3
Who can resist the need to suffer one or two real tragedies in life? A kind of fatalism had brought Jack back to Arizona once his father passed. He knew it then, though he didn’t express it this way to Jo, and he still felt it, though perhaps less urgently now, being here. It had long lost its acuteness, had settled into the kind of asymptomatic resignation that described many, Jack thought, of the people he had come to meet everywhere. It was as if once the country had finally voted its own government down to nothing more than an outsourcing agency—once they’d finally won—they’d all grown complacent, having nothing more to blame. When he and Jo had arrived, the lot had been the same as he’d left it: bare save for a four room adobe, a well, and a windmill atop a small rise to the south. During the day they’d watch the shadow of slowly spinning blades pinwheel across the scabby desert floor toward the house, almost touching its southwest corner, then retreat again, running from the sun.
Angel had been great friends with Jo, who he’d called Mrs. Lightning. Jack used to cringe when he used that term, and Jo herself would scold the man, but neither of them could break him of the habit. And now here he was, saying it for the first time in five years.
“What did you say?” Jack looked around.
“Mrs. Lightning. I saw her in town an hour ago.”
Jack watched the large cloud of dust caused by Paco’s guzzler climb, higher and higher, dispersing in the thinner air.
“I wasn’t aware she was in town,” he said. “Are you sure it was her?”
“There’s no mistaking Mrs. Lightning,” Angel said.
“No, I reckon there isn’t.” Jo’s long, bright red mane was easy to spot in these parts, where coarse black hair was the norm, followed closely by bald heads under hats. “You didn’t speak with her?”
“I was late for the meeting.”
“Oh, heck, Angel, you know you could have skipped the meeting. You and Jo were close…”
“I’m on the clock, sir. I have a duty.”
Jack nodded gravely. Jo was the kind of person who always welcomed guests, and found it difficult to understand the need some feel to prepare for them—but he was a little hurt that she hadn’t come to him directly. Or perhaps he was just embarrassed before Angel. It wouldn’t be the first time. Jack often felt strangely sheepish around old-timers, people who’d known this land before he’d begun shaping it with his own strange rituals. Also, he’d known Jack’s father.
“I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘sir,’ Angel.”
Angel nodded.
“Well, thanks for coming to me about Jo. I’m not sure what she’s doing in town, but we’ll know soon enough. And about how long she’ll be staying, I reckon we’ll find that out too, but my hunch is she’ll stay as long as it takes her to finish whatever business she has here, and not a moment longer.”
The two men parted ways, Angel back to the field, where he had to assess the damage of the day’s first run and prepare the grounds for the next one, and Jack in the opposite direction, down the sand and gravel path toward the small depression in which his house sat squat and mostly out of sight. He tried to think of what might bring Jo back into town, and despite his attempts to escape it, his mind kept circling back to the kid who’d disrupted the Q&A. What if she was somehow associated with him? That would mean that her work here was already done. Jack knew her sympathies—it wasn’t beyond belief—but she’d never gone so far as to ally herself with any group. It wasn’t her style. Or it hadn’t been. She wasn’t a show-off. When she’d stood and handed out flyers years ago, it had been hard for her, terrible.
Jack walked into his small home. Even without her there, he saw the place through Jo’s eyes again. The living room wasn’t cozy; it was cramped. The rusted plumbing wasn’t rustic; it was busted. It was difficult now, Jack thought, to recall exactly what had been his argument for keeping the place as it was when they’d arrived, but it was easy to remember the sentimentality that fueled it. It was the only place he’d ever felt at home. His father, though never passing along what little he may have known about his family’s history, about his tribe, had nonetheless somehow made him belong, and it was easy, looking now at the precarious stacks of books that grew like stalagmites under the halfway refinished roof, to remember his own feeling of completion when he and Jo had opened the unlocked door and breathed in the hot, stale air.
As a boy, Jack had shared the bungalow’s single bedroom with his father, first sleeping with him in the bed, then graduating to a small military cot by the door when he was old enough to stink. And when he turned fourteen, the night of the ceremony that would give him his last name, he’d come home late to find his father half-asleep on the couch. “Young man needs privacy,” the man had said, before rolling over and drifting off.
He’d spent his first night alone in the bedroom unable to sleep, just looking up at the ceiling his father had slept under until the room filled with the first grey light of dawn. Four years later he’d come home from a night of drinking to find his things in a pile on the couch where his father should have been, and the bedroom door closed. The message was clear enough: he was an adult now, and it was time for him to act like one. The next day he’d woken up to packed bags, a cold cup of coffee, and the last words his father had ever spoken to him: “Get out of here before you get stuck.”
Jack heard the scratch of footsteps coming down the path toward his house, and his pulse quickened. He knew who it was, and didn’t feel prepared. He sprang out of his chair, tucked in his shirt, and brushed the dust off his sleeves. The dining room had no window toward the house’s approaching path, so Jack could only stand, frozen beside the door, and wait for the knock. He waited. The footsteps stopped outside, leaving the place in silence. He waited. He pictured Jo looking up at the now-stalled windmill.
Then something slid under the door and stuck beneath the tread of his left boot.
Startled, he leapt back before seeing that it was just a piece of plastic, a thin, rigid card covered in big, bright lettering. “Come to the Busk Ceremony,” it read, “and honor the
Supreme Spirit!”
Jack picked it up and turned it over. The “Supreme Spirit” bit was a little over the top, he thought, but that was Larry’s department. There was a hand-drawn map on the card’s back that indicated where the annual festival would take place: in the parking of Border Run! itself. It was two days from now. It also advertised the fact that he, Jack Lightning, would be giving the mayor’s son a battle name—a gesture that was supposed to symbolize a new era of unity between the town of Arivaca and what passed for a business community.
Which reminded him: time was running out to think of one.
Jack sat back down with a deep sigh. He felt the tension evaporate from his muscles into the dry, eager air, and leaned back in his chair. A gecko darted out from under the light fixture above him and tucked into a crack. Maybe later he’d head into town to see if he couldn’t talk to someone else who’d seen Jo. Surely she’d stopped off at Desmonda’s Inn to say hello. Maybe she’d even had a drink at the Double Barrel. She was well loved, and impossible to miss. Someone was sure to have spoken to her.
In the midst of these thoughts, a knock at the door made Jack jerk forward, and the chair fell out from under him, toppling him to the floor.
“Jack,” said his ex-girlfriend. “Jack, are you okay?”
