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One
JANUARY 1933, PHOENIX, ARIZONA
Night folded in early during the winter.
It was only half past six, the neon of the auto courts and curio shops on Van Buren Street giving way to the emptiness of the Tempe Road, indigo pushing against my headlights as I drove east. Only a few other cars were about.
Cars were fewer in general than they had been only a few years ago and seemed to fit the new times: fewer jobs, fewer businesses, fewer people getting by.
Just after crossing the bridge over the Grand Canal, I parked, shut off the Ford’s purring V8, and stepped out. I pulled down my fedora close to my eyes, a habit I kept from my police days on the Hat Squad, stuck a Chesterfield in my mouth, and lit it with the Dunhill lighter brought back from London years ago. I buttoned my suit coat against the desert chill and walked toward the cottonwoods to the south, which loomed like storm clouds on a moonless night.
After walking beyond the trees, I was suddenly inside the camp. It held perhaps fifty denizens. Okies. Workers laid off from the closed copper mines. A miscellany of hoboes. It was outside the city limits and away from the attention of the cops. One of several Hoovervilles that had sprung up during the past three years. Hoover himself seemed ever more isolated and powerless, even though he’d be in office until March. Calvin Coolidge just died. Hoover, the “Great Engineer” who was so popular when he won in ’28, might have wished it were him instead. Now he was reviled and rejected.
In the camp, people kept to their clans. The Okies drawn and clad in tattered clothing, the miners with beaten-down faces and muscular bodies in canvas pants, they clustered around campfires and next to cars on their last miles.
Charity wasn’t to be much found in Phoenix now; everyone from the county to the churches, Kiwanis and Rotary clubs was tapped out. The Municipal Woodyard to provide help to the “worthy local unemployed” was struggling. Businesses continued to close and lay people off. The lettuce harvest and shipping were complete. Only pink grapefruits were being picked, boxed, and shipped now through March. Any new work in the fields and groves was months away. Maybe some of the travelers would make it to California, the promised land, by road or freight train.
Even with the nighttime cold, the weather was better now than back east. It would be different come summer, and the population of the hobo jungles would plummet.
The campfires glared at gaunt faces. Beyond the next stand of trees, a Southern Pacific freight train trundled past eastbound, shaking the ground, the smoke of its locomotive rising into the night sky. I saw a young man watch it as if it was the fanciest passenger train, only awaiting his presence in the parlor car.
And me? I had a photograph and a hunch and a pocket of dimes. It was my job.
“Hey, buddy, you look too well dressed to be here.”
He came out of the shadows and had friends. He was almost my height and had a face that looked like a dry desert river: brown, pocked, and creased by lines that shifted as he spoke.
“Well, here I am,” I said, handing him a dime and showing him the photo. He kept staring at me, and I noticed what looked like silver rings on every finger of his right hand. But I knew better and unbuttoned my coat.
“Who dares not stir by day must walk by night.”
This came fr
om a rail of a man at his right. He held out his arms as if to fly, then bowed. A thespian.
I ignored him and focused on the big man. His eyes were as barren as an abandoned house. I nodded toward the photograph. “Have you seen this fellow here?”
“We don’t truck with cops or cinder dicks.” His lips barely moved as the words came out. “You’re in the wrong place. Wrong time.”
His right hand came up fast. Brass knuckles wrapped around a fist headed my way. But I was faster, slashing my sap against his left temple. Training and experience had taught me how to swing the leather-covered piece of lead just enough to stop a man without killing him. It was all in the wrist.
I was in no mood to have my jaw rearranged or my brains scrambled. Experience had also made me especially wary of brass knucks; some of my former colleagues would have shot him for merely possessing them. His eyes rolled back, and he dropped straight down as if a trapdoor had suddenly opened beneath him. The others backed up.
I assessed them for a few seconds, the black come-along still dangling from my hand. “I’m not a cop or a railroad bull. This face. You seen him?” I showed the pic again and this time the men studied it.
“No need to get sore,” the thespian offered. “He’s about fifty yards that way, beyond the Okie truck with the piano in the bed. Give him a bottle, and he’ll tell you his life story. Claims he was a businessman, if you can believe that.”
I slid the sap back inside my belt, gave him a dime, and walked. I took a drag on the cigarette, which had survived the altercation, letting the tobacco settle my nerves. Sure enough, a Model T truck with wooden slats and an antique upright piano was parked beside a campfire. A raggedy family huddled next to it eating beans out of cans. Ten feet beyond, a man sat on his haunches, watching me.
I knelt down. He looked about my age with oily dark hair and a tattered muslin shirt, an army surplus blanket around his shoulders. His eyes took a moment to focus on me.
“Samuel Dorsey?”
“Sam. Who wants to know? I ain’t done nothing.”
“This is your lucky day, Sam,” I said. “Your family paid me to find you.”
“You a cop?”
