Jon Talton - South Phoenix Rules

The new cases were online, the old ones stored away in paper files. In theory, at least. I made a call and a friend from the county got me into the deep storage of the Superior Court clerk. Arizona v. DeSimone was not there. It felt strange being down at the county office buildings, seeing the line of prisoner buses parked and the corrections officers smoking outside the Madison Street Jail, except the sign had a stranger’s name on it as sheriff. I had no desire to have lunch, as I so often once did, at Sing Hi. I didn’t want to run into old colleagues from the S.O. or the county attorney’s office and have to make explanation, much less get angry over the treatment of Peralta.

It was a relief to be sent over to the State Archives, near the capitol. The building was new but the state’s financial troubles had cut the hours to nearly nothing and the crackpots in the Legislature were trying to take its space. Criminal transcripts might eventually make their way here, both for historical value and because the defendant had a right to appeal. In reality, the records were often a mess. This would especially be true for the DeSimone case. It lacked the notoriety of, say, Winnie Ruth Judd. Fortunately, we came at the right time; the archives were open. Within forty-five minutes a helpful archivist found the files we were seeking. Not much was left: maybe an inch of paperwork. We paid for copies to take with us.

Robin seemed happier after the catharsis of learning Jax’s true identity. She had been right about him. We would probably never learn more. Robin suggested that I give the dog tags to Amy Preston, the ATF supervisor; perhaps she could pass them onto Jax’s family. I had forgotten about them, and the idea alarmed me. This was, after all, evidence in a homicide investigation that we both had knowingly concealed. Better to let it be. She hadn’t argued.

But we talked a great deal those days, about ourselves, about history and art. She was a good companion. Our lives were complicated and yet simple. It felt as if we had been friends on a deep level for many years. Her presence eased the sting of not getting the ASU job, the gaping absence of Lindsey, and I didn’t worry too much about the future. Robin downloaded Chalino Sanchez songs from iTunes and we listened to them. I went running with her, starting to get into the best shape I had been in for several years. We made several visits to the art museum and I felt centered enough to read Kennedy’s book on the Depression and World War II. Light rail took us down to Portland’s for cocktails made by Michelle, the owner. The outside world didn’t hold its former menace.

We read the newspaper together. In addition to the news of the dreadful economy, the Legislature slashing everything from health care for children of the working poor to closing state parks, and the silly features written to make readers feel better, it contained several stories about the “cartel hit squad” arrested and facing charges. It didn’t mention’s the hit squad’s alleged murder of ATF agent Jax Delgado, of course. The reporter and editors also seemed oblivious to the larger implications of the arrests. So did the millions living here. Tea Partiers protested outside the Capitol against taxes, immigrants, and the government. They were too ignorant to know Arizona wouldn’t even exist as a habitable place without aggressive government action. Every day a new real-estate project slipped into foreclosure.

Robin and I pulled our small, contented world closer around us. I told her more stories about old Phoenix and learned about some of her adventures. I took her to the old cemetery just west of the Black Canyon Freeway, and, under the canopy of its old trees, we left flowers on the graves of my grandparents and the parents I never knew. We took the rough brush from the car-meant to wipe off snow-and used it to scrub the dust from the headstones. We sat in the grass, and she leaned her head on my shoulder. Lindsey called every four or five days and talked to each of us. She talked to Robin far longer. Our talks were unbearably light considering the deep-soul talks that had been our sustenance for years. What was she listening to? Carrie Newcomer, Heather Nova, and Dar Williams. What was she reading? Marcus Aurelius and Camus.

When Robin and I emerged from our research at the State Archives that day, it had been raining and a very faint rainbow was visible behind the downtown towers.

Lindsey loved rainbows. She seemed to bring them out. I had seen more Arizona rainbows since I had met her than I had seen in my entire life. She would call me to the window to watch them, where we lingered while she painted the scene with her words, her arm around my waist. The summer of her pregnancy, the monsoon season was poised to be the new strange normal. When I had been a boy, the summer rainstorms had come into the city regularly from mid-July through early September. The lightning and thunder were spectacular. The rain constituted the majority of the precious seven inches a year that made the Sonoran Desert lush and unique in all the world.

When I moved back, I found a metropolitan area that had become a 2,500-square-mile concrete block. The summers were becoming hotter and longer, and the monsoons strange and unpredictable. In this strange new normal-all that most of this city of newcomers knew-the big thunderheads stayed beyond the mountains, as if they were gods surveying the mess that man had made of their timeless Salt River Valley. And when the storms rolled in, they were often violent. One storm two years before had been so savage that it knocked the telephone poles on Third Avenue straight down and ripped off some roofs. The meteorologists talked about microbursts and the collision of the weather front with superheated concrete, especially in places like Sky Harbor airport. I thought about how those storm gods might be releasing their kindled anger.

But while last summer had been hot and scary with the broken gasoline line, the monsoons had been as before. In addition to the obligatory dust storms and dramatic nighttime lightning shows, several times a week we had gotten real rain. And real rainbows.

One afternoon I had come home early and found Lindsey and Robin together in the upstairs apartment. Lindsey stood at the window as the clouds moved away and the room lightened.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “It’s a double rainbow.”

It was: twins soaring all the way through the boiling sky toward Camelback Mountain.

“It’s a good sign,” Robin said.

An hour later, Lindsey started bleeding.

What is the dark matter that controls our fates, that brings catastrophes upon us suddenly? We are fools to even consider it. And what of the losses that we can never fully purge, never grieve away? Never make right. Never atone for. Never even hold a funeral or let our friends know what has collapsed us. Our child was gone without ever having breathed this fated atmosphere, without even a name.

My wife was only saved from bleeding to death by a procedure that meant she could never have children of her own. It was just another moment on a planet of tragedies, but it was our tragedy, our world knocked off its axis, taking with it all the tomorrows we had so vainly believed in. Later, when she was awake, Lindsey had demanded to know what had happened to her child. That was how she phrased it, “my child.” The doctor was not delicate: the fetus had been disposed of in the hospital incinerator. That was the way it was. Lindsey had nodded once and stared ahead dry-eyed.

I looked back on those three months with Lindsey as golden. But the complexion of the time was more complicated than that, as any historian would tell you, more shaded, nuanced. Someday when I could bear it, I might see it with greater clarity. We had grown closer together than ever, and yet mysteriously also drawn apart, as if making room for someone. Lindsey became very dependent on Robin, and now it was clear that having lost her job and facing the worst recession since the Depression, Robin embraced being needed. They denied that they were going shopping for baby things. “I don’t want to jinx it,” Lindsey said. The poetic watchfulness in her that had first so attracted me became something more. She worried. She was acutely aware of changes in her body, even as the doctor reassured her. A few days before the miscarriage, she had said, “Something doesn’t feel right,” and the doc reassured her again.