When It All Comes Down to Dust (Phoenix Noir Book 3)

by Barry Graham

  She tore it open, not the usual way you open an envelope, but from the bottom, keeping away from the flap that sealed it, because she couldn’t stand the thought of touching anything that might contain Frank’s dried saliva. She pulled the letter out of the envelope, her sweat dripping onto it and making the ink run while she sat there and read it.

  David’s editor called, but again David didn’t answer. It was late afternoon, and he was flipping through a recipe book, trying to find something he could cook for Laura when she came over after work.

  “David, it’s Jerry. Well, I got your email. I wrote back, so I guess you’re either not checking your email, or else you’re ignoring me. I think you’re making a big mistake, but that’s your problem. I’m not going to try to argue with you. I’ll pay you through today, and I want you to hand in your keys and clear out your desk by a week from now. Sorry it didn’t work out.”

  David smiled.

  Laura sat at her desk, trying to look busy but doing no work other than answering the phone. She could think of little else but Frank’s letter, which she’d left on the passenger seat of her car. She pictured it lying there, and wondered if it would curl in the heat. She imagined someone breaking into the car and stealing the letter, not knowing what it was, what it really meant. She kept wanting to call David, or email him, but she didn’t, and she didn’t know why not.

  David looked around his house. It really was a nice place, he thought. Not in the sense of being luxurious, but of just being a good place to be. A place to be every day, to read and cook and eat and talk with friends. He’d never had time to really live there before. Most people he knew were like that. Many of them had houses they spent a lot of money on, but they never really got to live in them. So much of their time was spent working, their houses were just places to quickly eat, bathe and sleep. They’d have been as well just to rent a cheap room. In the service of their egos, they spent their lives making money for corporations, while they themselves got paid money they had no time to spend, had families they had little time for, friends they rarely hung out with.

  He’d once dated a lawyer, a young associate at one of the city’s big firms. She’d faced a dilemma when she was offered a teaching fellowship at Georgetown University. While the idea of living in D.C. was appealing to her, the decrease in salary wasn’t. She’d told David how much of a cut in pay she was facing, and he’d burst out laughing because the amount of money she’d be losing every year was the exact amount of his annual salary. What made it less funny was the knowledge that she had more money than he ever aspired to, and yet she was the most unhappy person he’d ever known. All she did was work, visit various therapists, and obsess about whatever man she was dating.

  And then there was Laura. He thought about how different he and Laura were. Her apartment’s stark functionality reflected who she was – it was a place to eat and sleep. She didn’t like to be there otherwise, she always wanted to be where things were happening, where the action was. David had been living that way too, but it wasn’t what he wanted.

  He didn’t know what he wanted to do next, but he knew what he didn’t want. He didn’t want to spend most of his time doing work he didn’t like in order to make money he didn’t need in order to pay for a lifestyle that didn’t interest him.

  “So what are you going to do?” Laura asked him that evening, as they ate the stir-fry he’d made.

  “I don’t know. I’ve got a little bit of money saved, so I don’t need to make any decision right away.”

  “How long can you coast?”

  “If I’m frugal, maybe three months.”

  “Are you sure about quitting your job?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are your co-workers having a going-away party for you?”

  “I doubt it. People in the business are pretty into themselves. I don’t think they’ll want to do anything like that unless they think I might be able to do something for them.”

  When they’d finished eating, Laura said, “I want to show you something. I didn’t want us to have to look at it until after dinner.”

  “Uh-oh. You gonna tell me what it is?”

  “A letter from Frank del Rio.”

  “Shit. He knows where you live?”

  “No, he sent it to my old job.”

  “Still, he must have been checking up on you.”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay, show me.”

  “I’ll have to go get it. I left it in my car. I don’t like even having it in the same room as me.”

  He walked outside with her, and stood watching as she got the letter out of her car. She handed it to him, and they went back inside the house.

  David sat on the futon and Laura sat beside him. He looked at the letter in his hand. Outside in the darkness, it had seemed like an artifact from some charnel ground, something to avoid touching, but now it was just a folded piece of paper. The message was neatly handwritten in blue ink that somehow made David imagine a cheap plastic pen.

  Dear Laura,

  I’m very sorry for writing to you because I know that getting a letter from me might upset you and I don’t want to upset you or make you feel bad or angry or anything like that.

  I’m writing to you just to say I’m very sorry for what I did to you. I know you hate me and I don’t blame you but I want you to know that I would never want to bother you, and I’ll never contact you again after I send you this letter. I just want to say I’m sorry, and I wish you all the best and hope you have a very happy life.

  Best wishes,

  Frank del Rio

  David tried to hand the letter back to Laura, but she didn’t take it. He folded it and put it on the coffee table.

  “Well,” he said. “That wasn’t as bad as I thought.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought it might be nasty, but he doesn’t sound scary. More like pathetic.”

  “Glad you don’t think he’s scary.”

  “I know that was a stupid thing to say. I know it’s easy for me to say that when I didn’t go through what you –“

  “Don’t humor me.”

  “I’m not. I guess I’m just relieved that he didn’t say any of the things I was afraid he might say.” Like taunt you about what he did to you. Tell you he wanted to do it again.

  “You don’t get it.”

  “What don’t I get? Do you think he’s bullshitting about being sorry?”

  “No, he’s probably sincere. It doesn’t matter. Even if he doesn’t want to, he’ll do it again.”

  “What? Hurt you?”

  “No. He’ll find a little girl.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “Because he doesn’t have a choice. He didn’t have a choice about what he did to me. To most people, it was a crime. To him, it was a failed relationship. I think he might even have meant well to start with.”

  “Okay... the reason I’ve never asked you about it is that I thought if you wanted to tell me about it, you would. But you must know I want to know.”

  She nodded.

  “I’m not interested in pushing you, but if you want me to understand what you just said, you’re gonna have to tell me.”

  “I know,” she said.

  And she told him.

  PART II: FEAR

  SIX

  The first time Laura got drunk, she was seven years old. The beer was dark and heavy, and it was given to her by her father. Her parents had some friends over, and they all found it funny to watch the little girl get more and more messed up, going from talking loquaciously through throwing up in the bathroom to passing out on the living room floor, while the party continued all around her.

  Earlier in the evening, they had tried to get her stoned, but she thought smoking was gross, and she couldn’t figure out how to draw on the spliff once it was in her mouth. She liked the beer – it tasted good, and it made her feel good, and even when she was puking in the toilet she still felt better than she felt most of the time.<
br />
  Her parents were from the boondocks of Idaho. Her father had proposed marriage to the best-looking girl in town, and her mother had accepted the proposal from the wealthiest boy who had offered. They got married in their early twenties. Within a year, he knocked up his wife without ever deciding to, and they went ahead and had the baby without thought or investment. To them, procreation was something that just happened, and then the child was there, and you kept living your life. Her father saw his role, beyond sperm provision, as that of bill-payer. To that end, shortly after Laura’s birth, he decided to move to Phoenix and get into real estate.

  It was a shrewd decision. Phoenix was growing, exploding with development, going from large town to sprawling metropolis as people from all over the country headed for the Sunbelt. They came to escape – from poverty, failed marriages, failed businesses, felony warrants. They came to start again. Or they came from nothing and nowhere, looking to find something, looking to be somewhere. Some arrived on the bus with nothing but their ambitions. Others, like Laura’s father, arrived in big cars, their dreams paid for in legal tender.

  Bankrolled by his parents, he bought a house in Moon Valley, where the city’s new aristocracy lived. He went to work brokering real estate deals while his wife kept house, overcooked their dinners and fucked on demand. They went to the country club on Saturdays and to church on Sundays.

  Laura didn’t exist for them, though she tried to. In the afternoons, she’d sometimes ask her mother what they were having for dinner that evening. Then she’d go outside and write a message on the driveway in chalk: “DADDY YOU GET PORK CHOPS FOR DINNER.” She’d wait until he came home, and she’d point to the words as he walked up the driveway, and he’d smile at her and say, “Great” and keep walking.

  He worked hard, and so did many other people in the business. But money did what hard work couldn’t, and before he was thirty the name Ponto had become synonymous with real estate in the Valley. The legend had it that he was a self-made man, living proof that you could plant your flag on the peak of the entrepreneurial mountain through determination and work ethic. He even believed in the legend himself, at least after his third beer.

  Then the women’s movement hit. More specifically, it hit Laura’s mother. She read a few books and went to a few meetings, and soon she informed her husband that she wasn’t going to be the little woman anymore. Her consciousness had been raised, and she had realized that there was absolutely no reason a woman should be stuck at home raising children, when she could simply hire poor Latina women to do it for her.

  The women she hired would spend hours away from their own children because they needed the small amounts of money they were paid to take care of Laura while her mother volunteered at charitable organizations and got her picture on the society page of the Arizona Republic. Neither of Laura’s parents had to think about shit-stains or pubic hairs on toilets anymore – that was now taken care of by people who worked for twelve hours a day until their health gave out and they still couldn’t afford to see a doctor.

  Most of Laura’s diet was provided by the country club. Nearly every day when she got home from school her mother would tell her to walk over there, and sometimes she’d even drive her. Laura would play in the swimming pool, and when she got hungry she’d order some food and it would be charged to her father’s account. She didn’t see many other kids at the country club, but that was okay because Tori was always there with her.

  Tori was Laura’s twin sister, and they played together every day. The only trouble with Tori was that she didn’t exist. Laura was five when she invented her, and now she was six. She didn’t know if that meant that Tori was a year old, or, since they were twins, if she was six as well.

  Some evenings, Laura would play in the front yard of the house, while her parents socialized with her father’s business contacts, friends from the country club, and people her mother had met through her good works. Laura would sit outside and talk to Tori. It made Tori more real if Laura actually talked to her out loud.

  “Mommy and Daddy are dumb ’cuz they won’t get a swimming pool. Everybody has a swimming pool, but Daddy says it would spoil our view of the golf course. That’s dumb, huh?” Pause while Tori answered. “The golf course is lame, huh...?”

  That would be the way of it, but only for a little while. It was hard to sustain belief in a person she couldn’t see or hear, and so it wouldn’t take long for Laura to talk less and less, and then to fall quiet and just throw a ball or sit there with the warm night all around her and the coyotes howling close by as the sun set in a polluted sky and inside the house her father told his guests what a great kid she was.

  Sometimes they’d forget about her and she’d fall asleep on a seat out there, or she’d go inside and crabbily tell her mother that she was tired. Her parents would show her off for a few minutes, and then her father would give her a drunken hug and say, “You’re such a good girl! Your Daddy’s so proud of you.”

  None of them – her parents or their guests – ever heard the prayer Laura said on many nights. “I was very good today, God. I did my chores and I didn’t bother Mommy. So please let me die when I’m asleep tonight. Please.”

  When she woke in the morning and she wasn’t in heaven with God and Tori and people who talked to her and were like the families she saw on T.V., she’d know she had to go to school, which meant facing the dogs.

  The school was about a mile from her house. None of the other kids walked to school, because their parents wouldn’t have let them, and the heat in Phoenix is too punishing for any walk to be less than an athletic endeavor. The other kids were driven to school by their parents in air-conditioned vehicles, but Laura’s father went to work early, and her mother didn’t want to be bothered.

  So Laura walked.

  Some of the neighbors kept dogs, and they let them wander freely, since they didn’t think there would be any pedestrians for the dogs to bother. As Laura walked, the dogs would come running out the yards they regarded as their territory. Sometimes they would bark and growl at her, and sometimes they just wanted to sniff her. In every case, she was terrified. When she told her mother how scared she was, her mother told her just to say a prayer as she walked, and the dogs would leave her alone. That prayer never worked any better than the one she said in bed at night.

  She’d spend her day in school, too shy and sad to talk much to the other kids, preferring to stay inside her head with Tori. She’d think about the dogs she’d meet on the walk home, and she’d have conversations with God, asking him to show her how to be really, really, really super-good, so good that she’d deserve to go to sleep and never wake up again.

  That never happened, but, within a year, other things did.

  Laura never found out how it happened, but somehow her parents noticed the decade they were living in, and decided to take part in it. Her father stopped listening to Ronnie Milsap and got into Free instead. He adjusted his wardrobe accordingly, and so did his wife, who took to using phrases such as “far out.”

  Society gatherings were replaced by pot-and-booze-and-Dark Side of the Moon parties. Central Arizona was Southern California without the high prices, where money bought mellowness. As they sat around with their friends, sharing substances and discussing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, their meals were still delivered and their toilets were still cleaned by brown people.

  But if that remained the same, Laura’s role didn’t. She was no longer ignored, no longer a social prop to be briefly seen and never heard. After putting something up their noses, her parents would smoke some herb to come down, and then happily spend hours at a time talking to Laura about spirituality and What Everything Meant. She never understood any of it, but she was glad to have their attention.

  When her father offered her a beer, she felt as though she had arrived. And, the next day, when her head hurt and her throat was raw from puking, her mother laughed and told her that was what happened if you drank, and Laura felt as though
they were sharing something, for the first time ever.

  When they gave her cigarettes, it didn’t take – she just couldn’t smoke. She hated the taste and smell, and it made her cough right away. It was the same when they tried to get her to smoke a joint. That was a disappointment to everyone – to the adults, because they thought it would be “beautiful” to see her stoned, and to Laura because she wanted to be able to share what they were sharing.

  So she was glad when a friend of her mother’s brought over some space cake she’d made. Laura ate it along with everyone else, but it was so strong it caused hallucinations and some of the adults got freaked out. Laura didn’t. She went to the bathroom and stood looking in the mirror, watching as her nose got longer, then shorter, then longer again. It was fun.

  The men weren’t fun, at least not at first and not for a long time.

  When some of her parents’ friends started showing interest in her, she heard her mother and father discussing it.

  “We don’t have the right to make these decisions for her,” her mother said.

  “I know... I know. But she’s only eight,” her father said.

  “That’s a very hierarchical way of looking at it. If she wants to express her sexuality, we don’t have any right to try to control that, just because we’re older. I think you’re confusing parenthood with proprietorship.”

  “Yeah, I know. It just seems like a lot at her age. And it’s against the law.”

  “So are the drugs. So is giving her the booze, and that was your idea.”

  “I thought it would be fun for her. And it was. I thought it was beautiful.”

  “I did too. I think it’s beautiful to see anyone express who they are. And Laura has the right to express herself any way she wants to. I don’t think we’d even be having this discussion if she was a boy. I think you’re being both patriarchal and ageist.”

  “That’s reductive bullshit.”

  “Then if Laura wants to actualize her sexuality, you have no right to stand in her way.”

  “Right on,” her father said. “I guess.”