Drowning Tucson (43 page)

Now, all these years later, Brightstar was gone and the tunnels stood empty. Except for the dead body she left lying behind her. Rainbow walked through the concrete drainage tunnel, feeling the walls with her hands, counting her steps until she neared the place where the tunnel turned abruptly, half the distance to the end where she and Brightstar had lived for what had been the happiest months of her life after her grandfather’s death—something that actually resembled a normal life. And once again she wondered if this was her destiny—to die a lonely woman in a city teeming with bums, whores, and strip clubs. To fall over
dead one day while crossing the street, only to get hit by a bus and then run over by a dump truck, some cars, another bus, bicycles, the feet of children, more cars, a motorcycle, a military truck from the base, some DUI driver’s moped, tires and feet flattening her endlessly, until she blended with the street, dried by the sun, smashed paper thin, disintegrating piece by piece and ultimately washed away by rain.

Everywhere she had ever looked in her lifetime, all she had seen was loss and suffering. If it wasn’t her grandfather’s death, or her mom’s alcoholism, then it was the day-to-day events she saw living all alone in Tucson.

With her three newfound dollars, Rainbow climbed out of the wash and made her way across the mall parking lot to the Sun-Tran bus stop on Broadway. She took the bus back downtown to her regular room at the Hotel Congress. Two years earlier, when she turned nineteen, she struck a deal with one of the hotel’s managers, who, in exchange for some head in his office before she turned in each night after her last client, always kept the same room reserved for her, provided she paid cash daily and checked out each Friday afternoon. On weekends she took a room at a motel on the Mile and worked there.

But today was a weekday, so she got off the bus at the downtown depot and walked to the Congress and into the hotel’s bar. She didn’t need to order a drink; she’d been coming there for two years. The bartenders all knew her name and purpose there, and they treated her like any other well-paying customer. Cape Cod. That was her favorite drink. Heavy on the cape, honey, and easy on the cod cause there’s always plenty of that to go around, aint there, the bartenders knew to joke, dumping twice as much vodka as normal into the glass before splashing a little cranberry juice and tossing in a lime wedge.

None of the bartenders had given her a free drink on her twenty-first birthday, as was the custom, because they assumed she was much older, the way Rainbow had been coming in there all confident and caustic for two years now, smoking cigarettes and telling dirty jokes with the other afternoon regulars before she went back up to her room and put on one of the nine sexy, semi-expensive outfits she’d saved up to buy. It takes money to make money, she knew that much. On her
twenty-first birthday, just like today, she’d acted no different, as if nothing were particularly special about that one day above any other. So her birthday had gone unnoticed. The one day all teenagers and college students dream about. The day they finally get to go to bars without fear of getting in trouble.

Rainbow drank her Cape Cod, relishing the sting of vodka in the back of her throat because it made it nice and numb for the rest of the night. She bummed a cigarette and smoked it, then snuffed it out and ordered another drink. Then another.

By the fifth one she didn’t so much mind being alone. By the fifth one she understood her mother’s penchant for hitting the sauce, how it made her problems blurry and unimportant. By the fifth one she forgot about Brightstar being gone and the tunnels and the fact that she was still, these many years later, all alone in the world. By the fifth one she accepted that tonight would be just like any other—walking the downtown streets, switching her hips in an exaggerated fashion that told the businessmen she was for sale, that she’d be happy to keep them company for a little while before they had to go home to their wives or their lonely hotel rooms. She rarely had to do more than two or three blocks of walking before she snagged her first john, almost always a middle-aged man who tried to discreetly whisper under his breath how much, baby? but she always pretended not to hear, walked a little longer and made him follow her a few more feet, made him want her just that much more, so she had the upper hand, if only for those few moments before they agreed on a price as they walked down the sidewalk side by side, her telling him to meet her at the Congress bar, in the back corner, in a dark booth,
her
dark booth, where he should have a Cape Cod waiting for her and a couple of twenties. Three johns in one night paid for her room and left her thirty dollars. So the daytime was pure profit.

During the day she dressed in a more modest outfit and headed out into the bustling downtown district to give quick handjobs or blowjobs next to the dumpsters behind the parking garage. If the man was lucky enough to have a job where he had an actual hour to spare for lunch, she took him back to her room at the Congress and let him have a
quickie for twenty-five or thirty bucks, then she showed him to the door and took a nap, happy to have money for more drinks before her night shift began.

So it went, every day. Rainbow waking in the morning, showering and making her bed, then down to the bar to toss back a few Cape Cods before the lunch crowd arrived, then rushing out to make money to pay off her tab, then a quick nap, then back to the bar, then back out on the street to find another man with the lonely look in his eyes making him an easy target. She knew better than to try demanding higher prices. She worked alone, and so she really considered it luck when the men paid her anything at all. How many times had they given her money, only to wrestle it out of her hands after she let them fuck her? How many times had a prosecutor or a judge or one of those asshole public defenders given her money, ridden her for ten or twenty minutes, then brandished a badge and taken the money back, telling her just be happy I’m not haulin your fuckin ass in. Too many to count. But most businessmen were too afraid to pull a fast one on her. After all, they walked into the hotel too ashamed to even consider bullying, knowing that the desk clerk and the bartender knew why they were there, which also meant they knew Rainbow, which meant they probably had her back if something went wrong.

Before all of this whoring-around-downtown nonsense, before the deal with the hotel manager and the hustling on the sidewalks of Miracle Mile, Rainbow had been more hopeful. There was Brightstar, with his ever-present Army surplus jacket and his long braided hair, trying to give her a push. Trying to help her out. Trying to inspire her.

He’d wake her in the mornings to go looking for work, giving her a pep talk, and then he rode the bus to the VA campus to check on his case file, leaving her to wash up in the mall bathrooms and greet the possibilities. But it quickly became obvious to Rainbow a job wasn’t going to come anytime soon.

In the first few days she rose early, excited and hopeful to work at Orange Julius or maybe one of the other joints in the mall food court—the A&W stand, the Spaghetti Shoppe, Golden China Wok, Subway—but it was always the same response. Sorry, you’re too young. Or, sorry,
we don’t have any jobs. The managers giving her a fake look of disappointment for being unable to help her out. She knew they weren’t actually sad. She knew they looked at her and were either disgusted by her physical appearance, or they leered at her with man eyes that stared past her worn clothing to her young breasts, where their eyes lingered and caressed her skin—eye fucking her, as she’d heard other girls call it. She could feel them staring at her ass and watching her walk away to the next place, only to be given the same treatment there. And every afternoon she went back to the tunnels to wait on Brightstar, who returned a little later each evening, bitter because the VA just kept ignoring him. They don’t give a shit about us vets, he muttered, then took her hand and led her into the tunnel, where he pulled out a bag from Eegee’s or Whataburger and let her eat first, then ate whatever was left.

Sometimes he told her stories of being in the war. Sometimes he told her the methods he used to panhandle because it was so tough with the downtown streets overrun by war vets who came by the busload to wait for a handout from the VA, even though they OWE it to us. His approach was to appeal to a person’s sense of values, not their sense of guilt. With so many homeless in Tucson it was virtually impossible to play the guilt card. And on top of all that he continued waiting, day in and day out, for the VA to make a decision. Even though he knew one would never come. He told her nobody ever heard from the VA. Especially not poor people. And especially not Indians like me. They always say something like check back next week, we already sent your paperwork to Phoenix and should be hearing back soon. It’s out of our hands here. We’ve done our job. Every vet including Brightstar had heard this, and most had nothing else to do except wander the city of Tucson, up and down south 4th, 5th, and 6th Avenues, Veteran’s Boulevard, within walking distance of the Greyhound bus station, where they congregated at lunchtime to see what kind of handouts the Catholic soup kitchen had fixed up for the day, sleeping behind Southgate Shopping Center or bumming change from people at the greyhound racetrack and crashing for the night beneath overpasses, where eventually the TPD shook them out and forced them to wander half-drunk until they found an arroyo to
sleep in for the night, one of the only places the cops rarely went. What happened below the city wasn’t their concern. As long as the bums were out of sight, the TPD didn’t stir up too much shit.

What is the point, Brighstar often asked Rainbow, of coming to Tucson, of staying in Tucson, of doing anything in Tucson, when the VA people only pretended to care or told him we filed the paperwork already. Keep checking back. And still the numbers of vets grew. Rainbow had seen it herself downtown every time she walked past the Greyhound station where disheveled men disembarked from the buses, army duffel bags thrown over their shoulders, visibly hopeful until they left the parking lot and rounded the corner and saw the others who had come before them filling the alleys and scattered on the sidewalks and passed out on the grass of Veinte de Agosto Park where they slept in groups beneath the trees until the cops came and moved them along.

What is the point, Brightstar said, and Rainbow wondered the same thing. She too had finally given up trying to find work at the mall. No one was hiring. That fifty from her mother ran out after two weeks, so she had to rely on Brightstar for food, which made her feel guilty. She expanded her search to the businesses on Broadway and on 22nd, only to be turned down again and again. She went to Food Giant and filled out an application, hoping they might remember her from the many shopping trips she had taken with her grandfather, then walked to the produce section and stole some fruit, knowing she couldn’t jeopardize a job she’d never get anyway.

Every night, after she told Brightstar about her failed job search and he told her about his failure with the VA, she read to him until they fell asleep, and she dreamed the nightmares of her first night in the tunnels. It was always the same thing. The horrific deaths and the flood.

One night, three weeks after Rainbow’s arrival at the tunnels, Brightstar returned with an outfit he had pieced together from the clotheslines in the neighborhood—a short denim skirt and a mauve halter top—plus a pair of cute strappy heels he’d bought at Payless on sale, telling her maybe this will help. If you dress a little older, maybe they’ll give you a job. It’s worth a try, right? You keep saying they say you’re too young, so lie to them. Make yourself look older.

The next morning she took the new outfit into the mall and changed in the bathroom, washed her face with hand soap and ran her wet fingers through her hair, then brushed her teeth with a dab of soap on her finger. She posed in front of the mirror. Stuck out her breasts, pushed them up a little bit and bent over to look at her cleavage. She liked how it looked. Her breasts were so round and mysterious. Her shirt showed just enough to make people want to see more, like older girls’ shirts. And the skirt was exactly what was in fashion right now. Rainbow had seen tons of high-school girls in the mall wearing this exact same skirt, and they had boys all over them. This was the perfect thing. Just what she needed to be taken seriously.

She decided she looked old enough to maybe get a job at Dillard’s or Sears, who cares about the food court anymore? Who wants to get fry grease all over themselves and leave with the stench of burgers in her hair and all in her clothes? No. Brightstar was exactly right. This was going to work.

The first place she stopped in Dillard’s was the makeup counter. It was blindingly white. It was as clean as her old house. And the girls who worked the counters looked like angels, all dressed up in white smocks, white panty hose, white pumps. All of them had their hair pulled back and had perfect posture.
These
are princesses, Rainbow thought. This is where I belong. But when she stepped up and asked for an application, the woman standing on the other side of the glass counter gave her a look of condescending pity and said oh honey you could
never
work here, I mean look at your
skin,
and she grabbed a well-lit magnifying mirror and shoved it in front of Rainbow’s face and said your face is absolutely riddled with blackheads. Don’t you ever exfoliate? Have you ever even once used an oatmeal mask to clear your pores? She snickered at Rainbow and then called some of the other women over and said
look
at this poor thing. She thinks she can work in the makeup section. Isn’t that just the best? I mean,
look
at her hair. It’s like someone grabbed a handful of dyed straw and glued it to her head—giggle, giggle.