Phoenix Noir

In one quick turn he lifted the hem of her dress with his left hand and pulled down her thong with his right. He drew it across his face and inhaled her pussy smell in the purple strings, then buried his face between her legs. They spent most of the night working it in the backroom, then drove to her condo. Mandy didn’t ask him to leave, so Tom took that as permission to squat permanent residence. Most nights Tom simply reached over and touched Mandy between her legs and they were off following their heat.

“My father was a painter. He came out of the Bambi School of painting at IAIA,” he lied. “All Indians are artists,” he proclaimed. “Shit, just buy me some paints and a canvas and I can paint better than all those ditwads in your gallery,” he boasted.

So she returned with her Lexus loaded with canvas, paints, and an easel. While Mandy worked in her gallery, he painted romantic Plains Indians in buckskins and loin cloths. She hung them in her gallery but there was little interest.

One evening when Mandy was away on one of her buying trips, he walked into the gallery to find her assistant alone. She had just graduated with an Art History degree from ASU and was dreaming of moving on to San Francisco or New York. Over coffee they flirted and ended up in the backroom. Mandy was no fool. She smelled the sheets and promptly fired her assistant and sent Tom solo.

On his way out of Denny’s, Tom impulsively picked up the sticky receiver of the pay phone and dropped some coins into the slot. After several rings Mandy answered.

“Hey, Mandy, it’s been a long time since we talked.”

“Not long enough.”

“Come on, Mandy. I thought we were friends.”

“What do you want?”

“I just want to talk. Can I come over—Morning Light?”

“Go to hell!”

“You said you were my friend. I heard you say you were my friend.”

“Yes, well, friends don’t treat each other the way you did to me. Look, I’ve gotta go. I’ve got a date with Jay, who makes me laugh.”

The line went dead.

The sprain in his ankle was still aching and he tried not to limp as he headed past the Veterans Hospital to the Indian bar on Seventh Avenue. As he stepped into the dank room, the smell of beer and sweaty bodies and things swirling in the darkness assaulted his olfactory sense.

He found a stool at the far end of the Flying Eagle bar. One of the springs had worn halfway through the padding and was poking him in the ass. He ordered a draft. The foam splashed over the rim of the plastic mug when the bartender set it down. Tom threw a crumpled five-dollar bill down on the sticky wooden bar. A cowboy rez band took up one side of the bar and cranked out an old Johnny Horton tune, “Honky Tonk Man.” Couples in tight jeans and cowboy boots twirled in little circles. The band sped up the beat with another oldie from CCR. Suddenly, a woman dressed in white pants and jacket appeared among the couples. She moved her body woodenly and alternately picked up her foot, her arms raised stiffly like mannequin arms at her sides. The band kicked up the tempo and she moved even faster. The couples stepped aside and the woman in white had all eyes on her. Goaded on by the attention, she shook her torso and leg in an even more grotesque fashion. When the band stopped, she momentarily paused before leaving the floor, as if waiting for applause. She looked around the room as if to say, There! No one clapped except a woman on the other side of the bar.

That’s when Tom laid eyes on Crista.

Tom made his way over to the applauding woman, beer in hand. “Some dancer, eh?”

“You from Canada?” she asked, ignoring his question, and took a swallow of her drink in a tall glass.

“Naa. From around here.”

“I knew a guy from Canada who ended everything with ‘eh?’ So I thought …”

“Grew up here in Phoenix. My mom’s people are from the rez.” Tom followed the usual protocol among skins.

“Which one?”

“The big one.”

Tom’s mother had married her high school sweetheart from the Phoenix Indian School, but after a few years his parents fell apart and he was raised among the city lights and police sirens.

He’d only been to his mother’s homeland a few times, and felt out of place among the people who spoke a different language and had to haul water from the community well. His grandmother once remarked that he was too pretty for the harsh life of the rez.

“Navajo or Apache?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“You’re tall so you must be Navajo, maybe Apache.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, keep your secrets,” she said, and took another drink.

“And you, where you from?”

“Up north,” she said, and pointed with her lips.

He didn’t press further for fear she’d ask him questions for which he had no answers. In the dark he couldn’t tell if she was thirty or fifty. She had penetrating eyes, that much he could tell. There was also something in how she laughed, like she was laughing at him.

“What brings you here tonight? I mean besides the ‘so you think you can dance’ contest and the rah ja jin beat?”

“I’m hunting,” she said.

“What are you hunting? A date?” he joked.

“You could call it that.”