Lecha had brought up Seese’s old connections with Tiny and the Stage Coach because Root, Lecha’s biker boyfriend, had recognized Seese as one of Tiny’s nude dancers four or five years before. All Lecha said was she preferred that Seese stay away from Tiny and the Stage Coach. Zeta would not like it. No other reason was given.
“Well, there are a lot of unanswered questions,” Seese told Sterling the first day he was there. She had noticed him wandering outside the house with a rake although nothing was growing there but the desert itself. The old ranch house is low and long, lost in the brushy foothill paloverdes, giant saguaros, and thickets of greasewood. Seese figures this location, this house, is no accident either, but part of the old woman Zeta’s secrecy about herself and everything she and Ferro and Paulie are doing.
Sterling looks too harmless to be working here. He is graying and chubby and brown. His eyes look a little lost and sad. He rakes the pebbles and smaller rocks, and she can tell he knows how to appear busy when there is nothing to do. He sees her looking at him and gets bashful, looking down at the rocks he is raking. “Hi.” Sterling looks up at Seese and smiles. He says he was hired to be the gardener. He gestures with his chin at the paloverde trees, jojoba bushes, and big barrel cactus surrounding them. He is a little bewildered at this “Tucson-style garden,” he says. All of it looks like rocks and sticker trees to him. They both laugh.
Seese had wanted to tell Sterling how much alike they were. That she had been hired to nurse an old woman who is not so much dying of cancer as she is addicted to Demerol. But Seese had said nothing then because Sterling was new, and part of the job here was minding your own business. Sterling had been anxious to talk that first day. The ranch was a lonely place. Hiring was based upon the employee’s willingness to pass weeks at a time without going into Tucson. Sterling says he doesn’t know anyone in town anyway. “Like me,” Seese says, lying a little because she didn’t want to talk about Tiny and the Stage Coach Bar or Cherie. Seese and Sterling like each other right away.
Seese follows as Sterling rakes small orange stones around the swimming pool. Sterling checks the surface of the water. Two small lizards float blue bellies up. “It’s mostly this pool of water that takes up my time,” Sterling says as he uses a long pole and net to skim the corpses off the water. Seese watches the dead lizards fly over the edge of the pool, down the embankment. Sterling says he thinks other creatures will eat them. “That way their lives aren’t wasted,” he says hopefully. Seese would like to tell him as far as she can see all lives are wasted, but she doesn’t want to scare the old Indian guy too much. And if she made a remark like that it would bring on that choking feeling in her throat. Sterling sees something is wrong. He tells Seese how nice it is to have someone around while he is working. Because all those years on the railroad section gang had got Sterling used to working with other people. “Then when I retired—” He starts to tell her something but stops.
“Retirement is a big change!” Seese says, feeling sorry for the old guy. “Changes are real hard.” Seese closes her eyes and shakes her head. Right then Sterling had decided he didn’t care if they fired him for talking to the young blond woman. He hadn’t had anyone to talk to for such a long time.
“Well, this is mostly easy work,” he says, “these drowned lizards don’t weigh very much.” Seese laughs and is surprised to feel the laughing go deeper than she can remember feeling it for a long time. “And everyone wants to retire to southern Arizona,” he continues. Seese laughs some more and Sterling can’t help stealing a look at her breasts when she is laughing. He hasn’t even had the heart to look for such a long time. He remembers his Reader’s Digest magazines—“Laughter, the Best Medicine.” So maybe this job wouldn’t be so bad with a pretty blond nurse to joke with.
Seese asks questions then. Is he an Arizona Indian? Why did he come to Tucson? How did he ever get hired by Ferro? Sterling had been carefully following advice printed recently in a number of magazines concerning depression and the best ways of combating it. He had purposely been living in the present moment as much as he could. One article had pointed out that whatever has happened to you had already happened and can’t be changed. Spilled milk. But Sterling knows he’s one of those old-fashioned people who has trouble forgetting the past no matter how bad remembering might be for chronic depression. Just then the woman Lecha, twin sister of the boss lady, had called out the patio door for Seese. Sterling had seen Lecha in the wheelchair, yet the strength of her voice that day was remarkable. Later on he had learned Lecha only used the wheelchair occasionally. From the start there, Sterling had known to watch his step with the women. Because Sterling had seen older women and younger women too, in action, and the lessons had not been lost on him.
It was just as well that Seese had been called away because he had not been sure where to begin his story or even if he should disobey the magazine advice. What had happened to Sterling was in the category of things magazine articles called “irreparable” and “better forgotten.” Water under the bridge.
Seese returned before long. While Sterling was pouring chlorine pellets into the pool filter system, she had pulled a wrought-iron deck chair to the edge of the pool. As Seese stared into the deep end of the pool, Sterling suddenly realized she probably would not understand about the Pueblo and the village officers and the Tribal Council. “I would like to tell you about it,” he began in a voice so faint she had to say, “What?” Sterling repeated himself and then said, “But it’s sort of complicated, you know.”
Her blue eyes swerved away from him back to the surface of the pool churning from the filter jets. “You could tell me part of it. I might understand more than you think.”
“The part I will tell you some other time is the part where I am forced to go.” Seese nods. She understands that one firsthand. “I just took what I could carry. Right now I’ll just tell you how I ended up working here.” They both laugh together. “Some story, I bet — for both of us!” Sterling adds.
EXILE
STERLING HAD NOT intended to go to Tucson. He had bought a bus ticket only as far as Phoenix although he didn’t know a soul there either. Somehow he had been sleeping when the bus stopped in Phoenix, and the driver had not bothered to count the passengers who got off. At home in his own bed, Sterling had tossed and turned, unable to sleep. Yet now he had managed to sleep through roaring bus engines and diesel exhaust fumes as well as the loudspeaker announcements of departures and arrivals. Somewhere in the past, his life had taken a wrong turn, and Sterling had awakened to find himself surrounded by small rocky hills thick with what had first appeared to be utility poles. When he had put on his glasses, he saw they were giant cactus you always saw in cartoons with Mexicans in big hats sleeping under them.