Phoenix Noir

“Is that right?” Conover asked.

“Damn straight, Gene. He’d been indicted for all kinds of shit—assault, possession with intent to distribute. But here’s the thing, almost all of the charges were dismissed.”

Conover thanked Blankenship for the call and hung up. The detective sat at his desk, staring out the window a long time.

Later that afternoon, Conover picked up the red Camaro as it headed north on Tatum Boulevard. He lagged several cars behind in the rush hour traffic as the woman turned east onto Shea and continued toward Scottsdale. She pulled into a strip mall just before the light at Scottsdale Road and parked in front of a Nautilus Fitness Club. The detective backed his car into a space at the other side of the parking lot and watched Charlotte Hodge step out of the Camaro. She took a drag off of her cigarette, threw it to the curb, and slammed the door shut. Then she slung her workout bag over her shoulder and disappeared into the club.

Conover waited a moment and then got out of his car. He made his way through the crowded lot to where the blond woman had tossed her cigarette. He bent down and picked up the still-smoldering butt. The green lettering on the filter was clearly visible—Kool. Conover smiled and started walking toward the gym.

TOM SNAG

BY LAURA TOHE

Indian School Road

The waitress at Denny’s had just turned down his proposal for a drink. His old hook ’em line, “I’ll tell you my Indian name,” no longer enticed. She wasn’t buying his tired act. She tore the check out of her book and slapped it down next to his coffee cup. “You pay up front,” she said, and pointed with her chin in the direction of the cash register, then turned away. He watched her walk away and lusted after her ass anyway.

Lately he was losing his touch with picking up women. Hell, maybe it wasn’t so lately. He looked at his braids hanging across his chest. His hair was thinning and his braids were getting down to the diameter of a plastic straw, though it was still black thanks to his mother’s genes. He was grateful that he didn’t have to pour dye on it monthly the way some nosebleed Indians did.

He was wearing the T-shirt he took from his son’s closet. Path was written across his chest in big white letters and he had no idea what it meant. His once thin torso had taken a turn south and now stationed itself around his thickened waist. Surprised that he jiggled when he laughed, he took up running in the mornings at the old Indian School grounds. One morning he tripped on the gravel and came down hard. “Damnit!” Tom had rubbed his ankle, hoping it wouldn’t swell. Boarding school still kickin’ my ass, he thought.

Used to be he could walk into a conference, a bookstore, a nightclub, and the women would turn their heads at the tall, dark, handsome Indian man who could’ve been on the cover of the romance novels they scooped up in the grocery line, his hair draped over the pulsing pink bosom of the woman in his toned arms. When he was younger he let it hang loose like a wild pony testing the spring wind. Long hair drew the looks and the women. Someone once asked if he was the actor, Wind in His Hair in Dances with Wolves. It became a line he used to pick up women. “Did you see Dances with Wolves? That was me,” he lied to a co-ed who paid for his drinks at the college bar after a poetry reading at MCC. Time was when he could turn the charm on like a light, when women dropped into his lap and all he had to do was scoop them up.

Did he ever love any of them? He wanted to tell one that she was the love of his life, his candle in the wind, his San Francisco peak.

Eliza was a Jew and a former hippie and New Yorker. She was a nurse and rotated among programs and facilities in Phoenix. Tom was working at the Phoenix Indian Center at the time coordinating GED programs for the urbs. Eliza arrived one afternoon to give flu shots to the elderly Indians. Tom helped set up chairs and brought her a cup of coffee during her break, which she accepted though she normally avoided caffeine. She stirred the coffee and impulsively told him she hated that Indians were forced to live on reservations like concentration camps.

“Now their land is being taken from them again and they must live in the cities. Doesn’t it just make you angry?” she asked.

“Hell, we’re survivors,” Tom proclaimed dismissively.

After only four months, Tom decided to give marriage another go around. Their courtship had been a rather staid affair in comparison to the women he’d fucked in the backseats of their BMWs, Audis, and even a red VW bug, their bodies damp and sticking to the leather. Over a spaghetti and meatball dinner Eliza had once asked, “If you had one wish, what would it be?”

He slurped up strands of pasta that resembled roots growing from his mouth.

“May I?” she asked, and picked up his spoon and twirled the pasta onto it and offered it to him.

After a long pause he answered, “If I had one wish, I’d want you to be my wife.” Tom knew what to say when women felt most vulnerable.

Since she was already carrying his seed in the darkness of her womb and was soon to finish up her Physician’s Assistant training, they decided to make it legal. A child was born, a boy destined to be raised by his mother. Marital bliss faded quickly for Tom and eventually his wandering eye led him back to other women.

One morning a suit arrived at work carrying a yellow envelope. The man caught Tom by surprise, and before he knew it he’d signed the delivery of his divorce papers.

His first wife hadn’t been as dramatic. They’d met at the Indian Center before she got a better-paying job at a credit union. On their third date they’d gone to see George Strait sing his love songs in the US Airways Center. They sat way up in the cheap seats and held hands. Afterwards they walked to her apartment and made love for hours on the sofa sleeper she had bought at a garage sale. Carmen was an urb like him but often drove home to the rez on the weekends to be with her family. She’d return Sunday afternoons bringing freshly killed lamb and tortillas in the cooler. Tom made a few trips with her, but his childhood experience of being on the rez gave him excuses to stay in the city. When Carmen told Tom she was pregnant, he joked that he would name the child George, whether it was a girl or boy.

Tom settled into his life as husband and expectant father until he met up with some of his old drinking buddies. They would arrive with loud voices and six-packs of beer in paper bags after Tom and Carmen had gone to bed. Carmen endured for as long as she could Tom’s late-night hours and his alcoholic breath as he stumbled into bed beside her. When he wasn’t there to take her to the hospital she went alone in a taxi. She went into labor without Tom and when he showed up he was still reeking of last night’s party.

She’d merely dropped him off at work one morning and told him not to come home. He could pick up his things outside their apartment; she’d have them ready. He knew it was coming from the gathering of stony silence between the fights and the daily marital thrashings that their son had to witness. He was sorry that the streets would raise his son just as he had been raised.

He liked how Mandy moved her breasts back and forth across his bare chest, her nipples grazing his. Soft and sexy was how he liked them. Fake ones were only good for eye lust. Mandy owned a Western art gallery in old Scottsdale. He’d met her during one of the Thursday evening art walks when the tourists traipsed among the cliched Remington-style bronzes and oil paintings of Plains Indian men and women captured in the nineteenth century. One evening he walked into her gallery.

He stopped at a Lakota man holding a drum by a river and whistled low at the painting’s five-digit price tag. “Didn’t know these old Indians cost this much,” he’d said to no one in particular.

“That’s a Jordan Stone,” came a voice from behind. “I think he’s captured the spiritual essence of the old man in the morning light, don’t you?”

“Spirituality. ‘Morning light.’ Isn’t that the name of this place?” he asked.

“Morning Light. I just love that image. So I named my gallery that.”

Mandy had grown tired of the corporate race in New York City. She was forty-one now with one marriage behind her and no kids because she hadn’t made time for any. She considered herself a beginning middle-aged woman whose face and body had a few petals left. During a trip to Phoenix for her brother’s wedding in February, the warm winter seduced her, as it had many of the snow birds fleeing steel-gray skies and frozen car batteries. She quit her finance career, sold all her suits, and bought a gallery. Risky, but it meant warm winters and a year-