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Our walk was lit by stars and city lights. They made the barrel cactuses and boulders into shadowy companions as we picked our way up a steady incline. Critters scampered away with snaps and rustles as we walked. I wanted to think they were all jackrabbits and roadrunners. But the landscape seemed benign. The night was as dry as an old manuscript, with the desert air offering no resistance to our hike. She gave me her hand and I helped her across a break in the rocks. Ahead of us were the low mountains that are a fixture in the Phoenix landscape. Lost? Check your directions by the mountains. But from where we stood, they presented themselves as a steady black uplift that suddenly cut off leaving nothing but sky. Our navigation stars came from the television towers above the Dobbins Overlook, dozens of red lights blinking reassuringly. I had hiked these trails many times as a Cub Scout, but was ashamed to say I hadn’t been back since I returned home to Phoenix as an adult. But I wasn’t feeling like a Cub Scout right that moment.
Lindsey took the sleeping bag out of my hand and deposited it on the ground. We stood on a sandy, flat pause in the earth, surrounded by saguaros and rocks the size of sentinels. Above us, the torrid red stars pulsed and below us Phoenix spread out like a galaxy turned on its side. We just watched the lights, saying nothing. I slipped my hand around her waist, a feeling so wonderfully familiar—so right—and yet still so novel. The only sound was the everywhere-and-nowhere roar of the city below us. Then she was unbuttoning my shirt.
All the stars were still glowing later. Lindsey lay back against me. I nuzzled her neck and draped an arm over her breasts. Her fair skin was my oasis amid the blackness of the desert at night.
“Tell me a story, History Shamus.”
“South Mountain Park is the largest municipal park in the world. The only historic murder I know of happened in…”
She shook her head. “Tell me a hopeful story.”
I pushed my nose through her soft hair and nibbled her ear. She laughed her low, adult laugh. The horizon of lights blinked insistently. Amid the lights, the night was clear enough to make out Camelback Mountain miles to the north.
“This place lay abandoned for four hundred years,” I said, “except for the ghosts of its past and the phantasms of its possibilities. Here was one of the most fertile river valleys in the world. A Nile or a Euphrates. And yet, if you had ridden your horse into it in 1870, you would have found it empty.”
“I like this story,” she said.
“It’s called Phoenix because it rose from its ashes, like the bird of mythology. The ashes were the Hohokam, who built one of the most advanced irrigation societies in the New World. But the river was capricious—flooding in the spring, but then going years with barely a trickle. The Hohokam civilization disappeared—what happened is still a mystery. Then after the Civil War, settlers found this place and cleared out the old Indian canals. They were on the verge of abandoning it, too. But they dreamed what it could be. And mighty acts of faith and technology made the desert bloom. Now it’s the fifth-largest city in the nation.”
She leaned her head back and kissed me.
“You’re a romantic,” she said.
I adjusted myself so I could feel the length of her back against my chest. I said, “When I was a kid, the city was surrounded by fields and citrus groves. From up here in the daytime, we could have looked down and seen orange trees, then the Japanese flower gardens—they seemed to go on forever. Then, the city. It was beautiful. Too bad we had to pave it all over.”
“I wish I could have seen it, History Shamus. I just don’t know why we have to lose so much that’s beautiful.”
It was after one a.m. when we turned down Cypress Street. My body was feeling worked out and giddy in a way that comes from only one source. I was already imagining curling up in bed with my lover. But someone was on the porch, sitting on the step.
“What is Robin doing here,” Lindsey said sleepily. Then, in a tense voice, “My God, look at her eye.”
15
The city kept growing. Mile-long trains brought lumber and steel that soon became buildings. Eternal desert turned into ephemeral subdivisions, offices and retail strips. Sixteen billion dollars in new highways. Four thousand new construction jobs a month. From mountain reservoirs and a canal from the Colorado River came 400 billion gallons of water a year to support a megalopolis in a place that received a mere seven inches of rain a year. The growth leapt over mountain ranges and rerouted rivers. It inspired new policy centers at the university and lively debates in the newspaper. You heard it in the rhythm of heavy equipment and nail guns, and the music of melodious Spanish spoken by the framing crews in a hundred developments. You saw it in the ubiquitous pickup trucks of contractors and tradesmen, lined up in traffic on the freeways and ornamenting subdivision driveways. As May turned into June and the temperature shot above one hundred ten, I was reminded that our summers were getting longer and hotter. But hardly anyone in Phoenix had been around long enough to know this.
Robin moved in with us, staying in the small apartment over the garage that connected to the main house by the walkway that led off the living room. You got to it by taking the bookcase-backed stairway on the north end of the living room. The arrangement had been my suggestion, made after a very long night when we had found her battered and waiting for us on the front step. She had had a fight with her boyfriend, the elusive Edward. The damage to Robin was a nasty purple splotch growing around her left eye. Lindsey had immediately wanted to call the police. Then she was ready to arrest him herself. I had never seen my wife so depart from the preternatural calm that is so much a part of her. At one point, Robin was physically holding Lindsey back from the phone or t
he door. Robin said she, too, was to blame, and had given as good as she got in the fight. She just wanted to get away from Edward and let the relationship be over.
Lindsey, who had seen plenty of domestic violence as a young deputy, would have none of it. “The woman always blames herself,” she said. “This asshole will do it again, if not with you then with someone else.” And then: “You know this happened to Linda more than once. We watched it happen, remember?”
I felt out of my element, watching these two women who, until a few months ago, hadn’t seen each other in years and yet were connected by invisible strings of blood and personal history. I fetched ice for Robin, and mostly kept my mouth shut. There are times to not take charge. Finally, though, I broke the stalemate. Robin would stay with us for a few days. I offered to go with her the next day to retrieve her things from Edward’s house. But she refused help, saying that he was leaving on a business trip and the next day it would be safe for her to go alone. Lindsey never wavered from wanting to arrest and prosecute the bastard, as she unfailingly referred to him.
Two weeks later, Robin was still in the little apartment that had served, at various times, as Grandmother’s sewing room and Grandfather’s office. Nobody seemed to mind the arrangement. Lindsey was on loan to the Justice Department, so she left early for the federal building downtown. Some days I worked at home, and this gave me my first one-on-one conversations with my sister-in-law. She talked a lot, much of it about herself. But just when it risked becoming tedious, she was suddenly very interested in me, in my experiences and opinions.
Sometimes, I thought she was testing me.
“Lindsey’s gained weight,” she pronounced one day.
“I think she’s beautiful,” I said.
“I hadn’t seen her in years,” she said. “Anyway, maybe it’s because she’s happy.”
Other times, I began to see her inner turbulence. One morning we started talking about a college education, but by the end Robin was nearly shrieking at me about how she’d had to go to work when she was fourteen and I was being a snob. She had attended the University of Delaware, so I don’t know where she got the impression I was looking down on her. Later she apologized. But we had other talks that took the same course—not many, but once in a while. I came to realize that Robin had a very different emotional arc from Lindsey.
Robin was a major jock and enjoyed running through Willo. When I was home, she would stop in the study after her run to talk. I would get close to heat exhaustion from the two-block walk to the bus stop. She merely displayed a healthy glisten of sweat and breathed as easy as if she were sleeping. In her running togs, she was quite a specimen: tanned, muscled, and leonine with her thick, long hair. She was leggy like Lindsey, but her calves and quads were well defined. Her breasts were larger. This was all women-in-the-abstract, a condition that comes from a satisfying marriage to the woman you find most attractive in the world. And even in my hungriest horn-dog days, I wouldn’t have let myself contemplate my wife’s sister. And she still had that cute boy’s face.
“Lindsey Faith was always the pretty one,” she said as if reading my thoughts. “I think I look more like my dad. She has Linda’s beauty. But I’d say she’s luckier in love. I hope so, David. Don’t take that the wrong way, I’m just kind of down on all relationships right now.”
