Outside was a bright, wild wonderland of flowers and vegetables and auto parts. Heads of cabbage and lettuce sprouted out of old tires. An entire rusted-out Thunderbird, minus the wheels, had nasturtiums blooming out the windows like Mama’s hen-and-chicks pot on the front porch at home. A kind of teepee frame made of CB antennas was all overgrown with cherry-tomato vines.
“Can you believe tomatoes on the second of January?” Mattie asked. I told her no, that I couldn’t. Frankly that was only the beginning of what I couldn’t believe. Mattie’s backyard looked like the place where old cars die and go to heaven.
“Usually we’ll get a killing frost by Thanksgiving, but this year it’s stayed warm. The beans and tomatoes just won’t quit. Here, doll, bite down, don’t swallow it whole.” She handed me a little tomato.
“Okay,” I said, before I realized she had popped one into Turtle’s mouth, and was talking to her. “It hailed this morning,” I reminded Mattie. “We just about froze to death for a few minutes there.”
“Oh, did it? Whereabouts?”
“On the freeway. About five blocks from here.”
“It didn’t get here; we just had rain. Hail might have got the tomatoes. Sometimes it will. Here’s the beans I was telling you about.”
Sure enough, they were one hundred percent purple: stems, leaves, flowers and pods.
“Gosh,” I said.
“The Chinese lady next door gave them to me.” She waved toward a corrugated tin fence that I hadn’t even noticed before. It was covered with vines, and the crazy-quilt garden kept right on going on the other side, except without the car parts. The purple beans appeared to go trooping on down the block, climbing over anything in their path.
“They’re originally from seeds she brought over with her in nineteen-ought-seven,” Mattie told me. “Can you picture that? Keeping the same beans going all these years?”
I said I could. I could picture these beans marching right over the Pacific Ocean, starting from somebody’s garden in China and ending up right here.
Mattie’s place seemed homey enough, but living in the hustle-bustle of downtown Tucson was like moving to a foreign country I’d never heard of. Or a foreign decade. When I’d crossed into Rocky Mountain Time, I had set my watch back two hours and got thrown into the future.
It’s hard to explain how this felt. I went to high school in the seventies, but you have to understand that in Pittman County it may as well have been the fifties. Pittman was twenty years behind the nation in practically every way you can think of, except the rate of teenage pregnancies. For instance, we were the last place in the country to get the dial system. Up until 1973 you just picked up the receiver and said, Marge, get me my Uncle Roscoe, or whoever. The telephone office was on the third floor of the Courthouse, and the operators could see everything around Main Street square including the bank, the drugstore, and Dr. Finchler’s office. She would tell you if his car was there or not.
In Tucson, it was clear that there was nobody overlooking us all. We would just have to find our own way.
Turtle and I took up residence in the Hotel Republic, which rented by the week and was within walking distance of Jesus Is Lord’s. Mattie said it would be all right to leave my car there for the time being. This was kind of her, although I had visions of turnips growing out of it if I didn’t get it in running order soon.
Life in the Republic was nothing like life at the Broken Arrow, where the only thing to remind you you weren’t dead was the constant bickering between old Mrs. Hoge and Irene. Downtown Tucson was lively, with secretaries clicking down the sidewalks in high-heeled sandals, and banker and lawyer types puffy-necked in their ties, and in the evenings, prostitutes in get-ups you wouldn’t believe. There was one who hung out near the Republic who wore a miniskirt that looked like Reynolds Wrap and almost every day a new type of stockings: fishnets in all different colors, and one pair with actual little bows running down the backs. Her name was Cheryl.
There was also a type of person who lived downtown full time, not in the Republic but in the bus station or on the sidewalk around the Red Cross plasma center. These people slept in their clothes. I know that living in the Republic only put me a few flights of stairs above such people, but at least I did sleep in pajamas.
And then there was this other group. These people did not seem to be broke, but they wore the kinds of clothes Mama’s big-house ladies used to give away but you would rather go naked than wear to school. Poodle skirts and things of that kind. Standing in line at the lunch counters and coffee-shops they would rub the backs of each other’s necks and say, “You’re holding a lot of tension here.” They mainly didn’t live downtown but had studios and galleries in empty storefronts that had once been J. C. Penney’s and so forth. Some of these still had the old signs on the faces of the brick buildings.
Which is to say that at first I had no idea what was going on in those storefronts. One of them that I passed by nearly every day had these two amazing things in the front window. It looked like cherry bombs blowing up in boxes of wet sand, and the whole thing just frozen mid-kaboom. Curiosity finally got the better of me and I walked right in. I knew this was no Woolworth’s.
Inside there were more of these things, one of them taller than me and kind of bush-shaped, all made of frozen sand. A woman was writing something on a card under one of the sand things that was hanging on the back wall, kind of exploding out of a metal frame. The woman had on a pink sweater, white ankle socks, pink high heels, and these tight pants made out of the skin of a pink silk leopard. She came over with her clipboard and kind of eyed Turtle’s hands, which were sticky I’ll admit, but a good two feet clear of the sand bush.
“This is terrific,” I said. “What’s it supposed to be?”
“It’s non-representational,” she said, looking at me like I was some kind of bug she’d just found in her bathroom.
“Excuse me for living,” I said. She was about my age, no more than twenty-five anyway, and had no reason I could see for being so snooty. I remembered this rhyme Mama taught me to say to kids who acted like they were better than me: ‘You must come from Hog-Norton, where pigs go to church and play the organ.”
The thing was sitting on a square base covered with brown burlap, and a little white card attached said BISBEE DOG #6. I didn’t see the connection, but I acted like I was totally satisfied with that. “Bisbee Dog #6,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to know.”
Turtle and I went all around checking out the ones on the walls. Most of them were called something relief: ASCENDANT RELIEF, ENDOGENOUS RELIEF, MOTIVE RELIEF, GALVANIC RELIEF. After a while I realized that the little white cards had numbers on them too. Numbers like $400. “Comic Relief,” I said to Turtle. “This one is Instant Relief,” I said. “See, it’s an Alka-Seltzer, frozen between the plop and the fizz.”
On some days, like that one, I was starting to go a little bit crazy. This is how it is when all the money you have can fit in one pocket, and you have no job, and no prospects. The main thing people did for money around there was to give plasma, but I drew the line. “Blood is the body’s largest organ,” I could just hear Eddie Ricketts saying, and I wasn’t inclined to start selling my organs while I was still alive. I did inquire there about work, but the head man in a white coat and puckery white loafers looked me over and said, “Are you a licensed phlebotomist in the state of Arizona?” in this tone of voice like who was I to think I could be on the end of the needle that doesn’t hurt, and that was the end of that.
Down the block from the plasma center was a place called Burger Derby. The kids who worked there wore red caps, red-and-white-striped shirts, and what looked like red plastic shorts. One of them, whose name tag said, “Hi I’m Sandi,” also wore tiny horse earrings, but that couldn’t have been part of the uniform. They couldn’t make you pierce your ears; that would have to be against some law.