When It All Comes Down to Dust (Phoenix Noir Book 3) (13 page)

It was a shrewd decision. Phoenix was growing, exploding with development, going from large town to sprawling metropolis as people from all over the country headed for the Sunbelt. They came to escape – from poverty, failed marriages, failed businesses, felony warrants. They came to start again. Or they came from nothing and nowhere, looking to find something, looking to be somewhere. Some arrived on the bus with nothing but their ambitions. Others, like Laura’s father, arrived in big cars, their dreams paid for in legal tender.

Bankrolled by his parents, he bought a house in Moon Valley, where the city’s new aristocracy lived. He went to work brokering real estate deals while his wife kept house, overcooked their dinners and fucked on demand. They went to the country club on Saturdays and to church on Sundays.

Laura didn’t exist for them, though she tried to. In the afternoons, she’d sometimes ask her mother what they were having for dinner that evening. Then she’d go outside and write a message on the driveway in chalk: “DADDY YOU GET PORK CHOPS FOR DINNER.” She’d wait until he came home, and she’d point to the words as he walked up the driveway, and he’d smile at her and say, “Great” and keep walking.

He worked hard, and so did many other people in the business. But money did what hard work couldn’t, and before he was thirty the name Ponto had become synonymous with real estate in the Valley. The legend had it that he was a self-made man, living proof that you could plant your flag on the peak of the entrepreneurial mountain through determination and work ethic. He even believed in the legend himself, at least after his third beer.

Then the women’s movement hit. More specifically, it hit Laura’s mother. She read a few books and went to a few meetings, and soon she informed her husband that she wasn’t going to be the little woman anymore. Her consciousness had been raised, and she had realized that there was absolutely no reason a woman should be stuck at home raising children, when she could simply hire poor Latina women to do it for her.

The women she hired would spend hours away from their own children because they needed the small amounts of money they were paid to take care of Laura while her mother volunteered at charitable organizations and got her picture on the society page of the
Arizona Republic
.  Neither of Laura’s parents had to think about shit-stains or pubic hairs on toilets anymore – that was now taken care of by people who worked for twelve hours a day until their health gave out and they still couldn’t afford to see a doctor.

Most of Laura’s diet was provided by the country club. Nearly every day when she got home from school her mother would tell her to walk over there, and sometimes she’d even drive her. Laura would play in the swimming pool, and when she got hungry she’d order some food and it would be charged to her father’s account. She didn’t see many other kids at the country club, but that was okay because Tori was always there with her.

Tori was Laura’s twin sister, and they played together every day. The only trouble with Tori was that she didn’t exist. Laura was five when she invented her,  and now she was six. She didn’t know if that meant that Tori was a year old, or, since they were twins, if she was six as well.

Some evenings, Laura would play in the front yard of the house, while her parents socialized with her father’s business contacts, friends from the country club, and people her mother had met through her good works. Laura would sit outside and talk to Tori. It made Tori more real if Laura actually talked to her out loud.

“Mommy and Daddy are dumb ’cuz they won’t get a swimming pool. Everybody has a swimming pool, but Daddy says it would spoil our view of the golf course. That’s dumb, huh?” Pause while Tori answered. “The golf course is lame, huh...?”

That would be the way of it, but only for a little while. It was hard to sustain belief in a person she couldn’t see or hear, and so it wouldn’t take long for Laura to talk less and less, and then to fall quiet and just throw a ball or sit there with the warm night all around her and the coyotes howling close by as the sun set in a polluted sky and inside the house her father told his guests what a great kid she was.

Sometimes they’d forget about her and she’d fall asleep on a seat out there, or she’d go inside and crabbily tell her mother that she was tired. Her parents would show her off for a few minutes, and then her father would give her a drunken hug and say,
“You’re such a good girl! Your Daddy’s so proud of you.”

None of them – her parents or their guests – ever heard the prayer Laura said on many nights. “I was very good today, God. I did my chores and I didn’t bother Mommy. So please let me die when I’m asleep tonight. Please.”

When she woke in the morning and she wasn’t in heaven with God and Tori and people who talked to her and were like the families she saw on T.V., she’d know she had to go to school, which meant facing the dogs.

The school was about a mile from her house. None of the other kids walked to school, because their parents wouldn’t have let them, and the heat in Phoenix is too punishing for any walk to be less than an athletic endeavor. The other kids were driven to school by their parents in air-conditioned vehicles, but Laura’s father went to work early, and her mother didn’t want to be bothered.

So Laura walked.

Some of the neighbors kept dogs, and they let them wander freely, since they didn’t think there would be any pedestrians for the dogs to bother. As Laura walked, the dogs would come running out the yards they regarded as their territory. Sometimes they would bark and growl at her, and sometimes they just wanted to sniff her. In every case, she was terrified. When she told her mother how scared she was, her mother told her just to say a prayer as she walked, and the dogs would leave her alone. That prayer never worked any better than the one she said in bed at night.

She’d spend her day in school, too shy and sad to talk much to the other kids, preferring to stay inside her head with Tori. She’d think about the dogs she’d meet on the walk home, and she’d have conversations with God, asking him to show her how to be really, really, really super-good, so good that she’d deserve to go to sleep and never wake up again.

That never happened, but, within a year, other things did.

Laura never found out how it happened, but somehow her parents noticed the decade they were living in, and decided to take part in it. Her father stopped listening to Ronnie Milsap and got into Free instead. He adjusted his wardrobe accordingly, and so did his wife, who took to using phrases such as “far out.”

Society gatherings were replaced by pot-and-booze-and-
Dark Side of the Moon
parties. Central Arizona was Southern California without the high prices, where money bought mellowness. As they sat around with their friends, sharing substances and discussing
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
, their meals were still delivered and their toilets were still cleaned by brown people.

But if that remained the same, Laura’s role didn’t. She was no longer ignored, no longer a social prop to be briefly seen and never heard. After putting something up their noses, her parents would smoke some herb to come down, and then happily spend hours at a time talking to Laura about spirituality and What Everything Meant. She never understood any of it, but she was glad to have their attention.

When her father offered her a beer, she felt as though she had arrived. And, the next day, when her head hurt and her throat was raw from puking, her mother laughed and told her that was what happened if you drank, and Laura felt as though they were sharing something, for the first time ever.

When they gave her cigarettes, it didn’t take – she just couldn’t smoke. She hated the taste and smell, and it made her cough right away. It was the same when they tried to get her to smoke a joint. That was a disappointment to everyone – to the adults, because they thought it would be “beautiful” to see her stoned, and to Laura because she wanted to be able to share what they were sharing.

So she was glad when a friend of her mother’s brought over some space cake she’d made. Laura ate it along with everyone else, but it was so strong it caused hallucinations and some of the adults got freaked out. Laura didn’t. She went to the bathroom and stood looking in the mirror, watching as her nose got longer, then shorter, then longer again. It was fun.

The men weren’t fun, at least not at first and not for a long time.

When some of her parents’ friends started showing interest in her, she heard her mother and father discussing it.

“We don’t have the right to make these decisions for her,” her mother said.

“I know... I know. But she’s only eight,” her father said.

“That’s a very hierarchical way of looking at it. If she wants to express her sexuality, we don’t have any right to try to control that, just because we’re older. I think you’re confusing parenthood with proprietorship.”

“Yeah, I know. It just seems like a lot at her age. And it’s against the law.”

“So are the drugs. So is giving her the booze, and that was your idea.”

“I thought it would be fun for her. And it was. I thought it was beautiful.”

“I did too. I think it’s beautiful to see anyone express who they are. And Laura has the right to express herself any way she wants to. I don’t think we’d even be having this discussion if she was a boy. I think you’re being both patriarchal and ageist.”

“That’s reductive bullshit.”

“Then if Laura wants to actualize her sexuality, you have no right to stand in her way.”

“Right on,” her father said. “I guess.”

No one asked Laura.

At first she didn’t like it because it scared her and then when she got used to it and wasn’t scared anymore the things the men had her do were just gross or boring. And then she started to like it sometimes. Even when she didn’t like it, she still wasn’t being ignored. She was still a part of her parents’ world.

Laura learned too well, and yet not well enough.

When a teacher at her school was kind to her, she did what she knew men liked, what she knew they wanted from her. She didn’t know that there were men who didn’t want that from her, and so when she began rubbing the teacher’s penis through his khaki pants she didn’t understand why he yelled at her and slapped her hand away with enough force to cause a welt on her wrist.

There were calls to her parents, and visits from C.P.S., and even though grownups had always told her that lying was wrong, her mother told her that if she didn’t lie then the stupid squares would take her away and put her in an orphanage and she’d never see her parents again. So she lied, and even though she had no answers as to why she’d groped Mr. Fuller, the people from C.P.S. apologized to her parents and said they’d had no choice but to investigate because they were mandated to look into every case involving a child acting out symptoms of sexual abuse.

Her parents could do whatever they wanted, because the world was theirs. And then suddenly it wasn’t.

Every boom is followed by a slump, something her father had never considered. When the Phoenix real estate market went down the toilet in the 1980s, he had no idea what to do, so he did nothing. Other realtors were laying off their staff and cutting the salaries of those who remained, but Laura’s father wouldn’t do that, because he couldn’t stand the thought of anybody being mad at him or not liking him. He kept all his staff, and he cut his own pay without cutting theirs.

Laura had once pointed out that pieces of old food were stuck in the grooves of a picnic table. Her mother had responded by taking the top off the table and just flipping it over. “If I don’t have to look at it, I don’t have to deal with it,” she said.

Laura’s father took the same approach to his dying business, but he had to deal with it anyway. Laura would never forget the pile of bankruptcy papers on the kitchen table, her mother filling them out while her father looked on numbly and stirred himself just enough to sign each page she told him to.

The house in Moon Valley had to be sold. The place the family moved to – an apartment in Central Phoenix – was upscale by most people’s standards, but Laura’s father felt so humiliated at having to live there that he didn’t give his new address to his friends and former neighbors in Moon Valley. Not that it mattered – after he’d sold his country club membership, they’d stopped calling him, and he was no longer invited to any parties.

Now, living in a building with a uniformed security guard at the front door, J. Gary Ponto was as depressed as most people would be if they ended up in a homeless shelter.

Laura liked it there. She liked being able to look out of the apartment windows from high above the city, look at where the streets met the desert and the desert met the mountains and the horizon met the sky. She liked the way her parents were now. In leaving Moon Valley, they’d also left behind the psychedelic clothes and the funky sunglasses and everything else they’d been into. Their only indulgences now were beer, wine, cigarettes and T.V. They didn’t have people come over, and they didn’t send Laura outside to play, because there was nowhere to send her. Twelve years old, she thought things would be better now, and she didn’t pray to God to let her die in her sleep anymore.

Frank lived nearby.

––––––––

H
is parents fled the Los Angeles area because they were tired of what it was, and could see what its future held. They packed up and headed east, and, when they reached Phoenix after a day of driving, they decided to spend the night there. When they got up in the morning and looked around, they wanted to stay.

It wasn’t a city back then, just a town. There was something about the place that kept you from being surprised if you discovered that the town was founded by a scam artist who died in jail. There was a feeling that there were no rules, that everything was still being put together, that it had an established name but not much more. Everything seemed to be up for grabs, and many travelers who stopped for gas and a meal gave thanks that they didn’t live there, and then got back on the road to someplace better.