Desert Noir (9781615952236) Read Online Free PDF Page B

closet. Inspection finished, I went back to the front door, closed it firmly, and dead-bolted the lock. I’d learned to inspect my living quarters at the age of ten when I’d come home from school to what I thought was an empty house, only to discover that my foster father—my third in as many years—had hidden himself in my closet and I’d locked myself in with him.
    I never made that mistake again.
    Finally feeling safe, I nuked some ramen noodles and ate them while I watched the rape and pillage on CNN. It always comforted me to know that things were much worse elsewhere. By the time the sports segment came on, a black bar had appeared at the top and bottom of the thirteen-inch screen. Letterboxed football? I got off the couch and thumped the TV a good one, but the black remained. I switched it off. Now I needed new everything.
    I looked around at my beige living room. When I say beige, I mean it. Courtesy of the former tenant—a tax preparer who left everything but his clothes—the carpet was beige, the sagging sofa was beige, the occasional chair was beige, the dinette was beige, and the walls were beige. Even the plastic faux pine coffee table was beige. The only spots of color in the entire apartment were the few items I’d brought with me—the Two Gray Hills Navajo rug hanging over the couch, a yellow-and-black striped clown kachina doll lounging on the window sill, and the black satin toss pillow with red embroidered lettering that said, “Welcome to the Philippines.” I’d stolen it from my fourth foster home because they were nice people and I wanted something to remember them by.
    Or was that the fifth foster home? Over the years, I’d lost count.
    The living room held several other items which differentiated it from a Motel 6—an old phonograph turntable and next to it, a rack of vintage blues albums I’d begun collecting in my early days at Arizona State University. I owned the usual, of course—Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf. But I’d also accumulated an admirable collection of the less famed blues masters—Lightnin’ Slim, Jimmy Anderson, Lazy Lester, Whispering Smith, Elmore James, Big Joe Turner, Mississippi Fred McDowell.
    I put some Leadbelly on the turntable. As he moaned “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” I wondered for the hundredth time why this music moved me so. I was white, had lived in Arizona all my remembered life, and I’d never traveled east of Texas. Yet the plaintive songs of these old Black men from the Mississippi Delta filled me with a familiar ache nothing else could. Had I heard this music as a child?
    My ramen finished, I tossed the Styrofoam cup into the beige trash can. While Leadbelly wailed his suspicions, I went into the bedroom to change into a T-shirt, shorts, and running shoes. After strapping a pedometer around my ankle, I went back to the kitchen, filled an insulated bottle with ice water, and tucked the water and my .38 into the special fanny pack I kept on the counter. Then I let Leadbelly rest and went out the door.
    At a jog slow enough to prevent further injury to my hip, I headed west on Main Street, then south on Sixty-Eighth Street, and west again on Thomas to Sixty-Fourth. By the time I crossed McDowell Road and headed past the shadows of the giant double buttes at the entrance to Papago Park, I was slippery with sweat but no longer cared. Serotonin hummed along my brain synapses, making me as high as a red-tailed hawk on a windy day.
    Papago Park was a thousand-acre oasis of sage and sand surrounded by an urban ocean of concrete. Home to the Phoenix Zoo and the Desert Botanical Gardens, its natural beauty was somewhat blemished by the hiking and biking trails that criss-crossed over the site of the old Hohokam Indian village long since reduced to rubble. Over the years pot hunters—those thieves of time—had stolen