She called me from Arizona. She lives in one of those older mobile home communities where single- and double-wides lie encapsulated in a concrete-covered patch of desert. In the white heat of summer afternoons, doves and air conditioners are the only sounds. Mornings and evenings, a golf cart or two whines or putt-putts by. Occasionally you hear a car door slam.
The neighbors are retired, from Minnesota. (Perhaps the comma shouldn’t be there.) The wife, who works until late at night (?), asked my mother if she’d heard a scream — it seems she’d awakened to find her husband choking her, and wondered if the noise had carried. He has heart trouble, but not enough to keep him from coming outside at 1:00 a.m. to argue with a grown-up son and daughter-in-law who’ve been camped out on the patio for months. Maybe he has a reason. They sleep right there, up against the old lady’s fence, close enough for her to hear them murmuring, then stop whenever she goes outside to her porch. She thinks they’re smoking dope, too. She thinks everyone is crippled, using drugs, or hiding unacknowledged weaknesses. Sure, she may be right, but still.
Tucson washes cars with water that fell as rain when mastodons roamed the Mogollon. Good luck with the neighbors.
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Hi John,
Googling Tucson’s Long Range Water Plan 2000-2050, was interesting. Tucson gets about 60% of its water from the Colorado River and about 25% from non-replenishable sources. With global warming, increasing population, and the mastadon water drying up, they may have to stop washing cars.
Joseph.
In Texas in my youth we called those folks “poor white trash” and sort of shrugged off their feckless ways. They were always amongst us. Maybe they were we. In small cities and towns there were always folks like that in the neighborhood, and you went to school with their kids. Nowadays, when the social classes are so much more isolated from one another, you kind of shudder when you read such accounts. The world isn’t nearly as savory as it used to be – all the interesting stuff’s apparently now confined to the trailor parks!