Double Wide

by Leo W. Banks

  He looked down in shock, groping for the knife with both hands. But his hands only found the blood trickling down his chest. He looked at his smeared fingers and then at me, curious, seemingly baffled.

  His strength gone, he sat down with his legs stretched out in front of him.

  I kicked the machete away and grabbed his pistol out of its holster. Rincon didn’t speak or try to interfere, but his eyes tracked me in slow, mechanical movements.

  Quiet now, he looked down at the knife in his chest and the blood spreading across his shirt and smiled. “I’m surprised.”

  Rincon’s face emptied, becoming flat and distant. He fell back, dead.

  Opal lay with her face in the dirt, whimpering. When I put my hands on her shoulders, she turned, startled, her eyes huge. “All of a sudden he was just there! That bad man!”

  Cash wasn’t moving when I got to him, but he was alive. He groaned when I rolled him over and pulled up his muscle shirt. Rincon’s bullet had struck his stomach right of center and passed clear through. That was good, but he was losing a lot of blood.

  “Cash, look at me. Open your eyes.”

  I gripped his chin and shook it. He opened his eyes halfway. They were a mile deep. He let out another aboriginal groan.

  “Stay with me, Cash. Stay with me.”

  “Rincon. You get him?” His voice was weak, barely a voice at all.

  “I got him.”

  “Let the river run, baby.”

  He nodded and closed his eyes. I talked to him until they opened.

  He said, “Where’s my hat at?”

  “You’re wearing it. Arizona Feeds.”

  “Sweet.” He closed his eyes again.

  EIGHTY-SIX

  I kept pressure on Cash’s wound until the Rural Metro ambulance screeched and flashed over the mountain. Opal helped out, dabbing at his forehead with a wet cloth. Diaz came and saw Bolt wounded under the cactus, Rincon dead with a knife in his chest, and Angel’s trailer a pile of smoldering ash.

  “I’m impressed,” he said. “I think. Are you all right?”

  Better than all right. I felt an unexpected righteousness and a dangerous joy. Roscoe Rincon was dead. I’d killed the man who killed Rolando Molina, and not a glimmer of guilt clouded my heart.

  The ambulance took Cash first. I insisted on that. Ed Bolt couldn’t stop yelling about his leg. The EMTs gave him a shot of something to quiet him until another ambulance showed up and they shoved him in the back and took off.

  The next morning, the fire captain returned to Double Wide to kick through the debris again in daylight. He confirmed the fire was arson caused by ignition of the propane tanks.

  The only mystery was Angel. Cash said he was in the trailer when the shooting started and when the explosion and fire happened. But they found no remains in the ashes, no wounded or burned Angel wandering the nearby desert, no Angel anywhere.

  The only possible way out of that inferno was the hole in the kitchen floor.

  By then, my mind was on a grim task.

  The night before, I’d wrapped Chico in a blanket and placed him in the backseat of the Bronco. Now it was time for burial. With my dead dog in my arms and Opal beside me, we hiked into the wash.

  Mesquite trees clustered along the chest-high banks, their gnarled branches overhanging the rocky sand. Chico would need shade in his last resting place, and I could use some for the digging. I needed to go deep to keep rushing water from dredging him up and giving the coyotes and javelina a feast.

  Opal watched. She wore her straw hat with the plastic rose on top. The skin on her face was pale and tight, making the bones more prominent. She chewed her bottom lip. I didn’t ask what troubled her, figuring she’d tell me on her own when she was ready, which she did.

  “The fire guy is wrong,” she said. “That fire wasn’t on account of propane.”

  “Those investigators are pretty good.”

  “Angel’s friend did it. Angel’s friend was fighting that bad man. That’s how the fire started.”

  “We’re back to the mysterious friend,” I said, and kept digging.

  “That’s why Angel was hunting. He was getting food and burying it to leave a trail so his friend could find his way down here. He wanted his friend to protect him.”

  “There is no friend, Opal.”

  “The breath of the Gila monster started that fire!” Her words sputtered out on a rush of emotion.

  I straightened up and stood leaning on my shovel like a dumb man, no idea what to say. Opal gave me wondering eyes as if she couldn’t believe how I was missing the obvious.

  “The Gila monster came and warned Angel to get away! He’s here! The bad man is here! Angel escaped and the Gila monster fought that bad man with his breath. That’s how the fire started! I know you don’t believe me, but that’s the truth.”

  I started to say something about superstition, science, the twenty-first century, and other ideas that wouldn’t mean a thing to Opal Sanchez. People believe what they believe, and beliefs are hard set. Any time spent trying to talk someone out of an article of faith they’ve held since childhood is time wasted.

  The digging done, I lowered Chico into the hole. Opal folded her hands on her stomach, closed her eyes, bowed her head, and recited a Catholic prayer.

  Blessing herself, she said, “Chico was like us, Mr. Whip. He was a good old dog, but he didn’t have no easy life in this place.”

  EIGHTY-SEVEN

  Over the remainder of that week, I checked out two of the border gold mines on my list, hoping for some clue to Rolando’s whereabouts. I saw no sign of renewed activity, and that Sunday night Tork Mortenson called to report on his trip to the Oro Grande. His news mirrored mine.

  He rattled on about the mine’s history, and I was about to hang up when he said, “The only thing interesting out there was a Mexican boy. He wouldn’t talk to us and that was that.”

  The blood raced up my neck. “He had a bad eye, right?”

  “Why, yes. He looked rather like a lad from Dickens. How’d you know?”

  Next morning, I picked up Roxy in Tucson and we drove sixty miles to Patagonia, an old cattle and mining town of nine hundred people southeast of Tucson.

  The mountains swell up behind it through thick oak and manzanita forest all the way to the Mexican border, eighteen miles away. The trees made shadows on the switchback road. We blinked over twelve empty miles, nothing but white dirt ahead of us and dust devils behind.

  My map placed the Oro Grande in Crying Times Gulch, a deep gash of rock, scrub, and barrel cactus accessed by a road jammed against the hillside and too treacherous to drive. I spied down with binoculars on three clapboard buildings and scattered pieces of mining gear.

  No sign of habitation. I scanned the empty countryside waiting for an idea to pop into my head. Frustrated, I reached into the Bronco and leaned on the horn and shouted, “Come on, Rolando! Where are you, Rolando?”

  The shrill sound probably split boulders as it echoed through the gulch.

  With the racket still going on, Roxy put a hand on my shoulder and pointed to the ridge at the gulch’s southern end. A figure stood against the sunlight. I wasn’t sure it was Angel until I fixed him in my binoculars.

  “That’s him,” I said. “I’d recognize those Goodwill clothes anywhere.”

  He gave me his two-fingered whistle and motioned toward the southwest. He made a steering wheel of his hands and an air map, telling me where I should drive. He made a cross of his arms for an intersection, held his hands apart to indicate a short trip, made an X of his fingers to mark the spot, and then vanished from the ridge.

  I found the spur road he indicated and inched the Bronco along for a back-jarring half a mile before stopping at the edge of a deep, east-to-west drainage. A truck lay on its side at the bottom, burned to rust brown and half-covered with dirt carried by monsoon waters.

  It looked like someone had set it on fire and rolled it off the edge. Not a bad way to dispose of
a vehicle and human remains. The flames had scorched away the metal’s original color, but I had a good idea it was red.

  Roxy said, “You sure you want to do this?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d go with you, but these are brand-new shoes. Nike Flyknits.”

  “I can do it myself.”

  “It’s too naturey down there. Why don’t you stay up here? We can call the marshal.”

  “I owe it to Rolando.”

  “You’re like a dog with a piece of meat,” Roxy said. “If I wind up dead in the mountains, you’re the one I want looking for me.”

  I hiked down the steep slope, my heels sliding on the rocky ground. I turned sideways for balance. Avalanching pebbles rolled into my shoes. With my hands, with rocks, and a loose tree branch, I dug at the dirt.

  It didn’t take long. The skull staring out at me could’ve been anyone who’d died badly. A skull is a skull. But I knew in my heart it was Rolando.

  EIGHTY-EIGHT

  Oscar and Natty Molina got the burial they so desperately wanted, and sometime later, Roxy and I sat in on Max Mayflower’s sentencing in Pima County Superior Court.

  He started his legal battle playing it tough, until Ed Bolt cut a deal with prosecutors and rolled on him. Mayflower pleaded guilty and got twelve years for money laundering and conspiracy to smuggle heroin.

  A few days later, Roxy and I went to Costco to load up on supplies. Pete, the nervous ninety-pound body man, had installed the new roof on the Bronco and this was the inaugural trip. But it didn’t sit evenly. The whole apparatus shook at any speed above forty miles per hour.

  We were driving west on Speedway. It was late in the afternoon and the sky was pale and ordinary, with none of the customary sunset shenanigans. That was good.

  “You need to take this back and get it fixed,” Roxy said.

  “I went by the garage the other day. It’s boarded up and Pete has disappeared.”

  “Natch.”

  Roxy had on tight jeans and a form-fitting T-shirt with a crochet pattern at the chest. She wore a straw sun hat with a wide, waving brim. It had a burgundy ribbon around the crown and an oversized bow of the same color over the right ear. She had on those huge Tom Ford shades and dollar sign earrings. She called it her Costco outfit.

  “How do you stand it?” she said. “Nothing works in your life. Everything’s stolen, broken, or about to break.”

  I grinned and pointed out the windshield. “Double Wide’s just over the mountain.”

  “My point exactly.”

  The rattling roof sounded like a blackout drunk trying to break down a door with a poleaxe.

  Roxy said, “Next time we go to Phoenix, we’re taking the Audi. This is ridiculous.”

  I’d been going to the Maricopa County Jail every week to visit Sam. Most days Roxy came too. It had become a regular thing and would continue. The judge had granted Micah Alan Gabriel’s request to investigate Sam’s drug use and assess his ability to stand trial. Gabriel had no idea how long that would take or when the trial might start.

  “I never thanked you for coming with me,” I said. “Sam lights up when he sees you.”

  “He’s a sweetie, but it’s all about you. He knows you’ll be there, same time every week. Never a doubt.”

  “Everybody needs somebody to look after them that way. If that’s not written down somewhere, it should be. That’s something I’ve learned.”

  “You’re pushing self-improvement now?” She snickered. “My idea of self-improvement is buying clothes, maybe making a deadline now and then.” For a long time Roxy said nothing. “Who do you need, Prospero?”

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about that. Maybe I need you.”

  She burst out laughing, a long, rolling laugh with much more in it than humor. “Let’s review, shall we? You came to the desert thinking you could help your father and clear your head, find something decent in your life because yours had gone to hell. And that’s me? I’m what you’re looking for? That’s crazy. I can’t be anybody’s dream.”

  “I’m not saying I know what’s going on here,” I said. “But I don’t want to see you walk away. That’s all I know for sure.”

  I drove along. It takes concentration to negotiate the switch-backs through Gates Pass. Miss one and the trip to the bottom ends with a very loud noise. I reached the saguaro forest with that familiar feeling of entering an alien world.

  Roxy said, “You’re interested, but you don’t know why?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What every girl wants to hear.” She didn’t move a muscle as she stared out the window. Then: “A door slammed on it.”

  “Huh?”

  “My imperfection, my pinky.” She held out her hand to show me her half finger. “I was a little girl, four years old, and my stupid brother slammed the door on it. But that’s not what I tell people. No, sirree. I say it happened on a story, and there were bad guys and gunshots and all that. I tell a different story every time.”

  “You’re protecting your brother.”

  “Oh, Prospero, that’s what I love about you. I do it for me, not him.” She made a gesture of conclusion. “There you go. No secrets. You wanted to know and now you do.”

  The shadows had grown long on a hot day. A roadrunner darted in front of the Bronco, head angled forward, feet a blur as it zipped into the desert.

  Roxy perked up and said, “Wait—there’s something else. It’s important. If we’re going to do this, you have to guess my dancing name.”

  “Miss Honey Jones.”

  She bumped her shoulder against mine. “How’d you know?”

  “Asked around, simple detective work. I like it.”

  “The ‘miss’ part cinches it,” Roxy said. “It means she’s important and available. And it’s simple. Simplicity’s the key with men.”

  I bounced along the county road past the skulled fence line to my painted Double Wide sign and turned onto the entrance road. The Airstream faced us. Ed Bolt had shot holes in my trailer and I hadn’t repaired them yet.

  They looked like stars shining in the dull twilight.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Everything in my life works fine.”

  Roxanne Santa Cruz rolled her eyes.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  In high school, Leo W. Banks worked loading delivery trucks with the Sunday edition of the Boston Globe. In those days the Sunday paper was really heavy, so he switched from lifting to writing. He graduated from Boston College and earned a master’s degree from the University of Arizona. He has been a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe. His articles have appeared in the USA Today, National Review, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Wall Street Journal, and many others. He has written four books of Old West history for Arizona Highways’ publishing imprint, and his book about the saguaro cactus won’t stop selling.

  He has won thirty-eight statewide, regional, and national journalism awards. Today, he writes a column for True West magazine. Double Wide is his first novel.