Free Bad Country: A Novel by CB McKenzie

photo was the tribal cop Rodeo had encountered earlier that day at the Circle K. Officer Monjano held the baby Farrah, who was garishly overdressed in all pink. Farrah’s mother was strikingly attractive except for her fat. The father, Alonzo, looked slightly like Monjano but was older and sloppy in his khakis with his shirttails out and his eyes puffy and red. There were also four other photographs of Farrah in later years, in her contest makeup and outfits, that always included the Reservation cop named Monjano prominently in the frames, often holding the little beauty queen in his big arms.
    Since his client was still soundly asleep in the living room, Rodeo moved into Katherine Rocha’s bedroom for a quick tour.
    The smell in the old woman’s room was of talcum powder and piss, patent medicines and packaged bandages, muscle rubs, and the odor of the seepage that accompanies the decomposition of vitality into decrepitude. On the bedside table were a number of pill bottles including the blood thinner warfarin along with lisinopril and metoprolol for hypertension and lithium for depression. There was another framed glossy photo of the favored dead child, Farrah, on Katherine Rocha’s dresser and several old photos featuring Katherine Rocha herself, in her late teens and early adulthood. In one of these Katherine Rocha wore a traditional Mexican dress and posed in front of Teatro Del Carmen. Her pose was as dramatic and alluring as a professional actress’s. In another photo from the same era, Katherine Rocha lounged in front of El Minuto Café with some slick pachucos. An earlier photo showed Katherine Rocha as a smiling girl with curves in a cowgirl outfit standing in front of Western WearHouse with a Tucson Rodeo Parade prize banner draped over her chest. In these old photographs Katherine Rocha’s long, round chin always tilted to the left and her thick, sculpted eyebrows arched above deep-set eyes that were luminous even in these old photographic reproductions.
    Also on Katherine Rocha’s dresser was a computer-enhanced reproduction of an old snapshot, the grain exploded large as if the eight-by-ten had been derived from a much smaller original snapshot. In this picture a small cowboy on a paint pony faced Black Mountain. Rodeo recognized the location of the snapshot as the practice rodeo arena near the San Xavier Mission, just yards from the house in which he had spent most of his youth. And though the rider’s back was to the camera, from the way the cowboy sat his cutting horse Rodeo knew this was a photograph of his own father, a picture of Buck Garnet in his prime. Rodeo stood very still for a moment and then moved on.
    Samuel’s room was obviously the lair of an adolescent. Stale smoke residue coated the whole room, the odor refreshed by a hubcap brimful of cigarette butts, mostly Kools. There was no computer in the room and no cable connections for one. On a bedside table were a cheap cassette/CD/radio boom box and a small pile of CDs, mostly classic rock, the CDs so old the jewel cases were opaque. Rodeo opened them all and found nothing but liner notes.
    Posters covered the walls—Ray Msyterio, Nine Inch Nails, Insane Clown Posse, a shirtless Brad Pitt. Scarface aimed his machine gun at Dirty Harry, who responded with his trademark .357 magnum in the corner near the head of the single bed. Dirty and soiled sheets and T-shirts were twisted and spread over an uncovered, stained mattress. The floor was littered with men’s magazines, Mountain Dew and Red Bull cans, energy bar wrappers and Fritos bags. The drawers of the bureau disgorged dirty underwear, baggy jeans, graphic T-shirts that promoted Old School headbanger bands like Metallica, Whitesnake and Poison.
    The back of Samuel’s bedroom door was covered in concert ticket stubs from a wide variety of acts, mostly from the Rialto Theater, representing artists ascending to stardom or receding from it—Aimee Mann, The New Pornographers, Peter York,