by David Cole
Directing Brittles back into Coolidge, I steered him from one street to another, the signal getting stronger the farther we got off the main streets. Somewhere between LaPalma and Eleven Mile Corner Road, I knew we were close.
Tracking coffee cans on an empty highway was easy, but once inside Coolidge I asked Brittles to pull over to a curbside parking slot and got out a detailed street map. “Follow those power lines,” I said, scrabbling through the glove box to find a purple marker pen. “I’ll mark off every street as we check it.”
We crisscrossed a grid pattern of the main streets south of Casa Grande Monument, ending up on an old street, asphalt cracking and humped from years of no maintenance, the white and yellow traffic lines faded from decades of sunlight. Telephone and power poles tilted with the cracked sidewalk, so that power lines sagged between some poles and were stretched taut between others.
“Look,” he said, pointing above an old Laundromat next to a tiny bodega.
From there, the rest was easy. What we found, I still don’t like to remember.
25
Brittles turned onto an unpaved, unnamed street, more a dirt road with old transient laborer shacks on either side, finally dead-ending at a trash heap at the edge of the desert, with nothing ahead of us but weeds, bunchgrass, creosote bushes, and a few agaves. Turning the car around, I saw three single-story wood houses.
“One of them,” I said.
Smashed windows in the first house, half the roof missing from the second. But newspapers covered the single front window of the third. Brittles moved the car a few feet so we looked at a corner, saw one side of the house with two more windows covered with newspapers.
Brittles drove a block away and parked in front of a house that had far better care taken with house and lawn than anything else in the neighborhood. Bougainvillea flowing from the roof in front, the left and right sides of the house separated from neighboring lots by huge rows of red hibiscus. The lawn area was groomed and raked like a Japanese Zen garden, rocks and cacti placed in random locations.
As we walked up to the front door, I could hear an old air conditioner clanking from the house next door, the compressor and the fan obviously not taken care of for a long time. I heard a stereo playing somewhere. We rang the doorbell. An elderly black woman opened the door, her face set in both suspicion and resolve. A can of diet Coke in her left hand, an aluminum baseball bat trailing from her right hand, the bat resting on her polished oak floor. Music swelled from inside her house. The Ink Spots, I thought, or maybe some sixties smooth doo-wop group with that Detroit Motown sound.
She waited, silent. Brittles immediately showed his ID card.
“If you could just spare us a few minutes,” he said.
She studied his ID carefully, asked for his driver’s license, then leaned the bat against the doorframe. Brittles asked about the house at the end of the block.
She snorted with disgust.
“Everybody else on this block is just trash. Redneck and nigger trash, all of them. I’d move on out of here if I could sell my house. What chance you think I’d have of selling?”
“Not much,” I said, looking at the debris in the street.
“You got that right, honey. Down at the end there, at that dead end, that’s where people just dump their trash. We got no regular garbage pickup here for free. Nobody’s gonna pay for trash, they just run it down the block and pitch it out.”
“Do you know the man who lives in that end house?” Brittles asked.
“Honey, knowing him’s bout the bottomest thing on my mind. Was a depitty sheriff once, I think. I don’t refreshify my memory so good anymore. But he’s redneck trash. A Mexican trash friend comes around now and again, I think.”
“Thank you,” Brittles said.
“You’re a right good looking couple,” she said. I blushed. “And you folks got money, too. I can see it in your clothes. I can see it in your haircut, young man. See it in your car. Wish I had a car. I’d drive back to Alabama. If I knew how to drive.”
“Thanks,” Brittles said, trying to lead me away.
“You good looking young people with money, you ever stop to think what it’d be like you wasn’t so good looking? You didn’t have that car, that money? You ever think what it’s like to be a loser, like me, surrounded by redneck and nigger trash that are even worse losers than I am?”
We started to the car, but she followed us, held the door for me, looked around inside the car.
“My Elmer, he had a Buick. Bought it second hand from a jeweler, down in El Paso when Elmer was working the rail-road. We had money then, some money, enough money to rent a two bedroom bungalow. I grew chile peppers, vegetables, some flowers, we saved money from that so Elmer could buy that Buick. But being black in Texas, folks always looked down on us like we was just plain ugly losers that oughta get out of the neighborhood. We weren’t ugly losers inside, but they beat that pride out of us, too.”
Back at the end of the street, he turned off the engine. The hood and engine block tinked and pinged as they cooled.
“Think anybody’s in there?” I asked.
He slid off his grip holster, pulled out the Glock, and racked the slide, leaving the hammer at full cock. Studying the house. We waited half an hour. Nothing moved in the house. Even with the car windows all down, the afternoon sun warmed the car like a fifty-gallon oil drum used for a barbeque. Sweat soaked clear through my blouse to my bra, which started to itch and nettle me when I moved, so I reached inside my blouse and took off the bra.
“How did you do that?” Brittles asked.
“Tell you later,” I said. “Why don’t you go inside?”
“You stay here.”
“I’m getting out of this oven.”
Metal creaked as I opened the door, the outside metal so hot it partly blistered my finger and I kicked the door shut while sucking on the finger. Brittles raised his Glock in the Weaver stance, turning slightly sideways, his left palm underneath and supporting the right hand on the grip. Walking slowly, he circled the entire house, disappearing around the back so long that I went to the front door, climbing up some concrete construction blocks used as steps onto a small porch. The glass in the door covered by newspapers, I couldn’t see anything inside. I tried the door handle. Locked. I knocked and heard nothing.
“Get back in the car,” Brittles said, coming around to the front of the house.
“Why?”
His Glock stuck in his belt, he wiped sweat off his forehead.
“Just go back there, okay?”
“Is this the place?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said shortly, wearily.
“Is the back door open?”
He waved me toward the car, went around to the rear of the house. I followed a few steps behind and he didn’t notice me until we got to the rear door. The nearest occupied house was at least two hundred feet away, the back door shielded by three giant mesquite trees that grew along a dry creek bed. A half-rusted hibachi barbeque sat on concrete blocks, two aluminum folding chairs on either side of the hibachi. The green and white webbing on both chairs was frayed and worn so badly that nobody could possibly sit down without falling through. Twenty feet away an ancient Ford pickup bed sat on wooden sawhorses, with nothing left of the rest of the pickup. Wheel rims of all sizes lay around the yard, some with tattered retreads mounted, others bare and dented. Brittles walked over a small rise to the creek bed, where somebody had shoved the frame of the pickup, the engine still mounted, but the cab missing entirely. Hooked to the frame, a long rope went off behind one of the mesquite trees and I got close enough to see the bodies of two rottweilers, their gutted stomachs teaming with flies.
A slight breeze ruffled the mesquite branches, but standing in their shadow I could feel hot air drying the sweat on my shirt. I opened the shirt to below my breasts, grabbed the two sides, and flapped them, trying to get air inside the blouse to dry the sweat, the air roasting me, roasting my head, the inside of my head, as I stared at the rottwe
ilers, and there was no smell, I tell you, they’d been dead awhile, but I was upwind of the bodies, the breeze blowing from me to them, so my only horror was the thick mass of flies and a slow awakening of fear at what might be inside the house. The breeze picked up, like a late afternoon Santa Ana, like those winds that blow across the Sahara for days and days and drive people mad. I am not mad, I thought, but I just had to see what was in the house, nothing else made sense to me, in reality, nothing made sense at all except that the breeze dried all my sweat.
Unless I dried off from fear.
The back screen door hung from the bottom hinge. Nothing recent, the closing spring keeping the top of the door dangling. Somebody had smashed the glass window on the top of the rear door, and it stood open. I walked to it, but Brittles stopped me again.
“You don’t want to go inside.”
But it was hot, you see, I was so hot, so scared, so mad and out of my mind about where all of this was going and only wanting things to stop so I could get Spider out of prison, so I pushed Brittles’s arm aside and went inside the door into a room so small and so dark, windows covered with layers and layers of newspapers. I couldn’t see a thing.
“Is there a light?” I said.
“Power’s off.”
He ripped some of the newspapers from the window and I took a step forward and nearly collapsed with horror as I slipped in a pool of half-dried blood.
Through a doorway I could see a filthy kitchen. There was only one other room in the house except for a small toilet and shower stall partially visible behind another door. A faded, stained sofa was pushed back into a corner, opposite an ancient black and white TV set with rabbit ears wrapped with aluminum foil. The lath and plaster wall between this room and kitchen had been punched with holes, and two men stood side by side, flat against the wall, crucified against the framing studs, bodies sagging, their wrists and ankles across some of the punched-out holes and bound with barbed wire wrapped around the wall studs. Industrial-strength staples pierced both palms, the hands flat against the studs. The man on the left was heavy but muscular, his skin bronzed by the sun and his Indian blood, his face covered with dried blood from a dozen staples in his forehead. The other man’s face was undamaged, but he’d been gutted like the rottweilers, his blood pooled on the floor where I’d slipped.
“Jesus God!” I said.
If I’d just not felt that madness, not seen the rottweilers or felt the breeze, I wouldn’t have crossed over that doorsill, crossed from light into horrible darkness.
That’s the defining story of my life.
Knowing what will happen when I cross a border.
Knowing I have to cross over, against my will, against all my past crossings where, once the step was taken from one second into another, things changed.
Irrevocably.
“Let me see if there’s a computer here,” I said dumbly. “Let me just find the computer. Then we leave.”
“It’s in the other room. I’ll get it later. You go back outside.”
But I’d never seen anybody crucified. It was like looking at the rottweilers, except there were no flies in here yet, although now that Brittles had smashed open the rear door some flies were already buzzing outside.
“Cover the door,” I screamed, but he looked at me as though I were crazy.
I grabbed some of the newspapers he’d ripped off the window, the masking tape still with a bit of stick to it. I first shut the back door and then covered the broken window with the newspapers, a single fly buzzing in the room, but I can stand just one fly, I can stand anything now, I thought.
“Who are they?” I said.
“Don’t know them well.”
“But you know who they are?”
“This one’s a deputy sheriff.”
He started to unfasten the barbed wire around the man’s right wrist, staring so intently at the damaged face and recoiling as he saw the staples through the palm. I thought he’d have noticed that before, but I realized he was streets ahead of me, not focusing on the immediacy of the torture but trying to figure out why they’d been so cruelly treated. He turned to the other man.
“This one, I’ve forgotten his name. A maintenance worker at Casa Grande Monument. I met him two days ago. Met both of them. At the housing development where they found the bones.”
I felt dizzy and didn’t realize I’d started to faint until Brittles grabbed me under the arms, holding me up against the door, propping me there.
“Go outside,” he said.
“Can’t move.”
“Then lean against the door. Close your eyes. I’m going to get the computer and that other electronic stuff.”
But he called out two minutes later.
“You’re going to have to come in here and tell me what’s worth taking.”
“Shouldn’t we call the police…somebody? Shouldn’t we call?”
“I’m the police,” he said.
“But we should leave things here, we should leave everything here and just go away!”
“We leave this computer, we may never find out what’s on it once the Tucson Police Department, or the FBI, or whoever comes in here and takes all the evidence into custody. We’ve got to take this computer now.”
“Okay,” I said, stepping around the blood, going into the other room.
A black Dell computer stood on a cheap deal table next to a refrigerator, the monitor stacked beside a printer, keyboard, and mouse blackened with grime, as though an auto mechanic had used it for months. A two-burner portable kerosene stove sat on the floor, the grill covered with grease.
“What have we got here?” Talking to myself, trying to be logical and technical, just shut off the rest of my head. “That’s the computer box. Unplug it.”
He took a clasp knife from his pocket, opened it, and slashed all the cables.
“Okay. Cutting them is okay. We don’t need the cables.”
“What else? This?”
“No. That’s just a monitor. And that’s just a printer. Look for CDs?”
“Music?”
“Same size. But not music. Data.”
He raked stacks of paper off the deal table, opened the single drawer, crammed with junk. He turned it upside down to empty everything on the floor. There was a small, unfinished pine bookcase, just three shelves stacked with pornographic videotapes. He swept the top shelf on the floor, left me to pick through the tapes while he cleaned out the second shelf, then the bottom one. Just tapes. He picked up the bookcase, turned it around, and seven CD jewel cases were taped to the back.
“These?” he said.
I nodded and he crammed them into his pockets. Shouldering the Dell computer, he backed out of the kitchen, motioning me with his palm to step where he stepped. When he opened the back door a swarm of flies rushed into the room, filling my hair and the inside of my blouse, driving me truly mad for a moment, and I ran, I ran to the car, stripping off my blouse, brushing off flies, not wanting to swat them, not wanting their bodies stuck to my skin. When Brittles got to the car, I sat shivering in the heat, leaning against the front bumper.
Down the dirt road, an old black man stood on his porch, holding his screen door open with one hand, a twelve-string guitar in the other. Staring at me.
“Get in the car, Laura. Put on your blouse.”
“Yes,” I said.
Yes, anything.
The black man stood absolutely still as we went past him, except his head swiveled to follow us until he couldn’t turn his neck around any farther. He didn’t have the will or the energy to bother turning his body until we disappeared.
26
We drove, we drove, we drove. Brittles pulled over at the Tom Mix Memorial, trying to comfort me. Done with crying, I sat motionless, slumped against the door, staring at the half-inch thick steel outline of a cowboy on a bucking bronc, the steel pocked with bullet marks, one of them a hole through and through and probably from somebody who got tired just dinging the metal and went hom
e to load his assault rifle with a full metal jacket slug, hand-loaded with extra powder.
We drove past Catalina into Oro Valley, the outlines of Pusch Ridge dark against the sun. Brittles started working his cell phone, but I couldn’t hear anything with my window down, the air whistling by and the steadily increased roar from traffic. Or maybe I just didn’t want to hear anything. Brittles turned off Salina at the Tucson Mall, went across to Stone, and pulled into the parking lot of the Five and Diner.
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
“Well, I am.”
Ahead of us, a family of five pushed open the front door. The mother held a crying baby girl nestled in her right arm, her left hand gently urging the other three children toward the order counter. They all clumped together at the cash register, waiting to be seated. Our waitress motioned them into the left side of the diner, patting each of the children on the head as they passed her, the mother ordering all the meals in Spanish without looking at a menu, finally quieting the shrieking baby by opening her yellow cotton blouse so the baby could suckle.
Brittles steered to the right, way in the back to a red leather booth underneath all kinds of pictures of Marilyn Monroe. A young waitress plopped two menus on our table, got two large plastic glasses full of ice water.
“What you want, hon?” she said to Brittles.
“What’s good here?” he said.
“Well, you asking what I like myself?”
“Sure.”
“Well, okay. All soup is homemade and fresh, absolutely delicious. Especially the clam chowder and the potato-leek. We got a turkey club sandwich with fries, spices or no spices please, a kickass chicken sandwich, onion rings. To drink, dynamite malteds, chocolate or vanilla, or either vanilla diet Coke or cherry Coke. All drinks are fountain-mixed and hand-stirred with lots of syrup.”
I opened the thick menu, all burger-and-fries kinds of things, one of which Brittles ordered. I couldn’t stand the thought of eating meat and ordered macaroni and cheese.
“You’ll like that, hon. We make it ourselves. What to drink?”
“Two large diet Cokes,” Brittles said. “No straws.”
