the shakes when it’s attached to a live woman. It was held in a new strap-around black shoe, with a medium heel made of leather. And all had been sliced off at the shin. A railroad car will do that. This was no hobo.
“Where’s the rest of her?”
Fisher spat into the dust. “Beats the hell out of me. We’ve been a mile up and down the tracks in either direction, looked in the ditches, nothing. There was blood on the tracks but no woman. Trail of blood didn’t even go as far as the road.” He pulled out a handkerchief and ran it over his forehead before replacing his fedora. “She musta been a looker.”
The Westward Ho Hotel was the tallest building in Phoenix. It had sixteen stories and refrigeration. When I walked in a little after noon, the lobby was crowded with men in pricey suits and expensive cigar smoke. There wasn’t a single uniform. You’d think the world was at peace and nice girls weren’t getting their feet cut off by trains. Actually, I wasn’t sure she was a nice girl, which was one reason I had come to the hotel. I crossed the lobby and told the elevator operator, an ancient colored man, to take me to the eighth floor. I walked down the hall past three doors on carpet so soft it massaged my feet through the soles of my shoes. I put my hat in my hand and knocked on the fourth door once.
Strawberry Sue might have struck you as the prettiest girl you’d ever seen, if you saw her from behind and the dress fit right—and maybe twenty years ago it would have been true from the front too. But the sun had ravaged her skin, leaving her face rough and cut with lines and creases. Her face looked like the desert. I thought her figure was nice, but it went out of style in the ’20s. She was small, so thin I could almost touch my middle fingers if I wrapped my hands around her waist, and her hair was bright orange, worn unfashionably in a ponytail like the child of the ranch she was. Her real name was Ruby, but she hated it. The radio was talking about the big Allied landings in North Africa. I asked her to turn it off. She poured me a Scotch while I took off my shoes. As I sipped the drink, she pulled down her hair and took off my tie real slow.
Afterwards, we lay on the soft bed and I stroked her hair while she had her head in the notch where my neck met my shoulder. “My spot,” she called it. She didn’t seem to mind the scar there that looked exactly like the shape of the Grand Canyon. I had to smoke Chesterfields because that was what Sue smoked and I was out of my brand.
“You could fall asleep and get some rest, Stuck-On,” she said. “I’d take care of you. You wouldn’t have to be scared of nothing.”
“I’m doing good, Sue.” I let out a long blue plume of smoke and talked a little business.
“She doesn’t sound like the kind of girl I associate with.” Sue was like that, using big words, reading books, trying to better herself. I admired it.
“She looked like she could have been a high-end call girl, from what I saw of her. Nice shoe. Pale, nice skin.”
“Why would she end up under a train?”
“Maybe she steamed up a certain friend of yours.”
She made a small, indeterminate sound.
“He’s done it before, when a girl crossed him,” I said.
She stroked the hair on my chest with her small hands. “Don’t talk about that now, Stuck-On … You know why I call you that?”
I knew why but just ran my hand against the softness of her red hair and tapped some ash in the direction of the ashtray.
“Cause I’m stuck on you, silly,” she said. “Why don’t you get a real job and we can run away?”
Instead of answering her, I climbed out of bed and walked to the window. It faced north and I studied the palm-lined streets below, where neat bungalows had crew-cut lawns. They gave way to citrus groves and fields, dairies and livestock, and finally the desert. Camelback Mountain was miles away but it looked like I could lean just a little out the window and touch it. Phoenix was an oasis. It was a shame, some of the people an oasis attracts.
“What about it, Sue?”
She lay there naked, her small arms wrapped around her smooth young-girl breasts. “I haven’t heard anything, Stuck-On. Honest. I’d tell you. There’s lots of new people in town. Maybe it was the Japs?”
I looked back out at the crisp blue sky. “Most of the Japs are gone, you know that. They sent ’em to the camps. Their land’s just dying out there.”
“Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with call girls, or him.”
I used her fancy shower and felt better than I had in a month. Downstairs, I stopped at the smoke shop and nearly made it out the door. But he was fast for a fat man and suddenly his big saggy face was inches from mine.
“Well, Frank Darrow’s son. How’s Strawberry Sue this fine day?”
I moved back a step so I didn’t have to smell his cologne. “I’m sure she’s good.”
He laughed, a disconcerting gurgling sound, and offered me a cigar. I shook my head. Duke Simms was in his fourth term as a Phoenix city commissioner, but he wore suits and smoked cigars that didn’t come with a municipal paycheck. I wished I’d never met him.
“Who are all these people?” I indicated the crowded lobby.
“Businessmen, entrepreneurs. You know what that word means?”
“Friends of yours?”
“Yes, indeed. This is a business-friendly city, Jimmy.”
“Why the hell aren’t they in the service?”
“Now, don’t be that way. They’re supplying the air bases, building our defense plants.” His chest swelled and he ran his stubby fingers down his lapels. “This town is changing, son. You’re not even going to recognize it.”
I shook my head and tried to walk past him, but he blocked my way.
“Come outside, son,” he drawled, “I was just thinking of you.” He wrapped an arm around me and steered me out onto the sidewalk, far enough away from the door to give us some privacy. Simms wore a bright red tie and had a matching handkerchief in his coat pocket. An American flag sprouted from his lapel. “What’s going on down at the Espee these days?”
“What do you want, Simms?”
“Such a blunt young man, and after having had a good time just now.”
My fingers ached from making a fist.
“I need a little reciprocity,” he went on. “Just a little shipment coming to the freight station tonight.”
“Things are different,” I said. “It’s wartime.”
The gurgling came again from the back of his throat. “Is that why I had to pay to bring in thirty new clean girls from Texas and Oklahoma? Wartime, yes, indeed. Now, son, we have an understanding.”
“Tell me about a girl who had her foot cut off by a train west of town.”
He ignored me and put his hand on my bad shoulder, digging his fingers in. I set my face so the pain wouldn’t show. “Our understanding is you get to be entertained by Miss Sue complimentary, and you do some things for me. It’s worked out well. And it’s not as if Strawberry Sue is a spring chicken. Get it? If you went back on our deal, who knows …?”
He released my shoulder and the sensation of knitting needles probing somebody else’s flesh replaced the pain. I managed, “You’re a son of a bitch.”
“I am,” he agreed. “But you have to live with certain disagreeable realities.” He smiled through yellow teeth. “Here’s what I need.”
I rode a crowded streetcar back downtown, then waited for a long string of boxcars to be pulled along Jackson Street before I could walk the block to the depot. They told of faraway places: Baltimore and Ohio, New York Central, Pennsylvania, Frisco, Missouri Pacific, Burlington, Denver, and Rio Grande Western. Anywhere but here. The station sat at the end of the street, gracefully reigning over the surrounding hotels and warehouses. Mail and Railway Express Agency trucks crowded before the long building adjacent to the waiting room.
The Western Union sign hanging from one arch of the building was like a beacon for me. I wasn’t sure what the hell the brass wanted me to do about the girl attached to the foot, but I could send wires to station agents east-and westbound from Phoenix. Had anyone reported a passenger who didn’t arrive? Had any conductors noticed anything funny on their trains? Later, I’d take a car and check the rail yards, the Tovrea stockyards, Pacific Fruit Express icing docks, the bridge over the Salt River—make sure the line was secure, whatever the hell that meant. It
