive with loud voices and six-packs of beer in paper bags after Tom and Carmen had gone to bed. Carmen endured for as long as she could Tom’s late-night hours and his alcoholic breath as he stumbled into bed beside her. When he wasn’t there to take her to the hospital she went alone in a taxi. She went into labor without Tom and when he showed up he was still reeking of last night’s party.

She’d merely dropped him off at work one morning and told him not to come home. He could pick up his things outside their apartment; she’d have them ready. He knew it was coming from the gathering of stony silence between the fights and the daily marital thrashings that their son had to witness. He was sorry that the streets would raise his son just as he had been raised.

He liked how Mandy moved her breasts back and forth across his bare chest, her nipples grazing his. Soft and sexy was how he liked them. Fake ones were only good for eye lust. Mandy owned a Western art gallery in old Scottsdale. He’d met her during one of the Thursday evening art walks when the tourists traipsed among the clichéd Remington-style bronzes and oil paintings of Plains Indian men and women captured in the nineteenth century. One evening he walked into her gallery.

He stopped at a Lakota man holding a drum by a river and whistled low at the painting’s five-digit price tag. “Didn’t know these old Indians cost this much,” he’d said to no one in particular.

“That’s a Jordan Stone,” came a voice from behind. “I think he’s captured the spiritual essence of the old man in the morning light, don’t you?”

“Spirituality. ‘Morning light.’ Isn’t that the name of this place?” he asked.

“Morning Light. I just love that image. So I named my gallery that.”

Mandy had grown tired of the corporate race in New York City. She was forty-one now with one marriage behind her and no kids because she hadn’t made time for any. She considered herself a beginning middle-aged woman whose face and body had a few petals left. During a trip to Phoenix for her brother’s wedding in February, the warm winter seduced her, as it had many of the snow birds fleeing steel-gray skies and frozen car batteries. She quit her finance career, sold all her suits, and bought a gallery. Risky, but it meant warm winters and a year-round tan.

Mandy invited Tom to the wine-and-cheese table. She had a storage room in the back where she kept supplies and a futon. After the tourists left, she invited him to the spare room on the pretext of looking at more art. Browsing through the box of canvases, Tom wondered if he might try painting. Mandy dropped onto the futon next to him. It heaved a gust of air and she said impatiently, to Tom’s surprise, “Aren’t you going to fuck me?”

In one quick turn he lifted the hem of her dress with his left hand and pulled down her thong with his right. He drew it across his face and inhaled her pussy smell in the purple strings, then buried his face between her legs. They spent most of the night working it in the backroom, then drove to her condo. Mandy didn’t ask him to leave, so Tom took that as permission to squat permanent residence. Most nights Tom simply reached over and touched Mandy between her legs and they were off following their heat.

“My father was a painter. He came out of the Bambi School of painting at IAIA,” he lied. “All Indians are artists,” he proclaimed. “Shit, just buy me some paints and a canvas and I can paint better than all those ditwads in your gallery,” he boasted.

So she returned with her Lexus loaded with canvas, paints, and an easel. While Mandy worked in her gallery, he painted romantic Plains Indians in buckskins and loin cloths. She hung them in her gallery but there was little interest.

One evening when Mandy was away on one of her buying trips, he walked into the gallery to find her assistant alone. She had just graduated with an Art History degree from ASU and was dreaming of moving on to San Francisco or New York. Over coffee they flirted and ended up in the backroom. Mandy was no fool. She smelled the sheets and promptly fired her assistant and sent Tom solo.

On his way out of Denny’s, Tom impulsively picked up the sticky receiver of the pay phone and dropped some coins into the slot. After several rings Mandy answered.

“Hey, Mandy, it’s been a long time since we talked.”

“Not long enough.”

“Come on, Mandy. I thought we were friends.”

“What do you want?”

“I just want to talk. Can I come over—Morning Light?”

“Go to hell!”

“You said you were my friend. I heard you say you were my friend.”

“Yes, well, friends don’t treat each other the way you did to me. Look, I’ve gotta go. I’ve got a date with Jay, who makes me laugh.”

The line went dead.

The sprain in his ankle was still aching and he tried not to limp as he headed past the Veterans Hospital to the Indian bar on Seventh Avenue. As he stepped into the dank room, the smell of beer and sweaty bodies and things swirling in the darkness assaulted his olfactory sense.

He found a stool at the far end of the Flying Eagle bar. One of the springs had worn halfway through the padding and was poking him in the ass. He ordered a draft. The foam splashed over the rim of the plastic mug when the bartender set it down. Tom threw a crumpled five-dollar bill down on the sticky wooden bar. A cowboy rez band took up one side of the bar and cranked out an old Johnny Horton tune, “Honky Tonk Man.” Couples in tight jeans and cowboy boots twirled in little circles. The band sped up the beat with another oldie from CCR. Suddenly, a woman dressed in white pants and jacket appeared among the couples. She moved her body woodenly and alternately picked up her foot, her arms raised stiffly like mannequin arms at her sides. The band kicked up the tempo and she moved even faster. The couples stepped aside and the woman in white had all eyes on her. Goaded on by the attention, she shook her torso and leg in an even more grotesque fashion. When the band stopped, she momentarily paused before leaving the floor, as if waiting for applause. She looked around the room as if to say,
There
! No one clapped except a woman on the other side of the bar.

That’s when Tom laid eyes on Crista.

Tom made his way over to the applauding woman, beer in hand. “Some dancer, eh?”

“You from Canada?” she asked, ignoring his question, and took a swallow of her drink in a tall glass.

“Naa. From around here.”

“I knew a guy from Canada who ended everything with ‘eh?’ So I thought …”

“Grew up here in Phoenix. My mom’s people are from the rez.” Tom followed the usual protocol among skins.

“Which one?”

“The big one.”

Tom’s mother had married her high school sweetheart from the Phoenix Indian School, but after a few years his parents fell apart and he was raised among the city lights and police sirens.

He’d only been to his mother’s homeland a few times, and felt out of place among the people who spoke a different language and had to haul water from the community well. His grandmother once remarked that he was too pretty for the harsh life of the rez.

“Navajo or Apache?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“You’re tall so you must be Navajo, maybe Apache.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, keep your secrets,” she said, and took another drink.

“And you, where you from?”

“Up north,” she said, and pointed with her lips.

He didn’t press further for fear she’d ask him questions for which he had no answers. In the dark he couldn’t tell if she was thirty or fifty. She had penetrating eyes, that much he could tell. There was also something in how she laughed, like she was laughing at him.

“What brings you here tonight? I mean besides the ‘so you think you can dance’ contest and the rah ja jin beat?”

“I’m hunting,” she said.

“What are you hunting? A date?” he joked.

“You could call it that.”

“You won’t find any millionaires in this dump. You’d have to hit one of the nightclubs in Scottsdale.”

“I like it fine here.”

The beers were beginning to run through his body. The toilets were trashed, so Tom decided to take a leak in the parking lot. He excused himself and stepped outside, among the flashy rez pickup trucks and dented sedans. Cars sped past him on Seventh Avenue. He pissed against the wall of the 99 Cent store and as he zipped up, he thought he saw a blur of movement out of the corner of his eye.

“What the fuck?”

The bar was now reeling with more noise and drunken bodies. He looked for Crista. She wasn’t where he’d left her and Tom didn’t spot her among the dancers. Musta gone to the O, he thought.

He ordered another shot and went over what he thought he’d seen in the parking lot. Can’t be. No way.

“Hey, man.” A middle-aged man stood up next to Tom.

“Hey,” he returned, and noticed the guy was sporting a crew cut, like he’d just gotten out of the military and hadn’t had time to grow his hair out.

“You know that woman, the one you’ve been talking to all night?” the crew cut asked.

“Just met her. We’re hooking up …” he said in case the crew cut had other ideas.

“If I were you, I’d be careful. You never know what’s going to show up.”

“What do you mean ‘what’s going to show up’?”

“Miss me?” Crista’s voice suddenly came from behind, and the crew cut left.

“Hell yeah,” he answered.

“So what path are you on?” she asked, poking the
a
on his T-shirt.

“The path of finding a fine woman like you.”

“Shhhit, I’ll bet you say that to all the women who come across your path,” she laughed, and twirled his hair on her index finger in a teasing way.

Tom pulled her close and smelled a scent unfamiliar to him.

“Hey, is your car parked outside?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“I just saw the weirdest fucking thing out there.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, I mean … people used to talk about them when I worked at the Indian Center. One day I was driving on the 101 over by Salt River and I looked up on the embankment and there was a fucking coyote! I didn’t think they came that far into the city. He was standing there like he was taking it all in, checking it out. A twenty-first-century coyote!”