The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (117 page)

Leah had been afraid Trigg might be angry because she was late. But as she drove into the Arizona Inn parking lot, she saw Trigg had been late too. He had just started down the sidewalk in his wheelchair. Leah called and waved for him to wait. Trigg seemed surprised she was late. When she leaned down to kiss him, he pinched both her breasts. “See if
that
arouses you,” he said. The last few times they had met at the hotel for sex, Trigg had kept asking Leah what excited her. He claimed he wanted to find out what women really preferred sexually, but Trigg was a liar. He got aroused when she told him what excited her, and for Trigg that had been all that mattered.

Leah sat in the bed with the sheet pulled around her, watching Trigg lift himself from the chair to the toilet. He took great pride in his bladder and bowels, which emptied when he massaged and pressed his abdomen. These partial functions were evidence
not
everything had been severed; and Trigg talked constantly about his hope, his belief, that someday there would be transplants, a cure, for spinal cord injuries. Trigg talked the whole time she sat on top of him, his cock inside her hard and dead as a dildo. She ignored Trigg as she always did when they had sex, and she visualized a brutal French dwarf in a medieval castle who forced her to ride his huge, hairy rod instead. Trigg said he had to watch her excitement before he could come; but lately Leah had begun to wonder if Trigg really got that much out of sex, or if his “mental” orgasms were imaginary, his denial that paralysis had made him a eunuch.

Lately Leah had noticed their afternoons for sex at the Arizona Inn had dwindled from hours of nonstop sucking and bouncing with cocktails and a light lunch afterward, to fifteen minutes in which Leah bounced on top while Trigg used his tongue only to talk about the outcome of “their” bid on the bankrupt Tucson shopping mall and a partially completed resort hotel. Finally Leah told Trigg to be quiet or she’d never come; if she got sweaty, filthy, and rubbed raw while his chattering distracted her and she didn’t come, that would be the last time she bothered with Trigg.

She looked down at his face for a reaction as she spoke. His eyes opened wide and blue, and for an instant Leah was seized with the urge to slide herself up over his chest so his neck was between her thighs to strangle him or break his neck.

Instead, she slid up his chest and thrust himself at his mouth and leaned into his tongue, his most lively member. She whispered to Trigg, “Don’t waste your tongue talking.” They could talk about money later. Trigg had been trying to persuade Leah to sink more of her money into his sex mall scheme. Trigg’s bankers in Phoenix had all been sent to prison for making sweetheart loans. Trigg had depended on his banker friends in Phoenix for the “financial packages” Trigg had used to buy blocks of downtown Tucson, and to finance the plasma donor centers.

Leah was getting bored with Trigg, although she still got a sexual kick out of his helplessness; however, his financial helplessness was boring. Trigg talked about the past—how he had flown to Phoenix for a million-dollar unsecured loan and his banker friends had made the loan to him that same afternoon. Finally Leah had lost patience. She told Trigg what “used to be” was gone. Screw the loans Trigg had got
before. They were talking now. Trigg had tried to discourage Leah about building her dream city of white marble palazzos and canals in the desert. He said it wasn’t just because he wanted her to invest in his project; American and foreign manufacturers and businesspeople had still not forgot Arizona’s last paralyzing water crisis. But Leah Blue had thought about water before she had thought about anything else for her Venice plan.

Arizona’s worst water problems had accidentally been solved after the closure of the copper mines and the rapid loss of jobs and the drop in population in Tucson and Phoenix. Leah had the research and statistics; Arizona’s last water crisis had been blown out of proportion by the world news media. The drama of millions of middle-class, white Arizonans waking up one morning to find no water in their faucets had obscured the facts. Arizona would not have run out of water that infamous summer if federal water-management officials had not allowed too much of the Colorado River to escape to Mexico.

Leah Blue had got her idea from reading about oil-field bankruptcies and court-ordered auction sales in Oklahoma and Texas. She had read with fascination about the deep wells and the gigantic drilling rigs that were required, rigs costing millions of dollars. Leah remembered how Trigg and the others had made fun of her flying to Houston to bid on a deep-well rig; she had got it for a flat five hundred thousand dollars—a savings of almost a million dollars. Max had even caught wind of Leah’s purchases from the senator, who had heard about it from Judge Arne. Max had only mentioned the gossip in passing; he never interfered with Leah or how she spent the money. Trigg had bet Leah Blue’s rigs would hit salt water at two thousand feet; she could drill to China or to hell, but salt water was all she would get. Leah had not worried. If the canals and lakes of Venice, Arizona, ran with salt water that lent authenticity; salt water could be used to flush toilets. For drinking water, Leah would provide bottled glacier water from the Colorado Rockies. Trigg had anticipated that Arizona’s Indian tribes and the environmentalists would go to federal court to stop Leah’s deep-water well from ever pumping. Opponents argued that the salt water threatened to ruin the last of Arizona’s potable water. What Trigg had not anticipated was the quick denial of the injunction against Leah’s deep well by Judge Arne. Leah’s attorneys had argued that the deep wells were Arizona’s last hope for precious water. Leah Blue was a visionary, her attorneys said, because her deep wells would pump water even during drought
years when the Colorado River had dried up. A little salt in the water was still preferable to no water at all.

Trigg sat in a white terry-cloth robe eating French toast and arguing with his mouth full of bacon. The water supplied by the deep wells might be enough now, but Leah had no guarantee in ten years or even five. Trigg was still trying to “sell” her more stock in his sex mall. Arizona’s financial collapse had begun to spook little guys such as Trigg as they watched their banker friends fall. When two-bit hustlers got scared, they started to think small. Leah had always thought big, but Trigg saw no reason for Venice when thousands of residential properties in Tucson were still empty, unrented and unsold, or inhabited by squatters. Leah shook her head. Trigg knew nothing about real estate. Residential property priced over a million was still reliable. Leah’s homes in Venice would be priced beginning at two million. Leah did not mention that Mr. B. had already inquired about forty units for himself and business associates.

Trigg was not interested in hearing about the security features that the canals and lakes would provide; he wanted to know who were these people and why would they bother to come to, much less buy property in, a state such as Arizona, the first state ever forced into federal receivership by her creditors. As both the U.S. economy and the civil war in Mexico got worse, Arizona’s population would continue to drop. Why build a new city from scratch when you could buy Tucson already built for ten cents on the dollar? “That’s all I want to know,” Trigg said, lifting each leg into his trousers before he lay back on the bed to pull the trousers over the dead weight of his thighs and hips. Trigg wanted Leah to invest in the Tucson that was already there. They had to get Tucson back on “her” feet; they had to counter the ugly rumors. Had Leah looked at the faces on downtown Tucson streets lately? They were all Mexican and Indian; the only whites downtown were police, lawyers, and the clerks and workers in the county and city courts.

Leah had put the cart before the horse, Trigg told her. The city of Tucson was standing there all around them; commercial property was 85 percent vacant with residential properties running at a 47 percent vacancy rate. The Federal government owned all the vacant property by default. Here was a golden opportunity. Tucson was desperate. Attorneys for the City of Tucson had unsuccessfully sued to stop a network broadcast that called Tucson a “ghost town” or “ghost city.” People didn’t want to see empty storefronts and empty houses; empty buildings
scared people off. Even the Hollywood rich came less often to Tucson’s fat farms because limousine rides from the Tucson airport to the spas passed through acres of open desert shrubs dotted with the tents and the shelters of the homeless.

Leah looked at her Venice blueprints, then at Trigg. Even if he lied about feeling orgasms in his brain, Leah admired the man’s energy. Trigg never gave up, but he wasn’t very bright either. Her dream city had been calculated with Arizona’s financial collapse and Mexico’s civil war in mind. Venice, Arizona, would rise out of the dull desert gravel, its blazing purity of white marble set between canals the color of lapis, and lakes of turquoise. The “others” had to live someplace; let it be Tucson. Leah didn’t care how cheap real estate was, all she saw were dingy, decaying storefronts and defunct shopping malls in Tucson. Tucson had been rundown too long; forget Tucson and start over.

Leah pulled on her panty hose and combed her hair. She watched Trigg in the mirror as he pulled himself into his wheelchair. Leah didn’t bother to argue. She had noticed the pattern in Trigg all along. Trigg was always ready to steal what was there and make the best of it as fast as he could. Maybe that had been the effect of his accident, Leah wasn’t sure; but she knew it was important to Trigg to brag about sex with her and the imaginary threat Max posed. Max got reports that Trigg liked to say he might be in a wheelchair, but he still had more balls than the others did because he fucked Max Blue’s wife. Trigg didn’t know that Max had spies. Trigg didn’t know Leah told Max everything. Sex was unimportant to Max—something Trigg would never understand because Trigg was obsessed with standing up; more than anything Trigg himself wanted to be erect.

“What are we doing arguing?” Trigg had said, suddenly widening his blue eyes at Leah. He pointed at a large blank area on one map: “Venice, Arizona, City of the Future,” he said to show Leah he had been persuaded to accept her plans; now Trigg wanted Leah to support what he called his “comprehensive plan.” Trigg’s plan took a hard look at Arizona’s economy. Even in the best years, Arizona’s economy had never been famous. Arizona mined some copper and grew some cotton, but mostly Arizona had been the place Americans went when they went on vacation or got sick. Politics across the border had become so explosive that the wealthy vacationers and rich fitness addicts might be difficult to lure back to Tucson. But patients confronting fatal illnesses would be willing to take the risk Mexico might blow up while they were in Tucson. The terminal patients would not notice that Tucson’s parks
and arroyos were full of homeless people. Tucson was already a heart-lung transplant capital. Trigg’s comprehensive plan would make Tucson an international center for human-organ transplant surgery and research.

The beauty of Trigg’s plan was it took advantage of existing facilities and personnel already located in Tucson. Trigg kept development costs down that way. He wanted Leah Blue to realize that starting from scratch cost too much. All he had to do was to redesign the defunct Tucson resort hotels he had bought in bankruptcy sales and voilà! They would have luxury hospital accommodations to lure billionaires for organ transplants and other delicate operations. They would offer luxury outpatient treatment centers where new transplant patients might reside permanently in a luxury condominium only minutes away from the transplant center emergency room.

Trigg was convinced his plan took everything into consideration. Since the international market for organ transplants might at first be unpredictable, Trigg had been careful not to scrap his faithful standbys, the plasma donor centers, or his private hospitals for substance abusers and disturbed children and teens. Trigg dreamed of making Tucson and southern Arizona the health and beauty capital. The Arizona water crisis a few years previous plus recent border violence had frightened visitors away. Trigg would lure them back with his grand resort hotel in the mountain foothills where a luxury hospital and outpatient accommodations for cosmetic surgery would be featured. The beauty of this business was even when the fat came off or was sucked out, yards and yards of sagging wattles and crepey skin remained to be snipped off or tucked.

Trigg’s proposal even took into account the possibility of war in Mexico; even if the trouble in Mexico scared off wealthy transplant and tummy-tuck patients, Trigg wasn’t worried. If Mexico blew up, the beds of Trigg’s hospitals would be filled with wounded U.S. soldiers paid for by Uncle Sam. And of course, if civil war broke out in Mexico, there would be no shortages of donor organs in Tucson. Trigg wanted to draw transplant patients from all over the world to one location. The secret was how to obtain the enormous supply of biomaterials and organs which was necessary, and the civil war in Mexico was already solving that. Even if there were no war, still Trigg had come up with a brilliant solution. Trigg had a gold mine. Hoboes or wetbacks could be “harvested” at the plasma centers where a doctor had already examined the “candidate” to be sure he was healthy. A lot of those people on the street were full of worms and sick but didn’t look it.

Leah Blue felt the hairs on her neck rise on end. She rerolled the blueprints slowly while she chose what she would say. At the core of Trigg’s plan was a research center for nerve-tissue transplants for spinal cord injuries. Tucson had barely been able to keep the heart-lung transplant center after the university hospital had gone bankrupt, much less support an even more experimental transplant research program. Trigg’s capacity for self-delusion was inexhaustible. “All your millionaire transplant surgeons and their wives will have to live in Venice,” Leah said. “I can’t imagine they will tolerate living in Tucson.” Trigg had a puzzled expression. He didn’t get it. “I mean the surgeons and their families won’t want to live in Tucson once you get the ‘sex mall’ going,” Leah said.