Phoenix Noir

The other roommate was Jaimie. She was a native of the city, and had been doing well in her life until she’d suffered a head injury when a stranger stomped her for no reason that anybody knew of. Now she was frightened all the time, and never left the apartment unless she had to. She would often forget what she was talking about in the middle of a sentence. She worked part-time as what she called a “telephone actress,” talking dirty to men who called a phone sex company which patched the calls to her home number.

After paying her rent in advance, Vanjii had less than forty dollars. Her father had given her the money for the rent and the bus trip to Phoenix. She knew it wouldn’t be hard to find a job, but she didn’t have a car, and the bus service was a joke.

The apartment was on Seventeenth Avenue and Highland, about a mile away from the Spectrum Mall. On her third day in Phoenix, Vanjii walked to the mall and talked a clothing store into hiring her.

The walk to work was dreamlike. Some of the streets had no sidewalks, so she walked in the gutter. Everything seemed too huge, fast, and loud to be real. The cars blasted by, the drivers sometimes yelling at her just because she was walking. She felt so tiny. The only other people she saw walking were homeless, and they always came up to her, and they always said the same thing. Hey. Hey, I ain’t panhandling. It’s just that my car ran out of gas a couple miles away, and I lost my wallet, and my wife and kids are in the car, and … Vanjii had nothing she could give them.

The heat didn’t seem too bad while she was walking. But when she headed into the mall, with its air-conditioned chill, and sat down, the sweat came out so fast she felt like it was spurting out of her pores. She’d go into the restroom, take off her shirt, and wipe herself down with paper towels, then put on some deodorant. She’d work all day, stopping only to eat the lunch she’d packed. When she walked back home, it would be getting dark and she’d be nervous, but she knew it wouldn’t be long until she’d have saved a few hundred dollars and could buy a car.

Vanjii wondered about Luis, but it all seemed so far away that it didn’t hurt as much as she’d thought it would.

Luis had been in a bar on Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe when it all started to go to shit. He was talking to a guy about selling a little pot, something to make some quick money, to keep eating and maybe pay next month’s rent. It was about 7 in the evening, happy hour in the bar. The place was crowded, and the parking lot was full, so Luis had parked in a small lot across the street.

Luis crossed the street in the darkness and walked into the lot. When he reached his car, he saw that it had been wheel-clamped.

He stood and looked at it. Then he got in the car and sat there. “Fuck!” The word came out on a breath of laughter, but his face was wet with tears. He wiped his face with his hands and sat breathing quietly, trying to get ahold of himself. Then he stepped out of the car and walked around the building, hoping it was still open. It wasn’t.

As he moved back to his car, a white man approached him.

“Is this your car?”

“Yeah.” Luis pointed to the clamp. “I don’t get this.”

“I did it. I’m Dan Ward, I’m a partner in this company—”

“What company?”

He pointed at the building. “This company. We’re a security company. This parking lot’s private property.”

“I didn’t know … Sorry. I didn’t see no sign.”

“It should be obvious that this isn’t public parking.”

“Yeah. Sorry. I had to meet a guy in the bar over there, I couldn’t find a place to park. I didn’t see nobody here, so I thought it’d be okay.”

“Well, you can see that it’s not.”

“Can you take that thing off my car and I’ll go?”

Dan Ward nodded. “Sure. If you want to pay me your fine now.”

“What?”

“There’s a forty-dollar fine for parking here.”

“Bullshit. You can’t do that. You can’t just decide to fine somebody. You can tell me to get out of your parking lot, that’s all.”

“I’m not interested in a legal debate. I’m telling you there’s a clamp on your car, and it’s not coming off until you give me forty dollars.”

“I don’t have forty dollars.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Honest to God, I got about twenty, and I need that. It’s all the money I got.”

Ward looked at him and said nothing.

“Look, how about if I give you my address and you can—”

“Yeah, sure.” Ward laughed. “How about if you come back here when you’ve got the money, and you can have your car back.”

“Okay,” said Luis. “Okay. I’ll give it to you now. Here …” He reached inside a pocket of his jacket.