Next I headed for Brink’s office to tell him he could become New West’s Duke City representative. He might have been burrowed somewhere under the pile of papers that was his desk, but I didn’t have the heart to look. I moved on to the kitchen and found him at the Mr. Coffee machine. “Coffee?” he asked.
“No, thanks. I’m going to Phoenix next week to talk to New West.”
He put a little of the powdered stuff that imitates milk in his coffee, plus a couple of pink packets of artificial sweetener. “Who gets to do the work? You or me?”
“How about whoever has the most free time?” He knew who that was.
“If I’m going to have to do the work, then I should go to Phoenix.”
“You want to?” I knew I was safe; Brink liked to travel about as much as he liked to work.
“Maybe.”
“Brink, there’s no time for maybes. Whoever is going is going next week.” I wasn’t sure what a banker would make of me, but I knew what one would think of Brink. Last night’s dinner was crud on his tie. His hair was uncombed, his shirt unbuttoned around his ever-expanding belly, his shoes scuffed. There are lawyers who should remain in back offices doing careful and brilliant research while their more presentable colleagues deal with the clients. Brink’s research wasn’t that careful or that brilliant, but his looks and personality were back office all the way.
“You go,” he said. He stirred his coffee until it was the color of the Rio Grande in snowmelt.
“All right,” I said.
******
When Sharon Amaral returned my call, “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad” was playing in the background. Sometimes a woman has a wound that only Tammy Wynette can heal. “They taking my house?” she asked.
“Unless you can come up with the back payments they are.”
“Fat chance.”
“They’re talking about foreclosing. If they do and they don’t recover the amount of the mortgage by selling the house, you’re liable for the difference.”
“I don’t have it,” said Sharon.
“I know,” I said, “but if you ever get any money down the road they could take it.”
“Shit,” said Sharon.
“I might be able to talk the bank into a better deal for you. You sign the house over to them, they sign off on the mortgage. At least you wouldn’t owe them anything, and they might let you go on living in the house until they find a buyer. I’m going to Phoenix next week, and I’ll talk to them about it then.”
“Thanks for trying.” She didn’t ask me to send her a bill for my time. I didn’t offer.
“It’s nothing,” I said.
******
The Kid arrived at my place that night with a big bag of tacos under his arm. “Puta madre,” he said, putting the bag down on the coffee table.
He wasn’t the kind of man to show up after work tired and peevish. “Que pasa?” I asked.
“La Bailarina is gone.”
“Gone?”
“Her car is not there.”
“She just went out somewhere. She’ll be back.”
“She never goes out. Where would she go? This is her only home. Her car is always here by eight o’clock.” It was true; La Bailarina was as predictable and unfortunate as the evening news. “It was the watchman, I think. He made her go. You didn’t give him enough money or to drink.”
“What do you mean, I didn’t give him enough money? It’s not my job to support the ballerina.”
“What does it cost you to give her some money or some food? You have it.”
“I don’t have that much money.”
“You have enough.”
“You know, Kid, we’re not talking about Mexico here. She’s an adult, an American citizen; she’s got a car. Why can’t she take care of herself?”
“You can take care of yourself; that doesn’t mean she can?”
“I can take care of myself because I make the effort to take care of myself.”
“If she could help herself, she would. Why you not give Truman the money?”
“How do you know I didn’t give him the money? Why are you blaming me?”
“Because if you gave him the money she would be here.”
“I did give him the money,” I said. “That’s not why she left.”
“You know why?”
“Yeah, I think I do.” It was the guilt we were really talking about, the guilt of good but fucked-up intentions. “I think it’s because I talked to her. I left her an invitation to a party some lawyers were having. I thought she’d like the food. When I saw her at the food table I spoke to her. I told her I lived in La Vista and had given her the invitation. She said I was mistaken, and she walked away.”
“You took away her dignidad, Chiquita.” Pride is something a Latin American male knows all about.
“I know.”
“Where will she go?”
“Somebody else’s parking lot?”
“Mierda,” said the Kid.
“I’m sorry. Okay?” I replied.
******
Harry Chambers’s Resolution Trust Corporation auction brochure arrived in the Monday mail. It had a full-color cover with photos of the scenic Southwest: snow-peaked mountains, golden aspen, sixteenth-century adobes of God, orange-and-lavender-streaked sunsets, pink lightning, saguaro cacti. Inside, among the Arizona condominiums, vacant lots, four-plexes and single-family residences, I found El Dorado, a destination resort with plans for a golf course, two hundred homesites with restrictive covenants, and an uncompleted hotel that was open for inspection by potential buyers. Adobe doesn’t photograph well, and imitation-adobe models photograph even worse. El Dorado looked more like an oversized mud hut than a pot of gold in its one-inch-square photo.
******
There are always cheap flights from Albuquerque to Phoenix, whatever the state of the economy, and they begin or end in California. You can almost count on getting bumped and getting a free ticket out of it if you go late in the day, when everyone is trying to get home. I left Tuesday morning; I didn’t want to spend a night in Phoenix if I didn’t have to, but I packed a bag just in case. I saw Jed White, a lawyer I knew, picking up his boarding pass at the Southwest desk and said, “Hello, Jed,” which was about all I had to say to him. Southwest is one of those airlines that have no assigned seats; you board according to the number on your boarding pass. The number you’re assigned depends on when you get to the airport. While I stood on line, waiting to board my flight, I listened to the mix of accents behind me: New Mex, Old Mex, New York, unaccented English that had to be from California, the one state with no discernible accent.
People dress differently when they’re leaving Albuquerque than they do when they’re here. You always see more cowboy hats and boots in the airport than you do anywhere else in town. One of nature’s laws is, the smaller the cowboy, the bigger the hat. You also see a lot of ruffled denim skirts and silver belt buckles that are heavy enough to use for workout weights. Tourists, I wondered, or do New Mexicans dress the part only when they leave their state? The line began to move. The man taking the boarding passes had to be a native New Mexican, because he switched from English to Spanish and back again in the same sentence. “Dame your boarding pass. Gracias.” I’ve never heard anybody but a New Mexican do that. I handed him my pass and was walking down the ramp to the plane when I heard a man’s husky voice behind me say with a distinctly Argentine y, “Yo no lo tengo.” He was a man, apparently, who hadn’t figured out the system and hadn’t picked up his boarding pass. It’s hard not to be obvious when you stop in a corridor to see who’s behind you, but I did it anyway and found myself looking at a medium-tall guy in leotard-tight jeans and a shirt that was unbuttoned several buttons down his chest, far enough to show off his chest hair—if he’d had any. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and his dark hair was slicked in place. He didn’t look Southwestern or Latin American. He looked European: Italian, maybe, or Spanish, which is to say that he could easily be Argentin
e. When I turned around, he stopped arguing with the attendant and looked back at me with a crooked grin and an arrogant stare. Maybe he thought I was coming on to him. Maybe not. He didn’t have his pass, and the attendant made him go back and get one. The crowd pulled me down the ramp. I made my way to the rear of the plane and went through the too-many-oversized-bags-in-the-overhead-compartment dance, trying to squeeze mine in. I never did see the Argentine guy get on, if he did get on. By the time I left the plane in Phoenix he was nowhere in sight.
I rented a gray subcompact at Sky Harbor Airport and negotiated my way to New West Bank. Phoenix is a grid city like Albuquerque, crisscrossed by two interstates, only they call them freeways here, the L.A. influence. It’s an easy town to drive in, as long as you have air-conditioning, and no one—not even Rent A Wreck—would dare rent out a car at the Phoenix airport that didn’t have air-conditioning. Phoenix couldn’t exist without air-conditioning, even in November. All the escaping freon has to be doing its part to extend the hole in the ozone layer. That’s one reason I live in Albuquerque. You don’t need an air-conditioned car to survive, but you’d probably go out before dark a lot more if you had one.
I went up a ramp and got on a freeway that gave me a good view of the city. Palm trees lined the streets. Cone-shaped protrusions stuck up here and there, the only places in sight that hadn’t been developed. A large sign beside the road said the Clean Air Police advised people to car pool and in rush hour the left lane was reserved for them. Phoenix lives in the shadow of the Tonto National Forest, where the peaks are the height of the valleys in the Land of Enchantment. The altitude of Phoenix itself is a thousand feet—four thousand feet lower than the Duke City. The air was thick and humid enough to make my hair curl. From where I sat, Phoenix looked like a green and prosperous oasis. Albuquerque from any distance—near or far—looks like a dry and dusty pit stop. Going from New Mexico to Arizona reminds me of going from Spain to Portugal, from the bare and masculine to the soft and green. I asked myself the question that those of us who come from the Duke City ask here: Is Phoenix more prosperous than Albuquerque because it’s prettier, because it’s lower, because it’s warmer or because it’s closer to California? We’re closer to Texas, but Texas money doesn’t flow as freely as it used to. California money may not flow as freely inside the state either, but a lot of it seems to be flowing out. That’s the American way. When your own nest becomes fouled, find another.
I got off the freeway at Seventh Street and onto the surface streets that led downtown to New West. I saw a lot of anonymous gray rental cars that were exact replicas of mine. The traffic moved slowly, regularly and somnambulently. Driving here was too easy, and the persistent hum of the air-conditioning fan was the kind of white noise that could put you to sleep at the wheel. Everybody had automatic transmission, everybody was air-conditioned, everybody’s windows were rolled up. When I stopped at a light I heard the whir of my fan instead of my neighbor’s booming beat. I saw a lot of one-story houses, a lot of For Sale signs, and a lot of fountains on the surface streets. All over Phoenix, fountains were dripping, plopping, spurting and gushing water—water that had to be pumped in from somewhere else because it didn’t flow naturally here.
New West had a fountain in the lobby, one large Indian pot that poured water into another over and over again. My fellow lawyer Jed White was waiting there, indicating that he had taken a faster route than I, indicating also that he was interviewing with New West. This time I did have something to say to him, and it was “Jed, what are you doing here?” although I’d already figured it out.
“Interviewing to be New West’s representative in Albuquerque.” It didn’t take him long to figure it out either. We were lawyers, after all, known for our quick wits. “You, too?”
“Yeah,” I said. I’d known they were going to be interviewing other people, but it seemed kind of tacky to be doing it at the same time. Were they trying to intimidate one or the other of us into working for less? Going through the motions of being an equal opportunity employer? I peeked around surreptitiously to see if there were any blacks or Hispanics in the lobby. None that appeared to be interviewing for a job. Jed looked the part of an Arizona banker’s lawyer, I had to admit, casual but precise. His shirt was fresh, his suit pressed, his tie subdued, his hair short and combed, his expression eager. I could feel my own hair frizzing, my skirt wrinkling and my expression getting snarly. I considered going into the ladies’ room to try to spruce myself up, but what the hell. What they saw was what they’d get. Actually, what they’d get—Brink—was worse.
If Eric Winston was embarrassed that Jed and I had arrived at the same time, he didn’t let it show. He bustled across the lobby, jacket and tie flapping and a big grin on his face. If you can fake sincerity, they say, you can fake anything. “You two know each other?” he said. “Good.”
Jed looked at me. I looked back. He smiled. I didn’t.
“Why don’t you come first, Neil?” Eric said to me.
“Okay,” I said. When it comes to waiting around bank lobbies, I don’t have a principle to stand on.
Eric led me to his office and sat down. He was a little short, a little plump, a little slow, a whole lot affable, the kind of guy there probably was a board behind. Within those limits he was pretty much what he pretended to be—nice. He was the kind of good old local boy banks like to hire and promote—up to a certain point. When they get to the executive level, they bring in someone with more polish. We went through the motions, but we both realized relatively quickly that I was not the lawyer for New West. Sitting in his office for a half hour confirmed what I already knew—I’d hate bank work, and I couldn’t count on Brink to do it right. Eric said he’d talk it over with the board and call me.
“Okay,” I said. I almost told him not to bother, but why give up whatever guilt leverage I had? “So what do you think about Sharon Amaral?” I asked.
He tapped his pen on his desk while five gray-haired men sat around a table behind him and conferred. “It’s your call,” they whispered to Eric, and then they vanished. He cleared his throat. “We could probably sign off on the mortgage if she’ll turn the house over to us. We don’t want to go through foreclosure if we don’t have to,” he said.
“Can she stay in the house until she gets her life in order?”
“How long?”
“Six months.”
“All right, but we’ll need to draw up a lease and charge her rent.”
“How much?”
“Make me an offer.”
“Seventy-five dollars a month.”
“A hundred?”
“All right,” I said. It was a small victory, but that’s what practicing law is usually about: large losses, little wins.
I passed Jed White in the lobby on my way out. “All yours,” I said.
“Huh?” replied Jed.
17
THE NEW WEST interview hadn’t gotten me a client, but it had brought me to Phoenix and only thirty miles from Whit Reid’s golden place, El Dorado. After I left New West I got on the freeway and headed south. Following the directions in the RTC brochure, I left the freeway at Bernal Road. In my rearview mirror I saw the white car that had been behind me pull off, stop at the intersection and turn in the opposite direction, but I couldn’t see who was driving it. ENTERING BLOWING DUST AREA, the sign on one side of the road said. FOR SALE, said the sign on the other. “Living in the Shadow of a Doubt” played on the country music station. A car passed me going eighty-five. The kid behind the wheel was wearing a scarf around his head, tied pirate style. DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE, his bumper sticker said, YOU MIGHT HIT A BUMP AND SPILL IT.
Bernal Road passed through the Sonoran Desert. Saguaro cacti stood up like thirty-foot-tall sentinels with their arms raised, providing holes for birds’ nests and casting long shadows. Forget the palm trees that were imported from somewhere else—the saguaros are what make Arizona unique. They don’t grow anywhere in the world but here and northern Mexico and
a few places in California. Saguaros have a waiting, watching quality, which gives me the impression that they are trying to communicate. There are people who talk to plants. There were times when I lived in Mexico that I came close to doing it myself. If I ever broke through the species barrier and communicated with a plant, it would be a saguaro, but what would it have to say anyway? You’re only passing through, but I will endure? Or: You’re destroying yourselves, and you’re taking me along with you?
Go west on Bernal Road for five miles and turn north, the RTC brochure said, onto an unimproved road. That meant dirt, and I could see it in the distance, red dust whipped to pink vapor by the wind. At the corner was a large RTC For Sale sign, just in case anyone hadn’t been following the directions and keeping track of the odometer reading. A couple of guys had set up shop on the corner in a pickup truck with the tailgate flipped open. Two big saguaros wrapped in blankets stuck out of the back of the truck. I guessed what the cacti were doing in the truck, but why the blankets? I wondered. To keep them warm in the eighty-degree heat? To protect them? To cover them up if the cops came along? The guys were in a spot where they could see what was coming from a long way. It’s illegal to dig up and sell saguaros without a permit unless they are on your own land, but they can bring prices in excess of ten thousand dollars, so you know somebody’s going to be doing it. If these cacti could communicate, they’d be crying “Help!” They had minuscule roots, which made me wonder if they weren’t already dead, if the guys hadn’t cut off the root systems and murdered them when they dug them up. An elderly couple had stopped and were negotiating with the guys. People will sell anything—their plants, their pets, their mothers-in-law—and the reason is, there is always someone out there ready to buy. “Don’t do it!” I sent the negotiating couple a telepathic message, but they weren’t listening.
The Lies that Bind Page 15
