In his parents' time, this had really been the boonies, and the school bus had had to make a special trip out this way just to pick up him and Rich. More homes had been built since then, but this was still the least populated section of Rio Verde, and cactus here still far outnumbered people. Most of the time he liked it this way--it meant he could crank up his stereo to maximum volume without disturbing his neighbors; it meant he could target practice in the desert behind his house without fear of hitting anything but rocks but sometimes he felt isolated from the rest of the town, from the rest of the world, and at those times he wished that, instead of buying Rich out, he had sold the old homestead and both of them had moved closer to town.
He swung the car next to his mailbox, rolled down the window, and checked to see if he'd gotten any mail. Pulling out three bills, he tossed them on the passenger seat next to him, then drove over the old boards that covered the culvert, and pulled to a stop on the dirt driveway in front of the toolshed.
As always, the house was empty, the living room dark and silent as he walked through the door. He had been alone longer than he'd been married, but somehow he'd gotten used to certain aspects of married life and had never been able to wean himself of them.
One was coming home to a warm lighted house.
He threw his keys on the coffee table and turned on the lights in the living room, dining room, and kitchen. The house seemed quieter than usual, and he walked over to the TV and turned it on, grateful for some noise. On HBO, a police detective was inviting a pretty young woman back to his apartment.
He went into the kitchen, got a beer out of the refrigerator, and stood in the doorway for a moment, watching the television. He could not remember the last time he'd invited a woman over. There had been a few after Julie, one-night sluts he'd corralled in the roper bars, but those he'd brought home more for spite than pleasure, as ammunition to use as return fire in case he and Julie ever got back together again.
They never had gotten back together, though, had never even seen each other after, that last court appearance, and he had gradually stopped bagging the bimbos, realizing that there was no point to it.
The frightening thing was that he did not really miss them. Sex had just sort of drifted out of his life, and he had not even cared. He could not even remember the last time he'd beat off.
He sat down on the couch, feeling depressed.
Sometimes he wondered if he wasn't just wasting his life in Rio Verde.
He had never lived anywhere else, had never even been out of Arizona for more than a few days at a time, and he wondered what it would be like to move to a different state. Rich often told him he was lucky not to have made the mistakes he himself had made in moving away, but Robert wondered. Rich was different, always had been. Rich could be happy in prison if he had enough books to read. He, on the other hand, lived in the real world more than in his mind, and he needed physical, material things to make him happy.
Periodically, he toyed with the idea of running away: packing a suitcase and taking off, not telling anyone, not looking back. It was a nice dream, but that's all it was. The idea was romantic enough to appeal to him, but he was practical enough to know that it could never be anything more than a fantasy. He had responsibilities here. He wasn't some nobody who would not be missed, He was the damn police chief.
And there was a murderer at large.
A vampire.
He finished off the beer and dropped the can into the wastebasket. He remembered that he'd told Ted he would turn off the answering machine.
Reaching over the arm of the couch, he switched the phone over to manual. He put his feet up on the coffee table and tried to watch TV for a few minutes, but he felt restless, fidgety, and he kept flipping the channels, unable to concentrate on anything. Finally he stood up and walked outside.
The night was warm, the slight chill that had infiltrated the past few evenings gone. He stood at the edge of the porch, leaning on the railing, and looked up at the stars. Venus was visible, and the Big Dipper, and the belt of Orion, but the light of the moon had forced many of the minor stars to fade into blackness. His eyes moved from the sky to the ground. To the north, he saw an army of multi armed saguaro silhouetted in front of the faint glow of town lights. He shifted his weight, and a porch board creaked, scaring the cicadas into silence. From the area out toward ppache Peak came the faint howl of a far-off coyote, a lonely eerie sound that, even after a lifetime of desert living, he still associated with horror movies. Vampires.
The chill returned, and as he glanced around, he realized that because of the lay of the land, he could not even see the lights of his neighbors' houses from the porch. The coyote howled again, its cry low but clear even above the buzzing of the restarted cicadas.
Shivering, Robert walked back inside the house, locking the door behind him.
Corrie dropped Anna off at preschool, then stopped by the video store to return the tapes they'd rented over the weekend. She was supposed to have dropped the tapes off yesterday, but she hadn't felt like doing it, and they'd sat in the backseat of the car until now. She'd been low and kind of melancholy for the past few days, and, truth be told, hadn't felt like doing much of anything. Usually, when she felt down, she was able to cheer herself up by reading or exercising or playing with Anna, but lately her mood seemed to remain constant no matter what she did, and she could not figure out why. She'd thought originally that it might be PMS, but she'd checked her calendar and that was still a week and a half away.
It was Rich, she decided. It was their relationship. They were drifting apart.
Or rather, she was drifting. :;
Rich was staying exactly where he'd always been, anchored securely in place.
The problem was that she did not seem to be drifting toward anything.
She had toyed with the idea of going back to school to get her Master's. She had even halfheartedly considered having an affair. But nothing sounded good, nothing seemed right. Rich, of course, was oblivious to it all. He was as happy as ever, puttering around with his little paper, writing feature stories on ranchers who were making methane gas from steer manure and little old ladies who had once dated the cousins of B-movie actors. She didn't know if he actually thought his job was important, but she knew that he was content with it. He had no desire to do anything more ambitious, no desire to be anything more than the unread chronicler of these unlived small- town lives. And there was nowhere he would rather be than Rio Verde.
She wanted more. She'd known that from the beginning, from the first time he'd brought her back to this town to meet his brother. She'd tried to make a go of it for Rich's sake. She could see how much this meant to him, she knew how much he'd hated California, and she'd wanted him to be happy. But, damn it, she deserved to be happy too, and perhaps it was time for him to do a little sacrificing for her.
And for Anna.
She was not sure what she wanted for their daughter.
She wasn't sure Rich was either. She could see his point about the crime and the drugs and the gangs in the cities, but she knew that he could see her point about the intellectual disadvantages of small-town life as well.
She sighed. Great parents they were turning out to be. The bottom line was that she was not happy. It was time for a change. Even if she didn't know what that change was. Something in her life had to be altered. She was feeling stifled, smothered, though by what she didn't know. She did know that if something was not modified soon, she was liable to crack under the pressure.
It had occurred to her more than once recently that she should try to find another job, get away from Rich and the paper and do something separate, on her own. She had not mentioned this to Rich, but the more she thought about it, the more reasonable it seemed to her. A new job might not solve all of her problems, but it might be a step in the right direction.
She stopped at the crosswalk by the post office, waiting for an old cowboy to cross the road, and looked past the end of the street to the flat desert beyond. To the right, she could see into the unfenced backyards of houses on the next street over: colored shirts and ragged white underwear hanging on crooked clotheslines, rusted cars and parts of cars sinking into sandy lots, discarded bikes and Big Wheels strewn carelessly about depressingly under grown lawns.
God, this was an ugly town ..... An ugly dying town. Despite the influx of Phoenicians on summer weekends, despite the presence of the Rocking D, Rio Verde was slowly but surely turning ghost. It had never been a thriving business community or cultural showplace, but with the closing of the mine in the late eighties and the loss of jobs, what little economic stability the town possessed had been decimated. Rio Verde could not survive on tourism alone, particularly not the kind of weekend recreational tourism attracted to this area of the state, and gradu!!y businesses had started to bite the dust as people began to look elsewhere for work. In the past year alone, three
