the murder thrillers. The children’s books confront difficult issues…The murder thrillers are escapist fare with no redeeming social value.” That last statement (though presumably facetious) invites a response: how could a story as entertaining and as unpre-dictable and as sensitive in its depiction of senior citizens as “Death of a Snowbird” lack redeeming social value?
Agnes Barkley did the dishes. She always did the dishes. After breakfast. After lunch. After dinner. For forty-six years she had done them. Maybe “always” was a slight exaggeration. Certainly there must have been a time or two when she had goofed off, when she had just rinsed them and stacked them in the sink to await the next meal; but mostly she kept the sink clear and the dishes dried and put away where they belonged. It was her job. Part of her job.
Back home in Westmont, Illinois, the single kitchen window was so high overhead that Agnes couldn’t see out at all. Here, in Oscar’s RV, the sink was situated directly in front of an eye-level window.
Agnes could stand there with her hands plunged deep in warm, sudsy dishwater and enjoy the view. While doing her chores she occasionally caught sight of hawks circling in a limitless blue sky.
In the evening she reveled in the flaming sunsets, with their spectacular orange glows that seemed to set the whole world on fire.
Even after years of coming back time and again, she wasn’t quite used to it. Every time Agnes looked out a January window, she couldn’t help being amazed. There before her, instead of Chicago’s gray, leaden cloud cover and bone-chilling cold, she found another world — the wide-open, brown desert landscape, topped by a vast expanse of sunny blue sky.
Agnes couldn’t get over the clean, clear air. She delighted in the crisp, hard-edged shadows left on the ground by the desert sun, and she loved the colors. When some of her neighbors back home had wondered how she could stand to live in such a barren, ugly place three months out of the year, Agnes had tried in vain to explain the lovely contrast of newly leafed mesquite against a red, rockbound earth. Her friends had looked at her sympathetically, smiled, shaken their heads, and said she was crazy.
And in truth she was — crazy about the desert. Agnes loved the stark wild plants that persisted in growing despite a perpetual lack of moisture — the spiny, leggy ocotillos and the sturdy, low-growing mesquite; the majestic saguaro; the cholla with its glowing halo of dangerous thorns. She loved catching glimpses of desert wild-life — coyotes and jackrabbits and kangaroo rats. She even loved the desert floor itself — the smooth sands and rocky shales, the expanses of rugged reds and soothing, round-rocked grays, all of which, over the great visible distances, would fade to uniform blue.
At first she had been dreadfully homesick for Westmont, but now all that had changed. Agnes Barkley’s love affair with the desert was such that, had she been in charge, their snowbird routine would have been completely reversed. They would have spent nine to ten months out of the year in Arizona and only two or so back home in Illinois.
No one could have been more surprised by this turn of events than Agnes Barkley herself. When Oscar had first talked about retiring from the post office and becoming a snowbird — about buying an RV and, wintering in Arizona — Agnes had been dead set against it. She had thought she would hate the godforsaken place, and she had done her best to change Oscar’s mind. As if anyone could do that.
In the end, she had given in gracefully. As she had in every other aspect of her married existence, Agnes put the best face on it she could muster and went along for the ride, just as Oscar must have known she would. After forty-six years of marriage, there weren’t that many surprises left.
In the past she would have grudgingly tolerated whatever it was Oscar wanted and more or less pretended to like it. But when it came to Arizona, no pretense was necessary. Agnes adored the place — once they got out of Mesa, that is.
Oscar couldn’t stand Mesa, either. He said there were too many old people there.
“What do you think you are?” Agnes had been tempted to ask him, although she never did, because the truth of the matter was, Agnes agreed with him — and for much the same reason. It bothered her to see all those senior citizens more or less locked up in the same place, year after year.
The park itself was nice enough, with a pool and all the appropriate amenities. Still, it made Agnes feel claustrophobic somehow, especially when, for two years running, their motor home was parked next to that of a divorced codger who snored so loudly that the racket came right through the walls into the Barkleys’ own bedroom — even with the RV’s air conditioner cranked up and running full blast.
So they set out to find someplace else to park their RV some-place a little off the beaten track, as Oscar said. That’s how they had ended up in Tombstone — The Town Too Tough to Die. Outside the Town Too Tough to Die was more like it.
The trailer park — that’s what they called it: the OK Trailer Park, Overnighters Welcome — was several miles out of town. The individual lots had been carved out of the desert by terracing up the northern flank of a steep hillside. Whoever had designed the place had done a good job of it. Each site was far enough below its neighbor that every RV or trailer had its own unobstructed view of the hillside on the opposite side of a rocky draw. The western horizon boasted the Huachuca Mountains. To the east were the Wheststones and beyond those the Chiricahuas.
The views of those distant purple mountain majesties were what Agnes Barkley liked most about the OK Trailer Park. The views and the distances and the clear, clean air. And the idea that she didn’t have to go to sleep listening to anyone snoring — anyone other than Oscar, that is. She was used to him.
“Yoo-hoo, Aggie. Anybody home?” Gretchen Dixon tapped on the doorframe. She didn’t bother to wait for Agnes to answer before shoving open the door and popping her head inside. “Ready for a little company?”
Agnes took one last careful swipe at the countertop before wringing out the dishrag and putting it away under the sink. “What are you up to, Gretchen?”
At seventy-nine, Gretchen Dixon was given to chartreuse tank tops and Day-Glo Bermuda shorts — a color combination that showed off her tanned hide to best advantage. She wore her hair in a lank pageboy that hadn’t changed — other than color — for forty years. It was one of fate’s great injustices that someone like Gretchen, who had spent years soaking ultraviolet rays into her leathery skin, should be walking around bareheaded and apparently healthy, while Dr.
Forsythe, Aggie’s physician back home in Westmont, after burning off a spot of skin cancer, had forbidden Aggie to venture outside at all without wearing sunblock and a hat.
Agnes Barkley and Gretchen Dixon were friends, but there were several things about Gretchen that annoyed hell out of Agnes. The main one at this moment was the fact that despite the midday sun, Gretchen was bareheaded. Agnes loathed hats.
Gretchen lounged against the cupboard door and shook a cigarette out of a pack she always kept handy in some pocket or other, “So where’s that worthless husband of yours?” she asked.
Not that Gretchen was really all that interested in knowing Oscar’s whereabouts. She didn’t like Oscar much, and the feeling was mutual. Rather than being worried about their mutual antipathy, Agnes found it oddly comforting. In fact, it was probably a very good idea to have friends your husband didn’t exactly approve of. Years earlier, there had been one or two of Aggie’s friends that Oscar had been crazy about. Too much so, in fact — with almost disastrous results for all concerned.
“Tramping around looking for arrowheads as per usual,” Aggie said. “Out along the San Pedro, I think. He and Jim Rathbone went off together right after lunch. They’ll be back in time for supper.”
“That figures,” Gretchen said disdainfully, rolling her eyes and blowing a plume of smoke high in the air as she slipped into the bench by the table.
“Aggie,” she said, “do you realize you’re the only woman around here who still cooks three square meals a day — breakfast, lunch, and dinner?”
“Why not?” Agnes objected. “I like to cook.”
Gretchen shook her head. “You don’t understand, Aggie. It gives all the rest of us a bad name. You maybe ought to let Oscar know that he’s not the only one who’s retired. It wouldn’t kill the man to take you into town once in a while. He could buy you a nice dinner at the Wagon Wheel or at one of those newer places over on Allen Street.”
“Oscar doesn’t like to eat anybody else’s cooking but mine,” Aggie said.
Gretchen was not impressed. “He likes your cooking because he’s cheap. Oscar’s so tight his farts
