Almanac of the Dead

  The judge started to speak, but Max had cut in, “I know, I know—your grandfather showed you corpses of sheepherders split in half by lightning!”

  “And stone walls four feet thick reduced to shattered rock by a single lightning bolt,” Arne himself had continued.

  “You’d never know what hit you,” the police chief said. “It beats the gas chamber.”

  “How do you know?” Max Blue said, looking sharply at the police chief. Max always forgot how dull-witted police were until he spent a few hours with a cop.

  BELOVED BASSET HOUNDS

  ARNE COULD HEAR the thunder from the storm over the Rincon Mountains quite distinctly now. He was tired of sitting in a golf cart in the heat. The misunderstanding had been resolved, and Arne had given Max the good news: Leah Blue could begin to pump water from her deep wells at her Venice, Arizona, development whenever she wanted. The judge wanted to go home. They left Max preparing to tee off on the fourteenth hole. The police chief drove the golf cart as fast as it would go.

  Arne much preferred the company of his bassets to the company of humans. His grandfather had felt the same; more than once the old man had declared that his dog’s mouth was cleaner than a human’s mouth. Arne only wanted to go home and recover from the heat and the sun. But the young police chief wanted to talk about the “national security” shipments. Others in the department had been complaining they got no cut off the “national security” shipments. Suddenly the judge had not been able to restrain himself. Something about the little-boy cowlick on the police chief’s head infuriated him; stupidity passing for innocence. “Greed is so ugly in the police,” the judge said, “and really, it is quite useless to talk about law and order if you can’t control greedy ‘pigs.’ ” Arne was delighted with the police chief’s shocked expression at his use of the term pigs in the conversation. Arne had continued, “The French call the police vaches—‘cows.’ All I can picture are the milk cows on the old man’s ranch with bright green shit smeared all over their asses.” The judge wanted to make a point clear to the young cop: they had hired him out of Phoenix to work for them.

  Arne waited for some response, but the police chief had been too stunned by the attack. “Get too greedy and see what happens,” the judge said. “I’ve been on the federal bench for twenty-five years. There’s only so much pie to go around. Get out of line too often and the feds will call secret grand juries and flush you down the crapper like they did your predecessor.” The young police chief nodded soberly. The judge put a hand on the chief’s arm. “No hard feelings, Sean,” Judge Arne said, “I only tell you this for your own good. Clean house the first chance you get.” The young police chief nodded solemnly; the judge saw big circles of sweat under both the cop’s arms. “The men call what they take ‘combat pay’ and ‘fringe benefits,’ ” the police chief said hopefully, but the judge had turned away abruptly, leaving the police chief in midsentence. Arne was in no mood to argue about police salaries or Arizona’s brain-dead economy. Arizona had been sliding toward the financial abyss for years. One disaster had followed another. Arizona’s tax revenues had plunged. Hughes, Motorola, IBM—the list ran on and on; like rats off a sinking ship they had relocated to Denver or Las Vegas.

  The judge did not bother to look back or wave to the police chief. The senator had let the cat out of the bag the other night at the Thursday Club. The senator had been too drunk to stand up or focus his eyes, but he had delivered one of his spontaneous sermons, this time in front of the big urinal in the downstairs bathroom. “Things are looking up! Things are looking up,” the senator said, all the while letting his limp cock droop in his hand and piss on his own shoes. The judge had stayed close by to be sure the senator did not let too many cats out of the bag. The senator had just finished briefings about top-secret U.S. border policy. Yes, Arizona’s economy would certainly look up if suddenly, overnight, Tucson became command headquarters for all U.S. military forces assembled along the Mexican border.

  Judge Arne eased the Mercedes onto the dirt road to the home place. He was thinking about Max Blue’s wife, Leah, the real estate tycoon. She had spent millions drilling the deepest water wells in North America. The water from her deep wells had been salty, but all the better for her “canals of Venice.” Leah Blue was a gambler. Even the most expensive spas and resorts for the rich in Tucson had lost money, but that did not discourage Leah about her dream city in the desert. Leah Blue was lucky. Thanks to the judge’s directed verdict, she had all the water she wanted without interference from environmentalists or Indian tribes. If U.S. troops were sent into Mexico to restore order at the request of the Mexican president, then Tucson and all the border states would be booming again, and Leah Blue would be rich beyond imagination. Beside her, Max Blue would be a minor league player even with his assassination franchise.

  It was always a relief to come home to his basset hounds after a day in the courtroom. The judge had the maid and cook leave each night by six because he wanted to enjoy his privacy. The judge rather liked how fierce the badger hunters were with their huge basset heads, and thick dirt-digging claws; and yet bassets were nearly helpless without human assistance during mating. Bassets and basset-breeding weren’t for everyone; how many people wanted to guide a wet, pink, banana-size basset-hound prick into a bitch in heat? The judge certainly didn’t mind, but he knew he was not like others. Basset-breeding had required the utmost dedication for hundreds of years, by European nobles who had selectively bred the dogs for badger hunting.

  The judge poured himself a martini from the chilled shaker the cook always prepared and refrigerated before she went home. He went outside to sit on the patio where he could watch the kennel runs and his bassets, all barking their greetings to him. He closed his eyes, took a sip, and settled back on his chaise lounge. The martini warmed his veins and he began to relax. It was always a mistake to work with the dogs if he was tense or had had a difficult day. More and more he enjoyed being alone with only his dogs for companionship. During his sexually active years he had always preferred prostitutes of either sex. He did not think gender really mattered; sex after all was only a bodily function, a kind of expulsion of the sex fluids into some receptacle or another. Now at the Thursday Club, Arne found he was far more excited by watching the antics of the other club members or the sex videos on the club’s big-screen TV. Even the two or three words one had to speak to a whore were too many words to waste on such creatures. Sex had always been filthy and deadly even before the outbreak of AIDS.

  How much better the old man’s methods had been—how casually the old man had unbuttoned the fly of his trousers, then slipped his hard dick into the milk cow’s heifer tied and hobbled in the barn. Arne had watched his grandfather speechlessly. The heifer did not seem to mind. The old man’s dick was long and rather thin like a bull’s pizzle anyway. Afterward the old man had talked about the Greeks and their gods and the offspring of the gods who were part man and part horse or part man and part bull. Even as a young boy, Arne had not been confused. He knew there could be no such thing as minotaurs or centaurs. But even then, Arne had understood the old man’s urge to fantasize that he was no longer a man, but a bull.

  The bassets were pure and noble. They waited their turns with him one by one; it was their ritual, their excited barking in anticipation; then, after martinis, he had sex with the four bitches. His basset stud was a good sport. The bitches were receptive to the dog only twice a year, but they had been trained to accept their master from behind anytime. The stud dog smelled what went on in the bedroom off the patio; by the time it was his turn, the basset stud had performed gloriously on Arne, who lay belly down on Mother’s carved mahogany bed. Nothing was as deliriously potent as the orgasms that seized Arne when he fucked his basset hounds.

  TUCSON’S SEX MALL

  LEAH BLUE was already late for her meeting with Trigg, but she stopped her Mercedes anyway to look at the site of her dream city. Grayish gravel and yellowish creosote bushes were all that we
re there now, but since Judge Arne had thrown out the last motions for an injunction, Blue Water Development Corporation could begin construction on the hundreds of miles of canals that would crisscross the entire development. She imagined how stunned, then proud, her father and her brothers would be when they saw all the maps and blueprints. The water wasn’t just decoration either; the sight of foundations and canals everywhere was reassuring to newcomers in the desert. Surveys showed both residential and commercial buyers responded most strongly to property with flowing water; in the absence of a bubbling stream, fountains or canals greatly enhanced chances for quick sales. Leah closed her eyes and could see it all—sapphire water in canals weaving between brilliant white walls of palazzos and villas bordered with lawns that ran into fairways and greens. No vulgar wire fencing or asphalt parking lots in Venice, Arizona.

  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 Tuc
son 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.