Phoenix Noir

“Now their land is being taken from them again and they must live in the cities. Doesn’t it just make you angry?” she asked.

“Hell, we’re survivors,” Tom proclaimed dismissively.

After only four months, Tom decided to give marriage another go around. Their courtship had been a rather staid affair in comparison to the women he’d fucked in the backseats of their BMWs, Audis, and even a red VW bug, their bodies damp and sticking to the leather. Over a spaghetti and meatball dinner Eliza had once asked, “If you had one wish, what would it be?”

He slurped up strands of pasta that resembled roots growing from his mouth.

“May I?” she asked, and picked up his spoon and twirled the pasta onto it and offered it to him.

After a long pause he answered, “If I had one wish, I’d want you to be my wife.” Tom knew what to say when women felt most vulnerable.

Since she was already carrying his seed in the darkness of her womb and was soon to finish up her Physician’s Assistant training, they decided to make it legal. A child was born, a boy destined to be raised by his mother. Marital bliss faded quickly for Tom and eventually his wandering eye led him back to other women.

One morning a suit arrived at work carrying a yellow envelope. The man caught Tom by surprise, and before he knew it he’d signed the delivery of his divorce papers.

His first wife hadn’t been as dramatic. They’d met at the Indian Center before she got a better-paying job at a credit union. On their third date they’d gone to see George Strait sing his love songs in the US Airways Center. They sat way up in the cheap seats and held hands. Afterwards they walked to her apartment and made love for hours on the sofa sleeper she had bought at a garage sale. Carmen was an urb like him but often drove home to the rez on the weekends to be with her family. She’d return Sunday afternoons bringing freshly killed lamb and tortillas in the cooler. Tom made a few trips with her, but his childhood experience of being on the rez gave him excuses to stay in the city. When Carmen told Tom she was pregnant, he joked that he would name the child George, whether it was a girl or boy.

Tom settled into his life as husband and expectant father until he met up with some of his old drinking buddies. They would arrive with loud voices and six-packs of beer in paper bags after Tom and Carmen had gone to bed. Carmen endured for as long as she could Tom’s late-night hours and his alcoholic breath as he stumbled into bed beside her. When he wasn’t there to take her to the hospital she went alone in a taxi. She went into labor without Tom and when he showed up he was still reeking of last night’s party.

She’d merely dropped him off at work one morning and told him not to come home. He could pick up his things outside their apartment; she’d have them ready. He knew it was coming from the gathering of stony silence between the fights and the daily marital thrashings that their son had to witness. He was sorry that the streets would raise his son just as he had been raised.

He liked how Mandy moved her breasts back and forth across his bare chest, her nipples grazing his. Soft and sexy was how he liked them. Fake ones were only good for eye lust. Mandy owned a Western art gallery in old Scottsdale. He’d met her during one of the Thursday evening art walks when the tourists traipsed among the clichéd Remington-style bronzes and oil paintings of Plains Indian men and women captured in the nineteenth century. One evening he walked into her gallery.

He stopped at a Lakota man holding a drum by a river and whistled low at the painting’s five-digit price tag. “Didn’t know these old Indians cost this much,” he’d said to no one in particular.

“That’s a Jordan Stone,” came a voice from behind. “I think he’s captured the spiritual essence of the old man in the morning light, don’t you?”

“Spirituality. ‘Morning light.’ Isn’t that the name of this place?” he asked.

“Morning Light. I just love that image. So I named my gallery that.”

Mandy had grown tired of the corporate race in New York City. She was forty-one now with one marriage behind her and no kids because she hadn’t made time for any. She considered herself a beginning middle-aged woman whose face and body had a few petals left. During a trip to Phoenix for her brother’s wedding in February, the warm winter seduced her, as it had many of the snow birds fleeing steel-gray skies and frozen car batteries. She quit her finance career, sold all her suits, and bought a gallery. Risky, but it meant warm winters and a year-round tan.

Mandy invited Tom to the wine-and-cheese table. She had a storage room in the back where she kept supplies and a futon. After the tourists left, she invited him to the spare room on the pretext of looking at more art. Browsing through the box of canvases, Tom wondered if he might try painting. Mandy dropped onto the futon next to him. It heaved a gust of air and she said impatiently, to Tom’s surprise, “Aren’t you going to fuck me?”