Bad Country: A Novel Read online

  That’s a granddaughter of yours, Mrs. Rocha? Rodeo asked.

  The old woman lowered her chin to her chest.

  Is Farrah related to Samuel?

  Sister.

  Did Farrah and Samuel have other siblings?

  Katherine Rocha shook her head.

  You’ve had a lot of troubles, Mrs. Rocha.

  This should be Indian Country. By rights it should be. The woman said this as if it explained something in the world, maybe everything to her. But instead it’s mostly Mexicans who want everything and Anglos who own everything. The woman shrugged and shook her head in scarcely controlled anger. My husband was Mexican. And he made me have all those kids but never had any money or talents for them or me either.

  Rodeo had spent much of his early life on San Xavier Reservation and was Native-American, Mexican-American and Irish-American, so he understood this common domestic dilemma.

  Can I trust you? The woman said this abruptly, as if it had just occurred to her.

  Rodeo presented his regular sales pitch to a reluctant client.

  Mrs. Rocha, hiring a private investigator is something of a trust issue in general. There’s just no way around that. But you pay me, so I am a professional. And because I am a professional you can trust me to do my work. I investigate to the best of my abilities and then I report to you honestly what I find out. It’s just a business deal. Rodeo tried to smile in a winning way but his teeth had always been bad.

  The woman took a seat at the kitchen table and looked into her coffee cup as if divining in the dregs of nondairy creamer floating in Folgers some portent.

  So you will tell me everything you find out? she asked.

  You can have it that way if you want it that way, Mrs. Rocha. Or if you think I might find out something you really don’t want to know and you don’t want me to tell you about it, then I won’t tell you about it. Unless it’s something to do with Law Enforcement, then you have that option. Rodeo paused. The woman just stared into her coffee cup. Like I said, Mrs. Rocha, some people just hire me because they feel like it’s the right thing to do. And often it is. Because an objective investigation into a suspicious death demonstrates respect for the dead by trying to find out what killed them.

  But you can’t just turn your ideas over to the police, can you?

  Honestly, Mrs. Rocha, there’s not much likelihood that I’ll find anything the police didn’t find anyway. Not in the short period of time you could probably hire me for.

  I don’t want the police involved, she said.

  Rodeo rubbed the back of his neck and tried to keep the frustration out of his voice. Within common sense and the law of the land, I do what you want me to do, Mrs. Rocha, for as long as you got three hundred a day plus expenses.

  A day, the woman said.

  Rodeo sighed very quietly. We’ll just need to fill in a contract and sign it then, Mrs. Rocha. You can get a witness if you want. A relative or somebody.

  There’s nobody, the old woman said.

  Rodeo filled in a standard contract and under “services contracted” wrote “Investigate death of Samuel Rocha for one day and relay information accumulated to Mrs. Katherine Rocha.” Rodeo put a Bic pen on the kitchen table beside the contract. His new client attempted to read the contract but was obviously losing focus. Rodeo guided her pen to the signature line and she signed in a shaky hand. Rodeo folded the contract into his pocket and slid a sheet of clean note paper in front of her.

  If you would give me the full name and address of Samuel’s parents that would help me get started, Rodeo said.

  The old woman scratched violently on the paper and then thrust it away from her and slammed the pen down on top of it. Alonzo and her rented a house close to here, she said. But I don’t know if they are even there. And I don’t know anything about their business or that kid’s business.

  Can I get in Samuel’s room, Mrs. Rocha?

  The woman gestured toward the darkened hallway of the little house. Down there on the right. The police were in there but I don’t think they took much out.

  So I need my day rate plus fifty up front for expenses right now, Mrs. Rocha. That’s the deal.

  How do I know you won’t just take my money?

  Because I am a professional, Mrs. Rocha. Like I said. I always do my job.

  I’ll pay you the fifty for expenses then, she said.

  It’s not going to work that way, Mrs. Rocha. I need three hundred and fifty dollars.

  A hundred.

  When Rodeo shook his head, the old woman put her face in her hands and rubbed her eyes with her big knuckles, pressed a hard little fist against her chest then rose so abruptly she knocked over her chair. She moved on swerving slippers to a kitchen drawer and pulled out a plastic shopping bag from Food City and carefully counted out from it one hundred dollars in small bills, her swollen hands sure with the cash. She seemed now totally drained, spent completely. She held out the partial payment in a clenched fist.

  Rodeo shrugged and shook his head but accepted the partial payment and put the money into his big billfold. That’s one hundred, he said.

  Katherine Rocha pressed a hand against her breastbone again.

  Are you feeling all right, Mrs. Rocha?

  Whoever cared about how I feel. This was a rhetorical question as she intoned it.

  Why don’t you go lay down while I look over Samuel’s room, said Rodeo. If I take anything from Samuel’s room I’ll leave a receipt for that.

  There’s nothing in that pack rat’s nest I want, the old woman said. Take it all. Cart all that kid’s junk off in the back of that trashy brown truck of yours. That’d be a way to earn all that money you’re charging me at least.

  Have a rest now, Mrs. Rocha.

  She did not resist as Rodeo took her elbow and steered her back into the living room, reestablished her in her Barcalounger. Rodeo stood stock still behind her chair and out of her sight. The old woman started snoring in less than three minutes. He went to work.

  * * *

  The carpet in Katherine Rocha’s house was a mixture of browns and reds that partly camouflaged many stains. The walls were painted and overpainted several shades of tan except for the ones in the bathroom that were faded rose, and in that room most objects were either pink or fuzzy or both. The walls of the short hallway seemed sagged by the weight of framed photographs, many of which were faded beyond recognition with but few recent, as if the promise of Katherine Rocha’s past had been unfulfilled by later generations. Dominating one wall of the hallway was an eight-by-ten studio glossy of Farrah, framed in faux weathered wood that was washed with pink paint. The child had regular features but was not especially pretty. Her eyes were cerulean and bright yellow hair was piled up on her head so high it could not be contained by the picture frame.

  There were also on the hallway walls candid and studio photos of brown-skinned people in cowboy and Indian outfits, ill-fitting suits and prom gowns and oversized basketball uniforms, though very few of people in graduation robes and mortarboards. Rodeo knew what Samuel looked like from newspaper images and there were no photos of Samuel on Katherine Rocha’s Walk of Family Fame, not of him as a kid or teenager at least. All the babies on the wall looked pretty much the same except for Farrah, who had been framed theatrically from her earliest days. There were several candid shots of the little beauty queen with what must have been her parents jointly holding her at different stages of her growth. Standing beside the parents of Farrah and Samuel in one large photo was the tribal cop Rodeo had encountered earlier that day at the Circle K. Officer Monjano held the baby Farrah, who was garishly overdressed in all pink. Farrah’s mother was strikingly attractive except for her fat. The father, Alonzo, looked slightly like Monjano but was older and sloppy in his khakis with his shirttails out and his eyes puffy and red. There were also four other photographs of Farrah in later years, in her contest makeup and outfits, that always included the Reservation cop named Monjano prominently in the frames, oft
en holding the little beauty queen in his big arms.

  Since his client was still soundly asleep in the living room, Rodeo moved into Katherine Rocha’s bedroom for a quick tour.

  The smell in the old woman’s room was of talcum powder and piss, patent medicines and packaged bandages, muscle rubs, and the odor of the seepage that accompanies the decomposition of vitality into decrepitude. On the bedside table were a number of pill bottles including the blood thinner warfarin along with lisinopril and metoprolol for hypertension and lithium for depression. There was another framed glossy photo of the favored dead child, Farrah, on Katherine Rocha’s dresser and several old photos featuring Katherine Rocha herself, in her late teens and early adulthood. In one of these Katherine Rocha wore a traditional Mexican dress and posed in front of Teatro Del Carmen. Her pose was as dramatic and alluring as a professional actress’s. In another photo from the same era, Katherine Rocha lounged in front of El Minuto Café with some slick pachucos. An earlier photo showed Katherine Rocha as a smiling girl with curves in a cowgirl outfit standing in front of Western WearHouse with a Tucson Rodeo Parade prize banner draped over her chest. In these old photographs Katherine Rocha’s long, round chin always tilted to the left and her thick, sculpted eyebrows arched above deep-set eyes that were luminous even in these old photographic reproductions.

  Also on Katherine Rocha’s dresser was a computer-enhanced reproduction of an old snapshot, the grain exploded large as if the eight-by-ten had been derived from a much smaller original snapshot. In this picture a small cowboy on a paint pony faced Black Mountain. Rodeo recognized the location of the snapshot as the practice rodeo arena near the San Xavier Mission, just yards from the house in which he had spent most of his youth. And though the rider’s back was to the camera, from the way the cowboy sat his cutting horse Rodeo knew this was a photograph of his own father, a picture of Buck Garnet in his prime. Rodeo stood very still for a moment and then moved on.

  Samuel’s room was obviously the lair of an adolescent. Stale smoke residue coated the whole room, the odor refreshed by a hubcap brimful of cigarette butts, mostly Kools. There was no computer in the room and no cable connections for one. On a bedside table were a cheap cassette/CD/radio boom box and a small pile of CDs, mostly classic rock, the CDs so old the jewel cases were opaque. Rodeo opened them all and found nothing but liner notes.

  Posters covered the walls—Ray Msyterio, Nine Inch Nails, Insane Clown Posse, a shirtless Brad Pitt. Scarface aimed his machine gun at Dirty Harry, who responded with his trademark .357 magnum in the corner near the head of the single bed. Dirty and soiled sheets and T-shirts were twisted and spread over an uncovered, stained mattress. The floor was littered with men’s magazines, Mountain Dew and Red Bull cans, energy bar wrappers and Fritos bags. The drawers of the bureau disgorged dirty underwear, baggy jeans, graphic T-shirts that promoted Old School headbanger bands like Metallica, Whitesnake and Poison.

  The back of Samuel’s bedroom door was covered in concert ticket stubs from a wide variety of acts, mostly from the Rialto Theater, representing artists ascending to stardom or receding from it—Aimee Mann, The New Pornographers, Peter York, Queensrÿche, Bela Fleck, Sergio Mendoza, 2 Live Crew, Monkey Arte, Acoustic Alchemy, Tech N9ne, Lucinda Williams, Animal Collective, The Robert Cray Band, David Sedaris, Slammin’ Poetry, Tucson Poetry Festival, Dark Star Orchestra, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Raúl Malo, Ken Nordine, Missy Higgins, Japonize Monkey, Morrissey, John Legend, New Found Legend, Styxnaseua, Old Timey Times, The Way Back Machine, Madansky Folk Ensemble, Franz Ferdinand, Three Red Neck Tenors, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Nicky Cruz, Badfish, Craig Ferguson, Ice Cube, Lamb of God, Indigenous, Authority Zero, Los Lobos, Wilco, Atmosphere, The Fucking Kennies, The Breeders, The Whistlers, The Wrongs, The Hives, The Faint, The Fainters, The Zombies, The Dead, A Live and Calexico.

  In Samuel’s closet was one set of neatly pressed pleated khakis and one long-sleeved, button-down baby blue dress shirt scarcely worn and many hooded sweatshirts that promoted colleges or professional sports teams—Pima Community College, La Universidad de Arizona, Phoenix Cardinals, Arizona Diamondbacks, Colorado Rockies, Chicago White Sox, The Tucson Javelinas, Gila Monsters, Mavericks, Sidewinders, Scorch, Heat and IceCats and one sweatshirt that had airbrushed on the chest ROSESMOKE.

  Under the bed was nothing but a roach clip on a leather thong tied to a fragment of a hawk’s feather. Between the mattress and box springs were two abused pornographic magazines, one gay and one straight. And a small spiral notebook filled with poems, a whole bookful of poems. Rodeo flipped through all the poems and read several of the shorter ones.

  Rose Haiku

  Pink hair is the prettiest,

  Unlike the man-stink,

  Because it’s not natural.

  I’m supposed to be guilt-free

  After a guilt sweat.

  I love your pink hair the best.

  The tattoos that reach around

  Your wrists are etchings

  Not even God could dream up.

  I miss my little sister.

  You know how to make

  Her come back to life with words.

  Walking to the Palace

  It’s always night

  When I’m walking

  To the Palace to collect

  The Bitchwitch is only her empty winnings

  And heavy breath from

  Christian Brothers.

  Part cross, part hammer, all death

  Knell, life

  Sentence.

  Whatever

  Birds of prey dream

  Of devouring in the brush,

  Split and bloody,

  Holds no candle

  To what I’ll do

  To the BitchWitch is only her bones.

  Once I burn her flesh

  Clean off, I might let her

  Breathe my smoke

  A few hours more

  Before I kiss her goodnight

  With a straight razor

  And cup of bleach.

  Then, I’ll grind her bones

  And snort them. To complete

  The exorcism,

  Performed with the last of her

  Christian Brothers, her only family left,

  I’ll make fire leap

  From my mouth so my face

  May be burned clean

  Of any resemblance

  Of her, even in the dark.

  I am Smoke

  I am smoke

  and you’re a cloud

  and we float

  through each other

  and trade colors

  become each other

  and now you’re good

  and now I’m bad again

  and gray is roseate

  and black is white

  and wet is dry

  and earth is sky

  where the MIA

  are all at home

  Folded into this book of chirographic poetry was a copy of Farrah Katherine Rocha’s obituary. The six-year-old child’s obituary was longer than many of those marking the deaths of octogenarians, most of the copy detailing the girl’s many wins, places and finishes in Little Miss beauty pageants. No mention was made of her only sibling, her brother Samuel, as a survivor of hers.

  Rodeo closed the small notebook and stuck it in his shirt pocket, turned his attention to the teenager’s books. Though the rest of the room seemed well-tossed by the police, the books seemed undisturbed but by gravity. The shelves were made of splintered pallet wood and were not even held in the dry wall by expansion screw sets but only with nails scarcely sufficient to hold the pressure of the paperbacks resting on them. Many nail heads were bent and pounded into the walls in obvious frustration. The thin metal brackets were sagging from the wall under the weight of words.

  Each shelf had a theme. Science fiction, fantasy, true crime, government conspiracies, alien visitation, zombies, vampires and werewolves, satanic cults, Vietnam, guns, serial killers, Harry Potter, Stephen King and Poetry.
There were six books on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, so Rodeo studied these with some care. All had the pages containing the well-known diagrams of the Book Depository on Dealey Plaza dog-eared. A number of these diagrams of the ballistics report also had notes scribbled on them, distances from shooter to target and ballistics information. In a margin of one was drawn a Smiley Face and written beside it “not a hard shot!” In another book, on the most famous photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald, CE-133A, a halo was penciled in above Oswald’s head, and near Oswald’s mail-order rifle was penciled “Carcano 6.5 millimeters, ask RR about getting one for our ‘job.’”

  There were also two books detailing the lives, the pursuit and eventual capture of the Washington, D.C. “Beltway” serial sniper killers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo.

  Rodeo quickly flipped through the rest of the books and then replaced them one by one. He found only a single scrap of paper, in a book of Alexander Long poetry, a homemade business card that had ROSERITE.COM embossed on the front and handwritten on the back a local telephone number and the Kettle. No wallet, keys or personal items but several framed photos were on the battered chest of drawers. One photo was of little Farrah, not in one of her competitive Little Miss costumes, but simply smiling in a candid shot looking like a plain little Mexican-American girl with natural brown pigtails and brown eyes. There was a blurry shot of an Anglo girl with pink hair as she was leaving a chain restaurant. Samuel had also taped to the bureau mirror several of his own cropped school pictures. Though the photos represented several different school years, Samuel consistently had acne spots on his face and long greasy hair, a downy fuzz on his upper lip, and was a very ordinary-looking mixed-race kid except for his eyes, which were as luminous as his grandmother’s had been.