Free The Grand Tour by Adam O'Fallon Price

hundred dollars, he could take that to Apache Nights and put it all on 27 Red. He drove to the north side of South Mountain and turned up an access road. The road petered out next to a TV antenna station about halfway up the hill, and he parked in the runoff beside a hiking trail, next to a giant NO PARKING sign. He walked slowly up the zigzagging trail, pausing frequently to rest, then left the path and moved through the uneven brush until he found a spot that suited him.
    It was a flat patch of sandy scrub, with a huge dark saguaro standing to his left like a terse, disapproving ranch hand watching the town drunk on an epic binge. He looked down the mountain at his adoptive city. From a distance, Phoenix looked like a real place with history and secrets and not the pretend place it was, with everything built five minutes ago, a pastel Disneyland for Republicans and old people and methamphetamine addicts. He uncorked the bottle and turned it up, spilling a frothing mouthful down the front of his shirt. He was embarrassed by his need to commemorate the moment—it suggested there was still a part of him, however small, that remained capable of pride. And, worse, hope. Shouldn’t he have known better than that by now?
    Yes, but he couldn’t help it. Ego and its running buddy Sexual Desire were the nightmare guests at Dignity’s party—drunk buffoons that stayed far too late, refused to take polite hints, trashed the place, and insulted their host. The champagne stung his throat as it went down. To hell with it, he thought. To hell with everything. The vast city planing out in front of him didn’t begrudge him his frail vanity. It didn’t care. And on either side of Phoenix, the empty desert seemed like an absolution. It was why, despite the harsh, alien terrain, and his lack of relatives and family history there, he’d stayed for so long. The desert was unforgiving, yet it forgave. Having no memory, what choice did it have?
    On the way home, he stopped at a bar, then another one, then possibly a third. He was there for a while, and everything got foggy and smudged. The day outside had somehow darkened without his notice or assent. He squinted up at the bartender, one of those very fat shorn-headed bald guys that grow a goatee in order to create the impression of having an actual face and neck and head rather than just a fleshy head-shaped lump growing out of their collars.
    “The book sold,” he told the bartender.
    The bartender said, “That’s the third time you told me. Go the fuck home.”
    ———
    As he drove south on the John Wayne Parkway into the desert, the halogen lights of the outer suburbs of Chandler left vapor traces on his stunned retinas. Some kind of animal—a dog or coyote or mountain lion—flashed in his headlights, green eyes ablaze. He jerked the wheel and his head to the right in tandem. There was a tremendous sense of fluid motion, water falling and falling, then hitting bottom with a soft slap.
    When he came to, his car was splayed around a concrete overpass piling, the hood buckled and steam escaping with a disgusted sigh. Two cop cars had stopped ahead of him, just past the overpass, their gumballs blinking on and off. In the distance, he heard more sirens. He wanted to tell everyone that he was fine, to go home, not to make a stink about it. He wanted to open the door and jog off into the black maw of the desert. Instead, he sat there with his head on the steering wheel and his nose dripping blood, until something went a-tap-tap-tapping on his window. He looked up to see a penlight and, past that, the face of an unfriendly-looking policeman. The cop tapped the window again, and Richard rolled it down.
    The policeman said, “Have you been drinking, sir?”
    “The book sold.”
    ———
    The first check, when it arrived, was eighteen thousand and change. He stood in front of his trailer and rubbed his finger over the embossed type. There were three more on the way, a very nice