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Komatke was a sparsely populated town in the Gila River Indian Community, in the open desert south of Phoenix. I’d occasionally passed through Komatke in an attempt to bypass rush hour traffic when I had to get from west Phoenix to the southeast valley and beyond.
We parked on the street in front of Delgado’s place, a small wooden frame house coated in a layer of desert dust so thick it was difficult to tell what color it’d been painted. The yard was natural desert. No lawn. No crushed rock. Just bare ground littered with wild grass, creosote, brittlebush, and other plants I saw all the time but didn’t know the names of. One of them might have been a Mormon tea bush. But what did I know? I was no botanist. I wasn’t Mormon. And I didn’t even like tea all that much.
No cars were parked
