He was packed in fifteen minutes and on his way to the Tucson airport where he intended to sleep in the car in a parking lot. Mona had shocked him with the price of a first-class ticket, the only seating available. He was sorely overspending his retirement income but then it would be cheap again when he got home. The mountain road between Sonoita and Interstate 10 that led to Tucson spooked him in the moonlight. All of his life he had been drawn reverentially to the moon but down here it could look malevolent. This was of course part of the United States but it was considerably more alien in some respects than the northern Italy he had traveled through with Diane. Descending Sonoita pass he saw a group of illegal migrants huddled in a ditch and they reminded him of drawings of the starving Irish during the potato famine who were not considered human by their English landlords.
The parking lot as a sleeping place didn’t pan out. It was a cool night in Tucson, around freezing, and he had to keep cranking up the car heater for warmth. It reminded him of parking on a country road with a girl in the winter when he was in high school. He had paid a hard-earned hundred bucks for his ’47 Dodge but the interior was large and airy and the heater worked poorly. He recalled his cold hands on hot thighs, which was a pleasanter image than his head in a bloody toilet. He had no real idea of what to think about the relationship between Melissa and her brother. She had said that Xavier loved Mozart but then so did Goering and Goebbels. Anything was possible. A priest had doubtless said mass minutes after buggering a ten-year-old boy. He had also noted that Melissa didn’t seem upset that Xavier had beat her husband to death.
At midnight he bit the bullet and checked into one of the dozens of motels surrounding the airport, eighty-eight bucks for a single with the usual print of a sad-eyed donkey wearing a garland of flowers, plus another of a pretty senorita drawing water from a well in old Mexico. Marion and his wife had traveled to Mexico a number of times during Christmas vacations to avoid questionable family gatherings, and loved Michoacan and Oaxaca which were obviously without border problems. Marion had seen sad-eyed donkeys but none wearing flowers.
He set up the desk pot for morning coffee and allowed himself a single nightcap from his whiskey pint desperately not wanting to miss his dawn departure. He put his revolver in his suitcase to be checked but his niggling paranoia about Xavier delayed unloading it until morning. When he was lying in Nogales hospital as a big lump of bruises Melissa had been a vision of delight. In the bookcase in her house in Nogales he had noted a number of well-thumbed volumes of Marquis de Sade, which had seemed quirkish. He surfed through the TV channels watching ads for both Scientology and a new, revolutionary pill that would extend your dick. He thought that there was a will to power in both religion and sex that seemed transparently biological, and then money had always been the sole ticket to the future in the culture, with education trailing off far behind. Xavier had belittled the smallness of his pension but then the richer people of Marquette, and more so wealthy tourists, had never excited envy in him. The woods and creeks were free and cheap whiskey and plonk, Diane’s word, were sufficient. The closest he came to the delight of dancing was when he was walking along a creek looking for brook trout pools. For the first time he felt deeply that life might be good after retirement. He might even return to the Southwest for winter walking and camping though far out of range of Xavier and Melissa, say on the east side of the Chiricahuas where the Apaches once rode like the wind. Camping was cheap. Just before the divorce when Diane had received her inheritance he had been embarrassed by the large amount. Given his background it seemed unnatural.
He only fully exhaled when the plane was in the air. He was beside the window and as the plane curved he could see Nogales, Lake Patagonia, and the road to Patagonia. There was no apparent reason for taking southern Arizona from the Apaches except to raise skinny cows and mine unproductive mines but then much the same could be said for the Upper Peninsula where all the virgin timber had been cut and the earth hoovered of its wealth. Both Apaches and Ojibway had lost out to invading armies and the postwar economy had razed the landscape.
There was a certain indecipherable smugness in first class that he was trying to ignore. He had heard that drinks were free but then 7:00 a.m. was a tad early. He relented and had a Bloody Mary out of relief, he supposed, from escaping Xavier and his murderous thugs not to speak of his daffy sister. The expensively dressed matron next to him was tittering over the new Vogue with its ornately dressed stick girls. Diane had been a subscriber.
