We watched for what seemed like hours until the fire was pretty much extinguished. What happened next made my crew and I sick to our stomachs. It was Sally and Billy Perkins’s house, and both had been inside during the fire. Billy made it out with third-degree burns, but Sally came out draped in a death sheet stretched out on a gurney carried by two firemen. We never saw Sally again but caught a brief glimpse of Billy with his significant burn injuries.
We knew Billy well from school and some classes that we shared. He was a likable kid, but not cut from the same cloth as my crew of ne’er-do-wells. He was kept indoors mostly because his parents felt his being red-haired and freckled-faced, along with living in a barrio, might not be his best foot forward. Though we were somewhat diversified in our ethnicity, we were primarily upper-middle-class Hispanic. We were not the type of kids who wouldn’t accept you, not if you truly wanted to belong. We were kids, for Christ’s sake, and only fought with the kids from outside of our turf.
Each one of my friends and myself, at one time or another, had gone over to Billy’s after school to play or just hang out. I liked Sally well enough, and I’d watch her with her red pigtails flopping around as she jumped rope at recess. Billy would invite me over to play model cars after school, and Sally would keep to herself in her room. Seems that typical sibling rivalry was alive and well at the Perkins’s home.
I’d never forget the one time being at Billy’s, one day after school, when he motioned me over to the bathroom door where Sally was taking her bath. He let me peek at her through the keyhole, and all of a sudden, I had found a new appreciation for Sally. The image of Sally’s newly forming titties were emblazoned on my mind, and that served me well when I beat myself to euphoric bliss. When I told my friends what happened, I became an instant hero to all the guys.
I should have kept my mouth shut because now Billy was inundated with new best friends inviting themselves over for a playdate at his house. Poor unsuspecting Sally, I thought to myself, but who is gonna listen? So I kept quiet and continued playing at Billy’s from time to time. Or should I say, when he had a free space in his new busy schedule.
Now this terrible tragedy has happened, and Sally is gone forever. It is not even possible to think about her in the same perverse manner we used to. Each of us was filled with an inexplicable emptiness and sorrow, like we had never felt before.
We all had too many questions that needed answering, and the morning newspaper had nothing to offer. In the next few days, bits of info poured out, and it was determined that somehow, Billy had accidentally started the fire on Sally’s dress. She was near the drapes, which, as I remember, were of a brittle lacy fabric. They probably would have practically exploded like burning tissue paper. Anyway, the house was a very old stone house with lots of wood paneling and flooring, all gone up in smoke now.
The Perkins family had moved across town, and after some time, Billy healed. We never ran into him much anymore. Although once downtown, I ran into him, and we talked for a while. I learned that he didn’t care much for his sister, and he had purposely set her dress on fire. Billy, being so young, couldn’t have possibly realized the severity of his actions and what the end result would lead to.
He was remorseful though and felt the guilt about what he had done. He had to go through life with burns on his neck and some slight facial scarring—payback, I guess. I never ran into him again.
As for our group, we were back to playing in the brick pits.
I suppose I should give a description of these brick pits before I go any further. In my neighborhood, there was a brick-making company that occupied a piece of property, ½ mile by ½ mile or 160 acres or a quarter section of land—big. These were of the variety called fire-baked red bricks.
Along the eastern border of this brickyard ran the Santa Cruz River, which is dry year-round. This land, two hundred years ago, had lakes and marshes in abundance. Now it is just Southern Arizona, a virtual dry desert climate. One-half of this brick company property was pockmarked with many areas that had the soil removed to make these bricks. The soil consistency was a dehydrated loam, which when hydrated could be reconstituted as clay.
Thus, these pits were ideal for our bike trails, and it had jumping hills for our competitions. So as young kids, we had a paradise to play in free of charge.
Realize that this area was ¼ mile by ¼ mile in size, or 80 acres. We could get lost in there for hours of fun.
There was also a swampy area in there, a miniature lake, so to speak. It was the deepest area in the acreage and was surrounded by trees. A variety of birds inhabited the swamp, and I’m also sure that there were other animals in there that would stay hidden from sight. It was a marsh that was chock-full of cattails and quicksand. We never went in there. The rumor that the neighborhood parents had spread was that of a young boy who was swallowed up by the quicksand, never to be found again. That was enough to keep us boys from ever going near that place.
Some years later, I had come to learn that most of the land along the river was once very fertile with many small lakes. There was even a grotto with rental boats for rowing through the little mazes of the lake. The public could enjoy the grotto and the picnic tables for weekend gatherings. A large dance floor with a small stage was available for weekend fiestas, and all the other amenities could be had for a small fee. I was told that the place was closed up after an incident that occurred at a wedding reception where a young woman was abducted, never to be found again. As the years went by, the lakes dried up, and the buildings were set ablaze by vandals. I only saw photos of what it was like back then before my time.
I would conjure up an evening in the past and what it would’ve been like to swim in the lakes. As I would stand in those places, I just couldn’t conceive of the barren dirt beneath my feet as being any sort of Eden-like mini paradise. Now if you stood still in one spot for too long, your shoes would start to heat up.
Chapter 2
The Mighty Santa Cruz
Tucson in the summer was brutally hot and could be unbearable. We never knew better as young teens. It was what we were given, and believe me, we lived it to its fullest.
This mighty river is only mighty two to three months every year in the summer. Though it is a wide river, it is bone-dry most of the year. In Tucson, there is a monsoon season in the summer when it can rain like holy hell, with the river flowing to the top of its banks becoming a scary sight. Standing at the edge, one can become mesmerized and drawn to the muddy water as it roils along at a faster-than-normal flow. If you fall in, there is no salvation for at least forty miles to where it peters out to a manageable flow.
There were tamarack trees that lined the bank on the east side of the river that slightly obscured the old dance hall next to it. My gang found no real interest in the river because there was no real entertainment to be had. The sandy bottom was no place to pedal a bicycle, and it was just too damn hot to play in.
The dance hall had long ago been closed up and just sat there abandoned for many years. It had windows that were whitewashed over, but they were seven feet off the ground and not appealing to us curious ne’er-do-wells. Amazingly, the windows were intact, and looking back now, I ask myself how could that be. Every other building that I ever found abandoned in my travels had the windows broken out from rock-throwing contests. I guess they just held no appeal. The dance hall was a two-story structure probably, as best I can recall, measuring about 250 feet by 120 feet. Simply a large pale-yellow building made of brick.
It would be a few years later before the old dance hall, the lakes, and the bridge that spanned the Santa Cruz River on Congress Street would be of a profound significance to me.
One Saturday morning, the fellas and I came up with the notion to walk north in the riverbed for a change in our routine. I couldn’t say why we all agreed, because it never once held any appeal in all our years tramping about.
Unlike today, water was never a consideration for a trip. When we got someplace, we’d tap a neighbor’s spigot and be on our way.
I