Drowning Tucson (42 page)

She lay down, her mind sluggish, and when Brightstar blew out the candle, she whispered for him to come hold her. I just want to be held. So he did. And they slept that way while above them the mall parking lot emptied and outside the entrance to the tunnels shadows grew longer and a few of the Kings climbed down into the arroyo to smoke grass and spray graffiti atop the newly painted symbols of a rival gang.

It was the first night her nightmares began. While Rainbow slept in Brightstar’s arms, she bucked and kicked, breathing short, ragged breaths and murmuring unintelligible sentences, which despite their confusion, had a tone that filled Brightstar with sadness.

It was during these moments that Rainbow dreamed she was running, her breathing grew rapid and harried, her feet hurt as though they were pounding the ground, rocks and cactus and animal bones cutting into her soles as she ran faster and faster across the desert hardpan, and then her feet left the ground and she flew above the earth, her body rising into the sky before she realized it, up an invisible spiral that took her higher than the tallest buildings of Tucson, higher than the Catalinas and the Tucson Mountains. She flew into the air until the grid of the city lay beneath her and she was able to take it all in without moving her eyes at all. And then her body stopped. She floated in the night sky, among the stars, and watched as the city went about its business. Planes flew beneath her and scuffed runways with their tires. Tucson’s tallest building towered above the landscape, its red aircraft warning lights
blinking and keeping watch over the city. Cars rumbled back and forth and in circles and inexplicable patterns until it made her dizzy. She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them. When she focused again on the city below, her heart threatened to explode at the sight of the earth barreling toward her, and suddenly she was floating above a playground in some schoolyard where, under the cover of night, she watched two men pin a girl against a domed set of monkey bars while a third raped her. She levitated there, mere inches above them, and tried to kick at the men. To punch them. She cursed them and threw futile, underwater punches that made no impact and wouldn’t have hurt if they had. She cried out and tried to look away, but the dream only became distorted and the men moved faster, took turns, pinned the poor girl harder against the bars—Rainbow heard the girl’s back and ribs cracking from the pressure—and beat her and raped her and threw her to the ground and kicked her and ran off at breakneck speed, leaving her weeping and fumbling with the gravel, trying to find the torn clothing just beyond her reach. Rainbow tried to speak. To tell the girl everything would be okay because she was alive and Rainbow had seen everything and would help her back into her clothes and go with her to a police station.

Then she was flying again, away from the girl and the playground and the city. She was looking at the grid of lights and trying to keep her stomach from emptying itself onto her clothing and splashing to the earth like a bile-cursed rain until she was falling toward the city again. Rainbow kicked in her sleep and Brightstar held her tighter, shushing her and wiping the sweat from her face with his shirtsleeve. But Rainbow continued to dream. She couldn’t stop it. There were mothers weeping and bodies strewn about the desert. Prayers sailed past her, desperate cries from the victims below. She flew into the city and watched as someone bled to death in a culvert behind an adult bookstore on Speedway. She was sucked into the living room of a young family just as a drunk driver smashed through the wall, throwing their newborn daughter from her crib, just past Rainbow—she felt the baby’s nightgown brush the tips of her fingers—and she listened to the crunch of the baby’s body slamming against the opposite wall and the last breath of air that escaped her body in a small and devastating puff. She flew out
of that home and into another. She came upon a man who lay staring at the ceiling, trembling in his bed, terrified because he’d seen a much older version of himself downtown, completely by chance, and he knew that he would become a wino, lying passed out in his own piss and vomit in the doorway of an abandoned business, beaten by street punks and covered in pigeon shit and left to rot. Rainbow was forced to watch as a father of three children, on his way home from work, fell asleep at the wheel and slammed into the side of a train, and the car and the man were shredded while the train dragged them along the length of Tucson and out into the desert. Her heart broke again and again as the people of Tucson held vigils by the hospital beds of their loved ones succumbing to the final blows of cancer. She overheard the name of a stillborn child. A young woman lamented the loss of her first love. A child awoke screaming in an empty room.

She soared over the city, dipping in and out of various lives. Experiencing the losses and the tears and the dashed hopes. The lives scattered beneath her. She wished for it to stop but knew it wouldn’t. She tried to wake up. She wished aloud to die along with, or in the place of, one of these people. She tried to pull the bloated infant body out of the half-empty pool of an abandoned motel by the interstate. The city dragged out its dead and left-for-dead and she had to watch and say nothing. And do nothing. She begged for it to stop, but the words couldn’t form in her mouth. If only she could tell just one mother where her kidnapped child was buried. If she could tell the wife that her husband felt nothing when he was pulled beneath the train because a strip of the car’s metal hood pierced his skull immediately upon impact, sparing the man from the torture of having his body strewn about the city of Tucson and eaten by the vultures and wild dogs.

Then she heard the unmistakable sound of water, and to the north an enormous wave came surging over the Tortolita Mountains, rushing toward the city and destroying everything in its path. It swept over the mountains, crashing into the Catalinas, burying the landscape in minutes, wiping out the entire population of Tucson. The city wailed and shrieked and then fell silent as the water rose higher.

Rainbow could turn away, but she couldn’t ignore the terrible knowledge that something atrocious was going to happen just on the other side of her closed eyelids. She wanted to claw her eyes from their sockets but could only claw the air. She lifted her head and unleashed a scream that caught in her throat and lingered there, stewing and churning, refusing to leave her mouth, choking and gagging her as she coughed and tried to spit the scream out, but her mouth was too dry, and the scream scratched the roof of her mouth and scraped against her teeth and cut into her gums and caked her tongue, and she hacked and shook her head with such force that she finally freed herself from her nightmare and awoke in a dark concrete tunnel, in the arms of a stranger, sweating and shaking violently.

Brightstar brushed her hair back from her face. He blew on her to cool her forehead and said don’t be afraid. I’ve been to the desert and I’ve seen how it can be. I know how humans are. Rainbow nodded, grateful to be alive and in Brightstar’s strong arms. He smelled. He stunk like urine and rotten alcohol, but she was so happy to not be alone she let him hold her and whisper how she was safe with him because he’d been in war and seen awful things and yet he still came out of it alive. People thought he was crazy, but he was just realistic, because that’s what it took to survive. When it had been life-or-death in the jungles of Nam, Brightstar had no problem putting a bullet through the forehead of a wandering child. Because children don’t wander alone when there’s a war. If they do, they’re strapped with homemade bombs. He’d seen it himself, he told Rainbow. During his tour he once saw a terrified kid running toward a fellow soldier, crying, pointing toward a hut smoldering nearby and blabbering in Vietnamese, tears washing the mud down his cheeks, and the Marine knelt down and set his rifle on the ground beside him, holding out his arms to comfort the little boy—he had a kid at home roughly the same age—and the child ran to the Marine, who welcomed him to his chest, wrapping his arms around the little boy and palming the back of his head, pressing the tear-stained face into the crook of his neck, which was the last thing Brightstar saw before both bodies exploded and sprayed fleshy chunks and bony shrapnel into the faces of his battle buddies, most of whom gagged and cried out, not understanding what had
caused the child and their fellow soldier to erupt into the bloody mess that was running down their faces and turning their vision red, and one of them spat a piece of the Marine out of his mouth and vomited into his cupped hands, unable to stop the retching and the convulsing as he tried to clear the metallic taste of his dead comrade from his tongue. So after that, every time Brightstar found a child wandering alone in the jungle, he didn’t take chances. He shot each little fucker through the forehead and walked on before the body had slumped to the ground. It was like killing a mosquito. He put about that much thought into it. And that’s what it takes to survive down here in the bowels of the city, he told her. So you’re going to be okay. Because I have what it takes to survive. You just have to learn it too.

Rainbow shuddered at the thought of this man who now held her killing children to stay alive. She didn’t want to think of him as a murderer. But she understood he’d had reasons to kill. It was necessary. So she told him her nightmares, how frightening and real they were, Brightstar, to watch everyone’s misery. To see everything, even the private things. It was too much. I just wanted to die.

Brightstar shushed her softly and told her not to worry, that there were ways to survive. There were things she could do. And he would help her, he would protect her until she could take care of herself. Then he rose to head aboveground and called back to her that it was daylight now so it was safe to leave and wash up in the mall bathrooms. And then he was gone.

Rainbow decided she first wanted to investigate the rest of the tunnels, now that the danger seemed less real than it had the evening before. What she discovered was that the tunnels ran beneath the entire mall and its parking lot, all the way from Wilmot to the west end of the mall right next to the McDonald’s on Broadway. They were immense and foreboding. It was so strange that the city above seemed to have no idea these tunnels existed. She left the tunnel where she and Brightstar had slept, and went back out into the wash. The sunlight warmed her skin and made last night’s fears and nightmares seem foolish and girly.

She turned around and faced the entrance to the three tunnels. The middle one was where she’d slept. The other two were beckoning her to
enter. She stepped inside the tunnel on the left, bending enough so that she wouldn’t hit her head on the concrete ceiling, and walked forward, touching the ground lightly with the toe of her flip-flop before stepping with all her weight, unsure of what might be underfoot. She walked in this manner almost five minutes and then saw light in the distance and realized she’d almost made it through the first tunnel, which was far shorter than she had expected. That gave her a little more confidence, so she quickened her pace until she reached the end, where she emerged from the tunnel and looked around the wash, which ran down the middle of an alley, backyard walls lining both sides.

She climbed up to the edge of the wash and looked up and down the alley. There was more graffiti, but no one was in sight so she scrambled down into the wash and back to the tunnel. She went back inside and walked past bottles and empty spray-paint cans and a sock and a pair of panties and trash everywhere. She walked on at a steady pace, crouching sometimes to avoid hitting her head, and traveling more quickly than she had before until she arrived at the tunnel’s end and stepped out. The first tunnel wasn’t so bad. She felt a little uneasy, but much less so now that she saw there was nothing but trash and signs of people drinking or just relaxing. But there was one tunnel left. And this one scared her. There wasn’t as much litter in this entrance, and the graffiti petered off a few feet into the tunnel. It was as if this one were off-limits, even to the people who dared enter the first two. But it didn’t look nearly as terrifying in the daylight as it had the night before, so instead of leaving and going aboveground to freshen up, she walked into the final tunnel and felt her way along the walls, stepping lightly, kicking trash and old clothing and cardboard and a small dead animal, walking farther and farther into the tunnel until she lost track of time and distance, her skin getting sweaty with uncertainty and her fingers running along the wall more slowly, suddenly more aware, feeling every single grain of dirt in the cement walls, every crack and abnormality in the smooth surface, and her hearing grew more acute and she heard the silence of the earth, heard it shifting and trying to throw off the weight of the buildings overhead, and for a brief moment Rainbow began to panic, realizing she was beneath countless tons of cement, walking underneath a mall, and
the whole thing could collapse, trapping her in the tunnel, crushed beneath the cement and the bricks and the graffiti, drowning underground in a heap of man-made material that would pulverize and smother her, but probably leave just enough space for her to breathe in agony for a few more seconds, maybe a couple minutes, and then she’d be gone. Just like that.

But then the panic subsided and Rainbow knew the structure was sound, even with a few superficial cracks, and despite not knowing what was in here, she knew that there was enough room down here for her and Brightstar to live comfortably. So she walked the rest of the way, forcing herself to breathe steadily, wondering when she would reach the end, but not particularly worried because the place was strangely beginning to feel like a home. No other people would bother her as long as she had Brightstar.

When she finally reached the end, she immediately turned around to go back the way she came. This far entrance had the same graffiti. The same bottles and trash. It was nothing to fear. Just some punk kids playing tough. So she walked back through the tunnel more confidently, observing the change in temperature the farther in she went, getting excited and like any new homeowner, she started figuring out the layout of the place so she could designate different areas for different purposes. She could scrounge a few dime books from the thrift store and a cheap flashlight for reading at night. Rainbow continued walking, considering the possibilities, pleased by the size and the privacy and the sturdiness of her new home.