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Then the decks:
Three Cons Dead
Two Surrender In Bloody Clash
Hero Hammons Brothers
Credited With Stopping
Spree After County Jail Break
Alongside the story was a V. Vasquez photograph. Aside from the cops and meat wagons, I had to say my Ford looked good.
Eight
The most annoying question posed to a Great War veteran was whether you had killed anyone over there. I usually lied and said I was stationed behind the lines in the Quartermaster Corps. Now, however, there was no denying it. Sheriff McFadden assured us the shoot-out was self-defense and that the county attorney wouldn’t even present it to a grand jury.
That didn’t stop violence from pursuing me into the weekend.
Victoria and I went dancing at the Riverside Ballroom Saturday night. A big band from Oklahoma City was playing swing, and Victoria is a good dancer. We did the foxtrot and the new jitterbug until we were exhausted and sweaty, then a slow number placed us in each other’s arms, close. That perspiration only made her more beautiful.
The evening was cold and overcast when we’d arrived at the ballroom. When we came out later it was snowing. Snow in Phoenix! Neither of us had ever seen it, and we goofed around catching flakes on our tongues. That was the best we could do, with most of the snow melting when it hit the ground.
The snow turned to rain as we drove back to town, and when we crossed the railroad tracks on Central, three squad cars went speeding north with red spotlights and sirens. Victoria put down the gas and followed them.
I could only imagine Don’s reaction to me allowing myself to be driven by a woman, but she usually drove us in her car, where she kept her cameras. I tuned her car radio to KGZJ, the new police frequency—the first police radio operation in the state. They were responding to a robbery at the Pay’n Takit market on Virginia Street at Central, almost out of the city limits. We were there in less than five minutes. I stayed in the car while she grabbed her Speed Graphic and walked into the scene.
She would probably mostly be taking photos for the department, which irritated her because the city paid less than the AP or UP, and, because of the Depression, the city didn’t pay on time. It was strange sitting there, as the uniforms milled around in their peaked caps and Sam Browne belts with shoulder straps, then as the night detectives arrived. That used to be my life not so long ago. I might be the one interviewing witnesses, examining evidence, taking notes, and calming people down. Now I was only a civilian sitting in the passenger seat.
Half an hour later she slid in on the driver’s side, handing me her camera to hold, and gave me a quick rundown. It was a stickup gone wrong, with two dead, one of the robbers and a reserve police officer.
For a small city, Phoenix had its share of crime. Earlier that month, Penney’s had been robbed right down the street from my office.
I could see my hopes for the rest of the evening evaporate into the night like water on a summer sidewalk. She had to develop film, give most of the prints to the detectives for their case, and one or two for the wire services, and maybe for Monday’s Phoenix Gazette. She dropped me off at my apartment on Portland and sped toward downtown.
Upstairs, I waited a long time, sitting in the chill air on my sleeping porch, wrapped in a blanket, smoking and replaying the gunfight outside the citrus groves in my head, glad I had retrieved my .45 in time.
Victoria never made it back that night. But I was still sitting there around two when I noticed a match flare up in a dark late-model, four-door Chevy parked against the south side of the parkway. It had been there the entire time I was lounging on the sleeping porch. I stayed another hour, watching. Was it a coincidence, or was I being watched?
On Sunday, I went to early mass with Victoria at Immaculate Heart of Mary church. The Mexican community had built it in the twenties because St. Mary’s segregated its masses. As usual, I was the only Anglo there and unable to take communion because I wasn’t a Catholic. But my Spanish was good enough to be part of the responses to the priests. My Latin stank.
Then she went with me to the service at Central Methodist, M.E.-South, listening to me sing in the choir. As usual, she was the only Mexican American in the pews, but she was welcome to take communion in our “heathen Protestant” church, as she playfully called it, and did so.
Don could believe what he wanted, but this comforted me beyond the singing: The Apostles’ Creed, Doxology, Lord’s Prayer, and especially words of forgiveness. I needed the last one. Did I kill anybody over there? You bet—I killed over here, too, and I felt rotten about it, “Hero Hammons Brothers” notwithstanding. Why did the ringleader pick that moment to appear with a gun? And just like during the war, it was kill or be killed. I prayed for the souls of the ones whose lives I had ended, prayed for forgiveness. I prayed for Victoria and for Don. This was not an only-Sunday thing.
After I made it through the war and the Spanish flu, I stopped asking God anything for me. The Lord’s Prayer said, “Thy will be done.” That was a tough surrender. After the service, we went to brunch.
“You’re brooding, Eugene,” she said.
“You caught me.”
She placed her hand on mine. “It wasn’t your fault.”
Her family liked me. This was especially true after ’31, when Herbert Hoover’s Mexican deportation—an effort to lessen the number of job seekers in a free-falling economy—swept up American citizens. Among them was Victoria’s brother Feliciano. I went to Nogales and brought him back across the border, pretending he was my prisoner.
The Vasquez family had been in Phoenix for generations, opening a dry goods store in 1884. And they gave me their undying gratitude for saving Feliciano. Whether that would extend to giving me their daughter’s hand in marriage was another matter. Her parents were traditional, and I’m sure imagined Victoria married to a handsome Mexican American and having beautiful Mexican American children.
They wouldn’t have understood our relationship. I’m not sure I did. She was twenty-eight, well beyond the age of marriage in her community, even in the Anglo world, the postwar revolution in morals notwithstanding. Maybe they would welcome this Anglo preventing their daughter from becoming una solterona. She was far from an old maid in my mind, of course. And she had a career as a photographer. When was I going to make Victoria an “honest woman”? I didn’t know. It was complicated.
