South Phoenix Rules

Elegy

Low clouds hung over the city the night that Lindsey and I hopped the fence and made our way into the old cemetery. It was now called Greenwood Memory Lawn but it had been around since 1906 and was still adorned by hundreds of old trees shading the well-manicured grass. The city had grown around it and left it behind.

It was just as well. The news of local mayhem had been especially harrowing lately. It turned out that a Chicago mobster, Sal “the Bug” Moretti, who had been put in witness protection here, was selling heroin out of his Chandler house, using teenagers as couriers. The teens all came from “good families,” and neighbors of Moretti were quoted: “these kinds of things just don’t happen here.”

Moretti was also the secret owner of a big gun shop on Bell Road that was raided by the feds for selling guns to the drug cartels. A decorated ATF agent had been killed as part of the operation, and Moretti would be charged with murder, too. If they found him. Although ten teenagers from Chandler and Ahwatukee had been arrested, Moretti had apparently escaped. “Vanished without a trace,” the news stories kept saying.

Indeed.

Not every case was unsolved. In Bakersfield, a man already in jail was charged with the murder of four men in Maryvale the previous month. The police said a sniper rifle, found in an abandoned car, had linked the man to the killing. The case was broken thanks to an anonymous tip to the Silent Witness line. I checked the Web site for the Bakersfield paper and two days later learned that extradition wouldn’t be an issue: Tom Holden had been stabbed to death by another inmate, who was reputedly a member of La Familia. Meanwhile, every day brought news of fresh death south of the border: fifty killed in one day. The cartels kept growing, alliances shifting and breaking apart, the organizations dividing like cancer cells.

But in Phoenix, after two days of careful excavation, the bones of a World War II Japanese-American veteran had been discovered under the parking lot of an apartment complex on Baseline. Kate Vare was in the newspaper saying it was being treated as a homicide from the late 1940s, and that the discovery was the result of “painstaking police work by the cold-case unit.”

Indeed.

Now we walked past the tall old memorials to the familiar graves: my parents, my grandfather and grandmother. The flowers that Robin had left a few weeks ago were broken and dead. There was no room left in the family plot for me. We had bought a space for Robin in the garden columbarium. But I knew she wouldn’t want that and Lindsey had agreed.

We brought her ashes with us and gently spread them across the family plot. It amazed me how little was left of a person. I fought the pressure building against my eyes and the tightness in my throat. Lindsey was already weeping. Ashes to ashes. Dust in this valley of dust. This valley of tears. Civilization was breaking down all around us. It had happened in Phoenix before, with the Hohokam, when things grew too complex and nature rebelled, human nature bowed and broke.

Now it was happening again. It was starting all over, right here, in this city that had risen from its ashes and was being devoured again, starting here and moving across an America that didn’t even pay attention to Phoenix.

Civilizations fell.

I followed Zack Grady for an entire week. Sal Moretti’s Beretta was tucked in my pants with a full magazine. The all-American drug dealer who took the cash to Sabrina, knowing she had killed Robin. He had been offered the job himself and turned it down. But he didn’t go to the police. He didn’t do anything to stop it. While wishing for sleep at night I ran the scenarios through my mind, how I would grab him, drive to a secluded spot in the desert, and put a bullet in his brain. I let Sabrina live. Something inside me felt sorry for her. Zack – in many ways he was the worst of the lot. He was a young sociopath who was just getting his first taste. The next time he would be happy to kill. He had been someone’s adored child once, but that made me despise him even more. He had survived.

The last night I watched as he walked down a half-mile length of cars at Chandler Fashion Center, his stride full of insolence. The Prelude tracked him slowly from behind, lights off, the pistol gripped in my right hand. The passenger window was down and I would simply order him into the car. Maybe I’d handcuff him again. Or maybe I’d just beat him into unconsciousness with the police baton in the back seat.

I let him go. I was so far down a darkened path that I didn’t know how I could find my way back, find my way back to Lindsey and some semblance of the life we once had, find my way to a future I could at least endure. Taking him into the desert would only push me further into the darkness. I had already found parts of myself that frightened me. We were the good guys. That was what Peralta always said. It’s what separated us from the ones like Zack and Sal and Tom Holden. I let him go. Two days later he was arrested as one of Sal’s dealers.

Inside the cemetery, Lindsey and I listened to the cars roaring on Black Canyon Freeway, the sirens on 27th Avenue, a quick succession of gunshots, the echoes of the Tea Party rallies at the capitol where the legislature was destroying what took a century to build here, the last cries of the immigrants dying of thirst in the desert. Who will excavate our ruins of Wal-Marts and parking lots? Who would want to?

But at that moment, sheltered by the big trees, the low clouds, and the enchanted Sonoran Desert twilight, we sat cross-legged on the grass and leaned into each other. When I was a child, I had dreaded the trips out here. Cemeteries had frightened me. Grandmother’s love of the place had given me the creeps. Now I understood the matchless peace and beauty here.

“Poor Dave.” Lindsey stroked my arm. “Nick and Nora Charles are fictional characters. You thought you were marrying this sweet young thing with cheerleader legs and with no history and we’d go out and make the world right.”

I had never assumed that about her-well, maybe the cheerleader legs-but I said nothing, happy to hear her voice.

“You’ve taught me so much. Opened so much of the world to me. I love the jazz and martinis and cops. And the history…oh, Dave. You told me everything about yourself and your adventures, but you don’t understand. For me, where my life wasn’t dull, it was something I was ashamed of, something that made me feel worthless. I didn’t really understand what has been building inside me because our being together was such a gift.”

“All I ever wanted was you,” I said. “And truth and bone, as you once said.”

She laughed lightly. “Easier said than done, I guess.”

I wanted to say that her history hadn’t made her worthless. Far from it. But I wondered who she was now. She spoke first.

“Did you fall in love with Robin?”

In love. Such a loaded word, especially for women. I had grown to like, admire, and probably love Robin. If I lingered too long in that contemplation, it would be unbearable. I said, “I cared for her.”

She put her arms around me. “You care too easily.” That weightless laugh again, then a sob. “Robin built a lot of walls to protect herself. But I can tell you…”

She swallowed hard. “I can tell you, she cared for you right back.”

The broken shards sitting against my vital organs again shifted painfully. When I could speak again, I said, “I’m in love with you. With you, Lindsey. I think I was from the first moment I saw you.”

“I know.”

Draw me a map of the human heart. I am lost.

“I’ve failed you so much, David. I lost our child. I failed Robin.”

“No. Never.”

“It’s true. My life is a failure.”

I stopped for a moment. A light rain baptized my forehead. “Turn off your Linda Unit, Lindsey Faith.”

Now she laughed fully, my old Lindsey, if only for a moment.

Five minutes later I gathered the courage to ask, “Do you love him?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. No hesitation. After a long pause: “I just wanted to feel something again.”

The shrapnel sliced against my heart. How long before I would just bleed to death?

I said, “You left me once before.”

“I know.”

And that was all she said. We were both damaged.

The rain was falling hard and straight now, seeping through our clothes. It felt fine. We watched as Robin’s ashes vanished into the grass and the timeless soil.

“Oh, God.” Lindsey choked it out.

We held each other and cried a long time in the precious spring rain. I prayed that we would all be together again in the morning. Then I helped her up and she kept her index finger in my hand as we walked together through the darkness, trying to find our way out again.

Peralta was tapping slowly on a laptop computer when I walked into his office the next afternoon. He looked up, unsurprised.

“You think you’re real clever, don’t you.”

I shrugged.

“You could have gone to jail.”

“I know.”

“You could have been killed.”

“That would have been fine.”

“Have you ever considered…” He stopped, for he probably knew I had considered everything. My dirty hands were at my side, my academic detachment lost like luggage thrown out on a distant highway. I almost said: maybe I’ve become more like you. But I didn’t say it because I didn’t know what I was becoming. Whatever it was had no regrets over the rough justice meted out to Sal Moretti or Tom Holden. The detached part of me that remained knew it wasn’t quite right. But if I looked too long in the rearview mirror this would be the least of the demons chasing me. Peralta leaned back, straining his luxurious executive chair.

I looked around the place. It was as homely as it was austere. But this was where he had decided to make his stand. And it occurred to me, amid all the madness, that he was my oldest friend. Lindsey didn’t know what she wanted. Robin was gone. My hometown wasn’t home any longer. But my oldest friend was here, making his stand. So I would make the stand, too. I desperately needed to make this stand. So I said I was ready to go to work.

“About goddamned time!” He barked it but his face radiated relief.

“Two conditions.”

“Oh, fuck.” He closed the laptop and opened his arms: hit me.

“First, I want a decent chair, like you have.”

He nodded. “What else?”

“Restore the sign out front, neon and all.”

“Do you know how much that would cost?”

I stood there with folded arms.

He mashed his lips together. Then: “Mapstone, you’re a real bastard. All right, we’ll do the goddamned sign. Now I’m in the historic fucking preservation business, and all to provide a welfare-to-work program for a washed-out professor who’s a not-bad lawman…”

I let him keep talking as I settled behind the other desk.

Somewhere I heard Robin laughing.