Double Wide by Leo W. Banks

Author:Leo W. Banks [Banks, Leo W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brash Books, LLC
Published: 2017-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

FORTY-THREE

At 6:30 p.m. I left Pete’s and drove west on Grant Road, braving Tucson’s new Wild West. It takes place on streets that are uncared for and unmanaged by any recognizable authority. Frantic drivers rush to the next red light so they can crawl into your trunk and look around.

The potholes are so deep and numerous they’ve become tourist attractions. See our urban caves. See how many you can leap without snapping an axle.

At the intersection of Grant and Oracle Roads, I waited in the boiling heat through three lights, experiencing the standard hallucinations of the non-air-conditioned. At the fourth turn to green, I abused the accelerator to get as far from that light as I could.

The wind smoked through my hair. My phone rang. I listened to George Jones for a spell. The man broke my heart every time.

“Hellooo.”

“We got us a new resident, Mayor,” Cash said. “He made his way into the open trailer and went to sleep.”

“Does he have a name?”

“Won’t say. Some kid. Should I run him off?”

“Let him be until I get back. I want to talk to him.”

My goal was making the forty-mile drive to the Blue Lonesome before nightfall. Sunset was at 7:30 p.m. I didn’t want to be on mountain roads in a monsoon, and so far, the sky looked cooperative.

I drove north on Oracle Road into the Catalina foothills and kept going above the clamor of the city until human habitation thinned to not much at all.

At Oracle Junction, I turned right onto Highway 77 and rolled through empty desert for eleven miles into the town of Oracle. It consists of tin-roofed miners’ shacks, gray adobes, some trailers, and a few modern two-story stucco homes spread willy-nilly over the hills fronting the north face of the Catalina Mountains.

Downtown isn’t much: a gas station, a market, a few store-fronts where artists go and don’t make money, and a boarded-up steak house and lounge where Dean and the Destroyers killed it on Thursday nights.

Oracle definitely didn’t bustle. More like a wheeze.

Three blinks after downtown, the road split. I took the right fork into the Coronado National Forest and the Blue Lonesome turnoff, three miles along.

The dirt road snaked up the mountain at a steep climb. Every half mile or so, there were bullet-riddled No Trespassing signs. They should come out of the factory that way. It’d save the locals time and a bundle on ammunition. I passed oak trees and tall yucca plants that looked like warriors’ lances emerging from blossoming stands.

The switchbacks kept switching until I reached a meadow overlooking a huge expanse of the San Manuel Valley. The hills were burned and brown where the meadow fell off, and they flowed steadily down to deep canyons that made the ground disappear and towering stone ridges that brought it back again.

Far below, blackening clouds made a patchwork of shadows on the valley floor. A storm was building out there and blowing my way.

Another turn after the meadow, I came to a stone ranch house, headquarters of the Blue Lonesome.

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