Gloriana Alden-Taylor wasn't exactly satisfied. The word “satisfaction” rarely appeared in her personal lexicon, but with two new titles due out by Patriot's Blood Press by the end of the week, she felt gratified. Both books had money written all over them, especially A Man Stands Alone, that odd little memoir penned by the Death Row inmate. She hoped the man wouldn't get the needle before she could coax a sequel from the recalcitrant creature. Say what you will about serial killers, some of them could really write.
Lips stretched into a rare smile, Gloriana let the waiter exchange her half-eaten Arizona Agave Salad for an even stranger chicken dish, then peered around the banquet hall. Was it her imagination, or had the number of publishers attending the Southwest Book Publisher's Expo - SOBOP, to its friends - actually doubled since last year? Her smile faded. If the field became too crowded, her own market share might decline.
Gloriana was just wondering what strategy might work best if one of her competitors encroached upon her own hard-won territory when her heart began to race. The sensation wasn't unpleasant at first; it felt more like the bumpity-bump she'd experienced when she read the first-ever New York Times review of a Patriot's Blood title. Hardly a rave - vilification would be a more accurate term - but the national coverage put her little publishing house on the map. Almost immediately, orders from Idaho, Utah, Montana, and even Vancouver flooded the sales department. Patriot's Blood had become international! Bad reviews be damned, sales was the name of the publishing game.
Someone laughed, high and screechy.
Frowning with disapproval, Gloriana looked for the laugher, only to find her table mates staring at her, mouths agog. When she shut her own mouth, the sound stopped.
"Oh, lord," she said, patting her lips with the overly starched napkin the waiter had foisted upon her. "I can't imagine what brought that on."
The brown man sitting next to her put his hand on her arm. What was his name? Something ridiculous, if she remembered correctly. Hernando O'Riley? Sean Gonzales? Just the thought of his name started another paroxysm.
"Mrs. Alden-Taylor, are you feeling all right?" asked the brown man with the ridiculous name. His voice sounded strange to her, thick and grumbly, like some fairy tale ogre howling up from the bottom of a well. Surely she couldn't be losing her hearing. Then again, with her seventy-sixth birthday just around the corner...
Annoyed, she slapped his hand away. "Of course I'm feeling all right, you fool. Why wouldn't I?" Then, with a spasm-like motion, she stood up and stepped away from the table, all the while noticing her heart beat faster and faster, as if it were in a hurry to get someplace exciting. Perhaps the whole thing should have alarmed her, but it was fun, really, what the young people today called an adrenaline rush.
When she settled down, though, she'd have to talk to the resort manager about the banquet hall's lighting. What did he think he was doing, lighting a movie set? As she squinted her eyes against the glare, her hands and feet began to tingle. Maybe she should move around more, get her circulation going. Old age was such a bitch.
The people at the other tables gaped at her again. Not that she could blame them, because to her consternation she realized she was walking around in tiny circles, her legs lifting high in the air like a drum majorette's.
She wanted to ask the brown man if he knew why she was doing such a strange thing, but her throat, the same throat which had issued those bursts of laughter just moments before had begun to narrow. Now she could only utter ungainly uh-uh-uh sounds.
How embarrassing! Almost as embarrassing as the nausea which threatened to make itself evident at any moment.
"Mrs. Alden-Taylor, I think we need to call..."
Before the brown man with the ridiculous name finished his sentence, Gloriana spewed her dinner. Then, horror upon horror, her knees buckled and she fell to the floor, landing face down in the middle of the puddle. But her legs continued to high-step, high-step, high-step on the way to some mysterious destination.
And what was this new mess?
If she hadn't known better, she'd swear that she, Gloriana Alden-Taylor, descendant of the Plymouth Brethren, kin to senators and presidents, was actually frothing at the mouth.
"I need to clear her airway!" A woman's voice. That dermatologist she'd been talking to earlier, the one who published the skin care books.
Skin care books in the desert, such a waste of time and money.
Anyone with half a brain knew that no matter how much you pampered your skin in Arizona, by the time you were fifty you looked like a wrinkled old prune. Hadn't her husband constantly reminded her of that? "Old Prune Face," Michael had called her, pretending to joke. But she knew, oh, she knew. The slur was his way of excusing his behavior with all those sluts.
Yes, his words had hurt, but she enjoyed her consolations. At least she was now a rich old prune, every sag, every crease bespeaking her Mayflower lineage. Why, she was American royalty!
Just before her throat closed for good, it relaxed long enough for her to rasp, "Prune!"
Then the pain began, Jesus, the pain. Had she broken her hip in the fall? No, everything hurt, quite possibly because her body was bending backwards on itself, her head almost touching her heels. Ahhhhh...
A few minutes later, Gloriana Alden-Taylor's heart stopped. Despite the dermatologist's efforts, it never started again.
As he watched her die, the brown man with the ridiculous name murmured, "Prune? I wonder what she meant by that..."
Desert Noir - Excerpts
The freeway which separated Scottsdale from the Pima-Maricopa Salt River Reservation was originally going to be named in honor of Jimmy's tribe, but then an effort was launched to rename it the "John Wayne Highway." Since Wayne had spent much of his movie career slaughtering Indians, the Pimas - who had always been peaceful farmers - were not amused.
Anglos loved the state's Hispanic heritage, Hispanic food, Hispanic beer, Hispanic art, Hispanic clothes, Hispanic architecture. In fact, Anglos loved everything Hispanic except the Hispanics themselves.
For the past decade, Scottsdale - founded after the civil War by Winfield Scott, a U.S. Army chaplain - and whose slogan was once, ‘The West's Most Western Town,’ had been overrun by Californians fleeing earthquakes, New Yorkers fleeing crime, and Chicagoans sick of shoveling snow. While the influx was good for the tax base, Scottsdale was now suffering from a host of urban ills, including streets too narrow for the increased traffic. Not a day went by that some rancher didn’t sideswipe some underdressed immigrant on roller blades.
While present zoning restrictions protected the remaining part of Camelback Mountain, the once-magnificent peak was already ruined. The heat rose in waves from the desert floor below, and the ostentatious mansions clinging to the hillside appeared to wiggle in the sun. They looked like gyrating hookers at a Sierra Club dance.
I swung a hard left at the pseudo Space Age grandeur of Pioneer Park (triangular-shaped "sails" hovering over large round globes tacked onto improbably curved pieces of metal), then shot down Central Avenue past the Westward Ho Hotel. The grand old building had once housed Marilyn Monroe when she filmed The Misfits, but since then, had degenerated into a welfare hotel.
And that was the true story of the West. Forget Marilyn and Roy Rogers and the Riders of the Purple Sage. The West has become a place where luxury sedans run down coyotes and arrogant architects view shaman-haunted vistas as nothing more than empty lots suitable for building monuments to their own egos. Every time I drove along this raped section of the Valley of the Sun, my trigger finger started to itch.
