“How long before Halloween?” Ben asked.
“Less than a week,” I said.
“In a couple of days, they’ll string up some orange to go with the black, won’t have to change decorations hardly at all.”
He drove briskly, looking neither left nor right except when safety required it, as though willing himself to see as little of the town as possible. He turned once off G Avenue, once again onto a street of aging tract homes, took that about a half mile, and pulled to the side. A half dozen cars clustered near the end of the block, where the street ended and the desert began. We stepped out of the car. That time of the year the afternoon sun still burned hot, and the air smelled of baked earth and rock. I let the Rott patrol ahead of us and followed Ben toward a house with cars parked in front. Like her neighbors, Arlanda lived in a single-story cinder-block ranch house with an attached garage and a white-rock on tar-paper roof. Prickly pear and cholla cacti ranged across the dirt front yard, with rocks carried from the desert scattered among the cacti in an arrangement that might have been intentional. Cinder block marked the boundary between her property and the street. Sidewalks didn’t exist in the neighborhood because, presumably, nobody was fool enough to walk in weather hot enough to fry a lizard more than six months out of the year.
A little boy answered Ben’s knock. His black hair was short and he’d gelled it straight up, like exclamation points. The moment he saw Ben he twisted around and yelled to his mom. Ben grabbed the doorknob and lowered himself onto his heels, and when the boy turned around again he gave him a punch on the arm and a candy bar. “Don’t tell your mom I gave it to you, all right?”
The boy’s smile revealed a couple of teeth missing. It was a real Norman Rockwell moment. Ben pulled himself straight, knees creaking all the way up, and that was when the boy saw the dog. At first, the size of the Rott scared him. He stepped back and half hid behind the door. Then he looked up at me, asked, “You the dog lady?”
I’d been called a lot of things before and not all of them complimentary, but never that. “You want to say hello to my dog? His name’s Baby.”
The name offended the boy. “He’s no baby. He’s bigger’n I am.”
“You’re smart. You play with him awhile, you’ll figure out why I call him Baby.” I grabbed the Rott by the collar and followed Ben inside. Anybody who grew up around tract housing could have followed the floor plan blindfolded. Bedrooms off the hall to the left of the entry, living room to the right, kitchen straight ahead. Arlanda met us at the entrance to the kitchen. As Doubleday’s closest relative, the town gathered around her for the memorial service, and since late morning friends and neighbors had been dropping by the house with food, drink, and the quiet companionship that marks a funeral crowd. Arlanda had dressed her muted best, in a flowing black midcalf skirt, long-sleeved silk blouse, and loosely woven cotton shawl that matched the skirt. It wasn’t until the introductions were nearly complete that I noticed another boy hiding behind the skirt—her youngest. I knelt to his level and introduced him to the dog. The older boy dared closer then, overcoming his fear if only to impress his younger brother. After a few minutes of careful approach and retreat, they understood the dog wouldn’t intentionally hurt them, and following Arlanda’s suggestion, I let them out in the backyard to play. Like most dogs, the Rott responded to the boys’ frenetic energy with equal enthusiasm.
Ben disengaged himself soon after the introductions and stood in front of the television set, pretending to be interested in the blank screen. Arlanda’s friends and neighbors perked up when they learned what I did for a living, wanted to know about this celebrity or that. I didn’t tell them that almost everyone I photographed hated my guts. After a while I looked for Ben again and saw him out back, playing with the kids and dog.
The memorial service was held before the altar where Angela Doubleday had been baptized, in a brick church glowing red against the blue Arizona sky. The church had been built when copper made the town prosperous and thankful, and to a size that seemed optimistically large on most Sundays but was welcome that afternoon, with mourners and the curious packing the benches and spilling into the aisles. Most of the people attending hadn’t seen Doubleday in thirty years, if at all, Ben said. I stood at the back and watched him file into the front pew next to Arlanda and the boys, the spot her husband would have taken had he stuck around. I wondered briefly whether he would return now that she was soon to become the richest woman in Cochise County and whether she would take him back if he did. I doubted she would. Few things expand the horizons like a fat bank account.
Maria and Yolanda sat in the second row, wearing black as though born to it, trapping a scrubbed and sober Lupe between them. Arlanda reached over the back of the pew and shook the hand of each one, beginning with Maria. In the car Ben had told me that she had flown them in for the service, paying for it out of her expected share of the estate. Troy Davies left his seat at the end of a row across the aisle and solemnly greeted the two boys, then clasped Arlanda’s hand in both of his and whispered his condolences. Her eyes never left his face while he spoke, forgetting, for the moment, her resentment over his share of the inheritance. I couldn’t blame her for staring. Troy would be the best-looking man in any crowd, even though he had all the substance of a film set. He snubbed Ben, who stared the other way and pretended not to notice.
The mourners took their seats and the organ music faded. The previous week I’d been invading Angela Doubleday’s privacy with a five-hundred-millimeter lens. I didn’t belong at her memorial service. I hadn’t been to church in twenty years, and even back then, we weren’t a church-going family. I believed in God or, more accurately, had a notion of something people have called God over the millennia, but still I felt a fraud being there. When the pastor began to read Scripture, I slipped out the door and took the Rott for a walk.
The cemetery where Angela Doubleday’s ashes were to be interred rested at the edge of town, open to the winds sweeping from the desert and to whatever creatures followed the wind. Beyond the cypress trees that lined the entrance, the graveyard spread barren of any living thing, the earth too hard and dry to support a single twig of green. The crypt Doubleday had built for her family towered above the humble population of graves like a temple, its columns and pediment carved from a rose-colored granite that glowed when struck by the rays of the setting sun. The crypt straddled the Protestant and Catholic sections of the cemetery, which otherwise were as strictly segregated as any living people divided by race and religion. Gray granite tombstones studded the Protestant section to one side of the crypt, the names chiseled into the prosperous stone testifying to English, Irish, and German heritage. The Catholics were mostly Mexican-Americans, their graves marked by simple crosses, often constructed from metal pipe and decorated by riotous displays of plastic flowers, ribbons, and balloons. Along the border with Mexico, to be a dead Catholic was a more festive affair than to be a dead Protestant.
The interment was meant to be a private ceremony but it proved impossible to control admittance to a cemetery open on three sides to anyone who wished to walk in, and as the location and time of the ceremony were open secrets known to everyone in Cochise County, the number of unofficial mourners easily tripled the invited. The ceremony was short. The pastor read Scripture and led the crowd in prayer. The fire that killed Angela Doubleday reduced her to splinters of bone and teeth, and so what little remained of her had been formally cremated and placed in a copper-and-cloisonné urn. The urn was engraved with red and yellow flowers that might have been orchids. It seemed too handsome to be shut inside a crypt but I’m sure Arlanda, who had made most of the arrangements, wanted each detail to honor her aunt. Arlanda’s mother and father were interred there too, and as she lifted the urn to the vault reserved for it, I’m sure she was thinking that her own remains would one day rest beside them.
I stood amid the sun-bleached plastic flowers of the Catholic graves, away from the crowd yet near enough to hear the reading of
Scripture. When everyone bowed their heads and closed their eyes in prayer I figured I could pray just as well with my eyes open. I framed a group shot of the mourners huddled before the mausoleum and clicked the shutter. Troy Davies kept his eyes open too. He hadn’t noticed me until then, or at least hadn’t made a show of it. Tears streamed from his eyes, and though I’ve heard actors often use glycerin drops to simulate emotion, his seemed real enough. The pastor led the crowd in a final amen, told us to go in peace and to go with God. Ben and Arlanda embraced. Other mourners in the crowd turned to each other and shook hands in condolence and good fellowship.
Not Troy Davies. He broke from the crowd, zigzagging through the tombstones to get to me. He tried to keep his voice to a low hiss but he’d trained as an actor and spoke as loud as a stage whisper. “You have incredible nerve to show up here!”
I put my eye to the lens again and snapped his picture. That may not have been the wisest thing to do but it’s what I do for a living and I do it naturally. He must have thought he was Sean Penn because that was when he tried to hit me. Sean Penn can punch; Davies couldn’t. I took a step back and watched his fist do a flyby. Ben charged from the blind side and wrapped Davies’ arms but not his mouth.
“You were arrested for Angela’s murder, and you have the gall to show up at her service?”
His voice wasn’t a whisper then.
Ben told him to control himself.
“You were on the hill that day, weren’t you? You work for that cheap tabloid, the one that wouldn’t let her live in peace. And to think I let you interview me! Have you no shame? The lady is dead! You can’t take her picture now!”
“She’s invited,” Ben said. “She’s a friend of the family.”
“What are you talking about?”
Ben explained it to him again.
“But the police arrested her!”
“They made a mistake,” Ben said.
The muscles at the base of Davies’ throat relaxed and as the fight left him his shoulders sagged. Ben asked if he could control himself, and when Davies nodded, he let him go, warning me with a look to back off. I held my hands up, palms forward, the camera dangling innocently from my neck. Davies shuffled his feet on the packed earth, brushing the wrinkles from the coat of his suit. He didn’t look me in the eye, focusing instead on my camera, as though it represented all the evil in the world. “I don’t know how you got yourself invited, but I respect the wishes of the family.” He turned his shoulder, about to leave, but he was too angry to let it go. “You’re still a cheap camera snoop. Angela would have hated you.”
I might have answered him, but he was right. She would have despised me, and I probably shouldn’t have attended either service. He didn’t want to hear what I had to say anyway. He hurried off alone, probably believing he was the only one there who really mourned her death. He might have been right in thinking that, too. I caught Arlanda’s eye and shrugged. She gathered her sons to her side and moved away.
I felt a gentle punch on my arm and turned to the first smile I’d seen on Ben’s face all day. He said, “Looks like you’re even less popular in this town than I am.”
“You like that, don’t you?”
“I sure do.” He wrapped my shoulder with his arm, said, “What do you say we go scare up some ghosts.”
Douglas was a drinker’s town, with a half dozen bars on its main street, and so the doors to the Saddle and Spur creaked open and shut like a metronome, with people coming in from the street for a quick one and others stepping out to try the next bar down. A funeral crowd claimed most of the tables, though it was hardly a solemn or quiet one; the locals, many still in their church clothes, had turned garrulous with drink. They had lost a living icon and gained a dead one and so had much to talk about but little to mourn.
Ben and I grabbed a couple of barstools near the taps. The bartender was a good one; busy as he was, he didn’t make us wait more than two minutes before asking what we were drinking. I’d left the Rott with Arlanda or, rather, with her kids. He seemed to take naturally to the boys and served as playmate and babysitter while Arlanda greeted those who dropped by her house after the service.
“You don’t get angry when you drink, do you?” Ben asked.
“You mean lose my temper, get into fights?”
“It happens with some people.”
“Not me. Now my dad, he’s a mean drunk. In fact, he’s just plain mean.”
“I notice you have a mean streak, too.”
I looked at him, shocked. “You really think so?”
“You were ready to clock that guy in the cemetery.”
“I never took a swing.”
“You wanted to.”
“I wanted to kick his testicles over the moon, too. But I didn’t.” When I turned to my drink I glimpsed my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. Even then, six months out of prison, the sight of my reflection startled me as something foreign and defaced. Access to mirrors is strictly controlled in the penitentiary. Sometimes, I forgot what I looked like and expected to see the innocent young blonde I’d been, rather than the raven-haired and pierced virago I’d become, staring back at me.
“Nothing wrong with having a little mean streak,” Ben said. “I’ve got one. Every sheriff deputy who ever put on a badge has one. Got to have a mean streak if you’re going to survive on the job. The difference is, you’re putting that meanness into serving the law.”
“And I’m dedicated to breaking it?”
“Don’t get me wrong. You’re the nicest, most decent felon I’ve ever met. But you’re more of a law-unto-yourself type.”
I signaled the bartender for another round. “I prefer to call it self-reliance.”
He thought about that long enough for the drinks to be delivered. “You’ll forgive me for giving you a little fatherly advice?”
“All my life I’ve been waiting for that.”
“For what?”
“A little fatherly advice.”
“Okay then, here it is.” He gripped his drink before him like a shield and stared me straight in the eye. “Don’t change. I like you just the way you are.”
The remark caught me by surprise. Nobody had said that to me since the days I wore pink lipstick and painted my nails to match, back in the days when I worked at Hansel & Gretel’s Baby Portrait Studio and people liked me because I wasn’t who I was but who they wanted me to be. I found myself blushing, and I felt an odd swelling in my throat, as though I was about to cry, something I hadn’t done in years. I lifted my glass from the bar, clicked it against his, and swallowed the emotion with my drink.
Three drinks into the evening a man strode into the bar from the street, glanced around just long enough to spot Ben at the bar, walked up to him, and said, “I heard this was where you were hiding out, thought somebody should come over and tell you what a low, stinking son of a bitch you are.” Black crescent moons cut beneath his nails and dark lines creased the skin between his thumb and forefinger. I’d seen a lot of car mechanics with hands like that. No reason a car mechanic can’t be a belligerent drunk looking to pick a fight with a stranger, but the man’s anger seemed more particular than that.
Ben sat straight-backed on his stool, watching the man’s reflection between the bottles in the mirror behind the bar. “Glad to hear your opinion, son. Now you’ve stated it, your business is done.”
A lock of hair spilled down the man’s brow when he shook his head. “If you weren’t so fucking old I’d kick your ass.”
There was a brief, violent time in my life when I might have broken my whiskey glass on his face, but I’ve matured since then. I pulled the Nikon from my bag and slid off the stool. He glanced at me when I moved. Only natural. But he wasn’t afraid of me. I was a girl, right? I was supposed to get out of the way. The pupils of his eyes were big as eclipsed moons, and thick blood vessels veined the whites. He’d probably had a few to bolster his courage. I powered up the flash attachment with a flick of my thumb and fired i
t into his eyes. A good paparazza bobs and weaves like a middleweight because movement attracts the eye of the subject and makes you harder to hit if the subject objects. The first shot flashed into his brain like a fireball and the second blinded him.
“Beautiful, baby, just fabulous,” I said, giving him the full routine, patter and all. “You’re just what we’re looking for, a little local color. We’re doing a piece in next Sunday’s issue of Scandal Times comparing people to animals. Would you mind if we put your portrait next to a picture of a jackass? That’s right, look this way—beautiful!”
He flung his arm up to his eyes after the third flash, stumbled back, and nearly toppled over a chair. That made him mad at me, too. “You do that one more time and I’m gonna take that camera away from you.”
“You’re welcome to try,” I said, and when he lowered his arm I fired the flash again. “Then my publication can sue you, your boss, your boss’s boss, and run so many lawyers down your throat you’ll be gagging on court dates for the rest of your life.”
I was smart enough to be standing at the opposite end of a table then, because he was big enough to do serious damage if he caught me. But he wasn’t going to catch me. He’d come to pick a fight with a man and instead faced a weird-looking girl with a flash camera. It wasn’t going the way he’d planned it in his head while he was drinking a few to get his courage up. Had he really wanted to fight me, he could have come over the table and the backs of those around it, but I wasn’t the one he wanted. I could see how he’d find the situation confusing. It took him some time, shielding his eyes with his palm as he tried to process the information, but soon enough he figured out what to do.
“You’re not wanted here.” He pointed his finger at Ben, who remained seated at the bar, and then at me. “And you aren’t either. Get the hell out, the both of you, while you can still walk.” He showed us how to do that by walking out the door himself.
The bartender got a fresh drink to me by the time I reached the bar. When I reached for it I saw my hands were shaking. I drank it down like the sedative it was and nodded for another. Ben stared straight ahead, watching the room in the mirror behind the bar. I packed the camera in my bag. Neither of us spoke for some time, though everyone else in the bar did, conversations booming loud and fast. A little threatened violence always excites a crowd.
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