Goodbye Dolly

22

Daisy pushes her shopping cart filled with all her earthly possessions and turns toward the viaduct where Nacho usually sleeps. It's dark now, and so she hurries. Another fruitless day on the hot streets waiting for a talent scout to pick her out of the crowd. Even her new getup, purple flowered sundress and feathered wide-brimmed red hat, like those Red Hat Society ladies wear, hasn't attracted any Hollywood-style attention.

And the cart! She doesn't need any more weight to push around, what with her back about to break, but tell that to a man. Work, work, work, while they sit around drinking cheap whiskey and telling outrageous lies to each other, leaving her alone to guard the treasures in her cart.

She struggles along, the beams of light from the overhead streetlights casting a false sense of safety. But she isn't fooled. More than ever before, she needs Nacho's protection through the long, moonless night ahead. Poor Albert Thoreau had been beaten up pretty badly, she's heard. Both eyes swollen and punched black, nose flat and repositioned to the left of center, lips puffed, he laid motionless in the alleyway surrounded by fellow outcasts. Only the sound of irregular and ragged breathing proved that he had not departed for hobo heaven.

"Lucky he isn't dead," they say.

And if he has told, she will be next.

Has he?

"Cops! Don't trust them," someone in the group had said, disgust apparent in the wad of spit aimed at the ground. "Here's your proof. What did Thoreau ever do to anybody?"

Daisy has her suspicions about Thoreau's current condition. She hasn't lasted this long on the wild streets of Phoenix without her innate sense of imminent danger. The darkness of the viaduct's underbelly looms before her. Cars roar overhead even at this late hour. The shopping cart's wheels squeal as they jerk forward, and Daisy makes a mental note to find a little oil tomorrow and lubricate them.

She squints into the gloom as a form materializes from behind one of the viaduct's steel girders, striding toward her, arms swinging lazily, an unlit flashlight clutched in a muscular hand.

"Good evening," Daisy says, fighting the fear. "What brings you all the way down here?"