Someplace to Be Flying (24 page)

“So what’s your secret?” she asked.

The woman looked startled, as much, it seemed, from the fact that she’d been approached as by the question.

“I’m Lily, by the way,” she added, offering her hand.

“Margaret.”

Her handshake was firm, her skin dry, almost rough.

“It’s just so hot,” Lily went on, “but it doesn’t seem to bother you at all.”

Margaret smiled. “If you think this is hot, don’t come visiting in the summer.”

I was right, Lily thought. She was local and probably not supposed to be on the set. Not that Lily cared. Security wasn’t her responsibility and Margaret didn’t give the impression that she was about to cause any trouble, though she did look as though she could deal with any that might come her way.

“So you’re from around here?” she asked.

“I never really think of myself as being from anywhere specific,” Margaret said. “But I’ve been most places and this is a place I always come back to.”

“Why’s that?”

Margaret cocked her head like a bird and grinned. “What are you up to tonight?”

“I don’t know. We’re finished here for the day so I guess we’ll all be going back to the motel. I’ve no idea what anybody else is planning to do, but I’m going to have a long cold shower.”

“Let me show you around a little tonight.”

Lily hesitated for a moment, then thought, why not? She was tired, but not that tired. Her only other options were staying in her motel room by herself or hanging out with the others from the shoot, which was too much like joining the band’s admiration society.

“Sure,” she said. “But I have to have that shower first. Do you know where we’re staying?”

Margaret nodded. “Do you have a car?”

“No, I came down with the crew.”

“Well, let me drive you back. I don’t want to rush you, but before we do anything else, we
have
to do the sunset and that doesn’t give us much time.”

“Do the sunset?”

“You’ll see.”

Lily glanced over to where the others were packing up. Well, in for a penny, she thought. They wouldn’t miss her, except maybe for the bass player, who’d been making it clear that he could show her a good time, all she had to do was say the word. Yuck. She turned back to Margaret.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

“This is so unbelievable,” Lily said later. Now she understood what doing the sunset meant. They’d driven west of the city to a lookout on Gates Pass Road, parked Margaret’s Jeep, and climbed the red dirt hills to a vantage point from which they could see the hills on all sides, dotted with scrub, towering saguaro, and other, smaller cacti. Staghorn, aptly named. Teddy-bear cholla which wasn’t nearly as endearing as
its
name— get too close and the thorns seemed to jump right off the plant at you. The city was a distant grid of lights and squares to the east. And in the west, the sunset.

It was like nothing Lily had ever seen before. She didn’t even bother to try to capture it on film. Instead, she wiped the dust from her glasses and then, like Margaret, she lay back on the wide flat stone that Margaret had led them to and simply let the rich palette of color swell inside her, holding it in memory where it could live forever, unchanged, untouched by the whim of how film was developed, the printer’s colors.

They weren’t alone. The parking lot by the lookout had been filled with cars and the hillside was dotted with other climbers, tourists and locals, all taking in the sight. There’d been laughter and talking while she and Margaret climbed to their vantage point, but when the sun finally floated down to the horizon, a hush fell over them all as though everyone held a collective breath.

Lily glanced at her companion. “This’d be worth living here for—all by itself.”

“I knew you’d like it,” Margaret said. “You’ve got an artist’s eye.”

“I don’t think you have to be an artist to appreciate this,” Lily told her.

“No,” Margaret agreed. “You just have to be alive.”

From the lookout, they drove to a small Mexican restaurant on Fourth Avenue called La Indita. It looked like nothing special inside—booths and some tables, set up no differently than a hundred other greasy spoons Lily had been in— but Margaret led the way through the front part of the restaurant to a patio in back overhung with vines. Lily’s stomach grumbled as they passed the kitchen and its hot spicy smells. Happily, a waiter followed them outside, bringing water, a basket of tortilla chips, and a small bowl of salsa to their table as soon as they sat down. Margaret ordered Mexican beers for both of them while Lily sampled the salsa.

“Hot,” she managed after having some water. “But good?” “Mmm.”

On the wall in front of them was a stylized terra-cotta sun with small birds perched on its beams. From the birds’ studied looks, Lily decided they were waiting for her to drop a tortilla chip on the flagstones underfoot. When she obliged, small brown shapes winging down to pluck the morsels up, she looked up to find Margaret smiling at her.

“I guess that just encourages them, doesn’t it?” Lily said, returning the smile with a rueful one of her own.

Margaret shrugged. “Even the little cousins need to eat.”

Though she wasn’t exactly sure what Margaret meant, Lily liked the sound of it. Little cousins. She crumpled another tortilla chip and tossed the broken pieces onto the flagstones for the birds, licking the salt and crumbs from her own palm.

It had cooled down with the sunset and Lily was glad she’d brought along a jacket. The change in temperature didn’t seem to faze Margaret at all. She was still in her tank top, unconcerned, boots propped up on one of the table’s spare chairs.

Lily found herself studying Margaret when she could do it without being too obvious. She loved the character in her companion’s features, the fluid shift of expressions across them, the dark wells of her eyes. She tried to place her nationality, but couldn’t. Margaret spoke fluent Spanish to the waiter, sounding like a native, but her English had a cowboy drawl that appeared entirely unaffected.

And she certainly knew the city—better than Lily knew her own.

When they left the restaurant, they drove all over in the Jeep, stopping at places Lily could never have found for hersetf, all of them with great atmosphere. Clubs, roadhouses, cafés. A biker bar. A little cantina with a Mexican band playing. A dance club playing jungle and trance so loud it was almost impossible to think, little say talk. There was someone Margaret knew wherever they went and it quickly became obvious that she was equally at home with a wide spectrum of people, blending into any crowd like a chameleon.

Around two-thirty in the morning, they finally ended up back downtown, close to where they’d had dinner, drinking espresso in a bohemian café that was part of a place called the Hotel Congress. The building was old and worn, not all slicked up like the motel where Lily was staying, and she immediately fell in love with it. Next time she came to Tucson, she decided, she’d stay here, even if the rooms were as small as Margaret told her they were. She couldn’t resist taking a few pictures of the foyer with its mix of art deco design and Southwestern art, Margaret posing for her good-naturedly. In the café itself she kept expecting to turn around and see Leonard Cohen or William Burroughs sitting at the next table.

“So what do you think so far?” Margaret asked.

“So far? I’ve had the best time. But I’m running out of steam, so don’t tell me there’s more.”

“There’s always more, but we can leave some for another night, except … you’re only in town for a day or two, right?”

Lily nodded. “If Kenny gets everything he wants tomorrow, we’re flying out around noon on Monday.”

“That’s not nearly enough time.”

Lily had to laugh. “What are you? A one-woman tourist board?”

“I just like to have fun.”

“Well, you’ll have to let me return the favor if you ever come to Newford.”

“Oh, I love Newford.”

“When were you there?” Lily asked, surprised.

Margaret shrugged. “I go there all the time.”

“And do you know as many interesting nightspots there?”

“More.”

That figured, Lily thought.

Lily was sure she’d be far too tired to go out again with Margaret on Sunday night—she couldn’t have gotten more than five hours’ sleep before she had to get up to make it to the shoot the next morning—but the other woman’s enthusiasm and good humor were too infectious to ignore. Once she made sure that her part in the shoot was finished, Margaret drove her back to the motel so that she could shower and change, and they were off again.

This time they watched the sunset from a hiking trail in the foothills of the Rincon Mountains, then went rambling through the city, following an even more eclectic program than they had the night before. They ate in what seemed to be the backyard of someone’s house, an incredibly savory vegetable stew with flatbread and homemade beer. Went dancing in a club so small only six people could press onto the dance floor at a time. Stopped by a foundry where a sculptor friend of Margaret’s was working on enormous statues of hawks. He had the wing of one completed and it was easily the length of a car.

Around one in the morning, they finally ended up on a ranch somewhere west of the city in the Catalina Foothills. A bonfire was blazing, casting shadows to dance with the revelers around it. There was live music: electric guitars, bass, drums, accordion, fiddle. There was chanting and singing, dancing around the fire, and copious amounts of wine and beer consumed. Though there were a few Anglos such as herself, most of the people were dark-skinned and raven-haired. Lily couldn’t quite place them any more than she could Margaret.

“They’re crows,” Margaret told her when Lily asked in a break between songs.

Lily hadn’t realized that the Crow lived this far south. She’d always thought of them being from around the Yellowstone and Platte Rivers.

“So you’re all Native Americans,” she said.

Margaret laughed. “Oh, very native. But I’m not a crow myself. I’m a ‘pie.”

“You mean a Paiute?” Lily said.

That made sense, because she knew they lived in the Southwest.

“No, I mean a magpie,” Margaret told her.

Lily gave her a confused look. “What kind of tribe is—”

But then the band started another tune and talking became impossible again. Margaret swirled her out onto the tramped-down dirt in front of the band so that they could form a line with the other dancers and Lily lost her train of thought as she concentrated on following the somewhat complicated shuffling dance step that the music seemed to require.

At some point she was vaguely aware of being asleep on her feet. The next thing she knew, she was waking up on a sofa, a blanket with a Navajo weave tucked around her. She blinked with confusion and sat up. Her glasses were on a table beside the sofa, but when she put them on she was still Looking around an unfamiliar living room. A mild panic ran through her until she remembered the party the night before. Margaret appeared in the doorway, a mug of coffee in her hand, as she swung her feet to the floor.

“So you’re finally up,” Margaret said.

She sat down beside Lily and handed her the coffee.

“Thanks,” Lily said and took a sip.

“I thought you were going to sleep the whole day.”

“What time is it?”

“Almost eleven.”

Lily woke up completely. “Oh, my God. I’m going to miss my flight.”

“Don’t panic,” Margaret told her. “We’ll pick up your stuff from the motel and I’ll get you there on time. We’ll just make all the lights be green.”

“Yeah, right.”

But they didn’t hit a red light, not from the ranch to the motel, nor from the motel to the airport. By the time Margaret parked her Jeep and they’d carried Lily’s luggage and camera equipment into the terminal, they still had another fifteen minutes until boarding time.

“I’m surprised I don’t have a hangover,” Lily said after she’d checked in and they were walking toward her departure gate. She liked the small size of the Tucson airport—it seemed to have been built on a human scale, especially compared to the vast labyrinth that was the Newford International Airport.

“I’ve never believed in them myself,” Margaret told her.

Lily had to smile. “Do things ever not work out in your favor?”

“Oh, sure. If I’m not paying attention.”

“So that’s the trick.”

Margaret nodded. “Anyone can do it. You have to be in the moment— instead of thinking about what’s happened, or what might happen—and you have to know what you want. It’s simple, really.”

“Simple.”

“Most things are. People just make them complicated. ‘Course, you have to know your limitations. There’s no point in trying to move a mountain, or changing winter into summer. But that sort of makes it more interesting, too, don’t you think?”

“I suppose. Except—”

“Don’t look,” Margaret said suddenly and walked Lily into the cluster of people waiting to go through security.

But of course Lily had to. When she saw who Margaret was trying to avoid, she quickly ducked her head, her pulse drumming far too fast, her chest tightening until she thought she might not be able to breathe. Walking past them was the man she’d seen die in a Newford alley, the man who’d attacked her and shot Hank, before he was killed himself. It wasn’t possible.

“I don’t think he saw us,” Margaret said. “But you’d better board quickly.”

“He … he’s supposed to be dead… .”

She knew she wasn’t making any sense, but Margaret only nodded, as though she knew.

“He is,” Margaret said. “That’s Gerrard, one of his brothers.”

It took a long moment for that to sink in. Lily forced herself to take a steadying breath. She caught Margaret’s arm.

“How could you know?” she asked.

“Word gets around.”

“No,” Lily said, shaking her head. “This is something different. What’s going on here? Who are you?”

“A friend.”

But then Lily knew. “You’re like those girls from the other night, aren’t you? In Newford. The ones who killed—”

There was an announcement over the P.A.

“That’s your flight,” Margaret said. “You’d better go. I’ll head him off if it looks like he’s going to board your flight.”