Drowning Tucson (40 page)

She didn’t do this out of cruelty. Rainbow was not a cruel woman. Sure, she’d seen a vast amount of cruelty in her time walking the blocks of Tucson’s squalid hotels and strip clubs named Miracle Mile—the thefts, the beatings, the “doctor” who performed fifty-dollar abortions in the back of his van, even an occasional hearse parked tastefully behind a hotel to collect the body of one of her fellow streetwalkers—yet after almost six years of full-time hooking, she was practically the same woman she had been going into the business. A little older. A little less pleasing to the eyes. Slightly more bitter. More self-protective. But not cruel.

She knew this much about herself, and it helped her reconcile her line of work with the way the public frequently spoke of it. Cruelty and desperation were two completely different demons, after all.

So it wasn’t cruelty that made Rainbow rifle through the pockets of the dead man lying in her path. She was just barely old enough to drink legally, and still wishing some kindhearted man might save her. Hoping he might look beyond her past and take her away and give her a nice home where she could raise two or three kids, maybe plant a garden and put up a clothesline. She’d dress the kids real nice for school every morning, teach them to brush their teeth, maybe even
take them to church on Sundays if her husband wanted them raised as good Catholics.

In the corpse’s pockets Rainbow found three dollars, a pack of E-Z-Wider rolling papers, and an expired Sun-Tran bus transfer. She kept the three dollars.

After staring silently at the body for what she felt was the appropriate amount of time, having long ago given up on prayer but unable to break herself of certain habits, Rainbow crossed herself, stepped over it, and ducked into the entrance to one of the three concrete drainage tunnels that ran beneath Park Mall and emptied into the Alamo wash. The body would be gone soon enough, carried away by desert animals or the next flashflood, whichever found the body first.

Despite the danger of going down into the cement labyrinth alone, and she knew how dangerous this was, Rainbow still made it a point to visit the tunnels every few months, because she often grew nostalgic for the days when she lived there beneath the city with a homeless Vietnam vet named Brightstar. At fifteen, when her mother abandoned her shortly after Rainbow’s grandfather passed away, it was Brightstar who’d first protected her and taken her to his concrete hideout running under the length of the sprawling mall parking lot, a claustrophobic hallway that provided protection from the sun, the police, and the gangs prowling the neighborhoods in central Tucson.

When Marísol Delgado lost her virginity to her grandfather at the age of thirteen, she didn’t make a sound. She was too surprised it didn’t hurt like the girls at school said it would. Instead, she actually felt a deep sense of relief, as if she’d finally scratched an unreachable itch. The sensation of her grandfather lying on top of her, breathing heavily in her ear and whispering I love you more than you’ll ever know, Marísol, my little pomegranate, was the same feeling she got when she received more valentines in her basket at school than the other girls—which had, admittedly, only occurred once, in the second grade—or when she came home waving her straight-A report card and her mother wrapped her in a big hug and told her how proud she was of her smart baby girl for doing so well in those hard big-girl classes.

After the first time her grandfather had lain with her, after he finished and kissed her goodnight, Marísol lay awake trying to remember how to French-braid hair. How you’re supposed to grab a new strand as you go along, incorporating more and more hair with each pass. Luckily her fingers were long and nimble, so it wasn’t hard for her to manipulate the bulky clumps of hair that built up somewhere around the middle of the braid, becoming almost unmanageable. Her mother, after years of promising to teach her to French-braid, had finally shown her the previous weekend, and now Marísol was excited to practice on her dolls and one day move on to braiding her friends’ hair. It would be fun.

Right before she fell asleep, she had the idea of changing her name because there were like fourteen other Marísols in school and she hated being the same as everyone else. She wanted to be different. When she woke the next morning it was raining outside, and as she sat on the porch waiting on her mother to pick her up after her night shift at work, she decided her new name would be Rainbow. Not Rainbow Delgado. Just Rainbow. It was the perfect fit.

When her mother pulled up in front of her grandfather’s house and honked, Rainbow ran to the car full of energy and excited to reveal her new name. She tried to get her mother’s attention, to tell her mom how she was a brand-new girl, not like everyone else, but her mother was too exhausted and preoccupied to be bothered. So Rainbow kept her new name to herself until she got to school, where she announced the change through a series of notes that circulated the classroom as they studied for the CAT test.

Rainbow preferred her grandfather’s house to her own, despite her home’s cleanliness—and it truly was immaculate, she actually
had
eaten off the floor a few times, just because it was clean enough to do so and because she’d even heard other people say your floor’s clean enough to eat off of, back when she was younger and her mom still had friends to invite over. Her home gave her an eerie feeling when she returned from school each day to find all the blinds closed, the swamp cooler running full blast, and her mother passed out on the couch, a forgotten cigarette dangling from between her fingers, the whole ash still intact and curiously defying gravity while her mother snored and sputtered in a deep
drunken sleep. Her house was
too
clean. Everything was in order. Perfectly aligned. All at right angles. As if her mother thought that keeping a perfectly clean house would make up for her other shortcomings. As if her mother were trying to make up for the fact that she’d somehow lost her husband—Rainbow never did find out how or why.

Each day, when Rainbow—and now everyone but her mother acknowledged her new identity—walked home from school, pulled the house key from where it dangled on a piece of yarn beneath her shirt, and unlocked the deadbolt as stealthily as possible, she cringed at the quiet and darkness, fumbled with her backpack, and placed it as silently as she could on the floor inside the front hallway closet where her mom had a box labeled MARISOL’S BACKPACK that sat between neatly arranged rows of shoes and flip-flops and Rainbow’s galoshes that she sometimes got to wear during monsoon season.

To pass the time between her arrival home and when her mother miraculously rose for work without the aid of an alarm clock, Rainbow tiptoed to her bedroom and pulled from beneath her mattress a manila envelope she’d hidden away seven years earlier and carried with her from house to house each time she and her mother were either evicted or had to find a new home because of yet another ASSHOLE landlord who can’t cut a single mom a fuckin break. Rainbow called the envelope her wedding plans envelope. It contained pictures of wedding dresses and gardens and swans and beautiful smiling women she had painstakingly cut from the pages of her school library’s and mother’s magazines over the years. Each afternoon she spent her alone time carefully arranging clippings of everything from the cakes to the minister, and then she gently put on her dress, which she had taped together from pictures of beautiful lace and the remnants of white and pink tissue paper salvaged from the gift bags she received from her mother each birthday and Christmas. And there, in the privacy of her room, while her mother slept off the morning’s alcohol, Rainbow unfolded a years-old piece of notebook paper containing the wedding vows she’d hastily copied down during her aunt’s wedding in LA—the only time she’d ever been out of Tucson—and she whispered the words while dabbing imaginary tears of joy from her eyes as she stood at the
foot of her bed, her makeshift altar adorned with glossy magazine cutouts of extravagant springtime wedding bouquets.

The one thing she never included in her wedding was a groom. Throughout her childhood her mother had raised her to be a princess—good manners, perfect posture, impeccable hygiene—but every time she asked about her prince, her mother huffed there’s no such thing, and stormed out of the room. So Rainbow never bothered to include a groom, since she wasn’t entirely sure what would make a good one anyway.

With each day that passed Rainbow felt her mother growing more distant, and she longed for the time when her mother didn’t work nights and the mornings when Rainbow used to dress up in her plastic tiara and her feather boa, sneaking into her mother’s room while she slept and slipping on her mom’s high heels like a grown-up princess. In the days before her mother took the night-shift job, Rainbow always woke her up and presented herself, and her mother smiled and cooed what a beautiful girl. You’ll grow up to be a fine woman. Yep, I’ll be beating the boys off you. After their morning ritual her mother got out of bed, patted her daughter on the head, and said let’s go to the kitchen so I can show you how to be a real princess. Her mother taught her how to poach eggs and make omelets and toast the bread just right. And for snacks she gave her celery with peanut butter, so she could watch her princess figure.

When her mother took the job as a janitor at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, all that had changed. No more breakfasts together. No more dress-up. For years now, she saw less of her mother and more of her grandfather.

Rainbow never told her mother how she lost her virginity to her grandfather. And she never mentioned that it had become a routine. To her, it seemed perfectly natural. So natural, in fact, that Rainbow often felt something was missing during the hours she spent locked in her bedroom after school, waiting until it was time for her mother to go to work again. When her mother finally woke and called for her, she hastily stashed her wedding plans envelope and packed a bag with her overnight clothes, a book, and her next day’s school outfit, then she went straight to the car to wait for her mother to come grumpily staggering
out of the house with a freshly lit cigarette and wearing her janitor’s uniform. It made Rainbow sad to look over at her mom driving, then at the ID badge with her mom smiling so happily in the little picture. She often compared the smiling face in the badge to the scowling face of her mother, and inevitably looked away from both. During the entire silent ride to her grandfather’s house, Rainbow stared out the window as her mother drove to the neighborhood where her grandfather had lived since he and his now-deceased wife had first married and raised their two daughters.

She and her grandfather quickly grew close through her visits. He read her stories and patiently explained the rules of golf while they watched tournaments on TV. He took her to the Randolph Park golf course, told her sometimes the PGA and LPGA tours come through here and said look, right over there I saw Jack Nicklaus shoot an eagle during the Chrysler Classic. It was incredible. Then he promised to take her to Golf & Stuff and teach her how to putt.

Sometimes they shopped for groceries together at Food Giant, and she laughed when he complained that the neighborhood was going to shit because of all the gangs and the punk kids loitering at all hours. When it was time to cook dinner, they put on their matching KISS THE COOK aprons and her grandfather showed her how to bake enchiladas and make his special molé sauce. He even let her listen to 93.7 KRQ, the radio station Rainbow’s mother hated because it had thinly disguised songs about sex and DJs who openly flirted on the phone with lonely teenaged girls—I can’t believe they broadcast that filth like they’re PROUD, she grumbled every time Rainbow begged to listen to the Top 9 at 9.

Each evening, when Rainbow first arrived, her grandfather pointed to the mulberry tree growing in the backyard, reminding her it was hers, and told her to go play on it. She climbed it and carved pictures of flowers and stars and smiley faces into the bark with a steak knife, and her grandfather didn’t even get angry when she sometimes ate mulberries and accidentally smeared the purple juice onto her clothing. It made her feel safe when she looked down from the tree, toward the back porch, and caught her grandfather looking up from his crossword puzzles, his ubiquitous Jack on the rocks in hand, smiling as he watched his granddaughter play outdoors.

Outside the back fence was a pomegranate tree Rainbow often wished she could climb. When the fruit fell into her grandfather’s backyard she split them open with a rock and picked out the tiny bulbs full of red juice and squirted them into her mouth with a pinch of her two little fingers while she concocted recipes for pomegranate casseroles and cakes and juice drinks that she wanted to make when she was a full-grown princess with a husband and a home of her own.

Because they spent so much time together, Rainbow slowly began to prefer her grandfather to her mother. So on the nights when he went to bed with her, it made her happy to welcome him. If he didn’t come to her within fifteen minutes of her scuffling off to bed in her nightie and fuzzy pink slippers, Rainbow sat up in a panic, clutching her bedclothes to her chest and listening for a sound, any sound, to tell her that her grandfather hadn’t forgotten her and was still coming to visit, so she could sleep easily.