High Country Nocturne - [20]

The train was no more than half a block to my right, the operator flashing his lights and laying on the horn. I stepped back and let the train come into the station, walking around it.

The majestic old county courthouse was as lovely, dignified, and enduring as when it opened in 1929, an art deco interpretation of Spanish architecture. It had been built as a combined city-county building. So, here, facing Washington Street, was the courthouse. On the west side, guarded by carved Phoenix birds, was the entrance to old city hall. With such attributes, it amazed me that Phoenix had not torn it down.

Enough damage had been done. When I was a boy, lush grass and shrubs, shaded by queen palms, surrounded the building. Now all that was gone, replaced by dirt and the skeletons of palo verde trees. Somebody thought they were saving water, even though it was being misused to fill artificial lakes in subdivisions thirty miles away.

I wondered about the workers that had ripped out those noble trees back in the 1980s and whether they had realized the damage they were doing.

Then I made the mistake of looking back at the graceless, sterile cube of CityScape and how it overpowered the flawless art deco Luhrs Tower in the next block, its fourteen stories with elegant setbacks built for a low-rise city that held 48,000 people. CityScape, heavily subsidized by the taxpayers, was doing fairly well for now. It had a comedy club and a bowling alley. The bottom of the Luhrs Tower was empty except for a Subway shop. This was Phoenix.

At the front of the courthouse, the old fountain was still there. A plaque read:

IN MEMORY OF

LIEUT. JACK W. SWILLING

1831-1878

WHO BUILT THE

FIRST MODERN IRRIGATION DITCH

AND

TRINIDAD, HIS WIFE

1850-1929

WHO ESTABLISHED IN 1868 THE FIRST

PIONEER HOME IN THE

SALT RIVER VALLEY.

ERECTED BY

MARICOPA CHAPTER

DAUGHTERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

1931

I sat on the fountain’s concrete lip and listened to the water.

“Swilling’s Ditch” was one of the hundreds of miles of canals built by the Hohokam to divert water of the Salt River in this great alluvial valley. “Those who have gone”-the disappeared civilization, the canal builders. Then the Anglos came, found the ancient waterworks, the most advanced in the New World outside Peru. They cleared out the ancient canals, built new ones and the Phoenix was reborn.

Old Phoenix kept its secrets. Jack Swilling was one of the town’s founders. He was also a scoundrel who helped betray the Apache leader Mangus Coloradus, leaving him to be tortured and killed by the U.S. Army. It was an act of treachery that helped ensure twenty years of war. But this wasn’t engraved on the fountain.

And people like Chris Melton didn’t even know or care. They moved into their new subdivisions far from the heart of the city and thought the only history was back home in the Midwest. I would bet he had never read this plaque.

The water trickled in a melody that should have been comforting. Not tonight. Because I knew. Too much and not enough.

Maybe even Mike Peralta was a scoundrel who would throw everything away for a case of diamonds. And here I am carrying that damned badge. I never should have come back here. Not to this building. Not to this city.

Better to be teaching history in Southern California or Denver, Portland, or Seattle, even in a community college if need be. Anywhere but here.

Yet Peralta never stopped trying to get me back to the Sheriff’s Office and he had finally succeeded. When I didn’t get tenure in San Diego and returned to Phoenix, intending to sell the house and move on, he hired me to clean up some old cases. And I stayed.

I never should have stayed.

Phoenix is not my city now.

It belongs to the millions of newcomers drawn here by sun, a pool in the backyard, and big wide freeways to drive. To the ones that bulldoze its history and throw down gravel and concrete where there once were flowers and oleanders and canopies of cottonwoods, eucalyptus, and Arizona ash over open irrigation ditches.

I hear the ghosts of the Hohokam and love it when it rains. Newcomers want championship golf and endless sunshine.

They own this place now, not me.

They tell me every place changes, but why did my place have to get worse? It’s not as if we traded the Valley of Heart’s Delight to become Silicon Valley.

What right have I to hate them? They have no memory of my garden city when the air was so clear it seemed as if you could reach out and touch the mountains. They don’t miss the passenger trains at Union Station or the busy stores and movie palaces downtown.

How could they miss what had been wiped away?

The problem is me, for loving Phoenix still.

The blame rests with me, for coming back, for staying.

I should have sold the house in Willo, where the historic districts carry strands of the old city’s loveliness-sold it and left for good.

But it had been built by my grandfather, had always been in the family. How could I endure seeing a photo of it on the Web, knowing a stranger owned it, and had probably put rocks in place of Grandmother’s gardens?