In the morning, First Born gathered up a few small, sharp rocks from these mountains and threw them into some water. They grew sharp and white and long, just the way rattlesnake teeth are today. First Born gave them to Rattlesnake and said to him, “Here. Now the children will no longer torment you, but from this day on, you will have no friends. You must crawl on your belly and live alone. If anything comes near you, you must bite it and kill it.”
And that, nawoj, my Friend, is the story of how Ko’oi, Rattlesnake, got his teeth.
In a lifetime of serial matrimony, Myrna Louise Spaulding had worked her way through a list of last names far too numerous to remember. Like overly zealous Chicago voters, she cast her ballot in favor of marriage, voting early and often. She always married for love, never for money. She always divorced for the same reason-true love-which may have been true at the time but never lasted long. Myrna Louise wasn’t a risk-taker. She never slipped one wedding band off her much-used ring finger without having a pretty good replacement prospect lined up and waiting in the wings.
Her son, Andrew Carlisle, found his mother’s peculiar penchant disturbing at first, humorous later, and ultimately boring. In his opinion, if Myrna Louise had been any good at the game, she would have seen to it that she picked up a few good pieces of change here and there along the way. But no. With one minor exception, she always targeted bums and ne’er-do-wells who were far worse off mentally and financially than she was.
Her last husband, Jake Spaulding-who also happened to be her late husband-had managed to roll over and die before the divorce was final. Much to her stepchildren’s dismay, Jake died without first revising his will. He left Myrna Louise in sole possession of the little family house on Weber Drive.
As a neighborhood, Weber Drive didn’t have much to recommend it, unless you liked the multicolored jack-in-the-box on the corner, but the house constituted a roof over Myrna Louise’s head for a change. On her meager pension and with the widow’s mite she had lucked into after Jake Spaulding’s timely death, she figured she’d barely be able to cover both taxes and utilities.
A bit down-at-the-heels, Weber Drive still managed to be respectable enough, and even a bit self-righteous. Myrna Louise had made tentative overtures of friendship toward some of the neighbors. She was determined to fit in here, to really belong someplace at last. Her son’s unexpected arrival was a definite fly in the ointment. Those very same neighbors might well pull the welcome mat right out from under the mother of an ex-con.
“Why, what in the world are you doing here?” a stunned Myrna Louise demanded, covering her dismay as best she could when the opened door revealed her son waiting on her doorstep.
“I came to see my mama,” he said with a smile. “I thought you’d be glad to see me after all this time.”
“Oh, I am. Of course I am. Come in. Come in here right now. But why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”
“Because I didn’t know, not for sure, anyway. They like to keep people guessing until the very last minute. It makes for better control.”
She dragged Andrew into the living room and stood looking fuzzily up at him. Myrna Louise should have taken to wearing glasses years before, but she usually couldn’t afford it, and besides, she was far too vain. A driver’s license might have forced her into glasses earlier, but she’d never owned a car, not until now. Jake’s car was still out in the garage. She planned to sell it if money ever got really tight.
“So are you out on parole, or what?” she asked petulantly.
“I’m out period, Mama. Free as a bird.”
“Good,” she said. She paused uncertainly. “Andrew, I’d really like it if the neighbors didn’t find out. About where you’ve been, I mean. Not that I’m ashamed or anything, it’s just that it’d be easier. .”
“I’m still your son,” he began.
“Don’t let’s be difficult. You see, you’ve been having all that mail sent here, all those things for Phil Wharton, whoever he is. I’ve been saving them, keeping them here for you just like you said. Who is he anyway, a friend of yours or what?”
“It’s a pen name, Mama. I couldn’t very well send things out with my own name on them, now could I.”
“Thank goodness,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, that’s sort of what I’ve been pretending. That you were him, or at least that Phil Wharton was my son.”
“You’ve been telling your friends that I’m Phil?”
Myrna Louise cringed at the hard edge of anger in his voice. “I didn’t mean any harm, Andrew. One of the ladies was here when the mail came one day. She saw it on the table and asked about it. I told her that you’re a journalist who’s been out of the country working on assignment and that you’d be home soon.”
“So you’ve lied to them?”
“Please, Andrew, I. .”
Andrew had her dead to rights, but the idea of his mother making up that kind of whopper was really pretty funny. He decided to let her off the hook. After all, it was his first night home.
“It’s okay, Mama. The name’s Phil, remember?”
Breathing a sigh of relief, Myrna Louise smiled gratefully. He was going to go along with it and not embarrass her in front of her friends. She wouldn’t be expelled from the morning coffee break after all.
At once she switched into full motherly mode. “Have you had any dinner? Are you hungry?”
Sure he was hungry. Why wouldn’t he be hungry? It had been a busy day, a trying day. Besides, hiking up and down mountains always gives a man one hell of an appetite.
Diana waited until the sun went down before she tried going up on the roof to work on the cooler. No wonder people called them swamp coolers. The thick, musty odor was unmistakable, gagging. Diana climbed up the ladder armed with a bottle of PineSol. She raised one side of the cooler and poured several glugs of powerful disinfectant into the water. The oily, piny scent wasn’t a big improvement, but it helped.
After returning the side of the cooler to its proper position, Diana stood for a few moments on the flat, graveled roof to survey her domain. The wild and forbidding front yard remained much as it had been when she first bought the place. An overgrown thicket of head-high prickly pear cast bizarre, donkey-eared shadows in the frail moonlight. She had spent far more effort in back, where both yard and patio were surrounded by a massive six-foot-high rock wall. The end result was almost a fortress. Inside that barrier, she felt safe and protected.
The house and outbuildings, sturdily constructed in the early twentieth century and lovingly remodeled during the twenties, had originally belonged to one of Pima County’s pioneer families. When family fortunes fell on hard times and when surviving family members dwindled to only one dotty eighty-year-old lady, most of the land, with the exception of the house, cook shack, and barn, had been deeded over to the county as payment for back taxes. That had been during the late forties. The old lady, who wasn’t expected to live much longer anyway, had been allowed lifetime tenancy in the house, with her estate authorized to sell off the remainder after her death.
The old lady confounded all predictions and lived to a ripe 101, refusing to leave the walled confines of the compound until the very end, but letting the place fall to wrack and ruin around her. She died, and the wreckage went up for sale at almost the same time Gary Ladd’s life-insurance proceeds came into Diana’s hands.
After spending her entire childhood in housing tied to her father’s job, Diana Ladd wanted desperately to escape the mobile home in the Topawa Teachers’ Compound housing, to bring her baby home to a house that belonged to her rather than to her employer. She jumped at the chance to buy the derelict old house.